Start Making Sense

Recorded Monday, January 15, 2024:Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior foreign affairs reporter at HuffPost, returns to the American Prestige podcast to discuss his recent pieces covering the post-Gaza plans of top White House official Brett McGurk and the imminent departure of the White House’s special Middle East envoy on humanitarian issues.Then, for American Prestige subscribers, the group gets into the NSC’s attempts to discredit Akbar’s reporting, the media backlash, how this compares to treatment of reporters under Trump, and more.Subscribe to American Prestige for the full interview!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of American Prestige, Danny and Derek come off the hottest year on record with the new year’s cold, hard facts. This week, South Africa brings a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (2:39) while Antony Blinken tours the region (8:48); Iraqi PM Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani is looking to request the withdrawal of U.S. forces (19:09); the Israel-Hizbollah border battles continue to escalate (22:23); the U.S. and U.K. launch strikes on Yemen (25:31); rebels in Myanmar take the border city of Laukkaing (28:49); Ethiopia looks to make a deal with the unrecognized state of Somaliland (33:56); Ukraine is running out of air defenses and shifting to a defensive posture (37:12); armed battles and chaos break out in Ecuador (40:23); 2023 was indeed the hottest year on record (43:55). Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, Paris Marx is joined by Vincent Bevins to discuss the mass protests of the 2010s, the role that social and traditional media played in them, and why the horizontalism of those movements ultimately didn’t work.Vincent Bevins is a longtime foreign correspondent who has worked for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and LA Times. He’s the author of The Jakarta Method and If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Israel's war in Gaza has been going on now for three months, and the IDF said over the weekend they plan to keep the war going for another year. Amy Wilentz talks about Netanhayu’s use of the war to hold on to power.Also: the lies that protect profit, power and wealth in America: they are documented, and dealt with, in a wonderful new book co-authored by Joan Walsh. It's called Corporate Bullsh*t.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of American Prestige, an exploration of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s joint pursuit of war in Southeast Asia during the '60s and '70s.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hope is different from optimism – it’s an embrace of uncertainty, and a basis for action. The polls look bad for Joe Biden, but Democrats’ chances are much brighter in the House, and perhaps the Senate. John Nichols talks about reasons for hope in 2024, starting in the tipping point state of 2020, Wisconsin.Also: Bill Gates is now the 6th richest man in the world, with 104 billion dollars. He’s spent the last 20 years giving away some of his money--the Gates Foundation gave away $7 billion in 2022. But with the money comes a host of problems. Tim Schwab will explain; his new book has a great title: “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Our holiday giving list: Katha Pollitt presents her list of groups that need—and deserve—our support: Gaza aid, abortion assistance, and organizing against Trump.Also: Bob Dylan fans have been puzzled and troubled by his Christmas album ever since he released it in 2009. To help figure out what Dylan was doing, we turned to Sean Wilentz. He’s the official historian at BobDylan.com, and he also teaches history at Princeton.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Why have American feminist groups been slow to condemn rapes of Israeli women and girls by Hamas? that’s the question posed by Katha Pollitt, The Nation's award-winning columnist.Also: They call it “the parents’ rights movement.” we call it a culture war against public education. It failed as a Republican election strategy in 2023, but what about 2024? Randi Weingarten has our analysis – she’s president of the AFT.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Joe Biden has historic achievements as president, but polls show him to be the candidate least able to defeat Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Democrats need someone else to run and an open primary. Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect, and he joins the show to make the case for Biden to not run again.Also on this episode: What conditions are needed for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank? David Myers – professor of Jewish history at UCLA and contributor to the LA Times, the Forward, and the Atlantic – is on the podcast to comment on what it would take to get to Palestinian self-determination.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talked to Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American analyst who heads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. He offered an informed perspective on the ideological origins of the bear hug strategy and how it has manifestly failed in its stated goal of trying to restrain Israel from excessive violence. We also discuss the way Biden’s strategy is bad for American national interest and hurts Biden’s re-election chances. We also take up the repression of free speech as a result of the conflict.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, spent Thanksgiving weekend in Israel; she reports on meetings with shared society groups and peace movement leaders, and on the role of the US in bringing not just peace but equality and justice to Palestinians.Also: Who was Bayard Rustin before the 1963 March on Washington? Gary Younge comments on the remarkable life of a gay Black pacifist and former communist, the subject of a new biopic on Netflix, ‘Rustin.’ Gary wrote “The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Matt Duss and Jeet Heer on moving on beyond war.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In Part 6 of our series, Basketball Butterfly Effect, Arya Shirazi joins the show again to discuss the 2009 NBA draft and the Knicks coming close to getting Davidson sharpshooter Steph Curry, the most revolutionary player of his generation. You don’t want to miss this episode!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

