Category: interview

Coleman Hughes interviews Ben Shapiro

September 8, 2025 • 9:45 am

This is a new video interview from the “Conversations with Coleman” series at the Free Press, but I found it posted just this morning on YouTube. Before you go running to the hills when you hear and see “Ben Shapiro”, let me remind you of the salubrious effect of listening to those whose views differ from yours.

Here are the notes from The Free Press, with the piece titled “Ben Shapiro on the most dangerous force in America“.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro sees the civilizational battle of the modern era as one between the builders and the destroyers—or as he writes it in his new book, between the “lions” and the “scavengers.” [JAC: you can find the book here on Amazon].

When I sat down with Ben this week, he explained the way he sees this dynamic play out in American society—across both political parties—as “scavengers,” who feed on grievance, identity politics, and moral relativism, cut down the progress of “lions,” who choose responsibility, courage, and a commitment to truth, even when it’s unpopular.

Over the past two years, Ben has seen the scavengers ascendant, as America and Europe have exploded in violent protest against their own institutions, blaming their ills on the free markets and constitutional republicanism, or on the “military-industrial complex” and “global Jewry.”

I spoke with Ben about the way out of the darkness—which he thinks can best be found in religious values: family obligation and procreation, moral order, and meaning beyond the self.

Our conversation ranged across birth rates, wokeness, and the Donald Trump presidency, with moments of both agreement and debate. I came away with a clearer understanding of his worldview—one that frames the future of Western civilization as a high-stakes struggle, more fraught than ever.

Click to listen; it’s a bit more thanb an hour long, and I did listen to it. I have a few notes below the video. (Note: there are a few short ads.)

Shapiro’s premise, which isn’t controversial, is that those who protest Israel’s actions and favor Palestine (or Hamas) really want to see the demise of Western civilization.  This all, avers Shapiro stems from adopting the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, which leads to the idea that dispelling that dichotomy means “ripping down the whole system.”  The irony is that many of those who are scavengers, calling for the death of Western values, also benefit from the fruits of those values (e.g., the Oxford students whom Shapiro debated—the incident that inspired the book).  He adds that those “fruits”—the results of technological and scientific innovation, as well as of capitalism—were largely spread by Western colonialism, a contention that will drive “progressives” wild (cf. Bruce Gilley).

I do disagree with both Shapiro’s religiosity and his claim that alternative family structures are somewhat immoral (both of which, he says, are things that “scavengers” oppose, along with the “male/female binary”), and he does push hard on his view that the societal norm, endorsed by the government, should be that couples are best made of one heterosexual male and one heterosexual female, who have a sort of cultural duty, as well as a proper “life aspiration,” to have several children. (Apparently Shapiro is deeply worried by the low frequency of “replacement level” births in the West.

I’ve always wondered how Shapiro, who prides himself on his rationality, had bought so heavily into superstition—in the form of orthodox Judaism. It’s not just that religions like Judaism uphold the traditional values that that Shapiro sees as the grounding of Western civilization, but that Shapiro seems to believe the myths and superstitions of the Old Testament itself.

Moving on, at 43:45 Hughes says Shapiro describes himself as a “sometimes Trumper” rather than a “never Trumper”, and Hughes asks whether Trump has done or could do anything that would make Shapiro reject him completely. Shapiro responds that he’s been very critical of Trump’s economic policy (tariffs) and foreign policy, as well as of the use of executive power willy-nilly to promote “national security.” Shapiro abhors the expansion of executive power at the expense of Congress, something he says has been going on for a while, including under Biden and Obama.

When asked what he sees as Trump’s biggest achievements, Shapiro replies that the three big ones are the shutting down of the southern border, the dismantling of DEI (which, of course, is not near being dismantled), and the striking of Iranian nuclear facilities in conjunction with Israel.

They then discuss peak wokeness, and Shapiro argues that “Black Lives Matter” as well as “trans-issue” wokeness are gone, but we are heading into higher “economic wokeness”, which calls for violence against those, like the murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who are seen as parasitizing society. This takes him back to the “tear down society” mindset of many protestors.

