Power Line: Recent Episodes
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Steven Hayward brings you the Power Line Blog's perspective on the week's big headlines. Follow Power Line on Twitter (https://twitter.com/powerlineus) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/powerlineblog). Send any suggestions, tips, and fan mail to powerlinefeedback@gmail.com.
This week's episode features frequent guest Phil Munoz of Notre Dame University, sitting in for John Yoo, discussing his very timely new article in First Things magazine on "The Founders and the Common Good." His article is getting a fair bit of buzz on the interwebs, as it takes up the surprisingly hot topic of "post-liberalism," in particular to dispute the contention of some leading post-liberals that the American Founding was defective and therefore part of the problem. We also take up briefly an excellent article on the same issue by Andrew Walker in The Daily Wire, "The Neutrality Myth: Liberty, Order and the Common Good." Both worthy of your reading pile.
(By the way, speaking of First Things, have I mentioned that I am thinking about starting a quarterly academic journal for the OnlyFans community, and calling it First Thongs? I'll show myself out. . .)
This episode also features a short cameo appearance by "Henry Kissinger" (we summoned him by means of a Ouija board) to bring his legendary perspective to our current foriegn policy confusion, and we tackle a listener question about populism.
Our new voice for the show opener is Colin McClean, a noted voice-actor in Britain, semi-retired from a distinguished business career in The City. You can read about his voice work at his website Vocal Flair, and I also recommend his YouTube channel, The Healing Voice, where he ranges widely from poetry, music, story-telling, and some sensible psychology.
President Trump's executive orders Thursday afternoon attempting to re-ground his opposition to birthright citizenship prompted an emergency livestream with me and Lucretia on Substack. We wanted to get ahead of the certain hysteria of the blue-faced crazies on BlueSky (and the media, but I repeat myself) that Trump is "undermining the Constitution" and "defying the Supreme Court."
To the contrary, Trump is defending the Constitution from the mistaken assumption that the judiciary—and only the judiciary—has the last word on these matters. We break down the main issues in this 30-minute, ad-free mini-episode.
Our regular episode, featuring special guest host Phil Munoz of Notre Dame, and a cameo appearance from "Henry Kissinger," will be out Saturday morning as usual, where I'll explain our new voice over for the intro you hear today.
The hiatus for the rebooted 3WHH is over! We got the band back together, and to further paraphrase the political philosophy of the Ellwood brothers, it's 70 minutes to the end of this podcast, we've got a full glass of whisky, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Just like Anthony Fauci in his glam cover shot for In Style magazine back in 2021.
Most of our changes are cosmetic, and it it still a work-in-progress, but the two main new features on display this week is a short "cameo" appearance from a slate of contributors we're signing up, and responding to the best reader/listener question. This week's cameo is from Alex Priou of the University of Austin, who has some definite opinions about The Odyssey.
Two main topics are on our mind this week: the mendacious Dr. Fauci, and what pathways for legal redress might still be open despite President Biden's pardon. Second, we spend some time discussing the "republican guarantee clause" of Article IV of the Constitution, which is usually overlooked, and thought to be non-justiciable, if not in fact a nullity, similar to the 9th Amendment. We take up this question because of Glenn Reynolds' mischievous suggestion on his Substack that President Trump might be able to invoke the clause to justify sending federal authorities into states with high potential for vote fraud. Here's the key passage from Glenn's article:
"So if President Trump announces that we have uncovered massive electoral fraud — as he almost certainly will — and that he is dispatching huge numbers of federal election watchers to oversee voting and counting in areas where fraud has occurred, he would be acting directly under a power that the Constitution has vested in him. For a state to have a “republican form of government,” it must have meaningful elections, and elections that are rigged are not meaningful. Stopping them from being rigged would be protecting a republican form of government. Congress has passed other election laws, mostly for reasons of combating race discrimination, but those aren’t strictly applicable to these circumstances. . ."
Could make for some fun times!
Lots of people didn't get the memo that the 3WHH is on hiatus for the month of July as we revamp the show's format and lineup, but since I don't want loyal listeners to go into painful withdrawals, I am offering this emergency stopgap edition, with just me and a frequently-requested guest, John Eastman.
If you go only by the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court, you might think that the 6 - 3 decision against President Trump's executive order that attempted to curtail birthright citizenship under the emanations and penumbras of 14th Amendment was a serious setback. But discerning readers recognize that on the core constitutional question of whether birthright citizenship is anchored in the 14th Amendment, the vote was actually 5 to 4, since Justice Kavanaugh agreed with the other three dissenters that the 14th Amendment does not establish birthright citizenship, and he voted to strike down Trump's executive order because he thought it failed on statutory grounds.
Statutes, of course, can be changed. And 5 - 4 Supreme Court decisions indicate that the matter is not decisively settled. Keep in mind that Roe v. Wade was a 7 - 2 decision, but the shoddiness of the reasoning in Roe became so apparent over time that it was indeed overturned. Likewise this may occur on birthright citizenship. It is most definitely not over. Consider that even as recently a decade ago no one thought a constitutional challenge to birthright citizenship could make it to the Supreme Court, let along get four votes. Many commentators thought Trump might lose this case 8 - 1, or perhaps unanimously.
If there is one person above all who deserves credit for bringing this moment about, it is John Eastman. You may have heard of him. He's been in the news a bit the last few years. (Full disclosure, as the saying goes—Eastman and I were classmates, and for a time housemates—in graduate school back in the 1980s.)
About 30 years ago, Eastman began writing a series of law review and other academic articles attacking the supposedly secure foundations of birthright citizenship. His argument seemed exotic at the time, and was summarily dismissed. And yet in recent years more and more eminent constitutional scholars began to come around and endorse his critique of the accepted view, which as I say now commands four votes on the Supreme Court.
In our conversation here we review the course of this unfolding rethinking that has brought us to this moment, and we also take up what might be next, as Eastman has his eye on a sweeping revision of another important and highly consequential constitutional provision that nearly everyone ignores. If he can repeat the story arc of the birthright citizenship issue, it might lead to one of the most significant reforms of American government in decades.
To find out that this sequel is, though, you'll just have to listen.
Now we know what you're thinking: if we have on as a special guest historian Richard Samuelson, one of the pre-eminent experts on John Adams, you'd think we find out what Adams thought about the Clean Air Act, but no! Instead, the show reaches its zenith with Samuelson drawing our attention to some of Adams's handwritten marginalia that demonstrates why Adams would have completely understood the Sweeney Sensation.
Richard joined us for our intermittent series between now and next July 4 about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and he helpfully arbitrated the debate we had last week about the probity of Gordon Wood's treatment of the American creed. (Readers should also not miss Samuelson's article "John Adams Versus Edmund Burke," which helps clarify the extent to which Adams should be thought of (as Russell Kirk did) as "America's first conservative."
We also went through a couple of current headlines about the latest frontiers in lawfare, and the aftermath of the shooting of two national guard troops in Washington.
For those who like to take in the video, you can find the YouTube right here (and consider subscribing).
Naturally the 3WHH bartenders can't agree on the best way to cook a Thanksgiving turkey as well as the side dishes at the outset of this special Thanksgiving Day edition, but after that we get down to discussing what to make of prosecutions being dropped left and right—literally left and right in the case of the misbegotten Big Fani Willis case against Trump being dismissed in Georgia, and the Trump DoJ case against James Comey and Letitia James being dismissed in federal court. At least we still have trial by jury to be thankful for in America, as we hear Britain may abolish trial by jury for many crimes. Maybe the Labour Party is just trying to get out ahead of what's coming for them.
We'll be back over the weekend with a regular episode, just as soon as our tryptohpan-induced comas wear off.
Another week of last minute schedule changes, flight delays, lost iPads, misplaced laptops, and other mishaps delayed the recording of this week's episode, but finally on Saturday night we were able to sit down for an especially fast-paced episode to close out the week that comes with competing Star Trek metaphors, reflectioning and debating briefly about which was the weirdest news story of the week—the latest Epstein file revelations, MTG departing the House, the Mamdani-Trump Oval Office Summit—the greatest clash since Yalta, or the most bizarre meeting of Capitalist and Communist since Franklin Roosevelt dined alone—before we finally settle down to out main topic of the week: the launch of what will be a regular feature here on the 3WHH between now and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next July 4.
For this first installment, we ponder the strange case of historian Gordon Wood, considered the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding, who was in the news last week for a speech he delivered in Washington DC for the American Enterprise Institute. Steve was present to hear the speech; John took in the published version, and Lucretia let out a mighty harumph. Wood's main thesis at the beginning of his illustrious career was that the American Founding should be understood as part of the "civic republican" tradition, rather than a Lockean-Jeffersonian natural rights revolution. It made him the left's favorite historian for a time, a point Steve made in a critical article about Wood 20 years ago, "The Liberal Republicanism of Gordon Wood."
Naturally—do I really need to say "naturally"? you know what's coming next—John stepped up to defend Wood's civic republican thesis. Lucretia thought she could sit this one out, but ChatGPT provided us with a debate between Lucretia and Wood, with "Wood" getting off some good zingers like "Lucretia, the Founding wasn’t a live-action performance of Natural Right: The Musical," and "Of course they were serious—serious about the collapse of deference, the emergence of democratic culture, and all the other things that give Straussians spontaneous nosebleeds." Lucretia responded in kind: "You make it sound like Samuel Adams was out there organizing consciousness-raising workshops. “Hi, I’m Sam, and I’m here to talk about my feelings on monarchy…”
The episode is slightly shorter than normal as Steve had to rush off to the final performance of Steve Hackett's North American tour in Portland, Oregon, and the final performance of keyboardist Roger King, and because the philistine and cretinous Lucretia and John attempted to mock the gods of prog rock, the exit music this week is an excerpt from Hackett's most famous guitar lick. IYKYK.
While it was sorely tempting to devote the entire show to celebrating the return of Sydney Sweeney to the public eye last week, we decided to turn our attention to the serious matter of antisemitism on the right, and just what the heck "groypers" (groyperism??) is all about. Rod Dreher passed along estimates that up to 40 percent of young conservatives in Washington are closet Nick Fuentes fans or groyper-adjacent, though this estimate has received strong challenges. We review a few of the counter-arguments that seem to be left unsaid at the moment.
Then we turn to a brief recap and critque from Lucretia on our brief segment last week with Akhil Amar about his new book Born Equal. We didn't have time to get very far with the subject, but the amazing thing is that Lucretia and John were together on their end of this episode, and Lucretia didn't hit John once (though she may have spiked his whisky).
Oh, and we did have time to talk briefly about Helen Andrews's legs. You'll just have to listen to find out what this means in this compact, ad-free episode.
You might want to think of this totally gonzo episode as the 3WHH-Squared, as it was taped live during happy hour Friday night in a very noisy Washington Hilton Hotel at the annual conference of the Federalist Society, where John and I are present and making a general nuisance of ourselves. Lucretia was supposed to be in Hawaii this week on some kind of junket or super-secret mission, but the government shutdown interposed itself.)
As we did last year, we simply invited a handful of legal luminaries to drop by our not-so-quiet corner, with cocktails in hand, to kick around whatever is on our mind. We were delighted to have Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals drop by briefly before having to run off to host a dinner for his clerks; Roger Pilon, long-time director of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, hung around to heckle everyone; Ilan Wurman, one of the rising young stars of the conservative legal academy, fell into our snare as well, and Hadley Arkes, who needs no introduction here. (Would any such gathering be complete without Hadley dropping by? To ask the question is to answer it, of course, as any disquisition on necessary truths from Aristotle to Kant would know.)
The highlight of this gaggle was Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University (and one of John's principal mentors at Yale Law way back when, which may explain a few things), to talk about his brand new and highly readable book, Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920.
Since we were recording out in the open at the Washington Hilton, this episode is a bit . . . authentic, to so speak. We ask the indulgence of listeners to its many irregularities.
The 3WHH is a man down this week as John was unavailable, so Steve and Lucretia soldiered on without his ritual abuse of their superior taste in political philosophy, prudence, and natural law. And in the best fashion of Helen Andrews, Steve ran the episode even though it was Lucretia's turn on the host rotation calendar. We could have called this episode "Revenge of the Manosphere."
Steve and Lucretia consider a few news headlines, and some major stories conspicuously not making headlines (such as the Houise investigation of the White House conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden's senility), who Bill Kristol supports in the NY City mayor's race (you'll never* guess), whether the climate cult is over, and alarm bells about rising anti-Israel sentiment among young conservatives. (We recorded before the Kevin Roberts video went live, however.)
And then we arrive at the main topic of the day: Lucretia defending herself against charges of "lookism." Steve enlists an expert witness: the great Taki Theodoracopulos, who wrote way back in 1981 that American women were the ugliest in the world. Seems like the perfect topic for the week when the world discovered the Jennifer Welch, the Democrats' newest It-Girl. (And naturally, the exit music this week is "Ugly Women," by country musician Grant Langston.)
- Yes, that sentence is a sly reference to a light bulb joke: How many Straussians does it take to change a light bulb? None: the light is made conspicuous by its absence. (IYKYK, otherwise you don't get Plato.)
Helen Andrews' Compact article on "The Great Feminization" is causing a stir, provoking responses from left, right, and in-between. And I just know that everyone wants to hear David French's take on it, because how can we form a judgment about anything without hearing from the Conscience of the World. (Actually, just go with the normally mild-mannered Charles Murray's take: "I'm still waiting to read something by David French that doesn't irritate me. Even when I agree with the substance, the sanctimony drives me nuts. In this case, I wholly disagree with his take on Helen Andrews.")
John Yoo files a dissent of his own that Steve and Lucretia find worthy of certain members of the Supreme Court just now, but keep your eyes out on this one; Steve, naturally, has an analogy on offer.
The gang also wonders if some Chinese lab has come up with a new, more potent strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome, because how else can you explain how insane Trump-haters are over . . . a White House ballroom? (You can guess the exit music this week. Yup, it's that 1970s standard, "Ballroom Blitz" by Sweet.)
We end with a few sober thoughts about health care, and then it's back to arguing about . . . neckties.
With John Yoo hosting this week's episode in a vain attempt to deflect attacks, we devote most of the episode to foreign policy questions, ranging from Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, China, and . . . Africa? Yes, Africa. And why does it suddenly seem like Trump can be considered a neocon?
And not to worry: Lucretia still gets in her licks on her favorite Supreme Court justice (you all know which one it is) for another exemplary performance (/sarc) in this week's oral argument about the Voting Rights Act case.
The week ended with President Trump issuing a proclamation celebrating Columbus Day, rather than Indigenous People's Day as the identitarians and western-guilt mongers have crammed down on us for the last generation, and it put us in the frame of mind of Leo Strauss, who called Machiavelli "that greater Columbus." Maybe Trump is a Columbus of sorts, sailing precariously into the Blue State oceans to drain swamps, etc. It's worth a shot.
But much of the show revolves around discussion of why so many leftists (like Katie Porter and Jay Jones) are such horrible people, whether we are in fact much closer to a civil war that we could have conceived, but also saving time to console John over the ignominious loss of his beloved Phillies, and—being certified dog lovers—honoring the passing of Lily, the beloved pet of one of our faithful listeners whose dog literally ate up one of our books.
We were finally able to schedule a taping with enough lead time to get a special guest we've been wanting to have on for a long time—the great Hadley Arkes, emertus professor of jurisprudence from Amherst College and founder of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, and co-host of his own very fine podcast, the Natural Law Moment. We've abused Hadley in absentia in some of our podcasts over the last few months, so now he got hsi chance especially to attempt to sort out the very stubborn John Yoo.
John was delayed a bit joining us, so since this podcast is partly anchored not only in the truths of natural law, but also libations of a scotch variety, we decided to take advantage of Hadley's advanced expertise in gin martinis. Plus some "origin story" of how he came to political philosophy and in particular natural law as the primary focus of his mature work. And once John showed up, it was ON!
We rounded off this episode with an AI-generated parody of Hadley, which begins as follows:
“On the Ontological Status of the Ham Sandwich: A Moral Inquiry into the Lunchtime Crisis”
By Gladly Harkness, Edward Whiskers Professor of Ontological Jurisprudence
It is a curious feature of our current jurisprudence that the simple act of consuming a ham sandwich has not yet been subject to rigorous philosophical analysis. . .
For the whole thing, you'll need to head over to Steve's "Political Questions" Substack.
Steve reached 2 million lifetime miles on United Airlines this week, which meant party hats and free drinks on his flight to Washington (yet still no invitation to join Global Services), but despite all that he botched the YouTube livestream of this episode, such that the 12 subscribers who tried to tune in live saw only Steve, could neither see nor hear John Yoo (this week's hosts) or Lucretia. So we'll try to get it fixed, hopefully before Steve reaches the 3 million mile mark in a month or two.
You can guess the topics: The Comey indictment (two-and-a-half thumbs up), the prospects for the upcoming government shutdown where, for once, Republicans have all the high cards, and then some extended discussion of Steve's article on how to apply Max Weber's famously dense lecture "Politics as a Vocation" to the deteriorating political atmosphere that contributed to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. More to come on that, including how Steve's threat to grind up some Thomas Aquinas to put in John's tea to see if it has any effect on him.
Given the lede of this episode and the title, you can easily guess the exit bumper music, though it's a cover rather than the original artist.
We open today's ad-free episode with a whimsical look at the global sensation over the Number One Netflix show, "K-Pop Demon Hunters," and despite his Korean heritage, John Yoo can't explain it either. But near as we can tell, this anime cartoon show is somewhat classic melodrama, where the demons deserve defeat. And though it may seem a frivolous leap, we wonder about the demonic aspects of the larger story about Charlie Kirk's murder, with Steve recalling Max Weber's line—meant especially for young people—that "he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers..."
After reviewing the week's controversies over free speech and the mercy-killing of Jimmy Kimmel's pathetic late night show, we get down to one root of the larger problem—the inability of so-called progressives to brook any dissent from their party line, the lack of any introspection about any possible defects of their worldview, which was the primary object of Charlie Kirk's campus interrogatories. We'll come back to this subject in the coming weeks, because we sense a full-scale, China-syndrome level progressive meltdown is under way.
You'll want to listen all the way to the end of this episode, for our extended exit bumper music, from Harrison Tinsley: "Charlie Kirk (Remember Your Name)."
No bumper music, mirth about McDonalds, whisky, Babylon Bee headlines, or AI Haiku today: the assassination of Charlie Kirk is too serious a matter. John, Lucretia, and Steve (who is still over in Iceland hiking) assembled quickly for this special emergency episode, not only giving first reactions to a still developing story, but also connecting it to several recent events that point to a larger picture. Even before today's despicable event, it seemed as though we were reaching in inflection point in American political life, in which the reckless leftist fantasies of 2020 were finally being rejected.
With Steve and John away overseas, Lucretia takes full control of the podcast this week, welcoming back a much more sober special guest, Prof. Vincent Munoz of Notre Dame University, this semester visiting at the University of Texas at Austin.
With Sen. Tim Kaine making an utter jackass of himself by implying that the Lockean philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and the American Founders is "what the mullahs in Iran believe," and then our friends Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College and noted evangelical thought leader Doug Wilson getting into a tussle about exactly how Christian principles should be manifest in the American political order, it is obviously high time finally to get into the subject that baffles John Yoo (we know—not that hard to do): the "theological-political problem."
Don't be put off by that clunky-sounding phrase. It really is the key to everything, and few people are more versed and sound on the subject than Phil, who has dropped by the podcast a couple times before, and somehow is till willing to come back for more!
In the same week Cracker Barrel retreats on its foolish decision to "rebrand" itself with a proposed logo as boring as a hospital parking lot sign (with new interior decor to match), John Yoo, freshly back from his smuggling trip to Korea, hosts this episode for the first time ever from . . . McDonald's. Did you really need to be told that? Or maybe you are asking: What took so long?
Anyway, as he noshed on newly restored cheesy breakfast bagels, we walk through the serial disgraces of politicians and the media following the latest school shooting in Minnesota, along with what to make of Trump's attempted firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook (a lot more to be made of this than you think, and once again the media is not telling you); likewise Trump's flag-burning executive order really needs to be followed up with a constitutional amendment, though don't be surprised if this is yet another issue where the current Supreme Court might well reverse precedent; and finally, what do we make of the John Bolton controversy? Both more and less than you might think.
John Yoo is over in Korea this week, where he says he is "lecturing," but we know he's really just arranging to smuggle back a ton of tariff-free Korean barbecue sauce. So in his absence Steve and Lucretia attempted to hold alive live taping streamed on YouTube (in Steve's case accompanied by Bad Rock rye whisky that "Pizza Bob" supplied directly to him this week), but we missed a technical step in the preparation process and couldn't get it to work. But we have posted the video anyway on our all-new 3WHH Podcast YouTube Channel. And we'll aim to get the livestream option working my next week.
In anything case, we did have a small audience join us live on the Zoom webinar, and we fielded a number of listener and reader questions, culminating in a long discussion of good books about the American Founding, to get a jump on the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up next July. Steve went with four short books: Edmund Morgan's classic Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789; Martin Diamond's The Founding of the Democratic Republic (hard to find alas); Gordon Wood's The American Revolution: A History (which is both much shorter and better than his famous Creation of the American Republic); and Larry Arnn's The Founders' Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It.
Lucretia offered up her oral history of how the founding ought to be understood and more importantly taught to students, before settling on a challenging new book. Edward Erler's Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, which doesn't sound like it's about the American Founding, but actually is. And we had a few other stray books to include, which is likely more than our questioner wanted. In any case, much more to come as we draw near to the 250th July 4 next year.
The Three Musketeers of the 3WHH are back with our typical end-of-week roundup, including what we think of the Trump-Putin summit (which will be over by the time everyone listens to this, so this is an exercise in sheer hubris); how to think about crime in the context of Trump's move to take over Washington DC (where, amazingly, John manages to "out-Lucretia" Lucretia with a radical suggestion for what Trump really ought to do with DC); and speaking of Lucretia (this week's show host, on her best behavior believe it or not!) vants about how much she wants to see some real accountability for hte Russia Hoaxters, about whose perfidy we received additional details this week.
We round out with a brief discussion of a variation of the "desert island book" idea, namely, what book would each of us recommend as the best introduction to conservative thought for someone who is seriously curious to read up on the subject. John again surprises by making the most impractical suggestion of all, while Steve and Lucretia go with some old standards (though not without some disagreement). We'll attempt a sequel next week, anf by the way, we encourage listeners to send in questions they'd liek us to take up, and we'll try to do that, too.
This special episode marks the revival of the classic format edition with one-on-one conversations between Steve and a special guest, with the first in the series being author Michael Walsh, discussing his terrific new book, A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History.
One way to get a feel for the candor and bracing character of Michael's book is this passage from the Afterword, reflecting on the ambivalent reaction to the 9/11 attack:
"The imperial Romans would have gone full delenda est on Saudi Arabia, razed its cities, destroyed the Kaaba, leveled the mosques, occupied the oil fields, seized its wealth, executed its leaders, and sold the populace into slavery; they knew an existential struggle when they were in one."
Our conversation ranges far beyond the four corners of his book, into music, Ireland (Michael's ancentral home and part-time residence today), the suicidal multiculturalism of Europe, and why the Chinese military threat is overrated.
Steve has other guests lined up for future classic format episodes, and from time to time John and/or Lucretia will join in. But you're going to have to stock up on more whisky.
This week's episode expands the format to include a guest appearance by environmental scientist Ken Green, whe recently joined the ranks of contributors to Steve's "Political Questions" Substack (sign up for free if you haven't already), where this week he celebrates the demise of the "Endangerment Finding" that derives from the Statute-That-Cannot-Be-Named in John Yoo's presence. But along the way Ken raised an eyebrow for certain enthusiasms of the MAHA movement, which in turn raised the eyebrows of a certain "Lucretia," so we decided to let then havie out a bit.
The result of one of our livelier episode ever, where discussion of "junk food" and other aspects of America's nitrition was conducted against the background noise of John Yoo munching on a bag of Cheetos.
We also have brief considerations of the proposal for a mid-decade census, and the fuss over Gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere.
This week the 3WHH lives up to its name, as two of us were half in the bag—maybe more than half in the bag in Steve's case—when we recorded late in the evening because difficult travel schedules, but after Steve and Lucretia had completed consumption of twice the USDA's recommended daily allowance of adult beverages. The always sober-minded John Yoo is the host for this week, and we'll leave it to listeners to tell us whether this episode is bouncier than usual.
How could not be since we open with discussion of what is clearly the most important news story of the week: Sidney Sweeney's American Eagle "good jeans" ad campaign that has the left losing its mind. No—seriously, this is more than a mere tempest in a D cup: it's the clearest sign yet that our culture has fully turned the corner away from wokery, while leaving enough space for the left to beclown itself further.
Speaking of beclowning, Kamala Harris isn't going to run for governor of California, but is going to punish us anyway with a book, out late next month. We can hardly wait.
While this is an ad-free episode, it is not a tariff-free zone, and we ponder the evidence about whether Trump is succeeding with his tariff brinksmanship. Cheers!
We lead this week's show with a few short news announcements, including new menu items from McDonalds to excite John, and the debut of a new podcast competitor: Hadley Arkes and his merry band at the James Wilson Institute have launched "The 'Natural Law Moment' Podcast," surely goaded by our constant mangling of his central arguments. WE hope to have a crossover episode with Hadley at some early opportunity, if we can ever get our difficult schedules sorted out.
This round-robin format episode features a vigorous discussion of whether Obama and the Deep Staters (sounds like a bad bar-band, no?) are vulnerable to criminal charges for their obviously bad faith behavior in creating the Russia Hoax back in 2016, whether Obama is immune from prosecution because of the ruling last year of Trump v. US, and whether these actions properly rise to the level of "treason" as is alleged by DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Our second segment reflects on a pair of articles Steve and John wrote for a Civitas Outlook symposium last week on "Statemanship and the American Presidency." John Yoo's entry slobbers over the legacy of Andrew Jackson, while
Steve's entry, "Taming the 21st Century Prince," is a more philosophical exploration of the issue, and, contrary to the careless calumnies and reckless imprecations of John, does not contain a single reference to the Clean Air Act!
