TRIGGERnometry - Meet the Journalist Fired for ‘Defending Hitler’ - David Volodzko

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

David Volodzko is a writer and journalist based in the United States. His work has been published in New York Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The New Republic, Bloomberg, Forbes, Vice and Slate, among others. He is the author of The Radicalist, a newsletter on political extremism https://www.theradicalist.com/ and the host of The Radicalist podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/66pxhbfJyOF1bIxX4Ox3wH?si=3efaa46625bc4844 Try MUD\WTR for $29 at https://mudwtr.com/triggernometry Try Factor today and get 50% off by using code: TRIGGER50 at https://factormeals.com Go to http://givesendgo.com/triggerpod Raise or give money for anything important to you. Check out Barro’s campaign here: https://www.givesendgo.com/barro Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The other person then turns, looks me dead in the face and says, I think some of that violence was necessary. Would we tolerate a statue of Hitler for even one second? I think everybody knows the answer to that. So why do we have a statue of Lenin? Two hours later, I received another phone call that began with the words, I believe, effective immediately. And that was that. David, so you were fired from the Seattle Times for defending Hitler, at which point we were like, this is going to be a great guest for us.

And then I read more into the story. And disappointingly, you actually didn't defend Hitler. So it's been a letdown all round. Welcome to the show. Tell us your story. Thank you for having me on. Yes, that's correct. I'm actually, the deeper you look, I think, into my bio.

I think you'll find I'm probably the last person you could possibly imagine throwing that accusation at. That's what they all say, Dave. Sure. I was, I spent a good part of my career leading up to this situation, covering genocidal violence, genocidal rape. when the war in Ukraine broke out, I flew over to the border to write about the refugee crisis that was going on there. I've covered the Tigrayan genocide.

And I wrote specifically about how I think that it wasn't getting the attention that deserved because of racism, which is quite a something that actually the WHO director Tedros was convinced me of that I initially was not persuaded of. Anyway, so it was around this time right after those two stories came out or within a year of those two stories coming out that I decided to apply and get the position for the Seattle Times editorial board and columnist. I took that role. Now, leading into the role, there was a lot of conversation in the on-ramping about my capacity for, what would you say, tolerance for aggressive, combative argumentation. which I thought at the time was probably a good thing to test for in people who are going to be on an editorial board and hammering out difficult ideas, discussing the issues, that sort of thing. I have a slightly different conceptualization of what that might have been all about looking back. But anyway, David, just to clarify that, putting it in simple language, when you were being considered for this position, people were sort of saying, well, David, is. quite open to a combative way of discussing things. Is that broadly the theme that you're...

I think they were trying to figure out would I be able to tolerate a combative environment. And I interpreted that to mean that when I'm on the board, we're going to be hashing out ideas and it's going to get rough, but that's okay because that's part of it. I think what they were actually doing was preparing me for one particular individual who tends to be incredibly combative. I think that's what was actually happening, the owner of the paper. I see. Which I didn't know at the time. So... So then I took the role. I did some editorials whereby you write in the voice of the paper. You know, you go out, you do the research, that thing I wrote about Orcas. I wrote about the airport, things of this nature. After about a month and a half, my boss said, it's about time for your first column. What do you want to write about? And my initial thinking was that I would like to write about the astronomical costs of child care in the Seattle area. It costs more than college currently. Wow. And it's a cost. that hits you right up front, whereas with college, you have 18 to 20 years to prepare.

And I had just, I'm a new father. At the time, you know, my daughter was six months old. So this was an issue that interested me. But my boss repeatedly nudged me to write about the statue of Vladimir Lenin in downtown Seattle. And I thought, okay, it's not very difficult for me to make that a personal story, given my family background, which is that on my father's side, both my grandparents were refugees from Russia. They had my grandmother's from Siberia. My grandfather was from the western part of the country, and his family was just shredded

by both the Soviets and the Nazis. So he ended up in a concentration camp, but made it out with his life, which is its own story where he had to actually wait for a... torrential downpour so that the ground would be soft enough that he could dig under the fence with his bare hands. Although at that point of the plan, he had become so weakened through starvation that he wasn't able to. And his two buddies had to drag him under the fence because he couldn't dig. He could barely walk. Anyway, so he got out. He actually ended up entering the U.S. military as an advisor of sorts, largely because of the number of languages that he spoke at this point. Belarusian, Russian, English, German, very useful at that time.

