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, 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 KYE's own Will Epstein's new record, "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

This episode originally aired November 17, 2025 on Patreon — we're unlocking it as a holiday treat.

If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival populate government commissions, and their prescriptions find expression in various executive orders again. To understand who these people are, what their movement wants, and the kernel of truth in their grievances, we talked to architectural critic and proprietor of McMansion Hell Kate Wagner. We start by analyzing Trump's ballroom and the demolishing the East Wing of the White House — the perfect way into MAGA architecture and the mind of their Beautiful Builder himself, Donald J. Trump.

Sources:

Kate Wagner, "Duncing About Architecture," New Republic, Feb 8, 2020

— "Trump Will Not Make Architecture Great Again," The Nation, Jan 7, 2025

— "The Real Problem With Trump’s Cheesy Neoclassical Building Fetish," Feb 12, 2025

— "what the fuck are we doing anymore," The Late Review, Jan 9, 2025.

— "Wrecking Ballroom," The New York Review of Architecture, Dec 17, 2025.

Charlie Nash, "Trump Admits He Could've Built Ballroom Without Destroying the East Wing, But 'It Looked Like Hell,'" Mediate, Nov 10, 2025

Jonathan Edwards & Dan Diamond, "Trump hires new White House ballroom architect," WaPo, Dec 4, 2025.

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