11 MAG 2024 · John Yoo hosts this week's episode from exile in Austin, Texas, where he humors Steve and Lucretia's the extra-legal views on the Trump trials and tribulations in a Manhattan courtroom, and speculate how Trump's "Letter from the Rikers Island Jail" would read (though it will be more likely in the form of Tweets or TruthSocial posts). Have we discovered a trial judge who seems to have no judgment at all. Certainly we have a president without judgment, and we begin with pondering the question of just when it was that Bernie Sanders became president, because it is impossible to see how a Sanders administration would differ from everything the Biden administration has done. Steve notes a recent https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-hur-memo-and-the-tragedy-of-joe-biden/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR210Uq8bbiiKWEeaQkEsrPn0UKKTe6f6GGaPlEF9YKf0iaFHpcNr1Ql_b4_aem_AQWE46PMx-5tyDhDktNhurgmg09uWKzYvfNRVbPvkEJRUXPHb4P0ROHmlPU9WRdyzXZolsfbWKkpO4OkzX88Wmtn that picks up on parts of the Hur report on Biden. While everybody focused on the parts of the report that dealt with Biden's senility, other parts of the report show that Biden has actually had terrible judgment for his entire political career. Finally, we look at Steve's City-Journal article on https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-1968-sequel and today, and wonder how it is possible for so many of our "leaders" in high education to have so little good judgment or common sense about what ought to be done. (Lucretia recommends pepper-bullets, which sound like some kind of high-velocity jalapenos.)

6 MAG 2024 · There was a lot of listener and reader interest in our too brief comments on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in our last episode, and we realized this issue deserved keeping the whisky bar open after the usual 2 am closing time to extend our treatment of the issue, yielding this short special episode. To recap: Lucretia thinks it is a stupid idea (hence, "https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/podcast-the-3whh-on-never-murder-a-man-who-is-committing-suicide.php"), while John thought it was also unsound on basic free speech principles. Steve was, naturally, in the middle, ending up as road kill for his analysis of why Republicans thought there were some political mischief to be made. So we decided to order another round of drinks (or, in Lucretia's case, four margaritas to honor Cinco de Mayo) and try to go through the issue more thoroughly, especially taking account of David Bernstein's observations at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/what-people-are-getting-wrong-about-the-house-antisemitism-bill/ that there's a lot of disinformation about what the bill does and doesn't do. We also wanted to take up the argument Harry Jaffa argued more than 60 years ago that a free society could, under certain circumstances, curtail the speech of Nazis, Communists, and . . . anti-Semites? . . . in defense of a free society. Jaffa argued: “Does a free society prove false to itself if it denies civil liberties to Communists, Nazis, or anyone else who would use these liberties, if he could, as a means of destroying the free society? The answer, I believe, is now plain that it does not. Is saying this I do not counsel, or even justify, any particular measure for dealing with persons of such description. What is right in any case depends on the facts of that case, and I am here dealing only with principles, not their application. However, those who think every denial of civil liberties is equally derogatory of the character of a free society, without reference to the character of the persons being denied, make this fundamental error: they confuse ends with means. . .  [But] it is seldom either expedient or wise to suppress advocacy of even inhuman doctrines in a community like ours, it is not for that reason unjust.” Does the current campus scene arise to this standard? What does prudence counsel? The normally quarrelsome threesome at the whisky bar arrive at surprising agreement on the matter. Hint: We rather like Jaffa’s conclusion to his classic essay: “The more we can accomplish by opinion, the less we will have to do by law.”

4 MAG 2024 · Lucretia hosts this week's episode, reminding us once again that Republicans are living up to their reputation as "the stupid party" with the proposed "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act" that seems to have overlooked this quaint old thing called the First Amendment. Steve gamely tries to defend the political strategy behind it, but Lucretia is having none of it (putting her in rare alignment with the https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/politics/antisemitism-jews-republicans-democrats-congress.html), wondering why anyone would want to distract attention away from Democrats tieing themselves in electoral hangman's knots over the anti-Semitism raging wild inside their party and their wholly-owned subsidiary college campuses. Republicans ought to impose a gag order on themselves, and crusade against the gag order on Trump in his current trial in New York. Concerning which, John has several observations. And about that campus scene: another week, and another data point for Steve's thesis that "it's going to get worse before it gets worse." About the only sensible conclusion is that somewhere in the Great Beyond, Tom Wolfe is behind the whole current scene. Maybe we can still get a sequel from him, Bonfire of the Inanities.

