3 Whisky Happy Hour

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." And thus Lucretia and Steve were delighted that Haywood agreed to come on the 3WHH podcast and submit to a testing of some of his "provocative" thoughts, and a few of his especially spicy social media interventions. We barely scratched the surface with Charles, as we only got through three of his 12 pillars of how to reconstruct our decayed republic. Much of what he says looks like conventional conservatism, all well-sourced, if perhaps more pungently stated. Other vectors of his thought are novel, likely intentionally so. Listeners should do their own due diligence and make up their own mind, and also land on Charles' preferred moniker, "Shampoo Warlord." There is something comically ironic about the people who want to wash Haywood out of their on-fire hair, but might end up doing it with one of his products. (We delve into the whole shampoo thing in the brief biography segment at the beginning.)This special ad-free episode of the 3WHH is brought to you by our affiliated Substack, Political Questions. Subscribe today (it's free!) if you haven't already.

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!

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 of 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 taking 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."