Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is one of those pioneering American leaders whose story is for the history books. Born in the segregated south in the 1950s, Rice couldn’t step foot in certain movie theaters and restaurants when she was a little girl. By the time she stepped foot in the White House as a National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, she was one of the most powerful people in the world—and the highest ranking black woman in the history of the United States.
On today’s episode, a conversation with Secretary Rice, who now serves at the Director of Stanford's Hoover Institution, about the most pressing issues facing the country: the future of the GOP, the continued popularity of Donald Trump, the state of our democracy, the culture wars on race and identity politics, immigration, the rise of China, possible war in Russia … and much more.
Right now, the Winter Olympics are underway in Beijing. But for the Chinese Communist Party, the 2022 Games are an opportunity not simply for athleticism, but for authoritarianism.
Athletes at the Games are subject not just to official Olympics rules, but also the heavy hand of the CCP. They are being spied on—and they have been warned, including by Nancy Pelosi, not to criticize the injustices China is committing in plain sight.
Why is America participating in an Olympics in a country committing genocide? What does it say about our relationship with China? And will historians remember these games in the way we remember the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Josh Rogin is a foreign policy columnist for The Washington Post, the author of “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century,” and a favorite Honestly guest. Today he breaks down what you aren’t seeing when you tune into this year’s Olympics.
Eric Scmidt has been a pioneer at every chapter of the tech revolution… from the very beginnings of the internet to helming Google for more than a decade. Now, he’s focused on the next iteration of our digital world: artificial intelligence. His most recent book, written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocker, is called “The Age of AI: And our Human Future.” It investigates how AI is transforming the very foundations of what it means to be human.
Today, our quick question to Google’s former CEO is this: how long do we have until the robots take over?
Ever since the end of World War II, America has been the dominant world superpower. We have been ready to use that power to defend our national interest. Or to defend a certain set of values. Or both.
But there has always been a tension in this country between isolationism and interventionism. Between those among us who think we should maintain an active role in world affairs—and those who want to pull back and focus on our myriad problems here at home.
That long standing debate is being reignited right now on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
So for today, a debate between Bret Stephens and Matt Taibbi on American Power. When should we use our might? And has recent history proven that we do more harm than good?
The Covid vaccines are medical miracles. During the pandemic they have been literal life-savers; I’ll never forget the relief I felt after getting that first shot.
Despite the conspiracy theories in some corners of the web or on Fox News, there is simply zero evidence that they are killing people; that they are harming people in large numbers; or that this is all some malicious plot by Big Pharma. There is overwhelming proof that these vaccines prevent serious illness.
Like all medical interventions, though, vaccines can have side effects. And in the case of mRNA vaccines—those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna—there is a small but real risk for young people, especially young males. The need for an evidence-based discussion about the wisdom of requiring boosters is urgent.
But that’s easier said than done.
Over the course of this pandemic, the public has been told that pronouncements from federal health officials represent “the science.” Distinguished medical experts, including some from our nation’s most elite institutions, who have questioned official Covid recommendations and policies—on everything from lockdowns to masking to vaccine mandates—have often been demonized and sometimes silenced.
And so healthy debate about scientifically complicated and morally complex subjects has been shut down, both by censors and by self-censorship.
David Zweig has been one of those rare journalists who, from the start, has challenged the accepted narrative on Covid. He has published a stream of investigations for New York Magazine, the Atlantic, and Wired—from questioning the wisdom of closing schools, to hospitalizationmetrics, to maskingchildren—that initially were maligned or ignored, only to be accepted by legacy media and acknowledged by health officials months later.
Today, he reads an article he wrote for Common Sense that tackles the knotty subject of boosters and myocarditis.
It’s hard to think of an institution in American life that’s more broken than higher education. As universities have abandoned core liberal principles like free speech, bending to students’ demands for censorship, perhaps the most striking feature of all has been the cowardice and silence of tenured professors.
None of this has stopped her from speaking her mind.
Today, why Amy Chua remains an optimist in the face of unprecedented political tribalism; how her students continue to inspire her even as she’s lost faith in Yale; and why she did, indeed, threaten to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t practice her piano perfectly.
As a boy growing up in Turkey, Abdullah Antepli thought hating Jews was normal. He read Mein Kampf before he was 15. His parents gave him a children's version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He burned Israeli flags.
Today, he is an imam, a professor at Duke University, and, as he puts it, a recovering antisemite. Imam Adbullah has been fearless about blowing the whistle about rising antisemitism in the Muslim community. In the wake of the recent hostage-taking at the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, he tweeted: “Houston, we have a problem!” He wrote, “we need to honestly discuss the increasing anti-semitism within various Muslim communities.”
Today, on Holocaust Remembrace Day, a conversation with a man who has paid a heavy personal price for working to eradicate Jew-hate and to promote peace between Muslims and Jews. Learn more about Imam Abdullah’s work here.
At this point in the pandemic, one group of Americans generally gets to show their faces. The other still does not. One group orders groceries from Amazon, while the other packages it. One group enjoys take-out. And the other delivers it in the rain.
Today, in part two of my conversation with ProPublica journalist Alec MacGillis, we unpack the ways the pandemic has exacerbated the already enormous divide between the haves and the have nots. MacGillis discusses his recent book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Democrats became such a big part of what he calls “the Amazon coalition.” We also talk about how the stubbornness of our political and media class—and their insistence on doubling down on short-sighted policies—is already reshaping our politics and culture.
If you haven’t yet listened to part one of the conversation, you can do so here.
As we approach the third year of this pandemic, it’s become painfully clear that the stringent measures we took to mitigate against the virus had all kinds of unintended consequences. For mental health. For the economy. For our cities. And, especially, for our kids.
Today, award-winning investigative journalist Alec MacGillis helps us understand the morally urgent costs of school shutdowns on our youngest generations, and how pandemic policies contributed to the crime surge plaguing so many American cities.
MacGillis reported on these hidden costs with rigor, diligence and empathy well before the rest of the country caught up and said: hold on, these costs may be too high. (You can read many of those stories here.) Today’s episode is part one of my conversation with MacGillis. Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll talk about his recent book about Amazon, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Big Tech and progressive policies are accelerating the inequalities that were already running rampant in America.
The irrationality of the current policies and conversations surrounding Covid—guidelines that are coming from our public health authorities; rules coming from our schools and our workplaces; and information coming from our media—is making skeptics out of even the most compliant.
What gives? Why do things seem so nonsensical? Who should we trust? How can we get back to normal—or at least some semblance of normal? And how can we do it responsibly and safely?
To answer these questions, we brought together three doctors who have been islands of sanity in a sea of misinformation and confusion.
Dr. Vinay Prasad is an associate professor of epidemiology at UCSF. Dr. Stefan Baral is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. And Dr. Lucy McBride is a practicing internist in Washington D.C., and author of a popular COVID-19 newsletter.
This was a live subscriber-only Zoom event, and the thousands of listeners who tuned in had the chance to ask the panelists their most pressing and burning COVID questions. If you want to be able to participate in events like this one in the future, head over to bariweiss.substack.com and hit subscribe.
