Donald Trump’s tariff war is usually framed in terms of how it would impact consumers and America’s relationship with other countries, but it is also part of a larger project to remake taxation policy. Trump is very explicit that he wants tariffs to replace personal and corporate taxes with tariffs as the main source of revenue. As such, tariffs ar…

Silicon Valley has moved to the right in the last few years, with Elon Musk being the public face of a larger trend of tech lords aligning themselves with Trumpism. We now have a window into just how reactionary Silicon Valley has become thanks to reporting about private group chats where the tech elite gather to complain about wokeness and celebra…

This week, Kyle and Greg briefly catch up before chatting with Ian of Utah Health Workers United & United Campus Workers of Utah and organizer with the Utah Workers Center. We talk all about the challenges and successes of Ian's journey organizing labor unions in our great state. Please donate to the Utah Workers Center here:https://www.utahworkers…

Even as he imposes authoritarianism on the United States, Donald Trump has given a new lease on life to the center left in many other countries. Canada is holding an election at the end of April under the shadow of the American presidents threat to turn it into the 51st state. Until Trump’s inauguration, the Conservative Party of Canada had a comma…

We're back. Listen, this isn't a very structured episode, but we move. We're embracing the chaos tonight. In this episode, the boys rant about what's been going on locally, nationally, and within the prisons of our own psyches. Sundance, 401ks, tarrifs, White Lotus Season 3. We've got it all. Note from me, Kyle: sorry for doing something loud with …

By helping the Republicans pass a spending bill that made no compromises with the Democrats and extend Donald Trump’s power over the government, Chuck Schumer has made himself widely unpopular in his own party. Anger at Schumer is so intense that he had to cancel parts of his tour to promote his new book Antisemitism in America: A Warning. David Kl…

This week Washington was abuzz with a security scandal over a group chat planning the bombing of Yemen accidentally included magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Lost amid the finger pointing about operational security was the fact that the bombing of Yemen is illegal, immoral, and ineffective. To take up the actual scandal of the war,…

Episode Notes Jordan and Greg are joined by Elise, Jordan's wife and a public-school teacher to discuss HB 267, a law passed by the Utah legislature that removes the ability of public sector workers to collectively bargain as a part of a union or employment association, and the ongoing referendum efforts by unions, public sector workers and employm…

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas turned out to be short lived: Israel has now decisively broken the ceasefire and launched an even more intense onslaught into Gaza. Coupled with this renewed attack, Israel (sometimes in conjunction with the united States) is also carrying on military campaigns against Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, with rumors flo…

Episode Notes Greg talks with Tyler Jordan, the lead singer of the band Good Looks, on music, their band, religion, political awakenings, and the importance of activism.

For nearly seven decades, Noam Chomsky has been the most important critic of American foreign policy. Daniel Besser, co-host of the Nation podcast, American Prestige, recently reviewed for the magazine a new book authored by Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism. In his review, Daniel both extolled Chomsky’s monumental achie…

During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted i…

BYM, baby. This week, Greg interviews Taylor Barnes, a field reporter with Ink Stick Media who focuses on military affairs and the defense industry. In her work, she uncovered a connection about how the LDS Church, known for its humanitarian focus, has quietly invested in defense giant Northrop Grumman through its multibillion-dollar fund, Ensign P…

Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state tha…

Andrew, Marshall, and Jerry get together for a Thanksgiving chat about the election.By Andrew Hart, Marshall Steinbaum, Jerry Vinokurov

So this is the new year. And I know a lot of things don't feel any different. And honestly, a lot of things have gotten worse. But not with this episode. No chance. In this one, Kyle and Greg interview Joe and Tate from the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, a union of ski patrollers that work at Park City Mountain Resort that was able …

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Matt Duss on a popular right-wing fabulist. Has former president Barack Obama secretly been running the American elite — including the media and wide parts of the government — for nearly 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exc…

Episode Notes The Boys are back and need to catch up on a lot since, like most of you, we've let a lot of work pile up during the holiday season. In this episode we talk about South Korea, Syria, Trump's cabinet, and then finish up with a long discussion on what the current situation involving health insurance and how we got here, and what we can d…

Matthew Yglesias, a very influential journalist and proprietor of the Slow Boring substack, has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a glib attention seeker who has …

For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I gave at Carleton University earlier this month on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians li…

The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones. In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons. Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic documents in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are …

Episode Notes The boys are joined by University of Utah Economics Professor Marshall Steinbaum (@Econ_Marshall) to discuss Kyle's trip through Hooligan violence in Amsterdam, and then the results of the election, and how those ivory tower eggheads screwed us all again.

