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This episode has everything: a how-to guerilla guide to improving your McDonald’s hamburger experience; a spirited discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court decision that defines frozen embryos as persons (I think the media is willfully misreporting the decision—John is not so sure); those crazy new presidential rankings from political scientists—and even some soft-core porn!
Say what?
Well, it turns out that that Judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw Trump’s alleged fraud trial in New York City, apparently has a case of Anthony Weiner envy, and posted some rather racy locker room pics of himself some years back. And right in the middle of our discussion Lucretia flashed the pictures up on the Zoom screen, sending John and me rushing for some eye-bleach. There must be something in the bottled water Manhattan Democrats drink. (And doesn’t Engoron sound like the name of a dwarve or elve who goes bad in Lord of the Rings?)
In any case, we do finally get around to a new segment of the 3WHH, where we note three articles from the last week for what they can tell us about something. John chose those stupid presidential rankings; Lucretia chose an MSNBC articlefrom leftist columnist Paul Waldman that unwittingly admits that everything conservatives say about the administrative state is completely true; and I picked Karol Markowitz’s NY Post column reflecting on how recent social science that ratifies the conservative view that two-parent families are the best way to raise children is so controversial with the left, which is no surprise. (Honorable mention to a parallel column on the same subject by Mark Judge in the Washington Examiner.)
So listen here or from our hosts at Ricochet. But have your eye-bleach for your mind’s eye at the ready.
There is no Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast this week, because we practiced a bit of “settler colonialism” by occupying the flagship Ricochet podcast yesterday and expelling the pervious residents.
Well not literally. Rob Long and Peter Robinson were both away, so the producers asked the 3WHH crew to fill in for the whole hour. And hoo-boy, with James Lileks in charge of the discussion, the sparks flew on immigration, as we successfully flushed out and scolded John “Open Borders” Yoo. The comment thread there is taking off like a Starlink rocket launch, but if you’re not a Ricochet member, you can use the comment thread here as usual.
Ricochet calls the episode “Drunken Monkey Business” on account of the whisky reviews we offer at the end, and you’ll definitely want to listen all the way to the very end to take in the daring high seas tale of Lileks “urinating” on a certain former National Review writer. (We also covered some of the latest Trump legal news, the Gaza War, and the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”
Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, which we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of whisky because travel schedules prevented the normal and proper Friday evening happy hour, and guess what? We’re even worse without whisky!
Among the news and issues treated this week: Why Biden isn’t FDR (he’s not even Harry Truman); why this was the worst SOTU (Lucretia offers a different acronym) speech ever; whether there are signs of life for the GOP in California after all; how immigration and abortion are playing out in the campaign cycle so far; how to think about the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case dealing with Trump’s eligibility for the ballot (hint—it ain’t over till it’s over); and finally, can Harvard be serious in asking for a government bailout? The unifying theme here is galloping dishonesty, which is being normalized more and more every day.
Our articles of the week are (from me): Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” newly salient in an age of truth-denying euphemisms like “justice-involved youth” and “newcomers” instead of “migrants” (which was a substitute for “illegal alien”); Lucretia ponders the challenges of Alex Berenson’s Substack article on new threats to free speech; and John draws our attention to the original 14th Amendment article from Baude and Paulson that brought us to the Supreme Court steps earlier this week, plus responses (also here) that got overlooked at the time, now largely vindicated. (I wondered whether Baude and Paulson were a rope-a-dope set up to make liberals look stupid and induce still more MSNBC primal screams.)
As always, listen here, or from our hosts at Ricochet.
This week’s episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week’s installment comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. Hadley Arkes! Thus this episode become a Positivism-Free Zone, in which we review the deepest ground of the natural law unencumbered by John’s usual alarums, excursions, and errors.
The episode comes in three parts: Hadley made some news yesterday, celebrating the retirement of the noted Notre Dame Law professor Gerard V. Bradley, who will be joining Hadley at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding.
Gerard V. Bradley
From there Hadley proceeds to answering the question that we’ve been kicking around ever since the Dobbs decision, namely, just how should pro-life politicians break out of their self-imposed muteness about abortion. Hadley has the strategy.
Finally, we spend some time toward the end getting down some of Hadley’s “origin story” that brought him to Leo Strauss’s classroom at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s, and key friendships made along the way—especially our late friend and unsung hero Michael Uhlmann.
Note: We had some internet glitches while recording this episode that weren’t easily edited or smoothed over, so we ask listeners’ indulgence with these hiccups, in return for which we’re presenting this installment ad-free.
