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 hilarious article detailing not just what it’s like to be ripped off

but also illuminating the new grift economy that flourishes in the internet age as Donald Trump

pursues his agenda of deregulation and the promotion of crypto currency. I had enormous fun

both reading Alex’s article (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and talking to him about

his strange experiences.

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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 can help make life better. I talked to Greg about the lessons

of the Mamdani campaign. We also talk about strategies for investigating the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,

a subject he wrote about here.

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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 the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, has written an incisive critique of Donald Trump’s foreign policy

incoherence emphasizing how the president’s ad hoc response to problems and his excessive

faith in his own deal making ability prevents any systematic change from the status quo.

Stephen and I have a wide-ranging discussion on the over-stretched American empire and why

Trump is just making things worse.

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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 Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I

talked to Eoin about two of the major figures in this story, Peter Thiel, a plutocrat who is eager

to abandon the human species and Matt Taibbi, a onetime anti-establishment voice who now

has become a standard reactionary.

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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 he defeated but which maintains a strong capacity to shape policy. To talk

about Trump’s foreign policy and the factional battles that have bedevilled his administration, I

spoke to Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. 

In particular we take up the attacks on Elbridge Colby, the under-secretary of defense for

policy. Colby was the subject of a Politico hatchet job which claimed he was running a rogue

foreign policy. Justin critiqued this analysis here.

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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 and other contemporary corporate leaders

who are undermining journalistic integrity at a moment when it is needed more than ever.

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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 stalwarts, were responsible for two of the biggest foreign policy disasters in American history, George W. Bush’s War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Have this Never Trump conservatives learned from history? Alas, as my colleague David Klion points out in a recent column, many of them haven’t. Kristol and Frum are now cheerleading the attack on Iran (although to be fair their former ally Robert Kagan is more skeptical). I talked to David about the neocons and why they remain a pernicious force in American politics even if they vote against Trump. 

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Donald Trump has betrayed his promise to be a pro-peace president. Prodded by Washington hawks and the Israeli government, he has green-lit Israel’s attack on Iran, which the Untied States might soon join directly. A new Middle Eastern war would be a catastrophe. In order to stop it, Democrats will need to recover the anti-war politics that they adopted in opposition to George W. Bush’s Iraq War. I spoke with Matt Duss, vice-president of the Center for International Policy on how popular mobilization can push both Democrats and Republicans in congress to stand up to Trump’s war. Matt recently wrote on this topic for Foreign policy. 

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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 financial journalist Jacob Silverman, author of an upcoming book about Musk, notes that there is a wider drug culture in Silicon Valley, rooted in the supposed performative enhancing power of drugs as well as an ideological commitment to elitism, accelerationism and technological transcendence. I took up these matters in a recent column and Jacob helps flesh out this story.

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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 about the “weapons of mass destruction” the was used to sell George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked about Ledeen’s controversial life with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a fine study of neoconservatism, They Knew They Were Right.

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