The Paranoid Style of David Samuels

President Barack Obama

(Evan Vucci, Pool / AP Picture)

Has former president Barack Obama secretly been operating the American elite—together with the media and huge components of the federal government—for almost 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exceptionalism? That’s the argument made by David Samuels in a much-read piece in The Pill.

On this episode, I dissect Samuels‘s arguments with two associates of the podcast, David Klion and Matt Duss. We not solely have a look at the issues with Samuel’s reactionary fable but additionally take up why it’s so widespread on the proper and even attracts on conspiratorial concepts which have a wider buy amongst centrists and conservative liberals.

Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He additionally pens the month-to-month column “Morbid Symptoms.” The writer 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 quite a few publications, together with The New Yorker, The Paris Overview, Virginia Quarterly Overview, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.