The boys discuss Matt's recent Dissent essay on the 845-page report of the "Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol." What did the Jan 6 report — and the committee's work — achieve? Was the report a missed opportunity? How should political actors navigate the relationship between historical constraints and contingency? And is there a way...
2023-04-29 16:05:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings KYE Patrons,
I wanted to share my new review essay about the January 6 Report that will be published in Dissent's spring issue (and already is online), which Sam and I just recorded a bonus episode about—it should be posted within the next few days.
When Diss...
2023-04-26 18:48:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Gillian Branstetter (of the ACLU's Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project) returns to Know Your Enemy for an episode on the strange case of Ron DeSantis: what is his ideology and vision for America? And why do his political aspirations involve inflicting wanton cruelty upon LGBTQ children and adults in his home state? For our sins, we read DeSantis's new book — a campaign book, though he has n...
2023-04-18 16:13:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The great Sam Tanenhaus (author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography) returns to the podcast for a spirited and gossipy discussion of everything we missed — or only briefly mentioned — in our main episode on Chambers, including: his r...
2023-04-10 20:35:00 +0000 UTC View Post
"That’s the problem with a lot of things these days," wrote Bob Dylan in 2022, "Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs."
This mournful attitude — for a lost age of artfulness, mystery, and hope — pervades Dylan's 2022 book,
In the second (and final) of Matt's Lent-related conversations with theologians, he's joined by Dr. Nichole M. Flores of the University of Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and researches the constructive contributions of Catholic and Latinx theologies to notions of justice and aesthetics to the life of democracy. This conversation focuses on her recent book, The...
2023-03-29 14:21:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings Dearest Patrons -- I thought you all might enjoy this book review I just published at the Washington Post. It gets into some of the key historiographic questions we often encounter on the show: what is the relationship between "mainstream...
2023-03-25 16:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This conversation is the first of two that Matt recorded to be released during Lent, the forty-day season when Christians prepare for Easter Sunday by fasting and giving of their time and treasure to those in need. This episodes features Catholic theologian and Emory University professor Dr. Susan Bigelow Reynolds discussing her new book, People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury. In the book, she draws on years of ethnographic research about St...
2023-03-20 15:03:16 +0000 UTC View Post
In this episode, Matt and Sam go deep into the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, most famous for his role in the "trial of the century"—the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury after Chambers accused of Hiss of being a Communist spy during his years working in the federal government, especially the State Department. The two figures, once friends, came to symbolize a clash that was bigger than themselves, and prefigured the turn American politics would take at the onset of the Cold War. Chamb...
2023-03-12 19:57:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Jamelle Bouie (of the NYTimes) and John Ganz (of Unpopular Front) join for a spirited discussion of the 1984 film "The Little Drummer Girl," starring Diane Keaton — an adaptation of John le Carré's 1983 novel of the same name.
We approach the film — which, it turns out, is not very good — with the same analytical rigor that Ja...
2023-02-22 18:42:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Modern conservatives have long asked the following questions: how can we live together without God? Is there any substitute for religion in cohering a moral community? And if not, what can we do to revive the old sacred authority that reason, science, and liberalism have interred?
These were also the questions that preoccupied Philip Rieff (1922-2006), an idiosyncratic sociologist and product of the University of Chicago, whose thought cast a long shadow over right-wing intellectu...
2023-02-14 01:58:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Early in Timothy Shenk's absorbing, provocative recent book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, he describes it as "a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made them." Looking at American figures from Martin Van Buren to Charles Sumner to Mark Hanna to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama, t...
2023-01-31 17:37:49 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode is a little different. Rather than dissecting an influential conservative book written by long-dead intellectual, Matt and Sam are joined by Know Your Enemy's brilliant producer (and host of the very funny podcast, Tech Talk) to unpack a different kind of "text"—the hit CBS television show from the 1990s, 2023-01-18 23:51:04 +0000 UTC View Post
On Dec. 31, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died at the age of 95. A towering figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond—especially his decades helming the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then as Pope and Pope Emeritus—Benedict was involved in nearly all of the Church's many crises and controversies. He cracked down on liberation theologians, held a reactionary line on homosexuality at the height of the AIDS crisis, and s...
2023-01-08 17:41:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy New Year! In April 2022, Matt and Sam appeared on the excellent Jokermen podcast to discuss Bob Dylan's Christian rock records. And now we're sharing it with you. Lots to chew on in here for fans of KYE, Dylan, Jesus, and rock n' roll. Enjoy.