1 MAG 2024 · Today is May Day, but also the Victims of Communism Memorial Day, and as such today is the prefect days for this classic-hybrid format podcast, featuring Steve Hayward in a conversation with https://victimsofcommunism.org/leader/elizabeth-spalding-phd/, chair of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. (Elizabeth is also Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and Visiting Fellow at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College.) The Foundation has opened the Victims of Communism Museum in downtown Washington DC, and you should put it on your itinerary for your next visit to the nation's capital.  We call this a "hybrid" format because it comes in two parts. Following the conversation with Elizabeth, this episode offers Steve's recent speech at the Victims of Communism Museum about Reagan and Churchill on the Cold War, a major part of https://www.amazon.com/Greatness-Reagan-Churchill-Extraordinary-Leaders/dp/0307237192/ref=sr_1_1?crid=RRZAT4RHVZDI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sQBrunUd4h0v9ZacG8Uw0R5AHpJhbu3xn4BSzR_A_KpmIFWUaDlLgFR-2Qm-8FEylDQg0w03uGmzrLztMs4k4-L_8FIZ8W7G52DNVhST1gw.9zmDilDsvJQcvoA1utsHLqpCJhMNxVZzsPf_K5nt7bQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=Steven+F.+Hayward+Greatness&qid=1714590853&sprefix=steven+f.+hayward+greatness%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-1 about the two great statesmen. 

26 APR 2024 · We're going up a day earlier than usual this week, partly because our constantly irregular travel schedules complicated things again, but more importantly to be timely, as John, Steve, and Lucretia have LOTS of thoughts on the Supreme Court argument Thursday about whether ex-presidents should enjoy broad immunity for any or all acts they took while in office. Steve and Lucretia think the president does, while John thinks textual support for the proposition is lacking. Steve and Lucretia respond with an appeal to first principles, and enlist as an expert witness Harvey Mansfield, because of his unique book on the inherent ambivalence of executive power even in a constitutional republic, Taming the Prince. As usual, we fought to a draw. Our second subject is the ongoing Kristalnacht on campus. There's not much new to say except to calibrate how cowardly university administrators continue to be, and note that even some liberals, like George Packer in The Atlantic (who provides our article of the week, "https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-left-university-columbia-1968/678176/") are starting to figure out what conservatives have known about higher education for two generations now. It's as if no one ever bothered to notice Closing of the American Mind.

20 APR 2024 · This week's ad-free episode is probably better thought of as a Two Whisky Happy Hour, because John Yoo is away on a lecture- and Philly-cheesesteak-procurement tour back east, and Lucretia is out of action right now, too, though she appears in this episode by proxy, so to speak. So two whiskies it is. Last weekend, Lucretia and I offered a keynote session for Ammo Grrrll's annual CommenterCon conference in Phoenix, which is an annual gathering of Ammo Grrrll's best friends and devoted fans from around the country. My theme was "Will it get worse before it gets worse?", and Lucretia offered some thoughts on the future of free speech. We had some technical difficulties with our sound recording devices, so the recording has a sudden and noticeable quality shift right in the middle, and you can't always make out the audience questions perfectly, but we think listeners will still enjoy most of it.