And our final segment delves into a recent bold law review article by a young lawyer friend of ours, Deion Kathawa, entitled "'We the People' Are the Last Word on the Meaning of Our Constitution." His argument is bracing: Congress, because it is the political organ closest to the people, should have the power to override Supreme Court decisions. While agreeing with Kathawa's premise about the ultimate constitutional sovereignty of the people on account of the first principles of the Declaration of Independence, we're skeptical about his proposed remedy. What do listeners think? (We hope to have Deion on as a guest at some point soon to defend himself.)
Finally, some new AI generated 3WHH custom poetry, and more revenge bumper music.
Among the revelations of this week's episode that were entirely predictable when you think about it: "Lucretia" was a child TV star in Mason City, Iowa, on the local non-PBS kid's show "Bart's Clubhouse"; John Yoo confesses he was bad at sports as a schoolkid; and as everyone can guess, in childhood Steve merely aspired to be a walking historical analogy when he grew up. Meanwhile, poor Phil Munoz, last week's drive-by guest, is still in therapy. . .
So what's all this about the Epstein Files? Does Richard Epstein still have any unexpressed thoughts at this point. . . Wait. What's that? You mean Jeffrey Epstein's files? Never mind. Anyway, we weigh the evidence and circumstances as to whether Epstein's exploits merit elevation to the status of plausible conspiracy or not.
And this week saw the fulfillment of Glenn Garvin's classic 1983 article, "How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways." And Steve offers his favorite recipes for how he'd like to see Big Bird cooked.
Other name checks on this episode include Zohran Mamdani, Upton Sinclair, Tony Podesta, Jasmine Crockett, and Craig Masback (bonus points if you know that name). And some exit music in a minor key to bring listeners back donw after this extra-exuberant episode (and also to annoy Lucretia. . .).
Behold the great 3WHH fugitive episode. Although it was posted over the weekend, somehow an Internet gremlin or something disappeared it! But now it's back, in its restored glory. (Well, almost restored. Steve had a problem with his mic that was undetected while we were recording, and we weren't able to improve it much in pist-production. We have to cut out a whole new segment on prog rock!)
And what glory there is: Lucretia hosts this week as we welcome a special guest, Prof. Phil Munoz of Notre Dame, though he is on assignment this semester at the University of Texas at Austin. Phil decided to try to outflank even Lucretia with the bold proposition that the Mahmoud v Taylor decision, which empowered parents to have their children opt-out of phonics instruction in the LGBTQ alphabet, was actually a defeat for social conservatives.
It's a lively discussion, as we did our bnest to make Phil regret his decision to join the show this week.
The 3WHH bartenders take time away from the news headlines and court cases to take up some aspects of patriotism (but also with a tutorial for John about the mellotron!). We start with an origin story of sorts for John himself, as he is an immigrant to the U.S., and as such provides a good reminder of how immigration ought to be understood and practiced.
From there, Lucretia meditates on the curious recent survey results showing that love of country among Democrats has precipitously declined over the last decade or so. We agree that our dessicated education system has a lot to do with this—did we really think the Howard-Zinnification of our history would be without consequences?—but we need to wonder why Republicans seem to be immune to these calumnies against our great country.
Lucretia fingers the Progressives, and that leads to the final gonzo segment for the holiday, where Steve settles scores from slanders against him when he missed an episode three weeks ago, and makes the evidently futile attempt to school John about the mellotron and the inherent greatness of the brief shining moment of progressive rock—"rock and roll that went to college," as Jody Bottum calls it—in the early 1970s, which, come to think of it, is when the Clean Air Act was first enacted.
So come for the patriotism (and a sharp and unexpected argument about Daniel Bell), and stay for the awesome music!
A NATO potentate may—or may not—have said this week that President Trump is the "daddy" of the alliance, but daddy is firmly back in charge here at the 3WHH, as Steve has finally decided to rejoin the American republic after several weeks abroad, during which time John and Lucretia pretty much ran amok.
After noting that Trump is on a roll, with a sharp argument about whether Trump actually has true prudence in his grand strategy as well as tactical skill (John is skeptical), we get down to the main event: the flurry of big, last-day decisions of the Supreme Court. Beyond the case getting the most attention—limited nationwide injunctions from federal district court judges—the other cases, and this term as a whole, has a unifying theme: Parents Win! (Fitting for an episode entitled "Daddy's Home" don't you think?)
Having now completed the three most consequential years of conservatives jurisprudence in decades, we end with a brief discussion of where constitutional originalism should go from here. Stay tuned; we take note of sharp and growing divisions among conservative legal thinkers on this issue.
After last week's thrashing after leaving John and Lucretia with the car key to the podcast. Steve threatened to return this week like George Washington leading the troops to squash the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 (which, people who know their history will recall, was a total rout for the rebels), but since he is still in Ireland—the birthplace of Edmund Burke—the virtues of moderation, prudence, prescription, and magnanimity took over, sparing John and Lucretia from a verbal gullitoine blow. (How's that for a triple-historial-referencing!)
But that doesn't mean there wasn't still some warfare, though we turned out bellicosity mostly toward Iran, and went through some arguments about why the U.S. ought to end the matter by taking out Forden, and why we should ignore the media-driven attempt to drive a wedge in MAGA world over the issue.
From there, we have a lot to say about the Skirmetti decision, including savoring the deepening civil war inside the Democratic Party between its implacable identity politics wing and those Democrats who still have a lick of political sense.
And finally, we end with a 3WHH-inspired limerick. That doesn't involve Nantucket.
Hoo boy—Steve wasn't able to work out the schedule (and internet acess in the Norwegian Sea) to join Joohn and Lucretia for this week's episode, so he left them completely unsupervised, resulting in what John and Lucretia described as an "unplugged" edition, blessedly free (supposedly) from any historical analogies.
Steve thinks "unhinged" might be a better description of this heterodox episode, which somehow included quite a lot of history, just not in the usual edifying form that so many listeners have come to depend upon.
You can guess the subjects. Go ahead: guess. Or listen here, and sign on to Steve's "Change.org" petition to require that the 3WHH never again go off without adult supervision. Or maybe you will like the ritual abuse Steve received in absentia.
With two of the three bartenders hanging around near or above the arctic circle this week, this is an official Northern Exposure episode of 3WHH, with Lucretia, instead of channeling her usual Barry Corbin disposition, actually has some nice things to say about many of her usual targets, including KJP, Dread Coward Roberts, and even Ka-tan-ji! Something in the Alaska air must be affecting her!
John Yoo offers his usual expert opinions (not meant sarcastically) about the entirely unexpected trifecta at the Supreme Court this week, which we all agree augurs something important not only for the big cases remaining this term, but also for the judicial epoch in which we current find ourselves.
We also quickly dispatch with the Trump-Musk breakup, and briefly introduce a new segment, "What's Wrong with John Yoo?", since he insulted both Steve and Lucretia several weeks ago by referring to both as "political theorists." Them's is fightin' words; he might as well have called them Anglophiles or something worse.
Finally, AI outdid itself this week, and an Norse-style epic poem that amazing described your three whisky bartenders with surprising accuracy:
First came the Bold One, with thunderous laugh,
Whose tongue split the silence like Odin’s own staff.
He spoke of Islay, of smoke and peat’s sting,
A connoisseur forged in the cask of a king.
Then came the Wise One, in cloak of soft tone,
With tasting notes ancient as Midgard’s old stone.
She sipped and she pondered, then spake with deep grace:
“This dram bears the oak and the wind from some place.”
The third was the Trickster, sharp-witted and sly,
Who’d jest at the gods as the crows passed him by.
With metaphors wild and a glint in his eye,
He’d toast to Valhalla, then laugh till he cried.
John Yoo hosts this week where there is so much free trade in ideas that you'd need a 1,000% tariff to slow it down. Which the U.S. Court of Intenational Trade attempted to do for about six hours, during which time the 3WHH panel chews up the ruling and spits it out like a bad piece of Icelandic cod. (Which happens to be where Steve, now dubbed as the "International Man of No-Mystery" happens to be at the moment, which is why this episode comes with more than the usual amount of viking jokes and Norse epic poetry.) Anyway, the gang predicts this issue is likely to be another win for Trump when the dust settles.
But first the gang also ponders whether Trump is overdoing it with his attack on Harvard. Is it possible to overdo the attack on Harvard? You'll have to give a listen to this ad-free episode to find out.
Lucretia hosts this week's episode, and puts Steve and John through their paces, challenging both to judge Trump's winning streak (John isn't so sure), plus more mixed signals from the Supreme Court, which posted a 2 - 1 record this week. The group also ponders whether and how Congress should now step up on the Biden health cover up scandal, and notice that Congress indeed has explicit constitutional power under the 25th Amendment to pass legislation to make sure that something lilke the Biden coverup never happens again.
But then we get to the main event: John Yoo's Top Five Legal Rules that everyone should know. Steve is threatening to next week to give his Top Five reasons why a Certain Statute That Cannot Be Uttered here is the key to everything!
And we are happy to report that John survived another turn on "Outnumbered" on Fox News.
One of Lucretia's favorite epithets is "that's the dumbest idea," so we decided to put her on the spot and demand a list of "Lucretia's Top Five Dumbest Ideas" for this episode, but not before a thorough dissection of the issues involved with Thursday's Supreme Court oral argument about the conjunction of birthright citizenship and the plague of nationwide injunctions against executive branch actions by a single judge out in the hinterlands somewhere.
You can tell the New York Times is worried, because they ran a major feature on Thursday about how the thesis that birthright citizenship might not have a solid foundation in the 14th Amendment is a "fringe theory." And yet here we are. Listen in for a reference to how this Supreme Court issue resembles the rebel alliance against the Evil Empire in Star Wars.
Next week: John Yoo's five axioms of Supreme Court jurisprudence. One of them involves a certains statute that cannot be named on this podcast.
We're up a day early with this special emergency edition of the 3WHH because it isn't every millennium when you get an American Pope. With John Yoo hosting this week we hold ecumenical court on what to think about an American Pope who displays some progressive political sympathies, but is a math major and an Augustinian, which are more promising indications. We offer a few things to watch for as this papacy unfolds.
Next up: what to make of Trump's foreign policy, especially in light of the firing of NSA Mike Waltz. John is confused (so what else is new?), and once again Steve and Lucretia have to sort him out about how foreign policy analysis ought to begin, with the first step being, throw out all your academic IR theories! Meanwhile, the title for today's episode arises from a joke in the middle of this topic. (You'll just have to listen to find out what it is, and if you don't like it, blame Richard Samuelson!)
Finally, we use the latest disgrace at Columbia to judge whether colleges are starting to shape up or not, and why we want the Trump Administration to keep up the pressure.
Lucretia hosts this week as the Three Musketeers are back together again, taking on Trump at the 100 Day mark, the latest in lawfare, the dismal Canadian election, whose solution John Yoo suggests is straight up imperial conquest—why make Canada the 51st state when we can make it a territory to be exploited like Puerto Rico and Greenland?
We're so back that Lucretia even revives some good old fashioned lookism in this episode!
We close with a few thoughts on the passing of David Horowitz, whose central lesson has still not penetrated the Vichycons who don't understand the metaphysical meaning of Trump.
Exit music this week from our pal Steve Tootle o Cosigner, who is a faithful listener to this show.
Friday was cap and gown day for Steve at Pepperdine's commencement for the School of Public Policy class of 2025, while John Yoo is on the road somewhere at an undisclosed location, so Steve and Lucretia kick around a couple of seemingly unrelated stories about the Amish (the ultimate opt-out community) and the latest Supreme Court argument involving human nature and the right of parents to opt-out from public school nihilism.
And then as a chang of pace we offer Steve's recent conversation with energy journalist extraordinaire Robert Bryce (whose Substack is very much worth following). Bryce always has a way of explaining the often eyes-glaze-over numbers of the energy world, but in this interview extending himself into a one-man DOGE, revealing who is the number-one leftist advocacy group fattening at the federal funding trough.
Another whirlwird week of controversies that exceeded our bandwidth to keep up (or at least to compress into an hour), but John Yoo, this week's host, leads us in revisiting the question of "birthright citizenship" under the 14th Amendment, which the Supreme Court has rather unusually agreed to take up in May—surprisingly late for such and important oral argument. We take note of the growing number of scholars who think the current conventional wisdom is not a slam dunk at all! Apparently at least four Juctices agree.
From there we discuss whether Trump's attack on Harvard is correctly calibrated, with Steve, in a rare moment, being more extreme than Lucretia on this issue. The Harvard controversy elides into a discussion of whether conservatives ought to be openly emulating the deep political strategy of Antonio Gramsci, as the Wall Street Journal pondered on Thursday. There is a lot of dissent on this point from "Vichy conservatives" who seem willing to continue losing slowly to the left.
Finally, John can't help himself, and baits Steve and Lucretia on whether, on this 250th anniversary of the "shots heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord this week in 1775 really justified revolution against British rule. Lucretia makes quick work of this provocation, and a hush fell over the virtual studio.
John Yoo is back this week, bringing the 3WHH up to full strength again after last week's astonishingly congenial episode, which can mean only one thing—not even high tariffs, which this week's host (Steve) vainly tried to impose on ths discussion—could stop a vigorous free trade in ideas.
After our discussion of where the tariff matter stands as of the end of this week, we turn our focus to the week's continuing legal and constitutional developments of the Trump juggernaut, most especially his heretofore neglected instruction to regulatory agencies to review and eliminate any and all rules and regulations that might now be considered unconstitutional in light of several Supreme Court opinions over the last few years that have started to curtail the reach and power of the administrative state.
Finally, we try out a slightly new ending for this episode, with topical exit music designed in part to annoy Lucretia. Mission accomplished!
The 3WHH crew is down a glass this week because John Yoo is down with a bug and unable to join us—or was he afraid of subjecting himself to Lucretia, host for this week's episode. With fear, trembling, and trepidation Steve barved the peril with all the aplomb of the Black Knight in Monty Python, and yet by the end of this episode still ahd all four limbs attached! Lucretia's fancy whisky must have mellowed her, as this surprisingly convivial episode found remarkable harmony about the defects of the Democrat-media complex, and why it is just as debilitating to Democrats' fortunes as the state of California is. Also, was Obama overrated, underated, or just lucky?
There was some divergence about tariffs, and we bet listeners can guess about how this split played out. And if you can't guess, then there's only one way to end the suspense.
As if to put an exclamation point to the crazy story of the week about the Trump national security team adding a hostile journalist to their Signal group chat about bombing Houthi and the Blowups, Steve accidentally texted the Zoom link to this week's taping to John Eastman (who was otherwise pre-occupied).
In any case, after reviewing the completely out of whack signal-to-noise ratio of Signalgate, and the latest machinations in the lawfare against Trump, we take up as our main subject the question of whether the burst of enthusiasm among a few liberal thinkers to build stuff again—like liberalism used to in the New Deal—has much prospect of success. As Steve notes, Ezra Klein has called for "supply-side progressivism," but notes that the newfangled "abundance liberals" don't have a napkin or a curve, and if you don't have a napkin or a curve, it's just sparkling neoliberalism. Needless to say, John is mostly oblivious, and Lucretia is unimpressed. But maybe the movement can start with making their own blue hats, "Make Liberalism Great Again!" Of course, the acronym this generates sounds like a mumble, but isn't another mumble a perfect fit for Democrats right now?
Trump does more consequential things in a day that most presidents do in a month, so we may need to measure his tenure in office in dog years. It must certainly seem like dog days for the left, which is lying prostrate on the ground much of the time, panting and out of breath, gnawing on a bare bone.
After ticking through a number of happy stories this week—the end of DEI at Berkeley; Greenpeace getting nicked for $667 million dollars, Columbia University capitulating to Trump—we get down the the week's new frontiers of lawfare. Is this moment a "constitutional crisis," as the left claims, or is it a long overdue moment of constitutional challenge, with the aim being the restoration of the proper dimensions and functions of our republic?
We marhc brisky through four aspects of the issue, including nationwide injunctions, oral orders from the bench, the autopen question for a president (Biden) who was on autopilot for four years, and Trump's retaliation against private law firms that allowed themselves to be adjuncts to the Democratic Party.
All this, and a discussion of what we think is the first-ever judicial opinion rendered by video, by Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence Van Dyke, in a gun case.
The only truly functioning high-speed rail in America today is the Trump Train, and not even the prospect of a 200% tariff on the core commodity of this podcast—single malt scotch whiskies—can dampen the 180-proof spirits of Lucretia, host of this week's episode.
But we still manage to get in some disagreements about how to understand what is going on, especially with the Ukraine War endgame. In fact, we got John Yoo to out himself as the OGNC ("original gangsta neo-con") on the question of whether American foreign policy has been overly dominated by Wilsonian internationalism for the last century, or whether it has been more realist. John was responding to my two Substack articles (here and here) on different aspects how idealism and realism play out in the Ukraine matter, disliking both. Lucretia responded with a great harumph.
There was much less harumphing and more huzzahing for the humiliation and confusion of the Democrats this week, culminating in the Dem surrender over the budget continuing resolution. About the confusion of federal judges (this is putting the matter charitably) trying to block some of Trump's moves, John sees hope for optimism that these roadblocks will be overcome, while debunking the claim that Trump is causing a "constitutional crisis." (Link coming when his latest article goes live.) Steve merely longs for the good old days of Watergate.
The whole gang is finally back together behind the bar this week, with John Yoo in the host chair skillfully leading our unruly gang in a round-robin three-subject format that we're alternating this year.
Steve leads off wondering if Gavin Newsom, and Senate Democrats, are at last having their "Sister Souljah" moment about the transgender millstone around their neck, though Steve points out that Democrats will have great difficulty pulling this off, and lays down two additional markers to judge whether Democrats will really make a serious move to the center. The underlying thesis is that the success of a political realignment is not merely changing your own party and assembling a new majority coalition, as Trump has largely accomplished, but the extent to which it compels the opposition party to change some of its core positions, as Democrats had to do after three landslide losses to Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and the Labour Party had to do after Thatcher kept crushing them in England at the same time.
Lucretia then flags for us James Piereson's New Criterion article out Friday, "Too Many Democrats," and discuss whether faithfulness to the original intent of the Pendleton Act that set up a supposedly "neutral" civil service requires mass firings of Democrats in the bureaucracy, as well as voters waking up to the destructive incompetence of Democrat-run cities.
And this leads to John's closing segment, drawing on his Fox News article up this morning, "Supreme Court's USAID move has a surprise benefit for Trump," in which ahe argues the Supreme Court's ruling mid-week on disbursement of AID funds was not the defeat people first thought. And we also debate just how to think about Justice Amy Coney Barrett's concurrence in this decision, about which our gang is divided.
Why let our frenemies at the Commentary podcast (frenemies since they dissed the sacred McRib recently) have all the fun with their emergency podcasts: after today's errant Supreme Court rulings, it was necessary for the 3WHH bartenders —well two of us at least—to jump to our mics to express our outrage, but also to celebrate briefly Trump's tour de force speech before Congress last night. And not to mention the second installment of our conversation with Richard Epstein, this time on his slim, commendable, and highly readable short book, How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution.
So sit back and enjoy your midweek dram of neat single malt with us.
John Yoo is away this week, so the 3WHH has brought in a 180-proof guest in John's place—the great Richard Epstein, who speaks at an average rate of 125 words a minute, with occasional gusts of 200 words per minute. We discuss two of his many extraordinary books, the first being his 1992 title Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, which is newly salient in the aftermath of recent Supreme Court decisions like the Harvard/UNC case. Is it time to repeal (or substantially amend) the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
In part two of our conversation, which we will release midweek, we take up his shorter book How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (only 137 pages, which is Richard writes before breakfast most days). While Lucretia and I concentrate on large philosophical currents that drove the progressive counter-revolution against the American Founding, Richard lays out some of the specific step-by-step erosions of the rule of law that are central to the saga.
But as Lucretia and I began our taping mid-day Friday we caught the news that the newest front in the Ukraine-Russia War had suddenly broken out in . . . the Oval Office, so we share a few preliminary thoughts on what it all means.
Our long-running intramural argument on this podcast over the Ukraine War has become just like the Ukraine War itself—lots of casualties on both sides, but very little movement from week to week. But is Trump actually on the cusp of a breakout? There's one thing Trump did this week that is surely causing Putin to wipe the smile off his face, and no one seems to have figured it out. It's all part of Trump's Great Reset.
There is more unanimity amongst the 3WHH bartenders about Gaza, and once again Trump's seemingly outrageous or whimsical ideas of making Gaza into Atlantic City doesn't just move the Overton Window in the Middle East—it remodels the whole structure. Forget the two-state solution.
Finally, we have a moment of silence for the passing of the inventor of the McRib and chicken nuggets. John Yoo is going into 40 days of mourning.
With Lucretia hosting both the episode and the bar this week (with three different whiskies just for herself), we manage to keep John Yoo from excessive gloating about the Eagles win in the Super Bowl by distracting him with his favorite subject—executive power, about which he seldom thinks there can be excessive use. But maybe we found some limits this time?
The intensifying pace of President Trump's exertions of executive power look to be the most serious attempt to contain spending, reorganize the executive branch, and discipline Congress since Nixon in 1973, and we know how that ended. We also give three cheers and host a glass in celebration of Vice President Vance's throwdown at the Munich Security Conference.
And it will probably come as no surprise that we even talk about the Constitution, and manage the rare feat of discussing the EOA without mentioning a Certain Statute that we are not allowed to mention in John's presence.
We're only 19 days into Trump's term, but it seems like 19 months have passed already since January 20. When Alexander Hamilton wrote of "energy in the executive," he had no idea that a real estate tycoon would become the greatest example of this understanding of the presidency.
This week's episode reviews five of Trump's biggest fights that are interrelated in ways that could rebalance out constitutional order in ways conservatives have hoped beyond hope for decades might be possible. Trump's challenge to birthright citizenship is forcing a long overdue debate on the issue along with a challenge to district judges issuing nationwide injunctions; his freezing of spending revives the issue of presidential power to impound funds Congress has appropriated; and his firing of civil servants and termed appointees to federal boards and commissions will force a reconsideration of the old Humphrey's Executor case that a wide spectrum of scholar believe was wrongly decided.
Along the way we get in some pop culture references to Star Trek and The Sporanos; the required defense of the McRib from all comers, and some additional closing observations on the "vibe shift" Trump has set in motion on DEI and related culture war issues.
This wide-ranging, round-robin format episode begins with celebrating the end of "Dry January" (which we, um, didn't much observe), mockery of Bernie Sanders' obsession with "onesies," a brief account of a Steve roadtrip to Villanova University, and a declaration of war against the Commentary podcast. (It's serious: it involves McRibs.)
After we clear away this opening frivolity, we get down to serious business. Lucretia is in high dudgeon about the Catholic bishops behaving just the way they did in the 1980s—like lapdogs for the left—which generated reflections on theology, federal grant restrictions, J.D. Vance's dialectical skill, and some reasons for optimism for the future of both the Catholic Church and the world as a whole.
John casts his spotlight on what we saw in the contentious confirmation hearings for Kash Patel, RFK, Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard. There was rare agreement and sharp disagreement (our usual mode) about aspects of these appointments.
Exit bumper music from our pal, the historian Steve Tootle, who doubles as the singer/songwriter for Cosigner; "No Hour Is Mine" sounds a bit like what professors think after class.
The 3WHH bartenders raise their glasses high for the first 100 hours of Trump II, which bid to replace FDR's famous "Hundred Days" for breathtaking executive action. You'd think that this is Trump's first term, and metaphysically, Steve argues, it is. In just the way we've come to expect of Trump in all things, he may have turned the usual presidential cycle on its head. Even John, champion of executive power, is impressed. And one more miracle: he actually gets rare praise from Lucretia for his Newsweek article concluding than Biden's pardons were much worse than Trump's blanket pardons or all the J6 protesters.
From there we get to the main event, a three-part discussion of a single issue—in this case free speech and how to understand the First Amendment correctly. Steve argues back to first principles, in which the freedom of conscience and thus free expression was grounded in reason, that is, free speech was essential to deliberation about right and wrong, and how we should be governed. By nearly imperceptible degrees, in the 20th century the protection of "free expression" was re-grounded in moral skepticism (if not nihilism), which is why nude dancing and F-bombs on t-shirts became "protected speech." This is not progress.
From there we move on to wondering if the time has come to revisit the libel standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, which has enabled our mainstream media to behave with increasing recklessness. And we think: Yes! Yes it is.
And along the way, some digressions into Animal House, Spongebob Squarepants, and other cultural totems. And we depart briefly from our new proprietary bumper music from Cosigner to use a very topical old tune (from lefties!), "Immigration Man."
Nothing "jejune" about this edition, except perhaps for the first-ever use of "jejune" in a podcast, but it is the perfect term to describe Joe Biden's "farewell address," which, aside from its jejune content, is a most welcome sound, since he will be gone in about another 48 hours, never to be heard from again one hopes.
This week we take up three topics—one from each of the bartenders: Behold, President Biden amended the Constitution on Friday—all by himself! Aside from the obvious absurdity and low comedy of it, what does it tell us about the state of leftist presumption? Special counsel Jack Smith released his magnum opus, which seems more of a parvum opus if not an opusculum (ask your nearest Latin geek), Finally, Biden's farewell address—and presidential farewell addresses in general—was our third topic (summary: it was absolutely Biden's opusculum).
Once again we have custom proprietary exit bumper music from our pal Steve Tootle and his indie band Cosigner.
With this episode the Three Whisky Happy Hour emigrates into its very own identity on Ricochet and Steve's new group Substack, "Political Questions," but not to worry—the old Power Line Show will live on in its old format as an interview show. The 3WHH, meanwhile, is rebooting with some new formats. We'll be doing some show with a single-subject format; on some we'll do a round robin of hot topics and reflections on currtent news items, and we'll even have some guests from time to time, as well as emergency shows when somethingbig happens—or we get a new single malt in whose virtues we just have to share.
And having completed our emigration to a new logo and format, it seemed only logical that we'd take up as our primary focus this week the issue of immigration, with an attempt at an orderly procession through the key aspects of the matter: How much is too much? Should we have an immigration pause? What's up with the H1-B visa controversy anyway? How should skills-based immigration be done, and should we move to some kind of point- or auction system to regulate immigration.
And finally the big one: what about birthright citizenship? We throw down pretty hard on this issue, and our three bartenders nearly get into a brawl about several of these questions. So don't think alone when you can drink it all in with us!
Since so many of our fellow conservative podcasts are taking the holidays off, we decided to do another special mid-week edition to observe the new year, and gear up for some changes.