At about 53:30, they proceed to disagree on the value of the Second Amendment (Shapiro is pro, Hughes con, as he considers that Amendment as originally construed in the Constitution is largely superfluous).  Shapiro considers the Amendment moot because there are so many guns already in existence, and it’s impossible to get rid of them. I disagree: one can at least try to restrict and buy back guns from the public, even if it doesn’t work perfectly. Remember, far more deaths that result from privately-owned guns are of innocent people than of criminals shot in self defense.  This is from a study conducted by the Violence Policy Center:

The study finds that in 2019 there were only 316 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the SHR. That year, there were 9,610 criminal firearm homicides reported to the SHR. Using these numbers, in 2019, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 30 criminal homicides. For the five-year period 2015 to 2019, 49,104 Americans died in criminal gun homicides, while guns were used in only 1,453 justifiable homicides: a ratio of 34 to one. Neither ratio takes into account the tens of thousands of lives lost each year in firearm suicides and unintentional gun deaths. The study presents Bureau of Justice Statistics data that reveal that only a tiny fraction of the intended victims of violent crime (1.7 percent) or property crime (0.3 percent) employ guns for self-defense – and of these incidents, it’s not known whether the gun was even used successfully in stopping the crime.

They finish up with Shapiro describing what he sees as the biggest misconceptions about him harbored by the public. They include lumping Shapiro together with other conservatives (e.g., Tucker Carlson), a view which I don’t like either as it gives people an excuse not to pay attention to any message that comes from the Right.

Overall, it’s a decent conversation (Hughes is an excellent interviewer), though I thought Shapiro went on a bit too long about the duty to have heterosexual families and children, a view with which I disagree. And I still don’t understand his strict adherence to Orthodox Judaism, which is a form of superstition. I wish Hughes had asked him that question, but of course it would have made Shapiro uber-defensive.  And, in general, I agree with Shapiro on what he see’s as Trump’s biggest mistakes and three biggest achievements, though of course I did not and would not ever vote for Trump.  And I still think we should strive to eliminate all private ownership of guns.  Finally, there wasn’t enough discussion about the connection between war protests and the desire to destroy Western civilization. After all, that was supposed to be the “most dangerous force in America,” and yet I don’t perceive it as so dangerous right now. I would, however, like more people to be aware of the connection.

Triggernometry grills Benjamin Netanyahu

August 24, 2025 • 10:00 am

Here’s a 43-minute interview of Benjamin Netanyahu by the Triggernometry dudes: Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster.  It’s a short one: 43 minutes with about 4 minutes of commercials, and the schedule, given on the YouTube site, is at the bottom along with my comments.

Click on the screenshot below and then hit the “play” button.

 

 

Here’s the contents by introduction time (indented), and my comments (flush left):

00:00 Introduction

02:13 Benjamin Netanyahu’s Experience Of October 7th

06:05 What Do We Now Know That We Didn’t On October 7th?

08:11 How Did Your Intelligence Services Not See This Coming?

Netanyahu says this question will be answered by an upcoming investigation. There’s also another “lesson” he learned from October 7: that Israel “ultimately have to take on Iran itself”. I’m very curious about what the investigation will conclude.

12:57 Was Israel Allowing Qatar To Give Money To Hamas?

Netanyahu claims that the money was given by Israel to Gazans themselves, in order to “protect the population and feed and nurture them”, but I’m a bit dubious about this. How could they not know that the money would go mostly to Hamas, not ordinary Gazans? And with that dosh from Israel, Hamas built its huge network of terror tunnels.  In other words, Israel was financing terrorism and must have known it.  Here we have another conundrum, for Hamas swore in its first charter (1988) to not only wipe out Israel but kill all Jews.  Are you telling me that Netanyahu didn’t think about this?  His own country helped buttress Hamas terrorism in Gaza and now, he says, Israel will keep fighting until Hamas is eliminated.

16:14 Keir Starmer’s Comments And The UK Recognising Palestine As A State

Here Netanyahu says, correctly, that the recognition of Palestine as a state by European countries only encourages Hamas to continue their resistance. And that rewards Hamas with a de facto gift of a state whose rulers have already said they will to repeat the butchery of October 7 again and again.  As he says, echoing Douglas Murray “[Those European states] recognize Israel’s right to defend itself as long as Israel doesn’t exercise that right.”  He adds that those countries are weak, bowing to “radical minority protestors”.

19:36 Will Israel Be Trapped In A ‘Forever War’ Through Its Current Actions?

Here Kisen and Foster ask the obvious question: what  about the amount of casualties and suffering of Palestinians?  Further, they ask, “If Israel has achieved nearly all of its aims, won’t its actions continue to radicalize the Gazan population?”

Netanyahu responds again with an assertion that doesn’t quite ring true: he says that Gazans see hope and are many are telling Israel “don’t let up” until they eliminate Hamas. This seems like an exaggeration.

