On The Time of Monsters: Van Jackson on Trump's reckless plunge into conflict in Latin America.
An Indigenous woman waves a Venezuelan flag during a rally to commemorate Indigenous Resistance Day, on October 12, 2025 in Caracas, Venezuela.(Jesus Vargas / Getty Images)
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On Friday, the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced the US was sending an
aircraft carrier to bolster its attacks on Venezuelan boats (which the Trump administration
alleges, without evidence, are trafficking drugs). I spoke to international relations scholar Van
Jackson (whose work can be found here) about the motives for this new war as well as the
muted opposition to it from Democrats.
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On Friday, the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced that the US was sending an aircraft carrier to bolster its attacks on Venezuelan boats (which the Trump administration alleges, without evidence, are trafficking drugs). I spoke to international relations scholar Van Jackson (whose work can be found here) about the motives for this new war as well as the muted opposition to it from Democrats.
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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.