Power Line

Power Line

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.

Episodes

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: The No Pearl-Clutching Zone

December 5, 2025 • 59 mins
Lucretia hosts this week's episode with the running theme that there's too much pearl clutching going on among the hand-wringers in Washington and the media. We flop our pearls of wisdom on the Tennessee special election, the J6 bomber arrest, the double-tap bombings on Venezuelan "fishing boats," the Minnesota welfare scandal, and the related immigration control issues it raises. We have some diversions into the latest Trumpian no...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Why John Adams Would Get Sydney Sweeney

November 29, 2025 • 67 mins
Now we know what you're thinking: if we have on as a special guest historian Richard Samuelson, one of the pre-eminent experts on John Adams, you'd think we find out what Adams thought about the Clean Air Act, but no! Instead, the show reaches its zenith with Samuelson drawing our attention to some of Adams's handwritten marginalia that demonstrates why Adams would have completely understood the Sweeney Sensation. 

Richard joined us...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Special Thanksgiving Day Edition

November 27, 2025 • 56 mins
Naturally the 3WHH bartenders can't agree on the best way to cook a Thanksgiving turkey as well as the side dishes at the outset of this special Thanksgiving Day edition, but after that we get down to discussing what to make of prosecutions being dropped left and right—literally left and right in the case of the misbegotten Big Fani Willis case against Trump being dismissed in Georgia, and the Trump DoJ case against James Comey and...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Bringing the Wood to Wood

November 23, 2025 • 55 mins
Another week of last minute schedule changes, flight delays, lost iPads, misplaced laptops, and other mishaps delayed the recording of this week's episode, but finally on Saturday night we were able to sit down for an especially fast-paced episode to close out the week that comes with competing Star Trek metaphors, reflectioning and debating briefly about which was the weirdest news story of the week—the latest Epstein file revelat...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Getting a Grip on Groypers

November 14, 2025 • 43 mins
While it was sorely tempting to devote the entire show to celebrating the return of Sydney Sweeney to the public eye last week, we decided to turn our attention to the serious matter of antisemitism on the right, and just what the heck "groypers" (groyperism??) is all about. Rod Dreher passed along estimates that up to 40 percent of young conservatives in Washington are closet Nick Fuentes fans or groyper-adjacent, though this esti...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Gonzo Happy Hour-Squared Edition

November 8, 2025 • 46 mins
You might want to think of this totally gonzo episode as the 3WHH-Squared, as it was taped live during happy hour Friday night in a very noisy Washington Hilton Hotel at the annual conference of the Federalist Society, where John and I are present and making a general nuisance of ourselves. Lucretia was supposed to be in Hawaii this week on some kind of junket or super-secret mission, but the government shutdown interposed itself.)...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Here's Lookin' at 'Lookism'

October 31, 2025 • 63 mins
The 3WHH is a man down this week as John was unavailable, so Steve and Lucretia soldiered on without his ritual abuse of their superior taste in political philosophy, prudence, and natural law. And in the best fashion of Helen Andrews, Steve ran the episode even though it was Lucretia's turn on the host rotation calendar. We could have called this episode "Revenge of the Manosphere."

Steve and Lucretia consider a few news headlines,...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Woman Troubles?

October 25, 2025 • 60 mins
Helen Andrews' Compact article on "The Great Feminization" is causing a stir, provoking responses from left, right, and in-between. And I just know that everyone wants to hear David French's take on it, because how can we form a judgment about anything without hearing from the Conscience of the World. (Actually, just go with the normally mild-mannered Charles Murray's take: "I'm still waiting to read something by David French that ...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Return of the Neocons?

October 18, 2025 • 64 mins
With John Yoo hosting this week's episode in a vain attempt to deflect attacks, we devote most of the episode to foreign policy questions, ranging from Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, China, and . . . Africa? Yes, Africa. And why does it suddenly seem like Trump can be considered a neocon? 

And not to worry: Lucretia still gets in her licks on her favorite Supreme Court justice (you all know which one it is) for another exemplary performa...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Trump—A New Columbus?

