Conversations with Coleman

Frank Siller’s youngest brother, Stephen, was orphaned at 10, grew up to become a New York City firefighter, and was driving home from a night shift on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he heard the World Trade Center had been hit. He turned his truck around, grabbed his gear, and ran through the closed Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and up the stairs of the South Tower. He never came out. Two weeks later, Siller and his siblings started a charity in Stephen’s name. Twenty-five years on, that foundation, Tunnel to Towers, has paid off mortgages for fallen first responders and Gold Star families, built mortgage-free smart homes for catastrophically wounded veterans and first responders, and worked to end veteran homelessness across the country. Siller writes about Stephen—on that morning and the 25 years since—in his new memoir, Let Us Do Good. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk about what it actually took to build one of the largest charities of its kind in America out of a single family’s grief. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there a meaningful difference between a commonsense Democrat and a center-right Republican? Matthew Yglesias thinks so. But he also thinks the Democrats have spent the last decade making it harder and harder to tell. He cofounded Vox and writes the essential Slow Boring Substack. He has been one of the most consistent voices calling for a Democratic politics that is practical and winnable. He joins Coleman Hughes to make that case.  They start with the big picture: why people have started asking politics to give their lives meaning, what that has done to our culture, and whether the loss of monoculture has made us lonelier and more tribal. From there they get into the Democratic Socialists of America’s rise, why housing is the most important issue nobody campaigns on, and why Yglesias thinks public schools should go back to teaching straightforward patriotism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices