Power Line

This is going to be unlike any previous edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, because it was literally recorded during happy hour at the annual meeting of the Federalist Society in Washington, in a corner of the mass reception hall where John Yoo and I invited all comers to swing by to offer a few comments. This completely unstructured (but therefore highly authentic!) conversation included Ilya Shaprio and Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, the esteemed Roger Pilon, emeritus of the Cato Institute, our old pal Hadley Arkes, prominent appellate attorney Eric Jaffa, and Utah lawyer (and loyal 3WHH listener) Jacob Minas. And it goes pretty much how you might expect a wandering happy hour conversation to go. I had hoped that we'd have John Yoo outnumbered and outgunned on the natural law question, but several of our guests didn't do their part! But we also did some election talk, so there is something for everyone.

The Power Line single-malt whisky bar is still trying to process Donald Trump's decisive victory in the election, and this episode reflecting on the scene offers up a few fresh (we hope) takeaways from the result that we haven't yet seen elsewhere in the media, and then we turn our attention to some key priorities for the second Trump Administation starting in January. In such a target-rich environment, what should Trump aim at first on Day One in January: our ideologically corrupt universities, the Justice Department, ending the war in Ukraine and Gaza? And what should Congress do with the slim GOP majorities? Steve has some ideas for new committees, as well as a budget test. Also, does it seem like Trump is president already (since no one believes Biden is really president any longer)? We notice that several foreign governments are rushing to get on Trump's good side before January, which seems prudent.

For our many regular listeners who were not able to join us last night for our live taping of this special mid-week episode that included Scott Johnson and (very late) John Hinderaker (hence the "Five Whisky Happy Hour"), much of what we talked about has been overtaken by subsequent vote counts and other results. But we did have a number of questions and issues that should still be of interest even after the dust settles today, such as why the polls were wrong again, what's wrong with the exit polls, why the legacy media looks increasingly mediocre as well as biased, why the big winner of this election cycle—and an important harbinger for the future—is Joe Rogan. On the Power Line main site for this episode over-eager listeners will be able to listen to a bonus "overtime" recording where we brought in a number of listeners to comment widely on a number of things, some of them beyond just the election.

In our last episode before the election, the 3WHH bartenders pour a stiff one in honor of the end of recycling, since were back to pure garbage now, though Biden getting in his last chomps of a baby was a special bonus to end the week. We spend most of this episode reflecting on the final week of the campaign, arguing about what kind of vote fraud may or may not take place, and offering our final predictions for both the election result and the aftermath. You think it's over Tuesday! Think again. As the great Bluto Blutarsky asked so poignantly, Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

So it was Hitler week for Democrats, who are still fuming over being cooked by Donald Trump in a McDonald's deep fryer, and covering up their indigestion with an E.coli outbreak. Behind the public polls catching up with the terrible body language of Democrats and the news media lies a growing recognition that Kamala's brat summer has gone splat as election day approaches. The 3WHH team covers this, a few of the Senate races, the underrated scandal of suppressed science about gender bending medicine that appeared in the (checks notes) New York Times! What next—a confession that DEI is a counter-productive waste of time and resources? Oh, wait—that was last week.

The news out over the weekend that Israel's attack plans against Iran have been leaked by our government and/or European governments ought to be a major scandal and cause for a serious criminal investigation, but in fact the real story to be followed may be much worse: is anyone asking whether Iran has penetrated our government—either with spies inside our intelligence agencies, or agents of influence in the State Department or even the White House? This seemed like a good excuse to revisit the groundbreaking research on Soviet penetration and influence on American policy during the Cold War, and whether a similar thing is happening now with regard to Iran. This episode recalls the work of M. Stanton Evans on this topic, which he published in his book Stalin's Secret Agents (with Herb Rommerstein) and explained in an excerpt from a talk he gave about the book 20 years ago. I think listeners will spot the parallel, and agree with the conclusion—time for recriminations!

The Three Whisky gang were together in person live late today, the culmination of an intensive three-day project that we describe at the opening segment of the show. Fortunately John Yoo's office was well-supplied with Maker's Mark and Glenlivet 15, so everything is right with the world. After the opening overture, we get down to business, pondering the "body language" of the body politic as revealed by the grinding presidential campaign that suggests a Trump triumph, and then noting the growing signs of an effective backlash against wokery, starting with the New York Times dumping on DEI. None of us had that on our Bingo card! Listen to the end and you'll hear each of us give our betting market odds on the election. Guess who is the most optimistic and the most cautious!

