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. All three of us stewed in the event's footage, which runs to over four and a half hours, then convened to discuss it. After laying out for listeners what happened at State Farm Stadium in Arizona just over a week ago, replete with clips, we tried to understand how the event aimed to turn death and grief into power by unpacking its imagery, symbols, references, and, of course, how it might play "out there" among Americans not already plugged into the menagerie of seen subcultures on stage. 

Sources:

Charlie Kirk Memorial at State Farm Stadium, Sept 21, 2025 (Fox News on YouTube)

— Transcript of President Donald Trump's speech at Kirk Memorial

— The story behind the hymn, "It is Well with My Soul" (link)

Jack Jenkins, "At Charlie Kirk's memorial, religion, politics and antagonism toward liberals combine," Religion News Service, Sept 22, 2025

Amber Phillips, "3 takeaways from the Charlie Kirk memorial," Wash Post, Sept 22, 2025

Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, (2004)

Gabriel Winant, "On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer," Dissent, Oct 13, 2023

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

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

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 vengeance from the conservative movement, the GOP, and the Trump White House. In this episode, Matt and Sam respond to this ominous moment, analyzing Kirk’s legacy, the politics of martyrdom, and the dangers that lurk ahead. 

Two notes: (1) This episode was recorded on Tuesday 9/16, before some of the administration's specific repressive efforts — e.g. the FCC intimidating ABC into suspending late night host Jimmy Kimmel — had taken place. (2) Matt's sound quality is diminished toward the end of episode because of a technical problem with his mic.

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 The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, Osita Nwanevu sets out to understand the true meaning of democracy and defend it from its critics, not just on the right but those liberals who doubt the capacity of ordinary voters to determine their country's fate in a complex world. From there, he levels a critique of the Constitution for its myriad democratic deficits, then details what refounding the United States to be genuinely democratic—politically and economically—would require of us.

Listen again: "The Wolfe in the White Suit" (w/ Osita Nwanevu), July 5, 2024

Sources:

Osita Nwanevu, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (2025)

— "Conservatism’s Baton Twirler," New York Review of Books, Sept 25, 2025. 

Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy: And Other Essays (2016)

Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016)

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)

Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922)

Publius, Federalist 49 (February 1788)

Matthew Sitman, "Will Be Wild," Dissent, April 18, 2023

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

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

Roman Polanski's 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, only recently made it's U.S. "premier," running for a few weeks in August at Film Forum in New York City. When it originally was released, it couldn't find an American distributor (and likewise was shunned by streaming services), a consequence of the MeToo moment meeting Polanski's criminal past—in 1978 he fled to Europe after being indicted for the rape of a 13 year-old girl in the United States. Polanski's past is particularly relevant for his film about the falsely accused Jewish officer in the French military, to whom, in publicity materials circulated when An Officer and a Spy came out in Europe in 2019, the director explicitly compared himself.

Of course, we couldn't possibly have had on any other guest than John Ganz to help us understand the politics of the Dreyfus affair, both in 1895 and 2025, and what to make of Polanski's cinematic rendering of it. Topics include: Polanski's life and crimes; Hannah Arendt's treatment of the Dreyfus affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism; anti-semitism in 19th and early 20th century France; the way Polanski largely ignores the political convulsions caused by the Dreyfus affair, instead handling it more as a crime procedural, and why he might have done so; and more.

Sources:

John Ganz, "Reading, Watching," Unpopular Front, Aug 10, 2025

— "Gramscians vs Sorelians," Unpopular Front, Jan 23, 2021

— "The Third Republic and Today," Unpopular Front, Jan 27, 2021

— "The Century of Rubbish," Unpopular Front, Feb 2, 2021

— "From Republic to Reaction," Unpopular Front, Feb 4, 2021

David Bell, "An Officer and a Spy," H-France, March 2021

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Devoted Know Your Enemy listeners will recall that, in November 2021, we released a fairly dense, theory-driven episode on Frank Meyer, the Communist from New Jersey whose exploits on behalf of the Party in the UK got him kicked out of the country and back to the United States, where he eventually turned right and became a key figure in the post-war U.S. conservative movement, both as an editor at National Review and an architect of institutions like the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Conservative Party of New York. Of course, we had more to say about Meyer, and we're devoting another episode to him, this time focused on the details of his incredible life, thanks to the publication of an extraordinary new biography of Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn's The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Flynn discovered a trove of never-before-seen papers of Meyer's that range from personal documents (tax returns, Christmas cards from Joan Didion, his dance card from college) to his correspondence with nearly every conservative writer and intellectual of note in the 1950s and 60s. Armed with these files, Flynn offers a vivid portrait of a brilliant, eccentric political life and mind.

Listen again: "Frank Meyer: Father of Fusionism" (November 10, 2021)

Sources:

Daniel J. Flynn, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (2025)

Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Regnery, 1962)

F.A. Hayek, "Why I am Not a Conservative," from The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (2011)

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976)

Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Doubleday, 1979)

"Against the Dead Consensus," First Things, March 21, 2019

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

This episode was first published in October 2024, and has been un-paywalled following the death this week, on August 21, of Focus on the Family founder and influential figure on the religious right, James Dobson, at age 89. Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to hear more episodes just for subscribers.

