For a special minisode, Hadley Arkes and Garrett Snedeker, who attended the 2024 National Conservatism Conference July 8-10, share impressions of both the public panel discussions and how the conference fits within our larger political and cultural moment. Edmund Burke Foundation, Organizer of NatCon 4 Video of NatCon 4 speeches and panels

Esteemed constitutional scholar and gifted law professor Randy Barnett joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his new memoir A Life for Liberty: the Making of an American Originalist (Encounter). Prof. Barnett shares vignettes spanning his entire life from his deeply personal memoir on scholarship and practice, mentorship, his reconciling libertarianism and Natural Law, and his fights against anti-semitism. Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School. His publications includes thirteen books and countless scholarly articles, book reviews, and op-eds. In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, he represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius.  Leaern more about and purchase the book here.

June 28, 2024 will be remembered as a historic day in U.S. Supreme Court history. The Court reversed its forty year old precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a precedent that was the most important and most cited decision in all of administrative law. The Court’s Chevron precedent established a forty year practice of broad judicial deference to federal agency’s authority to interpret ambiguous statutes according to those agencies’ own criteria. In its decision in a pair of cases concerning the regulation of activity on fishing boats falling under the purview of such a vague statute, Loper-Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, the Court established new grounds according to which courts, agencies, and Congress would act. To discuss this "sea-change" in the law, we’re bringing you an exclusive, immediate mini-sode with one of the lawyers part of the team that prevailed, John Vecchione. Mr. Vecchione is a Senior Litigation Counsel for the non-profit New Civil Liberties Alliance representing clients against the Administrative State. He was previously President and CEO of the non-profit Cause of Action Institute, also advancing the constitutional order. He practiced at a number of D.C. area firms. He focuses his practice on strategic litigation in the federal district and appellate courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Read more about John at https://nclalegal.org/personnel/john-j-vecchione/ Follow John at https://x.com/VecchTweets Learn more about the Relentless case: https://nclalegal.org/press_release/in-landmark-victory-for-civil-liberties-ncla-persuades-supreme-court-to-overturn-chevron-deference/

Minisode 4 features JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes, who shares scenes from his recent trip to Budapest, Hungary where he keynoted a conference on the rule of law. With host Garrett Snedeker, they discuss how the Hungarian government is offering an alternative to the reigning orthodoxies and policy prescriptions of the European Union. He also details some colorful personalities with whom he enjoyed the conference hosted by the Danube Institute.

Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan devoted book-length treatment to shed light on the little-known stories of detransitioners, those individuals who undergo hormone therapies and often transgender surgeries and then reject the path they went down. In this latest Anchoring Truths Podcast episode, Olohan shares her perspective on writing this book as a journalist under the scrutiny of the ideologically-driven establishment media. She also discusses the emotional and physical complexities of transition, as well as the manipulation that has now become commonplace in anything from social media platforms to doctors' offices. Ultimately, Olohan gives a voice to young people she profiles in her book who have undergone intense transgender treatment. Buy Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult here. Follow Mary Margaret Olohan on Twitter/X here and her reporting at the Daily Signal here. Mary Margaret Olohan, a senior reporter covering culture and politics for The Daily Signal, previously wrote for The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller News Foundation. A graduate of The Catholic University of America, she is the proud eldest daughter of an Irish Catholic family of eleven children. Detrans is her first book.

2020 represented an inflection point for what some refer to as the Marxist "long march through the institutions." However, this inflection point was not spontaneous. Rather, according to our Anchoring Truths Podcast guest Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, it was evidence of what he and his co-author call NextGen Marxism. We discuss how this NextGen Marxism arose, what it means for how the Left operates, what it portends for this coming summer's Democratic National Convention, and any hopeful signs it may be abating. Buy NextGen Marxism here Follow Mike Gonzalez on X.com/Twitter here Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, writes on critical race theory, identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia and Latin America. He left journalism to join the administration of President George W. Bush, where he was speechwriter for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau. Gonzalez, who joined Heritage in March 2009, became a Senior Fellow in June 2014 and a chaired fellow in 2019. He is a widely experienced writer and public speaker. He has written for National Affairs, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, The Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, Quillette, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time.com, The Hill, Forbes.com, USA Today, The Guardian, The National Interest, The Daily Signal, National Review and others. Gonzalez has appeared on Fox, MSNBC, PBS, the BBC, CNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, The Voice of America, Television Española, Canal Plus, as well as many other networks and stations in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Gonzalez got his first regular reporting beat in 1981, covering high school sports for one summer for The Boston Herald. He went to work for Agence France-Presse in 1987, reporting from around the globe for the news agency for six years, including covering the war in Afghanistan, where he traveled with the Mujahedeen in the late 1980s. In his first foreign assignment, in Panama in 1987, he was arrested, jailed overnight and expelled by the dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. After taking off two years to earn a master's in Business Administration from Columbia Business School, he next logged 11 years with The Wall Street Journal, writing a column on the stock market in New York before being posted to Hong Kong in 1995 as Deputy Editor of the editorial pages of the newspaper’s Asia edition. Between 1998 and 2003, he served in the same capacity for the European edition in Brussels, before returning to Hong Kong as chief editorial page editor.  Gonzalez holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Boston’s Emerson College, and a master's in Business Administration from Columbia Business School.

Arabella Advisors is the largest network advising and steering billions of dollars to left-of-center causes. All but a tiny percentage of Americans is unaware of its influence. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, and author of a new book about Arabella, joins host Garrett Snedeker to explore what is Arabella and how it drives so much of what happens on the Left, particularly for progressives in the legal sphere through more well-known initiatives such as Demand Justice and Fix the Court. Scott Walter is president of Capital Research Center. He served in the George W. Bush Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and was vice president at the Philanthropy Roundtable, editing Philanthropy magazine and producing donor guidebooks on assistance to the poor, school reform, public policy research, and other topics. Walter has written for and been quoted in such outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Chronicle of Philanthropy. A Georgetown graduate (where he studied under Hadley Arkes), he served as a senior fellow at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and as senior editor of AEI’s flagship publication. He lives in Virginia with his wife and four children. Buy the book here. Learn more about Capital Research Center and Mr. Walter here.

Dr. Jay Richards, author of Fight the Good Fight, joins host Garrett Snedeker for a spirited discussion of how to fight the culture war in 21st century America. Dr. Richards is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, Executive Editor of The Stream, Assistant Research Professor in the Busch School of Business and Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. Buy the book here Follow Dr. Richards here on Twitter

Statistics on marriage and family formation in modern America seem to get worse year after year. Why is this the case, and what can be done about it? Prominent sociologist Brad Wilcox joins host Garrett Snedeker for a in-depth discussion of Wilcox's new book "Get Married." The book describes why America’s most fundamental institution matters for our civilization more than ever. And for men and women looking to establish strong, stable, and happy unions for themselves and their children. Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He studies marital quality; marital stability; and the impact of strong and stable marriages upon men, women, and children. The author and editor of six books, Wilcox has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and National Review, as well as for scientific journals such as the American Sociological Review and the Journal of Marriage and Family. A Connecticut native, he now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and family. Purchase the book here. Learn more about the Institute for Family Studies.

JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes celebrates the advent and arrival of new JWI Co-Director Gerry Bradley at a conference JWI co-hosted with First Liberty Institute in March 2024. Prof. Arkes details and praises Prof. Bradley's intellectual contributions over a lifetime of teaching constitutional law.