On The Time of Monsters: Greg Sargent on the New York mayoral candidate's peerless digital efforts.
Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, attends an endorsement event from the union DC 37 on July 15, 2025.(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Writing in The New Republic, Greg Sargent called attention to Zohran Mamdani’s highly
effective media strategy which has allowed him to reach many voters that have been drifting
away from the Democratic Party, especially young people and immigrants. In punchy, short
videos, Mamdani has offered an optimistic message that celebrates big city life and diversity
while showing how government policies can help make life better. I talked to Greg about the lessons
of the Mamdani campaign. We also talk about strategies for investigating the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,
a subject he wrote about here.
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Writing in The New Republic, Greg Sargent called attention to Zohran Mamdani’s highly effective media strategy, which has allowed him to reach many voters that have been drifting away from the Democratic Party, especially young people and immigrants. In punchy, short videos, Mamdani has offered an optimistic message that celebrates big-city life and diversity while showing how government policies can help make life better.
I talked to Greg about the lessons of the Mamdani campaign. We also talked about strategies for investigating the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, a subject he wrote about here.
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The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
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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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.