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3 Whisky Happy Hour

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.

Hosted by 'Lucretia', John Yoo, and Steve Hayward

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Episode length: 43m

Captain James T. Kirk and the Constitution

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.

Episode length: 54m

Knowledge or Not, Here We Come

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 cliché 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 from our friends at Encounter Books.

Episode length: 1h 5m

Saving Western Civilization Edition

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 Ilhan 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 those 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.

Episode length: 1h 6m

Godwin’s Law Edition

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."

Episode length: 59m

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 formulation has become more pronounced. Forget abortion: the leading edge of Progressive "compassion" is "assisted" suicide, which, while claiming to be in the cause of "relieving suffering," looks 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 is 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 misspent 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 needless 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.

September 2026

Episode length: 1h 2m

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!

Episode length: 1h 18m

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's getting glowing 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 ideal person to assist our beatdown of Fukuyama. Not to worry, and don't be scared. We keep our mentions of Hegel and Kojève 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?

Episode length: 1h 4m

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 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 take 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."

Episode length: 1h 5m

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.

August 2026

Episode length: 1h 15m

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 the 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 recent 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.

Episode length: 1h 15m

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 for the next one—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 sympathizers—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 gaffes—that "trees cause pollution"—in light of some new mainstream science findings that the Gipper was right after all.

Episode length: 1h 19m

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 Luigi Mangione, the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.

Episode length: 1h 11m

Post-Liberalism + ‘Henry Kissinger’ Cameo?

This week's episode features frequent guest Phil Munoz of Notre Dame University, sitting in for John Yoo, discussing his very timely new article in First Things magazine on "The Founders and the Common Good." His article is getting a fair bit of buzz on the interwebs, as it takes up the surprisingly hot topic of "post-liberalism" in particular to dispute the contention of some leading post-liberals that the American Founding was defective and therefore part of the problem. We also take up briefly an excellent article on the same issue by Andrew Walker in The Daily Wire, "The Neutrality Myth: Liberty, Order and the Common Good." Both worthy of your reading pile. (By the way, speaking of First Things, have I mentioned that I am thinking about starting a quarterly academic journal for the OnlyFans community, and calling it First Thongs? I'll show myself out. . .) This episode also features a short cameo appearance by "Henry Kissinger" (we summoned him by means of a Ouija board) to bring his legendary perspective to our current foriegn policy confusion, and we tackle a listener question about populism. Our new voice for the show opener is Colin McLean, a noted voice-actor in Britain, 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.

Episode length: 35m

Emergency Executive Order Edition

President Trump's executive orders Thursday afternoon attempting to re-ground his opposition to birthright citizenship prompted an emergency livestream with Lucretia and me on Substack. We wanted to get ahead of the certain hysteria of the blue-faced crazies on BlueSky (and the media, but I repeat myself) that Trump is "undermining the Constitution" and "defying the Supreme Court." To the contrary, Trump is defending the Constitution from the mistaken assumption that the judiciary—and only the judiciary—has the last word on these matters. We break down the main issues in this 30-minute, ad-free mini-episode. Our regular episode, featuring special guest host Phil Munoz of Notre Dame and a cameo appearance from "Henry Kissinger," will be out Saturday morning as usual. There, I'll explain our new voice-over for the intro you hear today.

Episode length: 1h 15m

The Hiatus Is Over!

The hiatus for the rebooted 3WHH is over! We got the band back together, and to further paraphrase the political philosophy of the Ellwood brothers: It's 70 minutes to the end of this podcast, we've got a full glass of whisky, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Just like Anthony Fauci in his glam cover shot for In Style magazine back in 2021. Most of our changes are cosmetic, and it's still a work-in-progress. Still, the two main new features on display this week are a short "cameo" appearance from a slate of contributors we're signing up, and responding to the best reader/listener question. This week's cameo is from Alex Priou of the University of Austin, who has some definite opinions about The Odyssey. Two main topics are on our mind this week: the mendacious Dr. Fauci, and what pathways for legal redress might still be open despite President Biden's pardon.

