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. Gonzalez, "The Right Lost the Culture War, and America," Contra, Feb 16, 2026

— "Trump Demands the Worst of Us," Contra, Feb 8, 2026

— "Why the New Right Can’t Quit Conspiracy Theories," Contra, Dec 18, 2025

— "Welcome to Hell," Contra, Dec 10, 2025

— "Gen Z’s Flight From Trump," Contra, July 24, 2025

James Burnham, The Machiavellians, (1943) 

Sam Francis, Beautiful Losers, (1993) 

Michael Anton, "The Flight 93 Election," Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2017. 

Matthew Boyle, "Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages," Breitbart, June 27, 2023

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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 as a companion of sorts to our interview with Jason Zengerle about Tucker Carlson—and, of course, as a chance for us to geek out about it. After describing the basics of the plot and introducing the main characters, we explore the history of the New Republic under its then-owner and editor in chief Marty Peretz; its string of young, Harvard educated editors during the Peretz Era, who often had short, turbulent stints in that role; fact-checking and the mythos of objective journalism; the relationship between elite magazine writing and celebrity culture during "the end of history"; and more.

Sources:

Shattered Glass (2003)

Buzz Bissinger, "Shattered Glass," Vanity Fair, Sept 1998

Howard Kurtz, "Stranger Than Fiction: The Cautionary Tale of Magazine Writer Stephen Glass," Washington Post, May 12, 1998

Jonathan Last, "Stopping Stephen Glass," Weekly Standard, Oct 30, 2003

Pete Croatto, "Why ‘Shattered Glass’ Endures," Poynter, Jan 24, 2024

Martin Peretz, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center (2023)

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "Peretz in Exile," New York, Dec 23, 2010

John Cook, "Why Won't Anyone Tell You That Marty Peretz Is Gay?" Gawker, Jan 25, 2011

David Klion, "Everybody Hates Marty," The Baffler, Sept 13, 2023

Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (1996)

— "The Tao of Marty," The Weekly Dish, July 21, 2023

Alex Shultz, "Nobody Wants To Talk About John Fetterman And Buzz Bissinger’s Pricey Memoir Project," Defector, June 23, 2025

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 intertwined stories: the life of Tucker Carlson, and the changes in the media that he's navigated so deftly (despite some low points along the way). This conversation takes you from his adolescence to his early fame writing for The Weekly Standard and Talk to his recent interview with Nick Fuentes, and all the phases and stages of Tucker's sad trajectory toward anti-semitism and conspiracy-mongering.

Sources:

Jason Zengerle, Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind (2026)

Andrew Marantz, "The Tucker Carlson Roadshow," New Yorker, Nov 1, 2024

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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 report on the situation for the New York Times. Topics include: how Lydia approached her reporting in Minneapolis; the way the resistance and response to ICE/BP has drawn on networks forged during the George Floyd protests; the ordinary Minnesotans acting with bravery and courage; the "civil war" she glimpsed on the streets of Minneapolis; original sin and democracy; and more.

Previous episodes referenced: "The Donroe Doctrine" (Jan 26, 2026); "The Killing of Renee Good" (Jan 19, 2026)

Sources:

Lydia Polgreen, David French, & Michelle Goldberg, "'Noem Needs to Go': Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis," New York Times, Jan 26, 2026

Lydia Polgreen, "In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War," New York Times, Jan 19, 2026

— "Trump’s One Small Trick to Destroy American Democracy," New York Times, Jan 9, 2026

Garry Wills, The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (1968)

Emily Witt, "The Battle for Minneapolis," The New Yorker, Jan 25, 2026

Last week, all eyes were on Davos as President Trump unfurled his deranged desire to buy or take Greenland from Denmark—just weeks after the United States kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Trump asserted the so-called "Donroe Doctrine." To help us understand what the Trump administration is doing in the Western hemisphere, we talked to the Progressive International's David Adler and Matt Kirkegaard, who take us from the Monroe Doctrine to what Trump had done both in his first term and in the first year of his second term in Venezuela and other Latin American countries before abducting Maduro. We then try to grasp what the Trump administration is up to with Greenland, all the while trying to offer a better explanation of the forces shaping Trump's foreign policy than the elusive search for a coherent theory of "Trumpism."  

Sources:

Patrick Iber, "The Trump Doctrine," Dissent, Jan 5, 2026

Alexandra Stevenson, "Trump Is Making a Power Play in Latin America. China Is Already There," New York Times, Jan 9, 2026

David Adler, Vanessa Romero Rocha, Michael Galant, "The Fourth Transformation: The political economy of Claudia Sheinbaum’s popularity," Phenomenal World, Apr 3, 2025. 

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Matt and Sam discuss the January 7 killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent, the promising signs that it is proving deeply unpopular, and the less hopeful indications coming from Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, and others in the administration and the Republican Party about what it portends.

