Podcasts have never done much for me, even though I’m often told there are a fair number of good ones on a fair number of topics. I’m more inclined to try out those that sound like radio broadcasts, shows like the BBC’s In Our Time, which features the simultaneously laconic and barbed interjections of host Melvyn Bragg, an old British guy who seems to have a decent grasp on pretty much everything. One podcast I have kept up with, however, and even pay for, is Know Your Enemy, hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, and produced by Jesse Brenneman. KYE takes the temperature of the political center-right and far-right from the perspective of the left, a topic that, during and after Trump’s presidency, seemed not only important but under-explored. Blending deep textual research with journalistic skill, frequent expert guests, and Sitman’s own background as an ex-evangelical conservative, the show offers a unique perspective on the current and past transformations of the American and global right.
Know Your Enemy intervenes at a time when so much punditry and analysis sounds both stale and gleefully uncritical. Immediately after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump at the end of June, Know Your Enemy published a rare two-hander episode where Matt and Sam indulged in a freewheeling conversation about what happened, what went wrong, and what to look for next. I thought it might be interesting to talk with Matt about the podcast, becoming a political pundit, and the uncertain place of intellectuals in society today. He generously agreed.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I was curious to talk about how you guys balance the contemporary with the historical. We can take the Biden post-debate episode as an example of the kinds of off-the-cuff episodes Know Your Enemy normally doesn’t focus on. What are the conversations like between you, Sam, and Jesse about when to respond to something so recent in a looser way?
Well, we promised our listeners we were going to get through this election season with them. We often joke that Sam and I have a podcast instead of going to therapy. There is a sense in which these kinds of episodes were just Sam and I responding to a political event in close to real time, maybe the morning or afternoon after a debate. In most of our episodes, we really dig deep into a particular topic. There's a number of books and texts and articles that provide the basis for the conversation that we provide links to in the show notes as a kind of bibliography. And in some ways, the episodes where we're responding to a recent event, the text is, for example, the debate in June between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
We tend to be very self-deprecating about these episodes. We call them “rank punditry” because I think we feel a little guilty. We know that why most people listen to us is the amount of work and research we do. But we also find that our listeners, especially our paid subscribers, really want our take on what's happening, which is interesting to us. We didn't start by being pundits who attracted attention because of how provocative we were, or how well-situated in terms of Congressional White House sources we had.
I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the editorial, ethical, or professional framework that shapes the show. Here, I’m specifically thinking of how you don’t try to blithely predict political events like a lot of other pundits do.
I would like to credit what you just described as being due to our editorial ethics, and in some ways it is. But I feel that some of the reason we hold back from making strong predictions is that, during the Trump era, if I can use that terrible term, we have felt very conflicted.
I get Trump's appeal. I come from a family in central Pennsylvania. The county where I grew up in central PA, Blair County, went something like 71 percent for Trump in 2020. Both of my parents voted for Trump. And as you and most listeners know, I’m an ex-conservative. So at a baseline level, I sort of understand why Trump appeals to some people. It doesn't mean he tempts me at all. I just mean that it's not incomprehensible to me why someone would have voted for Donald Trump.
What compounds this uncertainty, at least for me, is I've now lived in New York City for 11 years. After I grew up in central PA and went to a conservative Christian college in Western Pennsylvania, I lived in D.C. for four years and then Charlottesville, Virginia where I was teaching at the University of Virginia, and then New York. I haven't lived in central PA for 20 years. So I have a sense of why Trump appeals to people, but I also do genuinely feel like I no longer trust my gut instinct when it comes to how things play politically out there, so to speak.
I’m curious what you think it means to be an intellectual in the current landscape where fewer people are reading critically, if at all, and so many feel they’re being slammed on all sides economically, psychologically, spiritually. In preparation for this conversation, we talked a bit about the writer George Scialabba and his essay “What Are Intellectuals Good For?”