July 2026

Episode length: 52m

Emergency Edition, with John Eastman

Lots of people didn't get the memo that the 3WHH is on hiatus for the month of July as we revamp the show's format and lineup, but since I don't want loyal listeners to go into painful withdrawals, I am offering this emergency stopgap edition, with just me and a frequently-requested guest, John Eastman. If you go only by the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court, you might think that the 6 - 3 decision against President Trump's executive order that attempted to curtail birthright citizenship under the emanations and penumbras of the 14th Amendment was a serious setback. But discerning readers recognize that on the core constitutional question of whether birthright citizenship is anchored in the 14th Amendment, the vote was actually 5 to 4, since Justice Kavanaugh agreed with the other three dissenters that the 14th Amendment does not establish birthright citizenship — he voted to strike down Trump's executive order because he thought it failed on statutory grounds. Statutes, of course, can be changed.

Episode length: 55m

Gala July 4 Special Edition

Two guesses about the topic of this special bonus edition for today's semiquincentennial, and neither of them count. That's right: we take up the Declaration of Independence and revisit some of the lingering issues that have arisen during this season of renewed debate about America's "birth certificate," as well as a few that haven't seen much discussion. For example, John noted in National Review Online that contrary to popular impression, the Declaration does not reject energetic executive power, while Steve recalled for The Daily Wire (alas, paywalled) the contrast between how the left handled the bicentennial in 1976 and how they are approaching it today, calling it "The Patriotism Crisis That Could Tear America Apart." Sample: "Patriotism among a growing number of Democrats seems conditional about whether they are in power or not. And a conditional patriotism is a weak patriotism. The last time so many Democrats were conditional about their attachment to the country and their fellow citizens ended in a civil war. “Patriotism is civic friendship,” the political philosopher Harry Jaffa once wrote. “Patriotism is the link between justice and friendship in its purest or transpolitical form. Those who see each other as utterly alien cannot be fellow citizens.” Note: The 3WHH will be going on hiatus for the rest of July, as we retool the show for a new season. Stay tuned for announcements on our group Substack, Political Questions, for updates.

Episode length: 1h 3m

Grading the Supreme Court Term

Well, that was quite a finish for this year's Supreme Court term, which, as usual, released the most controversial and consequential cases on the very last day of its sitting. This wrap-up episode—the first of a double-episode package for July 4 since we missed last week's regular episode—dwells a lot on the birthright citizenship case, with sharp disagreements among the 3WHH bartenders, but from there we move on to ponder the ambiguity of the "Humphrey's Straddle," and the significance of the ruling striking down one of the key pillars of government regulation of campaign financing—the so-called "coordination" rule. We close out this first of our double-header with a celebration of America's new heroine, Sophie Cunningham, who is making us forget all about Sydney Sweeney.

June 2026

Episode length: 1h 3m

Hot Apple Pie Surveillance Edition

This epicly (is "epicly" a real word?) gonzo episode finds Steve still somewhere in the middle of the storm-tossed north Pacific Ocean, while John and Lucretia hold down the fort from various locales back on dry land. But who else can knit together the return of McDonald's hot apple pies with Elon Musk's hot SpaceX IPO, hot Apple i- devices and their security issues, hot section 702 renewal, hot rulings from the Supreme Court, and the need to take all of these in sections. Speaking of taking things in sections, we do our best to break down the Trump-Iran MOU, though our thoughts may be obsolete by the time these pixels reach your screen, since news overnight suggests the interim terms of the MOU are already being violated, turning the whole scene into chaos. But our collective judgment is that the critics are being a bit premature, and that there are good reasons for taking a wait-and-see attitude. As someone likes to say, we'll just have to see what happens, as it is far from clear that the MOU is Obama-lite. Meanwhile, since today is Juneteenth, don't miss Lucretia's modest proposal for how the liberation of slaves in 1865 should be commemorated, over at Civitas Outlook. (Since Steve is producing and posting this episode from the middle of the ocean, we're making it an ad-free edition, since the geography-based auto-ad placement might post up some truly bizarre ads. Enjoy!)

Episode length: 1h 1m

Channeling Admiral Ackbar? (It’s a Trap!)

