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In this episode we break down the results from last week's Democratic primaries in New York City, which saw candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America prevail in key congressional races (as well as downballot in local and state races). We break down what happened, review the deranged responses from both the right and centrist Democrats, the place of Israel/Palestine in these contests (and the ludicrous if expected charges of anti-semitism that followed), and consider what it might mean for the left in the age of Trump—however much longer that lasts—and more.

Sources:

Peruse all the results from the NYC Democratic primary at the New York Times.

Noah Rothman, "The DSA Is a Hate Group, and What It Hates Is America," National Review, June 24, 2026

— "The Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party That Everyone but the Democrats Saw Coming," National Review, June 25, 2026

Brianna Lyman, "Socialist Primary Wins Prove Mass Migration Remakes America," The Federalist, June 25, 2026

Jonah Goldberg, "Crazy Begets Crazy in New York City," The Dispatch, June 24, 2026

Michael Luciano, "'I'm Done, I'm Not in That F*cking Political Party':James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries," Mediaite, June 24, 2026

Elizabeth Kim, "'You're next': The Black and Latino New Yorkers Feeling Burned by Mamdani's Primary Sweep," Gothamist, June 24, 2026

Michael Lange, “DSA vs. WFP,” The Narrative Wars, May 18, 2026

As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they reveal about what it really means to be human being. It's a distinctly Augustinian reading of our nature and destiny, marked not just by Leo's attention to our limits as flawed and fallible creatures, but the joy and hope found by living into them—which, finally, becomes his plea to see life from the perspective of the lowly, the downcast, the abandoned. 

To help us explain such a rich document, we had on our friend Jack Hanson, one of the most perceptive American writers on the Catholic Church. We tease out the connections between this Leo's first and encyclical and that of his namesake Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, an intervention on behalf of working people during the industrial and considered the origin of Catholic social teaching; Leo's "Augustinianism"; the encyclical's critique of artificial intelligence and what that has to do with its account of what really makes us human; and more.

Sources:

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, May 15, 2026

Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891

Jack Hanson, "A Serious Man: The Militant Mysticism of Charles Péguy," Commonweal, May 3, 2021

– “The Heresy of Americanism,” The Drift, Jun 10, 2025. 

Michael Oakeshott, "The Tower of Babel" in On History and Other Essays (1983)

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Tower of Babel" in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937)

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1985)

...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.

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 Times, April 28, 2026

— "Progressives Must Not Give Tucker Carlson a Pass," The Beinart Notebook, May 11, 2026

— Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, (2025)

Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (2023)

"Tyler Oliveira: Exposing Somali Welfare Abuse, Republican Hypocrisy & the Group You Can’t Criticize," The Tucker Carlson Show, May 8, 2026

Will Alden, "The Many Equivocations of Curt Mills," Jewish Currents, April 16, 2026.

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 associate professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. If you've listened to previous episodes and wanted us to go deeper on Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who came to the United States after fleeing Nazism, "Straussianism," and what they might have to do with American conservatism and our present political moment, here you go.

After offering some background on Strauss and the context of Natural Right and History's publication, we discuss Strauss's patriotic appeal to Americans in the book's introduction, walk listeners through the chapters that follow (explaining what "natural right" is and why it's paired with "history" in the title along the way), and close out by exploring Strauss's ambiguous relationship to American conservatism—and more!

Sources:

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953)

— On Tyranny (1963)

— Spinoza's Critique of Religion (1965)

Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (1952)

James W. Ceaser, "The American Context of Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History," Perspectives on Political Science, Spring 2008

Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (2011)

— "On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss's 'Natural Right and History' as Response to Heidegger," The Review of Politics, Spring 2008

...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.

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 of the Revolutions and, especially relevant for the purposes of this conversation, History of Rome podcasts. We discuss how the right talks about decline, their hilariously ignorant invocations of Rome, our very symptomatic obsession with political decline and dissolution, the power of nostalgia and declension narrative—and then answer audience questions!

Thank you again to everyone who joined us in person, to Mike Duncan, to Patrick Iber and Rosalie Ryan and everyone at Dissent, to our intrepid producer Jesse Brenneman (who was able to fly in from Montana to join us), to listeners near and far who so generously continue to support Know Your Enemy!

Donate to Dissent here.

Photo credit: Jack Califano

Sources:

For quotes from conservatives about Rome's decline: Reagan, Nixon, Buchanan, Vance

Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (2017)

James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (1907)

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Kate Wagner, "Fear of a Breakdown," Late Review, May 11, 2026.

