Know Your Enemy

KYE Discord Server is LIVE!

For a while now, we've been looking for a way to foster more community and conversation among (and with) our amazing listeners. We settled on creating a "Discord" server to do that. Subscribers at the West Coast Straussian ($10/mo) level and above will have access to the KYE server.

In order to c...

Kamala's Commanding Debate Performance

Your intrepid hosts watched the first, and possibly only, presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump so you didn't have to—and then stayed up late to talk about it. After a somewhat wobbly start, Harris seized the momentum with a visceral, deeply affecting answer about the consequences of the GOP's assault on abortion rights, then baited Trump into a rambling rant about the si...

The Uncommitted Movement (w/ Waleed Shahid & Abbas Alawieh)

Matt and Sam interview Waleed Shahid and Abbas Alawieh, two organizers of the Uncommitted Movement, about their experiences in the months following October 7 as well as before, during, and after the Democratic National Convention. As an Arab-American from Michigan and one of the state's two Uncommitted delegates to the DNC, what has Abbas heard from the people in his community, and what has he ...

Episode 100! We Want Your Questions For It

The next episode of Know Your Enemy will be our 100th! While we've recorded more than one hundred episodes if we include all of our bonus episodes available to you, our beloved subscribers, they aren't numbered—and so we are considering this something of a milestone, which it is.

We couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than by answering your questions. They can be about anything...

Political Fictions (w/ Vinson Cunningham)

Today, we're joined by one of our favorite writers and thinkers, Vinson Cunningham, to discuss his excellent debut novel, Great Expectations, which tells the story of bril...

Kamala's Convention

Four days in Chicago, dozens of speeches by Democratic luminaries and backbenchers, and a spotlight on Kamala Harris, who reintroduced herself to America — your favorite podcast co-hosts endured watching the Democratic National Convention and are here to report on what they saw.

It was, in many ways, a highly successful convention: massive crowds, palpable energy for the Harris-Walz tic...

What Happened to America's Political Parties? (w/ Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld)

Why are American political parties so ineffectual? Why do they seem, simultaneously, so frantically active and so incapable of achieving specific objectives? Why have the Democrats tended to seem listless, uncertain of their own ideological identity; while the Republicans are increasingly dominated by a radical, lunatic fringe more interested in becoming famous on television, radio, and social...

What's Wrong with J.D. Vance?

In this episode, your co-hosts take a harrowing journey into the life, mind, and times of J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio and current vice-presidential pick of Donald Trump. You probably were introduced to Vance as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir that attempts to explain the plight of the "white working class" in places like Kentucky and Ohio, and now know h...

Project 2025 Implodes (w/ Mary Harris)

An extra episode for you: Sam went on Slate's What Next  podcast (hosted by Mary Harris) to discuss the rise and fall of the Heritage Foundation's Trump transition project — Project 2025.  Is it dead? Why did Trump's campaign resent it so much? And...

Trump Survives, Biden Doesn't. Where Are We?

In the week-and-a-half since we last offered you, our beloved subscribers, the highest quality election punditry around, a lot has happened: on the Democratic side of the ledger, "The Podcasters' Coup" succeeded and Joe Biden has stepped down as the party's presidential candidate; at least for now, the nomination appears to be Kamala Harris's to lose. Republicans, meanwh...

Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model (w/ Suzanne Schneider)

Last week, as Israel continued to prosecute its eliminationist war against Palestinians in Gaza, an eclectic group of right-wing bigwigs gathered in Washington, DC for the fourth iteration of the National Conservatism conference — convened by Yarom Hazony, an Israeli-born writer, activist, and former speechwriter for  Benjamin Netanyahu. As our guest, historian 2024-07-19 17:27:04 +0000 UTC View Post

If Joe's Cooked, What Now? (w/ Ettingermentum)

Just about two weeks ago, we gave a nearly real-time reaction to Joe Biden's catastrophically inept performance in his first presidential debate against Donald Trump. The fallout has been...

Joe's Gotta Go

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 about our conversation. We recorded this on the afternoon of Friday, June 28, the day after the debate (thus, you'll often hear us refer to "la...

Has the Far Right Won in Europe? (w/ David Adler & David Broder)

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 e...

When the Clock Broke (w/ John Ganz)

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. Vict...

Seeking Your Input!

One constant since we started Know Your Enemy over five years ago has been the thoughtfulness and intelligence of you, our listeners. That should be clear if you read the comments on here, but it's even more evident in the many notes we receive personally from listeners that you don't get to see—whether they're offering sincere criticism, generous praise, recommending a book, suggesting futur...

The Gay Men Who Built the Conservative Movement (w/ Neil J. Young)

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 thei...

Will the Trump Verdict Matter?

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's a wide-ranging conversation, including discussions of low-trust voters, educational polarization, how everything in the United States has...

What Was the CIO? (w/ Tim Barker and Ben Mabie)

Historian Tim Barker and editor/organizer Ben Mabie join to talk about a thrilling episode in the history of  American labor. Barker and Mabie are two of the hosts of Fragile Juggernaut, a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategi...

Consider the Cranks (w/ David Austin Walsh)

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 e...

The Inconclusive Mr. Buckley

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, Burns, the whole gang... What do we make of the doc? ...

Against Despair (w/ Christian Wiman)

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 ...

Write Like a Man (w/ Ronnie Grinberg)

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...

Arguing the World: Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and Bell

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 Bell, and Nathan Glazer.

Why now?...

Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome (w/ B.D. McClay)

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, a...

UNLOCKED: Keeping up with the Bozells

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 ...

Why the Right Loves Foreign Dictators (w/ Jacob Heilbrunn)

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...

A Remedy for Envy? René Girard Redux

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 own attachment to it; the politics of Jesus, ...

René Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz)

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 b...

Thinking the "Far Right"

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, "2024-02-11 16:23:14 +0000 UTC View Post