Dinesh D'Souza - THE EXODUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1152

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Aug. 21, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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THE EXODUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1152

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	Coming up, I'll consider new data to show you why voters nationwide are fleeing the Democratic Party.
	I'll talk about a big court win for Donald Trump that's going to save him a lot of money.
	I'll also offer my inside scoop on why MSNBC is detaching from its parent company NBC and author Daniel Flynn joins me.
	We're going to talk about a pivotal figure.
	in the history of conservatism, someone who's eerily relevant today, his name is Frank Meyer.
	If you're watching on YouTube X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel, click the subscribe, the follow, the notifications button.
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	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Music by Ben Thede.
	Elon Musk, I read, is kind of quietly jettisoning, giving up, abandoning the idea of starting a third party to which we can all say, Phew, we're relieved, we are grateful.
	This was a horrible idea, an atrocious idea, surprisingly bad coming from someone of the evident.
	genius of Elon Musk, but people who are geniuses sometimes come up with kind of wacky schemes.
	And I think Elon Musk thought that there might be a middle space between Republican and Democratic extremism and that there were at one point Musk suggested the kind of sane eighty percent of people in the middle.
	I think he's discovered that that is an imaginary construct.
	There is no such middle.
	The country is in fact more divided into two parts.
	Now there are some fuzzies in the middle of that, but those fuzzies are a small minority.
	These are the dangling independents, if you will.
	But the majority of Americans fall fairly clearly into one camp or the other camp, so the eighty percent is not the middle.
	The eighty percent is in fact the two camps.
	The twenty percent is the middle, and I don't even know if it's twenty.
	So Musk evidently has great enthusiasm about JD Vance.
	He's maybe not as enthusiastic about Trump.
	There was clearly some rift, some drawing apart by mutual consent.
	I'm glad it hasn't produced any further fireworks, but I think Musk's idea is let me focus on technology, on AI, on Tesla, on moonshots and other space ventures, and come twenty twenty eight, I'll have my own favorite, namely JD Vance as a likely contender.
	All very good news.
	Now, also good news is the revelations coming out of an article in the New York Times of all places.
	The New York Times is 95% garbage and I cancel my subscription.
	I don't really subscribe.
	Every now and then I get free stuff from the Times and I'm happy to kind of gobble it up, particularly this article, which is based upon the kind of thorough demographic analysis that you don't often get.
	Well, you don't often get anywhere.
	And you do very rarely even get from the Times.
	But this is about the it's called The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration.
	Now you know the Times is reluctant to publish something like this because it's very damning for their own side.
	But they're doing it again, not out of repertorial honesty or journalistic integrity.
	No such thing exists at the New York Times, they're doing it to alert their own side that there's a problem that needs attention.
	What's the problem?
	Here's the opening line of the article.
	The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they go to the polls.
	What they're saying is that people are fleeing the Democratic Party.
	And this can be seen in all kinds of indices that I'll talk about in just a moment.
	Now, first of all, let me just step back and say this is not only a welcome development, it's really absurdly overdue.
	And it's absurdly overdue because the Democratic Party has made it clear that they are A out of their minds, B, they don't care about ordinary citizens.
	They have nothing but unreserved contempt for them.
	Their favorite people are illegal ali criminals, criminals on the street, those are their favorite Americans.
	And then there are people in other countries who wish us ill.
	Those are the causes to which Democrats will rally.
	You round up a bunch of al Qaeda militants who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, Democrats will supply them with lawyers.
	Right?
	Do they supply lawyers to January sixth defendants?
	No, why?
	Because January sixth defendants to them are worse than the people who tried to blow up the world who did blow up the World Trade Center.
	So a lot of people like me have wondered for a long time like who today in their right mind can be a Democrat.
	Now I console myself with the idea that there are a lot of decent people who are Democrats and the reason they're Democrats is they are fed a diet of lies and misinformation from the media, from the media left and so they consume all this and it's garbage in garbage out and so as a result they go Democrats are the party of compassion, the Democrats are the party of saving the climate.
	So when I hear these sorts of robotic assertions, I realize that I'm dealing with a propagandized But a little part of me goes, but how can you be so stupid?
	How can you not open your eyes and just take note of how things are different?
	Just take a small example.
	There are a bunch of videos now on social media made mostly by black residents of Washington, DC, male and female, basically saying the whole place feels like it's new.
	I saw a video this morning of a woman walking around Union Station.
