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

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00:00:31.280 Lennon did these horrible things. He was a monster. We have a 16-foot bronze statue of him. 0.99

00:00:39.240 It was interesting for me to comment on this because of what I perceived to be the selective outrage on the left.

00:00:46.080 The other person then turns, looks me dead in the face and says, I think some of that violence was necessary.

00:00:52.160 Would we tolerate a statue of Hitler for even one second? I think everybody knows the answer to that.

00:00:57.900 So why do we have a statue of Lenin?

00:01:00.520 Two hours later, I received another phone call that began with the words, I believe, effective immediately.

00:01:07.840 And that was that.

00:01:10.020 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.

00:01:17.920 And then I read more into the story, and disappointingly, you actually didn't defend Hitler.

00:01:22.740 So it's been a letdown all round.

00:01:25.060 Welcome to the show. Tell us your story.

00:01:28.160 Thank you for having me on.

00:01:30.300 Yes, that's correct.

00:01:31.940 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.

00:01:41.880 That's what they all say, David.

00:01:43.280 Sure. I spent a good part of my career leading up to this situation covering genocidal violence, genocidal rape.

00:01:58.360 When the war in Ukraine broke out, I flew over to the border to write about the refugee crisis that was going on there.

00:02:06.720 I've covered the Tigrayan genocide, and I wrote specifically about how I think that it wasn't getting the attention that it deserved because of racism,

00:02:15.260 which is quite something that actually the WHO director Tedros was convinced me of, that I initially was not persuaded of.

00:02:25.940 Anyway, so it was around this time, right after those two stories came out, or within a year of those two stories coming out,

00:02:34.320 that I decided to apply and get the position for the Seattle Times editorial board and columnist.

00:02:40.980 I took that role.

00:02:42.280 Now, leading into the role, there was a lot of conversation in the on-ramping about my capacity for, what would you say,

00:02:51.820 tolerance for aggressive, combative argumentation, which I thought at the time was probably a good thing to test for

00:03:01.500 in people who are going to be on an editorial board and hammering out difficult ideas, discussing the issues, that sort of thing.

00:03:08.340 I have a slightly different conceptualization of what that might have been all about looking back.

00:03:15.440 But anyway.

00:03:18.620 David, just to clarify that, putting it in simple language, when you were being considered for this position,

00:03:24.420 people were sort of saying, well, David is quite open to a combative way of discussing things.

00:03:29.140 Is that broadly the theme that you're?

00:03:31.880 I think they were trying to figure out, would I be able to tolerate a combative environment?

00:03:36.560 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,

00:03:41.220 but that's okay because that's part of it.

00:03:42.940 I think what they were actually doing was preparing me for one particular individual who tends to be incredibly combative.

00:03:48.880 I think that's what was actually happening.

00:03:50.420 The owner of the paper.

00:03:51.560 I see.

00:03:52.240 Which I didn't know at the time.

00:03:53.660 So then I took the role.

00:03:58.340 I did some editorials whereby you write in the voice of the paper.

00:04:02.620 You go out, you do the research, that thing I wrote about orcas, I wrote about the airport, things of this nature.

00:04:08.920 After about a month and a half, my boss said, it's about time for your first column.

00:04:13.600 What do you want to write about?

00:04:15.180 And my initial thinking was that I would like to write about the astronomical costs of childcare in the Seattle area.

00:04:21.600 It costs more than college currently.

00:04:25.020 And it's a cost that hits you right up front, whereas with college, you have 18 to 20 years to prepare.

00:04:31.780 And I'm a new father.

00:04:34.340 At the time, my daughter was six months old, so this was an issue that interested me.

00:04:40.580 But my boss repeatedly nudged me to write about the statue of Vladimir Lenin in downtown Seattle.

00:04:48.940 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 of my grandparents were refugees from Russia.

00:05:02.880 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.

00:05:15.880 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.

00:05:30.960 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.

00:05:43.260 Anyway, so he got out.

00:05:46.200 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.

00:05:55.420 Belarusian, Russian, English, German, very useful at that time.

00:06:01.380 And then he made his way to America.

00:06:04.120 So, okay, so I'm asked to write this piece about Vladimir Lenin.

00:06:09.200 I can connect these parts of my background into the story.

00:06:12.380 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,

00:06:20.860 hey, this is who I am, this is my background, nice to meet you, I'm the new editorial board member, something of that nature.

00:06:26.980 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.

00:06:34.420 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.

00:06:44.420 I actually spoke to the former editor-in-chief of the Odessa Review and tablet writer Vladislav Davidsson 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.

00:07:00.220 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.

00:07:07.020 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.

00:07:15.000 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 statue must come down,

00:07:26.320 even some statues of George Washington must come down, but a statue of Vladimir Lenin is not only OK, it's the two most common responses that I received were that it was funny.

00:07:42.020 And the other one is that he's the glorious hero and we should, you know, there are a lot of Seattleites, I think, are unaware of how seriously some other Seattleites take this statue.

00:07:56.420 So people would write to me after the column came out and they would say, why are you taking this so seriously?

00:08:01.080 It's just a joke.

00:08:01.800 And then other people would write to me and say, how dare you disrespect the great Lenin?

00:08:05.660 And I'm like, oh, maybe you two should get together and hash this out and then get back to me.

00:08:11.580 But so the column comes out.

00:08:14.580 What was the gist of the column?

00:08:16.040 The gist of the column was basically there's a statue here.

00:08:19.200 Lenin did these horrible things. 0.99

00:08:22.340 He was a monster. 0.98

00:08:23.520 We have a 16 foot bronze statue of him.

00:08:26.380 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.

00:08:32.920 And then the reaction that some people have in the community when they see this.

00:08:37.340 One woman, for instance, she came to visit her son, Russian woman, Russian American son.

00:08:42.380 She saw the statue and broke down weeping.

00:08:44.440 She couldn't believe that there was a 16 foot bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin in the middle of the land of the free.

00:08:49.320 She just didn't know that she was going to see it.

00:08:53.500 And when you see that around the corner, it's quite stunning.

