the US and Israel becomes more salient. I spoke with Middle East expert Yousef

Munayyer on the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose interest

in a securing his country’s hegemony in the region is now in conflict with efforts to end

the war.

East and the wider world. It could easily lead to a Global Depression. Even before the

war, Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute noted that countries such as Qatar and

Saudi Arabia had good reason to wean themselves away from a close reliance on the

US. I talked to Annelle about the current state of the war and why it will only intensify

the alienation of traditional US allies.

with a weekly column tracking the progress of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. I spoke to Don

about how Mamdani is balancing pragmatism and principles as he deals with policing,

Donald Trump and a tough budget.

even by critics. As it turns into a regional conflict that has embroiled more than a dozen

nations, are there any possible ways Donald Trump can be forced to pull back. I spoke

with international affairs scholar Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center about the war

and paths to peace.

stupid and illegal. It is also wildly unpopular with the public. But he also observes that

congress has been reluctant to challenge Trump’s policy, although some progressives

have now forced the issue to a vote. Matt is a frequent guest of the show and foreign

policy expert. I talked to him about the dangers of a new war and also the larger

systematic problems of the imperial presidency.

administration’s use of anti-terrorism law to target political groups it doesn’t like.

In that piece, Kovensky notes,

"Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine

prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his

political enemies.

It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the

federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have

largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting

damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays."

I spoke to Kovensky about his essay and the history and politics of this dangerous legal

innovation.

promises to do a reprise of his quick attack on Venezuela that ended with the

kidnapping of president Nicolás Maduro. Trump claims that “like with

Venezuela, it is, ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission.” But will a

war with Iran really be so simple? To look at the prospects for war and the

larger politics driving the conflict, I spoke with Amir Handjani of The Quincy

Institute.

where he candidly acknowledged that the US led alliance system created in World War II was

coming to an end. Carney called for middle powers such as Canada and its European allies to

give up the illusion that a US led world is still viable and instead try to create new institutions to

preserve their values and their sovereignty. I talked to Canadian journalist Stephen Maher, who

has written a biography of Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau, about the far-reaching

implications of this speech.

has faced waves of protests from citizens demanding a more democratic society. Over the past

two weeks, these protests have erupted with a new ferocity and are being met with violent

repression. Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pushing the United States to renew bombing

Iran, a military objective now being given the guise of a humanitarian mission. To discuss the

turmoil in Iran and place it in the larger context of regional instability and competing visions of

the future of the Middle East, I spoke with Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at The Quincy

Institute who studies the region.

age 95. His legacy is a complex one, since in recent decades neoconservatism has been

supplanted in many ways by American First conservatism. But many aspects of Podhoretz’s

influence still play a shaping role on right. I take up Podhoretz’s career with David Klion (who

wrote an obituary for the pundit for The Nation) and the historian Ronnie Grinberg, who had

discussed Podhoretz in her book Write Like a Man.

not only from earlier administrations but also Trump’s first term in office. While the new policy

statement eschews the goal of global hegemony, it promotes culture war in Europe by

promising support of anti-immigration political parties, economic rivalry in Asia with China, and

a renewal of US military hegemony in the Western hemisphere. To survey this document and

Trump’s often contradictory foreign policy, I spoke to frequent guest of the show Stephen

Wertheim, who is American Statecraft senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace.

tide of right-wing anti-system parties (often styled as populists). But recent polls in France,

Germany and the United Kingdom show that that the far right is once again gaining traction,

thanks in no small part centrist governments that have demoralized the population and

legitimized xenophobia. David Broder, author of Mussolini's Grandchildren and European editor

of Jacobin, wrote a wide-ranging essay on this for The New York Times. I spoke to David about

both the dismal decisions of mainstream parties and also possible alternatives.

scandal. He’s had to take a leave from Harvard, where he teaches, because of embarrassing

emails he had with his late friend Jeffrey Epstein.

I talked to economic journalist and Nation contributor Doug Henwood, a long-time Summers

watcher, about the career of this controversial and influential figure. Summers has been one of

the most influential policy makers of his era, serving as Treasury Secretary and President of

Harvard. He has also embodied the major intellectual and political limitations of the ruling class.

in 2019, has never gone away. It continues to explode now that House Democrats have

released thousands of emails from Epstein and his cronies. But while the political class and

mainstream media are understandably focused on the sex scandal, another dimension of the

scandal goes uncovered except by independent media outlets such as Drop Site: Epstein’s deep

ties to the national security state. I talked to international relations scholar Van Jackson about

this crucial part of the story.

same is true of the right. Tucker Carlson’s interview with the antisemitic critic of Israel Nick

Fuentes has created an intense debate on the right about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism,

currently playing itself out in turmoil at the Heritage Foundation. I spoke with the historian

David Austin Walsh, whose book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far

Right provides a crucial background for this story.

