Know Your Enemy

On February 28, both the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, along with other political leaders and government officials, destroying various military targets, and bombing a girls elementary school that took at least 175 lives, many of them children. Just under a week into the war, where are we? Why did Trump decide to attack Iran now? What reasons did they give, and were any of them plausible? What have the consequences been so far? And what can Democrats do to fight back? To answer these questions, we had on Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders. Other topics include: Michael Ledeen and the right's fixation on Iran; Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and the Iranian hostage crisis, and more. 

Sources:

Matthew Duss, "War With Iran Would Be Illegal and Stupid. Democrats Should Care," Foreign Policy, Feb 27, 2026

Zachary Basu, "Trump's Lethal Presidency," Axios, Mar 2, 2026

Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, et al, "How Trump Decided to Go to War," New York Times, Mar 2, 2026

Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win (2002)

— The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction (2007)

— Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West (2009)

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On Monday, Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo posted this: "The Right's collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it." Given that Rufo was, after J.D. Vance, perhaps the most prominent Haitians-are-eating-pets-in-Ohio conspiracy theorist in the country, his complaint generated many, many responses rightfully calling him out for his lack of self-awareness and his own role in mainstreaming such a politics. As our friend John Ganz wrote, "Is this hypocrisy, stupidity, or unabashed malevolence? Try all three: it’s politics. Specifically, it’s the politics of the American Conservative Movement. People cry out for a new William F. Buckley. Give the title to Rufo, I say; he’s doing the job already."

In this episode we talked to Ganz about how the dynamic Rufo identified has always been a feature of the postwar conservative movement, stretching back at least to William F. Buckley, Jr. and Brent Bozell's defense of McCarthyism; what's distinctive about the Right's present slop era, especially the alignment of conservative movement propagandists, the Republican Party, and the state; populism and the "Madisonian model"; and more!

Sources:

John Ganz, "I Told You So..." Unpopular Front, Feb 24, 2026

— "Finding Neverland: The American right’s doomed quest to rid itself of Trumpism," New Republic, Feb 17, 2020

Olivia Bellusci, "Candace Owens Drops Trailer for Investigative Series About Erika Kirk Months After Charlie’s Death," Yahoo, Feb 24, 2026

Matthew Sitman, "Riding the Trump Tiger," Commonweal, Aug 7, 2015

Nathan Taylor Pemberton, "Is ‘Slopulism’ Shaping Our Politics?" New York Times, Feb 13, 2026

Ruby Cramer, "You Don't Know Bernie Sanders," Buzzfeed, Dec 16, 2019. 

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (1982)

When people break with MAGA, most of them walk away and don't look back, whether out of shame or fear or both. So it's a rare thing to talk with someone willing to describe publicly why they joined the Trump movement, what life was like on the inside, and the reasons they left — but it's just such a conversation we have for you today, with writer and former New Right firebrand Pedro L. Gonzalez. Enjoy. 

Sources:

Pedro L. Gonzalez, "The Right Lost the Culture War, and America," Contra, Feb 16, 2026

— "Trump Demands the Worst of Us," Contra, Feb 8, 2026

— "Why the New Right Can’t Quit Conspiracy Theories," Contra, Dec 18, 2025

— "Welcome to Hell," Contra, Dec 10, 2025

— "Gen Z’s Flight From Trump," Contra, July 24, 2025

James Burnham, The Machiavellians, (1943) 

Sam Francis, Beautiful Losers, (1993) 

Michael Anton, "The Flight 93 Election," Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2017. 

Matthew Boyle, "Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages," Breitbart, June 27, 2023

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Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.
This episode is about Shattered Glass, the 2003 movie portraying former New Republic writer Stephen Glass's fall from the heights of magazine journalism after he was exposed as a serial fabulist who routinely made up quotes, sources, key details, and more in his stories. We've both loved this movie for years, and thought discussing it would serve as a companion of sorts to our interview with Jason Zengerle about Tucker Carlson—and, of course, as a chance for us to geek out about it. After describing the basics of the plot and introducing the main characters, we explore the history of the New Republic under its then-owner and editor in chief Marty Peretz; its string of young, Harvard educated editors during the Peretz Era, who often had short, turbulent stints in that role; fact-checking and the mythos of objective journalism; the relationship between elite magazine writing and celebrity culture during "the end of history"; and more.
Sources:
Shattered Glass (2003)
Buzz Bissinger, "Shattered Glass," Vanity Fair, Sept 1998
Howard Kurtz, "Stranger Than Fiction: The Cautionary Tale of Magazine Writer Stephen Glass," Washington Post, May 12, 1998
Jonathan Last, "Stopping Stephen Glass," Weekly Standard, Oct 30, 2003
Pete Croatto, "Why ‘Shattered Glass’ Endures," Poynter, Jan 24, 2024
Martin Peretz, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center (2023)
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "Peretz in Exile," New York, Dec 23, 2010
John Cook, "Why Won't Anyone Tell You That Marty Peretz Is Gay?" Gawker, Jan 25, 2011
David Klion, "Everybody Hates Marty," The Baffler, Sept 13, 2023
Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (1996)
— "The Tao of Marty," The Weekly Dish, July 21, 2023
Alex Shultz, "Nobody Wants To Talk About John Fetterman And Buzz Bissinger’s Pricey Memoir Project," Defector, June 23, 2025

Finally, an episode about Tucker Carlson—and at an auspicious time, as his influence on the right seems only to have grown in the first year of Trump's second term. To help us understand him, we turned to journalist Jason Zengerle, who first crossed paths with Tucker in the last, halcyon days of magazine journalism before cable news and the internet, and now has written Hated By All the Right People, a book that tells two intertwined stories: the life of Tucker Carlson, and the changes in the media that he's navigated so deftly (despite some low points along the way). This conversation takes you from his adolescence to his early fame writing for The Weekly Standard and Talk to his recent interview with Nick Fuentes, and all the phases and stages of Tucker's sad trajectory toward anti-semitism and conspiracy-mongering.
Sources:
Jason Zengerle, Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind (2026)
Andrew Marantz, "The Tucker Carlson Roadshow," New Yorker, Nov 1, 2024
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