And then he made his way to America. So, okay, so I'm asked to write this piece about Vladimir Lenin. I can connect these parts of my background into the story. I thought it would be an interesting way not only to comment on what the statue means to Russian Americans, but also to introduce myself to the readers and say, this is who I am, this is my background. Nice to meet you. I'm the new editorial board.

member, something of that nature. It's important to note that in my column, I did say that I do not believe that the statue should be torn down by fiat. I think that it's a statue that, first of all, it's on private property, but also if it's to be taken down, it should be taken down with the consent of the community. I actually spoke to the former editor-in-chief of the Odessa Review and tablet writer Vladislavdavdsen about this and got some commentary from him on this. for the story because he has commented on this in the past, other statues that were of controversy. And he and I are eye to eye on the fact that you shouldn't just go around ripping down statues because they are offensive. Now, of course, in the context of Seattle and in the context of the

United States in the past few years, we know that statues has become a very contentious thing. And so I thought it was interesting for me to comment on this because of what I perceived to be the selective outrage on the left, whereby a Confederate statute, must come down, even some statues of George Washington must come down. But a statue of Vladimir Lenin is not only okay. It's the two most common responses that I received were that it was funny. And the other one is that he's the glorious hero. And we should, you know, there a lot of Seattleites, I think, are unaware of how seriously some other Seattleites take this statue. So people would write to me after the column came out and they would say,

why are you taking this so seriously? It's just a joke. And then other people would write to me and say, how dare you disrespect the great Lenin? And I'm like, well, maybe you two should get together and hash this out and then get back to me. But so the column comes out. What was the gist of the column? The gist of the column was basically there's a statue here. Lenin did these horrible things. He was a monster. We have a 16-foot bronze. statue of him. There was a little bit on the history of the statue and how it ended up here in the first place, which is an interesting story in itself. And then the reaction that some people have in the community when they see this. One woman, for instance, she came to visit her son,

Russian woman, Russian American son. She saw this statue and broke down weeping. She couldn't believe that there was a 16-foot bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin in the middle of the land of the free. She just didn't, she didn't know that she was going to see it. And when you see that around the corner, it's quite stunning. And it's a statue of him marching with guns and fire in the background. I mean, it's about what you would expect. So I didn't mean to say, shame on you, Seattle, you must take this statue down. I meant to say maybe there should be a little more reflection on what the statue means to everyone in the community. Because that tends to be the kind of rhetoric or dialogue that you often hear on the left is let's talk about the people most directly affected by this issue.

Let's talk about the people who are of this community, right? That's what we are instructed to do in these situations. But I felt that there was a problem here with what I would call selective outrage on the left. And unfortunately, this is no longer a point that I have to really hammer home in the wake of October 7th, where we really have seen selective outrage on the left at a level that almost defies comprehension. So the gist of the column was essentially was not that we should take it down, but that we should have more deeper consideration. And then, you know, I think as a good columnist does,

not to say this is what it is, but to say, well, here's the information, here's something to think about, there you go. What do you think about this? That was the point of the column, not to lecture people. Okay, so the column comes out. It's fairly warmly received, although I will say I was in the office one day and somebody said, you know, David's column's coming out and it's on the Lennon statue. You should check it out. And another individual said, oh, Lennon, I haven't seen this statue. I can't wait to see it though because he's my hero. To which the first person said, well, maybe you should read the column because in it David describes how he lost members of his hero. his family as a result of Soviet rule, and it's quite grim. The other person then turns, looks me dead in the face and says, I think some of that violence was necessary.

And that was the first... Wow. That was the first encounter I had with proper Leninism in Seattle. And I brushed it off. I was like, whatever. Okay, that was... And I changed the subject... In the moment, I changed the subject almost at me.

I didn't want to have that conversation. I changed the subject to something else. The column comes out and then I go, and then this is where things get sticky. I go online. I go on X and I write a few posts about the column and then I start getting into conversations with people and I make the point that, you know, we wouldn't tolerate a Confederate statue. Why would we tolerate a statue of Lenin when he has inarguably done vastly more damage than any single Confederate soldier or general ever did. And one individual made the point, well,

it's not really fair because we have a deeply personal relationship with the Confederacy in this country that we don't really have with Lenin because that's Europe, to which I said, okay, then, what about Hitler? Because Hitler is a European dictatorial leader who caused untold suffering and would we tolerate a statue of Hitler for even one second? I think everybody knows the answer to that. So why do we have a statue of Lenin? Now at this point I said it's even more ironic because Hitler, not in terms of any physical harm caused because we know that the death tolls, the Holocaust was uniquely evil. The death toll under the Nazis was worse. Nothing to be compared to what Lenin did. But psychologically, I said, Lenin was actually

more terrifying. And for this... Hang on a second, David. So let's explore that point, because I think this is a very interesting part of your story. I mean, why do you find him psychologically more terrifying?

I think because I don't know, obviously, as much as you about Soviet history, but Hitler was... The impact that he had psychologically on the people living under his rule was horrific. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me be more clear. I meant his psychology, not the psychological impact he had on others.

So Hitler is, this is a somewhat outdated framework for understanding psychopathy, but there is a framework that I find useful, which is a two-part framework. There's primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy, otherwise known as type 1 psychopathy and type 2 psychopathy, two types of psychopaths. So you can think of type 2 psychopathy as your more impulsive, hot-headed, quick to anger, usually not that bright. This is where I would fit Hitler from all of the research that I've done, the biographies that I've read, the information that I've gleaned. I would say he reads to me as a sort of, I think of him as a kind of Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones. Like you, every moment that he's on the screen for the first, I don't remember what season he ends up

