Know Your Enemy

We took the holiday week off,  so we're sharing an episode from behind the paywall. Coming soon: new episodes on The Biden Problem, SCOTUS, and Israeli illiberalism as an inspiration for the global right.  *** In this episode, from January 2024, writer Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documen...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  We watched it, and you probably did too. Here is our analysis of the incredibly depressing, even shocking first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. While the topic of this episode is self-explanatory, it's worth making a few comments ab...

We're joined by two experts on European politics to explain the EU parliamentary election results: David Adler , general coordinator of the Progressive International, and David Broder , historian of Italy and Europe editor at Jacobin . What do the results say about the strength of the far right in Europe? And why has Emmanuel Macron of France called snap parliamentary elections in response? Is Mac...

Something happened to America — and to American conservatism — in the early 1990s: an unspooling, a coarsening, a turn from substance to symbol and from narrative to fragment; prevailing political myths ceased to make sense or have purchase, and nothing sufficiently capacious or legible emerged to replace them, leaving only a dank, foggy climate of conspiracy, bellicosity, and despair. Victorious...

In this special Pride Month episode of Know Your Enemy, Matt and Sam talk to historian Neil J. Young about his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right . His absorbing account picks up in after World War II, when neither party made for a good political home for gay people, which helped make a libertarian approach to sexual politics—getting the government out of their private liv...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Matt and Sam break down the Trump guilty verdict—what happened during the trial, why the jury might have reached the decision they did, how Republicans and the right reacted, and the ways it all could matter, or not, for the 2024 presidential election. It'...

Historian Tim Barker and editor/organizer Ben Mabie join to discuss a thrilling episode in the history of American labor. Barker and Mabie are two co-hosts of Fragile Juggernaut , a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (or CIO). Along with  co-hosts Alex Press, Gabriel Winant, Andrew Elrod, and Emma Teitelman...

Historian David Austin Walsh joins to discuss his excellent new book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right — a fascinating re-description of the relationship between the far right and the American conservative movement from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War.   How did figures like William F. Buckley, Jr. relate to figures on the further right fringes of right-wing pol...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Matt and Sam gab about "The Incomparable Mr. Buckley," a new PBS documentary  on William F. Buckley Jr., which features Matt Sitman (!) as a talking head — along with a rogue's gallery of KYE friends and former guests: Perlstein, Tanenhaus, Tait, Gage, Bur...

This conversation is a little different. We wanted to take a break from the election-year political jousting to talk to the poet Christian Wiman about Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair , one of the most singular books published in recent memory—part memoir, part commonplace book, part poetry collection. As with his previous My Bright Abyss , Wiman, more than any other contemporary Ch...

Historian Ronnie Grinberg's new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals couldn't be better "Know Your Enemy" fodder. (Main characters include: Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy!) These writers, Grinberg shows, built and sustained a novel, secular, Jewish, and masculine concept of the intellect...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  It was inevitable that Know Your Enemy would eventually discuss Arguing the World , the 1998 documentary about four Jewish intellectuals who emerged from the alcoves and arguments of City College in the 1930s and influenced American politics and letters fo...

Why are Republicans and the right losing their minds over Taylor Swift, the gifted songwriter and globe-bestriding pop star? Why do they think her NFL-playing, Super Bowl-winning boyfriend is secretly gay—precisely because he's dating Taylor Swift? Why is this slice of Americana being portrayed as a deep-state op meant to hand the 2024 election to Joe Biden? To try to answer these, and other, simi...

What can four generations of men named "L. Brent Bozell" tell us about the trajectory of modern American conservatism? Well, quite a lot. In this classic KYE bonus episode from February 2021, newly unlocked for these last weeks of Lent, Matt and Sam discuss one of the first families of the postwar right, which ends up being a story about faith, fanaticism, and the "awful grace of God." From the un...

The right's romance with odious foreign dictators didn't start with Putin or Viktor Orbán, and their profound contempt for democracy long predates January 6. In his new book, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators , Jacob Heilbrunn traces this tradition on the right—in many ways their most deeply rooted and enduring tradition in foreign affairs—back over a century to...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Matt and Sam return to René Girard via Pope Francis—whom Matt personally met at a recent general audience at the Vatican, and whose homily at that audience addressed the problem of envy, and what Christianity might have to teach us about it. Topics include...

The late René Girard, former Stanford professor of literature and mentor to Peter Thiel, is having something of a moment on the right these days—as Sam Kriss recently put it in a Harper's essay, Girard's name is being "dropped on podcasts and shoved into reading lists," and "Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought." Why might that be the case? To...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Matt and Sam return to some historiographic questions from our episode with Kim Phillips-Fein — especially how to think the relationship between "right" and "far right" — and then discuss the troubling return of scientific racism to mainstream conservative...

As listeners might have noticed, 2024 is a presidential election year, and already the prospect of Donald Trump returning to power is looming over the campaign and the media's coverage of it. In a second term, Trump has promised to weaponize the Justice Department to punish his enemies, deconstruct major portions of the administrative state, and mobilize the largest deportation force in US history...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Journeyman actor Peter Crombie, who appeared in films such as Seven , Born on the Fourth of July , and Natural Born Killers , died earlier this month, on January 10, 2024, at the age of 71. But his most famous, or at least memorable, role probably was his f...

When did the American conservative movement begin? Who were its chief protagonists? What were their main motivations? Is the conservative movement a social movement, like any other, or is it something different? Should scholars have "sympathy" for their conservative subjects in order to study them? And are there important distinctions to be drawn between "conservative," "the right," and "the far r...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Writer Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation point...

For our final main episode of 2023, we're dipping back into the Wills well to discuss Garry's under-appreciated 2010 book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.  Joining us is our great friend Erik Baker, lecturer in the History of Science Department at Harvard University and an editor at The Drift magazine.  In Bomb Power , Garry Wills elegantly demonstrates how the i...

In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by Stanford historian Jennifer Burns to discuss her new biography of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose influence would reach far beyond the academy when, during his last decades, he became one of the most effective popularizers of libertarian ideas—in books, columns, and even a ten-part PBS program, Free to Choose . How did the son of...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Know Your Enemy Latin America correspondent David Adler returns to breakdown the (terrible) election results from Argentina, where Javier Milei, a deranged disciple of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Austrian economics, who consults his cloned dogs fo...