As usual, listen here, or at our hosts at Ricochet when it goes live there.
The House passed a four-bill $95 billion foreign aid package over the weekend that includes $60 billion in additional aid for Ukraine. The bill could cost House Speaker Mike Johnson his job.
The aid package passed in a 311-112 vote with the unanimous support of Democrats and 101 Republicans voting in favor of the bill.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., threatened to introduce a motion to remove Johnson, R-La., from his position as speaker if he brought the funding for Ukraine to the House floor for a vote.
“I think she’s looking at the totality of what’s come across the floor over the past few months, and she is expressing extreme disappointment with that,” Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, says of Greene. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, of which Heritage Action is the grassroots arm.)
Greene left Washington at the end of last week without introducing the motion to vacate the speaker but said during an interview Sunday on Fox News that she still planned to try to oust Johnson.
“Mike Johnson’s speakership is over,” Greene said on “Sunday Morning Futures,” adding, “He needs to do the right thing—to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process. If he doesn’t do so, he will be vacated.”
Less than one year after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the role, Capitol Hill is bracing for the potential of another speakership battle when Congress returns to Washington next week.
Walker joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the reason for the sharp divide in Congress over the foreign aid package and the likelihood Johnson will face removal as speaker. Walker also explains where Congress is getting the money to send to Ukraine.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Why Speaker Johnson’s Job Is on the Line After House Votes $60 Billion for Ukraine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is not going to allow one lone judge to dictate whether the children of Ohio are protected from “transgender” surgeries and hormones, he shared in an interview with The Daily Signal.
Yost asked the state’s Supreme Court to intervene after Judge Michael Holbrook issued a temporary restraining order for House Bill 68, the Saving Ohio Adolescents From Experimentation, or SAFE, Act, on Tuesday.
That law bars physicians from performing “transgender reassignment” surgeries on children and from prescribing cross-sex hormones or drugs to block children’s puberty. It also would allow students to sue if they are deprived of a fair playing field in sports due to transgender activism (such as a boy who “identifies” as a girl playing on a girls’ volleyball team) and would protect parents’ rights to raise their children according to their biological sex.
A supermajority of Republican lawmakers voted to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s controversial veto of the bill in January, and before Holbrook blocked it, it was scheduled to go into effect on April 24.
On Monday, Yost, the Medical Board of Ohio, and the state of Ohio filed an emergency motion for a writ of prohibition, asking that Holbrook be ordered to modify his temporary restraining order to “comply with Ohio statutory and procedural limitations.”
The Ohio attorney general discussed the move and what he hopes will ensue from here in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“This is actually a trick that the Left has been using for a long time,” he explained. “Go to court with a couple of sympathetic plaintiffs, get a court order restraining the law from applying to anybody anywhere, and then use it to avoid majority rule and democratic processes that we have here in America.”
“It’s contrary to the law, it’s a misuse of the judicial process, and its fundamentally anti-Democratic,” he said.
Listen to the interview below:
The post Ohio Attorney General Breaks Down Leftist Legal ‘Trick’ to Block GOP Efforts to Protect Kids appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The left-wing Arabella Advisors network has raked in more money than either of the two major political parties and affects almost every element of public policy and elections, argues Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a Washington-based investigative think tank.
Walter’s new book “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America” shows that in the 2020 election cycle, Arabella Advisors’ nonprofits took in $2.4 billion. That’s $1 billion more than the combined fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.
That amount rose to $3 billion in the 2022 election cycle, Walter says. Moreover, he adds, nothing on the Right comes close to competing.
“Arabella does not discriminate. It is working on arcane regulatory issues … but it also is running Facebook ads, attacking certain congressional candidates and boosting others. It plays in environmental issues. It plays in abortion issues. It plays in election policy,” Walter says on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Walter is set to testify Tuesday before the House Natural Resources Committee about what he calls “left-wing dark money [used] to influence environmental policy.”
“Arabella also continues to be very active in the environmental policy area in all sorts of ways,” he adds.
Arabella-backed organizations have been involved in battles over abortion and Supreme Court nominations and advocated that biological males compete in women’s sports.
Walter’s book details how two Arabella-aligned groups, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections and the Institute for Responsive Government, are involved in shaping election policy at the local level.
He notes that an Arabella-sponsored group funded by billionaire financier George Soros helped formulate the Biden administration’s recent change in Title IX policy to make it easier for biological males to compete in girls’ scholastic sports.
