Background Briefing: November 20, 2024
Can a MAGA Bill to Kill Nonprofits They Don’t Like Disguised as an Anti-Terrorism Bill Be Stopped Tomorrow?
We begin with a MAGA Republican effort underway to shut down non-profits they don’t like disguised as an anti-terrorism bill that the House is about to vote on for a second time. The bill would give Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury the unilateral power, without presenting evidence, to cancel a nonprofit if for example Trump wakes up one day and decides he’s mad at the ACLU, then it’s out of business. Joining us to assess the likely passage of this ominous bill is Noah Hurowitz, a journalist based in New York City whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Baffler, New York Magazine, and many others. He is the author of El Chapo:The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord and we discuss his article at The Intercept, “House GOP Moves to Ram Through Bill That Gives Trump Unilateral Power to Kill Nonprofits.”
As Comcast Sheds MSNBC, Could Elon Musk Buy it and Turn it Into a Platform For Right Wing Trolls?
Then we look into the possibility that following Comcast’s decision to cast off its cable assets like MSNBC and CNBC, someone like Elon Musk could buy a controlling interest in the new company and turn MSNBC into a platform for right-wing trolls. Joining us is William Cohan, a former senior Wall Street investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, as well as a New York Times best-selling author whose books include Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, and, most recently, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.A founding partner at Puck News, we discuss his latest article, “Cable Prepares for the Value Extraction Era.”
The US and NATO Are Poised For Hybrid Warfare Retaliation From Putin Now That US Missiles are Striking Russia
Then finally, with the US Embassy in Kyiv evacuated because of fears Putin will retaliate against Biden’s permission to allow Ukraine to fire longer range missiles into Russia and with undersea cables in the Baltic cut by Russian hybrid warfare operations, we speak with Michael Gorham, Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida. The recent Archie K. Davis Fellow at the National Humanities Center, he served for 12 years as Associate Editor of the The Russian Review and is the author of multiple award-winning books on Russian language and politics including After Newspeak and Speaking in Soviet Tongues. He is currently completing a book on the impact of the internet and social media on Russian political communication, called Networking Putinism: The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age and we discuss what state media is saying about the war in Ukraine that Putin is calling a war by the United States against Russia.