The Radicalist

In response to escalating Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes, President Trump ordered large-scale airstrikes this week, targeting Houthi military infrastructure in the capital city of Sanaa. These strikes are intended to protect international maritime commerce as well as send a warning shot over the bow to Iran for supporting these pirates, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them yesterday.

David Volodzko speaks with Allin Kimbrough, who grew up in the Quiverfull movement and its famous branch the Duggar family cult, a group of independent Baptist fundamentalists whose lifestyle was celebrated on The Learning Channel show 19 Kids and Counting and who later became the topic of the grim 2023 Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People, involving the story of how their eldest son molested his own sisters as well as his child pornography conviction.

David and Allin also discuss the cult’s ties to Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, and Russia, as well as the day-to-day routine of growing up in a crazy Christian cult. For more, see David’s interview with cult expert Steven Hasan.

The White House press secretary recently called New York Times reporter Peter Baker a “left-wing stenographer” after he questioned Trump’s decision to bar AP for not using the term “Gulf of America.” But just how biased is the NewYork Times, and in what ways?

This week, David Volodzko discusses nonpartisanship and the Oval Office ambush involving President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.

David Volodzko speaks with Sarah-Jane Murray about how medieval politics changed the way people at the time told stories, how politics influence narrative structure generally, theoretical frameworks in medieval narratives, the ethics of interpretation, postmodern hermeneutics, storytelling as the foundation of civilization, the universality of story design, and more.

Murray is a professor at Baylor University and an expert in medieval literature who translated the Ovide Moralisé and is the author of From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes, Basics of Story Design: 20 Steps to an Insanely Great Screenplay, and the children’s book Ralph’s Christmas Quest. She is also an Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose films—such as Primary Concern, a documentary about America’s looming healthcare crisis—have appeared on PBS and Netflix. In 2023, she founded The Greats Story Lab at the intersection of film, education, and emerging technologies.

David Volodzko speaks with Alexander von Sternberg about the concept of velvet jihad, which he coined—inspired by French historian David Todd’s A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century—to describe Islamic cultural imperialism. They also discuss the recent pogrom in Amsterdam, the influence of rhetoric on behavior, Sharia law, the myth of media-induced violence, and more.

Alexander von Sternberg is the host of the podcast History Impossible, a graduate student of history, and a former guest on The Radicalist.

Ashley Rindsberg is senior editor at Pirate Wires and author of the books Tel Aviv Stories and The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions & Fabrications Radically Alter History, which he was inspired to write after reading how the paper’s reported that Poland invaded Nazi Germany and not the other way around.

In this conversation, we discuss Israel, our current media environment and public mistrust of news outlets today, why the news needs to be more like Spotify, where Pirate Wires sits in the media landscape, AI-generated news, free speech on Wikipedia, the woke ecosystem, and more.

Katherine Brodsky is the author of the newsletter Random Minds and has been a correspondent for Variety for over a decade. She has also contributed to publications such as The Washington Post, WIRED, The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, Playboy Magazine, New York Magazine's Vulture, USA Today, and many others. As a journalist, she has mostly covered film, TV, culture, business, travel, tech—and espionage. She has interviewed figures ranging from the Dalai Lama to Elon Musk. She is also the author of the 2024 book No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority.

Part II:

The debate:

Notice he @’s FIRE, where I work, with claims of slander (never mind slander is spoken while libel is written), as if trying to get me in trouble or fired. This is precisely the disgusting kind of tactics we’ve all come to expect from woke activists.

Respectfully brother, it only seems more clear to me now that I did not misunderstand you. But let’s break this down just in case.

You said X will happen. Namely, if people who oppose identity politics support Zionism, “we will lose” because the woke left will “smell this hypocrisy a mile away.” I replied, who cares what the woke left thinks?

You then claimed I misunderstood you because if X happens, Y will result. Namely, the woke left will ‘point out the hypocrisy and make it clear to all watching.’

Pointing out this hypocrisy will become the woke left’s “greatest weapon,” you added, “and they will win.”

So I was correct, you did in fact say X will happen, and then proved it by explaining that your main concern here is the result of X happening.

But we needn’t go back-and-forth on this. If you want to put the focus on Y, I am happy to oblige, and in fact I agree that’s a better place to put it, so thanks for the redirection.

But my view remains unchanged. Yes, you are right that the woke left will allege hypocrisy, fill the comments below with accusations to that effect, third-party viewers will see them, and some will be persuaded. I will give you all of that.

But again I say, who cares what these people think? The woke left supports a litany of malevolent causes, most of which I noted above, and Americans have become so sick of it that even many liberals ended up voting for the very person they had spent years hate-posting about. That’s how much they despise this stuff. And the electoral college now has a not-insignificant Republican bias that will seriously bruise Democratic chances at the White House for the next decade or so, as data scientist David Shor has noted.