00:08:57.000 And it's a statue of him marching with guns and fire in the background.

00:09:00.680 I mean, it's about what you would expect.

00:09:04.060 So I didn't mean to say, shame on you, Seattle.

00:09:08.140 You must take this statue down.

00:09:09.640 I meant to say maybe there should be a little more reflection on what the statue means to everyone in the community.

00:09:15.080 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.

00:09:24.440 Let's talk about the people who are of this community, right?

00:09:28.200 That's what we are instructed to do in these situations.

00:09:32.920 But I felt that there was a problem here with what I would call selective outrage on the left.

00:09:38.580 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.

00:09:52.380 So the gist of the column was essentially, was not that we should take it down, but that we should have more deeper consideration.

00:10:03.020 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.

00:10:13.340 Here's something to think about.

00:10:14.860 There you go.

00:10:16.000 What do you think about this?

00:10:17.340 That was the point of the column, not to lecture people.

00:10:19.680 Okay, so the column comes out.

00:10:23.720 It's fairly warmly received.

00:10:26.840 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.

00:10:34.140 You should check it out.

00:10:34.880 And another individual said, oh, Lennon, I haven't seen this statue.

00:10:38.080 I can't wait to see it, though, because he's my hero.

00:10:41.440 To which the first person said, well, maybe you should read the column because in it, David describes how he lost members of him.

00:10:49.680 His family as a result of Soviet rule.

00:10:52.060 And it's quite grim.

00:10:54.420 The other person then turns, looks me dead in the face and says, I think some of that violence was necessary.

00:11:01.300 And that was the first encounter I had with proper Leninism in Seattle.

00:11:12.840 And I brushed it off.

00:11:14.600 I was like, whatever.

00:11:16.040 Okay.

00:11:16.680 And in the moment, I changed the subject almost immediately.

00:11:20.140 I didn't want to have that conversation.

00:11:22.700 I changed the subject to something else.

00:11:25.060 The column comes out and then I go and then this is where things get sticky.

00:11:28.860 I go online.

00:11:29.940 I go on X and I write a few posts about the column and then I start getting into conversations with people.

00:11:36.100 And I make the point that, you know, we wouldn't tolerate a Confederate statue.

00:11:42.180 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?

00:11:53.680 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.

00:12:06.980 To which I said, okay, then what about Hitler? 0.86

00:12:10.400 Because Hitler is a European dictatorial leader who caused untold suffering.

00:12:17.580 And would we tolerate a statue of Hitler for even one second?

00:12:21.420 I think everybody knows the answer to that.

00:12:23.860 So why do we have a statue of Lenin?

00:12:27.100 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. 0.81

00:12:38.200 The death toll under the Nazis was worse.

00:12:40.560 Nothing to be compared to what Lenin did.

00:12:42.320 But psychologically, I said, Lenin was actually more terrifying.

00:12:46.380 Hang on a second, David.

00:12:50.900 So let's explore that point, because I think this is a very interesting part of your story.

00:12:55.560 I mean, why do you find him psychologically more terrifying?

00:13:00.220 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.

00:13:13.440 Oh, I'm sorry.

00:13:15.040 Let me let me be more clear.

00:13:16.620 I meant his psychology, not the psychological impact he had on others.

00:13:20.660 So Hitler is this is a somewhat outdated framework for understanding psychopathy.

00:13:25.440 But there is a framework that I find useful, which is a two part framework.

00:13:28.860 There's primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy, otherwise known as type one psychopathy and type two psychopathy, two types of psychopaths.

00:13:36.040 So you can think of type two psychopathy as you're more impulsive, hotheaded, quick to anger, usually not that bright.

00:13:44.620 This is where I would fit Hitler from all of the all of the research that I've done, the biographies that I've read, the information that I've gleaned. 0.66

00:13:52.660 And I would say he he reads to me as a sort of I think of him as a kind of Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones.

00:14:01.240 Like you you every moment that he's on the screen for the first I don't remember what season he ends up leaving.

00:14:07.680 But up until that point, you're just hate watching the show waiting for this kid to get killed off.

00:14:13.340 Right. So that's that's your Hitler is this disgusting, little, hateful, bigoted, nasty. 1.00

00:14:19.280 But and what gives him his power in large part is that he is the ruler of Westeros or in Hitler's case, 1940s Germany. 0.98

00:14:26.220 Even if Hitler was on par with Lenin, you just can't compare 1920s Russia to 1940s Germany and expect that they're going to have the same degree of harm. 0.81

00:14:34.300 So that's that's a different issue, though.

00:14:36.700 So Lenin, now, Lenin was actually he was not a I don't think that Hitler was a great mind.

00:14:43.880 I don't think that he had a I don't think he was particularly intelligent.

00:14:47.340 Lenin was a genius.

00:14:48.980 Lenin would often play chess with some of the great players in Russia, which means the greatest players on the planet.

00:14:55.280 And he would give them a good game.

00:14:57.260 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.

00:15:05.020 He was incredibly brilliant. And that's not to say anything positive about the conclusions that he came to.

00:15:09.180 But he was a brilliant. He had an incredibly brilliant mind.

00:15:12.500 He was methodical. He was calculating. He was manipulative.

00:15:16.740 This is not a Joffrey Baratheon. This is a Hannibal Lecter.

00:15:20.000 This is a far more terrifying. Now, who killed more people, Joffrey or Hannibal?

00:15:24.980 Right. But why?

00:15:26.800 It's not because Hannibal is a less terrifying or less evil mind. 0.97

00:15:30.180 I think that Lenin is a is a type one psychopath, a primary psychopath.

00:15:35.800 He and one of the ways that I think we can understand this is by looking at the fact that even within his.

00:15:45.140 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. 0.61

00:15:57.020 So he had this kind of like moral architecture that we might recognize as defend the good, oppose the bad.

00:16:03.220 But what he chose to fill in there is the complete reverse of reality.

00:16:07.960 Right. So he was completely psychotic in his understanding.

00:16:10.280 His architecture did not map onto reality, if that makes sense.