At one point, he writes, “Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members—their intended readers, who desperately need the truths the intellectuals have to offer—are tired and stressed, have very little spare money for books or free time to read, are continually distracted by gaudy and often sexualized advertisements in every medium, did not receive a high-quality education, and have internalized the society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather than cooperative solidarity. These are not, unfortunately, peculiar circumstances but pretty much the way things are in the United States and have been for the last forty years. Under these circumstances the freedom of intellectuals is, again, not worth much.”
I have a tendency to express some form of nostalgia for the mid-century American intellectual scene, partly because writers were paid so much better. The era of Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, and other publications. People like us who look back and think you could really make your living and life as a writer in New York in a certain kind of way—George's essays on this disabuse me of believing that that’s possible to recreate now. There used to be a period in the 1920s through to the postwar years where an intellectual could know, as a generalist, all there was to know about something and then render judgment on it.
Scialabba points out, via Noam Chomsky, that over time, from the ‘60s into the present, you really need such a specialized degree of knowledge to push back against the propaganda and formation of consent. Not just from the government, but think tanks, the reams of statistics from surrounding institutions like the media and public policy experts. There's just no way a literary generalist intellectual can know everything they need to know now. There's a more specialized division of labor involved in discerning the truth.
How that relates to Know Your Enemy is that I think Sam and I both have a very strong sense of what we're good at, what we know about, what we've studied, and what we've been talking about now for five years. When we veer too much beyond the boundaries of the things we know we actually know a lot, we bring with us a certain humility and even skepticism. It's one reason we kind of play up the “rank punditry” line so much. It's joking in part, but it's also a bit of a signal that now we are venturing into territory that should be taken with a grain of salt perhaps.
Recently, I was revisiting your somewhat controversial 2021 episode with the young conservative Nate Hochman. I know there was a lot of ire from listeners with regards to platforming because Nate has since really fallen off the deep end. But there was a moment in time where he and other figures on the right seemed like willing political counterweights that could be spoken to in good faith. Since then, Know Your Enemy doesn’t really engage in across-the-aisle talks. Do you feel like those kinds of conversations, if they’re possible, are worth having now?
I agree with the thrust of your question. That episode is a fascinating litmus test for what different listeners want from us. Over time, we’ve cultivated a listenership and when our subscribers say something, not just because they pay us money but because so many of them have been listening for so long and have engaged with us for so long, we take that really seriously. After the episode with Nate, Sam and I talked a lot. We were criticized because we didn't break into the conversation and say, Ah Nate, you did a racism there. It seems like some listeners wanted the satisfaction of us calling him out in a certain way. And other listeners were like, No, when he refused to answer that question in a straightforward way, we thought you got him. I think there's validity to both perspectives and I'm not trying to appease anyone here. I'm torn myself.
I would say over the course of the podcast, we’ve become increasingly skeptical about the possibility of having some of these good faith conversations across the left-right divide. For a long time now, Sam and I have had a “no hacks” policy. Now, we almost feel burned in some ways because we invited people on in the past who we truly did not think were hacks. We’ve become less certain of that judgment. We do ask ourselves if there's someone we should have on from the right. Let me give you an example: Someone whose writing I often read, if not admire, and someone who shares some commonalities that we could discuss is Sohrab Ahmari, the political commentator and editor at Compact magazine. I did a conversation on the Plough podcast with Ahmari precisely about talking to your enemies and I did a debate with him on a Boston radio station, maybe two years ago. I'm willing to talk with him and I feel like he's genuinely interesting. But even someone like him, who I generally hold in fairly high regard, after the Trump assassination attempt—
Sohrab was comparing him to Napoleon, right?
Yes! He was tweeting that Trump was a kind of Hegelian, “man on the white horse,” Great Man of History like Napoleon. And I thought, “This is about as good as it gets on the right.” I thought it was such a ridiculous, self-abasing thing to say. This is the guy I would probably put No. 1 on my list of possible conversation partners with someone from the right on Know Your Enemy, and even he's saying things I find not just wrong but completely ridiculous and also indicative of a mindset that I do not have access to.
It’s a little ironic given how fairly well-received Ahmari’s last book, Tyranny, Inc., about how the private sector and corporate greed have ruined American society, was received by some people of the left.
