The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer (The Nation Company LLC)

This week we return to Central and South America with Jeffrey Gould, a scholar and filmmaker who has a long history of documenting social movements in the region. Currently distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Gould is author of many books on social movements in Latin America, including the recent Solidarity Under Siege (2019). In this discussion we’re joined by journalist Doug Bell. This episode is a follow up to a previous conversation with Gould and Bell in February.

Gould has just returned from a trip to Chile and El Salvador. He discusses developments in those countries, including the difficulties the left in Chile is facing in its efforts to amend the constitution. While the Chilean left is meeting resistance, it is still much more robust than the left in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Gould discusses why once vibrant political movements in those countries have gone into abeyance. Among the themes of the discussion are the need for movements to be grounded in working class activism and also the problems issues like immigration and crime present to the left.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by David Klion to discuss 'The Apprentice' — a movie about Roy Cohn’s mentoring of a future president.

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Donald Trump is such a clearly defined figure — a walking, talking political cartoon — that it’s hard to imagine when he was someone different. Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice, gives us a Trump we’re not used to seeing, a young man who was unsure of himself and found his path thanks to the mentoring of Roy Cohn, the notoriously crooked lawyer and political fixer. David Klion, frequent guest of the podcast, reviewed the movie for The Nation. While David liked the movie more than I did, we both agreed it is well worth watching, with superb performances and a vivid evocation of the New York of the 1970s and 1980s. In our talk, we discuss what the movie says about Trump’s origins and also the Trump fatigue that has hurt the film at the box-office.

Accelerating the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) is a centerpiece of Joe Biden’s climate policy. In making this push, the most likely choke point will come not from the car companies but from car dealers. Slate writer Alexander Sammon recently attended the annual conference of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and filed a fascinating report detailing just how adamantly opposed dealers are to EVs on both ideological grounds (most dealers are staunch conservatives) and economic ones (EVs require less repair, a major source of dealer profit). The article is unusually rich and I highly recommend reading it. 

I talked to Alexander about his report and the larger politics of auto dealership. We discuss how dealers are rent seekers who benefit from policies that stifle change and harm the consumers. They also form the economic and organizing backbone of the GOP. We also address a critique of his piece by policy analyst Matt Stoller.

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The midterm of 2022 is almost over, with only some counting and the Georgia run-off remaining. But it’s seismic impact will be felt for years to come. It was the first nation wide election since the Supreme Court eviscerated the right to reproductive choice in the Dobbs decision. The election confirmed the Dobbs decision has sent a shockwave through the electorate, energizing pro-choice voters to deliver a stinging rebuke to Republican ambitions.

Among political analysts, Moira Donegan, USA columnist for the Guardian, has been a major voice insisting on the centrality of the abortion issue, which she links not only to personal choice but also economic and political freedom. I talked to Moira about how abortion has changed this election and is likely to remain crucial to politics in the future.

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In two previous podcasts, we talked about the strong left resurgence in Latin America that is shaping up to be a second “pink tide.” But the new “pink tide” is much stronger in South America than Central America, where the left is often stalled, even in countries where it holds power.

To examine the special history of the region, I turned to Jeffrey Gould, who has known the area well as an activist, documentary filmmaker, and scholar since the 1970s. Currently distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Gould is author of many books on social movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua, most recently Solidarity Under Siege (2019). In this discussion we’re joined by frequent podcast guest, journalist Doug Bell.

Among the topics we take up are the “minor utopias” that occasionally rise up in the region through grassroots organizing, the counterrevolutionary violence from death squads that these movements confront, the American support for counterrevolution particularly under Ronald Reagan, the need for cooperation between the radical left and more center-left, and the persistence of authoritarianism in political institutions.

Jeffrey brings a lifetime of engagement with Central America to the discussion and provides a truly illuminating survey of crucial recent history.

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The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones. In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons.

Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic documents in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are in fact myths, designed to exculpate those responsible for the electoral disaster while scapegoating groups that have much less power. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I was very happy to talk to Branko about both election myths and the mythmakers who spin them.

On September 12, Politico noted that Trump's appointed judges were "on a tear” and listed “a flurry of controversial decisions by Trump judges in recent months that have been criticized as out of step with longstanding legal principles.” These decisions touched on everything from abortion, to Trump’s handling of classified documents to voting rights. Politico’s reporting was backed up by a strong analysis of the problem of Trump’s judges by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. 

The courts are now a bastion of reactionary activism. The are pushing to not just roll back settled rights but also hamstring the administrative state. To take up this topic, I talked to Linda Hirshman, a former law professor and author of many books on the struggle for civil rights by women, African-Americans and LGBTQ people. Her most recent book is The Color of Abolition. As always, Linda brings an incisive mind to the issues at hand. 

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the preferred Trump foe of the Republican establishment. Both the donor class and media outlets (notably those owned by Rupert Murdoch) have rallied around DeSantis as a figure who can unite the party by adopting the policies of Donald Trump but without Trump’s embarrassing personal flaws. But their theory of Ron Santis isn’t working out: he’s faltering in the polls and some of his major supporters are starting to waver. Other Trump rivals, like former vice president Mike Pence, are also having trouble gaining traction.

Writing in The New Republic, Alex Shepard cogently noted that De Santis and other would-be Republican presidential nominees face the same difficulty as candidates like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz did in 2016: they're afraid to alienate Trump’s passionate base of support, so they can’t fully challenge him. This makes them look weak when Trump attacks them in the most lurid and contemptuous ways imaginable. In this podcast, Alex and I survey the GOP primary race with a focus on why Trump remains the man to beat.  

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Donald Trump recently hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, praising the would be autocrat to the skies as “fantastic” and “a boss.” Of course Trump’s love of autocrats is nothing new. 

Jacob Heilbrunn has written a valuable new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, that places Trump’s love of dictators in a larger historical context. I wrote about the book in this column, where I summarize his arguments and take issue with a few of his claims.

I was happy to talk to Jacob both about his findings and also places where we disagree.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Jeet Heer on Dune: Part Two, the science fiction epic with real world echoes.

The ongoing defamation suit launched by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for its coverage of the 2020 election has already resulted in the release of an eye-opening tranche of documents that give an unprecedented window into the inner workings of the TV network. As National columnist Chris Lehmann has noted, the major revelation is how completely beholden the network is to its right-wing base, to the extent of knowingly pushing false stories to please that audience.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Chris and I talked about what the Fox News revelations say not only about the powerful media site but also the state of journalism and American democracy. The problem is not just that Fox News lies but that millions of viewers have grown addicted to those lies, so much so that they’ll look for any source to bolster their worldview. More than a media problem, this is a democracy problem; one with few obvious answers. Using the Dominion lawsuit as a starting point, Chris and I talk about the broader problem of a post-truth society.

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As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore evidence of Donald Trump is increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing and tottering on stage to a selection of his favorite tunes. My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about this event. He joins me to talk about Trump’s cognitive slide and also the failure of elite institutions that are still enabling Trump, including the mainstream media and the Republican Party. We also take up the state of the race in general.

Joe Biden has often been described as among the most pro-Israel politicians in America, a characterization which has a large element of truth but misses some important nuances. As David Klion argues in a deeply researched essay for The Nation, Biden’s support for Israel has long been accompanied by rhetorical gestures indicating opposition to aspects of Israel’s policies, particularly the building of settlements. How do we make sense of this disjunction between action and rhetoric? Is Biden simply trying to placate his liberal base with cheap words? Or is his fundamental thinking on the topic incoherence to his worldview. 

David joins the podcast to talk about Biden’s Israel policy, which leads into a wide-ranging discussion of the internal contradictions of Cold War liberalism and Biden’s larger policy thinking.

In addition to David’s piece, we talk about topics that address this by Jonathan Guyer in The American Prospect and Noah Landar in Mother Jones.