Peace Prize. But his foreign policy has been wildly contradictory. While the United States is

clearly retrenching from many parts of the world, violence against hemispheric neighbors is

increasing. I talked to Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy

Institute for Responsible Statecraft, for a wide-ranging discussion on why American hegemony

is declining but also why the push for retrenchment hasn’t gone far enough.

for now lessened it. But even if the ceasefire holds, the need for a political solution to

Palestinian dispossession remains. To discuss the issue of accountability, I spoke to Yousef

Munayyer, who is the head of the Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at Arab Center

Washington DC. We talked about how the shocking events of the last two years have shifted

global public opinion, including in the United States. Both parties are heading towards a long-

delayed debate about the value of the US/Israel relation.

Another, which traces the battle between revolutionary resistance groups trying to protect

immigrants and an authoritarian government run by racists. There are scenes from the movie

that feel like they are being played out right now on the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and

Portland. Although it presents a stylized version of reality, the film raises important questions

about different strategies of resistance. David Klion, a frequent guest, wrote about the movie

for The New Republic. David and I talked about the film, its roots in actual history but also

variance with that history as well as its relationship with the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland.

Nation colleague Chris Lehmann about the larger political stakes. We take up Trump’s shifting

rhetoric, which has started with false and racist claims about undocumented immigrants

receiving benefits and now seems to be about gloating over austerity. We also take up the

Democratic party response, and the way the base of the party has forced the leadership to take

a stronger stance. Chris’ article on the shutdown can be found here.

facility in Dallas coming hot on the heels of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and a school

shooting in Colorado committed by a neo-Nazi. Some of the best reporting on these events has

been done by Ken Klippenstein for his Substack. I spoke with Ken about what he’s discovered

when he interviewed those who knew the alleged shooters, how his findings go against the

simplistic partisan interpretations offered by both the left and right, as well as the dangerous

ways the Trump administration is using the shootings for a crackdown on civil liberties.

David Klion, Nation columnist and frequent guest on the podcast, has written an exceptionally trenchant analysis for The Guardian of Weiss’s politics and the way they align with the Trump administration’s war on critical voices. I was pleased to talk to David about Weiss’s career and how she has used her influence as an ideological enforcer, one that has the support of many wealthy patrons and powerful political allies.

especially Gaza. Matt’s essay on this topic for Foreign Policy is also worth reading.

anonymous Democratic Party donors to shape social media. Her article documented that,

"In a private group chat in June, dozens of Democratic political influencers discussed whether to

take advantage of an enticing opportunity. They were being offered $8,000 per month to take

part in a secretive program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet.

But the contract sent to them from Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal influencer marketing

platform, came with some strings. Among other issues, it mandated extensive secrecy about

disclosing their payments and had restrictions on what sort of political content the creators

could produce."

I talked to Taylor about her article and the considerable backlash it provoked from the people

she wrote about. We also discussed why Republicans have done so well on social media and

why this latest effort is both morally dubious and ineffective.

over. Trita Parsi, vice president and cofounder of the Quincy Institute, has been warning that

both the United States and Israel are planning for another round, with their European allies

providing the groundwork. I spoke to Parsi about the likelihood of war, the rationale behind the

current sabre-rattling, and ways to stop the impending catastrophe.

perplexing nuisance: an email or text with a job offer to make lots of money while working from

home. These messages seem like obvious scams but how do they work? Alexander Sammon, a

feature writer for Slate, conducted a personal experiment to find out by taking one of the jobs

he was offered. The result is a hilarious article detailing not just what it’s like to be ripped off

but also illuminating the new grift economy that flourishes in the internet age as Donald Trump

pursues his agenda of deregulation and the promotion of crypto currency. I had enormous fun

both reading Alex’s article (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and talking to him about

his strange experiences.

effective media strategy which has allowed him to reach many voters that have been drifting

away from the Democratic Party, especially young people and immigrants. In punchy, short

videos, Mamdani has offered an optimistic message that celebrates big city life and diversity

while showing how government policies can help make life better. I talked to Greg about the lessons

of the Mamdani campaign. We also talk about strategies for investigating the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,

a subject he wrote about here.

for being too belligerent and unwilling to negotiate with adversaries. But in office, Trump has

carried out a foreign policy that has all the vices he has criticized and been even more inclined

to risk war or get into new wars. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Stephen Wertheim,

a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, has written an incisive critique of Donald Trump’s foreign policy

incoherence emphasizing how the president’s ad hoc response to problems and his excessive

faith in his own deal making ability prevents any systematic change from the status quo.

