3 Whisky Happy Hour

This second installment of Steve Hayward’s conversation with Chris DeMuth takes up Chris’s “origin story” with his work on regulatory reform starting in the Reagan Administration, and taking the story of neoconservatism through its transformations in the 1990s and 2000s. Our conversation ends with Chris’s observations on the current hot button phenomena of populism, nationalism... Source

Steve Hayward recently sat down to conduct another “origin story” interview with Christopher DeMuth, who is nowadays a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he writes actively about government regulation and the administrative state. Prior to coming to Hudson, Chris was the long time president of the American Enterprise Institute, and served in senior positions in the Nixon and... So...

Getting Power Line’s own “fab four” (John, Paul , George and Ringo, Scott and Steve) together at once is almost as hard as getting The Beatles back together, even though all of the Power Line Fab Four are still living. But we did better than that: For our special year-end wrap-up and prediction show, we also assembled “Yoko Ono” (Susan Vass, aka “Ammo Grrrll”) and “Brian Epstein” (aka, Joe Malchow...

This week you’re really in for it, as Steve Hayward presents another of his lectures on conservative thought at Yale for the William F. Buckley Program. Steve decides to tackle the “P-word”—Postmodernism. The term is overused, vague, and, like so many other things, badly corrupted by the left. In fact, the useable parts of it are actually old conservative ideas in some respects—a fresh vindication...

This special doubleheader edition takes up the question of whether President Trump’s hush money payments to his temporary girlfriends is indeed a campaign finance violation with campaign finance law expert and California Fair Political Practices Commission member Allison R. Hayward (and in case you’re wondering, the answer is Yes). It’s not so clear cut as many in the media are saying... Source

The distinguished British historian and biographer Andrew Roberts has just released Churchill: Walking With Destiny, which the New York Times (along with several other prominent publications) has called “the best one-volume biography of Churchill ever written.” Steve Hayward borrowed a page from Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars” and interviewed Andrew during a car ride (maybe we should start a....

This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Timbs v. Indiana, concerning the widespread practice of “civil asset forfeiture,” in which law enforcement will seize your property upon arrest (sometimes even without an arrest and criminal charge) and keep the money or asset for themselves. By coincidence this week Steve Hayward ran into the person who helped to make this case (and....

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is out with a new report this week on Police Use of Force, and you know what that means—another sprightly dissent from commission member Gail Heriot. You can read Gail’s take on the report, and how the media misrepresented her views (as usual) here. Gail Heriot is professor of law at the University of San Diego, and has a long track record in the area of civil.....

Now I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong: the first rule of Conservative Fight Club is that you never shut up about Conservative Fight Club! In this recent lecture for the William F. Buckley Jr Program at Yale (originally titled “Varieties of Conservative Experience” in homage to the famous William James title), Steve Hayward explains the five major subdivisions on the right... Source

Scott Johnson joins host Steve Hayward this week for a podcast book party celebrating the launch of a collection of columns from “Ammo Grrrll,” Power Line’s Friday morning humor writer, Susan Vass. Ammo Grrrll Hits the Target is a collection of the first year of Susan’s Power Line columns, which have become a hit with readers. Susan is a retired stand-up comic, and this episode talks about the......

We’re up early with this week’s edition of the Power Line Show, because Steve Hayward (his voice finally back to about 90 percent) cornered Henry Olsen to get Henry’s Jedi-like outlook on the mid-term election next week. Henry’s not ready yet to make many specific calls—his detailed race-by-race forecast will go up at National Review Online this Sunday night or next Monday morning—but right how he...

While Steve Hayward continues to nurse his voice back to full strength, this episode of the Power Line Show offers another of Steve’s Yale lectures on conservative philosophy, this time on the topic “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.” Unfortunately Burke wasn’t available for an interview, so it’s just Steve’s introductory thoughts on why Burke’s writings remain highly relevant to our own times...

