All right, welcome listeners to episode 47 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm your podcast co-host Matt Sitman, and I'm here with my great friend, Sam Heather Bell.

Hi Matt, welcome back to the podcast in the New Year.

Yeah, that's right. This is our first actual new episode.

Yes, first fresh recording of the new year, 2022. It's going to be a big year,

and we're getting it started the right way. We're the bang.

Yes, what's this episode about, Sam?

Well, we're talking about Joan Didian, the writer who died late last year,

beloved pro-styleist reporter, novelist. But as listeners, we'll perhaps not be surprised to hear,

we're taking the Know Your Enemy approach to her uvra and talking about Joan Didian as a conservative,

which is something that people talk about sometimes, but usually kind of talk around.

But it's something that if you read many of the obituaries, maybe they said,

oh, and by the way, she started her career writing for National Review, but it didn't get a lot

of attention. And when we were thinking about how to do this episode and who to have on,

we were throwing names around. And guess who decided to join us on Know Your Enemy to talk about

Joan Didian's conservative years? The great Sam Tannenhaus, who's really become a friend of the

podcast in some ways, and a friend to Sam and I. And I think both of us had actually talked

to him on the phone within a week or so of Didian dying. And because of his research, he's William

of Buckley, Jr.'s biographer, he's been working on that now for over a decade, I believe.

He knows this material because it's been a part of that research. Because Joan Didian wrote for

National Review, Sam just has a lot of insights. He's clearly read Didian closely over the years,

and just was the perfect guess to have on, I thought. Yeah. For this particular conversation,

...