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...
Oct 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Republican 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 ...
Oct 07, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Matt 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, w...
Sep 30, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 flou...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Former 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 e...
Sep 19, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 24, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 o...
Aug 21, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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, An...
Aug 11, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 serv...
Jul 27, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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 ...
Jul 21, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 rulin...
Jul 17, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Jul 06, 2023•2 hr 52 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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 ...
Jun 30, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Last 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 ...
Jun 17, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast "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 Inst...
Jun 05, 2023•2 hr 52 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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! Sources Nate Cohn, " Why Ron DeSantis Is Struggling ," New York Times , May 5, 2023 S...
May 18, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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 conting...
Apr 29, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Apr 18, 2023•2 hr 40 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast 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 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 ...
Apr 10, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast "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...
Apr 04, 2023•2 hr 36 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast 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 conversa...
Mar 29, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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: ...
Mar 20, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 woul...
Mar 12, 2023•2 hr 20 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast 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 majori...
Feb 27, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Sam 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 ...
Feb 22, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, theologian...
Feb 13, 2023•2 hr 40 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy Early 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 S...
Jan 31, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jan 18, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast 
