Liberal Yale Students on Buckley and Yale; Daniel Flynn on the Frank Meyer Legacy

In the most recent episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Fellows Nico Sahi SOM ’26 and Toby Neal ’27 talk about being liberal at Yale and as members of the Buckley Institute: Nico Sahi: “I really wanted to learn a little bit more about conservative ideologies, partly because maybe I’ll change my own mind about something, but also that you can’t debate something that you don’t understand yourself.”Toby Neal: “The recent events of the Charlie Kirk assassination were very much on my mind because that kind of—is kind of the reason that I joined Buckley in a sense, that I wanted to join in a space where conversations, even though difficult, were being had and you could have a very democratic debate about it.”Neal: “We are more and more facing echo chambers in our lives. Institutions, higher education are echo chambers. And I think that’s where places like Buckley are important…”Neal: “It is less that my mind has been changed–I tried to reflect on if there was some actual point where I’ve changed my opinion on something and I don’t think I have. But what I think it has is helped me understand where the other people are coming from.”Sahi: “Over the past 10 years, the consistent story has been ‘we need to talk to more people who disagree with us.’ And I think everyone hears that information and goes, ‘yes absolutely’ and then goes back and talks to everyone that already believes [what they do.]”Daniel Flynn, author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, joined the podcast to discuss his book on the largely forgotten ex-Communist who shaped the modern conservative movement:Flynn: “All the way through this story there’s this kind of Forrest Gump quality to it where [Meyer] is around these people at the right time when they are happening, when they are exploding.”Flynn: “He establishes something called the October Club, which, when Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero Communists in the student body. When he leaves, there’s 300.”Flynn: “Do you want to join a movement where the guy’s looking down at his shoes and he’s got a bunch of marbles in his mouth, or do you want to join a movement of a guy who’s a winner? Frank was a winner and people wanted to be around him. That’s why he had such success in England as a Communist organizer. Also, why he had such success in America.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst