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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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. Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
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... Source...
