Podcasts
October 18, 2019 — Steven Hayward
What do you get when you combine “Lucretia,” Power Line’s ever popular international woman of mystery, with John Yoo, whose only mystery is his fondness for McDonalds? You get an episode that talks about fake burgers, the evils of soy, the importance of cooking with fat, fast cars, and even Starsky & Hutch. Oh, we also go into the impeachment circus currently unfolding in Washington, about which John has written
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October 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Nationalism is the subject of the moment, and both the term and the idea come with more baggage than Paris Hilton and Khloe Kardashian after an afternoon of shopping on Rodeo Drive. I’ve had a few things to say about this controversial topic myself, but I am delighted to feature as this week’s special guest Colin Dueck of George Mason University, who is the author of a new book coming
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September 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I’m a little late getting this week’s episode put together, but just in time for your Sunday afternoon walk or Monday morning commute, another installment in our special series critiquing the 1619 Project. For this episode I gave a field promotion to co-host for “Lucretia,” because we have a very special guest Lucas Morel, who is professor of politics and head of the politics department at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia,
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September 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Last week I was honored once again to be the after dinner speaker for the fall meeting of the Friends of Ronald Reagan, a local civic group in Los Angeles that meets at the California Club to celebrate the enduring greatness and example of the Gipper. It’s always a fun evening, usually capped off with brandy and cigars out on the patio when dinner concludes. I decided to talk about
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September 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
“Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, is back with me again this week with the third installment in our special series confronting the pernicious New York Times “1619 Project,” this time taking on the argument that slavery is the central factor in the rise of modern industrial capitalism—a proposal so laughable that we actually spend a lot of our time talking about entirely tangential subjects. (For listeners interested in a serious compilation
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September 6, 2019 — Steven Hayward
This special double-length episode features a wide-ranging conversation with best-selling author and iconoclast Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, with special focus on her new book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. I hosted Heather this week at . . . UC Berkeley (!!), and we decided that rather than going with a set-piece speech, I’d interview her about the
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September 3, 2019 — Steven Hayward
We have a new theory about the mainstream media: they have decided to work without editors any more. How else to explain how the Washington Post slandered J.D. Vance with the claim that he decried the “falling white birth rate” (he said no such thing, and the Posthad to correct the story), or MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell going to air with a completely uncorroborated story about Trump’s supposed Russian financial connections? Or
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August 30, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your Labor Day weekend listening, our new episode offers a conversation with Mary Eberstadt, whose new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics Paul previewed here a couple days ago. The old saying is that “sex sells,” and after the sexual revolution of the last several decades who can dispute that? Meanwhile, “identity politics” is the obsession of the current moment. Is there
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August 27, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As promised in our last episode, we return early this week with the first in a series of bonus episodes devoted to a deep dive into the New York Times‘s agitprop “1619 Project” that seeks to place slavery and racism as the central fact of the American story. In this first installment, Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, “Lucretia” (who happens to teach political philosophy and American government . .
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August 23, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your weekend listening pleasure, a special double-header-end-of-summer Power Line Show features Steve and, in a special guest turn, John venting about the “1619 Project” along with “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery. The “1619 Project” is so badly flawed that in the coming weeks we’re going to produce a series of special shows going point-by-point through its poisonous defects, and explaining why the color-blind principles
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August 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Readers of Thomas Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will know his central thesis that when anomalies and contradictions arise in a reigning scientific theory it creates a crisis out of which new theories emerge to replace the old. We may be seeing the beginnings of such a crisis for modern Darwinism, which appears to have gaps and contradictions that can’t be explained or explained away. The rumbles about
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August 9, 2019 — Steven Hayward
“Prudence” is not just something Dana Carvey liked to lampoon back when President George H.W. Bush was in office. Rather, it is the highest and most essential quality of those superb human beings we used to call “statesmen” before political science and history banished both terms in a fit of egalitarian madness that has yet to abate in our leading intellectual circles. One antidote to this narrowing of our horizons
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July 26, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Long time readers will know that we’ve been very focused on the problem of the “administrative state,” an arcane term from political science that has in the last few years broken out big in everyday discussion. The administrative state refers to the trend, decades in the making, of transferring lawmaking power away from the legislative branch of government to permanent, unelected bureaucrats and executive agencies. The administrative state undermines a central
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July 19, 2019 — Steven Hayward
A specter is haunting . . . well, just about everybody: the specter of a revival of nationalism. This week I attended the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, which was sponsored by the brand new Edmund Burke Institute. As Christopher DeMuth put it, “who knew that the next big thing would be the nation-state?” Of course if you say you are in favor of “nationalism” these days, right away critics
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July 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
One of my teachers in graduate school, the great constitutional historian Leonard Levy, insisted that “a history must serve its readers with explanations that suit the horizons of their curiosity and with writing that entertains and stirs them.” No one exemplifies that vivid style of biography and history better than Andrew Roberts. I caught up with Andrew in San Francisco this week, where we had a wide-ranging conversation about Churchill,
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July 4, 2019 — Steven Hayward
By popular demand from listeners, we’re bringing back “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, on this special edition for the July 4 holiday. Many listeners asked us to offer up mini-tutorials on various aspects of the American Founding and political thought in general, so we break down the Declaration of Independence, drawing notice to five key features—including how some of the specific indictments against King George III remain highly
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June 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
You could be forgiven for thinking this week’s Democratic debates were straight out of an old Monty Python sketch, which prompted Steve to ring up Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, “Lucretia,” for a full-tilt boogie rant-fest about what ought to be the two main “Freeport questions”* that could unravel the Democratic Party between now and election day next year. Are we really going to bring back busing? And how
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