The Daily Signal - The Daily Signal Presents “The “Signal Sitdown - The Communist Who Invented Modern Conservatism with Daniel Flynn

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

You may not have ever heard the name of a man who was among the most profound intellectuals of the modern ⁠conservative movement⁠ in America. Frank S. Meyer was the man who came up with the idea of fusionism, an alliance between traditionalists and libertarians that underpinned the anti-communist bloc that composed the American Right for the latter half of the 20th century. Ironically enough, Meyer first came up with the idea of fusionism when he was an out-and-proud Communist, though he initially used the term as a unification of the American Founding and communist ideas a la Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”  Daniel Flynn, a Hoover Institute fellow and senior editor of “The American Spectator,” has spent the last few years writing a new biography of Meyer called “The Man Who Invented Conservatism.” His book brings to light new documents and information about Meyer’s life previously unknown, and he joined ⁠“The Signal Sitdown”⁠ to discuss the man-turned-missing-link in the conservative movement. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Giving Tuesday, Cam H is counting on your support. Together, we can forge a better path for mental health by creating a future where Canadians can get the help they need when they need it, no matter who or where they are. From November 25th to December 2nd, your donation will be doubled. That means every dollar goes twice as far to help build a future where no one's seeking help is left behind. Donate today at camh.cage.ca.com slash giving Tuesday. Hi, Bradley Devlin here, politics editor of The Daily Signal, and I'm excited to share this episode of my show with The Daily Signal, called The Signal Sitdown, with you. The Signal Sitdown is one of the Daily Signal's other podcasts, and each show I bring you inside the biggest battles in Washington, D.C.

With some of the biggest names in politics. So if you like what you hear today, make sure you subscribe to the Signal Sitdown for weekly episodes. We'll see you there. Frank operated in 3D. The Communist Party deliberately silenced him. They muted him. They censored him. We know this because British intelligence were tapping their calls.

And when Frank finally broke with the communists, and he testified against them in America, here they are on tape, the British communist saying, well, what are we going to do? We need to rewrite the history of the student movement. And the reason they said this is because Frank is really the founder of the communist movement, the communist student movement in Great Britain.

And he took that, That same energy he brought it over to the conservative side, and that's why he was so effective. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Back Desjardin today, we'd love to talk business. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown, but before we get to the interview,

we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government, and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview. Daniel Flynn, welcome to the Signal Sit Down. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Of course, and we have this labor of love. Yes.

The man who invented conservatism, the unlikely life of Frank S. Meyer. Frank S. Meyer, a figure of a central figure of 20th century conservatism that has largely been memory hold. You think of Russell Kirk, you think of all of these people like William F. Buckley, Jr., but you forget who Frank Meyer was. Frank Meyer was? Who was Frank Meyer? Frank Meyer, I think prior to writing this project, I was apprehensive because I thought of Frank Meyer, and I think most people may think of Frank Meyer as an ideologue, as not even a person, but a personification of an idea that Frank Meyer was fusionism. And just for the uninitiated fusionism is sort of fusionism is like the, you know, if you're an Englishman and you want to conserve, you know, your country, maybe it's the monarchy, maybe it's fox hunts,

maybe it's the aristocracy. If you're an American and you're a conservative, well, you want to conserve the founding. That's what's unique about our culture. And what's special about the founding is freedom. And so you have this union of traditionalists and libertarians. And I think, I mean, a guy I used to see at Heritage, Stan Evans, who was an accolite of Franks. He wrote a book 30 years ago called The Theme is Freedom. And Stan's book is kind of fusionism applied.

And basically his point in that book is that, Freedom rests on thousands of years of tradition in Western civilization. And I think both Frank and Stan would say freedom and tradition, they cooperate. They don't clash. And so I think prior to this book, I was apprehensive because, well, this guy is just an idea guy. And most idea guys that I know, when I look at conservative movement, there's a lot of black and white TV people. The people that are just grayish to me. They're not that interesting.

I like to write about interesting people because it makes my job easier. So true. There's a few people that were in technicolor. I think Wilmore Kendall, Whitaker Chambers, they lived very technical lives, very lively lives. Frank operated in 3D, and I came to find that through research, and because most of the research was hidden, that he had the Communist Party deliberately silenced him, they muted him, they censored him. And we know this because, British intelligence were tapping their calls. And when Frank finally broke with the communists, and he testified against them in America, here they are on tape, the British communist, saying, well, what are we going to do? We need to rewrite the history. I'm already on it. We need to

rewrite the history of the student movement. And the reason they said this is because Frank is really the founder of the communist movement, the communist student movement in Great Britain. and he took that energy that, you know, where he was at Oxford, it went from zero communists amongst the student body to 300. That same energy he brought it over to the conservative side, and that's why he was so effective. When he was interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1961, Wallace said, you know, I would venture to guess maybe a one in a thousand of my viewers knows who Frank Meyer is. But I'm told that William F. Buckley hangs on your every word with regard to editorial advice,

and Barry Goldwater solicits your advice with regard to politics. Tell me who you are. And I think that Frank is a lot more influential than known. And to me, that's a much more interesting biography to write than to write a biography about Lincoln or Churchill, because we know everything there is to know about those guys. So, so much there. Let's get to unpacking it. What a story, you know, something that uniquely defines 20th century conservatism and its development. He's born in the progressive era, 1909, if I'm remembering correctly. He passes away in 72, you know, right at the cusp of post-Goldwater, but kind of right at the cusp of American renewal, the Reagan movement, et cetera, et cetera.

And he goes from, as you said, this communist, this communist organizer when he's in the United Kingdom, to this unseen but incredibly influential member of this conservative slash classically liberal in some sense, slash super traditionalist in other senses, milieu. And you mentioned, you know, you brought up Stan Evans' book, how they don't believe that traditionalism and liberty are necessarily always clashing. But yet, all of these figures in the mid-20th century conservative movement were constantly clashing. with one another. Whether it's, whether it's, Russell Kirk, Buckley, Frank Meyer, you know, I've heard it said that the National Review Masthead was just a way for all these conservative

intellectuals to stop from killing one another. Well, you know, on the Mastead, when Buckley, you know, the big guy at that point, one of the big guys was Russell Kirk. And Buckley desperately wanted Kirk on the Masthead. And Kirk said no. And he, he, he, he, He said, what do you mean? No. Why don't you want to be in the mess? He said, I don't want to appear cheek by jowl with those two guys. And he was talking about Frank Meyer and Frank Chodoroff because the year prior, or not even the year prior, Meyer had written essentially a hit piece on Kirk's ideas. And at that point, Meyer was much more libertarian. I think he shifted slightly towards Kirk's position, just slightly, not glacially. Where's Kirk was sort of always the same. But at that time, Kirk had caught wind that Meyer was doing this. He knew this. He said, my spies have informed me. And he said, who would fund this kind of thing? Who would publish this? And Henry Regnery said, I don't know who would do it. Well, what turned out, because he said, who would publish this as a book? And Regnery said, I don't know who would ever do this. Now, Regnery and Kirk had a slight falling out

later. And irony upon ironies, Regnery publishes in defense of freedom. That's the book that comes out of that initial attack on Kirk, which becomes something much grander than that. We recently lost Ed Fulner, who's obviously one of the founders of Heritage Foundation. I interviewed him for this book, and he said the lasting impression that he had of Frank, the thing that influenced him most, and he said that this came out in Fulner's first law, was that Frank was always about addition and multiplication, and, never about subtraction and division. That may be hard for some people to understand because Frank was always having fights with

