US Election: PJ O’Rourke vs Conrad Black - The Centre for Independent Studies
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Date & Time

Thursday, 1 October - Thursday, 1 October 2020
9:00 am - 10:00 am AEST

US Election: PJ O’Rourke vs Conrad Black

On Thursday, 1 October at 9 am we hosted a US Election election special with PJ O’Rourke & Conrad Black to hear two strikingly different views of how the September 30 Presidential debate went down and which candidate they thought would, or should, win the 2020 US Presidential Election.

All eyes are on America in the lead up to November 3. When the presidential race comes to an end one thing is certain, the US will be fractured. If Donald Trump is re-elected, outrage by left-wing political and media sophisticates will further alienate tens of millions of Americans who do not share their values. Yet, if Joe Biden wins, a display of anything other than humility would be equally alienating and would divide even more deeply a crisis-ridden nation.

How has it come to this? What is the likely path the US will take, both at home and abroad, once the pandemic passes? Are these two old men really the best America has to offer? 

P.J. O’Rourke is America’s leading political satirist. Formerly the editor of the National Lampoon, he is now a correspondent for the Atlantic and the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute. His books include Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages The Bastards, and most recently A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. PJ was a guest at CIS in 2009 and 2016.

Conrad Black is a former newspaper publisher, whose publications included The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator in the UK, Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post, and National Post in Canada. His books include Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. In 2019, Donald Trump granted Conrad a full-presidential pardon for two criminal fraud charges.

Host: Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies. Formerly with the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute and the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Centre, he is a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National and has written for the Wall Street Journal.