Conversations with Coleman

Richard Hanania is a political scientist, writer, and author of the new book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, which makes the sometimes uncomfortable case that antiestablishment politics, for all their appeal, tend to make countries worse. He joins Coleman to talk about who elites actually are and why they’re usually right, even when they’re sometimes spectacularly wrong.

They also get into what explains the rise of antiestablishment politics across the West, and why communications technology may be more to blame than any actual failure of institutions. Hanania’s own journey from the alt-right informs all of it, and he closes with some unusually honest advice for young men who find themselves going down that road.
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Dr. Cornel West is one of the most distinct voices in American public life. He’s a philosopher, theologian, and moral critic who has spent decades asking the toughest questions about America—what this country is and what it ought to be. He joins Coleman on the 250th anniversary of the founding to get into the state of America in 2026. They get into the founding contradictions, the ethics of manifest destiny, what American capitalism gets right and what it leaves out, the decline of religion and what has replaced it, and what he learned running for president. It ends, as all great philosophical conversations should, with his view of the Drake-versus-Kendrick beef.
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Douglas Murray is back as a columnist at The Free Press, and Coleman wastes no time putting him to work. They get into the Iran deal and why Murray thinks it won’t hold. They also dig into the nature of a regime that has been openly stating its intentions for decades, and a West that keeps refusing to believe them. And they cover what the resignation of British prime minister Keir Starmer reveals about a country that voted for change and got very little of it.
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Caitlin Flanagan joins the show today, now an official columnist at The Free Press. Flanagan, one of the sharpest essayists working today, spent 35 years in Los Angeles before deciding she’d had enough, and tells Coleman why. The answer says a lot about what progressive governance has done to one of America’s great cities. From there they get into territory Flanagan knows well: the state of marriage, the dating crisis, and the case for having children in a culture that has talked itself out of wanting them.
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Peter Beinart is a writer and author who has contributed to The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He grew up a committed Zionist and has spent the last decade publicly refuting that position, arriving at the view that Israel cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality under the law. His most recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, caused shock waves in the Jewish world. In this conversation, Coleman and Peter debate the Palestinian right of return and whether it’s comparable to Israel’s Law of Return for diaspora Jews. They argue over whether a one-state solution would produce equality or civil war, and whether the idea of comparing Israel to South Africa holds up under scrutiny. They get into the role of jihadist ideology in the conflict, whether Iran constitutes an existential threat to Israel, and what it would actually mean for Israel to be a democracy.
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