00:16:14.640 But he at least believed he was a good guy.

00:16:17.000 And if you go back and read Mein Kampf, you see that he was in his thinking.

00:16:21.040 Trying to rationalize his evil acts as in some way helping Germany, helping Germans, creating being a force of good in the world.

00:16:32.440 It's it's it's unbelievable that he was able to do the mental gymnastics on this.

00:16:36.100 But he if you look at Gregory H. Stanton, the great genocidal expert, if you look at his 10 stages of genocide.

00:16:42.920 Hitler was very much on the fourth stage of dehumanization, genocidal dehumanization. 0.77

00:16:48.820 That's what Hitler did to every single one of his enemies and everyone he targeted. 0.82

00:16:52.160 He dehumanized the Jews. He dehumanized the Romani. He dehumanized communists.

00:16:56.220 He saw anyone that he was killing as an existential threat.

00:17:00.800 To his to to Germany and to to all good people.

00:17:03.960 So as much as we might want to, you know, relegate Hitler as this as this unthinkable evil, I think there's there's two things that we have to come to terms with. 0.82

00:17:16.760 And one one of the things is that, as I think Jordan Peterson has often said.

00:17:22.460 He said that there's a little bit of Hitler in all of us, that there is a there is a psychological aspect of Hitler.

00:17:28.500 Don't forget, Mein Kampf, people who haven't read it, often assume that Mein Kampf, which literally means my struggle, is his struggle to power.

00:17:37.340 When in fact, it is his struggle against anti-Semitism.

00:17:40.860 And it's in the second chapter of the book that he describes his descent 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 to his realization that they have a point and that, in fact, anti-Semitism is the only way to save Germany.

00:18:01.360 Right. So something happened to him that was in the culture, that was a moment in Vienna that was so anti-Semitic.

00:18:09.200 And I think we're seeing some of this today, in fact, and this is why this kind of conversation matters.

00:18:16.960 Don't forget, it was in what was it, 1896, that Theodor Herzl, who was living in Vienna, came to the conclusion that Jews would never be accepted in Europe.

00:18:25.260 And therefore, he penned the pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, or the Jewish state, giving birth to political Zionism.

00:18:31.300 He was living in Vienna just a decade or two before Hitler ended up there.

00:18:35.820 He was in the culture.

00:18:37.160 So you have Hitler, who we often think of as this ominous, tyrannical, sort of European Genghis Khan.

00:18:45.080 He was more of a Napoleon Dynamite incel.

00:18:48.480 So that's who he was.

00:18:50.200 If you if you look at his 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.

00:19:08.680 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. 0.98

00:19:19.040 So anyway, the thing that we have to come to terms with when it comes with regard to Hitler is that he he was himself a psychopath. 0.81

00:19:28.880 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.

00:19:39.340 That's how he was able to be so successful.

00:19:41.460 He didn't convince all of these Germans to think what he thought. 1.00

00:19:45.060 They were already there.

00:19:46.440 He just had to get up and say it out loud.

00:19:48.980 I think they were just waiting like they were just waiting to and they already were blaming Jews for, let's say, the economic depredations, for instance.

00:19:58.720 In the wake of World War One, things of this nature.

00:20:00.980 So, OK, so he that's one thing that we have to think about with Hitler is that to the degree that he was this product. 0.83

00:20:08.060 But the other thing is that so.

00:20:11.900 He had this structure wherein he at least had convinced himself he was trying to.

00:20:18.900 Protect the good.

00:20:20.260 OK, 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 a very.

00:20:28.720 Corrupting influence, a sort of exaggeratory influence on the evils of individuals.

00:20:34.720 We saw this with Stalin.

00:20:35.680 We saw this with Hussein. 0.95

00:20:36.640 We saw this with Hitler. 0.86

00:20:37.660 We saw it.

00:20:38.060 OK, so go back to like 1891 is a very interesting time in Lenin's life.

00:20:43.700 Before he gets into power, he's a young man and he's living in the Volga region and famine is tearing through Russia.

00:20:51.380 It is.

00:20:53.160 It is unlike anything we could almost imagine today.

00:20:55.840 There were corpses, piles, piles of corpses outside the hospitals and along the roads, just corpses, corpses.

00:21:02.920 I mean, imagine.

00:21:03.800 All right.

00:21:04.060 We just we just came out of a pandemic.

00:21:05.340 OK, imagine under COVID, just 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.

00:21:15.960 The the international media was just having a field day with this to the great embarrassment of Russian leaders.

00:21:23.020 Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor, got involved and tried to do what he could.

00:21:31.680 Lenin's older sister, she started going around doing relief aid.

00:21:36.800 His other sister did relief aid as well.

00:21:39.080 Everybody was trying to get involved to save lives, do whatever they could.

00:21:41.900 Now, Lenin ran around spreading disinformation about the relief efforts.

00:21:45.700 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.

00:22:03.940 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.

00:22:12.060 Right.

00:22:12.320 If you're for vaccination, it's because you think you're going to save lives.

00:22:14.840 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.

00:22:21.780 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.

00:22:30.440 But in fact, he understood that the relief efforts were saving lives and his aim was to maximize death of all class, of all of all races, of all religion. 0.54

00:22:40.180 He just wanted as many people as possible to die.

00:22:42.740 There was no effort here to protect the good or save the innocent, maybe the children, nothing like that.

00:22:51.380 Everybody.

00:22:52.160 This was just like a...

00:22:53.260 Why was that, David?

00:22:54.800 Why did he want to maximize death?

00:22:57.080 The idea was that if he could maximize death, he could basically break Russia and that a utopian paradise would rise from the ashes. 0.91

00:23:08.300 Now, the amount of death that would be required in order to achieve that wasn't a calculation that he was particularly concerned with.

00:23:15.380 But if enough people died, then the czarist regime would collapse and the utopia would be born. 1.00

00:23:23.780 This was his thinking.

00:23:25.020 There was no...

00:23:25.740 Now, Hitler similarly had an interest in developing a sort of new world order, in a sense. 0.90

00:23:32.560 And 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.

