All right, welcome listeners to this very special episode of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman,

your podcast co-host, and I'm not here as always with my great friend Sam of the Bell.

That's because it's July, it's summer, and the Know Your Enemy team is having just a bit of a

respite here, but we didn't want to abandon you with nothing to listen to. So we're bringing out an

episode from behind the paywall. And the one we chose is an

episode that I recorded back in January with the podcaster Mike Duncan. As many listeners know,

I spend at least some time most winters now in Rome. And what I do, I always try to read

at least one book about Roman history while I'm there. And the one I chose this time around was Mike's book,

The Storm Before the Storm, the Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, which he published in

2017. Mike is one of my favorite podcasters. I'm sure most of our listeners don't need

much of an introduction to him, but Mike is the host of the Revolutions podcast,

and for the purposes of this conversation, from 2007 to 2012, he hosted the History of Rome

podcast. If you aren't a listener of his, you should be. Revolutions might be my favorite

podcast ever. It's up there. And Mike is just incredibly smart and wonderful person to talk to. And you might

think, how does the history of Rome relate to, you know, the typical themes of Know Your Enemy about

conservative politics and the right? While we begin by talking about the ways various figures on

the American right in recent decades have deployed analogies to the decline and fall of Rome in order to try to say something about what was happening in the United States,

analogizing Rome's fall to our own situation, in their own sense of the decay and decline of the United States.

So we start by discussing those kinds of analogies, kind of the uses and abuses of the United States. So we start by discussing those kinds of analogies,

kind of the uses and abuses of the history of Rome, especially in American politics by the

right. But then from there, we go on to talk about how we should use history, especially Roman history.

Some of what we might learn from the way norms and their abandonment, if I can put it that way, played out,

...