Brent Bezell, with Russell Kirk, with a guy named Donaldette Well, Zol. He was constantly having arguments and debates, and he loved that kind of thing. I don't know that the people on the other end of it loved, that Bezell did, but some of the people on the other end of it hated that. Bezal cherished it. Yeah, Bezal cherished it. I think that Kirk hated it, and others hated it. But the point being is that you may not get that impression about Meyer,

that he was always about addition because he was having these kind of fights. But he loved those fights, and he thought that's how his ideas became sharper. He became friends with people that way. And ultimately, Kirk came, you know, came along. He had a thing called the Exchange, which was sort of an early version of a message board, and he would land people jobs in the academy. And Kirk was probably, of all his contacts, was supplying him with more names than anyone. So even that relationship, which initially Kirk was saying,

I won't appear in Nash Review because you have Frank Meyer, even that calm down. And that cooled off. It's a remarkable intersection of politics and philosophy and personality. And so often the personality aspects are left off here. So let's get to how Frank Meyer goes from communist organizer and what he's doing in the UK to reading Hayek, the road served him, to embracing the Buckley movement, et cetera. So he's a young guy going to school, I believe it's Oxford, he's at Oxford, and he's a communist.

He is, and he walks into the Communist Party's office in London one day, and I'm sure all these people were thinking, someday a bunch of young people are gonna walk through that door. Well, that was the day that the young people walked through the door. So Frank walks through the door with a bunch of communists, say, hey, we're here, we're ready to join.

And they're shocked, like this is the fulfillment of their dreams. At Oxford, it went from zero to 300 members in about two years. He found something called the October Club. And he's a revolutionary. He's the leading young communists. He's on the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I mean, to be 22, 22, 23 years old and be on the board of the Communist Party.

So, Frank, as he's doing this, you have the British intelligence following him. They know what he's wearing, what kind of tweed coat he's wearing. They know what bars he drinks at. They know that it would bank his mother banks at. They put a mail coverer on his correspondence. They do a black bag job on his apartment. See, the first three things that you listed, you know, the tweed that he's wearing, his social circles, and the bar that he drinks at.

Those three things are known about every writer. But those next three things, the mail and everything else, seems crazy. It is. But here's the real crazy part. At this time, Meyer is having. a romantic affair with the daughter of their boss. He's messing about with Sheila McDonald, who is the Prime Minister of England's youngest daughter. Ramsey McDonald is the prime minister for almost all the time that Frank Myers in England, and almost for about half of that time,

he's messing around with Sheila McDonald. And I have the letters that show that they're, going on walks. And one of the letters says, hey, listen, my father's not here at 10 Downing Street. Why don't you come over? We'll have dinner. If you don't feel comfortable, we'll go somewhere else, but you know, come on over. The coast is clear. So the idea that you're a communist, you want to overthrow the government and your social circles extending into 10 Downing Street, that's kind of reckless, but that's the kind of guy Frank Meyer was.

Okay, so he's there. He's being surveilled. And then you mentioned in the response to my first question, who was Frank Meyer? Something changes. and he's erased from all of this communist history in the United Kingdom. I mean, explain that. Well, part of what he did in the United Kingdom, you know, eventually he gets deported. And whether he gets deported because he's a communist or whether he gets deported

because he's messing about with the Ramsey McDonald's daughter, we'll never know. I have 160 pages of intelligence from MI6 and MI5 and all sorts of declassified material from the Brits. and it knows all these things about Frank. Doesn't say anything that, yeah, he's with Sheila McDonald's. I would think they would know that because they were following him very closely. He gets kicked out of the country and he works. He's the peace organizer for a guy named Walter Ulbricht, who some of your older viewers would know. He goes to Europe and works for Ulbert.

Ulbricht at this point had already murdered people in Germany. he later was the longest serving dictator in East Germany. He's the guy who built the Berlin Wall. And Meyer is working for him as a peace activist. They're doing peace operate for Stalin, you know. So he gets to the United States. He does more of that. And he spends about 10 years in the American Communist Party.

He never really is at the height in the American Communist Party that he was in England. Right off the bat, he's a big shot in England. It took him some time in America. He's sort of a mid-level kind of person. He's the director of the Chicago Workers School. They wanted him to be the commissar over the Jefferson School in New York. He said, no, no, I don't want to do that. Ultimately, he gets in cozy with Earl Browder, who is the chairman of the Communist Party.

And he encourages Browder. He says, listen, our members, these people that are well-versed in Marxism, they amount to a tiny sliver of the population. If we're going to have an impact, we've got to attract bowlers. We need to tether. we need to fuse Marxism with the American tradition. We need to fuse Marxism, you know, not just on the

4th of July, but every day of the year and that will bring us more people. This is the Howard Zinn project, yes. Yeah, so yeah, Zinn was sort of a low-level guy at that point, but he was involved in that. Anyhow, Browder goes in that direction, whether he goes in that direction for because of Meyer

or he's going in that direction anyways, you know, who knows. But when Browder goes, Browder is on the outs with the communists, and they finally kick him out because there's something called the Duke Close letter, which basically is Stalin signaling all the Western parties that all this cooperation to defeat the Nazis, it's going to end the second the war does. And this year is-1945. Right. This is 1945. This is right as it's about to happen. This is right as it's about to happen. So in late May, this letter gets to America. And Meyer thinks, oh, this is just some French guy telling us that, why do we have to listen to a French guy? other people knew that this is Stalin talking through a French guy and signaling everyone, listen, it's coming. All this cooperation with capitalists, all this cooperation with, you know, Meyer had a course

ready to teach that claimed that Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest president in U.S. history. It was going to be on the presidency of FDR, and this is right after Roosevelt's death. The moment this Ducluss letter happens, or not the moment, within a few weeks, that course is canceled. Because in 1944, the Communist Party, they didn't run a candidate. They all just voted for Roosevelt. But by 1945, they knew there was going to be a Cold War before we did. And so they all shifted. Meyer did not.

