The Killing of Renee Good [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.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, 2026Peter Hamby, "Support for ICE is Collapsing," Puck, Jan 13, 2026Greg Sargent & Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, "Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Media as Polls on ICE Turns Dire," New Republic, Jan 16, 2026Marilynne 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, 2025And please check out the new record from KYE's own Will Epstein, "Yeah, Mostly."...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.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, 2021Sources: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, 2024Jorge 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, 2025Jonathan Edwards & Dan Diamond, "Trump hires new White House ballroom architect," WaPo, Dec 4, 2025. ...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 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, 2025Bilal Baydoun, "What Musk's DOGE Really Cut: Trust, Safety, and Democracy," Roosevelt Institute, May 29, 2025Jake 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, 2019Ryan Burge, "Religion Has Become A Luxury Good For The Middle Class, Married College Graduate With Children," ReligionUnplugged, July 12, 2023Matt Dinan, "Permission Structures: How AI-skeptic Professors Can Still Help Students Write Papers," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025

Given the not-terribly-uplifting streak of episodes we've had lately, we thought it was time for a Know Your Enemy movie night, and were joined by the podcast's intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman, for a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's 2025 film, One Battle After Another. Its tagline—"When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own"—suggests why all three of us absolutely loved it. We discuss: the film's relationship to the contemporary United States, and what it might reveal about our political situation; how it portrays both the left and the right; the family drama at the heart of the film, and the connection between origin and identity, personally and politically; the way Ronald Reagan haunts a surprising number of its scenes; and more! Spoiler alert: we offer a quick plot summary for those who haven't (yet!) seen One Battle After Another, but that does mean certain surprises will be spoiled for you.Sources:Sam Adler-Bell, "The Fantasy of Assassination Culture," New York Magazine, Nov 1, 2025Armond White, "There Will Be Bloodlust in One Battle After Another," National Review, Sept 26, 2025Richard Brody, "The Real Battle of 'One Battle After Another,'" New Yorker, Oct 7, 2025...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.Should you try to improve your friends or leave them be? Do friendship and politics mix? Is friendship about virtue or delight? In 2023, we were interviewed by Andrew Elrick, now a professor at Marist University, for a documentary podcast he was making about men and friendship. (Two of our favorite topics!) That podcast never came to fruition, but Andy was kind enough to share this audio with us, and now we're sharing it with you: a conversation about friendship — Matt and Sam's in particular — politics, and podcasting. Enjoy!Further Reading:Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (350 BCE)  Michel de Montaigne , “On Friendship” from The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1580) Judith Shklar, “On Political Obligation,” (2019)Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (1993)  Michael Oakeshott,  “On Being Conservative,” (1956)Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)Andrew Elrick, "Friendship is a Dangerous Thing," Game Stories, Nov 9, 2025.

Laura K. Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, published earlier this month, is a book we simply had to discuss. Listeners to this podcast will recognize its cast of characters—conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen, Michael Anton, John Eastman, Adrian Vermeule, and Harry Jaffa, among others—whose ideas and influence Field carefully categorizes and evaluates, bringing order to an unruly decade of intellectual history. Topics include: Leo Strauss and the problem of great teachers; the use and abuse of grand narratives by the right; how the Claremonters went all in on Trump; the permission given by postliberals to some of the nastiest impulses on the right; and more!Sources:Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (2025)— "Revisiting Why Liberalism Failed: A Five-Part Series," Niskanen Center, Dec 21, 2020Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)— Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023)Matthew Sitman, "Liberalism and the Catholic Left," Commonweal, Dec 3, 2018Publius Decius Mus/Michael Anton, "The Flight 93 Election," Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2016Adrian Vermeule, "Integration from Within," American Affairs, Spring 2018The Editors, "The Fight is Now," The American Mind, Nov 5, 2020Anemona Hartocollis, "On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need 'Safe Spaces,'" New York Times, Dec 8, 2016Further Listening: KYE: "Rise of the Illiberal Right," July 12, 2019. KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes (On West Coast Straussians)," Feb 11, 2021. KYE: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021. KYE: "The Afterlife of January 6," July 19, 2021....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.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 have found expression in several executive orders. 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.Charlie Nash, "Trump Admits He Could've Built Ballroom Without Destroying the East Wing, But 'It Looked Like Hell,'" Mediate, Nov 10, 2025

This episode isn't focused on a single topic or text, but rather just wanting to have a wide-ranging conversation with our guest, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and author of the recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. We start by discussing the appalling wave of Islamophobic attacks against Zohran Mamdani during the last weeks of his victorious mayoral campaign, the short-sighted embrace of such bigotry by too many American Jews and Jewish institutions, the current iterations of anti-semitism roiling the right, religious tradition and progressive politics, changing your mind, and more.Listen again: "Elon Musk, the Jews, and the ADL" (w/ Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, & Peter Beinart), Sept 26, 2023Sources:Zohran Mamdani, "My Message to Muslim New Yorkers—and Everyone Who Calls This City Home," YouTube, Oct 24, 2025Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025)Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, (2025)Arwa Mahdawi, "Mamdani's Mayoral Race was Marred by Unhinged Islamophobia. It's Not Going Away Soon," The Guardian, Nov 6, 2025Romanus Cessario, O.P., "Non Possumus," First Things, Feb 1, 2018George Washington, "To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island," August 18, 1790...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!