Category Archive: Reflection

Firing Line Debate on Brexit: James Kirchick and Dr. Nile Gardiner

On Tuesday, October 3rd, the Buckley Program hosted a Firing Line Debate on Brexit with James Kirchick and Dr. Nile Gardiner. James Kirchick, of the Brookings Institution, is the author of The End of Europe. Dr. Nile Gardiner, of the Heritage Foundation, is a former aid to Lady Thatcher. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity. 

By: Kevin Olteanu

Kevin: Thank you so much for being here. I have a couple of questions on Brexit. The first question is: was Brexit a good idea in your opinion and why?

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Reflection on event with Dr. Veuger, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

By: Blake Dixon

Last week, Dr. Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute and Ms. Rachel West of the Center for American Progress engaged in a spirited debate before members of the Yale community. The debate centered on the proper role for minimum wages in the labor market. As a Buckley Fellow, I was given the chance to sit down and speak with Dr. Stan Veuger before the debate commenced. For anyone interested in wage policy, his comments deserve thoughtful consideration.

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Reflection on event with Charlie Spies, former counsel to the Romney Campaign

Charles Spies, campaign finance lawyer and co-founder of the Pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC, came to speak at an event jointly hosted by the Buckley Program and The Politic magazine on November 28th, 2016. 

By: Zach Young

I enjoyed getting the chance to hear Charlie Spies, former counsel to the Romney Campaign, discuss issues about the influence of political donations on the electoral process. Notably, this recent election cycle showed backlash on both sides of the aisle against super PACs donations, with Senator Bernie Sanders and businessman Donald Trump turning their lack of financial backing into talking points during primaries against Secretary Hillary Clinton and Governor Jeb Bush, respectively. Mr. Spies, himself co-founder of the largest super PAC in history, took an oppositional stance to Mr. Trump during the primary. Although Mr. Trump’s campaign eventually spent around a half-billion dollars on the general election, less than half of what Secretary Clinton spent, he still managed to achieve victory with a considerable lead in the Electoral College. Does this mean, in some ways, we have departed from a “Cash is King” era of politics?

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A Reflection on Peter Collier’s Seminar

Overview

Last Friday the Buckley Program welcomed Peter Collier to campus to speak with fourteen Buckley fellows over a lunch at Mory’s. Mr. Collier was invited by the Buckley Program to talk about his book Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick but provided many interesting insights regarding the modern day political spectrum.

Mr. Collier began by giving a short history of Jeane Kirkpatrick and the political landscape that brought her and Ronald Reagan into contact. When Reagan was the Republican nominee in 1980, Kirkpatrick, a born and bred Democrat, was invited to work for Reagan after he read a piece she wrote regarding the double standard of dictatorships. However, Mr. Collier said that once Kirkpatrick and Reagan were in the same room, talking about foreign policy, they instantly clicked; “love at first sight,” he chuckled.

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Reflections on Christina Hoff Sommers

The Buckley Program’s recent guest speaker, Christina Hoff Sommers, gave a lecture on her vision for “freedom” feminism, and sparked an important conversation around campus about feminism and women’s rights. In the hopes of providing a small snapshot of this reaction, The Beacon features both an opinion piece of a current Buckley fellow, Karina Kovalcik, and an official statement issued by the Yale Women’s Center. It is our hope that these two responses foster additional discussion and reflection.

Opinion Piece by Karina Kovalcik

On Thursday night, Christina Hoff Sommers came to Yale’s campus and gave a talk on modern-day feminism. Since Yale is a breeding ground for motivated, driven, and strong, independent women, a feminist coming to give a talk doesn’t seem that out of place. However, this event was not a typical talk on feminism, and Christina Hoff Sommers is not your typical feminist (on the surface anyway).

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On the Poverty Conference: Part II

This is the second post in a three part series aimed at summarizing some of the arguments made at Notre Dame during the Center for Ethics and Culture’s 15th annual conference, this year on poverty. You can read my first post here. In the following post, I’d like to elaborate on the ways in which we are all called in our own vocations to participate in solutions to material and spiritual poverty.

On Healthcare

The first breakout session I attended was a panel of medical doctors moderated by bioethics professor William Hurlbut of Stanford University. Each doctor gave insight into the ways the medical field is uniquely challenged with questions of poverty and how doctors should work to reform the system.

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