More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about.

To talk about the movie I spoke with The Nation’s architectural critic Kate Wagner. We discuss the movie’s relationship to early 20^th century modernism as well as earlier movies such as Metropolis and the fiction of Ayn Rand. A major topic of conversation is the film’s reactionary gender politics.

Since 2016, the Democratic Party has moved steadily to the left. Even tried and true moderates like Joe Biden have adapted to this new reality with greater government intervention in the economy than was contemplated in the eras of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

But centrist Democrats still sometimes revert to their bad old habits. We saw two signs of this recently with New York Governor Kathy Hochul nominating a conservative judge despite the opposition of a wide swath of her own party and Joe Biden tapping Jeffrey Zients, a notorious corporate predator, to be the White House chief of staff.

Alexander Sammon wrote about Hochul’s blunder at Slate.com. He joins The Time of Monsters to discuss both of these inexplicable cases.

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Last year, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. This has only emboldened the anti-choice movement. Those who hoped that abortion would at least be safe in blue states and kept available in red states via mifepristone are waking up to a world where the anti-choice movement is using legal warfare to move towards its goal of a nation-wide abortion ban. As Moira Donegan notes in a recent column in The Guardian, a right-wing Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas is hearing arguments for rolling back FDA approval of mifepristone. Elsewhere, pharmacists and doctors are being intimidated by legal threats so that even legal abortion services are getting harder to come by. A novel legal argument is being used to raise the possibility that anti-abortion laws can be applied retroactively, again creating a chilling effect.

I talked with Moira about these and other trends. As she notes, they raise a fundamental question about not just reproductive freedom but also the future of American democracy. It’s no longer clear whether there is a federal rule of law that can protect reproductive freedom even in blue states. We also take up the urgency of Democrats making reproductive freedom a top issue. 

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Elon Musk’s first few days as the head of Twitter have proved rocky, with advertisers leaving in droves after he spread a conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, followed by a round of firings and rehirings, all in the service of a murky agenda. Whether Musk will be able to make Twitter an ongoing concern is an open question.

The question of why the world’s richest man wants to control an influential social media platform is more urgent. To solve this riddle, I talked to Jacob Silverman, who profiled a group he calls "the Paypal mafia” in The New Republic. This group consists of leading Silicon Valley plutocrats like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks, as well as sundry hanger-ons. Jacob and I talk about how this group is reshaping US politics on a host of issues including hate speech and criminal justice reform.

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On a previous podcast, the TV critic Sean T. Collins and I discussed how we were both surprised that Andor, the latest iteration of the Star Wars franchise, was actually a good TV program rather than just fan service. 

Now, the first season of Andor is over and there’s room for a larger appraisal. David Klion, writing in The New Republic, makes the bold claim that the show deserves to be seen as great TV, in the same league as shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. David and I share our enthusiasm for Andor on this week’s podcast.

Among other topics, we discuss the way the show draws on the history of revolutions, including the Russian revolution; the extraordinary acting of Stellan Skarsgård, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, and Genevieve O’Reilly; and the shaping role of writer/director Tony Gilroy, the mastermind behind the series.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Joe Howley on how Israel’s war in Gaza is coming to the home front.

The victory of Gustavo Petro in the recent Colombian presidential election is further proof that Latin America is being swept in a new “pink tide,” one that has the potential to be larger and more far-reaching in its impact than the original wave of left-of-center governments that took power in the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from Colombia, there are now left-of-center governments, including some openly socialist ones, in power in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. Depending on the results of an upcoming election in Brazil, nearly 80 percent of Latin America could soon be governed by parties of the left.

To survey the prospects for the left in the region, I sat down with journalist Doug Bell to interview Jeremy Adelman, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. He is also the Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton. We talked about the history of the first pink tide, its achievements and failures, the right-wing reaction to it, and the current renewal of socialism in the region. The talk also takes up the exciting constitutional innovations being debated in the region as well as the difficult balance between a development strategy that relies on resource extraction and the urgent need for climate policy. Another important question is whether the United States will, as in the past, attempt to thwart a push for economic independence. 

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Credits:

Ludwig Hurtado, Executive Producer

Jeet Heer, Host

Matthew Yglesias, a very influential journalist and proprietor of the Slow Boring substack, has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a glib attention seeker who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever ways to justify the status quo. 

For this episode of the podcast, I talked to David Klion, frequent guest of the show and Nation contributor, about Yglesias, the centrist view of the 2024 election, the role of progressives and leftists in the Democratic party coalition, and the class formation of technocratic pundits, among other connected matters. 

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American analyst who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. He offered an informed perspective on the ideological origins of the bear hug strategy and how it has manifestly failed in its stated goal of trying to restrain Israel from excessive violence. We also discuss the way Biden’s strategy is bad for American national interest and hurts Biden’s re-election chances. We also take up the repression of free speech as a result of the conflict.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential election is the latest evidence of the resurgence of the Latin American left. This is a one of the most hopeful stories in the world, since the left and center-left parties that now govern most of Latin America have the potential to seriously address issues like climate change and inequality. But it’s a complex story too, since the populist right is also gaining force. Bolsonaro’s supporters did well in elections below the presidential level. The right is also organizing effective opposition in many other countries in the region, forcing the left to govern in coalitions with centrists.

To survey the prospects for the left in the region, I sat down with journalist Doug Bell to interview Jeremy Adelman, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. He is also the director of the Global History Lab at Princeton. Both have spoken to me in a previous podcast. During the podcast, we talked about a UN address on the war on drugs and climate with Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Doug Bell can be found here. 

Kanye West’s appearance on the Alex Jones show, where the singer praised Hitler and Nazism, has brought the problem of antisemitism to the fore. To take up the issue, I spoke with Sarah Posner, a columnist at MSNBC and author of the valuable book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. 

Sarah is a particularly valuable voice in this conversation because the fraught and complex relationship between the religious right and right-wing Zionists is part of the story. We talk not only about West and Jones but also the right turn of the Supreme Court.

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Credits:

Host: Jeet Heer

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

In the past week, a number of prominent MAGA leaders have made comments about Jews that range from insulting to outright antisemitism.

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S. Those living in Israel, though are a different story – Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be P.M.! U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!” 

Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted: The same banks that hold George Soros accounts and hedge funds also held Jeffrey Epstein accounts and hedge funds.

In a tweet that was deleted by Twitter, the musician Kanye West wrote, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” 

What are we to make of these comments? To take up the issue I talked to David Klion, an editor at Jewish Currents who has written before on Trump’s comments on Jews. (David speaks on this podcast for himself and not for Jewish Currents). It’s a wide ranging discussion about how casual bigotry serves as a gateway to something much worse.

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Host: Jeet Heer

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

On this episode of the Time of Monsters podcast, Laura Marsh discusses Noami Klein's new book, Doppleganger, about Noami Wolf.

Queen Elizabeth II is being widely mourned in the United Kingdom and elsewhere as a symbol of the British state, tradition, and service. These mainstream sentiments, often expressed in the media coverage in the United States as well as the UK, are not universally shared. In Ireland and many other former colonies, the Queen is a symbol of the oppression of an imperialism that is now in retreat but still leaves a legacy. Conversely, many right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and former Trump advisor Steven Miller, are using the Queen as an avatar of an earlier era when the right people with the right bloodlines enjoyed unquestioned power.

To discuss the meaning of the Queen’s death and the monarchy, this episode of The Time of Monsters features a conversation with Nora Loreto, a Canadian journalist who podcasts at Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. One example of a right-wing politician seeking to weaponize monarchical sentiment is the newly chosen leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre. Nora and I take up the dangers of Poilievre’s mixture of libertarianism and cultural populism.