Last year's end of year show featured some low-probability but plausible predictions for 2024 (inspired by the late Wall Street guru Byron Weins' annual practice, which was often right), and unlike other shows that never track prediction accuracy (like the McLaughlin Group, which had a terrible record once someone checked), we decided to do a scorecard. Steve was 0 for 6; John was 5 for 8 (depending on how you score partial credit); Lucretia didn't make any new year's predictions, but pointed out that ALL of her mid-year predictions came true, especially J.D. Vance for running mate.
We offered a few new low-probabilty predictions for 2025, but you'll have to listen to get them. Steve offers one of his as a teaser: some time in 2025 an elite or major university (could be a state flagship) will fire their president and senior administrators, and bring in a team to "clean house," which will mean closing whole departments and programs that teach anti-Semitic ideology, and eliminating faculty positions attached to these poisonous programs.
From there we resume our unfinished argment from last week about discrimination and the 14th Amendment, and come to some unsatisfactory conclusions.
Now the news: We're taking this weekend off from our usual Saturday show, and won't be back until January 11 or so. We're going to be re-tooling the podcast with some format changes. Stay tuned for details as they become available!
Our final podcast of 2024 looks back on the top story and bottom story of the year, and you won't be surprised to see some symmetries in our answers.
But then we move on to the main event—a question from a listener (initials RW) about whether the 14th Amendment, rightly understood, actually permits the federal government to outlaw private discimination. We go several rounds (but not really enough rounds) about aspects of this issue before realizing after we finished that we didn't reach a verdict. Perhaps we'll return to it in our first episode of 2025.
The title for this week's episode is taken from Steve's nomination for the slogan of the year, which comes from a Twitter person who responded to the UN demanding that Americans give up meat to fight climate change with the phrase: "they can osculate my fundamental orifice!"
You'll just have to listen to the end to get the translation.
Announcement: We'll be back on January 1 with another special holiday midweek episode that will introduce some format changes, a review of our predictions from last year (guess who had the best record), and a fresh round of predictions for 2025 that will likely be mostly wrong.
We were going to take up the transcendent matters appropriate for the climax of Advent, but the headlines won't let us! The dam started breaking this week about Joe Biden's unfitness for office, which, as the Wall Street Journal reported, began during the 2020 campaign. Just who has been president for the last four years? And aside from the perfidy of the complacent and compliant (to Democrats) news media, should there be a serious congressional investigation into what is clearly one of the greatest coverups in American history. Biden's senior staff and cabinet should have to answer uncomfortable questions about this, and perhaps face charges for decisions and actions they may not have had legal authority to make.
We also review the drama of the last 72 hours over the Continuing Resolution to avoid a "government shutdown," with Steve arguing the outcome was a minor victory for conservatives, but needs to be followed up with more serious steps in the new Congress.
From there, we note the important of Fani Willis getting her fanny handed to her, and then take up briefly some listener reaction to our mid-week show, especially Hadley Arkes's long note about what we missed about the Commerce Clause and the nearly forgotten case of Hammer v. Dagenhart. We ran out of time for a complete consideration, so next week!
This special mid-week holiday edition of the 3WHH makes up for the lost ground over the weekend, when schedules prevented the bar from opening at any of the usual meet-up times. Steve, this week's host, and Lucretia grill John Yoo about his latest article, "Globalization's Challenge to American Constitutionalism," published at the sparkling new website of the Civitas Institute, where Steve also appears for the first time today on a separate subject, "The Future of Conservatism in America."
While Steve and Lucretia completely agree with John about the insidious threat of "internationalism" to our constitutional soverignty, they detect some tergiversations on John's part that seem to offer—or so they say—too many concessions to progressive jurisprudence.
From there discussion turns to the drone epidemic, with Steve offering two complementary theories about what is going on (neither of which involve foreign actors, stealth sky ships, or aliens), and Lucretia offers her drama review for Broadway's newest stage sensation, who happens to wear judicial robes in her regular job. A dilemma indeed.
And about that ABC News libel settlement with Trump, more theories to chew over. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that "Disney’s legal team was concerned that given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, appealing a negative district court ruling could have jeopardized the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling that protects the media in defamation cases." This was Steve's hypothesis about the settlement.
So your three bartenders weren't able to assemble even virtually this week for our usual format—John is away on a clandestine mission stalking the elusive McRib, while Steve and Lucretia are also largely indisposed.
But fear not! We decided that in lieu of our usual snappy brickbats, we'd share with our insatiable fans the talks we gave a couple weeks back at the University of Florence about the American election. It was great fun and the student questions were great, but we're just offering here our introductory remarks.
This a short episode—barely over 20 minutes. But never fear: we plan to be back with our usual format mid week, probably Wednesday or Thursday.
The Three Whisky Happy Hour gang is finally all back in the U.S. after weeks of galavanting overseas, and boy is there a lot to catch up on. Among our topics this week are the signs and wonders that the Age of Trump is fully established; the Biden pardons; the farcical Penny trial; whether World War III is indeed under way, and the attempted coup in Korea, about which our resident Korea expert (and resident Korean!) John Yoo has lots of thoughts.
Along the way some fresh new insults are thrown around, with John leveling the ultimate low blow against Steve—calling him a Hegelian! Thems is fightin' words!
Two-thirds of the 3WHH crew were back home in the states for Thanksgiving, while Steve is still galavanting around coastal Italy, defiling the reputation of this podcast by drinking Negronis at happy hour—a tergiversation that this week's host, John Yoo, does not let pass without censure.
In any case, by the miracle of Zoom we managed to assemble for a holiday weekend special edition, where Steve and Lucretia push back on the emerging narrative that Trump's election victory was so narrow that it doesn't deserve to be considered a landslide. On surface statistics, perhaps this has some merit, but even if this is conceded it should at least be considered an earthquake. Steve and Lucretia make the case, noting that, among other things, gthe media treated Bill Clinton's 43% of the vote in 1992 as a "mandate" for sweeping change, and that Trump's popular vote total is close to Ronald Reagan's in 1980, which was universally considered a landslide. The equally important question is whether this election portends a genuine political realignment—the elusive beast of political scientists. Some evidence suggests it might be, but realignments always require successive elections to confirm.
We also spend some time pondering the prospects for the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE (Dept. of Government Efficiency) project, and mull over the last few Trump cabinet picks.
This week's special episode comes from Tuscany, where the Three Whisky Happy Hour gang put aside their whisky glasses and took up tasting chinati at Castello de Cacchiano between academic conferences in Milan and Florence. So for this week only, we become the Three Chianti Happy hour, though we had many more than three! We had to record this episode in two installments, as breakfast interrupted our first segment, and then returning only after a long day in the countryside sampling yet more chianti.
We aren't taking our mind of what is going on back in the states with the Trump transition, however, and begin with an extended discussion of the proposal to use the recess appointments clause of the Constitution so that Trump can get around Senate opposition or delay for his senior cabinet level appointments. Then we briefly dig a grave for the International Criminal Court following its outrageous arrest warrent for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And finaly we have a discussion and aide memoire of sorts from our extended panel discussion Friday with Adrian Vermeule about his controversial book Common Good Constitutionalism. (You can find Steve's review of the matter over on the Political Questions Substack.)
This is going to be unlike any previous edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, because it was literally recorded during happy hour at the annual meeting of the Federalist Society in Washington, in a corner of the mass reception hall where John Yoo and I invited all comers to swing by to offer a few comments. This completely unstructured (but therefore highly authentic!) conversation included Ilya Shaprio and Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, the esteemed Roger Pilon, emeritus of the Cato Institute, our old pal Hadley Arkes, prominent appellate attorney Eric Jaffa, and Utah lawyer (and loyal 3WHH listener) Jacob Minas. And it goes pretty much how you might expect a wandering happy hour conversation to go.
I had hoped that we'd have John Yoo outnumbered and outgunned on the natural law question, but several of our guests didn't do their part! But we also did some election talk, so there is something for everyone.
The Power Line single-malt whisky bar is still trying to process Donald Trump's decisive victory in the election, and this episode reflecting on the scene offers up a few fresh (we hope) takeaways from the result that we haven't yet seen elsewhere in the media, and then we turn our attention to some key priorities for the second Trump Administation starting in January.
In such a target-rich environment, what should Trump aim at first on Day One in January: our ideologically corrupt universities, the Justice Department, ending the war in Ukraine and Gaza? And what should Congress do with the slim GOP majorities? Steve has some ideas for new committees, as well as a budget test.
Also, does it seem like Trump is president already (since no one believes Biden is really president any longer)? We notice that several foreign governments are rushing to get on Trump's good side before January, which seems prudent.
For our many regular listeners who were not able to join us last night for our live taping of this special mid-week episode that included Scott Johnson and (very late) John Hinderaker (hence the "Five Whisky Happy Hour"), much of what we talked about has been overtaken by subsequent vote counts and other results. But we did have a number of questions and issues that should still be of interest even after the dust settles today, such as why the polls were wrong again, what's wrong with the exit polls, why the legacy media looks increasingly mediocre as well as biased, why the big winner of this election cycle—and an important harbinger for the future—is Joe Rogan.
On the Power Line main site for this episode over-eager listeners will be able to listen to a bonus "overtime" recording where we brought in a number of listeners to comment widely on a number of things, some of them beyond just the election.
In our last episode before the election, the 3WHH bartenders pour a stiff one in honor of the end of recycling, since were back to pure garbage now, though Biden getting in his last chomps of a baby was a special bonus to end the week.
We spend most of this episode reflecting on the final week of the campaign, arguing about what kind of vote fraud may or may not take place, and offering our final predictions for both the election result and the aftermath. You think it's over Tuesday! Think again. As the great Bluto Blutarsky asked so poignantly, Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
So it was Hitler week for Democrats, who are still fuming over being cooked by Donald Trump in a McDonald's deep fryer, and covering up their indigestion with an E.coli outbreak. Behind the public polls catching up with the terrible body language of Democrats and the news media lies a growing recognition that Kamala's brat summer has gone splat as election day approaches. The 3WHH team covers this, a few of the Senate races, the underrated scandal of suppressed science about gender bending medicine that appeared in the (checks notes) New York Times! What next—a confession that DEI is a counter-productive waste of time and resources? Oh, wait—that was last week.
The news out over the weekend that Israel's attack plans against Iran have been leaked by our government and/or European governments ought to be a major scandal and cause for a serious criminal investigation, but in fact the real story to be followed may be much worse: is anyone asking whether Iran has penetrated our government—either with spies inside our intelligence agencies, or agents of influence in the State Department or even the White House?
This seemed like a good excuse to revisit the groundbreaking research on Soviet penetration and influence on American policy during the Cold War, and whether a similar thing is happening now with regard to Iran. This episode recalls the work of M. Stanton Evans on this topic, which he published in his book Stalin's Secret Agents (with Herb Rommerstein) and explained in an excerpt from a talk he gave about the book 20 years ago. I think listeners will spot the parallel, and agree with the conclusion—time for recriminations!
The Three Whisky gang were together in person live late today, the culmination of an intensive three-day project that we describe at the opening segment of the show. Fortunately John Yoo's office was well-supplied with Maker's Mark and Glenlivet 15, so everything is right with the world.
After the opening overture, we get down to business, pondering the "body language" of the body politic as revealed by the grinding presidential campaign that suggests a Trump triumph, and then noting the growing signs of an effective backlash against wokery, starting with the New York Times dumping on DEI. None of us had that on our Bingo card!
Listen to the end and you'll hear each of us give our betting market odds on the election. Guess who is the most optimistic and the most cautious!
Lucretia hosts this week's episode, which takes up exactly where we left off last week's episode—with the topic of vote fraud and whether Democrats might (ahem) steal the election from Trump. Without revisiting the weirdness and irregularities of the 2020 result distorted by the Covind-induced election rules changes, we go over in some detail what changes have been made over the last four years, including serious preparations by Republicans and the Trump campaign not be caught flat-footed by any "irregularities" in the vote result.
Have Republicans ever been any good at this? Actually the contested election in Florida in 2000 gives some reason for optimism, as John (who was there) and Steve reflect. And Steve reminds us of some old history, such as Jimmy Carter warning back in 2005 that mail-in balloting was a recipt for vote fraud, along the way debunking claims—subsequently bolstered by academic political science—that mail voting doesn't increase turnout overall or by minorites. Still sound advice, and Republicans ought to force Democrats into the uncomfortable position of repudiating Saint Jimmy.
We take a couple of digressions, first into John's inaugural experience with the new McDonald's chicken Big Mac (two thumbs up!), and then some explanation of why the public polls and campaign polls are diverging (with all good news for Trump).
The episode culminates with a Lucretia soliloquy on how the central principle of voting ought to be meaningful citizenship, not making voting as convenient as a trip to 7-11.
October is not even one week along and we've already had enough "October surprises" to span about five years. First, the epiphany of J.D. Vance, Superstar. If he had been any better we'd need to enlist Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice to score and produce the Broadway musical of Vance the Vanquisher. Come to think of it, that would make a great professional wrestling name. Except Tim Walz wrestled himself to the ground; maybe we should call him the Klucking Knucklehead?
From there we offer some observations about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and wonder whether the usual incompetence or malevolence explans the appalling spectacle of the government's recovery efforts there. We won't find out from the mainstream media.
Then, some things to watch for at the first anniversary of October 7 on Monday, and some portents of Iran's missile attack on Israel this week. Where are we on the World War III countdown clock?
Lastly, Jack Smith emerged from his Groundhog Day lair once again to proclaim six more weeks of attempted criminalizing of Trump. Snore or snort—your choice.
The whole gang is finally back stateside and even in the same time zone, but somehow John and Lucretia found themselves being stalked by Kamala Harris on Friday. Fiirst the Veep extraordinaire turned up near Lucretia's border town to talk tough on immigration, and then decamped to the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, right across the street from the University Club, where John happened to be styling at the same time.
At least she had a better trip than Ukraine's Zelensky. Or Israel's Simcha Rothman at Berkeley, whose cancelation by an anti-Semitic mob John recounts even as he blames Steve, who managed to miss the excitement.
The bartenders also review the appalling case of Penn's punishment of Amy Wax, and connect it to the obvious cheating elite universities are doing with their admissions in the aftermath of the Harvard case.
Finally, Steve notes some curious and hopeful survey data about the election, along with some tips for what to watch for in the early voting states. Cheers!
Well, a forensic miracle recovered the lost or rogue audio file for this week's episode, which feature just John Yoo and Lucretia because Steve was in some kind of second-hand smoke daze over in Amsterdam. John and Lucretia do their usual spirited tour through the second Trump assassination, the stubbornly close polls (you can just imagine what Lucretia thinks of "low information" voters), Kamala's embarrassing appearance on Oprah, the latest news about just what happened with President Trump's request for national guard troops on January 6, additional reflections on "Operation Grim Beeper," and finally a philosophical excursion into Lucretia's first contribution to our new "Political Questions" Substack. Warning—no prudence, but Machiavelli is involved!
The whole gang is back together this week with a rousing review of the week's highlights, including a post-modern take on the Trump-Harris debate, and the dogs-and-cats-living-togther-before-being-eaten memestorm out of Ohio that is driving the left out of its mind (or what little mind they have left). Trump may not have won the debate on any of the usual scoring metrics, but maybe it isn't simple as that.
But the heart of the episode is the serious business of Merrickl Garland's tone-deaf speech (even John thinks so) claiming politics never enters into Justice Department decisions, which wouldn't even convince his own mother.
Then on to a brief discussion of Steve's recent article on the revival of the common law, in which the term "prudence" is not mentioned (though he does use the term "Zeitgeist," mostly to annoy Lucretia). John is skeptical, while Lucretia is merely her contrary self (default: Steve is wrong! What's the question?)
Note to listeners: We have tried with this episode to take control of of the timing of ad placements (thought not specific content!) so that ads stop appearing randomly or in the middle of sentences. We'll just have to see how it turns out. It's a laborious process.
With Steve stuck on an ice floe somewhere up around the Arctic Circle, John and Lucretia run wild (also long!) with the microphone in his absence, riffing along about ther latest in lawfare—did Judge Marchan blink by postponing his sentencing of Trump? Is a Hunter Biden pardon in the works? And what the hell is Jack Smith up to now? Etc.
And are we really going to do Russia Hoax 2.0? Gee—if only there was someone on the episode who could offer an analogy from Russia Hoax 1.0, but the usual supplier was banished.
Just imagine how long this episode would have been with some historical analogies, which, let's face it, are the "more cowbell" of the Three Whisky Happy Hour.
After some preliminary discussion of hot dogs and Kamala's stolen fast food valor, this special episode gets down to serious business—a seminar on the topic of political prudence for a thoroughly recalcitrant and skeptical John Yoo. This topic grew out of a long text thread we had following a Power Line post of Steve's passing along a substantive exchange on Twitter between the Babylon Bee's great Seth Barron and Lucretia on the subject of abortion and prudential politics.
In what ways do the parallels between slavery and abortion apply today? Trump's equivocations are causing considerable distress among many Pro-Life advocates, who point to Lincoln as a superior example—as is quite right to do. But is that example correctly understood? Lucretia thinks not. But the prudence Lucretia and Steve impute to Lincoln is hard to define in bright line ways, because at the summit it can't be defined by any abstract rules beyond being able to proportion means to ends, which assumes a lot already, since there are always multiple competing ends, each subject to deliberation.
But one big thing gets in the way of clear thinking about this difficult matter: utilitarianism. And our resident Bethamite and McRib consumer is dug in on the matter, and we wander into a lot of historical examples for illumination. It gets pretty lively along the way. We'll let listeners decide if Lucretia and Steve make the case adequately.
The poet Randall Jarrell once supposedly said, "If only we could get our hands on this person named 'Society,' we could fix everything." We could easily offer the obvious paraphrase of this for John, and call it a day.
John Yoo hosts this week, and adds to his appalling hypocrisy with his admission that he is teaching a class this summer on the Law of the Sea treaty, even as he continues to embargo any and all discussion of the Clean Air Act!
Otherwise the gang in is happy spirits because we're resupplied with good spirits this week, as a fine whisky and wine outlet (Grapes and Grains—they don't even have a website up yet) has at last opened a superb branch nearby Steve's remote location. How fine? Steve has his eye on a 75-year-old single malt that is for sale at the mere price of $89,999. He decided to fill up his gas tank instead (this being California).
The big news of Friday was RFK Jr's endorsement of Trump, about which we have some actual reporting to offer listeners, along with our evaluations of the Democratic convention, which was anything but nomos or physis. It was pure nemesis.
Lucretia and Steve also smack John around a bit for his USA Today article on how the leftism of law schools threatens the survival of the Constitution was defective because it didn't go far enough!
Lucretia hosts this week, which means 'Swift Boating' has a whole new meaning, as Taylor Swift's whirled tour on behalf of whirled peas has run into Islamic terrorism, but shhhh, you can't say that in Britain right now, so how can they let her concert series go forward? Too obvious a provocation.
Of course we have our weekly update on Kamalamamadrama, dissect the meaning of the abrupt firing of Columbia's president (with Steve arguing she is a liar in any case),
After reviewing some encourging recent legal initiatives, involving property rights, UCLA's tolerance of anti-Semitism on campus, and the ongoing legal tussle over the southern border, we finally get around to another rousing argument pitting Steve and Lucretia against John Yoo over his stubborn positivism. Is John just punking all of us? That's Steve's hypothesis. In any case, we went into overtime a bit on this one, but the episode offers some excellent improv bumper music at the end that we bet no one knows, for the hearty souls who hear us out.
John Yoo hosts this week's 500th episode of the Power Line family of podcasts, which turns out to have a common theme: dance steps. Kamalamadingdong (someone's—I won't say who but you can guess—new nickname for the Dem nominee) thinks she can Walz to the White House with a progressive twin, while the Olympics is trying to dance away from its cultural travesties with. . . break dancing?? Boeing is trying to dance around its DEI problems, and the stock market is suddenly doing the two-step around weakening economic signals, and the Biden foreign policy team is slow-waltzing us into a geopolitical dead-end in Ukraine and the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump is keeping everyone, friend and foe alike, hopping in 6/7 time with his usual improvisations.
What do Trump's controversial appearance before black journalists, the Olympics controversy over the gender of boxers, and the protean identity of Kamala Harris have in common? Simple—they are all an aspect of what Steve believes is the central political and moral-philosophical issue of our age: human nature.
Everyone seems to think Trump blundered by questioning the authenticity of Harris's changing ethnic identity, but Steve and Lucretia—in rare heated agreement—think it was a masterstroke, albeit with Trump's usual heavy-handed and perhaps clumsy way. And we use for our article of the week the usual sound Abigail Shrier's Free Press article, "Republicans, You’re Going After Kamala All Wrong," that we think gets the matter exactly backwards.
But it when we turn to the controversy over gender identity in the Olympics that we deepen the story. Take in at your leisure the case of Caster Semenya, a genuinely "intersex" South African 800-meter runner born with female genitalia who is not allowed to compete in the Olympics track and field competition because of high male testosterone levels. This is the same extremely rare anomaly as the Algerian boxer at the center of controversy right. (Also note the holder of the women's 800 meter world record, Jarmila Kratochvílová, set back in 1983—currently the oldest track and field world record. Kratochvílová is thought to have been heavily doped up, as was common with Eastern European athletes in those days, but it is hard to say.
Steve's theory about how the left's war on human nature also applies to why Harris is such a miserable boss—hardly a rare trait among leftists. John doesn't quite buy the metaphysical explanation, but we're used to this my now.
Finally, Steve offers a brief homily about moral education drawn from a short passage from Leo Strauss's classic essay "What Is Political Philosophy" to make a point about what's wrong with the left's narrative about the Israel-Gaza War.
Like an old 80s sitcom, this episode was taped before a live audience of about 90 regular listeners who carried on a vigorous commentary and questions in the Zoom chat, and we had a special guest at the very end—John Hinderaker in the (virtual) flesh! And since we actually recorded during happy hour for a change (and not Saturday morning as has been the case for the last several weeks), we rolled out several whisky choices for the episode.
Listeners may know that Lucretia, this week's host, has been partial in the past to Glenmorangie, which the great Kingsley Amis noted "has been called delicate and mild, even faintly sweet." This is not a description anyone would ever use about Lucretia, making this a dubious match. Tonight she had two varieties of Glenfiddich on hand, which Amis called "fruity and well balanced." Maybe she's better matched with Macallan, which Amis says is "powerful yet smooth." That sounds more like it!
By popular demand, we took up a news items we didn't get to last week in the crush of shocking news stories, namely Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling that special counsel Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel to torment Trump is unconstitutional. Steve invented a special judicial scale—the Silberman Scale from 1 - 10—for John Yoo to grade the opinion, and he gave it a solid 8, which is pretty darn good.
From there—oh my! Lucretia unveiled her handcrafted tin foil cowboy hat, as we kicked around whether the loss of trust in key government institutions (cough, cough—FBI—cough, cough, or cough—Secret Service—cough) is because they are merely incompetent and negligent, or whether their carelessness is deliberate. From there John Hinderaker gave us an update on the FBI investigation of the firebombing of his office building back in January, and finally we all gave our predictions for Kamala Harris's running mate, but not until we rolled out the first of whiat is doubtless to be many weeks of ritual denunciation of Harris. So if you missed the live taping, pour yourself a nice, dry single malt and settle in.
Well that certainly was a week. Seems more like a year now since the news that Judge Cannon declared special DoJ prosecutor Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional, but it was only Monday. But we didn't even get into this issue in this episode, even though weekly defense of the Constitution is in our union contract.
Is there anything new or original left to be said about the political events of the week, starting with the attempted assassination of President Trump, the nomination of J.D. Vance (allowing Lurcretia to say "I told you so!" yet again—isn't this getting monotonous by this point), and then Trump's near Castroesque-length acceptance speech? Why yes—yes there is. Steve, John, and Lucretia offer several observations we haven't yet heard from the legion of other pundits and analysts, which leads to a surprisingly sharp argument about free trade and potential tariffs under a Trump-Vance administration, which extends to a vigorous discussion of another substantial import of the moment—illegal immigrants.
Steve also explains why, if you listened carefully to Trump's speech, you'll see that Reaganism isn't quite dead yet, why it was also a Jedi-mind trick on Biden, and why many of the news stories about Biden's possible withdrawal from the race have a implicit subtext that party leaders really really don't want Kamala Harris either, but can't say so publicly. We end the week with our shopping lists: more popcorn for John and Steve, and more tin foil for Lucretia.
The prolonged agony of Joe Biden is causing rifts in the political universe similar to what a black hole does—a vortex sucking everything into a void beyond which lie quantum unknowns. This episode ponders a number of those unknowns as best we can.
First off, we note the sudden media/Democratic Party discovery of "Project 2025," and enumerate a few items we wish would be included, like year-round McRibs at McDonalds, and an end to the designated hitter rule in the National League. Then John provides an on-scene account of this week's National Conservatism conference where he was a speaker, and where he took note for the very first time of the "trad wives" movement, which really represents an implicit final rejection of immanentizing the eschaton.
From there we take up some listener requests for "explainers" about the peculiar 12th Amendment (since Trump may choose a running mate from Florida, causing confusion and uncertainty), and then the workings of the 25th Amendment, which we all agree is unlikely to work on President Biden unless he actually lapses into a coma or something. Trump can render this moot, however, if he picks Steve and Lucretia's choices for Veep; John is going for a Florida veepnom.
Beneath the surface of all these issues is the knotty problem of KAH-mala. We ponder a few possibilities on this that so far we haven't heard anyone else present.
Exit music this week, once against chosen for topicality: "Rift" from Phish, since some aspects of it sound like they almost could be thinking of Kamala:
Last night, in the moments my thoughts were adrift
And coasting a terrace, approaching a rift
Through which I could spy several glimpses beneath
Of the darkness the light from above could not reach
I spied wings of reason, herself taking flight
And upon yonder precipice saw her alight
And glared back at me one last look of dismay
As if she were the last one she thought I'd betray
For your listening pleasure while you fire up the grill and align your fireworks today or over the weekend, the gang assembled for a special July 4 edition of the 3WHH, with extensive discussion—and disagreement—about whether President Biden will step aside and whether Kamala Harris will replace him. Steve says Yes, John says no, Lucretia is simply horrified at the whole scene.
