The passing of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025 marked not just the end of a papacy but the end of an era in global politics. The moment in which Francis spoke before Congress a decade ago and identified Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King as models of Christian moral witness feels like another universe — far from the cruel, cramped, suspicious, and selfish world we are living in. What was the Francis era? Where did he come from, and how did he become pope? And what are we losi...
2025-04-25 11:01:11 +0000 UTC
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Speaking in the Rose Garden on April 2, or as he called it, "Liberation Day," President Trump unveiled his plans to impose a new minimum tariff on nearly every country in the world, along with country-specific "reciprocal" tariffs for those nations Trump deemed to be engaging in unfair trade practices. He called it "one of the most important days in American history" and claimed it was "our declaration of economic independence." But rather than liberation, Trump's tariffs have unleashed chaos...
2025-04-15 15:16:24 +0000 UTC
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We heard you! We've unlocked this episode due to popular demand, so you can share it with anyone and everyone! (Can also be found on other platforms.)
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This month marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States in March 2020, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death toll in the United States now stands at over 1.2 million; global...
2025-03-31 11:00:17 +0000 UTC
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We mentioned this on the podcast already but here's another push: if you're a listener in New York City, please consider coming to a special Dissent fundraiser on April 8. Matt and I will be there (Jamelle Bouie too!), and we'd love to meet some KYE heads. If you can't make it, but have some extra dough, consider donating — or buy a ticket for a friend in the c...
2025-03-27 15:46:53 +0000 UTC
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If there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits,...
2025-03-25 14:22:37 +0000 UTC
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If there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits,...
2025-03-17 10:30:04 +0000 UTC
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In a bonus episode from August 2022, Matt and Sam were discussing Sam's profile of Arizona Senate hopeful and Peter Thiel-protégé Blake Masters when we found ourselves imagining how a future union of MAGA nationalism and Silicon Valley libertarianism might try to run the government. A listener flagged it for us, noting that the description — which we call "exit from within" — sounds remarkably similar to what we are now experiencing with Trump, Musk, DOGE, and the tech right. We had tot...
2025-03-05 13:00:19 +0000 UTC
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Just over a month into Trump's second term, Matt and Sam offer their thoughts on where we're at—and, to be blunt, the assessment is fairly depressing. They take stock of the troubling truth that Pete Hegseth's confirmation reveals about Trump's hold over the Republican Party, new FBI director Kash Patel's conspiratorial children's books, the state of the conservative legal movement, the right's relatively recent embrace of unbounded executive power, what the Democrats can do to fight back, ...
2025-02-24 11:56:58 +0000 UTC
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We're all anxious, and none of us can pay attention. We don't read long books anymore; our kids don't read at all. When we watch TV, we scroll at the same time. And we absolutely cannot be alone with ourselves. These are the symptoms of a modern malaise that is everywhere diagnosed but rarely treated with the dire seriousness it deserves: an epochal sickness that is fundamentally changing the way we relate to each other and to our own minds. What would it take to reclaim control?
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2025-02-18 16:30:45 +0000 UTC
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The first three weeks of Donald Trump's second administration have seen a flurry of vicious executive orders aimed at the federal workforce, trans people, government agencies, and others—all while Elon Musk and his deranged band of young sociopaths, otherwise known as the "Department of Government Efficiency," have been set loose on the Treasury's payment system and other key functions of the state. In this episode, we talk with John Ganz to try to make sense of it all: how to avoid getting...
2025-02-08 14:00:12 +0000 UTC
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An atheist, a radical for capitalism, a caricature of a greedy libertarian, a best-selling novelist, a difficult partner and passionate lover, and the self-proclaimed greatest philosopher since Aristotle: Ayn Rand was many things, and we talk about almost all of them in this epic episode. To do so, we called upon historian Jennifer Burns, whose intellectual biography, 2025-02-03 11:00:13 +0000 UTC
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A stock rhetorical trope on the right is to invoke ancient Rome when talking about American decline—often making direct comparisons between the Goth invaders and contemporary immigrants, obsessing over homosexuality and Rome's fall, and more. If their understanding of history isn't very serious, what should we make of these appeals? And are there any "lessons" we should learn from Roman history?
There's no better time to take up such matters than while Matt is in Rome, a...
2025-01-28 12:01:52 +0000 UTC
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This is a fascinating episode that takes up thinkers that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: that of the entrepreneurial work ethic. Historian Erik Baker's superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour...
2025-01-21 12:00:13 +0000 UTC
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Due to popular demand, we've unlocked this episode for non-subscribers; it's now available on all podcast platforms as well as here on Patreon. Feel free to share far and wide.
Right wing movements thrive by cultivating fears of disorder. Conservatives depict blue cities as sites of rampant crime, chaos, and iniquity. And often enough, it is progressives — with their overdeveloped empathy and concern for the poor and criminalized — who take the blame. Recently, a ...
2025-01-05 16:42:24 +0000 UTC
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Back in October, before the 2024 election, we had on our friend—and brilliant screenwriter and playwright—Dorothy Fortenberry to talk about gender and the presidential campaign. Amid all the postmortems and Democratic soul searching, we wanted to have Dorothy back on to revisit some of those questions, starting with the difficulties women face in running as "outsiders" or against "The System"—an especially relevant consideration given the prevailing anti-incumbent, burn-it-down sentimen...
