The Free Press: Conversations with Coleman

The Charlie Kirk Killing and America’s Forgotten History of Left-Wing Terror

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:01:12 GMT

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review and author of the new book Blood & Progress, which makes the case that left-wing political violence has a long and largely forgotten history in America. He joins Coleman Hughes to argue that the commonly held belief that political violence is largely a right-wing phenomenon is not just inaccurate but ac…

In Defense of Elites, with Richard Hanania

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:02:08 GMT

Richard Hanania is a political scientist, writer, and one of the more interesting and unpredictable thinkers working today. He first came to prominence as a critic of woke ideology and the legal architecture that enforces it, most thoroughly in his book The Origins of Woke. His new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, goes in what appears …

Dr. Cornel West: Is America Living Up to Its Promise?

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:01:47 GMT

After the weekend of America’s 250th, I wanted to sit down with someone who could do more than celebrate or condemn our nation. The 250th birthday of this country feels like a moment that demands genuine and serious reflection, and when I thought about who I most wanted to have that conversation with, the name Cornel West kept coming up.

I’ve known Dr. W…

Douglas Murray: The Iranian Regime Means What It Says

Coleman Hughes — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:02:44 GMT

Douglas Murray is back at The Free Press, where he started the column Things Worth Remembering. He is one of the most clear-eyed writers working today on the threats facing Western civilization, and I was glad to have him back on the show.

We started by looking at Britain, where Keir Starmer has just resigned after two years of achieving very little. Dou…

Caitlin Flanagan: Why I Finally Left Los Angeles

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:01:59 GMT

Caitlin Flanagan is one of the best essayists in America. She recently joined The Free Press, and I was glad to finally get her on the show. She is funny, opinionated, and not particularly interested in telling you what you want to hear.

We started with Los Angeles, where she lived for 35 years before deciding she’d had enough. Flanagan grew up in Northe…

Coleman Hughes vs. Peter Beinart Debate: Should Israel Be a Jewish State?

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:01:54 GMT

Peter Beinart grew up a committed Zionist and changed his mind. He now believes that Israel, as currently constituted, cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality under the law, and he has spent the last decade making that case publicly in The New York Times, Jewish Currents, and most recently in his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Ga…

Is America’s Racial Reckoning Over? with John McWhorter

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:02:17 GMT

John McWhorter has been one of the clearest thinkers on race in America for decades, and one of the few willing to say what a lot of people quietly believe. He’s a linguistics professor at Columbia, a New York Times columnist, and one of my personal heroes. It’s good to have him back on the show.

The years between roughly 2014 and 2022 were defined by a …

Why You Shouldn’t Be Scared of AI

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:01:49 GMT

Every generation has its bubble. Tulips in 1630s Amsterdam. Railways in 1840s England. Dot-com in 1999. And in each case, the story we tell afterward is roughly the same: irrational mania, easy money, and a crash that was obvious in retrospect. But what if that story is more complicated than it looks?

Aman Verjee has spent years studying the biggest fina…

What People Who Choose Assisted Death Actually Say

Coleman Hughes — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:01:41 GMT

Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, with a promise that it would be “narrow, cautious,” and reserved for those within months of death. It hasn’t stayed that way. The law has since expanded to cover people with chronic but nonterminal conditions, people with disabilities, and people whose suffering is entirely psychological. Now a parliamentary comm…

Michael Shellenberger on the Psychology of Left-Wing Violence

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:02:22 GMT

Michael Shellenberger is the kind of person with the intellectual honesty to change his mind. He’s a former progressive activist who changed his tune publicly on nuclear energy, homelessness, and a bunch of other issues where the left-wing consensus turned out to be wrong. He’s also the author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and runs Public, one …

The War Before the War: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:01:54 GMT

Most people with strong opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have never heard of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. That’s a problem, because it’s arguably the moment when the modern conflict took shape.

Historian and political analyst Oren Kessler spent five years researching this period, resulting in his book Palestine 1936, one of the only compr…

Walter Russell Mead on Christian Zionism, the ‘Israel Lobby’ Myth, and the Psychology of Antisemitism

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:01:57 GMT

On one of the most polarizing questions in American foreign policy—U.S. support for Israel— historian and geopolitical expert Walter Russell Mead argues that nearly everyone has the story wrong.

The standard explanations focus on lobbying power, campaign donations, and media influence. But, as Mead explains, this ignores the fact that American interest i…

The Case for Drinking Alcohol

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:16:09 GMT

I am not a big drinker by most people’s standards. I don’t do shots. I rarely drink alone. But a few times a week, usually over dinner or a long conversation with a friend, I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer. And over the years, I’ve noticed that those moments have a quality that’s hard to replicate any other way. Friendships that started over drinks i…

Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia?

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:02:01 GMT

I have noticed firsthand the way that Wikipedia—the internet’s encyclopedia, widely treated as an objective reference—can become, in small but persistent ways, an ideological battleground. After I testified to Congress against reparations for slavery, my own Wikipedia page became a site of competing edits. At one point, an editor removed the fact—well-d…

The Liberal Case for American Power

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:02:23 GMT

Shadi Hamid came of age in an environment where America was often seen as a font of destruction, the root cause of the world’s problems rather than their solution. He marched against the Iraq War. He read Noam Chomsky. Like many on the left, he saw the United States primarily as a source of global harm. But over time, he came to see American power as a …

What People Get Wrong About Birthright Citizenship

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:01:56 GMT

Linda Chavez once held the highest-ranking position of any woman in Ronald Reagan’s White House, serving as director of the Office of Public Liaison. But when she was nominated to be secretary of labor under George W. Bush, her candidacy unraveled when it emerged that she had been sheltering an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala in her home. She hadn…

What Tyler Cowen Thinks About (Almost) Everything

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:02:09 GMT

Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University, co-founder of my favorite blog, Marginal Revolution, and a contributor to The Free Press. A true polymath known for his short but extremely substantive answers to questions, Tyler is one of my favorite people with whom to have a long conversation. On the show this week, I got to do the kind of inte…

Coleman Hughes and Glenn Greenwald Debate Israel’s Influence in Washington

Coleman Hughes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:02:37 GMT

Earlier this year, I was set to debate the influence of the Israel lobby on the U.S. at a live event in New York. That event was canceled. So instead, I invited my would-be opponent, journalist Glenn Greenwald, onto the podcast to have the conversation anyway.

Glenn and I disagree on a lot, including how much influence Israel has over American foreign po…

Nonviolence in a Violent Age: Coleman Hughes Live in Atlanta

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:54:12 GMT

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the wave of campus protests since, I have been struck by how far modern activism seems to have drifted from the strategies and philosophies of the civil rights era—which, in my opinion, should have remained the model. In the 1950s and ’60s, political change was pursued with discipline, pre…

What Keeps Sam Harris Up at Night

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:02:54 GMT

Sam Harris is one of the great thinkers of our time. The philosopher, neuroscientist, and host of the Making Sense podcast joined me to discuss some of the defining issues of the moment. We began with the ongoing war in Iran. While Harris is in favor of regime change given the Islamic regime’s hostility to its own people as well as the United States, he…