Presidential Debate: Buckley Fellows Debate Trump or Harris

10/22/24 • 58 min

Pod and Man at Yale hosted its first ever presidential debate! Two teams of two Buckley Fellows each made the case for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump respectively to be the next president of the United States. Will Wang ’26 and Felix Leonhardt ’26 argued for supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Manu Anpalagan ’26 and Owen Tilman ’27 took the trump side of the debate.

Check it out before you cast your vote!

Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.
Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Check it out before you cast your vote!

Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.
Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Previous Episode

"The makings of another world war”–Buckley Students Sound Off on Foreign Policy; Hillsdale's Paul Rahe on Repeating the Mistakes of WW1

In this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Arav Dalwani ’26 and John Matthews-Ederington ’27 talk about the state of world politics, covering the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

Matthews-Ederington: “A lot of the failure of October 7th was an intelligence failure on Israel’s part.”
Dalwani: “The world is on fire in my opinion... The world is in a much more precarious position than it was four or five years ago.”
Matthews-Ederington: “Whenever you’re talking about nuclear weapons, you should always say yes, there’s a possibility that that’s going to happen.”
Dalwani: “I think [the two-state solution] is much more unrealistic and I think that’s because of two reasons. One, obviously is the conflict that’s happened with Hamas. But the second thing I think that the Palestinian National Authority... is much more unlikely to accept a peace deal.”

For the expert interview, 2024 Donald Kagan Memorial Lecturer and Hilldale College Professor Paul Rahe looks at American foreign policy since the Cold War and how repeating the mistakes of post-World War I international relations is putting America on the path to another world war:

Rahe: “And for 30 years, we acted, and we still continue to act to some extent, as if a utopia had been created that made war impossible.”
Rahe: “What you’ve got is the makings of another world war.”
Rahe: “Richard Nixon has been sort of demonized and he certainly did some foolish things but if you look at his conduct of foreign policy, it was brilliant. He laid the foundation for the end of the Cold War by driving a wedge between China and Russia.”
Rahe: “What the Russians did in 2014 was breach is breach that agreement. Why did they do it? They did it because they could. And they did it as a way of humiliating us and humiliating NATO.”

Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.
Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Next Episode

undefined - “The Larva Stage of a Death Cult”: Students on Campus Protest Report and Institutional Neutrality; Yale Law Prof. Keith Whittington on Yale’s New Comment Guidelines

“The Larva Stage of a Death Cult”: Students on Campus Protest Report and Institutional Neutrality; Yale Law Prof. Keith Whittington on Yale’s New Comment Guidelines

Arianne de Gennaro ’25 and Owen Tilman ’27 join Pod and Man at Yale to talk about institutional neutrality and how Yale handles free speech. They then look at the Congressional report on Yale’s handling of Gaza protests:

Tilman: “I think it’s pretty extraordinary that the free speech conversation on Yale’s campus in the past year has become, is it genocidal to shout ‘from the river to the sea?’ And then say, it depends on the context... The double standard is insane.”
De Gennaro: “All of a sudden we care about free speech? What it seems like to me is that we’re protecting speech that we deem to be correct or valuable. Which is basically saying, I’m right so my side gets to speak.”
De Gennaro: “I don’t really understand how people can expect to break the law and then not have any consequences. Why? Because their cause is just? We’re not living in a superhero movie.”
Tilman: “What I saw in Beinecke Plaza was nothing short of the larva stage of a death cult.”

Yale Law School Professor Keith Whittington talks about institutional neutrality and why he’s optimistic about Yale’s new public comment guidelines:

Whittington: “We hear [different ideas] out and then we try to engage with them. And if we can’t do that, then I don’t know what we’re bothering doing on university campuses at all.”
Whittington: “What we have found for decades of research on this is that if you ask people do they care about free speech, do they value free speech, left, right, and center, young and old, they tend to say, yes they care.”
Whittington: “If you’re going to go out picking fights in political arenas, you should not be surprised if your opposition decides to fight back. And ultimately, universities are going to lose that fight.”
Whittington: “Among the battles we should not be picking is how do we make symbolic statements that accomplish no particular purposes except to anger people that we disagree with and make the people who agree with us feel better.”

Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.
Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst