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 r...
Dec 16, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 460
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...
Dec 09, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 459
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, ...
Dec 02, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 458
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 res...
Nov 25, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 457
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. St...
Nov 18, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 456
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 re...
Nov 15, 2023•47 min•Ep. 455
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 w...
Nov 11, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 454
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 th...
Nov 04, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 453
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 great...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 452
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 " ...
Oct 30, 2023•32 min•Ep. 451
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