00:23:46.340 And that's an important distinction.

00:23:47.560 Hitler is this, I would characterize as this incel youth who goes to Vienna and absorbs the anti-Semitism there, comes back when his mother becomes sick with breast cancer, I believe, and to take care of her. 0.68

00:24:04.420 And then he ends up, you know, that's the sort of genesis of his racist hatred.

00:24:10.160 But Lenin, from a very early age, had, and his sisters often wrote once, 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.

00:24:33.200 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.

00:24:54.200 And so, to my mind, that is worse.

00:24:56.480 The only thing worse than delusional racist hatred would be racist hatred without any delusion about it, cognizant racist hatred.

00:25:06.960 You know the harm that you're going to do, and you do it anyway.

00:25:12.200 So that being the case, so we'll move back to your story now.

00:25:16.440 You've written the article.

00:25:18.000 Yeah.

00:25:18.540 So I wrote the article.

00:25:20.140 I went on Twitter.

00:25:21.680 Somebody made this point about a confederate, and I said, well, what about Hitler? 0.72

00:25:24.160 I mean, Lenin was an even greater monster.

00:25:27.460 Lenin was, you know, he was the Hannibal Lecter to Joffrey Baratheon.

00:25:31.220 This is, Lenin, what I said was that Lenin targeted people that even he himself believed knew to be innocent.

00:25:42.200 And people said, oh, so you're defending Hitler.

00:25:45.760 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?

00:25:56.960 Is that what you're suggesting in your argument?

00:25:58.620 And people said that I was also denying the Holocaust, which I don't even know.

00:26:05.060 I don't know how they got there, but that was another claim.

00:26:09.180 I started looking at the accounts who were attacking me.

00:26:11.420 I noticed a couple of things.

00:26:12.340 I noticed that some of them are following each other.

00:26:14.100 I noticed they were using the exact same comments and images.

00:26:17.700 So to a small degree, this was coordinated, but the vast majority of it was organic.

00:26:22.640 I did start receiving a lot of death threats and I became concerned.

00:26:29.260 So I contacted my boss and said, what should I do here?

00:26:33.900 And my boss said to me, don't worry about it.

00:26:37.760 You know, it's social media.

00:26:39.260 Nobody cares.

00:26:41.160 A little bit later is when the death threat started to roll in.

00:26:44.800 So I went back and I said, okay, this is a little disturbing.

00:26:49.460 What do you think I should do now?

00:26:52.360 And the response was, I can't tell, we can't tell you what to do with your account.

00:26:58.240 That's important.

00:27:00.720 But if you're really worried, maybe you should just log off, have a glass of wine,

00:27:07.140 play with your daughter and, you know, hand your laptop to your wife.

00:27:11.660 Okay.

00:27:13.880 A couple hours later, I look online and I noticed that there is a journalist based in Seattle

00:27:18.780 who is posting on social media that my ancestors were Nazis who killed tens of thousands of Jews.

00:27:27.660 And to be clear, my ancestors were Nazi killers.

00:27:31.280 And I was raised to believe that this was an incredibly noble thing in my family and to be

00:27:38.400 very proud of it from a, from a very young age, I've always been very proud of this.

00:27:44.380 So I politely corrected the gentleman.

00:27:49.960 And, uh, later that week, the, the, um, my boss and another of my bosses reviewed the tweets

00:27:59.600 as I think they should have done and came to the conclusion that the accusations against me were

00:28:05.900 completely false, that I had said and done no such thing and that we were going to put this behind us.

00:28:12.720 Then it was put before the editorial board.

00:28:15.320 We're going to put this behind us, but does anyone have anything to say or any objections?

00:28:19.520 Nobody had a single thing to say.

00:28:23.420 And the meeting moved on as normal.

00:28:26.360 And I did express a little concern at the time about the, the scandal.

00:28:31.740 I mean, it was only a couple hundred comments at this point.

00:28:33.960 It wasn't, I mean, I've, I've made posts on X that have gone viral and have gotten 10,

00:28:38.800 20 times more engagement than this, but still it felt concerning.

00:28:43.060 And so, uh, when I expressed that concern, I was told, no, we've got your back.

00:28:48.420 This is absurd.

00:28:49.220 We're not going to stand for a lying mob coming after one of our own. 0.68

00:28:53.800 Okay.

00:28:55.740 Two hours later, I received another phone call from the same person.

00:28:59.960 And that began with the words, I believe effective immediately.

00:29:06.520 And that was that.

00:29:08.160 Wow.

00:29:09.040 That's, uh, that's, that's quite a change to put it mildly with typical British understatement.

00:29:14.900 So you get the full backing and two hours later, effective immediately, you're gone.

00:29:21.040 Um, there's an obvious question here, which is what happened in those two hours?

00:29:27.740 I can only speculate, but, um, as I mentioned earlier, there was a little bit of

00:29:33.900 preparation for my ability to withstand conflict.

00:29:39.560 I think that may have been a reference to the publisher who has a reputation for being

00:29:45.980 hotheaded.

00:29:47.900 Uh, he, he, he once shot his neighbor's dog because it was in his garden, for example.

00:29:54.500 Um, I think that, I think that maybe, you know, everyone who had gone through the process that

00:30:04.020 was the correct process to go through and they had come to the correct determination, that's

00:30:09.280 what you want.

00:30:09.860 You have, you have that kind of system in place to handle these types of problems in the correct

00:30:14.440 manner.

00:30:14.760 And it was, and then I think the whole thing was overruled.

00:30:18.780 From above.

00:30:20.600 Okay.

00:30:21.000 I see.

00:30:21.760 David, I want to stick with your story, but I also want to just, uh, zoom out a little

00:30:27.580 bit and talk about some of the background to this as well, because it's relevant.

00:30:31.340 And we'll, we'll dip back into, into your story in a second. 0.99

00:30:34.680 Can I ask a really stupid question? 0.98

00:30:37.680 Why is there a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle? 0.99

00:30:41.220 Um, there was a, there was a gentleman who brought it over because he wanted, he said

00:30:47.920 that he wanted to have an Eastern European restaurant.

