Know Your Enemy

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This episode is the second in our occasional series on important, controversial, or unusually relevant conservative texts from the recent past. Here we take up Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Before embarking on a spirited bout of rank punditry, we take a step back and talk about the Staple Singers, Hannah Arendt's...

To try to understand both the power and strangeness of the Charlie Kirk memorial—one part evangelical worship service, one part MAGA rally—we turned, of course, to our friend Pat Blanchfield. All three of us stewed in...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. The assassination of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, seemed to change the landscape of American...

Since the start of the Trump Era over a decade ago, few words have been deployed as often as "democracy": how it's become imperiled, who threatens it, and what to do to defend it. In The Right of the People: Democracy...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premier," running for a...

Devoted Know Your Enemy listeners will recall that, in November 2021, we released a fairly dense, theory-driven episode on Frank Meyer, the Communist from New Jersey whose exploits on behalf of the Party in the UK got...

This episode was first published in October 2024, and has been un-paywalled following the death this week, on August 21, of Focus on the Family founder and influential figure on the religious right, James Dobson, at age...

A major topic following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election has been his gains with racial and ethnic minorities, a trend that's scrambled many people's assumptions about American politics, not...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Our mailbag runneth over! Unsurprisingly, we received so many excellent questions from subscribers for our most recent episode that...

It's been nearly a year since we asked our subscribers to send us questions for a mailbag episode—which they did, with remarkable thoughtfulness and intelligence, for our 100th episode back in September 2024. A lot has...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Over July 4th weekend, the Department of Justice and FBI put out a memo essentially declaring "case closed" on the matter of...

This episode from January 2025 has been un-paywalled for your summer enjoyment... A stock rhetorical trope on the right is to invoke ancient Rome when talking about American decline—often making direct comparisons...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. We don't do too many New York City-focused episodes on Know Your Enemy, but Zohran Mamdani's decisive win in the Democratic mayoral...

This episode is one that Matt and Sam have been anticipating for years: after two-and-a-half decades of research and writing, Sam Tanehaus's authoritative biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.—youthful booster of America...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Donald Trump's rise in U.S. politics over the past decade has been inextricable from his "America First" foreign policy and...

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Journalist Tammy Kim joins the pod to talk about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles — and the raids that precipitated them...