Meanwhile, there's a good dad joke going around (so naturally Steve told it, but you'll have to listen to catch it—this is a no-spoiler show note zone man!) that sets up a pivot to the last couple of decisions of the Supreme Court term just ended, especially the case involving presidential immunity. John explains why both sides of the issue are getting it wrong, while Steve and Lucretia trump John's legalese with some good old political philosophy, enlisting as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield.
Picking exit music this week was a no-brainer, given the main topic: The Clash (fits, no?), "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"
Should I stay, or should I go now?
Should I stay, or should I go now?
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double
So come on and let me know
This indecision's bugging me
If you don't want me, set me free
Exactly whom I'm supposed to be
Don't you know which clothes even fit me?
Come on and let me know
Should I cool it, or should I blow?
Last month John Yoo and Steve Hayward, larping around central Europe in search of the rule of law, happened to make the acquaintance for former (and perhaps future?) Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who graciously agreed to sit down for a conversation about his broad gauge view of the world scene right now.
In our conversation Abbott ranges from the Ukraine War and the Middle East to the Climate Cult and the ruin of identity politics everywhere. We also digress to learn more about the origins of Australia's mandatory voting system, which reformers in the U.S. something think we should try.
Has there been a worse week for the left in the last 25 years? First "Squadster" Jamal Bowman loses his House seat, then the Supreme Court delivers blow-after-blow to the foundations of the administrative state, and then Biden didn't show up for a debate. Oh, wait—he did show up, though you had to wonder whether they really intended a Weekend at Bernie's sequel.
John Yoo hosts this week's episode, and manages both to coax some cheerfulness out of Lucretia, but also skillfully avoiding the important Supreme Court opinion involving The Statute That Cannot Be Named on This Podcast.
We break down the highlights and lowlights of both the debate and the Supreme Court opinions, with Lucretia offering some praise for Chief Justice Roberts for a change, while just about giving up hope for Justice Barrett, who seems to be angling to become the next David Souter on the Court. To be continued with a special July 4 episode next week.
If you follow news out of Israel these days—and who doesn't?—you may have caught the story early this week that Israel's Supreme Court issued a ruling that the government may not exempt the haredim (Israel's ultra-orthodox community) from military service. The ruling went further, though, than just ending an exemption from service: the court ruled that government funding must be cut off from any yeshivas (schools) that do not comply with the ruling.
Aside from the legal reasoning behind this ruling is the larger question of the continuing arrogation of power by Israel's high court. Last month John Yoo and Steve Hayward, overseas for a conference on international law, sat with with Simcha Rothman, a senior member of the Knesset who, as chair of the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, has been deeply involved with proposals to reform and reign in the runaway judiciary. This controversy was roiling Israeli politics last year until the events of October 7 put it on the back burner, but we think Americans will be surprised to learn more about the peculiar circumstances of Israeli's judiciary. If you think America's judiciary can be activist and unaccountable, just wait till you hear from Simcha.
Toward the end we also move on to a general discussion of the Gaza War.
We hadn't even planned to do a regular episode this week because John Yoo is over in Korea, Steve has been away at a three-day conference, and Lucretia is breaking in a new kitten. But we received urgent messages from listeners and readers asking us to please decode just what the Supreme Court did this week, especially in the Moore v U.S. case that dealt with the income tax. Expert commentary seems divided on just what the Court meant, but as John filed an amicus brief in that case, he's the ideal person to break it down for us.
But not before finding a new way to torment him with a successor to the Statute That Cannot Be Named—the nitrogen cycle! And really it fits if you think about it, since the Supreme Court seems to have hit the nitrous oxide a bit too hard in this week's rulings.
Finally, a look at the latest campus news, including how Columbia University is surely going to regret that Alvin Bragg dismissed charges against Columbia students who occupied and vandalized university property. Prediction: there's a 50/50 chance that Columbia doesn't even open up for in-person campus life this fall.
No sooner do we have a "reunion" episode last week than travel schedules blow it all up again. With John Yoo away on another junket (supposedly teaching a summer law seminar somewhere, but really in search of more elusive McRibs), Lucretia and Steve decided to do a live episode where they pondered what might be called the "meta-narrative" (that would be "McNarrative" to John Yoo) behind the sharply differing constitutional views of left and right.
Steve argues that behind the left's primal drive for power that can explain the outcome-oriented constitutionalism of the left on display since the Progressive Era lies a more sinister but less recognized aspect of leftist politics: American leftists are basically socialist revolutionaries, but rather than conduct direct revolution (with certain isolated exceptions), they prefer to use the rule of law to subvert the rule of law. Steve thinks an important clue to understanding this dynamic (about which too many conservatives and Republicans are clueless) can be found in a reconsideration of . . . the Spanish Civil War. (See Nathan Pinkoski's fine essay reviewing the revisionist literature that essentially says everything you think you know about teh Spanish Civil War is wrong, and just imagine what Franco could have done if only he'd had some helicopters.)
Lucretia as always is less convinced by Steve's historical analogies and, having had three espressos after lunch and before taping, offers her own special sauce to understanding the problem, yet somehow omitted the usual snark about Steve's whisky of the week, Laphroaig Quarter-Cask.
Finally, in honor of Pride Month, some topical exit music this week from the great Jonathan Richman.
And thanks to the many Power Line readers who tuned in for the live taping. Sorry we didn't get to more of your questions and comments.
The Three Whisky Happy Hour bartenders are finally back in the same time zone, and Lucretia fills in Steve and John about what happened while they were away partying in Europe. We mostly skip over doting on Biden's dotage, and take up Jed Rubenfeld's argument that Trump isn't technically a "convicted felon" yet, and might have strong case for immediate relief from the Supreme Court.
We finally have a long-postponed update on the situation in Ukraine, where there have been a number of developments over the last two weeks that make the war more volatile. The French are sending in troops ('advisers,' but that sounds too familiar), while we have apparently greenlit Ukraine to attack inside Russian with our weapons—so long as we approve the targets. What could go wrong? (And why is Hungary opposing the NATO position on Ukraine? Not for the reasons you read in the American media. . .)
Finally, for our Article of the Week we take up the issue of climate change litigation, which John wrote about a few days ago for National Review, and which Steve is working separately on an article about European lawfare in this domain.
BUDAPEST, June 5: This Sunday the member states of the European Union will be going to the polls to elect their members of the European Parliament. I don't exactly know just what the European Parliament does either, and it has become boring viewing ever since Nigel Farage departed the European Parliament after Brexit. But there is intense campaigning underway. The streets of Budapest are lined with campaign posters, and there was a campaign march last Saturday with tens of thousands turning out.
Most of the polls suggest that right-of-center "populist" parties are likely to see the largest gains in this round of elections, though likely not large enough to command a coalition majority, but we'll have to see.
But wait! There's more! On July 4—an auspicuous day for Americans obviously—Britain heads to the polls for a general election, and all of the polls indicate the Conservative Party is heading for an epic wipeout at the hands of Labour. What explains the Tories' dismal prospects just five years after their largest landslide win in 70 years? To say they have underperformed the last five years under Boris Johnson and his successors is an understatement. From COVID lockdowns to Net-Zero energy madness, who needs the Tories when you can get real socialism from Labour? And just how will the Tories dust themselves off and recover?
I sat down a few days back with John O'Sullivan to sort it all out. John has had a long and distinguished career in journalism and politics, having served as editor of National Review in the late 1980s and 1990s, and as chief speechwriter for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for a time. Nowadays he is the president of the Danube Institute here in Budapest, where he overseas an active program of visiting journalists, academic, and political figures from all over the globe.
Lucretia hosts this episode from her bunker in an undisclosed bunker in the desert southwest while Steve and John are still galavanting over in Europe. And as hinted in a Power Line post, she is thermo-nuclear furious about the Trump verdict.
Rather than rehash the details of the case, which everyone has picked over thoroughly by this point, the whisky bar considers what at means, and what may or should happen next. Lucretia thinks the American republica died on May 30 (USA, 1776 to May 30, 2024, RIP), while Steve thinks this is another dismal turning point comparable to the way the demagogic attack on Robert Bork in 1987 poisoned and embittered our judicial politics ever since. The connecting thread between the two: Joe Biden, who may be the single-most destructive figure in American politics in the last 50 years—worse even than Obama, who was at least subtle in his contempt for the United States. It was Biden who gave in to the progressive left over Bork in 1987, and now giving in to the progressive left's Trump Derangement Syndrome and warping out legal order.
John looks beyond the appeals in the New York courts to a possible motion for a writ of mandamus from the U.S. Supreme Court, while all three whisky swillers agree that gane theory tells us that the only way to stop this kind of partisan lawfare is for Republicans to teach Democrats that two can play this game. And Lucretia has a list!
This week's special episode originates in Budapest, where John Yoo and I were presenting at a two-day conference on the decay of the rule of law in Europe. You think things are bad with the U.S. judiciary? It's much worse over here. (I'll post some video highlights when they are available.)
In any case, because of the time difference and other challenges, Lucretia couldn't join us, so we have a guest host holding down her spot as the third host (and also to maintain the crucial two-against-John ratio), and we have decided to give him his very own Roman-inspired pseudonym, "Hadleius Arkesius."
We indulge way too much time with our opening banter and general discussion of our experience pondering the problem of the decay of the rule of law before getting to the main event, which is a conversation with Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, who is professor of law at George Mason University's Scalia Law School, and head of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, one of Israel's largest think tanks. Prof. Kontorovich divides his time between the United States and Israel.
A few weeks back Eugene wrote a bracing article in Tablet on "The Ugly Lessons of October 7," and we review the article with him along with developments of the last week, such as the move of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Our conversation with Eugene begins around the 18 minute mark.
Listeners want to know from John: did Justice Clarence Thomas let us down with his ruling in this week's 7 - 2 decision upholding the unique funding structure of Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), which she designed precisely to avoid congressional control as much as possible? John says no, and makes a persuasive three-part case for why Thomas's opinion is thoroughgoing originalism, and good history to boot. If we want to get rid of Warren's regulatory handiwork (AND WE DO!), it will be to be done directly by Congress, rather than indirectly by the courts.
This week also marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which we have deplored before on account of the poor reasoning for the halfway right result, but a our Article of the Week from our friend Shep Melnick of Boston College draws our attention to some ongoing ambiguities of Brown that still afflict our civil rights law. You'd think after 70 years we might have figured it out, but no—and worse, the ambiguity is likely on purpose, because it suits the shifting strategy and tactics of the identitarian left.
Other topics covered briefly this week include the collapsing case against Trump in Manhattan, Trump's VP sweepstakes (you can scratch Kristi Noem from the list), the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and King Charles's ghastly portrait (hard to say which is worse here), Harrison Butker's cultural butt kick, and, finally, how to devise some tests to judge whether higher education is truly reversing its multi-decade slide into pernicious leftism.
This classic format episode features Steve in a one-on-one conversation with with Jeremy Carl, author of a dynamite (almost literally) new book entitled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.Jeremy commits heresy in this book, offerng statistics that you aren't supposed to mention, and truths that, in an earlier age, might have got you burned at the stake. In publishing this book Jeremy joins the ranks of fellow brave souls such as Heather Mac Donald, Steve Sailer, Zach Goldberg, and a handful of others who do not shrink from challenging the enforced orthodoxy that approves of anti-white discrimination and scapegoating.
It is, Jeremy rightly notes, a formula that if continued much longer will divide the nation so badly that we won't be able to live together. He thinks the old fashioned principle of basic human equality rightly understood, and old ethic of the "melting pot" that brought together different ethnicities into a common citizenship and shared national identity needs to be restored, and soon. He offers some suggestions, some difficult, some happily already starting to happen. One good sign: the book is getting a lot of attention. Maybe the ice is finally breaking.
John Yoo hosts this week's episode from exile in Austin, Texas, where he humors Steve and Lucretia's the extra-legal views on the Trump trials and tribulations in a Manhattan courtroom, and speculate how Trump's "Letter from the Rikers Island Jail" would read (though it will be more likely in the form of Tweets or TruthSocial posts). Have we discovered a trial judge who seems to have no judgment at all.
Certainly we have a president without judgment, and we begin with pondering the question of just when it was that Bernie Sanders became president, because it is impossible to see how a Sanders administration would differ from everything the Biden administration has done. Steve notes a recent American Conservative article that picks up on parts of the Hur report on Biden. While everybody focused on the parts of the report that dealt with Biden's senility, other parts of the report show that Biden has actually had terrible judgment for his entire political career.
Finally, we look at Steve's City-Journal article on the parallels between 1968 and today, and wonder how it is possible for so many of our "leaders" in high education to have so little good judgment or common sense about what ought to be done. (Lucretia recommends pepper-bullets, which sound like some kind of high-velocity jalapenos.)
There was a lot of listener and reader interest in our too brief comments on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in our last episode, and we realized this issue deserved keeping the whisky bar open after the usual 2 am closing time to extend our treatment of the issue, yielding this short special episode.
To recap: Lucretia thinks it is a stupid idea (hence, "Don't murder a man who is committing suicide"), while John thought it was also unsound on basic free speech principles. Steve was, naturally, in the middle, ending up as road kill for his analysis of why Republicans thought there were some political mischief to be made.
So we decided to order another round of drinks (or, in Lucretia's case, four margaritas to honor Cinco de Mayo) and try to go through the issue more thoroughly, especially taking account of David Bernstein's observations at National Review Online that there's a lot of disinformation about what the bill does and doesn't do.
We also wanted to take up the argument Harry Jaffa argued more than 60 years ago that a free society could, under certain circumstances, curtail the speech of Nazis, Communists, and . . . anti-Semites? . . . in defense of a free society. Jaffa argued:
“Does a free society prove false to itself if it denies civil liberties to Communists, Nazis, or anyone else who would use these liberties, if he could, as a means of destroying the free society? The answer, I believe, is now plain that it does not. Is saying this I do not counsel, or even justify, any particular measure for dealing with persons of such description. What is right in any case depends on the facts of that case, and I am here dealing only with principles, not their application. However, those who think every denial of civil liberties is equally derogatory of the character of a free society, without reference to the character of the persons being denied, make this fundamental error: they confuse ends with means. . . [But] it is seldom either expedient or wise to suppress advocacy of even inhuman doctrines in a community like ours, it is not for that reason unjust.”
Does the current campus scene arise to this standard? What does prudence counsel? The normally quarrelsome threesome at the whisky bar arrive at surprising agreement on the matter.
Lucretia hosts this week's episode, reminding us once again that Republicans are living up to their reputation as "the stupid party" with the proposed "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act" that seems to have overlooked this quaint old thing called the First Amendment. Steve gamely tries to defend the political strategy behind it, but Lucretia is having none of it (putting here in rare alignment with the New York Times), wondering why anyone would want to distract attention away from Democrats tieing themselves in electoral hangman's knots over the anti-Semitism raging wild inside their party and their wholly-owned subsidiary college campuses. Republicans ought to impose a gag order on themselves, and crusade against the gag order on Trump in his current trial in New York. Concerning which, John has several observations.
And about that campus scene: another week, and another data point for Steve's thesis that "it's going to get worse before it gets worse." About the only sensible conclusion is that somewhere in the Great Beyond, Tom Wolfe is behind the whole current scene. Maybe we can still get a sequel from him, Bonfire of the Inanities.
Today is May Day, but also the Victims of Communism Memorial Day, and as such today is the prefect days for this classic-hybrid format podcast, featuring Steve Hayward in a conversation with Elizabeth Spalding, chair of the Victim of Communism Memorial Foundation. (Elizabeth is also Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and Visiting Fellow at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College.)
The Foundation has opened the Victims of Communism Museum in downtown Washington DC, and you should put it on your itinerary for your next visit to the nation's capital.
We call this a "hybrid" format because it comes in two parts. Following the conversation with Elizabeth, this episode offers Steve's recent speech at the Victims of Communism Museum about Reagan and Churchill on the Cold War, a major part of Steve's book about the two great statesmen.
We're going up a day earlier than usual this week, partly because our constantly irregular travel schedules complicated things again, but more importantly to be timely, as John, Steve, and Lucretia have LOTS of thoughts on the Supreme Court argument Thursday about whether ex-presidents should enjoy broad immunity for any or all acts they took while in office. Steve and Lucretia think the president does, while John thinks textual support for the proposition is lacking. Steve and Lucretia respond with an appeal to first principles, and enlist as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield, because of his unique book on the inherent ambivalence of executive power even in a constitutional republic, Taming the Prince. As usual, we fought to a draw.
Our second subject is the ongoing Kristalnacht on campus. There's not much new to say except to calibrate how cowardly university administrators continue to be, and note that even some liberals, like George Packer in The Atlantic (who provides our article of the week, "The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education") are starting to figure out what conservatives have known about higher education for two generations now. It's as if no one ever bothered to notice Closing of the American Mind.
This week's ad-free episode is probably better thought of as a Two Whisky Happy Hour, because John Yoo is away on a lecture- and Philly-cheesesteak-procurement tour back east, and Lucretia is out of action right now, too, though she appears in this episode by proxy, so to speak. So two whiskies it is.
Last weekend, Lucretia and I offered a keynote session for Ammo Grrrll's annual CommenterCon conference in Phoenix, which is an annual gathering of Ammo Grrrll's best friends and devoted fans from around the country. My theme was "Will it get worse before it gets worse?", and Lucretia offered some thoughts on the future of free speech.
We had some technical difficulties with our sound recording devices, so the recording has a sudden and noticeable quality shift right in the middle, and you can't always make out the audience questions perfectly, but we think listeners will still enjoy most of it.
Steve hosts this crisp episode despite his creaky voice from a springtime bug (and Lucretia is partly hobbled, too) covering a lot of ground, starting with a brief recap of the latest (unanimous!) property rights victory at the Supreme Court, but then moving quickly on to initial reactions to the outbreak of World War III yesterday. What to make of Iran's attack on Israel? Many things are not clear about this impetuous scene.
Closely related, while the Biden Administration seems determined to tamp down the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East, it seems to be inviting one with Antony (Blank) Blinken saying a week ago that Ukraine should or would become a member of NATO. Are they trying to make Russia dig in, or draw the U.S. more directly into the war (which NATO membership would require)? We also ponder J.D. Vance's very clear-headed New York Times op-ed that reviews the grim math of the Ukranian battle scene, making us wonder whether the Biden Administration has any strategy at all beyond "fight to the last Ukranian."
Then we ponder briefly the astounding scene of the anti-Semitic protests in the back yard of Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Steve arging that to see this incident as a matter of the limits of free speech is woefully inadequate.
But the bulk of the episode is devoted to analyzing the latest abortion controversies, starting with the Arizona Supreme Court decision upholding the validity of Arizona's pre-Roe statutes, and observing as usual the way this narrow and largely technical ruling is being mis-reported in the media and misrepresented by the left. The main portion of this segment, though, is devoted to Trump's announcement that he does not support federal legislation of abortion and wants to leave the issue iup to the states. Does this make him the modern-day equivalent of Stephen Douglas, as John Davidson argues in our Article of the Week over at The Federalist? Lucretia will startle many regular listeners with her analysis of the matter, to which John and Steve largely agree.
In fact, it is an amazing how much agreement we had this week, but perhaps because we recorded in the morning sans-whisky, and with Steve and Lucretia ailing.
John Yoo takes command of host duties this week, as Steve was on the road at an academic conference at City University of New York, where a knowledgeable faculty member remarked that he was surprised Steve didn't need an armed guard. The conference was largely devoted to the intellectual history of the liberal tradition, and was designed perfectly to induce a scornful snort from Lucretia who disdains all such flim-flummery. The bonus was that Steve apparenlty brought an earthquake with him, and we're not referring to his conference paper!
Aside from these unexpected things, there were fresh tremors for Trump's legal problems, Biden's long-expected turn against Israel that was designed to appear to a constituency of one (hint: the person insists on being called DOKTOR), fresh encomiums for Mitch McConnell (okay—it was not unanimous), and finally into some tremors for the income tax.
As Stan Evans liked to say, "Any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax," and now a member of the House has proposed repealing the 16th Amendment. Especially salient in light of the pending Supreme Court case that might allow the government to tax unrealized asset gains (a back-door wealth tax), which will guarantee that the government will adopt a de facto policy of 10 percent inflation forever.
This week's episode has it all, starting with the lamentable fact that when you hear "porn is everywhere these days," it included even the Powerline website this week, and then proceeding to the obscenity of the John Eastman disbarment, the disappointment with the 5th Circuit's decision preventing Texas from securing its territorial integrity, on how best to squash squatters, and a vigorous argument about the legacy of the recently deceased Joe Lieberman. (Steve and John give Lieberman a thumbs-up, while Lucretia. . .)
All three of us independently chose the same article for our picks for Article of the Week—Walter Russell Mead's Tablet magazine piece entitled "Twilight of the Wonks." It has some magnificently harsh language about the leaders of our elite educational institutions, such as "moral jellyfish," and leaders who are "careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment." We're less sure about Mead's diagnosis about the role of narrow specialization in the decay of our universities.
At least we have Krispy Kreme donuts coming soon to McDonald's to look forward to.
This episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week's episode comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. Hadley Arkes! Thus this episode become a Positivism-Free Zone, in which we review the deepest ground of the natural law unencumbered by John's usual alarums, excursions, and errors.
The episode comes in three parts: Hadley made some news yesterday, celebrating the retirement of the noted Notre Dame Law professor Gerard V. Bradley, who will be joining Hadley at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding.
From there Hadley proceeds to answering the question that we've been kicking around ever since the Dobbs decision, namely, just how should pro-life politicians break out of their self-imposed muteness about abortion. Hadley has the strategy.
Finally, we spend some time toward the end getting down some of Hadley's "origin story" that brought him to Leo Strauss's classroom at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s, and key friendships made along the way—especially our late friend and unsung hero Michael Uhlmann.
Note: We had some internet glitches while recording this episode that weren't easily edited or smoothed over, so we ask listeners' indulgence with these hiccups, in return for which we'll present this installment ad-free.
Move over "Republicans pounce" as the favorite media deflection. We now know that when an old man yells at clouds—or members of Congress—the media fall in line and declare it "fiery."
Well the 3WHH is authentically fiery! Four habanero spicy! This week more than ever.
After dissecting the Hur testimony and its missed opportunities, we take on the issue of whether Biden is playing senile on purpose, what to make of the Tik-Tok forced sale proposal, what to make of Chuck Schumer's proposal for an putsch in Israel, and finally, another round in the ring on constitutional originalism, prompted by Frank DiVito's article out this week, "Can Constitutional Originalism Overcome Our Crisis?"
Lucretia hosts this week's episode, which we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of whisky because travel schedules prevented the normal and proper Friday evening happy hour, and guess what? We're even worse without whisky!
Among the news and issues treated this week: Why Biden isn't FDR (he's not even Harry Truman); why this was the worst SOTU (Lucretia offers a different acronym) speech ever; whether there are signs of life for the GOP in California after all; how immigration and abortion are playing out in the campaign cycle so far; how to think about the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case dealing with Trump's eligibility for the ballot (hint—it ain't over till it's over); and finally, can Harvard be serious in asking for a government bailout? The unifying theme here is galloping dishonesty, which is being normalized more and more every day.
Our articles of the week are (from Steve): Daniel Patrick Moynihan's classic essay "Defining Deviancy Down," newly salient in an age of truth-denying euphemisms like "justice-involved youth" and "newcomers" instead of "migrants" (which was a substitute for "illegal alien"); Lucretia ponders the challenges of Alex Berenson's Substack article on new threats to free speech; And John draws our attention to the original 14th Amendment article from Baude and Paulson that brought us to the Supreme Court steps earlier this week, plus responses (also here) that got overlooked at the time, now largely vindicated.
This episode has everything: a how-to guerilla guide to improving your McDonald's hamburger experience; a spirited discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court decision that defines frozen embryos as persons (Steve thinks the media is willfully misreporting the decision—John is not so sure); those crazy new presidential rankings from political scientists—and even some soft-core porn!
Say what?
Well, it turns out that that Judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw Trump's alleged fraud trial in New York City, apparently has a case of Anthony Weiner envy, and posted some rather racy locker room pics of himself some years back. And right in the middle of our discussion Lucretia flashed the pictures up on the Zoom screen, sending John and Steve rushing for some eye-bleach. There must be something in the bottled water Manhattan Democrats drink. (And doesn't Engoron sound like the name of a dwarve or elve who goes bad in Lord of the Rings?) Click through the link here if you are brave.
In any case, we do finally get around to a new segment of the 3WHH, where we note three articles from the last week for what they can tell us about something. John chose those stupid presidential rankings; Lucretia chose an MSNBC article from leftist columnist Paul Waldman that unwittingly admits that everything conservatives say about the administrative state is completely true; and Steve picked Karol Markowitz's NY Post column reflecting on how recent social science that ratifies the conservative view that two-parent families are the best way to raise children is so contoversial with the left, which is no surprise.
We're up a day early with this week's episode because of schedule problems, but mostly to get a drop on the streaming services with our new (un)reality TV show, "The Real Prosecutors of Atlanta," starring Big Fani Willis. OMG, is this not the best television since last week's Super Bowl?
Steve show up, however, with a gin martini instead of peaty whisky, which drew a rebuke from You Know Who, who had three proper whiskies on hand for the episode.
But this episode isn't all fun and giggles. We also rake up the ongoing immigration saga in Washington, complete now with an impeachment! And also analysis of Trump's supposed attack on NATO and surrender to Putin, though some of us think this is another sign of Trump's peculiar genius.
Finally, can we really be so lucky that a week later the Hur report is the gift that keeps on giving?
The Twenty-Fifth Hour is the 1950 novel by the Romanian writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu that weaves a tangled, early post-modern tale of central Europe and the Balkans in World War II. It is justly forgotten today, but the title is back in a manner of speaking because it highlights the great irony of the Left's Ahab-like pursuit of the Great Orange Whale (to mix literary references).
Anyone else recall back in 2017 how a concerted mob of concerned citizens suggested the presidential disability clause of the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove President Trump from office? Think of it as a 25th Hour moment. This week ended with the 25th Hour being invoked to remove Joe Biden from office because of his obvious and rapidly advancing senility. Yet one more example of how a strategy to get Trump, like the Me Too movement, has circled around like a rogue torpedo to explode in the face of the Left.
