JWI Presents: Anchoring Truths Podcast: Recent Episodes
James Wilson Institute
Imagine being three years old in the heart of the Congo. Your father has just died of cancer. Your mother is left alone to raise five children in a world of poverty, tribal conflict, and political chaos. By every human measure, your future should have been written in hardship and limitation. But that is not the story God wrote for Athanase Kadita Tshibaka—known to friends andcolleagues simply as A.T. In his powerful new memoir, Son of the Congo: A Journey of Tragedy, Triumph, and Transformation, A.T. takes us across six continents and nearly eight decades of an extraordinary life. From near-expulsion as a troubled student to graduating with top honors fromDartmouth and the Tuck School of Business, from surviving coups, wrongful imprisonment, and boardroom battles, to rising as a senior leader at Citigroup overseeing risk across 77 emerging markets, then serving as interim CEO ofOpportunity International. A.T.'s story is not just a rags-to-riches tale, it is also a living testimony of unwavering faith, resilience, and the quiet, miraculous hand of God that turns ashes into beauty. A.T. joins us now to share how a sonof the Congo became a global banking executive, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather as well as friend of ours at the James Wilson Institute—and why he believes every broken beginning can still lead to a divine destination.
Learn more and purchase here Son of the Congo
As part of our ongoing series of episodes devoted to thecelebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration, we are delighted to bring you an episode devoted to the legal relevance of the Declaration’s most famous sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We’ll focus in today’s episode particularly on that last phrase.
In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone described the pursuit of happiness as a science of jurisprudence by which his students could identify, and then apply, the first principles of the Common Law in their future work in law. Separately, the American founders includedthe pursuit of happiness as one of only three unalienable rights specifically listed in the Declaration of Independence. Where do Blackstone and the founders agree and disagree in their understanding of the pursuit of happiness? What practical role (if any) did they suggest the concept could serve in English and early American law and legal philosophy?
To discuss these subjects, we are pleased to have Carli N. Conklin with us. She is an associate professor at University of Missouri School of Law, an associate professor of constitutional democracy and former associate director at theKinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and director of the School of Law’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. She earned her JD/MA and PhD in American Legal History from the University of Virginia, where she received the School of Law’s John and Madeleine Traynor prize for outstanding written work.
This episode is captured from a jointly-sponsored webinar by the James Wilson Institute and the Center for Religion Culture and Democracy of First Liberty Institute.
For the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are pleased to share an intimate discussion with Dr. Matthew Spalding whose timely new book The Making of the American Mind explores the philosophic underpinnings of and story behind the Declaration. Please enjoy this special Anchoring Truths episode as a celebration of our nation’s Independence and Founding.
Spalding, dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel graduate school in Washington D.C. and new board member of the James Wilson Institute, shares the microphone with Professor Hadley Arkes, JWI’s Founder and Co-Director.
Purchase The Making of the American Mind
Learn more about Dr. Spalding
Our latest Anchoring Truths Podcast episode focuses on a new book Taking American Citizenship Seriously: The Recovery of the Fourteenth Amendment. Our guest is the author that book, David R. Upham. With the book, Professor Upham delivers a comprehensive account of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. Drawing on a close textual analysis, Upham shows how the framers shaped the Amendment to secure the rights to life, liberty, and property for all through due process and equal protection, while reaffirming birthright citizenship for nearly everyone born on U.S. soil. He also recovers the Amendment’s promise to protect core citizenship rights—including the freedoms to travel, engage in commerce, speak freely, bear arms, and live free from racial discrimination or civic exclusion. By recovering this originalmeaning, the book challenges later interpretations and offers fresh insights for today’s constitutional debates.
Professor David R. Upham is an Associate Professor of Law at St. Thomas University College of Law. He earned his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Dallas, along with degrees from Middlebury College and Boston College.
Our latest Anchoring Truths Podcast episode centers on a 2026 case in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, covering New York City. This case presented a fascinating opportunity to discuss the intersection of Natural Law, international law, and contract law. Petersen Energia Inversora v. YPF (2nd Cir. opinion here) concerns how Argentina raised more than a billion dollars from American investors on the New York Stock Exchange with ironclad anti-nationalization guarantees—only to seize YPF in 2012 and, according to the plaintiffs, stiff minority shareholders out of $16 billion.
We are thrilled to discuss this case in light of those larger considerations with one of the lawyers for Petersen, our old friend and returning podcast guest Mike Fragoso. Mike is a partner at Torridon Law PLLC and counsel for Petersen Energia Inversora in one of the most important corporate-governance cases in a decade. Before entering private practice, Michael served as Chief Counsel to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, where he advised on judicial nominations, legislation, and high-stakes oversight. He previously held senior roles on the Senate Judiciary Committee, served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, clerked for Judge Diane Sykes on the Seventh Circuit, and began his career as a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis. A Notre Dame Law graduate (where he was a student of JWI’s co-director Gerry Bradley) and Princeton alum (where he was a student of our friend Robert George), his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoy the program.
Read Fragoso's assessment of the Second Circuit ruling in City Journal.
As we continue our commemoration of America 250, we’re inspired to present a variety of different celebrations of our country. In that spirit, we are honored to welcome on theshow Dr. Matthew Mehan of Hillsdale College, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Government at the Van Andel Graduate School in Washington, D.C. A literary scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Dallas, Dr. Mehan has spent more than twenty-five years teaching and designing humanities curricula that shape the next generation of citizens. He’s also a beloved author of best-selling illustrated family books, including Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals and The Handsome Little Cygnet. In his brand-new release, TheAmerican Book of Fables, Dr. Mehan reimagines the timeless wisdom of Aesop for the next generation of Americans. His new book is a stunning 395-page heirloom volume that honors America’s 250th anniversary with original and adaptedfables, poetry, witty sayings, and reflections drawn from our history, geography, wildlife—and even the Declaration of Independence itself. Crafted for readers of all ages—sections for Littles, Middles, and Bigs—the book brims with joyful rhymes, moral tales, and deep reflections on liberty, friendship, and the American spirit. And what makes it truly unforgettable? The breathtaking, luminous illustrations by acclaimed realist-impressionist artist John Folley—gorgeous watercolor, ink, and oil paintings that celebrate our nation’s natural wonders from the Everglades to the sequoias. Dr. Mehan joins us to share the stories behind the book, the timeless lessons inside, and why these fables matter now more than ever.
Purchase The American Book of Fables
Follow Dr. Mehan's work at Hillsdale in DC
We’ve devoted past Anchoring Truths Podcast episodes to the promise of AI in the legal profession and beyond. Today, we’ll be discussing more of the perils of that technology with Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds. He's the Beauchamp BroganDistinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and the mind behind the legendary Instapundit blog. In his brand-new Encounter Books Broadside, Seductive AI, Professor Reynolds delivers a provocative warning.While the rest of us worry about rogue superintelligent machines rising up to take over, he argues the real danger is far more subtle—and far more tempting. AI doesn't need to conquer us with force. It can seduce us instead—flatteringour egos, anticipating our every desire, offering perfect companions, endless convenience, and the illusion of control—until we've quietly handed over our agency, our relationships, and our ability to think for ourselves. It's a timely, eye-opening look at the soft power of artificial intelligence and whatit means for human freedom.
Prof. Reynolds is a graduate of the University of Tennesseeand Yale Law School, he’s one of America’s most influential legal thinkers on technology, constitutional law, and the intersection of law and society. He’s the author of several acclaimed books, including An Army of Davids and The HigherEducation Bubble.
Buy the book
Follow Prof. Reynolds on Substack https://instapundit.substack.com/
This week's Anchoring Truths Podcast is a roundtable discussion of the James Wilson Institute's travels around the country to law school campuses from February-April. JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes and Programs Director Daniel Osborne join host Garrett Snedeker to describe what they saw from law students at four different campuses during JWI's law school seminars as well as on visits to conferences held at other schools. Listen to hear about the deepening interest in this Natural Law Moment from the ground up.
Our latest episode is a little bit of a something differentthan what we’re used to featuring on the Anchoring Truths Podcast. Our guest this week is an expert on etiquette, Alison Cheperdak. Whether from the hallowed halls of the West Wing to the bustling chaos of a newsroom, Cheperdak captures stories of her experiences rendered with vivid detail, emotional resonance, and the intimacy of a confidante sharing her most vulnerable truths in her new book Was itSomething I Said? Everyday Etiquette to Avoid Awkward Moments in Relationships, Work, and Lifefrom Harper Collins. We discuss several of the lessons and tips she features in the book along with how her multiple careers provided training ground for good etiquette.
Alison is the founder of Elevate Etiquette, a distinguished consultancy that offers social, business, and dining etiquette courses, as well as international protocol. She has spoken at Harvard Law School and the US Congress, and her insights have been featured in Vogue.com among other publications. Alison also educates and inspires millions each month across social media with her daily etiquette posts.After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Villanova University, she worked as a TV news reporter and anchor for an NBC station in New York. She then moved toWashington, D.C., where she earned her law degree from The George Washington University Law School. Throughout her legal career, Alison worked in a large corporate law firm as well as in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the federal government, including the West Wing of the White House. She also served in a senior leadership position at the March for Life. Purchase Was it Something I Said?
Follow Alison Cheperdak and Elevate Etiquette on Instagram.
Read Alison Cheperdak's latest on Substack.
Our latest episode features a living legend and one of our oldest, closest friends at the James Wilson Institute: Prof. J. Budziszewski on the occasion of the release of his new book “Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy” from Creed and Culture. In ourconversation we will discuss his new book as well as his work at the intersection of Natural Law, constitutional law, and moral philosophy.Budziszewski is a professor of government, philosophy, and civic leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. Internationally recognized for his work on natural law,self-deception, happiness, and ultimate purpose, he is widely read on the unraveling and possible restoration of our common culture. He is the author of twenty books. He has taught for more than four decades during which he has advised such fine graduate students as our own Senior Fellow Justin Dyer and Affiliated Scholar Paul DeHart. A former atheist who once denied not only the reality of God but also the reality of good and evil, he is a convert to Catholic Christianity.