00:30:51.820 And I believe he was an English teacher, uh, in, uh, the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia.

00:30:58.020 And the statue was going to be melted down and turned into park benches.

00:31:02.140 And so instead he acquired it and brought it over.

00:31:07.020 Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter in a car accident.

00:31:11.220 And then the statue was taken on by another individual.

00:31:14.040 And now the first guy claimed that he didn't know anything about Lenin, which I, I didn't

00:31:20.000 dig very deep into his background, but I find that incredibly, uh, sus as they say.

00:31:25.240 Um, I will make it a stereotypically anti-American joke here, which is to say that I do find that 0.93

00:31:30.380 plausible actually, but anyway, carry on.

00:31:32.940 Fair enough.

00:31:34.220 Uh, well, details about this particular individual's background make me think that he may have

00:31:38.860 been sympathetic figure to Lenin.

00:31:42.180 Yeah.

00:31:42.720 And the second individual as well.

00:31:44.680 So now it stands on private property and the, the individuals who own the statue, who

00:31:50.020 I believe are family of the gentlemen.

00:31:52.460 I don't remember what the, what they're trying to sell it for, but they are trying to sell

00:31:56.280 it.

00:31:56.440 So if someone was willing to buy it and, you know, somebody could potentially come along,

00:32:00.360 buy it and melt it down.

00:32:01.320 Um, but until then, so it stands.

00:32:05.140 Okay.

00:32:05.420 Let me rephrase a little bit because what I actually meant was, uh, let me put it this

00:32:11.660 way to use your own, uh, analogy.

00:32:15.300 If there were a statue of Hitler in Seattle and I said to you, why is there a statue of

00:32:23.200 Hitler in Seattle, what you would understand that question to mean is how come the residents

00:32:29.480 of Seattle tolerate the fact that there is a statue of a mass murderer in their city?

00:32:35.080 And so what I'm getting at with you is, is Seattle the sort of city in which there

00:32:40.380 is a significant number of people that are actually quite happy to have a statue of a

00:32:44.520 communist, uh, mass murderer in their city?

00:32:47.660 That's what I'm really asking you.

00:32:49.420 Yes.

00:32:50.640 I think the simple answer is yes.

00:32:52.280 And how did that happen?

00:32:55.620 Uh, Seattle has a long history of, um, communist sympathetic and also noble labor efforts,

00:33:05.920 but as is often the case, labor union efforts and communist sympathizers, uh, walk hand in

00:33:11.520 hand as we know.

00:33:12.300 So that's part of it.

00:33:14.200 Uh, another part of it is of course what we've seen, uh, and what has actually blown up in

00:33:18.820 our faces more recently with what's been happening in our education system with regard to certain

00:33:25.400 types of, uh, I don't think it would be unfair to call it indoctrination, um, on, on, of universities

00:33:33.500 taking on this sort of like Paulo Freire, leftist deconstructionist decolonization, what you

00:33:40.660 might just sum up as woke progressivism, it's very strong in Seattle.

00:33:45.140 I think everybody knows the reputation that Seattle has and Portland and also, uh, San Francisco.

00:33:52.660 So that's part of it as well.

00:33:54.640 Now, before I came out to Seattle, um, I was aware of the reputation, but I underestimated

00:34:04.260 it.

00:34:05.620 And after I wrote the column and I started receiving mail from readers, I started to get

00:34:10.840 a better sense of it.

00:34:12.340 Maybe perhaps I first got my sense of it when I was sitting in the room at work and that

00:34:16.300 individual made the remark about.

00:34:18.380 But, but I, I wrote that off as a, as an individual experience, not, not as something representative.

00:34:25.440 Then I started to get mail from readers and, and some very angry readers just extolling

00:34:33.120 the virtues of Lennon's legacy and things of this nature.

00:34:36.000 And, um, I tried to engage some of them.

00:34:39.520 You know, I, I, I used to be a university lecturer of logic and debate, so I'm always, I'm always

00:34:45.640 interested in having a good faith discussion with somebody and talking through the issue.

00:34:49.140 This is also partly what I think, um, may have gotten me into trouble on, on X was, was

00:34:57.240 trying to engage people rather than just ignoring trolls.

00:35:01.200 I, I, I tried, I didn't want to just block them out.

00:35:06.080 I thought that would be, um, I don't know, bad faith.

00:35:10.520 But anyway, so I was, I started to see it then I started to see more of it after the

00:35:17.160 column came out.

00:35:17.900 I went out, uh, as this thing was blowing up a little bit, you know, my wife said, you

00:35:21.840 know, let's go, let's go out and get a couple of drinks, maybe blow off some steam, relax.

00:35:25.640 So we go out and somehow or other, as we're having cocktails, this, uh, I don't, I know

00:35:31.700 I didn't bring it up, but I think either my wife did, or maybe the bartender may have

00:35:35.800 brought something up that was related.

00:35:36.980 And anyway, he ends up making some comment about the recent column and I, and my wife's

00:35:41.360 like, oh, you should tell him.

00:35:42.260 And I was like, no, no, no.

00:35:43.520 She's like, no, no, no.

00:35:44.280 Tell him.

00:35:45.280 And I was like, okay, yeah, that I wrote that column.

00:35:47.800 That's me.

00:35:49.080 And so he leans in and he says, oh, well, you should know I'm a communist and I love

00:35:55.220 Lenin.

00:35:56.280 And about 30 seconds later, we were kicked out and I'm looking at my wife as we're standing

00:35:59.620 on the sidewalk and I'm like, did we just get kicked out of a bar in the United States

00:36:02.400 of America?

00:36:02.840 Because I'm not a communist.

00:36:04.420 Is that what just happened?

00:36:06.980 And I told that to another friend and he was like, welcome to Seattle.

00:36:14.300 What do you, have you not heard of Seattle before?

00:36:17.060 And I think that's an unfair characterization.

00:36:20.660 I've met many wonderful, incredible people in Seattle, but there is truth in that.

00:36:26.580 There is definitely truth in that.