Episode Notes Holy lord, we made it. Election Day. Anyway, against our better judgement Greg and Jordan did an episode with Josh from The Worst of All Possible Worlds Podcast to look into the last few weeks of the Trump Campaign and make predictions that will either make us seem like prophets or the dumbest people on earth. Time will tell! You can …

Howdy! It's your BYM buds checking in with a new ep. For this one, we had officially official BYM Southern Utah Correspondent, Zak Podmore, on the podcast. Before getting to the really good stuff, we chatted about all the garbage talk from the garbage rally at MSG, Trump being a sex criminal still, and more. In our main segment tonight, and the rea…

Donald Trump and JD Vance have a surprising closing message in the 2024 election: they are the antiwar candidate. About the rising conflict in the Middle East, Trump has said, “I wanna see it all stop, I wanna see the Middle East get back to peace.” On a podcast, Vance criticized the Biden “Even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civ…

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by David Klion to discuss 'The Apprentice' — a movie about Roy Cohn’s mentoring of a future president. --- Donald Trump is such a clearly defined figure — a walking, talking political cartoon — that it’s hard to imagine when he was someone different. Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice,…

Episode Notes Greg and Jordan talk with members of the Teamsters 222 who are attempting to form a union with the Grocery chain WinCo. We discuss the challenges of organizing, the limitations of "employee owned and empowered businesses" and how to overcome crippling social anxiety to talk with your coworkers about organizing. Follow the union on Ins…

As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore evidence of Donald Trump is increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing …

More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forc…

The boys return for an episode so special that we needed to bring in some reinforcements. While Erin Vanderhoof isn't technically from Utah, she pretty much is spiritually. In this ep, we talk Utah's ballot amendment mess, Israel doing more bad stuff (gasp), Eric Adams' arrest, and more. But the main topic in this episode is what's been on the fore…

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the con…

Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expa…

Kamala Harris and many other Democrats often warn that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. This is true enough, but it raises the question of how a ridiculous reality-TV star got in a position to be so dangerous. The excellent new podcast Master Plan shows that democracy has been under siege in the United States for decades due to a concerted ef…

After the convention and on the cusp of a debate, the presidential election is a near dead heat. The polls show Kamala Harris has a slight edge, but it is well within the margin of error. This is a massive improvement over the performance of Joe Biden, who was on a path to a major defeat but it is by no means a guarantee of victory. To take up the …

Episode Notes The boys are all back to discuss the DNC, the bleakness of Greg's replies, and what happens when an idiot and a narcissist meet at a cemetery

Episode Notes Jordan and Greg are joined by author, journalist, and podcaster, Jason Kirk (@jasonkirk_fyi) to talk about his excellent new book Hell Is A World Without You. Which is about the experience of growing up Evangelical at the turn of the 21st Century, and all the unique cultural aspects that come from that exact moment of political and so…

On June 28, I delivered a speech at the central branch of the Regina Public Library on the history of American support for Israel. The speech almost didn’t happen. The library briefly cancelled it because they claimed the group promoting it was encouraging discrimination against Jews. Fortunately, a city councillor intervened to sponsor the talk. F…

Episode Notes Kyle and Jordan discuss the recent happenings, mainly the recent primary elections and Utah and Joe Biden's historic and incredibly competent debate performance.

Joe Biden’s performance on the first presidential debate, held on Thursday in Atlanta, has been widely criticized. Much of the criticism has focused on Biden’s style: his horse voice, frequent halting digressions and verbal flubs. But the substance of Biden’s comments, as Moira Donegan pointed out in her Guardian column, was equally troubling. In t…

Joe Biden has often been described as among the most pro-Israel politicians in America, a characterization which has a large element of truth but misses some important nuances. As David Klion argues in a deeply researched essay for The Nation, Biden’s support for Israel has long been accompanied by rhetorical gestures indicating opposition to aspec…

Donald Trump does not like sharks. During his memorable encounter with Stormy Daniels, he fixated on a documentary about the predator that was playing on the hotel television and muttered, “I hope all the sharks die.” The former president returned to this topic at a recent campaign rally where he went on bizarre and lengthy digression asking what w…

The summer season has started with a fizzle for Hollywood, as expected hits like The Fall Guy, and Furioso have far underperformed their expectations. This isn’t a matter of a few films. Over the last few years, Hollywood is discovering that audiences are no longer reliably willing to buy tickets for the action adventure franchises that are the mai…

Episode Notes Greg and Jordan are joined by Economics Professor Academic Marshall Steinbaum (@Econ_Marshall) to discuss the current situation in Gaza, it's ramifications back on American campuses, and how the political establishment are reacting to all of these events.

Marty Peretz has led a large life, one he recounts with aplomb in his autobiography The Controversialist. As long time publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, from 1974 to 2011, he transformed the venerable liberal magazine into an organ of neoliberalism, with a politics that emphasized deregulation of the economy, scaling back the welfa…

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Tom Durkin and Joe Ferguson on FISA renewal. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyBy The Nation Company LLC

Episode Notes Jordan and Kyle do some riffing on RFK Jr having literal brain worms and his important new endorsement, we then go over Utah's choices for a new hockey team name, and then finish it off by talking about the money and plans for Ryan Smith's new entertainment district in Salt Lake City.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Yousef Munayyer on a president at war with his base. 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 …

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Joe Howley on how Israel’s war in Gaza is coming to the home front. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyBy The Nation Company LLC

Episode Notes Kyle and Jordan are back with another episode where we talk a lot about the NHL coming to town, what that means for your outdoors shopping needs, and why the Arizona Coyotes died like... Well... a dog. Then we discuss the ongoing Trump trial, and finish with the dumbest people you know getting mad and disrupting a school over that mas…