Lucretia hosts this week's episode, which takes up exactly where we left off last week's episode—with the topic of vote fraud and whether Democrats might (ahem) steal the election from Trump. Without revisiting the weirdness and irregularities of the 2020 result distorted by the Covind-induced election rules changes, we go over in some detail what changes have been made over the last four years, including serious preparations by Republicans and the Trump campaign not be caught flat-footed by any "irregularities" in the vote result. Have Republicans ever been any good at this? Actually the contested election in Florida in 2000 gives some reason for optimism, as John (who was there) and Steve reflect. And Steve reminds us of some old history, such as Jimmy Carter warning back in 2005 that mail-in balloting was a recipt for vote fraud, along the way debunking claims—subsequently bolstered by academic political science—that mail voting doesn't increase turnout overall or by minorites. Still sound advice, and Republicans ought to force Democrats into the uncomfortable position of repudiating Saint Jimmy. We take a couple of digressions, first into John's inaugural experience with the new McDonald's chicken Big Mac (two thumbs up!), and then some explanation of why the public polls and campaign polls are diverging (with all good news for Trump). The episode culminates with a Lucretia soliloquy on how the central principle of voting ought to be meaningful citizenship, not making voting as convenient as a trip to 7-11.

October is not even one week along and we've already had enough "October surprises" to span about five years. First, the epiphany of J.D. Vance, Superstar. If he had been any better we'd need to enlist Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice to score and produce the Broadway musical of Vance the Vanquisher. Come to think of it, that would make a great professional wrestling name. Except Tim Walz wrestled himself to the ground; maybe we should call him the Klucking Knucklehead? From there we offer some observations about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and wonder whether the usual incompetence or malevolence explans the appalling spectacle of the government's recovery efforts there. We won't find out from the mainstream media. Then, some things to watch for at the first anniversary of October 7 on Monday, and some portents of Iran's missile attack on Israel this week. Where are we on the World War III countdown clock? Lastly, Jack Smith emerged from his Groundhog Day lair once again to proclaim six more weeks of attempted criminalizing of Trump. Snore or snort—your choice.

The whole gang is finally back stateside and even in the same time zone, but somehow John and Lucretia found themselves being stalked by Kamala Harris on Friday. First the Veep extraordinaire turned up near Lucretia's border town to talk tough on immigration, and then decamped to the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, right across the street from the University Club, where John happened to be styling at the same time. At least she had a better trip than Ukraine's Zelensky. Or Israel's Simcha Rothman at Berkeley, whose cancelation by an anti-Semitic mob John recounts even as he blames Steve, who managed to miss the excitement. The bartenders also review the appalling case of Penn's punishment of Amy Wax, and connect it to the obvious cheating elite universities are doing with their admissions in the aftermath of the Harvard case. The point: the toxic DEI ideology may be on the defensive right now, but it is not going quietly into the night. Finally, Steve notes some curious and hopeful survey data about the election, along with some tips for what to watch for in the early voting states. Cheers!

Well, a forensic miracle recovered the lost or rogue audio file for this week's episode, which feature just John Yoo and Lucretia because Steve was in some kind of second-hand smoke daze over in Amsterdam. John and Lucretia do their usual spirited tour through the second Trump assassination, the stubbornly close polls (you can just imagine what Lucretia thinks of "low information" voters), Kamala's embarrassing appearance on Oprah, the latest news about just what happened with President Trump's request for national guard troops on January 6, additional reflections on "Operation Grim Beeper," and finally a philosophical excursion into Lucretia's first contribution to our new "Political Questions" Substack. Warning—no prudence, but Machiavelli is involved!

The whole gang is back together this week with a rousing review of the week's highlights, including a post-modern take on the Trump-Harris debate, and the dogs-and-cats-living-togther-before-being-eaten memestorm out of Ohio that is driving the left out of its mind (or what little mind they have left). Trump may not have won the debate on any of the usual scoring metrics, but maybe it isn't simple as that. But the heart of the episode is the serious business of Merrickl Garland's tone-deaf speech (even John thinks so) claiming politics never enters into Justice Department decisions, which wouldn't even convince his own mother. Then on to a brief discussion of Steve's recent article on the revival of the common law, in which the term "prudence" is not mentioned (though he does use the term "Zeitgeist," mostly to annoy Lucretia). John is skeptical, while Lucretia is merely her contrary self (default: Steve is wrong! What's the question?) Note to listeners: We have tried with this episode to take control of of the timing of ad placements (thought not specific content!) so that ads stop appearing randomly or in the middle of sentences. We'll just have to see how it turns out. It's a laborious process.

