As 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 country." The key to achieving these goals, conservatives believe, is ensuring that this time — unlike in 2016 — Trump is surrounded by the right people: populist true-believers who are sufficiently loyal and sufficiently competent to implement his extreme agenda. "Personnel is policy" is the watchword. And think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) are busy building rival rosters of ideologically-vetted political appointees. (And pissing each other off in the process.)This episode explores how movement conservatives are refashioning the "conservative pipeline" for an anti-establishment era — through their efforts to recruit, credential, and train political professionals for a second Trump term. The question is: can these initiatives overcome the candidate's own erratic style, his weakness for sycophancy, his preference for hiring devoted courtiers over disciplined ideologues? If push came to shove, would Trump submit to the Heritage Foundation's plans for his presidential transition? Or would he resent being managed by these self-understood "adults in the room?" In other words, can the eggheads of the conservative movement clean up the mess that is MAGA? Or is that just another intellectual fantasy? After all, as we often say on Know Your Enemy: "MAGA is the mess."Sources:Sam Adler-Bell, "The Shadow War to Determine the Next Trump Administration," New York Times, Jan 10, 2024Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Devlin Barrett, "Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term," Washington Post, Nov 6, 2023. Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, "Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportation: Inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans," NYTimes, Nov 11, 2023. Jonathan D. Karl, "The Man Who Made January 6 Possible," Atlantic, Nov 9, 2021.Zachary Petrizzo, "Trumpworld Is Already at War Over Staffing a New Trump White House," Daily Beast, Nov 16, 2023. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, "Behind the Curtain — Scoop: The Trump job applications revealed," Axios, Dec 1, 2023.Ian Ward, "The Brash Group of Young Conservatives Getting Ready for the Next Trump Administration," Politico, Nov 3, 2023. Michael Hirsh, "Inside the Next Republican Revolution," Politico, Sept 9, 2023. Dylan Riley, "What Is Trump?" New Left Review, Nov 2018.Timothy Snyder, "Not a Normal Election," Commonweal, Nov 2, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyJourneyman 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 obsessed with Elaine and believes Jerry is sabotaging his career.The "Crazy" Joe Davola episodes come at a major turning point in Seinfeld's nine seasons. The grittier, nearly vanished working-class New York City that's depicted in its earliest episodes, filled with dingy laundromats, struggling actors, immigrant relatives, and people who are literally poor, begins to drop out of view as Jerry's career takes off and the settings, references, and concerns of the show becomes more absurd and removed from the day to day life of ordinary people in Manhattan and beyond.Using the death of Peter Crombie as the thinnest of excuses to do an episode on the politics of Seinfeld, Matt was joined by KYE producer Jesse Brenneman and historian Gabe Winant to explain its "Jewish humor"; how the class politics of New York City in the 70s and 80s informed the show; the deeper meaning of its many references to dictators, Nazis, communists, and others; the Dinkins vs. Giuliani race for mayor; and more!

When 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 ways they answer them — and the reasons their answers  change — is the subject of today's episode. In other words: we're discussing the historiography of the American right. (Fun!)In a highly influential 1994 essay, historian Alan Brinkley referred to conservatism as "something of an orphan in historical scholarship." By 2011, when our brilliant guest, Kim Phillips-Fein, surveyed the historical literature on conservatism, she found a dynamic, prolific, even "trendy" field, but one with many unsettled methodological debates. In 2017, friend of the pod Rick Perlstein wrote that historians, himself included, had made a mistake, privileging the more respectable and intellectual dimensions of conservatism over the more irrational, rank, and racist. "If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story," Perlstein mused, "might historians have been telling that story wrong?" Since then, several studies and popular books have emerged which correct the record, and take up Perlstein's call to study "conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage." To start off the year — an election year, no less — we're taking up these questions again. What is the state of the field of conservative studies now? Have historians, popular writers, and/or podcasters over-corrected, in the Trump era, for the mistakes Perlstein cites? What might we be missing this time? We're so very lucky to have long-time friend of the show Kim Phillips-Fein, the Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University, as our guide. Let's get big picture and take stock. 2024, here we go.  Further Reading:Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," The American Historical Review, Apr 1994. Kim Phillips Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," The Journal of American History, Dec 2011. — Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (2010)— Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017)Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong." New York Times, Apr 11, 2017. Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," The American Scholar, Winter, 1954. Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)John Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (2021)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyWriter 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, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?Further Reading:Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s," New York Magazine, June 1972— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)— A Man in Full (1998)— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017

For 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 changed American democracy — massively empowering the presidency, disempowering Congress, and setting the nation on a permanent war footing. At the same time, secrecy and deception metastasized through the American system, enabling the rise of extra-judicial assassinations, coup plotting, domestic surveillance, torture, and clandestine war.  "Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission..." writes Wills, "Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began specializing in secret keeping.” Also discussed: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer  (2023), Henry Kissinger (RIP), Bush and Obama, Snowden, Ellsberg, and the ways in which Bomb Power is a profoundly Catholic book. Enjoy!Sources:Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner (2017)Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (2021)Archbishop John Wester, "Living in the Light of Christ's Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament," Jan 11, 2022Erik Baker, "Daniel in the Lion's Den: On the Moral Courage of Daniel Ellsberg," The Baffler, June 17, 2023John Schwenkler and Mark Souva, "False Choices: The Unjustifiable Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Commonweal, Oct 14, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

In 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 does Friedman's variety of libertarianism differ from, say, that of Mises or Hayek? What made Friedman, unusually for the times, someone who valued the intellects and work of the women around him? And what should we make of Friedman now, as Trump and elements of the conservative movement and Republican Party supposedly jettison the "fusionism" of which Friedman's free markets were a part? As mentioned in the episode's introduction, listeners might want to revisit episode 16 with economist Marshall Steinbaum for a broader, and more critical, look at the Chicago school.Sources:Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)Jennifer Burns, Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market (2009)Naomi Klein, "40 Years Ago, This Chilean Exile Warned Us About the Shock Doctrine. Then He Was Assassinated." The Nation, Sept 21, 2016.Tim Barker, "Other People’s Blood," n+1 , Spring 2019. Pascale Bonnefoy, "50 Years Ago, a Bloody Coup Ended Democracy in Chile," NY Times, Sept 11, 2023....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyKnow 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 presidency.David is the General Coordinator of the Progressive International, and despite what he tells people at parties, unrelated to Sam.Further ReadingQuinn Slobodian, "Monster of the Mainstream," New Statesman, Nov 20, 2023Murray Rothbard, "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,"  Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Jan 1992.John Ganz, "Murray Rothbard's America," Unpopular Front, May 30, 2022.Manuel García Gojon “Will Argentina’s Next President Be a Rothbardian?” The Mises Institute, Jul 4, 2022. Philipp Bagus, "Javier's Milei's Populist Strategy in Argentina Is Working," The Mises Institute, Sept 14, 2023.

In 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 what could be learned about America from the way Nixon attracted or repelled his fellow countrymen. Why not do the same thing for the Kennedys?"The result of Wills's efforts is a devastating portrait of an Irish-Catholic family who strove to be accepted at the most rarified heights of American society—and then, when they weren't, relentlessly pursued political power. Along the way, the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, used his money and influence to create a series of myths surrounding his sons, most of all the son who would become president, John F. Kennedy. It is these myths at which Wills takes aim, showing how Joseph Kennedy bought his second son good press, a heroic war record, and even a Pulitzer Prize. And it was Joseph Kennedy who taught his sons what was expected of them as men: to use and dominate women (many, many women), to valorize virility and daring and risk, and to understand power as enlightened leadership by the best and brightest (most of all, the Kennedys), not as harnessing the popular energy of mass movements. What begins as a book exposing the Kennedy men as wannabe aristocrats bent on conquest, both sexual and political, ends as an indictment of the liberalism they came to represent.Sources:Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (1982)Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970)Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (1972)Joan Didion, "Wayne at the Alamo," National Review, Dec 31, 1960Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (1988)Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971)Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (1960)John Leonard, "Camelot's Failure," New York Times, Feb 25, 1982Norman Mailer, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," Esquire, Nov 1960...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyIn 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.— "Whither the Religious Left?" The New Republic, April 15, 2021.Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 2018.Kyle Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001, (2020)Paul Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, (2020)Edward H. Miller, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism, (2021)John S Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism, (2021)Kim Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," Journal of American History, Dec 2011.Allen Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," The American Historical Review, Apr 1994.Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong," New York Times, Apr 11, 2017.Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement, (1979)Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, (1986)Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, (2017)Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, (2017)

Once 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 reply, "On Mourning and Statehood," and Leifer's response to Winant herePatrick Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023)Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron" (1961)Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018)Samuel L. Popkin, Crackup: The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Politics (2021)Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (2016)John Spong, "Daniel Lanois on Recording Willie Nelson’s Landmark Album 'Teatro,'" Texas Monthly, June 2023Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1971)Suzanne Schneider, "Light Among the Nations," Jewish Currents, Sept 23, 2023Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor (1971)Mark C. Henrie, ed., Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman (2001) ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

In 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 Vidal for good measure.)  The article, despite its meandering prose and fuzzy-headed conclusions, sparked an enormous response from NR's readership, some of whom felt Buckley was too hard on Pat and Joe, others who thought he was not hard enough. The following year, Buckley combined the essay, several of the responses, and a few new thoughts of his own... and sold it as a "book." And thirty-one years later, we read that book — carefully — and recorded a podcast about it with our friend John Ganz, author of the forthcoming book, When the Clock Broke, about the derangement of American politics in the 1990s. (You can pre-order it here. It's sure to be excellent). Unfortunately for us all, In Search of Anti-Semitism is not a good book; it's hardly a book at all. But it is a fascinating artifact of a fleeting post-Cold War moment in which conservatives furtively faced their own demons — before turning right back around. For those interested, here is the link mentioned in the episode's introduction for tickets to Dissent's 70th anniversary event later this month.Sources:William F. Buckley Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992)John Ganz, "The Year the Clock Broke," The Baffler, Nov 2018Joshua Muravchik, "Pat Buchanan and the Jews," Commentary, Jan 1991Matthew Sitman, "There Will Be No Buckley Revival," Commonweal, July 2015 ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyRepublican 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 Republican caucus in the House, and how did they get that way? Were Democrats right to not bail out McCarthy? In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by New York's Eric Levitz to provides answers to all these question—and more. Listen:Todd Snider, "Conservative, Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males" (2004)Sources:Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (Penguin, 2022)Eric Levitz,  "The GOP Is More Ungovernable Than Ever Before," New York, Jan 5, 2023Ettingermentum, "The Art of Losing the Speaker's Gavel," Oct 3, 2023Matthew Loh, "Mitch McConnell Says House Republicans Should Get Rid of the Motion to Vacate Because It 'Makes the Speaker's Job Impossible,'" Insider, Oct 5, 2023

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt 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 line, while Trump spoke to employees of a non-union auto parts company. Why did the mainstream media continually insist that Biden and Trump were both appealing to striking workers? Did Biden do enough in his brief visit to the picket line? What did Trump actually say about the strike? These questions and more get answered in this primary season special!Sources:Alex Press, "Trump Is Speaking Tonight in Michigan at a Nonunion Auto Shop, as a Guest of Its Boss," Jacobin, Sept 27, 2023Craig Mauger, "Donald Trump: UAW Negotiations 'Don't Mean as Much as You Think,'" Detroit Free Press, Sept 27, 2023Martin Pengelly, "Signs Touting ‘Auto Workers for Trump’ at Michigan Rally Found to be Fake – Report," The Guardian, Sept 28, 2023Heather Carter, "UAW President Shawn Fain Is Reviving That Old-Time Religion: Christian Radicalism," Jacobin, Sept 29, 2023

A 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 flourishing of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent sentiment on Twitter/X since Musk purchased the platform.But for our guests — Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, and Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents — the story is more complicated. Over the past five years, Jewish Currents  has been perhaps the only outlet on the left aggressively reporting on the ADL, exposing its complicity with the Trump presidency, its attacks on pro-Palestinian activism, and its fraying relationships with Muslim and black-led civil rights groups. In this episode, we explore the central tension animating the ADL's erratic politics: can an organization officially dedicated to securing "justice and fair treatment to all" simultaneously forbid criticism of a state — the state of Israel — whose ethnonationalist social order is an inspiration to right-wing movements the world over? And if that contradiction can't be reconciled, how should we respond to Musk's attacks on the organization? Is the ADL salvageable? And does it deserve to be saved? Listen to find out! Further Reading Emmaia Gelman, "The Anti-Democratic Origins of the ADL and AJC," Jewish Currents, March 12, 2021Peter Beinart, "Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?" New York Times, Aug 26, 2022Mari Cohen, The ADL's Antisemitism Findings, Explained, Jewish Currents, April 4, 2023Mari Cohen & Isaac Scher, "The ADL Doubles Down on Opposing the Anti-Zionist Left," Jewish Currents, May 1, 2022Alex Kane & Jacob Hutt, "How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work," February 8, 2021Noah Kulwin, "The Unbearable Ignorance of the ADL," Jewish Currents, Dec 9, 2022 Mari Cohen & Alex Kane, "ADL Staffers Dissented After CEO Compared Palestinian Rights Groups to Right-Wing Extremists, Leaked Audio Reveals," Jewish Currents, Mar 8, 2023Alex Kane & Sam Levin, "Internal ADL Memo Recommended Ending Police Delegations to Israel Amid Backlash," Jewish Currents, Mar 17, 2022Eric Alterman, "What Does the ADL Stand for Today?" The New Republic, Aug 21, 2023James Traub, "Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?" New York Times, Jan 14, 2007 Find our intrepid producer Jesse Brenneman's new record "Modern Life" on Bandcamp,  Spotify, or YouTube. ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! 

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyFormer 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 2020 election, efforts that culminated with the insurrection on January 6. In this episode, Matt and Sam try to make sense of them and weigh the possible risks and rewards of "breaking the seal" and criminally charging a former president. In particular, they give closes readings to the two January 6-related indictments and discuss what they reveal about the deranged efforts Trump and his team made to overturn the election and a Republican Party that seemed to mostly go along with it, along with some of the problems with the RICO statute Trump and others are being charged under in Georgia. And of course, these indictments came down just as we're entering presidential election season — how will Trump's legal problems effect the 2024 race?Sources:Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, "The Trump Jan. 6 Indictment, Annotated," NYT, Aug 1, 2023Alan Feuer, et al, "The Trump Georgia Indictment, Annotated," NYT, Aug 15, 2023Charlie Savage, "The Four Trump Criminal Cases: Strengths and Weaknesses," NYT, Aug 28, 2023James Risen, "In Trump’s Georgia Indictment, a Tale of Two Election Workers," The Intercept, Aug 17, 2023Rick Rojas and Sean Keenan, "Dozens of ‘Cop City’ Activists Are Indicted on Racketeering Charges," NYT, Sept 5, 2023Laurence Tribe, "Anatomy of a Fraud," Just Security, Aug 8, 2023Matthew Sitman, "Will Be Wild," Dissent, Spring 2023Damon Linker, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Trump?" Notes from the Middleground, July 18, 2022

In 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 freedom. For Moyn, the liberalism that emerged from the Cold War is, lamentably, still with us—a culprit in the rise of Donald Trump, and a barrier to offering a compelling alternative to him. Sources:Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)Matthew Sitman, "How to Read Reinhold Niebuhr, After 9-11," Society, Spring 2012 ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt 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

