Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor, Chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today at last by a writer I have been wanting to talk to for a very long time. He is Jeet here.

National Affairs correspondent for the Nation magazine.

Host of the Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters, and he is the author of a new major piece in the nation called Friends and Enemies, Marty Parrots, and at the Travails of American

Liberalism.

Jeet here, welcome to Kurt Affairs.

Oh, I'm very honored to be on this show.

Oh, we're so excited.

I'm delighted to have you.

So you've written, just to give people some background here, the New Republic

magazine was once very important and very influential. It was called, it had been called in the

1990s, the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, which I think it actually may have been. And you have written a couple of

really interesting things on the kind of rise and fall of the influence of this magazine.

In 2015, you wrote a major piece for the New Republic itself, which was kind of exorcising the magazine's long history of publishing, well, racist

bullshit, which is, you know, it's called the New Republic's legacy on race, and under new ownership,

they kind of wanted to grapple with, I guess, what they had done.

And you wrote this

remarkable piece where you dive to the entire history of the magazine. You have now written

this piece that is a, I mean, sort of a book review, but a sort of an essay on the long-time

publisher of the New Republic magazine, Martin Perrits, who has written a memoir called The Controversialist.

You write about that memoir, which you say is very good, but you also point out that he

is a horrendous person and this magazine published a lot of horrendous stuff.

The question I want to start for you with is some people.

...