This special end-of-semester episode features Steve and Lucretia  reflecting on the latest academic hoax that Steve highlighted earlier in the week on Power Line (here and here), and which may have contributed to Higher Education Quarterly having to retract the fake article on how “right wing money” is supposedly pushing colleges and universities to the right and intimidating faculty and administrators. The study was so ludicrous that only a liberal (and apparently the academic “peer reviewers” who signed off on the article) could have believed it.

This opens up a wider window into the question of why leftists—especially on campus—are such miserable, unhappy, and intolerant people, and why they behave tyrannically, increasingly turning our campuses into Stasi-like institutions worthy of East Germany. (Just this week, Columbia University put out a video, posted below, calling on students and staff to “report” people who use incorrect pronouns because of the “harm” and threat to safety such unpure speech acts represent. Suggestion: Why don’t we simply just call everyone “comrade” and solve everything at once.) The answer requires taking seriously the nihilism of the modern left which cannot tolerate any disagreement or challenge to their position because it threatens their very being, while conventional or moderate liberals have been swept too far by the premises of supposedly progressivism to offer effective resistance to the extreme left. Warning: Expect cameo appearances from Harry Neumann and Harry Jaffa along the way!

Back in the sixties Ronald Reagan liked to quip, “A liberal’s idea of being tough on crime is giving longer suspended sentences.” Today’s liberals don’t even bother with lenient sentences; instead, in our current “defund the police, empty the prisons” mania, they don’t even bother charging many crimes or applying significant bail, as we saw in Wisconsin a few days ago.

This week Steve and Lucretia decided to go back to the classics on this issue: James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Heather Mac Donald, and . . . Aristotle (because of course everything needs to go back to Aristotle whenever you can), though Lucretia offers a zesty side dish of modern social contract theory. (Short version: When it comes to crime, “Government—you had one job!”)

This week’s review of the news begins with the two huge stories that broke Friday—the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse (which is causing grief counselors for leftists to work overtime again), and the House passage of Biden’s so-called “Build Back Better” spendathon.  The latter story may seem like a Biden/Democrat triumph, but in fact a closer look shows that this may come to be seen as the week when the wobbly wheels of the Biden administration began to come off completely.

Lucretia and Steve review the whole scene, starting with the reaction to the Rittenhouse acquittal, but then moving to Steve’s theory about what the civil war inside the White House over Kamala Harris really means, and the warning signs all of this should be sending to Democrats. As Thomas Byrne Edsall advised in the New York Times, Democrats shouldn’t panic right now—they should be “going into shock.” (Ditto from Ruy Teixiera—another rare progressive who gets it.)

This week’s edition of the Three Whisky VERY Happy Hour revels in schadenfreude over the spectacle of the left freaking out over the election results on Tuesday. As political philosophers we try to go beyond the usual political punditry to get at the heart of the matter, explaining why the left’s dime-store Hegelian historicism (“the side of history”) that informs their moral smugness makes it necessary to charge that the only reason they lost was that Americans are irredeemably racist. Keep it up Dems: I’m sure you can lose even more votes next time with that line.

The episode is extra long, but there was so much to celebrate that even Lucretia’s normally coal-black soul was brighter than usual (“I only wore black once this week,” she admits). In addition to the election results, we also have some quick examinations of the latest COVID news, especially the madness of the employee vaccine mandate that is certain to backfire, the feeble results of the COP 26 climate hootenanny, some cautions about falling for a possible bait-and-switch in the Biden “Build Back Better” plan still bouncing around the House now that the “infrastructure” bill has passed (hint: it’s not about the spending—it’s about raising taxes), the final straw in cancel culture, and a few observations what special counsel Durham’s arrest of Igor Danchenko, who sounds like a minor character out of Rocky & Bullwinkle. And of course some new whisky reviews!

The title of this week’s episode—”Let’s go Bruno”—requires some explanation, though you’d be right in assuming that “Bruno” fills the same place as “Brandon” in the more familiar slogan of the moment. In this case it refers to the famous and celebrated child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Lucretia was struck by Ann Bauer’s searing article in The Tablet, “I Have Been Through This Before,” which recounts the awful abusiveness and quackery of Bettelheim which somehow never drew any critical attention, and suggests some obvious parallels with today’s COVID mandate mania, not to mention a parallel public celebration of an obviously defective doctor whose name rhymes with grouchy.

Sample from Bauer:

Lucretia, looking typically unconvinced by one of Steve’s arguments.

This week’s episode, recorded with a live audience on Zoom, was off the hook a little more than usual, as Lucretia was in a grumpy mood (despite Steve changing up his whisky selection in a futile attempt at appeasement), and audience questions and comments came flying in fast and furious. Yet somehow we managed to cover a lot of territory, from an after-action report on this year’s Indigenous Peoples Day Columbus Day holiday, to some new perspectives in the “voting irregularities” of the 2020 election, to the glories of Popeye’s fried chicken, which apparently triggers the snowflakes at Yale Law School.

This week’s episode is sans-guests and sans-metaphysics, as Lucretia and Steve kick around the news of the week, which is a mix of the usual ominous portents from Washington, along with some evidence that Democrats are in free-fall with the public.

First up is a look at the egregious Department of Justice letter identifying parents protesting at local school board meetings as a threat to the regime (in an ironic way, the DoJ is right!), wondering just what the federal question under the law is, and noting how this step certifies the open contempt Washington has for local self-government (thank you for your candor Terry McAuliffe!). Then we look at the Ezra Klein NY Times article about Democratic data-maven David Shor, who is trying to warn Democrats that the public is swifty turning against them. Steve offers some historical perspective to show how insane Democrats are in thinking they can govern the country as though they had the same kind of huge and durable majorities that FDR and LBJ had once upon a time.

Steve’s happy place!

Steve returns as host this week, and after some of the ritual lover’s quarrel over whisky (including a celebration of Steve’s happy place—see nearby pic), Steve and Lucretia get down to the main business, which is slagging the left, and taking on the problem of “scientific expertise” in modern government.

Lucretia assumes hosting duties for this week’s potpourri of a show because Steve is recovering from major surgery, which he relates at the show opening today. (It includes a theological dimension!) But while Steve is improving, the recall effort against California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears not to be. Steve explains the reasons why the polls show a strong turnaround in Newsom’s favor over the last week to 10 days, and why Larry Elder’s campaign has not been as effective as it could be.

From there Steve and Lucretia share their own reminiscences of the morning of 20 years ago—Steve from just three blocks away from the White House, and Lucretia over in Europe—and then answer the question: are we better off than we were 20 years ago? The answers are less than reassuring. President Biden’s absence from a public speaking role today underscores the problem that is getting more difficult for the White House to conceal with every passing day: the man isn’t up to the job. And that’s even more worrying that the larger geopolitical scene of the moment, which is distinctly more ominous than it was 20 years ago.

This week’s episode is a Biden-free zone, so if you’re looking to avoid the Biden-Afghan collapse story, this is the show for you.

Instead we decided to circle back return to an argument Steve was losing badly at the end of last week’s episode with Michael Anton, and go into greater depth on the meaning of equality in American political thought. To recap, Steve argued that the critics of “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence—from Tocqueville to today’s “paleoconservatives”—have a point, at least historically considered, and that the simple and laudatory instinct of Americans that “you are not the boss of me” is insufficient and prone to the defects of cognitive dissonance.