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.

This follows the first letter of my correspondence with Margaret Anna Alice in which we discuss fascism, censorship, and humor. Margaret Anna writes about propaganda, psychology, and health at Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass. If you find her letter below as fascinating and informative as I do, follow the link to her Stack and subscribe.

Kris Goldsmith is an Iraq War combat veteran who came home from serving as a forward observer in the slums of Baghdad only to realize he had signed up after 9/11 but never had a chance to do the job he was trained to do. When he came home, he fought in veteran advocacy for 15 years before using his military training to protect freedoms at home by huntin…

The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened. You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.”

Yet the history of the word holocaust itself tells the story of our collective refusal to learn this lesson.

This feels to me the proper way to set into a history of the word holocaust, because so much of its history, as you will see, is actually not about Jews, and yet the word is now irrevocably about nothing other than man’s inhumanity to Jews. It is an inhumanity that seems only to fade in order to surprise you that it has been gaining strength in the shadows, an inhumanity that we felt was far behind us and now find right in our faces.