Purchase: Pandemic of Lunacy: How to ThinkClearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy
J.'s website: www.UndergroundThomist.org
Creed and Culture's website: www.CreedandCulture.com
As part of our ongoing series of joint programs with our friends at First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, we’re delighted to bring you a provocative lecture from Hiram Sasser on “The Religious Liberty Solution to Big Tech Censorship: How The Religious Freedom Restoration ActLimits Section 230”.
Sasser is the Executive General Counsel for First Liberty Institute, a leading nonprofit defending religious liberty, where he directs litigation and media strategies focused on First Amendment and constitutional rights. A powerhouse in the courtroom, Hiram has served as co-counsel in eightmajor victories before the U.S. Supreme Court, including landmark cases like Groff v. DeJoy (overturning nearly 50 years of employment discrimination standards), Kennedy v. Bremerton (reversing decades of Establishment Clauseprecedent), Carson v. Makin, American Legion v. American Humanist Association, and others protecting faith in public life. Beyond the law, he's a seasoned media voice, appearing on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, BBC, and radio stationsworldwide. In 2016, he served as Chief of Staff to the Texas Attorney General. Hiram also shares his expertise as an Adjunct Professor of Law, teaching Religious Liberty at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law and Civil Rights Procedure at Oklahoma City University School of Law.
Learn more about First Liberty Institute
Learn more about the CRCD
In 2026, we celebrate 250 years since our Declaration of Independence. In honor of this milestone in our country’s history, we’ll be placing an extra emphasis on the American Founding in episodes and with guests this year. And there’s no better place to start on this theme than in the James Wilson Institute’s backyard, historic Old Town Alexandria, Virginia the home of the Institute since 2021, and with the father of our country George Washington for whom Alexandria was his adopted hometown.Our guest has written a new book weaving the story of Washington’s life with the growth of Alexandria from the mid 18th century onward. That guest is local historian Tim Rose, author of George Washington and Alexandia, A Founding Friendship. Tim is the founder and owner of Alexandria History Tours. In addition to being a published author, he is a proud Marine Corps veteran who lives in Old Town Alexandria. Learn more about Tim and Alexandria History Tours
Buy the book from Amazon
Vice President JD Vance is one of the most influential Republicans in America. But unlike many politicians, he is a public intellectual. Long before holding office, he was a prolific writer and speaker, wrestling with the core issues facing conservatism in America. Vance has emerged to be in many ways the intellectual synthesizer of various emerging threads of the GOP in law, politics, and culture.
To discuss the Vice President in light of these themes, we are delighted to have legal and political analyst Frank DeVito on the Podcast. In his new book, which is also his first book, JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party, DeVitoexamines Vance’s body of intellectual and political work with an eye toward what that portends for the future of GOP politics and conservatism writ large.
DeVito serves as Senior Counsel and Director of Content at Napa Legal. Prior to his position at Napa Legal, he served as the full-time solicitor for the Carbon County, PA Children & Youth Services Agency, and before that was an associate at the law firm of Lesavoy Butz & Seitz LLC. His written work hasbeen published in the Claremont Review of Books, National Affairs, The American Conservative, The Federalist, First Things, The Public Discourse, and several other publications.
Buy the book on Amazon here.
Judicial supremacy has been a frequent topic of conversation on the Anchoring Truths Podcast, but never before have we analyzed it from a comparative or international perpective. Yonatan Green, the author of Rogue Justice: the Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, allows us to do both on the latest episode. Green's timely new book chronicles the experience of the Israeli Supreme Court's imposition of judicial supremacy on the Middle Eastern country and serves as something like a cautionary tale for Americans wary of living under judicial supremacy.
Green is an Israeli-American attorney and Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution. As the co-founder of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum, Green has been at the forefront of the debate over Israeli judicial reform.
Buy the book from Amazon here.
One of the country's foremost authorities on executive power, Prof. Saikrishna “Sai” Prakash, joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss his fascinating new bookThe Presidential Pardon. Prof. Prakash’s slim new tome from Harvard University Press delivers an engaging analysis of the Constitution’s Pardon Clause and its transformation over the centuries into a blunt and potent instrument that is an ever growing feature of our politics as well as still a mechanism of mercy.
Prof. Prakash is the James Monroe distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers, and Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive. The former book focuses on the modern presidency while the latter considers the presidency of the Founders. Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. He subsequently clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Order the book from Harvard University Press or Amazon.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a tour de force from our friend Prof. Josh Blackman. In the height of the politicization of the judicial branch, the federal courts cannot be reformed through unilateral disarmament, argues Blackman. Rather, any federal judicial reform must be bilateral. Blackman lays out a set of ten proposals for reducing the power both the Right and the Left exert through the judiciary based on a law review article he wrote earlier this year. This episode is an adapted webinar co-sponsored with the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy of First Liberty Institute.
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications. Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh is the Senior Editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution (3rd Edition). Josh has written more than seven dozen law review articles that have been cited more than a thousand times. Josh was selected as the Jurist of the Year by the Texas Journal of Law & Public Policy, received the inaugural Meese III Originalism Award from the Heritage Foundation, and was awarded the Inaugural Joseph Story Award. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and tweets @JoshMBlackman.
Read Blackman's article here.
In light of the tragic killing of Charlie Kirk, the culture of American Campuses and Free Speech - which Kirk fought so hard for - are more relevant than ever. Profs. Hadley Arkes & Justin Dyer share a discussion of a new way to look at free speech, its purpose, and the best way to restore its role at American Universities.
Arkes Symposium Article
Dyer Symposium Article
Please note that this episode is marked as explicit. Due to the discussion of free speech, some words used in examples are explicit in nature.
With less than one more before the Supreme Court’s oral argument in one of the most explosive cases of this term, Trump v. Slaughter, you're encouraged to join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of this important case over whether the President remove any Senate-confirmed commissioner of an agency he no longer wishes to have serve in that federal agency. The constitutional question in the case concerns statutory removal protections for the Federal Trade Commission—previously upheld in the Court’s landmark decision in Humphrey's Executor v. United States—and whether a federal court may prevent removal of a commissioner from public office. The stakes for this case are enormous for all three branches of the government, foremost though the executive. Is the power to remove an executive branch agency’s commissioner vested solely in the President, as it is under what’s known as the theory of the unitary executive? Or can Congress place conditions on removal that prevent such exercise of the executive’s authority?
Joining us to preview the oral argument is Mark Chenoweth of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Mark is NCLA’s President and Chief Legal Officer, and along with Margot Cleveland and Professor Philip Hamburger, the co-authors of an amicus brief in the case.
Mark served as the first chief of staff to Congressman Mike Pompeo, as legal counsel to Commissioner Anne Northup at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as a law clerk to the Hon. Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Mark has worked in several different roles in the private sector as well. He began his legal career in D.C. as a regulatory associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He then returned to his home state of Kansas to serve as in-house counsel for Koch Industries. Most recently he spent over four years as general counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation.
Learn more about NCLA.
Professor Melissa Moschella of the University of Notre Dame joins us to discuss the contents of her recently published book titled, "Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing." A rich yet cogent articulation of New Natural Law Theory (NNLT), Moschella's work has been described as "the clearest, most readable exposition and defense of contemporary natural law theory yet to appear" by Dr. Robert George. Professor Moschella provides an overview of the ideas in her book with respect to the subject of parental rights and two recent landmark decisions currently shaping its discourse.
Melissa Moschella is Professor of the Practice in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. Her work spans the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and law, and her areas of special expertise include natural law theory, biomedical ethics, and the family, especially parental rights. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, earned a Licentiate in Philosophy summa cum laude from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, and received her Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Princeton University.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an in-depth dive into the career and jurisprudential mind of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The occasion for doing so is the publication in September of Justice Barrett's new book, Listening to the Law. Anchoring Truths featured an exclusive review of the book by Michael A. Fragoso. Fragoso joins the podcast to discuss his review. Fragoso was not only a student of the justice while in law school at Notre Dame, but also one of the Senate staffers most responsible for her confirmation to the Supreme Court. He brings a fascinating and unique perspective to the path the justice has taken to the Court and the approach to judging she details in the book.
Fragoso is currently Partner at Torridon LLC, the boutique law firm founded by former AG Bill Barr. Before joining Torridon, he was chief counsel to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Fragoso was the Leader’s primary legal advisor and managed the “last mile” of any legislation touching on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He also repeatedly represented Leader McConnell as counsel of record at the Supreme Court. Leader McConnell said of Fragoso that he’s “equally at home in the high-minded philosophical discourse of the legal community and the urgent pragmatism of Congressional dealmaking,” and that he “maintains a firm grasp on the realm of the possible” but “knows which screws to twist.” He observed that Mike “is so exceptionally competent that he often produces from his desk the work that would normally require, literally, teams of outside counsel.”
Fragoso previously was chief counsel for nominations and constitutional law for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Ranking Member Chuck Grassley and Chairman Lindsey Graham. During this time, he advised the Senators on two presidential impeachments, ran multiple policy hearings, and managed the confirmation process for over 80 federal judges, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Chairman Graham described Fragoso as “a force of nature.” He frequently comments on public affairs, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Fragoso has also served as a law clerk to Judge Diane Sykes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School and Princeton University.
Think back to when you were in high school or even middle school. Do you remember the history textbook you used? Perhaps that’s the problem: what passed for your reading material was so forgettable. Or if you do remember it, do you remember it being so ideologically slanted you were constantly fighting the story you were presented with? Indeed reinstating lost academic standards for excellence is an arduous task. Fortunately, a path towards academic renewal has been charted by a burgeoning reform movement of parents and educators who aspire to a higher standard for children. In recent years this coalition has made critical strides in expanding families’ freedom to choose alternatives from legacy educational models. It’s with this backdrop that we are delighted to convey that there is a fantastic new textbook series, a two volume set titled "The Golden Thread” which offers an eloquent and refreshing overview of the trajectory of the West—its unique customs of art and literature, law, philosophy, science, faith, and tolerance that have bound the people of its tradition together—from the ancient Greeks and Romans to medieval Christendom and Europe, and finally the modern world and America. And we are pleased to have one of the authors of this series, a friend of ours for many years, Prof. Allen Guelzo, on the Anchoring Truths Podcast to tell us about this fantastic new offering.