A slight departure for the Power Line Show this week: Steve Hayward has lost his voice (bringing cheer to his critics and enemies), and couldn’t do the author interview planned for this week, so John Hinderaker stepped in to host this episode with special guest. . . Steve Hayward! Just how does that work, you say? Well, Steve is currently giving a series of periodic lectures on conservatism at......

Herbert Meyer, a senior CIA official during the Reagan years and occasional contributor to Ricochet, suffered a serious bicycle accident recently and remains hospitalized. Herb was one of the first persons in the Reagan Administration who began to think out loud what Reagan had thought more privately—we can win the Cold War with the Soviet Union! With several new books about Reagan and the Cold......

The Power Line Show takes a break from the All-Kavanaugh-All-the-Time format of recent weeks, and sits down with historian William Anthony Hay, author of a brand new biography of Robert Banks Jenkinson. What? You’ve never heard of Robert Banks Jenkinson? You might recognize him better by his “stage name,” Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1812-1827, during the windup of the... S...

With the Kavanaugh-Ford sexual assault controversy reaching a climax in the next few days, Steve Hayward decided to check in with “Lucretia,” Power Line’s “International Woman of Mystery,” and Julie Kelly, frequent contributor to American Greatness and other sites, to see what they make of the situation. To say they are “not impressed” with Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh would be a Cat 5......

This episode features the address Steve Hayward delivered this week to the Friends of Ronald Reagan at the California Club in Los Angeles, reflecting back on how Reagan weathered two tough mid-term elections and what lessons it might hold for Trump and Republicans this November. Dennis Quaid, who has signed recently to star as Reagan in an upcoming biopic, was in the audience... Source

Between the incessant controversy about Russia hacking our elections, and the recent recommendation of several U.S. science academies that we return to paper ballots, we thought it was high time to devote an episode to cyber-security issues. And we have just the person for the topic: “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery. In addition to being an expert on the Constitution... Sour...

With two more weeks of primary election results to pick over, Steve Hayward checks in with Henry Olsen to see how things look. Florida increasingly appears to be the most interesting battleground state, with very competitive races for both governor and U.S. Senator. Henry also puts down his political polling data and puts on his Bill James hat to look ahead to the baseball playoff season starting....

After receiving a query from a young person about why the U.S. didn’t aim for victory in Vietnam, Steve Hayward decided to put the question to Mackubin T. Owens, a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam and long time professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Mac has also written for National Review, the New York Post, and numerous other publications... Source

Will the November election produce a (Democratic) blue wave or a (Republican) red tide? Pre-election opinion polls this year seem more volatile than ever, and beyond the horse-race aspect, there are lots of problems with opinion polling in the age of cell phones and the internet. Steve Hayward sat down with Karlyn Bowman, public opinion specialist at AEI and author of recent article on “ Is... Sou...

Steve Hayward, just back from a regional meeting of the National Association of Scholars, sits down with Warren Treadgold, author of brand new book, The University We Need, which offers a bold idea: because colleges and universities are so far gone and likely unfixable, the time has come to found a brand new elite university that not only departs from the dreary orthodoxy of campus leftism... Sour...

In this very special episode, Steve Hayward uses some unaired material from a long interview with the late Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center. Peter passed away in August 2015, and left a legacy of brilliant and inspirational teaching to a generation of students at Ashland University. This Hungarian immigrant is best known from his lecture and essay on how he became an American, “Born American.....

If a thuggish regime fell in the forest and the New York Times didn’t report it, did it make a sound? This week Steve Hayward talks with Kelly Jane Torrance of the Weekly Standard about what is going on in Iran, where the Trump Administration’s heavy pressure may be straining the regime to the breaking point. But the mainstream U.S. media seem to be ignoring the tidings of increasing unrest and......

Steve Hayward and his pseudonymous mystery guest “Lucretia” return for the second half of their conversation about the meaning and interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Building on last week’s analysis of the “equal protection clause,” this episode goes on to the other three important clauses in Section 1—the “citizenship clause,” the “privileges and immunities clause,” and the “due process clause...