Three 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 many of our most vigilant listeners have suggested)? Were we naive about the value of welcoming young conservatives on the show? And, perhaps most illuminatingly, what can Hochman’s trajectory (from Never-Trump conservative and Michael Oakeshott fan to disgraced DeSantis speechwriter) tell us about the young right today?After all, Hochman was not alone. A few weeks before the Hochman affair, DeSantis influencer and Chronicles magazine editor Pedro Gonzalez was exposed for expressing virulent anti-Semitic sentiments in private group chats in 2019. And most recently, Huffington Post reported that Richard Hanania, another young conservative — a darling of Silicon Valley reactionaries and a frequent interlocutor with centrist pundits on Twitter — had lived a previous life as an alt-right white supremacist and misogynist.In this episode, we ask (not for the first time): what exactly is going on with young conservatives? Has the wall between mainstream conservatism and unacceptably hard-right sentiments completely broken down? Was it ever there? Or has it only become more porous in the age of Twitter, Telegram, and online anonymity? Did the alt-right of 2016, with its Pepe memes and winking fascist apologia, ever go away? Or did it merely merge, seamlessly, with today’s young right, turning an entire generation of GOP operatives into half-ironic racists, neofascists, and violent homophobes? Further Reading:Michelle Goldberg, “The Radicalization of the Young Right,” NYTimes, July 31, 2023.“Young, Radical, and on the Right, with Nate Hochman,” KYE, Dec 16, 2021."How Euphemisms Muddy Our Political Conversations," On the Media (WNYC), Jan 21, 2022David Weigel and Shelby Talcott, “‘This belongs in the Smithsonian’: Inside the meme video operation that swallowed Ron DeSantis’ campaign,” Aug 1, 2023.Sam Adler-Bell, “The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right,” The New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” from Rationalism in politics and other essays, 1962.John Ganz, “They’re All Like That,” Unpopular Front, Aug 6, 2023.Jordan Nixon-Hamilton, “‘F**k This President’: More Messages Show Pro-DeSantis Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Turned on Trump in 2019,” Breitbart, Aug 1, 2023.Christopher Mathias, “Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym,” Huffington Post, Aug 4, 2023. ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyThe 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 Carlson, Ann Coulter, and Paul Ryan count the Grateful Dead among their favorite bands? Isn't there something odd about these social conservative luminaries loving the Dead, such avatars of 1960s psychedelia, libertinism, and hippie counterculture? Or else, have we misunderstood something essential about the band — their Americana roots, their individualist ethos, their reverence for transcendent experiences — which makes them particularly suitable to conservative sensibilities?And also why do we all love them so much — this band that tests our patience, produces largely forgettable studio records, and often sounds, in concert, as if they're playing their own songs for the first time? The mind reels...Strap in for a long, strange, improvisational trip to the heart of these bewildering matters.Further Reading:Sophie Haigney, "Those of Us Who Love the Dead," Gawker, Dec 3, 2021.— "The Final Dead Shows: Part One," The Paris Review, Jul 17, 2023.— "The Final Dead Shows: Part Two," The Paris Review, July 18, 2023.— "The Final Dead Shows: Part Three," The Paris Review, Jul 19, 2023.Ann Coulter, "I’m A Grateful Dead Fan For Life," Billboard, Jun 24, 2016.Noah Eckstein, "'Wave That Flag': Meet the Deadheads Who Stump for Trump," Variety, Nov 2, 2020.Zachary D. Carter and Arthur Delaney, "Why Do Conservatives Love The Grateful Dead? We Ask Tucker Carlson," Huffington Post, Jul 15, 2015.Dean Budnick, "Behind The Scene: Jake Sherman on Phish, the Grateful Dead and Covering 535 Class Presidents at Punchbowl News," Relix, May 12, 2021.Martin Longman, "Why Do Republicans Love the Grateful Dead?" Washington Monthly, July 3, 2015Nick Paumgarten, "Dead Head," The New Yorker, Nov 18, 2012.Hunter Schwartz, "Grateful Dead fans: Surprisingly Republican," Washington Post, Jul 1, 2015.Marc Tracy, "Saying Goodbye to the Dead. (Again.)" NYTimes, Jul 14, 2023.Andy Kroll, "Jon Huntsman: We Need a 'Grateful Dead Tour' to Save America," Mother Jones, Jan 8, 2012.

In 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 served on the boards of numerous conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Committee for the Free World, and the Independent Women's Forum, among others.  Her essays, books, and memoirs represent an anguished counter-revolt against the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and her trajectory from (ostensible) New Deal liberal to anti-feminist Cold Warrior proves a perfect subject for Know Your Enemy. Decter also was married to Norman Podhoretz (another subject of KYE lore) and the mother of John Podhoretz, current editor of Commentary magazine. A quarrelsome, Jewish conservative with a lively writing style and a fascinating, emblematic life story: what could be better?Further Reading:Midge Decter, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War (2002) —The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation (1972)— Always Right: Selected Writings of Midge Decter (2002)— Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975)— Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait (2003)— “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, Sept 1980.— “Socialism & Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,” Commentary, Dec 1982.— “Documentation: Sex Education on Trial—What They’re Teaching Our Children,” Crisis Magazine, Dec 1, 1998.John Podhoretz, A Son’s Eulogy for Midge Decter (1927-2022), Commentary, May 12, 2022.R. R. Reno, “My Memories of Midge Decter,” First Things, May 11, 2022.Jeet Heer, “Farewell to Midge Decter, the Bigot on the Beach,” The Nation, May 13, 2022.Ronnie Grinberg, “An overlooked conservative writer helps explain Trump’s enduring appeal,” Washington Post, May 20, 2022.Douglas Martin, “Midge Decter, an Architect of Neoconservatism, Dies at 94,” NYTimes, May 9, 2022.Adrienne Rich, “The Anti-Feminist Woman,” NYRB, Nov 30, 1972. ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt 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 your hosts plenty of fodder to discuss where faith ends and cynicism begins, the relationship between evangelicalism and consumer capitalism, cheap grace vs. real grace, whether or not people can change, the pathologies of evangelical purity culture, and much more. Plus: Jesse takes us behind the scenes of his brilliant, very funny podcast Tech Talk and its surprising connections to Elon Musk, Eli Gemstone, and others.Sources:John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Upon This Rock," GQ, January 24, 2004Austin Considine, "Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous," New York Times, June 14, 2023Doreen St. Félix, "The Lost Sheep of Danny McBride's The Righteous Gemstones," New Yorker, January 17, 2022Matthew Sitman, "Speaking of New York: An Interview with Fran Lebowitz," Commonweal, February 7, 2019

After 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 design ruling). Each of these rulings represents a victory for the conservative legal movement, an exercise of raw power by the court, and a blow to dignity and decent policy for millions of Americans. Taken together, they help us understand  the workings of the conservative intellectual pipeline — at law schools, fellowships, and well-endowed non-profits — to change federal policy. How do conservative institutions work together to (in the eyes of the law) turn victims into oppressors and vice versa? Listen to find out. Sources:Jennifer Schuessler, "Conservative Group Withdraws Lawsuit Against Left-Wing Podcast," New York Times, July 12, 2023John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (1997)Sarah Posner, "The Legal Muscle Leading the Fight to End the Separation of Church and State," Washington Spectator, April 1, 2007Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, "Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court Nominee, Spoke at Program Founded to Inspire a 'Distinctly Christian Worldview in Every Area of Law,'" Washington Post, September 27, 2020Melissa Gira Grant, "The Mysterious Case of the Fake Gay Marriage Website, the Real Straight Man, and the Supreme Court," New Republic, June 29, 2023Thomas Sowell, "The Day Cornell Died," Weekly Standard, October 30, 1999Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Know 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 thinkers. Then they turn to a favorite writer, journalist Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and The Journalist and the Murderer. They talk about parallels between the role of the analyst and that of the journalist; interiors and interiority; secrets, thefts, and betrayals; the so-called “Freud wars”; and the internal politics of psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, they examine Malcolm’s famous claim that the task of the journalist is “morally indefensible” and its implications for the work of the analyst. Further reading: Sam Adler-Bell, "Janet Malcolm’s Dangerous Method," The New Republic, Mar 20, 2023Sam Adler-Bell, "Succession's Repetition Compulsion," The Nation,  Nov 10, 2021Hannah Gold, “Analysis Interminable: On Janet Malcolm,” The Nation, June 25, 2021.Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession  (1982)— In The Freud Archives  (1984)— The Journalist and the Murderer  (1990)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! For more  Ordinary Unhappiness:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyIn 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 how the discourse about men has evolved in recent years, the darker and more deranged consequences of an "abstract rage to protect," some of the ways gender and class might relate to each other, and more about Matt's psyche than you might care to know.Sources:Phil Christman, How To Be Normal (2022)"What Is It Like To Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018"Guy stuff. Boy time. Brosephery." The Tourist, June 11, 2023"Manfulness. Hot guy stuff. Convening a bro-seph bro-dsky reading group." The Tourist, June 22, 2023Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club, (1981)Rudyard Kipling, “If—“ (1941)

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyLast 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 the Republican Party and the religious right. Where did Robertson come from, and what was distinctive about Robertson's theological and political views? What were the innovations of the Christian Coalition, the group he founded in 1987, in organizing conservative believers for the GOP? How did he respond to the end of the Cold War and adapt his message for the 1990s and the supposed advent of a "New World Order"?In this episode, Matt and Sam take up these questions and more, plus offer a discussion of James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, who died in late May. An evangelical Christian known for railing against the Beach Boys, his offensive comments about Native Americans and others, and using the supposed imminent return of Christ to justify destroying the environment.Sources:Pat Robertson obituaries: NYT, Washington PostJames G. Watt obituaries: NYT, Washington PostDaniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (2016)Jacob Heilbrunn, "His Anti-Semitic Sources," New York Review of Books, April 20, 1995Pat Robertson, The New World Order (1991)James Conaway, "James Watt, In the Right with the Lord," Washington Post, April 27, 1983John Taylor "Pat Robertson’s God, Inc." Esquire, Nov 1994.

"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. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves' 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It is a best-seller. Figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate attract huge audiences, serving as reactionary self-help gurus for young people eager to be told what a man is and how he should behave. One doesn't have to accept the right's framing of the problem — nor any kind of gender essentialism — to acknowledge the statistics: boys and men are falling behind in education, in work-force participation, and succumbing to drugs, alcoholism, and suicide. Hawley — apparently having stewed on the topic for two years — has just released a book on "manhood," which advises a revival of biblical virtues to guide the aimless young men of 21st century America. To pair with Hawley, we  read Harvey Mansfield's 2006 book on "manliness." Putting Hawley's evangelical Christian preaching in conversation with Mansfield's Straussian philosophical playfulness proved very constructive. Along the way, we talk about our own relationship to manhood and try to decide which (if any) of the virtues associated with maleness are worth preserving, defending, or even advising young men to embrace. Further reading: Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness, Yale University Press, 2006.Joshua Hawley, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Regnery, 2023. Joshua Hawley, "America's Epicurean Liberalism," National Affairs, Fall 2010.Becca Rothfeld, "How to be a man? Josh Hawley has the (incoherent) answers," The Washington Post, May 18, 2023.  Phil Christman, "What Is It Like to Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018.Martin Amis, "Return of the Male," London Review of Books, Dec 5, 1991. Martha Nussbaum, "Man Overboard," New Republic, June 22, 2006. Idrees Kahloon, "What's the Matter With Men?" The New Yorker, Jan 23, 2023.Zoë Heller, "How Toxic Is Masculinity?" The New Yorker, Aug 1, 2022. Lisa Miller, "Tate-Pilled What a generation of boys have found in Andrew Tate’s extreme male gospel." New York Magazine, Mar 14, 2023. ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt 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!SourcesNate Cohn, "Why Ron DeSantis Is Struggling," New York Times, May 5, 2023Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan, "Why Ron DeSantis Is Limping to the Starting Line," New York Times, May 13, 2023Reid J. Epstein & Shane Goldmacher, "Biden’s Slow Start Worries Democrats. Aides Insist All Is Well," New York Times, May 14, 2023Sam Adler-Bell, "The One Thing Trump Has That DeSantis Never Will," New York Times, Apr 10, 2023Matthew Sitman, "The 'Weekend at Bernie’s' Primary," Commonweal, Mar 3, 2020.

With 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 rightwing political candidates or the effects of climate change, in these fraught times, when the demands of good art can seem in tension with a simplistic and moralistic culture. Also discussed: parents, children, and families, now and in the coming climate crisis; how and whether people can change; and, of course, the WGA strike and why it matters.Sources Cited:Michael Schulman, "Why Are TV Writers So Miserable," The New Yorker, Apr 29, 2023Alex Press, "TV Writers Say They’re Striking to Stop the Destruction of Their Profession," Jacobin, May 3, 2023.Sam Adler-Bell, "Succession's Repetition Compulsion," The Nation, Nov 10, 2021.Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (“On Care for Our Common Home”), May 2015Listen to previous Know Your Enemy episodes with these guests:"We Can Be Heroes" (w/ Will Arbery), November 11, 2019"Suburban Woman" (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry), October 29, 2020"Living at the End of Our World" (w/ Daniel Sherrell & Dorothy Fortenberry), September 2, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyThe 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 contingency? And is there a way to wed the Democrats' eagerness to "defend democracy," as such, with a more robust program for social and economic justice? We puzzle it out.Sources:Matthew Sitman, "Will Be Wild," Dissent, Apr 18, 2023.Jill Lepore, "What the January 6th Report is Missing," The New Yorker, Jan 9, 2023.David Sirota, "The Long American Meltdown Led to the January 6 Insurrection" Jacobin, Jan 6, 2022Sam Adler-Bell, "Is the January 6 Committee Really Saving Democracy?" New York Magazine, Jul 11, 2022.Executive Summary of the Jan 6 Report

Gillian 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 for America's Revival. (You heard it here: it sucks.) Along the way, Gillian provides an update on the conservative war on so-called "gender ideology" and "wokeness," how organizations like hers are fighting back, and why superficial expressions of sympathy for trans people by major corporations and banks — which so outrage the right — are themselves a trap and a means of evading real justice.  We also discuss Sam's New York Times piece on DeSantis as an anti-woke technocrat, an embodiment of the twin cults of expertise and meritocracy, even as he disavows and demonizes the "ruling class" and it's irksome cultural mores. Finally, we identify the violent underpinnings of DeSantis's political impulses, discussing his alleged involvement in detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay. As Gillian summarizes DeSantis's worldview, “It’s just cold efficiency and shared enemies. That’s what he’s selling. It’s like getting a moral lecture from a gun."  Sources:Gillian Branstetter, "The Gender War Is A Forever War," The Autonomy, Mar 5, 2023.— "When Biology Needs Some Help," The Autonomy, Feb 9, 2023.Ron DeSantis, The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival, Feb 2023Sam Adler-Bell, "The One Thing Trump Has That DeSantis Never Will," NY Times, Apr 10, 2023.Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, Oct 2020.Zack Beauchamp, "Ron DeSantis is following a trail blazed by a Hungarian authoritarian," Vox, Apr 28, 2022. Angelo Codevilla, "America's Ruling Class," The American Spectator, Jul 16, 2010. Jasper Craven, "The Sunshine Imperium: The militarism of Ron DeSantis," The Baffler, Mar 2023.Daniel Luban, "The Belligerent: Angelo Codevilla and the ideological origins of the New Right," The Baffler, Oct 2022. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Jul 2019.Joseph Darda, The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, Mar 2022. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, "Identity Politics and Elite Capture," Boston Review, May 7, 2020.Michael Kranish, "DeSantis’s pivotal service at Guantánamo during a violent year," Washington Post, March 19, 2023....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!   

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyThe 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, and much more.Plus: we extract from Sam Tanenhaus an update on the status of his HIGHLY-anticipated biography of William F. Buckley Jr... This one is for real heads. Enjoy!

"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 Song. In this sense, it's a quintessentially conservative book. But decline and nostalgia are not its only themes.  In short bursts of prose reflecting on sixty-six totemic songs (from Webb Pierce's 1953 hit "There Stands the Glass;" to The Fugs' 1967 proto-punk romp "CIA Man;" to Nina Simone's unimpeachable "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"), Dylan conjures a country — and canon — defined most of all by mutability, motion, and menace.  Dylan's America never stops moving, reinventing itself, or rebelling against its own strictures. Things get better; things get worse; what they don't do is stay the same. To help us make sense of Bob Dylan's idiosyncratic vision of America and American song, we're joined by Know Your Enemy musician-in-residence (and Bob super-fan) Will Epstein. Besides providing the music for our show, Will is a song-writer, composer, and improvisor; his latest album, WENDY, is out from Fat Possum records. (Download it or buy the vinyl here.) Music may not be the place where most people put their dreams these days, but it's still where we put ours. And there is no better way to understand America's dreams than by listening — closely — to its music.  Sources:Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2005)Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (2010)Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (2003)Martin Chilton, "Bob Dylan and the Great American Songbook," May 24, 2022Raymond Foye, "Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song," The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2022.Hua Hsu, "How Nam June Paik’s Past Shaped His Visions of the Future," The New Yorker, Mar 29, 2023.John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, coming Aug 2023....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe 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 conversation focuses on her recent book, The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy, and considers the promise and perils of using particular religious symbols, imagery, and language in a pluralistic, democratic society. Sources:Nichole M. Flores, The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy (2021)

Subscribe 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 Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury. In the book, she draws on years of ethnographic research about St. Mary of the Angels, a small, urban parish near Boston's Egleston Square, to understand how that religious community "constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building radical solidarity in the face of racial and economic injustice."  Sources:Susan Bigelow Reynolds, People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury (2023)Susan Bigelow Reynolds, "Ways of the Cross," Commonweal, March 14, 2023

In 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 would become a hero of the nascent postwar conservative movement, with his status as an ex-Communist—one of many who would congregate around National Review in the mid-to-late 1950s—bringing his moral credibility to the right as one who had seen the other side and lived to tell his tale. Before all that, though, Chambers's life was like something out of a novel: a difficult family life, early brilliance at Columbia University, literary achievement in leftwing publications, and years "underground" engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States. "Out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century," writes  Chambers in his 1952 memoir/jeremiad Witness.  Your hosts break it all down, assess his crimes and contributions, and explore one of the most consequential American lives of the twentieth century.  Sources:Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (1964)Whittaker Chambers, "Big Sister is Watching You," National Review, December 28, 1957The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National ReviewWritings, 1957-1959 (2014)William F. Buckley, Jr., editor, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (1969)L. Brent Bozell, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954)Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1956)Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (2013)Richard H. Crossman, editor, The God that Failed: A Confession (1949)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Matthew Richer, "The Cry Against Ninevah: A Centennial Tribute to Whittaker Chambers," Modern Age, Summer 2001Christopher Hitchens, "A Regular Bull," London Review of Books, July 1997Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, "No Laughing Matter" (YouTube, 2007)Jess Bravin, "Whittaker Chambers Award Draws Criticism—From His Family," Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2019Isaac Deutscher, "The Ex-Communist's Conscience,"  The Reporter, 1950. John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative odysseys in American intellectual history, (1975)Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, (1961)Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, (2011) ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! 

