Hoover Institution Talks, Retreats, and Events

On April 11, 2018, the Hoover Institution hosted a panel on female genital mutilation featuring Mary Wambui, the founder and director of Shelter Children’s Rehabilitation Center in Ngong, Kenya, along with Research Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Titled “The Human Rights Violation of Women that Rarely Gets Discussed,” the event illuminated not only the great harm caused by female genital mutilation but also its shocking extent. The discussion drew on the experience of Wambui and Hirsi Ali not only as advocates against the practice, but as victims of female genital mutilation themselves. The event was organized by Christie Skinner-Gilligan, wife of Hoover director Tom Gilligan, who has been a longtime friend and supporter of Wambui after meeting her during a mission trip to Kenya. Skinner-Gilligan invited Wambui to visit Hoover following a presentation on female genital mutilation before the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The discussion was moderated by Hoover research fellow Alice Hill, formerly senior counselor to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and founder of the internationally recognized Blue Campaign to combat human trafficking.

The Hoover Institution hosted "Scalia Speaks: Collecting the Wit and Wisdom of Justice Antonin Scalia" on Tuesday, October 10, 2017 from 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST. In all of American history, few judges rival the late Justice Antonin Scalia's abilities as a writer. When he passed away last year, he left behind an immense legacy of judicial opinions, journal articles, essays, and other writings. But in addition to his voluminous published works, Justice Scalia also delivered countless speeches on the law, on life, on faith, and on his friends. Any library of Scalia's writings, limited to just his published judicial opinions and articles, would be incomplete without the speeches that he delivered to audiences fortunate enough to witness in person. To fill the gap, we now also have Scalia Speaks, a collection of many of Scalia's speeches. Edited by Christopher J. Scalia, one of the justice's sons, and Edward Whelan, one of the justice's former clerks, this book collects Scalia's reflections on law, faith, and life well lived. Christopher J. Scalia, the eighth of Justice Scalia's nine children and a former professor of English, works at a public relations firm near Washington, D.C. His book reviews and political commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and elsewhere. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former law clerk to Justice Scalia. He is a leading commentator on the Supreme Court and on issues of constitutional law. They were interviewed by Adam White, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and executive director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls for decoupling political aims from the religion of Islam to combat growing radicalism. She also discusses counterterrorism strategy, which she argues should focus on battling the ideas that spread radicalism rather than the radicals themselves.

Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson offers his take on President Trump’s first hundred days, discussing the president’s policy and international impact in the wake of the Obama years, as well as Trump’s complicated relationship with the Republican Party.

Hoover Institution fellow Michael Mcconnell discusses the interplay between the rule of law and human nature in our legal system and how it affects the independence of our legal institutions.

Based on his new Hoover Institution Press book, Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive? co-authored with his longtime Pepperdine colleague Gordon Lloyd, David Davenport discusses our unique brand of individualism that dates back to the American founding. Davenport begins with the articulation of American individualism in the Declaration of Independence, following it through its safeguarding in the US Constitution, its flourishing in westward expansion, and its declining in the face of progressive ideology and New Deal politics. He also discusses the ebbs and flows of our “rugged individualism” through the decades since, from the great society to the Reagan revolution, as well as Herbert Hoover’s role as one of that philosophy’s most ardent champions.

The international security climate may be volatile, but according to Research Fellow Kori Schake the most serious threat to the United States is domestic policy failure. Drawing on her work with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and former commander of the US Strategic Command James O. Ellis Jr. in the Blueprint for America project, Schake explains a number of key insights for strengthening the domestic institutions and policies underlying US national security strategy. After turning outward to explore what she and her Blueprint coauthors identify as the most serious external threats to US security, Schake closes by identifying a new challenge to cohesive strategy that is emerging in 2017: lack of consensus within the Trump cabinet and between the new administration and Congress.

Two days before the presidential inauguration, we took a look at the contentious relationship between Donald Trump and California. In addition, we analyzed a Hoover Golden State Poll that gauged Californians’ attitudes toward various aspects of the Trump agenda: immigration, Obamacare repeal, tax reform. Finally, as California braces for another round of storms, we look at the politics of water in 2017.

Hillary Clinton got close to the same number of votes as Barack Obama in 2012 yet lost. How’d that happen? With the 2016 American election settled, will the populist uprising carry over into 2017 when Europeans go to the polls?

With the returns in and the presidency decided, we discuss why the polls didn’t get it right in 2016. How much criticism does the polling industry deserve, or was it just one more victim of one of the most unpredictable elections in American history?

Among presidential exponents of American exceptionalism, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan are in a class by themselves. In his talk George H. Nash discusses the experiences underlying Herbert Hoover’s prescient conviction that the social, economic, and political institutions of the United States were superior to the collectivist systems that were then sweeping the globe. Annelise Anderson explains Ronald Reagan’s vision of the United States as a “city on a hill,” and how that vision guided his foreign and domestic policy.

With less than a week to go until Election Day, a conversation about what the polls are suggesting in the way of the late-breaking voters and predictions on who’ll be the next president and which party will control the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Constitutional safeguards help protect the United States from bad governance, regardless of who holds office. Those safeguards are predicated, however, on civil, electoral, and educational institutions, all of which are eroding as the result of troubling domestic trends. Our constitutional system and overall political health depend on the reinvigoration of those institutions and restoring our nation’s commitment to classical liberal values.

The current international political order, maintained largely through the United States’ exertion of soft power on the world stage, doesn’t simply benefit our allies; it crucially supports our own interests. The alternative to US dominance is a framework of international rules and norms determined by other powerful states. Schake argues that we should strengthen, not abandon, the institutions and alliances that uphold the current international order and maintain the exemplary status of our domestic institutions in the international community.

The United States’ unique position in the international order is not preordained. Instead, according to Victor Davis Hanson, it is the result of unique demographic, economic, political, and educational characteristics. As these strengths diminish, so too does our status as a world power. To reverse this trend, we must restore our confidence in the exceptionalism of American institutions.

The rule of law is the legal cornerstone of the United States’ economic prosperity and political freedom. Yet the deviation of US law from transparency, equality, and impartiality threatens to unravel a fundamental institution that took centuries to build. Threats to the rule of law should be taken seriously, but potential intellectual and political reforms, and the American electorate’s visible determination to address our political and economic troubles, are cause for optimism.

The latest Hoover Institution/Lane Center Golden State Poll reveals the state of the presidential and US Senate races in California. A discussion about how changing generational sensibilities are affecting initiative battles over marijuana legalization, repealing the death penalty, and extending a tax on the wealthiest Californians.

With twelve days remaining to the election, a conversation about the art and science of polling–with the numbers showing Hillary Clinton in the lead in a race that’s tighter than it was a week ago--and why the notion that polls are rigged or unfairly weighted to one side’s advantage just doesn’t hold up.

The aftermath of the second of the three presidential debates: what the data is telling us about the state of the race. Is the contest over after Trump’s bad run of stories; should Hillary Clinton start measuring the Oval Office drapes?

On the eve of the second presidential debate, we look at why Hillary Clinton has taken a lead over Donald Trump since their first onstage encounter. With various polls showing differences in the size and scope of the gender gap, we examine what the candidates have to address in Sunday’s debate and what constituencies they need to bolster.