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John Yoo assumes the rotating host chair for this week’s episode, since Steve was on the road much of the week and didn’t keep up with news that didn’t involve whisky (and mermaids). We review what to make of Liz Cheney’s huge defeat in Wyoming, and Steve gamely attempts to defend the shrewdness of Mitch McConnell from Lucretia’s scorn.
Then we turn to the still-unfolding story and fallout from the Mar-a-Lago raid, noting the late breaking news that the magistrate judge will release a redacted version of the affidavit behind the search warrant, though we suspect our pal Charles Lipson has correctly anticipated what we’ll get (see image left).
The attempted killing of Salman Rushdie has revived one of the oldest bad habits of the left—asserting the moral equivalence between the efforts to restrain the teaching of CRT in public schools and the murderous ideology of radical Islam (The New Republic seriously argued this).
And then we spring a surprise guest—Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, to comment on the astonishingly positive feature article on Claremont that appeared in the (checks notes) New York Times Magazine: “How the Claremont Institute Became the Nerve Center of the American Right.” Do take the time to read it if you have access to the NY Times, and ponder how many Times staffers must have felt “unsafe” in the newsroom after it appeared. Ryan shares some of the inside story of how it came to be, while Steve marvels that Claremont gets better treatment from the NY Times than from The Bulwark. One sample from the article: “Claremont was rooted in the plucky outsider, swashbuckling frontier conservatism of California, which shaped its perception of America.”
Finally, responding to a listener query, each of us gives a case for optimism to close out this overlong episode that raided just about everything in the news.
By the way, we’re working on sourcing some new 3WHH whisky glasses which we hope to make available as swag for fans, but we promise it won’t look like the one pictured left here, though it is tempting.
(Trick question: what’s wrong with this picture? Hint: Just think about one of our closing slogans. . .)
P.S. Since we talk a little bit about emissions at one point, special exit music this week consists of a real blast from the past from Allan Sherman.
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One of the best—if not the best—episodes of this esteemed podcast!
I could not agree more with Lucretia’s comments about pundit conservatives (I’m thinking mostly of the editors at National Review) grousing about the quality of Republican candidates running for Senate. It’s just snobbery straight up! I thought the Founders wanted a citizen legislature. What in the world is wrong with candidates who have done well for themselves as Americans taking a shot at solving some problems? They didn’t help bring us to this increasingly perilous national state, but their revered predecessors sure did—I’m thinking of you, Paul Ryan, who claimed that multiple replacement plans for Obamacare would be waiting for Trump, which reeked at the time of a big fat peaty-smelling lie. So I would prefer that “the editors” either throw one of their hats into the ring or stop bashing people they’re aesthetically put off by.
Also, Lucretia, it might make you even more optimistic to hear that a Gays against Groomers rep (a real lesbian) has been featured on the Blaire White Project podcast. Blaire—a trans woman I have zero problem calling “her” or “she” because she looks and acts more like a woman than I ever have—is on the frontlines of the battle to “stop medicalizing children” and gets a ton of grief for it on all sides, as does her comrade Buck Angel, a trans man I would never look at and see as a woman. (I think Blaire’s only in her late twenties!) And, finally, gays in the UK are organizing a non-trans gay group in opposition to the hopelessly morally compromised Stonewall group, abetted by the recent announcement that the gender-affirming Tavistock clinic is to be shuttered and that treatment of body dysphoria will return to a focus on talk therapy (what trans activists, in their Orwellian way, describe as “conversion therapy”).
This makes me insane.
Mark Kelly is a celebrity gun grabber with an engineering degree. Is there any constructive reason he has so much power?
I just received my Gays Against Groomers limited addition sweatshirt in the mail, and since it is 66 degrees here in the Southern Arizona desert during the height of summer (because global warming) I am actually wearing it!
Stunning, of course.