	She goes, I normally can't walk like this.
	I'm looking over my shoulder, I'm clutching at my purse.
	I view everybody as a potential.
	a mugger or carjacker or assailant And she goes, suddenly I feel like I'm in a different city.
	Why?
	Because there are National Guards people everywhere and because essentially she says it just feels lighter, it just feels brighter.
	So the old Washington DC was brought to you by the Democratic Party.
	Criminals roam the streets and instead of cracking down on the carjacking, they give you long memos on how to avoid being carjacked yourself.
	Things like make sure you drive really fast in the middle lane.
	Republicans on the other hand bring in the cops, shut down the criminals.
	So there's lots of good reasons for people black, white, Hispanic, it doesn't really matter.
	And the good news is all these people, all these demographic groups are waking up and are essentially deciding to get out of the Democratic Party.
	Out of the thirty states to track voter registration, says the New York Times, every single one is moving toward the Republicans.
	In four years, the Republicans have added four point five million voters.
	Think about it, in a hundred million voter contest, four point five million voters is a lot.
	That's five, almost five percent straight out that you're getting.
	And remember, you're not just getting it, it's coming from the other side.
	So the stampede from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the blue states, and the red states.
	So what's left?
	Nothing.
	The Democrats are losing everywhere.
	The lustre of the party is gone, and this also means that the Democratic Party's self styled image, that they are the party of concern, of the working man, of civil rights, all of this, all of these blinders are falling off the eyes of the electorate.
	Quote, I don't want to say the debt cycle of the Democratic Party, but there doesn't seem to be any end to this.
	There is no silver lining, there's no cavalry coming across the hill.
	This is month after month, year after year.
	In other words, this is not a single episode that is causing people to like run in droves to the Republican Party, it's everything.
	It's a little bit over here and a little bit over there, and it's occurring all over the place.
	The drain is even worse in the so called battleground states.
	So the New York Times focuses on Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and they go, that's where it's happening probably in the largest proportions.
	Now, it is true that more and more voters have been in recent years identifying as independence.
	And that may seem to be something that is a pox on both your houses.
	We don't like the Republican Party, we don't like the Democratic Party, but the time zooms in on who are these people who are calling themselves independence.
	And it turns out most of them are Democrats.
	So in other words, the movement is not a movement that is from the red and the blue toward the independent camp.
	The Republicans are staying Republican.
	But more and more Democrats are saying I don't really like the way this party is going.
	I don't feel comfortable calling myself a Democrat.
	I'm not going to change my tag from a D to an I. I want to stop being a donkey.
	Now, the Democrats have also relied for voter registration on a spate of nonprofits.
	And somewhat surprisingly, the New York Times admits this.
	For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits.
	And then the Times in a very telling addition says this, though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic.
	So these are fake nonprofits.
	In fact, they should be investigated by the IRS.
	What they do is they're trying to essentially add to the ranks of the Democratic Party.
	But there are two problems with it.
	One is that the nonprofits themselves are losing federal funding, and that's a very good thing.
	That's why the dismantling of USAID, the shrinking of the bureaucracy, all of that has proven to be critical.
	But the second thing, and this has probably come as the greatest surprise, is these nonprofits thought that you can go to the inner city, you can go to the barrio, register some guys and you're basically getting an 80 to 20 or 90 to 10 democratic advantage out of every 10 black guys you register, 9 will be democratic, 1 will be republican, except they've now discovered that's no longer true.
	You register 10 black guys and 5 of them end up voting Republicans, so that this democratic effort to increase minority enrollment and minority voter registration is no longer the unambiguous benefit that it used to be for the Democratic Party.
	I'm now quoting, you can't just register a young Latino or young black voter and assume that they're going to know it's the Democrats that have the best policies.
	from Maria Cardona, a veteran Democratic Party strategist.
	She's saying that if you pick a random black or Hispanic guy off the street, it's an even bet.
	Even though you think they're one of yours, it could turn out that they're one of theirs.
	And so all of this is a way of saying, you know, we're all concerned about the midterms, we're all concerned about, well, will the Democrats try to impeach Trump?
	One good sign that is happening here, and it's happening across the country in the red and the blue states and in the purple states, all of them is a kind of quiet rebellion, a quiet revolt against the insanity of the Democratic Party.
	Now my hope is that the Democratic Party leadership will read this New York Times article and do what they do normally, which is dismiss it.
