Know Your Enemy
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Has Trump 2.0 Been a Success So Far? — And Other Questions
🕑 Added 2025-08-04 10:30:06 +0000 UTCIt'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 the mailbag and find out what was on the minds of Know Your Enemy listeners, who sent too many excellent questions for just one episode—so, if you like what you hear, consider subscribing on Patreon to listen our next bonus episode when we'll answer even more of them.
In this round of listener questions, we take up how much Trump has kept his campaign promises, our favorite bourbons, the politics of Judaism, St. Augustine and original sin, novelists (gay and straight), and more!
Sources and further reading:
Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1945)
— A Single Man (1964)
Don Bachardy, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990)
Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (2009)
— A Boy's Own Story (1982)
— The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)
— The Farewell Symphony (1997)
— The Married Man (2000)
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1971)
— Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)
Henri du Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1962)
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1949)
— Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968)
Sam Adler-Bell, "The Father of All Secrets," The Baffler, Dec 2022.
— "The Essential John le Carré," NYTimes, Jul 12, 2023.
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, (1930)
Javier Marías, A Heart So White, (1995)
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, (2000)
Percival Everett, Erasure, (2001)
Comments
Know Your Enemy
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Know Your Enemy
Or “vice signaling”
Trevor Davis
Maybe it’s a little bit too obvious (and petty), but regarding conservative cigar-smoking, etc, I was really hoping you would explicitly point out that it’s straight-up VIRTUE SIGNALING!!
BTS
Amen to Sam’s take on DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. I’m probably a bit older than most KYE listeners, so didn’t know it was cool when I bought it. It is brilliant.
Greg Welch
The discussion you two had on conservativism struck a chord. It brought to mind Marx's phrase from the Manifesto "All that is solid melts into air" etc. While it's usually interpretted as admiring of the bourgeoisie, it always had overtone of melancholy for me. I'm drawn to Romantic Marxism and the notion of bringing what's of value from the past into the future in a dialectical relationship.