Prof. Guelzo has joined the Hamilton School faculty at the University of Florida in the summer of 2025 as a Professor of Humanities. He is a New York Times best-selling author, American historian and commentator on public issues. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Robet E. Lee a Life as well as Gettysburg: the Last Invasion and Lincoln Redeemer President. He was the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and he taught for many years at Gettysburg College.
Lawyer and legal scholar Timon Cline joins the podcast to share his ambitious proposal to revisit and overturn the Supreme Court’s 1947 ruling on the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education. Drawing on his recent Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy article, "Everson Must Fall," co-authored with Josh Hammer (James Wilson '21) and Yoram Hazony, Cline explains the role that the opinion has played in misshaping our culture and a potential path to its reversal.
Timon Cline is the Editor in Chief at American Reformer. He is an attorney and a fellow at the Craig Center at Westminster Theological Seminary and the Director of Scholarly Initiatives at the Hale Institute of New Saint Andrews College. His writing has appeared in Anchoring Truths, the American Spectator, Mere Orthodoxy, American Greatness, Areo Magazine, and the American Mind, among others.
The episode is adapted from a webinar the James Wilson Institute hosted with the Center on Religion, Culture, and Democracy of First Liberty Institute.
Join us for this episode as Professor Robert Luther anticipates judicial nomination selection in Trump's second term. Professor Luther asks two types of questions: formally, "How will the Senate composition impact Judicial Nominations?" "How many seats will be open to fill? Will blue slips still apply for district courts?" "Will any circuit seats be moved to different states?" and substantively, "What types of judges will President Trump nominate and how will this differ from his last term?"
Robert Luther, III was appointed Associate Professor of Law in 2025 at Antonin Scalia Law. He teaches and writes on the federal courts, legal and judicial ethics, political law, Congress, and professional sports. He has served at high levels in all three branches of the federal government and recently founded Constitutional Solutions PLLC—a law firm that navigates judicial candidates, judges, elected officials, professional athletes, and executives through high-stakes hearings, investigations, and reputational attacks.
Immediately before joining the Scalia Law faculty, Professor Luther spent over five years in the Washington, D.C. office of Jones Day, where his practice focused on strategic counseling, crisis management, and litigation. Prior to joining Jones Day, he served as Associate Counsel to the President of the United States in the White House Counsel’s Office. In the White House, he co-managed the judicial selection process and supervised the preparation of over 150 federal judicial nominees for their successful U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. The New York Times Magazine referred to his work on judicial selection during this period as “unique in White House history.” Before joining the White House, Professor Luther served as Counsel to then–U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where he served as a core member of the team that prepared the Senator for confirmation as United States Attorney General. Professor Luther was also a law clerk to Judge Daniel A. Manion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Earlier in his career, Professor Luther practiced civil and appellate litigation at a boutique firm in Williamsburg, Va. and taught at William & Mary Law School.
Professor Luther frequently speaks on the legal profession, political law, and federal judicial selection. His public work has been covered by or appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Fox News, The Hill, The Washington Examiner, National Law Journal, Law360, The Washington Reporter, and elsewhere, while his scholarship is published in the law journals of nearly twenty universities including Harvard, Georgetown, Texas, William & Mary, UC-Davis, UC Law San Francisco, Howard University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Richmond, and Marquette University. He holds active law licenses in Virginia, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and half of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Professor Luther serves on the Advisory Board of the Wilson Center for Leadership at Hampden-Sydney College. Since 2019, over 150 of his former students have secured clerkships with federal judges.
As a loose tie in to the launch of our sister podcast, Natural Law Moment, we could not think of a better guest to have on the Anchoring Truths Podcast than Dennis Wieboldt, the author of a new article forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy titled "Our Natural Law Moment(s).” The article argues that in the last 100 years, American law has experienced two other Natural Law Moments before today. We explore what today’s moment, the third Natural Law Moment in Mr. Wieboldt’s view, has in common with these past ones, where it has differed, and what it has built on.
Dennis Wieboldt is a J.D./Ph.D. student in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellow at the Graduate School and Edward J. Murphy Fellow at the Law School. The first Notre Dame student to concurrently pursue a J.D./Ph.D. in history, Dennis has authored more than a dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on religious liberty, civil rights, constitutional interpretation, and related subjects.
Dennis earned his B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Boston College. After earning his B.A., Dennis earned an M.A. in history from Boston College.
Read "Our Natural Law Moment(s)" here
Follow Dennis on Twitter/X here
Join us for this special episode featuring Judge Janice Rogers Brown (U.S. Circuit Court for D.C, ret.). Her remarks, given in 2023 as she received the James Wilson Leadership & the Law Award, comment on the need for judicial courage and fortitude, especially for those who take the Natural Law seriously.
What are the pre-political grounds of property rights? What are the just uses of property according to natural rights and the natural law? In this Anchoring Truths Podcast episode, Prof. Eric Claeys, presents his research on these questions inspired by his new book Natural Property Rights. Claeys, discusses the ways a natural right to property is justified and limited, drawing on sources from ancient, medieval and contemporary analytic philosophy. Claeys also describes the history of how a natural right understanding of property has influenced American positive law and jurisprudence. Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. In his scholarship, Professor Claeys studies theories of natural law and natural rights and their implications in property law. Professor Claeys is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.Professor Claeys received his AB from Princeton University and his JD from the University of Southern California Law School. After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. He has also taught at Saint Louis University, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Law School, and he is a member of the Princeton Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
In the pantheon of intellectual giants of modernconservatism, standing first among equals is the late professor Harry Jaffa. Jaffa, who influenced generations of students from his academic perch at Claremont Graduate University, might have been the 20th century’s greatest scholar on the thought of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who along with JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes was a student of the great Leo Strauss, produced two seminal books on Lincoln. First, in 1958, he gave us Crisis of the House Divided, a close analysis of the Lincoln Douglas debates,andthen forty two years later, A New Birth of Freedom, which was devoted to the larger project of the causes of the Civil War, the Election of 1860, and the secession thereafter. A former student of Jaffa, and close confidant, Edward Erler, has now come forth with a new book Prophetic Statesmanshipfrom Encounter Booksthat Jaffa himself entrusted Erler to write as a follow-on to A New Birth of Freedom after Jaffa died about a decade ago. We are deeply pleased then to be joined by Prof. Erler for a wide ranging discussion of this important new work on Lincoln, with a relevance to theissues at the heart of our present way of life that is quite striking.
Erler is Professor of Political Science emeritus fromCalifornia State University, San Bernardino, where he taught Political Philosophy and Constitutional Law, and served as Department Chairman from 1984-1991. He is the Author of numerous books and law reviews and professionaljournals, among the most recent, are “From Subjects to Citizens: the Social Contract Origins of American Citizenship”; “Marbury v. Madison and the Progressive Transformation of Judicial Power”;. He received a B.A. in Political Science from San Jose State University, on a grant from the G.I. Bill for services rendered, a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School. He has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and served as Director of theBicentennial for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Purchase Prophetic StatesmanRead more of Prof. Erlier at The American Mind
Could it possibly be the best of times as well as the worst of times for the pro-life movement? This has been a topic we have visited before on this show. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, immediate celebration met the harsh realities of how divided the country remains on abortion. The political reaction to the Dobbs decision, with Blue States in particular enshrining abortion rights in their states, confirmed that overturning the Roe and Caseyregime would not by itself change the culture. But there have been hopeful signs for pro-lifers intermixed with these challenges in the past few years too. To discuss these ever-changing developments, we can’t think of someone wewould rather have on our show at a more timely moment than Jennie Bradley Lichter.
Jennie assumed the office of President of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund in February, 2025. In this capacity, she proudly directs the organization responsible for the largest annual gathering of pro-lifers, the March forLife in Washington, D.C.
Jennie has wide-ranging legal and policy experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the highest levels of the federal government. During the Trump Administration, Jennie served in the White House as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) where she supervised rulemaking and policy efforts implicating a number of federal agencies, and led policy initiatives across the federal government to defend the dignity of life.
Prior to her White House service, Jennie was Deputy General Counsel at Catholic University of America, and worked on policy issues and federal judicial (including Supreme Court) confirmation efforts in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S.Department of Justice. She previously served as in-house counsel for the Archdiocese of Washington. Early in her legal career, Jennie clerked for two federal appeals court judges and was an associate at the international law firm Jones Day.
Jennie graduated from the University of Notre Dame and from Harvard Law School, and earned an M.Phil in Theology & Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Jennie Bradley Lichter's full biography at the March for Life
Can one federal district court judge, even temporarily, be more powerful than the President of the United States? That’s the issue at the heart of the critical debate over the legal remedy known as the nationwide injunction. The deployment of this legal remedy by federal district court judges has increased significantly in the past ten years, most acutely though during the presidencies of Donald Trump to enjoin, or stop, his administration’s policies from being carried into full effect. The Supreme Court is poised to take up the scope as well as underlying justification for nationwide injunctions in the Trump v. Casa Inc. case, which is scheduled for oral argument on May 15. To help us understand nationwide injunctions and the stakes of the upcoming oral argument, we could think of no one better than our friend GianCarlo Canaparo. GianCarlo is the co-author of One Ring to Rule Them All: Individual Judgments, Nationwide Injunctions, and Universal Handcuffs published in the Notre Dame Law Review.
GianCarlo is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Canaparo’s research focuses primarily on constitutional and administrative law. He earned his law degree from Georgetown University, where he was a published editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Davis.