14 APR 2024 · Steve hosts this crisp episode despite his creaky voice from a springtime bug (and Lucretia is partly hobbled, too) covering a lot of ground, starting with a brief recap of the latest (unanimous!) property rights victory at the Supreme Court, but then moving quickly on to initial reactions to the outbreak of World War III yesterday. What to make of Iran's attack on Israel? Many things are not clear about this impetuous scene. Closely related, while the Biden Administration seems determined to tamp down the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East, it seems to be inviting one with Antony (Blank) Blinken saying a week ago that Ukraine should or would become a member of NATO. Are they trying to make Russia dig in, or draw the U.S. more directly into the war (which NATO membership would require)? We also ponder J.D. Vance's very clear-headed https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/jd-vance-ukraine.htmlthat reviews the grim math of the Ukranian battle scene, making us wonder whether the Biden Administration has any strategy at all beyond "fight to the last Ukranian." Then we ponder briefly the astounding scene of the anti-Semitic protests in the back yard of Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Steve arging that to see this incident as a matter of the limits of free speech is woefully inadequate.  But the bulk of the episode is devoted to analyzing the latest abortion controversies, starting with the Arizona Supreme Court decision upholding the validity of Arizona's pre-Roe statutes, and observing as usual the way this narrow and largely technical ruling is being mis-reported in the media and misrepresented by the left. The main portion of this segment, though, is devoted to Trump's announcement that he does not support federal legislation of abortion and wants to leave the issue iup to the states. Does this make him the modern-day equivalent of Stephen Douglas, as John Davidson argues in our https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/11/on-abortion-donald-trump-goes-the-way-of-stephen-a-douglas/ over at The Federalist? Lucretia will startle many regular listeners with her analysis of the matter, to which John and Steve largely agree. In fact, it is an amazing how much agreement we had this week, but perhaps because we recorded in the morning sans-whisky, and with Steve and Lucretia ailing.

6 APR 2024 · John Yoo takes command of host duties this week, as Steve was on the road at an academic conference at City University of New York, where a knowledgeable faculty member remarked that he was surprised Steve didn't need an armed guard. The conference was largely devoted to the intellectual history of the liberal tradition, and was designed perfectly to induce a scornful snort from Lucretia who disdains all such flim-flummery. The bonus was that Steve apparenlty brought an earthquake with him, and we're not referring to his conference paper! Aside from these unexpected things, there were fresh tremors for Trump's legal problems, Biden's long-expected turn against Israel that was designed to appear to a constituency of one (hint: the person insists on being called DOKTOR), fresh encomiums for Mitch McConnell (okay—it was not unanimous), and finally into some tremors for the income tax.   As Stan Evans liked to say, "Any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax," and now a member of the House has proposed repealing the 16th Amendment. Especially salient in light of the pending Supreme Court case that might allow the government to tax unrealized asset gains (a back-door wealth tax), which will guarantee that the government will adopt a de facto policy of 10 percent inflation forever.

29 MAR 2024 · This week's episode has it all, starting with the lamentable fact that when you hear "porn is everywhere these days," it included even the Powerline website this week, and then proceeding to the obscenity of the John Eastman disbarment, the disappointment with the 5th Circuit's decision preventing Texas from securing its territorial integrity, on how best to squash squatters, and a vigorous argument about the legacy of the recently deceased Joe Lieberman. (Steve and John give Lieberman a thumbs-up, while Lucretia. . .) All three of us independently chose the same article for our picks for Article of the Week—Walter Russell Mead's Tablet magazine piece entitled "https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/twilight-wonks-walter-russell-mead." It has some magnificently harsh language about the leaders of our elite educational institutions, such as "moral jellyfish," and leaders who are "careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment." We're less sure about Mead's diagnosis about the role of narrow specialization in the decay of our universities. At least we have Krispy Kreme donuts coming soon to McDonald's to look forward to.

23 MAR 2024 · This episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week's episode comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. https://jameswilsoninstitute.org/about/about-page-3! Thus this episode become a Positivism-Free Zone, in which we review the deepest ground of the natural law unencumbered by John's usual alarums, excursions, and errors. The episode comes in three parts: Hadley made some news yesterday, celebrating the retirement of the noted Notre Dame Law professor https://law.nd.edu/directory/gerard-bradley/, who will be joining Hadley at the https://jameswilsoninstitute.orgg.  From there Hadley proceeds to answering the question that we've been kicking around ever since the Dobbs decision, namely, just how should pro-life politicians break out of their self-imposed muteness about abortion. Hadley has the strategy. Finally, we spend some time toward the end getting down some of Hadley's "origin story" that brought him to Leo Strauss's classroom at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s, and key friendships made along the way—especially our late friend and unsung hero Michael Uhlmann. Note: We had some internet glitches while recording this episode that weren't easily edited or smoothed over, so we ask listeners' indulgence with these hiccups, in return for which we'll present this installment ad-free.