Episodes

Today’s guest is a Mark O. Hatfield type of Republican, Dr. Vernon Grounds, Ph.D., former Chancellor, President, and long-time professor of Philosophy and Counseling at Denver Seminary.

Dr. Grounds got his bachelors from Rutgers during the Great Depression, and struggled mightily with his Christian faith. He got seminary training, and later a Ph.D. in Psychology from Drew University, where he wrote a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Sigmund Freud.

He wrote several books, but the one we discuss and read from today is his “Emotional Problems and the Gospel” (Zondervan, 1976).

Since Dr. Ground died before we were able to record this with him, he joins this episode through his first chapter in the above book, which he titled “The Bible and Anxiety, Part 1.”

The Republican Professor is a pro-mental-health-in-politics, pro-ultimate-issues podcast.

Therefore, welcome Dr. Vernon Grounds, Ph.D.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
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Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D. is perhaps the most Liberty-conscious physician in America. He carries a copy of the Constitution with him where ever he goes. He’s not just interested in making money: He’s very disturbed by the threats to Liberty we’ve continued to witness in California and beyond, and he puts his money where his mouth is in a beautiful, refreshing spirit of public service.

Dr. Barke co- founded the only school in California that is fully officially affiliated with Hillsdale College in Michigan, and it costs nothing to the students to attend because it is a public (tax-funded) charter school. It’s called Orange County Classical Academy in Orange County, California. The students don’t need to stress about having the latest fashion of expensive clothes because everyone wears a school uniform so that they can concentrate more on their studies and less on being cool. The foreign language requirement is Latin so that they can understand, in the original language, the classical underpinnings of Western Civilization.

The amazing backstory to how and why this Academy was founded is summarized by Jeff here in this conversation.

There is an interesting connection we discover between us: The Hillsdale official who had to sign off on the Academy’s Hillsdale affiliation was a Ph.D. classmate of TRP Podcast producer and host, Dr. Lucas J. Mather. Her name is Katy Arnn — well, now, Dr. Katy O’Toole, Ph.D. — Larry Arnn’s daughter. (Mather and both Arnns got their PhDs from Claremont Graduate School in the Politics Department).

Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D. grew up as a public school kid himself in the Valley in Lost Angeles. He graduated from the University of Southern California and UC Irvine’s Medical School and is a Board Certified Physician in California. He is a major in the United States Army Reserve Medical Corps, and has been an elected official for a decade in his local public school board in Orange County. As a Jewish man, he carries a firearm with him at all times. He views it as a right and a duty to defend innocent life against great bodily injury or death. He’s well-trained as a reserve law enforcement officer for a local agency.

Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D. believes that Liberty has a whole lot to do with everything, including his craft, Medicine. Essential to the standard of care is making sure that any person has proper informed consent before receiving any medical intervention, whether any vaccine or mole removal. What does that entail ? It means that the patient understands, and has a copy of, in writing, the backstory of how the vaccine came to market, what the characteristics of the studies were, exactly, and what the ingredients were, including any possible side-effects that may result. The patient has to be clear about this before, and as a condition of, the care or treatment received, as an essential bioethical component of the standard of care in medicine. This is not a new feature of medicine, but it apparently has been forgotten. Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D. takes every Friday to remind as many as who will listen about what exactly informed consent means on a different aspect of intervention, each and every Friday by Instagram reel. The history of these past reels are accessible. Each reel is less than 2 minutes and is highly informative.

Dr. Barke offers a subscription on Meta for $4.99 a month where he goes in depth on wholistic health practices that try to prevent any unnecessary medical interventions or Big Pharma dependence.

Check out his Instagram page, here : https://www.instagram.com/rxforliberty/

Find Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D. online at his website, https://www.rxforliberty.com/

The Republican Professor is a pro-liberty-in-medicine, pro-public-school-done-right podcast.

Therefore, welcome Dr. Jeff Barke, M.D., Instagram’s @RxForLiberty, a prescription for Liberty, indeed.

The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

To financially support this podcast, comment on today’s episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We’d love to hear from you.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack
https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/
https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/
https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRepublicanProfessor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRepublicanProfessor
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Mr. Alan Gottlieb, Founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) joins us today to pay tribute to the late Sam Slom, who was elected to the Hawai’i State Senate when TRP’s producer and host (Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.) lived in Hawai’i.

