This episode from January 2025 has been un-paywalled for your summer enjoyment...

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, and there was no one better for him to talk with about them than Mike Duncan, the prolific and brilliant history podcaster; he currently hosts the Revolutions podcast and, especially relevant for the purposes of this conversation, hosted the History of Rome podcast from 2007-2012, a project that led him to write The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (2017). Matt and Mike discuss the use and abuse of history, how "norms" do and do not matter, the relationship between imperialist foreign policy and domestic politics, the perils of vast income inequality, then and now, and more.

Sources:

For quotes from conservatives about Roman decline: Reagan, Nixon, Buchanan, Vance (and Pete Navarro & Michael Anton)

Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm(2017)

— Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution (2021)

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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 thirty-three year old democratic socialist, state assemblyman, and Muslim of Indian descent born in Uganda, ended up running away with it, defeating the runner-up, former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, by over ten points—and, when all the ballots finally were counted, set a record by receiving the most votes of any candidate for mayor in a Democratic primary in the city's history.

Our format in this episode is a little different. In the first half, your podcast co-hosts lay out the basics of Zohran's victory, from Zohran's biography to the final tallies to our impressions of the candidate and his message. In the second half, we're joined by veteran progressive campaign strategist Waleed Shahid to get more of an insider's take on Zohran's achievement: the campaign's stunningly effective turnout operation, which brought out young voters in droves; how he withstood the disgusting way he was attacked as an anti-semite for his protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza; the substance of his pitch to New Yorkers, and it's contrast with Cuomo's uninspiring, mostly negative campaign; the deranged Islamophobic attacks on Zohran since he became the Democratic nominee, and not only from the right; the role of current NYC comptroller and a progressive, Jewish candidate in the race, Brad Lander, who cross-endorsed Zohran, refused to punch left, and joyfully campaigned with Zohran in the final weeks leading up to the election; and more!

Sources:

Waleed Shahid, "How Broadcast Media Covered Zohran Mamdani's Win," Waleed's Substack, July 3, 2025

Matthew Miles Goodrich, "It's...the Politics of No Translation," Something Different, July 2, 2025

Sam Adler-Bell, "Can DSA Go the Distance?" Dissent, Fall 2022

John Cassidy, "The Case for Zohranomics," The New Yorker, June 30, 2025

David Wallace, "10 Ways of Making Sense of Zohran Mamdani’s Win," New York Times, July 2, 2025.

Nicholas Fandos, Benjamin Oreskes, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, & Jeffery C. Mays, "How Zohran Mamdani Stunned New York and Won the Primary for Mayor," New York Times, July 1, 2025

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 stretches to just under 900 pages of text, before you get to the endnotes and index, an appropriately epic biography of an overstuffed, consequential life, containing far more than could be covered in a single episode. This conversation focuses on the challenges of writing a biography of a man whose archives rivaled those found in presidential libraries; Tanenhaus's discovery of a newspaper the Buckley's owned in South Carolina that essentially was a mouthpiece for the White Citizens' Council, and the Southern roots of Buckley's "northern segregationist" politics; the influence of his oilman father, who fled the revolution in Mexico and instilled anti-communist politics, as well as the Catholic faith, in his children; Buckley's role in forging the post-war conservative movement, through National Review and his frenetic endeavors as a columnist and speaker; the controversies, disappointments, failures, and triumphs of his decades-long career; and more. 

Sources:

Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (2025)

— Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)

John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988)

Sam Adler-Bell, "A Practical Fanatic," The Idea Letters, June 26, 2025

Alexander Chee, "Mr. and Mrs. B.," Longreads, June 18, 2025

Christopher Owen, Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall, (2022)

Listen again to these Know Your Enemy episodes for background on:

Brent Bozell: "Keeping up with the Bozells," Feb 26, 2021

Willmoore Kendall: "The Long Farewell to Majority Rule? (w/ Joshua Tait)," May 17, 2021

Frank Meyer: "Frank Meyer, the Father of Fusionism," Nov 10, 2021

Joan Didion: "Joan Didion, Conservative (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)," Jan 13, 2022

William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Buckley for Mayor (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)," Aug 23, 2021

— "The Conservative and the Convict (w/ Sarah Weinman)," May 9, 2022

— "Consider the Cranks (w/ David Austin Walsh)," May 21, 2024

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

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 could police the world. Trump's message of a restrained foreign policy and pledge to avoid getting dragged into forever wars especially seemed to resonate as he ran to take back the presidency in 2024—there was no end in sight to the war between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel was committing genocide in Gaza as Bibi Netanyahu walked all over an exhausted, only occasionally lucid Biden.

But less than half a year into President Trump's second term and the failure negotiations with Iran, Israel bombed that country's nuclear facilities and assassinated their negotiators and nuclear scientists—and just over a week later, so did Trump when he ordered the dropping of massive "bunker buster" bombs to try to destroy the nuclear facilities Israel could not.

In this episode, we once again talk to executive editor of The American Conservative, Curt Mills, a leading voice of the restraint and realism wing on the right, to try to understand the war within MAGA set off by the "Twelve Day War" with Iran. Why did Trump bomb Iran? Who was he listening to, or not, as he made that decision? How did the various factions within the MAGA movement respond, and what is the state of play currently in Trump World? What was Israel's role in all this? And how much longer will Trump tolerate Netanyahu's constant efforts to get the American military to fight in Israel's wars? We take up these questions, and more.

