Know Your Enemy: The Furious Minds of MAGA

Matt and Sam talk to Laura K. Field about her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.

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.

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 post-liberals 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 (2020)

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

— Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023)

Matthew Sitman, Liberalism and the Catholic Left, Commonweal (2018)

Publius Decius Mus/Michael Anton, The Flight 93 Election, Claremont Review of Books (2016)

Adrian Vermeule, Integration from Within, American Affairs (2018)

The Editors, The Fight is Now, The American Mind (2020)

Anemona Hartocollis, On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need ‘Safe Spaces,’ New York Times (2016)

Listen again:

The Rise of the Illiberal Right (2019)