Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Last month, on May 14th, we were joined by nearly 800 listeners in New York City for the first ever Know Your Enemy live show, " Decline and Fall ." The event was a fundraiser for Dissent , so we called in the big guns, our great friend Mike Duncan, to join us on stage. Many KYE listeners will be familiar with Mike, the brilliant and prolific host of the Revolutions and, especially relevant for the purposes o...
Jun 01, 2026•4 min
In this episode we have a conversation with reporter Jasper Craven about his new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood , which is a made-for-KYE feat of research that offers a fascinating way into perennial themes of this show: masculinity, U.S. empire, the relationship between violence and civilization, and the surprising camp of conservatism. Along the way we discuss Donald Trump, the mob, Peter Brian Hegseth, Graham Platner...
May 26, 2026•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 136
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. As always, listeners asked more mailbag questions than we could respond to in one episode, so we continue answering them here for subscribers. In this second round we take up: a playlist of KYE's Straussian-related episodes; (Straussian) esoteric writing versus (French) death of the author and the art of writing (and interpretation); prose style—what it is, why it matters, its relationship to poetry, and the ...
May 18, 2026•5 min
Not only was May 6th the seven-year anniversary of Know Your Enemy, an occasion to celebrate your support of our work, but it's been nearly a year since we last opened the mailbag and answered listener questions. As always, we loved thinking about the topics you so thoughtfully and intelligently asked us to consider, and we take up a number of them in this episode: the future of the MAGA coalition and GOP politics post-Trump, the promise and perils of graduate school, novels we unexpectedly love...
May 11, 2026•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 135
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. REMINDER: COME SEE KYE x MIKE DUNCAN LIVE IN NYC Given the string of recent episodes that, in various ways, grappled with religion we wanted to take a step back and offer a rather personal conversation about believing in God, or not, and what difference it might makes. The discussion begins by revisiting when we first met over a decade ago and talked a lot about faith, then ranges widely, including: atheism v...
May 04, 2026•5 min
Over the course of the past year, Peter Thiel—the Trump backing, Vance boosting gay tech billionaire—has been delivering a series of lectures on the Antichrist, using an examination of the Biblical antagonist of the End Times to make an argument about the supposed perils of this political moment. We got our hands on transcripts of these talks as delivered last year in San Francisco, and explain what Thiel said and why it matters. Topics include: Thiel's conservative evangelical upbringing, the i...
Apr 27, 2026•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 134
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Once more we take up religion and politics, this time a conversation about President Donald Trump's attacks on Pope Leo XIV—the first successor of St. Peter from the United States—mostly, though not only, over the pope's pleas for peace as Trump rages war against Iran. Why is the incredibly unpopular Trump going after the beloved pontiff? Why does Trump's Catholic vice president, J.D. Vance, argue that Leo sh...
Apr 17, 2026•5 min
In 1897, a small group of Jewish Marxists on the outskirts of the Russian empire founded the General Jewish Labour Bund. The Bundists were revolutionary socialists, unapologetic internationalists, champions of the Yiddish language, and implacable foes of nationalism of every stripe, including (especially) Zionism. Bundists helped found the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, organized militias to defend Jews against pogroms, fought on the frontlines of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, fought f...
Apr 10, 2026•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 133
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Last month, our very own Sam Adler-Bell published a deeply reported article in New York magazine about "the women leaving the New Right." That is, the women who've come to realize, as Sam pithily puts it, this truth about the MAGA movement: "Sexism wasn’t merely the price of entry; it was the theme of the party." MAGA-style misogyny is different than the oldfangled, pre-Trump, pre-Fuentes, pre-Tate brothers i...
Apr 01, 2026•5 min
There’s perhaps no living person who better embodies the themes, contradictions, ethos, and pathos of “Know Your Enemy” than William Kristol, this week’s guest. Today, Kristol is editor-at-large of The Bulwark , a valuable redoubt of unreconstructed Never-Trumpism, which he helped found in 2018. But before dedicating himself, full-time, to the admirable if quixotic mission of undermining Donald Trump from the center-right — alienating many of his one-time friends in the process — Kristol was bes...
Mar 23, 2026•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 132
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this episode, we shift our attention from the Trump administration to the winner of the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Texas, state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian, James Talarico. Even before prevailing in that contest earlier this month, Talarico had been having something of a moment, appearing on Ezra Klein's podcast , being profiled by the New Yorker , and generating a wave of media c...
Mar 16, 2026•4 min
On February 28, both the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, along with other political leaders and government officials, destroying various military targets, and bombing a girls elementary school that took at least 175 lives, many of them children. Just under a week into the war, where are we? Why did Trump decide to attack Iran now? What reasons did they give, and were any of them plausible? What have the consequences been so far...
Mar 06, 2026•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 131
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. On Monday, Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo posted this: "The Right's collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it." Given that Rufo was, after J.D. Vance, perhaps the most prominent Haitians-are-eating-pets-in-Ohio conspiracy theorist in the country, his complaint generated many, many responses rightfully ...
Feb 27, 2026•3 min
When people break with MAGA, most of them walk away and don't look back, whether out of shame or fear or both. So it's a rare thing to talk with someone willing to describe publicly why they joined the Trump movement, what life was like on the inside, and the reasons they left — but it's just such a conversation we have for you today, with writer and former New Right firebrand Pedro L. Gonzalez. Enjoy. Sources: Pedro L. Gonzalez, " The Right Lost the Culture War, and America ," Contra , Feb 16, ...
