Two ‘Leftist Bros’ Dive Into Conservatism to ‘Know Your Enemy’

The podcast hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell offers history lessons that middle-aged liberals, young socialists and even some conservatives can love.

When Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell sat down in the spring of 2019 to start the podcast “Know Your Enemy,” all they had was a microphone, a cheeky title and the vague hope that “yet another podcast where two leftist bros guide you through the swampy morass of the American right,” as they put it, might be something other people would actually listen to.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” Adler-Bell, 31, said during an interview last month in Sitman’s apartment in Manhattan, groaning at the mention of that first episode, which featured plenty of awkward fumbling and jokes about Sitman’s Leo Strauss tattoos.

Sitman, 40, a self-described “recovered conservative” (with no tattoos), offered a somewhat more charitable take.