Read More:
The Best Way to Fix Nationwide Injunctions
One Ring to Rule Them All: Individual Judgments, Nationwide Injunctions, and Universal Handcuffs
For a special episode of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, we bring you a presentation featuring Prof. Julia Mahoney of the University of Virginia School of Law. Prof. Mahoney examines how the Classical Legal Tradition has been making a return in American law. She discusses some recent opinions that provide a hopeful opportunity for its return to legal practice and describes the rising interest in this perspective within legal academia.
Julia D. Mahoney teaches courses in property, government finance, constitutional law and nonprofit organizations. A graduate of Yale Law School, she joined the University of Virginia faculty as an associate professor in 1999 and is now John S. Battle Professor of Law. She has also taught at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, and before entering the legal academy, practiced law at the New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Her scholarly articles include works on land preservation, eminent domain, health care reform and property rights in human biological materials.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an episode featuring a scholar quite near and dear to us at the James Wilson Institute, Daniel Mahoney.
Mahoney is an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute, and with his latest book he applies his gift of prose to perhaps our most pertinent cultural issue, the rise and possible fall of wokism with The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now from Encounter Books.
Mahoney is a professor emeritus at Assumption University (where he taught from 1986 until 2021), a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior writer at Law and Liberty. He has written extensively on statesmanship, French politicalthought, the art and political thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, conservatism, religion and politics, and various themes in political philosophy. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order (2011), TheOther Solzhenitsyn (2014, reissued in 2020), and The Idol ofOur Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.
Purchase The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now from Encounter Books.
Join Anchoring Truths Podcast hosts Garrett Snedeker & Daniel Osborne for a discussion of bringing Congress back to the center of our legal and political life. The backdrop for their discussion was their visit to the University of Michigan Law School in March for the annual Federalist Society Student Symposium. This year, the Symposium was titled "Congress: Reviving the Impetuous Vortex." Snedeker and Osborne offer observations about their visit to Ann Arbor as well as examine recent legal flashpoints through the lens of what the congressional role could or ought to be. They also discuss how the conference is a fantastic occasion for meeting students interested in the broader work of the James Wilson Institute.
Videos of the panels Snedeker and Osborne discuss may be found on the Federalist Society's website.
Josh Hammer returns to the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his first book Israel The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. The book is a powerful, next-generation manifesto declaring that the future prosperity and ultimate fate of Western civilization is dependent upon the security and thriving of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel—that the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland demands a distinctly realist foreign policy and tight-knit US-Israel relations.
In addition to being a contributing editor at Anchoring Truths, Josh is a 2021 James Wilson Fellow. He is the senior editor-at-large of Newsweek, where he hosts "The Josh Hammer Show" podcast and syndicated radio show. A syndicated columnist through Creators Syndicate, Josh also hosts the "America on Trial with Josh Hammer" podcast for The First. Josh graduated from Duke University and from the University of Chicago Law School.
Purchase Josh's book here
Listen to The Josh Hammer Show
Listen to America on Trial with Josh Hammer
*Toward the end of the podcast, Josh notes that he meant to cite Rabbi Hillel, rather than Rabbi Akiva, in discussing the Golden Rule and its origins in Leviticus 19.
We’re pleased to have as our guest Daniel Whitehead. Daniel was a 2022 James Wilson Fellow. He served in the General Counsel’s Office of Governor Ron DeSantis and has clerked on two federal courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. He was also a John Marshall Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Hungary Foundation, where he is spending a year living in Budapest. We were eager to hear about Daniel’s experience in Hungary living amidst the Hungarian people, learning the Hungarian language, and conducting original research and writing. We also discuss his recent article we republished at Anchoring Truths titled Securitization: A Solution to the Migration Crisis in the United States.
As part of our ongoing webinar series between the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion, Culture, and Democracy, Professor William Kamin discusses the debates over Federal post-conviction Habeas Corpus. Whether one looks towards the Judicial Right or the Judicial Left, there are serious issues plaguing both perspectives on this topic. Professor Kamin offers an in-depth explanation on a new approach to postconviction Habeas Corpus--one that offers a more luminous beacon to guide lawyers and scholars alike.
Blink and you may have missed it. President Trumpsigned into law another executive order, this one touching on a significant concern for pro-life Americans: in-vitro fertilization.
The President’s latest EO reinserts us back into a debate over what legal protections should be afforded to embryos and the attendant public policy ramifications. But this debate goes even beyond the President’s EO, to debates about the future of pro-life politics. Joining us to discuss these subjects is our friend Steve Aden.
Steve serves as Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel atAmericans United for Life. He is a highly experienced litigator, having appeared in court against Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry dozens of times andappointed by the attorneys general of six states to defend pro-life laws. Aden secured court victories that upheld an Arizona law that resulted in six abortion businesses ceasing to offer abortion, applied Missouri’s abortion laws to chemical abortion and upheld the right of Louisiana regulators to shut down dangerous abortion facilities.
A prolific author and analyst on sanctity of life issues andconstitutional jurisprudence, Aden is admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Hawaii (inactive), and is a member of the bars of the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal circuit and district courts. He earned his J.D. (cum laude) from Georgetown University Law Center and his B.A. from the University of Hawaii.
The opening weeks of the Trump presidency have featured a flurry of Executive Orders aimed not only to reverse the policies and priorities of the Biden Administration but also to advance the Trump administration’s vision of the good. Indeed, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration he placed himself in the middle of the Capital One Arena indowntown DC before a giant rally of his supporters to begin signing these Executive Orders (or EOs). This relatively unprecedented practice of drawing attention to the signing of EOs speaks to how significant they are at altering the political and legal terrain. Some of the most impactful of these EOs concern matters touching on human sexuality and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. We’ll discuss those EOs with attorney Mary Rice Hasson.
She is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, aninitiative that equips parents and faith-based institutions to promote the truth about the human person and counter gender ideology. An attorney and policy expert, Mary has been a keynote speaker for the Holy See during theUnited Nations Commission on the Status of Women, addressing education, women and work, caregiving, and gender ideology, and serves as a consultant to theU.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family, Life and Youth.
The co-author of several books on education, Mary’s writinghas appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, National Review, First Things, the National Catholic Register and OurSunday Visitor, among others.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Notre DameLaw School, Mary is married to Seamus Hasson, and they are parents of seven grown children and grandparents of seven.
Much of our discussion springs from this article she co-authored inFirst Things.
Alex MacDonald, a DC-based labor lawyer, touches on the historical roots of the right to work, the right’s connection with natural-law principles, and its return to modern jurisprudence. Informed by JWI Co-Director Hadley Arkes's Mere Natural Law, Alex examines how that return could transform modern labor law, especially the concept of exclusive representation. This episode, adapted from a lecture he delivered to the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion Culture & Democracy in 2024, draws largely upon Alex’s article published in the North Dakota Law Review.
For the latest Anchoring Truths Podcast, JWI Affiliated Scholar Paul DeHart joins for a fascinating in-depth discussion on themes from his latest book, The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent. DeHart is a distinguished professor of political science at Texas State University. Topics include the limits of the consent of the governed, philosophic errors of modern liberals such as John Rawls, what the American Founders correctly identified about the origins of rights, and the problems with Justice Holmes's legal positivism.
This episode features a webinar discussion on Natural Law and Women's Rights with Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar and current fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This webinar was part of our ongoing series of legal education webinars with the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy.
Erika Bachiochi examines, both philosophically and historically, two competing accounts of rights with their derivative (and competing) accounts of women's rights: the early modern (autonomy) account and the natural law (responsibilities) account. Erika argues that, properly understood, modern sex discrimination law is a determination of the natural law in our day and that abortion restrictions do not discriminate against women.
Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar who works at the intersection of constitutional law, political theory, women’s history, and Catholic social teaching. She is also the editor-in-chief of Fairer Disputations, the online journal of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at ASU. She is a 2024–25 Fellow at the Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) where she is teaching a women’s history course in UST’s new Catholic Women and Gender Studies Program. A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, she is also a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA, where she founded the Wollstonecraft Project. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021, and was named a finalist for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2022 Conservative Book of the Year award.
Returning Anchoring Truths Podcast guest Ilya Shapiro has written a new book Lawless: the Miseducation of America’s Elites that is part indictment of how the legal academy has succumbed to the worst excesses of illiberalism but also part memoir of his own experience at Georgetown Law at the hands of administrators who run the legal academy. His book is a must read, and our conversation a must listen.
Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
Shapiro is also the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020). He writes frequently, including at his Substack Shapiro’s Gavel. Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an Masters from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
You may purchase a copy of Lawless from Amazon here.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for both a look back and a look ahead for originalism. Our guest, Steven Calabresi, is the co-author of a new intellectual history “The Meese Revolution” that describes the rise of originalism, which necessitates telling the story of Ed Meese, without whom it surely does not happen. Calabresi, who was part of that history working closely with Meese, threads a story through virtually all important legal and policy events of the 1980s, many of which continue to shape the world of the twenty-first century. And as we come to the end of our discussion, I think you’ll agree that in many respects we are still living through the Meese Revolution.
Professor Calabresi is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, as well as a visiting professor at Yale Law School. Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a Special Assistant to Attorney General Meese from 1985 to 1987 and worked with Ken Cribb as his deputy in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House. Calabresi has written books on presidential power and comparative constitutional law and the origins of judicial review. He and co-author of The Meese Revolution Gary Lawson are also the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. Constitutional Law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law. He has written over seventy law review articles since 1990.
"The Meese Revolution" may be purchased here.
Join host Garrett Snedeker for an exciting discussion with author Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., about his new book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. The conversation explored conflicting definitions of liberty, the issue of expressive individualism, and misperceptions of the freedom secured by the Constitution.
Pre-order Called to Freedom here.
Brad Littlejohn (Ph.D, University of Edinburgh) is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), where he writes on technology policy and Protestant social ethics. He is also the founder and President Emeritus of The Davenant Institute, and the author or editor of nineteen books, the newest of which is Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. He writes (regularly) at his Substack, bradlittlejohn.substack.com, and tweets (irregularly) under the handle @WBLittlejohn.