This week's episode, which finds Steve over in Japan but still with a hoarse voice, ranges widely from exonerating John Yoo from being implicated in a major whiskey heist, to what the prodigious drinking habits of the Founding Fathers has to say about constitutional law today. Justice Neil Gorsuch reminds us that “John Adams took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day. James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol—he only had three or four glasses of wine a night.” Ah, the great ones. Speaking of the Founders, we make a nod to the tragic passing of Gordon Wood, and naturally manage to get into an argument about history and historians. But the central topic of today is considering John's foray into grand strategy in his Civitas Outlook article this week on "America Doesn't Need to Fear a 'Thucydides Trap,'" and while Admiral Ackbar needed to fear a trap, John doesn't think so. But what was Chinese premier Xi trying to do in bringing up the subject in a public session at the recent summit with Trump? One doesn't imagine Trump being a reader of Thucydides, though one can easily see him liking the outcome of the Melian debate. In fact, maybe that's what he's up to with Iran? Who can tell?

Episode length: 58m

Jet Lag Edition

So your three bartenders are back from overseas, but still a bit jet-lagged and struggling to keep up with the news. Was it a good week? The firing of Scott Pelley is certainly good news, as are the initial results of the California primary, where the energy and enthusiasm are clearly on the side of the outsider insurgent candidates. (Knock on wood: let's see how the "vote counting" goes over the next several weeks in the "incompetent" Golden State.) Not such a good week for John Bolton, nor for aesthetic sensibility, if the Obama library is any indication. Why does the left prefer brutalist ugliness? We have our suspicions. . . We do our longer dive this week into some meta-narratives about the Supreme Court, inspired by Paul Moreno's terrific Law & Liberty article, "Save the Last Branch for Me." It's a new day indeed. We also get in our licks at woke British policing, Star Trek, and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has some rather uncommon Eucharistic forms. Oh, also McDonald's news, just to keep John Happy and well-fed.

May 2026

Episode length: 54m

Tackling the Admin. State from Sicily

The end of this week finds the 3WHH crew in situ in Enna, up in the highlands of Sicily, visiting the University of Kore for a conference on, well, everything, though it is hard to tell since half the speakers are speaking in Italian and the rest of us are speaking in English. John Yoo's incoming plane was delayed—again—but it gave us the prompt we needed to have in John's place, R.J. Pestritto, the Dean of graduate education at Hillsdale College, but above all, one of the most trenchant critics of the Progressive revolution of the early 20th century, and the insidious administrative state it birthed. If ever you want to throw down on Woodrow Wilson—and what sensible person doesn't?—R.J. is your man. For this episode we consider R.J.'s recent short monograph for the Claremont Institute's "Provocations" series, Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed. Settle in with your favorite Chianti for this one, as "D.J.—R.J.," as I like to call him when he gets rolling on this subject, really gets rolling on this subject with us. For this episode, recorded in a hotel lobby with some visitors wandering by our "field recording studio (which included Michael McConnell listening in for some of it), we decided to keep the "authentic feel" of the background noise, in case you get to wondering. Meanwhile, the full 3WHH crew arms up for the next podcast after they finish sacking Sicily:

Episode length: 54m

Rolling Road Trip Edition

We could have called this the jeg lag from hell episode, as John Yoo managed to spend 11 hours yesterday on an airplane that didn't fly anywhere, while Steve, already planted as an advance guard in Palermo ahead of next week's conference in Sicily where the 3WHH crew will be together in person at the University of Enna, is batting both jet lag and a airplane-acquired bug that left his voice raspy. So Lucretia hosts this week, and wonders whether both parties are a hot mess at the moment, what to make of the scene from the cashiering of Messy Massie to Der Platner of Maine to Ken Paxton in Texas, but landing on the breath of fresh air that is Spencer Pratt. In the middle of taping the news broke of the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, so we pivoted to an impromptu discussion of the wider scene of dysfunction in the "intelligence community." Steve made a case for bringing back James Jesus Angleton from the dead, drawing the predictable guffaws from John. All just a warm up for our on-location episodes next week.

Episode length: 57m

Gonzo Hybrid-Reboot Edition

We've had some gonzo episodes before, and a couple of trainwrecks, but this is the first-ever episode that is actually two episodes edited together, with sequence changes, new sound effects, canned insults from John, etc. I explained in a Substack post our technical difficulties that arose in the livestream, and here is the fix. Let us know what you think! In fits and starts we do cover some breaking legal developments, whether Israel has any hope of a libal action against the New York Times (which richly deserves it), the surprising statesmanlike bearing of President Trump, some surprising remarks on anti-Semitism from T.S. Eliot, and more. So here we go!
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