The week began with such promise for the anti-Trump crusade. The walls were closing in on the breaking dam that would drown the freshly roosting chickens! Bam: no immunity for you! And the Supreme Court might allow Trump to be banned from the ballot! Except that didn't go according to script. And then the report of the greatest Hur since Ben Hur, declaring that Biden isn't competent to stand trial for the very same "willful" crime for which Trump is being prosecuted, but is somehow competent to remain president? The Left should have taken a lesson from those failed exploding cigars they tried to use on Castro 60 years ago.
But about that disability clause in the 25th Amendment: we take a closer look, and note that Section 4 in particular is not as clear cut and simple as it sounds. Meaning we're likely stuck so long as Edith Wilson. . ., er, we mean, DOCTOR Jill Biden has anything to say about it.
And finally, we close out this week's epsiode with happy 64th birthday wishes to Lucretia, so the exit bumper music is fairly predictable, isn't it? (Though I chose a rendition from an obscure artist just to annoy this week's host!)
John Yoo is where?? Mexico!?!? So after all that talk the last couple weeks saying the situation at the southern border did not constitute an "invasion," now he's in Mexico on some undisclosed clandestine mission. Which makes no sense: they don't even have McRibb there.
Taking John's place this week is Inez Stepman of the Independent Women's Forum, frequent contributor to the New York Post, First Things, The Federalist, and other premier outlets, and co-host of the High Noon podcast on the Ricochet network. She was more than game to join Lucretia in beating up on Steve.
We invited Inez to weigh in on the long-running debate we've been having here about the Civil War, how to understand it correctly, and how presidential candidates like Nikki Haley should talk about it. From the we take a look of David Frum's quixotic attempt in The Atlantic to "uncancel Woodrow Wilson," to which were in heated agreement that David is off his rocker.
Then John Hinderaker joins us to give us the latest news about the firebombing of his office this past week, plus a few summary impressions of the Michael Mann vs. Mark Steyn cage match playing out in court in Washington DC, where John sat in on the trial several days last week. Does this politically-motivated arson fire presage a return to the bad old days of the Weather Underground of the late 1960s?
Thematic exit music this week is "Burning Up My Time" by Pigeons Playing Ping Pong.
This special ad-free edition, posted a day ahead of the usual schedule because of the urgency of events at the southern border, finds the 3WHH hosts engaging in their own civil war over the question of whether states have any remedy when the federal government abdicates is responsibility to protect the border. Steve and Lucretia were in rare accord—well maybe not quite complete accord—against John's positivist position of federal supremacy uber alles*.
Our normally genteel whisky-sipping salon became more of a bourbon-swilling barroom brawl, and indeed we were tempted to call this episode "Showdown at the Positive Law Corral." Steve thinks the crisis over Texas's assertion of its right to defend the border, and the demand of the Biden Administration that Texas back down by tomorrow, represents the kind of "right of revolution" moment contemplated in the Declaration of Independence, especially since the governors of 25 other states have signaled their agreement with Texas.
But the rare concord between Steve and Lucretia breaks down when the subject turns to the Haley-Trump cage match in New Hampshire primary.
(*To paraphrase an old Bill Buckley line, if you think it is hard to argue with Lucretia, just try agreeing with her. It's nearly impossible.)
This week's episode covers more ground more quickly than a Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes passing attack. Which the Philadephia Eagles won't get to experience because they flopped in the first round of the playoffs last weekend, falsifying one of John Yoo's predictions for 2024 that the Eagles would make the Super Bowl. We're hoping his brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Trump's place on the Colorado ballot is more on the mark.
We mostly skip over the fine points of John's brief and take in a wider look at the entire pool of briefs filed in this case, wondering, for example, why the world needs an Amicus brief from the Ryan Binkley for President campaign. This prompts us into wider still observations about other current issues involving the administrative state, which somehow managed to bring up the Statute usually banned from mention on this podcast, John Locke, and the weaknesses of modern property rights theory.
Which ultimately brings us to the question heldover from the last two weeks: Nikki Haley and the Civil War. It is now apparent that Haley's momentum in the nomination contest halted abruptly with her flub of the Civil War question, and alas some of our friends are still not getting the question right, such as our good friend Dan Oliver. We go over the matter from Square One, and try—not for the first time—to school John on the issue of prudence. Oh, and we also make our prediction for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries coming up.
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses Monday, we got to wondering just who or what lives up to the description of "Iowa Stubborn" in Meredith Wilson's "Music Man":
And we're so by God stubborn
We can stand touching noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye to eye!
Is it Trump, DeSantis, Haley—or the legions of lawyers waging endless lawfare against Trump? It's a trick question. Lucretia—the host for this week's episode—actually hails originally from Mason City, Iowa, which is the inspiration for "River City" in the Broadway play, which explains a lot about our Lucretia when you think about it.
Anyway, John and Steve declare their picks if they were caucusgoers, but then the episode turns quickly to the latest frontiers of the lawfare against Trump, from which we have an inside perch of sorts: John is busy spending the weekend workng up an amicus brief for the upcoming Supreme Court hearing on the case involving Colorado's attempt to ban Trump from the ballot on grounds he is an "insurrectionist." (Trump, not John.) And since the brief have to be turned in next Thursday for this fast-track case, it's very fresh in mind.
We also consider the latest developments in other Trump cases, too. Did Trump's lawyers really claim that in fact he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue if he was back in the White House. (Short answer: No.) And what accounts for Hunter Biden's reversal of his refusal to submit to a House subpoena for a deposition? Has Texas first the first shot of a new rebellion by taking over part of the souther border? Has the Supreme Court signaled that enough is enough with rampant urban homelessness by granting cert in an appeal of lower court rulings that the homeless have 8th Amendment (that's right, 8th Amendment) rights to sleep on the streets wherever they want? (The Court had previously declined to hear this issue.)
All that and our usual good cheer and raspberries, including the fact that we recorded on Edmund Burke's birthday. To paraphrase the great lyric from our title tune, "Oh, there's nothin' halfway/About the Whisky way we treat you/If we treat you/Which we may not do at all."
Ronald Reagan used to joke that for Republicans, every day is the 4th of July, while for Democrats every day is April 15. Today we need to update that contrast by noting that the favorite new holiday for Democrats is January 6—"Insurrection Day."
We'll get to Joe Biden in due course, but the real insurrection this week took place at Harvard, where, as John Yoo predicted last week (we have receipts!) Claudine Gay was ousted in a right-wing putsch, a vertiable academic insurrection against all that is true and good (if you believe the left and Gay's causal explanation). A harbinger of things to come? Our panel weighs the chances, but the key clue to real change will be whether Harvard starts by reforming its governing board, currently dominated by political hacks. And who will be the next president of Harvard? We offer some guesses. . .
Then we turn to Biden's demagogic campaign speech warning about the "end of democracy," and are undecided whether it deserves a sneer or a snort, but above all wondering if will backfire on Biden. Clearly Democrats hope to bait Trump into making crazy statements, but Trump's way-outside-the-box comments are fairly well discounted by now. Is this the best they've got? Well, at least they are securing their base of NPR listeners.
We also take up the late-breaking news that the Supreme Court will take up on an expedited schedule the Colorado ruling throwing Trump off the ballot, with a few early thoughts, though we'll be all over this story in depth right after the oral argument next month.
And finally, a few quick closing thoughts on the latest Jeffrey Epstein non-revelations.
Who needs a rockin new year's party when you have the Three Whisky Happy Hour in peak form, dishing out on the top stories of 2023, and, in the spirit of the late financial analyst Byron Wein, offering a range of potential low-probability surprises (rather than firm predictions) for 2024.
What's the difference between a prediction and a surprise? Well think about it this way: who would have predicted, at year end 2022, that right now our favorite Democratic Senator would be . . . John Fetterman? Black swans everywhere are saying, "I did NOT see that coming!"
But before getting started with your 2024 Bingo card we take note of the dumbest controversy of the week, which is seeing some conservatives upset at the "Conservative Dad's Real Women of America" 2024 calendar, which features fetching photos of leading conservative heroines such as Riley Gaines in fetching outfits. Along the way we learn that somewhere in a box in her garage, Lucretia has some modeling photos from her time doing the Jane Fonda workout back in the 1980s, and so we're committing ourselves to producing a 3WHH calendar at some point.
And speaking of attractive women in unattractive poses, Nikki Haley got her second strike this week (her first being the blunder several weeks ago of proposing to ban anonymous accounts on social media) when she completely flubbed the "planted" question about the cause of the Civil War. We deplore her Kamala-esque answer and attempts a cleaning it up, but are relieved that at least she didn't say "tariffs."
And as befits any fast-moving party conversation, we take surprising digressions, such as a detour into the legacy of Edward Tufte, who reminds us that Stalin had the greatest Power Point presentations ("no one has bullet points like Stalin's bullet points!") and also the single greatest chart of all time.
Eventually we get down to business with our picks for Story of the Year for 2023 (hint: Steve says "party like it's 1954!"), and our surprises for 2024. Get your Bingo cards ready. And also enjoy our exit bumper music this week from Spike Jones. Happy new year!
This special holiday week bonus episode features a conversation between Steve and Will Inboden, author of a fabulous recent book based on the very latest declassified files of the Reagan presidency entitled Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. (Steve reviewed the book favorably in the Free Beacon.)
In his distinguished career Inboden has worked on Captiol Hill and at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. He was professor and director of the Willian Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, but is now the brand new director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, which is one of the brand new initiatives several states have set in motion at their public universities to generate some actual intellectual diversity on campus.
This two-part conversation covers both topics—Reagan's statesmanship, and the problems of higher education today. And because this episode features The Gipper, it ends with a departure from the usual closing bumper music.
This week's special, ad-free edition of the 3WHH was recorded in live webinar format with about 80 of our most loyal listeners tuning in and heckling us MST3K style (IYKYK) in the chat room, but for a holiday episode it partook more of Judgment Day at times, as we reckoned with some lingering issues from our Cage Match about J6 and the Ukraine War two weeks ago, along with a thoroughly judgmental detour into "Lookism." Steve, in particular, recalls Taki's old case from the 1980s that Jane Fonda was the ugliest woman in America, while we reveal Lucretia's guilty secret that she in fact once owned the Jane Fonda Workout video from that glorious era.
But if the judgment of our three bartenders remains divided, we are unanimous in scorn for the Colorado Supreme Court, who somehow think that safeguarding us from "threat to democracy" requires preventing political parties from choosing their nominees, and since when did Orwell don judicial robes?
The cleaning crew is still scrubbing the blood off the floor from last week's cage match about Ukraine and January 6, and already Ali and Frazier (that is, Lucretia and John) want to go for a sequel—maybe "Rumble in the Faculty Club Food Court" or something. (And yes, since we recorded in the morning instead of evening happy hour like we are supposed to, talk turned to McDonald's and breakfast meats. Steve blames John for McDonald's stock slumping this week while the broad market had a monster rally.)
While we await Don King's promotion for Cage Match 2 next week, we devote this episode to catching up on the other news of the moment, especially the rot in higher education as fully revealed by last week's ignominious appearance of the presidents of three Poison Ivy League universities (boy did we call it or what).
But then we also note the curious legal cases that popped up this week, especially Jack Smith's Hail Mary pass to the Supreme Court to try Trump as soon as possible, but the equally inside-out coverage of what a novelist might call "The President's Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Biden." Somehow we ended up with a digression into religious liberty, and pondering whether the Hell's Angels might be a bona fide religion that might be useful in some circumstances.
Next week, back to the Cage for Round Two!
We finally get around to our promised but delayed cage match about Ukraine and unanswered questions about January 6, and alas, all of Steve's attempts to cheer up Lucretia with the week's great news—the Hunter Biden indictment, the embarrassment of Ivy League presidents, Kevin McCarthy resigning, Trump winning Tom Friedman's vote—proved unavailing. Futile, even. Why Lucretia even trashed McDonald's, which is really fightin' words for John.
But then we get down to business, with the bruising cage match. Steve did his best to play a "neutral" Sean Hannity, posing challenges to both John and Lucretia about both topics, but occasionally donning a Hershey's Kiss-sized tin foil hat on a couple of points. Score the jabs about roundhouse blows at home, and send in your point total in the comment threads.
John and Lucretia were united on one topic, though: Both attacked Steve for his fondness for classic Genesis, which Steve discussed at length this week on Steve Gosney's Rumble channel here (or YouTube version here) if you have the proper tastes in "rock music that went to college," to quote Jody Bottum on prog rock. Natually, Steve takes out revenge with the exit music, with a fragment of a classic Genesis song that includes the fitting lyric, "Even academics, searching printed word. . ." Who can name that song without looking it up?
Note: We haad a few technical glitches recording this episode, with some abrupt edits and incomplete thoughts in a couple places, but listeners should be able to make out the main threads.
So we had promised last week that this episode would feature a cage match between Lucretia and John about realism versus idealism as applied to the Ukraine War (especially since John baited Lucretia by calling her a neocon, which is fighting words not just in the desert west), as well as the problem of January 6, but the passing of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Henry Kissinger diverted us, along with the DeSantis-Newsom debate.
Along the way we were treated to an extraordinary tale—John Yoo, as a young Supreme Court clerk, going one-on-one with the visiting Charles Barkley at the Supreme Court's own basketball court, which is known as the highest court in the land because it is located on the upper story of the Supreme Court building. Can you guess how it went? (Barkley was still playing in the NBA for the Phoenix Suns at the time.) It was the surprise revelation of this episode.
We had lots of critical (though respectful) things to say about both Justice O'Connor and Henry the K, and I suspect as usual listeners will find our contentions unique and not widely mentioned in the torrents of encomiums for both historic figures this week.
And we promise we'll go the cage match next week, or your money back. (Though we did do a small preview with a brief argument about why the cause of Israel should rank higher than the cause of Ukraine.)
While most other podcasts are taking the Thanksgiving holiday off, your three bartenders behind the Three Whisky Happy Hour remain on the job, because no one wants leftover podcasts for the long weekend. Steve and Lucretia had traditional home-cooked feasts, while John, naturally, dined Thursday at a yacht club, sweater knotted properly around his neck.
In the middle of this episode that ranges from the metaphysics of free speech to Nikki Haley's chances to the Argentinian and Dutch election results along with the Israel-Hamas deal, Steve recalls hearing Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in person in Washington several years back explaining that the reality of the Middle East is that often the choice is between bad and worse, and this becomes the unifying theme for several of our disparate topic today.
In some ways, this episode turned into previews of coming attractions, as we set up a clash of the titans (that is, Lucretia against all comers) next week on the ongoing dispute about January 6, and the essence of "neoconservative" foreign policy. Consider these teases as a placeholder, along with our custom exit music, "Am I Very Wrong?" (to which question Lucretia typically answers "YES!"), a 1967 tune by a then-obscure combo whose name will not be uttered here:
Am I very wrong
To hide behind the glare of an open minded stare
Am I very wrong
To wander in the fear of a never ending lie
Am I very wrong
To try to close my ears to the sound they play so loud
Hoo-boy—pour yourself three-fingers of your favorite high-proof single malt for this episode of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, as Steve, John, and Lucretia throw down hard on the limits of free speech in theory and practice. A lot of people—some of them conservatives (and, ahem, John at times!)—think that banning student chapters of the pro-Hamas Students for (In)Justice in Palestine, as Governor DeSantis has done in Florida, represents right-wing "cancel culture" and is therefore hypocritical. Steve and Lucretia argue that two generations of flabby jurisprudence from the Supreme Court about the First Amendment has left us illiterate about the first principles of the matter.
Thus, we recur to some older writings of David Lowenthal and Harry Jaffa on this point, and suggest that is it not difficult at all in principle to distinguish between political speech that deserves protection and speech from would-be tyrants who, if successful, would take away everyone else's right to speech (if not right to life in the case of Jews) if they gained power. Whether to do so is a matter of prudence and circumstance, but one of the lessons of history is that if a nation waits too long (cough, cough—Germany in the 1930s—cough, cough) to assert its right of self-preservation against the barbarians in its midst, a free society is lost.
The question of barbarism is central to the second part of today's episode, where we sort out some of the basic issues of the laws of war and just war theory. And we use Angelo Codevilla as one of our expert witnesses on this subject, which shouldn't be that hard to sort out, but somehow is if you only read the New York Times or some other pre-school level source.
Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal are back in fashion these days, featuring some truly strange bedfellows. Liberal intellectuals told President Biden that he could become the next FDR if he simply spent like a convention of drunken sailors, but some of the "national conservatives" also suddenly like FDR and think we should emulate the New Deal's economic policies, which surely has Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley rolling over in their graves.
Meanwhile, historians have neglected FDR's record on civil liberties, with the conspicuous exception of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II because that is too large a blot to be ignored (though even that story is not understood fully or accurately). Historian David Beito explores this forgotten aspect of FDR and the New Deal in his new book, The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveilance. There's probably a connection between the New Deal's political economy and constitutionalism and these offenses to civil liberties—the point Hayek made in his misunderstood Road to Serfdom—that modern-day FDR admirers ought to keep in mind
With John Yoo, who accuses Lucretia and Steve of being closet monarchists, back from his jungle adventures in South America (albeit without any archeological relics to satify his Indiana Jones fantasies) and sitting in the host chair this week, the gang offers its two cents on the latest GOP debate (someone—guess who?—is not impressed with Nikki Haley), and the disappointing election results, which, Steve suggests, is like Twain's remark on Wagner's music ("it's better than it sounds"), though with the key takeaway that the GOP is doomed to more election night disappointments as long as it has a deer-in-the-headlines problem when it comes to abortion.
After reviewing a few new legal developments in the largehr Trump saga, we get down to exploring the mounting crisis of anti-Semitism, with an analysis of why this current eruption of anti-Semitism we're seeing nwo is not your grandfather's anti-Semitism, but is in fact ax expression of a much deeper problem with the maliganancy of the progressive left. College administrators who think they can weather the storm and wait for the fury to abate on its own are deluded.
We're going to retur next week with a sequel, and explain to everyone why a wholesale purge of leftist institutions is not a violation of free speech rightly understood, or merely "right-wing cancel culture," as the left and too many simple-minded libertarians think. Fire away (heh).
With John Yoo still away somewhere in the jungles of South America, Steve and Lucretia are delighted to be joined by a very special guest, Prof. Amy Wax of Penn Law School. Followers of the campus scene may be familiar with Penn Law's crusade to fire Prof. Wax for the sin of offending against campus orthodoxies on race and immigration, at the same time Penn so conspicuously tolerates anti-Semitism.
Prof. Wax isn't at liberty to discuss the details of her ongoing ordeal, but we do get into the thick of several pertinent questions, such as:
—Does the current crisis of tolerance for anti-Semitism on campus represent a possible inflection point to turn back “wokery” at last, or will this episode prove that higher education has passed the point of no return?
—Is there any evidence that the high-profile donor revolt at Penn and elsewhere is having an effect?
—On a wider note, many conservative law professors are leaving their posts because of the increasing ideological hostility. This seems another bad omen for academia.
Another bonus classic format edition, this time featuring Steve in extended conversation with Col. Austin Bay, one of the proprietors of the indispensable Strategy Page, columnist for Creators Syndicate, and author of the splendid Cocktails from Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century.
His column last week is a brief and lucid tour through the proxy wars America is currently confronting (against Russia and Iran, by way of Ukraine and Israel), and our conversation goes into much greater depth on both of these conflicts as well as our potential conflict with rapidly-arming China.
Can Ukraine defeat Russia? What must Israel do to prevail, and what are the risks of a wider war? Some of what Col. Bay lays out will curl your hair and make you want to buy a lot of canned goods, but he also gets into detail about how combined arms work on the battlefield and especially in the kind of urban warfare U.S. forces faced in Iraq and Israel is facing now in Gaza.
The biggest risk of the moment, Bay agrees, is with America's pathetic leadership class, making him more worried for the fate of the country than at any time in the last 20 years.
Way back in 1960, Leo Strauss wrote in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that "Natural law, which was for many centuries the basis of the predominant Western political thought, is rejected in our time by almost all students of society who are not Roman Catholics." In the decades since then, however, natural law has enjoyed a revival of sorts, and is implicated today in the rise of constitutional originalism at the Supreme Court.
But it is also a confusing subject, because many so-called "new natural law" theories seem to concede too much to modern philosophy, as if the great tradition of natural law begins with Bentham. To be sure, the classical authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas were not simple thinkers on the subject, but their work tends not bog down with specialized jargon or abstruse theory.
One person stands out for rescuing the older tradition of natural law: Hadley Arkes, author of Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution. In this conversation, Steve Hayward draws out the basics of the argument from Prof. Arkes, and extends the line of reasoning to today's controversies about free speech and "cancel culture," which are more confused than ever with the sudden eruption of anti-Semitism on college campuses.
With John Yoo away this week on a junket to South America, Steve and Lucretia reverted to old times and scheduled a live taping where we fielded questions and comments in a webinar format.
We talked about the reasons to be bullish about the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, along with discussion of the strategic challenges facing Israel and the United States, and more—always more—on the rot in our universities.
In between these three main topics we took up listener questions about social contract theory, whether the U.S. could realistically find itself in a real civil war some time soon, and whether the general challenges of political leadership in a time of deep polarization can be overcome.
A real crowd-pleaser, we hope.
The only thing more predictable than a sunrise in the east is a Hamas claim that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital and that the Western media would report it as dictated because the story was just too good to check, though we always thought the mainstream media employed—or so they told us in 2004—"layer and layers of fact-checkers." Once again, we see whose side our media is on. And it's not ours—or Israel's.
Topic 2: Time to "decolonize" all the academic departments that won't shut up about "colonialism." Full stop.
And has anyone in DC figured out yet that the move by renegade Republicans to oust Speaker McCarthy and leave the Speaker's chair empty was a clever plot to get Democrats to vote for a de facto government shutdown, and stymie aid to Ukraine? Who are the dumb guys now?
And what to make of the plea deals of Sydney Powell and Kenneth Cheesebro in the Georgia prosecutions of the supposed Trump RICO conspiracy? We speculate that both Powell and Cheesebro might reprise the great star turn of Frankie Pentangelo in Godfather II.
Never mind Hamas in Gaza: what do we do with Hamas ideology on American college campuses? On top of the pusillanmous responses of college presidents we can clearly see the emerging theme of moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, out of which the next step is certain: any attempts to curtail Hamas ideology on campus will be called "cancel culture," and will be said to prove the hypocrisy of everyone who has been attacking cancel culture over the last few years. And thus nothing will change. At the least, Jews should boycott Harvard, and perhaps the entire Ivy League. Steve suggests a more robust alternative way of thinking about the problem, but John and Lucretia are not convinced.
Topic two is the domestic political scene. Who needs a Speaker of the House anyway? But more curious is the case of RFK Jr., who has now decided to run as an independent nex year. Is there a chance he could actually win, say, for instance, if Biden tumbles down the stairs of Air Force One in early October, and can't be replaced on the ballot—never mind the prospect that he might draw more votes from Trump than from Biden. The point is, black swan events are becoming so much more common than maybe it is time to bring back white swan events.
We do live up to our name at the open, however, with some whisky recommendations from the GoodSpirit whisky bar in Budapest.
Lucretia, freshly back in the U.S. from her adventures with Steve in Budapest, is in the host chair for this week's episode, and she's not in a good mood. And it's not jet lag. Looking out at the concurrent disasters at home and abroad at the moment—high inflation, an undefended southern border, and now war in Israel—she poses a straightforward question: Would any of this be happening if Trump was still president? And more acute to a certified dog-lover: While Trump has many personal flaws, would he kick a dog? The evidence accumulates that Joe Biden is not just a terrible president, but a terrible human being.
From there we take up the inner desires of Kamp Kommandant Hillary Klinton, the good news (for John) of the return of the McRibb, and the demise of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Which somehow leads to a discussion of President James K. Polk, whom John thinks is an executive to be highly esteemed, drawing immediate 50-cal fire from Lucretia. And we also marvel afresh at the feral genius of Trump's method of contesting the kangaroo court fraud trial under way in New York.
But it isn't all bad news. We celebrate the fact that apparently women, too, think a lot about the Roman Empire, though Lucretia prefers to think of the Roman Republic instead, since she founded it.
Settle in with your best chilled Hungarian dessert wine and Philly cheese steak for this cosmopolitan issue, which finds John Yoo—host for this week's episode—tired out from looting in his home town of Philadelphia, while Lucretia and Steve are together in Budapest carrying on with more conspiracies against the international rules-based order.
John gives us on-scene reports from ground-zero of the "recreational shopping" going on in Philadelphia, plus an update on his three days of testimony in the incredible John Eastman disbarrment trial going on in California. We also cover the aftermath of our event with Heather Mac Donald at Berkeley Law, which made it all the way to Jesse Watter's show on Fox News, and has gained something like 3 million views online.
But that's nothing compared to our beat down on the implosion of Ibram X. Kendi (Sen. John Kennedy's favorite "butthole professor"), which was not only predictable, but was predicted! By Glenn Loury, among others, whose profanity-laced rant about Kendi to John McWhorter we excerpt here for its news value, but also underscore the main point that the academic exaltation of an intellectual fraud like Kendi is another indication of the corruption and deep politicization of our universities today.
Government shutdown? GOP debate? The rest of the Supreme Court docket for the new term beginning Monday. Yes—we cover all that too. Better get a second bottle of Hungarian wine.
This circuitious episode, hosted by Steve in Budapest with John Yoo in Dallas and Lucretia in her undisclosed desert location, starts off with the entirely predictable news that David Brooks drinks his whisky on the rocks (insert shudders and horror here), and quickly moves on to the news that hasn't broken yet, so we'll fix it: Gavin Newson is running for president. We know—he hasn't offically announced, but he's behaving like a candidate more and more every day. And why has no one noticed that Newsom would also solve the Democrats' Kamala problem? (See the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, especially the passage that reads, "The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves." That rules out Kamala as Newsom's running mate, which is okay because Newsom and Harris hate each other.
We also devote too much time to the sartorial severity that is the Fetterman Senate Dress code, and you'll just need to listen to hear who Lucretia calls "Senator Stripper Boots."
From there Steve gives a central European "sit rep" on attitudes there about the Ukraine War, American policy about the war, and general political matters, all gleaned from Steve's conversations with highly placed (and very smart) Hungarian sources.
We've been wanting to talk about a legal issue that's been our mind for a while, and we finally get to it in this episode in depth: qualified immunity. We don't quite reach a firm conlusion about how the doctrine should be reformed, but you'll feel smarter for our dissection of it.
