With John Yoo, who accuses Lucretia and Steve of being closet monarchists, back from his jungle adventures in South America (albeit without any archeological relics to satify his Indiana Jones fantasies) and sitting in the host chair this week, the gang offers its two cents on the latest GOP debate (someone—guess who?—is not impressed with Nikki Haley), and the disappointing election results, which, Steve suggests, is like Twain's remark on Wagner's music ("it's better than it sounds"), though with the key takeaway that the GOP is doomed to more election night disappointments as long as it has a deer-in-the-headlines problem when it comes to abortion.After reviewing a few new legal developments in the largehr Trump saga, we get down to exploring the mounting crisis of anti-Semitism, with an analysis of why this current eruption of anti-Semitism we're seeing nwo is not your grandfather's anti-Semitism, but is in fact ax expression of a much deeper problem with the maliganancy of the progressive left. College administrators who think they can weather the storm and wait for the fury to abate on its own are deluded.We're going to retur next week with a sequel, and explain to everyone why a wholesale purge of leftist institutions is not a violation of free speech rightly understood, or merely "right-wing cancel culture," as the left and too many simple-minded libertarians think. Fire away (heh).

With John Yoo still away somewhere in the jungles of South America, Steve and Lucretia are delighted to be joined by a very special guest, Prof. Amy Wax of Penn Law School. Followers of the campus scene may be familiar with Penn Law's crusade to fire Prof. Wax for the sin of offending against campus orthodoxies on race and immigration, at the same time Penn so conspicuously tolerates anti-Semitism.Prof. Wax isn't at liberty to discuss the details of her ongoing ordeal, but we do get into the thick of several pertinent questions, such as:—Does the current crisis of tolerance for anti-Semitism on campus represent a possible inflection point to turn back “wokery” at last, or will this episode prove that higher education has passed the point of no return?—Is there any evidence that the high-profile donor revolt at Penn and elsewhere is having an effect?—On a wider note, many conservative law professors are leaving their posts because of the increasing ideological hostility. This seems another bad omen for academia.

Another bonus classic format edition, this time featuring Steve in extended conversation with Col. Austin Bay, one of the proprietors of the indispensable Strategy Page, columnist for Creators Syndicate, and author of the splendid Cocktails from Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century.His column last week is a brief and lucid tour through the proxy wars America is currently confronting (against Russia and Iran, by way of Ukraine and Israel), and our conversation goes into much greater depth on both of these conflicts as well as our potential conflict with rapidly-arming China.Can Ukraine defeat Russia? What must Israel do to prevail, and what are the risks of a wider war? Some of what Col. Bay lays out will curl your hair and make you want to buy a lot of canned goods, but he also gets into detail about how combined arms work on the battlefield and especially in the kind of urban warfare U.S. forces faced in Iraq and Israel is facing now in Gaza. The biggest risk of the moment, Bay agrees, is with America's pathetic leadership class, making him more worried for the fate of the country than at any time in the last 20 years.

Way back in 1960, Leo Strauss wrote in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that "Natural law, which was for many centuries the basis of the predominant Western political thought, is rejected in our time by almost all students of society who are not Roman Catholics." In the decades since then, however, natural law has enjoyed a revival of sorts, and is implicated today in the rise of constitutional originalism at the Supreme Court. But it is also a confusing subject, because many so-called "new natural law" theories seem to concede too much to modern philosophy, as if the great tradition of natural law begins with Bentham. To be sure, the classical authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas were not simple thinkers on the subject, but their work tends not bog down with specialized jargon or abstruse theory. One person stands out for rescuing the older tradition of natural law: Hadley Arkes, author of Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution. In this conversation, Steve Hayward draws out the basics of the argument from Prof. Arkes, and extends the line of reasoning to today's controversies about free speech and "cancel culture," which are more confused than ever with the sudden eruption of anti-Semitism on college campuses.

With John Yoo away this week on a junket to South America, Steve and Lucretia reverted to old times and scheduled a live taping where we fielded questions and comments in a webinar format.We talked about the reasons to be bullish about the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, along with discussion of the strategic challenges facing Israel and the United States, and more—always more—on the rot in our universities.In between these three main topics we took up listener questions about social contract theory, whether the U.S. could realistically find itself in a real civil war some time soon, and whether the general challenges of political leadership in a time of deep polarization can be overcome.A real crowd-pleaser, we hope.

The only thing more predictable than a sunrise in the east is a Hamas claim that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital and that the Western media would report it as dictated because the story was just too good to check, though we always thought the mainstream media employed—or so they told us in 2004—"layer and layers of fact-checkers." Once again, we see whose side our media is on. And it's not ours—or Israel's.Topic 2: Time to "decolonize" all the academic departments that won't shut up about "colonialism." Full stop.And has anyone in DC figured out yet that the move by renegade Republicans to oust Speaker McCarthy and leave the Speaker's chair empty was a clever plot to get Democrats to vote for a de facto government shutdown, and stymie aid to Ukraine? Who are the dumb guys now?And what to make of the plea deals of Sydney Powell and Kenneth Cheesebro in the Georgia prosecutions of the supposed Trump RICO conspiracy? We speculate that both Powell and Cheesebro might reprise the great star turn of Frankie Pentangelo in Godfather II.

