Dirty Moderate with Adam Epstein

Mona Charen is a conservative American journalist, columnist, commentator and best selling author. She is the Policy Editor of The Bulwark, and host of the Beg to Differ podcast, which you need to subscribe to immediately.  

Mona's books:

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As the host of the podcast History of the Land of Israel, and his own YouTube show, Israel Explained, Shaiel Ben-Ephraim spends his time thinking about Israel and assessing Israel’s long term goals. Given Iran’s attack on Israel, we invited Shaiel back to Dirty Moderate so he and Adam could discuss the implications of Iran launching drones and missiles, including ballistic ones, directly at Israel for the first time in Israel’s history. What does this mean for the stability of the region( or instability?) 

Arab nations like Jordan and Saudi Arabia joined Irael in intercepting these missiles, as the United States and the UK. And what does this mean for the Israel Gaza war? 

If you are not subscribed to Shaiel's shows and following him on Twitter you are missing out. 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@shaielb

Twitter @academic_la

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Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a longtime journalist who currently writes for The Washington Examiner. Prior to that, he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, where he was based in Hong Kong. 

Mike is an ardent conservative and he sees the re-election of Trump as the only stopgap against the progressive onslaught of the left. His latest book is “NextGen Marxism: What it is and How to Combat it,” which might as well his own ideological manifesto.

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George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction.

With his latest book,  The Cause, Joseph J. Ellis sits down with Adam and discusses how his book takes a fresh look at the events between 1773 and 1783, recovering a war more brutal than any in American history save the Civil War and discovers a strange breed of “prudent” revolutionaries, whose prudence proved wise yet tragic when it came to slavery, the original sin that still haunts our land. 

Joseph J. Ellis is a leading scholar of American history and is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner for his biographies of our nation's earliest presidents. Ellis is a distinguished professor and seasoned speaker who regales audiences with stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other U.S. presidents.

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As a young girl born in Canada, Yasmine Mohammed was born into a strict Islamic household. If she missed a word of her Koran readings, she was beat until her feet were bloody and raw. And the Canadian government said there was nothing they could do to help her. “This is your culture,” they smugly told her. 

But Yasmine escaped the horrors of her childhood and the strictures of her faith to emerge as an important spokesperson for women everywhere, especially lapsed Muslims who have also been emancipated from the patriarchal, repressive dogma of Radical Islam. And she wrote a harrowing, must-read book about it.

Yasmine sits down with Adam to discuss “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” which is a scathing rejoinder to the ideological left and to all those secular “liberals” who prize Wokeness over truth out of fear of “Islamophobia.” “Believe women,“ goes the #MeToo motto. Yasmine’s heroic life and personal story of resilience asks that women who live and have lived under the terror of Islamic extremism are believed too.

-Support Yasmine's org here: www.freeheartsfreeminds.com

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Damon joins Adam to discuss his latest article for the Atlantic, "The Dead-Enders of the Reagan-Era GOP" in which Damon argues that Mike Pence's non-endorsement of Donald Trump only underlines how irrevocably the Republican Party has left traditional conservatism behind and embraces populism. 

Don’t miss Damon’s conversation with Adam about how a full on MAGA populist party not only renders the party of Lincoln ideologically impotent  but represents a clear and present danger to our republic.

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New York Times columnist David French joins Adam to discuss the role of religion in public life, and he offers up a unique portal into the pro-life movement, and its perils in the aftermath of Roe. David discusses the important role of the courts, and especially the critical role of the Supreme Court, in securing( or not securing) the guardrails against a Trump/MAGA led assault on our institutions and norms. 

David is an expert on the law, faith and politics, Prior to his being at the Times, David was at Dispatch, which he helped launch, and The Atlantic, where he was a contributing writer. Prior to those posts, he wrote for National Review from 2015 to 2019. But David spent the bulk of his career as a practicing lawyer, with an emphasis on the First Amendment. He also took time off from that career to join the U.S. Army in his thirties and serve, in Iraq, as a Judge Advocate General (JAG).

Don’t miss this captivating conversation between Adam and David, who is unquestionably one of America’s more eagle-eyed and incisive voices writing today .

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It’s not playtime in America. It’s high time in America that we all stand up for democracy. It’s gonna take all of us, especially independents like myself who will back Biden in November because that’s putting America first.  It’s America or Trump; you can’t have both.… 

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Noah Rothman is an author and conservative thinker who is a Senior Writer for National Review, and whose recent bestseller, “The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun,” is the chief subject of the second episode of our new series Dirty Moderate After Dark.

Adam and Noah do a deep dive into the origins of Puritan thought, and they detail the odd, and very uniquely American way in which Puritanical thinking is embedded into our cultural and political tapestry. What’s more, Noah explains how his book examines the deeply religious and dogmatic English Puritans who settled on the Eastern Seaboard in the 17th century and how their spiritual, if not religious, successors have found a cozy home within the extreme wing of today’s woke left.

Adam and Noah also discuss the collapse of the Republican Party into an incoherent, ideologically barren cult of personality party led by Trump, and they lament the abandonment of the robust internationalism which the Reagan era GOP once typified and the dangers of today’s MAGA GOP and the shortsighted, isolationist thinking that they promulgate.

Though neither of them were boozed, Adam and Noah waxed eloquently After Dark about all things philosophical and political, and their conversation was nevertheless wide-ranging, absorbing, and unlike today’s Puritans, fun.

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