Podcasts
June 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
This week I actually coaxed John Hinderaker to join me along with the Wizard of Oz behind the tech curtain at Power Line, Joe Malchow, to kick around the IG report on the Hillary investigation, and then in the second half of the show I converse with Henry Olsen on what can be learned from the latest primary election results, in the first of what we’re going to call our
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June 12, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Last weekend I made a quick trip to Denver to participate in the Western Conservative Summit on a panel with Charles Copeland, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), on the subject of “The Suicide of the University.” Sorry folks—I wasn’t able to score an interview with Saturday night’s headliners Diamond and Silk for our podcast, so instead you’ll have to settle for an edited version of the panel with
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June 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Just in time—a day ahead of our regular schedule!—Power Line Show Episode 73 is now up, in case you’re looking for some fun listening for a Sunday afternoon. We’re very pleased to welcome back to the show author, screenwriter, journalist and all around smart guy Michael Walsh, to talk about his brand new book, just out from our friends at Encounter Books, The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and
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May 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
This week’s episode of the Power Line Show is a meditation on a great line from Macaulay: “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” Yet paradoxically doomsaying has been at the heart of so-called “progressivism” for a long time, as I noted in a post months about about Steven Pinker entitled “Why Do Progressives Hate Progress?”
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May 22, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Listeners of our podcast know that we can’t let go of making fun of Samantha Power’s famous election night whimsy of “milking the soft-power dividend” of Hillary’s expected victory, because it’s just such a perfect shorthand expression of everything wrong with liberalism today. In any case, last week in Washington I recorded a conversation with Rebecca Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute, who doesn’t have much time for soft power. Rebecca
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May 21, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I have stumbled across the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while, and the fact that I don’t read much German makes it all the better. The German newspaper Zeit had an article last week explaining how Donald Trump should be understood as an epigone of Leo Strauss. All I can say is they’re a little late to the party, because that’s what the paranoid left said about George
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May 14, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Last Thursday and Friday John and I participated in the Ricochet Podcast Summit at AEI in Washington DC, and on Friday morning we taped episode 7o of the Power Line Show with Michael Anton, the former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council and author of the controversial “Flight 93 Election” article from September 2016. Anton revisited the infamous article, shared his insights about Trump’s political character, and also regaled the live
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May 7, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Episode 69 of the Power Line Show is now up, and it features . . . me. I decided the time had come to post up as a podcast the keynote lecture I gave at Arizona State University’s new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership back in late February on the subject of “The Suicide of the University.” The lecture has three distinct parts to it, but you’ll
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May 1, 2018 — Steven Hayward
In our last semi-regular check-in with psephologist Henry Olsen, I titled the show “Help Us Obi Wan Henry—You’re Our Only Hope!” But by now I’m really scraping the barrel for pop culture references for Henry. This time I had to go back 30 years to an obscure and bizarre British kids TV show called “Helping Henry,” in which space aliens were helping a young boy named Henry make his way
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April 26, 2018 — Steven Hayward
As previously mentioned, last week we learned that Fresno State University in California apparently hires complete idiots to teach “creative writing.” There’s not much else to add about Randa Jarrar’s jarring comments about the late First Lady Barbara Bush, except I suppose that her choice and use of adjectives seems neither creative nor original—so just how did she get tenure again? But I use this incident to continue the theme
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April 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Some weeks ago you may recall that I had Damon Linker, a liberal columnist for The Week, as a podcast guest, and this week I have on another of my favorite liberal thinkers, Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University. Prof. Teles stands out from many liberals in part because he did his Ph.D work with a group of distinguished conservative professors at the University of Virginia, and would that more
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April 10, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Today is the official publication date of Joseph Tartakovsky’s book The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds That Shaped America’s Supreme Law. Joseph is the James Wilson Fellow in Constitutional Law at the Claremont Institute, and was most recently the Deputy Solicitor General of Nevada. Tartakosvky has taken an original and innovative approach to illuminating the Constitution and its evolution over time, looking at ten individuals across the sweep of American
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April 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
In this episode, I talk with Ed Whelan, president of of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, author of “Bench Memos” on National Review Online, and co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and a Live Well Lived. It’s a wonderful collection. The speech Scalia gave to an Irish-American dinner on how an Italian thinks about the Irish is worth the price of the book alone. In addition to
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March 27, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Charles Murray, unquestionably one of the premier social scientists of the last generation, turned 75 last fall, and in January gave a valedictory lecture at AEI upon becoming an emeritus scholar there that you can listen to here. I was curious to speak with him further about the arc of his life story, and last week we sat down for a fascinating conversation that ran from his childhood in Iowa
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March 19, 2018 — Steven Hayward
In this short episode number 62, we do our regular check in with Henry Olsen, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of election analysts. We cover the fallout from the special election in House district 18 in Pennsylvania, how the tariff issue might play out, what to expect in the aftermath of the recent chaotic Italian election, plus a look ahead to November, including some of the key governor’s races like Bruce Rauner in
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March 19, 2018 — Steven Hayward
One of the mischievous things I did in Washington last Friday was to hijack Mona Charen and Jay Nordlinger’s “Need to Know” podcast, also hosted by our friends at Ricochet. Long story, but we decided that if the Marvel Cinematic Universe can combine Iron Man and Batman, why can’t the Ricochet Podcast Universe do the same thing? So I took over their mic to talk with Mona Charen about how to
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March 18, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I spent the end of last week in Washington DC with a hectic schedule of meetings and mischief, including, most importantly, doing a number of one-on-one interviews with great people for the Power Line podcast. Stay tuned for details as these roll out over the next two weeks. And one of these podcast adventures was a return visit to Jonah Goldberg’s Remnant podcast, in which I joined with Jonah and
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