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Know Your Enemy

Hitler, "The Lessons of History," and the Maw of Late-Stage Trumpism [Teaser]

Matt and Sam talk about Hitler, Charlie Kirk, Trump, and the lessons of history.
Duration
8m
Broadcast on
14 Sep 2026
Audio Format
other

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

In this conversation, Matt and Sam range widely, beginning with Sam's recent NYT review of a book explaining how Hitler "dismantled a democracy in 53 days" then discussing the late, great conservative historian John Lukacs's Hitler of History, a survey of the many biographies written of the Nazi dictator. What makes for a useful historical analogy, especially in our age of the "fascism debate"? What about the past can we truly understand? And what should induce us to humility? From there, your co-hosts press on to more contemporary matters: Charlie Kirk's assassination, one year later, and how its consequences seem so different now than in the days after his death; how to know what truly matters now, to say nothing of hindsight; the slopification and inundation of our political consciences; and more!

Sources:

Sam Adler-Bell, "What the Third Reich Can Teach Us About America Today," New York Times, Sept 1, 2026

Timothy W. Ryback, 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy (2026)

— "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days," The Atlantic, Jan 8, 2025

John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (1997)

— The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 (1976)

— Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (1968)

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006)

I want to read a passage from the start of the Hitler of history because it's just been on my mind the last couple of days. We are not yet finished with Hitler, wrote two members of a younger generation of German historians independently of each other in the 1980s. And this is so in both the broader and the narrower sense of finished. The first of these should be evident. History means the endless rethinking and reviewing and revisiting of the past. History in the broad sense of the word is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews. People and events are retried and retried again. There is nothing profound in this observation since this is what all thinking is about. The past is the only thing we know. All human knowledge springs from past knowledge. All human thinking involves a rethinking of the past. This is true in the narrower sense too involving historical profession. The notion that once the scientific method has been applied accurately with all extent documents exhausted the work will be finished and the result will be final. And then he has this great parenthetical quote unquote the final and definitive history of the third right certified by German-American, British, Russian, liberal and conservative, nationalist and Jewish historians. That is a 19th century illusion. But I love it that the past is always the remembered which say interpreted past. There is no kind of non interpretive posture toward the past. And I was thinking about that and the first example that came to my mind, Sam, was we are recording this on September 10th which is the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination. And I don't think we were wrong to be alarmed by how the right responded to that. There were people who lost their jobs persecuted the kind of you know, drained rally that was supposedly right a memorial service. All those things I think we were right to be alarmed but I am taking it back at just how Charlie Kirk has now become almost a meme like a butt of jokes. Not him necessarily the man himself but like that whole scene after his assassination. Like it's almost this retrospective acknowledgement that everyone was out over their skis. The right who thought this would be their path to like kind of cementing some kind of cultural power and the people like us who took it very seriously and were alarmed by it. You look back and say other than the immediate consequences right of people who were persecuted and lost jobs and whatnot obviously Charlie Kirk's death and the people who loved him they're suffering. Like once you get beyond that what did anyone say about that that proved to be really true or incisive in terms of naming the kind of future that was now coming down the pike. We didn't understand that really did we and we're still kind of reinterpreting it revisiting it rethinking it. I mean for better for worse it does feel like a real vindication of the Anton Yeager hyper politics thesis the kind of vulgarization of the hyper politics thesis is nothing matters nothing ever happens. We're offering a armchair Yeagerism here but I do think that like the fact that something that feels like a weighty historical event that does involve violent death and that feels like a possible actual event you know like a capital E event a pivot point for the regime what it can justify and what it will do when that comes into contact with the sort of maw of social media mediated political consciousness which is what we all have now that at the the on the other side you have just endless memes of Charlie Kirk's face being put on to every like character in the televisual and film at canon it's just you you think something's going to be huge and it's going to matter and actually it's just a joke. Yeah Sam this really came home to me I think it was yesterday I saw you know the shirt that Charlie was wearing Charlie Kirk was wearing white shirt black kind of block lettering freedom someone now was selling I saw online a shirt that looked the exact same same typeface lettering etc colors but it said femdom instead of freedom and I was like like if you were to combine all the little like like memes that go into like into that my jaw kind of dropped like it was a little funny but I was just like that just if you if you do get the references that you're saying it's kind of deranged it's completely deranged or it says something about like the decomposition of the event that was Charlie Kirk's assassination yeah it's really wild and like I think it's possible to come up with a lot of a lot of reasons why it didn't amount to an event with a capital E and I think they do have to do with the way politics is mediated by social media but I think it also has to do with you know the fractured nature of the right and the perverse incentives of a person

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk about Hitler, Charlie Kirk, Trump, and the lessons of history.