And he was a loser in this. That Browder gets kicked out. Meyer basically sort of worms out. Prior to him warming out, they approached his wife Elsie. And this occasionally happened in the Communist Party. They said, listen, your husband's unsalvage. but we think you make a good communist. You need to divorce him.

Their marriage was very tight, and she was like, no. I mean, she didn't say that to them, but they said, let's go. And they leave, they live up in Woodstock, New York. They buy a place up there in 44, and Frank alters his behavior. And one of the things that Frank is known for, one of the eccentricities that he's known for, is he becomes a nocturnal creature at this point. He goes to bed at about seven in the morning. He stays up all night.

and, you know, sleeps until the afternoon, eats dinner maybe at 11 o'clock at night, and at the same time, he obtains a firearm. Because I don't think unreasonably, he wonders, are these people going to come and kill me? Because they have killed other people, not many Americans, but they had killed Americans. And so Frank changes his behavior. He sort of, I don't want to say he goes underground, but he sort of just sort of lays low for a few years. And in 1947, through his friend Louis Boudens, the FBI approach him. And they say, listen, would like for you to talk.

And he says, the most agonizing things of his life. And he finally says, you know, there's no good way. I finally understand what grace is because there is no honorable thing I can do. Either I sell out my country or I sell out my friends. There's no good position. And he decided to go with his country. And he testified. He was called a surprise witness, a mystery witness.

And what at that time was the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history, the Smith Act trial of 1949, started in 1948. And Meyer is one of five witnesses who actually was an earnest communist. Most of the other witnesses are what, you know, how far back your audience goes, but there used to be like a cottage industry. I was a communist for the FBI. And it was a radio show, a TV show, a movie books. And it was about a guy who had infiltrated the Communist Party.

Most of the witnesses were that type of communist. FBI people. But Meyer was one of the few who was an actual communist and he sent Gus Hall to jail. He sent Eugene Dennis to jail. He sent 11 Communist Party leaders to jail in that trial. And throughout much of the 50s, he was testifying at one thing or another, not many more trials, but at various government hearings. So he's, I think, I think let's take one step forward to take a step back. Yeah. The McCarthy era has been written in such a way that says, you know, everything that McCarthy did was bad, the Red Scare never really was real.

At the same time, this comes a little bit later, but at the same time in the 40s, you're seeing, Frank Meyer is seeing all this on the inside. Sure. And knows that he has to make a choice. And I think something that is incredibly understated, even in the conservative movement's education of their young activists and operators, is just how widespread communist agitation and communist activism and communist infiltration was of America's biggest, most powerful, most prominent institutions. Frank's seeing all this on the inside, and he moves away, he worms out, he gets this firearm, he sends communists to jail.

if you could speak to the tentacles of the U.S. Communist Party at this time in U.S. history, I mean, what did it look like? Well, I think its peak is probably right before the Nazi Soviet pact. So Frank judged that the party really didn't lose members because of the Nazi Soviet pact. He said, maybe in New York. But in Chicago, where he was, where isolationist sentiment was high, because there were a lot of polls and there were a lot, not because of a lot of polls,

but because there were a lot of, you know, Chicago Tribune, McCormick and all that. You know, it was more isolationist than that part of the country, that they didn't really lose many members at all. And so at that point, it's at its peak. But what happened, even if they didn't lose a lot of members,

they had a lot of mainstream credibility. They would have things like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi Committee, and then that changes overnight to some innocuous name. They had a group that, Frank was heavily involved with, was almost at some of the founding meetings, at least in Europe, the League Against War and Fascism. Well, they had to change their name because now the fascists were aligned with the communist. So what it did was the people in the mainstream left, progressives and other people who were not communists, all of a sudden saw them for what they were

because here they are aligning with the Nazis. It's not like they were enthusiastic about it, but they aligned with Adolf Hitler. And so they realized that these people were just puppets for Stalin. They would do anything for the Soviet Union and Stalin. They had no sort of independence of mind. And so even if they didn't lose a lot of members because of that, they lost credibility and they lost standing in the left. Not to say that they were part of the mainstream left,

but it was almost getting to that point that they were within that continuum. after that point, the mainstream left looked on him with great suspicion. As far as their influence in the government, I mean, Frank wasn't part of the underground Communist Party. He was part of the Open Party. However, he knew people in the underground, and he did a little bit of stuff that, it wasn't underground stuff, but like, you know, sort of touching upon it. We know now, I mean, there were hundreds of people, and we know that they were in,

very high positions, Harry Dexter White or Alger Hiss, who was a pretty high-ranking guy in the State Department. There were a lot of people at Los Alamos that gave technical secrets, both on the bomb, but also on mainstream weapons to the Soviet Union. They got the formula for greenbacks that we were printing in our zone in Germany, and so they just started printing our money and paying their soldiers with it. They did a lot of very shade, the Soviets did a lot of shady things because Americans enabled them to. Frank, you know, it wasn't until, you know, Frank in 45 sort of becomes a Truman Democrat.

He's not really a conservative until 1950. But if you look at the initial masthead of National Review, that's probably the best barometer of how widespread communist infiltration went because so many of these people were former communists. You know, in those years, let's say the first five or ten years of National Review, You had people like Max Eastman who was on the left, was a critic of communism. But he came over from the left. Whitaker Chambers, who was part of the underground.

James Burnham was a Trotskyist, was a big advisor to Trotsky, was someone that, and then Trotsky sort of has a falling out with him or he has a falling out with him. Everyone that's a main line figure at National Review is a big figure, other than William F. Buckley, the editor, came over from the left. Vili Shlam, the guy whose idea National Review was, he had met Lenin at the Kremlin when he was 16. So almost everyone who was a power player at National Review was involved in disillusioned, at least on the left, and a lot of them were involved in the Communist Party. So let's get to that disillusionment. First, Frank's conversion.

And then we'll talk about the forces that generally propelled all these people to go from this hard left to the hard right. I mean, not only are they adopting a different politics, they're adopting different values. They're adopting a different philosophy of history. They're adopting a whole suite of new ideas and their lives. I mean, Frank changes, I think, in the most eccentric ways. Yes. But their lives all change radically. So Frank converts.