leaving. But up until that point, you're just hate watching the show waiting for this kid to get killed off, right? So that's, that's your Hitler. He's, he's this disgusting little hateful, bigoted, nasty, and what gives him his power in large part is that he is the ruler of Westeros, or in Hitler's case, 1940s Germany. Even if Hitler was on par with Lenin, you just can't compare in 1920s Russia to 1940s Germany and expect that they're going to have the same degree of harm. So that's a different issue, though. Lenin, now, Lenin was actually, he was not a, I I don't think that Hitler was a great mind. I don't think that he had, I don't think he was particularly intelligent. Lenin was a genius. Lenin would often play chess with some of the great

players in Russia, which means the greatest players on the planet. And he would give them a good game. And if you go back and read his writing, you look at his research, you look at the sort of his routine when he was in prison or just throughout his life. He was incredibly brilliant. And that's not to say anything positive about the conclusions that he came to, but he was a brilliant, he had an incredibly brilliant mind he was methodical he was calculating he was manipulative this is not a joffrey brathian this is a hannibal lector this is a far more terrifying now who killed more people joffrey or hannibal right but why it's not because hannibal is a less terrifying or less evil mind i think that lenin is a is um a type one psychopath the primary psychopath he and one of the

ways that I think we can understand this is by looking at the fact that even within his almost incomprehensibly evil worldview, Hitler, he still had this framing of his desire to protect what he defined as the good and to oppose what he defined as the bad. So he had this kind of like moral architecture that we might recognize as defend the good, oppose the bad, but what he chose to fill in there is the complete reverse of reality, right? So he was completely psychotic and his understanding, like his architecture did not map onto reality, if that makes sense. But he at least believed he was a good guy.

And if you go back and read Mind Kampf, you see that he was in his thinking, trying to rationalize his evil acts as in some way helping Germany, helping Germans, creating being a force of good in the world. it's unbelievable that he was able to do the mental gymnastics on this. But if you look at Gregory H. Stanton, the great genocidal expert, if you look at his 10 stages of genocide, Hitler was very much, the fourth stage is dehumanization, genocidal dehumanization. That's what Hitler did to every single one of his enemies.

And everyone he targeted, he dehumanized the Jews, he dehumanized the Romani, he dehumanized communists. He saw anyone that he was killing as an existential threat to his, to Germany and to all good people. So as much as we might want to relegate Hitler as this unthinkable evil, I think there's two things that we have to come to terms with. And one of the things is that,

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Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. He said that there's a little bit of Hitler in all of us, that there is a psychological aspect of Hitler. Don't forget, mind conf, conf, people who have I haven't read it often assumed that my encomf, which literally means my struggle is his struggle to power, when in fact it is his struggle against anti-Semitism. And it's in the second chapter

of the book that he describes his dissent from that position, from walking down the streets of Vienna and seeing people with their anti-Semitic pamphlets and pushing them aside because he's disgusted to his realization that they have a point and that in fact anti-Semitism is the only way to save Germany, right? So something happened to him that was in the culture, that was a moment in Vienna that was so anti-Semitic, and I think we're seeing some of this today, in fact, and this is why this kind of conversation matters. Don't forget, it was in, what was it, 1896, that Theodore Herzl, who was living in Vienna, came to the conclusion that Jews would never be accepted in Europe, and therefore he penned the pamphlet Der Udinstadt or the Jewish state giving birth to

political Zionism. He was living in Vienna, just a decade or two before Hitler ended up there. It was in the culture. So you have Hitler, who we often think of as this ominous, tyrannical, sort of European Jenghis Khan. He was more of a Napoleon dynamite in cell. That's who he was. If you look at his writings, if you look at his relationships with other people, his sex life, which is just it's just chapters and chapters of unbelievably awkward and abusive and absurd behavior on his part. But so for instance, like going on a date with a girl and telling her that she has his dead mother's eyes or beating a dog almost to death, his dog in front of her, things like this. So anyway, the thing that we have to come to terms with when it comes with regard to Hitler is that he was. himself a psychopath, yes, and so different, but also at the same time, to a degree, a product of his environment, a product of what was rampant anti-Semitism at the time. That's how he was able to be so successful. He didn't convince all of these Germans to think what he thought. They were already there. He just had to get up and say it out loud. I think they were just waiting. They were just waiting to, and they already were blaming Jews for, let's say, the

economic depredations, for instance, in the wake of World War I, things of this nature. So, okay, so he, that's one thing that we have to think about with Hitler is that to the degree that he was this product. But the other thing is that, so he had this structure wherein he at least had convinced himself he was trying to protect the good. Okay. Now let's turn the page and look at Lenin. And let's look at him before he got into power, because power can have. have a very corrupting influence, a sort of exaggeratory influence on the evils of individuals. We saw this with Stalin. We saw this with Hussein.

We saw this with Hitler. We saw it. Okay. So go back to like 1891 is a very interesting time in Lenin's life. Before he gets into power, he's a young man. And he's living in the vulgar region. And famine is tearing through Russia. It is unlike anything we could almost imagine today.

