Dirty Moderate with Adam Epstein

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.

Mike and Adam don’t agree on Trump in the least, and they spar respectably on various issues. They find enough common ground, however, to affirm Adam’s long held belief that democracy depends upon our disagreement.

Purchase Mike's excellent book here
Explore the work Mike and his colleagues do at The Heritage Foundation here
Curious about Al Gore's concession speech after listening to Mike and Adam? Watch it here 

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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.
 
At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”: former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams insisted that the British were the real revolutionaries, for attempting to impose radial change without their colonists’ consent.

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.

Explore the work of Professor Ellis at his website here

While his fine books are certainly available everywhere, Professor Ellis encourages you to shop at your local independent bookstore :) Click here to find one near you. 

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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
-Buy her incredible book: https://www.amazon.com/Unveiled-Western-Liberals-Empower-Radical/dp/1999240502
-Listen to Yasmine's podcast: https://www.yasminemohammed.com/podcast
-Link to her ebook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o2aIvLt1IVX1Ue8jAbIR9e-s4zTO4IIp/view?usp=sharing

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Damon Linker, is a writer for the Atlantic and is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He also writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground” and is an Open Society Project senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

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.

Read Damon's article in the Atlantic article discussed in the episode here

Find Damon's Substack-"Notes from the Middleground" here

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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 .

Read David here
Sign up for his weekly newsletter here
Follow and enjoy David on Threads here

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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.

Find Noah's amazing book here
Read Noah at National Review
Noah on X @NoahCRothman

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Tina Nguyen is a national correspondent for Puck covering the world of Donald Trump and the American right for their The Best & The Brightest newsletter. Previously, Nguyen was a White House reporter for Politico, a staff reporter for Vanity Fair Hive, and an editor at Mediaite.

Her new book, The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out) is a dazzling memoir of Tina’s fast, furious, stressful and altogether bonkers time in the world of the Conservative movement long before it was destroyed and devoured by Trumpworld. 

Tina talks to Adam about her growing up in Boston as the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, how she ended up at the prestigious but right-wing Xanadu known as Claremont McKenna College, and her short but not insignificant stint at The Daily Caller working for its then founder, Tucker Carlson. They explore her front row seat to the rise of what is now the MAGA movement, and how she ended up on the other side of this dystopia, mostly unscathed, but nonetheless loaded with insight as how to best cover Trumpism with all the scrutiny it most definitely deserves.

Tina also gives Adam the tea on some of the more sobering realizations which came to her in her post-Conservative days about some of her previous colleagues and their not so nice agendas. Tina’s story, which is indeed essential reading , is also a must listen for Dirty Moderates everywhere. 

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Philip K. Howard is a lawyer, author and chair of Common Good (www.commongood.org), a nonpartisan organization aimed at replacing red tape with human responsibility and agency. 

In his discussion with Adam, Philip discusses his latest book “Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society,” which argues that the post 1960’s legal framework which has guided government policy for 60 years has been a failure. Philip persuasively argues that humans have been disempowered and common sense has been thrown out the window. Inertia and powerlessness have overtaken our politics because so called ‘good government’ has come to be synonymous with red tape and inefficiency. Philip calls this stasis a “disease consuming the American spirit,” and that “Modern law fails because it is dehumanizing, and, however hard this may prove to be, it must be replaced by a framework that empowers everyday freedom.”

As engaging and incisive a discussion as we’ve had on this podcast, Adam and Philip’s dialogue is essential food for thought. Have a listen!

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