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This week’s episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week’s installment comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. Hadley Arkes! 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 Gerard V. Bradley, who will be joining Hadley at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding.
Gerard V. Bradley
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’re presenting this installment ad-free.
As usual, listen here, or at our hosts at Ricochet when it goes live there.
Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, which we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of whisky because travel schedules prevented the normal and proper Friday evening happy hour, and guess what? We’re even worse without whisky!
Among the news and issues treated this week: Why Biden isn’t FDR (he’s not even Harry Truman); why this was the worst SOTU (Lucretia offers a different acronym) speech ever; whether there are signs of life for the GOP in California after all; how immigration and abortion are playing out in the campaign cycle so far; how to think about the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case dealing with Trump’s eligibility for the ballot (hint—it ain’t over till it’s over); and finally, can Harvard be serious in asking for a government bailout? The unifying theme here is galloping dishonesty, which is being normalized more and more every day.
Our articles of the week are (from me): Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” newly salient in an age of truth-denying euphemisms like “justice-involved youth” and “newcomers” instead of “migrants” (which was a substitute for “illegal alien”); Lucretia ponders the challenges of Alex Berenson’s Substack article on new threats to free speech; and John draws our attention to the original 14th Amendment article from Baude and Paulson that brought us to the Supreme Court steps earlier this week, plus responses (also here) that got overlooked at the time, now largely vindicated. (I wondered whether Baude and Paulson were a rope-a-dope set up to make liberals look stupid and induce still more MSNBC primal screams.)
As always, listen here, or from our hosts at Ricochet.
There is no Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast this week, because we practiced a bit of “settler colonialism” by occupying the flagship Ricochet podcast yesterday and expelling the pervious residents.
Well not literally. Rob Long and Peter Robinson were both away, so the producers asked the 3WHH crew to fill in for the whole hour. And hoo-boy, with James Lileks in charge of the discussion, the sparks flew on immigration, as we successfully flushed out and scolded John “Open Borders” Yoo. The comment thread there is taking off like a Starlink rocket launch, but if you’re not a Ricochet member, you can use the comment thread here as usual.
Ricochet calls the episode “Drunken Monkey Business” on account of the whisky reviews we offer at the end, and you’ll definitely want to listen all the way to the very end to take in the daring high seas tale of Lileks “urinating” on a certain former National Review writer. (We also covered some of the latest Trump legal news, the Gaza War, and the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”
This episode has everything: a how-to guerilla guide to improving your McDonald’s hamburger experience; a spirited discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court decision that defines frozen embryos as persons (I think the media is willfully misreporting the decision—John is not so sure); those crazy new presidential rankings from political scientists—and even some soft-core porn!
Say what?
Well, it turns out that that Judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw Trump’s alleged fraud trial in New York City, apparently has a case of Anthony Weiner envy, and posted some rather racy locker room pics of himself some years back. And right in the middle of our discussion Lucretia flashed the pictures up on the Zoom screen, sending John and me rushing for some eye-bleach. There must be something in the bottled water Manhattan Democrats drink. (And doesn’t Engoron sound like the name of a dwarve or elve who goes bad in Lord of the Rings?)
In any case, we do finally get around to a new segment of the 3WHH, where we note three articles from the last week for what they can tell us about something. John chose those stupid presidential rankings; Lucretia chose an MSNBC articlefrom leftist columnist Paul Waldman that unwittingly admits that everything conservatives say about the administrative state is completely true; and I picked Karol Markowitz’s NY Post column reflecting on how recent social science that ratifies the conservative view that two-parent families are the best way to raise children is so controversial with the left, which is no surprise. (Honorable mention to a parallel column on the same subject by Mark Judge in the Washington Examiner.)
So listen here or from our hosts at Ricochet. But have your eye-bleach for your mind’s eye at the ready.
Vaunce News 