Finally, a few quick notes on the Kendi implosion, missing jet fighters, and other fun matters. But not to worry—we're still drinking our whisky neat, even if David Brooks kills his with four ice cubes. In an airport.
Lucretia hosts this week, as the fearsome threesome give a brief summary of a recent law school seminar on natural law and the Constitution we presented last week at Berkeley Law before a group of somewhat skeptical students, and then moving on to assaying the Biden impeachment inquiry and Hunter Biden's smoking gun charge, asking why all the White House spokespeople seem to have come from Nerd Central (we mean you, Ian Sams!), and explaining the fundamental asymmetry of the Administrative State in Democratic and Republican presidencies.
And isn't it nice that Virginia Democrats have offered us a whole new definition of a "working family"? Who knew that Only Fans might become a new source for campaign contributions. Also: once again the question—are Biden and Harris both on the Democrats' chopping block for next year?
Get this: the latest rationale for federal government censorship of the internet is protecting "cognitive infrastructure," which sounds beyond the perverse imagination even of Orwell. And you know how well things go when the government gets interested in infrastructure! But I now have an excuse for the next time I forget something: "My memory hit a pothole in my cognitive infrastructure!"
Finally, we close out with some actual news, namely, John Yoo sharing some perspective on his expert witness testimony in the ongoing disbarment proceeding against John Eastman this week.
We're a day late and a person short this week, as we're missing John Yoo because of schedule conflicts. Over morning coffee instead of evening single malt, this shortened, ad-free epiode finds Lucretia and Steve wondering if the Branch Covidians can really be getting ready to impose a mask mandate on all of us again, and pondering whether the COVID case of the multiply-boosted DOKTOR Jill Biden should make us wonder whether anyone knows anything anymore.
Could this all be a sign of the deepening panic among Democrats over the latest polls showing Donald Trump stronger than ever, and ever increasing doubts about Joe Biden?
And speaking of Democrats, who knew that Democrats have become Carl Schmitt fans, as is seemingly the case with New Mexico Governor Grisham declaring that an "emergency" gives her the power to suspend the 2nd Amendment. This comes on the heels of the latest 5th Circuit Court ruling that the Biden Administration trampled the 1st Amendment with its Covid censorship regime.
Never mind saving “our democracy"—who's going to save our gerontocracy! With Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden in a contest for Greatest Brain Freeze Moment, while Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman look on with envy, we are starting to long for the good old days of the youthful vigor of the Soviet Politburo. Is it time for age limits for high federal office (though Sen. Chuck Grassley, still firing on all cylinders two weeks before his 90th birthday, might want a word with us), or do we just need cognitive tests for office?
Equally alarming is how the Baude-Paulsen argument for disqualiftying Trump for the presidency under the 14th Amendment is gaining traction. Could a county registrar of voters in some deep blue percinct throw the 2024 election into complete chaos? John has a good article on this scene suggesting the answer is a hard No, which we review.
Meanwhile, the whole Georgia case gets curiouser and curiouser, as you'd expect in our current Alice in Wonderland world of "verdict first, trial later" phase of Trump-specific law enforcement. But also some good news: the forces of decency are fighting back against the left's demagogic attack on Clarence Thomas.
This classic format episode of the Power Line podcast features Steve Hayward all by himself, and breaks some news: Steve is returning to Pepperdine University this academic year as the Edward Gaylord Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy. Steve will be filling the large shoes of the late Ted McAllister, who passed away earlier this year, leaving a big hole in the SPP program.
Pepperdine's SPP Dean Pete Peterson asked Steve to offer the faculty address to this year's incoming class of graduate students during orientation last week, and he spoke on the relevant contemporary lessons from Max Weber's famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation," which intersects perfectly with Karl Rove's Wall Street Journal essay over the weekend on how America has sometimes been in much worse shape than today. True, but not exhaustive, and supposing natural cycles of history will take us out of our current funk is likely a mistake, akin to fiddling while Rome burns.
In one sentence, Steve's message to incoming students is that they'll need to step up their game even more than they might have thought. That's what Weber told students in 1919, and his lesson didn't fully take.
Wondering what to make of the first GOP debate, Trump's arrest and mug shot, and the apparently deteriorating battlefield situation in Ukraine? Then you've come to the right place. John Yoo hosts this week while we break it all down in crisp fashion, partly because our schedules this week prevented us from recording at a time suitable to have our whisky glasses filled. Next week, we promise!
As loyal listeners know, yesterday Steve, John, and Lucretia took over the flagship Ricochet podcast in the absence of both Peter Robinson (still somewhere in the Witness Protection Program) and Rob Long (out walking a Hollywood picket line somewhere), and we made James Lileks' life completely miserable.
We decided that a couple of issues we brought up deserved some extended discussion in this bonus episode, starting with the "trust" question: why do Americans now hold nearly all major institutions, both public and private, in such low regard? We run through a number of factors, from ideology, competence, and corruption, but also wonder about whether our ruling elites today don't have the same kind of noblesse oblige that characterized the elites of the 1950s (the Dulles brothers get a special shout-out).
Next, we return to the question of "human rights" versus the natural rights of the American Founding, and the mischief that the rise of "human rights" has entailed in modern times. Steve had intended to nitpick John's understanding of Thomas Hobbes, but the Learned Lucretia shows up in force, with marvelous renditions of Locke and Hobbes, casting doubt on Steve's proposition that maybe there exists a "Hobbistotle" to go with Tom West's "Lockistotle." It's not as wonky and esoteric as it sounds! Well actually maybe it is, but we think you'll still enjoy this Trump and Biden-free episode (and ad-free, too!)
Our thanks, by the way, to the Ricochet team for the honor of occupying their show, and to James Lileks for his indulgence.
But because Lucretia and John once again wrongly dismiss Steve's embrace of prog rock ("Rock and roll that went to college," as Jody Bottum calls it), the exit music for this episode is an excerpt from "The Chamber of 32 Doors," which is the Prog Rock version of "Rich Men North of Richmond" which we discuss briefly in this episode.
I'd rather trust a countryman than a townman
You can judge by his eyes, take a look if you can
He'll smile through his guard, survival trains hard
I'd rather trust a man who works with his hands
He looks at you once, you know he understands
Don't need any shield, when you're out in the field. . .
The priest and the magician
Singin' all the chants that they have ever heard
And they're all calling out my name
Even academics, searching printed word
Maybe the academics will figure it out someday, but judging by the elite culture's reaction to "Rich Men North of Richmond," today is not that day.
The late week news was so screwball that Steve surrendered to Screwball Peanut Butter Whiskey to cope while Lucretia the Lightweight settled for Irish coffee while John, out of place as usual, passed on a liquid lunch to have a real one. (By the way, the Screwball Peanut Butter Whiskey is not recommended.)
And what a lot of screwball news, starting with the designation of a DoJ special counsel to deal with Hunter Biden's special needs, a trial date and mini-gag order for Trump, and the flurry over the proposal of two conservative law professors to ban Trump's eligility for the ballot under Section III of the 14th Amendment about "insurrection." (If you are a glutton for the punishment of a 126-page law review article, you can view the whole thing here.) There's just one problem with this scenario: Trump hasn't been charged with fomenting insurrection or rebellion. Maybe the special counsel is waiting for another bad news dump on Hunter?
After some observations about the failed Ohio referendum this week we finallky getr down to some wider topics, including reflections on the astonishing interview last week with Obama biographer David Garrow in The Tablet, which presents about as unflattering a portrait of "the lightworker" as can be imagined. (If you haven't read the Garrow interview, do so at your earliest convenience.) And we also ponder the latest notable offerings on the state of the country from Victor Davis Hanson ("Who Will Say No to the Current Madness") and Jacob Howland ("America Is Now a Zombie State"). Steve, naturally, sees some signs of life while Lucretia, naturally, finds him to be too infernally optimistic.
Finally, a few suggestions for great general reading about politics, with Steve recommending a title from Kenneth Minogue and John recommending two titles from Daniel Bell. Lucretia is sticking with Calvin and Hobbes—the comic strip, not the 16th and 17th century authors!
This isn’t our normal 3WHH; John isn’t here, just Steve and Lucretia. So maybe a 2WHH. The occasion for today’s extra episode—since we moved up our usual weekly offering on account of the latest weekly Trump indictment, is to take note of two related items.
First, did you know that Italy’s new and very popular prime minister Giorgia Meloni recently visited Washington and had a brief meeting with President Biden? I missed this too, as the meeting took place behind closed doors, probably to cover up the fact that Biden either fell asleep or sniffed PM Meloni’s blonde hair, and there was apparently no press availability or public photo op. Of course, Biden called Meloni a fascist when she was first elected, so I expect there was no enthusiasm for noting her visit.
The second item is an article in National Review ("The Italian Option") recently on Meloni, where Dalibor Rohac argues that Meloni is a better model for nationalist conservatives than Hungary’s Viktor Orban, because Meloni’s positions on various matters are more congenial to Americans. Maybe so, though I note Rohac’s article neglects to mention that Meloni is fond of Orban, having met with him a number of times. And Rohac is a defender of the European Union, which makes us suspicious right there.
Leaving aside the whole Hungary question for another day, this seems like an occasion to roll out at last a conversation Lucretia and Steve had recently with one of our favorite Italians thinkers—and part-time opera singer—Edoardo Raffiotta. Edoardo is professor of law at the University of Milan, where we first made his acquaintance last year at a conference. He specializes in European constitutional law, and especially the problems of emergency powers (hence is occasional interest in Carl Schmitt). He is also actively involved in legal issues pertaining to cyber-security and the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence, which of course are specialities of Lucretia. We wanted to hear first hand from Edoardo about Meloni and other topics—including opera. Stick around after we finish with Edoardo, because Lucretia and I will come back with a “postgame” show of sorts where we offer some additional reflections about the wider scene—and make a small news announcement.
And we manage to sneak in a few bars of Edoardo's favoite Puccini opera, La Rondine, at the end.
Our normal weekend rendezvous at the whisky bar was convened early this week to get out our fresh reactions to the Trump indictment for his role in the events of January 6, and our general reaction after reading the filing is—is this all there is? Where is incitement? Where is conspiring with violent groups like the Proud Boys and Barbie and Ken? There is very little if any new evidence or facts in the filing, and there are some stunning assumptions of fact that will surely fall apart in the courtroom.
More seriously, John Yoo rightly describes this filing as the most serious political-criminal trial since the trial of Aaron Burr way back in 1807—a trial that, keep in mind—acquitted Burr on the charge opf treason. And the timing, coming amidst a lot of new revelations of Biden corruption this week—seems suspicious.
Where do we go from here? Should the GOP House move right away to an impeachment investigation of Biden, before the Justice Department names a special counsel that would ironically lock down a House investigation into an "ongoing investigation" by Justice?
We do, finally, get back to our leisurely summer stroll through best books, this week laying out criteria for what makes a good biography, with each of us offering up some representative picks, such as Lord Charnwood's Lincoln, Jean Edward Smith on John Marshall, and Plutarch. You'll have to listen to see which of us recommended what book or author—you may be surprised!
After clearing the decks of the latest headlines from the week involving Biden trials and Trump tribulations, we get down to business discussing John's new book The Politically-Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (co-authored with Robert Delahunty). Naturally Steve and Lucretia have some issues to pick with John.
Steve manages to annoy everyone by noting the Statute-That-Cannot-Be-Named-On-This-Podcast (rhymes with Lean Fair Fact) and connecting it to the "L-Word," meaning the Lochner case. You thought it meant something else? How old fashioned and quaint in this Age of Infinite Pronouns.
And did Kamala Harris set a new low in hypocrisy and bad faith this week with her attack on Florida's African-American history standards? Let us count the ways. . .
I knew when I saw news of Vice President Kamala Harris claiming that Florida's new African-American history standards for public schools taught that "enslaved people benefitted from slavery," I knew instinctively that this was a lie of unusual medacity even for her. Don't take my word for it: read the curriculum guide for yourself, especially page six, where Harris and the rest of the race-obsessed educrat-complex twists one sentence in the most grotesque way imaginable.
The real sin of the curriculum guide, from the left's demented point of view, actually can be seen page eight, where the curriculum mentions including the history of slavery before 1619. Ah—there's the rub. The real reason Harris attacks the Florida curriculum is that it dares to correct the distortions and omissions of the 1619 Project, which has become the platform for saying that America was, and is, purely a slavocracy, and that American capitalism practically invented slavery.
One of my principal teachers in graduate school (and a past guest on this podcast), William B. Allen, was one of the authors of the new Florida curriculum guide, and he's been in high demand this week refuting the calumnies of our vice president. I managed to catch up with him this morning to note the obvious irony that the party of Calhoun would be reviving Calhounism just now, but trying to deflect it onto the other party. (Because of course the real reason for this attack is that Joe Biden might face Ron DeSantis as a candidate next year, so better start calling him a racist now.)
Are the anticipated coming Trump indictments serious? Defrauding the federal government? Obstructing Congress? Violating the Ku Klux Klan Act? This is indeed John McEnroe territory—"You cannot be serious!" But is it going to work?
Let's just say this episode revisits the events of January 6 with considerable disagreement among the panel about how it should be understood, what we still don't know, and how it is afftecting the next election cycle, concerning which, Luretia road-tests her latest outlandish theory. ("We're going to get comments on this one!", she promises.)
Then we assay the state of the widening Biden scandals, with Lucretia scorning Steve's "eternal infernal optimism" that sooner or later the media is going to jump on this scandal. Lucretia and John are skeptical. . .
Finally, are the dividends of the Harvard affirmation action admissions ruling already growing and spreading to the private sector? Have you noticed the news of the growing number of layoffs and shrinkages of corporate DEI offices? Who says there isn't any good news these days.
John Yoo is away overseas this week, so Steve and Lucretia are joined by Glenn Ellmers, author of the brand new book The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibilty of Political Philosophy. Do not be intimidated by the mention of Foucault or anything else in the title, as this crispy-written and very accessible book comes in at a reader-friendly 79 pages (Glenn admits that it began as an essay that grew a little out of control). It sheds a lot of light on our current culture war, which is really a continuation of the ructions in the country from the left that began in the 1960s but fooled us by receding briefly in the shadows for a time when the Cold War ended. More than that, though, the roots of our current contentions trace all the way back to Plato, and from whom we may also find some answers. As as we say, all this in 79 pages!
Steve and Lucretia also dilate the Farce of the Week in Washington, the latest lower court rulings that look like promising attacks on the administrative state, and why the Equal Protection Clause was such a mess at the Supreme Court for 150 years, contra Alan Dershowitz's argument that Earl Warren had it right all along. No sale!
You've heard of the Avengers. And the Incredibles. We at the 3WHH consider ourselves The Uncensorables. (Only because Justice League is taken.) In any case, just when you thought it was safe to pass by the courthouse and law library because the Supreme Court term has finished, along comes a bracing district court opinion slapping the Biden Administration hard for its collaborating with social media companies to censor COVID dissenters who turned out to be right about nearly everything.
We also work through the aftermath of the Harvard/UNC decision, which is forcing the left to transfer their hated for Citizens United to this case. And what's up with the left's complaint that the 303 Creative case was a phony case? What's phony is the left's argument, which John Yoo (this week's show host) dispatches with ease, while Steve reminds us that the left has been contriving phony cases for decades.
Finally, since it was Fourth of July week, we reflect on the holiday this year, Steve gives a foerboding prediction for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration in 2026, and we offer up recommendations for the best books about the Declaration for our slowly developing reading list of essential whisky-wisdom pairings.
It's over. The fat lady has sung. The Supreme Court ended its current term with a big bang, delivering a long-overdue smackdown of affirmative action that with any luck history will say was a turning point for restoring the proper understanding of equality in our Constitution, though the follow up to overcome ther massive resistance of universities and their epigones in HR and DEI departments everywhere will be crucial—and exhausting.
But wait! There's more! The Court also smacked down Biden's student loan power grab, and vindicated the principle of free speech the right of conscience in turning back the coercive identitarian demand that a Christian website designer must be compelled to produce offensive products.
The 3WHH hosts were actually together in person this week for this episode, and marked the end of the Supreme Court term with a several nice rounds of Makers Mark. Next week we'll be back to our more "diverse" (heh) scope of wine, whisky, and wonkery, and we'll also get back to our slow-rolling "best books" deliberation.
The submersible that is the Biden presidency looks to be under as much increasing pressure as the Trump reboot tour, and maybe both will implode? And when is the Supreme Court going to end the suspense and deliver the rulings on the big cases we've all been waiting for?
The Court did deliver a disappointment of sorts in U.S. v. Texas, which rejected the state challenge to the Biden Administration's complete implosion of border enforcement, ruling that while states along the border have indeed suffered injury, they lack standing to sue, and/or the Court lacks a remedy it can supply, so the Biden Administration wins this round. But we break down the convoluted reasoning of the majority opinion (can it really be right that if the executive branch arrested just one person crossing the border instead of zero, states would lose standing to sue, or the Court any remedy whatsoever?), and wonder whether the case is nearly as good for liberals as they think, and whether the next item on the agenda for conservative jurisprudence is to develop a new doctrine of standing, as it did with the "major questions doctrine" promulgated last year.
We also look at the latest attacks on Supreme Court justices from the left. Justice Barrett sold her house to—gasp!—a conservative! Can you believe it? And finally we explore the state of abortion one year after Dobbs.
By the end of the week when our three bartenders assembled, the Trump indictment had been pretty well munched and masticated, so there wasn't much left to say about the matter for the moment. But John Yoo has a wild idea to resolve the controversy: President Biden, he says, should pardon Trump right now, and say "Let's put everything before the voters next year on the issues."
Of course the last thing Biden wants to do right now is run on the issues, since he's doing such a dreadul job, and in any case there is no chance Trump will agree to any conditions for a pardon (such as admitting guilt or agreeing to drop out of the presidential election altogether). And it is doubtful Biden has either the statesmanship or the cynical wit to see the mischievous possibilities of a pardon.
From there the gang tries to read the tea leaves at the Supreme Court, which handed down another puzzling ruling this week regarding Indian adoptions, and finally we continue our "best of" recommended reading list with some nominations for best satirical fiction.
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Who needs Steve's peaty, smoky whisky this week when Canada is supplying a surplus for half the nation? (But it ain't Canadian Club they're serving.) After clearing the smoke from our eyes—and our whisky glasses, we get down to business on what is known so far about the Trump indictment (we recorded before the full details of the indictment were released), and wonder if the Dept. of Justice isn't blowing a lot of smoke.
And just how did the Supreme Court manage to botch the Voting Rights Act case?
Finally, we begin rolling out our listener-requested Essential Reading List, starting with a couple titles for the category of philosophy. Naturally Steve and Lucretia divide on a title to recommend. Next week we'll either do histort or biography, which are also difficult categories, but that's part of the fun.
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John Yoo is away traveling this weekend, so the 3WHH reverts to its old form, with Lucretia pummeling Steve like a chiropractor working on a stiff neck for his conventional thinking about the debt ceiling deal. But otherwise we're in a jolly mood this week, as we see signs that a "Revolt of the Normies"—that is sensible middle class Americans—against gender wokery is finally underway. Just ask the sales manager for Bud Light, or shareholders of Target. (We could have alternately called this episode "Pride Month Goeth Before the Fall.")
Then, in response to some listener requests, we begin a preliminary excursion into a "Best Books" list, though we want to await John's return for an orderly treatment of this question. For this episode Steve and Lucretia talk about political novels, and why some are enduring, like Orwell's 1984 or Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and why others have been forgotten, like Andre Malraux's Man's Fate, or Wyndham Lewis's Revenge for Love (which Steve is reading right now). As usual Steve and Lucretia come at this subject from different directions, and finally settle together on . . . Shakespeare.
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Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is one of the most productive—and provocative—working scholars today (with emphasis on working, as his output is prodigious).
This classic format episode features Steve Hayward and Phil in a one-on-one conversation about three of Phil's major areas of current research, starting with his co-authored article that breaks new ground in the history of Marxism, "The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence," published recently in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the premier journals in economics. The article is causing heads to explode on the left, which means he must have hit a nerve.
From there we talk about the history of the intellectual left's favorite epithet today, "neoliberalism," but also about how the term has been embraced with almost the same pejorative meaning by some leading thinkers on the right. Is this a good idea?
Finally, as Phil has been one of the pre-eminent critics of the 1619 Project from the moment it first appeared four years ago, we catch up on the latest iterations of that popular leftist propaganda effort.
Everyone should follow Phil on Twitter, @PhilWMagness, and you'll see how he lives rent-free every day inside the heads of leftists.
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It's late in the 4th quarter for this year's Supreme Court season, and the Justices are starting to score with some long bombs. Our 3WHH bartenders celebrated with entire flights of whisky (our kind of diversity!) while pondering Thursday's clean sweep of two 9 - 0 decisions that reinvigorate the "takings clause" of the 5th Amendment, and clip the wings of the EPA without once mentioning either the Chevron doctrine, or a certain other statute that is banned from this podcast.
But wait! There's more! We also dispatch with prejudice the crazy idea of President Biden using the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling, preview a couple of brand new cases that may start to undo the DEI regime, and puzzle over a head-scratching case from a few weeks ago involving California's extra-territorial imposition of regulations of pig-farming. As this poses an existential threat both to the availability of bacon supplies and McRibbs in California going forward, this is a matter of deep concern and outrage.
Speaking of pigs, John Yoo is about to come out with his own PIG book to go on your bookshelf right next to Steve's PIG book. That is, John and co-author Robert Delahunty are about to come out with The Politically-Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court, which will make a nice pairing with both a good whisky and Steve's Politically-Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, from Wilson to Obama. We discuss the common points of interest between the two books, though Steve alleges that John and his co-author got the Lochner case wrong, as everyone usually does.
There is no truth to the rumor that Lucretia is writing The Politically-Incorrect Guide to Political Incorrectness, though she's the obvious choice for the title.
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The hiatus in Hollywood brought on by the current writers strike seemed a good occasion to check in with Christian Toto, proprietor of the indispensable HollywoodInToto website, as well as a podcast, and a terrific recent book, Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
Our conversation ranges widely from the problems of streaming services, the leftward lurch that has nearly killed off late night talk shows, why Top Gun: Maverick was snubbed at the Oscars, and above all whether a backlash against wokery in Hollywood is approaching critical mass. There are some signs that it is. Stay tuned, but listen here and bookmark Christian's site and podcast.
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With Steve Hayward back in the host chair this week, the 3WHH actually breaks some real news with special guest Kelly Janes Torrance, the op-ed editor of the indispensible New York Post. This week Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is attracting surprising interest from many conservatives, visited the Post for a grilling from the Post's editorial board, and Kelly Jane opened up her reporter's notebook to share previously unreported statements RFK Jr offered at their 90-minute meeting. You won't want to miss her scoops shared exclusively with the 3WHH podcast.
John Yoo was late joining us—apparently he got stuck in an extra long McDonald's drive-through line right before show time—but did manage to break down the Durham report, and also gets in on the sequels with Kelly Jane, who has a lot of thoughts on the Ukraine situation from her experiences as an election watcher in recent years.
Since KJT is Canadian, we decided to honor her guest turn with exit music from the Barenaked Ladies, "New Kid on the Block," since we're definitely going to have her back on 3WHH. As mentioned early in this episode, she may not be a neat whisky drinker, but she has an epic cocktail game.
We're got a short pre-roll excerpt from John on the Ricochet podcast that we think is appropriate to share with our listeners, though I think Rob Long was not amused!
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Lucretia hosts this week's episode, and as Hamilton predicted about how executive power would promote sobriety, the awesome responsibility of the host chair led Lucretia to praise Kevin McCarthy for the second week in a row, and she even has nice things to say about Steve!
After the smelling salts were passed round to John and Steve (and fresh glasses of whisky poured), the bartenders get down to business, breaking down the rising anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party; Lucretia's first-hand report from the border in the immediate aftermath of the end of Title 42 and where the immigration disaster will go next (and once again, the responsible Lucretia surprises with her sympathy for asylum seekers); the travesty of the criminal indictment of Marine veteran Daniel Penny for his justified act of self-defense on the New York subway (just think of it as the attempt to run George Floyd 2.0); what to make of Trump's humiliation of CNN; what to make of the week's revelations of the Biden Family Crime Syndicate; and what to make of the Supreme Court interposing itself—by a rare 9 - 0 vote—between federal corruption probes of the states.
Because we're waiting on a serious corruption probe into the Bidens, and to go with our thoughts on how the country is repeating the worst of the 1970s, exit music this week is an old 70s-era Ambrosia tune, "Time Waits for No One."
Why am I searching and when will I know?
Are the years that I've waited with nothing to show?
I'm ready to listen I'm ready to win
But I can't wait much longer before we begin
Time waits for no one
Time waits for no one
No one, no one
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With all three bartenders back together and John Yoo in the host chair, the gang wonders why it is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr is so far making the most sense in the 2024 presidential race, how it is that Kevin McCarthy has (stop the presses!) actually impressed Lucretia, and why the obviously political attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas expose the left at their power-grasping worst.
But then we get back to school, with John expressing his usual faux-puzzlement about the New York Times's genuine puzzlement of why conservatives "still" like Aristotle. Too bad there isn't an Aristotle for Dummies title we can send the Times, but we do manage to sort out John.
Finally, we round out this episode with some mockery of the high octane decadence of the ruling class as seen by the scheduing of the Met Gala and the White House Correspondents Dinner within 48 hours of each other last week. It must be exhausting for our rulers to keep up this kind of social schedule, not to mention the expense of the wardrobe. Tune in for Piers Morgan's fantastic headline about the scene, and grab a can of Raid.
Heather Mac Donald may be the most fearless journalist in America. She is relentless in her reporting, bracing in her truth-telling, and ferocious in arguing her case. Her new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, explores how the current attack on meritocracy in the name of "equity" is rampaging through almost all American institutions, in particular arts and culture, but also higher education and corporate America.
Her bleak inventory includes the degredation of the sciences as well, which will if continued will exact a high cost. But our conversation also takes some unusual twists and turns, delving into some of the deeper aspects of the issues of race and merit that are typically neglected. We conclude our conversation with a discussion of Heather's recommendations for remedies, which will require some serious backbone on the part of the nation's political leadership that appears to be in short supply just now.
Who is the only federal judge to have played basketball in the Olympics for Cuba? Who is the only federal judge known for driving around town in a 1960s-era convertable Rolls Royce? Who is the only federal judge who was nearly deported?