	They say, Oh, this is just we hear this all the time, this is not something for us to worry about.
	I'm kind of hoping that they will ignore it.
	Why?
	Because that way the hemorrhaging will continue and this party that is doing so much, well, it's done a great deal of damage throughout American history, but this party that's doing so much damage today will deservedly be held accountable for it.
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	Donald Trump woke up this morning in a very good good mood also if I had just learned that an appellate court in New York had thrown out a five hundred twenty seven million dollar penalty against me.
	This is exactly what happened.
	What are we talking about?
	You remember the so called civil fraud case where Trump had been accused of inflating the value of his properties.
	The whole case was a complete scandal, disaster, absurdity.
	The idiot judge insisted that Marlaga, which is worth at least a billion dollars was somehow worth, you know, the eighteen million dollars or thereabouts tax assessment.
	And so Trump had inflated its value to get a loan, even though the bankers came in and said, Trump didn't mislead us.
	We had our own appraisers.
	There's nothing amiss here.
	We made a loan, Trump paid it back, there are no victims of this crime.
	Nevertheless, so this was a thoroughly politicized prosecution with an absolutely dishonest, corrupt judge.
	And all of this resulted in Trump getting this massive fine, and he had to put up a big sum of money pending the appeal to get bonds.
	But here comes the appella division.
	This is the appeals court, of course.
	And he says, quote, this is an excessive fine barred by the Eighth Amendment.
	So in other words, this is unconstitutional.
	You cannot take a claim like this in which Trump is said to have exaggerated his assets and just stick on millions and millions of dollars of interest, let it all balloon up to five hundred million dollars and then just go., pay up.
	And the court basically goes, no.
	Now, Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, can appeal to the state Supreme Court, so it's quite possible that will happen.
	No one is to say that no one is saying that this matter is completely settled, but the good news is that this verdict is now tossed to the wayside, and it's going to take the New York Supreme Court to somehow restore it if that happens at all.
	Trump, at least for the moment, can breathe easier.
	And all of the chastisement that Trump was subjected to.
	Judge Engeron was like, you know, Trump shows a lack of contrition.
	Trump didn't do anything wrong, so there's no reason to have contrition.
	I'm sure the judge is basically sobbing at his desk right now.
	Letitia James is probably reassessing her options.
	It is New York, so it's a corrupt jurisdiction.
	And Trump, alas, has to deal with it.
	His properties are in that area.
	So this is how they chose to go after him.
	But good news for Trump on that front.
	Now, also good news from another front.
	I realize today is a day of almost unremitting good news news.
	And that is, I want to talk a little bit about the end of MSNBC.
	MSNBC is not going out of business.
	That would be better.
	But they are essentially detaching from NBC.
	So MSNBC got a lot of its journalistic credibility from the fact that, like, we're not one of the major three networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, but we're essentially engrafted onto NBC.
	This all happened by a kind of peculiar set of accidents and mergers.
	But I think NBC has realized that MSNBC is a left wing enough.
	MSNBC made NBC into a complete joke.
	And so MSNBC is now off on its own.
	It's not even allowed to use the name NBC.
	This is the key point.
	MSNBC is shaving off other aspects of its corporate empire.
	So it's shaving off the USA channel, it's shaving off CNBC, it's shaving off the E Entertainment channel and the Oxygen and the Golf channel also.
	But here's a key point.
	CNBC gets to keep the name NBC.
	Why?
	Because CNBC, even though it's.
	politically a little bit all over the place, It maintains a certain type of business integrity.
	I watch it frequently when I'm on the treadmill.
	I'm catching up with news about markets, about bonds, about cryptocurrencies, and they do a pretty good job.
	And their hosts, one of them appears to be slightly left of center, but one of them appears to be Joe Kernan somewhat right of center.
	And so it's kind of a nice mix and a decent exposition of what's going on in the business world.
	But MSNBC, now they're trying to put a bright face on it.
	Rachel Maddow, Ari Melbourne., Nicole Wallace, we're better than ever.
	We're no longer bound to NBC.
	Well, what these people mean by that is they're going to be more unhinged than usual.
	They're not even going to have any NBC kind of reins to pull them in at all if that was even happening.
	I expect MSNBC or the new name is MS Now.
	MS Now is going to go into a kind of declining spiral.
	Now, like a dead star, stars sometimes burn out completely, but other times they just get dimmer and dimmer and dimmer and dimmer until essentially nothing is left of them.
