When the news broke yesterday that the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project” had won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, I knew the only thing to do was get Phillip W. Magness on the line. Magness, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is the author of a brand new and indispensable book answering the factual errors and gross interpretive distortions of the 1619 Project, entitled The 1619 Project: A Critique.

But there’s more to the Magness portfolio on my mind just now. I regard Phil as the LeBron James of the conservative-libertarian community, because he is playing monster defense against bad ideas from all corners, and dunking hard on a lot of lefties who richly deserve it, from the authors of the 1619 Project to the Thomas Piketty/Emanuel Saez/Robert Reich/Gabriel Zucman distortions about income inequality that informed Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax. Phil has dug deep into the data the equality crusaders have assembled and exposing their methodological weakness.

It’s Earth Day today—and not just any old Earth Day, but the 50th anniversary. It’s passing rather more quietly than in many previous years because the coronavirus crisis is eclipsing everything at the moment. But a lot has changed since the first Earth Day. Not only is the environment in the United States, and in most places around the world, in much better condition than it was in 1970, but our perspectives on environmental policy has changed somewhat for the better since then, too. Environmentalists used to say openly that “Economics is a form of brain damage,” but today the centrality of economics to sound environmental policy is grudgingly conceded by even the most Malthusian holdout greenies.

One of the key thinkers behind this change in perspective is Terry L. Anderson, the co-author (with Don Leal) of one of the most significant books of modern conservative-libertarian intellectual thought: Free Market Environmentalism. The book has gone through several editions since it first appeared in 1992, has been translated into multiple foreign languages, and is widely used in college classrooms. Terry is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and was one of the co-founders and long-time executive director of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, which is one of the premier intellectual nodes of contrarian environmental thinking. Terry also does a lot of research and writing on native American culture and economies, with similarly unique insights and observations.

Our parochial news media seem only interested in reporting on the state of things here in the U.S. and in their favorite European vacation spots like France and Italy, but of course the COVID-19 pandemic extends into Eastern Europe as well, where most countries are also on some degree of quarantine or lockdown. I decided to check in with Clifford Angell Bates, a friend based in Warsaw who teaches political philosophy at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of Aristotle’s Best Regime: Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (LSU Press, 2003), as well as numerous articles and book reviews. Prof. Bates is currently working on a book on the crisis of modern sovereignty and how the crisis emerges from the Hobbesian foundation of modern theory of sovereignty.

Beyond describing the street scene and atmosphere in Warsaw, we also range widely across several other topics, including intellectual life in Polish universities, the character of Polish “populism,” Polish attitudes toward the European Union, and how Trump is regarded. Plus some good anti-Russian jokes, which Poles have in adundance. And as you can see from the nearby photo, Cliff is a man who enjoys a good cigar.

This bonus episode features the insights and observations of Brian Sullivan, a serial entrepreneur in the domain of health care and medical device innovation. He is the founder and CEO of Celcuity, a biomedical research firm currently working on highly specialized cancer research. Brian, a long time friend of Power Line in Minnesota, has been sending along his unique thoughts on the coronavirus epidemic, especially some caveats about the reported data and what we should be looking for in terms of data quality, completeness, and what really matters most—the number of fatalities and the overall morbidity rate. We thought it would be worth hearing directly from Brian about all of this, and in this conversation he offers some facts and figures about Japan and South Korea that have been been widely reported or appreciated.

I’m posting this week’s episode a couple days ahead of our usual weekend schedule to keep up with the fast-moving news cycle of the most important story of the week—no, not necessarily the coronavirus, but rather the oil price war that broke out last weekend between Saudi Arabia and Russia. The timing may not be purely coincidental, as I discuss with my guest this week, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills. Mark is my go-to person for all things pertaining to energy and our ongoing digital revolution.

Bottom line: Oil isn’t going away any time soon, and the independent oil sector in the U.S. holds the high cards in this battle over the long run—but the next year or so could be very rough. Toward the end of our conversation also offers his typically unique thoughts about what we’re going to learn from the COVID 19 experience.