I went to that book launch event held in lower Manhattan where he was in conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor at Jacobin and now president at The Nation, who’s an honest-to-God socialist. Which is to say, Ahmari is still considered a serious person to engage with. But he’s an example of the best case scenario and even then, I hesitate. Even someone like J.D. Vance, who Ahmari is a fan of.
I feel like I'm the Bizarro J.D. Vance. We’re almost the exact same age, we’re both Catholic converts, we both grew up in kind of white working-class families and communities, we were both admitted to elite institutions and circles in spite of our backgrounds. I think there's a version of him that someone like me could have incredible conversation with. But when I listen to him now and he says that Joe Biden specifically targeted voters in Ohio to kill them with fentanyl, I lose all respect for that person.
Do you feel that there’s a moral dimension to the Know Your Enemy project?
Yes and no. I think the show’s secret sauce is that Sam and I love talking to each other. At some level, we do not view conversations in an instrumental way. In other words, there are non-instrumental goods from a conversation where you pursue the truth and discover certain things about the subject. The pleasure comes from just that, from understanding and knowing and talking about something. That’s a good in itself that we don't feel needs any justification.
That said, I do think what you're getting at is something that I can say personally I really try to bring to the podcast. In this moment of political crisis during the Trump era, there are so many figures on the broad center-left who have become Trump whisperers and try to sell you the secret formula that will explain what's about to happen. For all our deep explorations of the right, both historically and in the present, we've really tried to avoid being Charlie in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in front of a cork board connecting bits of red string.
I do feel that it's become a kind of opium during the Trump era: Trump is terrible, you're depressed, but you can watch MSNBC and be told why the walls are closing during the Mueller investigation. This is why there will always be a ceiling to how many listeners our podcast has, to be honest. We really try to eschew low-hanging fruit, an easy monetization of being a certain kind of Trump-era explainer of what's happening on the right.
Do you feel that this desperation for answers to clarify what’s happening politically is a product of Trump or something that’s preceded him?
I think it's a mix. [laughs] Despite everything I just said, at some basic level, if you take a step back and put aside some of the finer details, the most insane MSNBC-pilled, resistance lib wine mom is probably closer to being correct about Trump than a lot of people in the American political firmament. To me, after January 6, what was being too paranoid about Trump? This is someone who did something that no president in American history tried before.
That said, it's not enough just to be right in that overall sense. How you make the argument really matters. Whether you're right in the short term, but also poisoning the minds of your listeners or readers or viewers, that matters too. There’s a political economy of takes where the most alarmist perspective gets clicks. And again, there’s cause for alarm. It’s not an incorrect emotion or posture towards Trump, but it gets exploited.
Where does that situate Know Your Enemy in such a landscape? I hate to distort the podcast’s aims into anything like a “point," but are you and Sam and Jesse striving toward a certain intellectual goal?
If we ever have another enemy on, so to speak, it's not to convert them. I can't tell you how uninterested I am in quote-unquote debates, especially the way things are structured now, especially online and social media. Even on the podcast, I'm much more interested in trying to get people to articulate where they're coming from in a way that might be illuminating for our listeners. I am under no illusions. I don’t think I can engineer a moment where I dunk on someone on the right and they’re going to be like, Oh shit. You're right, Matt. I'm a transphobe and a racist. Fuck it. You got me. I just don't think that happens and it's not the point of having certain conversations, or having a podcast like ours, where we try to understand people who are very different from us.
It's an interesting mix of two things. One is hoping that what our conversations provide—the historical information, the political insights and explanations—has a productive element that helps people think through what's happening now and discern how to think about it better than they would otherwise. The other is that there's no point to any of this. We are just having conversations that ideally help us understand this or that topic or person or thinker or text better. I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot: “Teach me to care and not care.” I think that complexity, that holding two things together in your mind at once, is very rare these days and I think it's part of why our dedicated listeners keep coming back to Know Your Enemy, because we really do try to do that.
Correction: An earlier version of this post described George Scialabba as "the late writer."