	In fact, they don't even register a presence in the night sky.
	I think that's what's going to happen to MS and MS now.
	It's going to have, it's got limited influence now, it's going to have less and less and less, and a day will come probably not in the not too distant future when people say MS what?
	Is the continued rift or divide between Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again?
	Can the Fed take the right action at the right time?
	Or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slump, a slowdown?
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	Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast really an old friend of mine from my days in Washington, DC.
	It's Daniel J. Flynn.
	He is author and senior editor of the American Spectator.
	We're going to talk about his new book, an important book about a very important man.
	The book is called The Man Who Invented Conservatism The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
	Now many of you probably may not know of Frank Meyer, may never even have heard the name.
	That's why we have Dan here to straighten us out.
	By the way, you can follow the American Spectator on X at Am Spectator or just spectator dot org.
	Dan, welcome.
	Thanks for joining me.
	You have taken on what some people would think to be a somewhat unlikely, maybe even eccentric topic.
	figure who was relatively well known in the latter half of the twentieth century, somebody who would be certainly familiar by name to people like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and many of us young conservatives from the Reagan days, and yet somebody whose name appears to have largely vanished.
	So let me begin by asking you why did you take on this project?
	You've written a rather hefty book about this man.
	Clearly you think that he is important in and of himself and perhaps in some ways even important to today.
	Why did you decide to write a life, write an interpretive biography of Frank Meyer?
	Well, there's a lot of people out there that write biographies of Churchill or Lincoln or write about World War two.
	I think there's been enough ink spilled about all that.
	We know all there is to know about Lincoln or Churchill.
	And I would rather write about people that should have biographies of them but don't, and Frank Meyer to me, fit that description.
	And the more I got into the research, the more I realized, yes, he definitely did.
	I mean, just to take one example, the, you know, when I got the intelligence files, the declassified files from, from Great Britain of Frank, very early on there is a tapped phone conversation of communists of communists saying, Did you hear about Frank?
	And at that point, Frank had turned against the communists and had testified in the longest, most expensive trial in US history, the Foley Square trial, which put Gus Hall, Frank helped put Gus Hall and Eugene Dennis and other communist leaders in prison.
	And this tapped conversation in England, they said, Did you hear about Frank?
	And they said, Yes, I did.
	What are we going to do?
	Well, I'm already rewriting our history now.
	You're rewriting the students' part, this part about the students' and then, yes, we're rewriting it.
	And so they wrote, you know, just like Stalin airbrushed those commissars out of that famous picture, they're caught dead to rights taking Frank Meyer out of their history.
	And Frank's history in the Communist Party of Great Britain, it is rather shocking.
	It's something that's unknown until I brought out this book.
	And a lot of his stuff in the Conservative movement is unknown too, because his, you know, while William F. Buckley's papers are at Yale or Jim Burnham's papers are at Hoover, Frank's papers were sitting in a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
	And it took me two years, but I found it.
	And in that warehouse, there's just a trove of documents really giving, you know, life to a guy who just pops off the page in Frank Meyer.
	Dan, let me back up a little bit on this conversation because I want to frame intellectually or perhaps philosophically the way I understand Frank Meyer and his importance, and then maybe we can from that fill in some of the details of his life.
	But tell me if you agree with my assessment of who Frank Meyer is and why he is important.
	The Conservative movement and in fact the Reagan Republican movement which has given rise to where we are today was basically could be divided into two camps.
	There was the liberty camp dominated by the libertarians, and there was the virtue camp dominated by the paleoconservatives and the traditionalists.
	The concern of the libertarians was essentially with the idea of freedom, and the concern of the traditionalists was with the idea of civic and moral virtue.
	Now, it is an odd thing to fit these two camps together and in the early days of intellectual conservatism, including National Review, these camps were actually bickering and in some cases openly.
	They're doing open swordsmanship with each other.
	And in fact, to the point where there were, and you know about this probably better than anyone else, Young America's Foundation groups where the traditionalists would kick out the libertarians or vice versa at various campuses.
	And here comes Frank Meyer with a brilliant reconciliation or an attempted reconciliation between these two camps.
	And the reconciliation to put it in a nutshell is this virtue is in fact the goal, but liberty is the necessary means to that goal.
	Why?
	Because without liberty, there really can't be virtue at all.
	A virtue that is somehow imposed or coerced is not a virtue because it's compulsory.