2024-12-27 16:03:10 +0000 UTC
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Thought you all might like to see this. We couldn't do it without you — the best listeners in podcasting.
"Listening to Sitman and Adler-Bell is like wandering the basement stacks of a library with two grad students jazzed on coffee and shuffling index cards."
(Yes. That's right. Coffee. Just coffee.)
2024-12-18 16:53:11 +0000 UTC
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It's been a while since we've had our friends from the 5-4 podcast on KYE, and we thought there was no better time to do so than the weeks before Donald Trump is inaugurated, again, as president. As listeners might guess, we wanted to talk to them about what opportunities Trump might have during his second term to reshape the federal judiciary—and if he can secure the confirmations of Kash Patel at the FBI and Pam Bon...
2024-12-17 13:20:55 +0000 UTC
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We wanted to offer something of a palette cleanser for our subscribers, so we decided to watch the recent movie, Reagan, with our intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman. Even better, it's based on the 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, by Paul Kengor—who just hap...
2024-12-06 23:04:06 +0000 UTC
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This is a conversation we've wanted to have for a while, and it seemed like there was no better time than now, as many people on the broad center-left are asking tough questions about Donald Trump's strength in rural America—according to one post-election analysis, he won 62 percent of rural voters. To unpack what's happening in these parts of the country, we talked to Luke Mayvi...
2024-11-27 22:47:37 +0000 UTC
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The second Trump administration hasn't started, but it's already proving chaotic, disturbing, and downright bewildering. (Not unlike the first!) Trump's picks for key staff and cabinet positions display a discordant, if not altogether surprising, mix of ideologies, experience, and scandalous baggage. (Indeed, one of his picks, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, withdrew...
2024-11-21 19:48:09 +0000 UTC
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In our first episode after the 2024 elections, we briefly considered what the results revealed about how Donald Trump won, and why Kamala Harris lost, before discussing what Trump's first picks for his White House staff and Cabinet meant for his second term as president. This conversation is different—a proper "post-mortem" of the results and a bit of a group thera...
2024-11-16 18:25:37 +0000 UTC
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As the reality of Donald Trump's decisive victory sets in, we wanted to talk to Politico's Ian Ward, who's done some of the very best reporting on post-liberal intellectuals, JD Vance, and MAGA-world, in addition to spending time on the campaign trail this fall. After breaking down the results of the presidential election, we discuss Vance's role in the ca...
2024-11-08 18:45:00 +0000 UTC
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Hey everybody, Sam and I wanted to announce that tonight (Monday) at 8pm Eastern Time, we'll be going "live" on the KYE Discord to discuss our thoughts—and perhaps even predictions—on tomorrow's election. (As a reminder, access to our Discord comes with subscriptions at the West Coast Straussian level and above.) This will be more rank punditry than philosophy of voting, but I'm sure we'll range widely, so come ready with questions, comments, or other contributions that help us all get th...
2024-11-04 17:56:23 +0000 UTC
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(Per many of your requests, we’ve unpaywalled this conversation so everyone can listen.)
If you're on the left and you've spent time on the internet in the past few weeks, you've probably observe or participated in debates about the strategic value and moral status of voting in the 2024 election: Is it okay to ...
2024-10-29 13:00:15 +0000 UTC
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The author of several excellent books about the history of American conservatism, including The Invisible Bridge, Nixonland, and 2024-10-25 16:07:54 +0000 UTC
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In this episode, Matt is joined by journalist Talia Lavin to discuss her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, one of the most fascinating and unique books published on the Christian right during the Trump-era. Lavin takes her subjects seriously, but not uncritically, and espe...
2024-10-18 10:30:01 +0000 UTC
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Historian Timothy Shenk joins us for a conversation about his new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, a timely look at political strategy on the liberal-left as the New Deal Consensus cracked up in the late 1960s and 1970s through Bill Clinton's presidency and beyond. He tells the story of how Democrats responded to class dealignment through the careers of tw...
2024-10-11 22:03:43 +0000 UTC
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This conversation is a little different. We thought that exploring the life of, say, Russell Kirk might not be the best way to spend the weeks before such a consequential election, so this is the first of a few episodes that won't be about a text or a life, but about the 2024 elections—hopefully digging a little deeper than most, and with a special concern for the themes and topics of Know Your Enemy. To help us get started, we had on a great friend of the podcast, playwright and screenwrit...
2024-10-03 16:40:23 +0000 UTC
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Matt and Sam continue the 100th episode extravaganza by answering more truly excellent listener questions and hear from more friends of the show. Topics include: leftwing politics and orthodox Christianity, how to maintain hope (especially on the socialist left), learning to love Freud, complicated family politics, and more! Plus: Dissent co-editor Tash Lewis sings "Happy Birthday" to Matt in Welsh.
Sources:
Charles Péguy, 2024-09-26 19:07:04 +0000 UTC
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To celebrate the 100th episode of Know Your Enemy, Matt and Sam decided to open up the mailbag and field listener questions—which, as always, proved to be incredibly intelligent and interesting, with topics ranging from what they've learned along the way to the politics of guns. Plus, past guests from the podcast stop by to offer their commentary on this auspicious occasion.
Sources:
John Lukacs, 2024-09-19 14:07:16 +0000 UTC
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