In fact, Dr. Mather recalls passing Slom’s campaign or senate office either in Hawai’i Kai or Kahala (I think the Kahala Mall) back in 1996 or 1997. Sam Slom served as Hawai’i State Senator from 1996 to 2016 in East Honolulu and was the only Republican in the State Senate. He was one of the founding Board Member of The Second Amendment Foundation in 1974.

Mr. Sam Slom was one of the good Republicans defending the right to keep and bear arms and invididual liberty , and it’s an honor to remember him here.

Mr. Alan Gottlieb, Founder of The Second Amendment Foundation helps us do just that.

We also discuss a bit about the kinds of cases that SAF is involved in, including some recent and famous ones. Recently, SAF won a preliminary injunction against California’s arbitrary and capricious 10+ magazine confiscation scheme. Historicallly and famously, SAF won at the US Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller (2008) and representing plaintiff Otis McDonald in McDonald v. Chicago (2010). In that latter case, the City of Chicago spent a million dollars to deprive this black man of his right to self defense absent police protection .

If this sounds good to you, become a supporter of this work at https://saf.org/join-saf/

Enormous progress has been made ! The work continues.

The first time TRP host Dr. Mather studied the Second Amendment academically was at Marine Corps Air Station, Kaneohe Bay in 1999 in a required State and Federal Government course for his undergraduate college, Wayland Baptist University Hawai’i. The professor for the course used a textbook that gave scant and misleading information about the history, text, scope, and meaning of the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.

During that time, and a few years before when he saw “Jerry McGuire” (Tom Cruise movie) at Kahala Mall in East Honolulu (the swanky part of “town”), Mather was living downtown at the time, and noticed the office of Sam Slom, Republican elected to the Hawai’i State Senate. Mr. Slom was a Founding Board Member of The Second Amendment Foundation. He served as the only Republican in the Hawai’i State Senate from 1996 to 2016, twenty years !

On The Republican Professor Podcast, what a wonderful opportunity to remember Sam Slom, Mather’s time studying the Second Amendment for the first time academically in Hawai’i, and the careful , persistent work of The Second Amendment Foundation.

Mr. Alan Gottlieb, Founder of The Second Amendment Foundation, helped us do all that. SAF has won a recent preliminary injunction against the 10+ magazine limit here in California last week . More famously, SAF brought the challenge to DC’s onerous registration/home disarmament scheme which they won at the US Supreme Court in 2008 called D.C. v. Heller (2008). We talk about his conversation with Antonin Scalia, what it was like growing up in New York City, why the arbitrary magazine limitation is unconstitutional, how knife laws also should be challenged as problematic under the Second Amendment, and my favorite, what it was like winning the Chicago case called Otis McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) at the US Supreme Court (filed the day they won Heller).
Enormous progress has been made since I saw Sam Slom’s office in East Honolulu and spoke with him and his team in 1996. The textbooks no longer can afford to give the disfavored Second Amendment short shrift. That has everything to do with the hard , persistent work since then . Glad to be a part of it and to have had the opportunity to document it on The Republican Professor podcast.
The work continues.

The Republican Professor is a pro-Second-Amendment podcast.

Therefore, welcome Mr. Alan Gottieb, founder of The Second Amendment Foundation.

The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

To financially support this podcast, comment on today’s episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com . We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for subscribing.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

When I first met our guest today, it was during the administration of George W. Bush in 2007 at the Starbucks near Ralphs in Malibu, California between Pepperdine classes. Dr. Kaufman was discussing anything and everything with anyone who would stop by to chat, from students to homeless-looking billionaires to homeless looking homeless people. He reminded me of a real-life Socrates in the Agora, except with a nice tie.

Professor Robert G. Kaufman has taught at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy in Malibu, California since 2004. Before that, Dr. Kaufman was tenured in Bernie Sanders’ country at the University of Vermont as the only Republican faculty member. He has 4 degrees from Columbia University in New York City, including a Great Books background as undergraduate and a Ph.D. Kaufman’s law degrees are from Georgetown (JD) and his advance law studies in dispute resolution were from Pepperdine Law’s famous Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution program in Malibu, California.