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It’s easy enough for liberals to laugh at Marjorie Taylor Greene, the voice of the most unhinged faction of the Republican party. The onetime QAnon supporter who will always be associated with the immortal concept of “Jewish space lasers.” But inside the Republican party, Greene is no joke. She’s a rising star and has emerged as the kingmaker who ensured that Kevin McCarthy would be House Speaker. McCarthy reportedly told a friend, “I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her.”

For Greene, the sky might be the limit. As my colleague Chris Lehmann recently reported, she even has hopes of being Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick in 2024. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I spoke to Chris about Greene’s ascendency and also about another recent column he wrote, on the dubious history of Joe Biden’s new chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients.

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Writing in The Nation, David Klion recently reviewed Alexander Ward’s new book on Biden’s foreign policy, which offers a redemption arc whereby an administration wounded by the botched exit from Afghanistan made good by its handling of the Ukraine invasion.

But as Klion notes, the two year frame of the book is too narrow. In conversation on this podcast, David and I contextualize Biden’s foreign policy, which is deeply unpopular and flawed, in the larger history of hawkish liberalism. We look at the attempt to revive a style of military Keynesianism and at Biden’s deep investment in Zionism, as well as the contradictions on issues of human rights that are hampering Biden’s presidency.

During the discussion, I alluded to this excellent Mother Jones article by Noah Lanard on Biden and Israel. 

The victories of Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin are the latest signs that the upper Midwest, after a long period of trending right, is now the home of a liberal and left resurgence. Chris Lehmann, who surveyed the region in a recent column for the Nation, joins the podcast to talk about this development. We look at the history of how the “Blue Firewall” that helped Obama win in 2012 became a cornerstone of Trump’s victory in 2016, the disastrous impact of the 2010 midterms, the GOP campaign (aided by Koch-family money) to create permanent Republican power in the region using gerrymandering, and the counterattack led by grass-roots activism and union organizing. 

In discussing the recent liberal resurgence, we examine the impact of social issues (notably abortion and trans rights) and economic issues (notably workers’ rights and trade). We also contrast the politics of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan (where the Democrats are finding their footing) with Iowa (where the right continues to be ascendant). 

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The news from the Middle East remains bleak, with the Israeli response to the Hamas massacre leading to more than 10,000 deaths, mainly of civilians. Most people regard the unfolding news with horror, but there is a subset of people who are not hiding the fact they are thrilled. A subset of evangelicals known as Pentecostals see the news as proof that the long awaited apocalypse, which will herald the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, is at hand. They are strongly pro-Israel because they believe that the return of the Jews to the holy land, to be followed by their mass conversion to Christianity, is a necessary fulfillment of God’s plan.

My Nation colleague, Chris Lehmann wrote about this influential religious faction in a recent column. On this episode of the podcast, Chris and I discuss Pentecostal beliefs about the Middle East, the Cold War, Trumpism, the prosperity gospel and the Americanization of the faith.

We also talk about alternative Christian traditions that don’t hunker after Armageddon but work for peace. 

An earlier conversation I had with Sarah Posner took up the history of the religious right and is a good companion for this podcast.

The mathematician Chandler Davis, who died in 2002 at age 96, was one of the notable victims of the second Red Scare. In 1960, Davis was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party. Davis’s lawyers defended him with the innovative legal argument that the First Amendment barred such questioning. While Davis lost in the courts, his legal battles were still an important effort in a larger battle to extend the parameters on political speech. Davis’s story is told in a new book, The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis by Steve Batterson. Siobhan Robert’s obituary for Davis ran in The Nation.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to journalist Doug Bell, who knew Chandler Davis, about this book and Davis’s larger place in history. We take up the history of anti-communism and how it has limited free speech, the legal philosophy of Alexander Meiklejohn, and the reactionary Supreme Court's use of the First Amendment to expand corporate power.  

The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 supermajority of Republican appointed justices, is on a rampage. On Friday, they extinguished the constitutional right to reproductive freedom. Then on Monday, they eased restrictions on teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at public schools. 

In his majority statement in the Dobbs case which ended abortion rights, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made a curiously two faced statement about future rights: he said that he thought previous court rulings on birth control, marriage equality, and gay rights broadly were badly decided. But he also offered assurances that they would not be touched since they were less serious than abortion.

Should Alito be trusted? The fact that conservative justices previously made misleading statements about respecting precedent on abortion suggests not.

This week I talk to Linda Hirshman, who I often describe as the Cassandra of the American left because she has been warning of this moment for decades. Linda is an astute analyst of conservative judicial extremism, whose work can be found here. We talk about where the court is going next and also radical (but also perfectly doable) actions the Democrats can take to stop the evisceration of basic constitutional rights. 

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Credits;

Jeet Heer, Host

Ludwig Hurtado, Executive Producer

Republican congressman George Santos seems to have lied about everything: about his ancestry, his education, his career, his charitable work, his medical history, and other things. Many people have taken delight in the Santos story as an over-the-top example of a con-man who rose to the top.

But Moira Donegan, a columnist for the Guardian, pushed the discussion about Santos deeper in a recent column by asking what purpose Santos’ lies serve and what we are to make of a political system where a liar like Santos can flourish?

The Santos story is about more than just one fibber, but a deeper and more systematic corruption. I was happy to talk to Moira on this episode of The Time of Monsters to tease out the meaning of the scandal. 

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It’s no secret that the rich have an outsized role in Ivy League colleges, both as students and alumni. But a new study, by a group of Harvard-based economists, documents in detail just how much elite private education in the Untied States favor the ultra-wealthy. As the New York Times reports, “At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.” The rich enjoy disproportionate access to these schools due to a mixture of legacy admission, sports admissions for specialized sport programs (like fencing), and weight given to personal essays as well as letters of recommendation.

In a very real sense, elite private universities are a major pillar of plutocracy, allowing a narrow caste to hold on to social and political dominance that goes hand in hand with their economic wealth.

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project has written an excellent summary of the report. For this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked with Matt about the problem of inequality in higher education. We take up possible reform policies and also the possibility that these institutions might be inherently harmful to democracy. This leads to a discussion of possible measures to nationalize elite private schools and absorb them into a proper and robust public education system.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Daniel Bessner on Larry David.

The United Auto Workers union has launched an innovative strike against all three major automakers, a major disruption that is upturning American politics, as both major parties are divided on it. 

On the Republican side, Donald Trump is disingenuously posing as a populist by going to the picket line. But rivals like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott show that the GOP commitment to union-bashing is still strong. On the Democratic side, Joe Biden has a strong record as a president supporting labor but he has been cautious about showing overt support. Only after much prodding did he decide to join picketers.

Luke Savage wrote about the strike for Jacobin magazine where he is a staff writer. We talk about the strike and the larger labor upsurge. 

Savage is the author of the forthcoming book Seeking Social Democracy. In the conversation, he references a Tim Scott video, which can be viewed here as well as a Politico article which can be read here.

Richard Seymour joins the Time of Monsters podcast for a live conversation in London, to discuss climate change and economic crisis in the United Kingdom.

Last month, Pat Buchanan announced he was retiring as a newspaper columnist, an event that went strangely under-noticed in the mainstream press. The simple fact is Buchanan is one of the most influential writers and thinkers on the American right since World War II. He’s had a long career as not just a newspaper columnist and TV pundit but also as an advisor to presidents such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and as a perennial presidential candidate.

As historian Nicole Hemmer persuasively argues in her new book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, Buchanan’s political agitation was instrumental in the emergence of a new nationalist and populist right that replaced the earlier Cold War anti-communist consensus (which was much friendlier to immigration, trade agreements, and international alliances). Buchanan in other words was the essential bridge between Reagan and Trump. 

Since Buchanan’s long shadow is ignored by the media, I was happy to have Nicole on as a guest on this week's episode of The Time of Monsters to discuss his history. We take up his roots in conservative Catholicism, his life-long anti-Semitism and racism, his friendliness with media elites who helped soften his image, and his lasting impact on American politics.

