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Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, which we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of whisky because travel schedules prevented the normal and proper Friday evening happy hour, and guess what? We’re even worse without whisky!

Among the news and issues treated this week: Why Biden isn’t FDR (he’s not even Harry Truman); why this was the worst SOTU (Lucretia offers a different acronym) speech ever; whether there are signs of life for the GOP in California after all; how immigration and abortion are playing out in the campaign cycle so far; how to think about the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case dealing with Trump’s eligibility for the ballot (hint—it ain’t over till it’s over); and finally, can Harvard be serious in asking for a government bailout? The unifying theme here is galloping dishonesty, which is being normalized more and more every day.

Our articles of the week are (from me): Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” newly salient in an age of truth-denying euphemisms like “justice-involved youth” and “newcomers” instead of “migrants” (which was a substitute for “illegal alien”); Lucretia ponders the challenges of Alex Berenson’s Substack article on new threats to free speech; and John draws our attention to the original 14th Amendment article from Baude and Paulson that brought us to the Supreme Court steps earlier this week, plus responses (also here) that got overlooked at the time, now largely vindicated. (I wondered whether Baude and Paulson were a rope-a-dope set up to make liberals look stupid and induce still more MSNBC primal screams.)

As always, listen here, or from our hosts at Ricochet.