Podcast: PLU Lesson One—The Federalist, Nos 1 – 9

Lucretia and I held the first “classroom” for PLU (Power Line University) yesterday, with 110 people ultimately tuning in live for our first formal session on The Federalist Papers. We had a couple of technical difficulties—for some reason we kept failing to get the Chat window working right—and we had some hiccups admitting some live questions and comments from viewers, but we hope to have these ironed out for our next session which will likely be mid-week next week. Anyway, here is the podcast version for those of you who weren’t able to join us live.

Our first session got off to a bit of a slow start—like the Federalist Papers themselves—with a look at numbers 1 – 9. (We had planned to include the famous Federalist 10 in this first session, but are putting it off to the next session.) The first few papers review at length the case against the disunity of the infant nation if the Constitution was not ratified and the United States split into three or four regional confederacies—not unlike some of the talk we hear today about a second civil war, or a breakup between red and blue states. The point is: the themes and analysis of the Federalist remain highly relevant to today.

Things really get hopping with Hamilton’s high-spirited Federalist 9, which is where we had to break off for the day.

Theodore Ian, our youngest participant.

Our tag line for this podcast series is “Never let college get in the way of your education,” and we’re glad to see that our live audience had a wide age span, starting with our youngest viewer, Theodore Ian (age four months), who is clearly enthralled by our scintillating commentary—proof that it is never too early to get the kids started on a sound education in the Right PrinciplesTM.  

We did share some slides of the text we were considering, and read aloud most of the passages, but not all of them, so if you want to see the session, including the text slides instead of just listening to it in your car or on a walk, you can see the session on YouTube here. (Another thing we will try to arrange going forward is sharing the Power Point slide decks in these podcast links.)

Stay tuned for announcements of the schedule for future PLU seminars, likely the middle of next week.

So listen here, or slip in to the back of the lecture hall over at our hosts at Ricochet.

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