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Michael Walsh joined Seth and me today to discuss the civil war on the Right. As an observer of and participant in elections going back to Eisenhower, Walsh notes that the most vehement opposition to Donald Trump comes from conservatives under 50 - people whose first vote was for George H.W. Bush.  He posits that younger conservatives don't know the source of their inheritance and wrongly think it can easily be won back if Hillary wins.  It can't and Walsh explains why.  

Dr. R.R. Reno joins us for a fascinating discussion "Resurrecting A Christian Society" his new book.  Reno is a deep thinker with a unique perspective that is Christian, pluralistic, and distinctly American.  This is one of our best interviews ever. A deep dive into what a Christian society is, how it benefits everyone regardless of faith, and what we can do to get it back. 

The Progressive project has ever been to replace the written constitution with rule by self-proclaimed experts.  The American Right has resisted this believing that the only legitimate basis for government is the consent of the governed and that the will of the people acting their constitutional majority must be respected. While imperfect it is the natural right of people to rule themselves and they are more likely to come to better decisions than an unaccountable elite. Unfortunately, the Tory wing of the American Right has bought into the Progressive notion and has acted in concert with the Left to empower an unaccountable bureaucracy with lawmaking power not contemplated by the Constitution.  Julie Ponzi joins me to offer a full throated defense of the rights and prerogatives of the sovereign people. 

Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College joins me today to discuss the present crisis of the West.  Not so long ago, external enemies in the form of international communism posed an existential threat to American Constitutional government, but today our challenges are closer to home, though they share common lineage in the writing of Marx and Hegel.  The bipartisan ruling class here and in Western Europe is turning its collective back on both the form and the substance of free government - defying the natural right of the people to be their own sovereign in their constitutional majority. Dr. Arnn explains the American crisis with a practical wisdom and breadth and depth of learning far too rare in our present age.  

We've been talking about the death of Reaganism but not as a negative, as an opportunity for conservatives to move beyond meaningless nostalgia and reassert the people's right to rule through constitutional means against the rising tide of the administrative state empowered by ruling class disdain for voters as being too ignorant or stupid to rule.   Reagan biographer, Professor Steve Hayward of of the University of California, Berkeley, joins us to discuss how we can learn from Reagan's statesmanship and practical wisdom without trying to mindlessly mimic all of his policy decisions which were necessarily the product of their time.  

Donald Trump exposed a split within the the Republican Party that precious few people seemed to know was there.  A small, but noisy faction led by most of the Party's intellectuals seems to have become unmoored from their own American roots.  They identify more with an amorphous conservative ideology than with American conservatism - a philosophy of government that links timeless principles to the this particular people and this particular place and seeks the best form of government in reality rather than a fanciful city in speech, to use Plato's phrase.  

I wrote a piece for American Greatness (www.amgreatness.com) titled Death of the Reagan Revolution.  Seth and I discuss the greatness of Reagan but also the necessity of moving on to a politics that is more timely and relevant to the issues facing the country today. Of course any politics worth its name must be grounded in the timeless principles of natural right and must protect and defend the American people, but this year has shown decisively that it is past time to move on from the politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s.   The term Reaganism has been tortured beyond recognition which does a disservice to Reagan's real legacy and to the pressing needs of the country today.  But what comes next?  We discuss the possibilities for the country. 

Dr. Wayne Grudem is an evangelical Christian & professor of Systematic Theology at Phoenix Seminary.  A former supporter of Marco Rubio, Grudem argues in a powerful new essay directed at wary Christians that far from being a choice between the lesser of evils, that voting for Donald Trump is morally good.  His argument is deep, thoughtful, and sensitive to the concerns of faithful Christians.  Our discussion was insightful both regarding this election and for politics more generally.  

I am joined today by Ben Boychuk my friend and colleague at American Greatness (www.amgreatness.com) where Ben is Managing Editor.  Ben and I discuss where movement conservatism has failed and how to build a better, more relevant, and more American conservative movement that will can win elections. 

