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 in various executive orders again. To understand who these people are, what their movement wants, ...
2025-11-17 11:30:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 atta...
2025-11-11 11:30:01 +0000 UTC
View Post
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—an...
2025-11-03 11:30:05 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 allegiances, and more—all recorded before the news of his tattoo, now covered over,...
2025-10-24 10:30:15 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 White America, 1960-2010. With its focus on the ascendence of a new "cognitive elite," cultural divides, and the pathologies afflicting working and lower class whites, the book might seem prophetic of the Age of Trump — but the reality is more complicated. (Murray's over...
2025-10-15 10:30:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
Before embarking on a spirited bout of rank punditry, we take a step back and talk about the Staple Singers, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Zohran, and giving a damn about both your "fellow man" and democracy. Then, we walk you through the latest catalogue of horrors: Hegseth's lame TED talk in front of the generals, the menacing yet comically inept dimestore Gestapo that is ICE, the shutdown, and more!
Sources:<...
2025-10-06 10:30:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 the event's footage, which runs to over four and a half hours, then convened to discuss it. After laying out for listeners what happened at State Farm Stadium in Arizona just over a week ago, replete with clips, we tried to understand how the event aimed to turn death and gr...
2025-09-29 10:30:03 +0000 UTC
View Post
The assassination of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, seemed to change the landscape of American politics in an instant, inspiring a startlingly unanimous battlecry of vengeance from the conservative movement, the GOP, and the Trump White House. In this episode, Matt and Sam respond to this ominous moment, analyzing Kirk’s legacy, the politics of martyrdom, and the dangers that lurk ahead.
Two notes: (1) This episode was recorded on Tuesday 9/16, be...
2025-09-19 16:53:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 and the Case for a New American Founding, Osita Nwanevu sets out to understand the true meaning of democracy and defend it ...
2025-09-12 10:30:04 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 few weeks in August at Film Forum in New York City. When it originally was released, it couldn't find an American distributor (and likewise was shunned by streaming services), a consequence of the MeToo moment meeting Polanski's criminal past—in 1978 he fled to Europe after bein...
2025-09-05 10:30:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 him kicked out of the country and back to the United States, where he eventually turned right and became a key figure in the...
2025-08-28 10:30:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 least those of anti-racist liberals. Why have minority voters drifted toward Trump, despite his many comments and campaign pledges that demonize or disparage them? To try to understand this phenomenon, we talked to Daniel Martinez HoSang, who has studied the minorities entering the...
2025-08-18 10:30:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
Our mailbag runneth over! Unsurprisingly, we received so many excellent questions from subscribers for our most recent episode that we decided to answer even more of them. Once again religion seemed to be on the minds of listeners, and we take up charismatic Christians and the evolution of both the religious right and the Republican Party, as well as the rol...
2025-08-11 10:30:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 happened since then (to say the least), so we wanted to once again open up the mailbag and find out what was on the minds ...
2025-08-04 10:30:06 +0000 UTC
View Post
It's been nearly a year since we asked you, our subscribers, to send us questions for a mailbag episode—which you did, with remarkable thoughtfulness and intelligence, for our 100th episode back in September 2024. As we enter the dog days of summer, once again we're putting out the call for your questions.
We're going to record this mailbag episode Thursday afternoon, so please consider asking us a question in the replies to this post, or via direct message or email if you'd rather no...
2025-07-29 00:35:46 +0000 UTC
View Post
Over July 4th weekend, the Department of Justice and FBI put out a memo essentially declaring "case closed" on the matter of Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected sex criminal and pedophile who died (apparently) by suicide in federal custody in 2019. No more files. No more questions. He killed himself and that's that. This was quite the reversal from an administration stacked with figures — like FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino — who built their celebrity in MAGA circles b...
2025-07-28 10:00:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 primary last month certainly warrants this one. The thirty-three year old democratic socialist, state assemblyman, and Muslim of Indian descent born in Uganda, ended up running away with it, defeating the runner-up, former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, by over ten points—and, when all the ballots finally were counted, set a record by receiving th...
2025-07-11 11:00:17 +0000 UTC
View Post
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 First, enfant terrible at Yale, CIA agent, founder of National Review, best-selling author, brilliant television host, and more—has blessedly arrived. 2025-07-04 11:01:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
If you were intrigued by our conversation with Curt Mills last week, Sam's latest column provides more detail about the intra-MAGA fight over Israel and Iran.
