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In 2019, when Matthew Sitman, a former conservative, and Sam Adler-Bell, a Bernie bro, started the Know Your Enemy podcast, they joined a very online leftie discourse—while striving, in their way, to contribute a dose of philosophical sobriety. The aim was to develop a shared understanding of the intellectual and political origins of the contemporary right wing, including press coverage of Donald Trump. “I was dissatisfied,” Sitman said the other day. He and Adler-Bell had come to Columbia to speak with students at an event sponsored by the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism and moderated by Keith Gessen, the writer and Delacorte professor. In the years since Know Your Enemy debuted, its audience has risen steadily, reaching more than seventy-five hundred paying listeners on Patreon, pulling in more than thirty-six thousand dollars a month. Between June and July—after Joe Biden’s debate performance, and amid increasingly vigorous, ultimately successful calls for him to drop out—the show’s subscriber base shot up by almost a thousand.
At the beginning, Know Your Enemy was sponsored by Dissent; Sitman is on its editorial board and Adler-Bell writes for the magazine. Podcasting offered the possibility of control. “I was frustrated with the structure of the industry,” Sitman said. “Podcasting seemed like a way to break out and be in charge.” It also had freewheeling appeal. “There is no writer’s block or staring at a blank page in podcasting. You just start talking.” Adler-Bell produced the show on GarageBand—which he advised up-and-comers never to do—and, through conversations that sometimes lasted for hours, the show meandered through personal experiences, book reviews, and big ideas of shared interest. Each episode analyzed historical texts, contemporary readings, and right-wing players. The guys don’t hold back; discussion of J.D. Vance’s sperm is fair game. In their most recent show, the pair spoke with Dorothy Fortenberry—a writer and producer of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu—about, among other topics, the politics of family values.
The show had its first big break after the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. They brought in Jesse Brenneman, formerly of On the Media, who began cutting down they guys’ aeonian conversations to a digestible program of about an hour. There are no ads. “We are a hundred percent accountable to our listeners and subscribers,” Sitman said. Most come via Patreon, paying at one of two tiers: “Young Americans for Freedom” (five dollars per month) and “West Coast Straussians” (ten dollars). A much smaller cohort listens on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Player FM (about a thousand through each channel). (Know Your Enemy ranks a bit below the infamous dirtbag-left podcasters of Chapo Trap House—one of Patreon’s most popular, with more than fifty thousand subscribers.) The guys don’t track their audience, though Sitman said that, if he had to guess, they’d tend to be male, in their twenties to forties—much like the hosts.
Recently, Trump’s coronation of Vance—who, for Know Your Enemy, represents hard-right intellectualism—has provided a well of material. “How can you make sense of the right,” Adler-Bell asked, “without the ‘fear of the other’ and the family as a protective force?” Over two episodes, the guys talked about Vance’s conversion to Catholicism and interest in René Girard, a French historian and critic who has influenced thinking on the right.
Delving into those ideas doesn’t make all subscribers happy. But as the podcast has expanded its base, Sitman said, his skin has grown thicker. “It’s kind of a strange phenomenon,” he said. “At a certain point we started to have enough listeners that were coming from so many different places politically, right? So, we do have a fair number of people who are more conservative—significantly more conservative than me or Sam. We also have people on the socialist left who I think sometimes we disappoint.”
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