00:36:28.160 We've seen that with recent protests.

00:36:29.520 We've seen that.

00:36:30.160 And if you go to the statue, I can't tell you which days are the correct days to go,

00:36:36.060 but you can still find Leninists standing, handing out pamphlets, giving speeches.

00:36:42.380 I don't think you see that in many other American cities.

00:36:46.720 You certainly are not going to see it happening in front of a statue of Vladimir Lenin.

00:36:50.940 We know that.

00:36:51.720 Do you know what's interesting about, what's interesting about that, David, is that you

00:36:56.600 couldn't actually do that in, in almost all of Eastern Europe.

00:37:00.720 If you, if you attempted to do that in all Eastern Europe, there's places where that would

00:37:04.420 be illegal.

00:37:05.900 And there's other places where the locals wouldn't let you do it.

00:37:09.540 Let's put it like that.

00:37:10.420 Yeah.

00:37:11.500 Places where I think the memory of what took place is embedded and fresh, where people

00:37:18.120 actually know who he was and what he stands for.

00:37:20.480 So I think that you have a lot of these, these particularly young and frankly, quite often

00:37:29.260 upper middle class, white, woke progressives who admire Lenin.

00:37:34.680 Who would probably be the first ones to have their, their, their necks on the chopping block.

00:37:41.960 Actually, I mean, it's something somewhat analogous to Queers for Palestine or something

00:37:46.700 like that.

00:37:47.100 Like these people are not going to, they're not going to survive very long in a, in a

00:37:51.140 Leninist regime, but for them, it, their, their, their, their understanding of Leninism.

00:37:58.580 I think, you know, these are the kind of kids who have, who have like Che Guevara posters

00:38:02.400 in their dorm rooms and, and their understanding of Che probably begins and ends with the poster.

00:38:07.540 So that's what we're dealing with, I think, unfortunately.

00:38:10.760 And we're starting to reap the rewards of this in a sense.

00:38:15.220 Again, I'm come back to October 7th, but this was such an inflection point in our society

00:38:20.340 and globally that I think we see, I made this argument recently, but I said, you know,

00:38:26.160 this is the same argument that I was making with regard to Lenin and Hitler, which is this,

00:38:31.280 the only thing worse than being, let's say, a Gazan who would support a group as horrific as Hamas. 0.85

00:38:40.200 Remember, Gazans are brainwashed, thoroughly brainwashed from a very young age. 0.97

00:38:45.260 You can go online and find videos of like four-year-olds who say they want to grow up and kill Jewish people. 0.92

00:38:50.340 So they're completely brainwashed about us as profoundly as you can imagine.

00:38:54.400 And the only thing worse than that would be if you are a Western university student who hasn't been brainwashed,

00:39:02.320 who has had access to the best news sources, the best educational resources.

00:39:06.660 You haven't been forced under this regime of Hamas to live your life.

00:39:10.100 So you have no excuse.

00:39:11.860 This is the difference between delusional support and cognizant support.

00:39:16.080 And I think morally cognizant support is far more worthy of condemnation.

00:39:23.080 You can almost feel, you should, in fact, feel sorry for Gazans who have been brainwashed and psychologically almost have no other choice.

00:39:30.580 There's everyone around them, their entire life supports this group.

00:39:33.100 I mean, if you go against the grain, that's so difficult psychologically.

00:39:38.160 And even if you do manage to do it, what's going to happen to you physically?

00:39:41.400 What is your life going to be like?

00:39:42.860 Whereas if you're going to school at Cornell or Harvard, what excuse do you have when you had all these resources and you know better?

00:39:53.720 That's worse.

00:39:55.440 That is worse by an order of magnitude.

00:39:58.380 I agree.

00:39:59.380 And I also disagree to a certain extent.

00:40:01.880 Do you not think these kids are getting brainwashed in these institutions?

00:40:04.860 If you think about when you go to university, you were 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.

00:40:20.160 Is that not really a form of brainwashing as well?

00:40:23.120 If you're 18 years old, you go to Harvard and someone tells you that communism is brilliant?

00:40:27.400 I suppose we could use the word in both situations.

00:40:35.660 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.

00:40:45.040 But if we were to use it, I would say, okay, fine, but then one is far more extreme and thorough and intense.

00:40:51.680 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.

00:41:02.080 Okay, there is, but just the fact that you have access to so many alternative forms of information dilutes the effect, or anyway should, especially if you're going to an elite school.

00:41:11.780 I still think that you can't get out from under the weight of you should know better.

00:41:17.940 I think that that still remains, and I don't think I can put that on – you can still hold Gazans morally responsible without feeling that they should know better in the same sense as a student at Stanford, for instance. 0.98

00:41:35.040 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. 0.85

00:41:45.100 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?

00:41:55.160 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,

00:42:08.760 is coming from our media and our universities or our schools, and these are the two most powerful sources of information.

00:42:17.080 So if the two most powerful sources of information have been hijacked, where does that leave us?

00:42:23.280 It's coming from within these institutions.

00:42:25.120 It's not as if they've been taken over in a sense, but it's from the inside out.

00:42:29.460 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.

00:42:40.300 And anyway, in the movie, it's explained that there's a form of warfare whereby you just shut down the grid,

00:42:48.640 and then you just leave people in the chaos of darkness.

00:42:52.420 And you don't have to invade, and you don't have to kill anyone.

00:42:55.220 You just let them rip themselves apart.

00:42:56.620 And I feel – I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I do feel as if, to a degree, China, Russia, our rivals, Iran, North Korea,

00:43:09.580 they don't have to push too hard.

00:43:11.740 They can just kind of turn the dials on social media, TikTok.

00:43:17.680 I mean, you have to ask yourself how many of these Osama bin Laden reputation repair individuals 0.97

00:43:22.420 are getting their news from TikTok, which is run by China.

00:43:27.640 But they're just turning the dials on these social media controls and then watching us go at each other.

00:43:33.900 They're just watching a new generation of Americans grow up who hate America, who think that Lenin was a hero.

00:43:40.560 I mean, they don't have to push very hard against us once – I mean, our own legs are giving out from underneath us.

00:43:47.480 So it's a very serious problem.

00:43:51.340 I quite agree, David.

00:43:52.560 And so moving back to your story now, so you've been fired.

00:43:57.600 What was the official – what was the official reason that was given?

00:44:02.200 That's a good question.

00:44:03.140 So the reason, I guess, that everyone would be perceiving from the outside would be he said these things on X,

00:44:10.320 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,

00:44:18.340 which would reinforce the impression that it was the remarks that I made on X.

00:44:22.960 And they think that, of course, that probably is the reason, but the official reason given to me couldn't be that

00:44:29.960 because they'd already gone through the analysis and done the review and said, you're good.

00:44:34.980 So then the official reason was, well, you engaged after we told you not to, to which I said, I asked for guidance,

00:44:44.280 and I was told we can't tell you what to do with your account.

00:44:46.800 Yes, but we told – you were told to hand your laptop over to your wife and have a glass of wine.

00:44:53.580 And I was like, that wasn't a directive.

00:44:55.360 That was like friendly.

00:44:56.320 Okay, whatever.

00:44:58.320 Forget about that.

00:44:59.300 But the engagement was a single response that I made to the Seattle journalist who accused my ancestors of being murderous Nazis.

00:45:10.860 And I corrected him.

00:45:12.540 That was my engagement.

00:45:13.760 That was the only further engagement I made.

00:45:16.800 So the technically official reason was for me telling a journalist my ancestors were not Nazis.

00:45:25.040 And if that's not the reason, then the other reason would, of course, be that I said Lenin is a primary psychopath

00:45:32.280 and we have a real problem with selective outrage on the left.

00:45:34.600 David, can I ask a few questions about – well, this will sound like I'm sort of being passively, aggressively critical,

00:45:46.540 but I am sort of an adopted Brit, so it comes naturally.

00:45:50.420 I suppose the question is, why are you surprised by this?

00:45:54.960 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.

00:46:03.700 Why did you take a job with the Seattle Times and then expect to be able to criticize Lenin and get away with it?

00:46:11.020 I guess that's not an unfair question.

00:46:13.560 That's a completely fair question.

00:46:14.700 And it's one that I've been asked before.

00:46:19.120 One of my very close friends, in fact, asked me, like, what do you think was going to happen?

00:46:25.540 And to which I responded, well, look, my background is that I've been writing for many years about North Korea.

00:46:36.660 I was the U.S. correspondent for NK News, which is one of the best outlets for North Korean news in the world, the other one being 38 North, I think.

00:46:50.100 Sorry.

00:46:50.600 And I wrote about China for many years, so I get a lot of heat from tankies. 0.99

00:46:57.460 Just define tankies for people who are not familiar.

00:46:59.840 Tankies would be people who are in support of violent, the use of violence to further their beliefs. 0.95

00:47:07.520 This comes from the, I believe it was during the Hungarian Revolution, where they were rolling in the tanks.

00:47:11.900 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.

00:47:17.420 We can't go in there with tanks and start slaughtering innocents.

00:47:19.520 And then there were others who were like, no, no, we have to, as the individual said to me, this violence is necessary.

00:47:27.020 So that's a tankie.

00:47:28.280 Essentially a Leninist, I suppose you could say.

00:47:31.100 Someone who thinks that, you know, revolutionary violence is morally justifiable.

00:47:36.200 And this is the same thing that you hear today from pro-Hamas protesters.

00:47:40.760 You know, if we can define it as an occupation, then we can reframe this as a revolution, and then we can justify whatever violence took place on October 7th.

00:47:51.440 So, okay, I have tankies coming after me.

00:47:53.740 I've also written about neo-Nazis.

00:47:56.740 I've exposed some neo-Nazi activity, things of that nature.

00:48:01.920 So I have neo-Nazis coming after me.

00:48:03.420 So I have tankies coming after me. 0.71

00:48:04.560 I have neo-Nazis coming after me.

00:48:05.720 The thing is, on social media, when these groups come after you, you ignore them.

00:48:09.520 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 really don't like what I had to say, my bosses would have said, why are you telling me about this?

00:48:23.900 I don't care what some pro-Mao, pro-Hitler individual on social media, why are you even wasting my time?

00:48:35.240 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.

00:48:42.380 And that was the understanding I had coming into this.

00:48:44.340 So I knew that if I wrote this, there was going to be some kind of, like, backlash of tankies and Leninists, fine, and that I would ignore it.

00:48:51.500 I did not predict that my paper would choose not to ignore it and that they would ever end up citing with Leninists.

00:49:04.240 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.

00:49:12.560 Not only are they self-identified Leninists or communists with the flag in their bio or whatever. 0.52

00:49:17.400 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 are Leninists, that they would do that.

00:49:34.540 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 truly did catch me by surprise.

00:49:50.300 I was not.

00:49:50.860 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 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,

00:50:10.420 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?

00:50:20.000 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.

00:50:32.780 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, loathe the Seattle Times, and they're never going to read it.

00:50:43.380 So I don't see how firing me was a business decision.

00:50:45.640 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 neoconservative.

00:50:57.180 And this is for a variety of reasons.

00:50:58.880 Some of the editorials have come out over the years in support of Republican candidates.

00:51:02.520 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 moderates, if not Biden Democrats, I imagine.

00:51:16.040 But the paper has also had some controversy in the past.

00:51:21.100 I remember when, I think, gubernatorial candidate Bob McKenna was running, the paper was like his third largest donor.

00:51:28.340 A lot of staffers were upset about that, and they wrote a letter of protest, and he was a Republican candidate.

00:51:35.580 And it's quite unusual for a newspaper to do such a thing.

00:51:38.160 So the paper has, and especially the editorial board, has this reputation of being very conservative.

00:51:42.500 Now, also in the city, there are more left-leaning outlets.

00:51:47.900 The stranger is the primary one.

00:51:50.200 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.

00:52:07.720 I don't understand why.

00:52:10.220 I don't see how that would fit into the analysis.

