In this episode Clay is joined by Columbia student journalists Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma.

Last week, Sundial published a piece co-authored by Nikos and Christina called The “Cornell 7” is Really About Liberalism. In it, they articulate their unique take on the Cornell 7 story, and, as they put it, the “collective frenzy” it precipitated.

Needless to say their piece received a fair bit of backlash.

Nikos has received death threats, the Editorial Board of the Columbia Political Review condemned Sundial’s decision to publish the piece, and some of Sundial’s own writers started a petition to demand that the publication “cease organizational operations”.

Even the Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA), an organization founded specifically to promote free speech, open dialogue, and civil, productive disagreement across differences in ideology and opinion, threw Nikos and Christina under the bus. Its executive board condemned their article on the grounds that it promoted rape culture and worked to silence survivors of sexual assault (which it did not), and then canceled an event on the topic of press freedom.

In this conversation, Christina and Nikos explain the argument they made in their controversial article, detail the outrageous response to it, and reveal how CODA has completely betrayed its founding principles.

Other Sundial articles worth reading:

• Now It’s Really About Liberalism

• The Vanity Fair of Campus Contrarianism

Christina’s article on dating:

• Are Men the Problem, Or Are We?

Relevant pieces by Nikos in UnHerd:

• Why my classmates want me silenced

• The Cornell Seven is fueling a campus media frenzy

In this episode Clay is joined by Holly Jean Soto. Holly is an economics and liberty communicator who seeks to distill complex economic concepts into content that anyone can understand. In addition to her social media activity, she also writes. Her work can be found in publications such as The Daily Wire and Real Clear Politics.

You can follow Holly on X, TikTok, and Instagram.

If you want to understand the differences between socialism, communism, social democracy, and democratic socialism, and get Holly’s take on why the DSA seems to be rising in popularity, then this is the conversation for you.

In this episode, Clay is joined by David Christopher Kaufman. David is a New York based journalist whose writing can be found in many notable publications, including The New York Post, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Jerusalem Post, and Commentary, just to name a few. He has also worked as an editor for The New York Times.

David’s writing often focuses on identity. A subject on which he has a somewhat unique vantage point, given that he is black, gay, and Jewish. He is also quite adamant, as you will hear at the top of this episode, that he is first and foremost, an American.

David is also hard at work on The Octagon Project, an organization dedicated to combat the rise of the DSA by creating coalitions of groups who share the values of the Jewish community. The website will be up and running very soon, so keep an eye out!

In this conversation David and Clay discuss his understanding of identity, Nikole Hannah Jones’ recent article in the New York Times questioning her decision to enroll her daughter in an underprivileged school, the double standard Jews face when talking about antisemitism, his potentially controversial term for Jews that disavow Israel and Zionism, and much more.

You can follow David on X and Instagram.

A selection of David’s writing:

• Choosing Between My Two Identities

• Woke Jews are sacrificing their own at the altar of wokeness

• How America’s Jews Became America’s ‘New Blacks’

• How #Palestine became the ultimate elitist pursuit

**Correction** -> at around the 41 minute mark Clay accidentally says “Adrian Brody” instead of “Adam Brody”. He was in fact talking about Adam Brody.