Luke Ford

01:00 Trump’s plan for Gaza
08:00 How morality is used against Israel
13:30 Under Trump we have more free speech
15:00 Affirmative action
23:00 Why Michael Kochin eschews jargon
25:00 Paying obeisance to the tiny group of people who decide what knowledge is
31:00 “It is not possible to articulate common experience in politically acceptable language.”
39:00 Collegiality among professionals
45:00 Does Israel have a higher quality of life than America?
51:00 Jacob Taubes: The Man Who Made Thinking Erotic, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/books/review/professor-of-apocalypse-jerry-z-muller.html
53:00 Accreditation
57:00 The right-winger who wants a career in academia
58:00 Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? by Harry Lewis, https://www.amazon.com/Excellence-Without-Soul-Harry-Lewis/dp/1586485016
1:06:00 Nathan Cofnas’s critique of woke
1:08:00 Critiquing women in law enforcement, fire fighting, and the military
1:12:00 Prof. Thomas Powers’ recent book on civil rights politics deemed ‘the definitive study, https://www.carthage.edu/live/news/51009-prof-thomas-powers-recent-book-on-civil-rights
1:14:00 Israel judicial reform, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform
1:22:00 Donald Trump is a race realist
1:23:30 Steve Sailer
1:24:34 Leo Strauss
1:30:00 Paleocons vs Straussians
1:51:00 Gadi Taub, https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/israel-update
1:52:00 Caroline Glick, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Glick
1:54:00 Meir Kahane, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meir_Kahane
1:50:00 United States Semiquincentennial, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Semiquincentennial
2:02:00 Historicism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
2:04:00 Walther Rathenau, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau
2:05:00 Exodus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus
2:08:00 Who wrote the Torah? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah
2:11:00 Nehemia Gordon, https://carm.org/preachers-and-teachers/nehemia-gordon/
https://x.com/mskochin
https://telaviv.academia.edu/MichaelKochin
https://americanmind.org/salvo/reforming-the-national-security-state/
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-crisis-of-the-managerial-state/
An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States, https://www.amazon.com/Independent-Empire-Diplomacy-Making-United-ebook/dp/B082T3MYJD/
Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art, https://www.amazon.com/Five-Chapters-Rhetoric-Character-Nothing-ebook/dp/B017EUAR4C/

Michael Kochin and Michael Taylor write:

* You are alone. You are exhausted, bruised and battered. You have no real friends and you are surrounded by enemies. You have no money to pay your bills, and you have scarcely the means to defend yourself. You have no sure way to put your house in order, but you have built this house in a vast wilderness of mountains, rivers, forests, jungle, and desert. This is no country for old men, no country for young republics. In 1781, at the moment of the British surrender at Yorktown, this was the situation of the United States of America. Victory in the Revolutionary War did not bring glory—freedom did not mean safety. One false step and this ambitious experiment in republican government would fail forever. So just how, not even fifty years later, had the United States become the undisputed master of North America and the self-proclaimed guardian of the Western Hemisphere?

The transformation of a string of rebellious colonies along the eastern seaboard into a military superpower is the most remarkable story of modern political history. Yet this rapid ascension was not the manifest destiny of the United States—there was nothing naturally ‘great’ about the new republic. Time and again, the United States came close
to disaster. What if Benjamin Franklin had not brought the French into the Revolutionary War? What if the Federalists had not forced through a constitution that could bind thirteen states into the Union? What if ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne had started a war with the British in Ohio in 1794? Or if the British had re-taken New Orleans in 1815?

The Founding Fathers had no safety net. They had no reputation either, for Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson played only supporting roles on the global stage. At every turn, they were faced with problems that spelled life or death for the United States. Somehow, the Americans got it right. How did they do it? They asked the right questions about foreign affairs, the military, taxes, and trade. With skill, wisdom, experience, and no little luck, they found the right answers too.

* the United States sought to avoid open war with the British, French, and Spanish.

* the transformation of thirteen British colonies into the United States of America, and then into one of the great powers of the world, is the most remarkable story in modern political history.

* “We have not Men fit for the Times,” wrote John Adams [in 1776]. “We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Travel, in Fortune—in every Thing. I feel unutterable Anxiety.” Nevertheless, despite Adams’s pessimism, these “United States of America”—a term first coined by Jefferson in June 1776—quickly became what George III feared, “an independent empire.” By 1826, after only five decades of independence, the American Union had become the imperial master of much of North America and the self-proclaimed guardian
of the Western Hemisphere.