But the PM’s response to accusations of genocide is on the mark:  “If we wanted to commit genocide, we could have done it in one afternoon.”  He says that the ratio of civilians to combatants killed is 1.5/1, which of course readers here have contested. But I’d believe the IDF’s estimates over Hamas’s any day.  To expect a lower ratio, says Netanyahu, is holding Israel “to an impossible standard”.

26:47 The Inflammatory Comments By Israeli Government Ministers

People are always quoting statements made in anger by Israeli government officials (or, more recently, by extreme right-wing politicians) to justify their charge of “genocide” against Israel. My own response is the same as above: there is no evidence I see that Israel is actually acting in a way that will wipe out all Gazans, terrorists or civilians. IDF soldiers are being killed in efforts to invade by killing as few civilians as possible, and why would they do that if they could simply bomb the country to smithereens at no risk to IDF soldiers?  Netanyahu admits that Israeli officials have said things they “don’t mean”, but, nevertheless, most but not all of Israelis are united in the war aims

Kisen and Foster responds, “But those espousing the ‘kill ’em all’ ideas were in the government; so isn’t that ethnic cleansing?” [Not a direct quote!] Netanyahu says that ethnic cleansing has never been discussed in the war cabinet but admits that there are disagreements in the cabinet about how to conduct the wear.  He adds that Israel’s policy is not to occupy Gaza. Rather, he wants a non-Israeli civilian government that doesn’t condone or launch terrorism (i.e., not Hamas or PA), and he does not want to see or send Israeli settlers in Gaza.

31:33 The Views Of The Younger Generations Towards Israel

Kisen and Foster mention that the biggest opposition to Israel’s attack on Gaza is among young people. Netanyahu responds that these young folk should look carefully at exactly whom they are supporting: terrorists, Iran, even those who tried to kill Trump. He adds that he does not want to see American boots on the ground to help Israel, though he approves of Trump’s “forceful support given in a judicious way.”

Finally, he says something that seems very true: “We are the litmus test for the survival of the West.” He claims, correctly, that many of the pro-Palestinian protestors have as their explicit or implicit aim the destruction of Western civilization. There is plenty of evidence that this is indeed the case.

35:01 What Does The Future Of Gaza Look Like?

Again the Triggernometry duo asks Netanyahu, “How can you have a peaceful eoexistence with radicalized people who hate you?” Netanyahu responds that after the war there should be a “program of deradicalization”. Such a program, he says, has worked elsewhere, as in Japan and Germany after WWII, and even with the Gulf States in the Middle East. The goal, he says, is to “reconstruct Gaza and deradicalize it.”

The problem, of course, is that after WWII the world was not allied against the U.S. for defeating Germany and Japan, as it is now against Israel defeating Hamas. Further, the U.N. (especially UNRWA) is firmly on the side of Hamas, and so “deradicalization” in Gaza would face enormous pushback from the rest of the world. Still, I think, it’s necessary, and for that they need good, moderate, and non-terrorist Palestinian leadership. Sadly, nobody seems willing to step up to the plate. Other Arab states already recognize the seeds of terrorism in Palestinians by refusing to let them settle in their countries.

Starmer and others who recognize a Palestinian state are, says the P.M., recognizing a state that would continue to foster terrorism. These countries are implicitly calling for the continuance of Islamist threats against Israel’s existence. Indeed, one might almost think they wouldn’t be disturbed if Israel disappeared.

37:15 What’s The One Thing We’re Not Talking About In Western Civilisation That We Should Be?

Netanyahu’s answer is “Three things: history, history, and history”  As he says, “If you don’t know how we got here, you don’t know how to proceed from here.”  One of these bits of knowledge is to take threats of annihiliation, like those in Hamas’s first charter, seriously. Another is that if a state like Iran says it might use nuclear weapons, do not ignore that. That in fact is why Israel and the U.S. united to go after Iran’s nukes in June of this year.

A few final comments. I am getting a lot of anti-Israel emails (and a few comments on the site) that parrot the Hamas line of genocide and call for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, apparently leaving Hamas in power. Some of the emails and comments are uncivil.  To those who want Israel out of Gaza now, leaving Hamas to resume power, I ask you to tell us, “What would you do if you were in Netanyahu’s place now?” That is, how would you conduct the war if you controlled the IDF?

Almost nobody ever answers that one, save one commenter who told me that Israel should withdraw from Gaza and build a huge, high, and impenetrable wall on the border between Gaza and Israel!  The problems with that are clear, of course. Rockets do not respect high walls, and Hamas will begin firing rockets again if it resumes power. Further, you remember what happened when Israel built walls along parts of the West Bank to stop terrorists from entering. Those walls worked very well, but Israel was accused of furthering “apartheid” by building them. The fact is that nothing Israel does in this war will ever be praised, much less be free from worldwide condemnation.

