Month: September 2020

Background Briefing: September 8, 2020

 

Calling Out Trump’s Racist Reelection Strategy

We begin with whether or not the overt and inherently racist reelection campaign Trump is running will find enough voters to afford him a slim victory in November. With Trump demonizing minorities and the Black Lives Matter movement portraying them as dangerous looters out to burn down white suburbia as he stokes racial division and hatred in order to benefit from it, we assess what strategies can be employed to calm white fear and speak with Ian Haney Lopez, a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. An incisive voice on white identity and the author of the new book Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, he joins us to discuss how to neutralize the Republican strategy of inflaming racial tensions about and among minorities in what he sees as the GOP’s agenda of distraction from the fact they are giving away the country to rich donors.  He offers a plan to defeat this racist power grab which is available at raceclassacademy.com

 

Time For the Democrats to Get Tough With the Mafia Boss in the White House

Then we look further into the deficit of strategy on the part of the Democrats who appear to be making the same mistakes Hillary Clinton made in not understanding that they are up against a ruthless criminal who is portrayed by his former lawyer and fixer in his new book out today as a wannabe Mafia Boss. Fathali Moghaddam, a Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University and author of The Psychology of Dictatorship and Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty, joins us to discuss how the liberal pundits are making a mistake in dismissing Trump enablers in the GOP as members of a cult. Instead he argues that they share Trump’s dangerous politics and authoritarian personality believing that morality is obedience. This combined with the anti-science and anti-fact nature of the propaganda machinery of Fox News, means it is time for the Democrats to get tough and tell it like it is.

 

Senior Republicans Try to Stop Trump From Trashing Mail-in Balloting

Then finally, with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and other leading Republican senators urging Trump to stop trashing mail-in balloting because he is scaring off seniors who vote for the GOP, we speak with Dr. Michael McDonald, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida who is the Director of the United States Election Project. He joins us to discuss how Trump is using the phony controversy over mail-in ballots as a cover if he loses to Joe Biden in November.