The discussion today includes his controversial book “In Defense of the Bush Doctrine” (University of Kentucky Press, 2007) as well as its sister book that came nearly a decade later with the same themes, “Dangerous Doctrine: how Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America (University of Kentucky Press, 2016). Those books defend what he urges that a prudent, historically learned president would decide, given the right lessons from the Civil War, WW 1, WW 2, the Cold War, and the first Gulf War.

He stands by his arguments and conclusions in those books despite the well-spring of isolationist rhetoric creeping back into Republican Party politics, allegedly inspired by Trump.

Kaufman voted for Trump and would again, so he’s not a Never Trumper. But he’s not an Always Trumper, as well. And the dangers of either side are worth paying close attention to.

Professor Kaufman also offers critical reflection on presidents Trump and Biden, and suggestions for a way forward with our most critical, pressing challenges.

We also incidently mention an earlier book that I read two decades ago, his biography of the Democrat US senator from Washington, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who had the correct view of Nixon’s detente and who helped establish the Reagan Doctrine that won the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

The Republican Professor is a pro-getting-a-better-grip-on-the-right-foreign-policy podcast.

Therefore, welcome the one and only Professor Robert G. Kaufman of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy in Malibu, California.

The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

“No one talks to us like this,” the young men on campus say to Dr. Anthony Bradley, Ph.D., long time professor of Religious Studies at Kings College in Manhattan, NYC, & now Distinguished Research Fellow at Acton Institute. https://www.acton.org/about/staff/anthony-b-bradley

In Part 1, he talks about the loss to New York City of all of its Christian colleges, including Kings College, and begins to talk about his process for writing his books, including being motivated by anger.

In Part 2, Dr. Bradley talks about being motivated by anger as a Christian scholar, that young men are hungry for models of virtue, and the basis for his hope for the future.

We had a few technical difficulties, which we overcame with Dr. Bradley’s quite remarkable patience and kindness.

Part 2 picks up the speed with the rest of the interview where we cover the struggles that men have in today’s American culture, the basis for his hope for change, what makes him the most angry, and how he goes about his work, and a bit about his family life.

He’s written such scholarly books as “Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from Civil Society” (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

His latest we discuss at length is called : “Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America” (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

The Republican Professor is a pro-rightly-using-anger, pro-inculcating-virtue-in-men, pro-saving-America podcast.

Therefore, welcome Dr. Anthony Bradley, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor (TRP) Podcast is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

To financially support this work, comment on today’s episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com .

We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for subscribing.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

“No one talks to us like this,” the young men on campus say to Dr. Anthony Bradley, Ph.D., long time professor of Religious Studies at Kings College in Manhattan, NYC, & now Distinguished Research Fellow at Acton Institute. https://www.acton.org/about/staff/anthony-b-bradley

In this interview, he talks about the loss to New York City of all of its Christian colleges, including Kings College, and begins to talk about his process for writing his books, including being motivated by anger.

We had a few technical difficulties, which we overcame with Dr. Bradley’s quite remarkable patience and kindness. Part 2 picks up the speed with the rest of the interview where we cover the struggles that men have in today’s American culture, the basis for his hope for change, what makes him the most angry, and how he goes about his work, and a bit about his family life.

He’s written such scholarly books as “Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from Civil Society” (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

His latest we discuss at length is called : “Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America” (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

The Republican Professor is a pro-rightly-using-anger, pro-inculcating-virtue-in-men, pro-saving-America podcast.

Therefore, welcome Dr. Anthony Bradley, Ph.D.
The Republican Professor (TRP) Podcast is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
To financially support this work, comment on today’s episode, or to make a suggestion for a topic or guest for the podcast or Substack newsletter, send an email to therepublicanprofessor@substack.com .
We’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for subscribing.
Warmly,
Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

In this episode, professor Mather shares the story of when he only had one student , and what he learned about Higher Education from the experience.

The Reason Magazine Facebook post referenced in the opening is here .

The Republican Professor podcast is a pro-teaching-your-heart-out podcast.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

Should there be age limits on candidates for election ?

We say no, and here’s why.