Finally, I ask readers to avoid accusing Israel of deliberately committing genocide against the Palestinians, much less saying Israel is an “apartheid state”. Those are stupid and obtuse assertions, and obtuseness (defined by Brittanica as “stupid or unintelligent: not able to think clearly or to understand what is obvious or simple”) is banned by Da Roolz. In fact, it might behoove you, especially if you’re a new reader, to read “Da Roolz”, as many seem to have forgotten them.

That said, feel free to go after Netanyahu–or support some of what he said.

Lawrence Krauss interviews Carole Hooven

August 9, 2025 • 12:00 pm

This is one of the twenty-odd interviews that Lawrence Krauss conducted to support the new book he edited, The War on Science, comprising essays about the pollution of academia by ideology. (Nearly all of us indict ideology from the Left, though many of us, including me, admit that the Right is currently a bigger threat to science—but perhaps only temporarily.)  As you know, I am not a fan of podcasts and long videos, but I’m trying to listen to as many of my cowriters  as I can (Luana Maroja and I have an essay in the volume, but didn’t do an interview).

Here’s an interview with Carole Hooven, whom you’ve surely heard of as an evolutionary biologist specializing  in testosterone and the evolutionary basis of sex differences. (Her book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, is excellent.)  When teaching at Harvard, she made the mistake of saying that there were only two sexes, and that statement snowballed into a huge fracas. Hooven’s colleagues in human evolutionary biology wouldn’t support her for emphasizing the biological facts about biological sex, for that’s a minefield that demonizes those who enter it as “transphobes”. As Carole recounts in her Free Press piece, “Why I left Harvard,” she got in trouble for simply speaking the truth. If you know Carole, you’ll know the she’s eminently civil and polite. She just wasn’t ideologically correct. Here’s an excerpt of the FP piece, which she reprinted as the essay in The War on Science.

In the brief segment on Fox, my troubles began when I described how biologists define male and female, and argued that these are invaluable terms that science educators in particular should not relinquish in response to pressure from ideologues. I emphasized that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.” We can, I said, “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.”

I also mentioned that educators are increasingly self-censoring, for fear that using the “wrong” language can result in being shunned or even fired.

The failure of her colleagues to defend her for speaking the truth is reprehensible, and eventually the pressure forced her to leave her department.  The rest you can hear in this video (the interview starts at 4:04).  There’s a lot more than the Harvard-cancellation story: Carole’s had an interesting life, starting as a primatologist working in Africa, and you’ll learn something about that, too. Have a listen.

Nicholas Christakis interviewed about attacks on science

August 4, 2025 • 11:30 am

Lawerence Krauss has conducted 20 interviews with people who contributed to the recent book he edited, The War on Science (Luana Maroja and I coauthored chapter, a reworking of an earlier publication).  I’ve listened to some but not all of the interviews, and many are good (you can find the collection here).  But today I want to highlight Krauss’s interview with Yale physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis for one reason: it rebuts some critics’ accusation that the book, which deals largely with “progressive” Leftist attacks on science, is deficient because it neglects a bigger threat to science: the one from the Right conducted by Trump and his minions. In fact, some benighted people have even claimed that our book was outmoded before it appeared on July 29.  None of these critics, by the way, have read the book (see one example here).

I’ve responded to this criticism by making several of the points articulated by both Krauss and Christakis in the video below. First, they agree, along with me, that yes, Trump’s depredations on science right now are indeed a more serious threat to science than are the attacks from the Left.  But so what? Most of us have criticized what Trump has done: I, for one, have called it out almost daily on my Hili posts.  But for several reasons that does not mean that we should completely neglect attacks on science from the Left. One I’ve mentioned already: attacks from the Left come largely from within science, and are likely to persist for decades as students are propagandized by “progressive” faculty. (Trump, on the other hand, will be gone in 3.5 years, and one hopes that what he’s doing to science will be reversed, which it easily can be.)  Plenty of people are in fact going after Trump for his right-wing blackmail, but who is going after the Left?

Second, the book was conceived and assembled before the Trump Mafia decided to use science funding as a blackmail to bend universities to its will. But the book didn’t change when Trump started the blackmail, and I think that’s okay, but the point of the book was simply to show from where in science the attacks on science are coming from.

Third, Leftist attacks on science are largely worldwide, while the attack on science from the Right is largely limited to the U.S.