Early 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 majority — in those moments when existing partisan and coalitional structures were reshuffled and articulated anew. In other words: a realignment.In this thrilling conversation, Matt, Sam, and Tim talk through the implications of past realignments and argue about whether something similar is possible today.Sources:Timothy Shenk, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Harvard University Press, 1993)Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," The New Republic, Dec 2021Firing Line debate on the Panama Canal (YouTube) This episode was unlocked from Patreon. To hear more bonus episodes, subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy. 

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemySam 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 rigor that Jamelle and John bring to their own podcast, "Unclear and Present Danger," which focuses on the post-Cold War thrillers of the 1990s. We wind up talking about why the film doesn't work and about le Carré's ambiguous approach to spy fiction, in particular, how his perspective differs from other British chroniclers of Cold War espionage, like Ian Flemming and Graham Greene.In what ways does le Carré's approach represent an essentially (small-c) conservative disposition? And why is it so attractive to all of us? Listen to find out! Recommended Reading:Sam Adler-Bell, "The Father of All Secrets," The Baffler, Dec 2022.Laura Marsh, "The Nonconformist," NYRB, Feb 2022.Nicholas Dames, "Coming in from the Cold," n+1, Spring 2018.John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, Hodder & Stoughton, 1983.Tim Cornwell ed., A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, Random House, Jan 2023.

Modern 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, theologians, and other Jeremiahs of the modern condition (like Christopher Lasch and Alasdair MacIntyre). In the two books that made his name — 1959's Freud: Mind of the Moralist and 1966's Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud — Rieff engages deeply with psychoanalysis, deriving from Sigmund Freud a theory of how culture creates morality and, in turn, why modern culture, with its emphasis on psychological well-being over moral instruction, no longer functions to shape individuals into a community of shared purpose. Rieff, a secular Jew, remained concerned to the very end of his life with the problem of living in a society without faith, one in which the rudderless self is mediated, most of all, by therapeutic ideas and psychological institutions rather than by religious or political ones. Less sophisticated versions of this conundrum haunt conservative thought to this day — from complaints about "wokeness" as a religion to the right's treatment of sexual and gender transgression as mental pathology. To help us navigate Rieff, Freud, and the conservative underbelly of psychoanalysis, we're joined by two brilliant thinkers and writers: Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston. Hannah is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics; Alex is a PhD student at Duquesne in clinical psychology. Most importantly, for our purposes, Hannah and Alex are also the editors of Parapraxis, a new magazine of psychoanalysis on the left. We hope you enjoy this (admittedly, heady) episode. If you do, consider signing up for a new podcast — on psychoanalysis and politics, of all things — hosted by beloved KYE guest Patrick Blanchfield and his partner Abby Kluchin entitled "Ordinary Unhappiness." Further Reading: Philip Rieff, Freud: Mind of the Moralist (Viking, 1959)— The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Harper & Row, 1966)— Fellow Teachers (Harper & Row, 1973)Gerald Howard, "Reasons to Believe," Bookforum, Feb 2007. Blake Smith, "The Secret Life of Philip Rieff." Tablet, Dec 15, 2022George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity: Rieff's Problem with Freedom," Boston Review, Jul 1, 2007.Christopher Lasch, "The Saving Remnant," The New Republic, Nov 19, 1990. Hannah Zeavin, "Composite Case: The fate of the children of psychoanalysis," Parapraxis, Nov 14, 2022. Alex Colston, "Father," Parapraxis, Nov 21, 2022. Rod Dreher, "We Live In Rieff World," Mar 1, 2019. Park MacDougald, "The Importance of Repression," Sept 29, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyEarly 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 Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, the book attempts to define the character and conditions necessary for fashioning a durable electoral majority — in those moments when existing partisan and  coalitional structures were reshuffled and articulated anew. In other words: a realignment. In this thrilling conversation, Matt, Sam, and Tim talk through the implications of past realignments and argue about whether something similar is possible today. Sources:Timothy Shenk, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Harvard University Press, 1993)Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," The New Republic, Dec 2021

This 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 Texas Rangers who takes on drug dealers, Satanists, corrupt cops, and other bad guys, a task aided by his incredible martial-arts skills. The episodes of Walker discussed in this conversation were carefully curated by Jesse, and they provide a great deal of fodder for understanding conservatism (and America) in the 1990s, law and order politics, the American penchant for moral panics, how the Right has changed in the decades since the show aired, and more.Sources:Walker, Texas Ranger on IMDB"Chuck Norris's code of honor," drawn from the Chuck Norris System of martial arts (Chun Kuk Do)Chuck Norris, Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America (2008)Aaron Cantú, The Chaparral Insurgents of South Texas,The New Inquiry, April 2016.  ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Listen 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 liberation theologians, held a reactionary line on homosexuality at the height of the AIDS crisis, and slowly awakened to the depths and depravity of the Catholic sex-abuse scandal—but he also wrote movingly about God's love and took positions on the environment and the economy that would be mostly ignored by his conservative fans. To try to make sense of Benedict's life and work, especially his relationship with American Catholics, Matt is joined by Michael O'Loughlin, the national correspondent at America magazine and author of Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear.Listen to the entire conversation by subscribing to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!

Merry Christmas! Here's a little bonus content to tide you over until 2023. In April, Matt and Sam appeared on the excellent Jokermen podcast to discuss Bob Dylan's Christian rock records. And now we're sharing it with you. Lots to chew on in here for fans of KYE, Dylan, Jesus, and rock n' roll. Enjoy. 

For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI. In her authoritative new biography, G-Man, Yale historian Beverly Gage brings Hoover to life, uncovering the all-too-human man who played such an outsized role in twentieth-century U.S. political history. Gage's decade of research provides fascinating insights into the troubles that impinged on Hoover's childhood; his formative time in a white supremacist, Southern fraternity at George Washington University, Kappa Alpha; his early years in what was then the Bureau of Investigation and eventual rise to running it; Hoover's personal life and sexuality, including his longterm relationship with Clyde Tolson; and the transformation of the FBI across the 1930s and 1940s, and the ways it drew Hoover into a number of controversies that followed, from the Kennedy assassination to COINTELPRO and the FBI's attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sources:Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022)Michael Kazin, "J. Edgar Hoover’s Long Shadow," New Republic, Dec 9, 2022Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835, 2002)Please consider making an end-of-year donation to Dissent this holiday season, Know Your Enemy's beloved sponsor. And don't forget to subscribe to KYE on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes.

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent mailbag episode and keep answering listener questions. Topics include: KYE merchandise, the existence of Hell, Francis Fukuyama, Mormonism, gun violence, and more. Sources:David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019)John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012)Francis Fukuyama, "Still the End of History," Atlantic, October 17, 2022Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)W.H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1940)Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)Sohrab Ahmari, "Urban Jeremiah: Mike Davis, 1946-2022," Compact, October 26, 2022

As the end of the year approaches, Matt and Sam are once again answering questions from you, their beloved listeners. Like previous mailbag episodes, there was an abundance of excellent questions that were submitted. Topics include: the possibilities for the religious left, white Christian nationalism, your hosts' literary habits and favorite novels, conspiracy theories—and more. For those who especially enjoy this type of episode, check out the next KYE bonus episode on Patreon, which will take up even more listener questions!Sources:Hannah Gold, "The Loud Parts," Harper's, October 2022Jewish Currents, "The Jews" (On the Nose podcast episode), November 23, 2022Alastair Roberts, "On Thomas Achord," Alastair's Adversaria, November 27, 2022Rod Dreher, "The Thomas Achord – Alastair Roberts Mess," The American Conservative, November 27, 2022Matthew Sitman, "Whither the Religious Left?" New Republic, April 15, 2021Ned Rorem, Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999 (2002)Breece D'J Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (2002)Breece D'J Pancake, "Trilobites," The Atlantic, December 1977Andre Dubus, Selected Stories (1995)Janet Malcolm, "I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist," New York Review of Books, March 2018John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)Art Shay, Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures from the Twentieth Century (2000)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes

This is episode is a little different. Listeners know that Matt and Sam have been following John Fetterman's Senate campaign in Pennsylvania from the start, doing their first episode about him after his primary win in May. After his victory over Dr. Oz earlier this week in the general election, they talked to the Fetterman campaign's Director of Communications, Joe Calvello, for a behind-the-scenes look at how they did it. Topics discussed: Fetterman's strategy of defining Oz early (and, yes, the origins of some of Fetterman's most popular Twitter dunks), left populism, crime, abortion, why voters have a right to be angry, and how the campaign responded to Fetterman's stroke and turned his very public recovery into one more argument about why he'd fight for Pennsylvanians. To hear Know Your Enemy's full take on the midterm elections, recorded earlier this week, listen and subscribe on Patreon here —  you'll also get access to all of our previous bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt and Sam recap and analyze the 2022 midterms — as we know them so far. Why did Dems do so much better than we thought? Why did the GOP underperform? How cucked were the polls? How happy is Matt that John Fetterman beat Dr. Oz? (Very) What about Blake Masters in Arizona? Was this a bad night for Trump? Was it a good night for DeSantis? How worried should we be about the integrity of American democracy given these results? And how happy should we be that the Democrats managed to stave off the worst possible outcome? Listen while it's hot... 

"What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strength and deficiencies in Richard Nixon." It's difficult to think of a more electric meeting of author and subject than Garry Wills and Richard Nixon, a meeting that produced what might be the best book ever written about American politics, Wills's Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. What begins as reporting from the campaign trail during the 1968 presidential contest—where Wills introduces us to Nixon, George Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, and more—eventually becomes a profound meditation on the fate of liberalism in the United States. Wills found in Nixon the key to unlocking the reigning—but by then faltering—myths of their country's history and self-understanding, and what they reveal about each other. Along the way he discusses the complex psychological dance between Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower; takes us on a tour of Nixon's hometown, Whittier, California; describes the Republicans' "southern strategy"; examines the roiling anger and protests over the Vietnam War; and offers on-the-ground reportage from the 1968 conventions (the GOP's in Miami, the Democrats', infamously, in Chicago). Matt and Sam try to make sense of it all and ponder what Nixon Agonistes might say about how we got here and where we're going. Sources:Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970)                           Confessions of a Conservative (1979)                           Outsider Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (2010)Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1968)Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (1973)KYE, "Joan Didion, Conservative,  (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)" Jan 13, 2022  ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!                                      

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyWith the midterms a week away, Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project (aka @BobbyBigWheel) about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level — where Trumpist state legislators continue to deny the 2020 election and lay the groundwork for ignoring the will of the majority in the future. How did the conservative movement manage to to take over so many statehouses? Can Democrats still turn back the tide? What is the "independent state legislature" theory?  Aaron helps answers these questions and more — and gives us a useful rundown of the states to watch closely in the midterms next Tuesday. 

At long last, an episode about baseball—America's national pastime, and a sport that conservatives in the United States seem to especially love. To understand baseball's appeal, both to conservatives and the rest of us, Matt and Sam are joined by David Roth of Defector Media, a brilliant, funny writer who also is a long suffering Mets fan. Topics include: the start of the MLB playoffs, baseball's interesting place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more!Sources: George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (Macmillan, 1990)                                  "Foul Ball," New York Review of Books, June 1991Donald Kagan, "George Will's Baseball—A Conservative Critique," Public Interest, Fall 1990Tim Marchman, "Did George Will’s Men at Work Anticipate Baseball’s Statistical Revolution?" Slate, April 27, 2010David Bentley Hart, "A Perfect Game," First Things, August 2010Greg Hillis, "Quit Trying to 'Fix' Baseball," Commonweal, March 27, 2018David Roth, "Replacement-Level Billionaires," The Baffler, March 2020Leander Schaerlaeckens, "Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?" Slate, May 5, 2020Michael Serazio, "The GOP hates baseball now. But it has always been a conservative sport," Washington Post, April 7, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemySam is joined by David Broder — the Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine and author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy and the forthcoming book, Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy — to discuss the recent victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italian general elections. Meloni's Brothers for Italy party descends directly from the neo-fascist parties of post-war Italy. We discuss the ways in which her victory is continuous and discontinuous with the recent history of right-wing populism in Italy — from Silvio Berlusconi to Matteo Salvini. And David explains how Meloni has incorporated fascist nostalgia and historical revision into a 21st century, identitarian nationalism, which draws heavily on conservative economics, anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ politics, and "great replacement" nativist conspiracy. Further reading: David Broder, "Italy’s drift to the far right began long before the rise of Giorgia Meloni," Guardian, Sept. 2022. Natasha Lennard, "It's a Girl (Fascist!)," The Intercept, Sept. 2022.Adam Tooze, "Who is going to vote for Italy's right-wing coalition?," Chartbook, Sept 2022. 

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyKYE super guest John Ganz joins Matt and Sam for a characteristically spirited discussion of The Claremont Institute's "Sheriff Fellowship," which invites county sheriffs from across the country to California for a weekend of West Coast Straussian ideological programing. Drawing on the history of "posse comitatus" movements and recent reports on the role of conservative sheriffs in resisting COVID mandates, propagating 2020 election lies, and cozying up to vigilante militias, we offer a synthesized account of why the mythologized figure of the sheriff — and sheriffs themselves — have such an attraction for right-wing radicals intent on subverting American democracy.Further Reading:Jessica Pishko, "Here’s the Secret “Sheriff Fellowship” Curriculum From the Country’s Most Prominent MAGA Think Tank," Slate, Sept 21, 2022.Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, "2020 Election Deniers Seek Out Powerful Allies: County Sheriffs," NYTimes, Jul 25, 2022.Adam Rawnsley, "MAGA Claremont Institute Honors Sheriffs Who Defy Laws They Don’t Like," Daily Beast, Nov 22, 2021.Ashley Powers, "The Renegade Sheriffs," The New Yorker, Apr 23, 2018. Kimberly Kindy, "Boosted by the pandemic, ‘constitutional sheriffs’ are a political force," Washington Post, Nov 2, 2021.Christian Vanderbrouk, "Notes on an Authoritarian Conspiracy: Inside the Claremont Institute’s “79 Days to Inauguration” Report," The Bulwark, Nov 8, 2021. Michael Anton & Glenn Elmers, "The Stakes: Harry Jaffa’s Philosophy," The American Mind, Sept 19, 2022.

Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he's a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He's also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what's happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsletter he titled Eyes on the Right. In this conversation, Matt and Sam talk with Linker about what his own trajectory can teach us about the Right: his experiences working at First Things while the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq; why thinks Sarah Palin marked a turning point on the Right; and his case for understanding Donald Trump as a political, rather than legal, problem. Sources:"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996Damon Linker, "There is No Happy Ending to America's Trump Problem," New York Times, Aug 21, 2022                                   "A Giving of Intellectual Accounts," Eyes on the Right, Sept 9, 2022                                  "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Donald Trump?" Eyes on the Right, July 18, 2022                                   The Theocons: Secular America Under Seige (Doubleday, 2006)Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, Aug 24, 2015...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

This episode was unplanned, but when Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1, 2022, we felt an urge to honor her memory and the profound influence she has had on the American left, socialism, feminism, and our collective thinking about class struggle. From her work in the women's health movement of the 1960s, to her theorizing (with  ex-husband John Ehrenreich) of the "professional-managerial class" in the 1970s, to her explorations of Reagan-era yuppie pathologies, and her renowned exposé of low-wage work in 2001's Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an essential and nuanced guide to the inner-life of American class conflict in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. To undertake this journey through an extraordinary body of work, we're joined by two brilliant writers who have both — in their own way — taken up  Ehrenreich's profound ethical and intellectual challenge: Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine (and KYE's favorite labor journalist); and returning guest Gabe Winant, University of Chicago historian and author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care.As Gabe writes in his stunning obituary last week, "Ehrenreich’s specialty was to reveal her readers to themselves by showing them the other. Her humor and projection of personal vulnerability were particularly deft techniques for asking the reader to see their own position, often through identification with Ehrenreich: she invites this, beckoning you to follow her into her subject, and then suddenly wheels around on you—and you are caught out." We hope this episode can manage something of that technique for the listener, that you might find yourself "caught out" too, thinking deeply about where you fit into the story Barbara is telling — and what it might call on you to do, fight for, or think harder about. Enjoy.  Further Reading: Barbara & John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America, March 1977. — "The New Left and the Professional Managerial Class," Radical America, May 1977.— "Death of a Yuppie Dream," Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Feb 2013. Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press, 1973.Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Pantheon, 1989. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Metropolitan, 2001. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Preface to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History," U of Minnesota Press, 1987. Gabriel Winant, "On Barbara Ehrenreich," n+1, Sept 9, 2022. — "Professional-Managerial Chasm," n+1, Oct 10, 2019. — "The Right Kind of Worker," Know Your Enemy, May 2022. Alex Press, "On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich." Dissent, Oct 22, 2019. David Rieff, "White Bread, White Dread (review of Fear of Falling)," LA Times, Aug 20, 1989.   This episode of Know Your Enemy is dedicated to Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) and all those who loved and learned from her.