This is the second “office hours” chat with fellow liberty-lover @ChartingLiberty’s Dale Fincher.

The Republican Professor is a pro-rightly-contemplating-Representation-in-Elections podcast.

Welcome, Mr. Dale Fincher of @ChartingLiberty !

Feel free to subscribe here and to TRP Substack as well, link below.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack

She’s had access to such luminaries as President Bill Clinton and the Washington Post’s Kay Graham for her biographies of them, but her very first book was on the woman that seemed to split the country in half, Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly is most notorious (or famous, depending) for nearly single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment from most certainly being ratified in my lifetime. How she did that — and the fact that it is probably only her that could have done something like that — is an issue in American Politics not many understand. Though it seems you have to at some point grapple with it.

But Schlafly was sui generis in every rich nuance of the term. She was more comfortable debating detente with the Soviets and nuclear throw weights. She had a lot of kids, was a serious Catholic, and went to Law School in her fifties. She homeschooled all of her children up to a certain age, taught them all how to read herself, wrote books that were self-published and sold millions of copies, spoke all around the country, sometimes multiple times in one day, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, and yet answered her own telephone.

One could make the argument that she was the most important woman in American Politics in the latter half of the twentieth century — perhaps the entire twentieth century.

Is this real ? Her critics thought she was a phony. And she had millions of critics.

My recent thoughts about this topic began in Scottsdale , Arizona, in 2023 at a used bookstore. In the section called “Conservativism,” I found a copy of Carol Felsenthal’s 1981 Doubleday biography of Schlafly . The book is called “The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schalfly” by Carol Felsenthal. It began with a story that Schlafly gave her biographer the cold shoulder because of something very critical that Felsenthal had written about Schlafly years prior. Yet this copy had of all things Phyllis Schlafly’s signature on it, inscribed for a couple , with best wishes.

Now Schalfly had not signed most of the books she herself had written — copies in the many, many millions. To think that she had signed this one written by someone whom she herself had dissed at some point for being highly critical. This, I had to see.

So I reached out to Carol while reading it, and made the offer that she could easily refuse.

But she didn’t. And we ended up talking for 2 hours about Phyllis Schlafly and Carol’s life as a biographer and a writer.

Here’s an example of the writing she has done for Chicago Magazine, a quite moving piece she did about her brother, an obituary of sorts, the man who had done the title sequences for such famous films as Superman (1978), Alien (1979), and The Untouchables (1987), who had recently died : https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/June-2018/On-the-Life-and-Death-of-My-Brother-Dickie/

The Republican Professor is a pro-understanding-correctly-Phyllis Schlafly podcast.

Therefore, welcome, Mrs. Carol Felsenthal, 1981 Doubleday biographer of Phyllis Schlafly.

The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack
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https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/
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The author of the most thorough, clear, interesting and persuasive academic textbook on Constitutional Law of the Second Amendment is today’s guest. That book is “America’s Rifle: The Case for the AR-15” and the scholar’s name is Dr. Stephen P. Halbrook, Ph.D., J.D.

Get it today and buy a copy for a friend or family member. Share this book, and read it carefully yourself — you will not regret it for a second.

Guest co-hosting this episode today is Instagram’s @highcalibernc , Heather Allen, a firearms educator and concealed carry instructor, and candidate for city council in North Carolina.

For a brief review of the book and a link to buy it, see TRP Substack’s write up at https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/p/the-best-second-amendment-academic

The Republican Professor is a pro-rightly-contemplating-the-Constitution, pro-correct-understanding-of-the-Second-Amendment, pro-taking-productive-action-to-defend-liberty podcast.

Therefore, welcome Constitutional legal scholar and attorney Dr. Stephen P. Halbrook, Ph.D., J.D. & conceal carry instructor @highcalibernc, Heather Allen of North Carolina.

Please subscribe here and at TRP Substack. It helps us cobble together the resources necessary to continue in this vitally important work.

Warmly,

Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Republican Professor Podcast
The Republican Professor Newsletter on Substack
https://therepublicanprofessor.substack.com/
https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/podcast/
https://www.therepublicanprofessor.com/articles/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRepublicanProfessor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRepublicanProfessor
Twitter: @RepublicanProf
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