In this episode, Matt is joined by journalist Talia Lavin to discuss her book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, one of the most fascinating and unique books published on the Christian right during the Trump-era. Lavin takes her subjects seriously, but not uncritically, and especially focuses on the wrecked and ruined lives left in the wake of conservative evangelicalism's more conspiratorial and authoritarian elements, from the Satanic Panic to James Dobson's parenting manual on how to discipline a "strong-willed child" into compliance. Along the way, they talk about the triumph of QAnon, End Times theology, the importance of the New Apostolic Reformation, and more—all with an eye toward how these religious views and practices help explain conservative evangelicals' overwhelming support for Donald Trump.

Sources:

Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America (2024)

— Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (2020)

— "The Sword and the Sandwich" (Talia's newsletter)

Listen again:

"The Prayers and Prophecies of Pat Robertson," Know Your Enemy, July 17, 2023

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 American politics, not least those of anti-racist liberals. Why have minority voters drifted toward Trump, despite his many comments and campaign pledges that demonize or disparage them? To try to understand this phenomenon, we talked to Daniel Martinez HoSang, who has studied the minorities entering the GOP coalition, not only but especially in the MAGA era, including extraordinarily rich interview with people of color on the right attending Turning Point USA conference, CPAC, Trump rallies, following right wing influencers, and more. 

Sources:

Daniel Martinez HoSang, "Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right," New York Times, July 24, 2025

Daniel Martinez HoSang, Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone, (2023)

Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, (2021)

Joseph E. Lowndes & Daniel Martinez HoSang, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (2019)

Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (2008)

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

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

Our mailbag runneth over! Unsurprisingly, we received so many excellent questions from subscribers for our most recent episode that we decided to answer even more of them. Once again religion seemed to be on the minds of listeners, and we take up charismatic Christians and the evolution of both the religious right and the Republican Party, as well as the role of Christian Zionism in U.S. policy toward Israel. But that's not all: other topics include leftist theory bros; Roy Cohn, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and the politics of sexual blackmail; Gore Vidal at 100, and more.

Sources:

Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation (2023)

Wilson Carey McWilliams, "The Bible in the American Political Tradition," in Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick Deneen & Susan McWilliams (2011)

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem (1992)

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (1938)

Phil Christman, Why Christians Should Be Leftists (2025)

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

Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (1988)

Christopher M. Elias, Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (2021)

Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993)

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 100th episode back in September 2024. A lot has happened since then (to say the least), so we wanted to once again open up the mailbag and find out what was on the minds of Know Your Enemy listeners, who sent too many excellent questions for just one episode—so, if you like what you hear, consider subscribing on Patreon to listen our next bonus episode when we'll answer even more of them.

In this round of listener questions, we take up how much Trump has kept his campaign promises, our favorite bourbons, the politics of Judaism, St. Augustine and original sin, novelists (gay and straight), and more!

Sources and further reading:

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1945)

— A Single Man (1964)

Don Bachardy, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990)

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

— A Boy's Own Story (1982)

— The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)

— The Farewell Symphony (1997)

— The Married Man (2000)

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1971)

— Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

Henri du Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1962)

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1949)

— Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968)

Sam Adler-Bell, "The Father of All Secrets," The Baffler, Dec 2022. 

— "The Essential John le Carré," NYTimes, Jul 12, 2023.

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, (1930)

Javier Marías, A Heart So White, (1995)

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, (2000)

Percival Everett, Erasure, (2001)

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

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

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 (apparently) by suicide in federal custody in 2019. No more files. No more questions. He killed himself and that's that. This was quite the reversal from an administration stacked with figures — like FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino — who built their celebrity in MAGA circles by ginning up the Epstein conspiracy and demanding his case files be released. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi had said the the Epstein client list was "sitting on her desk for review." Now the White House says no such list exists. And Trump wants everyone to stop talking about it.

As all this unfolded, a number of listeners wanted the KYE take on the Epstein story—so here it is. We recount some of the most salient details of the case for the uninitiated, then offer our takes on what we think really is going on, and, perhaps more importantly, assess how this might affect Trump's second term: how serious the breach between Trump and the MAGA movement is, the possible consequences of administration officials spinning stories about Hillary's emails (still!) instead of doing their actual jobs, the ongoing attacks on the basic functions of the federal government, Trump's spectacular, open corruption, and, as we all pay attention to the crisis of the day, what sending tens of billions in new funding to ICE will mean for our country.

Sources:

Emily Davies, Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck and Kadia Goba, "Trump fumes as Epstein scandal dominates headlines, overshadows agenda," Washington Post, Jul 27, 2025.

Khadeeja Safdar & Joe Palazzolo, "Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump," Wall St. Journal, July 17, 2025

Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, et al, "Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files," Wall St. Journal, July 23, 2025

Jacob Weindling, "FBI Deputy Director Takes Mental Health Day Over Trump’s Epstein Betrayal," Splinter, July 11, 2025

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, "Budget Bill Massively Increases Funding for Immigration Detention," Brennan Center, July 3, 2025

Julie Turkewitz, "Convicted Murderer Released by Trump From Venezuelan Prison Is Free in U.S." New York Times, July 24, 2025.

Glenn Thrush & Julian E. Barnes, "Gabbard’s Attacks on Obama Put the Attorney General in a Tough Spot," New York Times, July 24, 2025

Miriam Waldvogel, "Rogan Hits Patel Over Epstein Claims: 'Doesn’t Make Any Sense,'" The Hill, July 25, 2025