October 11, 2025 • 63 mins
The week ended with President Trump issuing a proclamation celebrating Columbus Day, rather than Indigenous People's Day as the identitarians and western-guilt mongers have crammed down on us for the last generation, and it put us in the frame of mind of Leo Strauss, who called Machiavelli "that greater Columbus." Maybe Trump is a Columbus of sorts, sailing precariously into the Blue State oceans to drain swamps, etc. It's worth a ...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Rumble in the State of Nature Jungle

October 3, 2025 • 66 mins
We were finally able to schedule a taping with enough lead time to get a special guest we've been wanting to have on for a long time—the great Hadley Arkes, emertus professor of jurisprudence from Amherst College and founder of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, and co-host of his own very fine podcast, the Natural Law Moment. We've abused Hadley in absentia in some of our podcasts over the last...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Million Miles to Go Edition

September 26, 2025 • 58 mins
Steve reached 2 million lifetime miles on United Airlines this week, which meant party hats and free drinks on his flight to Washington (yet still no invitation to join Global Services), but despite all that he botched the YouTube livestream of this episode, such that the 12 subscribers who tried to tune in live saw only Steve, could neither see nor hear John Yoo (this week's hosts) or Lucretia. So we'll try to get it fixed, hopefu...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: The Demonic—Both Whimsical and Serious

September 19, 2025 • 56 mins
We open today's ad-free episode with a whimsical look at the global sensation over the Number One Netflix show, "K-Pop Demon Hunters," and despite his Korean heritage, John Yoo can't explain it either. But near as we can tell, this anime cartoon show is somewhat classic melodrama, where the demons deserve defeat. And though it may seem a frivolous leap, we wonder about the demonic aspects of the larger story about Charlie Kirk's mu...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Emergency Episode About Charlie Kirk

September 10, 2025 • 48 mins
No bumper music, mirth about McDonalds, whisky, Babylon Bee headlines, or AI Haiku today: the assassination of Charlie Kirk is too serious a matter. John, Lucretia, and Steve (who is still over in Iceland hiking) assembled quickly for this special emergency episode, not only giving first reactions to a still developing story, but also connecting it to several recent events that point to a larger picture. Even before today's despica...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour, On the 'Theological-Political Problem'

September 6, 2025 • 61 mins
With Steve and John away overseas, Lucretia takes full control of the podcast this week, welcoming back a much more sober special guest, Prof. Vincent Munoz of Notre Dame University, this semester visiting at the University of Texas at Austin. 

With Sen. Tim Kaine making an utter jackass of himself by implying that the Lockean philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and the American Founders is "what the mullahs in Iran believe," and then ou...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: McDs vs Cracker Barrel, and other Burning Topics

August 29, 2025 • 61 mins
In the same week Cracker Barrel retreats on its foolish decision to "rebrand" itself with a proposed logo as boring as a hospital parking lot sign (with new interior decor to match), John Yoo, freshly back from his smuggling trip to Korea, hosts this episode for the first time ever from . . . McDonald's. Did you really need to be told that? Or maybe you are asking: What took so long?

Anyway, as he noshed on newly restored cheesy bre...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Almost Live Q & A Episode

August 22, 2025 • 66 mins
John Yoo is over in Korea this week, where he says he is "lecturing," but we know he's really just arranging to smuggle back a ton of tariff-free Korean barbecue sauce. So in his absence Steve and Lucretia attempted to hold alive live taping streamed on YouTube (in Steve's case accompanied by Bad Rock rye whisky that "Pizza Bob" supplied directly to him this week), but we missed a technical step in the preparation process and could...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: The Summit of Everything

August 15, 2025 • 59 mins
The Three Musketeers of the 3WHH are back with our typical end-of-week roundup, including what we think of the Trump-Putin summit (which will be over by the time everyone listens to this, so this is an exercise in sheer hubris); how to think about crime in the context of Trump's move to take over Washington DC (where, amazingly, John manages to "out-Lucretia" Lucretia with a radical suggestion for what Trump really ought to do with...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Classic Format Conversation with Michael Walsh

August 14, 2025 • 56 mins
This special episode marks the revival of the classic format edition with one-on-one conversations between Steve and a special guest, with the first in the series being author Michael Walsh, discussing his terrific new book, A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History. 

One way to get a feel for the candor and bracing character of Michael's book is this passage from the Afterword, reflecting on the a...
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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: With Special Guest Star Ken Green

August 8, 2025 • 60 mins
This week's episode expands the format to include a guest appearance by environmental scientist Ken Green, whe recently joined the ranks of contributors to Steve's "Political Questions" Substack (sign up for free if you haven't already), where this week he celebrates the demise of the "Endangerment Finding" that derives from the Statute-That-Cannot-Be-Named in John Yoo's presence. But along the way Ken raised an eyebrow for certain...
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