Today, H.R. McMaster tells his life story, with the help of his wife Katie, on the latest episode of GoodFellows. Norbert Holtkamp joins with other scholars to point out the many ways America benefits from international research collaboration. And Eugene Volokh outlines the situations where burning a US flag could be prosecuted despite the current interpretation of the First Amendment.
Determining America’s Role in the World
On the latest episode of GoodFellows, Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen speaks with Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster about how he always wanted to join the US Army, his West Point years, participating in tank battles in the Middle East, and his family. Whalen also gifts McMaster a tie bearing the crest of his beloved Philadelphia Eagles and the city’s most famous sandwich. Later, his wife Katie joins the broadcast, and tells Whalen about how she and her husband met (it was love at first sight), the challenges of being a military spouse, the day H.R. said goodbye to his head of hair (he shaved his head at her insistence), plus her ongoing campaign to spare her Orange County neighbors from the blare of H.R.’s favorite tunes. Watch or listen to the episode here.
Understanding the Impact of Technology on Economics and Governance
US research institutions have a long history of international collaboration that has played a defining positive role in contributions to national and global security, according to a new report coauthored by a Hoover science fellow. In the new report, Science Fellow Norbert Holtkamp and several coauthors including Thomas Mason, the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, detail how international collaboration and cooperation continues to benefit research and scientific development. “In a world where international science collaborations become increasingly difficult, it is important to understand not only the risks but also opportunity cost,” Holtkamp said of the report. “This report highlights examples [of] cooperation [that] enabled faster access to technology, increased economic competitiveness, or simply advanced basic knowledge helping the human cause.” Read more here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Over on his blog at Reason.com, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh points out that while a simple prosecution for burning a US flag would violate the First Amendment, there are several instances where such a burning could be prosecuted irrespective of America’s right to free expression, in situations where the burning causes “harm unrelated to expression.” Volokh points out that if a flag is stolen from a government building and then burned, or burned on government property, or burned in an area deemed to be sensitive to fire spread, all of those actions can be punished even considering the protection afforded by the First Amendment. The key to this issue is enforcement and prosecution of such incidents must be neutral and not selective based on the content of a political protest. For example, if one protest movement defaces a piece of public property with a chalk-written slogan and goes unpunished, their opponents must also go unpunished if they do the same. Read more here.
Revitalizing History
Hoover’s Library & Archives have acquired new materials from the estate of Chao Heng-ti, a Chinese Nationalist leader who served as governor of Hunan Province in the 1920s. In this time as governor, he worked to develop a constitution that allowed direct elections. He fought on the Nationalist side against the Japanese during World War II and fled to Taiwan after Nationalist forces were defeated on the mainland in 1949. The collections include correspondence between Chao and Nationalist high-ranking political figures and aid our understanding of the complicated history of early Republican China. Read more here.
Writing in Defining Ideas, Research Fellow Paul R. Gregory argues that Americans had plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Steele dossier when it was published by Buzzfeed in January 2017. The document, purported to be a workup about a lengthy effort by Russian intelligence services to cultivate Donald Trump as an asset, was filled with red flags, Gregory argues. If one is to believe the contents of the dossier, one must accept that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele spent a mere $168,000 bribing senior Russian intelligence officers and oligarchs for the sordid details about Trump’s engagements with Russia. And that $168,000 was enough money for all of those sources to spill the beans in a country where loose lips or disloyalty is often punished by sudden and unexplained, pseudo-accidental death. In Gregory’s view, it’s all too much to swallow. Read more here.
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