Know Your Enemy

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This conversation is something of a follow-up to our last episode on Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. We begin by "providing receipts" for the views of prominent midcentury conservative intellectuals (Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Mel Bradford, to name a few) about the Declaration, equality, and Lincoln, then take a step back to discuss what their quarrel with Lincoln, Harry Jaffa, Garry Wills, and other partisans of equality might reveal about the nature of the American founding and the shape of our country's history. After all that—and more—we consider NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's July 3 speech celebrating America's 250th anniversary and the promise and perils of leftwing patriotism.

Listen again: "Lincoln at Gettysburg," Know Your Enemy, July 6, 2026

Sources:

Zohran Mamdani, "Remarks as Prepared: Mayor Mamdani Delivers Address Marking America’s 250th Birthday," July 3, 2026

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)

Abraham Lincoln, "Letter to Joshua Speed," Aug 24, 1855

— Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858

— Message to Congress, July 4, 1861

Alexander H. Stephens, "Corner Stone Speech," March 21, 1861

James Madison, "Federalist no. 39," Jan 16, 1788

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826

Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)

George W. Carey, In Defense of the Constitution (1997)

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)

— John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics (1951)

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000)

George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 2005

We're ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills's superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It's central argument is that Abraham Lincoln succeeded in revolutionizing how Americans thought of the founding of their country, especially the Declaration of Independence, with the Gettysburg Address—a revolution not just in "thought" but in "style," one that placed the Declaration's assertion of equality at the very center of our political tradition. The book is one that only Garry Wills could have written, with his PhD in Classics allowing him to compare Lincoln's "funeral oration" to that of Pericles, with his long meditation on the American presidency and leadership preparing him to grasp the enormity of the task Lincoln set himself, and with his time at National Review in his youth helping him understand why the American right never forgave Lincoln for succeeding. We discuss all this and more in our conversation about one of our favorite writer's very best books.

Tickets for Sam's events: Tuesday with Tad Devine / Thursday with Dan Denvir. 

Previous KYE episodes on Garry Wills:

Nixon Agonistes

The Kennedy Imprisonment (w/ Jeet Heer)

Bomb Power (w/ Madeleine Baker)

Sources:

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)

— Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)

— "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!" Esquire, Aug 1, 1968

— "The Blind Teach Us to See," Boston Globe, Aug 20, 1970

Abraham Lincoln, "Letter to Joshua Speed," Aug 24, 1855

Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959)

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)

Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)

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

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

In this episode we break down the results from last week's Democratic primaries in New York City, which saw candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America prevail in key congressional races (as well as downballot in local and state races). We break down what happened, review the deranged responses from both the right and centrist Democrats, the place of Israel/Palestine in these contests (and the ludicrous if expected charges of anti-semitism that followed), and consider what it might mean for the left in the age of Trump—however much longer that lasts—and more.

Sources:

Peruse all the results from the NYC Democratic primary at the New York Times.

Noah Rothman, "The DSA Is a Hate Group, and What It Hates Is America," National Review, June 24, 2026

— "The Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party That Everyone but the Democrats Saw Coming," National Review, June 25, 2026

Brianna Lyman, "Socialist Primary Wins Prove Mass Migration Remakes America," The Federalist, June 25, 2026

Jonah Goldberg, "Crazy Begets Crazy in New York City," The Dispatch, June 24, 2026

Michael Luciano, "'I'm Done, I'm Not in That F*cking Political Party':James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries," Mediaite, June 24, 2026

Elizabeth Kim, "'You're next': The Black and Latino New Yorkers Feeling Burned by Mamdani's Primary Sweep," Gothamist, June 24, 2026

Michael Lange, “DSA vs. WFP,” The Narrative Wars, May 18, 2026

As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they reveal about what it really means to be human being. It's a distinctly Augustinian reading of our nature and destiny, marked not just by Leo's attention to our limits as flawed and fallible creatures, but the joy and hope found by living into them—which, finally, becomes his plea to see life from the perspective of the lowly, the downcast, the abandoned. 

To help us explain such a rich document, we had on our friend Jack Hanson, one of the most perceptive American writers on the Catholic Church. We tease out the connections between this Leo's first and encyclical and that of his namesake Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, an intervention on behalf of working people during the industrial and considered the origin of Catholic social teaching; Leo's "Augustinianism"; the encyclical's critique of artificial intelligence and what that has to do with its account of what really makes us human; and more.

Sources:

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, May 15, 2026

Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891

Jack Hanson, "A Serious Man: The Militant Mysticism of Charles Péguy," Commonweal, May 3, 2021

– “The Heresy of Americanism,” The Drift, Jun 10, 2025. 

Michael Oakeshott, "The Tower of Babel" in On History and Other Essays (1983)

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Tower of Babel" in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937)

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1985)

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

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics, their connection to his broader nationalist project, and how the left should think about right-wing anti-zionism.

Sources:

Peter Beinart, "What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel," New York Times, April 28, 2026

— "Progressives Must Not Give Tucker Carlson a Pass," The Beinart Notebook, May 11, 2026

— Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, (2025)

Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (2023)

"Tyler Oliveira: Exposing Somali Welfare Abuse, Republican Hypocrisy & the Group You Can’t Criticize," The Tucker Carlson Show, May 8, 2026

Will Alden, "The Many Equivocations of Curt Mills," Jewish Currents, April 16, 2026.