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.
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The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy that is a marked shift
not only from earlier administrations but also Trump’s first term in office. While the new policy
statement eschews the goal of global hegemony, it promotes culture war in Europe by
promising support of anti-immigration political parties, economic rivalry in Asia with China, and
a renewal of US military hegemony in the Western hemisphere. To survey this document and
Trump’s often contradictory foreign policy, I spoke to frequent guest of the show Stephen
Wertheim who is American Statecraft senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet 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 Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.