JWI Affiliated Scholar & Professor of Philosophy Frank Beckwith confronts a troubling trend among some legal scholars who, in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, have constructed and advocated for a right to abortion rooted in religious liberty.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey in Dobbs, an increasing number of scholars argue that the Constitution may still vindicate the right to abortion, but through the First Amendment’s two religion clauses. They argue that state laws that limit access to abortion on the grounds that the fetus is a person or that prenatal life is sacred violate the Establishment Clause, since such laws are based on a contested religious view of what constitutes “personhood.” They also argue that prolife laws violate the Free Exercise rights of women whose religious views either permit or require them to procure an abortion in certain circumstances.
Because all current post-Dobbs prolife laws include exceptions--such as for the life of the mother, substantial health risk, severe fetal deformity, or a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest—defenders of the Free Exercise argument maintain that under current precedent after Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court should apply strict scrutiny to such prolife laws. Francis "Frank" J. Beckwith is a member of the JWI Board of Scholars and a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University, where he also serves as the Associate Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy and an Affiliate Professor of Political Science. His academic interests encompass religion, jurisprudence, politics, and ethics. Beckwith's scholarly contributions appear in leading academic journals, and he has authored several influential books that explore the intersections of faith, law, and morality. A recognized figure in the discourse on church-state relations, he frequently engages in public debates and discussions, sharing his expertise in both academic and broader societal contexts. Additionally, Beckwith has delivered lectures at various institutions, enhancing the understanding of how philosophical principles inform contemporary legal and political issues.
This episode is adapted from a program JWI co-sponsored with First Liberty Institute's Center on Religion Culture and Democracy.
A recap of the largest annual gathering of the Right's lawyers, the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, is the topic of discussion this week. Garrett Snedeker joins JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne for a high-level account of the 2024 NLC.
Snedeker shares his thoughts with Osborne on the convention's theme of group identity and the law, the backdrops of the convention including a new administration and a forthcoming change in leadership for the Society, and the happy presence of so many James Wilson Fellowship alumni at the convention.
To watch videos of the convention's panels visit here
Who was for they/them versus who was for you? Join host Garrett Snedeker for a fascinating discussion with Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy for the American Principles Project (APP), on the power of the most influential political ads that shaped the 2024 presidential election.
Jon Schweppe is the Director of Policy for APP. He advances the organization’s legislative priorities by working with allied groups and with federal and state lawmakers. Schweppe co-authored the groundbreaking 2020 report Protecting Free Speech and Defending Kids: A Proposal to Amend Section 230. Schweppe is an alumnus of the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship. He has been published in a number of publications, including The New York Post, The American Mind, First Things, Newsweek, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. He has worked on several political campaigns, focusing mainly on communications and policy. He is a graduate of Augustana College, where he majored in Economics and Finance.
Follow Jon on X here.
Learn more about APP here.
JWI Co-Director Gerry Bradley delivers remarks on what he calls the tragedy of "progressive" prosecution. Since George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, the U.S. has undergone a significant reevaluation of its criminal justice system and has moved towards a more "progressive" prosecution. Professor Bradley explores the legal and societal implications of this evolution and will consider how a proper understanding of crime and punishment might provide a just solution; particularly in light of the moral responsibly of prosecutors and the need for a compelling justification for punishment in a fair society.
We are excited to be dive into Second Amendment jurisprudence and the Natural Right to Self Defense. Our entry into that topic is collection of opinions in Hanson v. United States from a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from October 29, 2024. In that case, the majority upheld the District’s ban on the possession and sale of what it called “extra-large capacity magazines." The panel ruled the city’s ten-round limit for magazines fit within the nation’s historical tradition of regulating “particularly dangerous weapons” and those “capable of unprecedented lethality,” even though there weren’t similar bans when the Second Amendment was ratified. A dissenting opinion held that “Magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition are arms in common use for lawful purposes. Therefore, the government cannot ban them.”
Joining us on the episode is the lawyer who delivered theoral argument and represented Mr. Hanson and other plaintiffs at the D.C. Circuit, Edward “Ed” Wenger. Ed, a 2016 James Wilson Fellow, is a partner at Holtzman Vogel. Ed has focused the bulk of his career on appellate and constitutional litigation, as well as critical motions practice. His appellate experience began, first, as a law clerk for the Judge Edward Prado of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and it continued as a law clerk for the Judge Karen Henderson of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He has since served as the Chief Deputy Solicitor General for the State of Florida (the number two appellate litigator or the State) and the General Counsel to the West Virginia Attorney General.
Hanson v. D.C. appellate opinion
Hadley Arkes on D.C. v. Heller in First Things
Join Anchoring Truths Podcast host Garrett Snedeker and journalist Conn Carroll for an exciting discussion about Carroll's new book Sex and the Citizen and the importance of marriage.
In Sex and the Citizen, Conn Carroll shows how the assault on marriage conducted by cultural and political elites is undermining the very foundations of our democracy. Carroll's book is a powerful and urgent exploration of one of the most overlooked forces shaping the political landscape today: the rapid decline of marriage. Once the cornerstone of American life, marriage has seen a dramatic fall from grace. In 1960, four out of five households were led by married couples; today, that number has plummeted to less than half, with more people choosing cohabitation over commitment. The American family, as we once knew it, is unraveling. Sex and the Citizen offers a bold vision for restoring the stability and prosperity that marriage once provided. By learning from history, we can rebuild a society where love and commitment are the keys to human flourishing.
Conn Carroll is the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner. He served as a communications director in the U.S. Senate for seven years before returning to journalism. He is a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School and lives in northern Virginia with his wife and three children.
Order Sex and the Citizen here, and follow Conn Carroll on his Twitter page.
In this minisode, host Garrett Snedeker speaks with returning guest Mark Bauerlein about the current decline in educational quality at universities, and the challenges that technology poses to the intellectual development of youth.
Mark W. Bauerlein is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor of First Things. He also serves as a visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah and as a trustee of New College of Florida.
The world is not a machine. Humanity is not a mistake. Those should not be such bold words and yet, according to this week’s guest, Spencer Klavan, they need to be repeated as often as possible today.
For centuries, a grim anti-human outlook has taken hold of the public imagination, teaching us all to view ourselves as random products of a cruel and uncaring natural world. The pursuit of scientific understanding of the material world has made mastery of it and determinism the reigning orthodoxy.
Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Spencer's new book, tells a daring new story about how we got here, and how we can chart a better path forward. He argues that science itself is leading us not away from God but back to him, and to the ancient faith that places the human soul at the center of the universe.
Spencer A. Klavan is returning guest to the Anchoring Truths Podcast. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author of the acclaimed book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and the editor of Gateway to the Stoics. The host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, he has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, The American Mind, and The Daily Wire. He lives near Nashville, Tennessee.
Buy Light of the Mind, Light of the World here.
Follow Spencer on X/Twitter
Subscribe to Spencer's Substack
Join host Garrett Snedeker and JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne for special look inside JWI's Law School Seminar program. Highlighting their trips to Harvard Law and Notre Dame Law, Snedeker and Osborne provide an overview of the seminars JWI hosts on campuses across the country and the impact of these seminars on law students.
JWI Deputy Director, Garrett Snedeker, and 2023 James Wilson Fellow Jack Kieffaber discuss the impact of impending AI developments on the judiciary.
Kieffaber's new article "Predictability, AI, and Judicial Futurism: Why Robots Will Run the Law and Textualists Will Like It," forthcoming in 2025 in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, is a stirring challenge to avowed textualists. In this podcast, Kieffaber shares his predictions about the development of "Judge.AI," discusses this system's implications on the popular understanding of textualism, and expounds on the role of normative judgments in textualist inquiry.
As Constitution Day approaches, we feature a forthcoming book that tackles how far we’ve come in the Progressives’ quiet regime change over the last century, replacing our constitutional republic with rule by the administrative state. That book is American Leviathan: the birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism by Ned Ryun.
Ryun is the Founder and CEO of American Majority and Voter Gravity. The son of the former congressman, Olympian, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Jim Ryun, Ned is also the author of Restoring Our Republic and The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill. A frequent commentator on Fox News, Ryun currently resides in Western Loudoun County, VA, with his wife and four children.
Buy or pre-order American Leviathan here.
Follow Ned Ryun on Twitter.
After the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision in Loper Bright/Relentless on administrative law, the question remains what will happen next in the effort to rein in the administrative state. Host Garrett Snedeker discusses a recent essay he wrote in which he urges close attention to the lower courts wrestling with the precedent in a post-Loper Bright future with JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne.
Read Snedeker's essay from TomKlingenstein.com here.
Join JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and Intern Catherine Hickam for a discussion with Prof. Michael Pakaluk about Natural Law and the traditional Thomistic and New Natural Law perspectives.
Guest Ben Weingarten, the Editor at Large at RealClearInvestigations, joins host Garrett Snedeker to document how public and private actors (government, academia, media, and tech) have acted to curtail our natural right to speak freely in a concerted effort that Weingarten calls "The Censorship Industrial Complex." Mr. Weingarten has also testified before Congress on this issue. They discuss the recent Supreme Court decision in Murthy v. Missouri as well as how the history of the Censorship Industrial Complex stretches back to the late 1940s.
Weingarten is a Senior Contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek and The Epoch Times, and a Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party. He co-hosts the Edmund Burke Foundation’s “NatCon Squad” podcast. Ben has appeared on “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and “The Ben Shapiro Show,” among many other programs. He is founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media, a conservative media consulting company.
