Know Your Enemy
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UNLOCKED: Reagan, the Movie (w/ Jesse Brenneman)
🕑 Added 2025-06-12 10:50:56 +0000 UTCAs the world falls apart — and we prep for our Buckley mega-episode with Sam Tanenhaus — we're unlocking this fun episode from late last year. Listen to the new intro for Jesse's touching tribute to Brian Wilson. RIP.
A palette cleanser for subscribers: we watched Reagan (2024), with our intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman. Even better, the movie is based on the 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, by Paul Kengor — who just happens to have been Matt's close mentor as an undergraduate student. Reagan clocks in at over two hours and twenty minutes, and it's a wild, even fantastical ride that offers a revealing glimpse into the conservative psyche and a faithful rendition of the most hagiographic version of the Reagan mythology, especially his personal responsibility for ending the Cold War and finally putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.
Sources:
Reagan (2024)
Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism(2006)
— God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life(2004)
Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999)
...please listen to Jesse's insane, hilarious, freakishly prescient (and fake) podcast Tech Talk.
Comments
Renate Riffe
I have little respect for Jimmy Carter as president, though I don't know if any Presidential administration could have survived the forces that washed over our country at that time. I'm just amazed at the level of hatred that he triggered in certain conservatives.
Renate Riffe
While all of us hold some level of delusion, your former mentor seems unusually attached to his. The last time I felt this level of hero worship, I was in my mid-teens. Can you explain why he hated Jimmy Carter so much?
Joel
Waitin' on dat new Tanen🏠
