Know Your Enemy: Legal Trouble

Matt and Sam talk about the lawsuit filed against the podcast and Dissent before turning to the conservative movement’s recent victories at the Supreme Court.

Student debt relief activists rally at the Supreme Court on June 30, 2023. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

After several trying months, Matt and Sam can finally discuss the lawsuit against Know Your Enemy and Dissent filed by the Young America’s Foundation, the successor organization to Young Americans for Freedom. (We prevailed—for now, anyway.)

Then we turn to three Supreme Court rulings from the end of the session: (1) Biden v. Nebraska (the student debt ruling); (2) Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (the affirmative action ruling); and (3) 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (the gay wedding website design ruling). Each of these rulings represents a victory for the conservative legal movement, an exercise of raw power by the court, and a blow to dignity and decent policy for millions of Americans. Taken together, they help us understand how the workings of the conservative intellectual pipeline—at law schools, fellowships, and well-endowed nonprofits—change federal policy.

How do conservative institutions work together to turn victims into oppressors and vice versa in the eyes of the law? Listen to find out.

Sources and further reading:

Jennifer Schuessler, Conservative Group Withdraws Lawsuit Against Left-Wing Podcast, New York Times (2023)

John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (1997)

Sarah Posner, The Legal Muscle Leading the Fight to End the Separation of Church and State, Washington Spectator (2007)

Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court Nominee, Spoke at Program Founded to Inspire a ‘Distinctly Christian Worldview in Every Area of Law,’ Washington Post (2020)

Melissa Gira Grant, The Mysterious Case of the Fake Gay Marriage Website, the Real Straight Man, and the Supreme Court, New Republic (2023)

Thomas Sowell, The Day Cornell Died, Weekly Standard (1999)

Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020)

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