Yeah. So basically, a few things happen. One, Frank was the mentor of a guy named John Cornford in England. John Cornford becomes the martyr icon. of the communist movement in England. Frank basically grooms him to be a successor. And when he leaves England, Cornford becomes a leader of the young communist there. Ultimately, Cornford gets killed in the Spanish Civil War a day after his 21st birthday. Meyer was very tight with this guy. And if there was no Frank Meyer, John Cornford, who was the grandson of Charles,

a great grandson of Charles Darwin, he's never going to go and fight in Spain. It was Frank Meyer's influence that brought him into that world, I have to think that Frank felt a great deal of guilt. He was also at the same time a recruiter sending Americans over to Spain, and so undoubtedly some of those guys probably died. When the Second World War breaks out and the Nazi Soviet pack falls apart, Frank wants to sign up for the military. And his handler says, no, we need you here. He says, no, no, no, you're exhorting everyone to go and fight. I need to go over there and fight. no, no, no, no. So this went on for about, I don't know, eight months or something like that, six months. And finally, the guy says, you want to go, go. And Frank washes out of the military. But what happened twofold. One, he realized there's sort of an hypocrisy, the Soviet Union telling everyone to go fight Hitler, but they want to keep their own guys there. The second thing is he meets regular people for the first time. Frank had a lot of social isolation. Frank lived in a very high hat hotel in Newark. New Jersey. His family's name had been on a department store there. He went to Balliol College

at Oxford. He didn't, you know, cavort much amongst the Hoy-Polloy. But all of a sudden, he's in a squad bay, and there's all these guys that are electricians and carpenters, and they work in factories, and he realizes, gee, the proletariat is not what Marx made it out to be. That's the second thing that happens. The third thing that happens, he gets a training injury. He recuperates for a year and a half. He gets washed out of the army, and separation doesn't work well for a communist. He starts to question. Questioning in communism don't go together. He gets brought back in because Browder does adopt his position of Americanizing the Communist Party. I think he would have left if Browder didn't do that. This happens with Elsie, where they tried to break apart their

marriage. And then finally, you have Browder, who's kind of his idol at that point. At that point, getting tossed unceremoniously, and Myers is like, well, this isn't the place for me. Interestingly, what happened this time when there was the Americanization of the party and there was a little bit more freedom, Frank reviewed a book for New Masses, which essentially was a communist publication. And in communist publications, you don't get conservative, free market thinkers, libertarian thinkers, getting a fair hearing. Frank writes a review of the road to serfdom that I guess you'd call it a mixed review, but it's quite positive in parts, which is highly unusual that you would have Friedrich Hayek being reviewed

in a somewhat positive way in a communist publication. He reads the road to serfdom. It floors him. A few years later, he read ideas have consequences by Richard Weaver. That also has a big impact on him. But it's this weird time between the Cold War and before the Duclis letter and during the time when the Soviets are aligned with us, that you have this freedom. The Soviets, you know, supposedly they abolished the common turn. The American Communist Party became the American Communist Political Association. So there's this sort of freedom. And Frank thinks it's real. And he writes this sort of somewhat paused review of the Hayek book. Had that review been delayed a week, it would have never been published because Stalin had sent out his order through the

Duke-Close letter. We're not cooperating with these people anymore. But it came out the week that it did. And so that, you know, reading Hayek had a profound influence on him. I mean, he's not the first guy to read the road to serfdom to come away with it thinking, gee, maybe my ideas were wrong all along. Yeah. And generally, all of these guys having these similar conversions, I mean, Frank's story is particularly interesting, but generally, aside from the Communist Party dynamics, aside from the due close letter, I mean, you have to have a complete and total collapse of what you view to be the central conflict in American society, in society writ large all over the world. And that's that class conflict.

You have to kind of shed that. How do these, this group of men go from being all in on communism and class conflict to shedding that ideology? What forces are at play there? Are they sensing that this Cold War that they're going to talk about, that they talk about in the close letter is coming and so then they have to make a choice. Is this like a political decision or is it more of a philosophical decision if that makes sense? A political decision in that they are, they are choosing to side as Frank did in those hearings with country over old communist friends. And that's a question of political prudence or is it a question of philosophy that something

kind of changed in all these guys overnight? It's a good question. It's a question a conservative might ask, but a communist is not going to see it the way you're asking it. I have a letter correspondence from Leo Strauss and Frank Meyer that didn't make it into the book. I'll write about it at some point. And Strauss asks about whether Khrushchev is going to have, be the preeminent philosophical theoretician of communism and also have the political power because that's, of course, what Stalin did. And Frank was like, well, listen, and he was kind to him, but he said, you know, he's, you know, it doesn't work that way. The guy that has the political power is going to be the chief theoretician.

Whether he is or not, whether someone's behind him whispering in his ear, it doesn't matter. But the way communism is constructed, those two things go together. So Frank's choice and the choice of anyone else who is a communist, those things would be tethered in their minds, even if they're wrong, but they would think they're the same thing. So for Frank, it was a number of things. for Jim Burnham, and Burnham was a Trotskyist, but, you know, I think if you're around Trotsky for long enough, you're going to say this guy's a jerk. It's probably going to be a personality conflict. You don't want to be around him. There's a, you know, I'm not saying Stalin was good for killing him, but like, listen, there's a reason they got fed up with this guy. You know, so there's, there's all sorts of reasons why,

and some of these other characters that I mentioned, they may have been on the left, but they weren't as heavily into it as Frank was or Whitaker Chambers was. And so these guys, this is their life. This was their, you know, Frank would have people come in. Nelson Algren, the author from Chicago, came in and Frank just thought he was a goofball. And they weren't looking for numbers. They weren't looking for, they were looking for committed people who would become part of the communist cadre like Frank was. And when Frank realized this guy was, you know, a dilettante or whatever, get lost. You know, don't come around here anymore. We don't want you. We don't need you. They were hardcore ideologues who were committed and they could sniff you out if you didn't have the commitment and you wouldn't have have gone up the ladder.

You've referenced it a few times and I've held back. Yes. But this was, as we said at the beginning, a labor of love, years in the making, no book is that thick. If you're not loving it and getting a lot of really original interesting information, you have this. folder here in front of you. You've gotten a lot of files. Yes. Files that we previously didn't really even know existed. So this project, before we get to fusionism itself, the future of American fusionism on the right, all this stuff, talk about the process of writing this book and show us a few things from what you brought today. I see some green pen there. Yeah,

The green pen is a tell. A couple of things happened with the federal government. One was COVID, and it shut down pretty much all the archives around the United States shut down at the very time I was going to go look at them. And the other was when I made my FOIA request in 2021, I got back a note saying, in 2022, saying we can get you Frank's FBI files. But we're now processing requests from 2014. it's going to take a little longer because of COVID.

In other words, check back with us in the 2030s. And, well, you know, this is supposed to, FOIA is supposed to speed things up. But, you know, it's going to be 10 years or something is what they basically said. So I was panicking because I didn't want to write a junk book. And I noticed at Hoover what they purported to be, and I'm a Hoover visiting fellow. I do so much research at Hoover. Hoover is amazing place. To be in that basement in that archive, the reading room down there, it's one of my favorite places in the world.