There were corpses piles, piles of corpses outside the hospitals and along the roads, just corpses, corpses. I mean, imagine, all right, we just came out of a pandemic. Okay, imagine under COVID, you're driving to your grandma's house and there's just dead bodies along the highway because there's just so many people dying in your country. The international media was just having a field day with this to the great embarrassment of Russian leaders. Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor, got involved and tried to do what he could. Lennon's older sister, she started going around doing relief aid. His other sister did relief aid as well. Everybody was trying to get involved to save lives, do whatever they could.

Now, Lennon ran around spreading disinformation about the relief efforts. And something that I think that it's important for us to remember here is that under COVID, for instance, when you had people who were in whatever direction they were pushing, whether they were on this side of the argument or that side of the argument, isolation, masking, vaccination, whatever it is, both sides were doing it because they believed that their side was the right side and that the harm being done was being done by the people on the other side. If you're for vaccination, it's because you think you're going to save lives. If you're against it, it's because you're not sure about the vaccine science and you don't

want people to get hurt. Either way. So you might think that Lenin was going around spreading disinformation because he believed that the relief efforts were harmful as we saw people doing similar things today. But in fact, he understood that the relief efforts were saving lives. And his aim was to maximize death of all class, of all races, of all religious. He just wanted as many people as possible to die. There was no effort here to protect the good or save the innocent. Maybe the children.

Nothing like that. Everybody. This was just like a... Why was that, David? Why would he want to maximize death? The idea was that if he could maximize death, he could basically break Russia and that a utopian paradise would rise from the ashes. Now, the amount of death that would be required in order to achieve that wasn't a calculation that he was particularly concerned with. But if enough people died, then the Tsarist regime would collapse. and the utopia would be born. This was his thinking. There was no...

Now, Hitler similarly had an interest in developing a sort of new world order, in a sense. And as almost as profoundly evil as he was, I don't think that Hitler wanted to kill just absolutely anybody and everybody in order to get there. And that's an important distinction. Hitler is this, I would characterize, this in-cell youth who goes to Vienna and absorbs the anti-Semitism there comes back when

his mother is becomes sick with breast cancer I believe and to take care of her and then he ends up you know that that's that's this sort of genesis of his of his racist hatred but lennon from a from a very early age had had and his and his sisters often wrote once uh In particular, I'm thinking, wrote about this, about the callous cold. Nobody uses the term psychopathic, but this is, I think, what we're dealing with is a primary psychopath or what's known as a born psychopath. So this is someone who, even the people within his own life, even, you know, innocent children, you might say, that he would have regarded as innocent by his own terms. they were just fuel for the fire. And so to my mind, that is worse.

The only thing worse than delusional racist hatred would be racist hatred without any delusion about it. Cognizant racist hatred. You know the harm that you're going to do, and you do it anyway. So that being the case. So we'll move back to your story now. You've written the article.

Yeah. So I wrote the article. I went on Twitter. Somebody made this point about Confederate, and I said, well, what about Hitler? I mean, Lenin was an even greater monster. Lenin was, you know, he was the Hannibal Lecter to Joffrey Barathean. This is Lenin, what I said was that Lenin targeted people that even he himself believed knew to be innocent. And people said, oh, so you're defending Hitler?

And I said, wait, so if I said that it's evil to kill my sister, but that it would be worse to kill my sister and my mother, am I defending the murder of my sister? Is that what you're suggesting in your argument? And people said that I was also denying the Holocaust, which I don't even know. I don't know how they got there, but that was another claim. I started looking at the accounts who were attacking me. I noticed a couple things. I noticed that some of them were following each other.

I noticed they were using the exact same comments and images. So to a small degree, this was coordinated, but the vast majority of it was organic. I did start receiving a lot of death threats. And I became concerned. So I contacted my boss and said, what should I do here? And my boss said to me, don't worry about it. You know, it's social media. Nobody cares.

A little bit later is when the death threat started to roll. in so I went back and I said okay I'm this is a little disturbing what what do you think I should do now and the response was I can't we can't tell you what to do with your account that's important but if you're really worried maybe you should just log off have a glass of wine play with your daughter and you know hand your laptop to your wife okay a couple hours later I look online and I noticed that there is a journalist based in Seattle who is posting on social media that my ancestors were Nazis who killed tens of thousands of Jews. And to be clear, my ancestors

were Nazi killers. And I was raised to believe that this was an incredibly noble thing in my family and to be very proud of it from a very young age. I've always been very proud of this. So I politely corrected the gentleman. And later that week, the, my boss and another of my bosses reviewed the tweets, as I think they should have done, and came to the conclusion that the accusations against me

were completely false, that I had said and done no such thing, and that we were going to put this behind us. Then it was put before the editorial board, We're going to put this behind us, but does anyone have anything to say or any objections? Nobody had a single thing to say, and the meeting moved on as normal, and I did express a little concern at the time about the scandal. I mean, it was only a couple hundred comments at this point. It wasn't, I mean, I've made posts on X that have gone viral and have gotten 10, 20 times

more engagement than this, but still, it felt concerning. And so when I expressed that concern, I was told, no, we've got your back. This is absurd. We're not going to stand for a lying mob coming after one of our own. Okay. Two hours later, I received another phone call from the same person and that began with the words, I believe, effective immediately. And that was that.