Finally, Christakis points out at 7:20, there are attacks on science from both Right and Left, and the attack from the Right is more serious. Yet, as they both add beginning at 9:05, the attack on science by the Right was motivated in part by the behavior of “progressive” scientists from the Left!  As Christakis says, “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets. And we are an easy target because we have been hypocritical, we have been self-serving. . . . we definitely played a role in this. But I think a political commentator in the United States said that ‘Trump is the wrong answer to the right question’. . . . There’s a kernel there, as you and Niall [Ferguson] were talking about, where we did make ourselves into targets.  And this is why, in my judgement, many of the authors of the book volume you edited—The War on Science-—have the credibility to push back against the right—because they also push back against the Left.”  Christakis then explains why criticisms of the book outlined above are misguided.

In fact, I know many of the book’s authors, and all of them whose politics I know are on the Left side of the political spectrum (I can’t vouch for those I don’t know), and also think that what Trump is doing to science is execrable. We are not, as some imply, a pack of alt-right Nazi sympathizers!

All in all, I don’t take seriously the criticism that our book is either trivial or outdated. I find criticisms like those of Jonathan Howard at Science-Based Medicine (another person who didn’t read the book) both amusing and uninformed.

Those who want to address the book’s arguments should read the damn thing and actually deal with its contentions. So far, nobody has.

At any rate, I’ve always admired Christakis ever since he dealt so calmly with the unhinged Yale students enraged by the infamous Yale Halloween letter.  Here he shows the pernicious effects that ideology can have on science, whether that ideology comes from either the Right or the Left.  I haven’t yet read Christakis’s piece in the book, but look forward to it.

Ezra Klein interviews Ross Douthat on his Christian religious beliefs (they include angels and demons)

May 6, 2025 • 10:00 am

I’ve never read or listened to Ezra Klein, who does podcasts and columns at the NYT and elsewhere, but the impression I got from others was that he was wickedly smart.  I don’t listen to podcasts, his main metier, so I didn’t know. I have to say, though, that I’m not that impressed by the views he expresses in this 1.5-hour interview (bottom) with Ross Douthat, also of the NYT.

Douthat has been pushing his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, all over the place, including in the NYT and the Free Press . I’ve discussed some of his theses before on this site (see here), and, as you might imagine, I haven’t been a fan. Not only does he say that everyone has a longing for religion to fill their “god-shaped hole,” but he says that Roman Catholicism, which (not coincidentally) is his own religion, is the right faith—the way to a happy afterlife. And Douthat’s bought pretty much the whole Vatican hog, including the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels. I was surprised to see that, released on Feb. 11, the book is only at Amazon position 2,825 this morning; I thought that—given his claim that Americans are longing for faith—his written lucubrations would be in the top 100 at least, since I’ve never seen a book promotion so relentless in the MSM.

But I digress. In the video below, Douthat and Klein, both eloquent and clearly smart people, make a great deal of the unevidenced: the things that science and “materialism” can’t explain and, therefore, constitute for both men evidence for either God or “something beyond materialism.” And I have to say that I was terrifically bored, but don’t let my reaction put you off.

Here are the YouTube notes by Klein with the timings of relevant parts.

I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.

My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike. [JAC: I didn’t!]

Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty?

And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

The segments of the video (click to go to them):

0:00 Intro
1:11 Trump: man of destiny?
19:55 Political power, cruelty and Godliness
36:25 Religion and spirituality in the modern world
43:18 The mysteries of the universe…
49:31 Aliens! Fairies! (and some Catholic history)
58:25 Contending with uncertainty and evil
1:07:02 Psychedelic experiences
1:23:36 Official knowledge
1:36:02 Book recommendations

The NYT has a written transcript here (archived here). I did not read it exept to check the quotes, so my reactions below are based on listening.

I started listening 36 minutes in. after the politics were over, and Ceiling Cat help me, I made it to the end, but still required a stiff dose of Pepto-Bismol afterwards. But perhaps you want to listen to the politics, too.

So here’s the evidence that Douthat takes for the existence of the Christian (and Catholic) god. I’ll make no attempt to be cohesive here; I’ll just give my thoughts, Douthat’s and Klein’s assertions, and some quotes.

First, I was greatly disappointed to see Klein (who appears to be a slightly religious Jew susceptible to the “supernatural”) not pushing back on some of Douthat’s more extreme claims, including the existence of Jesus and an omnipotent loving God, of course, but also of angels and demons (he mentions the efficacy of exorcism), saints, life after death, and even trickster beings (“fairies”). Douthat’s primary evidence for God is the existence of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, which, he avers, have considerable overlap between different faiths. In other words, he bases the existence of his religion—and his being—on what people feel. To him that’s as strong, or even stronger, evidence than scientific evidence and materialism. But it’s nothing new. It’s popular now because it’s being pushed by the press as an “important” book.