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After the convention and on the cusp of a debate, the presidential election is a near dead heat. The polls show Kamala Harris has a slight edge, but it is well within the margin of error. This is a massive improvement over the performance of Joe Biden, who was on a path to a major defeat but it is by no means a guarantee of victory. To take up the state of the race, I talk to analyst Joshua A. Cohen, who writes for The Nation and runs the Ettingermentum newsletter.

We take up both what Harris has been doing right (which explains her quick rise in the polls) but also weaknesses in the Democratic Party’s messaging (which explain why the Democratic National Convention didn’t produce a significant bump). We then look towards the debate as a chance for Harris to more clearly define herself against Donald Trump and increase the size of her lead to win big.

This week, I talked with Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, about the recent death of Henry Kissinger and how the violence in Israel/Palestine could realistic give way to diplomatic solutions.

The GOP held their first presidential debate for the 2024 election cycle and the crowded stage was notable for a significant absence.

Former president Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen. Enjoying a commanding lead in the polls, Trump rightly felt that it was beneath his dignity to share a stage with a crew of also-rans. So the evening became a contest to see who could imitate Trump best. But Trump did remain in the news thanks to fresh new indictments in Georgia over his alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

To examine the debates and Trump’s domination of the GOP, fellow Nation writer Chris Lehmann joins the Time of Monsters podcast. He's written on these topics lately, and we had a robust discussion about a party in deep trouble.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is the rarest of things: a summer blockbuster that is super-smart and repays close analysis. Two weeks ago, this podcast teamed up with Jewish Currents writers and editors Mari Cohen, David Klion, and Raphael Magarik to talk about the way the film portrays the 20th century left.

But there is more to be said about the movie. Frequent Time of Monsters contributor, Doug Bell had some bones to pick with the the film. In particular, he feels it slighted the way Oppenheimer compromised with the anti-communist witch-hunters who tried to destroy his career. Was Oppenheimer a martyr or an opportunist? To take up the movie and the longer history of anti-communist repression in the United States, Jeet Heer talks with Doug Bell about the movie and the reality it sometimes fails to do justice.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Moira Donegan on Joe Biden’s need to embrace pro-choice politics.

The Star Wars franchise has long seemed to have exhausted itself with endless sequels and prequels offering variations of the same old stories. That's why the new Disney+ program, Andor has come as a surprise to many viewers. In tone and story, it’s very different than the Star Wars norm, offering a much grittier story about imperial oppression, police violence, and the emergence of a revolutionary movement.

To talk about Andor, I sat with critic Sean T. Collins, who has been writing about the show for Decider. A respected TV critic, Sean also podcasts about TV and books, especially Game of Thrones related narratives, at The Boiled Leather Audio Hour.

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CREDITS:

Host: Jeet Heer

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

Dianne Feinstein, who will soon celebrate her 89th birthday, is currently the oldest member of the Senate. In recent months, a controversy has swirled around her due to reports of her alleged cognitive decline in outlets like The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Some argue that this debate is sexist and ageist.

Rebecca Traister recently wrote a profile of Feinstein for New York Magazine that opened up this debate by situating it within Feinstein’s life trajectory and the story of the cohort she belongs to: a generation of septuagenarians and octogenarians who now hold the commanding heights of power in America.

This week, I learned a lot in a spirited talk with Traister, in which we took up Feinstein as an emblem of the ruling class, the years of turmoil in San Francisco that accompanied her rise to power, the way the political system values seniority, and the reasons why the gerontocracy is so committed to a politics of elite civility.

Good news is easier to notice if you consider the alternatives. On Monday, the Biden offered “unwavering” support of Brazil president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the aftermath of an right-wing coup. It’s easier to imagine earlier presidents, not just Republicans like Donald Trump but also Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, taking a very different stand when a socialist government in Latin America is facing a right-wing attempt at regime change.

In a recent article in The New Republic, Matthew Duss and Stephen Wertheim note that the rising progressive movement in the Democratic Party has usefully pushed Biden to partially move beyond the failed policies of the past. This can be seen especially in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the retreat from drone warfare. But there’s still much work to be done, with USA foreign policy still to militarized.

For the latest episode of The Time of Monsters podcast, I talked to Duss and Wertheim about Biden's foreign policy record. Duss is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders. Wertheim is also affiliated with Carnegie, where he is a senior fellow. He’s the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. 

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This has been an eventful week in both the news media and social media. Tucker Carlson was apparently fired from Fox News. Meanwhile, Twitter under the aegis of Elon Musk continues to be in turmoil as it changes verification policies, to the irritation of longtime users. 

To make sense of it all, I talked to Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect. Ryan has produced a fascinating Youtube video about the journalist Matt Taibbi, a one-time muckraking radical who in recent years has increasingly aligned himself with the reactionary agenda of Carlson and Musk. As it turns out, Taibbi’s trajectory provides a perfect storyline for tracing recent changes in the media and also the disturbing tendency of some former leftists to shift right under the impetus of the culture wars.

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The mass shooting in Buffalo, which left 10 people dead, has ignited a debate about the role the “great replacement” conspiracy theory plays in contemporary politics. As many commentators note, the “great replacement” theory not only animates the manifesto of the alleged shooter but also has become, in only a slightly watered down form, a staple of right wing media programs like Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.

Glenn Greenwald, a contrarian writer on Substack, rushed to Carlson’s defense in a lengthy post. First noting, correctly, that shooters have many different ideologies, Greenwald goes on to downplay Carlson’s well-documented history of racism. According to Greenwald, “Carlson believes … that the proper citizenry of the United States is multi-racial and that Black Americans and Latin Americans and Asian-Americans are every bit as much U.S. citizens, with all of the same claims to rights and protections, as every other American citizen.”

Is Tucker Carlson really as enlightened as Greenwald believes? To take this up, I spoke with Eoin Higgins of The Flashpoint newsletter, who has written multiple times about Greenwald’s habit of acting as Carlson’s pro bono mouthpiece.

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The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the conflict and also the prospect for change under a Kamala Harris presidency, I talked to Matt Duss, a seasoned foreign policy analyst at the Center for International Policy.

Marty Peretz has led a large life, one he recounts with aplomb in his autobiography The Controversialist. As long time publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, from 1974 to 2011, he transformed the venerable liberal magazine into an organ of neoliberalism, with a politics that emphasized deregulation of the economy, scaling back the welfare state, militant Zionism, and an aggressive foreign policy (leading the magazine to support the disastrous Iraq War in 2003). Coupled with the magazine, Peretz used his second wife’s vast fortune to create an political network that extended to many nodes of elite power: Harvard, Wall Street and even the White House (Vice President Al Gore was Peretz’s protégé).

I wrote about Peretz’s life and also the largescale damage done by his politics in a recent review of his memoir. Frequent guest of the show David Klion, who wrote about the memoir for The Baffler, joined the The Time of Monsters for a spirited discussion of a memorable life. Also relevant to this discussion is David’s review of Liberties, a magazine founded by Peretz’s longtime crony Leon Wieseltier.

Although only formed in 2021, Moms For Liberty, a group agitating for reactionary policies in schools, is already a major player in national politics. Republican presidential hopefuls like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are eager to speak at the group's convention. Moms for Liberty is also receiving generous profiles in major media outlets like the New York Times.

As my Nation colleague, Chris Lehmann notes in a recent column, such profiles tend to whitewash Moms for Liberty, falsely portraying it as a grassroots organization and ignoring its bigoted agenda and ties to the institutional right. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we talk about the true nature of Moms for Liberty as well as the way anti-trans agitation is remaking politics. In the discussion, we reference this earlier conversation I had with the historian Rick Perlstein about the deep roots of right-wing agitation over education.

