Know Your Enemy: Hindsight is 2021

Matt and Sam answer listener questions about Garry Wills, human nature, how and whether to interview conservatives, Nixon, Bob Dylan, and bourbon.

William F. Buckley Jr talking on the phone at home in his study in 1965. (Truman Moore/Getty Images)

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

With another year of the podcast, the pandemic, and American decline in the rearview, we turn to Know Your Enemy‘s listeners for guidance and intellectual stimulation. That’s right, folks, it’s a mailbag episode! And thanks to you, our cups runneth over with fascinating questions. We discuss the intellectual legacy of one-time National Review wunderkind Garry Wills; why Bill Buckley never wrote a great book; right-wing half-wit propagandists like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk; conservative feminism; Richard Nixon’s role in conservative history; Vatican II; Bob Dylan’s artful incoherence; our favorite books; and our favorite bourbons. We also take a few minutes to discuss listener feedback from our last episode with Nate Hochman.

So strap in! Like the year 2021, it’s a wild ride, with many twists, turns, and digressions.

Sources and further reading:

Matthew Sitman, There Will Be No Buckley Revival, Commonweal (2015)

Garry Wills, Daredevil, The Atlantic (2009)

Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs, Paulist Press (1972)

Wills, Confessions of a Conservative, Knopf Doubleday (1979)

Wills, John Wayne’s America, Simon & Schuster (1997)

Sam Adler-Bell, The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right, The New Republic (2021)

Leonard Coen, Beautiful Losers, Vintage (1966)

Kaya Oakes, The Defiant Middle, Broadleaf Books (2021)

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories, New Directions (1945)

Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Knopf Doubleday (1982)