Feb 23, 2026•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 130
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. This episode is about Shattered Glass , the 2003 movie portraying former New Republic writer Stephen Glass's fall from the heights of magazine journalism after he was exposed as a serial fabulist who routinely made up quotes, sources, key details, and more in his stories. We've both loved this movie for years, and thought discussing it would serve as a companion of sorts to our interview with Jason Zengerle a...
Feb 16, 2026•3 min
Finally, an episode about Tucker Carlson—and at an auspicious time, as his influence on the right seems only to have grown in the first year of Trump's second term. To help us understand him, we turned to journalist Jason Zengerle, who first crossed paths with Tucker in the last, halcyon days of magazine journalism before cable news and the internet, and now has written Hated By All the Right People , a book that tells two intertwined stories: the life of Tucker Carlson, and the changes in the m...
Feb 09, 2026•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 129
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. The shocking execution of Alex Pretti occurred after we recorded our last episode for subscribers about Minneapolis, and so the city and its people have remained in our thoughts in a special way. To help us understand what's happening on the ground there, we talked to our friend Lydia Polgreen, who grew up in Minneapolis and traveled there to report on the situation for the New York Times . Topics include: ho...
Feb 02, 2026•6 min
Last week, all eyes were on Davos as President Trump unfurled his deranged desire to buy or take Greenland from Denmark—just weeks after the United States kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Trump asserted the so-called "Donroe Doctrine." To help us understand what the Trump administration is doing in the Western hemisphere, we talked to the Progressive International 's David Adler and Matt Kirkegaard, who take us from the Monroe Doctrine to what Trump had done both in his first te...
Jan 26, 2026•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 128
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Matt and Sam discuss the January 7 killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent, the promising signs that it is proving deeply unpopular, and the less hopeful indications coming from Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, and others in the administration and the Republican Party about what it portends. Sources: Nancy Cook, " Inside the White House, Stephen Miller is Making His Vision of America Real ," Bloombe...
Jan 19, 2026•4 min•Ep. 128
For years now on Know Your Enemy, we've taken the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a glimpse of Trumpism unbound—not a few naive Q-anon types and tourists bumbling around, and not an excuse to be blackmailed into voting for Democrats, but a violent prelude to what a second Trump term would be like, a judgment that, sadly, has been entirely vindicated. One reason we've taken this perspective is Robert Draper's exceptionally insightful reporting from the Capitol that day and the days that followed,...
Jan 12, 2026•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 127
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein , Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan...
Jan 02, 2026•6 min•Ep. 127
This episode originally aired November 17, 2025 on Patreon — we're unlocking it as a holiday treat. If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival populate government commissions, and their prescriptions find expression i...
Dec 22, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. As the end of the year approaches, we wanted to look back at another year of trying to understand the American right—what we got wrong, what we got right, and what to expect in 2026. The conversation begins with the cracks showing in Trump's coalition, his plummeting approval ratings, and the possibility that Charlie Kirk really was helping hold the marriage of MAGA and the GOP together, then consider if we s...
Dec 15, 2025•6 min
Given the not-terribly-uplifting streak of episodes we've had lately, we thought it was time for a Know Your Enemy movie night, and were joined by the podcast's intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman, for a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's 2025 film, One Battle After Another . Its tagline—"When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own"—suggests why all three of us absolutely loved it. We discuss: the film's ...
Dec 08, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 126
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Should you try to improve your friends or leave them be? Do friendship and politics mix? Is friendship about virtue or delight? In 2023, we were interviewed by Andrew Elrick, now a professor at Marist University, for a documentary podcast he was making about men and friendship . (Two of our favorite topics!) That podcast never came to fruition, but Andy was kind enough to share this audio with us, and now we'...
Dec 01, 2025•2 min
Laura K. Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right , published earlier this month, is a book we simply had to discuss. Listeners to this podcast will recognize its cast of characters—conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen, Michael Anton, John Eastman, Adrian Vermeule, and Harry Jaffa, among others—whose ideas and influence Field carefully categorizes and evaluates, bringing order to an unruly decade of intellectual history. Topics include: Leo Strauss and the problem of gre...
Nov 24, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 125
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival populate government commissions, and their prescriptions have found expression in seve...
Nov 17, 2025•4 min
This episode isn't focused on a single topic or text, but rather just wanting to have a wide-ranging conversation with our guest, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and author of the recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning . We start by discussing the appalling wave of Islamophobic attacks against Zohran Mamdani during the last weeks of his victorious mayoral campaign, the short-sighted embrace of such bigotry by too many American Jews and Jewish insti...
Nov 11, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 124
This is a different kind of episode than is typical; there's no book, no central text, not even a single, central event that guides the conversation. Instead, we begin with a few recent news items—speculation about Trump 2028, Speaker Mike Johnson's refusal to swear in a Democratic congresswoman, the stunning abdication of Congress as the shutdown continues, and, incredibly, a secretive billionaire and Mellon heir donates over a hundred million dollars to pay the military, among others—and then ...
Nov 03, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 123
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. The theme of this rank punditry episode is Getting in Trouble on the Internet, and we begin with the frankly unsurprising story of the Young Republican Hitler group chats, then move on to a longer discussion about Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, and the revelations about controversial past posts on Reddit about guns and fighting fascism, rural white voters, his ideological a...
Oct 24, 2025•4 min•Ep. 123