In fact, Douthat and Klein both reject materialism, largely because it can’t explain these experiences and consciousness, as well as the existence of a world that, Douthat asserts, was “created with us in mind.” It makes me wonder why God created all those other lifeless planets. Is it for our amusement or wonder? And if there is life on some planets, was that also created by God, and did the aliens experience visitations by Jesus?

As Douthat says, “a new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity, in its unruliness, in the experiences people have, in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe”. . . and then mentions quant-mechanical entanglement and the many-worlds hypothesis as a speculations beyond materialism that makes his faith in God stronger. I don’t think a physicist would find these either non-materialistic or evidence for the divine. As in everything that both men espouse in this show, our failure to understand something gets figured into Douthat’s Bayesian statistic that raises the probability of God’s existence.

For Klein, the unexplainable experiences can be spiritual ones as well as religious ones. But Klein leaves no doubt that religious and spiritual explanations, as well as other phenomena that science doesn’t (yet) understand, are supernatural explanations, and “supernatural” means “nonmaterialistic.”

Douthat:

I mean the view that all of existence — life, the universe and everything — is finely reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary, rather than the other way around. I don’t mean materialism in terms of Madonna’s “Material Girl” or something like that — although the two can be connected.

He clearly thinks it’s the other way around (i.e. mind isn’t material), and firmly rejects the view—Klein seems to agree—that consciousness and the mind are nonmaterial phenomena that give Douthat evidence for God and Klein evidence for the supernatural. Douthat, it seems, is apparently unaware of the advances that science has made showing that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon (for one thing, you can predictably remove it with anesthesia and then restore it).

Now to be fair, Klein, who apparently has tried drugs like ayahuasca, notes that predictable effects on the mind can also be effected by psychedelic substances, Douthat rejects this materialism, claiming that religious experiences are very different from psychedelic ones (having taken psychedelic drugs in the past, I have strong doubts about this, though I haven’t experienced Jesus). And, to further counteract this, Douthat argues that the religious experiences of all religions are pretty much the same.  As I recall from reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, this isn’t true, even for Western religion. I wonder, for example, if the religious experiences of a Buddhist monk living his whole life in a cave are the same as those of a Christian talking to Jesus. The only common factor is something beyond the worldly.

Giving a sop to other religions—though Douthat thinks that Roman Catholicism is the “right” one (and by that he clearly means you don’t go to heaven if you embrace the wrong one, don’t confess, don’t take communion, and the like)—he does say that all religions have a core set of “truths” that are pretty much the same. I doubt it.  Hard-core Muslims not only reject the divinity of Jesus or the necessity of believing in the tripartite God if you want to live in Paradise after death. And the morality of faiths is very different. If you’re an apostate Muslim, you should be killed, and you have to pray five times a day.  (I haven’t mentioned the cargo cults, which to me qualify as religions, too.)

Further evidence that Douthat adduces for God are the fact that the universe seems “fine tuned” for life (I won’t go into the many alternative explanations), and that a broken radio started playing spontaneously at Michael Shermer’s wedding with no materialistic explanation (I kid you not; read the transcript).

Now Douthat’s Achilles’s heel, which Klein mentions, is the existence of natural evil: childhood cancers, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like—things that kill innocent people for no obvious reason. These don’t evince an omnipotent or omniscient God. Why do they happen?

Douthat says we don’t know:

I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved.

I’m not here to tell you I’ve resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It’s a real issue. Again, I think it’s an issue that’s there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testaments.

So, although he hasn’t resolved this HUGE problem, Douthat is confident that it’s part of God’s plan. (What an evil God it must be to give children leukemia!).  Yet I see no difference between his view one one hand and his denigration of science for having confidence  that materialism will someday resolve the problem of consciousness on the other.  After all, science is making progress on consciousnes, but has made no progress in understanding the existence of natural evil. And it never will, for all we have are smart people like Douthat, and a coterie of theologians, who get paid to simply ruminate on the problem but, in the end, can make no progress. How can your mind tell you why God permits natural evil? Through a revelation?

And I’d like to ask Douthat this: “If the Chcristian God says that we can get to heaven only by believing in him (and going “through Jesus”), why doesn’t God make his presence more clearly?  He could, you know, and then everyone would have the “right” religion!”  And here I don’t mean “religious experiences,” but a physical manifestation that could be documented to such an extent that it can’t be doubted. (I give an example of this scenario in Faith Verus Fact.) God surely wants everyone to go to heaven, for he’s a good God, so why didn’t he show up in first-century Palestine. What happens to all those Egyptians and Babylonians?

