Biden Versus the Pro-Palestinian Protesters
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Yousef Munayyer on a president at war with his base.

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.

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
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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