The GOP held their first presidential debate for the 2024 election cycle and the crowded stage was notable for a significant absence.

Former president Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen. Enjoying a commanding lead in the polls, Trump rightly felt that it was beneath his dignity to share a stage with a crew of also-rans. So the evening became a contest to see who could imitate Trump best. But Trump did remain in the news thanks to fresh new indictments in Georgia over his alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

To examine the debates and Trump’s domination of the GOP, fellow Nation writer Chris Lehmann joins the Time of Monsters podcast. He's written on these topics lately, and we had a robust discussion about a party in deep trouble.

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Christopher Nolen’s Oppenheimer, a biopic about the famed scientist who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb, is a surprise hit of the summer. It’s made more than $650 million worldwide, putting it ahead of more conventional blockbusters such as the newest entry into the Mission: Impossible franchise. 

Time of Monsters host Jeet Heer sat down with writers and editors at The Jewish Currents (Mari Cohen, David Klion, and Raphael Magarik) for a team-up of podcasts to talk about the movie. We discuss the way the movie portrays tensions within the Jewish community, its grappling with the history of the American left, its avoidance of direct portrayals of the effect of nuclear weapons, and its critique of the military-industrial complex.

During the discussion we touch on David Klion’s review of the movie which ran in The New Republic. 

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Barbie has smashed through the glass ceiling. Greta Gerwig’s new movie based on the popular Mattel doll is the big summer film of 2023. It’s made more than $1 billion –the first time that box office benchmark has been reached by a film directed by a woman. This popular success is all the more notable because the movie deals explicitly with feminist critiques of patriarchy. 

Barbie has generated an enormous public debate, but not everybody wholeheartedly loves the movie. I think the best piece of writing on the film was written by Tarpley Hitt for The Nation. Hitt, a writer and editor for The Drift who is working on a book about the Barbie doll, described the movie’s feminism as “muddled.” I sat down and talked to Tarpley for an enlightening discussion about this year's buzziest blockbuster.

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Disney has released a new documentary which myself and many others have criticized for regurgitating a mythical version of history that extolls Stan Lee as sole creator of the Marvel universe. 

To talk more about the documentary, I’m joined by Elana Levin, who has written widely on comics and hosts the Graphic Policy podcast– an excellent forum that takes up the intersection of politics and popular culture.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, beyond rebutting the documentary, Elana and I talk about the true history of Marvel, with particular emphasis on the contribution of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the artists who were also (at a minimum) co-writers of the stories credited to Lee. In the discussion, Elana recommends some excellent resources for more information including Abraham Josephine Riesman’s biography of Lee and Kate Willaert's fascinating tumblr page, Kirby Without Words.

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It’s no secret that the rich have an outsized role in Ivy League colleges, both as students and alumni. But a new study, by a group of Harvard-based economists, documents in detail just how much elite private education in the Untied States favor the ultra-wealthy. As the New York Times reports, “At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.” The rich enjoy disproportionate access to these schools due to a mixture of legacy admission, sports admissions for specialized sport programs (like fencing), and weight given to personal essays as well as letters of recommendation.

In a very real sense, elite private universities are a major pillar of plutocracy, allowing a narrow caste to hold on to social and political dominance that goes hand in hand with their economic wealth.

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project has written an excellent summary of the report. For this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked with Matt about the problem of inequality in higher education. We take up possible reform policies and also the possibility that these institutions might be inherently harmful to democracy. This leads to a discussion of possible measures to nationalize elite private schools and absorb them into a proper and robust public education system.

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There’s an old joke that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even an empire. The right-wing student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), founded in William F. Buckley’s house in 1960, is similarly misnamed. It’s not young; the current head, Scott Walker, is 55. It’s definition of American is very narrowly partisan and reactionary in ways that most Americans would reject. And as for freedom, it has a long history of aligning with administrators and government authorities to suppress its political foes– something I wrote about in a recent column. Most recently, YAF launched a vexatious lawsuit designed to cripple Dissent magazine and its affiliated podcast, Know Your Enemy.

To talk about YAF, I spoke with historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of the forthcoming book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. In that book, Lauren documents how groups like YAF groomed the ideological extremists who have taken the GOP into authoritarianism. In our talk, Lauren and I look at the group's ties to powerful plutocrats and politicians as well as their strategy of using legal power as a political tool. 

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Although only formed in 2021, Moms For Liberty, a group agitating for reactionary policies in schools, is already a major player in national politics. Republican presidential hopefuls like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are eager to speak at the group's convention. Moms for Liberty is also receiving generous profiles in major media outlets like the New York Times.

As my Nation colleague, Chris Lehmann notes in a recent column, such profiles tend to whitewash Moms for Liberty, falsely portraying it as a grassroots organization and ignoring its bigoted agenda and ties to the institutional right. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we talk about the true nature of Moms for Liberty as well as the way anti-trans agitation is remaking politics. In the discussion, we reference this earlier conversation I had with the historian Rick Perlstein about the deep roots of right-wing agitation over education.

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The Supreme Court ended its term last week with a spate of extremely right-wing decisions that included severely restricting affirmative action in elite universities and colleges, clawing back on anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQ citizens under an argument for expressive free speech, and squashing the Biden administrations plan to give relief to student debtors. These ruling come after earlier decisions curtailing labor rights and the end of a constitutional right to abortion. Taken together, the court has emerged as the powerful reactionary force in American society, one that is working overtime to roll back a century of expanding rights for workers, people of color, women, and LGBT citizens.

To survey the reactionary agenda of the court and the extremist social vision undergirding that agenda, I talked to Moira Donegan. She’s a frequent guest of the podcast and a columnist for the Guardian. She brings her characteristic incisiveness to analyzing the courts and warning of the dangers ahead.

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This week we return to Central and South America with Jeffrey Gould, a scholar and filmmaker who has a long history of documenting social movements in the region. Currently distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Gould is author of many books on social movements in Latin America, including the recent Solidarity Under Siege (2019). In this discussion we’re joined by journalist Doug Bell. This episode is a follow up to a previous conversation with Gould and Bell in February.

Gould has just returned from a trip to Chile and El Salvador. He discusses developments in those countries, including the difficulties the left in Chile is facing in its efforts to amend the constitution. While the Chilean left is meeting resistance, it is still much more robust than the left in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Gould discusses why once vibrant political movements in those countries have gone into abeyance. Among the themes of the discussion are the need for movements to be grounded in working class activism and also the problems issues like immigration and crime present to the left.

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The debate over the causes of inflation is heating up and showing an important divide in the discipline of economics. Mainstream economists like Larry Summers blame it on rising wages and recommend interest rate hikes to cool the economy by raising unemployment. But other scholars, notably Isabella Weber of the University of Massachusetts, have a different theory: they argue inflation is due to price gauging made possible by the Covid emergency and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Weber’s ideas, which are gaining traction, suggest the solution is price control.

The possibility that establishment economics is losing its dominance over policy is making some economists angry. There’s been a vicious backlash to Weber’s work. To talk about the inflation debate and other examples of heterodox thinking on the rise, as well as the circling-the-wagon approach of the discipline, I talked to Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, we range widely over the discipline of economics and the unseemly hissy fit of many leading practitioners. Marshall’s twitter account can be followed here. 

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