Never mind Hamas in Gaza: what do we do with Hamas ideology on American college campuses? On top of the pusillanmous responses of college presidents we can clearly see the emerging theme of moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, out of which the next step is certain: any attempts to curtail Hamas ideology on campus will be called "cancel culture," and will be said to prove the hypocrisy of everyone who has been attacking cancel culture over the last few years. And thus nothing will change. At the least, Jews should boycott Harvard, and perhaps the entire Ivy League. Steve suggests a more robust alternative way of thinking about the problem, but John and Lucretia are not convinced.Topic two is the domestic political scene. Who needs a Speaker of the House anyway? But more curious is the case of RFK Jr., who has now decided to run as an independent nex year. Is there a chance he could actually win, say, for instance, if Biden tumbles down the stairs of Air Force One in early October, and can't be replaced on the ballot—never mind the prospect that he might draw more votes from Trump than from Biden. The point is, black swan events are becoming so much more common than maybe it is time to bring back white swan events.We do live up to our name at the open, however, with some whisky recommendations from the GoodSpirit whisky bar in Budapest.

Lucretia, freshly back in the U.S. from her adventures with Steve in Budapest, is in the host chair for this week's episode, and she's not in a good mood. And it's not jet lag. Looking out at the concurrent disasters at home and abroad at the moment—high inflation, an undefended southern border, and now war in Israel—she poses a straightforward question: Would any of this be happening if Trump was still president? And more acute to a certified dog-lover: While Trump has many personal flaws, would he kick a dog? The evidence accumulates that Joe Biden is not just a terrible president, but a terrible human being.From there we take up the inner desires of Kamp Kommandant Hillary Klinton, the good news (for John) of the return of the McRibb, and the demise of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Which somehow leads to a discussion of President James K. Polk, whom John thinks is an executive to be highly esteemed, drawing immediate 50-cal fire from Lucretia. And we also marvel afresh at the feral genius of Trump's method of contesting the kangaroo court fraud trial under way in New York.But it isn't all bad news. We celebrate the fact that apparently women, too, think a lot about the Roman Empire, though Lucretia prefers to think of the Roman Republic instead, since she founded it.

Settle in with your best chilled Hungarian dessert wine and Philly cheese steak for this cosmopolitan issue, which finds John Yoo—host for this week's episode—tired out from looting in his home town of Philadelphia, while Lucretia and Steve are together in Budapest carrying on with more conspiracies against the international rules-based order. John gives us on-scene reports from ground-zero of the "recreational shopping" going on in Philadelphia, plus an update on his three days of testimony in the incredible John Eastman disbarrment trial going on in California. We also cover the aftermath of our event with Heather Mac Donald at Berkeley Law, which made it all the way to Jesse Watter's show on Fox News, and has gained something like 3 million views online. But that's nothing compared to our beat down on the implosion of Ibram X. Kendi (Sen. John Kennedy's favorite "butthole professor"), which was not only predictable, but was predicted! By Glenn Loury, among others, whose profanity-laced rant about Kendi to John McWhorter we excerpt here for its news value, but also underscore the main point that the academic exaltation of an intellectual fraud like Kendi is another indication of the corruption and deep politicization of our universities today.Government shutdown? GOP debate? The rest of the Supreme Court docket for the new term beginning Monday. Yes—we cover all that too. Better get a second bottle of Hungarian wine.

This circuitious episode, hosted by Steve in Budapest with John Yoo in Dallas and Lucretia in her undisclosed desert location, starts off with the entirely predictable news that David Brooks drinks his whisky on the rocks (insert shudders and horror here), and quickly moves on to the news that hasn't broken yet, so we'll fix it: Gavin Newson is running for president. We know—he hasn't offically announced, but he's behaving like a candidate more and more every day. And why has no one noticed that Newsom would also solve the Democrats' Kamala problem? (See the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, especially the passage that reads, "The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves." That rules out Kamala as Newsom's running mate, which is okay because Newsom and Harris hate each other.We also devote too much time to the sartorial severity that is the Fetterman Senate Dress code, and you'll just need to listen to hear who Lucretia calls "Senator Stripper Boots."From there Steve gives a central European "sit rep" on attitudes there about the Ukraine War, American policy about the war, and general political matters, all gleaned from Steve's conversations with highly placed (and very smart) Hungarian sources.We've been wanting to talk about a legal issue that's been our mind for a while, and we finally get to it in this episode in depth: qualified immunity. We don't quite reach a firm conlusion about how the doctrine should be reformed, but you'll feel smarter for our dissection of it.Finally, a few quick notes on the Kendi implosion, missing jet fighters, and other fun matters. But not to worry—we're still drinking our whisky neat, even if David Brooks kills his with four ice cubes. In an airport.