Wow. That's quite a change to put it mildly with typical British understatement. So you get their full backing and two hours later, effective immediately, you're gone. There's an obvious question here, which is what happened in those two hours. I can only speculate, but as I mentioned earlier, there was a little bit of preparation for my ability to withstand conflict. I think that may have been a reference to the publisher who has a reputation for being hot-headed. He once shot his neighbor's dog because it was in his garden, for example. I think that maybe, you know, everyone who had gone through the process that was the correct process to go through

when they had come to the correct determination, that's what you want. You have that kind of system in place to handle these types of problems in the correct manner, and it was. And then I think the whole thing was overruled. From above. Okay, I see. David, I want to stick with your story, but I also want to just zoom out a little bit and talk about some of the background to this as well, because it's relevant.

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That's OLL.L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Why is there a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle? There was a gentleman who brought it over because he wanted, he said that he wanted to have an Eastern European restaurant. And I believe he was an English teacher in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia. And the statue was going to be melted down and turned into park benches. And so instead he acquired it and brought it over.

Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter in a car accident, and then the statue was taken on by another individual. Now, the first guy claimed that he didn't know anything about Lenin, which I didn't dig very deep into his background, but I find that incredibly suss, as they say. I will make a stereotypically anti-American joke here, which is to say that I do find that plausible, actually. But anyway, carry on. Fair enough. Well, details about this particular individual's background make me think that he may have been sympathetic figure to Lennon, yeah. And the second individual as well.

So now it stands on private property and the individuals who own the statue, who I believe are family of the gentleman, I don't remember what they're trying to sell it for, but they are trying to sell it. So if someone was willing to buy it and, you know, somebody could potentially come along by it and melt it down. but until then so it stands. Okay, let me rephrase a little bit because what I actually meant was, let me put it this way, to use your own analogy, if there were a statue of Hitler in Seattle, and I said to you, why is there a statue of Hitler in Seattle, what you would understand that question to mean is how come the residents of Seattle tolerate the fact that there is a statue of a mass murderer

in their city? And so what I'm getting at with you is, is Seattle the sorts of city in which there is a significant number of people that are actually quite happy to have a statue of a communist mass murderer in their city? That's what I'm really asking. Yes. I think the simple answer is yes. And how did that happen? Seattle has a long history of communist sympathetic and also noble labor efforts, but as is often the case, labor union efforts and communist sympathizers walk hand in hand, as we know. So that's part of it. Another part of it is, of course, what we've seen and what has actually blown up in our

faces more recently with what's been happening in our education system with regard to certain types of, I don't think it would be unfair to call it indoctrination, of universities taking on this sort of like Paulo Freire leftist, deconstructionist, decolonization, what you might just sum up as woke progressivism. It's very strong in Seattle. I think everybody knows the reputation that Seattle has in Portland and also San Francisco. So that's part of it as well. Now, Before I came out to Seattle, I was aware of the reputation, but I underestimated it. And after I wrote the column and I started receiving mail from readers, I started to get a better sense of it. Maybe perhaps I first got my sense of it when I was sitting in the room at work and that individual made the remark about.

But I wrote that off as an individual experience, not as something representative. Then I started to get mail from readers and some very angry readers just extolling the virtues of Lenin's legacy and things of this nature. And I tried to engage some of them. I used to be a university lecturer of logic and debate. So I'm always interested in having a good faith discussion with somebody and talking through the issue. This is also partly what I think may have gotten me into trouble on X. was trying to engage people rather than just ignoring trolls. I tried, I didn't want to just block them out.

I thought that would be, I don't know, bad faith. But anyway, so I was, I started to see it then. I started to see more of it. After the column came out, I went out, as this thing was blowing up a little bit, you know, my wife said, you know, let's go, let's go out and get a couple drinks, maybe blow off some steam, relax. So we go out. And somehow, as we're having cocktails, this,

I know I didn't bring it up, but I think either my wife did, or maybe the bartender may have brought something up that was related. And anyway, he ends up making some comment about the recent column. And my wife's like, oh, you should tell him. And I was like, no, no, no, no.

She's like, no, no, no, tell him. And I was like, okay, yeah, I wrote that column. That's me. And so he leans in and he says, oh, well, you should know, I'm a communist and I love Lenin. And about 30 seconds later, we were kicked out. And I'm looking at my wife as we're standing on the sidewalk.

And I'm like, did we just get kicked out of a bar in the United States of America because I'm not a communist? Is that what just happened? And I told that to another friend and he was like, welcome to Seattle. What do you, have you not heard of Seattle before? And I think that's an unfair characterization. I've met many wonderful, incredible people in Seattle. But there is truth in that. There is definitely truth in that.

We've seen that with recent protests. We've seen that. And if you go to the statue, I can't tell you which days are the correct days to go, but you can still find Leninists standing, handing out pamphlets, giving speeches. I don't think you see that in many other American cities. You certainly are not going to see it happening

in front of a statue of Vladimir Lenin. We know that. Do you know what's interesting about that, David, is that you couldn't actually do that in almost all of Eastern Europe. If you attempted to do that in all Eastern Europe, there's places where that would be illegal. And there's other places where the locals wouldn't let you do it. Let's put it like that. Yeah, places where I think the memory of what took place is embedded and fresh, where people actually know who he was and what he stands for. So I think that you have a lot of these particularly young and frankly quite often upper middle class white woke progressives who admire Lenin, who would probably be the first ones to have their their necks on the chopping block actually.

