Episodes
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The End of the French Fifth Republic? (w/ Cole Stangler) [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Many listeners will have seen the recent protests in France, protests that began with high school students marching out of classrooms for better conditions in them, then grew to a broader backlash against the...
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Islamophobia in America, Then and Now (w/ Rozina Ali)
In this episode, we're joined by Rozina Ali for a conversation about Seasons of Fury, her new book about the rise, persistence, and changing contours of Islamophobia in the United States, a story she tells through the lives of four very different American families. It's an elegantly written feat…
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What Do Conservative Intellectuals Do? (w/ John Ganz) [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this episode we talk to our friend John Ganz about the nature and function of conservative intellectuals—or "intellectuals," whichever you prefer—past and present. In particular, the Trump era has been a…
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The Post-MAGA Midterms? (w/ David Weigel)
Dave Weigel is a longtime favorite political reporter of ours—someone we've both read for years, and find unusually unblinkered by partisan loyalties—so we couldn't think of a better guide to the 2026 midterms elections than him. What everyone knows is that, right now, polls show a possible...
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Late-Stage Trumpism's Morbid Symptoms [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. A sundowning, octogenarian president radically out of step with the country's mood, surrounded by Yes Men (and Women), cowards, and idiots, whose administration and party are plunging in popularity as war…
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End Times Fascism (w/ Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor)
This episode is a free-wheeling conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about their superb (and superbly written) new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. Both terms in its title—"end times" and "fascism"—are ones we've discussed at length in previous episodes, but...
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Hitler, "The Lessons of History," and the Maw of Late-Stage Trumpism [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this conversation, Matt and Sam range widely, beginning with Sam's recent NYT review of a book explaining how Hitler "dismantled a democracy in 53 days" then discussing the late, great conservative…
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The Pump and Dump Presidency (w/ Jacob Silverman)
Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, and it isn't close. Between his family's crypto business — designed to enable foreign oligarchs, criminals, and state actors to bribe the administration while enriching Trump and his family — his insider trading and manipulation of…
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MAGA’s Fight for Animal Rights (w/ Astra Taylor & Aaron Regunberg) [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. We talk to Astra Taylor and Aaron Regunberg about their recent New Republic article about MAGA's embrace of animal rights—which, like RFK Jr. and "Make America Healthy Again," has allowed them to make inroads...
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The Long Struggle Against Equality in America (w/ Kim Phillips-Fein)
In this episode, we're pleased to welcome back historian Kim Phillips-Fein, one of the truly outstanding observers of the right, past and present, working today, for a conversation about her new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against...
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Conservatives in Disarray? [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. What is going on with the right? Why are they so mad at each other? What accounts for their apparent malaise? Why are they arguing about the price of burritos? Is anyone qualified to replace Ross Douthat at…
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Archaeology and Annexation in Palestine (w/ Jasper Nathaniel)
This episode begins by noting the proximity of two of the most significant events of the twentieth century, one archaeological, the other political: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948. What do they have to do with each other? A…
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UNLOCKED: Tucker Carlson and the Anti-Israel Right (w/ Peter Beinart)
This episode originally aired June 15, 2026 on Patreon — we're unlocking it for the rest of you. Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics, their connection to his broader nationalist project…
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The Platner Ordeal (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry) [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Matt and Sam are joined by their great friend Dorothy Fortenberry to discuss the debacle of Graham Platner: the Maine Democratic Senate nominee who was forced to drop out amid allegations of rape. We compare...
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Gerontocracy in America (w/ Sam Moyn)
Lindsey Graham's death last week at 71 was as remarkable for the senator's relative "youth" as its possible political and electoral consequences, so much so that it actually prompted conspiracy theories about the precise nature of his passing. Meanwhile, 84-year old Mitch McConnell's status as...
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Why Patriotism [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. This conversation is something of a follow-up to our last episode on Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. We begin by "providing receipts" for the views of prominent midcentury...
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
We're ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills's superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It's central argument is that Abraham Lincoln succeeded in revolutionizing how Americans thought of the...
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The Left Ascendant in New York City [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this episode we break down the results from last week's Democratic primaries in New York City, which saw candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America prevail in key congressional races (as...
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Pope Leo XIV's 'Magnifica humanitas' (w/ Jack Hanson)
As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they reveal about what it really means to be human being. It's a distinctly Augustinian reading of…
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Tucker Carlson and the Anti-Israel Right (w/ Peter Beinart) [Teaser]
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics, their connection to his broader nationalist project, and how the...
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Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (w/ Matt Dinan)
Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, based on his 1949 Walgreen Lectures at the University of...
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Know Your Enemy, Live! (w/ Mike Duncan) [Teaser]
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…
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Military Education and American Manhood (w/ Jasper Craven)
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:...
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Even More Listener Questions, Answered [Teaser]
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...
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The Seven Year Anniversary Mailbag Episode
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...
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Reasons To Believe [Teaser]
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...
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Peter Thiel and the Antichrist
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....
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The Pope and the President [Teaser]
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...
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The Bund: Fighting Fascism, Fighting Zionism (w/ Molly Crabapple)
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...
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Misogyny, MAGA-style [Teaser]
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...
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From Neocon to Never-Trump (w/ Bill Kristol)
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.…
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James Talarico and the Politics of Progressive Christianity [Teaser]
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...
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Trump's War Against Iran (w/ Matt Duss)
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…
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Standing Athwart History, Yelling "Slop!" (w/ John Ganz) [Teaser]
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...
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Leaving MAGA Behind (w/ Pedro L. Gonzalez)
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…
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'Shattered Glass,' Journalism, & the End of History [Teaser]
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...
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Tucker Carlson's Phases & Stages (w/ Jason Zengerle)
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...
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On the Ground in Minneapolis (w/ Lydia Polgreen) [Teaser]
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...
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The Donroe Doctrine (w/ David Adler & Matt Kirkegaard)
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...
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The Killing of Renee Good [Teaser]
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,...
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January 6, Five Years Later (w/ Robert Draper)
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…
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Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser]
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...
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UNLOCKED: Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner)
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...
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What We Got Wrong (and Right) about the Right in 2025 [Teaser]
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…
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One Podcast After Another (w/ Jesse Brenneman)
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…
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On Friendship (w/ Andy Elrick)
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...
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The Furious Minds of MAGA (w/ Laura Field)
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…
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Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner) [Teaser]
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...
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Zohran, the Jews, and Reckoning with Gaza (w/ Peter Beinart)
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...
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Break Glass in Case of Emergency
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,...