Know Your Enemy

In his provocative new book, Liberalism Against Itself , historian Samuel Moyn revisits the work of five key Cold War thinkers—Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Lionel Trilling—to explain the deformation of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in his telling, liberals abandoned their commitment to progress, the Enlightenment, and grand d...

Matt and Sam stayed up late to record just minutes after the first GOP presidential debate ended on Wednesday night; we did this for you, our beloved subscribers, because we care . This episode (full of blistering insights) is the result of that decision. "Enjoy." Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyour...

Three weeks ago, one-time Know Your Enemy guest and “frenemy” of the show Nate Hochman was fired from Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign for his role in producing a campaign video featuring a Nazi “sonnenrad” symbol. (You may have read about it!) Unsurprisingly, the Hochman affair inspired some soul-searching on the part of your podcast hosts: had we inadvertently exposed our audience to a neo-n...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy The Grateful Dead Conservative (w/ Sophie Haigney) Another fun summer-y episode for you, our beloved subscribers: This time, we talked to writer, Paris Review editor, and Grateful Dead super-fan Sophie Haigney about a topic we've long pondered: the phenomenon...

In this episode, Matt and Sam join Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub — co-hosts of the new podcast “ In Bed With The Right " — for an in-depth look at the life, times, and work of the late Midge Decter, who died in 2022. Decter was inspired by a distinctly conservative, mid-century American reading of Freudian psychology, mobilized in defense of traditional family hierarchies, which made her an import...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Matt and Sam welcome their intrepid producer and great friend Jesse Brenneman back to the third mic to talk about HBO's The Righteous Gemstones . In addition to being a wildly entertaining entry to the Danny McBride cinematic and television universe, the show...

After several trying months, Matt and Sam can finally discuss the lawsuit against KYE and Dissent magazine filed by Young Americans Foundation , the successor organization to Young Americans for Freedom. (We prevailed, for now anyway.)  Then we turn to three SCOTUS rulings from the end of the session: (1) Biden vs Nebraska  (the student debt ruling); (2) Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (th...

Know Your Enemy presents: an episode of Ordinary Unhappiness — a new podcast about psychoanalysis with hosts Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield.  Their guest? Sam Adler-Bell! In the episode that follows, we talk about how Sam came to study conservative thought from a leftist perspective and what role psychoanalysis plays in that project; discuss the libidinal satisfactions of conservative politi...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy In this follow-up to " What's Wrong with Men ?, Matt and Sam talk with the essayist and critic Phil Christman about his 2018 Hedgehog Review article, " What Is It Like To Be a Man? "—an article that figured prominently in their conversation—as well as two pos...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Last week, televangelist, businessman, conspiracy theorist, and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson died at the age of 93. Though mostly known today for his deranged comments about homosexuality, abortion, feminism, and other "sins" causing...

"Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling," Missouri Senator Josh Hawley said at the National Conservatism conference in 2021. "And that's not just a crisis for men. It's a crisis for the republic."  Some version of this sentiment — that men are in trouble, adrift, or falling behind — is shared by writers and thinkers across the political spectrum. It's nearly impossibl...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Matt and Sam take the pulse of the 2024 presidential race: Is DeSantis already doomed? Does Trump still have the juice? Can Biden handle a full campaign schedule? And how do you solve a problem like Kamala? The answers to these questions and more! Enjoy some...

With the Writers Guild of America strike underway, the plight of television writers—especially their treatment in the age of streaming and artificial intelligence—is garnering new, and overdue, attention. Matt and Sam are joined by two friends of the podcast, Will Arbery and Dorothy Fortenberry, who write for major television shows: Will is a writer for HBO's Succession , and Dorothy for Apple TV+...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy The boys discuss Matt's recent Dissent essay on the 845-page report of the "Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol." What did the Jan 6 report — and the committee's work — achieve? Was the report a missed opportuni...

Gillian Branstetter (of the ACLU's Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project ) returns to Know Your Enemy for an episode on the strange case of Ron DeSantis: what is his ideology and vision for America? And why do his political aspirations involve inflicting wanton cruelty upon LGBTQ children and adults in his home state? For our sins, we read DeSantis's new book — a campaign book, though he...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy The great Sam Tanenhaus (author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography ) returns to the podcast for a spirited and gossipy discussion of everything we missed — or only briefly mentioned — in our main episode on Chambers, including: his religious faith, his sexual...

"That’s the problem with a lot of things these days," wrote Bob Dylan in 2022 , " Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs."  This mournful attitude — fo...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy   In the second (and final) of Matt's Lent-related conversations with theologians, he's joined by Dr. Nichole M. Flores of the University of Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and researches the constructive contributions of Catho...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy   This conversation is the first of two that Matt recorded to be released during Lent, the forty-day season when Christians prepare for Easter Sunday by fasting and giving of their time and treasure to those in need. This episodes features Catholic theologian...

In this episode, Matt and Sam go deep into the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, most famous for his role in the "trial of the century"—the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury after Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist spy during his years working in the federal government, especially the State Department. The two figures, once friends, came to symbolize a clash that was bigger than themselv...

Early in Timothy Shenk's absorbing, provocative recent book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy , he describes it as "a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made them." Looking at American figures from Martin Van Buren to Charles Sumner to Mark Hanna to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, the book...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Sam is joined by returning KYE all-stars Jamelle Bouie (of the NYTimes ) and John Ganz (of Unpopular Front ) for a spirited discussion of the 1984 film "The Little Drummer Girl," starring Diane Keaton — an adaptation of John le Carré's 1983 novel of the same...

Modern conservatives have long asked the following questions: how can we live together without God? Is there any substitute for religion in cohering a moral community? And if not, what can we do to revive the old sacred authority that reason, science, and liberalism have interred? These were also  the questions that preoccupied Philip Rieff (1922-2006), an idiosyncratic sociologist and product of...

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Early in Timothy Shenk's absorbing, provocative book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy , he describes it as "a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made t...

This episode is a little different. Rather than dissecting an influential conservative book written by long-dead intellectual, Matt and Sam are joined by Know Your Enemy's brilliant producer (and host of the very funny podcast, Tech Talk ) to unpack a different kind of "text"—the hit CBS television show from the 1990s, Walker, Texas Ranger , starring the very much still-living Chuck Norris. Set in...