I mean, it's something somewhat analogous to queers for Palestine or something like that. Like, these people are not going to, they're not going to survive very long in a Leninist regime. But for them, their understanding of Leninism, I think, you know, these are the kind of kids who have, who have like Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms. And their understanding of Che probably begins and ends with the poster. So that's what we're dealing with, I think, unfortunately. And we're starting to reap the rewards of this in a sense. Again, I come back to October 7th, but this was such an inflection point in our society and globally that I think we see.

I made this argument recently, but I said, you know, this is the same argument that I was making with regard to Lenin and Hitler, which is this. The only thing worse than being, let's say, a Gazin who would support a group as horrific as Hamas, Remember, Ghazans are thoroughly brainwashed from a very young age. You can go online and find videos of like four-year-olds who say they want to grow up and kill Jewish people. So they're completely brainwashed about as profoundly as you can imagine. The only thing worse than that would be if you are a Western university student who hasn't been rainwashed, who has had access to the best news sources, the best educational resources. You haven't been forced under this regime of Homaas to live your life.

So you have no excuse. This is the difference between delusional support and cognizant support. And I think morally cognizant support is far more worthy of condemnation. You can almost feel, you should, in fact, feel sorry for Gazans who have been brainwashed and psychologically almost have no other choice. There's everyone around them, their entire life supports this group. I mean, if you go against the grain, that's. That's so difficult psychologically, and even if you do manage to do it, what's going to happen to you physically?

What is your life going to be like? Whereas if you're going to school at Cornell or Harvard, what excuse do you have when you've had all these resources and you know better? That's worse. That is worse by an order of magnitude. I agree, and I also disagree to a certain extent. Do you not think these kids are getting brainwashed in these institutions? If you think about when you go to university, you are raised to believe that these are your professors, these people know more than you, they have the answers,

and you were there to learn and to take in information that the professors will dispense. Is that not really a form of brainwashing as well? If you're 18 years old, you go to Harvard and someone tells you that communism is brilliant? I suppose we could use the word in both situations, but if we were going to deploy the word to describe both scenarios, then I would say, it's not that I'm against using it in that situation, although I don't think I would use it.

But if we were to use it, I would say, okay, fine, but then one is far more extreme and thorough and intense. And the other one, perhaps it's a form of social, quote-unquote, brainwashing to have people that you look up to and maybe even your family and friends all feeding you the same information. Okay, there is. there is but just the fact that you have access to so many alternative forms of information dilutes the effect or any way should especially if you're going to an elite school i still think that you can't get out from under the weight of you should know better i think that that still remains and i don't

think i can i don't think i can put that on you can still uh hold gauzen's morally responsible without feeling that they should know better in the same sense as a student at Stanford, for instance. And so what we've seen, and this is not to say that I in any way justify or support what I see coming out of the Middle East, but what I see coming out of Gaza, but to say that when I see it coming out of our own Western institutions, the first thing I have to ask myself is what has become of our institutions, what has become of our, particularly, for me, most especially the sort of beating heart of corruption of this rot that we're seeing in our society that is kind of eating us from the inside is coming from our media and our universities or our schools. And these are the two

most powerful sources of information. So if the two most powerful sources of information have been hijacked, where does that leave us? It's coming. from within these institutions. It's not as if they've been taken over in a sense, but it's from the inside out. This reminds me of, I'm not going to remember the name of it, but I just recently, the other night, saw this dystopian science fiction movie. And anyway, in the movie, it's explained that there is a form of warfare whereby you just shut down the grid and then you just leave people in the chaos of darkness. And you don't have to invade. and you don't have to kill anyone.

You just let them rip themselves apart. And I feel, I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I do feel as if, to a degree, China, Russia are rivals, Iran, North Korea, they don't have to push too hard. They can just kind of turn the dials on social media, TikTok. I mean, you have to ask yourself how many of these Osama bin Laden reputation repair individuals

are getting their news from TikTok, which is run by China. But they're just turning the dials on these social media controls and then watching us go at each other. They're just watching a new generation of Americans grow up who hate America, who think that Lenin was a hero. I mean, they don't have to push very hard against us once, I mean, our own legs are giving out from underneath us.