	It's kind of like if your parents grab you by the ears and drag you to do something, you don't deserve any moral credit because they made you do it.
	It's only when you choose to do something voluntarily that you can say, wow, I can feel a sense of moral satisfaction because I did the right thing.
	Now this is a very crude and oversimplified summary, but is this a fruit offul way to talk about the, I think important contribution of Frank Meyer in creating the intellectual foundation for libertarians and conservatives to come together as a team?
	Yeah, Frank called it fusionism and you sum it up very well.
	Another way of putting it would be, you know, if you were conservative in Great Britain, you might want to conserve the aristocracy or the royalty or fox hunts.
	If you were conservative in the United States, what's unique about our country?
	Well, Frank said that the founding was unique and I think most people would agree with that.
	Now, what is the meaning of the founding?
	Frank said, well, it's freedom and I think most people would agree with that.
	Tradition is the founding, and what the founding means is freedom.
	And therefore, his point was that freedom and tradition, they're not in conflict, they're in cooperation.
	In other words, if you take away a couple of thousand years of Western civilization, and you can't expect freedom to flourish at that point because it rests on something that's been being built and built and built.
	And that's basically fusionism.
	Now, what I found in the book is this is an idea that came to him ironically in the Communist Party, that there was something called commun, you know, in the popular front in communism prior to the Hitler-Stalin pact.
	There were phrases like slogans like like, Communism is 20th century Americans.
	That was their heyday in the 40s when the Soviet Union again became allies with the United States or became allies with the United States.
	Frank went to a guy named Earl Browder, who was the chairman of the party, and said, you know, listen, if we want to have a chance at getting bowlers instead of all these hardcore Marxists, we need to fuse the American tradition with Marxism.
	And we need to do this not just on the 4th of July, we need to do this every day of the year.
	And Browder went down that path.
	Now whether he.
	Whether Meyer and him became close eventually.
	Now whether Browder was going on that path anyway, I don't know.
	But the Communist Party, they used to start their meetings with the International.
	All of a sudden, it was with the Star Spangled Banner.
	It used to be General Secretary Browder.
	Now it was President Browder.
	Meyer used to run something called the Chicago Workers' School.
	Sounds very Marxist.
	Well, they started having things like the Jefferson School in New York or the Sam Adams School in Massachusetts.
	So they were trying to go in a way to claim that communism was wrapped up in the American flag.
	Ultimately, Meyer's a smart guy, even if he was an ideologue.
	And he realized, gee, these things really don't fit.
	What does fit?
	And that was the odyssey that he had for the rest of his life.
	And in his mind, what fit there with the American tradition was freedom, not Marxism.
	Now, what caused Meyer to finally and totally break with the Marxist communist world that he was very much a part of and in fact was considered to be a kind of intellectual pioneer in?
	What caused that rupture that made him a man of the right?
	There's a number of things that happened.
	I'll give you the abridged version.
	He was going to join up in the Second World War and he had been recruiting people for the Spanish Civil War and the communists were exhorting people to fight Hitler.
	And Meyer said, I want to go and fight Hitler.
	And they said, no, you stay here.
	And he thought this was strange.
	Why are you telling everyone else to go fight Hitler but you won't let me?
	Finally they let him go.
	He washes out of camp in training.
	He gets an injury.
	But in those five or so months that he's there, he finally meets the proletariat that Marx has been talking about so much.
	Meyer grew up in a hi-hat hotel in Newark, New Jersey.
	He went to Balliol College at Oxford.
	He really had a lot of social insulation.
	And when he finally met these plumbers and br bricklayers, they were not at all like what Marx had said.
	He got an injury.
	He had time to recover and question, and he was isolated from the communists.
	Questioning and communism don't go together.
	In 1945, he wrote a review of Friedrich Hayek's road to serfdom in a publication called The New Masses, which was communist controlled.
	Now, I don't know at any point in the history of the New Masses where they ever gave a favorable review to someone like Friedrich Hayek.
	Myer essentially gave a mixed review.
	It's pretty positive to Hayek.
	And so there were clearly cracks in the armor.
	The communists could see it.
	They went to Elsie Myer, his wife, and said, Listen, Frank's bad news, divorce him and you can stay in the party.
	And that was very scary to her.
	And she told Frank, and they said, Let's get out of here.
	At the same time, it became clear from Europe.
	There was something called the Duclos letter where Stalin sent the message that, hey, when this war ends, there's going to be a Cold War.