In this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer returns to the show to discuss her new book, Partisans, about the ascendancy of an angrier, more radical strain of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1990s—a backlash driven by the right's dissatisfaction with the genial, popularity-seeking Ronald Reagan. As the Cold War ended, many conservatives stopped genuflecting to democracy and freedom and used new forms of media—talk radio and cable news especially—to spread their grievances. Topics include: Pat Buchanan's campaigns for the presidency, Ross Perot, Newt Gingrich and the GOP's takeover of the House of Representatives, Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza, and the new breed of anti-feminist, rightwing women such as Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.Sources:Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic, 2022)                                     Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Penn, 2016)Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1990)John Ganz, "The Year the Clock Broke," The Baffler, November 2018Know Your Enemy, "The Year the Clock Broke" (w/ John Ganz), March 16, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy to listen to all of our bonus episodes!  

Subscribe 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 bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement, discussing two recent and related articles in the New York Times. The first: Sam’s profile of Arizona GOP senate nominee Blake Masters, who, like J.D. Vance, is bankrolled by his former employer and mentor, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. And second: an in-depth look at the Claremont Institute by Elizabeth Zerofsky, whose excellent reporting gives the boys an opportunity to refine their thoughts on the West Coast Straussian legacy of Harry Jaffa.It’s KYE classico. Enjoy. Cited:Adler-Bell, “The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters,” NYTimes, Aug 3, 2022.Adler-Bell, “The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right,” The New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.Elizabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” NYTimes Magazine, Aug 3, 2022.Marc Fisher & Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute triumphed in the Trump years. Then came Jan. 6.” Washington Post, Jul 30, 2022.Glenn Ellmers, “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” The American Mind, Mar 24, 2021.Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2019Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, U Chicago Press, 1982.Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, Roman & Littlefield, 2000.David Tucker "Why Did Harry Jaffa Change His Mind?" Law and Liberty, Jul 3, 2019.For more on Claremont/Jaffa/Strauss:KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes" Feb 2021.KYE: The Long Farewell to Majority Rule (w/ Joshua Tait), May 2021.

Christopher Lasch, the late historian and social critic, can be difficult to pin down. Despite writing with startling clarity and verve, Lasch  frustrates his readers' longing for clean partisan taxonomies and explicit programmatic statements. Taken up in recent years by Steve Bannon and  post-liberal populists, he was, in life, a man of the left who never ceased interrogating his own side’s pathologies and historical blindspots — often using Marxism, psychoanalysis, and a rich, idiosyncratic historiography of the American scene to do so. As George Scialabba once put it, “Virtually every political and cultural tendency in recent American history has smarted under Lasch’s criticism."  And even his most devoted readers have been left asking — “plaintively or exasperatedly,” writes Scialabba — what exactly does Christopher Lasch want? For our guest, editor and writer Chris Lehmann, Lasch was more than an admired intellectual iconoclast and gadfly; he was a treasured teacher and mentor — who was nonetheless difficult to get to know well. In our conversation, Lehmann finds fault with tendentious readings of Lasch’s work by his most ardent fans and virulent enemies alike. To unearth the powerful critique running through Lasch’s oeuvre, we spend most of this episode discussing his late-career opus The True and Only Heaven. Along the way, Lasch’s insights frustrate and illuminate in equal measure, inspiring new variations on classic KYE themes: the relationship between particularity and solidarity, tradition and hierarchy, egalitarianism and expertise, and religion and political virtue. Come along for the ride!  Further Reading: Chris Lehmann, "Pilgrim's Progress," BookForum, Summer 2010.Chris Lehmann, "The Betrayal of Democracy," The Baffler, March, 13, 2017.George Scialabba, "A Whole World of Heroes: Christopher Lasch on Democracy," Dissent, 1995. Patrick Deneen, "Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope," First Things, Dec 2004.Matthew Sitman, "Whither the Religious Left?" The New Republic, April 15, 2021. Eric Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, Wm B Eerdmans, 2010. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Norton, 1991. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, Norton, 1978.Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, Norton, 1984.  

Matt is joined by John Huntington, author of Far-Right Vanguard, which chronicles the history of what he calls the "ultraconservative" movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century.John is a history professor at Houston Community College.Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Here's something fun and a little different: your beloved cohost Matt Sitman was recently interviewed by Victor Bruzzone and Matt McManus on their podcast, Plastic Pills, and the ensuing conversation — about Matt's own history, the right-wing intellectual pipeline, and the enduring and contested influence of Leo Strauss on the conservative movement and its minds — is just fascinating. So we're sharing it with you, dear listeners. I do want to acknowledge the elephant in the room: we're in a bit of a summer slow down at KYE headquarters. After sprinting to get the Roe v Wade series done last month, we've all had to take a bit of a breath amid the July heat — our producer, Jesse, has been on vacation — and so there've been fewer new episodes in the feed than we would prefer. But thank you for bearing with us. And trust that many excellent  episodes are in the works!  ...if you're hurting for KYE content, feel free to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access our back catalog of bonus episodes!

In the third and final episode in their series on the overturning of Roe v. Wade—recorded on the day it happened—Matt and Sam pick up with 1990s, the George W. Bush administration, and eventually take listeners up to the present. They focus especially on way conservative, mostly Christian intellectuals, many of them connected to the religious journal First Things, brought Catholics and evangelicals together to fight against abortion rights, with figures like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Robert P. George, and Hadley Arkes providing language and arguments in a more elite idiom—a project that deeply influenced Bush's presidency and helped cement the anti-abortion movement's place not just in the religious right but the broader conservative movement and the GOP.Sources:"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994"Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millenium," First Things, May 1994"The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics," First Things, November 1996Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday, 2006)Mary Ziegler, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale University Press, 2021)Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Eerdmans, 1984)Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993)Hadley Arkes, "The End of the Beginning of the End of Abortion," First Things, June 24, 2022Matthew Sitman, "Reading Left to Right" (review of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square), Commonweal, August 24, 2015Tara Isabella Burton, "The Biblical Story the Christian Right Uses to Defend Trump," Vox, March 5, 2018

Today we're sharing a special "Dig Your Enemy" crossover event, as Daniel Denvir of Jacobin magazine's The Dig podcast puts Matt and Sam in the hot seat. We answer all of Dan's excellent questions about the state of the American right, including: the return of isolationism, the New Right, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano, the prospects for a multi-racial conservative majority, the "groomer" panic, masculinity and gender politics, MAGA, authoritarianism, NYC's new reactionary "downtown scene," and the bad dialectic between racial liberalism and the anti-woke reactionaries. Enjoy! This episode was originally posted by The Dig; find the rest of their excellent podcasts here: https://thedigradio.com/ ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! 

At long last, Matt and Sam dive into the origins of the Christian right—a complicated tale often flattened by contemporary debates. What was the history of Christian anti-abortion activism before Roe, and how soon after the landmark Supreme Court decision did conservative Christians coalesce around the abortion—and other issues—to become the political force we know today? What did it take to get Catholics and evangelicals to join forces, and what were the barriers to them coming together, especially given the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States? And how did all this help reshape the GOP into a vehicle for anti-abortion politics, given that such a scenario was not fated on the eve of Roe? Your hosts take up these questions and more, stopping in the early 1990s—when they'll pick up with the story in the third and final episode in the series.Sources and Citations:Randall Balmer, "The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth," Politico Magazine, May 10, 2022Neil J. Young and Gillian Frank, "What Everyone Gets Wrong about Evangelicals and Abortion," Washington Post, May 16, 2022Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015)Kristen Luker, Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood, (University of California Press, 1985)Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, (Harvard University Press, 2015)Ilyse Hogue and Ellie Langford, The Lie That Binds (Strong Arm Press, 2020)Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-80 (Simon & Schuster, 2020)Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016)Joshua Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars, (Stanford University Press, 2013)David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2005)"Killing Abortionists: A Symposium," First Things, December 1994 

On May 5, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, written by Justice Samuel Alito, that would overturn Roe v. Wade. How did we get here? In the first of three episodes dedicated to answering that question, Matt and Sam talk to Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael of the 5-4 Podcast about the conservative legal movement's role and the right's use of the courts in achieving their aims. What were the main arguments in the leaded Dobbs decision, and where did these ideas come from? How important was opposition to abortion rights to the development of originalism and organizations like the Federalist Society? What function has the Federalist Society served in the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court? Also discussed in this episode: the relationship between radical, violent anti-abortion groups and the broader anti-abortion legal movement, the narrower victories the right won against abortion rights along the way, and what might come next from an emboldened conservative movement with the Supreme Court on their side.Sources:Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, "Supreme Court Has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows," Politico, May 5, 20225-4 Podcast, "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health: The End of Roe," May 4, 20225-4 Podcast, "The Return of the Rise and Fall of Roe v. Wade, Pt. 1," January 4, 2022                               "The Return of the Rise and Fall of Roe v. Wade, Pt. 2," January 4, 2022Know Your Enemy (w/ 5-4's Rhiannon), "The Texas Bounty Hunter Bill," September 30, 2021Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford University Press, 2019)Ilyse Hogue and Ellie Langford, The Lie That Binds (Strong Arm Press, 2020)Joshua C. Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, America's Culture Wars (Stanford University Press, 2013)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to access to all of our bonus episodes!

A conversation with David Adler and Thea Riofrancos about the return of the Latin American left — unlocked from Patreon in advance of hugely consequential elections in Colombia this weekend!! (Originally published May 15, 2022.)Hope for the American left is at a fairly low ebb, at the moment, but our counterparts in Latin America are on the march and succeeding at beating back repressive right wing governments across the region. What can we learn from them? And given extremely volatile global conditions — and the continued role of the US in defending the interests of capital in the region — what can these new left-wing governments hope to accomplish?Sam is joined by political scientist Thea Riofrancos and David Adler, the General Coordinator of the Progressive International, to discuss left populism in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and elsewhere. Further Reading: Thea Riofrancos & David Adler, "Gabriel Boric and Latin America’s new pink tide," New Statesman, Mar 11, 2022.Thea Riofrancos, "The rush to ‘go electric’ comes with a hidden cost: destructive lithium mining," Guardian, Jun 14, 2021.— "The View from Latin America," Boston Review, Apr 27, 2020. — "Ecuador After Correa," n+1, Fall 2017.John Bartlett, "Chilean journalist dies after being shot while covering Workers’ Day marches," Guardian, May 12, 2022...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

In this bonus episode, Matt takes Sam on a tour of his native state, Pennsylvania, where a number of key primaries were held this week. The results brought some hopeful news: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman handily defeated State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta and (even better) Manchin-backed moderate Rep. Conor Lamb in the contest for the Democratic senate nomination. But it also revealed the madness that continues to grip the GOP: State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a January 6 marcher and election-fraud true believer, will be running for governor in November, and Dr. Oz, as of this writing, was clinging to a narrow lead in the race to take on Fetterman. Don't worry, though, it's not all punditry: the cuisines, strange regional dialects, and curious folkways of the virtuous commonwealth also are discussed. Then the episode turns to the fortunes of the Thiel tools: J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of whom are running for the Senate (Vance in Ohio and Masters in Arizona). The former won the Republican nod, and in come-from-behind fashion—how did he do it, especially after months of woke pundits dismissing his campaign? And what are Masters chances in August, when the Arizona GOP primary will be held?Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Hope for the American left is at a fairly low ebb, at the moment, but our counterparts in Latin America are on the march and succeeding at beating back repressive right wing governments across the region. What can we learn from them? And given extremely volatile global conditions — and the continued role of the US in defending the interests of capital in the region — what can these new left-wing governments hope to accomplish?Sam is joined by political scientist Thea Riofrancos and David Adler, the General Coordinator of the Progressive International, to discuss left populism in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and elsewhere. Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Sarah Weinman's new book—Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free—is a gripping true crime story, and perhaps the tale of an ill-fated love triangle.  It also is a story about William F. Buckley, Jr., who defied expectations to show mercy to a death-row prisoner, Edgar Smith, after finding out that he supposedly read National Review. In this episode, Weinman joins Matt and Sam to talk about this fascinating, half-forgotten episode from a key period in Buckley's life and career—how Smith and Buckley met; what Buckley did for him; the role played by Sophie Wilkins, Smith's editor at Knopf, in what happened; and the sad ending toward which it all careened.Sources:Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free (Ecco Press, February 2022)Sam Adler-Bell, "The Conservative and the Murderer," New Republic, March 7, 2022Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (Twelve Books, May 2009)Garry Wills, "Daredevil," Atlantic, July/August 2009Sophie Wilkins, trans., The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930, 2017)Alexander Chee, "Mr. and Mrs. B," Apology Magazine, Winter 2014...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Since Donald Trump was elected president — partially on the strength of white working class support in the Rust Belt — we've heard that the GOP is a working class party; that liberals sold out American labor to globalized capital; and that American workers are too socially and culturally conservative to remain within the increasingly progressive Democratic tent. According to the populist right, the culture war is itself a class war, waged on behalf of real workers against a secular, libertine professional elite who control the commanding heights of the economy, government, and media. What's wrong with this story? Labor historian and essayist Gabriel Winant joins Matt and Sam to answer that question. Using Gabe's award-winning book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America as a guide, we tell a different story about working class formation in this country, about the forces that led to the decline of America's industrial base, and about the prospects for renewing labor's power relative to capital. Along the way, we take on figures of the newly labor-curious right — Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, and others — explaining how their vision is based on ideologically motivated elisions that seek to resolve rather than energize class conflict.  It's a hot one, folks! Further Reading:Gabriel Winant, "We Live in a Society," n+1, Dec 12, 2020— "Professional-Managerial Chasm," n+1, Oct 10, 2019— "Coronavirus and Chronopolitics" n+1, Spring 2020.— "Strike Wave," New Left Review, Nov 25, 2021.Sohrab Ahmari, "How America Kneecapped Its Unions," Compact, Mar 31, 2022.Julius Krein, "The Real Class War," American Affairs, Nov 20, 2019.Alexander Riley, "Labor Betrayed by the Progressive Left," Chronicles, Mar 2022. Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left, Princeton U Press, 2012.Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism Zone Books, 2017.Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America, 2001. Oxford U Press. 2001.

Did this week's one-on-one debate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen change the race in any significant ways? Why is Le Pen drawing notably more support this time around than she did in 2017? How much is Macron's strategy of pivoting to the right on issues of culture and identity to blame for her rise? What about Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftwing politician who nearly made it to the runoff? And why did the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour fade? Listen for the answers to these questions—and more! You can do so by subscribing to Know Your Enemy at Patreon. 