Donald Trump and JD Vance have a surprising closing message in the 2024 election: they are the antiwar candidate. About the rising conflict in the Middle East, Trump has said, “I wanna see it all stop, I wanna see the Middle East get back to peace.” On a podcast, Vance criticized the Biden “Even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that maximizes those casualties. They say that they're pro-Israel. They've pursued the pathway that has prolonged the war as long as possible, which is bad for Israel.”

This message is of course deeply cynical since Trump is planning on staffing his administration with hawks, as he did in his first term. But it might have appeal to undecided voters, who polls show are strongly antiwar.

To discuss why Democrats have ceded the peace vote to the GOP, I talked to Matt Duss, vice president of the Center for International Policy and frequent guest of the show.

Donald Trump does not like sharks. During his memorable encounter with Stormy Daniels, he fixated on a documentary about the predator that was playing on the hotel television and muttered, “I hope all the sharks die.” The former president returned to this topic at a recent campaign rally where he went on bizarre and lengthy digression asking what would be worse, being electrocuted or being eaten by a shark? Trump said he thought a shark attack would worse.

It's easy to dismiss Trump’s rantings as mere gibberish but my Nation colleague has written incisively on how this rhetoric should be understood not as logic but as an emotional and religious appeal. Chris joined me to talk about Trump’s appeal to his MAGA base. We also take up how Trump is increasingly aligned with Christian nationalism (a topic Chris wrote about here) and how the mainstream media doesn’t offer enough cultural context to make clear just how dangerous Trump’s rhetoric is.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has settled into an interminable and bloody war of attrition. Even as the consequences of the war, including the disruption of the global food supply that could starve countless poor people, ripples forward, political attention to the conflict has faded. Still, the war presents real dilemmas for the left, especially on the question of how to balance the need to thwart a brutal violation of international norms with the equally urgent necessity of bringing an end to the conflict. Many on the left remain divided on the right balance to seek. 

Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote an analysis of why Ukraine matters to the left for The New Republic. I talked to him about the state of the war and the prospects for peace.

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Credits:

Hosted by Jeet Heer

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Edited by Sophie Hurwitz

In recent years, ads from companies such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA have become a staple on television and social media. They promise customers a chance to find out family secrets through DNA collection. What’s rarely emphasized is that the real DNA data goldmine is selling the information gathered by customers to big pharma, which can then be better positioned to sell its products.

To look into how DNA became a multibillion dollar industry, I talked to Myles W. Jackson, the inaugural Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Myles is the author of three books, Spectrum of Belief (2000), Harmonious Triads (2006), and The Genealogy of a Gene (2015). In our conversation, we take up Myles’ fascinating new essay “Ownership, Knowledge, and Genetic Information” which will appear next year in a book titled Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property, edited by Dagmar Schäfer, Marius Buning, and Annapurna Mamidipudi.

In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how the courts have opened the door to corporate ownership of DNA data and how the DNA industry ends up promoting a regressive idea that ethnic identity is a matter of bloodlines. There are many reasons to be wary of the corporate ownership of DNA data, not least that it ends up replicating racism in a new way.

Myles and I are joined in this conversation by journalist Doug Bell, a frequent guest on the podcast who can be found here. 

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Martin Scorsese’s masterful new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon strikes out to new territory for the famed director. It’s his first foray into the American West (although set a generation after the traditional western and overturning many of the conventions of the genre).

The film also explores many of his familiar themes: toxic masculinity, domestic violence, gangs, criminal conspiracies, spirituality and the limits of the law. 

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I am joined by David Klion to talk about this fascinating movie. David wrote about the movie for The New Republic and my review appeared here. In the course of the discussion, I mentioned a novel about the Osage murders recommended by Lily Gladstone. The novel is Charles Red Corn’s A Pipe for February.

Midge Decter, who died at age 94 earlier this month, was a crucial figure in 20th century politics but also a much misunderstood one. She’s received many tributes from the political right which have cast her as an inspiring writer and editor, as well as obituaries from the mainstream media which tend to whitewash her hard right politics. 

Neither the tributes nor the obituaries actually explain why Decter was important. To get at her true story, I spoke with Ronnie Grinberg, assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. In her forthcoming book, Write Like a Man: The New York Intellectuals and Jewish Masculinity, Grinberg places Decter in the larger history of social conservatism, showing how Decter was formed by the revisionist Freudianism of the mid-20th century, which she later recast in her stinging critiques of feminism and gay rights. This social conservatism went hand in hand with militarism, as Decter connected traditional gender norms with a militant foreign policy.

This illuminating discussion with Grinberg helped clarify not just Decter’s life but the triumph of social conservatism in the Republican Party. 

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Credits:

Edited by Sophie Hurwitz

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Republicans are accusing the January 6 Hearings of being a partisan witch hunt, but I’ve argued the opposite is true: in the effort to be bipartisan, the hearings have, if anything, underplayed GOP complicity in Trump’s aborted coup. 

I do also think the hearings have been an impressive presentation of the evidence, one that establishes Trump’s guilt. Greg Sargent, a Washington Post columnist who has been covering the hearings, has written compelling arguments about how the hearings both point to the dangers to American democracy and offer some solutions for preventing future coup attempts. 

I talked with Greg about what we’ve learned from the Hearings and the implications they have for the future. 

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Barbie has smashed through the glass ceiling. Greta Gerwig’s new movie based on the popular Mattel doll is the big summer film of 2023. It’s made more than $1 billion –the first time that box office benchmark has been reached by a film directed by a woman. This popular success is all the more notable because the movie deals explicitly with feminist critiques of patriarchy. 

Barbie has generated an enormous public debate, but not everybody wholeheartedly loves the movie. I think the best piece of writing on the film was written by Tarpley Hitt for The Nation. Hitt, a writer and editor for The Drift who is working on a book about the Barbie doll, described the movie’s feminism as “muddled.” I sat down and talked to Tarpley for an enlightening discussion about this year's buzziest blockbuster.

Over the last thirty years, Republicans, when in control the House of Representatives, have repeatedly used the debt ceiling to force Democratic presidents to make draconian budget cuts. This drama took place under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. We are now witnessing a replay under Joe Biden. Under pressure from divergent political forces, Biden is being forced to make a choice between negotiating with the Republicans or figuring out a way to squash the debt ceiling threat.

In a recent statement, Jeff Hauser, founder of The Revolving Door Project, makes the case for a direct fight: “GOP leaders have sent a wildly exploitative ransom note to the public. The administration should not accept its terms. Biden, Yellen, and Garland have many executive branch pathways to avoid doing so, including by refusing to defend the debt ceiling against the recent lawsuit from government employees arguing that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to not pay its debts. The Biden Administration must not cave in to extremists and overwrite the best of the administration’s legacy merely in order to sustain the legal incoherence that is elites’ understanding of the debt ceiling.” I spoke to Jeff about the dangers of the debt ceiling as a threat to the constitutional order and how Biden can fight it.

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A government shutdown has been temporarily avoided, but congress remains a mess. Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from his position as House Speaker. The hand-shake deal he made over Ukraine funding is now in doubt and the prospect of another shutdown drama looms, bringing with it the real danger of a prolonged government closure.

Chris Lehmann, D.C. Bureau Chief for The Nation joins the program to look at the deep history of the GOP’s persistent proclivity for empowering extremists in congress. Special emphasis is given to Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party. This Politco interview with the sociologist Theda Skocpol is also discussed.

It’s become a familiar pattern that mass shootings are often exploited by the right to scapegoat marginalized groups. The tragedy in Uvalade, Texas is no exception. Within hours of the news of the school shooting breaking on social media, trolls were fabricating a story that the shooter was trans, a fiction that was picked up by at least one Republican politician.