For Minisode 7, host Garrett Snedeker along with JWI Program Manager Daniel Osborne offer a live update from the 2024 Summer James Wilson Fellowship for Young Lawyers. Snedeker and Osborne discuss JWI's flagship program, the lessons on law and morality taught at the Fellowship, the broader experience for young lawyers, and how the Fellowship has grown over its eleven years.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast team and Dr. Yuval Levin for a deep-dive into how the Constitution may unify us again. In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again, Levin gives us a thorough analysis of both the written and unwritten constitution and why that structure that theAmerican Founders gave us is still morally good and durable. Levin argues that we today through our institutions need to devote ourselves toward the project of recovering those habits and practices that historically have sustained our life under the Constitution.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of numerous books besides American Covenant. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at New York Times. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was alsoexecutive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels. He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Listen as Joshua Turner, Chief of Constitutional Litigation and Policy for the State of Idaho and James Wilson Fellowship Alumnus, unpacks the ramifications of the Court's decision to return the case of Idaho v. United States back to the 9th Circuit, dismissing it as improvidently granted. Josh outlines some of what we may expect from this case as it progresses.
Host Garrett Snedeker and JWI intern Isaac Michael speak with Prof. Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary about his new book Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good. Professor Walker discusses his intended audience for the book, its main ideas, and his hopes for a revival of the Natural Law in American legal discussions. He also touches upon common difficulties many Protestants have with the Natural Law and makes the case for the authority of the Natural Law in Protestant moral thought. He ultimately presents a Christ-centered case for Natural Law reasoning which he sees as essential to any coherent account of a natural moral order. Dr. Walker serves as Associate Dean in the School of Theology, and Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is also the Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. Additionally, he is a fellow in Christian Political Thought at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and serves as the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. Walker joined the faculty of Southern Seminary in 2019. His previous appointment was Senior Fellow in Christian Ethics at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He is married to Christian, and they have three children. He is a member of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. Purchase Faithful Reason here.
Learn more about Prof. Walker here.
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 isthe 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.
Popular columnist, radio host, lawyer, and legal commentator Josh Hammer returns to the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss his latest piece of legal scholarship in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Common Good Originalism and Common Good Constitutionalism: a Convergence? Host Garrett Snedeker, who has co-written several times with Hammer, draws Hammer out on debates animating legal conservatism such as originalism, legal positivism, and the moral ground of law.
Hammer is the Senior Editor-at-Large of Newsweek, where he also hosts "The Josh Hammer Show" podcast, "America on Trial" podcast, a syndicated radio show, and writes a weekly newsletter, "The Josh Hammer Report."
Hammer is also a syndicated columnist through Creators Syndicate, host of the "America on Trial" podcast for The First, a fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation and the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, and a popular campus speaker. He was a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute.
Prior to Newsweek, Hammer previously worked as an editor and writer at a different publication, and before that he practiced law as an attorney and clerked for Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Chicago Law School. In addition to Newsweek, Josh has been published by dozens of other leading outlets, both lay and academic.
Finally, Hammer was a 2021 James Wilson Fellow and currently the Contributing Editor of Anchoring Truths.
READ:Common Good Constitutionalism and Common Good Originalism: a Convergence? LISTEN: Josh Hammer Show, America on Trial
For Minisode 3, Host Garrett Snedeker & JWI Program Director Daniel Osborne discuss their recent visit to Harvard Law School for the Federalist Society National Student Symposium. The theme of the symposium was "Why Separate Powers." Snedeker and Osborne share how two panels in particular focused on topics central to JWI's work, as well as sharing observations about the student interactions they enjoyed.
Nate Fischer of the venture firm New Founding joins host Garrett Snedeker for a Mini-Sode to discuss Fischer's provocative essay in The American Mind "Meritocracy Must Not Be Our Goal." Fischer provides some fascinating angles on why common understandings of merit in 21st-century America undermine a flourishing society.
Read the piece here: https://americanmind.org/salvo/meritocracy-must-not-be-our-goal/
Nate Fischer on X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/NateAFischer
New Founding: https://www.newfounding.com/
Professor Aaron Zubia joins Anchoring Truths Podcast host Garrett Snedeker to discuss his new book analyzing David Hume’s political theory with its implications on liberalism. Professor Zubia gives a glimpse into what the state of affairs was in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ancient and Epicurean roots Hume has, and the modern applications and ramifications of his political theory. In a time of ever growing political turmoil, Zubia’s renewal of David Hume’s thought and proposal of a “politics of truth” is well worthy of listening.
Aaron Zubia is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He specializes in the moral and political philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American founding. His first book,The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination (ND Press) is available now.
His scholarly work has appeared in Hume Studies and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. He has also written in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, First Things, Law & Liberty, Washington Examiner, and Public Discourse. He is the winner of the first annual Hume Studies Essay Prize for his paper, “Hume's Transformation of Academic Skepticism," and he was a runner up for the Jack Miller Center's Excellence in Civic Education Award in 2021.
Previously, Zubia was a Postdoctoral Fellow with The Tocqueville Program in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University. In 2019-20, he was a Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a B.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Texas at El Paso
Follow Prof. Zubia's work here https://www.aaronzubia.com/
In this special "minisode," JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and Programs Director Daniel Osborne sit down to talk a bit about the ideas and debates that came to characterize 2023. They discuss Mere Natural Law, Originalism, Historicism, and Courage.
Catherine Glenn Foster (James Wilson Fellowship Alumna '16) joins Anchoring Truths Podcast host Garrett Snedeker to discuss the state of the pro-life movement in America. They discuss recent developments in the movement, and Foster conveys the challenges that arise from outlawing abortion, encouraging pro-lifers to help and redirect young moms and families in their communities. The podcast also delves into Foster's personal experience as a post-abortive woman and how that experience provides her with conviction to build a culture of life from natural birth to natural death.Catherine Glenn Foster, M.A., J.D., is a constitutional attorney and a mother. She is the former President and CEO of Americans United for Life. She writes, speaks, and testifies around the country on all issues related to building a culture of life. You may follow Catherine Glenn Foster on Twitter/X at @cateici and at CatherineGlennFoster.com
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast team for our first episode of 2024, featuring an extended episode. Our guest is the distinguished political scientist Prof. W.B. "Bill" Allen, who chatted with us about his new translation, fifty years in the making, of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes paid a surprise visit to the podcast to join the discussion.
For the final episode of the year, Anchoring Truths presents a special episode featuring Professor David Bernstein of the Scalia Law School at George Mason University. Prof. Bernstein delivered remarks on the American Law of Race post the Harvard cas, Students for Fair Admissions, delivered at our James Wilson Senior Seminar on October 20th. Host Garrett Snedeker served as a research assistant on Prof. Bernstein's book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
Erika Bachiochi joins host Garrett Snedeker on the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion of her thoughts on Natural Law and modern feminism as a departure from the feminism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, she is also a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA, where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project. Her newest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021, and was named a finalist for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2022 Conservative Book of the Year award.
Bachiochi's Podcast with Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-erika-bachiochi.html
Anchoring Truths Podcast host Garrett Snedeker welcomes Prof. Kevin Walsh of Catholic Law for a briefing on Prof. Walsh's recent conversation with Justice Amy Barrett that touched on the institutional authority of the Supreme Court. Topics covered include Justice Barrett's apparent rejection of judicial supremacy and more thoroughly the debate over judicial supremacy versus departmentalism.
Kevin C. Walsh is a professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, and co-director of the Law School’s Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Professor Walsh teaches federal courts, constitutional law, torts, agency and partnership, and a seminar on law in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Professor Walsh’s scholarship focuses on doctrines that define the scope of federal judicial power, and has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, and the Notre Dame Law Review, among other venues.
Prior to joining Catholic Law, Professor Walsh taught at the University of Richmond School of Law for thirteen years. He previously practiced law at Hunton & Williams LLP. Professor Walsh clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States and for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the University of Notre Dame, and Dartmouth College.
Watch Prof. Walsh's discussion with Justice Barrett on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJUHuu2aoP4
Clarke Forsythe joins Garrett Snedeker for a discussion of his new book on the history of the fall of Roe v. Wade and the rise of the pro-life movement. The book, co-authored with Alexandra DeSanctis, Pushing Roe v. Wade Over the Brink, chronicles the 50 year legal campaign against Roe v. Wade, the implications of the Dobbs decision overruling Roe, and the challenges for the cause for life in America going forward. This rich discussion reminds us of both where the pro-life movement has been and where it must go in order to save the lives of pre-born children.
Clarke Forsythe is Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life (AUL) and the author of Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade Encounter Books 2013, which was cited by the Supreme Court in its majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
In his 38 years at AUL, Clarke has been co-counsel for parties in three U.S. Supreme Court cases and has argued cases before federal and state appellate courts. He has also testified before Congress and state legislatures. Clarke has authored or co-authored 20+ professional legal articles on constitutional and bioethical issues. Purchase a copy of the book here.
Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast Team with our friend Theo Wold, the former Solicitor General of Idaho, for a quite personal account of the origins of the administrative state and the failure of the conservative movement to combat its growth. With key insights derived from his experience working in the Trump Administration, Wold helps illuminate just how many challenges the administrative bureaucracy poses to a future Republican President, as well as the potential path forward. This is an episode you will not want to miss.
Before serving as Idaho's Solicitor General, Wold served as the Acting-Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President Donald Trump. Before working in the Trump Administration, Wold served as Deputy Chief Counsel to United States Senator Mike Lee on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Theo Wold's analysis is best fleshed out in his recent essay "A Century of Impotency: Conservative Failure and the Administrative State", as featured in the Claremont Institute's recently published volume Up from Conservativism. We encourage our listeners to read both Wold's essay and the book in its entirety.
Join Bloomberg Investigative reporter Zeke Faux and the Anchoring Truths Podcast team for a deep dive into his first groundbreaking book Number Go Up, an engrossing account of the cryptocurrency craze, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a titular cast of nerds, crypto visionaries and swindlers turned virtual coins into trillions of dollars. With key insights into the rise and fall of the crypto craze and those swallowed by it, we highly encourage our listeners to listen to this week’s episode.
Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He's a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.
Judge Douglas Ginsburg joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an in-depth discussion of the new documentary he shaped, We Hold These Truths, a story of the Declaration of Independence's global legacy. Judge Ginsburg traveled the world to film the documentary, which aired on PBS over Independence Day. It's now available to watch free of charge on YouTube.
