The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Nov 03 2024 96 ep. 40 mins 140
The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer Podcast artwork

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

Nov 03 2024 31 mins  
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 pursu

The Making of Donald Trump w/ David Klion

Oct 27 2024 42 mins  
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 Trum

Trump’s Bobbing and Dancing Disaster

Oct 20 2024 35 mins  
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 sele

Francis Ford Coppola’s Contentious Utopia w/ Kate Wagner

Oct 13 2024 51 mins  
More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether yo

Expanding Wars With a Lame Duck President w/ Matt Duss

Oct 06 2024 26 mins  
The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the conflict and also the prospect for

Israel’s Expanding War Against Lebanon w/ Trita Parsi

Sep 22 2024 25 mins  
Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises

The Plutocratic Threat to Democracy w/ David Sirota

Sep 15 2024 39 mins  
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

How Kamala Harris Can Use the Debate to Win Big

Sep 07 2024 36 mins  
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 analy

Why Biden Continues Supporting Israel’s Onslaught in Gaza

Jul 07 2024 25 mins  
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

The Real Problem With Joe Biden’s Bad Debate

Jul 01 2024 47 mins  
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 dis