Podcasts
February 27, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This week has something for everybody, as our three segments (we actually stick to format this week!) range from Mr. Potato Head (now Zir Potatx Head apparently) to Winston Churchill, with a detour to throw some rotten tomatoes at Smith College, and then on to a sequel of sorts to last week’s seminar, in which we point out how today’s leftist racism is the direct descendant of the “scientific racism” of
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February 20, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Busy week, which ended with podcast overtime pay for me. And so for the first time, two for the price of one! First up, our regular installment of the Three Whisky Happy Hour. This week we shake up the format, and skip over our gratuitous whisky reviews and commentary on the top news stories of the week, and head straight in to the classroom for our long-postponed seminar on constitutional originalism,
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February 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Well, we had planned to continue our tutorial on the natural law basis for genuine constitutional originalism, but we two professors reverted to form and didn’t prepare! And we’ve got standards, so we’re not going to fake it. Instead, we got distracted by the news of the week, including France—France!—deploring the wokeness of American university culture and calling it a threat to French culture. Can it really be after all
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February 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Another week, another dismal article in The New Republic (a former magazine) to beat up. We promise not to make a habit of this, lest TNR get an anti-stalking injunction, but this week’s TNR howler, “Originalism Is Dead; Long Live Catholic Natural Law,” is so stupid that we had to smack it around as another stepping stone to our ongoing conversation about constitutional originalism. Key question: if Thomas Aquinas and
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February 1, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I grew up admiring “the crusading syndicated labor columnist” Victor Riesel, as the New York Times called him in its 1995 obituary. In a scene with overtones of On the Waterfront, Riesel had been blinded in an assault just after leaving Lindy’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan at 3:00 a.m. on April 5, 1956. “An hour earlier,” the Times recalled, Riesel “had finished a radio broadcast in which he assailed the
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January 30, 2021 — Steven Hayward
What episode offers you “spice that ramps up the palate, carried forward by the full body, hearty proof, and mouth-coating texture”? This edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, if the latest reviews of our choices in the Whisky Advocate are any indication. Alas, we remain unable to resolve our “peat-versus-sweet” single malt debate. In any case, we know the magazine is just a shill for Big Whisky, and we
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January 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Almost exactly a year ago I had Spencer Case on the show from Wuhan, China, where he had a front row seat to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of listeners wrote asking about Spencer and wanting to know if he got out, and what he was up to. And now is the perfect time for a sequel and update: Spencer is back in Wuhan, finishing up a
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January 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Paul Singer is the incredibly successful founder, president, co-chief executive officer, and co-chief investment officer of Elliott Investment Management. Grant Williams invited him to share his thoughts on the current state of economic affairs on his January 22 End Game podcast. The podcast is posted here. I have embedded it below. According to the description provided: “Among the topics covered in this extremely rare and endlessly fascinating conversation are Paul’s
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January 22, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It’s been wall-to-wall podcasts for me today. This morning I was a guest on the flagship Ricochet podcast with Jame Lileks, Peter Robinson, and Rob Long, discussing Biden’s inaugural and first steps in office, and then after me the show took up UFOs and aliens, which may be our best hope for the next four years. Then this evening I recorded a new episode of our “Three Whisky Happy Hour”
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January 16, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Settle in with your favorite single malt for this extra-long episode that offers a deep dive into the election results with Henry Olsen, the Trump-sympathetic analyst who concludes that Democrat voter fraud did not determine the outcome of the election. He fields a lot of fastballs and curveballs from me and “Lucretia” about why so many Americans can harbor reasonable doubts that the election was run fairly—about why this election
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January 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I was caught up short yesterday when I spotted, on the generally very pro-Trump American Greatness website, William B. Allen’s article entitled “Let Us Impeach Him.” It pays to read past the headline of this article, because the argument is not what you think: it’s not a “get-him-out-office-as-fast-as-we-can” manifesto. Rather, Prof. Allen argues that we should take our time and impeach Trump after he leaves office, thereby allowing scope for
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January 9, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Lucretia and I decided to pour triple shots and host an open bar episode of our regular whisky-drenched dialogue with special guests John Hinderaker and Charles Lipson, frequent contributor to The Spectator and other publications. Partly this is because I wanted some company in the weekly “getting-thrashed-by-Lucretia” moments. And also because we taped this episode with a live virtual Zoom audience of Power Line VIP members, which kind of made
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January 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I imagine about now many readers may be looking for some comic relief from the dreadful scenes of this week. Well, here is the episode for you! M. Stanton Evans As a few select people know, I am currently writing a biography of the late, great M. Stanton Evans, who passed away in 2015. Stan was one of the key figures in the conservative movement from the late 1950s (he
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January 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
“Lucretia” and I begin the New Year and a whole new cocktail cycle by examining three breaking news stories (to go with three shots of whisky, of course), all of which add up to the conclusion that the liberal learning curve is flat. First, Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler is finally starting to understand that Antifa is an anarchist group that you can’t reason with like a teenager. Second, Nancy Pelosi’s
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December 26, 2020 — Steven Hayward
In another wide ranging episode (our last for the year), “Lucretia” and I review the best and worst Christmas movies, the best and worst Christmas music, the rank order of the best Will Ferrell movies, whether blended whisky is ever acceptable, why Finnish rock music sounds like a whale being tortured, and whether we can deduct the cost of our whisky under the tax changes of the COVID relief and
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December 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This is without doubt The. Most. Gonzo. Episode. Ever. This week “Lucretia” (“That’s Doctor Lucretia to you, kiddo!”) and I put down our whisky and take up Australian red wines instead (with brief consideration about whether the banana daiquiri represented the nadir of the West during the Cold War), as we range from Hegel to Snoop Dogg (“That’s Mister Dogg to you, kiddo!”), from cyber espionage to cork versus screw-cap
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December 12, 2020 — Steven Hayward
So there we were, armed with a fresh bottle of 10-year-old Ardbeg Islay whisky (not quite as peaty as Laphroaig or Talisker), and all set to plunge back into political philosophy again and escape yet another thrashing at the hands of Lucretia, but then the Supreme Court laid an egg, politicians acted stupidly again about COVID (in other words, as they usually act), and news came out about the further
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