Podcasts

Podcast: The 3WHH, Wherein John Yoo Goes One-on-One with . . . Charles Barkley??

Featured image 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on Deciding Between Bad and Worse

Featured image 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. Lucretia and I 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on Canceling Students for (In)Justice in Palesine

Featured image It’s another bonus two-podcast weekend, as I sat in again on the Ricochet podcast this week with James Lileks and Charles C.W. Cooke, with special guest Noah Rothman. You can take it in here. But hoo-boy—pour yourself three-fingers of your favorite high-proof single malt for this week’s episode of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, as John, Lucretia, and I throw down hard on the limits of free speech in theory »

Podcast: FDR and Civil Liberties, with David Beito

Featured image This classic format conversation features another look at Franklin Roosevelt. FDR 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 »

Podcast-Palooza: The 3WHH, Return of the King, and Ricochet

Featured image With John Yoo, who accuses Lucretia and me 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, I suggest, is like Twain’s remark on »

Podcast: The 3WHH, with Special Guest Amy Wax

Featured image With John Yoo still away somewhere in the jungles of South America, Lucretia and I 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. But »

Podcast: A Conversation with Col. Austin Bay about America’s Proxy Wars

Featured image Herewith another bonus classic format edition, this time featuring an 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 »

Podcast: Classic Format Conversation with Hadley Arkes About Natural Law

Featured image 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH, Live Crowd-Pleaser Edition

Featured image With John Yoo away this week on a junket to South America, Lucretia and I 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on Campus Conundrums Over Hamas, and the Return of Frankie Five-Angels?

Featured image 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on Hamas on Campus

Featured image Never mind Hamas in Gaza: what do we do about 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on The Dog Days of the Biden Presidency

Featured image 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH, Phila-Pest Edition

Featured image 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH, on No Qualified Whisky Immunity

Featured image This circuitious episode, hosted by me 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on the ‘Cognitive Infrastructure Crisis’

Featured image Lucretia hosts this week, though I was unable to enjoy a dram of whisky since we taped at 4:30 am local time in Budapest. Anyway, 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on the Return of the Branch Covidians

Featured image 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 episode finds Lucretia and me 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 »

Podcast: The 3WHH on Saving Our Gerontocracy!

Featured image 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 »