Parker Molloy, who followed this story in the newsletter The Present Age, joins this week's episode of the Time of Monsters podcast to talk about not just this fabrication but the wider problem of sorting fact from fiction in a news story. We also take up the issue of police dishonesty, as displayed in shifting stories and the too credulous acceptance of other social media reports.

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Credits:

Hosted by Jeet Heer

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Production Assistance by Sophie Hurwitz

Original Music by Micah Wittman

Last month, the Canadian parliament embarrassed itself during an official visit by Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky when the entire legislative body gave a standing ovation to a veteran of the Waffen SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later apologized for incident. 

To understand what happened, it’s important to realize that Canada, like other Western nations, has a long history of sheltering Nazi war criminals. This was not a matter of negligence but official policy. During the Cold War, these hardened Nazi criminals were seen as valuable allies against the Soviet Union. This policy is all the more shameful because during World War II, the vast majority of Ukrainians who took up arms did so in the Red Army against Nazism.

Lev Golinkin, a Ukrainian-American reporter, has been doing excellent work for The Forward and The Nation bringing this shameful history to light. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I sat down with Lev to talk about the long history of Canada’s hospitality to Nazi war criminals. In the podcast, he references this enlightening video.

The Supreme Court ended its term last week with a spate of extremely right-wing decisions that included severely restricting affirmative action in elite universities and colleges, clawing back on anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQ citizens under an argument for expressive free speech, and squashing the Biden administrations plan to give relief to student debtors. These ruling come after earlier decisions curtailing labor rights and the end of a constitutional right to abortion. Taken together, the court has emerged as the powerful reactionary force in American society, one that is working overtime to roll back a century of expanding rights for workers, people of color, women, and LGBT citizens.

To survey the reactionary agenda of the court and the extremist social vision undergirding that agenda, I talked to Moira Donegan. She’s a frequent guest of the podcast and a columnist for the Guardian. She brings her characteristic incisiveness to analyzing the courts and warning of the dangers ahead.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Tom Durkin and Joe Ferguson on FISA renewal.

Kamala Harris and many other Democrats often warn that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. This is true enough, but it raises the question of how a ridiculous reality-TV star got in a position to be so dangerous. The excellent new podcast Master Plan shows that democracy has been under siege in the United States for decades due to a concerted effort to let corporations dominate the commanding heights of power. I talk to David Sirota, who along with the team at The Lever, created the podcast. We take up the crucial role of Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, whose influential 1971 memo created out a blueprint for big business to roll back democracy.

The emerging scandals at the Supreme Court are only getting worse with new revelations about Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni being the beneficiaries of plutocratic largess. But it remains unclear whether the Democrats can mount an effective attack that uses the scandal to reform the courts. 

To discuss how gridlock and a lack of political will is allowing a constitutional crisis to fester, I spoke with Alexander Sammon, a political writer for Slate. He provides an expert tour of both the scandals and also of the completely inadequate political response, as well as providing some insights on how Democrats could use their existing power to actually reign in an increasingly lawless judiciary.

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On June 28, I delivered a speech at the central branch of the Regina Public Library on the history of American support for Israel. The speech almost didn’t happen. The library briefly cancelled it because they claimed the group promoting it was encouraging discrimination against Jews. Fortunately, a city councillor intervened to sponsor the talk. For this podcast, I give the gist of my talk. 

The podcast will be going on a summer break and return in a few weeks.

The New York Times has become mired in an acrimonious public dispute over its coverage of transgender issues. A letter signed by more than 1,200 writers (both freelance and staff) for the newspaper has challenged the paper for mainstreaming transphobic ideas. A separate letter from the human rights group GLADD also criticized the Times.  The editors of the newspaper dismissed both letters and affirmed their faith in the professionalism of their handling of this issue. 

For The Nation, Jack Mirkinson, an interim senior editor at the magazine, wrote an important and detailed article noting that this is not the first time the Times has had to grapple with accusations of prejudice against LGBTQ people. As Jack documents, under the tenure of the late Abe Rosenthal from 1969 to 1986, the newspaper took what it now itself admits was homophobic editorial line. Among other things, the paper treated the rising gay rights movement with suspicion, it refused to use the term “gay” from 1975 to 1987 and it downplayed the AIDS crisis.

For this week’s podcast, Jack and I talk about the Times’ acknowledged history of homophobia and how it undermines the newspaper’s argument that it should be trusted on current transgender disputes.

Disney has released a new documentary which myself and many others have criticized for regurgitating a mythical version of history that extolls Stan Lee as sole creator of the Marvel universe. 

To talk more about the documentary, I’m joined by Elana Levin, who has written widely on comics and hosts the Graphic Policy podcast– an excellent forum that takes up the intersection of politics and popular culture.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, beyond rebutting the documentary, Elana and I talk about the true history of Marvel, with particular emphasis on the contribution of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the artists who were also (at a minimum) co-writers of the stories credited to Lee. In the discussion, Elana recommends some excellent resources for more information including Abraham Josephine Riesman’s biography of Lee and Kate Willaert's fascinating tumblr page, Kirby Without Words.

Pat Robertson, who died at age 93, was a much hated figure on the left and for good reason. For many decades, through his television show, The 700 Club, and in his frequent interventions in political debates, he’s been one of America’s most prominent voices for the religious right: a sexist and homophobic preacher with a wide audience.

Unfortunately, Robertson left a large legacy, which we need to reckon with. To do so, I spoke with the journalist Sarah Posner, who writes frequently on the intersection of politics and religion. She is the author of the book Unholy, about white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Sarah also wrote a very fine essay for Talking Points Memo about Robertson’s role in creating an infrastructure of right-wing lawyers who are pushing the religious right’s agenda through the courts and the policy ranks of the Republican Party. 

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Sarah and I talk about Robertson’s background as the son of Democratic senator, his distinctive brand of charismatic Christianity which has been gaining force, his conspiracy theories and sundry bigotries, and the support he gets from more mainstream institutions such as AIPAC. 

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Joe Biden’s performance on the first presidential debate, held on Thursday in Atlanta, has been widely criticized. Much of the criticism has focused on Biden’s style: his horse voice, frequent halting digressions and verbal flubs. But the substance of Biden’s comments, as Moira Donegan pointed out in her Guardian column, was equally troubling. In this podcast, Moira and I dissect Biden’s weak and incoherent arguments with a particular emphasis on his lifelong reluctance to strongly support reproductive freedom. We also take up Biden’s policies towards Israel/Palestine as well as Donald Trump’s lies and authoritarianism.

Christopher Nolen’s Oppenheimer, a biopic about the famed scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb, is a surprise hit of the summer. It’s made more than $650 million worldwide, putting it ahead of more conventional blockbusters such as the newest entry into the Mission: Impossible franchise. 

Time of Monsters host Jeet Heer sat down with writers and editors at The Jewish Currents (Mari Cohen, David Klion, and Raphael Magarik) for a team-up of podcasts to talk about the movie. We discuss the way the movie portrays tensions within the Jewish community, its grappling with the history of the American left, its avoidance of direct portrayals of the effect of nuclear weapons, and its critique of the military-industrial complex.

During the discussion we touch on David Klion’s review of the movie which ran in The New Republic. 

There’s an old joke that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even an empire. The right-wing student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), founded in William F. Buckley’s house in 1960, is similarly misnamed. It’s not young; the current head, Scott Walker, is 55. It’s definition of American is very narrowly partisan and reactionary in ways that most Americans would reject. And as for freedom, it has a long history of aligning with administrators and government authorities to suppress its political foes– something I wrote about in a recent column. Most recently, YAF launched a vexatious lawsuit designed to cripple Dissent magazine and its affiliated podcast, Know Your Enemy.

To talk about YAF, I spoke with historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of the forthcoming book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. In that book, Lauren documents how groups like YAF groomed the ideological extremists who have taken the GOP into authoritarianism. In our talk, Lauren and I look at the group's ties to powerful plutocrats and politicians as well as their strategy of using legal power as a political tool. 