“It’s the battle of the Murdoch empire v...
2025-06-29 14:48:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
Donald Trump's rise in U.S. politics over the past decade has been inextricable from his "America First" foreign policy and withering criticisms of the Iraq War, nation building, and both the neoconservatism that led the Republican Party to disaster during George W. Bush's presidency and the Washington establishment that still thought America could police the world. Trump's message of a restrained foreign policy and pledge to avoid getting dragged into forever wars especially seemed to resona...
2025-06-27 11:00:17 +0000 UTC
View Post
Journalist Tammy Kim joins the pod to talk about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles — and the raids that precipitated them.
Further Reading:
E Tammy Kim, "Immigration Protests Threaten to Boil Over in Los Angeles," The New Yorker, June 9, 2025.
— "2025-06-19 17:16:39 +0000 UTC
View Post
As the world falls apart — and we prep for our Buckley mega-episode with Sam Tanenhaus — we're unlocking this fun episode from late last year. Listen to the new intro for Jesse's touching tribute to Brian Wilson. RIP.
A palette cleanser for subscribers: we watched Reagan (2024), with our intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman. Even better, the movie is based on the 2006 book, 2025-06-12 10:50:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
If you pay any attention at all to political news, it's been hard to avoid Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's recent bombshell of a book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which offers behind-the-scenes reporting from the White House, halls of Congress, the campaign trail, and beyond about Joe Biden's health, mental and physical, and the efforts to conceal just how bad it had gotten from his Cabinet, Congress, and, most damnin...
2025-06-07 11:00:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
Attentive listeners will notice that this episode is about a book but isn't an author interview. That's because it's the first in a new occasional series of episodes that will be dedicated to books by conservative writers that we think are important — whether because a book articulates the right's approach to an issue or problem in an especially revealing way, influenced or galvanized the conservative movement when it was published, or, with the benefit of hindsight, has proven to be presci...
2025-06-02 10:45:01 +0000 UTC
View Post
In a recent New Yorker essay, our guest, UC Davis anthropologist Manvir Singh, argues, "The Trumpian mystique echoes a dynamic that has occurred for centuries and across cultures. Its core ingredients—an alleged league of pedophiles, a godlike miracle worker, promises of an Edenic restoration—resemble archetypes that have long occupied humanity’s imagin...
2025-05-22 21:44:27 +0000 UTC
View Post
Among the many factors credited for Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race was one that, naturally, the hosts of Know Your Enemy took an interest in: podcasts. More specifically, "bro" podcasts—think Joe Rogan or Theo Von—seemed to be one reason why Trump continued, as he did in 2016 and 2020, to perform so well with male voters, especially gaining ground with younger, Black, and Latino men. An episode of one of these podcasts might stretch to three hours ...
2025-05-15 10:58:50 +0000 UTC
View Post
With the papal conclave convening in Rome to pick Pope Francis's successor, Matt and Sam are joined by novelist Brandon Taylor to discuss the 2024 film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The film, as you might guess, depicts the shabby and conspiratorial inner-workings of a (fictional) College of Cardinals as they go a...
2025-05-08 11:00:09 +0000 UTC
View Post
Recently Matt joined Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub of the excellent In Bed with the Right podcast to record what turned out to be two episodes about Roy Cohn—the "lawyer, closet case and ratfucker extraordinaire," as they describe him. These days Cohn is perhaps most infamous for being Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor, but this first episode focuses on Cohn's childhood a...
2025-05-02 10:30:02 +0000 UTC
View Post
Video from our event at the University of Chicago on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone who came out. It was a delight to meet you all. (Conversation starts around 16:50 in the video.)
2025-04-30 17:18:32 +0000 UTC
View Post
Hello beautiful patrons - Just wanted to let you all know that Matt and Sam will be at University of Chicago (!) — yes, the source of some of the worst ideas we talk about on the show — tomorrow, April 29th, at 5:30 pm CDT for a conversation with Reid Cherlin of Crooked Media. (RSVP at the link.)
What: The KYE boys in conversation w/ Reid Cherlin
Where
2025-04-28 15:07:00 +0000 UTC
View Post
