Know Your Enemy
A leftist's guide to the conservative movement, one podcast episode at a time, with co-hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell.
Episodes
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. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America stretc...
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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 cou...
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.
Further Reading:
E Tammy Kim, "Immigration Protests Threaten to Boil Over in Los Angeles," The New Yorker, June 9, 2025.
— "Inside the Activist Groups Resisting ICE," The New Yorker, Jun 13, 2025.
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. Subscribe at Patreon.com/knowyourenemy to never miss an episode like this one. And please listen to Jesse's insane, hilarious, freakishly prescient (and fake) podcast Tech Talk.
A palette cleanser for subscribers: we watched Reagan (2024), with our intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman. Even be...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.
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...
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...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.
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...
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 epis...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.
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-work...
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 and family life, his decisive role in the Rosenberg trial (espe...
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...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy
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 response to several requests from our (wonderful) Patreon subscribers, we're unlocking this episode from behind the paywall. Consider subscribing at Patreon.com/KnowYourEnemy to never miss an episode.
March 2025 marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death tol...
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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; globally it surpasses 20 million people. Tens of ...
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 e...
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 e...
Here's something a little creepy. 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 simi...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy
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...
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 ...
Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy
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...
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