Know Your Enemy
166 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1.7K ratingsA leftist's guide to the conservative movement, one podcast episode at a time, with co-hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell.
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Episodes
Against Despair (w/ Christian Wiman)
April 27, 2024 21:36 - 1 hour - 62.4 MBThis 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 Christian writer, manages to shake off our culture's desiccated religious tropes to write and talk a...
"Write Like a Man" (w/ Ronnie Grinberg)
April 17, 2024 02:22 - 1 hour - 70.2 MBHistorian 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 intellectual life, an ideology that would profoundly affected the development of Cold War liberalism, ne...
Arguing the World: Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and Bell [Teaser]
April 09, 2024 17:36 - 3 minutes - 3.37 MBSubscribe 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 for much of the rest of the twentieth century, and beyond: Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bel...
Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome (w/ B.D. McClay)
March 26, 2024 17:05 - 1 hour - 72.1 MBWhy 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, similarly bewildering questions, Matt and Sam talked to writer B.D. McClay, whose Substack, Notebook...
UNLOCKED: Keeping Up with the Bozells
March 19, 2024 17:33 - 1 hour - 86.3 MBWhat 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 union-busting, ad-man scion (Brent Sr.), to the fiercely brilliant and troubled National Review e...
Why the Right Loves Foreign Dictators (w/ Jacob Heilbrunn)
March 11, 2024 18:13 - 1 hour - 79.1 MBThe 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 the embrace of Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I and envy of Mussolini to the present. In this d...
A Remedy for Envy? René Girard Redux [TEASER]
March 04, 2024 16:48 - 2 minutes - 2.74 MBSubscribe 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: how to think about Girard's Christianity, in terms both of how it informs his work and his ow...
René Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz)
February 26, 2024 15:29 - 1 hour - 91.3 MBThe 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 unpack this question, Matt and Sam welcomed back John Ganz, whose four-part series on Girard is ...
Thinking the "Far Right" [Teaser]
February 11, 2024 16:29 - 4 minutes - 3.68 MBSubscribe 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 thought. Further Reading: James Alison, "Facing Down the Wolf," Commonweal, June 10, 2020. ...
Project 2025: Building a "Better" Trump Administration
January 30, 2024 23:16 - 1 hour - 79.3 MBAs 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 — to cleanse the nation of immigrants who, as Trump says, "are poisoning the blood of our count...
[TEASER] The Politics of Seinfeld (w/ Gabe Winant and Jesse Brenneman)
January 26, 2024 02:17 - 4 minutes - 3.85 MBSubscribe 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 five-episode arc in season four of Seinfeld as "Crazy" Joe Davola, a struggling writer who becomes ...
The History of the History of the Right (w/ Kim Phillips-Fein)
January 17, 2024 22:44 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBWhen 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 right?" These are the sorts of questions historians ask each other and themselves. The changing...
Tom Wolfe (w/ Osita Nwanevu) [TEASER]
January 01, 2024 19:57 - 3 minutes - 2.85 MBSubscribe 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 points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work,...
Bomb Power (w/ Erik Baker)
December 19, 2023 22:24 - 1 hour - 80.9 MBFor 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 imperatives of secretly conceiving, building, and deploying the nuclear bomb fundamentally change...
Milton Friedman and the Making of Our Times (w/ Jennifer Burns)
December 03, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 89.3 MBIn 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 Jewish immigrants in New Jersey come to hold the often radical ideas that made him famous? How d...
Anarcho-Capitalism in Argentina? (w/ David Adler) [TEASER]
November 22, 2023 16:43 - 3 minutes - 2.76 MBSubscribe 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 for political advice and promises to tear down the Peronist state with a chainsaw, has won the pr...
The Kennedy Imprisonment (w/ Jeet Heer)
November 17, 2023 22:29 - 1 hour - 92.9 MBIn this episode, Matt and Sam welcome the Nation's Jeet Heer to the podcast to continue their journey into the work of Garry Wills—in particular, Wills's under-appreciated 1982 masterpiece, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. The book might be thought of as a sequel to his earlier Nixon Agonistes (1970). As Wills puts it in his introduction to the most recent edition of The Kennedy Imprisonment, "I had written a book about Nixon, and it was not a biography, but an attempt to see...
More Questions, More Answers [Teaser]
November 04, 2023 18:49 - 2 minutes - 2.34 MBSubscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy In which we answer more of your excellent questions, including: the right-wing panic over children; how to leave grad school; Tillich, Niebuhr, and Dorothy Day; why 21st century Bob Dylan is the best Bob Dylan; how to teach a course on post-war conservatism; and more! Sources cited: Matthew Sitman, "Anti-Social Conservatives," Gawker, July 25, 2022...