People with very different visions of what a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians might look like must work together to stop the war: That’s what D.D. Guttenplan argues.  He’s Editor of The Nation.Also:Also: “Slow Horses,” the British spy series based on the books by Mick Herron, is starting its season 3 this week.  John Powers has our review.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What comes after Israel’s war on Hamas? The Israeli government seems incapable of thinking about that. Now, the ideas of Israel’s left-wing, pro-peace camp are needed more than ever. Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist based in Tel Aviv, is on the podcast to explain.Also on this episode of Start Making Sense: “California has always been a place to write home about.” David Kipen reads letters and diary entries from Charles Mingus, Vita Sackville-West, Marilyn Monroe, Susan Sontag, Thomas Pynchon, and Mike Davis – David’s new book is Dear California: The Golden State in Letters and Diaries.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On Wednesday, Alex Sammon reported in Slate that “one of the biggest, bitterest, and most expensive political battles of the 2024 election cycle has emerged: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], one of the most powerful, best-funded influence operations in Washington, is planning to go all out to knock the famed “Squad”—the small group of highly visible and popular progressive legislators of color, most of them women—out of office.”AIPAC is planning on spending more than $100 million to push the Democratic party to the right. Given AIPAC’s successful track record, this is a genuine threat. For this episode of the podcast, Alex and I sat down to talk about this development, the way the current Israel-Palestine conflict is sending political shockwaves in America, and the Democratic party’s selective defense of incumbents. We also discuss the fact that Israel’s war is increasingly unpopular and facing mass opposition— a fact that could undermine AIPAC’s agenda.Advertising Inquiries: https://redc

For this week’s Start Making Sense podcast we have two archival segments about Palestinians; neither is about the current war. In 2016, Rachel Kushner visited Shuafat, the only Palestinian refugee camp inside Jerusalem. She went alongside a community organizer as he tried to solve massive problems. Her report, published originally in the New York Times Magazine, appears in her 2021 book of nonfiction, The Hard Crowd.Also on this episode, Adam Shatz talks about Edward Said, the leading voice of Palestinians in the US before he died in 2003. Said was also The Nation’s classical music critic, and Adam Shatz, now an editor for the London Review of Books, was The Nation‘s literary editor. His work included editing Edward Said’s pieces for the magazine.(This show was first broadcast in May, 2021)Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of the Edge of Sports podcast, it's Part 5 of our series, Basketball Butterfly Effect, Arya Shirazi joins the show again to discuss the 1993 NBA draft and a crucial trade that takes place that changes the course of 90s basketball.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of the Time of Monsters podcast, Chris Lehmann and Jeet Heer discuss Pentecostal beliefs about the Middle East, the Cold War, Trumpism, the prosperity gospel and the Americanization of the faith.The news from the Middle East remains bleak, with the Israeli response to the Hamas massacre leading to more than 10,000 deaths, mainly of civilians. Most people regard the unfolding news with horror, but there is a subset of people who are not hiding the fact they are thrilled. A subset of evangelicals known as Pentecostals see the news as proof that the long awaited apocalypse, which will herald the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, is at hand. They are strongly pro-Israel because they believe that the return of the Jews to the holy land, to be followed by their mass conversion to Christianity, is a necessary fulfillment of God’s plan.Nation columnist Chris Lehmann wrote about this influential religious faction in a recent column.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy &

Tuesday’s vote tested the potency of abortion rights as an issue for Democrats, with a referendum in Ohio and the election of a new state legislature in Virginia. John Nichols has our analysis of those elections, and some others.Also on this episode of Start Making Sense: What is Israel’s endgame in its war with Hamas? Over the past 50 years they’ve tried two radically different strategies in Gaza, and neither succeeded. Fintan O'Toole explains that history. He teaches at Princeton and is an advising editor at the New York Review of Books, where he's been writing about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy