Know Your Enemy - The Seven Year Anniversary Mailbag Episode

Matt and Sam answer listener questions about post-Trump politics, the meaning of Zohran, the fate of liberalism, and more.

Duration: 1h 16m
Broadcast on: 11 May 2026
Audio Format: other

Not only was May 6th the seven-year anniversary of Know Your Enemy, an occasion to celebrate your support of our work, but it's been nearly a year since we last opened the mailbag and answered listener questions. As always, we loved thinking about the topics you so thoughtfully and intelligently asked us to consider, and we take up a number of them in this episode: the future of the MAGA coalition and GOP politics post-Trump, the promise and perils of graduate school, novels we unexpectedly loved, our favorite places to read, how the left should understand liberalism, among others!

* BUY TICKETS FOR KYE x MIKE DUNCAN LIVE IN NYC *

Sources:

Katherine Miller, Margie Omero, & Adrian J. Rivera, "'Disappointed,' 'Surprised,' 'Betrayed': 11 Trump Voters on What Has Gone Wrong," New York Times, April 27, 2026

Christopher Caldwell, "The End of Trumpism," The Spectator, Mar 30, 2026

Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018)

Daniel Schlozman & Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (2024)

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981)

William T. Kavanaugh, "Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good," Modern Theology, April 2004

Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 135 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Adler Bell. Hello, Sam. Hi, Matt. We're releasing this Monday, May 11th, otherwise known as your birthday. Great day. Yes, an auspicious day to release one of our favorite kinds of episodes to do, which is answering listener questions. A mailbag episode. Yes, and this, like all the other mailbag episodes, was a total delight to do. The questions are fantastic, and I had so much fun just chatting about a million things with my great friend. That's it. Yes, we have a blast doing these, but I have to add, you know, we always get so many questions that are excellent and that we want to answer. We can't get through as many as we want, but we did record two episodes worth this one and one for subscribers. And frankly, the one for subscribers, it's not better than this one, but it's way weirder. And, Sam, we hadn't had that kind of conversation for a long time. Like, we were really lathered up and got into some topics, I would just say, they might surprise you, but also delight you. So if you love hearing us answer your questions, this isn't your only opportunity. Sign up at patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the second half of this conversation. Yes, and later this week, Thursday, May 14th, on the Upper West Side at the Society for Ethical Culture at their venue, we are doing, as we've told you before, our live show, our first ever live show, accompanied by our great friend Mike Duncan of the History of Rome and Revolution's podcast. It's a fundraiser for Descent, and as always, there will be information to buy tickets in the show notes. If there are tickets left, we're just about sold out. Yeah, you got to get them. You got to get there. I'm considering that event my birthday party, so if you want to wish me a happy birthday, come to the live event on the Upper West Side. Sam has to be the center of attention. Well, should we do other housekeeping apps? Yes, speaking of the live show in Descent, Descent sponsors this podcast. We love partnering with them. And one thing they do for us is if you subscribe to Know Your Enemy on our Patreon page, patreon.com/knowyourenemy, for $10 a month, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, and the Know Your Enemy Discord, and a free digital subscription to Descent. So, best $10 a month, you can spend, really. Yes, indeed. And of course, for $5 a month, you can listen to all of our bonus episodes, many of which provide our ranked punditry of what's going on. But as we mentioned earlier, you're going to want to sign up for the second mail bag episode. I'll just give one little hint. We talk a lot about hermeneutics and the Straussian esoteric method versus a French theory's death of the author. We do do that. And you'll like it more than you think. I thought you were going to say that I gave a really good Straussian reading of Steely Dan. Well, that too. You're only going to hear that on Know Your Enemy. Well, with that said, we also want to thank Jesse Burneman, our intrepid producer, who's coming to New York City for the live event. It's going to be so fun to have Jesse here. So if you also want to see the real brains behind this operation come to the live event to meet Jesse, and we want to thank Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. Yes. Well, shall we get to it? Yes. Here's our episode answering your questions. Enjoy. All right, Samuel, should we get started? Yeah. Pretty much we just do one mail bag episode a year now. And I love it. Me too. I'm really excited. It's very helpful because it reminds me like what all the themes of the podcast are, like in a sense that our listeners collectively have a really detailed and textured memory of what we've covered on the show in a way that I get tunnel visioned. If you were to listen to the last 10 hours of Know Your Enemy, you would think it's just a podcast about religion. God talks by Max Evans and Heather Bell. But it's not. And because our listeners are so smart and because they remember what we've talked about on the show better than I do, we get this set of questions which covers a lot of ground. And therefore, we get to cover a lot of ground. Yes. I mean, that's part of the fun of it. Like one reason I did not make it in academia is my powers of, you know, concentration, focus. Yeah. Yeah. So I love hopping around from topic to topic. Although, Sam, I have to say, I mean, you and I have discussed, we know we've done a number of religion-related episodes in a row. We're not going to start with a religion question,

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam answer listener questions about post-Trump politics, the meaning of Zohran, the fate of liberalism, and more.