Joe Biden has become increasingly frank and forthright in in his criticism of Donald Trump. In late August, Biden told Democratic party donors that “extreme MAGA philosophy” 

“It’s not just Trump,” Biden said. “It’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.” Subsequently, Biden delivered an important and substantial speech in Philadelphia where he avoided the word fascism but detailed the way MAGA Republicans were a threat to American democracy.

Biden’s remarks and his speech have elicited a considerable pushback from the mainstream media, with the president being accused of being inflammatory and partisan. 

New Republic staff writer Matt Ford has written an strong defense of Biden’s deployment of the term semi-fascism. I talked with Matt about his article and about the ways in which fascism does (and doesn’t) describe Trumpism.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

Richard Seymour joins the Time of Monsters podcast for a live conversation in London, to discuss climate change and economic crisis in the United Kingdom.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

The victory of Gustavo Petro in the recent Colombian presidential election is further proof that Latin America is being swept in a new “pink tide,” one that has the potential to be larger and more far-reaching in its impact than the original wave of left-of-center governments that took power in the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from Colombia, there are now left-of-center governments, including some openly socialist ones, in power in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. Depending on the results of an upcoming election in Brazil, nearly 80 percent of Latin America could soon be governed by parties of the left.

To survey the prospects for the left in the region, I sat down with journalist Doug Bell to interview Jeremy Adelman, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. He is also the Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton. We talked about the history of the first pink tide, its achievements and failures, the right-wing reaction to it, and the current renewal of socialism in the region. The talk also takes up the exciting constitutional innovations being debated in the region as well as the difficult balance between a development strategy that relies on resource extraction and the urgent need for climate policy. Another important question is whether the United States will, as in the past, attempt to thwart a push for economic independence. 

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe. 

Credits:

Ludwig Hurtado, Executive Producer

Jeet Heer, Host

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 supermajority of Republican appointed justices, is on a rampage. On Friday, they extinguished the constitutional right to reproductive freedom. Then on Monday, they eased restrictions on teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at public schools. 

In his majority statement in the Dobbs case which ended abortion rights, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made a curiously two faced statement about future rights: he said that he thought previous court rulings on birth control, marriage equality, and gay rights broadly were badly decided. But he also offered assurances that they would not be touched since they were less serious than abortion.

Should Alito be trusted? The fact that conservative justices previously made misleading statements about respecting precedent on abortion suggests not.

This week I talk to Linda Hirshman, who I often describe as the Cassandra of the American left because she has been warning of this moment for decades. Linda is an astute analyst of conservative judicial extremism, whose work can be found here. We talk about where the court is going next and also radical (but also perfectly doable) actions the Democrats can take to stop the evisceration of basic constitutional rights. 

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

Credits;

Jeet Heer, Host

Ludwig Hurtado, Executive Producer

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 has been covering the hearings, has written compelling arguments about how the hearings both point to the dangers to American democracy and offer some solutions for preventing future coup attempts. 

I talked with Greg about what we’ve learned from the Hearings and the implications they have for the future. 

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe. 

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 for New York Magazine that opened up this debate by situating it within Feinstein’s life trajectory and the story of the cohort she belongs to: a generation of septuagenarians and octogenarians who now hold the commanding heights of power in America.

This week, I learned a lot in a spirited talk with Traister, in which we took up Feinstein as an emblem of the ruling class, the years of turmoil in San Francisco that accompanied her rise to power, the way the political system values seniority, and the reasons why the gerontocracy is so committed to a politics of elite civility.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 thwart a brutal violation of international norms with the equally urgent necessity of bringing an end to the conflict. Many on the left remain divided on the right balance to seek. 

Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote an analysis of why Ukraine matters to the left for The New Republic. I talked to him about the state of the war and the prospects for peace.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe. 

Credits:

Hosted by Jeet Heer

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Edited by Sophie Hurwitz

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 story in the newsletter The Present Age, joins this week's episode of the Time of Monsters podcast to talk about not just this fabrication but the wider problem of sorting fact from fiction in a news story. We also take up the issue of police dishonesty, as displayed in shifting stories and the too credulous acceptance of other social media reports.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe. 

Credits:

Hosted by Jeet Heer

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Production Assistance by Sophie Hurwitz

Original Music by Micah Wittman

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 explain why Decter was important. To get at her true story, I spoke with Ronnie Grinberg, assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. In her forthcoming book, Write Like a Man: The New York Intellectuals and Jewish Masculinity, Grinberg places Decter in the larger history of social conservatism, showing how Decter was formed by the revisionist Freudianism of the mid-20th century, which she later recast in her stinging critiques of feminism and gay rights. This social conservatism went hand in hand with militarism, as Decter connected traditional gender norms with a militant foreign policy.

This illuminating discussion with Grinberg helped clarify not just Decter’s life but the triumph of social conservatism in the Republican Party. 

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

 

Credits:

Edited by Sophie Hurwitz

Executive Produced by Ludwig Hurtado

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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

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 show on Fox News.

Glenn Greenwald, a contrarian writer on Substack, rushed to Carlson’s defense in a lengthy post. First noting, correctly, that shooters have many different ideologies, Greenwald goes on to downplay Carlson’s well-documented history of racism. According to Greenwald, “Carlson believes … that the proper citizenry of the United States is multi-racial and that Black Americans and Latin Americans and Asian-Americans are every bit as much U.S. citizens, with all of the same claims to rights and protections, as every other American citizen.”

Is Tucker Carlson really as enlightened as Greenwald believes? To take this up, I spoke with Eoin Higgins of The Flashpoint newsletter, who has written multiple times about Greenwald’s habit of acting as Carlson’s pro bono mouthpiece.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe. 

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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