The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.

  1. Project 2025 For Real w/ Chris Lehmann

    FEB 1

    Project 2025 For Real w/ Chris Lehmann

    Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column. 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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    37 min
  2. The Paranoid Style of David Samuels

    JAN 4

    The Paranoid Style of David Samuels

    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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    46 min

  3. 12/08/2024

    Matthew Yglesias and the Problems of Popularism

    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.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    1h 6m

  4. 12/01/2024

    Factchecking Won’t Save Democracy

    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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    38 min

  5. 11/24/2024

    Don’t Believe the Election Myths

    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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    43 min

  6. 11/03/2024

    The Dangers of Trump’s Cynical Anti-War Message w/ Matt Duss

    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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    32 min

  7. 10/27/2024

    The Making of Donald Trump w/ David Klion

    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. --- 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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    42 min

  8. 10/20/2024

    Trump’s Bobbing and Dancing Disaster

    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. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    36 min
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4.3
out of 5
29 Ratings

About

The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.

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