2023-01-02 18:52:12 +0000 UTC View Post
For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI. In her authoritative new biography, G-Man, Yale historian Beverly Gage brings Hoover to life, uncovering the all-too-human man who played such an outsized role in twentieth-century U.S. political history. Gage's decade of research provides fascinating i...
2022-12-19 23:16:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Matt and Sam pick up where they left off in their recent mailbag episode and keep answering listener questions. Topics include: KYE merchandise, the existence of Hell, Francis Fukuyama, Mormonism, gun violence, and more.
Sources:
David Bentley Hart, 2022-12-07 16:31:37 +0000 UTC View Post
As the end of the year approaches, Matt and Sam are once again answering questions from you, their beloved listeners. Like previous mailbag episodes, there was an abundance of excellent questions that were submitted. Topics include: the possibilities for the religious left, white Christian nationalism, your hosts' literary habits and favorite novels, conspiracy theories—and more. For those who especially enjoy this type of episode, check out the next KYE bonus episode which will take up eve...
2022-12-01 00:52:39 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings dearest patrons,
We're planning another mailbag episode to close out November! Please submit your questions for Matt and Sam here, by message on Patreon, or by email at knowyourenemypodcast@gmail.com — and please do so by Monday 11/28.
With love and enduring gratitude,
Sam and Matt
This is episode is a little different. Listeners know that Matt and Sam have been following John Fetterman's run for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania from the start, doing their first episode about his campaign after his primary win in May. In light of his victory over Dr. Oz earlier this week in the general election,...
2022-11-11 22:22:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Matt and Sam recap and analyze the 2022 midterms — as we know them so far.
Why did Dems do so much better than we thought? Why did the GOP underperform? How cucked were the polls? How happy is Matt that John Fetterman beat Dr. Oz? (Very) What about Blake Masters in Arizona? Was this a bad night for Trump? Was it a good night for DeSantis? How worried should we be about the integrity of American democracy given these results? And how happy should we be that the Democrats managed ...
2022-11-09 23:55:25 +0000 UTC View Post
"What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strength and deficiencies in Richard Nixon." It's difficult to think of a more electric meeting of author and subject than Garry Wills and Richard Nixon, a meeting that produced what might be the best book ever written about American politics, Wills's Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. What begins as reporting from the campaign trail during the 1968 presidential contest—where Wills introduces us to Nixon,...
2022-11-06 17:35:03 +0000 UTC View Post
With the midterms a week away, Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project (aka @BobbyBigWheel) about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level — where Trumpist state legislators continue to deny the 2020 election and lay the groundwork for ignoring the will of the majority in the future. How did the conservative movement manage...
2022-10-31 16:34:04 +0000 UTC View Post
At long last, an episode about baseball—America's national pastime, and a sport that conservatives in the United States seem to especially love. To understand baseball's appeal, both to conservatives and the rest of us, Matt and Sam are joined by David Roth of Defector Media, a brilliant, funny writer who also is a long suffering Mets fan. Topics include: the start of the MLB playoffs, baseball's interesting place in American his...
2022-10-17 18:50:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Sam is joined by David Broder — the Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine and author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy and the forthcoming book, Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy — to discuss the recent...
2022-10-05 23:15:16 +0000 UTC View Post
KYE super guest John Ganz joins Matt and Sam for a characteristically spirited discussion of The Claremont Institute's "Sheriff Fellowship," which invites county sheriffs from across the country to California for a weekend of West Coast Straussian ideological programing.
Drawing on the history of "posse comitatus" movements...
2022-09-23 20:14:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he's a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He's also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what's happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsl...
2022-09-20 15:55:20 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode was unplanned, but when Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1, 2022, we felt an urge to honor her memory and the profound influence she has had on the American left, socialism, feminism, and our collective thinking about class struggle. From her work in the women's health movement of the 1960s, to her theorizing (with ex-husband John Ehrenreich) of the "professional-managerial class" in the 1970s, to her explorations of Reagan-era yuppie pathologies, and her renowned expos...
2022-09-12 18:34:48 +0000 UTC View PostIn this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer returns to the show to discuss her new book, Partisans, about the ascendancy of an angrier, more radical strain of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1990s—a backlash driven by the right's dissatisfaction with the genial, popularity-seeking Ronald Reagan. As the Cold War ended, many conservatives stopped genuflecting to d...
2022-08-31 19:14:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Matt and Sam bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement, discussing two recent articles in the New York Times. The first: Sam’s profile of Arizona GOP senate nominee Blake Masters, who, like J.D. Vance, is bankrolled by his former employer and mentor, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. And second: an 2022-08-18 13:13:03 +0000 UTC View Post