Your Questions, Answered
October 28, 2023 17:31 - 1 hour - 87.5 MBOnce a year Matt and Sam take questions from listeners—and they always prove to be incredibly smart and interesting. This time around was no different, with questions that include such topics as: the crisis in Israel and Palestine, the influence of postliberal thinkers on the right, polarization and our political future, the state of the GOP, Willie Nelson, conservative art (and artists), and more! Sources: Joshua Leifer, "Toward a Humane Left," Dissent, Oct 12, 2023; read Gabriel Winant's...
In Search of Anti-Semitism (w/ John Ganz)
October 13, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 66.6 MBIn a 1991, William F. Buckley, Jr. dedicated almost an entire issue of National Review to an essay entitled "In Search of Anti-Semitism." In its pages, Buckley attempted to adjudicate a conflict that was then roiling America's right wing intelligentsia — over whether two of its leading lights, Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran, were guilty of antisemitism in their syndicated columns and speeches. (Never one to miss an opportunity to antagonize an enemy or blame the left, Buckley threw in Gore...
House of Pain (w/ Eric Levitz) [Teaser]
October 07, 2023 15:55 - 2 minutes - 2.66 MBSubscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy always wanted to make history—and he did when, earlier this week, he became the first Speaker of the House to be ousted from the job after eight Republicans joined Democrats to approve a motion to vacate the position. How does a motion to vacate work? What events led to McCarthy's fall from grace? How deranged is...
The Debate, the Donald, and the Strike [Teaser]
September 30, 2023 17:34 - 2 minutes - 2.73 MBSubscribe 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 suffer through the second GOP debate—a pathetic display from a gaggle of generally uninteresting reactionaries with no chance of defeating Trump in the primary—and then turn to an extended conversation about the politics and possibilities of the UAW auto strike against the Big Three car manufacturers. President Biden walked the picket li...
Elon Musk, the Jews, and the ADL (w/ Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, & Peter Beinart)
September 26, 2023 15:05 - 1 hour - 60.1 MBA few weeks ago, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, eagerly joined in a campaign, originating on the far right, to demonize the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a century-old Jewish civil rights organization whose leaders have criticized Musk for allowing anti-semitic and white supremacist hate speech to proliferate on Twitter/X. To many progressives, it could sound like a simple story of good vs. evil — the righteous vs. the hateful — especially for those who've experienced the palpable...
Reading the Trump Indictments [Teaser]
September 19, 2023 17:23 - 2 minutes - 2.41 MBSubscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Former president Donald Trump is currently facing 91 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions — Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia. Two of these indictments — Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's in D.C. and District Attorney Fani Willis's Fulton County, Georgia — take up Trump's and his co-conspirators efforts to steal the 2...
What the Cold War Did to Liberalism (w/ Samuel Moyn)
September 05, 2023 19:57 - 1 hour - 65 MBIn 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 dreams of emancipation and instead embraced fatalism, pessimism, and a narrow conception of freedo...
The First 2024 GOP Presidential Debate [TEASER]
August 24, 2023 23:30 - 2 minutes - 1.98 MBMatt 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/knowyourenemy
The Hochman Affair
August 21, 2023 17:25 - 1 hour - 71.8 MBThree 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-nazi? Was our original December 2021 interview insufficiently combative — or too credulous (as ma...
Grateful Dead Conservatives (w/ Sophie Haigney) [TEASER]
August 11, 2023 20:54 - 2 minutes - 2.1 MBSubscribe 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 of the "Grateful Dead conservative." Why is it that right-wing figures including Tucker Carl...
Midge Decter: Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior (w/ Moira Donegan & Adrian Daub)
July 27, 2023 20:30 - 1 hour - 75.7 MBIn 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 important link between neoconservatives and the religious right — unsurprisingly, she helped found or se...
TEASER: Sin and Salvation in the Righteous Gemstones (w/ Jesse Brenneman)
July 21, 2023 21:53 - 2 minutes - 2.14 MBSubscribe 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 perceptively explores the culture of American megachurch, evangelical Christianity—and offers y...
Legal Trouble
July 17, 2023 16:17 - 1 hour - 71.2 MBAfter 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 (the affirmative action ruling); and (3) 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (the gay wedding website desig...
