Know Your Enemy posts
Posts: 231
Files: 936
Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner)
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; par...
Zohran, the Jews, and Reckoning with Gaza (w/ Peter Beinart)
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, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. We start by discussing the a...
Break Glass in Case of Emergency
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 congres...
Command + F + Hitler
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 revelation...
How Charles Murray (Almost) Predicted the Trump Era
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 "cognitiv...
How To Give A Damn
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...
Death, Power, and the Charlie Kirk Memorial (w/ Pat Blanchfield)
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 conven...
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
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 an...
The Case for Democracy (w/ Osita Nwanevu)
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 Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, Osita Nwanevu sets out to un...
An Officer and a Spy (w/ John Ganz)
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 American distributor (and likewise was shunned...
Frank Meyer, Inventor of Conservatism (w/ Daniel J. Flynn)
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 exploits on behalf of the Party in the UK got him kicked out of the country and back to the United States, where he eventually t...
The Minority Voters Moving Right (w/ Daniel Martinez HoSang)
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 tow...
From Armageddon to Zionism — More Listener Questions
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 religion seemed to be on the minds of listeners, and we take up charismatic Christians and the evolution of both the ...
Has Trump 2.0 Been a Success So Far? — And Other Questions
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 back in September 2024. A lot has happened since then (to say the least), so we wanted to once again open up ...
Longtime Listener, First Time Caller? Send Us Your Questions for Our Next Mailbag Episode
It'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 fo...
Trump's Epstein Problem
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...
Zohran! (w/ Waleed Shahid)
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, ...
A Complicated Man: William F. Buckley, Jr. (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)
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, bes...
More on the MAGA Civil War over Iran
If you were intrigued by our conversation with Curt Mills last week, Sam's latest column provides more detail about the intra-MAGA fight over Israel and Iran. “It’s the battle of the Murdoch empire versus the podcast bros,” said a former administration official. “Whoever wins determines ...
MAGA's War Over the War with Iran (w/ Curt Mills)
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...
Immigration Showdown in LA (w/ E. Tammy Kim)
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, "Immigration Protests Threaten to Boil Over in Los Angeles," The New Yorker, June 9, 2025. — "Inside the Activist Groups Resisti...
UNLOCKED: Reagan, the Movie (w/ Jesse Brenneman)
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 Reagan (2024), with ou...
Joe Biden's Betrayal
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 Ho...
Christopher Caldwell's Case Against Civil Rights
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...
Trump as Messianic Prophet (w/ Manvir Singh)
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 ingredients—an alleged league of pedophiles, a godlike miracle worker, promises of an Edenic restoration...
Did Podcasters Make Trump President? (w/ Andrew Marantz)
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 T...
Conclave (2024) (w/ Brandon Taylor)
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, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The film, as you might gue...
The Life & Crimes of Roy Cohn (w/ In Bed with the Right)
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 extraordinaire," as they describe him. These days Cohn is perhaps most infamous for being Don...
VIDEO: Know Your Enemy in the Windbag City (w/ Reid Cherlin)
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.)
KYE Boys in Chicago Tuesday (April 29) — post-event hang at Jimmy’s
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 conversation with Reid Cherlin of Crooked Media. (RSVP at the link....
