The Sheen Center

18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012

Doors open at 6:00 PM
Meeting Convenes on the Main Stage: 6:30 PM
Reception: 8:00 PM

Moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

For the affirmative:

Brent Orrell is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on job training, workforce 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.

For the negative:

Tom Woods is the New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, which have been translated into a dozen languages, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He won the $50,000 first 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.

Symphony Space

2537 Broadway (at 95th St), New York, NY 10025

Doors open at 6:00 PM
Meeting Convenes on the Main Stage: 6:30 PM
Reception: 8:00 PM

Moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

For the affirmative:

Alan Dershowitz is 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(2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019). 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, self-identifing as both "pro-Israel and pro-Palestine," and writing, "I want to see a vibrant, democratic, economically viable, peaceful Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel."

For the negative:

Glenn Greenwald is 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’s fiercely adversarial reporting has won the highest awards in journalism around the world, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the NSA-Snowden revelations. Leaving The Intercept—which he co-founded—in 2020, he is now an independent journalist and host of SYSTEM UPDATE nightly on Rumble.

The Sheen Center

18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012

Doors open at 6:00 PM
Meeting Convenes on the Main Stage: 6:30 PM
Reception: 8:00 PM

Moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

For the affirmative:

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, and How Innovation Works. "Viral: the search for the Origin of Covid-19", co-authored with Alina Chan, was published in 2021. He sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For the negative:

Dr. Stephen Goldstein is a virologist at the University of Utah conducting research on coronavirus evolution. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted research on the biology of MERS-CoV, a zoonotic virus first identified in 2012. Over the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic Dr. Goldstein has engaged with the Utah Department of Public Health, University of Utah Health, and local and national media to provide scientific expertise. He has co-authored reviews and original research papers on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.