With Steve stuck on an ice floe somewhere up around the Arctic Circle, John and Lucretia run wild (also long!) with the microphone in his absence, riffing along about ther latest in lawfare—did Judge Marchan blink by postponing his sentencing of Trump? Is a Hunter Biden pardon in the works? And what the hell is Jack Smith up to now? Etc. And are we really going to do Russia Hoax 2.0? Gee—if only there was someone on the episode who could offer an analogy from Russia Hoax 1.0, but the usual supplier was banished. Just imagine how long this episode would have been with some historical analogies, which, let's face it, are the "more cowbell" of the Three Whisky Happy Hour.

After some preliminary discussion of hot dogs and Kamala's stolen fast food valor, this special episode gets down to serious business—a seminar on the topic of political prudence for a thoroughly recalcitrant and skeptical John Yoo. This topic grew out of a long text thread we had following a Power Line post of Steve's passing along a substantive exchange on Twitter between the Babylon Bee's great Seth Barron and Lucretia on the subject of abortion and prudential politics. In what ways do the parallels between slavery and abortion apply today? Trump's equivocations are causing considerable distress among many Pro-Life advocates, who point to Lincoln as a superior example—as is quite right to do. But is that example correctly understood? Lucretia thinks not. But the prudence Lucretia and Steve impute to Lincoln is hard to define in bright line ways, because at the summit it can't be defined by any abstract rules beyond being able to proportion means to ends, which assumes a lot already, since there are always multiple competing ends, each subject to deliberation. But one big thing gets in the way of clear thinking about this difficult matter: utilitarianism. And our resident Bethamite and McRib consumer is dug in on the matter, and we wander into a lot of historical examples for illumination. It gets pretty lively along the way. We'll let listeners decide if Lucretia and Steve make the case adequately. The poet Randall Jarrell once supposedly said, "If only we could get our hands on this person named 'Society,' we could fix everything." We could easily offer the obvious paraphrase of this for John, and call it a day.

John Yoo hosts this week, and adds to his appalling hypocrisy with his admission that he is teaching a class this summer on the Law of the Sea treaty, even as he continues to embargo any and all discussion of the Clean Air Act! Otherwise the gang in is happy spirits because we're resupplied with good spirits this week, as a fine whisky and wine outlet (Grapes and Grains—they don't even have a website up yet) has at last opened a superb branch nearby Steve's remote location. How fine? Steve has his eye on a 75-year-old single malt that is for sale at the mere price of $89,999. He decided to fill up his gas tank instead (this being California). The big news of Friday was RFK Jr's endorsement of Trump, about which we have some actual reporting to offer listeners, along with our evaluations of the Democratic convention, which was anything but nomos or physis. It was pure nemesis. Lucretia and Steve also smack John around a bit for his USA Today article on how the leftism of law schools threatens the survival of the Constitution was defective because it didn't go far enough!

Lucretia hosts this week, which means 'Swift Boating' has a whole new meaning, as Taylor Swift's whirled tour on behalf of whirled peas has run into Islamic terrorism, but shhhh, you can't say that in Britain right now, so how can they let her concert series go forward? Too obvious a provocation. Of course we have our weekly update on Kamalamamadrama, dissect the meaning of the abrupt firing of Columbia's president (with Steve arguing she is a liar in any case), After reviewing some encourging recent legal initiatives, involving property rights, UCLA's tolerance of anti-Semitism on campus, and the ongoing legal tussle over the southern border, we finally get around to another rousing argument pitting Steve and Lucretia against John Yoo over his stubborn positivism. Is John just punking all of us? That's Steve's hypothesis. In any case, we went into overtime a bit on this one, but the episode offers some excellent improv bumper music at the end that we bet no one knows, for the hearty souls who hear us out.

John Yoo hosts this week's 500th episode of the Power Line family of podcasts, which turns out to have a common theme: dance steps. Kamalamadingdong (someone's—I won't say who but you can guess—new nickname for the Dem nominee) thinks she can Walz to the White House with a progressive twin, while the Olympics is trying to dance away from its cultural travesties with. . . break dancing?? Boeing is trying to dance around its DEI problems, and the stock market is suddenly doing the two-step around weakening economic signals, and the Biden foreign policy team is slow-waltzing us into a geopolitical dead-end in Ukraine and the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump is keeping everyone, friend and foe alike, hopping in 6/7 time with his usual improvisations.

What do Trump's controversial appearance before black journalists, the Olympics controversy over the gender of boxers, and the protean identity of Kamala Harris have in common? Simple—they are all an aspect of what Steve believes is the central political and moral-philosophical issue of our age: human nature. Everyone seems to think Trump blundered by questioning the authenticity of Harris's changing ethnic identity, but Steve and Lucretia—in rare heated agreement—think it was a masterstroke, albeit with Trump's usual heavy-handed and perhaps clumsy way. And we use for our article of the week the usually sound Abigail Shrier's Free Press article, "Republicans, You’re Going After Kamala All Wrong," that we think gets the matter exactly backwards. But it when we turn to the controversy over gender identity in the Olympics that we deepen the story. Take in at your leisure the case of Caster Semenya, a genuinely "intersex" South African 800-meter runner born with female genitalia who is not allowed to compete in the Olympics track and field competition because of high male testosterone levels. This is the same extremely rare anomaly as the Algerian boxer at the center of controversy right. (Also note the holder of the women's 800 meter world record, Jarmila Kratochvílová, set back in 1983—currently the oldest track and field world record. Kratochvílová is thought to have been heavily doped up, as was common with Eastern European athletes in those days, but it is hard to say.) Steve's theory about how the left's war on human nature also applies to why Harris is such a miserable boss—hardly a rare trait among leftists. John doesn't quite buy the metaphysical explanation, but we're used to this my now. Finally, Steve offers a brief homily about moral education drawn from a short passage from Leo Strauss's classic essay "What Is Political Philosophy" to make a point about what's wrong with the left's narrative about the Israel-Gaza War.

Like an old 80s sitcom, this episode was taped before a live audience of about 90 regular listeners who carried on a vigorous commentary and questions in the Zoom chat, and we had a special guest at the very end—John Hinderaker in the (virtual) flesh! And since we actually recorded during happy hour for a change (and not Saturday morning as has been the case for the last several weeks), we rolled out several whisky choices for the episode. Listeners may know that Lucretia, this week's host, has been partial in the past to Glenmorangie, which the great Kingsley Amis noted "has been called delicate and mild, even faintly sweet." This is not a description anyone would ever use about Lucretia, making this a dubious match. Tonight she had two varieties of Glenfiddich on hand, which Amis called "fruity and well balanced." Maybe she's better matched with Macallan, which Amis says is "powerful yet smooth." That sounds more like it! By popular demand, we took up a news items we didn't get to last week in the crush of shocking news stories, namely Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling that special counsel Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel to torment Trump is unconstitutional. Steve invented a special judicial scale—the Silberman Scale from 1 - 10—for John Yoo to grade the opinion, and he gave it a solid 8, which is pretty darn good. From there—oh my! Lucretia unveiled her handcrafted tin foil cowboy hat, as we kicked around whether the loss of trust in key government institutions (cough, cough—FBI—cough, cough, or cough—Secret Service—cough) is because they are merely incompetent and negligent, or whether their carelessness is deliberate. From there John Hinderaker gave us an update on the FBI investigation of the firebombing of his office building back in January, and finally we all gave our predictions for Kamala Harris's running mate, but not until we rolled out the first of whiat is doubtless to be many weeks of ritual denunciation of Harris. So if you missed the live taping, pour yourself a nice, dry single malt and settle in.

Well that certainly was a week. Seems more like a year now since the news that Judge Cannon declared special DoJ prosecutor Jack Smith's appointment was unconstitutional, but it was only Monday. But we didn't even get into this issue in this episode, even though weekly defense of the Constitution is in our union contract. Is there anything new or original left to be said about the political events of the week, starting with the attempted assassination of President Trump, the nomination of J.D. Vance (allowing Lurcretia to say "I told you so!" yet again—isn't this getting monotonous by this point), and then Trump's near Castroesque-length acceptance speech? Why yes—yes there is. Steve, John, and Lucretia offer several observations we haven't yet heard from the legion of other pundits and analysts, which leads to a surprisingly sharp argument about free trade and potential tariffs under a Trump-Vance administration, which extends to a vigorous discussion of another substantial import of the moment—illegal immigrants. Steve also explains why, if you listened carefully to Trump's speech, you'll see that Reaganism isn't quite dead yet, why it was also a Jedi-mind trick on Biden, and why many of the news stories about Biden's possible withdrawal from the race have a implicit subtext that party leaders really really don't want Kamala Harris either, but can't say so publicly. We end the week with our shopping lists: more popcorn for John and Steve, and more tin foil for Lucretia.