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Know Your Enemy

Frank Meyer, Inventor of Conservatism (w/ Daniel J. Flynn)

Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Ronald Reagan, Conservative Movement, Politics, Right Wing, Society & Culture, National Review, Socialists, Reactionaries, News, History, William F Buckley, Conservatism, Leftists Look At Conservatism

4.72.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 105 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Matt and Sam interview Dan Flynn about his extraordinary new biography of Communist-turned-National Review-editor Frank Meyer.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

All right, welcome listeners to episode 119 of No Your Enemy.

0:04.1

I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam at the Bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. Well, this one's a barn burner, so we're not going to tarry with too long of an introduction. It's almost as long as our Buckley episode, and that's fitting because it's about Frank S. Meyer, a close colleague of Buckley's friend, early senior editor at National Review, very importantly, manned the back of the magazine, all the book reviews. So why have we returned to Frank Meyer, Sam? I don't know. I'm just kidding. Because there was this wonderful book that just came out, a biography of Frank

0:37.9

S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn. And we had the author himself on the episode to talk about the life

0:44.7

and times of Frank S. Meyer. Yes, Dan Flynn, he's a senior editor with the American Spectator.

0:50.9

He's authored a number of previous books, often having to do with the right, published

0:55.5

in Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, City Journal. So Dan is a conservative. He was an

1:01.2

ostensible enemy, but in this case, it's kind of the best kind because he's clearly a sicko

1:06.3

for the kind of obsessive, you know, tracking and researching of mid-century conservative intellectuals that we are.

1:14.1

So in that sense, the best of enemies, we'll say.

1:17.2

Yes.

1:17.9

And really, it's a hell of a story.

1:19.5

Like, Dan is a great storyteller.

1:21.7

I think you'll enjoy just listening to him, talk about Frank, as he calls him, which I found lovely.

1:29.2

And we just wanted to mention, too,

1:36.9

that about four years ago now, we did do an episode on Frank Meyer, Just Me and Sam. So if you want to go back and listen to that, feel free. It is the case, and I think Sam would agree with

1:41.3

this, that in the episode that was just me and Sam, there's more on

1:44.9

the theory of fusionism, the kind of theory that Frank Meyer offered that married freedom and

1:50.9

tradition. And this is much more biographically driven in some ways, just because of the incredible

1:56.5

details. Details we did not know the first time around. And I was thinking, Sam, before we hopped on

2:02.6

to record this introduction, that it's a little like reading Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories,

2:07.2

and then reading his later memoir, Christopher and his kind, where Christopher's kind has all the, like,

2:11.7

the sex and gay stuff, that he kind of censored or wrote about obliquely or changed names and

...

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