Power Line Ricochet

John Yoo hosts this week's episode from exile in Austin, Texas, where he humors Steve and Lucretia's the extra-legal views on the Trump trials and tribulations in a Manhattan courtroom, and speculate how Trump's "Letter from the Rikers Island Jail" would read (though it will be more likely in the form of Tweets or TruthSocial posts). Have we discovered a trial judge who seems to have no judgment at all.

Certainly we have a president without judgment, and we begin with pondering the question of just when it was that Bernie Sanders became president, because it is impossible to see how a Sanders administration would differ from everything the Biden administration has done. Steve notes a recent American Conservative article that picks up on parts of the Hur report on Biden. While everybody focused on the parts of the report that dealt with Biden's senility, other parts of the report show that Biden has actually had terrible judgment for his entire political career.

Finally, we look at Steve's City-Journal article on the parallels between 1968 and today, and wonder how it is possible for so many of our "leaders" in high education to have so little good judgment or common sense about what ought to be done. (Lucretia recommends pepper-bullets, which sound like some kind of high-velocity jalapenos.)

There was a lot of listener and reader interest in our too brief comments on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in our last episode, and we realized this issue deserved keeping the whisky bar open after the usual 2 am closing time to extend our treatment of the issue, yielding this short special episode.

To recap: Lucretia thinks it is a stupid idea (hence, "Don't murder a man who is committing suicide"), while John thought it was also unsound on basic free speech principles. Steve was, naturally, in the middle, ending up as road kill for his analysis of why Republicans thought there were some political mischief to be made.

So we decided to order another round of drinks (or, in Lucretia's case, four margaritas to honor Cinco de Mayo) and try to go through the issue more thoroughly, especially taking account of David Bernstein's observations at National Review Online that there's a lot of disinformation about what the bill does and doesn't do.

We also wanted to take up the argument Harry Jaffa argued more than 60 years ago that a free society could, under certain circumstances, curtail the speech of Nazis, Communists, and . . . anti-Semites? . . . in defense of a free society. Jaffa argued:

“Does a free society prove false to itself if it denies civil liberties to Communists, Nazis, or anyone else who would use these liberties, if he could, as a means of destroying the free society? The answer, I believe, is now plain that it does not. Is saying this I do not counsel, or even justify, any particular measure for dealing with persons of such description. What is right in any case depends on the facts of that case, and I am here dealing only with principles, not their application. However, those who think every denial of civil liberties is equally derogatory of the character of a free society, without reference to the character of the persons being denied, make this fundamental error: they confuse ends with means. . .  [But] it is seldom either expedient or wise to suppress advocacy of even inhuman doctrines in a community like ours, it is not for that reason unjust.”

Does the current campus scene arise to this standard? What does prudence counsel? The normally quarrelsome threesome at the whisky bar arrive at surprising agreement on the matter. Hint: We rather like Jaffa’s conclusion to his classic essay: “The more we can accomplish by opinion, the less we will have to do by law.”

Lucretia hosts this week's episode, reminding us once again that Republicans are living up to their reputation as "the stupid party" with the proposed "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act" that seems to have overlooked this quaint old thing called the First Amendment. Steve gamely tries to defend the political strategy behind it, but Lucretia is having none of it (putting her in rare alignment with the New York Times), wondering why anyone would want to distract attention away from Democrats tieing themselves in electoral hangman's knots over the anti-Semitism raging wild inside their party and their wholly-owned subsidiary college campuses. Republicans ought to impose a gag order on themselves, and crusade against the gag order on Trump in his current trial in New York. Concerning which, John has several observations.

And about that campus scene: another week, and another data point for Steve's thesis that "it's going to get worse before it gets worse." About the only sensible conclusion is that somewhere in the Great Beyond, Tom Wolfe is behind the whole current scene. Maybe we can still get a sequel from him, Bonfire of the Inanities.

Today is May Day, but also the Victims of Communism Memorial Day, and as such today is the prefect days for this classic-hybrid format podcast, featuring Steve Hayward in a conversation with Elizabeth Spalding, chair of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. (Elizabeth is also Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and Visiting Fellow at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College.)

The Foundation has opened the Victims of Communism Museum in downtown Washington DC, and you should put it on your itinerary for your next visit to the nation's capital. 

We call this a "hybrid" format because it comes in two parts. Following the conversation with Elizabeth, this episode offers Steve's recent speech at the Victims of Communism Museum about Reagan and Churchill on the Cold War, a major part of Steve's book about the two great statesmen. 

We're going up a day earlier than usual this week, partly because our constantly irregular travel schedules complicated things again, but more importantly to be timely, as John, Steve, and Lucretia have LOTS of thoughts on the Supreme Court argument Thursday about whether ex-presidents should enjoy broad immunity for any or all acts they took while in office. Steve and Lucretia think the president does, while John thinks textual support for the proposition is lacking. Steve and Lucretia respond with an appeal to first principles, and enlist as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield, because of his unique book on the inherent ambivalence of executive power even in a constitutional republic, Taming the Prince. As usual, we fought to a draw.

Our second subject is the ongoing Kristalnacht on campus. There's not much new to say except to calibrate how cowardly university administrators continue to be, and note that even some liberals, like George Packer in The Atlantic (who provides our article of the week, "The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education") are starting to figure out what conservatives have known about higher education for two generations now. It's as if no one ever bothered to notice Closing of the American Mind.

This week's ad-free episode is probably better thought of as a Two Whisky Happy Hour, because John Yoo is away on a lecture- and Philly-cheesesteak-procurement tour back east, and Lucretia is out of action right now, too, though she appears in this episode by proxy, so to speak. So two whiskies it is.

Last weekend, Lucretia and I offered a keynote session for Ammo Grrrll's annual CommenterCon conference in Phoenix, which is an annual gathering of Ammo Grrrll's best friends and devoted fans from around the country. My theme was "Will it get worse before it gets worse?", and Lucretia offered some thoughts on the future of free speech.

We had some technical difficulties with our sound recording devices, so the recording has a sudden and noticeable quality shift right in the middle, and you can't always make out the audience questions perfectly, but we think listeners will still enjoy most of it.