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 c...
Oct 28, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 450
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 "coloni...
Oct 21, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 355
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. ...
Oct 14, 2023•49 min•Ep. 448
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, woul...
Oct 07, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 347
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 ...
Sep 30, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 446
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...
Sep 23, 2023•58 min•Ep. 445
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...
Sep 16, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 444
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...
Sep 10, 2023•47 min•Ep. 443
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 ...
Sep 02, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 442
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 o...
Aug 29, 2023•33 min•Ep. 441
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!
Aug 26, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 440
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 instituti...
Aug 19, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 358
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 ov...
Aug 12, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 438
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 ...
Aug 06, 2023•55 min•Ep. 437
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 cou...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 436
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...
Jul 29, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 435
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 curr...
Jul 26, 2023•17 min•Ep. 434
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 ou...
Jul 22, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 433
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 ...
Jul 15, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 432
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 w...
Jul 08, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 431
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 s...
Jul 01, 2023•48 min•Ep. 430
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 s...
Jun 24, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 429
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 ...
Jun 17, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 428
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 cas...
Jun 10, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 427
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 epis...
Jun 03, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 426
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 Revoluti...
Jun 01, 2023•45 min•Ep. 425
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 m...
May 27, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 424
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 ...
May 25, 2023•40 min•Ep. 423
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 t...
May 20, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 422
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 repo...
May 13, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 421