Sources:

Ian Ward, "The MAGA Split Over Israel," Politico, June 13, 2025

Joe Gould, et al, "MAGA Largely Falls in Line on Trump’s Iran Strikes," Politico, June 21, 2025

Katy Balls, "Trump is Taking Fire Over 'Forever Wars,' but MAGA’s Real Battle Awaits," The Times of London, June 22, 2025

Jude Russo, "What Next?" The American Conservative, June 24, 2025

Sohrab Ahmari, "Did Iran win the 12-day war?" Unherd, June 25, 2025

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 better, the movie is based on the 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, by Paul Kengor — who just happens to have been Matt's close mentor as an undergraduate student. Reagan clocks in at over two hours and twenty minutes, and it's a wild, even fantastical ride that offers a revealing glimpse into the conservative psyche and a faithful rendition of the most hagiographic version of the Reagan mythology, especially his personal responsibility for ending the Cold War and finally putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.

Sources:

Reagan (2024)

Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism(2006)

— God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life(2004)

— A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century(2017)

Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999)

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 Joe Biden's health, mental and physical, and the efforts to conceal just how bad it had gotten from his Cabinet, Congress, and, most damningly, the American people. Much of the coverage of the book has focused on a handful of sensational examples—Biden supposedly not recognizing George Clooney at a fundraiser, or forgetting the names of staffers who'd worked for him for decades—but that's unfortunate. What's most shocking is the book's cumulative force, the sheer number of details that make it undoubtedly clear Biden was not fit to run again in 2024, or, for that matter, be President. As you won't be surprised to learn, Matt eagerly read Original Sin, and he and Sam discuss what the take-aways from the book should really be, what it says about the state of the Democratic Party, what it reveals about the media, and more.

Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (2025)

Matthew Sitman, "The 'Weekend at Bernie's' Primary," Commonweal, Mar 3, 2020

Sam Adler-Bell, "The Tragic Legacy of the Mourner-in-Chief," New York Magazine, Jan 14, 2025

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s & 70s (2009)

— My Lives: A Memoir (2005)

— A Boy's Own Story (1982)

— The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)

— The Farewell Symphony (1997)

— Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)

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, or, with the benefit of hindsight, has proven to be prescient about where the right, and perhaps the country, were heading. Many of these books will be from decades past, but our first selection is more recent: Christopher Caldwell's 2020 broadside against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what it wrought, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Caldwell argues that the apparatus created by civil rights legislation and the federal courts in the 1960s amounted to a new, second constitution that displaced the one Americans had lived under since the founding, one that jettisoned traditional liberties like freedom of association and replaced democratic self-government with rule by bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges. 

Who has access to these new levers of power? Not the working class whites who are neither a favored racial or ethnic minority — a person of color — nor a member of the progressive elites who preside over the new regime. Much of The Age of Entitlement is dedicated to tracing the effects of civil rights legislation when it comes to the causes that arose in its wake: feminism, immigrant rights, gay marriage, and more. But the book is equally a brutal examination of the legacy of the Baby Boom generation (and, by extension, Ronald Reagan, whose presidency they powered), that most "entitled" of generations, whom Caldwell deplores for wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. Boomers, in Caldwell's telling, refused to straightforwardly reject the second constitution and its distributional demands, while also insisting petulantly, again and again, on having their taxes cut. We explore these topics and more, and end with a discussion of where Caldwell leaves the reader — and where we're at now, in light of the challenge he poses to both conservatives and the left.

Sources:

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020)

— Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (2009)

Helen Andrews, "The Law That Ate the Constitution," Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2020

Timothy Crimmins, "America Since the Sixties: A History without Heroes," American Affairs, Summer 2020

Perry Anderson, "Portents of Eurabia," The National, Aug 27, 2009. 

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

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 imagination. Trump’s followers may communicate through memes and message boards, but their faith belongs to a much older mythology: the eternal face-off between shaman and witch, prophet and cabal."

In this conversation, Manvir, the author of a new book on "Shamanism," compellingly demonstrates how the MAGA movement — especially in its QAnon-inflected guises — manifests archetypal features of the messianic cult, analogues for which can be found across cultures and historical epochs. On KYE, we haven't often indulged in this sort of critique, for (justifiable) fear of eliding the very specific political conditions that gave rise to Trumpism, but for today: we're going for it! And Manvir was an ideal (and suitably careful) guide to this methodology and way of thinking about our political conjecture.

Further Reading:

Manvir Singh, "The President Who Became a Prophet," The New Yorker, May 17, 2025.

— "How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?" The New Yorker, Dec 23, 2025.

— "Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation," The New Yorker, April 15, 2024.

— Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, (May 2025)

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 episode of one of these podcasts might stretch to three hours long or more, and typically features meandering, casual conversations that put a premium on apparent authenticity, as well as a knack for hanging with the boys. Trump and other Republican candidates and figures on the right (such as Elon Musk, a regular on Rogan's show) made appearing on these podcasts part of their campaign strategy, which allowed them to reach men who tend not to "follow politics" or even vote in every election. 

To try to understand what's happening with bros, podcasts, Trump, and beyond, there was no better guest than New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, author of an early—and quite perceptive—piece on KYE and, more importantly for this conversation, a recent investigation into the world of bro podcasts and streamers, and what they might mean for both the left and the right at the start of Trump's second term.

Sources:

Andrew Marantz, "The Battle for the Bros," The New Yorker, Mar 17, 2025

— "Is the U.S. Becoming and Autocracy," The New Yorker, April 28, 2025

-- "Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist," The New Yorker, March 27, 2024

— "The Post-Dirtbag Left," The New Yorker, July 26, 2021

 Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes, "The inside story of Harris' lost gamble on Joe Rogan, Beyoncé and a late Texas rally," NBC News, Jan 29, 2025

Jack Crosbie, "Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body," New York Times, April 27, 2025

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!