Lucretia, looking typically unconvinced by one of Steve’s arguments. This week’s episode, recorded with a live audience on Zoom, was off the hook a little more than usual, as Lucretia was in a grumpy mood (despite Steve changing up his whisky selection in a futile attempt at appeasement), and audience questions and comments came flying in fast and furious. Yet somehow we managed to cover a lot of territory, from an after-action report on this year’s Indigenous Peoples Day Columbus Day holiday, to some new perspectives in the “voting irregularities” of the 2020 election, to the glories of Popeye’s fried chicken, which apparently triggers the snowflakes at Yale Law School. Stick around to the very end to take in the exit music from Tom Danks, who offers us the one of the first and best country music takes on “Let’s Go Brandon!” Oh, and apparently is it some guy’s birthday today. Maybe this guy: The happy warrior!

Power Line

E283. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Go Brandon Edition

This week’s episode is sans-guests and sans-metaphysics, as Lucretia and Steve kick around the news of the week, which is a mix of the usual ominous portents from Washington, along with some evidence that Democrats are in free-fall with the public. First up is a look at the egregious Department of Justice letter identifying parents protesting at local school board meetings as a threat to the regime (in an ironic way, the DoJ is right!), wondering just what the federal question under the law is, and noting how this step certifies the open contempt Washington has for local self-government (thank you for your candor Terry McAuliffe!). Then we look at the Ezra Klein NY Times article about Democratic data-maven David Shor, who is trying to warn Democrats that the public is swifty turning against them. Steve offers some historical perspective to show how insane Democrats are in thinking they can govern the country as though they had the same kind of huge and durable majorities that FDR and LBJ had once upon a time. And this leads into another of our friendly arguments about how to judge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who Steve thinks has performed brilliantly in dividing House Democrats and showing that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are actually terrible political strategists, while Lucretia is naturally less enamored of this thesis. And finally, a Lucretia shout out to Andrew Klavan’s new article in City Journal on what lies at the heart of our political divisions of the moment, and what is necessary to fix it. Exit music this week is “What’s In the News” by MacMillan, Bell, and Alexander.

E282. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: What’s In the News Today, Oh Boy!

We’re a day late with this week’s episode because Lucretia and Steve had the opportunity to catch up live with the Pacific Research Institute’s education expert extraordinaire Lance Izumi in San Francisco, to talk about what’s going on in the world of K-12. Lance is the author of the forthcoming book entitled The Homeschool Boom, but also helpfully fills us in on the backstory of how Japanese whisky originated and came to take its place as a rival to the finest Scottish whisky. And we also get some confessions about his unlimited collection of minor league baseball team uniforms (yes, including even the Toledo Mud Hens). This is only fitting for the person whose unofficial PRI title is the Gilbert & Sullivan Fellow in Sartorial Splendor. (Look up his Facebook page photos if you doubt us.) Among the news items we review about why home schooling is going to continue growing rapidly is Gov. Newsom’s mandate that all school children will need to be vaccinated to attend public and private schools. There are reports that inquiries to home schooling websites from California parents have soared in the three days since this announcement, and 160,000 students have already de-enrolled from the public schools in California since COVID began. We also contemplate how Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe let the progressive mask slip when he blurted out that parents shouldn’t have any influence on what is taught in public schools. Nothing shouts contempt for self-government in the most important matters than telling parents, “shut up.” In other words, the home schooling boom is looking like delayed vindication for Alice Cooper (“School’s out—forever!”), who happens to be a Republican rocker. Historian Richard Samuelson joins us again to offer his best puns, so sit back and enjoy this episode with your favorite Japanese (or Scotch) whisky.  

E281. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Alice Cooper (“School’s Out”) Vindicated, with Lance Izumi

With all the controversy over General Mark  Milley’s direct contacts with senior Chinese military leaders, his apparently extensive contacts with journalists, and the confusion or contradictions over what advice he and others gave to President Biden about our endgame in Afghanistan, I decided to reach out to Mackubin T. Owens, decorated Vietnam War vet, long time friend of Power Line, professor at the Naval War College, and author of numerous articles on books on civilian-military relations. Among his books that bear on this subject include US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil Military Bargain, and What Military Officers Need to Know about Civil-Military Relations (with co-author Christopher Robertson). Also not to be missed is his 2015 article in Strategic Studies Quarterly, “Military Officers: Political without Partisanship.” And above all, see his brand new article in Strategic Studies Quarterly, “Maximum Toxicity: Civil-Military Relations in the Trump Era.” Mack doesn’t mince words in this conversation, giving direct and blunt answers about Gen. Milley’s performance, as well as commenting on the case of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, currently in the brig awaiting court-martial.

