Know Your Enemy - Dissent Magazine

Know Your Enemy: Midge Decter, Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ July 28, 2023

Matt and Sam join Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub to discuss the life and work of an anti-feminist, neoconservative icon.

Know Your Enemy: Legal Trouble

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ July 17, 2023

Matt and Sam talk about the lawsuit filed against the podcast and Dissent before turning to the conservative movement’s recent victories at the Supreme Court.

Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ June 6, 2023

Matt and Sam explore the “crisis of masculinity” in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.

Know Your Enemy: TV Writing Today, with Dorothy Fortenberry and Will Arbery

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ May 5, 2023

Matt and Sam talk to writers on Succession and Extrapolations about the WGA strike and how they approach political topics and themes on their shows.

Know Your Enemy: Ron DeSantis Wants to Make America Florida, with Gillian Branstetter

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ April 18, 2023

On Ron DeSantis’s political aspirations.

Know Your Enemy: Bob Dylan’s America, with Will Epstein

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ April 5, 2023

In some respects, Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song is a quintessentially conservative book. But Dylan’s America never stops moving, reinventing itself, or rebelling against its own strictures.

Know Your Enemy: Whittaker Chambers and the Freight Train of History

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ March 13, 2023

A discussion on the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, the Communist spy who became a conservative hero.

Know Your Enemy: Realignments, with Timothy Shenk

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ February 27, 2023

Timothy Shenk discusses Realigners—“a biography of American democracy told through its majorities, and the people who made them.”

Know Your Enemy: Triumph of the Therapeutic, with Hannah Zeavin and Alex Colston

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ February 13, 2023

A discussion on Philip Rieff, a conservative sociologist concerned that society was being driven by therapeutic ideas and psychological institutions rather than by religious or political ones.

Know Your Enemy: J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man, with Beverly Gage

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ December 20, 2022

For forty-eight years, American presidents came and went, but J. Edgar Hoover remained as the powerful director of the FBI.

Know Your Enemy: You Have Questions, We Have Answers (Mailbag Episode)

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ December 1, 2022

Matt and Sam answer listener questions about religion and the left, literature, white Christian nationalism, conspiracy theories, and more.

Know Your Enemy: Nixon Agonistes

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ November 7, 2022

Matt and Sam discuss Garry Wills’s 1970 masterpiece of political reporting and analysis, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man.

Know Your Enemy: Why Conservatives Love Baseball, with David Roth

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ October 17, 2022

A conversation on the MLB playoffs, baseball’s place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more.

Know Your Enemy: After the Theocons, with Damon Linker

Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ September 20, 2022

A conversation about the George W. Bush administration, the conservative religious publication First Things, and how today’s right became so deranged.