Know Your Enemy - Conservatives in Disarray? [Teaser]

Matt and Sam check in with some of their favorite enemies. Why are they so mad at each other?

Duration: 6m
Broadcast on: 17 Aug 2026
Audio Format: other

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

What is going on with the right? Why are they so mad at each other? What accounts for their apparent malaise? Why are they arguing about the price of burritos? Is anyone qualified to replace Ross Douthat at the NY Times? How is Reihan Salam's Manhattan Institute gearing up to combat Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Will it work? And why is Chris Rufo suddenly so worried about the far-right fever swamp, which he did so much to cultivate?

Matt and Sam check in with their favorite enemies — and find them wanting.

This episode was edited and produced by the great Colin Wambsgans (Jesse is on vacation).

Sources:

Ezra Klein interview with Chris Rufo, New York Times, June 30, 2026

Rufo & Lomez, "Trump Won...Now the Online Right Is Falling Apart," BlazeTV, Jul 28, 2026

Eliza Shapiro & Nicholas Fandos, "Can This Man Stop the Mamdani Agenda? Reihan Salam Loves New York. He Loves the Free Market. And He’s Very Worried," New York Times, July 29, 2026

Sohrab Ahmari, "Trump Was the Never the One," UnHerd, Mar 19, 2026.

Natalie Allison & Isaac Arnsdorf, "Trump Privately Tells Donors to Back Vance While Publicly Keeping 2028 Open," Washington Post, Aug 6, 2026

Dan Adler, "Tucker Carlson Threw Down the Post-MAGA Gauntlet. Can He Actually Build a Movement?" Vanity Fair, Aug 6, 2026

Amos Barshad, "Tucker Carlson: 'I'll I Have Is the Power to Talk and Be Heard,’" Columbia Journalism Review, July 1, 2026

Brendan Rascius, "MTG and Tucker Carlson Announce New ‘Movement’ in Photo Packed with MAGA Renegades," The Independent, Aug 1, 2026

Russ Buettner, "Trump Crypto Took $100 Million From a Businessman With Red Flags," NYTimes, Aug 9, 2026

Christopher Hitchens & Christopher Caldwell, eds., Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (2002)

Reihan Salam & Ross Douthat, Grand New Party: How Republicans can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream (2008)

I do think something that's interesting about the position that Ryhan and Ross staked out in that book is that they actually supported some kind of entitlement reform in particular for Social Security and Medicare. But the position that they staked was, well, we shouldn't just cut those programs and then give a tax cut to the rich. If we have to cut those programs or restructure them, then we should use the savings to fund early childhood care and help people have babies. The thing that Ross still has the inner Neocon in him is that keeping your fiscal house in order, I think, is something that still matters to him. And it contributes to his disdain for Trump because Trump's position is a red line on entitlements for the elderly. And he ran on that in 2016. But we're also going to do the tax cuts. It's not like do the entitlement reform. And then what do we use the revenue for? For Trump, it's like having your cake and eating it, too, in a way that is, I think, offensive to Ross. We're going to eschew being pundits about who should replace Ross. Part because we don't have any good answers. And I think a figure that might help us flesh out the lack of down to like replacements is Chris Rufo, a figure we've talked about before on the podcast. One reason we wanted to bring him in here is because he was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein. Again, Rufo works at the Manhattan Institute. He's on Rihan's payroll. Yes, yes. You have a polished, thoughtful writer able to move among liberal leads Ross down that you've some like Rihan salam, ethnic minority, talking about the beautiful mosaic that's the kind of face some people on the right want to present. But you know, scratch the surface. And they're someone like Chris Rufo, who maybe even in a previous generation would have been the kind of polished right-wing intellectual think tank creature that maybe we would have seen as not necessarily as a policeman for Ross, but someone who traffics in that world. Yeah. I mean, it's worth saying about Rufo. He is polished. Well, yes. He's just a polished white nationalist propagandist. That's correct. Yes. The interview, as Recline did with Rufo, was frustrating to listen to for various reasons. But I thought, Sam, a part of the conversation I wanted to ask you about was their discussion of, well, go back to matters of integrity, lines you cross or don't. How can Chris Rufo be a serious interlocutor? Like, let's say you posit, yes. Like there is some kind of immigration problem. We should have a serious conversation about it, even if you grant that premise. How can you have a serious conversation with people like Rufo or J.D. Vance, who make up lies about Haitians stealing pets and eating them? To his credit, Cline plays the clip of Vance saying, yeah, if the media isn't talking about things we want them to, we have to create stories, make things up to generate that attention that kind of leads into, can you ride the tiger with a leopard claw your face? What did you think of that part of the conversation? I did think that was kind of the core of what Ezra was trying to accomplish. In the interview, and as I've complained to you in the past about Ezra's interview style, I think it's very impressive, but it often feels like if it's a mildly hostile interview, which this one is, at least they ideologically disagree, then the point is to get to this moment where like all the pieces fall together. And Ezra, whether or not his interlocutor agrees with him, they probably won't. Ezra gets to like deliver this essayistic final blow. And I think Ezra's argument, I'm annoyed by the form that these interviews take, but I think this is a good argument, is that Rufo has this position that it's okay to play with fire with propagandistic, affective populist fire resentments and recrimination and indignation on the basis of even like false or tendentious information in order to achieve these policy goals, which are legitimate telos, in the word that Rufo notably uses, in the sense that exactly what Vance was saying there, and Rufo says this over and over again, in more gussied up terms, we need to package these ideas in a way that will play on people's nerve endings and get them excited and angry. And then from there, we can institutionalize that anger and use it to implement policy. And Ezra's position is, you unleash something dark and uncontrollable when that is your method. And that one of Rufo's big complaints over the past few months, and I think since last year, has been that the right is becoming too racialist, too angry, too anti-Semitic, too irresponsible in their animosities towards American others. He does say these kinds of things, but Ezra's point is that like you are a major, the chief contributor to that in mainstream Republican politics,

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam check in with some of their favorite enemies. Why are they so mad at each other?