	Meyer misinterpreted that.
	He thought that this guy Duclos, this French communist actually wrote it.
	He didn't realize that Stalin wrote it.
	This was an order.
	And so Meyer, Earl Browder, Louis Budenz, a number of other people kind of washed out of the party at that point.
	And it took him about five years.
	But by 1950, it's pretty clear he's a right winger.
	Dan, let's fast forward to today.
	It seems to me that we have.
	We have some of the old schisms of the second half of the 20th century are bursting out again.
	And by that, I mean we see among young people, some of them are pushing in very much a traditionalist direction, they reject the notion that liberty in a sense means that you cannot have a devotion to a substantive good.
	I don't know if you're friends with Larry Arn.
	I've been friends with Larry, Arn recently said something, and I think he thought he was saying something very benign.
	He said basically that we cannot have a Christian society because Jesus' kingdom is not of this earth.
	In a sense, Larry was making a libertarian point.
	Our society needs to be based on liberty.
	But if you look at his feed, he is blasted for this by all kinds of young people saying things like, well, if Jesus' kingdom is not of this earth, how can we have a Christian college?
	Isn't Hillsdale supposed to be a Christian college?
	And so what you get is this a lot of young people these days believe that we who are maybe at the edge of the boomer movement have sold out to the idea of liberty and given up the notion of a substantive destination for America and for Western civilization.
	Can you just kind of drawing on the well of Frank Meyer address this issue?
	Yeah, I mean, there used to be a phrase that I used to chuckle at and you've certainly heard it if you've been around the conservative movement, but don't emancipize the eschaton, which is like don't create heaven on earth because it's a u kind of basic conservatism one hundred and one.
	And if you look at the 20th century, it's a century of people trying to create heaven on earth or to create a perfect race of men.
	And when that happens, when you think you're creating a heaven on earth, you'll do all sorts of hellish things to make that happen.
	And we've seen that in the 20th century.
	I think people who are not old enough to remember the 20th century probably didn't see that.
	Frank, unfortunately, you know, from a very young age, from when he was a teenager, you know, went on that path, went on the path of, you know, not just communism, but sort of dabbling with, with Satanism with, you know, he had a very active social life.
	I mean, I think before I touched on the fact that when he was trying, when he was advocating the violent overthrow of Great Britain, he was having an affair with the Prime Minister's daughter.
	I mean, imagine Lenin or Che or Mao Ce-tung saying, We're going to overthrow this country.
	And at the same time, sneaking into the, you know, he was going to Prime, ten Downing Street.
	I have a letter from Sheila McDonald saying, Come to ten Downing Street.
	Ramsey McDonald's not here.
	Frank was a very brash young man.
	He was a very reckless young man.
	And this led to his deportation from England.
	But he was also a very charismatic figure.
	So when he dropped those ideas that we're talking about, these kind of heaven on earth ideas, he still was the same personality.
	He changed his mind.
	And that personality that's going to take people at Oxford from zero communists in the student body to three hundred, that's the same charismatic personality on the right that's going to make people follow you.
	And that's why he was there at the creation of National Review, American Conservative Union, Philadelphia Society, Young Americans for Freedom.
	You can go on and on, Conservative Party of New York.
	This guy was present at the creation of so much.
	He has his fingerprints on so much of the conservative movement.
	Part of that because he was a brilliant guy and he had the right ideas that we talked about earlier.
	But the other part of it that he was there at the creation of the National Review, the American Conservative Union, Philadelphia Society, and the Young Americans for Freedom.
	But the other part of it that I think people don't explore is that if you're a guy who's looking at your shoes and mumbling, people don't want to follow you.
	But if you have some charisma like Frank had, people will be attracted to you just like they were when he was a communist and they'll be attracted to you on the right.
	I have a letter from James Michener when he was a nobody.
	He writes, Frank, I missed when we were drinking and we need to take a cook's tour this part of the country and I miss the scintillating conversations that we had together.
	That's the kind of thing, the effect that Frank had on people.
	This is years before he writes South Pacific.
	But time and again, I mean, Michael Straight, the publisher of New Republic, remembering when in England, when they were deporting Frank Meyer, him and a whole mob of students marching around London saying free Frank Meyer, free Frank Meyer.
	Sometimes the people that you want in your movement, they may not have had all the good ideas all the way around, but they have something.
	And Frank had a lot of charisma and he had a lot of good ideas.