Another point Shor makes, though everyone has noticed it by. now, is that despite Republican rhetoric on racial conflict, nonwhite voters did not go blue in higher numbers, as one might have expected. In fact, it appears the reverse happened. And given Democrats’ post-election lamentations about how this merely proves that Americans are super racist, I see zero signs of lessons being learned, so we can reasonably expect Republican power to grow further still.

In conclusion, the idea that we ought to fear a mob of psychopathic narcissists because they will accuse Zionists of hypocrisy and convince enough people to “win” is not a persuasive argument when their influence is dying faster than DEI.

Not only am I not at all concerned about third-party viewers hearing what the woke left says, but it may surprise you to learn that I think not enough people have heard the gospel. If I had my way, I would broadcast their remarks as far and wide as humanly possible because I think the greatest weapon against the woke left is to hand the woke left a giant microphone so that they can tell everyone precisely what they think about white people, men, women, Jews, Christians, Israel, America, the West, police, soldiers, CEOs, and so on.

But if I may, in the name of civil discourse, let me offer this steelman: If you can find a way to make this argument about liberals instead of progressives, i.e. about the moderate left instead of the woke left, then you'll have me up at night—and then your argument will inspire the kind of bone-chill I think you were going for—except I don’t see any way this can be applied to the moderate left, and the idea that we might lose the woke left is like telling a moderate Republican they might lose the racist right. Boo hoo.

Now let’s see if he engages with any of my points above. Spoiler: nope!

I stand corrected, though in my defense, I did make clear at the very top in multiple posts that I read anti-Zionist white identitarian as woke left, and you said you meant both, so thank you for clarifying, and since I’ve given you my thoughts on one, here are my thoughts on the other—everything I said about the woke left is only more true of the woke right, and for the same reasons.

Perhaps you can explain what you mean by woke right, but I see it as essentially a fascist movement, minus the altruistic window dressing that the woke left used to capture so many hearts, and therefore minus any of the cultural influence, particularly as the woke right is already being excommunicated to a degree.

Additionally, and more directly to your point, I fail to see the hypocrisy in being a Jewish nationalist while also opposing fascist and antisemitic movements, whether they be of the left or right. It seems like you’re saying these are all identity politics, which is of course true, so if you’re in favor of Jewish IP but not Nazi IP, you’re a hypocrite. And I disagree.

You’re punching at wind with some assumptions about my understanding of identitarianism, political socialization, and anti-IP, not to mention that to say the woke left has been “more specific than just opposing fascism or antisemitism” is a bit unfair because it is fact both those those things and I never suggested there was nothing more to the story.

But again, can you explain this hypocrisy? Is it as I assumed, that if you support Jewish IP but not right-wing or left-wing IP, then you only support IP when it suits you and therefore you are a hypocrite, or something like that?

So support of a Jewish state but not a Nazi state is hypocrisy? That’s like saying that because I oppose Nazi politics but not Danish politics, I’m a hypocrite.

Okay, I’m sorry. I did skip over “If one claims to oppose identity politics.” Not because I was being obtuse but because I find the technicality unserious, particularly since none of the people you listed above oppose identity politics in the way that you claim, and I think you know already know this.

Specifically, none of them have ever said anything that should make you think they oppose identity politics so broadly as to include Zionism, the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, or disability rights. They are not using the term is the strict literal sense that you are when you examine their remarks, so it makes no sense to talk about hypocrisy in the context of opposing literally all identity politics.

Yes, some folks say things like, “identity politics are bad,” and then we can do some bad faith interpretation and try to catch them on a trumped-up procedural victory by arguing in ackshually rhetoric that they’re hypocrites because this techincally includes things they support, but that would very obviously be a straw man.

I wonder, what would happen if you steel-manned or star-manned their positions?

If I say in 2023 that I hate wokeness, this means the far-left, and if it is later pointed out that the right can be woke too, you cannot use this to go back and pick apart what I said unless you're willing to discard the spirit of my message in favor of the letter, which is a great way to, as you say, deliberately misunderstand people.

So until you can provide evidence that Kisin, Weiss, or whoever else may be on your list actually meant the kind of perfectly totalizing definition you have in mind, I am not sure what to add here. But let's park that and go back to your main point.

A bunch of neo-Nazi fascists are going to accuse classical liberals of hypocrisy because they support the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and because these people hate Jews. So when liberals express their support for Israel, particularly liberals of Jewish ancestry like Kisin, Weiss, or myself, they will be targeted by racist buffoons and labeled hypocrites, as well as sundry other names I care not to list.

And this is supposedly concerning because if we do not capitulate to these Nazis and surrender our principles and our belief in civil liberties, liberal democracy, and Enlightenment values—then “they will win.” I understand you do not bel…