E280. The Crisis in Civilian-Military Relations, with Mackubin Owens

We’re a day late because of travel problems, and Steve is working on a backup computer because he left his laptop behind at his office on Friday, but this allowed us finally to book historian Richard Samuelson to join the happy hour to talk about . . . history. Specifically, what the hell has happened to history? It’s not just that the academic field has gone left like everything else; it has become narrow, mediocre, and . . . boring. Richard breaks it all down for us, with some cheers and side rants from Steve and Lucretia. From there we do a deep dive into the Arizona election audit, and kick around the two big stories of the end of the week: the revelation, in the New York Times of all unexpected places, that the FBI had an informant inside the Proud Boys on January 6, and the revelation that the Biden Administration admitted 12,000 Haitians from under the Del Rio Bridge scene. It is extremely unlikely than any of this number were properly processed.

E279. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: The End of History, with Richard Samuelson

Steve’s happy place! Steve returns as host this week, and after some of the ritual lover’s quarrel over whisky (including a celebration of Steve’s happy place—see nearby pic), Steve and Lucretia get down to the main business, which is slagging the left, and taking on the problem of “scientific expertise” in modern government. We begin with an update on the egregious 1619 Project, with a look at a long essay from Princeton University’s eminent historian Sean Wilentz that appeared, for some strange reason, in a Czech publication. Actually not so strange: as Wilentz explains in the article, an orthodoxy has grown up around the 1619 Project that effectively bans any criticism of it in leading academic publications, let alone the New York Times. Wilentz, a high-octane liberal, goes through some amazing stories of the bad faith of New York Times editors and many academics (including the American Historical Review), but as Lucretia points out, he exhibits terminal cluelessness about how his brand of weak-minded liberalism paved the way for the extremism of the 1619 Project that Wilentz now thinks is deeply flawed. From here our dynamic whisky crusaders have a good laugh at how progressives propose to re-write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the pages of Democracy: A Journal of [Bad] Ideas. Yet somehow when you suggest to progressives that they hate the American Founding and our Constitution, they get very upset, despite this obvious confession. But the main event this week is a reflection on “scientific expertise” in government, whose defects were on full display this week especially with the confusion of the FDA over COVID vaccine booster shots, and several other aspects of the whole sorry COVID story. We enlist two surprising witnesses: the old socialist warhorse Harold Laski, who wrote a terrific attack on “scientific expertise” in government way back in 1931, entitled “The Limitations of the Expert.” (This link may be behind a paywall for most readers.) And then we also take in similar cautions from Hans Morgenthau, in a mid-1960s essay “Science and Political Power.” (Also behind a paywall, unfortunately.) But we offer key highlights from both essays, culminating with a reminder of the key part of President Eisenhower’s farewell address: Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

E278. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Do “Experts” Know Anything?

Lucretia assumes hosting duties for this week’s potpourri of a show because Steve is recovering from major surgery, which he relates at the show opening today. (It includes a theological dimension!) But while Steve is improving, the recall effort against California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears not to be. Steve explains the reasons why the polls show a strong turnaround in Newsom’s favor over the last week to 10 days, and why Larry Elder’s campaign has not been as effective as it could be. From there Steve and Lucretia share their own reminiscences of the morning of 20 years ago—Steve from just three blocks away from the White House, and Lucretia over in Europe—and then answer the question: are we better off than we were 20 years ago? The answers are less than reassuring. President Biden’s absence from a public speaking role today underscores the problem that is getting more difficult for the White House to conceal with every passing day: the man isn’t up to the job. And that’s even more worrying that the larger geopolitical scene of the moment, which is distinctly more ominous than it was 20 years ago. Finally, Steve and Lucretia can’t help but beat up on higher education, which got a lot of very bad press last week, though they end up playing TV critic about the Netflix comedy “The Chair,” about a diversity-obsessed English department at the fictional “Pembroke College.” Despite its flaws, Steve rather liked the series; Lucretia—surprise, surprise—didn’t.

E277. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: 9/11 Reflections, CA Recall Predictions, and More

Next Tuesday, Encounter Books will publish Glenn Ellmers’ magisterial intellectual biography The Soul of Politics: Harry Jaffa and the Fight for America, and Glenn joins us this week to walk through some of the highlights in the book in what is turning out to be a month-long “Jaffapalooza.” Naturally, we draw Glenn into our running argument about the problems of communicating the proper understanding of the principle of equality in an age of raging “equity,” which is not the same thing. But from there we move on to surveying the capacious mind of Jaffa, including his excellent but overlooked work on Shakespeare, and how, over course of 40 years, he changed his mind about Lincoln and the American Founding. Glenn had access to a large number of Jaffa’s early letters and papers that no one has seen before, such as his extensive correspondence with Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (among others) over the years.

