Know Your Enemy: January 6, Five Years Later

Know Your Enemy: January 6, Five Years Later

Matt and Sam talk to Robert Draper about his reporting from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and how the Republican Party “lost its mind” in the months that followed.

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.

For years, we’ve taken the January 6 insurrection as a glimpse of Trumpism unbound—not a few naive QAnon 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. It’s a judgment that, sadly, has been 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. Draper saw first-hand the MAGA mob’s unfolding violence, and then followed figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Kevin McCarthy, and others who followed Trump’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 6 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 (2025)

— Once He Was ‘Just Asking Questions.’ Now Tucker Carlson Is the Question, New York Times Magazine (2025)

— Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right, New York Times Magazine (2025)

— How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right, New York Times Magazine (2025)

And please check out the new record from KYE’s own Will Epstein, Yeah, Mostly.