The answer is an n of 1, as statisticians would say: Judge Carlos T. Bea of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who the Los Angeles Daily Journal was correct to call "the most interesting judge on the 9th Circuit." Born in San Sebastian, Spain in 1934, his family left Spain for North America after the Spanish Civil War and on the eve of World War II. And the story only gets more interesting from there.
Judge Bea recently took senior status on the 9th Circuit, and the San Francisco chapter of the Federalist Society decided to throw a reception and celebration of his long and distinguished career in the law, inviting me to serve as an interlocutor with Judge Bea for a conversation that covers the highlights of his colorful life story along with his views on jurisprudence. He also supplies lessons on how to survive and prosper as a Republican in San Francisco.
This week we took the 3WHH on the road for a special ad-free episode, as Lucretia and Steve recorded before a live audience at Commenter-Con II in Phoenix. Commenter-Con II is the inspiration of 'Ammo Grrrll" (known in real life as Susan Vass), with Power Line readers from 27 states turning up. It also coincides roughly with the 40th anniversary of Lucretia and Steve's very first argument, which, Steve now admits, Lucretia was right about after all.
After we kick around the stunning news about Tucker Carlson's startling exit from Fox News, and a few other background questions about favorite books, reasons for the never-ending whisky divide, and related, we turn to audience questions, in particular our nominees for who we'd like to lock up if we had genuine prosecutorial powers.
(John Yoo wasn't able to join us as he had to be in the classroom for the last week of his classes at Berkeley Law, but sent along a note: "I wish I were there, but on the advice of counsel, I've been warned against showing up anywhere where people calling themselves 'Ammo Grrrll' and 'Lucretia' are in attendance. Steve Hayward, not so much."
In what may be the most wide-ranging episode of the 3WHH yet, the troika ranges from the implications of the Fox News settlement with Dominion for the defectiveNY Times v. Sullivan doctrine, to an extended discussion of the natural law arguments on abortion—the topic aborted last week for lack of time—and lastly to a look at notable political movies with the unlikely offering from Lucretia that an underrated moral-political movie worthy of note is . . . The Devil in Miss Jones??!!
Needless to say John and Steve didn't see that coming, and didn't know quite what to say. And this doesn't include our new segment, "Lucretia's Featured Rant of the Week," which debuted with a much deserved blast at the Department of Justice.
Steve gets his revenge at the very end, with exit music drawn from his favorite recent political movie that John and Lucretia have embargoed from further mention on the 3WHH.
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Groff vs. Dejoy, involving a Post Office mail carrier named Gerald Groff, who, for religious reasons, wished not to work on Sundays. Previously the postal service had granted this accommodation, which was easy back when the Post Office didn’t do mail delivery on Sundays. But a few years ago the Post Office started contracting with Amazon and other package delvery services to do Sunday deliveries, though they still granted Groff his religious accommodation. But then the Post Office changed its mind and compelled Groff to work Sundays. Hence this case, raising again an aspect of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.
You would think after all these decades of both religious liberty cases and employment law cases that such a situation would be well-settled, but you would be wrong. In fact the First Amendment’s clauses related to the establishment and free exercise of religious remain highly contested and unsettled.
One person who has a deep grasp of the broader issue is Vincent Phillip Munoz, who is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of political science and law at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is “Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses.” Phil’s work has been cited in several Supreme Court opinions on the issue.
Phil sat down recently with John Yoo and me to discuss the issue, and the wider issue of how constitutional originalism should be understood today. You could think of this episode as a “two-whisky happy hour,” as we wanted to have Lucretia Zoom in, but she wasn’t able to, so Phil got off the hook. But in any case, let’s turn to Phil now.
Note: Apologies for the background static and other sound issues. We had our communal microphone on the wrong settings, and it was not amenable to a post-production fix.
Lucretia hosts the bar this week, as Steve and John extol the virtues of Japanese whisky while trolling the left for its latest futile attempt to take down Justice Clarence Thomas. Lucretia celebrates a brew pub in Arizona that stood up to the braying mob that resents real beer drinkers who like the Federalist Society, which deserves to go with a lighter highland malt. And in our "This Week in Democrats" segment, which pairs well with a dusty, peaty whisky, we wonder why the left is suddenly trying to push out Dianne Feinstein, and the problem this creates for Gov. Winsome Newsom, among other amusements and free entertainment Democrats provided this week.
John then walks us through the puzzles of the fast-moving case involving the revocation (stayed for the moment) of the aboritificent drug mifepristone, which turns quickly to a too-brief discussion of natural law and abortion, and why, to borrow once again Stan Evans's great line now more applicable than ever, it is a good thing Republicans are pro-life, since they spend so much time in the fetal position, unable to offer even the simplest public argument for their stance on the issue. (To be continued. . .)
Finally, Steve and Lucretia wonder why the leak of classified documents showing that the situation in Ukraine is very different from what we've been told (some people might call the party line a "lie," but that's just some people) isn't seen as the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam. Instead, we're being treated to a spectacle of government secrets unveiled by the cast of High School Musical: Gamer Sequel.
You know how people who think they can top something crazy like to say, "Hold my beer"? Well, this week Budweiser decided to try to top Alvin Bragg's bogus indictment of Donald Trump by rebranding their "light" beer such that no one want to hold it even for Alvin Bragg. What explains this dumbest marketing move since the New Coke? And does the Biden Administration have a political death wish by deciding to use Title IX as a trans-cudgel? ("Trans-cudgel" is one of the 159 genders isn't it?) Yes, this week was that crazy, and we haven't even got to the elections in Chicago and Wisconsin yet.
John Yoo hosts this week's episode, which is good since Steve is under the weather with yet another bug of some kind, necessitating at least three whiskies, while Lucretia adds to her "Moron of the Week" designation with yet another new feature (which will rotate amongst the three of us every week) on . . . political philosophy! Don't groan—it's going to be fun. Especially since Steve demonstrates in this episode how it is possible to sneak up on John unawares with a reference to . . . the verboten Clean Air Act!
Lot going on this week, including Steve successfully completing his mandatory online "Abusive Conduct Training," otherwise known as Lucretia's How-To Guide to Blunt Speaking. Did you know abusive conduct ias bad? How would we have known without an online training module?
The good news for Lucretia is that "making unpopular statements about controversial issues" is not considered abusive. The bad news is that "making egregious statements about a person's lifestyle" is considered abusive, so we have to stop ragging on John for his McRibb fixation.
The main subject this week is the turmoil in Israel about proposed reforms to its judiciary. Somehow this is an international story, as it involves possible interference from the United States, and with might be called the Internationale of the Administrative State. Did you know Israel doesn't have a written constitution? This is a large part of the problem. While the judicial reform package Netanyahu's government put forward may have some defects, its defeat—and defeat is what has occurred, make no mistake—is a loss for the cause of constitutional government everywhere.
We also get in some observations about the Nashville shooting, the proposed Census question about whether someone is a descendant of slaves, and a new feature: Lucretia's Stupid Person of the Week.
The whisky bar is short one bartender this week as John Yoo is overseas yet again to Italy for some nefarious purpose, so it’s just Steve and Lucretia slinging the 180-proof analysis of the Twitter revelations and other news headlines of the end of the week. But the main topic is following up on the mid-week conversation with Glenn Ellmers on “Hard Truths & Radical Possibilities...
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Glenn Ellmers has done it again, with a new provocation that “the constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists.” His article posted at American Greatness, “ Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities,” backs up this startling proposition with five very stark supporting arguments, starting with the fact that elections no longer suffice to control our government (even if they are fair...
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In this special Thanksgiving long weekend edition with John Yoo sitting in the rotating host chair, the 3WHH bartenders share some wine, whisky and food pairings from the big meal. Steve supplemented his usual fare with popovers, washed down with some 2015 Trump Meritage red, expecting that it was likely past its prime, and although it had indeed lost its fruit, the depth and complexity surprised...
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One of my favorite journals these days is The European Conservative, edited by the intrepid Alvino-Mario Fantini out of Vienna. Printed on heavy stock paper, its articles are adorned with fabulous reproductions of classic art, making it the kind of journal you’d happily put out on your coffee table alongside your gallery books from the Met or wherever. Back in September I wrote on Power Line about...
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Your Three Whisky Happy Hour bartenders wandered to Milan this week where we recorded a rare in-person episode, and since we met in Italy, naturally we taste-tested Austrian single-malt whisky, described on the label as “dark” and “peated.” You’ll have to listen to find out the complete verdict, though one hint is that we don’t think we’ll be rushing to import any Waldvietler whisky any time soon.
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Some smart aleck wag at the Daily Caller has decided this midterm was the “McRib” election, saying “Democracy is like the McRib: It comes and goes mysteriously every two years or so and it is confusing. And, like politicians, once the McRib is reintroduced with a big ad campaign, you remember months later why you didn’t like it in the first place.” Needless to say, with lingering threats by...
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With John Yoo in the host chair this week, the 3WHH bartenders enjoy some four-finger pours of mostly American whisky ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election, which Steve and Lucretia think is going to be a wave of tsunami proportions. In addition to reviewing the still-volatile findings of the latest polls, we offer ranges of GOP pickups in the House and Senate (you’ll just have to listen to mark...
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With John Yoo in the host chair this week, the 3WHH bartenders enjoy some four-finger pours of mostly American whisky ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election, which Steve and Lucretia think is going to be a wave of tsunami proportions. In addition to reviewing the still-volatile findings of the latest polls, we offer ranges of GOP pickups in the House and Senate (you’ll just have to listen to mark...
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With the World Series knotted at 2-2, and the mid-term election just days away, it seemed the perfect time to catch up with Henry Olsen, the premier psephologist (trying saying that word fast just once, never mind seven times) of all things data-related when it comes to politics—and also baseball. We disagree about the decision to remove a starting pitcher working on a no-hitter into the 7th...
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With the World Series knotted at 2-2, and the mid-term election just days away, it seemed the perfect time to catch up with Henry Olsen, the premier psephologist (trying saying that word fast just once, never mind seven times) of all things data-related when it comes to politics—and also baseball. We disagree about the decision to remove a starting pitcher working on a no-hitter into the 7th...
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That was an extraordinary five hours at the Supreme Court yesterday—twice as long as the oral arguments were originally scheduled to last—and the longer the argument went on, the worse it seemed to get for the defenders of raced-based admissions for higher education. Maybe that was by design on the part of Chief Justice Roberts, who was sarcastic in his open scorn for what he has previously called...
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On Monday the Supreme Court takes up the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases in what is the Super Bowl of civil rights litigation—arguably the biggest moment for the Court since Brown v. Board of Education. Naturally that is the focus of this episode, though we do briefly review a couple of the key news stories of the week, such as Fetterman’s collapse...
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Next Monday the Supreme Court takes up the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action admissions cases, but before getting to the constitutional doctrine of the matter, there is a vexing matter that is often overlooked: if we’re going to be giving out racial preferences for admissions (and government contracts, etc), who counts as a member of which minority group?
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Lucretia and Stave gave John Yoo the day off for this special interstitial (and abbreviated) episode that we’ll just call the Two Whisky Happy Hour, in which Lucretia and Steve clear up some confusion from our most recent fast-paced episode, where a few main points got muddled. Several new listeners want us to clear up exactly what we mean by natural right, how natural right (especially its...
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Last February John Yoo and I hosted Richard Epstein, who needs no introduction for Ricochet members and listeners, for a lecture at Berkeley Law on his most recent book, The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law. Given that we were still under a mask mandate on campus at the time, Richard decided to talk about our COVID misadventures as a prime example of the administrative state run amok.
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Hoo boy! This week’s fiery episode takes up the argument leftover from last week about whether conservatism—and especially the new “national” variety that is sparking so much energy and enthusiasm right now—should conceive of its mission as Burkean in character, as “restorationist” or revolutionary. We cover a lot of ground, with Lucretia beating up on Steve for his suspicious Burkean sympathies...
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With John Yoo in the host chair this week, we get off to a rocky start because a certain friend of ours made a favorable reference to Edmund Burke in a draft article shared with us in advance of publication, and Lucretia immediately went to DefCon1. To be continued next week! Anyway, after introducing our whiskies of the week, we get down to business with ranking the biggest farce of the week...
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For the left, we have arrived at juris-thermo-geddon. If the Ruskies don’t nuke us, then the Supreme Court is going to nuke the Constitution! The Doomsday Clock at leftist institutions everywhere is striking midnight, yet somehow the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists “official” Doomsday Clock hasn’t budged, because apparently it is just a climate change clock now. Anyway, before taking up the legal...
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This week offers a hybrid car of an episode—almost literally as it turns out—as John Yoo was traveling midweek when Lucretia and Steve gathered in person with Richard Samuelson to record the first half, reviewing his reflections on the significance of the “Washington Football Team” deciding to name themselves the “ Commanders,” which rather fits the administrative state today, no? From there we go...
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This week the gang revisits the taxonomy of which Star Wars characters map properly onto the domain of the New Rebel Alliance, aka, the “national conservatives” we discussed in some detail last week, chiefly because John and Steve knew it would annoy Lucretia, who declined to accept the open position as the Princess Leia of the NatCons. But this was all just preface for her on-the-scene report of...
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Move over Calvin Coolidge: Grover Cleveland has a valid claim to being regarded as the most constitutionally faithful and fiscally frugal president since the Civil War—a case made splendidly in Troy Senik’s new biography that is being published today, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. What explains this outlier of a politician, who is so unlike...
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Today is Constitution Day, so naturally conversation at the 3WHH bar turned directly to the question of whether the state-mandated observances of Constitution Day in public colleges and universities are unconstitutional! Naturally there is division on this issue that maps with our ongoing division over the perspicacity of peated whisky. John (left) appears less than convinced here.
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With John Yoo sitting in the host chair this week, we decided to post this episode a day early partly on account of travel schedules (John and Steve are head for the NatCon conference in Miami), and partly because of the breaking news of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Also because it turns out that the favorite whisky of King Charles III is reportedly Laphroaig 15, which counts as a point in...
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The setting for Biden’s speech was so bad that it rivals Michael Dukakis’s tank ride for disastrous visuals, but that’s noting compared to the egregious content, which makes Jimmy Carter’s dreadful “malaise” speech seem like Demosthenes by comparison. Speaking of the demos, Biden’s speech can be seen an as especially inartful presumption of anti-republican principles that have been at the center...
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The setting for Biden’s speech was so bad that it rivals Michael Dukakis’s tank ride for disastrous visuals, but that’s noting compared to the egregious content, which makes Jimmy Carter’s dreadful “malaise” speech seem like Demosthenes by comparison. Speaking of the demos, Biden’s speech can be seen an as especially inartful presumption of anti-republican principles that have been at the center...
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Once again the three-host Three Whisky Happy Hour didn’t get around to any whisky reviews, distracted once again by important breaking fast-food news. But the main first topic of this back-to-school special edition is the role education is playing in this election cycle. On the K-12 level, the same dynamic that propelled Glenn Youngkin to victory in Virginia last year seems to have legs...
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The heart of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) is a massive increase in subsidies for “green energy,” which normally summons a gag reflex from most conservatives. But the iconoclasts at the Breakthrough Institute, who are not automatic or uncritical fans of wind and solar power, think the climate parts of the IRA represent a break from historic climate orthodoxy that most people haven’...
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The heart of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) is a massive increase in subsidies for “green energy,” which normally summons a gag reflex from most conservatives. But the iconoclasts at the Breakthrough Institute, who are not automatic or uncritical fans of wind and solar power, think the climate parts of the IRA represent a break from historic climate orthodoxy that most people haven’...
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John Yoo assumes the rotating host chair for this week’s episode, since Steve was on the road much of the week and didn’t keep up with news that didn’t involve whisky (and mermaids). We review what to make of Liz Cheney’s huge defeat in Wyoming, and Steve gamely attempts to defend the shrewdness of Mitch McConnell from Lucretia’s scorn. Then we turn to the still-unfolding story and fallout from...
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Glenn Ellmers has done it again, with a fresh provocation entitled “ America Never Existed.” Say what?!?! Did he drink some 1619 Moonshine or something? Here’s his lede: It is possible (not certain, but possible) that within the next 20 years or so, the United States will no longer exist. . . The end of the American republic would most likely mean the end of self-government all over the globe—the...
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Glenn Ellmers has done it again, with a fresh provocation entitled “ America Never Existed.” Say what?!?! Did he drink some 1619 Moonshine or something? Here’s his lede: It is possible (not certain, but possible) that within the next 20 years or so, the United States will no longer exist. . . The end of the American republic would most likely mean the end of self-government all over the globe—the...
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With this episode of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, the great John Yoo joins up as a permanent co-host along with Steve and Lucretia, having spent the last several weeks in Triple-A podcast instructional league while Steve was drinking his way across the British Isles. Perfect timing, since John worked in the Justice Department once upon a time, and has insights into its internal political dynamics...
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With this episode of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, the great John Yoo joins up as a permanent co-host along with Steve and Lucretia, having spent the last several weeks in Triple-A podcast instructional league while Steve was drinking his way across the British Isles. Perfect timing, since John worked in the Justice Department once upon a time, and has insights into its internal political dynamics...
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If I stay overseas any longer, it’s pretty clear the usurpation of the 3wHH will morph into the “The McRibb Happy Meal Podcast” if I don’t put a stop to it, so I made sure to disrupt this week’s episode once again from London, this time while finishing off a bottle of Poit Dhubh (potch-goo), as fits the real show. I didn’t stick around for long as it was the dinner hour over here in London...
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I can’t believe I had to crash my own podcast today to blunt the slow-rolling coup that Lucretia and John Yoo started last week in my absence, but by the miracle of the internet I did just that, dropping in for a few minutes between drams of whisky and dishes of haggis. We kick around the Joe Manchin news, whether the White House will invent a new term for economic distress—”recessionyx”...
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I can’t believe I left the car keys to the podcast sitting on the kitchen counter when I left for overseas, and now Lucretia and John Yoo have snatched them up and usurped the usufructs of the 3WHH. After they finally get clear of their ritualistic but obligatory abuse of me, they get down to important subjects, like Philly cheese steaks and other delectables, President Biden’s latest ailments and...
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In this second half of my conversation with Geoff Shepard (part 1 here, if you missed it), we walk through the famous “smoking gun” Oval Office tape of June 23, 1972, which was the final straw that led to Nixon’s resignation in August, 1974. Except we’ve got the facts all wrong about what was actually being discussed. Shepard walks through the matter, and then moves on to his devastating evidence...
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The big news story this week was the appearance of the fetching Fawn Hall Cassidy Hutchinson before the Watergate January 6 select committee, which somehow put us in the frame of mind of “Cassidy” by the renowned poetic duo of Weir/Barlow: Lost now on the country miles in his Cadillac I can tell by the way you smile, he is rolling back [to the West Wing] Come wash the nighttime clean Come grow the...
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Writing about the Watergate scandal in the 1980s, political scientist John Marini said “The passage of time has not resulted in greater clarity concerning what it is we should have learned from the event, perhaps because we still lack an authoritative account of it.” Having reached the 50th anniversary of the most famous “burglary” in history, we may be coming closer to have a complete...
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Has there been a more momentous week for the Supreme Court ever? The Court went three-for-three on the key cases this week ( Carson, on school choice; Bruen, on gun rights: and Dobbs, overturning Roe and Casey), not simply on the decision of the specific cases at hand, but the broader reasoning behind the decisions. Indeed this week may come some day to be be seen as the equivalent of the infamous...
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When it comes to energy, is the Biden administration simply stupid, or blindly ideological? Yes—we should embrace the power of “and,” because these possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Indeed the Bidenistas appear to be both dumb and ideological. Yesterday I ran into energy expert extraordinaire Robert Bryce—we’re at a murky gathering at an undisclosed location—and we sat down for a hearty...
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With Steve and Lucretia still locked in mortal combat over how best to understand equality, equity, prudence and related issues, and divided as bitterly over Edmund Burke as they are over whisky styles (with Steve recklessly wading in with a new piece on the Burke question just this week), this week’s episode brings on a neutral party to serve as a tie-breaker: Jean Yarbrough, the Gary M. Pendy Sr.
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The penultimate chapter of my recent biography, M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Defender of Freedom, summarizes the enduring literary, philosophical, and historical contributions of his last two books, The Theme Is Freedom, and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Digging into the audio archives of the Philadelphia Society, I found two talks Stan gave—one in 1994...
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A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality, are absolutely necessary, to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government. —Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 This week’s conversation offers up some new whisky choices while continuing with a...
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When Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appointed the noted libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2016, the left freaked out (so what else is new), calling his appointment “chilling.” The Center for American Progress gasped, “Mr. Bolick has spent the last quarter century working — at times quite successfully — to make the law more friendly to anti-government conservatives.
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Two favorite guests and friends join us at the bar for this week’s happy hour, to hash out bar fights they started in less reputable watering holes. Jeremy Carl argues in The American Conservative that there needs to be “A Republican Counter-Elite,” while Glenn Ellmers continues to spark controversy with his article a year ago, “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough,” and now, last week...
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The 20th anniversary is known as the “China anniversary,” and can you still use that if your predominant mode is breaking China? In any case, the Power Line crew assembled for a live (by Zoom) VIP webcast this week that featured a rare appearance by our technical director Joe Malchow, who is usually our behind-the-screen Wizard of Oz figure. Among other things, Joe shared a sacred relic...
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This week’s review of the news is more wide-ranging than usual, starting with the question of whether the release of Top Gun: Maverick will turn out to be one more small indicator that the backlash against the cultural left is gaining steam. After all, the left hated the original Top Gun in the 1980s, because it was said to be an emblem of Reaganite jingoism, and since the sequel involves...
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This is the week we learned that there is a reason we’ll miss Jen Psaki at the White House (plus a shout out to the forgotten Dee Dee Myers, who looks pretty good in retrospect); that the Anthony Scaramucci duration-in-office scale remains useful for marking the tenure in office of Nina Jankowitz (who nonetheless lasted longer than CNN+); that the Defense Production Act can apparently solve our...
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There are so many things that seem . . . wrong about the 2020 election, and now comes the new documentary film “2000 Mules” offering some visually compelling circumstantial evidence, along with a few examples of direct testimony of voting misbehavior in nursing homes and other locales. A lot of readers and listeners have been asking about the film, so Lucretia and both took it in this week...
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Owing partly to travel schedules that prevent our normal and proper Friday evening happy hour to debrief the week, combined with the shocking leak of the prospective Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case, we decided to declare a special mid-week happy hour with Scott and John joining in the libations, along with a special guest, the noted Whisky-McRibb pairing expert, John Yoo, coming to us from...
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This is the week the world was introduced to the O’Brien of the 21st century, Ms. Nina Jankowicz, aka the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” (her own term), who is going to lead the Biden Administration’s new Ministry of Truth in the Department of Homeland Security—the very same government agency that leftists once despised because it might be able to spy on our library books because of the Patriot...
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Now that my biography of M. Stanton Evans is out, time to go back and take in Stan in his own words in podcast form. A previous podcast featured several of Stan’s greatest comedy chops, so this one highlights some of his serious work. I decided to highlight here just four aspects of many that draw chiefly from one of his enduring books that everyone should have on their shelf of indispensable...
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Jordan Peterson took the intellectual world by storm in 2016, bursting on the scene in a way not seen by a non-leftist thinker since Allan Bloom in the late 1980s. His idiosyncratic mix of Jungian psychology, existential philosophy, and common-sense self-help advice (also lobsters!) as expressed in his best-seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is hard to sort out at times. Glenn Ellmers...
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Suddenly energy security and geopolitical risk is on everyone’s mind again, so we decided to consult a true expert on the subject— Terry Hallmark of the University of Houston. He currently teaches ancient, medieval and early modern political philosophy, American political thought, American foreign policy and energy studies in the Honors College at the U. of H, but in a prior life was an...
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First, we are pleased to appoint Lance Izumi, a previous guest on this show, to be the official whisky master of the 3WHH, even though he doesn’t drink whisky (or anything else for that matter), because anyone who can pull off this look deserves the recognition. And we’ll have him back soon to talk about the latest on K-12 education. (Notice Laphraoig front and center in his lineup—a point for...
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Steve and Lucretia intended to head back into the seminar room in this episode, with a treatment of Critical Race Theory (because why should the 1619 Project get all the love?), and some reflections on the puzzle presented by the head-scratching fact that Bill Clinton claims that Max Weber’s famous 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” is his favorite “book” about political life. But we never got...
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Historian Richard Samuelson turned up for Friday evening happy hour this week, with 14-year-old Oban in hand, to kick around this week’s less-than-neat headlines. Is it merely a coincidence that Jen Psaki chose April Fools’ Day to have the news come out that she’s going to join MSNBC? Irony is truly dead. Meanwhile, on the great existential question of the week—”Team Smith” or “Team Rock”—Lucretia...
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It would be easier at this point to start a list that names of everything that is not caused or tainted by racism, because it is becoming absurd. The latest from Nikole Hannah-Jones is that tipping is a legacy of slavery. No, she really said this, on Twitter last week: This brought a hearty guffaw from economic historian Phil Magness, who has more than once prompted Hannah-Jones to take down a...
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Is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson an originalist? Of course not. In no possible universe will we get a Justice Jackson who turns out to be a closet moderate or even conservative. The last Democratic Supreme Court pick who moved to the right was Byron White, appointed by President Kennedy. But for some reason she felt compelled to say this in her confirmation hearing: “I believe that the Constitution...
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Freshly resupplied with Laphraoig and Glen Livet, Lucretia assumes hosting duties this week to examine—and cross-examine—Steve about his new biography M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, which comes out officially on Monday. Lucretia walks Steve through how he came to know Evans (41 years ago now!), and why he think Evans is “the perfect conservative,” both in theoretical and...
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Prof. Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and author, most recently, of The Crisis of the Two Constitutions, recently visited Berkeley to give a lecture on his book, and sit down with John Yoo and me to discuss what we’re calling the “Claremont Question,” which is really just a headline for several controversies. The largest is the “Trump question” and the character of...
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Lucretia and Steve review the week’s news, and conclude that there’s a gathering storm of doom for the left. First, the incompetence of the Biden Administration from top to bottom is impossible to disguise effectively much longer. The attempt to blame inflation on Putin (because they can’t blame it on Trump after claiming for so long that it was merely a “transitory” supply chain issue) is...
