If you follow news out of Israel these days—and who doesn’t?—you may have caught the story early this week that Israel’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that the government may not exempt the haredim (Israel’s ultra-orthodox community) from military service. The ruling went further, though, than just ending an exemption from service: the court ruled that government funding must be cut off from any yeshivas (schools) that do not comply with the ruling.

Aside from the legal reasoning behind this ruling is the larger question of the continuing arrogation of power by Israel’s high court. Last month John Yoo and Steve Hayward, overseas for a conference on international law, sat with with Simcha Rothman, a senior member of the Knesset who, as chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, has been deeply involved with proposals to reform and rein in the runaway judiciary. This controversy was roiling Israeli politics last year until the events of October 7 put it on the back burner, but we think Americans will be surprised to learn more about the peculiar circumstances of Israeli’s judiciary. If you think America’s judiciary can be activist and unaccountable, just wait till you hear from Simcha.

The Three Whisky Happy Hour bartenders are finally back in the same time zone, and Lucretia fills in Steve and John about what happened while they were away partying in Europe. We mostly skip over doting on Biden’s dotage, and take up Jed Rubenfeld’s argument that Trump isn’t technically a “convicted felon” yet, and might have strong case for immediate relief from the Supreme Court.

We finally have a long-postponed update on the situation in Ukraine, where there have been a number of developments over the last two weeks that make the war more volatile. The French are sending in troops (‘advisers,’ but that sounds too familiar), while we have apparently greenlit Ukraine to attack inside Russian with our weapons—so long as we approve the targets. What could go wrong? (And why is Hungary opposing the NATO position on Ukraine? Not for the reasons you read in the American media. . .)

BUDAPEST, June 5: This Sunday the member states of the European Union will be going to the polls to elect their members of the European Parliament. I don’t exactly know just what the European Parliament does either, and it has become boring viewing ever since Nigel Farage departed the European Parliament after Brexit. But there is intense campaigning underway. The streets of Budapest are lined with campaign posters, and there was a campaign march last Saturday with tens of thousands turning out.

Most of the polls suggest that right-of-center “populist” parties are likely to see the largest gains in this round of elections, though likely not large enough to command a coalition majority, but we’ll have to see.

Lucretia hosts this episode from her bunker in an undisclosed bunker in the desert southwest while Steve and John are still galavanting over in Europe. And as hinted in a Power Line post, she is thermo-nuclear furious about the Trump verdict.

Rather than rehash the details of the case, which everyone has picked over thoroughly by this point, the whisky bar considers what at means, and what may or should happen next. Lucretia thinks the American republica died on May 30 (USA, 1776 to May 30, 2024, RIP), while Steve thinks this is another dismal turning point comparable to the way the demagogic attack on Robert Bork in 1987 poisoned and embittered our judicial politics ever since. The connecting thread between the two: Joe Biden, who may be the single-most destructive figure in American politics in the last 50 years—worse even than Obama, who was at least subtle in his contempt for the United States. It was Biden who gave in to the progressive left over Bork in 1987, and now giving in to the progressive left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome and warping our legal order.

This classic format episode features Steve in a one-on-one conversation with with Jeremy Carl, author of a dynamite (almost literally) new book entitled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. Jeremy commits heresy in this book, offerng statistics that you aren’t supposed to mention, and truths that, in an earlier age, might have got you burned at the stake. In publishing this book Jeremy joins the ranks of fellow brave souls such as Heather Mac Donald, Steve Sailer, Zach Goldberg, and a handful of others who do not shrink from challenging the enforced orthodoxy that approves of anti-white discrimination and scapegoating.

It is, Jeremy rightly notes, a formula that if continued much longer will divide the nation so badly that we won’t be able to live together. He thinks the old fashioned principle of basic human equality rightly understood, and old ethic of the “melting pot” that brought together different ethnicities into a common citizenship and shared national identity needs to be restored, and soon. He offers some suggestions, some difficult, some happily already starting to happen. One good sign: the book is getting a lot of attention. Maybe the ice is finally breaking.

There was a lot of listener and reader interest in our too brief comments on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in our last episode, and we realized this issue deserved keeping the whisky bar open after the usual 2 am closing time to extend our treatment of the issue, yielding this short special episode.

To recap: Lucretia thinks it is a stupid idea (hence, “Don’t murder a man who is committing suicide“), while John thought it was also unsound on basic free speech principles. Steve was, naturally, in the middle, ending up as road kill for his analysis of why Republicans thought there were some political mischief to be made.

Today is May Day, but also the Victims of Communism Memorial Day, and as such today is the prefect days for this classic-hybrid format podcast, featuring Steve Hayward in a conversation with Elizabeth Spalding, chair of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. (Elizabeth is also Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and Visiting Fellow at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College.)

The Foundation has opened the Victims of Communism Museum in downtown Washington DC, and you should put it on your itinerary for your next visit to the nation’s capital.

We’re going up a day earlier than usual this week, partly because our constantly irregular travel schedules complicated things again, but more importantly to be timely, as John, Steve, and Lucretia have LOTS of thoughts on the Supreme Court argument Thursday about whether ex-presidents should enjoy broad immunity for any or all acts they took while in office. Steve and Lucretia think the president does, while John thinks textual support for the proposition is lacking. Steve and Lucretia respond with an appeal to first principles, and enlist as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield, because of his unique book on the inherent ambivalence of executive power even in a constitutional republic, Taming the Prince. As usual, we fought to a draw.

Our second subject is the ongoing Kristalnacht on campus. There’s not much new to say except to calibrate how cowardly university administrators continue to be, and note that even some liberals, like George Packer in The Atlantic (who provides our article of the week, “The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education“) are starting to figure out what conservatives have known about higher education for two generations now. It’s as if no one ever bothered to notice Closing of the American Mind.