So this isn't a knock on Hoover or anything like that, but what purported to be the Frank Meyer papers, I sense was not. I've been doing archival work for about a quarter century with kind of increasing intensity the last decade or so. And there's a rhythm to what you see in someone's papers. And that rhythm was not there with Franks. Now, sometimes there's... When you say rhythm, what do you mean by that? Well, there would usually be someone's letters in there, right? and there were no letters from Frank or to Frank.

And I thought- Facts of professional stuff and personal things. Yeah. You can, you can- What would you keep over the course of a lifetime? You'd probably keep your tax returns. You'd probably keep certain, back then you would keep your correspondence. Right.

And so these kind of things weren't there. And what was there was a lot of newspaper clipping, some about Frank, but a lot of them were things that Frank had clipped. Because, you know, I mean, I'm old enough that prior to the internet, I used to have file folders. if I wrote about, let's say I wrote about the IRS, I'd keep a file on the IRS. They'd get a file on me. It's fair, right? But I keep the file on the IRS. And when I'd write about the IRS two years from then, I'd go back to that file for, that would be the context of the article. And most of the stuff out there,

a lot of the stuff out there was that. And if you want to write a biography of someone, that's the least important stuff, what someone clipped from the newspaper. Who cares about that? So I started calling around, almost wishing into existence Frank's papers, because I was desperate. and I started calling people. And, hey, do you have any stuff laying around? Do you know where the stuff is? And I got the deed to Frank's house. I got some letters from Frank.

James and Campaign gave me some letters between him and Frank when he was editing. He came in late as an editor of In Defensive Freedom. So some of that stuff was kind of valuable. I got some letters, Kendall talking about Meyer. But it wasn't enough to write a book. So I kept asking around. And finally, John, Frank's son said, well, you know, we did sell the house and all of its contacts to this couple.

David's and Cabbage and Karen Myers, who have become, you know, wonderful friends of mine. And so I called David and I said, hey, you know, I understand you bought the house, so we don't own the house anymore. And he said, he donated the papers to Stanford. And I said, no, you didn't. He said, yes, I did. I said, no, no, no, no, you donated some. I'm not accusing of doing anything.

But I think you inadvertently kept some. And he said, no, no, no. And so this went on for a few months. And finally, he said, well, you know, we do have a warehouse. And I said, David, ding-k-ding, ding. Take me to your warehouse. Like, this should have been the first thing you said to me. And just like John should have talked about David and Karen on our first conversation.

And that took a few months to kind of negotiate. And finally, in August of 2022, and part of his rationale was, listen, there's a thousand boxes in there. No one can open them all. I said, no, I will do this. I will do this. And so I went in there. There were 663 boxes. Took me three days.

I went through every box. Fifteen of the boxes were Frank Meyer's stuff. They were, you know, probably in excess of 100,000 letters. All of his tax returns from 1940 to 1972 when he dies. His dance cards from London School of Economics. I know who he danced with. I know what songs they danced to. I have his birth certificate.

I know who he lost his virginity to. I know what his IQ score was. It is detailed. It is that detailed. And it took me... A little too detailed. A little too detailed. That's right.

And it took me 19 months to go through all of those documents, type in notes. And that is, you know, about half of the book is what came out of that warehouse. And this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You know, if you're a writer, this isn't going to happen. Like you're going to wish into existence an archive just because everything's closed down. and you can't write your book. Well, that's what happened. God answers prayers sometimes.

And so part of it was that. But then there was, you know, there was about 50 or something collections around the world, UK, Canada, United States, around that world, where I got material from. So I got some valuable material when I went to England. And there were all sorts of archives like Sterling and Beinke at Yale and Hoover,

Library of Congress here in D.C., there was a Jewish library up in New Jersey that had a lot of good material on a young Frank Meyer, including his first article he ever wrote for his temple newspaper when he was 14 years old. So there was a lot of stuff not in that collection that I got elsewhere that was also quite detailed that I'm quite proud of as well. But really this book without Davids and Cabbage and Karen Myers keeping that stuff, even if they didn't know they had at all, them keeping it allowed this book to happen. I don't want to distract from the book. I mean, but the Frank's story is the real story,

but there's a cool little side story of how this book was written. Yeah, I mean, it's a recovering of history from an essential time in the American conservative movement. So show us something here. Well, I'll just go ahead and hold that up. Older people would know what this means, but this is green ink. There's one guy who wrote in Green Inc, and that's Wilmore Kendall. And Kendall's, you know, there's a, I have a thousand letters between Kendall and Meyer. And Kendall's letters, I would say in the collection, the two best folders are Rose Wilder Lane, because she wrote, she was really a mentor to Frank, and she wrote really dense, dense in a good way, philosophical letters that anyone reading it would be, you know, provoked into having thoughts.

Kendall's letters are a little different. Now, Kendall was a supremely intelligent guy, but his letters are gossipy. His letters are, you know, picking fights. And because they're friends, he's saying things like, you know, Frank's the book review editor at National Review. He's saying, listen, I'm sorry. I couldn't turn in my book review.

And I'm afraid I don't have a good excuse this time. Remember that 19-year-old co-ed I told you about? Well, she showed up at my door again. and this time, I didn't turn her away. Oh, gosh. And so there's stuff like that where Kendall is struggling with alcoholism. Kendall saying, listen, I'm on a health kick. I just cut down.

I'm now smoking a pack of cigarettes a day down from my normal 70 cigarettes. Oh, my gosh. And so these guys really were madmen. You know the show Mad Men. They were into, a lot of them were into Mad Men activities. For Kendall, that's a lot of wine women in song. For Meyer, it's kind of drinking and holding court at his place. place a little bit different.

Living in the night, yes. Living in the night. And so they were leading these sort of exciting lives at the same time they were shaping the post-war conservative movement. So square that circle for me, you know? How do these men live such chaotic, disordered lives and yet at the same time are talking about civilizational order? you know like there's something you know perhaps you can just chalk it up to a more elite mentality

where you know certain members of the elites are are going to have these eccentricities but that doesn't mean that they are writing or speaking eloquently about things that they wish they would they'd see more reflected in their own life sure but but i mean if the founders of the conservative movement are not turning away 19-year-old coeds when they come knocking, that's kind of disappointing, is it not? Well, Kendall is his own special case. And I had asked Neil Freeman, who was a friend, you know, close friend of Bill Buckley's, was with Buckley for years and years and years as a confidant, advisor, I don't know,

whatever you want to call it. I said, Neil, why did they let this guy hang around for so long? Because at a certain point, Buckley writes him kind of a dear John letter that is absolutely brutal. It is one of the most brutal things that I've ever read. And a little of it's in the book. But that's a letter that people had before I stumbled upon it. So that's out there. Why did Buckley?