Heather MacDonald a scholar at the Manhattan Institute joins us to discuss her new - and timely book, the War on Cops.  In light of recent events including the cop killings in Dallas and additional anti-cop violence across the country in places like St. Louis, Georgia, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Tennessee, Phoenix and many other places MacDonald's work has never been more timely. Among other things she points out that the attacks on cops by groups like Black Lives Matter harm the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society as cops restrained from protecting them in their own neighborhoods which are the most dangerous.  

FBI Director James Comey declined to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton despite delivering a speech that describes in detail the laws she broke and lies she told to cover it up.  Dick Morris joins me to help explain why. 

Over the past week we have seen Black Lives Matter protests turn violent in cities across the country.  In Phoenix a mob hurled rocks and bricks at police.  In Minneapolis they used molotov cocktails.  5 cops were murdered at a BLM rally in Dallas and others were shot at in cities like St. Louis and San Antonio.  Such violence, orchestrated by organizations for whom the delegitimization of the police and our political institutions has been a multi-decade project threatens chaos which strikes at the pillars of civil society.  They do it to gain political power through threats and intimidation rather than at the ballot box and through the people's elected representatives.  This is a threat to free government that well meaning people must counter.  

The gap between rich and poor exists but it's not what the Left thinks it is. Instead global elites - the very rich - have allied themselves with the very poor in order gain political and economic power at the expense of the broad middle class in the United States and Western Europe.  Brexit represents a break from a generational string of victories by the elites that have steadily eroded the sovereignty of the people.  And the elites are not happy.  We explain how this situation developed and why the middle class must fight to restore political power to the people.  

Robert Spencer is one of America's foremost authorities on radical Islam and the sharia supremacist movement.  He joins me today for a discussion of the movement and the ideology that motivates it.  He describes in detail how domestic terror is one of their tools - and not even the most potent one.  Terror gets the headlines but the sharia supremacists have become masters at wielding soft power. 

The Orlando shooter was born in New York.  He was an American citizen, the son of an Afghan immigrant.  He swore allegiance to ISIS as an adult and worked for nearly 10 years as a Department of Homeland Security contractor.  His story is a cautionary tale for this country as it faces a growing threat from homegrown terrorism.  Andrew McCarthy, one of the country's foremost experts on radical Islam, joins me to explain the threat.   

We look at the cognitive dissonance still afflicting conservative intellectuals and we offer a tribute on the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion to liberate Europe.  

Some disgruntled conservatives and neoconservatives are looking for options beyond the Republican Party.  The Libertarian Party has been taken over by people with more in common with Bernie Sanders than Ronald Reagan and Bill Kristol's Renegade Party looks more like a Clinton Campaign dirty trick than a real political party. 

Lauren Southern of The Rebel joins us today to discuss the free speech wars. She's on the front line.  Lauren is a Canadian and is battling a law likely to go into effect that can put people in jail for 2 years for offending someone's "gender identity" with their speech.  Lauren also just battled Facebook after they banned her sharing a post critical of Facebook's apparent policy of censoring conservatives.  

One of the main strands of American Conservatism has been the so-called paleoconservatives or traditionalists.  These were the conservatives and the mainstream of the GOP until the mid-1960s.  And they still represent one of the 4 groups in the conservative coalition.  We look at who they are and what they believe. 

The terms "true conservative" and "Constitutional conservative" have been thrown around a lot this year - as if American conservatism has ever been 1 thing.  It's not.  There have been several major strands of conservative thought in the post-war era and there still are.  But today's pundits don't know their history and that ignorance leads them to bad decisions based on false premises. So we're going to educate them.  Today we answer the question: who are the neoconservatives and what do they believe?  What are their distinctives?  The answer starts in the 1930s at City College New York but we'll bring it all the way up to the current day.  By the end of today's show you'll know more - way more - than the pundits.