	I agree.
	And I think, Dan, the interesting thing for me to have seen over many, many years is that there were important figures in the past.
	And there are some recognizable names, but their ideas are not particularly germane to what we're dealing with now.
	But Frank Meyer is an exception to this.
	In fact, he is someone who is not well known, and yet what he had to say is debatable, but is nevertheless very timely, very relevant.
	And so is your book, which is called The Man Who Invented Conservatism The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
	Guys, you've just gotten the tiniest glimpse into Frank Meyer thanks to Dan Flynn's description of him.
	But check out the book.
	It looks great.
	I actually have it sitting on my desk and I'm excited to get into it.
	I'm going to have to wait for a long flight because I realize it's going to be just a kind of time capsule and an intellectual adventure, which of the kind that I really like.
	Guys, I've been talking to Daniel J. Flynn, author and senior editor of the American Spectator.
	Dan, it's a great pleasure.
	Thank you for joining me.
	Thank you so much, Tanesh.
	I appreciate you having me on.
	I'm talking about the character of Reagan.
	The chapter is The Man Behind the Mask, and we're talking about my book, Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
	And one of the remarkable things about Reagan was that he was.
	He was deep down a real loner.
	Now, this is an odd thing to say for many people because outwardly Reagan was very gregarious.
	Sometimes Debbie and Danielle and I we talk about the INTJs, the introverts who are this is a kind of a personality type.
	And with Reagan, he appeared to be an extrovert.
	But there was a part of him that was removed from other people and that existed solely within the corridors of his own mind.
	We see this in the fact that Reagan had a lot of acquaintances, but very few close friends.
	And in this way, Reagan was different than, say, George HW Bush, who had a gift for friendship.
	Bush had so many friends that he would sit on an airplane and for the entire airplane ride, he would write little personal notes to people, remembering things and handwritten notes, and he knew seriously thousands of people around the country.
	You could never say this of Reagan.
	Even when Reagan socialized in Malibu after his presidency, there would be people who'd show up, oh, we're friends, but they weren't Reagan's friends.
	They were Nancy's friends, but not Reagan's.
	Reagan was kind of just present.
	Many entrepreneurs, California millionaires, he had a so called kitchen cabinet that first encouraged him to run for office.
	But they were not Reagan's friends.
	Ed Meese is thought to be one of the closest people to Reagan.
	Subsequently he became, well, he was chief of staff, then he was also head of the DOJ, the Justice Department.
	But Ed Meese once said in a public statement, I think of the Heritage Foundation, I heard him say, he said, You know, Reagan and I, our relationship was not in fact, quote, friendly.
	We were it was totally business.
	He said, I never called him Ron, I called him governor or mister President, and we did not socialize outside of work.
	Patty Davis, Reagan's wayward daughter, said that Reagan only had one friend, and that was the actor Robert Taylor.
	She says that when Robert Taylor died, Reagan kind of broke down at the eulogy when he was giving the eulogy for Robert Taylor.
	And the reason that that stuck out so much is that that was so unusual for Reagan.
	would never break down, but he would never break down over some other person.
	He would normally break down over a challenger disaster or the boys of Point Ahawk, the invasion of Normandy, but not over another individual, and yet he did, apparently, in the case of Robert Taylor.
	I think all of this establishes Reagan as the hero of some old Western movie.
	He was really like that.
	Notice that Westerns are about the solitary man, and that was Reagan.
	And Reagan, in fact, had a codename by the Secret Service, which was well.
	It was, well, you probably already know it, Rawhide, a western name right out of western movies.
	I would, in my time in the Reagan White House give people tours, and the whole White House was like western.
	It was Remington sculptures and paintings and cowboys and Indians and brooks and mountains, and the whole aura was distinctly western.
	And that told me that Reagan kind of yearned for outdoor solitude, where he could be, in a sense, by himself on a horse.
	Reagan liked Camp David, that was a getaway.
	But what he really liked was his own ranch, Rancho del Cielo called The Ranch in the Sky.
	Debbie and I visited there together years ago.
	This actually, I think this was, honey, was that before we even got married?
	I think it might have been.
	We might have been engaged.
	In any case, the Young Americas Foundation gave us a really cool inside tour.
	And it's fun to thumb through Reagan's books and look at how modest and simple that cabin was.
	But it was on six hundred plus acres in the Santa Inez Mountains.
	And that's the part of it that Reagan loved, full of cowboy that Western movies are made of.