And he said, well, Dan, there were a lot of brilliant people around early National Review and the early conservative movement. There was one genius. And that was Wilmer Kendall. And my interpretation of that is that you've certainly. seen beautiful women. They can get away with a lot. They can say anything come out of them all and everyone's, oh, that's brilliant that you just said that. The smartest guy in the room is a lot like a beautiful woman and that he can get away with all sorts of things. People will tolerate him. He was an interesting guy. He was a fun guy. But he was also someone who eventually turned on all

his friends, his family members. Kendall was a special case. So although, you know, they're, they're all kind of sort of in the great tradition. They're all kind of drinking and debating and talking in Myers' living room. But Kendall himself was, you know, he was on an abuse. He was a hardcore alcoholic, which is different from someone like Frank nursing a couple of scotches at night and just Frank, I should say about alcohol. Later, when drugs become an issue, just as an aside, Frank says, listen, marijuana, that's an Eastern drug. Alcohol is the Western drug. Marijuana, pot, all this kind of hallucinogens, that anesthetizes the mind. Alcohol stimulates conversation. Alcohol and nicotine, yes. Yes. There's no surprise that this man converted

to become a Catholic. As a Catholic convert myself. Yes. Yes. So they, you know, they did have Mad Men qualities to them. And then there were other people that led kind of domestic existences. I mean, Jim Burnham, as brilliant as he is, and if you read like the manager revolution, that's not so much profound as it is prophecy. It's a great book. And Burnham was completely brilliant. But his life was boring.

He led a milk toast existence in Kent, Connecticut with his wife and his kid. Yeah, the Burnham book isn't this thick, right? No, I don't think so. But, you know, and it's a more intellectual book. But Frank lived a life. Like I said, he lived in 3D. He pops off the page, and that's why writing a book like that, it's easy. I mean, when he's a kid and he's dating the prime minister's daughter,

he's telling other girlfriends, listen, I'm non-monogamous. Why can't you accept me for who I am? And for that woman, the letters stop unsurprisingly. He's dating a lot of women, and a lot of them are famous women. I think there's three or four women that he dated. that have Wikipedia entries. Do you know how many women from the 1920s and 30s have Wikipedia entries? Right.

So he was, you don't, I mean, looking at the guy, you wouldn't think he was a playboy or a lady's man, but he had a gift, a social gift, not just with women, but if you, I have a letter from a prep school teacher who had hung out with Frank for, you know, extended period of time when he was home. And he writes Frank a letter and says, listen, I just long for these scintillating conversations. that we had. I love it when you're drunk because you get up on, you start giving your soapbox, give a speech. Let's take a Cook's tour this part of the country. These books that you recommend and I read them, let's hang out. It's a sycophantic letter. He's like begging Frank to hang

out with him. That guy was James Mitchner. James Mitcher, who later, you know, South Pacific and all these, you know, so he is, you know, leading figure and sort of popular fiction in the country. I don't think, I don't think of him as a great writer or anything like that. But a lot of lot of people love James Mitchner, and of course, what became South Pacific to play based on his work. Here he is as a prep school teacher begging to hang out with Frank Meyer. So it wasn't just women wanted to be around this guy, but men wanted to hang out with him too. And you have to ask yourself, well, gee, if this guy had so much success as an organizer in England, he had so much success in the United States, I think that's the guy you want on your side. You don't want to

follow some nerd. You want to follow some guy that people want to hang out with. And that was Frank Meyer. So I'm going to, I'm going to open the book real quick to, I thought, just a great little line that you had in the introduction was, we'll edit all my silence at some point. That's okay. But there was, there's a little line that you say, charisma creates charisma. Oh, that's, yeah, that's in the end. That's in the end. That's in the end. So, yeah, unfortunately, I mean, we talked about a little bit earlier, John Cornford follows him. And, and, And Cornford gets killed. Other people probably get killed going over to Spain. And Meyer is the pied piper of communism in Great Britain. It goes from nothing to a big deal. Great Depression had an effect on that too. But Frank kind of came along at the right time.

There was another guy named Jack Dunham, who was sort of a low-level communist, but a lifetime communist in England. And after Frank dies, he writes Elsie a letter and says, I wrote him a real, and I have his nasty letter, but I wrote him in a real nastiest letter I could think of when he testified against the communists. I never want to talk to him again,

but the reality was, Frank saved my life. Frank brought me into communism. My whole wife, he gave my life meaning, and I just was so sad that he had left communism. Now, the reality was, Frank destroyed this guy's life. He was a complete loser. R.W. Southern, at a public banquet where this guy was at, he said, I've never known a more unsuccessful person than you.

He said this publicly in front of everyone. And it was painful because it was true. This guy, because he was communist his whole life, believed that Frank Meyer saved his life. It didn't. But then you have other people, strangers who never even knew Frank Meyer, that were just bawling their eyes out when he died because they felt like they knew him. They felt like in the pages of National Review, this guy gets me. This guy gets it, reading principles and heresies his column or reading his book in defense of freedom, that they thought, here's a guy who finally gets it. and even if they hadn't met him, Frank's charisma even touched them.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, the parisocial relationship that a good opinion columnist has with his audience. Well, a podcaster, I think, especially people tune in. Sometimes I want to be friends with this guy. Right, right. No, and it's actually, you know, one of the reasons that you get drawn into this writing business or this podcasting business in the first place is you hear people on the radio that you want

to emulate. There's a reason why the studios that we sit in around here are named the Rush Limbaugh studio. Okay. But let's get to, in defense of freedom, a conservative credo. Let's get into the fusionism. We talked a little bit about the fusionism that he was envisioning for the communists and marrying it to the American tradition. He has this conversion. And he comes up with the fusionism that we know now from the later 20th century conservative movement. And this is this marriage between, as you've put it, traditionalism and liberal. It's the three-legged stool of the religious right or social right, the national security hawks and the libertarian economics folks all meshed together against anti-communist, against communism and against the Soviet Union. Talk about in defense of freedom and how he comes up with fusionism. Well, I mean, probably one of the more controversial parts of the book is that I you know, I believe that. but Frank came up with fusionism in the Communist Party. And I believe that because I have a letter that I got at Syracuse University.

