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Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Know Your Enemy

A weekly News, Politics and Society podcast featuring Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman
 4 people rated this podcast
Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Know Your Enemy

Episodes
Know Your Enemy

Matthew Sitman

Know Your Enemy

A weekly News, Politics and Society podcast featuring Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman
 4 people rated this podcast
Rate Podcast

Best Episodes of Know Your Enemy

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A few weeks ago, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, eagerly joined in a campaign, originating on the far right, to demonize the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a century-old Jewish civil rights organization whose leaders have criticized Mus
Matt and Sam talk to Gillian Branstetter,  press secretary for the National Women’s Law Center, about the spate of anti-trans laws sweeping the country: What do these interventions do? Who is pushing them? And why? The American right has long b
It seems almost every  big culture-war battle of the moment—from "Critical Race Theory" to COVID mandates—is being fought in America's schools. Meanwhile, Democrats, anxious about a midterm rout driven by angry Republican parents, too often are
Note: This bonus episode was  first published on April 13. We're unlocking it now because  we're working on a companion episode that explores in greater detail the intellectual origins of, and justifications for, hostility toward democracy amon
When Joan Didion died at the age of 87 in December, her early conservatism figured into a number of obituaries and commentaries, but was rarely discussed in detail. Matt and Sam turned to Sam Tanenhaus, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s biographer and
Matt and Sam are joined by special guests Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes of the You're Wrong About podcast to discuss moral panics—from tales of rampant Satanism in the late 1970s to the Stranger Danger wave in the 1980s and beyond—and their
From the never-ending culture war over the New York Times's 1619 Project to arguments about the Black Lives Matter protests to President Trump's promise to Make American Great Again, today's political conflicts reflect, to an extraordinary degr
When did the American conservative movement begin? Who were its chief protagonists? What were their main motivations? Is the conservative movement a social movement, like any other, or is it something different? Should scholars have "sympathy"
For our final main episode of 2023, we're dipping back into the Wills well to discuss Garry's under-appreciated 2010 book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.  Joining us is our great friend Erik Baker, lecturer i
In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by Stanford historian Jennifer Burns to discuss her new biography of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose influence would reach far beyond the academy when, during his last decades, h
"Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling," Missouri Senator Josh Hawley said at the National Conservatism conference in 2021. "And that's not just a crisis for men. It's a crisis for the republic." Some version of t
Gillian Branstetter (of the ACLU's Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project) returns to Know Your Enemy for an episode on the strange case of Ron DeSantis: what is his ideology and vision for America? And why do his political aspirations
This episode is a little different. Rather than dissecting an influential conservative book written by long-dead intellectual, Matt and Sam are joined by Know Your Enemy's brilliant producer (and host of the very funny podcast, Tech Talk) to un
In this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer returns to the show to discuss her new book, Partisans, about the ascendancy of an angrier, more radical strain of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1990s—a backlash driven by the right's dissa
In the third and final episode in their series on the overturning of Roe v. Wade—recorded on the day it happened—Matt and Sam pick up with 1990s, the George W. Bush administration, and eventually take listeners up to the present. They focus esp
At long last, Matt and Sam dive into the origins of the Christian right—a complicated tale often flattened by contemporary debates. What was the history of Christian anti-abortion activism before Roe, and how soon after the landmark Supreme Cou
On May 5, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, written by Justice Samuel Alito, that would overturn Roe v. Wade. How did we get here? In the first of three episodes dedicated to answering
A conversation with David Adler and Thea Riofrancos about the return of the Latin American left — unlocked from Patreon in advance of hugely consequential elections in Colombia this weekend!! (Originally published May 15, 2022.)Hope for the Ame
Matt and Sam talk to Michelle Nickerson about her brilliant book, Mothers of Conservatism, which explores the lives and political activism of conservative women in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s and 50s. Unlike many other conversations on th
This is a slightly different kind of Know Your Enemy episode—a conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us. At the center of that conversation is a brilliant new book, Daniel Sherrell's Warmth: Coming
Matt and Sam explain West Coast Straussianism, the school of thought behind one of the last acts of the Trump administration: its publication of the "1776 Report," the Right's shabby response to the 1619 Project and blueprint for how the Americ
We released this bonus episode on depression and politics in July, and it quickly became a favorite of our Patreon subscribers. A number of them asked us to make it available in front of the paywall so they could share it with friends and famil
Matt and Sam talk to John Ganz about paleoconservatism, the Island of the Misfit Toys of the American right. Along the way we're introduced to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, and others, and discuss their enduring influence on the Republ
Ross Douthat is that strangest of all creatures, a religious conservative with a New York Times column—a perch from which he pronounces on U.S. politics, the Catholic Church, and modern culture with style and intelligence, plus a dash of mordan
Sarah Jones joins Matt and Sam to discuss the myth of "Trump Country" and the pitfalls of reporting on rural America, and to address the most important question of all: is Donald Trump the Antichrist? (Answer: Probably not.) Sarah's essay, "Sca
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