D.W. Winnicott, "Fear of a Breakdown," Intl. Review of Psychoanalysis, (1974)

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 discuss Donald Trump, the mob, Peter Brian Hegseth, Graham Platner, and more.

Sources:

Jasper Craven, God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood (2026)

— "Battle of the Sexes: Pete Hegseth's War on Women," The Baffler, Sept 2025

Dan Gilgoth, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War (2007)

Dr. James Dobson, Dare to Discipline: A Pyschologist Offers Urgent Advice to Parents and Teachers (1970)

...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.

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—what it is, why it matters, its relationship to poetry, and the rhythms of Norman Maclean; a "Straussian" reading of Steely Dan; and why liberalism is (mostly) worth defending.

Thank you to everyone who attended our live event in NYC on Thursday! We had a great time. 

Sources:

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)

— Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958)

Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (1987)

Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," Poetry, Oct 1921

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976)

— The Norman Maclean Reader (2008)

Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

W.H. Auden, "Friday's Child," (1958)

Sam Adler-Bell, "Can Liberalism Stop Being So Darn Liberal?" The New Republic, June 20, 2024.

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 promise and perils of graduate school, novels we unexpectedly loved, our favorite places to read, how the left should understand liberalism, among others!

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Sources:

Katherine Miller, Margie Omero, & Adrian J. Rivera, "'Disappointed,' 'Surprised,' 'Betrayed': 11 Trump Voters on What Has Gone Wrong," New York Times, April 27, 2026

Christopher Caldwell, "The End of Trumpism," The Spectator, Mar 30, 2026

Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018)

Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (2024)

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981)

William T. Kavanaugh, "Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good," Modern Theology, April 2004

Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)

...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.

REMINDER: COME SEE KYE x MIKE DUNCAN LIVE IN NYC

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 talked a lot about faith, then ranges widely, including: atheism vs agnosticism, W.H. Auden, why we're not experiencing a religious revival in the United States (but could be soon), and more.

Sources:

Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist (2026)

Edward Mendelson, "The Secret Auden," New York Review of Books, March 20, 2014

David Martin, w/ a reply from Edward Mendelson, "Why Auden Married," New York Review of Books, April 24, 2014

Matthew Sitman, "Saving Calvin from Clichés: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson," Commonweal, Oct 5, 2017

Ryan Burge, "Religion Has Become A Luxury Good For The Middle Class, Married College Graduate With Children," Religion Unplugged, July 12, 2023

Daniel Cox, "The Illusion of America's Religious Revival," American Storylines, Nov 13, 2025

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

— The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975)

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, edited & with an introduction by W.H. Auden (1999)

W.H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone," in Nones (1951)

"Jill Lepore on Nationalism, Populism, and the State of America," EconTalk, April 15, 2019

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 it matters. Topics include: Thiel's conservative evangelical upbringing, the influence of Rene Girard on his thinking, and how Thiel's Antichrist lectures relate to his broader thinking and worldview; the place of the Antichrist in the eschatology of different Christian traditions, and the curious similarities between Thiel's understanding of the Antichrist and that found in the work of Timothy LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind novels; Christianity's recent trendiness in Silicon Valley; the way Thiel's account of how the Antichrist will come to power connects to his economic interests; and more!

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Listen again: 

"Rene Girard and the Right" (w/ John Ganz), KYE, Feb 26, 2024

"A Remedy for Envy? Rene Girard Redux," KYE, March 4, 2024 (for subscribers)

Sources:

Peter Thiel, "The Straussian Moment," 2007

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel (transcript), New York Times, June 26, 2025

Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs (2021)

Timothy LaHaye, Revelation Unveiled (1999)

Elisabetta Povoledo, "Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming. In Rome, Some Call His View Heresy," New York Times, March 17, 2026

Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr, Nick Robins-Early, "Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist," The Guardian, Oct 10, 2025

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe, "Voyages to the End of the World," First Things, Oct 1, 2025

Emma Goldberg, "Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley," New York Times, Feb 11, 2025

Kate Lucky interview w/ Michelle Stephens, "‘Wouldn’t It Be Funny if We Tricked a Bunch of People into Going to Church?’" Christianity Today, Aug 11, 2025

Laura Bullard, "The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession," Wired, Sep 30, 2025

John Ganz, "What Happened Here," Unpopular Front, Feb 4, 2025

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