The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Donald Trump claims he wants to be the peace president and has even lobbied for a Nobel 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 Statecraf...

On Friday, the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced the US was sending an aircraft carrier to bolster its attacks on Venezuelan boats (which the Trump administration alleges, without evidence, are trafficking drugs). I spoke to international relations scholar Van Jackson (whose work can be found  here ) about the motives for this new war as well as the muted opposition to it from...

The fragile ceasefire negotiated between Israel and Hamas hasn’t ended the violence, but it has 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 abou...

Few movies have ever been as timely as Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After 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...

Donald Trump has plunged the nation into another government shutdown. I spoke with my 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...

The United States continues to be roiled by political violence, with the recent shooting at an ICE 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 tho...

Bari Weiss, founder and editor of  The Free Press , has often been profiled in the media, but usually in a superficial way that focuses on her personality and disputes with fellow journalists. She is currently on the cusp of great power, reportedly working on a deal to sell The Free Press and take a senior position at CBS. David Klion,  Nation  columnist and frequent guest on the podcast, has writ...

Matt Duss, vice-president of the Center for International Policy, wrote an excellent review for The Nation of Bob Woodward’s book War , which is a celebration of Joe Biden as a foreign policy sage. Duss is rightly skeptical of the book. We discuss Biden’s actual record on Ukraine and especially Gaza. Matt’s essay on this topic for Foreign Policy is also worth reading. Advertising Inquiries: https:...

On August 27, journalist Taylor Lorenz reported for Wired on a dark-money project funded by 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...

The Iran-Israel conflict in June was terrifying but brief: it lasted 12 days. But that war is not 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-r...

In April, the Liberal Party of Canada, under the leadership of Mark Carney, won an election that heartened opponents of the right-wing. Carney had run on the promise of fighting Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada and also to bolster the Canadian state to deal with issues like affordable housing. But in office, Carney has been delivering something different than his rhetoric suggested: he has b...

Almost everyone who is on line or even has a cell phone has encountered a familiar and 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 hi...

Writing in The New Republic , Greg Sargent called attention to Zohran Mamdani’s highly 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...

Since 2015, Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the American foreign policy establishment 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...

Tech lords such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the richest humans who have ever 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 Bill...

Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been as unstable as the man himself, shifting quickly from 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 h...

Writing in The Nation , Pamela Alma Weymouth drew a contrast between Kay Graham, her late 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 an...

Over the last decade, centrist Democrats have diligent courted Never Trump Republicans, hoping that this cohort could help create a new consensus politics to oppose the MAGA coalition. From the start, this strategy seemed flawed: after all, this faction is very small and also carries a lot of baggage. In particular, neo-conservatives such as William Kristol and David Frum, now Never Trump stalwart...

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported that Elon Musk, currently trying to mend a feud with his quondam political ally Donald Trump, is a heavy user of mind alternating substances ranging from Ketamine to LSD to mushrooms to cocaine. While this story has been treated as one about the foibles of one increasingly erratic powerful man, it has wider implications. The financi...

Michael Ledeen, who died on May 17 at age 83, was a prominent figure on the American right since the 1970s. He is most famous, or notorious, as one of the instigators of the Iran/Contra scandal, helping to connect the Reagan administration with an Iranian arms dealer. Beyond that, he was active not just as a writer but also as an activists who often promoted disinformation, most notably the lie ab...

The late David Horowitz, who died in April at age 86, was often dismissed as a fringe figure not just by liberals and leftists but even many on the right. Horowitz would often complain that his books — crude polemics with titles such as BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020) and The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America (2021) — were ignored by respectable conser...

On his latest trip to the Middle East, Donald Trump is making big news. He’s indicating a receptiveness to making a deal with Iran trading normalization for nuclear non-proliferation. He ended the bombing campaign against Yemen and is also pushing for normalization with Syria. Further, the White House has sidestepped Israel in order to have direct talks with Hamas. These moves have angered some ha...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jacob Silverman on why it’s hard to regulate the high tech ponzi economics. 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....

Silicon Valley has moved to the right in the last few years, with Elon Musk being the public face of a larger trend of tech lords aligning themselves with Trumpism. We now have a window into just how reactionary Silicon Valley has become  thanks to reporting  about private group chats where the tech elite gather to complain about wokeness and celebrate Donald Trump’s plutocrat-friendly policies. M...

Donald Trump’s tariff war is usually framed in terms of how it would impact consumers and America’s relationship with other countries, but it is also part of a larger project to remake taxation policy. Trump is very explicit that he wants tariffs to replace personal and corporate taxes with tariffs as the main source of revenue. As such, tariffs are a sales tax, of a particularly regressive sort. ...