“That was plotted through a highly secretive group in the Arabella network, funded entirely with Soros money,” Walter said. “Governing for Impact, which they started in 2019, two years before the Biden administration was even sworn in. And they worked with Harvard Law School folks to do very sophisticated legal strategy memos of how to overturn dozens of regulations in the federal government, the most famous being Title IX.”
What’s differentiates Arabella from other major donors on the Left is the level of secrecy, Walter says. The network is more secretive than most nonprofits financed by Soros and his family, he says.
“We have tracked the institutional donors, and we can tell you that for almost all of the Arabella nonprofits, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which provides donor-advised funds to wealthy people, is the largest,” Walter said. He added, “Other really big donors to the Arabella network have [included Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates. He is one of the largest, mostly through his foundation. [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg has given tens of millions, mostly for criminal justice reform—quote unquote—[that results in] letting criminals back on the streets.”
A spokesperson for Arabella Advisors didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Listen to Walter outline Arabella’s reach in a discussion of his book in the podcast below:
The post Arabella Network’s Leftist ‘Dark Money’ Influence Expanding, Author Reveals appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The protests in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death in police custody and today’s antisemitic, pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are rooted in the same ideology of Marxism, Katharine Gorka says.
Marxism preaches that the world “is divided between oppressor and oppressed,” says Gorka, co-author with Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez of the new book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.” (Heritage launched The Daily Signal in 20014.)
German-born philosopher Karl Marx believed that the oppressors were the business owners and the oppressed were the workers. But Gorka says that Marxism today, or “NextGen Marxism,” holds that the “oppressors are white, Americans, Israelis, [but] some Asians … kind of the successful.”
“And the oppressed is everybody else, right?” she asks rhetorically. “Anybody who’s a minority of any sort, whether it’s based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, [or] having once been colonized.”
This movement of Marxism today has its roots in the 1960s, Gorka explains, as the student activists of those says became the community organizers who influence young people today, often via social media.
Gorka joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to outline the progression of Marxism and to discuss philanthropy’s significant role in furthering Marxist ideology in America.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post This Is the Next Generation of Marxism appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Cliff Sims had a front-row seat in the White House to some of President Donald Trump’s biggest decisions and helped craft the administration’s message to the American people.
As a special assistant to the president, Sims served as a key staffer in the White House communications office before later moving to a different role as deputy director of national intelligence for strategy and communications.
Along the way, Sims wrote a bestselling book, “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House.” And this month, he is now out with a new book, “The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power.”
Sims writes from the perspective of a Baptist minister’s son whose own Christian faith guided him during his time in the Trump administration. He spoke to The Daily Signal about the lessons he learned and his advice for Americans as they prepare to make a choice for our country’s future.
Listen to the full interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read the transcript—edited for length and clarity—below.
Rob Bluey: What inspired you to write “The Darkness Has Not Overcome”?
Cliff Sims: When I left the government, a lot of it was me wrestling with what that time period of my life meant for me, like, what were some of the things I could have learned from that experience, and I journaled a lot about it and was thinking a lot about it.
I realized through that process that a lot of the things that I could have learned I was learning, the takeaways that I had could apply to anybody’s life. No matter what they’re doing, they had to serve in government to have some takeaways from it.
I realized that there was an opportunity to write a book that told a bunch of cool stories from behind the scenes in the White House and CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Air Force One and all these different things, but use those to jump into biblical takeaways, faith takeaways that could apply to anybody’s life. So that was really what inspired me to write the book.
Bluey: Can you speak to your upbringing as the son of a Baptist minister and how that shaped your approach to faith and particularly politics during your time serving a government?
Sims: The subtitle for the book is “Lessons on Faith and Politics From Inside the Halls of Power.” But the first thing that people would need to know about me is that I come from about as far away from those halls of powers you could possibly imagine—lived in, grew up in a working-class family, working-class neighborhood. My dad was a Baptist minister and faith was an integral part of our lives. We’re in the church every time the doors were open.
But really my personal faith journey, I had a knowledge of the Bible that was more than a lot of my friends growing up. There’s no doubt about that, but it really had not had a heart change in me until later in life.
A lot of that kind of grit and determination from growing up in a working-class family I think I’ve applied to a lot of things I’ve done professionally. And really the moment in my life when—well, I guess there wasn’t a moment in my life that I could point to that’s like that’s when God changed my heart. Even though I certainly remember the moment that I accepted Christ, my savior, and things like that.
I learned a lot about the way that God changes people and it’s not the way that we think about it. We focus a lot on our actions. Any self-help podcast that you listen to, it focuses on actions. If you could just work out a little bit more. If you could just get up a little bit earlier. If you could just spend more time with your family. If you were a better networker, all these things and actions.
