The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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...

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...

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 thwa...

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...

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 explai...

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...

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 Lin...