At the end, Klein asks Douthat to recommend three books for the audience. Here they are:

Stephen Barr, “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”

After” by Bruce Greyson (about the afterlife)

“Mind and Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel

Of these I’ve read only Nagel’s book, which is teleological without being religious and somewhat confused. You can find several critiques of the books by Big Minds online.

There are two big problems with this discussion. The first is Douthat’s uncritical embrace of Roman Catholicism and all its doctrine. And the mask slips a bit when he says this:

I don’t know what your metaphysical perspectives were as a kid. But I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.

I just think it’s, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that’s not inherently comforting. It’s quite terrifying.

Well, what is comforting–or discomforting–need not be true.  But since neither Douthat nor Klein is a materialist, there is very little discussion about the evidence for Jesus, God, Satan, angels, demons, and so on. They are taken as a given, presumably evidenced through revelation or experience.

And that brings us to the second problem. Though Klein and Douthat are buddies, Klein does not push him hard on his views. It’s more a spiritual bro-fest than a discussion, which is perhaps why I found it so tedious. Douthat is making a name for himself even though he spouts the same old pieties (worse–he buys the whole Vatican hog)

Here are some quotes from a reader who called this to my attention.

Ezra Klein interviewing Ross Douthat. Klein hardly endears himself to rationality. But Douthat is talking about the reality of angels, demons, fairies, and that Christianity and Judaism being divinely founded – poor Buddhists left out… The NYTimes gives Douthat uncritical time. Shame on them for giving him prominence in the paper of record.

. . .Perhaps I am being harsh and insensitive to their friendship. But Klein’s failure to challenge RD’s belief in demons, angels, fairies, etc saddened me. Hence my “Klein hardly endears himself to rationality” comment.

If there is a religious revival going on, the juggernaut is being pushed by the mainstream media. I have no idea why save for the tiny flattening of the curve showing the proportion of “nones” over the last two years.

Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos

July 6, 2024 • 10:30 am

Here’s the full 22-minute uncut interview of Joe Biden by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. It took place yesterday evening, and concentrated, of course, on Biden’s performance in his debate for Trump.  Please weigh in below.

My short take: Stephanopoulos asked good, hard questions—no softballs. And Biden’s unscripted performance here was better than in the debate, but I’m still worried.

When asked whether he watched the debate on tape, Biden says he couldn’t remember. He says he was ill and “just had a bad night.” He also claims that Trump’s shouting, even with his mike shut off, threw Biden off. But then remember that Biden gave a barnburner teleprompted speech the very next day, and how could that be if he was ill? As for reports that he has a “bad day” often in private life as well, he replies by touting his accomplishments in a boilerplate recitation, and denies that his efforts in the past 3.5 years has cost him anything vis-à-vis his health.

Biden claims that his doctors say he’s fine, and that “he has a full neurological test every day”, which sounds dubious. Stephanopoulos asks, however, if Biden had taken a full cognitive test. Biden evades that question, saying that he “has a full cognitive test every day,” referring to his behavior in public. But that’s not an answer, and it’s curious if he really hasn’t HAD such a test, which could put many minds at ease  Nevertheless, the President says he doesn’t want to have a full medical evaluation because “he’s already done it.”  That’s clearly not the case: he’s referring to his “normal” behavior in public. But many of his answers are basically a campaign speech: assertions that he “put NATO together,” “shut Putin down,” “checkmated China” (???), “put together a South Pacific initiative,” and so on.

Biden vehemently asserts that he will defeat Trump in November. despite the polls that show otherwise. He adds that he got this same poll-based pushback in 2020, when he won.  Ergo, he implies that the polls aren’t really a good prediction of what will happen, and it’s merely a “toss-up”. That may be the case, and no candidate ever admits that they’re really behind. He claims that a “pathological liar” like Trump simply can’t win, and that he knows of nobody “more qualified to be President and win this race than me.”

When Stephanopoulos notes that a group of Congresspeople are getting together to convince Biden to drop out of the race, Biden poo-poos that, claiming that all the people in Congress he knows have told him to stay in.  (Biden looks disturbed at this point.) He reasserts that his dropping out “is not gonna happen,” and denies that his approval rating really is 36%.