I had researched Earl Browder in like 2006 or 2007. So I had a lot of stuff on Browder already. But I got this letter later on with Frank is writing him saying we need to fuse Marxism with the American tradition. And he uses the variant of the word fusionism again. He's using the same template that he used for fusionism later. He's using the same word. But inevitably what's going to happen,

And if you try to merge Marxism with the American tradition, it's going to run into a brick wall. Those two things don't go together. Frank, I suspect, came to that conclusion. What does go with the American tradition? And there goes an intellectual journey. And for Frank, it was freedom. Frank was always a more libertarianish conservative. I don't say, Murray Rothbard said Frank was just a libertarian.

He's a libertarian who was anti-communist. I don't, I think Rothbart said that because they were, close friends. Well, and Murray was always looking for friends. Well, I don't know. Murray was looking for enemies too. He was looking for enemies too. But there was a certain point where he was, I think everyone decided to make Rothbard their punching bag. And so he would kind of grapple on to some folks that he... Correct. And Meyer and Rothbard remained friends till Meyer's death. And Rothbard always spoke favorably of Meyer. I have correspondence between them as well, including he uses Meyer as a sounding board about Ein Rand.

And to me, that's very exciting because Rothberg doesn't write about Rand until 72. Here he is in 57, 58, talking about Rand in these letters that I found in the warehouse. So with regard to indefensive freedom, in regard to fusionism, there's this, you know, I hear from various people that, oh, Frank didn't like the term fusionism. Well, if he didn't like it, why did he keep using it? I don't know. He used it a lot. at a certain point, maybe he gets sick of it. But he uses it in the Communist Party in 43 or 44.

He uses it later in a piece in the American Mercury. And then he uses it still later. The philosophy somewhat develops. And ultimately, you know, it's not just that freedom goes with, you know, the tradition buttresses freedom. But that you don't have, you know, his point is that libertarianism is a good political philosophy, but it's not enough to govern your soul. And that's where virtue comes in. And at the same time, compulsion, if you're compelling people to be virtuous, that's not true virtue anyway. So all of this comes to fruition in defense of freedom. This is sort of his manifesto.

I'll call it his big book. It's a slim book. But by big book, this is his kind of statement. And in that book, he lays out sort of the three, what he considers legitimate functions of the government, which is federal government, which is police powers, to adjudicate disputes through judiciary and to defend the country with some type of army.

Anything beyond that, it's not going to pass muster with Frank Meyer. So, in other words, like 75% of the things that Washington does, Frank would be against. And I think a lot of people in the conservative movement now would find agreement with Frank in that 75 to 80% of what the federal government does in Washington, D.C., it has no business doing, if you are people of the right. But what they might push back on Frank, and there's been a lot of pushback on fusionism today. And we'll return to this into a second, but I think it's definitely an open question on how Frank would think about fusionism as it operates to, day in the conservative movement where we're entering maybe a new type of fusionism, where certain gatekeepers have created a fusionism that is more dogmatic and ossified than maybe he would

have preferred. But one thing that they might point out is if your point, Mr. Meyer, is that the government has no legitimate authority beyond these three functions and that virtue is an individual phenomenon. And that is, you know, one of his critiques of the new conservatives, and we called them the new conservatives in the 60s, is that they viewed the central power of the state as a mean to, as a way to inculcate that virtue. And you say, well, you've just pointed out that there's a legal system, that there's policing powers, and that there's a defense of a country. So you've admitted that the defense of the country, the country is a specific thing. Sure. You've admitted that there is.

a police function, and if there's going to be a legal system that defends that police function, then you've accepted that law is not only, that law is a ruler, it is a curb, and it is a mirror, and it's reflecting societal goods that you hope the individual reflects for sure, but it's reflecting these higher orders in society. They would say, this is, this, this, this, This doesn't seem like you are, you're playing straight with us here, Mr. Meyer. If, you know, I think Russell Kirk has submitted objections to what he says in this vein. Brent Bozell in particular, there's one essay that I like from Brent Bozell, I believe it's a National Review, where he talks about the difference between divorce laws in Spain versus the United States.

And he says, the United States, there's no fault divorce. Yeah. And in Spain, there's all these penalties that come around with. trying to divorce your wife. Well, does the person in America who stays with his wife make a more virtuous decision than the Spaniard who stays with his wife because there are incentives encouraging him not to do so, right? Is that compulsion? I just got back. There's a lot there, but you see what I'm saying. I just got back from Spain a few weeks ago and amazingly, you know, like everywhere went, all the people were socialist. Now I was in Barcelona and places like that. But it shows you

that what Bozell was looking at and thinking was the ideal state for the West, and my letters show that he thought that, it didn't last. It could last under the thumb of Franco, but the second he lifts his thumb, that disappears, which I think validates Frank's point. Bezell wanted Frank to come to Spain, and at that point, Kendall and Bezell were both in Spain, and he said, listen, Meyer, I no longer want to be president of the United States. I want to be such and such office in Spain. This is the only country, Bezell says, that's fit to save the West. And Myers perplexed at this and says, you know, I don't see the world the way you do. What do you propose to do?

Run National Review from Madrid. But Bezell, and to some extent, Kendall, were really won over by Spain. And I think particularly Bezell, I mean, he was never the same. One year he writes Conscious of a Conservative, which is very much a Meyerite book, which is very much a libertarianish conservative book. And the next year, he is saying in the letters that I have to Meyer that this guy is our Frankenstein, that we've created a Frankenstein.

So, I mean, one of the cool things about the book is you have all this behind-the-scenes stuff where we all think of Goldwater as a National Review creation, but behind the scenes, all of them had misgivings. And we're wondering, by my 1964, Meyer, and a lot of them were just so gung-ho, But earlier they had misgivings. I think Spain disproves Bezell's point, what has happened with Spain? Because you can force these people to do whatever you want to force them to do,

no fault, you know, have fault, whatever. Whatever's the opposite of no fault divorce. Penalties for divorce. Penalties for divorce. You know, I went to see some, I went to Montserrat and seen some Catholic cathedrals and things like that. These are tourist attractions now. I don't know that these people are going to church the way they were doing. so under Franco. So you can force people to do whatever you want and think that that's virtue.

But the second you take the thumb off the scale, you're going to see something different. And I think that was Myers' point. And Spain, I think, proves his point. So the philosophical underpinnings, I think we have a lot of dialogue about on the right to this day. Of course. But there is a politically practical reason for this alignment. And the question that a lot of conservatives are asking today is, is this alignment still functional? Or are we looking for different legs of a stool in the Trump era? Yeah, I think there was always that question about whether this was just some utilitarian construct, where these are two disparate groups, traditionalists and libertarians, and it's a forced marriage between them. And people have to come to their own conclusions on that.

