Friday on the RealClearPolitics radio show — weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, and here on our website — Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Andrew Walworth start the show with the dinner President Trump hosted last night for owners of his branded cryptocurrency. “It’s not the greatest look,” Tom Bevan said. “The thing about Trump, though, is if you think this is corruption, he’s out in the open about it. Of course, the White House argues this is not corruption.” “It’s the most spectacular grift in the history of politics,” Carl Cannon declared. “We’ve been building toward this. Ford didn’t do it, but every president has. As we’ve entered this culture where you can monetize your name, fame has become something you can turn into money, it’s asking a lot for presidents to resist that. But I would ask that.” *** After that, starting at timestamp 7:20, a judge almost immediately halted the Trump administration’s order to block Harvard from enrolling international students, in response to another lawsuit from the university. “We knew Harvard was going to sue; they’re suing him for everything, and the administration is being sued over all these orders they want to do,” Cannon said. “I’m not sure of the legality, no one has ever tried this before, but I think it is a winning political argument that makes sense to a lot of Americans.” “Part of this was a response to the administration’s request for information about current foreign students participating in these protests. Apparently, Harvard said they weren’t going to give it to them, so they said you can’t have any more foreign students,” Bevan added. Andrew Walworth commented: “Kristi Noem said to let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions around the country. They aren’t being subtle at all about what they’re trying to do here. It goes well beyond Harvard, and it strikes at the very heart of these institutions. Up to 25% of the student body are international students, and those are the people paying full freight, supporting these institutions. They’re really going after the whole business model of the modern university.” *** In the next segment, starting at timestamp 13:30, the fifth anniversary since George Floyd died in the custody of Minneapolis police will pass this weekend. What has changed in the world since then? Did the protests make a difference? “If you live in Washington you don’t root for the Washington Redskins anymore,” Cannon said. “There’s no evidence policing has gotten any better in this country… The excess of the left here is leading to excess from the MAGA Right now… The pendulum swings one way and the other in American history. If you take the long view, you’ll be a saner and happier person. I just wish it would slow down in the middle a little longer.” “It totally supercharged the culture war,” Bevan added. “And remember in context, the country had just shut down because of Covid, and then we had this explosion of protests, which, if you remember, public health experts said was okay. You can’t go to church or visit grandma, but you can protest in the street.” *** Next, at minute 20, our Friday You Can’t Be Serious! segment highlights some of the most ridiculous stories out there. This week, NPR appeared to accept the logic of the attacker in the shooting of two Jews in DC, an over-the-top sensationalized headline in the The Independent about Gaza caused global outrage over a completely fictional claim, and the Secretary of Homeland Security told illegal immigrants who tried to sue to prevent their deportation to “suck it!” *** After that, at minute 24, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz talks to Carl Cannon about his new book, “The Preventative State,” which discusses how to balance the increasing capacity of new technology to predict and prevent crimes with the preservation of civil liberty. “When I started teaching, there were more people in jails and prisons based on predictions of what they would do in the future than based on proof of what they had done in the past,” Dershowitz said. “We’ve always had prevention. We called it exile. If we thought somebody was dangerous but couldn’t really prove it, that person would be exiled-often to the United States, to places like Georgia or Australia.” “I talk about 1935-how 50 million lives could have been saved if Britain and France had engaged in a preventive war after Nazi Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, started to build up its army. But they didn’t. I call that a false negative: failing to take an act that could have prevented many innocent people from being killed,” he said. “Then we’ve had false positives-we went into Iraq on the basis of a mistaken assumption that they had nuclear weapons.” “So the purpose of my book is to try to create a jurisprudence-to suggest a framework for how we analyze predictive decisions, because we’re making more of them. Especially with artificial intelligence, we’re going to be making lots and lots of predictions about how to stop people from doing terrible things. And we’re going to make mistakes,” he said. “What kind of mistakes do we prefer? A mistake that allows the bad thing to happen, but does not violate the human rights of the people who would otherwise be arrested? Or a mistake that results in innocent people being arrested, but perhaps prevents the bad act?” *** Finally, at minute 35, Andrew Walworth alks to RCP contributor and author John J. Waters on how Americans should mark Memorial Day, and Trump’s aborted plan to change the name of Veterans Day to Victory Day for World War I, a move that was opposed by many veterans’ groups. “It’s a day to pause, a time to remember-not just veterans, but people who have died in war. And in particular, I think first of the Civil War, where Memorial Day came from. It was called Decoration Day originally. And if you run it all the way through to today, through all the battles and conflicts we’ve fought in, there are some one million to one and a half million Americans who served in uniform and died in war,” Waters said. Waters also talks about his recent book, “River City One,” what he calls “a post-war novel.” “Jim Webb would quote Yeats, who said war hurt me into poetry,” he said. “It’s the memory of war, the memory of friendships that are gone, and trying to put that in a place where you can live in the present-not bitter, not angry, but hopeful, and wanting to live a life worthy of who you used to be, and the sacrifice that your friends made at war.” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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