The Triumphs and Tragedies of the American Revolution

On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with an urgent warning about TikTok’s looming sale to Donald Trump–aligned insiders—a move David calls the “biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants.” He argues that the American media landscape has been quietly transformed, and political power has shifted from legacy outlets to algorithmic platforms loyal to the president.

Then David speaks with the filmmaker Ken Burns about his new documentary series on the American Revolution. Together, they explore the Revolution’s competing legacies—liberty and exclusion, heroism and hypocrisy—and how its unresolved contradictions still shape the nation’s identity. Burns reflects on the moral complexity of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the forgotten role of Loyalists and Indigenous nations, and the Revolution’s echoes in contemporary America.

Finally, David discusses Benjamin Nathans’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, an exploration of the Soviet dissident movement and the story of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, who defied tyranny by insisting that Soviet laws be obeyed exactly as written. 

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