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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Tom Durkin and Joe Ferguson on FISA renewal.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Yousef Munayyer on a president at war with his base.

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.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Joe Howley on how Israel’s war in Gaza is coming to the home front.

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Writing in The Nation, David Klion recently reviewed Alexander Ward’s new book on Biden’s foreign policy, which offers a redemption arc whereby an administration wounded by the botched exit from Afghanistan made good by its handling of the Ukraine invasion.

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. 

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Daniel Bessner on Larry David.

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In the last few weeks, Hollywood has given us Drive-Away Dolls (directed by Ethan Coen, who also co-wrote it in collaboration with Tricia Cooke) and Live Lies Bleeding (directed by Rose Glass who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska). Although very different in tone, the two movies have some striking commonalities, both are set in the late 20th century and take familiar genres (the buddy road comedy, the erotic thriller) while featuring lesbian lead characters.

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.

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Donald Trump recently hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, praising the would be autocrat to the skies as “fantastic” and “a boss.” Of course Trump’s love of autocrats is nothing new. 

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.

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Steven D. Levitt, best known for co-writing the bestselling 2005 book Freakonomics, is retiring from the University of Chicago with a bang. On the Capitalism and Freedom podcast, Levitt gave a farewell interview where he detailed many internecine feuds in the discipline and examples of toxic abuse, with particular focus on his long-time colleague and nemesis James Heckman. 

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.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Jeet Heer on Dune: Part Two, the science fiction epic with real world echoes.

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The mathematician Chandler Davis, who died in 2002 at age 96, was one of the notable victims of the second Red Scare. In 1960, Davis was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party. Davis’s lawyers defended him with the innovative legal argument that the First Amendment barred such questioning. While Davis lost in the courts, his legal battles were still an important effort in a larger battle to extend the parameters on political speech. Davis’s story is told in a new book, The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis by Steve Batterson. Siobhan Robert’s obituary for Davis ran in The Nation.

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.  

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, a discussion with Adam Johnson on the Democrats' failed border policy.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Moira Donegan on Joe Biden’s need to embrace pro-choice politics.

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Gaza, under siege and bombardment from Israel, remains ground zero for violence in the Middle East, sending shock waves through the region. The Gaza onslaught is provoking a series of escalating wars with the United States and Israel on one side against Iran and its allies and proxies on the other. Fighting of various degrees of intensity has broken out in Yemen, the Red Sea, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria as well as the borders of Israel, among other places.

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.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American analyst who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. He offered an informed perspective on the ideological origins of the bear hug strategy and how it has manifestly failed in its stated goal of trying to restrain Israel from excessive violence. We also discuss the way Biden’s strategy is bad for American national interest and hurts Biden’s re-election chances. We also take up the repression of free speech as a result of the conflict.

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