E275. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: ‘The Soul of Politics,’ with Glenn Ellmers

This week’s episode is a Biden-free zone, so if you’re looking to avoid the Biden-Afghan collapse story, this is the show for you. Instead we decided to circle back return to an argument Steve was losing badly at the end of last week’s episode with Michael Anton, and go into greater depth on the meaning of equality in American political thought. To recap, Steve argued that the critics of “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence—from Tocqueville to today’s “paleoconservatives”—have a point, at least historically considered, and that the simple and laudatory instinct of Americans that “you are not the boss of me” is insufficient and prone to the defects of cognitive dissonance. So Steve decided to enlist a witness on his behalf—the voice of Harry Jaffa himself. Using some excerpts from an audio recording of a lecture Jaffa gave in 1972 on “What Is Equality? The Declaration of Independence Revisited” (you can find the full audio recording here) Steve and Lucretia work through some of the complications of the idea of equality and especially its directly related principle—the “consent of the governed.” Bottom line: this matter is complicated. As Jaffa wrote elsewhere: “Free government would be an absurdity did it require citizens all like Abraham Lincoln; yet it would be an impossibility if it could not from time to time find leaders with something of his understanding.” The trouble is, our entire education system, from K-12 through college, is today now determined to convey only anti-democratic principles, in service of a totalitarian misunderstanding of equality. We have work to do. Maybe we just need to screen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance more often. It’s how this episode opens. (P.S. The fine article “Why Are Elites So Hostile to Merit-Based Hiring” by our young friend Deion Kathawa that we mention at the end of the episode can be found here.)

E274. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: On Equality, Consent, and the Difficulty of Self-Government

We’re not done thrashing the Afghanistan disgrace, so we coaxed Michael Anton (the Power Line podcast’s most frequent guest it turns out) to join us for a few quaffs. We use three of his recent articles to launch our discussion, starting with “Afghanistan: Doomed from the Start.” But we use a section from the middle of this essay, on the blunders of our advisers in the Middle East who don’t understand our own Constitution but presumed to advise Iraq and Afghanistan about how to write theirs, to pivot to the crisis here at home. Along the way, though, Michael has been having some very polite arguments with some of the leading “Paleoconservatives,” who for various reasons didn’t like President Trump’s 1776 Commission that was set up in explicit opposition to the pernicious 1619 Project. From there we have a vigorous argument amongst ourselves about how to think about—and more importantly argue in public about—the place of equality in America, deriving from the famous phrase “All men are created equal.” (The two Anton articles that bear on this are “Could the Founders Have Done Better?“, and “Getting Right with the Founders.”) And then at the end, we ask Michael when we can expect him to start a full fledged cooking channel on YouTube, since he recently did a boffo sample on preparing a lamb demi-glace, which naturally led to an argument about . . . lamb. Seriously. (Guess what: Lucretia is agin’ it. It figures, doesn’t it?) So for listeners who bear with us all the way through to the end, I have some fitting exit music, though not everyone will get it.

E273. The Three Whisky Happy Hour, with Guest Bartender Michael Anton

We weren’t able to do an episode for our regular Saturday time slot last weekend because Steve was on the road, so we’re doing this mid-week show with a special return guest, philosopher Spencer Case, who in a previous life served in the U.S. Army in deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. While supportive of our military mission, he had misgivings about how it was all going during his Afghan deployment in 2009 and 2010. Then Steve and Lucretia discuss at length whether conservatives should turn against the military, or at the very least the politicized and bureaucratized military leadership. They spend a lot of time discussing a savage article by an anonymous serving general officer posted by Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit, which says, among other bracing things, “Unreformed, the Department of Defense is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse.” To which Steve proposes: maybe we should cut the Pentagon budget in half. The left has always hated the military, while the right always defended it and wanted to spend more, even with its waste and extravagance. But perhaps that support was a contingent relic of the Cold War? What does it mean for the American military if both the left and the right dislike it?

