The Radicalist

This week, the Los Angeles Times announced that it has laid off at least 115 people, or more than 20% of its newsroom. They did it via Zoom, took no questions, and gave no answers. Jared Servantez, assistant editor of breaking news at the paper, said a colleague told him, “that was like a drive-by.” The L.A. Times is the 5th largest daily in the nation after The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. This is cataclysmic, not just because of what it will do to the L.A. Times or the breadth and depth of news coverage in the City of Angels, but because of what it heralds for the newspaper industry more generally. There is a pale rider darkening the door of American newsrooms. Why is this happening? Let me explain.

We had Bolsheviks in my family. The brothers Wołodźko. I remembered the story when I saw progressives in the West celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. How could thinking people persuade themselves they were fighting oppression by justifying the rape and mutilation of 1,400 innocent Jews? How could they give full-throated support to those that would see them raped, enslaved, or beheaded? These are the kind of people, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, who would find a viper in their child’s bed and place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But he was writing decades ago. The problem now is far worse.

Richard Nixon gave the first speech of his presidential campaign in February 1968 at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord. It was a volatile time in American life.

Then as now, Americans lived with the looming threat of Russian aggression, North Korean hostility, and a distant war against barbaric forces that left American public opinion bitterly divided.

So it wasn’t terribly surprising that I was reading the paper on Christmas Eve when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a story in the New York Times suggesting a parallel between the Vietnam protests of the 1960s and the pro-Palestinian protests of today.

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University who is known for fighting dogma with data.

His 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, looked at a dataset of 409 allegedly false hate crimes and found that a substantial percentage are hoaxes, such as the Jussie Smollett case.

His 2020 book Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can’t Talk About] reviews facts about race, gender, and class that have become taboo in American society.

His upcoming book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me is set to be released in June.

In this conversation, we discuss his mother’s influence on his thinking, what it means to have an honest conversation about race, whether diversity is always better, hate crime hoaxes, taboo facts about race and gender, the color-blind approach to race, race and IQ, his unfiltered frankness on social media, and much more.

Elizabeth Spalding is the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum. She teaches U.S. foreign policy and national security at Pepperdine University and at Hillsdale College, and she is the author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism and co-author with her father Lee Edwards of A Brief History of the Cold War.

In this conversation, we discuss North Korea, China, Russia, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the centrality of the lie in communist states, the importance of honest journalism and the battle for truth and freedom in our era of disinformation, the reason people in the West are drawn to figures such as Vladimir Lenin, and just how many people have been killed by communism.

This letter is a response to Benjamin Carlson, the author of the newsletter The Carlson Letter, the former executive editor of The Atlantic and former China correspondent for AFP. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and he was my colleague at GlobalPost. I contacted Ben with the idea of a letter exchange and he selected the topic. Before reading my response below, I suggest starting with his initial letter.

James Scaminaci is an independent researcher and former civilian senior intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center (ITAC) and the European Command’s Joint Analysis Center (JAC), specializing in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, counter-organized crime, and counter-terrorism.

He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University and has written about the Christian Right in America, the Patriot militia movement, the Tea Party, and the concept of fourth-generation warfare.

In this conversation, we discuss Hamas’s massacre on October 7, the Christian Right in America, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, Trump’s connection to NAR, anti-LGBT bigotry in Russia, “spiritual kung fu” in China, the racist roots of the pro-life and militia movements, the NRA, the corporate origins of the war on science, how woke leftists harm the lower class, why AOC is not really socialist, the military strategist John Boyd, the discursive force of identity politics, deep-fake propaganda, and much more.

As you can imagine, there has been a lot speculation over Hitler’s psychopathology. Unsurprisingly, his monstrous behavior extended to his personal relationships—and to the bedroom.

In this episode, I spoke with Nico Perrino, the executive vice president at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which was founded in 1999 to protect free speech on college campuses in the United States and has since expanded its efforts beyond campuses to American society in general. As I wrote in my previous post, Fire in the Belly, his organization is “one of the greatest institutions of American democracy.”

Nico is also the creator and host of FIRE’s So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, co-director and senior producer of the 2020 documentary “Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story” about the life and career of former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser, and was creative consultant on the 2015 film “Can We Take a Joke?” about censorship in stand-up comedy.In this conversation, we talk about the First Amendment and its philosophical grounding, the ongoing pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests and the state of free speech at American universities, my firing from The Seattle Times and the state of free speech in American media, Ira Glasser, censorship in stand-up comedy, and much more.

From the beginning of history, our ancestors have practiced the art of storytelling, wrapped in blackness as they huddled around the flickering fire, telling the legends of their people in the warm, crackling glow, passing on the best of themselves. This has always been the way, for we are storytellers.

Is it any wonder then that we would seek to protect the very instrument of our being, or that throughout history societies have celebrated and defended our freedom of speech?

In the 5th century BC, the practice of speaking freely or parrhesia was a necessary aspect of Athenian democracy, practiced in both the assembly and the agora, where citizens spoke openly—provided they were not women or slaves. Or think of the Roman Republic, which could not have existed had its senators been unable to voice critical concerns. And of course, the Enlightenment itself was nothing if not a flowering of ideas the sum total of which was not worth a single breath had it not been shared.

Freedom of speech is the most precious of all liberties, the one by which we defend all others, the horn we sound when another freedom is in peril, the shield we raise against the arrows of deception, and the spear we send into the ranks of oppression.