3 Whisky Happy Hour

Ricochet

4.7 (520)
Politics
Updated Biweekly

Steven Hayward, John Yoo, and "Lucretia" bring you a whisky-sodden perspective on the week's big headlines, and occasional deep dives into law and philosophy. Listen to the Three-Whisky Happy hour, along with more than 40 other original podcasts, at Ricochet.com. No paid subscription required.

1d ago

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: The Left's Death March Picks Up Speed

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 Exceptionism, 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.
Sep 26

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: What the Hell Is This?

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!
Sep 18

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Is Trump "The End of History"?

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?
Sep 11

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: 25 Years On

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."
Sep 4

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Is There a Modern Remedy for Ancient Hatred?

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.
Aug 28

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Privateering Edition

The band is back together again this week as John Yoo ends his truancy, and we take up the fresh legal and constitutional disputes of the moment, starting with the Supreme Court's recent rulings about mail-in ballots and the Trump Administration's efforts to enlist the Postal Service on behalf of election integrity. From there we move on to the novel proposal to bring back prize courts and authorize old fashioned "privateers" to capture Iranian shipping on the high seas and profit from their cargoes—something United States hasn't done since around the time of Andrew Jackson (Trump's favorite president, perhaps not coincidentally). Then, on to the emerging controversy over Flock cameras, and whether we can trust the government not to abuse them or use them to spy on and harass us. This week's cameo appearance is from our favorite classicist Alex Priou, who joins us to discuss his terrifically cheeky recenbt essay, "How to Be an Elitist." And our listener question this week is: why does the president get to select the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Shouldn't that be up to the members of the Court? The president doesn't get to appoint the Speaker of the House, after all, and the language on this matter in the Constitution is incomplete or ambiguous. Hmmm.
Aug 23

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: New Headlines and Old Time Religion

We're a day and a half late with this episode, but better late than never. It's just Steve and Lucretia this week—John Yoo will be back next week—and they spend the first half of the episode updating some of last week's main stories while noting that instead of dying down, they have intensified. The Luigi Mangione Fangirl Murder Mob has extended its tender mercies to Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts wife who (allegedly) strangled her three children apparently—to listen to her demented symathizers—in anticipation of what may become Fourth Wave Feminism. No—we're not making this up! The Jason Arday story continues to have legs, and some strange new permutations, one of which directly includes Lucretia and a strangely self-referential article in the Comical of Higher Education. This resolves into a discussion of what else the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress ought to be doing to force our East German universities into serious reform, and not just renaming their DEI operations and other evasions of the campus rot. (We also have positively identified who will replace Arday at Cambridge, and it's a familiar name.) After a brief intermission, we take up what may turn out to be the central legacy of J.D. Vance, and think other leaders ought to pay more attention to his latest core message. And then we visit one of Ronald Reagan's supposed most egregious gaffs—that "trees cause pollution"—in light of some new mainstream science findings that the Gipper was right after all.
Aug 16

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Will the Rotting Timbers of Academia Finally Fall?

The shocking suicide of the fraudulent Jason Arday alongside the Atlantic cover story about how a mostly leftist scholar "of color" (Tyler Austin Harper) quit his tenure track job at Bates College because he couldn't stand "the insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia," ought to be the last straw for our nation's tolerance for a completely rotten education system, from K-12 through the colleges and universities. But it probably won't be, because the left is not going to give up these premier bastions of political power unless they are crushed. And that can't be done quickly or easily. Joining us this week to take the place of the truant John Yoo is Bates College alum Richard Samuelson, nowadays a professor of history at Hillsdale College, who adds some detail from his own experience as an undergraduate at Bates College, and you will wonder how he survived the place. We also have a brief cameo appearance from John, who notes the peculiar legal strategy being pursued by Liuigi Mangione, the killer of United HealthCar CEO Brian Thompson last year. Keep your eye on this one, as we have a possible conspiracy theory to roll out about it. And finally, we take up a reader comment about something we said last week about the meaning of the phrase, "nature bats last." This is a long episode, but it's ad-free this week, so it zips long even zippier than usual. I want to introduce again the new voice for the show opener, Colin McLean. Colin is a noted voice-actor in Britain, and semi-retired from a distinguished business career in The City. You can read about his voice work at his website Vocal Flair, and I also recommend his YouTube channel, The Healing Voice, where he ranges widely from poetry, music, story-telling, and some sensible psychology.

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4.7

out of 5

520 Ratings

Volume

Sep 19

Tired of it 4494

Steve Hayward is too low so I turn up the volume then guests are too loud. Not as interesting as before.
Horrible explanation of the Thucydides trap

Jun 12

Kevinneedstheword

John gave a horrible explanation of the Thucydides trap. We’re crying out loud, you’re a professor. It is about what happens when similar powers see each other building capability. The outcome was a preemptive attack, but it doesn’t have to end that way.
R.J.Pestritto

Jun 3

Charles1634

The guest for this show was terrific. Please have him on again to fill in for John Yoo.
More liberty bell

May 2

gardenweasel

Once a week is not enough!

Steven Hayward, John Yoo, and "Lucretia" bring you a whisky-sodden perspective on the week's big headlines, and occasional deep dives into law and philosophy. Listen to the Three-Whisky Happy hour, along with more than 40 other original podcasts, at Ricochet.com. No paid subscription required.