Diplomacy and war were essential to the creation and the survival of the United States. It was only with foreign assistance that the Revolutionary War was won. Even when independence was secured in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris, the new republic was surrounded by European colonies and hostile forces. To the north, smarting from their recent defeat, were the British in Canada. To the south, governing the Gulf of Mexico, was Spanish Florida. To the west were Native American tribes and Spanish Louisiana, which controlled the vital conduit of the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans.

* the American economy had been designed to supply the British Empire. American diplomats urgently needed to negotiate better access to British markets, to make deals with other European nations, and even to arrange the protection of American shipping from the pirates of the West Indies and North Africa.

* If the fifteenth century belonged to the Portuguese and the sixteenth to the Spanish, and if the seventeenth century was defined by la gloire of the Sun King, Louis XIV, it was in the long eighteenth century that Great Britain emerged as a global force.

* The Stamp Act also provoked the rancor of a more sophisticated constituency. By taxing printed materials such as newspapers and legal documents, it directly affected the journalists and lawyers who were best placed to articulate colonial discontent. One such lawyer was John Adams, a bustling attorney in the provincial town of Braintree, Massachusetts.

* In these, the early years of the Revolutionary War, the American situation was perilous. Foreign aid was needed desperately, but the two most likely Samaritans were the French and the Spanish, whom the Americans, due to their British history, had long regarded as natural enemies. Even with the cord to London cut, the Protestant, republican Americans still feared and hated the Catholic absolutism of these European monarchies.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/26/trump-gaza-ai-video-israel-hamas-war
https://www.reuters.com/legal/straight-womans-reverse-discrimination-case-goes-us-supreme-court-2025-02-26/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/25/ohio-discrimination-marlean-ames-supreme-court/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/scotus-hear-straight-womans-discrimination-case-could-reshape-employment-law
https://www.thefp.com/p/christopher-caldwell-dei-trump-executive-order
Christopher Caldwell writes:

Now Trump has done what Reagan would not. His repeal came via three executive orders, two issued on Inauguration Day. The first overturned dozens of Biden decrees, including the “Advancing Racial Equity” executive order signed in the first hours of his presidency in 2021. The second ended all initiatives, offices, contracts, and employees connected to DEI, which Trump referred to as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
The decisive blow came the following day. In an order called “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” Trump repealed a variety of executive orders, including 11246, and explicitly barred the OFCCP from enforcing affirmative action. And his Office of Personnel Management followed through on the previous day’s business, ordering that all DEI federal employees be sent home, all DEI federal contracts be terminated, and all efforts to pursue federal DEI programs under another name be rooted out.
RIP affirmative action.
But that is only part of the story. A curious element of Trump’s third executive order is its invocation of the president’s “solemn duty” to enforce “longstanding Federal civil-rights laws,” mentioning the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is not a concession. It’s a threat.
While the Civil Rights Act mentioned “affirmative action” it attached no specific meaning to the term, and the law was resolutely color-blind. Affirmative action programs, with their differing treatment of races, are in tension with it. DEI programs, many of which scapegoat white people, are even more so. It is Trump’s assertion that DEI programs “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws.” Trump is doing more than reforming the public sector. He is signaling to the private sector that certain kinds of programs are liable to prosecution, even asking each federal agency to name up to nine large private-sector organizations that might be engaged in discrimination.

01:00 FA: The World Trump Wants, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-trump-wants-michael-kimmage
17:00 The Deep State, rogue intelligence officers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwDDj-9UtY0
25:00 NYT: The Election Just Ended and We Already Have a New Michael Wolff Book
In “All or Nothing,” the Trump biographer shows that he is his favorite subject’s perfect twin., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/books/review/all-or-nothing-michael-wolff.html
29:00 Where’s the coverage of Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles nor any process stories?
32:15 What’s the future of MSNBC?
34:45 FDR’s attempt at DOGE
37:45 Jesse Waters
44:00 Politico: Trump allies circulate mass deportation plan calling for ‘processing camps’ and a private citizen ‘army’, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/25/documents-military-contractors-mass-deportations-022648
50:00 Whither MSNBC? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5q5sj8CsLs
52:00 Perhaps most egregious liberal media bias is to hire left-wing people who hate Trump to cover the news media
1:01:00 WP: Weight-loss drugs aren’t just slimming waists. They’re shifting the economy., https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/23/ozempic-wegovy-change-life-spending/
1:13:00 WP: Her claim of anti-straight bias could upend discrimination law
The Supreme Court will hear a case that could unleash a wave of workplace bias claims by Whites, men and people who are straight., https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/25/ohio-discrimination-marlean-ames-supreme-court/
1:23:00 Hollywood gay mafia, https://www.lukeford.net/essays/contents/homo_mafia.htm
1:32:30 Trump’s Wrecking Ball, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ahz6GfcCfI