Podcasts
July 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I figured a nine time zone distance might provide a margin of safety from Lucretia’s rear-end kicking over my article “What the Hell Happened to Bill Kristol?“, which Lucretia finds sorely wanting. And my attempts to mollify Lucretia with tales of how great Hungary’s conservatives are was mostly unavailing, even if true. Anyway, in this slightly abbreviated episode (because I had to rush off to begin a typical Central European
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July 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Once upon a time, “CRT” stood for “cathode ray tube,” sometimes known as “television,” but also oscilloscopes, computer screens, some x-rays, and certain other technical devices designed for testing and calibration. Cathode ray tubes went the way of the Dodo bird quite some time ago, and nowadays CRT means something else: Critical Race Theory. There is one way in which today’s CRT resembles the old tech CRTs—they both depend on
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July 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Who knew that that hottest new thing in the early 21st century would be an old thing—the nation state? Nationalism acquired a foul odor in the 20th century, but ever since Brexit and Trump upset the cosmopolites from Berkeley to Brussels, the idea of nationalism has crept back into favor, at least with many conservatives. I’ve written my own short overview of the issue a couple years ago now, but
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July 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
After a week off for travel and for me to recover from the pummeling I took at the hands of “Lucretia” in our last episode two weeks ago, the 3WHH is back with some fresh malts and fresh looks at the news of the week. We start with what appears to be the White House cat fight between First Doctor Jill Biden and Veep Kaaaaammmaaala Harris, and also offer a
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July 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I met today’s special guest, Gigi Georges, very briefly on a quick visit to Boston College several years ago when I passing through town, and so I was delighted to get a copy of her charming new book, Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America in the mail. If you only go by the major media or your local college sociology department, you’d think rural America is
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June 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This week’s Power Line Classic format show features me in conversation with Prof. Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, talking about his brand new book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness. Crisis collects several of Kesler’s old and new essays and details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. In addition to explaining
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June 19, 2021 — Steven Hayward
We get letters. And one from a regular listener baited us with the proposition that since FDR’s New Deal—decried here on a recent episode—is now nearly 90 years old, the duty of Burkean conservatives is now to preserve the New Deal rather than pine romantically for the good old days of Calvin Coolidge. To which I responded, well, I guess we should do a seminar-style episode about Edmund Burke, the
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June 12, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Pour a double for this weeks 3WHH, as Lucretia and Steve host Michael Anton to talk about his extraordinary new article, “The Art of Spiritual War, Or, How to (Posthumously) Conquer the World from Your Desk.” The author of the famous (or infamous) “Flight 93 Election” article in 2016 covers an amazing amount of ground in a short space, which includes rehabilitating Machiavelli in a certain way, and then asking
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June 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As regular listeners know, we never tire of beating up on Progressivism—both the old kind and today’s high-octane version—and we especially like to beat up on Woodrow Wilson. Most of what we know about Wilson’s perfidy comes from the ur-text of Wilson criticism, Ronald J. Pestritto’s Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism from 2005. R.J. (as he is known to his friends), is out this week with a
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June 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The modern conservative movement born in the 1950s had two main objects: It was anti-Communist, and anti-New Deal. Lately, however, some conservatives have warmed up to both FDR and the New Deal, which has to have Robert Taft rolling over in his grave—and maybe William F. Buckley, Jr. too. Conrad Black, an esteemed man of the right, has long championed FDR as a “champion of freedom” (the subtitle of his
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May 29, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This week Lucretia and I decided to take a break from our recent seminar format—in other words, no schoolwork this week—and just review some of the week’s news instead. Or perhaps we should say non-news, since most of the “news” items we review turn into examples of what’s wrong with journalism today. Call it “The Age of Al Hunt,” in homage to Evelyn Waugh’s device about “the Age of Hooper”
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May 26, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This week’s Power Line Classic format podcast features Fred Barnes, who recently announced his retirement after more than 50 years as a working journalist, having served as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Star, The New Republic, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Examiner. He contributed to countless other publications such as The American Spectator and Reader’s Digest, but many people will remember him for his frequent turns
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May 22, 2021 — Steven Hayward
All it took was a NY Times op-ed article on the (misunderstood) legacy of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the 1896 Plessy (“separate but equal”) case to set off a classic “Lucretia” rant in an email this week: I find the NYT piece more damaging to the cause of equality before the law even than critical race theory. I think [the author] perpetuates that subterfuge that makes it possible for
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May 20, 2021 — Steven Hayward
With this episode of the Power Line Show, I’m reviving what I call “Power Line Classic” format, featuring interviews and conversations with interests thinkers, writers, and doers. I took a hiatus from this format last year while I was working on my Stan Evans biography, and using the Three Whisky Happy Hour format as a substitute because “Lucretia” does all the work (except for selecting my whisky). But don’t dismay—the
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May 15, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This “mission to Moscow” is not to be confused with the infamous Joseph Davies 1941 book, Mission to Moscow, which I call a “novel” at the opening of this episode, because its pro-Stalinist viewpoint was fiction indeed. Our use of “mission to Moscow” serves a dual-use purpose today: while it isn’t clear whether there was Russian involvement in the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, we lean on Lucretia’s cyber-expertise
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May 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This week we decided to play “clean up on Supreme Court aisle [footnote] four,” and explain further why we think 1938’s Carolene Products decision was actually the most significant of the New Deal era decisions that distorted the Constitution and our subsequent politics. Many of the perversions of modern civil rights policy and politics actually descend from this case that was about . . . adulterated milk, of all silly
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May 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Hoo boy, is this episode off the hook! First, “Lucretia” staged a coup, usurping my role as episode host, and punishing me for my bad puns, but we finally get to the main event, which is a long conversation with the great Charles Lipson about his recent article, “Packing the Court, Then and Now.” We take a while to get to the subject, however, in favor of a long prologue
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