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.
The Nation Podcasts
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The Imperial Presidency and the Iran War w/ Matt Duss | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
Writing in Foreign Policy, Matt Duss argues that Donald Trump’s rush to war is both
stupid and illegal. It is also wildly unpopular with the public. But he also observes that
congress has been reluctant to challenge Trump’s policy, although some progressives
have now forced the issue to a vote. Matt is a frequent guest of the show and foreign
policy expert. I talked to him about the dangers of a new war and also the larger
systematic problems of the imperial presidency.
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