So it's a very serious problem. I quite agree, David. And so moving back to your... story now. So you've been fired. What was the official, what was the official reason that was given? That's a good question. So the reason I guess that everyone would be perceiving from the outside would be he said these things on X. And then a public statement was put out to the effect that we apologize for any harm done to the community by these remarks or something, which would reinforce the impression that it was the remarks that I made on X. And I think that, of course,

That probably is the reason, but the official reason given to me couldn't be that because they'd already gone through the analysis and done the review and said, you're good. So then the answer. So then the official reason was, well, you engaged after we told you not to, to which I said, I asked for guidance and I was told we can't tell you what to do with your account. Yes, but you were told to hand your laptop over to your wife and have a glass of wine. And I was like, that wasn't a directive. That was like friendly. Okay, whatever. Forget about that. But the engagement was a single response that I made to the Seattle journalist who accused

my ancestors of being murderous Nazis. And I corrected him. That was my engagement. That was the only further engagement I made. So the technically official reason was for me telling a journalist my ancestors were not Nazis. And if that's not the reason, then the other reason,

but of course be that I said, Lenin is a primary psychopath, and we have a real problem with selective outrage on the left. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com,

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from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. David, can I ask a few questions about, well, this will sound like I'm sort of being passively, aggressively, critical, but I am sort of an adopted Brit, so it comes naturally.

I suppose the question is, why are you surprised by this. And I hope that's not an unfair question, but you seem incredibly smart, incredibly knowledgeable about a lot of things both historically and modern day. Why did you take a job with the Seattle Times and then expect to be able to criticize Lenin and get away with it? I guess. I hope that's not an unfair question. That's a completely fair question. And it's one that I've been asked before. one of my very close friends, in fact, asked me, like, what do you think was going to happen? And to which I responded, well, look, my background is that I've been writing for many years about North Korea. I was the U.S. correspondent for NK. News, which is one of the best outlets for North Korea news in the world, the other one being 38 parallel.

38 North, I think. Sorry. And I wrote about China for many years. So I get a lot of heat from tankies. Just to find tankies for people who are not familiar? Tankies would be people who are in support of violent, the use of violence to further their beliefs. This comes from the, I believe it was during the Hungarian Revolution,

where they were rolling in the tanks. And that was a point, that was an inflection point for many communists who were like, okay, this is a step. This is a bridge too far for me. We can't go in there with tanks, start slaughtering innocence. And then there were others who were like, no, no, we have to, as the individual said to me, this violence is necessary. So that's a tankie.

Essentially a Leninist, I suppose you could say, someone who thinks that, you know, revolutionary violence is morally justifiable. And this is the same thing that you hear today from pro-Hamas protesters. You know, if we can define it as an occupation, then we can reframe this as revolution, and then we can justify whatever violence took place on October 7th. So, okay, I have tankies coming after me. I've also written about neo-Nazis. I've exposed some neo-Nazi activity, things of that nature.

So I have neo-Nazis coming after me. So I have tankies coming after me. I have neo-Nazis coming after me. The thing is, on social media, when these groups come after you, you ignore them. If I had ever told my boss at NK News or one of the outlets I worked at, with regard to China, like, hey, I've got these tankies and they're really, they really don't like what I had to say. My bosses would have said, why are you telling me about this? I don't care what, I don't care what some pro-Mao, pro-Hittler individual on social media,

why are you even wasting my time? So that was my general understanding of the appropriate way to respond, and I think it still is the appropriate way to respond to this type of thing. And that was the understanding I had coming into this. So I knew that if I wrote there was going to be some kind of like backlash of tankies and Leninists fine and that I would ignore it. I did not predict that my paper would choose not to ignore it and that they would and that they would ever end up citing with Leninists. I mean, you look at the accounts of the people who were attacking me and who were really incensed. And you can look at their accounts on X and you can see they're self-identified. Not only are they self-identified Leninists or congeny.

with the flag in their bio or whatever. I checked back a little bit later with as many of them as I could still find. And almost every single one that I looked at was also pro-Hamas, spewing anti-Semitic garbage, which you probably could have predicted if I had told you that they're Leninists, that they would do that, but then to think that the paper would side with those types of individuals who are armed with lies about one of their journalists just is something that I think true. is something that I think truly did catch me by surprise. I was not.

Well, not to add misery on top of it, and certainly not to sound like I'm sort of victim blaming you for what happened. But I just, it seems to me that if you know that in Seattle a significant number of people or a certain number of people have those views, would it not be quite natural that the Seattle Times would, be sensitive to them if that is a portion of the local population, I guess? I think the reason for them to be sensitive would be if they perhaps, you mean if they saw it as a potential business issue? Like, they're concerned. Well, the problem, I understand

what you're saying, but the only problem that I foresee with that analysis is that the people, the leftists loathes the Seattle Times, and they're never going to read it. So I don't see how firing me was a business decision. They see the Seattle Times, which may be surprising to hear, especially the editorial board upon which I sat, is viewed as conservative, if not neo-conservative. And this is for a variety of reasons. Some of the editorials have come out over the years in support of Republican candidates. I don't think that the board members you can say are just conservative, maybe one of them or two of them, but largely they're rational, moderate, if not, you know, of Biden Democrats, I imagine.

But the paper has also had some controversy in the past. I remember when I think gubernatorial candidate Bob McKenna was running, the paper was like his third largest donor. A lot of staffers were upset about that, and they wrote a letter of protest, and he was a Republican candidate, and it's quite unusual for a newspaper to do such a thing. So the paper has, and especially the editorial board, has this reputation of being very conservative. Now, also in the city, there are more left-leaning outlets. The stranger is the primary one.

