Know Your Enemy

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Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics, their connection to his broader nationalist project, and how the left should think about right-wing anti-zionism.

Sources:

Peter Beinart, "What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel," New York...

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, based on his 1949 Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago (where he taught for two decades) and published in 1953. To help us, we called on our friend Matt Dinan, a political theorist who's...

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Last month, on May 14th, we were joined by nearly 800 listeners in New York City for the first ever Know Your Enemy live show, "Decline and Fall." The event was a fundraiser for Dissent, so we called in the big guns, our great friend Mike Duncan, to join us on stage. Many KYE listeners will be familiar with Mike, the brilliant and prolific host ...

In this episode we have a conversation with reporter Jasper Craven about his new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, which is a made-for-KYE feat of research that offers a fascinating way into perennial themes of this show: masculinity, U.S. empire, the relationship between violence and civilization, and the surprising camp of conservatism. Along the way we di...

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As always, listeners asked more mailbag questions than we could respond to in one episode, so we continue answering them here for subscribers. In this second round we take up: a playlist of KYE's Straussian-related episodes; (Straussian) esoteric writing versus (French) death of the author and the art of writing (and interpretation); prose style...

Not only was May 6th the seven-year anniversary of Know Your Enemy, an occasion to celebrate your support of our work, but it's been nearly a year since we last opened the mailbag and answered listener questions. As always, we loved thinking about the topics you so thoughtfully and intelligently asked us to consider, and we take up a number of them in this episode: the future of the MAGA coalition and GOP politics post-Trump, the p...

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Given the string of recent episodes that, in various ways, grappled with religion we wanted to take a step back and offer a rather personal conversation about believing in God, or not, and what difference it might makes. The discussion begins by revisiting when we first met over a decade ago and t...

Over the course of the past year, Peter Thiel—the Trump backing, Vance boosting gay tech billionaire—has been delivering a series of lectures on the Antichrist, using an examination of the Biblical antagonist of the End Times to make an argument about the supposed perils of this political moment. We got our hands on transcripts of these talks as delivered last year in San Francisco, and explain what Thiel said and why i...

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Once more we take up religion and politics, this time a conversation about President Donald Trump's attacks on Pope Leo XIV—the first successor of St. Peter from the United States—mostly, though not only, over the pope's pleas for peace as Trump rages war against Iran. Why is the incredibly unpopular Trump going after the beloved pon...

In 1897, a small group of Jewish Marxists on the outskirts of the Russian empire founded the General Jewish Labour Bund. The Bundists were revolutionary socialists, unapologetic internationalists, champions of the Yiddish language, and implacable foes of nationalism of every stripe, including (especially) Zionism. Bundists helped found the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, organized militias to defend Jews against pogroms, fo...

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Last month, our very own Sam Adler-Bell published a deeply reported article in New York magazine about "the women leaving the New Right." That is, the women who've come to realize, as Sam pithily puts it, this truth about the MAGA movement: "Sexism wasn’t merely the price of entry; it was the theme of the party." MAGA-style misogyny is dif...

There’s perhaps no living person who better embodies the themes, contradictions, ethos, and pathos of “Know Your Enemy” than William Kristol, this week’s guest. Today, Kristol is editor-at-large of The Bulwark, a valuable redoubt of unreconstructed Never-Trumpism, which he helped found in 2018. But before dedicating himself, full-time, to the admirable if quixotic mission of undermining Donald Trump from the...

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In this episode, we shift our attention from the Trump administration to the winner of the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Texas, state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian, James Talarico. Even before prevailing in that contest earlier this month, Talarico had been having something of a moment, appearing on Ezra Klein's podcast, bei...

On February 28, both the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, along with other political leaders and government officials, destroying various military targets, and bombing a girls elementary school that took at least 175 lives, many of them children. Just under a week into the war, where are we? Why did Trump decide to attack Iran now? What reasons did they give, and w...

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On Monday, Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo posted this: "The Right's collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it." Given that Rufo was, after J.D. Vance, perhaps the most prominent Haitians-are-eating-pets-in-Ohio conspiracy theorist in the ...

When people break with MAGA, most of them walk away and don't look back, whether out of shame or fear or both. So it's a rare thing to talk with someone willing to describe publicly why they joined the Trump movement, what life was like on the inside, and the reasons they left — but it's just such a conversation we have for you today, with writer and former New Right firebrand Pedro L. Gonzalez. Enjoy. 

Sources:

Pedro L....

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This episode is about Shattered Glass, the 2003 movie portraying former New Republic writer Stephen Glass's fall from the heights of magazine journalism after he was exposed as a serial fabulist who routinely made up quotes, sources, key details, and more in his stories. We've both loved this movie for years, and thought discussing it would serve...

Finally, an episode about Tucker Carlson—and at an auspicious time, as his influence on the right seems only to have grown in the first year of Trump's second term. To help us understand him, we turned to journalist Jason Zengerle, who first crossed paths with Tucker in the last, halcyon days of magazine journalism before cable news and the internet, and now has written Hated By All the Right People, a book that tells two int...

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The shocking execution of Alex Pretti occurred after we recorded our last episode for subscribers about Minneapolis, and so the city and its people have remained in our thoughts in a special way. To help us understand what's happening on the ground there, we talked to our friend Lydia Polgreen, who grew up in Minneapolis and traveled there to rep...