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The Ukraine crisis isn’t going away, and with recriminations on all sides making the rounds here at home, it seemed propitious to check in with Michael Anton, who, among other things, served on the National Security Council in two administrations. To say Michael is not happy with the state of play here at home is an understatement, and Lucretia and I fully join in. It doesn’t take long for us to...
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A common theme making the rounds is that Vladimir Putin must be crazy or has badly miscalculated his interests, and therefore is extremely dangerous. In fact the problem may be much worse than that. Putin is not merely a tyrant as understood by the classics (though not modern political science or theorists of international relations, who no longer recognize tyranny as a distinct political...
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The “fog of war” is even foggier in the age of 24/7 news and social media, so it is impossible to know what the hell is happening on the ground in the Ukraine, let alone in Moscow. High time, then, to check in with Col. Austin Bay, author of Cocktails From Hell and other books, Creators Syndicate columnist, and contributor to StrategyPage. I was delighted to discover that we’re both fans of...
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Lucretia added to her intrepid legend by venturing into the asylum at Berkeley this week to record this episode in person with Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett about his new book (co-authored with Evan Bernick), The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit. To remind listeners, Barnett argued the Gonzalez v. Raich case that challenged the unlimited reach of the...
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This week we’re joined once again by the historian, political theorist, and borscht-belt comedian Richard Samuelson to break the 3WHH deadlock on “the FDR Question.” But fear not weary listeners, we dispose of that question in short order, and move on to other things. (“Team Lucretia” will be pleased with his tie-breaking verdict.) Among our other topics include the San Francisco school board...
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Even without the Canadian truckers providing the St. Crispin’s Day rally point against the Branch COVIDians, you have the feeling that this was the week the edifice started to crumble, when our betters started to contemplate the fate of Nicolae Ceaușescu when they look in the mirror. The science changed, you say? I think that must mean opinion polling science. Steve and Lucretia also have a polite...
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Hollywood has been liberal to far-left for decades, but in recent years it has become fully Hollywoke. Christian Toto, proprietor of the invaluable Hollywood-in-Toto website, is out with a new book surveying the wreckage of Hollywokeness: Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul. I come to the conclusion that wokeism in Hollywood is arguably worse than wokism on the university campus...
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Last week’s episode with Conrad Black defending his pro-FDR thesis generated a lot of reader interest and comments, so Lucretia and I decided to return to the boxing ring to argue out the matter de novo. It will not be a surprise to regular listeners to hear that Lucretia is not persuaded, even by the serious arguments of another of our favorite thinkers after Lord Black, the late scholar John...
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Almost completely ignored by conservative media, there is a growing generation gap emerging within young conservatives that in some ways resembles the “generation gap” of the 1960s which saw the new left “hippie” generation emerge from liberal homes, as Midge Decter explained in her early book Liberal Parents, Radical Children. Now it is happening on the right. I started picking up on this story...
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As regular listeners will know, Lucretia and I have debated “the FDR question” a lot, amidst a flurry of new reconsiderations among a few thinkers and places on the right who think we should hold FDR in higher esteem. But over and over again in this running argument we keep coming back to Conrad Black’s magisterial biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom . While there have been...
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After we recorded and posted part 1 of this conversation last week, the news came out that the Supreme Court will hear the Harvard/University of North Carolina affirmative action admissions cases. It has been solidly demonstrated that the universities don’t just use race as a minor, tie-breaking “plus” factor, but indeed put both feet on the scale in favor of blacks and to a lesser degree...
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The idea for this episode was born on Twitter. Someone wondered if Charles Murray would be willing to do a podcast with journalist Steve Sailer, who, like Charles, is willing to confront openly the most delicate aspects of race and class in America—and gets the same treatment from liberals everywhere: complete demonization. I offered to host, and Charles and Steve, who have never met, agreed.
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This week Lucretia really takes it to Steve for his advanced case of DMLAS (Deficient Meat Loaf Awareness Syndrome—and we’re not talking the baked dish here), which surely must make the next edition of the DSM.
But from there we quickly pivot to a recap and demolition of the highlights of this week’s news, starting with Biden’s disastrous press conference, but moving quickly to the heart of the matter—that Biden’s errors stem from the luminous lightweights he listens to that have appealed to his narcissism. (Yes, we’re pointing at you, Jon Meacham! Meacham is reported to be the person who wrote Biden’s appalling lines about how everyone who doesn’t agree with him is Bull Connor.)
From there we make what we can of the momentous decision of M&Ms to go woke, to Weber grills for their meat loaf apology, and some reflections on the wider meaning of Jordan Peterson’s resignation from the University of Toronto. In between you’ll get some dish (but not meat loaf!) on NPR, some advice on proper apology form from Monty Python, and custom bumper music at both ends from Meat Loaf. Plus two teasers about two upcoming podcasts featuring illustrious guests. Pour yourself a double and settle in for an especially fast-paced episode.
Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/the-three-whisky-happy-hour-on-dmla-syndrome-and-other-defects-of-modernity/.
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Subscribe to Power Line in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
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Both Steve and Lucretia get through three different whiskys each in this gala episode, recorded with a live audience on Zoom, celebrating the Biden-Harris administration’s worst week in office yet, though as the noted political analyst Homer Simpson might say, “their worst week—so far.”
It took Jimmy Carter three years to hit bottom in the summer of 1979, when even The New Republic declared that he had “packed it in” with his pathetic performance in the “malaise” speech. It’s only taken Biden one year to sink to Carter-levels of incompetence and public disapproval. At least he had a plausible Vice President, even if he was a bit dull (get it—Walter Mondull, as Rush used to call him). Mondale, by the way, considered resigning in July of 1979 he was so distraught at Carter’s collapse. Sadly we have no such hope that our current Vice President might consider the same step.
And if that wasn’t enough, we got the Hillary 2024! boomlet. I’m with her, but at this point, what difference does it make?
But listen through to the very end where we also highlight our Hero of the Week. (And also a cameo appearance from Billy Madison instead of our usual Madison—as in James.)
Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/the-three-whisky-happy-hour-on-bidens-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week/.
Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.
Subscribe to Power Line in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
Follow Power Line on Twitter (https://twitter.com/powerlineus) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/powerlineblog). Send any suggestions, tips, and fan mail to powerlinefeedback@gmail.com.
Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA and the University of Alabama at Huntsville is one of the nation’s most accomplished climate scientists, having won awards for his work developing the satellite monitoring system that provides some of the best weather and climate trend data available. But because he is modest about what climate science actually knows about the future, he dissents from the extreme apocalypse scenarios beloved of the doomsayers of environmental religion.
Google has recently demonetized his website, Dr.RoySpencer.com, claiming that his site makes “unreliable and harmful claims” about climate, but without offering a single specific instance. It is another clear-cut case of ideological censorship by big tech. I decided to catch up with Roy to see whether Google has offered any explanation, and also to ask for his latest perspective on recent climate science assessments. (Not to be missed his is fine book Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor.)
Since Dr. Spencer has expertise in satellites, we also talk about the recently launched Webb telescope, which promises to produce major new data on the universe, but also likely many more new question and uncertainties (sounds like climate models, doesn’t it?), and we end with a few recollections about his friendship with Rush Limbaugh.
Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/roy-spencer-on-climate-change-censorship-and-cool-satellites/.
Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.
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We open this first episode of the 3WHH of 2022 with the existential question: why is Lucretia so mean to Steve? Actually she has a really good reason, but you have to get all the way to the end for the reward—or is it a redemption? (Steve attempts to mellow Lucretia with a Snickers Bar of an op-ed in the middle, with some success.)
In any case, we try to offer some original and comparative perspective on the relentless leftist narrative about January 6, which somehow reminds Steve of . . . climate change. (You’ll just have to listen to learn the parallel, but it works!)
From there we continue on to the collapse of the Biden Administration’s entire COVID policy, which sees the White House trying to manage a withdrawal from the field every bit as disastrous and embarrassing as the withdrawal from Afghanistan. As with the January 6 “issue,” Steve and Lucretia engage in a spirited debate on how best to think about the scene: should we be appalled, disgusted, or outraged? (Of course, this isn’t multiple choice: you can be All of the Above, and more.) Among other things, there’s a lot of good schadenfreude to be enjoyed at how badly Democrats are alienating their own constituents.
Cheers! (This week’s bonhomie brought to you by Rittenhouse Rye and Macallan 15.)
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With today’s leftist Ahab-like obsession with the “insurrection” of January 6, it seems like as good a time as any to post the lecture I gave last summer in Budapest (cue scary Dracula music here) last summer on “What’s Going on in America?” My summary answer: America is having a nervous breakdown. Slightly longer summary: we’ve seen this before in many ways, and sometimes worse, such as in the 1960s.
However, some things about the present moment are much more ominous than in the 1960s, such as how leftist postmodern dogma, which is indistinguishable from nihilism, has settled at the core of nearly all of America’s institutions, including big business and the churches. Recovery from this will be more difficult than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
I still intend to turn this lecture into a longer article, but I’d love to hear from readers on this thesis and answer the question: should my next book be “America’s Nervous Breakdown”? Or would a book on reviving breakdancing be better?
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For what turns out to be the 300th Power Line podcast as well as the last episode of 2021, we decided to revert to full three-whisky mode with a live audience on Zoom, and an extended conversation with historian Richard Samuelson about the left’s distorted and impoverished understanding of democracy. Steve had his usual Islay peat bombs and Lucretia polished off a bottle of Glenfiddich, while Richard, who is under quarantine with an actual case of the Omigod variant, had a soothing toddy.
In between recalling what the Founders thought about democracy (and especially John Adams’s contributions, since Richard is an Adams expert), Steve offered up his lexicon of what certain terms mean for liberals:
Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election. (Think Brexit and Trump.)
Racism: Any opposition to the agenda of the left.
Democracy: When the left gets what it wants.
This explains the left’s tantrums when they don’t get what they want, and their demands to change the rules until they do.
Richard also reviews for listeners the defects of the stage play Hamilton, even as it is coming under fresh attack from the left.
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Today’s episode offers up our picks for losers and winners of the year. I won’t spill them here—you’ll just have to listen to find out—but they do fall within the obvious range, though Steve’s winner of the year provides the pivot for answering a listener question about energy. Plus we offer yet another new “Let’s Go Brandon” exit music tune—this one from ab ad hoc country group strangely named “FJB.” I wonder if those are the initials of the individual singing artists?
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Today’s minicast takes in the observation of an unlikely source—Nate Silver—about how our politicized “public health” establishment worked assiduously to delay the approval of COVID vaccines last year until after the election so as to help defeat Trump, even though this delay might have cost many thousands of lives.
Silver has this letter, signed by dozens of doctors, in mind, which helped persuade Pfizer to delay the application for emergency use of their vaccine:
The entire story was actually reported before the election in the MIT Technology Review, which made explicit the campaign by politicized doctors to prevent not only vaccines but certain treatments in development, all because of their deep Trump derangement syndrome. Combined with the recent revelations of how Dr. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci worked diligently to suppress the Great Barrington Declaration, it is one more piece of evidence of why Trump should have fired Birx and Fauci early on in the pandemic. Settle in with a dram for an epic rant.
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The historical record notes that George Washington used to include ample supplies of whisky to distribute to voters and campaign workers in the elections of the 1790s, so the subject of election integrity is perfect for this week’s one-off Whisky Shot casts.
Steve and Lucretia review what is gradually coming into sharper focus: the very targeted intervention of nearly $500 million from Mark Zuckerberg decisively swung the election to Joe Biden. Changes in voting rules because of COVID helped, but without the supercharged efforts funded by Zuckerberg through left-wing groups maximizing turnout in key Democratic urban strongholds it is more likely than not that Trump would have been re-elected.
Remember when liberals claimed that “big money” (and especially “dark money”) were threats to democracy? Yeah, you can expect that claim to begin receding on the left any moment now, just as the left’s advocacy for public financing for presidential campaigns fell silent when Obama blew up the presidential public financing system in 2008. The left is nothing if not expert on situational ethics.
From here we go on to talk about how to restore election integrity, going beyond common sense measures such as voter ID, and settling on ending early voting—not so much as a fraud-prevention measure, but because the early voting we have in place today actually diminishes election day as a clear statement of the people’s will at a point in time.
Finally, we begin discussion of the outrageous proposal of Democrat super-lawyer Mark Elias to disqualify Republicans from holding office, based on a novel reading of a clause in the 14th Amendment that was written to apply to Democrats who backed the Confederacy in the 1860s. Look for this preposterous idea to catch on with the left, with a hundred law review articles from Lawrence Tribe arguing for its constitutionality.
Exit music this week, chosen for its topical lyrics, is “2nd Self” from Umphrey’s McGee, which includes in part:
No matter how you break
You shouldn’t be the one to take
Your own opinions as they twist in their own way. . .
All she wants is to be spared
From voting for a candidate who doesn’t care
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The week after Christmas is the interregnum where we attempt to resume a more moderate level of eating and drinking before the football-anchored binge of New Year’s Eve, and so instead of one three-whisky podcast, Lucretia and I decided—for this week only—to do a short, daily single-shot whiskycast, focusing on just one topic for just 20 minutes or so. So you can binge-listen, even if you can’t binge-drink. We try to be equally intoxicating.
Today’s episode takes up an academic question raised by a listener about a stray comment of Steve’s about how the twain shall never meet between philosophy and political philosophy.
Tomorrow we’ll take up the subject of election integrity, as there’s a fair bit of recent news on this front. We haven’t planned much beyond tomorrow, so we welcome reader suggestions for topics (also whisky). Just drop in your questions or comments in the comment thread below. And go light on the whisky until Friday!
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Okay, this episode, intended as a respite from all-issues-all-the-time for the holiday week, also doubles as pure James Lileks bait. Back when Ken Green and I were resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, lunchtime conversation often turned to science fiction, and especially our favorite hobby horse—how much we both hated “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” TOS is the only Trek worthy of honor! And William Shatner’s voyage into space this year proves that, as Ken puts it, “Shatner wins!”
But we also branch out beyond the Trek world to talk of other science fiction adaptations, including whether Dune is filmable at all, whether Fox TV might have actually done us a favor by canceling the great Firefly before Joss Whedon could screw it up with his political correctness, why Babylon 5 and Eureka are the best sci-fi shows most people missed, why Steve thinks The Expanse will not age well, along with the two big questions: DC versus Marvel, and why do libertarians tend to be such huge sci-fi fans in the first place.
We do take a few minutes to look at some recent developments in the world of climate change (speaking of science fiction), as Ken was once an official reviewer for the IPCC on its climate science reports. Plus, you’ll also learn a quick hack for instantly identifying a TV show or movie that has been filmed in Canada. News you can use! And happy holidays.
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For what may be our last episode of the year (since next weekend in Christmas),Steve is quaffing Bunnahabhain for this week’s peaty Islay whisky, mostly in the vain hope that “Bunnahabhain” could be added to the National Spelling Bee, just for grins and giggles. But after the usual whisky reviews and insults, we get down to business with special guest “Adam Mill,” whose fine work you can take in regularly at American Greatness. “Adam Mill” is a pseudonym for a lawyer based in the midwest who, like our own “Lucretia,” needs to preserve a modicum of anonymity against the Bureau of Cancellations. He took the name from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, which means that not only is the Three Whisky Happy Hour the only podcast with two pseudonymous contributors, but with “Lucretia,” the only podcast that combines ancient and modern pseudonyms.
Since it’s the holiday season, we decided to review a few of the key stories of 2021 (chiefly January 6 and its bizarre and infuriating aftermath, and the palpable collapse of the Biden presidency in its first year), and then “Adam Mill’s” predictions for 2022.
Finally, Steve relates how he has discovered “Spaces” on Twitter, where you can listen in on and particpate in live conversations. The one Steve is now following is a young conservative underground—people who pride themselves on being “based,” whatever that means—that is using Spaces to carry out superb improv comedy that mocks every progressive cliche and shibboleth you can name in a complete deadpan style. (The best “runner” was the sequential riffs on “St. George of Floyd, blessed be his name. . .”) Hats off to Athenian Stranger for his role in this delightful and transgressive escapade.
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This week’s episode is going up a day early as we had to call Happy Hour for Thursday evening on account of scheduling problems, and Steve and Lucretia welcome to the bar the noted Bourbon drinker and McRibb connoisseur John Yoo. (He’s also apparently a law professor somewhere.)
We review a few of the tea leaves from last week’s Supreme Court oral argument in the Dobbs case, but use this momentous case to talk more broadly about the whole problem of stare decisis (“let the decision stand”) in our jurisprudence. Along the way we entertain some seriously heterodox views, such as the proposition that Brown v. Board of Education never actually overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. It it has done so, we wouldn’t have the messy regime of quotas and affirmative action today.
We also speculate on whether there might actually be leaks from somewhere inside the Court ahead of the decision—something that rarely or never happens—because the liberal justices are desperate to do anything to derail an overturning of Roe (which, Steve argued to John, is the “McRibb sandwich of modern jurisprudence: a compressed confection of offal cuts slathered with sauce to disguise its true awfulness”). Finally, we discuss the “crisis of the conservative legal movement” and what might happen to it if the Court muffs the Dobbs case.
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This special end-of-semester episode features Steve and Lucretia reflecting on the latest academic hoax that Steve highlighted earlier in the week on Power Line (here and here), and which may have contributed to Higher Education Quarterly having to retract the fake article on how “right wing money” is supposedly pushing colleges and universities to the right and intimidating faculty and administrators. The study was so ludicrous that only a liberal (and apparently the academic “peer reviewers” who signed off on the article) could have believed it.
This opens up a wider window into the question of why leftists—especially on campus—are such miserable, unhappy, and intolerant people, and why they behave tyrannically, increasingly turning our campuses into Stasi-like institutions worthy of East Germany. (Just this week, Columbia University put out a video, posted below, calling on students and staff to “report” people who use incorrect pronouns because of the “harm” and threat to safety such unpure speech acts represent. Suggestion: Why don’t we simply just call everyone “comrade” and solve everything at once.) The answer requires taking seriously the nihilism of the modern left which cannot tolerate any disagreement or challenge to their position because it threatens their very being, while conventional or moderate liberals have been swept too far by the premises of supposedly progressivism to offer effective resistance to the extreme left. Warning: Expect cameo appearances from Harry Neumann and Harry Jaffa along the way!
Note especially the passage in the middle about how “Intentionally misgendering someone by refusing to use the correct pronouns or name is a violation of the Columbia university non-discrimination policy,” and encouraging students to visit Columbia’s website if they need to “report an incident.” Campus Stasi operators are standing by!
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As Monty Python used to say, “And now for something completely different.” I decided to do a one-off episode about my favorite topic with which to annoy anyone of taste and refinement—a reflection on prog rock, which Jody Bottum once aptly described as “rock and roll gone to college.” It turns out that 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of some of the classic albums from the golden age of Prog Rock, include “Fragile” and “The Yes Album,” Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung,” “Nursery Crime” from Genesis, and “Acquiring the Taste” from Gentle Giant.
Steve Hackett
Given that I’ve successfully annoyed Power Line readers with some of the more forbidding Gentle Giant tunes from that era, I decided for this episode to review some of the instrumental interludes and bridges of Genesis from those long ago albums before Phil Collins ruined the band by taking it into pure pop after Peter Gabriel left in 1975. For excerpts, however, I decided to use some of the recent live arrangements of Steve Hackett, one of the lead guitars and co-songwriter for many of those old tunes. So while it may be “prog rock,” it’s easy listening! (Though I did sneak in a few bars of Gentle Giant at the very end.)
The episode features excerpts from “Firth of Fifth,” “The Cinema Show,” “Supper’s Ready,” “Horizons,” “After the Ordeal,” and “Harlequin.”
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Back in the sixties Ronald Reagan liked to quip, “A liberal’s idea of being tough on crime is giving longer suspended sentences.” Today’s liberals don’t even bother with lenient sentences; instead, in our current “defund the police, empty the prisons” mania, they don’t even bother charging many crimes or applying significant bail, as we saw in Wisconsin a few days ago.
This week Steve and Lucretia decided to go back to the classics on this issue: James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Heather Mac Donald, and . . . Aristotle (because of course everything needs to go back to Aristotle whenever you can), though Lucretia offers a zesty side dish of modern social contract theory. (Short version: When it comes to crime, “Government—you had one job!”)
The main theme is that we’re repeating all of the mistakes of the 1960s that led to soaring crime, and which was—eventually—corrected with great difficulty. The core of the problem is the left’s sentimental progressive belief, derived from Rousseau and other sources, in the perfectibility of human nature and social institutions, along with its patronizing race-consciousness. Conservatives know better: the root cause of crime is criminals. Increase the incentives for crime (the result of leniency) and you will get more of it. Like everything else in life, incentives matter.
Will the cycle of self-correction repeat itself? Here Churchill’s observation comes into play: “America will always do the right thing—after exhausting every other possibility.” We’re still in the “exhaust every other possibility” phrase of the matter, but there are early signs the tide is slowly turning. Refund the police!
In the spirit of the holiday, Steve gives thanks for no supply-chain interruptions of Laphroaig imports, and Lucretia gives thanks for her new puppy (left).
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This week’s review of the news begins with the two huge stories that broke Friday—the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse (which is causing grief counselors for leftists to work overtime again), and the House passage of Biden’s so-called “Build Back Better” spendathon. The latter story may seem like a Biden/Democrat triumph, but in fact a closer look shows that this may come to be seen as the week when the wobbly wheels of the Biden administration began to come off completely.
Lucretia and Steve review the whole scene, starting with the reaction to the Rittenhouse acquittal, but then moving to Steve’s theory about what the civil war inside the White House over Kamala Harris really means, and the warning signs all of this should be sending to Democrats. As Thomas Byrne Edsall advised in the New York Times, Democrats shouldn’t panic right now—they should be “going into shock.” (Ditto from Ruy Teixiera—another rare progressive who gets it.)
From there we survey the willful cluelessness of the major media, from the Times to NBC News, along with wondering whether David Brooks (actual headline: “Joe Biden Is Succeeding“) has decided to become a parody of himself at long last. Also this week: Sen. John Kennedy has found a new “butthole professor” (Saule Omarova) to pick on, and the left immediately lit up the old McCarthyism bonfire. We round out this week’s episode with some fresh schadenfreude over the meltdown of the College Democrats, and Steve’s latest example of “social science” in the university today. (Plus some speculation about who is behind a mystery whisky that Steve likes.)
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Steve actually turned up for this week’s show with three different whiskys in hand (Finlaggan, Lagavulin 8, and Bunnahabhain 12—in other words, Islay All the Way!), along with a sampling of the worst-reviewed whiskys ever, though these reviews pale in comparison to the reviews this episode’s panel gives to Democrats just now.
Historian Richard Samuelson joined Steve and Lucretia for this week’s show—which was recorded on Veterans Day with alive audience on Zoom, a day earlier than normal—to go over an all new, 21st Century Democratic Misery Index, the most outrageous part of the farcical “infrastructure week,” the strange reactions to the news of the founding of the University of Austin, and the new malicious deceptions of the New York Times‘ 1619 Project.
We also range over the strange news that some dunderheads in Britain actually think it is news that John Locke read Thomas Hobbes, the Rittenhouse trial, Kamala in Paris, and at the last, the results of a viewer poll intended to settle the Steve-Lucretia feud about peaty whisky, where Steve’s peat bombs narrowly edged Lucretia’s Highland style by less than 2 percent. But there are allegations of voting irregularities, so there may need to be a recount.
And the next time a liberals says “Critical race theory is not being taught in schools!”, show them this picture and ask why education schools are adopting all of these:
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This week’s edition of the Three Whisky VERY Happy Hour revels in schadenfreude over the spectacle of the left freaking out over the election results on Tuesday. As political philosophers we try to go beyond the usual political punditry to get at the heart of the matter, explaining why the left’s dime-store Hegelian historicism (“the side of history”) that informs their moral smugness makes it necessary to charge that the only reason they lost was that Americans are irredeemably racist. Keep it up Dems: I’m sure you can lose even more votes next time with that line.
The episode is extra long, but there was so much to celebrate that even Lucretia’s normally coal-black soul was brighter than usual (“I only wore black once this week,” she admits). In addition to the election results, we also have some quick examinations of the latest COVID news, especially the madness of the employee vaccine mandate that is certain to backfire, the feeble results of the COP 26 climate hootenanny, some cautions about falling for a possible bait-and-switch in the Biden “Build Back Better” plan still bouncing around the House now that the “infrastructure” bill has passed (hint: it’s not about the spending—it’s about raising taxes), the final straw in cancel culture, and a few observations what special counsel Durham’s arrest of Igor Danchenko, who sounds like a minor character out of Rocky & Bullwinkle. And of course some new whisky reviews!
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The title of this week’s episode—”Let’s go Bruno”—requires some explanation, though you’d be right in assuming that “Bruno” fills the same place as “Brandon” in the more familiar slogan of the moment. In this case it refers to the famous and celebrated child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Lucretia was struck by Ann Bauer’s searing article in The Tablet, “I Have Been Through This Before,” which recounts the awful abusiveness and quackery of Bettelheim which somehow never drew any critical attention, and suggests some obvious parallels with today’s COVID mandate mania, not to mention a parallel public celebration of an obviously defective doctor whose name rhymes with grouchy.
Sample from Bauer:
[He] required the unquestioning, devout allegiance of his team to constantly remake reality so that it conformed to his recommendations.
Steve recalls once knowing someone who had been committed to Bettelheim’s care as a child, and who wrote after Bettelheim’s death with the same point in Commentary in 1991: Ronald Angres, “Who, Really, Was Bruno Bettelheim?” The close:
So to the scandal of terror spread by Bruno Bettelheim in his school another scandal needs to be added: the fact that so many people who knew about the terror went to such lengths to cover up for him—and, to judge by the mostly adoring accounts that have appeared in the press after his death, that they are still willing to do so.
We don’t actually get to the Bettelheim story until the last half of the episode, as we cover a lot of related ground getting to that point, including some new whisky reviews, some samples from the Babylon Bee’s brand new Guide to Wokeness, the continued descent of President Brandon, what’s up with Kyrstin Sinema, and the prospects of the Virginia gubernatorial election next week. Lucretia, to my shock and surprise, is actually optimistic about Youngkin’s chances! Otherwise, as she says herself, she’s “mad as hell and not going to take it any more!”
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