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Yousef Munayyer on a president at war with his base.

According to a recent CNN poll, 81 percent of voters age 18 to 35 disapprove of President Joe Biden support of Israel’s war in Gaza. This number should be a concern to Biden, because for his reelection bid to succeed he absolutely needs young voters to be as enthusiastically supportive of him as they were in 2020. The issue of Israel/Palestine is dragging Biden’s support down even as he needs to rally his base. But Biden is doubling down on his policy of offering a virtual carte blanche to Benjamin Netanyahu. 

This conflict between Biden’s policy and the opinions of a supermajority of young people is now spilling into actual physical violence, as universities such as Columbia and UCLA send in cops to arrest pro-Palestine protesters.

To talk about the growing political divide and what it portends for the both the Middle East and the United States, I talked to Palestinian American writer Yousef Munayyer.

In the last few weeks, Hollywood has given us Drive-Away Dolls (directed by Ethan Coen, who also co-wrote it in collaboration with Tricia Cooke) and Live Lies Bleeding (directed by Rose Glass who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska). Although very different in tone, the two movies have some striking commonalities, both are set in the late 20th century and take familiar genres (the buddy road comedy, the erotic thriller) while featuring lesbian lead characters.

To talk about this trend, I spoke to Moira Donegan, a frequent guest of the podcast, who sees the movies as evidence of “the lesbian plot” becoming Hollywood fare. She locates both films as exercises in nostalgia in a period when actual lesbian culture is rapidly changing.

Joe Biden has a divided mind when it comes to the Republican Party. On the one hand, he’s all to aware that the GOP has become radicalized and is an existential threat to American democracy. On the other hand, Biden, drawing on his many decades in Washington, is drawn to the idea of bipartisan compromise and acts as if it is his duty to elevate the more moderate wing of the Republican party. We can see the two sides of Biden’s approach to the opposition party as he tries to navigate through the debt ceiling crisis. Biden has acknowledged the idea of taking the debt ceiling weapon off the table by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment even as he has also indicated a willingness to cut a deal. 

It's unclear which side of the equation will win. To take up the issue of Biden’s handling of the GOP and the debt ceiling crisis, I spoke with Brian Beutler, the editor-in-chief at Crooked Media. Brian edits a very fine newsletter, Big Tent, which can be found here.

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For this week's episode of The Time of Monsters, I’m doing a joint podcast with the crew from Know York Enemy (Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman) talking about the legacy of the Kennedy family.

Our talk is based on our shared love for Garry Wills’ The Kennedy Imprisonment, a revelatory book about not just the Kennedy family but the nature of 'great man politics.'

Steven D. Levitt, best known for co-writing the bestselling 2005 book Freakonomics, is retiring from the University of Chicago with a bang. On the Capitalism and Freedom podcast, Levitt gave a farewell interview where he detailed many internecine feuds in the discipline and examples of toxic abuse, with particular focus on his long-time colleague and nemesis James Heckman. 

The economist Marshall Steinbaum, a University of Chicago graduate who now teaches at the University of Utah, returns to the Time of Monsters to elucidate not just the Levitt/Heckman spat but also the question of why economics is a notoriously toxic discipline, how economics has changed over the decades rendering both Levitt and Heckman anachronistic, and the recent backlash against anti-racist politics in the discipline. 

To supplement the article, listeners can read: Noah Scheiber’s 2007 article on the intellectual origins of Freakonomics, Marshall Steinbaum’s  2020 post about racism in the University of Chicago economic department, and a recent Bloomberg story on racism and sexism in economics.

Gaza, under siege and bombardment from Israel, remains ground zero for violence in the Middle East, sending shock waves through the region. The Gaza onslaught is provoking a series of escalating wars with the United States and Israel on one side against Iran and its allies and proxies on the other. Fighting of various degrees of intensity has broken out in Yemen, the Red Sea, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria as well as the borders of Israel, among other places.

This week, I speak with Trita Parsi, vice president and co-founder of The Quincy Institute, about the cascading violence in the region. We also take up the Biden administration’s decision to double down on its push for a Saudi/Israeli alliance, a program that could itself deepen the violence. As an alternative, we consider the possibility of other great powers taking over the job of negotiating a settlement to the regions problems. Trita has written on these issues in many venues, including The Nation.

In the theater of American politics, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is auditioning for the role of Trump II. His pitch is that he’ll offer all the hard right policies the GOP base loves but with a more competent and stable persona which won’t offend centrist voters. His current gambit of shipping asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts is just his latest bid to gain attention.

But Chris Lehmann, the recently appointed Washington Bureau chief of The Nation, is skeptical as to whether it’ll pay off. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talk with Chris about why DeSantis is risking a backlash. We also take up the center right and centrist pundits who are all too eager to jump on the DeSantis bandwagon.

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CREDITS

Host: Jeet Heer

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

On this week's episode of the Time of Monsters podcast, author Linda Hirschman joins the show to discuss the problems of activism in a country divided against itself. In the past I’ve described Linda as “the Cassandra of the American left” for her writing on reproductive freedom. She’s warned us of the moment that has now arrived, the end of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. 

As Lincoln said in 1858, A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand. That was true then, and true now. It makes Linda’s new book on the abolitionist movement all the more relevant. It’s titled The Color Of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation.  

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The good news is we have one less thing to worry about: so-called Havana Syndrome turns out not to be caused by a mysterious super-weapon to harm American diplomats and military personnel, despite numerous press reports warning of a hypothetical ray gun created by a foreign foe (Cuba? Russia? China?). Instead, an assessment by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) concluded that the symptoms of Havana Syndrome, reported by hundreds of government officials working all over the world) likely had “medical, environmental, and social factors that plausibly can explain.” In less polite terms, this was an example of a mass psychogenic illness, a product of hysteria and over-active imaginations. 

Writing in Jacobin, Branko Marcetic links the Havana Syndrome frenzy to other examples of national security paranoia such as the false reports of Russians paying for Taliban bounty hunters and the recent meltdown over Chinese surveillance balloons. I talked with Branko about both the Havana Syndrome, and the reasons – political and psychological–that the military-industrial complex is going into over drive conjuring up imaginary or overhyped threats.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Matt Duss on a popular right-wing fabulist.

Has former president Barack Obama secretly been running the American elite — including the media and wide parts of the government — for nearly 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exceptionalism? That’s the argument made by David Samuels in a much-read piece in The Tablet. 

On this episode, I dissect Samuels arguments with two friends of the podcast, David Klion and Matt Duss. We not only look at the problems with Samuels’s reactionary fable, but also take up why it is so popular on the right and even draws on conspiratorial ideas that have a wider purchase among centrists and conservative liberals.

After months of teasing voters and reporters, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has finally launched his presidential bid. He did it on an unusual platform: Twitter Spaces. The launch was widely viewed as a bungle because of its small audience and many technical glitches.

Even if was a fiasco, it was significant as an example of Elon Musk trying to remake himself as a right-wing media mogul, a Rupert Murdoch of the digital age. To better understand what DeSantis and Musk are up to, I talked with Parker Molloy, who runs the fine newsletter The Present Age.

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The Hamas massacres that started last Saturday and the ensuing retaliation by the Israel government deserve both a moral witness and policy analysis. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Spencer Ackerman, Nation contributor who wrote about the events here, provides both.

In a searing and informed conversation, he places front and center the human worth of all the innocent victims. He also places the event in the framework of the bipartisan Abraham Accords, supported by Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike, which elevated alliances between authoritarian states at the expense of human rights.

