The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.