Conversations with Coleman

Tim Naftali is a presidential historian who spent four years running the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. He’s listened to thousands of hours of secret Oval Office recordings from Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy. Naftali joins Coleman to break down which president was actually the sharpest, walking through the different kinds of intelligence—tactical, strategic, emotional—that separated men like LBJ and Nixon from each other. They get into why presidents started taping themselves in the first place, and what those recordings actually reveal. Naftali also takes on the recent online rehabilitation of Nixon, the idea that he was a victim of the same deep state that took down Kennedy, and explains why that story falls apart once you look at what he was actually asking the CIA and FBI to do.
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Nathan Cofnas is the academic researcher who broke the story alleging Jason Arday had fabricated his biography and plagiarized his PhD thesis, a scandal that led to Arday’s resignation from Cambridge University and, weeks later, his death.

But Cofnas has his own history of controversy. He’s a self-described race realist who says that genetic differences between population groups explain average IQ gaps. His argument has gotten him attacks from both the right and left, the termination of his research post at Cambridge’s Emmanuel College, and a since-lifted suspension from Ghent University. He joins Coleman Hughes to walk through the Arday scandal in detail, then defends his research directly. They get into whether ideas about race and IQ should be discussed openly among elites, whether cultural explanations for racial disparities hold up, and whether mainstreaming these claims about IQ would tear society apart rather than heal it. Hughes argues that most people are incapable of separating a claim about group averages from how they judge individuals, and that this is exactly why the conversation is so dangerous to bring into the mainstream.
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Robert Wright has spent decades writing about human nature, evolution, and the forces that shape history. In his latest book, The God Test, he argues AI is forcing a test humanity can’t afford to fail: whether we can finally get past the tribalism that’s defined most of our history. He joins Coleman Hughes to walk through a real scenario where competition between the U.S. and China over AI dominance escalates into an arms race, one that could end in nuclear war if either side believes falling behind means losing everything. The actual danger, in his telling, comes from human beings racing each other into a corner, not the technology itself.

On Tuesday, September 8th, Coleman will be live at the 92Y in conversation with Dara Horn, author of the new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Tickets are going fast, and you can find them here:https://www.92ny.org/event/dara-horn-with-coleman-hughes

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Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site that’s been fact-checked and banned more times than most outlets twice its size. He joins Coleman Hughes to argue that comedy is one of the best weapons against ideas unable to survive scrutiny. He also warns that a new problem has arisen. While the culture has moved on from the joyless era of a few years ago, there is now a complete disregard for the truth, with social media platforms rewarding outlandish claims over boring, well-sourced versions of events. They get into how The Bee forced Snopes to change its fact-checking rules, why both President Donald Trump and Joe Biden pose unusual challenges for satire, and the one joke Dillon retracted that he now regrets.

On Tuesday, August 18th, Coleman will be answering your questions in the Free Press Forum. Join the conversation here!

https://www.thefp.com/forum/america-at-250/post/308869859
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Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress, and he’s spent the last few years building a case that the Democratic Party’s future runs through places like Johnstown and Erie–in his home state of Pennsylvania–not just tech wealth. He calls it progressive capitalism, and he thinks it’s the platform that beats both Donald Trump’s economic nationalism and the socialism of the party’s left flank. He joins Coleman Hughes to make his case, ahead of an expected decision on a 2028 presidential run.

They start with why Khanna broke from his own party to defend the Hunter Biden laptop story, and whether he’d actually seek congressional approval for military action as president or repeat the pattern set by Democratic presidents before him. From there they get into his pitch for why Democrats should pick him over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and his case for targeted tariffs on steel and trucks instead of Trump’s blanket approach. They end on his shift from calling himself a pro-Israel progressive to arguing that Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to genocide.

On Tuesday, August 18th, Coleman will be answering your questions in the Free Press Forum. Join the conversation here!

https://www.thefp.com/forum/america-at-250/post/308869859
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