The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

CNN is reporting that the CIA has been actively engaged in assassination campaigns in Mexico targeting alleged members of drug cartels. While both the CIA and the Mexican government have denied these allegations, there is clear evidence of an escalating war in the country that destabilize the government. I spoke with Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University, about the CIA’s activities in the context of the Trump administration’s wider assertion of imperial dominance over the Western hemisphere.

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The late Jeffrey Epstein was friends with all sorts of elite figures in the US and many other countries. This extensive network is now sometimes described as “the Epstein class.” The question is, was this class held together merely by the opportunistic trading of favors or did it have a coherent worldview and agenda?
Branko Marcetic has written a series of articles in Jacobin that clarify this issue by looking at relationships Epstein had with the billionaire Peter Thiel and the political operative Steve Bannon. 

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The conflict in the Middle East is currently in an intermittent holding action with an extended ceasefire but no diplomatic breakthrough. To assess where things are going, I sat down with the foreign policy analyst Anusar Farooqui, who runs an excellent substack called Policy Tensor and posts on Twitter here. We discussed the resiliency and growing stature of Iran, as well as the signs that unipolar US hegemony is coming to an end, to be replaced by a multipolar world. 

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As negotiations proceed in ending the Iran War, the question of the relationship between
the US and Israel becomes more salient. I spoke with Middle East expert Yousef
Munayyer on the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose interest
in a securing his country’s hegemony in the region is now in conflict with efforts to end
the war.

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As millions of Americans protest Donald Trump under the slogan of “No Kings,” it is worth asking how the nation ended up with such an authoritarian president. David Sirota and the team at the Lever have provided a great answer to this question in their new podcast series Master Plan: The Kingmakers, which looks at the revival of the Imperial Presidency after the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. I talked to David about the history uncovered in this podcast and why Trump is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem.

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