In the end, yes, I think Biden did a good job in his first term. He was good on Ukraine vs. Russia, okay on Israel, not so good on immigration, decent on most other things, but lame on gender/sex issues (Title IX).  I don’t hold him responsible for the downturn in our economy; but I think he certainly did better than Trump would have.  Trump will be mired in trials and legal issues for the next few years, and I also think he’s mentally ill. So, as a “never Trumper” liberal, I’ll vote for whatever candidates the Democrats choose. But I’m still dubious about Biden, even after watching this interview. He was simply not sharp enough, and what’s the story with his voice? I do think he has a neurological problem that might impede his effectiveness as President. He needs to take a cognitive test and make the results public.

Despite that, and despite his defensiveness and clear reluctance to even consider dropping out of the election, I guess he’ll be the Democrat whose name is by the party box.

After the end of the debate, 23 minutes in, four ABC correspondents give their take during the last 8 minutes. None of them think that Biden did a good enough job to rehabilitate his reputation, and several say that he hasn’t taken the doubt among House Democrats seriously enough. None of the four are enthusiastic.

Biden’s self-confidence may hurt not just the party, but, come November, the country.

Here are two takes (excerpted). First, from the New York Times (archived here):

Mr. Biden’s performance in the 22-minute session with George Stephanopoulos was not viewed as disastrously as his debate against Mr. Trump eight days earlier. But while his most loyal supporters presumably found enough reassurance to stick with him, those who have turned against him or were on the verge of doing so did not seem comforted, and time is running out if the party is to change nominees, as some would like.

While Mr. Biden had a ruddier color to his face this time and looked calm and composed with his hands in his lap and legs crossed, he once again sounded hoarse and at times tentative, sometimes struggling to finish a sentence. He was dismissive about concerns about his health, denied that he was more frail and ducked questions about medical tests.

He took responsibility for his debate performance repeatedly — “nobody’s fault but mine” — but then blamed it on exhaustion and sickness and Mr. Trump “shouting” and distracting him. Even so, he indicated that he did not know whether he had actually watched a recording of the debate afterward. He said that he has a cognitive test every day because he is “running the world” and that he would only step aside as a candidate “if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race.’”

Probably the one line that generated the most irritation among fellow Democrats was his response when Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Biden how he would feel in January if he loses to Mr. Trump and has to turn the White House back over to the former president. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Mr. Biden replied.

Multiple Democrats expressed exasperation at that afterward, declaring that the election was not about earning a participation trophy but about stopping a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election he had lost, urged “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to power and vowed to devote his next term to exacting “retribution” on his adversaries. One House Democrat, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussion, said that he hoped the Lord Almighty would be coming to talk with Mr. Biden soon.

And from this morning’s Free Press article by Eli Lake:

President Joe Biden, in his interview Friday night with ABC News, said many things. The polls had him in a dead heat with Donald Trump. Democratic Party leaders have urged him to stay in the race. America, under his leadership, has “checkmated” China.

He delivered these assessments with a gravel-voiced clarity missing from his disastrous debate performance on June 27. He was engaged and followed his train of thought to a conclusion. The problem was the substance of his answers were lacking. In fact, many of the things he said strained credulity.

Call it Biden’s alternative facts.

Let’s start with the polling. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up” between him and Donald Trump. It’s possible Biden has indeed spoken to pollsters who tell him the presidential race, after the debate, is 50-50. But the highest quality polls after the debate show Trump in a firm lead.

The New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, has Biden down six points among likely voters. A Wall Street Journal post-debate poll found 60 percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. CNN’s latest poll among American adults has Biden at 43 percent versus Trump at 49 percent.

Former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Axelrod posted on X a more realistic assessment of Biden’s chances in the race on Friday evening: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.”

The other extraordinary answer Biden gave to Stephanopoulos was that Democratic Party leaders were urging him to stay in the race. In response to a question about whether he would consider abandoning his run for a second term if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged him to withdraw, Biden said, “Every one of ’em. . . they all said I should stay in the race.” He said this was also true of James Clyburn, the former House majority whip from South Carolina who saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 in his home state.

In public remarks, however, two of these Democratic leaders have signaled a very different message for Biden. This week Clyburn said he would support a “mini-primary” before the Democratic convention at the end of August if Biden stepped aside. And Pelosi this week encouraged Biden to give an interview to serious journalists to prove he is capable of running for a second term. Then she added this knife-twist in an interview with MSNBC: “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’ ”

Scanning the liberal press, I really couldn’t find a single op-ed saying that Biden did a good job and should forget about dropping out.  Surely that tells you something about the mindset of liberals.  Joe needs to go.

Bari Weiss interviews Roland Fryer

February 21, 2024 • 12:45 pm

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

  1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
  2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
  3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.