Impossible Professions: Freud and Janet Malcolm (ft. Patrick Blanchfield & Abby Kluchin)
July 06, 2023 22:45 - 1 hour - 102 MBKnow 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 politics; and speculate about the contemporary absence of sophisticated right-wing psychoanalytic thi...
Grow Up, Men (w/ Phil Christman) [TEASER]
June 30, 2023 16:00 - 2 minutes - 2.04 MBSubscribe 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 posts responding to the episode published on his always excellent Substack, The Tourist. They discuss ...
The Prayers and Prophecies of Pat Robertson [TEASER]
June 17, 2023 16:55 - 3 minutes - 3.29 MBSubscribe 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 everything from natural disasters to 9-11, Robertson had a major influence on the evolution of...
What's Wrong With Men?
June 05, 2023 23:01 - 1 hour - 103 MB"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 impossible to open a magazine without finding an article about the state of manhood in America. Brooking...
The 2024 Race: "It's Showtime, Folks!" (TEASER)
May 18, 2023 18:54 - 2 minutes - 1.96 MBSubscribe 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 rank punditry! Sources Nate Cohn, "Why Ron DeSantis Is Struggling," New York Times, May 5, 2...
"Succession," "Extrapolations," and TV Writing Today (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry and Will Arbery)
May 04, 2023 22:12 - 1 hour - 70.4 MBWith 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+'s Extrapolations. They discuss how they write about political topics and themes, such as rightwi...
TEASER: The January 6th Committee Report
April 29, 2023 16:26 - 1 minute - 1.58 MBSubscribe 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 opportunity? How should political actors navigate the relationship between historical constraints and co...
Ron DeSantis Wants to Make America Florida (w/ Gillian Branstetter)
April 18, 2023 16:10 - 1 hour - 91.3 MBGillian 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 has not yet formally announce his presidential run — The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint...
TEASER: Whittaker Chambers, Redux (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)
April 10, 2023 20:35 - 2 minutes - 2.25 MBSubscribe 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 sexuality, his ideological position in the National Review crowd, Hannah Arendt's review of Witness, a...
Bob Dylan's America (w/ Will Epstein)
April 04, 2023 21:35 - 1 hour - 88 MB"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 — for a lost age of artfulness, mystery, and hope — pervades Dylan's 2022 book, Philosophy of Modern ...
TEASER: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy (w/ Nichole M. Flores)
March 29, 2023 15:47 - 2 minutes - 2.32 MBSubscribe 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 Catholic and Latinx theologies to notions of justice and aesthetics to the life of democracy. This ...
TEASER: Suffering, Solidarity, and Ritual (w/ Susan Bigelow Reynolds)
March 20, 2023 15:21 - 3 minutes - 3.13 MBSubscribe 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 and Emory University professor Dr. Susan Bigelow Reynolds discussing her new book, People Get...
Whittaker Chambers and the Freight Train of History
March 12, 2023 19:09 - 2 hours - 128 MBIn 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 themselves, and prefigured the turn American politics would take at the onset of the Cold War. Chambers ...
Realignments (w/ Timothy Shenk)
February 27, 2023 16:38 - 1 hour - 86 MBEarly 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 attempts to define the character and conditions necessary for fashioning a durable electoral maj...
TEASER: Le Carre's Cold War (w/ Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz)
February 22, 2023 18:47 - 2 minutes - 2.15 MBSubscribe 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 name. We approach the film — which, it turns out, is not very good — with the same analytical ri...
Triumph of the Therapeutic (w/ Hannah Zeavin & Alex Colston)
February 13, 2023 20:50 - 1 hour - 91.3 MBModern 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 the University of Chicago, whose thought cast a long shadow over right-wing intellectuals, theo...
TEASER: Realignments (w/ Timothy Shenk)
January 31, 2023 17:42 - 2 minutes - 1.86 MBSubscribe 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 them." Looking at American figures from Martin Van Buren to Charles Sumner to Mark Hanna to Phyll...
The Eyes of the Ranger (w/ Jesse Brenneman)
January 18, 2023 15:16 - 1 hour - 75.3 MBThis 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 the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Norris stars as Sergeant Cordell Walker, a member of the storied Texa...
TEASER: The Death of Pope Benedict XVI (w/ Michael O'Loughlin)
January 08, 2023 17:47 - 2 minutes - 2.14 MBListen to the entire conversation by subscribing to Know Your Enemy on Patreon! On Dec. 31, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died at the age of 95. During his long career as a towering figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond—especially his decades helming the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then as Pope and Pope Emeritus—Benedict was involved in nearly all of the Church's crises and controversies. He cracked down on liber...