Matt and Sam are joined by Georgetown University historian and co-editor emeritus of Dissent, Michael Kazin, to discuss his new book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. They discuss the origins of the Democratic Party, the alliance between its urban North and segregationist South, the party's turn toward using government to help ordinary people, and the eventual crack-up of the New Deal coalition—and the rise of the right, and the Republican Party, that followed. Why did people whose relative comfort and prosperity had been made possible by policies championed by Democrats turn against them? How did Democrats respond to Ronald Reagan winning 49 states in 1984? Did it have to turn out the way it did? Sources:Michael Kazin, What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022)                                   A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Anchor, 2007)Michael Kazin, "Whatever Happened to Moral Capitalism?" New York Times, June 24, 2019Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Earth's Holocaust" (1844)Sam Rosenfeld, "What Defines the Democratic Party?" New Republic, February 15, 2022Matthew Sitman, "Tribute to Michael Kazin," Dissent, October 6, 2020...don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt and Sam are joined by KYE all-star John Ganz to discuss Compact: A Radical American Journal, a new publication founded by Sohrab Ahmari, Matthew Schmitz, and Edward Aponte. It's launch coincided with a profile in the New York Times—and a party that Sam attended. What are the ideas behind Compact? How should the left approach the perspective it offers? Your hosts answer these questions, and more, drawing on Ganz's excellent Substack post on these topics, "Compact Magazine's Unholy Alliance."Subscribe 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 are joined by Ari Brostoff, author of  Missing Time: Essays, to explore David Horowitz's 1996 memoir, Radical Son. Like a number of prominent conservatives, Horowitz is a convert from the left. But he's younger than most of the first neocons, and his journey to the right went through Berkeley and the New Left more than the alcoves of City College. Radical Son is his account of that journey—an evocative, angry, revealing text that takes the reader from his red-diaper baby childhood in Queens's Sunnyside neighborhood to his involvement with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in Oakland to his break with the left and turn to the right. What does Horowitz's trajectory reveal about the rightwing politics today? Sources:Ari Brostoff, Missing Time: Essays (n+1, 2022)Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977, reprint Verso 2020)David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (Simon & Schuster, 1996)Fran Lebowitz, "Speaking of New York," Commonweal, February 7, 2019Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern, "Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist," New Republic, May 5, 2021Cole Stangler, "David Horowitz: 'Conservatives are So F**king Well-Mannered," In These Times, December 12, 2013Reinhold Niebuhr, "Augustine's Political Realism," from The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (Yale University Press, 1987)..and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt and Sam talk to Gillian Branstetter,  press secretary for the National Women’s Law Center, about the spate of anti-trans laws sweeping the country: What do these interventions do? Who is pushing them? And why? The American right has long been invested in policing gender boundaries, but its fixation on trans people — and trans children, in particular — has  become more acute in recent years. Over 100 anti-trans state-level measures have been passed this legislative session alone, including athletics bans, curriculum/book bans, religious refusal laws, and bans on access to health care. Perhaps most alarmingly, states like Texas are instituting policies that equate gender-affirming care with child abuse, terrorizing  trans kids and their families. With Gillian's help, we explore the conservative forces behind these bills and reveal the ideological fixations, misapprehensions, and contradictions driving this panic. It's a difficult but necessary conversation.If you'd like to help fight the right's anti-trans onslaught,  consider donating to The Trans Justice Funding Project.  Further Reading: J David Goodman, "How Medical Care for Trans Youth Became ‘Child Abuse’ In Texas," NY Times, March 11, 2022Melissa Gira Grant, "The Groups Pushing Anti-Trans Laws Want to Divide the LGBTQ Movement," The New Republic, Feb 17, 2022. Jeremy W Peters, "A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground," NY Times, Nov 3, 2019. Judith Butler, "Why Is the Idea of ‘Gender’ Provoking Backlash the World Over?" The Guardian, Oct 23, 2021.Jules Gill-Peterson "The Anti-Trans Lobby’s Real Agenda," Jewish Currents, Apr 27, 2021.— Histories of the Transgender Child, UM Press,  2018. ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

In the first half of this conversation with Buzzfeed’s Joe Bernstein, Sam asks: What is “disinformation?” Who gets to decide? And does it explain what's wrong with our politics? And in the second half: why is Trump’s favorite venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, funding New York City’s downtown arts scene? And what are the political stakes of "anti-woke" art? This was a fun conversation with one of our favorite journalists! 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 past few months have seen much talk of a "second Civil War" in the United States or a "national divorce" between red states and blue states. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joins Matt and Sam to discuss why the analogy to the Civil War fails, what such rhetoric does for those who deploy it, and what the challenges really are to a better politics in America.Listening: Check out Jamelle's podcast, co-hosted with fellow KYE guest John Ganz, Unclear and Present Danger!Reading:Jamelle Bouie, "Why We Are Not Facing the Prospect of a Second Civil War," New York Times, Feb 15, 2022Michelle Goldberg, "Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?" New York Times, Jan 6, 2022Nate Hochman, "Let's Stay Together," Spectator, January 2, 2022Michael Anton, "Right Flight: The War Between the States," Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021Helen Andrews, "Reconstruction Revisionism," American Conservative, Dec 11, 2021Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (University of Chicago, 1959)..and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt and Sam talk to Michelle Nickerson about her brilliant book, Mothers of Conservatism, which explores the lives and political activism of conservative women in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s and 50s. Unlike many other conversations on the show, this one is less about intellectuals and ideas than social history—a description of how, as Nickerson puts it, housewife activists worked to "protect the nation from aliens, internationalism, and power-hungry bureaucrats in Washington." Topics include: the Great Depression and the rise of "housewife populism," conservative bookstores and "Americanism" centers run by women, the networks of activism that conservative women built and deployed, fierce battles over public education, the menace of psychiatry and the social sciences in shaping education policy, and more.Sources:Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2012)                                              "Stefanik's Rise and Cheney's Fall Mark a New Role for GOP Women," Washington Post, May 13, 2021Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," American History Review, April 1994Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (Basic Books, 2002)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt talks to writer Phil Christman about his new essay collection, How To Be Normal. They talk about the meaning of "normal" (especially in these pandemic times), religious fundamentalism, Christian conspiracy theories about rock music, Mark Fisher, love, and much more.Sources:Phil Christman, How To Be Normal (Belt Publishing, 2022)                               "Turning Nothings Into Somethings," Commonweal, Dec 3, 2020                               "What Is It Like To Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018

It seems almost every  big culture-war battle of the moment—from "Critical Race Theory" to COVID mandates—is being fought in America's schools. Meanwhile, Democrats, anxious about a midterm rout driven by angry Republican parents, too often are conceding these battles to the right, adopting their rhetoric and their terms of debate, and have been for a long time—despite supposedly being the party of teachers' unions.  Does it have to be this way? We put that question, and many more, to our guest Jennifer Berkshire, the coauthor (with Jack Schneider) of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and co-host of the education podcast Have You Heard.  Jennifer guides us through the recent history of conservatives' war on public education—fights over desegregation, the Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk, the "parents' rights" movement of the 1990s, Obama-era ed reform, and the CRT gag-orders sweeping the nation today. Along the way we tease out some illuminating contradictions in the right's nationalist coalition, which  seeks to cultivate a shared, sanitized story about American history while simultaneously dismantling the only system by which that narrative can be imposed. We also cast a critical eye on the triangulating, moderate Democrats who have utterly failed to provide a galvanizing, alternative message about the purpose of public education. As Jennifer makes brilliantly clear, the crisis of American education is real; the question is, who will be empowered to solve it? Further Reading:Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door:  The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, November 2020)Jennifer Berkshire, "The GOP Has Revived Its Obsession With Parents’ Rights," The New Republic, Dec 9, 2021— "The GOP's Grievance Industrial Complex Invades the Classroom," The Nation, Oct 28, 2021— "'Corporate Democrat Goes Down to Defeat in Virginia,'" The Nation, Nov 8, 2021— "How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party," The Baffler, Nov 17, 2017Sam Adler-Bell, "Behind the Critical Race Theory Crackdown," The Forum, Jan 13, 2022Sarah Jones, "We're Having the Wrong Conversation About Schools," New York Magazine, Jan 12, 2022...and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon for access to all of Know Your Enemy's bonus episodes!

Author, podcaster, and New York Times Magazine staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Matt and Sam for a spirited discussion of some treacherous topics: identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture (oh my!). Jay is our charming, intrepid guide to these touchy subjects, those that liberals and leftists are sometimes loath to engage, offering his idiosyncratic (though not contrarian!) takes on each — and inspiring some of our own.Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy 

When Joan Didion died at the age of 87 in December, her early conservatism figured into a number of obituaries and commentaries, but was rarely discussed in detail. Matt and Sam turned to Sam Tanenhaus, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s biographer and knower of all things National Review, to discuss Didion's early writing for the magazine, her roots in California conservatism,  and how her politics changed—and didn't—over the course of her long career.  Along the way, they discuss why she loved Barry Goldwater and hated Ronald Reagan, why she finally stopped writing for National Review, and how she compares to other writers from that era—from Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe to Gore Vidal and Garry Wills. Sources:Joan Didion: "On Self-Respect,"  Vogue,  1961‘I want to go ahead and do it,' (Review of Mailer), NYTimes, Oct 7, 1979"The Lion King," (Review of Dinesh D'Souza), NYRB, Dec 18, 1997"New York: Sentimental Journeys,"  NYRB, Jan 17, 1991. "John Wayne: A Love Song," Saturday Evening Post, 1965Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968)The White Album  (1979)Salvador (1983)Political Fictions (2001)Where I Was From  (2003)A collection of Didion's National Review Writing Commentary on Joan Didion:Ross Douthat, "Try Canceling Joan Didion," NYTimes, Jan 5, 2022Parul Sehgal, "The Case Against the Trauma Plot," NYTimes, Dec 27,  2021Louis Menand, “Out of Bethlehem,” New Yorker, Aug 17, 2015Stephen Schryer, "Writers for Goldwater,"  Post45, Jan 20, 2020Haley Mlotek, "It’s All in the Angles," The Nation, June 15, 2021Caitlin Flanagan, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," The Atlantic, Feb 15, 2021Jacob Bacharach, "Joan Didion Cast Off the Fictions of American Politics," The New Republic, Dec 27, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Unlocked by popular demand: Psychoanalytic writer and teacher Pat Blanchfield joins Sam for a discussion of Freud and politics. Together we ask: how can psychoanalytic tools help us make sense of our irrational political moment, our desires and attachments, as well as conservatism, liberalism, fascism, Donald Trump, and even Thanksgiving? If we've done our job right, you'll derive many blistering insights from this discussion whether or not you've read a single page of Sigmund Freud — or remotely buy into his theories of mind, culture, or clinical practice. (And hopefully we didn't talk too fast.) Because Freud would disapprove of any injunction to enjoyment, we'll simply say: "have a listen, if you please."(Originally published on Patreon 12/01/2021.)Further Reading/Listening:KYE Episode 7: "Gun Power" (w/ Pat Blanchfield)Pat Blanchfield, "Kyle Rittenhouse is an American," Gawker, Nov 16, 2021Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Yale Press, Mar 22, 2016.Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time (1988)Jacqueline Rose, "To Die One's Own Death," LRB, Nov 19, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

With another year of the podcast, the pandemic, and American decline in the rearview, we turn to Know Your Enemy's absurdly brilliant listeners for guidance and intellectual stimulation. That's right, folks, it's a mailbag episode! And thanks to you, our cups runneth over with fascinating questions. Along the way, we discuss the intellectual legacy of one-time National Review wunderkind Garry Wills; why Bill Buckley never wrote a great book; right-wing half-wit propagandists like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk; conservative feminism; Richard Nixon's role in conservative history; Vatican II; Bob Dylan's artful incoherence; our favorite books; and our favorite bourbons. We also take a few minutes to discuss listener feedback from our last episode with Nate Hochman. We are truly blessed with the most curious, sophisticated, and intellectually voracious listeners in the podcast game. We love you freaks so very much. So strap in! Like the year 2021, it's a wild ride, with many twists, turns, and digressions. Further Reading:Matthew Sitman, "There Will Be No Buckley Revival," Commonweal, Jul 28, 2015. Garry Wills, "Daredevil," Atlantic, Aug 2009.                             Bare Ruined Choirs (1979)                             Confessions of a Conservative (1979)                            John Wayne's America  (1997) Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," New Republic, Dec 2, 2021. Leonard Coen, Beautiful Losers (1966)Kaya Oakes, The Defiant Middle (2021)Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1945)Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1982)Dan Georgakas & Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (1998)Norman Rush, Mating (1991)..and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Finally, another enemy! This time Matt and Sam are joined by Nate Hochman, a rising star on the intellectual Right and one of the subjects of Sam's recent New Republic article about today's young, populist conservatives. They discuss Michael Oakeshott, friendship and politics, where the Right and Left might agree, and, especially, where they don't.Further Reading:Sam Adler-Bell, "The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right," New Republic, Dec 2, 2021Nate Hochman, "Michael Oakeshott, 30 Years Later," National Review, Dec 18, 2020Matthew Sitman, "Leaving Conservatism Behind," Dissent, Summer 2016Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Liberty Fund, 1991)                                            The Voice of Liberal Learning (Yale University Press, 1990)..and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Psychoanalytic writer and teacher Pat Blanchfield joins Sam for the long-awaited KYE "Freud Pod," in which we discuss how psychoanalytic tools can help us make sense of our irrational political moment, our desires and attachments, as well as conservatism, liberalism, fascism, Donald Trump, and even Thanksgiving.Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

It's rare for nearly all the inhabitants of the KYE podcast universe to gather in one place, but it happened earlier this month in—as you might guess—Florida, where the National Conservatism 2 conference was held. The proceedings were littered with extraordinary claims of a "totalitarian cult" (liberals and the left) deliberately trying to destroy the United States, with the help of Big Tech, China, and...university professors. The conference seemed to mark the ascendency of national conservatism on the Right, and perhaps the Republican Party. Matt and Sam break it all down: what it means, what it portends, and why they're wrong.Sources:Watch all the National Conservatism conference videos (YouTube)David Brooks, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right," Atlantic, November 18, 2021J.G. Ballard, Super Cannes (Picador, 2000)Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (David van Nostrand Company/William Volker Fund, 1962)Background Listening:Know Your Enemy, "The Definitely Not-Racist National Conservatives," July 30, 2019                                            "The Rise of the Illiberal Right," July 12, 2019                                             "Frank Meyer: Father of Fusionism," November 10, 2021...and don't forget you can subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Matt talks with playwright Ben Firke about I Am The GooseKing, which just finished its debut run at The Tank theater in New York City. Here's a description of the play:Jane Vazquez is a journalist on assignment for a tech blog. She travels to New Hampshire to interview a young conspiracy theorist and YouTuber named Phil, who has thousands of followers who embrace his elaborate "vegetable conspiracy," first outlined by the mysterious GooseKing. As Jane goes deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of Phil's family, she finds herself in a mire of journalistic ethics.To learn more, watch the I Am The Gooseking trailer or read an excerpt from the play. To contact Ben Firke, follow him on Twitter (@pasta_ben).Subscribe 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 dedicate an entire episode to an under appreciated but indispensable figure in the founding of post-war conservatism: Frank Meyer, the father of "fusionism."Meyer was  a man of  contradictions: an ex-communist ideologue who longed for consensus; a cantankerous, unyielding debater who kept his friends and rivals close; a bohemian, individualist Jew who argued vociferously for freedom and against repressive orthodoxies, but who converted to Catholicism on his death bed. In this episode, we explore his life, work, and legacy — including a close reading of his most famous book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. Along the way, we ask some big questions: Why was it so important for Meyer to find a philosophical justification for fusing the traditional and libertarian strains of the conservative movement? How did he go about doing it? And did it work? Today, many — especially younger — conservatives consider fusionism to be a dead consensus, a marriage of erstwhile convenience in which one partner, economic libertarians, got everything they wanted, while the other, Christian traditionalists, have seen unfettered capitalism and licentious liberalism destroy the precious permanent things they had hoped to conserve: Church, family, and community.  As the seams of the fusionist alliance fray, we look back to the man who conceived it in the first place. This one is for the nerds. We hope you enjoy it! Further Reading: Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Regnery, 1962)George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976)Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times (ISI Books, 2006)Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Doubleday, 1979)Kevin J. Smant, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and  the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2002)Various, "Against the Dead Consensus," First Things, March 21, 2019Frank S Meyer, "The Twisted Tree of Liberty," National Review  Jan 16, 1962L. Brent Bozell Jr. "Freedom or Virtue," National Review, Sept 11, 1962...and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! 

Subscribe 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 are joined by historian Lauren Stokes and writer John Ganz to unpack the American Right's ongoing embrace of Viktor Orbán's Hungary, from Rod Dreher's springtime junket there  to Tucker Carlson broadcasting from the country to the adoring attention it receives from an assortment of "postliberal" intellectuals What gives? Your hosts and their esteemed guests break it down, including: what the American Right gets from Orbán, and what he gets from them; the 20th century history of Hungary that provides the backdrop to its current politics; the long history of U.S. conservatives of admiring authoritarians abroad; John's visit to a Nazi bookshop in Budapest; and more!Sources and Further Reading:Elisabeth Zerofsky, "How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary," New York Times Magazine, Oct 19, 2021Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "What American Conservatives See in Hungary's Leader," New Yorker, Sept 13, 2021David Baer, translation/Twitter thread of Rod Dreher's interview with Klubradio, Aug 29, 2021John Ganz, "Anti-Democratic Vistas, Part I: The Right Goes to Hungary," Unpopular Front, Aug 10, 2021                           "Anti-Democratic Vistas, Part II: Reflections on the Revolutions in Hungary," Unpopular Front, Aug 13, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon.com for access to all of our bonus episodes.

Matt is joined by Know Your Enemy favorite Sarah Jones to discuss her recent New York Magazine essay, "An Atheist Reconsiders God in the Pandemic." They discuss their shared religious upbringing and college years among fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, why Sarah became an atheist (and Matt didn't), and the reasons she reopened the question of God's existence during the pandemic—and what she did and didn't find along the way. Other topics include: C.S. Lewis, the nature of rituals, how we hold our beliefs, and more!Sources:Sarah Jones, "An Atheist Reconsiders God in the Pandemic," New York Magazine, October 11, 2021Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story," from Selected Stories (Vintage)T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," from Four Quartets (1943)C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperOne)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes.