Stephen and I have a wide-ranging discussion on the over-stretched American empire and why

Trump is just making things worse.

lived and have an enormous sway over the American political system but even that isn’t enough

for them. They also want a compliant media, one that echoes their ideas, doesn’t investigate

their business practices, and goes after their enemy. This is the subject of a new book by Eoin

Higgins: Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I

talked to Eoin about two of the major figures in this story, Peter Thiel, a plutocrat who is eager

to abandon the human species and Matt Taibbi, a onetime anti-establishment voice who now

has become a standard reactionary.

pushes for restraint to escalating wars in the Middle East. This volatility is a function not just of

Trump’s personality but the contradictions and competing factions that are gathered under the

term America First, as well as the continued power of the foreign policy establishment that

Trump has claimed he defeated but which maintains a strong capacity to shape policy. To talk

about Trump’s foreign policy and the factional battles that have bedevilled his administration, I

spoke to Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. 

In particular we take up the attacks on Elbridge Colby, the under-secretary of defense for

policy. Colby was the subject of a Politico hatchet job which claimed he was running a rogue

foreign policy. Justin critiqued this analysis here.

grandmother who was publisher of The Washington Post when it fought Richard Nixon’s

administration on The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, with the current owner of the

newspaper, Jeff Bezos. Unlike Graham, Bezos has been all too willing to bend the knee to a

corrupt president. I talked to Pamela about Bezos and other contemporary corporate leaders

who are undermining journalistic integrity at a moment when it is needed more than ever.

Have this Never Trump conservatives learned from history? Alas, as my colleague David Klion points out in a recent column, many of them haven’t. Kristol and Frum are now cheerleading the attack on Iran (although to be fair their former ally Robert Kagan is more skeptical). I talked to David about the neocons and why they remain a pernicious force in American politics even if they vote against Trump. 

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked about Ledeen’s controversial life with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a fine study of neoconservatism, They Knew They Were Right.

I talked to David about Horowitz’s long shadow and tumultuous journey from being a red-diaper baby to a New Left radical to an right-wing polemicist who tried to revive the very McCarthism that damaged his parent’s life. Horowitz left a terrible legacy but was also a figure whose impact can’t be ignored.

Over the last few years, crypto-currency has emerged as a political powerhouse, thanks to tens of billions in campaign donations. As Jacob Silverman reports in a recent feature in The Nation, “crypto, despite being a relative flop commercially, has infiltrated American politics.” This is most bluntly obvious in Donald Trump, who has become a crypto king in corrupt schemes that have enriched him and his family in billions of dollars. But almost as corrupt are the members of congress, of both parties, reluctant to regulate crypto. I talked to Jacob about the dangers crypto poses to the American economy and to American democracy. 

My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about these group chats in a recent column. He joins the podcast to explain exactly why these wealthy leaders are becoming open supporters of autocracy.

To talk about the quick revolution in Canadian politics I spoke to Luke Savage, a widely published journalist and substracker. We take up not just Canada’s likely rejection of Trumpism but also the question of whether Carney’s technocratic centrism really offers an alternative. If there is to be a new Canadian nationalism, will it have more substance than Carney offers?

To take up the actual scandal of the war, I spoke with Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. We also discuss the actual contents of the group chat which real important fissures within Trump’s foreign policy team between neo-conservatives who favor fighting as many wars as possible and unilateralists who insist there has to be a prioritizing of conflicts. This fissure opens the path to a much different foreign policy, one that the left can play a role in shaping.

Daniel and I talked about Chomsky’s legacy as well as the way the establishment has been able to success thwart popular resistance.

This shift has frightened many American allies, particularly the NATO countries and Mexico. Yet mixed with Trump’s advocacy of a new manifest destiny have been welcome indications his administration will be more open to negotiating with Russia, Iran and perhaps even China.

To make sense Trump’s conflicting foreign policy messages and actions, I was happy to talk to Stephen Wertheim, who shares my belief that we need to distinguish between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions. 

Chris and I talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkable supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.'

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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, 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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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.

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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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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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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

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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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. 

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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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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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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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

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

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

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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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

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 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.

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

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

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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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.

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

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

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

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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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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