In the first half, conservative thinker David Horowitz talked about the radicalization of American universities, and what he views as a war on Christianity by Democratic progressives and those on the left. He recounted how he began his political career as one of the New Left's founders in the 1960s and served as an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. But then, he said, a close friend of his was murdered by the Black Panthers, and this led him on the path of becoming a conservative activist. On the issue of stifling religious freedom, he contended that Vice President Pence has been "persecuted" for his Christian views by those on the left. He also cited the case of a Colorado baker who was sued for refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because of his religious beliefs.

Horowitz was critical of various social media, which he maintains have a bias against conservative viewpoints (he suggested that many of his posts on Twitter are "shadow banned" --made less discoverable). He also talked about his forthcoming book, Blitz, which argues that the attacks made on Donald Trump, including the impeachment process, have been the most brutal against any sitting president of the United States.

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In the latter half, writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown spoke about cosmology and astronomy, and the proverbial 'magicians of science,' individuals who predicted not only the existence of unknown worlds, black holes, and subatomic particles, but antimatter - invisible waves that course through the air and ripple the fabric of space-time. One of these scientists was James Clerk Maxwell, "who was probably the most important physicist between the time of Newton and Einstein," he noted, as he discovered that the light we see with our eyes is in fact, an electromagnetic wave.

We are permeated in a field of neutrinos ("ghostly subatomic particles")-- "there are a hundred thousand million going through every square centimeter of your body every second," said Chown. Neutrinos are the second most common particle in the universe (first are photons-- particles of light). Every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart, but we have a relatively small one in our Milky Way-- if it were larger, all the dust and matter that makes up our solar system would have been sucked into it, and we wouldn't exist, he explained. Describing the universe, Chown pointed out that we can only see 2.5% of it, and only 5% of it is composed of visible matter. The rest is dark matter (25%) and dark energy (70%). It's amazing, he added, that we've only known about the major component of the universe since 1998. This mysterious dark energy or force is everywhere, but it doesn't interact with ordinary matter, so it remains highly elusive.

News segment guests: Mish Shedlock, Howard Bloom