The Radicalist

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.

Yevgeny Simkin is a contributor at The Bulwark and co-founder of Samizdat Online.

During the Soviet Union, samizdat was the grassroots practice of evading censorship by reproducing banned publications, often by hand. Samizdat Online is the digital incarnation of this practice, publishing articles from an array of outlets while bypassing firewalls and protecting readers’ anonymity to bring truth to people living under authoritarian rule. Samizdat’s only requirement for publishing articles is that they come from an outlet that has been banned by an autocratic leader.

This interview includes two separate conversations, held weeks apart, that I have stitched together as one episode. In the first, we discuss his life growing up in Russia and the antisemitism he faced there, how he cut his teeth at CBS and the erosion of public trust in the media since the days of Edward R. Murrow, how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected his Ukrainian and Russian employees, the state of life in rural Russia today, the playful flexibility of Russian grammar and why he thinks poetry is more beautiful in Russian than in English, the ethos of pre-Soviet folktales and where Russia went wrong as a nation, the rise of Putin and the bedrock importance of free speech in the media, and Samizdat Online's efforts in Russia, Iran, China, and beyond.

In the second half, we discuss the events of October 7, Osama bin Laden’s reputation repair on TikTok, antisemitism in the United States, David Hirsh’s thoughts on the banality of evil, and a few exciting updates for Samizdat Online.

We can defeat Hamas on the battlefield, but we must also fight the rot in Palestinians culture, and in our own, that embraces such ideologies. We must counter those who think Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Hamas, and Osama bin Laden are the good guys. These people are our enemies. Thankfully for us, the truth is their enemy.

In the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel, we have seen pro-Hamas activists on the political left celebrate the atrocities. The problem of left antisemitism seems worse now than ever before, or perhaps it has always been lurking just beneath the surface and now the mask has finally slipped.

This week, I spoke with the British sociologist David Hirsh, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, who literally wrote the book on the subject—Contemporary Left Antisemitism, published in 2018, for which I recently wrote a review.

Hirsh is also the founder of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, which does the noble work of nurturing scholarship on antisemitism and the Holocaust and building “a community of living research, scholarship and teaching.”

In this conversation, we discuss the two types of antisemitism, the influence of societal structures versus personal agency in human behavior and in the Holocaust in particular, what it takes to overcome antisemitism, the importance of rational debate instead of simply denouncing people, the pro-Hamas protests we have seen on the political left in the wake of the October 7 massacre, and much more.

There can be no more essential reading now than the 2018 book Contemporary Left Antisemitism by the British sociologist David Hirsh, whose brings to the subject the level of academic rigor required to truly unpack and understand the issue. It is astonishing to see how perfectly Hirsh outlined everything we see before us now.

For anyone paying attention to the protests in the West and pro-Hamas rhetoric on the left, this is an absolute must-read. And stay tuned as I plan to publish a two-hour podcast interview with the author in the next day or two.

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning foreign correspondent and scholar of East Asia. His first book, Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, is the definitive text on the world’s largest tech conglomerate. His second book, The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, is the best available book on the subject.

He is a former correspondent for The Economist, a regular commentator in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and The Nation, and a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and Bloomberg. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the technology think tank the Foundation for American Innovation. Geoffrey is a fearless journalist, heavyweight intellectual, and a dear friend. For more, visit his website and follow his X account.

In this discussion, we talk about recent events in Israel, the radicalization of the left since the 1960s, my cancellation, the evidence we have for the Uyghur genocide, what the U.S. should do if China invades Taiwan, Chinese public support for Xi Jinping, rural Cuba’s opposition to communism, the technology behind China’s police state, why you shouldn’t download TikTok, and the story of Israel’s phenomenal success.

Arash Azizi is a writer and historian whose commentary has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Newsweek, BBC, Haaretz, The Daily Beast, Guardian, Vanity Fair, The Nation,  Al-Jazeera, and more.

He holds a PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from NYU, where his dissertation examined the communist movement in the Middle East during the Cold War. He is a lecturer in political science and history at Clemson University, and a fellow at the Center for Middle East and Global Order (CMEG).

Arash’s work has been translated to 18 languages and he is the author of the 2020 book “The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran’s Global Ambitions” as well as the upcoming 2024 book “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.”

In our conversation, we discuss the political situation in Iran, who will likely replace the aging Khamenei, the nation’s path to freedom, the role woman have played and continue to play in this story, and more.

This episode was recorded days after the October 7 massacre in Israel, and with events unfolding in the region it is more important than ever to educate ourselves on Iran, which is the major state sponsor of Hamas and the reason for its dominance in Gaza.

In this episode, I brought Razib Khan, writer in population genetics and consumer genomics, back on the show to discuss the genetics of Israelis and Palestinians. Razib explains the genetic differences between various Jewish communities as well as the differences between people from the West Bank and from Gaza. We discuss which groups are most closely tied to the region, where other groups involved actually come from, and what the map would look like today if Europe had never interfered.