I think the way that Meyer puts it, to me it's in its distilled form, like we talked earlier in the show, it makes sense to me that if you're a traditionalist in this country, the main thing you want to conserve is the founding, because that's what's unique to this country. And the founding does mean freedom. So in that sense, in that very simple, distilled form, I think it's hard to argue with fusionism. problems arise when you start, fusionism usually isn't that simple. You start bringing all sorts of other things into it. The three-legged stool, I think, is the popular understanding of fusionism, but I don't think Frank, that was Frank's point.

And I think that's a more sort of utilitarian point. And that is a more forced marriage kind of thing. Although for an outsider, that's what fusionism look like. I get that. Times change. I don't know if principles do. I think unfortunately, principles, people aren't reading books the way they read books back then. And so where are you getting your ideas?

You're getting it from Twitter. Are you getting it from Fox News or cable news or whatever? That's a little bit different from getting it from a book that a guy's thought about for five years. Or in the case of Indivance of Freedom, I think that was about seven years in the making for 180 page book or something like that. So I think now, for better and worse, conservatives have been influenced by people on TV, by charismatic leaders and not by principles that are written down. And I don't, that may be one of the reasons why fusionism is not, you know, from 19, from the early, from Goldwater through Reagan, this was. sort of the default conservative perspective. And it was so powerful that even people had never heard of Frank Meyer had never heard of fusionism. That was kind of their perspective too. Certainly

Reagan's perspective. Times have changed. In some ways, I don't like to hold through the whole connofractual thing. But if you look, you know, like if you look at the correspondence between Meyer and Rose Wilder Lane, she calls him a restrictionist. So he's used on immigration, clearly, we're not what you would think of a typical libertarian. His views on foreign policy, although he was a fierce cold warrior, and at certain points was, you know, debating the idea of a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and whether that would be a good thing. So that's not very libertarian. However, if you look at, take one example, Henry Kissinger, when he was the incoming national security advisor to Richard Nixon, in December of 68, the administration's a month away, two months away from, convening, and he asked Meyer, what should we do? What should we do on foreign policy? And Meyer's answer

is, well, listen, we should be governed by the national interests of the United States in a very firm way. But we have this problem. There is a messianic crusader state that's out to convert the world to Soviet communism. They're essentially out to destroy the world. And so we have to take care of this. This sort of nudges, disorients our foreign policy. But if this country were not in existence, foreign aid, the United Nations, even the war in Vietnam, all of this would be ridiculous, that another country's social system would be our concern would be completely preposterous. It's just the existence of the Soviet Union that makes us do this. And when they go away and they will go away, this is what our foreign policy should be. Well, and that's why you have the anti-communist alliance forms, right?

is that you have thinkers like Meyer and even, you know, more contemporary, but Pap Buchanan, all agreeing on the nature of the threat that the Soviet Union poses, I think a big fracturing point happens when leaders like Frank Meyer passed the torch to a new generation that held on to fusionism or conservatarianism or whatever you want to call it as this as this dogma. Sure. Any dogma is a kind of a bad idea. And something that a lot of these guys would say, no, no, no, no, we can't turn into that. Reaganism, like, don't turn Reagan into an ism. Reagan was a man. He was a statesman. And it under, and by turning him into an ism,

you're actually underappreciate him. This is my point in my book is that I think for the longest time, and I may have said this earlier, Frank was not a person. Frank was a personification of an idea. When you thought of Frank Meyer, you thought of fusionism. That's all you were. you thought of. And the whole point of my book is there's this interesting character who had many loves, who had many friendships, there were betrayals, there were feuds, there was all sorts of action going on with this guy. I mean, the story of his friendship with Eugene O'Neill Jr. And his interactions with Eugene O'Neill, the greatest playwright in American history, that is

some deep stuff. And if you've read a Eugene O'Neill play, you sort of know how Eugene O'Neill, Jr., his most tragic creation ends. And Frank was his best friend. Frank was a lot deeper and was a person who was much more interesting than being a symbol, being the embodiment of an idea. And so I'm hoping that this book will sort of, you know, shatter that, that this was a guy. And he had flaws and he had heroic attributes. And he had all sorts, but he was interesting.

And he was colorful and he pops off the page. He was living in 3D, whether he was a communist when he was messing around with all sorts of women, or whether he was a conservative and holding court having people making pilgrimages up Ohio Mountain Road. You know, for a conservative in the 1960s, going to Woodstock meant something very different. Yeah. They would go up to Frank Myers' house, Gary Wills, Wilmore Kendall, Brent Bezell, my boss, R.M. Material. All these people would make that obligatory pilgrimage, spend the weekend, stay up all night, drink, eat, smoke. debate, laugh.

What a room to be in, right? What a room to be in. Bob and everybody. And what Ed Fullner told me, he said, someone, it didn't take credit for this piece, someone said it was insulated by the best minds of Western civilization because it was all books all around. And so Frank was an amusing character. He also had this big idea.

I think if you reduce him to that big idea, you will miss out on a lot. And that's kind of what my book wants to do, is not to, I mean, the best. big idea matters. The fusionist stuff matters, but don't reduce him to that big idea. And I think anytime, you know, some of the older folks, I mean, they get dogmatic about fusionism or whatever strain of conservatism that they've been a part of, I would just say, you know, times do change. Principles don't. I think Reagan would handle things differently now in 2025. And maybe Trump would handle things differently in 1980. It's a different country. It is a different country. And as we look to the,

of the American, right? We have somebody in the Oval Office right now who lives in Technicolor, who lives in 3D, right? That's right. And so to put it back to Meyer, I mean, that's exactly right. And that was a point I was going to make in a talk I was going to give tomorrow. But that that Meyer, I mean, there's a lot of, Meyer was not a populist. He would disagree with certain things on Trump and he would agree with certain things. It's, so I'm not going to do that counterfactual thing. We'll say, well, Meyer would believe this about Trump and he would believe this. I don't know. I do know this. The reason Donald Trump is in the Oval Office is because the guy is engaging

that if he's in a room, people want to be around this guy, that women are attracted to him, men want to hang out with him, all these sports stars like the guy, and it's not just because of money. And in that sense, he's very much like Frank Meyer.

You want a guy leading your movement who people in a room would be attracted to and not the guy like me who's staring at his shoes. And so I think that that's part of the reason why even to this day, more than 50 years after his death, people are into Frank Meyer,

And that's a big part of the reason why Donald Trump was, I mean, he has, Donald Trump had some ideas, too. But Donald Trump's personality, his big personality. Frank Meyer was a big personality, too. Daniel Flynn, thank you for coming on the Signal Sitdown. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown. Before you go, be sure to hit like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review.

We not only love your feedback, but it really does help the show. Remember, it's your government, and together we'll expose how it really works. See you next time