3 Whisky Happy Hour

Welp, it's only a One Whisky Happy Hour this week, as Steve had to go solo. John is overseas, and Lucretia is indisposed this weekend. Actually, you could say this is a One-and-a-Half Whisky Happy Hour, as Steve has an extended "cameo" with special guest Carson Holloway of the University of Nebraska, author of a terrific new book, No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case Against NY Times v. Sullivan. 

Steve opens with a few observations about the election rout, which don't sum up to "things will get worse before they get worse." While no one should sugarcoat the magnitude of this election defeat, Steve points out that we've actually seen worse before, and rebounded nonetheless—sometimes sooner than people recall. So be of good cheer, and enjoy at least one-and-a-half shots on us.

Then Steve and Carson walk up through the Sullivan case that shields the media from libel actions by public figures, with a made-up extra-constitutional doctrine, and explain why it is ripe for overturning. Along the way, you'll get a quick primer on how the Founders understood libel and the First Amendment, and some of the background in the common law. It's a splendidly written and highly accessible book for the non-specialist.

Since it's only Steve and Carson, this episode is shorter than usual, but presented ad-free.

John Yoo is back this week, but Lucretia is away for once, but in her place we have special giest Michael Stokes Paulson of the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota, who is the author of, among many other significant legal articles, "Captain Kirk and the Enterprise of Constitutional Interpretation: Some Modest Proposals from the 23rd Century."

It turned out to be very timely as we received the sad news of the passing of Patrick Stewart, which started off a fresh round of the SciFi equivalent of the debate between the ancients and the moderns, that is, Star Trek: The Original Series, or Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Captain Kirk versus Captain Piccard. (I'll merely note that Shatner Lives!) 

Prof. Paulson has some excellent and serious consitutional reflections from an Original Series episode called "The Omega Glory," and all three of us indulge our best Shatner imitations. But we also get a recollections of Paulson's role in the nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court in 1990. 

So as Piccard might say, now that this episode has been posted, Make it so! to be on the top of your podcast queue.

This week's delayed episode is a throwback to the old days, with just Steve and Lucretia in attendance because travel schedules disrupted all three of the 3WHH bartenders. So the original dynamic duo just kick around some news highlights of the week, and offer a couple book recommendations.

Is "not to my knowledge" Ilhan Omar's version of Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" (IF "Ilhan Omar" is her real name)? This appears to be one of those cases where the media's favorite mistaken cliche about Trump—"the walls are closing in"—appears to apply. And what's up with the polls? Hard to tell, even from the real ones, let alone the fake ones and the media's psyop that is trying to suppress Republican turnout. It's all very weird.

Finally, Lucretia and Steve share two books currently on the top of their reading pile. Lucretia is reading Raymond Ibrahim's Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, while Steve recommends Rupert Darwall's The Age of Error and the West's Undoing, just our from our friends at Encounter Books.

John Yoo turns up this week, along with a cameo from our favorite classicist Alex Priou, for an episode that ranged widely from McDonald's to the prospective deportation of Ihlan Omar to women's "athleisure-wear" in the gym, but in the end resolves to a common theme: are we going to be able to save Western Civilization from that relentless attacks from the Left? (And if you don't think McDonald's is important to Western Civilization, you aren't paying attention!) 

We have our usual spectrum of views about the whole "civic education" enterprise, and our cameo conversation with Alex Priou of the University of Austin looks at the conservatives who didn't like Secretary Marco Rubio's speech in Athens last week. For the record, we liked it a lot.

Sitcom viewers will recall the "Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld, but the famous Soup Nazi needs to yield to the latest iteration of this low form of comedy, as this week's episode features the person who has been called "the Shampoo Nazi"—Charles Haywood. We would have thought that people named "EricKKK EricKKKson" (see how easy it is to be stupid?) would know Godwin's Law, whose most important corollary application is that the first person to resort to Reductio ad Hitlerum is immediately deemed the loser of the debate. 

Charles Haywood is a person of considerable controversy these days, and to be sure he has some exotic opinions, which listeners should check out for themselves at his capacious website, The Worthy House, in particular his Foundationalist Manifesto. 

Harry Jaffa, the person who wrote the infamous phrase, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" for Barry Goldwater (and who got called a Nazi for saying this in 1964) also wrote: "'Provocative articles' are worthless unless they can be tested."  And thus Lucretia and Steve were delighted that Haywood agreed to come on the 3WHH podcast and submit to a testing of some of his "provocative" thoughts, and a few of his especially spicy social media interventions. 

We barely scratched the surface with Charles, as we only got through three of his 12 pillars of how to reconstruct our decayed republic. Much of what he says looks like conventional conservatism, all well-sourced, if perhaps more pungently stated. Other vectors of his thought are novel, likely intentionally so. Listeners should do their own due diligence and make up their own mind, and also land on Charles' preferred moniker, "Shampoo Warlord." There is something comically ironic about the people who want to wash Haywood out of their on-fire hair, but might end up doing it with one of his products. (We delve into the whole shampoo thing in the brief biography segment at the beginning.)