E272. The Three Whisky Happy Hour, with Afghan Vet Spencer Case

Lucretia takes over hosting duties for this episode (which seems only truth-in-advertising, since most listeners think she is charge every week), as we contemplate the question: wouldn’t it be nice if we actually had two political parties? We use as our text for the subject one of Harry Jaffa’s earliest essays, “The Nature and Origin of the American Party System,” where he explains why at its core party competition at crucial moments presents a fundamental choice between conflicting understandings of the nation’s core principles. As Jaffa puts it in a bracing paragraph early in the essay: “While it is true that, happily, we have not had more than one Civil War, I believe that the Civil War, even if an exception in one sense, is also the most characteristic phenomenon in American politics, if by characteristic we mean that which reveals the innermost character of that politics.” It is probably the case that American politics right now is in a state of genuine civil war in terms of the deepness of the divisions over first principles between our two parties—if only Republicans would stand up and speak out more clearly about it. If they can figure this out, they might actually win a victory that will break the stalemate of the last 25 years. From there we ponder the “Great Liberal Freakout Over Hungary” precipitated by Tucker Carlson’s visit there this week—a freakout that unfortunately includes too many conservatives. (“French Surrenders Again” could be the headline of this segment.) Steve shares some observations from his recent visit, and notes the massive hypocrisy of liberal complaints about Hungary.

E271. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Can We Please Have a Second Political Party?

As everyone knows, California is having another fun-filled recall election next month, and some recent polls show that Governor Gavin Gruesom is in trouble and may well lose. The way California’s recall works is that if a majority votes to recall the governor, the second step on the ballot is to choose a successor, and right now the list of people who have qualified for the replacement field is nearing 50. Ted Gaines Although there are a number of half-known Republican candidates on the hustings, our favorite is Ted Gaines, who happens to be the highest ranking Republican in state office just now. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because his office is at the State Board of Equalization, which is a body that normally escapes much public attention for reasons explained at the beginning. Ted has also served as a state senator, Assemblyman, and Placer County supervisor. He also happens to be one of my oldest friends, and I’ve been urging him to think about running for statewide office for several years now. So I was delighted when he called up to say he decided to throw his hat in the ring for the recall, and in our conversation we walk through some of the main issues facing the state, but also reminisce about some of the old days, such as how, as college students, we both discovered and thrilled to Milton Friedman, among other important conservative thinkers.

E270. Ted Gaines for Governor!

When it comes to COVID, Power Line’s go-to source for making sense of the subject is Kevin Roche, who brings his years of experience in the health care field to his very useful website, healthy-skeptic.com. Scott Johnson follows Kevin’s work closely on Power Line (here, here, and here, for example), but we decided it was time  to hear from Kevin directly in podcast form. Among his other pithy phrases are, “Coronamania thrives in darkness,” a nice twist on the pretension of the Washington Post, and also, “you can’t spell ‘pandemic’ without panic.” In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the latest on the “Delta variant,” the misperceptions of the so-called “breakthrough” infections among the vaccinated, what vaccines actually do, how the CDC has squandered its credibility with its constantly shifting messages that seem in large part to be politically driven, and several other aspects of the COVID scene (including the lab leak hypothesis). One important takeaway: COVID is here to stay, and we haven’t yet come to grips with a serious long-term adaptation strategy. It’s almost as though our public health bureaucracy and some political leaders like the crisis atmosphere—and license to spend huge amounts of money—COVID has provided. Never let a crisis go to waste, as someone once said.

E269. Kevin Roche on coronamania

We’re back! After a hiatus for a week while Steve was overseas, we return to the bar with some new whiskies and a sequel to our last episode that talked about the hysterical attacks on our friends at the Claremont Institute. Little did we know the liberal hysteria was just getting started! Damon Linker, the columnist at The Week and a previous guest on this podcast, thinks our Claremont friends are going all-in for dictatorship. This seems a bit overwrought, but it provides a good occasion for a genuine example of “Caesarism” in the form of Franklin Roosevelt and especially his imperious and authoritarian First Inaugural Address. Most people recall only one famous line from the speech—”We have nothing to fear but fear itself” (did FDR’s speechwriters actually get this from a newspaper ad? We review the evidence). Much less recalled are FDR’s multiple references to how the American people needed and wanted “discipline,” and that he was more than ready to be the disciplinarian, especially if Congress didn’t step up and grant him the extraordinary powers he wanted. Just imagine what the left would say if Trump had said anything like this. Also, is it really correct to call Edmund Burke “the Jane Fonda of the American Revolution”? Curtis Yarvin thinks so, and it briefly throws Lucretia off her game. But not to worry; she recovers quickly and puts Burke back in stir.

E268. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Fight Club Sequel With a Twist of FDR

Steven Hayward brings you the Power Line Blog's perspective on the week's big headlines.

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