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Know Your Enemy

Know Your Enemy

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Know Your Enemy posts

Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner)

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 R...

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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 auth...

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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 itemsâ...

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Command + F + Hitler

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...

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How Charles Murray (Almost) Predicted the Trump Era

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, Comin...

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How To Give A Damn

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 Amer...

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Death, Power, and the Charlie Kirk Memorial (w/ Pat Blanchfield)

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. A...

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The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

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...

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The Case for Democracy (w/ Osita Nwanevu)

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 2025-09-12 10:30:04 +0000 UTC View Post

An Officer and a Spy (w/ John Ganz)

Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premi...

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Frank Meyer, Inventor of Conservatism (w/ Daniel J. Flynn)

Devoted Know Your Enemy listeners will recall that, in November 2021, we released a fairly dense, theory-driven 2025-08-28 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post

The Minority Voters Moving Right (w/ Daniel Martinez HoSang)

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 Ameri...

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From Armageddon to Zionism — More Listener Questions

Our mailbag runneth over! Unsurprisingly, we received so many excellent questions from subscribers for our most recent 2025-08-11 10:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Has Trump 2.0 Been a Success So Far? — And Other Questions

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 2025-08-04 10:30:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Longtime Listener, First Time Caller? Send Us Your Questions for Our Next Mailbag Episode

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 ...

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Trump's Epstein Problem

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 ...

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Zohran! (w/ Waleed Shahid)

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 thir...

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A Complicated Man: William F. Buckley, Jr. (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)

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.—you...

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More on the MAGA Civil War over Iran

If you were intrigued by our conversation with Curt Mills last week, Sam's latest 2025-06-29 14:48:19 +0000 UTC View Post

MAGA's War Over the War with Iran (w/ Curt Mills)

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 neoco...

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Immigration Showdown in LA (w/ E. Tammy Kim)

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, " View Post

UNLOCKED: Reagan, the Movie (w/ Jesse Brenneman)

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 touch...

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Joe Biden's Betrayal

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...

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Christopher Caldwell's Case Against Civil Rights

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...

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Trump as Messianic Prophet (w/ Manvir Singh)

In a recent New Yorker essay, our guest, UC Davis anthropolog...

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Did Podcasters Make Trump President? (w/ Andrew Marantz)

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...

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Conclave (2024) (w/ Brandon Taylor)

With the papal conclave convening in Rome to pick Pope Francis's successor, Matt and Sam are joined by novelist Brandon Taylor to...

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The Life & Crimes of Roy Cohn (w/ In Bed with the Right)

Recently Matt joined Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub of the excellent In Bed with the Righ...

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VIDEO: Know Your Enemy in the Windbag City (w/ Reid Cherlin)

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.)

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KYE Boys in Chicago Tuesday (April 29) — post-event hang at Jimmy’s

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 — tomorro...

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