The real "threat to democracy."
— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) May 8, 2024
The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power is out NOW https://t.co/B7qlVi6H9L @MarkLevinShow pic.twitter.com/YXSocrBHJK
What I’ve learned in my own life is the way that God changes people is, like, I would call it like concentric circles. And at the center of that concentric circle is worship. I found in my life, I’ve worshiped my career, I’ve worshiped power, I’ve worshiped fame, I’ve worshiped money. I mean, go down the list of these things.
What you worship becomes what you think about. What you think about becomes your desires, and your desires become your actions. And what God did was he changed what I worshiped or who I worshiped. Once he was at the center of that Venn diagram, it changed the things that I think about and changed my desires and, ultimately, that changed my actions.
And the way that that manifested itself in serving in government is, I think, in retrospect, I struggled with a lot of things that I didn’t know that I would, such as like the attraction of power.
When you don’t have power, how do you know that you’re going to be susceptible to the attraction of power? But being able to lean back on my faith and look to Scripture for new challenges, things that I was struggling with that I never had to think about before, that biblical foundation helped me not lose myself in the process.
Bluey: I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, and that was that you found yourself growing up far from the halls of power. So did you ever imagine as a younger man that you would be serving the most powerful man in the world?
Sims: No, definitely not. I mean, that’s the thing about life in general is, like, all of us only know the universe that we’ve been exposed to. I mean, I had never met anybody who had money. How could I know what someone with money would do with money? I’d never met someone who’d served in the government. How would I know what people who walk the halls of power, so to speak, what they do, how they lived their lives?
I’d never in a million years would have imagined that. But I do remember the moment when I realized, in retrospect, that God was ordering my steps, that kind of the way that the trajectory of my life has gone on, that he was organizing all of that.
SCOOP: A former top White House and intelligence official will release a book targeting an overlapping audience of political conservatives, particularly those in Trump's base, and evangelical Christians, who play a big role in election outcomes. https://t.co/LA8NVbUFR6
— Axios (@axios) February 15, 2024
I was playing college basketball at a university in Mississippi, a buddy of mine was playing at a junior college in South Alabama, and I was thinking about wanting to transfer. My family was living in Florida at the time. I go and visit this tiny town called Enterprise, Alabama, which is most famous for having a monument to a bug in its downtown, to a boll weevil. It’s the only city in the country with a monument to a bug. It’s all I knew about it.
So, I go and visit and I really liked it. The team was good. I thought, “You know what,? I’m going to transfer here.” And the last thing I needed to do was call my dad and say, “Hey, I’m going to transfer.” And again, they were living in Florida at the time and I called my dad and said, “I’m going to transfer to this tiny school in Enterprise, Alabama.” And it was an awkward silence on the phone, and I said, “Well, is that OK?” And my dad said, “I was going to call you today and tell you that our family is moving to Enterprise, Alabama.”
My dad was a Baptist minister. His friend had become a pastor of a church in Enterprise and called him to be the executive pastor there. And so, my friend was a pastor of a church in Enterprise and called him to be the executive, was kind of reunited on coming from two separate tracks, and it’s like a moment in time where even the most fervent atheist would have a difficult time chalking that up to mere coincidence.
I remember it because at a time in my life where I didn’t care what God’s plan was for my life, he was already ordering his steps. And my Sunday school teacher, the day that I walked into Sunday school, the first day at our new town, was a guy named Barry Moore. Moore, who was a small business owner, but now he’s Congressman Barry Moore.
So, the first thing I did in politics in the 2010 election cycle was help to run Barry’s campaign. And six years later, I had an office in the West Wing. A lot of stuff happened in between there, but that’s kind of my journey in politics. Well, God’s plan for each of us is truly amazing.
Bluey: Thank you so much for sharing that, that story. Wow. Speaking of the West Wing, can you share a specific example from your time working there where you felt challenged in maintaining your Christian principles in this political environment in which we live?
Sims: There aren’t a lot of examples from the West Wing where there’s like a dramatic moment where it’s like, oh my gosh, I’m being asked to do something that is against my sincerely held beliefs.
I worked in the Trump White House and, fortunately, from a policy perspective, I was a fervent believer in a lot of things that we’re doing, what President Trump did from a policy perspective for the faith community—things like ending the “Mexico City policy,” funding with taxpayer resources abortions in foreign countries, or putting pro-life justices on the Supreme Court, or instructing the Department of Justice to no longer … go after the nonprofit status of faith-based nonprofits that speak into divisive political issues. I think you can go down the list of these things.