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

It's impossible to comprehend the state of conservative politics — or American politics in general — without looking closely at the wars we've been waging for the past two decades. The story we've been telling about American conservatism has been incomplete without a deep-dive on the so-called Global War on Terror. Luckily, Spencer Ackerman has written the perfect book to occasion such a dialogue. In Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Ackerman provides a richly detailed (and acutely frustrating) account of the perversions of justice, liberalism, humanity, and the constitution wrought by the forever wars. Our discussion with Ackerman goes from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the cancellation of Susan Sontag to the battles among neocons and paleocons to define the post-9/11 era. We also touch on the CIA's torture program, nation-building in Afghanistan, and the hypocrisies of the Trump-era Resistance. In typical KYE fashion, it's a complex and wide-ranging conversation you won't find elsewhere. Further Reading:Susan Sontag et al. "Tuesday, and After: New Yorker writers respond to 9/11." The New Yorker, Sept 16, 2001.Bernard Lewis, "The Revolt of Islam," The New Yorker, Nov 11, 2001.Jake Tapper, "Pat Buchanan: America First," Salon, Dec 4, 2001.Spencer Ackerman, "The CIA’s Outsourced Torture Is Lost To History," Forever Wars, Aug 6, 2021.Sam Adler-Bell, "How the War on Terror Fuels Trump," Jacobin, Aug 13, 2016....and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon to hear all of our bonus episodes!

This is a slightly different kind of Know Your Enemy episode—a conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us. At the center of that conversation is a brilliant new book, Daniel Sherrell's Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of the World, that focuses not on the facts of climate change or how to stop it, but what it feels like to imagine and live into the future in the knowledge of its existence. Matt and Sam are joined by Sherrell and Dorothy Fortenberry, a playwright and television writer currently working on Extrapolations, an upcoming limited series for Apple TV+ that focuses on climate change. Sources and Further Reading:Daniel Sherrell, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin, 2021)Pope Francis, Laudato si' ("On Care for Our Common Home"), May 2015Dorothy Fortenberry, "Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore: What Donald Trump Understands about Politics Today," Commonweal, November 5, 2020Sam Adler-Bell, "Beautiful Losers: The Left Should Resist the Comforts of Defeat," Commonweal, March 11, 2020...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Finally, a deep-dive on William F. Buckley, Jr.! Matt and Sam are joined by Buckley's biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, to talk about WFB's 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City. Topics include: how Buckley's campaign made him the most famous conservative in America; the importance of his candidacy to the conservative movement's rise; the hardline positions he took on policing and his inflammatory views on race; and more. Along the way, Tanenhaus offers countless details that only Buckley's biographer would know, from WFB dropping LSD with James Burnham to the debate that changed Buckley forever.Sources and Further Reading:Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Random House, 1997)Sam Tanenhaus, "The Buckley Effect," New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2005Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury, 2011)Matthew Sitman, "There Will Be No Buckley Revival," Commonweal, July 28, 2015...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

For those who want to learn more about the 5-4 podcast, you can visit their website here!

Subscribe 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 episode, Matt and Sam are joined by political theorist and conservative intellectual Samuel Goldman—a very sensible and polite "enemy"—to discuss his brilliant new book, After Nationalism. Topics include: Goldman's punk-rocker past; the influence of Leo Strauss on his thinking; historical attempts to provide Americans with a coherent, enduring symbol of national identity; why these symbols have failed; what all this means for debates about teaching U.S. history; and what alternatives to nationalism its critics can offer.  Sources:Samuel Goldman, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)James Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard University Press, 2008)

It's been over seven months since pro-Trump protestors breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The meaning of the event remains contested. Was it a genuine coup attempt by an extra-parliamentary faction of the Trump movement? Or was it a  disorganized and pathetic act of desperation by Fox News-poisoned rubes? Were the protestors inside the Capitol more like tourists or like terrorists? Was the siege an expression of dangerous anti-democratic forces? Or should we be more worried  about the security state's  overreaction to January 6th than about the event itself?  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we try to contextualize the events of January 6th in terms of a longer trajectory of right-wing mobilization in 2020. Conservatives have variously downplayed, ignored, and defended the insurrectionists. Trump and others have begun to treat Ashli Babbitt — killed by a police officer during the riot — as a martyr for the cause. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson  insists the siege was an inside job, planned and executed by the FBI — an implausible theory gaining popularity among conservatives hoping to absolve themselves of culpability.  Still other factions of the right (e.g. our old friends at the Claremont Institute) dream about a version of 1/6 that would actually have succeeded. Further Reading: Video: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol, New York Times, June 30, 2021. Paige Williams, "Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante" The New Yorker. June 28, 2021.Ben Burgis & Daniel Bessner, "Trump Is a Threat to Democracy. But That Doesn’t Mean He’s Winning." Jacobin. Jan 15, 2021. Micah Loewinger, The Road to Insurrection, WNYC, July 2, 2021. Michael Anton & Curtis Yarvin, "The Stakes: The American Monarchy?," The American Mind. May 31, 2021.Joshua Hochschild "Once Upon a Presidency," The American Mind. Feb 19, 2021.Andrew Egger, "The New January 6 Scapegoats," The Dispatch, Jun 18, 2021.John Ganz "Feb 6 1934/Jan 6 2021," Unpopular Front. Jul 15, 2021....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for all of our bonus episodes! 

In this unlocked bonus episode, Matt is joined by historian Eric Rauchway for a deep-dive into his new book, Why the New Deal Matters. It's Rauchway's latest effort to recover Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an anti-fascist political leader who sought to expand the meaning and practice of American democracy—that in a robust democracy, people don't just need enough to live on, but something to live for. Topics include: Herbert Hoover's and FDR's different responses to the Bonus Army's march on Washington; why Hoover is the true founding father of modern conservatism; how FDR understood the New Deal as more than just a pragmatic series of experiments; the importance to the New Deal of public art and projects like building libraries and theaters; why, despite its compromises with white supremacists in the Democratic Party, the New Deal continues to inspire; and more! Further Reading:Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021)Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal (Basic  Books, 2018)Jamelle Bouie, "F.D.R. Didn't Just Save the Economy," New York Times, April 16, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyMatt and Sam are back in the same room — Matt's  study — enjoying brown liquor, each other's company, and a surprisingly coherent discussion of the right's latest fixations: our "rainbow regime" and "critical race theory." Listen to find out how Matt's mother feels about his porn-stache, if Sam feels bad about boosting the career of Robin DiAngelo, whether the term "white fragility" has any utility, and why queer community is a metaphysical conundrum for Christian post-liberals. It's fun!

In this episode Matt and Sam discuss Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's roman à clef about the Straussian political philosopher Allan Bloom, who achieved late-in-life wealth and fame after publishing his controversial bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. Along the way they consider the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, eros and the intellectual life, love and friendship, Bellow and Bloom's shared Jewishness, and much, much more.Sources and Further Reading:Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (Penguin, 2000)Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987)                              Giants and Dwarfs (Simon & Schuster, 1990)                              Love and Friendship (Simon & Schuster, 1993)Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," from The Complete Works (trans. Donald Frame)D.T. Max, "With Friends Like Saul Bellow," New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2000Christopher Hitchens, "The Egg-Head's Egger-On," London Review of Books, April 27, 2000Patrick Deneen, "Who Closed the American Mind? Allan Bloom, Edmund Burke, & Multiculturalism," The Imaginative Conservative, May 29, 2013PLUS: Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyEvery June it happens: conservatives get all hot and bothered by Pride celebrations, and this year has been no different. Why do banal corporate expressions of support for LGBTQ+ rights drive them so mad? How does religion factor into their opposition to basic protections for LGBTQ+ people? What part do these culture war flareups play in their broader political strategy? In this bonus episode, Matt and Sam offer a survey of hyperbolic rightwing reactions to the start of Pride month and break it all down. 

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyWhat is the status of "equality" in the American political tradition? What place does it have in the inheritance that conservatives are trying to preserve? Matt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent conversation with historian Joshua Tait, this time focusing on Harry Jaffa's devastating review of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey's The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition. In it, Jaffa defends Abraham Lincoln against Kendall and Carey's charge that he "derailed" our political tradition by putting the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the principle of equality at its center—a move, in their account, that opened the way to Ceasarism, the rights revolution, and more. Sources and Further Reading:Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970; reprint, The Catholic University of American Press, 1995)Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)Harry V. Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1, 1975Joshua Tait, "Why Willmoore Kendall and James Burnham are the Prophets of Modern Conservatism," National Interest, April 30, 2021Matthew Sitman, "Farewell to a Constitutional Conservative," The American Conservative, June 27, 2013

For a slight change of pace, we invited our dear friend Brandy Jensen—author of the world's best advice column, Jezebel's Ask a Fuck-Up, and features editor at the new Gawker.com—to answer listener questions about reentering the world post-vaccine, dating, conservative relatives, whether the "Trad Caths" are right, and mourning the lives we did not live.  As you'll see, we ended up addressing many classic Know Your Enemy themes—mercy, redemption, humility, etc.—and we had a great time doing it.  Thank you to everyone who wrote in with such intimate and profound questions. You're all very beautifully fucked-up. Further Reading:Adam Philips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Macmillan, 2013Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, October 3, 2020Brandy Jensen, "Ask a Fuck-Up on a Fucked-Up Year," Jezebel, December 31, 2020

In this follow-up episode to "Democracy and Its Discontents" (listen here), historian Joshua Tait joins Matt and Sam for a conversation about the intellectual origins of the American Right's hostility to democracy—from John C. Calhoun's invention of the filibuster in the nineteenth century to the writings of conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and others, in the 1950s and '60s. Sources and Further Reading:Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy (Liveright Books, January 2021)James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Regnery, 1959)Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Regnery Publishing, 1963)Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970; reprint, The Catholic University of American Press, 1995)Saul Bellow, "Mosby's Memoirs," The New Yorker, Jul 12, 1968John A. Murley & John E. Alvis, eds., Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)Harry V. Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1, 1975Joshua Tait, "Why Willmoore Kendall and James Burnham are the Prophets of Modern Conservatism," National Interest, April 30, 2021Joshua Tait, "The Long History of Fighting Over the Term 'Conservative,'" The Bulwark, April 2, 2021Matthew Sitman, "Farewell to a Constitutional Conservative," The American Conservative, June 27, 2013...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for all of our bonus episodes!

Note: This bonus episode was  first published on April 13. We're unlocking it now because  we're working on a companion episode that explores in greater detail the intellectual origins of, and justifications for, hostility toward democracy among the founders of the modern American conservative movement. ***In state legislatures across the country, Republicans are unleashing a fierce assault on voting rights. Hundreds of proposals aimed at restricting ballot access are being considered, and in a few states—most notably Georgia—have already become law. These obvious efforts at suppressing turnout have been justified by the deranged lie that Donald Trump had a landslide victory stole from him in November, along with the usual evidence-free worries about election integrity peddled by conservatives. Of course, the debates all this has generated have been remarkably unintelligent—just more fodder for the culture wars. Matt and Sam breakdown where voting-rights bill have been passed, what provisions they include, and how it all fits into both the GOP's current strategy of minority rule and the right's longstanding suspicion of mass democracy.Sources Cited and Further Reading:Brennan Center for Justice, "Voting Laws Roundup," April 1, 2021Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein, "What Georgia's Voting Law Really Does," New York Times, April 2, 2021Ari Berman, "Republicans Say the Georgia Law Wasn’t Designed to Suppress Voting. Don’t Believe Them," Mother Jones, April 8, 2021Ari Berman, "361 Voter Suppression Bills Have Already Been Introduced This Year," Mother Jones, April 1, 2021Daniel Dale, "Fact Check: Biden and Kemp Misleadingly Describe Parts of Georgia Elections Law," CNN, April 2, 2021Daniel Dale, "Fact Check: Republicans Falsely Equate Georgia and Colorado Election Laws," CNN, April 7, 2021Michael Wines, "In Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite Rules," New York Times, February 27, 2021Glenn Ellmers, "'Conservatism' Is No Longer Enough," The American Mind, March 24, 2021William F. Buckley, Jr., "Why the South Must Prevail," National Review, August 24, 1957Kevin Williamson, "Why Not Fewer Voters?" National Review, April 6, 2021To listen to more bonus episodes like this one, subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.In this episode, Matt is joined by historian Eric Rauchway for a deep-dive into his new book, Why the New Deal Matters. It's Rauchway's latest effort to recover Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an anti-fascist political leader who sought to expand the meaning and practice of American democracy—that in a robust democracy, people don't just need enough to live on, but something to live for. Topics include: Herbert Hoover's and FDR's different responses to the Bonus Army's march on Washington; why Hoover is the true founding father of modern conservatism; how FDR understood the New Deal as more than just a pragmatic series of experiments; the importance to the New Deal of public art and projects like building libraries and theaters; why, despite its compromises with white supremacists in the Democratic Party, the New Deal continues to inspire; and more! 

At last, Know Your Enemy takes on climate change! Kate Aronoff, staff writer at The New Republic and Dissent editorial board member, joins Matt and Sam to discuss her new book, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back. The conversations traces the history of collaboration between fossil fuel executives and conservative think tanks; then we discuss what comes after climate denial and try our best to imagine a post-carbon world. What will it take to avoid a future of eco-apartheid, fortress nations, and "lifeboat ethics?"  Listen to find out.Further Reading:Kate Aronoff, "The European Far-Right's Environmental Turn," Dissent, May 31, 2019.Kate Aronoff, "With A Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like For The Next Generation," The Intercept, Dec 5, 2018.Sam Adler-Bell, "Appalachia vs. the Carceral State," The New Republic, Nov 25, 2019.Sam Adler-Bell,  "Why White Supremacists are Hooked on Green Living," The New Republic, Sept. 24, 2019....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon!

To listen to this episode, and all of our bonus content, subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyIn state legislatures across the country, Republicans are unleashing a fierce assault on voting rights. Hundreds of proposals aimed at restricting ballot access are being considered, and in a few states—most notably Georgia—have already become law. These obvious efforts at suppressing turnout have been justified by the deranged lie that Donald Trump had a landslide victory stole from him in November, along with the usual evidence-free worries about election integrity peddled by conservatives. Of course, the debates all this has generated have been remarkably unintelligent—just more fodder for the culture wars. Matt and Sam breakdown where voting-rights bill have been passed, what provisions they include, and how it all fits into both the GOP's current strategy of minority rule and the right's longstanding suspicion of mass democracy.

This episode is something different: the latest installment of the KYE Film Club, an ongoing series in which Matt and Sam's great friend (and the podcast's producer) Jesse Brenneman guides them through the strange world of terrible conservative movies. The selection this time was "Christmas Cars," a confusing attempt at Confederate nostalgia written and directed by former Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider.Watch: Christmas Cars on VimeoPeruse: John Schneider Studios...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes! 

To listen to this episode, and all of our bonus content, subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyAt last, Matt and Sam take on  the British royal family. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's recent interview with Oprah set off a firestorm of commentary—not least from aggrieved conservatives who were outraged at the young couple's criticisms of the monarchy. Why was the Right so upset by the interview? Why did the defenders of the American Revolution find themselves siding with our ancient enemy? Then your hosts turn to a documentary that offers an acerbic look at the media coverage of Princess Diana's death—Diana: The Mourning After, by none other than Christopher Hitchens. It leads to a discussion of neoliberalism, what happens when the powerful to share their struggles and appear relatable, and more!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.In recent months, French president Emmanuel Macron, once hailed as the savior of mainstream liberalism, has responded to a series of Islamist terror attacks with a sharp right turn—one he hopes will serve him well in a possible run-off election against the nativist/populist Marine Le Pen. KYE Paris correspondent Cole Stangler joins Matt and Sam to explain Macron's increasingly Islamophobic, authoritarian, and anti-leftist policy agenda. Topics include: whether or not his reactionary pivot should have been a surprise; the alarming parallels between France today and America after 9/11; the susceptibility of center-left politics to reactionary forces; the role French secularism (laïcité) has and hasn't played in these controversies; prospects for the French left; and more!

No media figure has had a more profound impact on the shape of contemporary conservative politics than Rush Limbaugh. For three hours a day, every weekday since 1988, Rush delighted and ignited his radio audience with a high-octane diatribe against liberal degeneracy — an often comic, always cruel, and never apologetic expression of the white male id. When he died on February 17, 2021, Rush left behind an American media landscape — and a Republican Party — reshaped in his image: a ruinous marriage of entertainment, insular world-building, and reactionary meanness that found its apotheosis in the presidency of Donald J. Trump.And no one is better situated to elucidate Rush Limbaugh's appeal, his effectiveness, and his impact on American politics than our guest, Nicole Hemmer. Hemmer is  the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.  She's at work on a new book tracing the transformation of right-wing politics in the post-Reagan years — a story in which Rush plays a starring role. Hemmer is also an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University. And — a skilled broadcaster in her own right — she cohosts the podcasts Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History.We're certain you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we did! Further Reading:Nicole Hemmer, "The Man Who Created President Donald Trump," CNN, February 17, 2021.Mary Harris, "Rush Is Dead, but We're Still Living in the World He Created," Slate, February 18, 2021Jill Filipovic, "The Life and Death of a Woman-Hater," New York Times,  February 20, 2021William F. Buckley Jr., "Crucial Steps in Combating the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers," NYT, Mar 18, 1986....and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content!From the union-busting, ad-man scion (Brent Sr.), to the fiercely brilliant and troubled National Review editor-turned-Catholic zealot (Brent Jr.), to the insipid media watchdog and Trump apologist (Brent III), and finally, to the ball-cap-wearing January 6 capitol siege participant (Brent IV, aka "Zeeker") — the Bozell epic has all the elements of a great family saga: pathos, intrigue, tragedy, farce, decline, and even a bit of redemption. In classic KYE fashion, we over-prepared and over-imbibed to bring you this story. Please enjoy responsibly!

