On October 29th 2026 Lehigh University hosted former president and current senescent war criminal George W. Bush to give a talk as part of their “Compelling Perspectives” series. It was a private event that was closed to all media, including Lehigh’s own newspaper. I, as an alumnus, was invited to join the waitlist for this event a couple of months ago. When I got the official word on my selection earlier this week, my task became clear: infiltrate the event, and bring an unfiltered report to the people. This is that story.
The email had said to arrive ninety minutes in advance of the event to allow time to pass through security. I thought this was stupid, and arrived at 6:08 pm, seven minutes before the doors closed. Outside the event was a group of maybe ten protestors, each screaming their lungs out at me for supporting a war criminal. I couldn’t blow my cover, so I tried to channel the look of a smug liberal pundit, which looked something like this: 👉😝👈.
After breezing through security I found my seat in a far corner of Stabler Arena. My best guess is that the arena contained between 750-1000 people. There were signs telling attendees that “personal photography, recording, [and] note-taking” were not allowed during the talk. I tried to take a few pictures before it started, since it seemed the faux pax didn’t set in until Dubya himself stepped on stage. There was a woman in front of me playing an incomprehensible game where you moved balloons around a grid and they would pop. A student near me was using Google Lens to identify a type of plant. Another was watching Pistons highlights on Instagram Reels. While we waited for Bush, orchestral versions of hit songs were playing faintly from the speakers. I first noticed it because I thought Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” was playing, which I found entertaining. I shook it off as an overactive imagination until Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” began braying from the speakers. I thought to myself that this is the quintessential American experience. Waiting around for Pappy War Crimes, listening to an orchestral version of the worst pop song of the 2010s, a middle aged woman next to me playing a mobile game usually reserved for the bottom half of a Royal Pains YouTube shorts compilation.
Rules are meant to be broken.
In preparation for this event, I downloaded a sketchy app on my phone called “Closed Camera” which allowed me to take video with my phone in sleep mode or in other apps. I planned to use it to snap a pic of the president on stage and wasn’t very successful. I regret not just using my normal camera, since no one really looked at me the entire time I was there except this one secret service person who was keeping an eye on my section.
The event was in the form of a fireside chat between the president of Lehigh and the former president of the United States. At first they struggled to develop chemistry. Bush was often interrupting president Helble’s questions. Although in his defense Helble asking questions was like a towel drying on the rack, slowly leaking out questions buried in a million inane presuppositions. Bush also stumbled some out the gate with mumbling and stuttering and general old people things.
My terrible attempt at a hidden photo app picture.
But after a while Dubya started to get a little loose with it, since there was no media to report what he shared. He relayed a strange anecdote about a Texas senator named Bullock who was a drunk and broke a urinal. He told us about the time he introduced his dog, Barney, to Vladimir Putin and Putin dissed the dog for being small. And then when he met Putin’s dog the Russian president said that he was “bigger, stronger, and better than Barney.” This was followed up by an unnamed Canadian prime minister remarking, “at least he only showed you his dog.” Thus was the tenor of the first fifteen or so minutes of this chat.
Finally Helble began asking about the major policies and challenges of Bush’s presidency. He never asked a halfway challenging question, and indeed every question was asked with such adulation it made me a little embarrassed. But I don’t want to talk about the act of the interview itself. If you want to read a rant about why this never should have happened, the Brown and White has you covered. I want to write about what I was able to glean about George W. Bush’s theory of politics from this private talk.
The most important thing Bush said in this talk is this, “If the Constitution holds, we [U.S.] self-correct.” I believe this to be a pithy distillation of his theory of politics. The two main threads running through this talk that support this idea are the Middle East and immigration.
The Iraq question was the only one in which Helble mentioned Bush’s “critics.” Despite this Bush did not back down on Iraq. He instead compared himself to Harry Truman and South Korea. He said that Truman left the office with his handling of Korea unpopular, but that history showed that SK would become a great ally of the United States. He says that Iraq has turned it around to become the country it is now because of the Iraq War, and that history will look back on him the same way they do Truman. His point here is that change takes time. We hear this line all the time from centrists and liberals alike. This isn’t new, but I’m building to something I promise.
Dubya talked about being a hardline closed borders person. Then he said that now that borders are closed, we need to start letting some people in. This was perhaps his clearest illustration of the “self-correction” principle. He remarked that there have always been anti-immigrant sentiments in this country, and yet this country is built on immigrants and their labor. This is the contradiction at the heart of America, but I don’t think Bush sees it as a contradiction. He sees it as a feature of American democracy. We let a bunch of immigrants in to find work and build a better life, but wait, that's too many, so we self-correct in the other direction. Now no one can come in but wait, we need people to work construction and we need more engineers and doctors, so we self correct in the other direction.
To hear George Bush talk glowingly about this process was very interesting, because I have always seen this as our government’s biggest hurdle. He sees it as “fair.” No one side is ever in power for that long, everyone is always making compromises and if they don’t, the constitution is there to bring us back to equilibrium.
And if you lived the life of George W. Bush, or any of the nepo cases littering the stands of Stabler Arena, why would you think anything different? Whether the country is at equilibrium, or mid “self-correction,” your life and liberty is never threatened. Meanwhile, marginalized people can never feel fully secure in their own country. You never know when your freedoms will be unjustly ripped away, when you will have to take up the fight again for basic human rights. This mystical “self-correction” doesn’t happen by itself, and it definitely doesn’t happen because of the constitution. It takes work.
So while I’m sure the denizens of the Lehigh alumni and student community walked out of this chat thinking America is going to be okay, we will self-correct our way out of this dark era, I will do my best to bonk them on the head and remind them of the cost, the human cost of keeping the status quo.
“It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death” - Plato, “Apologia”
I haven’t written in a while and this is by far the most I’ve written for this blog. I wrote it in one shot. I will not edit it. I just had one more thing to touch on but couldn’t figure out where to put it, so I’m leaving it here. Why did Lehigh have this event? From what I can tell they did not advertise it at all on social media in the days leading up to it. I was able to find one post about it on the website. There were multiple counter events that I saw advertised instead. My best guess was that it was an attempt at fundraising. Is paying a few hundred grand (my best guess at an estimate of Bush’s speaking fees) to have a former president tell a bunch of rich alumni how righteous and moral it is to do nothing profitable? I shudder to think.
