Podcast / The Time of Monsters / May 5, 2024

Biden Versus the Pro-Palestinian Protesters

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

A large crowd of NYPD officers in riot gear on the Columbia campus.

NYPD officers in riot gear march onto Columbia University campus, where pro-Palestinian students were barricaded inside a building and set up an encampment, on April 30, 2024.

(Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)

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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Noam Chomsky and the Fight Against Empire | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Daniel Bessner on a radical critic’s achievements and the limits of protest.

For nearly seven decades, Noam Chomsky has been the most important critic of American foreign policy. Daniel Besser, co-host of the Nation podcast American Prestige, recently reviewed for the magazine a new book authored by Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism. In his review, Daniel both extolled Chomsky’s monumental achievement and raised questions about the weakness of antiwar movements in challenging the terrible policies that Chomsky has so diligently analyzed.

Daniel and I talked about Chomsky’s legacy as well as the way the establishment has been able to success thwart popular resistance.

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Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

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