Joe Biden has become increasingly frank and forthright in in his criticism of Donald Trump. In late August, Biden told Democratic party donors that “extreme MAGA philosophy” 

“It’s not just Trump,” Biden said. “It’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.” Subsequently, Biden delivered an important and substantial speech in Philadelphia where he avoided the word fascism but detailed the way MAGA Republicans were a threat to American democracy.

Biden’s remarks and his speech have elicited a considerable pushback from the mainstream media, with the president being accused of being inflammatory and partisan. 

New Republic staff writer Matt Ford has written an strong defense of Biden’s deployment of the term semi-fascism. I talked with Matt about his article and about the ways in which fascism does (and doesn’t) describe Trumpism.

The power of centrism as a political force comes from the fact that it’s not so much an ideology as it is an ambient mood. It’s the shared common sense of the elite, a set of axioms about the goodness of bipartisanship, deficit reduction and military spending. Those who adhere to it take it so for granted, that they don’t feel the need to even defend it.

Part of the achievement of Luke Savage’s new book The Dead Center is that it makes us see the almost invisible ideology of centrism and its pervasive ability to roadblock progress. A staff writer at Jacobin and co-host of the Michael and Us podcast, Luke is also a delightful guest on this episode of The Time of Monsters, as we survey the trajectory of centrism from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden.

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CREDITS:

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

Host: Jeet Heer

For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I gave at Carleton University earlier this month on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking.

But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawed since voters who respond to antisystem arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with antisystem anger in a more productive way.

The debate over the causes of inflation is heating up and showing an important divide in the discipline of economics. Mainstream economists like Larry Summers blame it on rising wages and recommend interest rate hikes to cool the economy by raising unemployment. But other scholars, notably Isabella Weber of the University of Massachusetts, have a different theory: they argue inflation is due to price gauging made possible by the Covid emergency and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Weber’s ideas, which are gaining traction, suggest the solution is price control.

The possibility that establishment economics is losing its dominance over policy is making some economists angry. There’s been a vicious backlash to Weber’s work. To talk about the inflation debate and other examples of heterodox thinking on the rise, as well as the circling-the-wagon approach of the discipline, I talked to Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we range widely over the discipline of economics and the unseemly hissy fit of many leading practitioners. Marshall’s twitter account can be followed here. 

Joe Biden’s executive action on college student debt is both the culmination of a long political struggle and the possible start of a new era of debt relief not just for college students but for many other people weighed down by money they owe for hospital stays, housing and other essentials.

To talk about the potential of debt relief as the basis for an energized new left politics, I talked with Astra Taylor, the documentary filmmaker who has been an active player in these debates since the days of Occupy Wall Street. Astra is the co-founder of the Debt Collective. In her writings and speeches, she’s made many key points about how debt relief is grounded in organizing and solidarity, how economic equality (including making sure people aren’t burdened with undue debt) is crucial for democracy, and how we need to free people from the unjustified guilt that prevents them from fighting for their rights.

I should note that I was coming out of the cold when I recorded this podcast, so my voice is raspy. But I think Astra’s eloquence more than carries the show.

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On Wednesday, Alex Sammon reported in Slate that “one of the biggest, bitterest, and most expensive political battles of the 2024 election cycle has emerged: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], one of the most powerful, best-funded influence operations in Washington, is planning to go all out to knock the famed “Squad”—the small group of highly visible and popular progressive legislators of color, most of them women—out of office.”

AIPAC is planning on spending more than $100 million to push the Democratic party to the right. Given AIPAC’s successful track record, this is a genuine threat.

For this episode of the podcast, Alex and I sat down to talk about this development, the way the current Israel-Palestine conflict is sending political shockwaves in America, and the Democratic party’s selective defense of incumbents. We also discuss the fact that Israel’s war is increasingly unpopular and facing mass opposition— a fact that could undermine AIPAC’s agenda.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, a discussion with Adam Johnson on the Democrats' failed border policy.

Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of Biden’s bear-hug strategy, which the administration argues would help foster peace and restraint. This failure of this policy is likely to haunt who ever wins the White House in November.

To survey the dire scene and discuss the possibility of American involvement in yet another large Middle Easter war, I talked to Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute.

The collapse of FTX, a crypto currency exchange that went from a valuation of $32 billion to bankruptcy, is sending shockwaves not just through the economy but also politics. FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the second biggest donor to the Democratic party in 2022. He has many complex ties with Democratic politicians, policymakers and pundits. In a recent column, I wrote about how Democrats have a crypto problem.

On this week’s episode of The Time of Monsters podcast, I talked with David Klion, an editor at Jewish Currents who writes for many publications, including The Nation. We had a wide-ranging conversation on not just the crypto crash but the philosophies of effective altruism and longtermism (supported by some of the players in the story), the dangers of plutocratic philanthropy, and the role writers like Matthew Yglesias played in whitewashing Sam Bankman-Fried. Along the way, we take up Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune and ask whether it, too, is an example of longtermism.

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The summer season has started with a fizzle for Hollywood, as expected hits like The Fall Guy, and Furioso have far underperformed their expectations. This isn’t a matter of a few films. Over the last few years, Hollywood is discovering that audiences are no longer reliably willing to buy tickets for the action adventure franchises that are the mainstay of the film industry. In particular, the once-dominant superhero genre is now fizzling. Adding to the troubles of Tinsel Town is the fact that streaming services, long touted as the future revenue model for the industry, are being squeezed by falling profits and rising interest rates.

Historian Daniel Bessner wrote a lengthy survey of Hollywood’s woes for the May issue of Harper’s Magazine. His account gives particular focus to political economy: the way government regulations and unions once made Hollywood a hospitable home for culture workers and how this has been undermined by the rise of private equity and monopolies. Daniel joins the podcast to talk about the movie industry and its discontents.

The movie award season is in full swing and this year’s crop of potential Oscar winners includes a healthy and diverse array of films, ranging from psychological studies like Tár to big blockbusters like Avatar: The Way of Water. 

I sat down with Adam Nayman, a film critic for The Ringer, about the Oscar list. We also discuss, at greater length, one particular nominee which we felt merited a long discussion: The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical account of his youth. Adam’s review of the movie can be found here. As Adam notes, the the movie is multi-layered and rewards a deeper examination. It’s a portrait of the artist as a youthful cinephile which also makes explicit the family break-up that would haunt Spielberg’s work. Surprisingly self-critical, the movie is not, as some have said, a victory lap. Rather, it delves into the psychological price paid by becoming an artist who uses creativity to hide from reality. It also tells the complex story of Jewish assimilation into an American mainstream aided and abetted by Hollywood.

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Host: Jeet Heer

Executive Producer: Ludwig Hurtado

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), was a hero of feminism, but a complicated and difficult hero. Her book and activism were pivotal for igniting second-wave feminism in the 1960s. But as head of NOW, her leadership was irascible and nettlesome, marred especially by her homophobic hostility towards lesbian activism.

In a recent review for The New Yorker looking at books about NOW and Friedan, Moira Donegan lays bare the contradictions of Friedan’s legacy, her world-changing importance but also the way she sabotaged both herself and the movement she did so much to create. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we talk about the lessons of Friedan’s life and how they remain urgent in current feminist struggles. Moira is a frequent guest of the podcast. She’s a columnist for The Guardian and also cohosts a podcast called In Bed With the Right.

While the arrest of former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business record can be welcomed as a rare example of accountability for the elite Americans, the actual case will have to be tested in court. My colleague Elie Mystal has written an important column cautioning against having high expectations. The fact is the case brought by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg is for one of Trump’s lesser offenses (compared to ongoing investigations over obstruction of justice, over attempted influencing of election officials, over incitement of the January 6 attempted coup, and over handling of classified documents, among other matters).

Further, this particular case against Trump has to clear some high legal hurdles. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to Elie about Trump’s legal status, why we should welcome the former president’s arrest, why we should be clear-eyed about how far the court case can go, and how MAGA Republicans are using this case to foment racism.

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