Judge Ginsburg has served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 1986. Before joining the court, he served in the Reagan Justice Department. He has taught at the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School, New York Law School, and the Scalia Law School.
Watch the documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc2Ij8NhP2E
More information on the documentary: https://www.pbs.org/show/we-hold-these-truths-global-quest-liberty/
The AT Podcast continues with a mini-series “The Right Rethinks Economics" featuring guest author Prof. Alexander Salter. Prof. Salter has sought to bridge a gap in the the discourse between the camp that represents the received wisdom broadly supportive of economic liberty and the camp that considers doctrinaire defenses of economic liberty to be ill-suited, at least on their own, for the challenges of the present.
Prof. Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. His new book that we’ll be discussing is titledThe Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good, published by Catholic University of America Press.
Prof. Salter took his PhD and MA in economics from George Mason University and earned a BA from Occidental.
As part of an ongoing conversation surrounding the rethinking of economic policy on the American right, Compact Magazine editor Sohrab Ahmari joins host Garrett Snedeker and JWI Intern Victoria Baker to discuss his new book, Tyranny, Inc. Their discussion touches on the balance of power between capital and labor across varying periods of economic history, the potential for private corporations to pose a threat to individual liberty, and the appropriate role for unions in America's economic and political life.
Join Judge Amul Thapar and the Anchoring Truths Podcast team for a deep dive into Judge Thapar's new book on Justice Clarence Thomas, "The People's Justice." The book delves into some of Justice Thomas's opinions that tell the fascinating stories of the litigants behind the cases.
Prof. John Yoo of California's Berkeley Law School joins the pod for a light-hearted and spirited discussion of his new, co-authored book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court" as well as the recent decisions of the Supreme Court in its OT 2022 term.
James Rosen, author of Scalia: Rise to Greatness, and Chief White House Correspondent for Newsmax, joins host Garrett Snedeker for an insider's look at Antonin Scalia's life before he became Justice Scalia. Their discussion touches on Scalia's upbringing in New York, his early positions in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, his tenure as a law professor, and those early years as a judge on the D.C. Circuit.
Prof. Mark David Hall, JWI Affiliated Scholar and Professor at George Fox University, joins host Garrett Snedeker for a discussion of Mark's new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans. The two discuss the vital place of religious liberty in American culture, both historically and at present. They delve especially deeply into the highly problematic slogan "separation of church and state" as well as contemporary flashpoints in the courts over religious liberty.
Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress, joins host Garrett Snedeker for a discussion of her fascinating new book. Harrington, a British writer, argues that “Progress” no longer benefits the majority of women, and only a feminism that is skeptical of it can truly defend their interests in the twenty-first century. She explains how modern feminism claims to advance “equality” and “freedom” but instead results in sexual dimorphism itself. This shift may benefit the elites, but it only makes it easier to commodify women’s bodies, human intimacy, and female reproductive abilities by stripping women of the exact things that make them uniquely women.
Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist,” is a contributing weekly editor at UnHerd. She was born in the United Kingdom and graduated from Oxford University in 2002. Her work quickly drew attention from the UK’s Unherd, and she has since appeared in First Things, American Affairs, the New York Post, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Times of London, and the Daily Mail. She writes a weekly Substack, Reactionary Feminist, on culture and politics in the cyborg era.
Rep. Keith Rothfus joins the AT Podcast for a discussion of the Lincolnian position, particularly on abortion, and why it needs to be restored in our political and legal discourse. We also chat about his terms in Congress and what reforms he advocates for a better functioning U.S. House.
Jon Schweppe of American Principles Project and Garrett Snedeker sit down to discuss the confusion in the pro-life movement among conservative politicians, particularly at the Federal level. While some have taken up the standard of national restrictions on abortion, others have taken the line simply that the Dobbs decision returned the choice to the States and the Federal government has no further business in abortion. Jon Schweppe warns that without a coherent strategy and message, the pro-life movement may be set back years by this confusion.
Jon Schweppe's Twitter
Jon Schweppe's Substack
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have reentered our public discourse due to some fascinating new applications, yet AI’s role in these areas has also made many question the moral place of AI and its implications on our culture beyond these applications. We’ll be discussing these topics and more with one of the foremost experts on AI and tech regulation, Adam Thierer.
Garrett Snedeker sits down with Mark Bauerlein to discuss the New College of Florida, the importance of new alternative educational institutions, and what these kinds of long-term strategies mean for the conservative movement.
"Who Deserves Scalia's Mantle?" by Garrett Snedeker
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/who-deserves-scalias-mantle/
"Legal Conservatism's Chevron Pivot" by Jesse Merriam
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/legal-conservatisms-chevron-pivot/
Western Culture is in a state of crisis. Objective truth is being replaced by virtual reality, humanity by “transhumanism,” meaning by meaninglessness, and religion by whole-hearted devotion to scientism. And these are just a few examples of the situation the West faces. We discuss these subjects and more with Spencer Klavan, the author of How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises (Regnery).
“The introduction of critical race theory (CRT) and race-based instruction in schools has disrupted American classrooms from coast to coast and impacted families from every ethnic, cultural, and income background.” That’s the opening sentence of a new book that chronicles the story of individual parents, students, and school board members who are fighting this ideological indoctrination. One of the co-authors of that book joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast.
Lance Izumi is Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He has written and produced books, studies and films on a wide variety of education topics. His new co-authored book that we’ll discuss today is THE GREAT PARENT REVOLT: How Parents and Grassroots Leaders Are Fighting Critical Race Theory in America’s Schools.
In 2016-17, Mr. Izumi served on President Trump’s transition Agency Action Team for education policy. As a member of the transition team, he drafted policy papers and recommendations for consideration by the Trump administration.
Mr. Izumi served as chief speechwriter and director of writing and research for California Governor George Deukmejian and as speechwriter to United States Attorney General Edwin Meese III in President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
You may purchase the book from Amazon here.
Dr. Samuel Gregg returns to the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his new book, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World. Gregg carefully addresses New Right criticism of the conventional wisdom on economics that pervaded conservative intellectual circles in recent decades. Gregg offers a defense of America as a commercial republic, though one in need of a substantive argument rooted in morals to defend trade and growth. He also discusses how China's unique challenge requires a rethinking of the conventional wisdom in a healthy way.
Join Garrett Snedeker and Criminologist Barry Latzer for an in-depth look at Latzer's new book, The Myth of Overpunishment, arguing provocatively that America underincarcerates. Latzer also details his proposal for reducing the cost of incarceration as well as the overall prison population: e-carceration.
Host Garrett Snedeker and JWI Programs Manager Daniel Osborne review the key debates in law and morality animating the conservative legal movement in 2022. They also discuss how those debates featured in audiences gathered by JWI.
Garrett Snedeker sits down with Jordan Ballor, Director of Research at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy at First Liberty Institute, to discuss the CRCD's inaugural, first of its kind initiative to measure and rank each state's safeguards for religious liberty.
Populism and self-government take center stage in this discussion of "The Conservative Affirmation" by essayist Willmoore Kendall. The book of essays has been re-released with a new foreword by ISI's Dan McCarthy. McCarthy joins us for a wide-ranging discussion of Kendall, populism, and the underpinnings of conservative intellectual thought.
JWI Founder & Director Hadley Arkes offers his fullest statement on the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health. Arkes finds much to savor in Justice Alito's majority opinion, but cautions that the logic of Justice Kavanaugh's pivotal concurrence does not augur well for conservative jurisprudence. JWI Senior Scholar Gerry Bradley reacts to Arkes's address with his own notes of caution and his path forward for pro-life litigation strategy. This is a recording of a public event JWI hosted on October 28, 2022.
In this episode of the Anchoring Truths podcast, Garrett Snedeker and JWI intern Jacob Shields sit down with Troy Senik to discuss his new book titled, "A Man of Iron; The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland" They discuss Cleveland's rise to political prominence, his principled approach to executive power, and his relevance to our current moment. You can purchase a copy of the book here.
In this episode, Garrett Snedeker and JWI intern Jacob Shields sit down with Professor Carson Holloway of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, to discuss his recent article for the Claremont Institute titled "Rethinking Libel, Defamation, and Press Accountability," They discuss New York Times v. Sullivan, the natural right to reputation, and the most likely scenario for a challenge to current libel precedent.
Join us as host Garrett Snedeker and JWI Programs Manager Daniel Osborne recap their experience at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Miami Sept. 11-13, 2022. Timon Cline, an Anchoring Truths contributing writer and panelist at NatCon, chats with Garrett about Protestantism and the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition.
Professor Phillip Munoz, author a new book on the original meaning of the First Amendment's religion clauses, joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on what the Founders thought about religion and what the drafters of the Constitution wrought with the First Amendment.
Professor Phillip Munoz, author a new book on the original meaning of the First Amendment's religion clauses, joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on what the Founders thought about religion and what the drafters of the Constitution wrought with the First Amendment.
Garrett Snedeker sits down for a conversation with Mike Sabo of the RealClear Civics Portal to discuss building up organizations and ideas in the conservative movement.
Garrett Snedeker sits down for a conversation with Mike Sabo of the RealClear Civics Portal to discuss building up organizations and ideas in the conservative movement.
Garrett Snedeker and JWI Intern Sarah Merly sit down with Ryan Anderson, President of EPPC and JWI Fellowship Faculty member, to discuss how Abortion has impacted our culture and political discourse. They analyze how the Dobbs decision may play out in the years ahead.
Garrett Snedeker and JWI Intern Sarah Merly sit down with Ryan Anderson, President of EPPC and JWI Fellowship Faculty member, to discuss how Abortion has impacted our culture and political discourse. They analyze how the Dobbs decision may play out in the years ahead.
In this episode of the Anchoring Truths podcast, Professor David Bernstein, of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, joins host Garrett Snedeker and JWI intern Sophia Harrison to discuss his newest book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. Professor Bernstein discusses the problems with classifying race and ethnicity using imprecise, government mandated categories. The extent of the problem extends beyond affirmative action programs to funding for federal contracts as well as how pharmaceutical companies have had to conduct research into developing new drugs. Of further interest to our listeners, Snedeker served as a research assistant for Bernstein on the book. Click here to purchase Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America!