Sources:

Nancy Cook, "Inside the White House, Stephen Miller is Making His Vision of America Real," Bloomberg, Jan 9, 2026

Peter Hamby, "Support for ICE is Collapsing," Puck, Jan 13, 2026

Greg Sargent & Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, "Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Media as Polls on ICE Turns Dire," New Republic, Jan 16, 2026

Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989)

For years now on Know Your Enemy, we've taken the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a glimpse of Trumpism unbound—not a few naive Q-anon types and tourists bumbling around, and not an excuse to be blackmailed into voting for Democrats, but a violent prelude to what a second Trump term would be like, a judgment that, sadly, has been entirely vindicated. One reason we've taken this perspective is Robert Draper's exceptionally insightful reporting from the Capitol that day and the days that followed, beginning with being in the Capitol on January 6 and seeing first hand the MAGA mob's unfolding violence, then following figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Kevin McCarthy, and others who followed Dear Leader's coattails to power (or attention), offering fascinating portraits of the menagerie of conspiracy theorists, liars, and frauds at the center of power in Trump's Washington. We discuss what Draper experienced on January and what he's learned since about the motivations behind, and meaning, of the riot, then ask him about Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Charlie Kirk, all of whom he's profiled in the last year.

Sources:

Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (2022)

— To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (2020)

— When the Tea Party Comes to Town: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives' Most Combative, Dysfunctional, and Infuriating Term in Modern History (2012)

— Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (2007)

— "'I Was Just So Naïve': Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump," New York Times Magazine, Dec 29, 2026

— "Once He Was 'Just Asking Questions.' Now Tucker Carlson Is the Question," New York Times Magazine, Nov 15, 2025

— "Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right," New York Times Magazine, Sept 9, 2025

— "How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right," New York Times Magazine, Feb 10, 2025

And please check out the new record from KYE's own Will Epstein, "Yeah, Mostly."

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We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan took a fairly radical approach to confronting AI in the classroom, and it seemed to work. We consider the art of teaching, the qualities of great teachers, and what it all reveals about an insidious technology's effect on how we live and learn as citizens in, at least for now, a democratic republic.

Listen again: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021

Sources:

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000)

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Matt Dinan, "Saul Bellow's Ravelstein," Hedgehog Review, Spring 2025

— "Permission Structures," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025

— "It's Not Just a Calculator," Prefaces, Aug 28, 2024

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," Collected Fictions (1999)

Jonathan Malesic, "ChatGPT Is a Gimmick: AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die," Hedgehog Review, May 21, 2025

— "Taming the Demon: How desert monks put work in its place," Commonweal, Feb 2, 2019

This episode originally aired November 17, 2025 on Patreon — we're unlocking it as a holiday treat. 

If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival populate government commissions, and their prescriptions find expression in various executive orders again. To understand who these people are, what their movement wants, and the kernel of truth in their grievances, we talked to architectural critic and proprietor of McMansion Hell Kate Wagner. We start by analyzing Trump's ballroom and the demolishing the East Wing of the White House — the perfect way into MAGA architecture and the mind of their Beautiful Builder himself, Donald J. Trump.

Sources:

Kate Wagner, "Duncing About Architecture," New Republic, Feb 8, 2020

— "Trump Will Not Make Architecture Great Again," The Nation, Jan 7, 2025

— "The Real Problem With Trump’s Cheesy Neoclassical Building Fetish," Feb 12, 2025

— "what the fuck are we doing anymore," The Late Review, Jan 9, 2025.

— "Wrecking Ballroom," The New York Review of Architecture, Dec 17, 2025.

Charlie Nash, "Trump Admits He Could've Built Ballroom Without Destroying the East Wing, But 'It Looked Like Hell,'" Mediate, Nov 10, 2025

Jonathan Edwards & Dan Diamond, "Trump hires new White House ballroom architect," WaPo, Dec 4, 2025. 

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As the end of the year approaches, we wanted to look back at another year of trying to understand the American right—what we got wrong, what we got right, and what to expect in 2026. The conversation begins with the cracks showing in Trump's coalition, his plummeting approval ratings, and the possibility that Charlie Kirk really was helping hold the marriage of MAGA and the GOP together, then consider if we should have seen this coming (or not) and what it might say about our understanding of Trump, Vance, Kirk, Musk, and others we've considered on KYE in 2025.

Sources:

Christopher Flavelle, "How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration," New York Times, Dec 7, 2025

Bilal Baydoun, "What Musk's DOGE Really Cut: Trust, Safety, and Democracy," Roosevelt Institute, May 29, 2025

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

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

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

Matt Dinan, "Permission Structures: How AI-skeptic Professors Can Still Help Students Write Papers," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025