Know Your Enemy

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The shocking execution of Alex Pretti occurred after we recorded our last episode for subscribers about Minneapolis, and so the city and its people have remained in our thoughts in a special way. To help us understand what's happening on the ground there, we talked to our friend Lydia Polgreen, who grew up in Minneapolis and traveled there to report on the situation for the New York Times. Topics include: how Lydia approached her reporting in Minneapolis; the way the resistance and response to ICE/BP has drawn on networks forged during the George Floyd protests; the ordinary Minnesotans acting with bravery and courage; the "civil war" she glimpsed on the streets of Minneapolis; original sin and democracy; and more.
Previous episodes referenced: "The Donroe Doctrine" (Jan 26, 2026); "The Killing of Renee Good" (Jan 19, 2026)
Sources:
Lydia Polgreen, David French, & Michelle Goldberg, "'Noem Needs to Go': Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis," New York Times, Jan 26, 2026
Lydia Polgreen, "In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War," New York Times, Jan 19, 2026
— "Trump’s One Small Trick to Destroy American Democracy," New York Times, Jan 9, 2026
Garry Wills, The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (1968)
Emily Witt, "The Battle for Minneapolis," The New Yorker, Jan 25, 2026

Last week, all eyes were on Davos as President Trump unfurled his deranged desire to buy or take Greenland from Denmark—just weeks after the United States kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Trump asserted the so-called "Donroe Doctrine." To help us understand what the Trump administration is doing in the Western hemisphere, we talked to the Progressive International's David Adler and Matt Kirkegaard, who take us from the Monroe Doctrine to what Trump had done both in his first term and in the first year of his second term in Venezuela and other Latin American countries before abducting Maduro. We then try to grasp what the Trump administration is up to with Greenland, all the while trying to offer a better explanation of the forces shaping Trump's foreign policy than the elusive search for a coherent theory of "Trumpism."  
Sources:
Patrick Iber, "The Trump Doctrine," Dissent, Jan 5, 2026
Alexandra Stevenson, "Trump Is Making a Power Play in Latin America. China Is Already There," New York Times, Jan 9, 2026
David Adler, Vanessa Romero Rocha, Michael Galant, "The Fourth Transformation: The political economy of Claudia Sheinbaum’s popularity," Phenomenal World, Apr 3, 2025. 
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Matt and Sam discuss the January 7 killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent, the promising signs that it is proving deeply unpopular, and the less hopeful indications coming from Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, and others in the administration and the Republican Party about what it portends.
Sources:
Nancy Cook, "Inside the White House, Stephen Miller is Making His Vision of America Real," Bloomberg, Jan 9, 2026
Peter Hamby, "Support for ICE is Collapsing," Puck, Jan 13, 2026
Greg Sargent & Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, "Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Media as Polls on ICE Turns Dire," New Republic, Jan 16, 2026
Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989)

For years now on Know Your Enemy, we've taken the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a glimpse of Trumpism unbound—not a few naive Q-anon types and tourists bumbling around, and not an excuse to be blackmailed into voting for Democrats, but a violent prelude to what a second Trump term would be like, a judgment that, sadly, has been entirely vindicated. One reason we've taken this perspective is Robert Draper's exceptionally insightful reporting from the Capitol that day and the days that followed, beginning with being in the Capitol on January 6 and seeing first hand the MAGA mob's unfolding violence, then following figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Kevin McCarthy, and others who followed Dear Leader's coattails to power (or attention), offering fascinating portraits of the menagerie of conspiracy theorists, liars, and frauds at the center of power in Trump's Washington. We discuss what Draper experienced on January and what he's learned since about the motivations behind, and meaning, of the riot, then ask him about Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Charlie Kirk, all of whom he's profiled in the last year.
Sources:
Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (2022)
— To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (2020)
— When the Tea Party Comes to Town: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives' Most Combative, Dysfunctional, and Infuriating Term in Modern History (2012)
— Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (2007)
— "'I Was Just So Naïve': Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump," New York Times Magazine, Dec 29, 2026
— "Once He Was 'Just Asking Questions.' Now Tucker Carlson Is the Question," New York Times Magazine, Nov 15, 2025
— "Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right," New York Times Magazine, Sept 9, 2025
— "How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right," New York Times Magazine, Feb 10, 2025
And please check out the new record from KYE's own Will Epstein, "Yeah, Mostly."
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Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.
We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan took a fairly radical approach to confronting AI in the classroom, and it seemed to work. We consider the art of teaching, the qualities of great teachers, and what it all reveals about an insidious technology's effect on how we live and learn as citizens in, at least for now, a democratic republic.
Listen again: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021
Sources:
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000)
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
Matt Dinan, "Saul Bellow's Ravelstein," Hedgehog Review, Spring 2025
— "Permission Structures," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025
— "It's Not Just a Calculator," Prefaces, Aug 28, 2024
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," Collected Fictions (1999)
Jonathan Malesic, "ChatGPT Is a Gimmick: AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die," Hedgehog Review, May 21, 2025
— "Taming the Demon: How desert monks put work in its place," Commonweal, Feb 2, 2019