So the idea that these Leninists are in some sense that the paper should maybe take action to appease these Leninists, who will never read your paper, who will never pick up a copy except to spit on it. It just doesn't make business sense to me. I don't understand why. I don't see how that would fit into the analysis. But then again, that assumes that the analysis was perfectly rational, and that may not have been the case. It may have just been an emotional reaction. And so where does this leave you now, then? Because has that impacted your ability to go and get another job?

Because if people look at your CV, they'll say, well, this person, this candidate has been fired? I mean, it certainly was the first thing that came to my mind was, are people going to Google my name and, you know, what's going to come up when they see? and initially that is all that came up, including from outlets that I had written for exposing neo-Nazi lies, and now they're doing these hot takes about me, which I thought was just really unfortunate to see, for instance, the Daily Beast did that. So I've written for them about neo-Nazism,

and now they're doing a piece without mentioning that maybe I had written for them about neo-Nazes. I think that maybe that would have been relevant in the story. So these stories are coming up, and I'm thinking this doesn't look good. Then Vladislav Davidsson, in fact, the great Ukrainian writer and journalist, who I had gotten commentary from for the original column,

he ends up writing a piece about this whole thing for the Jewish magazine tablet titled Hitler in the Seattle Times, which was a scathing, skating judgment on their decision and the whole thing and then more largely speaking cancel culture and where we are today. Then after this, I wrote a piece for the free press in which I told the full story. I'm sure you've seen this. And these things help, I think, to show what really happened. And hopefully if someone's looking up my name, they'll see all of it. And And it's not very difficult to put together what took place and look at the things that I wrote on social media.

I mean, I've spoken to, spoken to many people. Other than the Leninists who came after me, I haven't met anyone yet who looked at what I wrote on social media and believed what they believed about it. Nobody does. Everybody, you know, understands what happens. So other than, so there's, so there's. I suppose my hope is that when people are looking, if a prospective employer is looking at my name, they're going to see all of this information. That's one thing. The other thing is when something like this happens to you, until you do take your next step, you're thinking, well, what do I do now? And what I've decided to do in the meantime is, as we've seen with many journalists, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this transition to independent journalism.

And so I took the subject, which was the basis of my cancellation, which was not just Lenin, but more broadly political extremism. And now I have a substack newsletter and podcast, which is focused on political extremism. It's called the radicalist, if anyone's interested. And this is, if this reaches the point of bringing in a livable wage, then that's, what I would continue to do until then or depending on the um on how things go I'll be doing that or I will um I'm still looking for gainful employment elsewhere we'll see how it goes well uh David it's a really crazy I was said crazy but it's I mean the people the number of people we've had on the show who've been in a similar position to you is such that it's no longer crazy

It's just part of American and British life now, sadly. The good thing is what you said at the end there, which is you have a substack now. A substack, I think, is a great platform for people like us. I ride on there, and, you know, it's really worked out for me. I am certain, given how eloquent and erudite you are on these subjects, it will work out for you. I recommend everybody head over there and subscribe right now. We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters that they've already sent in, which goes behind a paywall.

But before we do, we always end with the same question, which is, what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think really should be? That's a good question. Thank you. Christopher Hitchens once said that he became a journalist because he didn't want to have to rely on newspapers for information. And I think one of the things that I try to express to people is the way in which it used to be a problem with journalism is, getting the information out to people, whether that means writing on a horse and literally handing them a paper out in the middle of wherever they happen to live, or just having the means by which to publish, you know, the media is the only company mentioned in the U.S.

Constitution. And I think that we've now reached the point where the problem is not getting out the information. It's that we are basically feeding off a fire hose of information. information. It's too much. And people are not equipped to deal with that. And so what is the result is that they end up accepting or subscribing to whatever it is that they are fed. And they are fed what they choose to be fed. They go to the outlets that they prefer and then they adopt those viewpoints more deeply and more deeply. We become siloed and separated. The thing that we lack in America today is something that I think only maybe, you know, very careful readers and journalists,

perhaps have, which is the ability to read through the news with the mindset of a fact-checker, which is a specific skill set. It's not just Googling things that you're reading about in an article. It's a specific skill set that unfortunately, I think it should be a part of the school system at this point. I think it should be something that we teach is how do you read an article? How do you know? How do you verify this information? This is a very important. We live in an age with so much information, but we also live in an age, Alex Jones, who has, he comes to mind because of all of the things that he said and done, he got one thing really right. And that was the name of his show, Info Wars. That's what we're in the middle of right now. These are

information wars that we are not equipped to fight. Our population is not equipped to fight these wars and they are sitting ducks and they are being their minds are being molded and who's doing the molding? Well, I don't know. But then look around you. What do we see? We see people saying, Osama bin Laden wasn't that bad. And Hamas are freedom fighters. And well, I think there's your answer. So we have to better educate our public and yet look at our education system. So I this is the conversation that we need to be having. And I think that we are now more fully aware of the problem, but I don't think we're having the conversation yet.

Well, David, and everybody, follow us over to locals or wherever you support us for the bonus section of this interview. You've spent your life exposing the immoral to scrutiny. How do you decide right and wrong and what would keep you from coming tyrannical if you had more political power?