A Soho Forum Discussion of COVID with Tom Woods

04/26/24 • 93 min

Important Update from The Soho Forum: "[We regret] to inform you of a significant change to tonight's debate between Brent Orrell and Tom Woods. Unfortunately, Brent Orrell will not be able to participate as his granddaughter tragically passed away over the weekend. Our hearts go out to Brent and his family during this difficult time. In light of this, we've made adjustments to the event to ensure it can still proceed. Our director Gene Epstein will read, word-for-word, the script that Brent prepared, along with the slides Brent submitted. Tom Woods will then make his case for the negative. In lieu of an Oxford-style before/after voting, we will extend the Q&A portion and conclude the program with a 5-mins summation from Tom Woods."

The originally scheduled event was as follows:

Brent Orrell of the American Enterprise Institute and podcaster and author Tom Woods debate the resolution, "Government-imposed restrictions during the Covid pandemic were prudent and essential."

Taking the affirmative is Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on job training, work force development, and criminal justice reform. Orrell has over 20 years of experience in the executive and legislative branches of government and was nominated by President George W. Bush to lead the Employment and Training Administration at the U.S. Department of Labor. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote extensively on the impact of the disease on working conditions and the role of social distancing policies and practices in protecting worker and public health.

Taking the negative is Tom Woods, the host of The Tom Woods Show and author of 13 books, including latest Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania. He won the $50,000 first-place prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards for his book The Church and the Market and was the winner of the 2019 Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award, given in Vienna by the Hayek Institute and the Austrian Economics Center.

The post A Soho Forum Discussion of COVID with Tom Woods appeared first on Reason.com.

The originally scheduled event was as follows:

Brent Orrell of the American Enterprise Institute and podcaster and author Tom Woods debate the resolution, "Government-imposed restrictions during the Covid pandemic were prudent and essential."

The post A Soho Forum Discussion of COVID with Tom Woods appeared first on Reason.com.

Previous Episode

Did Capitalism Fail During the Pandemic?

Joe Nocera of The Free Press and Gene Epstein of The Soho Forum debate the resolution, "Capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic."

Taking the affirmative is Nocera, a columnist for The Free Press and co-author (with Bethany McLean) of The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. His business journalism has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Bloomberg, and The New York Times.

Arguing against the resolution is Epstein, the executive director of the Soho Forum. He is the former economics and books editor of Barron's, a position he left in January 2018 after a 26-year stint. He frequently appears on libertarian podcasts, especially The Tom Woods Show.

The post Did Capitalism Fail During the Pandemic? appeared first on Reason.com.

Next Episode

Glenn Greenwald and Alan Dershowitz Debate Bombing Iran

Professor and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald debate the resolution, "The U.S. should strike Iran's nuclear facilities."

Taking the affirmative is Dershowitz, an American lawyer and law professor known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. He is the author of several books about politics and the law, including The Case for Israel and The Case for Peace. His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump, and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo. In January 2020, he joined President Donald Trump's legal team as Trump was being tried on impeachment charges in the Senate. He is a strong supporter of Israel but self-identifies as both "pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli."

Taking the negative is Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer, investigative journalist, and best-selling author. Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America's top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald has won the highest awards in journalism, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the revelations surrounding the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden.

This debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:06 Dershowitz's Opening Statement
00:19:43 Greenwald's Opening Statement
00:37:48 Dershowitz's Rebuttal
00:45:27 Greenwald's Rebuttal
00:53:56 Q&A
01:35:08 Dershowitz's Summation
01:40:22 Greenwald's Summation

Abbreviated Transcript:

Moderator: Now that we've got everyone voting, we can call our debaters to the stage. The United States should strike Iran's nuclear facilities speaking for the affirmative Alan Dershowitz. Alan, please come to the stage. Speaking for the negative, Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, please come to the stage.

All right guys, as you know, the timekeeper is in front. We'll be flashing five minute, two minute, and one-minute and 30 seconds cards. Professor Dershowitz prefers to use the 85-year-old prerogative and do it from his chair. Alan, you have 17 and a half minutes to make your case. Please take it away, Alan.

Alan Dershowitz: Thank you so much. What a wonderful event. At a time when, as the moderator said, there are too few debates, too many bumper stickers, too many people cheering for one side or the other, having a great debate about a really difficult subject is so important. Parts of me wishes this was not a debate, wishes it was a discussion because there are arguments on both sides of this. Very, very compelling arguments on both sides of this. It's a very, very difficult question anytime a decision is made to take preventive military action that involves cataclysmic consequences and considerations.

I want to go over why I think the argument here favors taking such preventive military action, though I understand the consequences. We know, we know the risks of taking preventive military action when it shouldn't have been taken. We can call those false positives. You can call them by whatever word you want to call them, but we know that that happened in Iraq when we went in thinking or believing or proclaiming or claiming that there were nuclear facilities only to find out that there wasn't with very tragic events for so many people, civilians and military.

A lot has been written about false positives. A lot h...