This special ad-free episode of the 3WHH is brought to you by our affiliated Substack, Political Questions. Subscribe today (it's free!) if you haven't already.

Way back in the 1970s Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a classic essay entitled "The Great Liberal Death Wish," but in recent years this forumulation has been becoming more pronounced. Forget abortion: the leading edge of Progressive "compassion" is "assisted" suicide, which, while claiming to be in the cause of "relieving suffering," loosk to be much more insidious when you look closer at what is really happening. 

John Yoo is away this week, so Lucretia and Steve welcome Wesley Smith as the special guest host for this episode. Wesley the director of the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, a regular contributor to National Review, and author of more than a dozen books, several of them co-authored with Ralph Nader in his mis-spent youth! Wesley has been on the death-cult-of-the-left beat for a long while now, but the details of what is going on are truly shocking—and needness to say ignored by the mainstream media. (Also, we should mention, he is a fellow podcaster, with a weekly show called Humanize. Put it in your rotation!

In light of the seriousness of this week's subject, we decided to omit our usual Babylon Bee headline roundup at the end, but we do have a "cameo" toward the end this week from "Henry Kissinger," reflecting on what's going on with the Iran War.

We don't know how to describe this episode. We start out by looking over the forthcomong docket of cases for the new term of the Supreme Court that begins next week, but then John Yoo, back from playing hookie last week, drops in a mischievous question about the "theological-political question," and proved anew that Pavlov's theory still works, as Lucretia and Steve bit, hook, line, and sinker, as the story goes. 

But the gang also goes on to the juicy media and higher education stories of the week, including the latest embarrasment of Nicole Hannah-Jones discovering that New York's public schools are really bad, and how Cambridge University predictably wimped out on the promised "investigation" of the Jason Arday scandal.

This, and Steve's latest short-form book review, and much more!

So it happens that Francis Fukuyama, who became famous because of his of book The End of History and the Last Man back in the early 1990s, is having a moment in 2026. See, he really didn't mean it, and besides, he is no longer even a neo-con but has moved left because Donald Trump ruined his parade by restarting history. Or at least disrupting it. Or something. And suddenly he'd getting glowin notices in the liberal media. Big surprise there.

Glenn Ellmers of the Claremont Institute takes the truant John Yoo's place this week, and as the author of a book that is a sharp contrast to Fukuyama (The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy) is the idea person to assist our beatdown of Fukuyama. Not to worry, and don't be scared. We keep our mentions of Hegel and Kojeves to a minimum, and use the occasion to beat down on Progressives—our favorite target.

Our cameo segment this week is with comedian David Deeble, who has lately made his first comedy club appearances in . . .  Germany. In German. Is this conceivable? As he likes to say, "There are two things Germans don't joke about: Hitler, and everything else."  We talk about the whole comedy scene, and whether comedy clubs are in fact the front line of turning back wokery.

And Sydney Sweeney is back in the news. What's not to like this week?

This week's episode is 100% ad-free, as we take up the somber subject of "memory against forgetting" (to borrow Milan Kundera's useful phrase) on the subject of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and we didn't want to risk getting an automated ad for "Jihadis-R-Us Truck Rental" or something. John was at the Dept. of Justice that day (and late into the night); Steve was four blocks from the White House (and due to meet there at 11 am that morning), and Lucretia was overseas in Germany toward the end of her stint there as a military spouse (and mom to young children that she never once thought about strangling). 

In addition to personal reflections, we go through a few of the key issues that became urgent that day, such as the necessary transition from regarding terrorist acts as criminal matters to seeing them more properly as acts of war, requiring a war-fighting mentality. This necessary shift remains controversial of course. John recalls of this in detail in a piece for Civitas Outlook, "Remembering 9/11 and the War We Fought." Don't miss it!

We also wonder about the strange twists and turns that have happened in the intervening years (such as having a radical Muslim mayor of New York City today—something unimaginable in the immediate aftermath of 9/11), and finally taking up the question of whether we and our Western allies are finally, slowly coming to grips with the problem of radical Islam, or even non-radical Islam, taking some of our bearings from Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Tablet article, "What Mohammad Atta Was Trying to Tell Us."

We manage to end on an upbeat note with a modest suggestion for how to reform "land acknowledgements."

John Yoo is off again this week (I know—many of you think he's "off" every week!), so joining us as a special guest is Titus Techera, who wears many hats, including executive director of the American Cinema Foundation; Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College; International Program Coordinator, Edmund Burke Foundation; and researcher in political philosophy, Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. The Romanian-born Techera is one of those non-citizens whose love of liberty led him to become a deep lover of America.

We cover a lot of ground with Titus, and since he is currently in Budapest, we get a report on what the new authoritarian government of Peter Magyar is doing to suppress all remnants of the supposedly authoritarian government of Victor Orban that voters turned out of office a few months back. This is not just a Hungarian problem; we also look at France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, where the EU establishment blob is trying to suppress the democratic will all in the name of "saving democracy."

From there we take up the question of rising anti-Semitism, about which Titus has some novel suggestions. And finally, as a preview of his next visit with us, we do a lightning round discussion of our favorite John Ford and Whit Stillman movies.