. @Tgowdysc is joined by @Cliff_Sims as he dissects the clash between one’s political identity vs. spiritual identity when holding a position of power. https://t.co/6ov8gO1GMX pic.twitter.com/6EkRK0c4Mh
— FOX News Radio (@foxnewsradio) May 7, 2024
I think the wrestling with what serving in government meant for my faith or how my faith applied to that experience or where it was tested really has come more in retrospect. And I think the most direct example that I could give is the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated president, Jan. 20, 2021.
I was deputy director of national intelligence at the time, and I was standing alone in the nearly empty hallways of the CIA. And I was wandering those empty halls by myself because it was not just a transition moment for the country. I knew it was a transition moment for me, that this was going to be the last opportunity that I had to walk those halls, at least in the short term.
And I was wrestling with this nagging feeling that nothing that I will ever do in life will be this important. It’ll never be this big of a deal again. How could I ever find value in the work that I’m doing when it’s never going to be like this again? And, of course, that’s ego talking, but it’s also just wrong because what I learned through that process about work is that who we are working for is more important than what we are doing.
The Bible says whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord. And when you put work in its proper context—that whether I’m in the White House or in a coffee house I’m performing with excellence and there is meaning to it because I’m serving God in my work—your work becomes an overflow of worship. And that’s a totally different way of looking at work.
So, I think the way to answer your question that my faith was tested was, I was in what C.S. Lewis would call the inner ring. I had access to power and influence and things that test your character. Only in retrospect was I able to come to terms with that is not what defines me. I’m not defined by the title that I have. The fact that my phone quit ringing when I left because people didn’t like me, they were calling me because of the title that I had. I had to come to terms with that.
Going through that and wrestling with that, I’ve been able to put my work, my career, in a much better, more biblical context.
Bluey: There’s so much in our culture that happens outside of government and politics, but obviously, 2024 is a big year. There’s a lot of focus on elections, not only at the national level, but local level. How much is at stake when it comes to the future of our country and the direction we go when it comes to electing leaders?
Sims: Every single election cycle, it feels like we say, “Well, this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” And it’s like, well, in retrospect, some of these elections were not as important as others. Let’s just be honest about them.
But this is another moment where I think we are at a real crossroads as a country and deciding kind of what to do, what direction we’re going to go. Are we going to go the path of limited government, more human freedom and flourishing? Are we going to go the path of bigger government, more intervention in our daily lives where the government does play a meaningful role in our daily lives here? Which I don’t want to happen.
Millions of college students may be protesting Israel, but if Trump wins 2024, Israel WILL have a loyal friend in the WH again. Former Deputy DNI @Cliff_Sims tells me how determined Trump was to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem: "[He said] I said I would do it. We're doing it." pic.twitter.com/jRxw7b9zNo
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) May 3, 2024
On every single issue from foreign affairs—right now you’re seeing just mayhem in every corner of the world. From the Middle East to Eastern Europe to China’s breathing down Taiwan’s neck in Southeast Asia, foreign affairs to economics, where you’re going to have a decision and people aren’t thinking about early next year. We’re going to have to re-up the tax cuts that came for from the Trump presidency. Are we going to do that or we’re going to have to be more taxed and more regulated? All these different issues.
So, I do believe this is one of those elections that we’ll look back on and say that that was a really, really important election.
Bluey: What is one of the things that you hope readers take away from the book, especially those who may be feeling discouraged or disillusioned by the current state of politics and society today?
Sims: Thank you for asking that. I mean, I’ll go back to the title of the book, “The Darkness Has Not Overcome.”
It comes from the Gospel of John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” This is a promise from Scripture that we can lean on, even in the darkest of times, that Scripture makes it clear the good guys win. Again, we can skip to the end. End of the book: The good guys win.
It’s hard not to be discouraged at the moment. We have work to do, and we need to do everything that we can to spread the Gospel and fight for policies that we believe in government.
All these different things are very important. But even in the darkest times, we can lean on that promise that the darkness will not overcome this, that we have a hope that is bigger than our politics and it’s found in our relationship with God.
Bluey: I’m so glad the book is doing well. I encourage our Daily Signal listeners to pick up a copy wherever books are sold or online. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing your experiences and advice with us today.
Sims: Rob, thanks for having me. I love The Heritage Foundation, love The Daily Signal. Love everything that you guys do. It’s an honor to be on with you.
The post Faith and Politics: An Insider’s View From Former Trump Aide Cliff Sims appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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