In this episode of the Anchoring Truths podcast, Orlando Magic star Jonathan Isaac joins Garrett Snedeker and JWI Intern Chloe Edwards to discuss his book Why I Stand. Isaac details his refusal to kneel for Black Lives Matter during one of his spring 2020 basketball games, particularly who shaped his character, the potential consequences of his decision to stand, and more. He also explains how his Christian faith intersects with all aspects of his life, including his basketball career. Please click here to purchase Why I Stand on Amazon!
Welcome back to our multi-episode series on "Building the Right." This episode features Andrew Kloster, good friend of Garrett Snedeker, Senior Counsel at Compass Legal Group, and longtime fixture in the conservative movement.
Link to Andrew's substack: https://andrewkloster.substack.com/
In this episode, Garrett Snedeker joins talented young journalist Nate Hochman to discuss his recent article, "What Comes After the Religious Right?" This article was featured as the lead essay for the New York Times' Sunday Section in early June of 2022 and is applauded for its detailed descriptions on the debate on the future of conservatism and the Republican party.
In this special edition of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, Prof. Gerry Bradley, JWI Senior Scholar and Trustee, delivers a powerful account of the incoherence of a jurisprudence that avoids moral reasoning.
In this special edition of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, Prof. Gerry Bradley, JWI Senior Scholar and Trustee, delivers a powerful account of the incoherence of a jurisprudence that avoids moral reasoning.
Author Steve Hayward joins Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and JWI Intern Emeline McClellan to discuss his recent book,M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom. In the podcast, we explore Evans’s career and legacy, the rise of conservative institutions such as YAF and the National Journalism Center, and the extraordinary wit that animated Evans’s dealings with both sides of the aisle.
Join us for the first part of a multi-episode look at some of the individuals and groups building anew on the Right. Matt Peterson is President of New Founding and the founder of The American Mind.
Join us for a special edition of the Anchoring Truths Podcast at the movies as we unpack the classic legal drama 12 Angry Men with film expert Onalee McGraw. Dr. McGraw is the director of the Educational Guidance Institute.
Join us for a lively hour discussing conflicts in state constitutional law with Judge Jeff Sutton of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Topics also include judicial review, administrative law, and why lawyers do not sue in state court as often as federal court. Judge Sutton is the author of a new book, "Who Decides?: States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation," available from Oxford University Press.
In this special episode, Garrett speaks with JWI Scholar David Forte and AEI Fellow Adam White about the history of fetal heartbeat legislation, the new Texas Heartbeat Law, and its unique enforcement mechanism allowing a private right of action for any citizen to bring suit.
Join Garrett Snedeker and Seth Root as they interview Judge Robert Conrad of the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. They discuss his new book, John Fisher and Thomas More: Keeping Their Souls While Losing Their Heads, and how the faith and integrity of these two men carried them through challenges and social upheaval.
Michael Knowles, author of the new book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds," joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss how conservatives should not expect to win the culture war by abandoning all standards, how critical theory made its “long march through the institutions,” and the need for conservatives to adopt a view of free speech that is consonant with a coherent conservative worldview.
And now for something different: a peek behind the curtain. For a special edition of our podcast, JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker convened Summer Interns Tom Sarrouf and Sean Tehan for a discussion of their experience with us. Topics included how they grappled with JWI's unique approach to law, their views on how JWI adds to their own understanding of jurisprudence, learning new skills such as podcasting, and becoming accustomed to juggling independent and team-based responsibilities.
Glenn Ellmers, author of "The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America," joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss the singular contributions of Jaffa to our understanding of the moral ground of the American regime. Topics include how Jaffa and JWI Founder Hadley Arkes overlap in their views on morality and law, the fight over conservatism in America since World War II, and Jaffa's recasting of Lincoln as the securer of the Founding.
Dr. Charles Murray, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America." Author of "The Bell Curve" and "Coming Apart," Murray shares insights into his book, which he believes is a timely reminder that the timeless moral principle of "all men are created equal" need not mandate equal outcomes for all racial groupings.
Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer joins the JWI Podcast again to discuss his influential new Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy piece, "Common Good Originalism." Topics include the history of the conservative legal movement, the influence of the Constitution's preamble on interpretation, and how a determination of the common good in constitutional interpretation draws both textual and philosophic support.
We talk about Breidenbach's new book, Our Dear Bought Liberty, and how early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty during the time of the Founding while also transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process. We also discuss whether the religious character of the colonies and early states exemplified mini-integralist republics.
Prof. Jesse Merriam of Patrick Henry College joins returning podcast guest Josh Hammer of Newsweek to discuss Merriam's critique of Hammer's co-authored piece "A Better Originalism" with fellow author and podcast host Garrett Snedeker.
Author and New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari joins JWI for a two-part discussion of his new book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos." In Part 2, we continue our discussion of how tradition informs understandings of filial piety and the Sexual Revolution, while also hearing about how Ahmari reconciles modernity's avoidance of death against traditional acceptance of frailty as part of the human condition.
Author and New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari joins JWI for a two-part discussion of his new book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos." In Part I, we discuss Ahmari's inspiration for writing the book, the failings of modernity to provide mass satisfaction in the West, traditional religious communities, filial piety, and the Sexual Revolution.
Stephen Soukup, author and publisher of The Political Forum, joins JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and intern Peter Spence to discuss his new book, "The Dictatorship of Woke Capital". Soukup's book examines the methodical takeover by the left of big business and finance over the last decade and the danger that this poses to our nation. Snedeker, Spence, and Soukup discuss different issues brought up in the book and look at the solutions that Soukup proposes.
Author and Professor Scott Yenor joins JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and intern Peter Spence to discuss his new book, "The Recovery of Family Life". Professor Yenor's book explores the problems that the institution of the family is facing in modern society, the causes of these problems, and concrete solutions that we can implement to ensure the stability of marriage and the family going forward. Snedeker, Spence, and Yenor examine different issues discussed in the book and the policy solutions that Yenor suggests.
Author and Professor Greg Collins joined JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and intern Chance Cook to discuss his new book, “Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy”. Collins’s book explores the intersection of Edmund Burke’s economic thought and views on natural law in light of newly discovered manuscripts and data. Prof. Collins gives a clear picture of Burke’s views on revenue, taxes, trade, and other economic issues. Snedeker, Cook, and Collins discuss different aspects of the book, and why it is important to study Burke’s philosophy.
Prof. Lucas Morel, distinguished Lincoln scholar at Washington and Lee University, discusses the 1619 Project and its challenge to the American Founding with Garrett Snedeker, JWI Deputy Director, and Jovan Tripkovic, JWI Intern.
Ilya Shapiro joins Garrett Snedeker and Spencer Reeves to discuss his book, "Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court," which concerns the partisan battles over Supreme Court nominations that have become a focal point of judicial politics in the past few decades. He discusses the history of partisan Supreme Court nominations, the role of game theory, and some possible Supreme Court reforms that can finally end the partisan battles.
Robert Reilly walks us through his book, America on Trial, which pushes back on recent theorists who have argued that the American founding brought with it the "Poison Pill" of modern liberalism. He goes through in detail, the traditions of thought that lead to the American founding, arguing that it has its roots in Natural Law and the medieval constitutional tradition.
After the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union, the categories of Left and Right continue to be used to describe political ideologies, despite their historic ambiguity and a shared utopian root. The idealistic belief that a perfect world is possible continues to dwell on existential hope for messianic salvation. This belief lay at the heart of the apocalyptic narratives of the Bible and reflects what the Greeks called hubris, a fatal and destructive form of conceit. This conceit reemerged in the Gnostic sects of early Christianity, then again in medieval millenarianism, Jacobinism, Marxism, Fascism, and secular liberal collectivism. Modern-day Salafi Islam is the latest manifestation in this nefarious tradition. In The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, noted political philosopher Juliana Geran Pilon explores the roots of this malevolent ideology as the common ancestor of both anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism in the contemporary world, where political and religious freedom is increasingly under assault. In an age of rampant religious and philosophical skepticism and national and ethnic deracination, religious and quasi-religious ideologies bent on the vilification and destruction of entire communities are confronting and undermining a confused, guilt-ridden, materialistic, and often nihilistic Western society. In this bold and dynamic book, Pilon argues that a strong defense of freedom and pluralism, which forms the basis of constitutional democracy, is essential for the survival of civilization. Culturally sensitive and empirically tested outreach, predicated on an uncompromising defense against disinformation and terror, must be waged by all civilized nations, but especially the United States as its role evolves in a changing world.
Shoshana Weissmann is the senior manager of digital media and a fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank. She oversees RSI’s social media, email marketing, and website while also working and writing on a variety of policy and regulatory subjects. She also likes SpongeBob. Jon Schweppe is the Director of Policy and Government Affairs for American Principles Project (APP). In this role, he develops and advances the organization’s legislative priorities by working with allied groups and with federal and state lawmakers. Prior to joining APP in late 2014, he worked on a number of political campaigns, focusing mainly on communications and policy. Schweppe was named a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute in 2020. He has been published at a number of outlets, including First Things, the New York Post, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. He graduated from Augustana College in 2010 with majors in economics and finance. Shoshana and Jon lead us through a discussion of Section 230, the disagreements between different movements in the broader conservative movement and the implications for the internet in the future.
On his book: Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State's Challenge to Constitutional Government (University of Missouri Press, 2017).
Christopher DeMuth is a Distinguished Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was President of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) from 1986-2008 and D.C. Searle Senior Fellow at AEI from 2008-2011. In this lecture from 2014, Mr. DeMuth addressed the unconstitutional actions taken by the Obama administration, the active role of congress has in ceding its authority to the executive branch through regulatory agencies, and how these same agencies subvert the separation of powers.