Matt and Sam have an in-depth conversation with HIV/AIDs activist Peter Staley to get his perspective on Dr. Anthony Fauci's role in America's response to two of the most devastating public-health emergencies of recent decades: the AIDS crisis and the pandemic that began nearly one year ago.  They discuss how Peter got his start in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York City in the 1980s, what the group was fighting for, his run-ins with Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms, and other rightwing rogues, and how he came to know Fauci. How does Peter understand Fauci's role in the Trump administration's response to the pandemic? Should Fauci have resigned? What good was he able to do? And how does his experience as an activist inform his views about working with government officials on the "inside"?  Watch:How to Survive a Plague (the 2012 documentary about ACT UP in which Peter figures prominently) Read:Sam Adler-Bell, "Dr. Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci," The Drift, February 4, 2021"A Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic," New York Times, January 10, 2021...and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon for all Know Your Enemy bonus episodes! 

Matt and Sam explain West Coast Straussianism, the school of thought behind one of the last acts of the Trump administration: its publication of the "1776 Report," the Right's shabby response to the 1619 Project and blueprint for how the American Founding should be understood and taught. What are the origins of this school of conservative thought? Why are its adherents so enthusiastic about Trump? How do they understand the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and U.S. history? And why are they obsessed with "identity politics"?  Sources:Harry Jaffa, "American Conservatism and the Present Crisis," Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2003Publius Decius Mus, "The Flight 93 Election," Claremont Review of Books, September 2016Steven Smith, "Hidden Truths," New York Times, August 23, 2013John J. Miller, "The House of Jaffa," National Review, January 12, 2015Kathryn and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.Beloved KYE guest John Ganz (Ep. 15: The Year the Clock Broke) returns to explain how the Dreyfus Affair (and the French Third Republic) help us understand the Trumpian right, fascism, and the left's response to both.

Matt and Sam are joined by special guests Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes of the You're Wrong About podcast to discuss moral panics—from tales of rampant Satanism in the late 1970s to the Stranger Danger wave in the 1980s and beyond—and their role in the rise of rightwing politics in America. What do such "Save the Children" stories tell us about the way the conservative mind conceives of morality and power? What do they tell us about American culture and politics? It all builds to a discussion of QAnon and both the promise and problems with empathy.FURTHER READING AND LISTENING:Sarah Marshall, "Remote Control: Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the Spectacles of Female Power and Pain," The Believer, January 1, 2014Michael Hobbes, "Everything You Know about Obesity is Wrong," Huffington Post, September 19, 2018John Paul Rollert, "Going to Extremes: What Acting Taught Me about the Limits of Empathy," Commonweal, January 27, 2021Rebecca Jennings, "What we can learn about QAnon from the Satanic Panic: An Interview with Sarah Marshall," Vox, Sept 25, 2020Paul M. Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, (Oxford University Press), June 2020. Listen to You're Wrong About here, support them on Patreon here, and check out their merch here......and don't forget you can subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.Your hosts explain West Coast Straussianism, the school of conservative thought undergirding the "1776 Report" — the Right's shabby response to the 1619 Project and a blueprint for how the American Founding should be understood and taught. 

Matt and Sam take up the question that's dominating The Discourse: Is Donald Trump—and the movement he leads—fascist? To provide an answer, they turn to the rich historiography of fascism and some key essays on the subject published since Trump's election. Along the way, they break down different approaches and sets of criteria for evaluating fascism, consider the similarities—and differences—between the 1920s and '30s and today, and ponder whether or not the "fascist question" is the right one to be asking. Listen to the end to find out where Matt and Sam finally land!Further Reading: Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2004)Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair (New York Review of Books, 2013; originally published in 1947)Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017)Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Harvard University Press, 2019 Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin, 2018)Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)George Jackson, Soledad Brother, (1970)Robert O. Paxton, "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now," Newsweek, Jan 11, 2021Richard Evans, "Why Trump Isn't Fascist," New Statesman, Jan 13, 2021Dorothy Fortenberry, "Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore" Commonweal, Nov 5, 2020Dylan Riley, "What is Trump?" New Left Review, Dec 1, 2018Gabriel Winant, "We Live in a Society," n + 1, Dec 12, 2020Alberto Toscano, "The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism," Boston Review, Oct 28, 2020Angela Davis, "Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation," Verso, Feb 21, 2018Jairus Banaji, "The Political Culture of Fascism," Historical Materialism, Feb 19, 2017.Richard Seymour, "Inchoate Fascism," Patreon, Nov 13, 2020. Samuel Moyn & David Priestland, "Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is," New York Times, Aug 11, 2017Corey Robin and David Klion, "Almost the Complete Opposite of Fascism," Jewish Currents, Dec 4, 2020. Peter Steinfels "The Semi-Fascist Candidate," Commonweal, May 16, 2016....and don't forget to subscribe at Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.  Matt and Sam analyze the Trumpist "siege" on the Capitol on our latest bonus episode.

Matt and Sam—in a rare, just-the-two-of-them episode—look back at what a bad year revealed about a number of bad people, especially the coterie of rightwing intellectuals and politicians who have downplayed the pandemic, exacerbated anxieties about the uprising against police violence, and played along with Donald Trump's conspiracy-fueled attempts to steal the presidential election. What holds these efforts together, and what do they say about the state of conservatism? It turns out that 2020 confirmed the anti-democratic, revanchist character of the Right in the United States.Sources Cited:Matthew Sitman, "Why the Pandemic is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad," New Republic, May 21, 2020Matthew Sitman, "Time in the Eternal City," Commonweal, December 24, 2020Sam Adler-Bell, "Conservative Incoherence," Dissent, Summer 2020Bret Stephens, "America Shouldn't Have to Play by New York Rules," New York Times, April 24, 2020"Trump’s Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?" New York Times, December 31, 2020"Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn Election," New York Times, January 2, 2021...and don't forget to sign-up on Patreon for all of our bonus episodes!

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.An excerpt from our latest bonus episode on Trump's 'non-interventionist militarism' and the future of American foreign policy — with Stephen Wertheim of the Quincy Institute.  

In this much anticipated crossover event, Matt and Sam take aim at the conservative legal movement with Rhiannon, Michael, and Peter—the brilliant and funny team behind the 5-4 podcast, a Know Your Enemy favorite. For those who are not yet fans of the show, it's "a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks" that offers "a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases, and an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics." Topics discussed in this conversation include the origins of originalism, the founding of the Federalist Society, Robert Bork's disastrous confirmation hearings, the way the media covers the Supreme Court, and how the Left can fight back. Know Your Enemy listeners can check out 5-4 here.  Follow @fivefourpod on Twitter for their latest episodes, along with hosts @AywaRhiannon, @_FleerUltra, and @The_Law_Boy. Special thanks to podcast guru Leon Neyfakh (@leoncrawl) for helping make this happen.Listeners, especially new ones, might want to revisit Know Your Enemy episode eight, "Koch'd Out," for a deep dive into some of the foundations and institutions mentioned in this conversation....and don't forget to support KYE on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes! 

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content.An excerpt from our latest bonus episode on "the limits of realignment" with Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon.

Who is Donald Trump? The great David Roth, co-owner of Defector Media and a columnist at the New Republic, joins Matt and Sam to answer that harrowing question. From Trump's odd lies about his baseball talents to creepy White House Christmas decorations, this conversation was the perfect opportunity to unpack the neuroses, self-protective measures, cruelty, humor, and sheer weirdness of a terrible president on his way out of office. Also: Sam finally gets to do his Melania "impression"!Sources Cited:Leander Schaerlaeckens, "Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?" Slate, May 5, 2020David Roth, "I Made Up a Fake Donald Trump Quote, and He Retweeted It," SBNation, June 10, 2014 David Roth, "A Unified Theory of Trump's Creepy Aesthetic," New Republic, December 19, 2019David Roth, "The Littlest Prince," New Republic, November 17, 2020For more of David's writing on Trump, check out his author archives at the New Republic...and don't forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to our extensive catalogue of bonus episodes!  

Subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear this and all our bonus content!An excerpt from our election recap bonus episode with New York magazine's Eric Levitz and Daniel Sherrell, director of the the #VoteTrumpOut campaign.  

Matt and Sam are joined by Dorothy Fortenberry for a wide-ranging conversation about women and politics. Topics include growing up in Washington, D.C; her experiences writing women characters in Hollywood;  why the left should take over existing institutions; the complicated Catholic motherhood of Amy Coney Barrett; and much, much more. For those not familiar with her work, Fortenberry is a writer and producer on Hulu’s award-winning adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, and her plays include Species Native, Partners, Mommune, and Good Egg. She's a regular contributor to Commonweal, among other publications, though for her latest political takes you should follow her on Twitter (@Dorothy410berry).READ: Dorothy Fortenberry, "One of Those Serious Women: Andrea Dworkin's Radical Feminism," Commonweal , April 29, 2019Dorothy Fortenberry, "A Plea to My Fellow Warren Moms," Commonweal, March 6, 2020Dorothy Fortenberry, "Why I Stay," Commonweal, November 18, 2018LISTEN:Highwomen, "Highwomen"Highwomen, "Redesigning Women"Dar Williams, "The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed" ...and don't forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon to hear all Matt and Sam's bonus episodes.

Matt and Sam talk to two esteemed guests, Rick Perlstein and Leon Neyfakh, about why U.S. politics took a right turn in the 1970s. “We organize discontent,” as one New Right activist put it—and they did. Fierce battles over desegregation, gay rights, abortion, and the meaning of America itself all paved the way for Ronald Reagan's smashing victory in 1980.Over four books and two decades, historian Rick Perlstein has chronicled the rise of movement conservatism in America, starting with its renegade beginnings in the 1950s and '60s. Now, with Reaganland  (2020), his extraordinary tetralogy is complete—taking readers on a journey through Jimmy Carter's doomed administration,  the culture wars of the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan's campaign for the presidency. Perlstein's sweeping narrative is paired in this episode with the brilliant work of journalist Leon Neyfakh, who just finished the third season of his podcast Fiasco. It's a deep-dive into the battle over integration in Boston public schools during the 1970s (colloquially but inaccurately known as the Boston "busing crisis")—a vivid and compulsively listenable portrait of a pivotal episode in recent American history.In this conversation, Rick and Leon  disinter forgotten figures from a decade crucial to the rise of conservatism—the 1970s—while discussing how they tell stories we know the ending to, the problem of contingency and political agency, and issues such as American innocence, white backlash, right-wing rhetoric, and more. Don't miss this one!Further Reading: Rick Perlstein, "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong," NYTimes,  April 11, 2017Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, (1972)Jesse Curtis, "'Will the Jungle Take Over?' National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization,"  Journal of American Studies, November 2019Jefferson Cowie, "Is Freedom White?" Boston Review, Sept 23, 2020 Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (1995) ... and don't forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon to hear all of Matt and Sam's bonus episodes!

We released this bonus episode on depression and politics in July, and it quickly became a favorite of our Patreon subscribers. A number of them asked us to make it available in front of the paywall so they could share it with friends and family who have experienced depression and other mental-health issues—so that's what we decided to do. Topics discussed include: Matt's review of George Scialabba's memoir about depression; how left and right understand moral desert; and the struggle to build a society based on human frailty, our vulnerability to bad luck and bad breaks, and how much we need each other. Further Reading:Matthew Sitman, "Muddling Through: A Depression Memoir Like No Other," Commonweal, July 14, 2020.Johanna Hedva, "Sick Woman Theory," Mask Magazine, January 2016.Gabriel Winant, "Coronavirus and Chronopolitics," n + 1, Spring 2020And Listening:Steve Earle, "My Old Friend the Blues" (1986)

From the never-ending culture war over the New York Times's 1619 Project to arguments about the Black Lives Matter protests to President Trump's promise to Make American Great Again, today's political conflicts reflect, to an extraordinary degree, disagreements over the meaning of American history. Jamelle Bouie's New York Times column is one of the places where these lively debates are most effectively narrated and clarified. Bouie joins Matt and Sam to help make sense of how history, historiography, and politics relate to each other—or at least, how they should. Along the way, the conversation takes up slavery and capitalism, Afro-pessimism and Marxism, and (a frequent preoccupation of the podcast) what left-wing patriotism might look like.  Further Reading:Jamelle Bouie, "Beyond White Fragility," NY Times, June 26, 2020.Jamelle Bouie, "Why Juneteenth Matters," NY Times, June  18, 2020.Sam Adler-Bell, "The Remnant and the Restless Crowd," Commonweal, Aug 1, 2018.Vinson Cunningham, "The Argument of Afropessimism," New Yorker, July 20, 2020Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” New York Times, Aug 14, 2019. Sean Wilentz, "A Matter of Facts," The Atlantic, Jan 22, 2020.John Clegg, "How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism," Jacobin, Aug 28, 2019.Tom Mackaman, "An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project," World Socialist Website, Nov 18, 2019PLUS: Check out Jamelle's newsletter, which recently featured a huge list of books on the American Revolution and the early republic, and don't forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon for bonus episodes!

Matt and Sam welcome Yale historian Samuel Moyn to the show for a deep-dive into the Never Trump movement.  Who are the Never Trumpers? How seriously should we take the heroic story they tell about themselves? Did they sink Bernie's campaign for the Democratic nomination? Have they reckoned with their role in paving the way for Trump?  In trying to answer these questions the conversation moves from the baleful influence of Never Trumpers to a discussion of historical debates about over the rise of fascism, the perils of "tyrannophobia," and the possibilities for breaking through the hegemony of neoliberals and neoconservatives in our political life.Further Reading:Samuel Moyn, "The Never Trumpers Have Already Won" (New Republic)Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles, "Don't Blame Never Trumpers for the Left's Defeat" (New Republic)Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, "Trump Isn't a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is" (New York Times)Samuel Moyn, "Interview: We Can't Settle for Human Rights" (Jacobin)Sam Adler-Bell, "The Remnant and the Restless Crowd" (Commonweal)Matthew Sitman, "Riding the Trump Tiger" (Commonweal)Pankaj Mishra, "The Mask It Wears" (London Review of Books)John Ganz, "Finding Neverland: The American Right's Doomed Quest to Rid Itself of Trumpism" (New Republic)Marshall Steinbaum, "Guardians of Property" (Jacobin)Books Cited:Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elite (Oxford University Press)Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press)James Chappel, Catholic Modern : The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press)...and don't forget to support Know Your Enemy on Patreon for bonus episodes! 