	One little tit bit, by the way, from the tour that W and I did, the Reagans, think about it, they were not super rich, but they were millionaires.
	They were not what we would today call billionaires.
	They were not one of Nancy Reagan's good friends was Betsy Bloomingdale, the heiress and the wife of the guy who started Bloomingdale's.
	Nancy Reagan was not in that economic category as Betsy Bloomingdale.
	Betsy Bloomingdale was fabulously wealthy.
	Nancy Reagan was well off.
	And the reason for this is that even though Reagan and Nancy were both actors, they were actors from the old days.
	There was no such thing as five million dollars to make a film.
	Basically the way Reagan was hired is he was hired to make a certain number of films, like you'll do the next eight films for Warner Brothers and we will pay you so much.
	Nancy the same.
	And both Reagan and Nancy were stars, but they were not massive stars of the dimension of a Marilyn Monroe or a Carrie Grant.
	So they were paid well, but not extravagantly.
	And so anyway, Debbie now walkingk in through their humble, really two bedroom, if I remember, cottage in the mountains, and you see their bed, except it's not a bed, it's two beds.
	And how are these two beds brought together?
	Well, the answer is they are tied together with what was it, honey?
	It was yeah, zip ties.
	There were zip ties fastening the two beds together.
	And so we asked the guy who's giving us the tour from Young America's Foundation like, why would they do that?
	And he goes, well, that's because they were were cheap.
	They didn't want to get a single mattress.
	They didn't want to get rid of the two beds and bring in a bigger one, a king size bed, be the California king size.
	No, none of that.
	John Barletta was a secret service agent who protected Reagan, and after Reagan left office, he joined Reagan.
	He stayed with Reagan, he left the Secret Service, he became Reagan's caretaker at the ranch.
	And John Barleta would say that Reagan just built a lot of that stuff on the ranch with his own hands.
	He cut logs, he built fences, and when his favorite dog died, John Barleta said to Reagan, he goes, you know, this is.
	very sad.
	Reagan was aggrieved.
	He goes, let me bury him.
	And Reagan goes, no, no, no, he was a very loyal friend to me.
	I got to bury him myself.
	And so here you have, think about it.
	You have Reagan digging the dog's grave out of a sense of loyalty.
	I'll close this particular segment with an anecdote about Reagan that I think is very telling and captures the essence of his character.
	It's one of my favorite anecdotes about Reagan.
	It's on page two hundred seventeen of my book.
	It involves a woman who was eighty three years old, her name is Francis Green.
	And she lived on social security, she was from Dale City, California, and she was a lifelong Republican.
	Every year she'd send a small amount of money.
	She was on a fixed income, so it was not a lot, it was a few dollars to the RNC.
	One day she gets an invitation from the RNC inviting her to the White House to meet President Reagan.
	So she puts on her best outfit and she takes the train, the train, if you can believe it, cross country from California to Washington.
	What she didn't do was carefully read the direct mail or the so called invitation, because the invitation made it really clear and the reply card made it even more clear that this was a fundraiser, and anyone who comes from it was expected to make a large donation.
	So she missed that part, she thought, Hey, I'm being invited by Reagan to visit the White House, so I'll go.
	So she arrives at the White House on the appointed day and time, and the guards tell her, We're very sorry, but your name is not on the list.
	You can't enter with the group.
	Francis Green was crestfallen, was kind of heartbreaking, but apparently a White House aide found out about this and relayed it to the president's secretary and took it to Reagan.
	So Reagan says, let her in.
	And so they let her in and Francis Green joins the tour.
	And she's with all these wealthy Republicans and she's getting they're going through the blue room and the green room and the yellow room and they are approaching the Oval Office and all of them are like hoping to peek in and maybe maybe.
	Maybe, maybe if they have any good luck, Reagan will be in.
	They can get a glimpse of the president.
	A National Security Council meeting was concluding, and as the military people walk out one by one, suddenly, Frances Greene hears her name.
	Frances Greene, Frances.
	She stunned looks up, out comes Reagan.
	And Reagan goes, Frances, well, if I had known you were coming, I would have come out there to get you myself.
	So can you imagine the impact on this woman of modest means who was not even really expected to get through the security?
	But Reagan gets her in and greets her in person, he brings her into the Oval Office, they chat for a couple of minutes like old friends, and I think if we know Reagan, he would not have considered a single moment of that time to be wasted.

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