00:52:12.440 But then again, that assumes that the analysis was perfectly rational, and that may not have been the case.

00:52:16.140 It may have just been an emotional reaction.

00:52:19.420 And so where does this leave you now, then?

00:52:22.120 Because has that impacted your ability to go and get another job?

00:52:25.760 Because if people look at your CV, they'll say, well, this person, this candidate has been fired.

00:52:30.480 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?

00:52:39.820 And initially, that is all that came up, including from outlets that I had written for exposing neo-Nazi lies.

00:52:48.580 And now they're writing, 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.

00:52:59.500 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-Nazism.

00:53:05.020 I think that maybe that would have been relevant in the story.

00:53:06.980 So these stories are coming up, and I'm thinking, this doesn't look good.

00:53:12.900 Then Vladislav Davidsson, in fact, the great Ukrainian writer and journalist, who I had gotten commentary from for the original column,

00:53:27.360 he ends up writing a piece about this whole thing for the Jewish magazine Tablet titled Hitler and the Seattle Times,

00:53:35.460 which was a scathing, scathing judgment on their decision and the whole thing, and then more largely speaking, cancel culture and where we are today.

00:53:48.600 Then after this, I wrote a piece for the Free Press, in which I told the full story.

00:53:54.600 I'm sure you've seen this.

00:53:56.640 And these things help, I think, to show what really happened.

00:54:03.140 And hopefully, if someone's looking up my name, they'll see all of it.

00:54:07.940 And it's not very difficult to put together what took place and look at the things that I wrote on social media.

00:54:15.560 I mean, I've spoken to many people.

00:54:19.560 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.

00:54:28.320 Nobody does.

00:54:28.900 Everybody, you know, understands what happened.

00:54:32.660 So, 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.

00:54:45.400 That's one thing.

00:54:46.020 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?

00:54:54.140 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.

00:55:04.800 And so, I took the subject, which was the basis of my cancellation, which was not just Lenin, but more broadly, political extremism.

00:55:14.860 And now I have a Substack newsletter and podcast, which is focused on political extremism.

00:55:21.360 It's called The Radicalist, if anyone's interested.

00:55:25.720 And this is, if this reaches the point of bringing in a livable wage, then that's what I would continue to do.

00:55:36.220 Until then, or depending on how things go, I'll be doing that, or I'm still looking for gainful employment elsewhere.

00:55:49.980 We'll see how it goes.

00:55:51.440 Well, David, it's a really crazy, I 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.

00:56:04.420 It's just part of American and British life now, sadly.

00:56:09.780 The good thing is what you said at the end there, which is you have a Substack now.

00:56:13.340 Substack, I think, is a great platform for people like us.

00:56:16.340 I ride on there, and, you know, it's really worked out for me.

00:56:19.780 I am certain, given how eloquent and erudite you are on these subjects, it will work out for you.

00:56:25.080 I recommend everybody head over there and subscribe right now.

00:56:28.740 We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters that they've already sent in, which goes behind a paywall.

00:56:34.120 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 we really should be?

00:56:44.060 That's a good question.

00:56:46.120 Thank you.

00:56:51.520 Christopher Hitchens once said that he became a journalist because he didn't want to have to rely on newspapers for information.

00:56:56.340 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.

00:57:07.980 Whether that means riding on a horse and literally handing them a paper out in the middle of wherever they happen to live.

00:57:16.020 Or just having the means by which to publish, you know, the media is the only company mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

00:57:25.320 And I think that we've now reached the point where the problem is not getting out the information.

00:57:31.560 It's that we are basically feeding off a fire hose of information.

00:57:35.200 It's too much and people are not equipped to deal with that.

00:57:40.000 And so what is the result?

00:57:41.200 Is that they end up accepting or subscribing to whatever it is that they are fed.

00:57:49.240 And they are fed what they choose to be fed.

00:57:51.620 They go to the outlets that they prefer and then they adopt those viewpoints more deeply and more deeply.

00:57:56.760 We become siloed and separated.

00:57:58.100 The thing that we lack in America today is something that I think only maybe, you know, very careful readers and journalists perhaps have.

00:58:06.980 Which is the ability to read through the news with the mindset of a fact checker.

00:58:13.020 Which is a specific skill set.

00:58:15.000 It's not just Googling things that you're reading about in an article.

00:58:18.220 It's a specific skill set that unfortunately, I think it should be a part of the school system at this point.

00:58:22.740 I think it should be something that we teach is how do you read an article?

00:58:26.480 How do you know?

00:58:27.200 How do you verify this information?

00:58:29.200 This is a very important.

00:58:30.900 We live in an age with so much information, but we also live in an age.

00:58:35.540 Alex Jones, who has, he comes to mind because of all of the things that he said and done.

00:58:43.200 He got one thing really right.

00:58:45.120 And that was the name of his show.

00:58:47.540 Infowars.

00:58:48.260 That's what we're in the middle of right now.

00:58:50.260 These are information wars that we are not equipped to fight.

00:58:55.040 Our population is not equipped to fight these wars and they are sitting ducks and they are being, their minds are being molded.

00:59:06.400 And who's doing the molding?

00:59:08.040 Well, I don't know.

00:59:09.000 But then look around you.

00:59:09.980 What do we see?

00:59:10.500 We see people saying, Osama bin Laden wasn't that bad. 1.00

00:59:13.140 And Hamas are freedom fighters.

00:59:16.420 And well, I think there's your answer.

00:59:21.260 So we have to better educate our public and yet look at our education system.

00:59:27.160 So I think this is the conversation that we need to be having.

00:59:31.680 And I think that we are now more fully aware of the problem.

00:59:35.660 But I don't think we're having the conversation yet.

00:59:38.680 Well, David and everybody, follow us over to Locals or wherever you support us for the bonus section of this interview.

00:59:45.340 You've spent your life exposing the immoral to scrutiny.

00:59:50.740 How do you decide right and wrong?

00:59:52.880 And what would keep you from coming tyrannical if you had more political power?

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TRIGGERnometry - March 20, 2024

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

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