Matt and Sam are joined by two special guests, Sarah Jones and Marshall Steinbaum, who return to the show to take stock of where we're at: our failed response to the pandemic, the connections between the pandemic and the protests, and how all this might play out in November.  The four of us range widely—but be warned, this is not the most inspiring conversation. Are there any reasons to be hopeful? Listen and find out.Sources Cited and Further Reading:Eric Levitz, "Coronavirus is Killing Our Economy because It Was Already Sick" (New York Magazine)Sam Adler-Bell, "Conservative Incoherence" (Dissent)Sarah Jones, "Eugenics Isn't Going to Get Us Out of This Mess" (New York Magazine)Sarah Jones, "The Coronavirus Class War" (New York Magazine)Matthew Sitman, "Why the Pandemic is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad" (The New Republic)Know Your Enemy bonus episode: What Are Intellectuals Good For? (with further thoughts on the protests that followed George Floyd's murder)

There's been no shortage of commentary on the rise of the "nones," those Americans who claim no religious affiliation, a trend especially notable among younger people. But that doesn't mean we live in a secular age. Matt and Sam talk to Tara Isabella Burton about her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, and the way our search for meaning and the need for ritual has met our neoliberal economic order.  What does this spiritual churn mean for our politics? Why do reactionary ideas find a ready audience among those disillusioned with modern life? We take up these questions and more in a wide-ranging conversation about the way we live now.Sources and Recommended Reading:Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless WorldTara Isabella Burton, "Christianity Gets Weird" (New York Times)Daniel José Camacho, "The Racial Aesthetic of Burton's 'Weird Christians'" (Sojourners)Michael Anton, "Are the Kid Al(t)right?" (Claremont Review of Books) 

Matt and Sam are joined by writer and editor Shuja Haider to discuss a topic near and dear to all of our hearts: country music. We talk about country's conservative reputation, the problems with (and virtues of) Ken Burns's recent documentary about country music, and the humane politics that arise from acknowledging—as the best country songs do—our collective frailty. Plus, a bunch of great music recommendations for your quarantine listening.A playlist featuring every song we mention in the episode, plus a few more bangers can be accessed here.Further Reading:Matthew Sitman, "E Pluribus Country," Dissent, Winter 2020.Shuja Haider, "The Empty Jukebox: Johnny Paycheck and the Return of the Repressed in Country Music," Viewpoint,  March 10, 2015Shuja Haider, "A World That Draws a Line: Interracial Love Songs in American Country Music," Viewpoint, March 1, 2017Shuja Haider, "Canon Fodder," Popula, Sept 13, 2018Cole Stangler, "Emotional Archaeology: An Interview With Ken Burns," Commonweal, Sept 13, 2019Shuja Haider, "The Invention of Twang," The Believer, Aug 1, 2019Shuja Haider, "Somebody Had to Set a Bad Example," Popula, Nov 14, 2018Nick Murray, "The Other Country," LA Review of Books, Nov 1, 2018Jesse Montgomery, "African Chant," Popula, Sept 18, 2018

Here it is—the mailbag episode. Recorded on 4/20 and celebrating a full year of Know Your Enemy, Matt and Sam answer listener questions about: conservatives hiding in plain sight, our favorite conservative novelists, a George W. Bush counterfactual, the right’s response to COVID-19, and—against our better judgment—some Bernie Sanders campaign postmortem.We received so many amazing questions for this and recorded tons of material. So much, in fact, that we decided to release another 25 minutes of it as bonus material on Patreon. If you get to the end of this episode and find yourself hankering for more, sign up on Patreon and you can listen to some extra discussion of Bob Dylan and political realignment + our entire back catalog of bonus episodes.Thanks for your support through all this. Stay safe and (reasonably) sane. Further Reading:Matthew Sitman, "Trump's Intellectuals and the Great Moving Right Show," The Bias, April 3, 2020.Matthew Sitman, "A Time For Politics," Commonweal, April 23, 2020.Matthew Sitman, "Saving Calvin from Clichés: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson," Commonweal, October 5, 2017Sam Adler-Bell, "Coronavirus Has Given the Left a Historic Opportunity," The Intercept, April 14, 2020.Sam Adler-Bell, "Beautiful Losers," Commonweal, March 11, 2020.John Thomason, "Hope Deferred (on Obama and Marilynne Robinson)," The Point, May 8, 2017. 

Matt and Sam are finally joined by the show's longtime bête noire, Marshall Steinbaum, for a deep dive into the Chicago school of economics and the wreckage it's supported—from welcoming the birth defects caused by deregulating the pharmaceutical industry to justifying massive resistance to desegregation to being put in the service of Coronavirus truther-ism. Where did this iteration of libertarianism come from, intellectually and institutionally? Who are the key figures in the Chicago school? How have their ideas infected the way we all think about economics and politics? It's a sordid, depressing tale of rightwing money, intellectual dishonesty, and a gleeful desire to discipline the forces of democracy.Sources and further reading:Marshall Steinbaum, The Book That Explains Charlottesville, Boston Review,  August 14, 2017Marshall Steinbaum, Economics after Neoliberalism, Boston Review, February 28, 2019Isaac Chotiner, The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory that Informed the Trump Administration, New Yorker, March 30, 2020Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (Penguin-Random House, June 2017)Edward Nik-Khah, Neoliberal Pharmaceutical Science and the Chicago School of Economics (Social Studies of Science 2014, Vol. 44(4) 489–517)

Our rollicking conversation with Know Your Enemy Film Correspondent Jesse Brenneman is now out from behind the paywall! Be prepared: we dive into Darrel Campbell's 2012 war-on-Christmas fever dream Last Ounce of Courage, a deranged film that nevertheless offers real insight into the conservative mind. (If you really love freedom, you can watch the film here, before you listen. But it is not at all necessary.) Jesse is a seasoned radio producer and dear friend—and funny. He has his own new podcast you should check out: Tech Talk with Tim and Ted.WATCH: Last Ounce of Courage (YouTube)READ: the Ronald Reagan speeches mentioned in the episode: "A Time for Choosing" (October, 27, 1964 ) and "Encroaching Control" (March 30, 1961) *** As mentioned in the intro, we're doing a mailbag episode next week. Please submit questions you'd like us to answer on air by email knowyourenemypodcast[AT]gmail.com OR by tweet  @Knowyrenemypod ***

Matt and Sam talk to John Ganz about paleoconservatism, the Island of the Misfit Toys of the American right. Along the way we're introduced to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, and others, and discuss their enduring influence on the Republican Party and conservative politics—both in 1992, when Buchanan made a failed run for president, and today, when the hopes of their movement seems to have been fulfilled in Donald Trump.Sources and Recommended Reading:John Ganz, The Year the Clock Broke (The Baffler)John Ganz, Finding Neverland (The New Republic)Rick Perlstein, I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong  (New York Times)Murray Rothbard, Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo MovementMichael Brendan Dougherty, The Castaway (America's Future Foundation)Shuja Haider, How To Be a Democrat, According to Republicans (The Outline) 

Ross Douthat is that strangest of all creatures, a religious conservative with a New York Times column—a perch from which he pronounces on U.S. politics, the Catholic Church, and modern culture with style and intelligence, plus a dash of mordant pessimism. In other words, the perfect choice to be the first "enemy" to come on the show. He joins Matt and Sam to discuss his own conservatism, the American right in the Trump era, and his new book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Further Reading:Ross Douthat, "The Decade of Disillusionment," NYT, Dec 28, 2019Ross Douthat, "The Case for Bernie," NYT, Nov 30, 2019Ross Douthat, "Trump’s Message: Love It or Leave It, With a Bigoted Edge," NYT, Jul 16, 2019Ross Douthat, "What Are Conservatives Actually Debating?" NYT, June 4, 2019Rudyard Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," Harper's, Oct 26, 1919 

Making It is Norman Podhoretz's 1967 memoir about his journey from the working-class neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn to his heady ascent in the New York literary scene of 1950s and '60s. It's also a fascinating psychological study of a man on the cusp of converting from Cold War liberalism to what came to be known as neoconservatism—a shift driven, at least in part, by the cool reception of this book. Making It proves a fascinating text through which to understand not just one conservative mind, but multiple generations of New York intellectuals, the neoconservative movement, and the politics of grievance, self-pity, and narcissism that have come to define much of conservatism in the Trump era.Sources Cited:David Klion, "The Making and Unmaking of the Podhoretz Dynasty," Jewish Currents, Dec 19, 2017Norman Podhoretz, "My Negro Problem — And Ours," Commentary, Feb 1963Janet Malcolm, "‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist'" New York Review of Books, Mar 22, 2018Louis Menand, "The Book That Scandalized the New York Intellectuals," The New Yorker, Apr 24, 2017Benjamin Moser, "My Podhoretz Problem — And Ours," Jewish Quarterly, Dec 5, 2018Lee Smith, "Making It," Tablet, Jan 16, 2019 

Matt and Sam talk to Rebecca Traister of New York magazine about sexism and electoral politics. How has patriarchy conditioned the political careers of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren? How does the right mobilize anti-feminism to win? And how do conservative women like Sarah Palin use traditional womanhood and femininity to their advantage? Listen to find out! Traister is the author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.Further Reading:Rebecca Traister, "Elizabeth Warren's Classroom Strategy," The Cut, Aug 6, 2019Rebecca Traister, "Leader of the Persistence," New York Magazine, July 23, 2019Elaine Blaire, "The Power of Enraged Women," New York Times, Sept 27, 2018Liesl Schillinger "Book Review: Big Girls Don't Cry," New York Times, Sept 16, 2010

Will Arbery's play "Heroes of the Fourth Turning"—about four conservative Catholic friends arguing under a night sky in Wyoming—feels like it was written to be discussed on Know Your Enemy. An ominous meditation on faith, conservatism, empathy, cruelty, and power, "Heroes" has ignited debate and garnered praise across the political spectrum—from First Things to the (failing) New York Times to Rod Dreher's blog at the American Conservative. Arbery was raised by conservative Catholic professors and grew up imbibing the ideas of the right and the teachings of the Church. He writes from a place of deep love and withering scrutiny. Lucky for us (and you!) Will displays all the sensitivity, intellectually curiosity, and love in this conversation that he does in his remarkable play. Enjoy!You can buy tickets to see "Heroes" here, which is playing in NYC until November 17. Watch a preview here.Further Reading:The New York Times profile of Will, "A Play about God and Trump, from a Writer Raised on the Right"Vinson Cunningham, "A Play About the Nuances of Conservatism in the Trump Era," The New Yorker, October 14, 2019B.D. McClay, "Heroes of the Fourth Turning’ is a haunted play about religious conservatives," The Outline, November 5, 2019Rod Dreher, "Will Arbery’s Heroes," The American Conservative, October 2, 2019C.C. Pecknold, "An extraordinary play that challenges progressives and conservatives alike," Catholic Herald, October 1, 2019 

Sarah Jones joins Matt and Sam to discuss the myth of "Trump Country" and the pitfalls of reporting on rural America, and to address the most important question of all: is Donald Trump the Antichrist? (Answer: Probably not.) Sarah's essay, "Scapegoat Country," appears in this month's special issue of Dissent on "Left Paths in Rural America."Sarah is a staff writer for New York Magazine, where she covers inequality and national politics. Follow her on Twitter: @OneSarahJonesSources Cited:Sarah Jones, "Scapegoat Country," Dissent, Fall 2019Sarah Jones, "What Brett Kavanaugh Means to Conservatives," New York Mag, Sept 30, 2019Sarah Jones, "Here’s How We’d Really Know That Trump Is the Antichrist," New York Mag, Aug 21, 2019Mollie Hemingway, "I wasn’t a Trump supporter. I am now." Washington Post, Jan 19, 2018 

UNPAYWALLED:Sam interviews journalist Hannah Gais about (1) the far right's ongoing efforts to infiltrate conservative media and (2) the self-victimizing grift of Quillette anti-anti-fascist Andy Ngo.Discussed:Hannah Gais, Leaked Emails Show How White Nationalists Have Infiltrated Conservative Media, SplinterHannah Gais, The Making of Andy Ngo, Jewish Currents

Matt and Sam talk to Max Alvarez—writer, editor, and host of Working People, an excellent podcast—about growing up working-class and conservative in a mixed race household.Matt and Max compare experiences as we try to answer some basic but tough questions: what attracts some members of the working class to conservative politics? How do the cultural and economic aspects of conservatism interact for working class conservatives? And what can the left learn from working-class conservatism's appeal?Support Max's Patreon here!Further Reading:Max Alvarez, "Can the Working Class Speak?" Current Affairs (2018)Stuart Hall "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists," (1988)Charlie Post's two-part essay from the early aughts in Against the Current (and Sebastian Lamb's response)Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and WalmartThomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)Larry Bartels' review of Frank.John Jost, "Working Class Conservatism: A System Justification Perspective," (2017)Oh and please support our Patreon!

With the help of Jane Mayer's essential 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, your hosts explore the world of right-wing philanthropy and the institutions—from centers at universities to think tanks in Washington, DC—it has funded. What emerges is a startling history of how a small group of incredibly rich families used novel techniques to shelter their wealth from taxation and fund a right-wing takeover of American politics. Other sources cited and consulted: Theda Skocpol, "Who Owns the GOP?" (a critical review of Mayer in Dissent) Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin Terbeek, "The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise." Politico Mark Schmidt "The Legend of the Powell Memo," The American Prospect Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833)

Matt and Sam's first ever guest, Patrick Blanchfield, is an Associate Faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of the forthcoming book Gunpower from Verso books, which you can and should pre-order here. In the wake of the massacres in El Paso and Dayton, we turn to Patrick—a truly brillant writer and thinker—to help us understand how these traumatic reptitions of spectacular violence are rooted in American history and ideology. Patrick's work: "The Market Can't Solve a Massacre" (Splinter) "Recoil Operation" (New Inquiry) "Ghosts of 2012" (N+1) "The Gun Control We Deserve" (N+1) "Thoughts and Prayers" (N+1) "'They're Coming for the Ones You Love': My Weekend of Gun Training in the Desert" (The Nation) Declaration of War: The Violent Rise of White Supremacy after Vietnam (The Nation) Other sources cited: Evan Simko-Badnarski, Condition Yellow (Images from Patrick and Evan's trip to a firearms training institute in Nye County, Nevada) Thomas Meaney "White Power," London Review of Books Adam Kotkso, Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capitalism Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993) Okkervil River "Westfall" Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Benjamin Madley, American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 PS If you haven't already, please subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon! For $5/month, you get additional episodes and other subscriber-only content. For $10/month you get the bonus content + a digital subscription to Dissent magazine!

The first National Conservatism conference was convened at the Ritz Carlton in Washington D.C. two weeks ago. It was a coming out party for the rising nationalist wing of the conservative movement, with attendees laying the groundwork for a more intellectual version of Trumpism. Many mainstream conservatives were in attendance, along with paleoconservatives, figures from the religious right, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and a popular Fox News host. In the era of Trump, mainstream conservatism is making room for hardcore nationalists, economic populists, illiberal theocrats, and others—this conference was a chance for them to find common ground. Matt and Sam discuss the conference, what it means for the present and future of conservative politics, and how the left can combat the nationalists' appeal—which is, in many ways, much more powerful than that of the dying Reaganite consensus. Here's what we read and watched: Video and text of Senator Josh Hawley's speech Alexander Zaitchick's profile of Hawley in the New Republic. National Conservatism 2019 YouTube channel (videos of many but not all speeches) Zach Beauchamp's original write-up at Vox. NYT's write-up. Osita Nwanevu (New Yorker), Conservative Nationalism is Trumpism for Intellectuals Jacob Heilbrunn (NYRB), National Conservatism: Retrofitting Trump’s GOP with a Veneer of Ideas Daniel McCarthy's (TORY ANARCHIST) take. Damon Linker's contrarian take. David Walsh's take on the conference and fascism Douthat's NYT column. Daniel Luban's profile in the New Republic of Yoram Hazony. Criticism from the right: The Federalist and Jacobite takes.

Interested in the background reading we did for this episode? There's a lot of it. But we want to show our work and give you the chance to dig deeper. Below are the articles we referenced, read, or drew upon for our conversation on the illiberal right. Primary Sources: Against the Dead Consensus, First Things Sohrab Ahmari, Against David French-ism, First Things David French, What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong, National Review R.R. Reno, What Liberalism Lacks, First Things Romanus Cessario, O.P., Non Possumus, First Things Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist., Integralism in Three Sentences, The Josias Ross Douthat, What are Conservatives Actually Debating?, New York Times Rod Dreher, The Meaning of the Benedict Option, The American Conservative Adrian Vermeule, Integration from Within, American Affairs Adrian Vermeule, A Christian Strategy, First Things Commentary: Matthew Sitman, Liberalism and the Catholic Left (a review of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed), Commonweal Emma Green, Imagining Post-Trump Nationalism, The Atlantic Jane Coaston, David French vs. Sohrab Ahmari, Explained, Vox Damon Linker, How the Intellectual Right is Talking Itself into Tearing Down American Democracy, The Week Sam Adler-Bell, With Census Decision, Trump's GOP Falters in March to White Minority Rule, The Intercept Isaac Chotiner, Interview with Ross Douthat on the Crisis of the Conservative Coalition, New Yorker Eric Levitz, Oregon Republicans Flee State to Block Action on Climate Change, New York Patricia Mazzei, Florida Limits Ex-Felon Voting, Prompting a Lawsuit and Cries of ‘Poll Tax’, New York Times Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Bars Challenges to Partisan Gerrymandering, New York Times

Special thanks to Will Epstein and The Downtown Boys for providing music for these two episodes. Check them out. Ronald Reagan's televised "A Time for Choosing" speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY A choice excerpt: "Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation. They tell us that by avoiding a direct confrontation with the enemy he will learn to love us and give up his evil ways. All who oppose this idea are blanket indicted as war-mongers. Well, let us set one thing straight, there is no argument with regard to peace and war. It is cheap demagoguery to suggest that anyone would want to send other people’s sons to war. The only argument is with regard to the best way to avoid war. There is only one sure way—surrender."

Sam Tanenhaus's original 2009 essay in The New Republic, the basis for the book we're discussing today: https://newrepublic.com/article/61721/conservatism-dead Whitaker Chambers's 1957 dismantling of Ayn Rand in the pages of National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/ And here's Buckley's 1955 mission statement for National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/1955/11/our-mission-statement-william-f-buckley-jr/

In episode two of KNOW YOUR ENEMY, Matt and Sam discuss economist Albert O. Hirschman's 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Along the way, they identify the persistent patterns in conservative rhetoric from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek to Paul Ryan. They finish off by examining some of the rhetorical tics of the progressive left, and Sam reminisces about the good old days when DSA was comprised exclusive of young nerds and old Jews.

Read Matt's Dissent essay, "Leaving Conservatism Behind" Read Sam's essay about Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West, "The Remnant and the Restless Crowd"