If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival p...
2025-11-17 11:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode isn't focused on a single topic or text, but rather just wanting to have a wide-ranging conversation with our guest, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and author of the recent book, 2025-11-11 11:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a different kind of episode than is typical; there's no book, no central text, not even a single, central event that guides the conversation. Instead, we begin with a few recent news items—speculation about Trump 2028, Speaker Mike Johnson's refusal to swear in a Democratic congresswoman, the stunning abdication of ...
2025-11-03 11:30:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The theme of this rank punditry episode is Getting in Trouble on the Internet, and we begin with the frankly unsurprising story of the Young Republican Hitler group chats, then move on to a longer discussion about Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, and the revelations about controversial past ...
2025-10-24 10:30:15 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode is the second in our occasional series on important, controversial, or unusually relevant conservative texts from the recent past. Here we take up Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. With its focus on the ascendence of a new "cognitive elite," cultural divides...
2025-10-15 10:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Before embarking on a spirited bout of rank punditry, we take a step back and talk about the Staple Singers, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Zohran, and giving a damn about both your "fellow man" and democracy. Then, we walk you through the latest catalogue of ...
2025-10-06 10:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
To try to understand both the power and strangeness of the Charlie Kirk memorial—one part evangelical worship service, one part MAGA rally—we turned, of course, to our friend Pat Blanchfield. All three of us stewed in the event's footage, which runs to over four and a half hours, then convened to discuss it. After laying ...
2025-09-29 10:30:03 +0000 UTC View Post
The assassination of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, seemed to change the landscape of American politics in an instant, inspiring a startlingly unanimous battlecry of vengeance from the conservative movement, the GOP, and the Trump White House. In this episode, Matt and Sam respond to this omino...
2025-09-19 16:53:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Since the start of the Trump Era over a decade ago, few words have been deployed as often as "democracy": how it's become imperiled, who threatens it, and what to do to defend it. In The Ri...
2025-09-12 10:30:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premier," running for a few weeks in August at Film Forum in New York City. When it originally was released, it couldn't find an Americ...
2025-09-05 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Devoted Know Your Enemy listeners will recall that, in November 2021, we released a fairly dense, theory-driven episode on Frank Meyer, the Communist from New Jersey whose ...
2025-08-28 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
A major topic following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election has been his gains with racial and ethnic minorities, a trend that's scrambled many people's assumptions about American politics, not least those of anti-racist liberals. Why have minority voters drifted toward Trump, despite his many comments an...
2025-08-18 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Our mailbag runneth over! Unsurprisingly, we received so many excellent questions from subscribers for our most recent episode that we decided to answer even more of them. Once again religio...
2025-08-11 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been nearly a year since we asked our subscribers to send us questions for a mailbag episode—which they did, with remarkable thoughtfulness and intelligence, for our 100th episode...
2025-08-04 10:30:06 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been nearly a year since we asked you, our subscribers, to send us questions for a mailbag episode—which you did, with remarkable thoughtfulness and intelligence, for our 100th episode back in September 2024. As we enter the dog days of summer, once again we're putting out the call for your questions.
We're going...
2025-07-29 00:35:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Over July 4th weekend, the Department of Justice and FBI put out a memo essentially declaring "case closed" on the matter of Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected sex criminal and pedophile who died (apparently) by suicide in federal custody in 2019. No more files. No more questions. He killed himself and that's that. This was ...
2025-07-28 10:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
We don't do too many New York City-focused episodes on Know Your Enemy, but Zohran Mamdani's decisive win in the Democratic mayoral primary last month certainly warrants this one. The thirty-three year old democratic socialist, state assemblyman, and Muslim of Indian descent born in Uganda, ended up running away with...
2025-07-11 11:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode is one that Matt and Sam have been anticipating for years: after two-and-a-half decades of research and writing, Sam Tanehaus's authoritative biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.—youthful booster of America First, enfant terrible at Yale, CIA agent, founder of National Review, best-selling aut...
2025-07-04 11:01:02 +0000 UTC View Post
If you were intrigued by our conversation with Curt Mills last week, Sam's latest 2025-06-29 14:48:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Donald Trump's rise in U.S. politics over the past decade has been inextricable from his "America First" foreign policy and withering criticisms of the Iraq War, nation building, and both the neoconservatism that led the Republican Party to disaster during George W. Bush's presidency and the Washington establishment that stil...
2025-06-27 11:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Journalist Tammy Kim joins the pod to talk about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles — and the raids that precipitated them.
Further Reading:
E Tammy Kim, "Imm...
2025-06-19 17:16:39 +0000 UTC View Post
As the world falls apart — and we prep for our Buckley mega-episode with Sam Tanenhaus — we're unlocking this fun episode from late last year. Listen to the new intro for Jesse's touching tribute to Brian Wilson. RIP.
A palette cleanser for subscribers: we watched 2025-06-12 10:50:56 +0000 UTC View Post
If you pay any attention at all to political news, it's been hard to avoid Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's recent bombshell of a book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which offers behind-the-scenes reporting from the White House, halls of Congress, the ca...
2025-06-07 11:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Attentive listeners will notice that this episode is about a book but isn't an author interview. That's because it's the first in a new occasional series of episodes that will be dedicated to books by conservative writers that we think are important — whether because a book articulates the right's approach to an issue or pr...
2025-06-02 10:45:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In a recent New Yorker essay, our guest, UC Davis anthropologist Manvir Singh, argues, "The Trumpian mystique echoes a dynamic that has occurred for centuries and across cultures. Its core in...
2025-05-22 21:44:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Among the many factors credited for Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race was one that, naturally, the hosts of Know Your Enemy took an interest in: podcasts. More specifically, "bro" podcasts—think Joe Rogan or Theo Von—seemed to be one reason why Trump continued, as he did in 2016 and 2...
2025-05-15 10:58:50 +0000 UTC View Post
With the papal conclave convening in Rome to pick Pope Francis's successor, Matt and Sam are joined by novelist Brandon Taylor to discuss the 2024 film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Jo...
2025-05-08 11:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Recently Matt joined Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub of the excellent In Bed with the Right podcast to record what turned out to be two episodes about Roy Cohn—the "lawyer, closet case and ratfucker extrao...
2025-05-02 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Video from our event at the University of Chicago on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone who came out. It was a delight to meet you all. (Conversation starts around 16:50 in the video.)
2025-04-30 17:18:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello beautiful patrons - Just wanted to let you all know that Matt and Sam will be at University of Chicago (!) — yes, the source of some of the worst ideas we talk about on the show — tomorrow, April 29th, at 5:30 pm CDT for a ...
2025-04-28 15:07:00 +0000 UTC View Post
