Month: November 2020

Briefings

Background Briefing: November 16, 2020

On By gram

 

Trump’s Religious Right Supporters Lost the White House But Plan to Win the War

We begin with an analysis of the constituencies inside the 72 million who voted for Trump, 70% of whom cling to the delusion that he won the election which was stolen from him by the Democrats. And while the gun-toting white nationalist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and the crackpot Q-Anon cultists get a lot of attention, Trump’s most loyal and enduring constituency, his silent majority of sorts, remains the Christian Nationalists and the Religious Right. Katherine Stewart, a journalist and author of The Good News Club: the Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on American Children and her latest book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, joins us to discuss her article at The New York Times, “Trump or No Trump, Religious Authoritarianism is Here to Stay.” We examine how Trump’s loss at the hands of secular liberals could propel the Religious Right to interpret this as persecution and affirmation of their own righteousness, meaning that their unlikely ally may have lost the White House but the Religious Right and Christian Nationalists still plan to win the war. And the point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for the politics of total obstruction and the return of a “legitimate” ruler.

 

In the Bunker Spouting the Big Lie as Trump’s Goebbles Rupert Murdoch Spreads Dangerous Delusions

Then we speak with Benjamin Carter Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic whose latest book is The Nazi Menace: Hilter, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War. He joins us to discuss his article at The Los Angeles Times, “What a bunker mentality really means” and how the “Big Lie” emanating from our weak strongman in the Oval Office is being disseminated by the Goebbels of our era, Rupert Murdoch, as Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Mike Pompeo eagerly cater to Trump’s despotic delusions.

 

Pressure Underway to Have “Faithless” Electors Vote for the Loser

Then finally we speak with Robert Alexander, The Chair of the Department of History, Politics, and Justice and a professor of political science at Ohio Northern University. The author of Presidential Electors and the Electoral College and Representation and the Electoral College, he joins us to discuss his article at CNN, “The Electoral College is not going to give Trump a second term” and efforts underway to pressure electors into being “faithless” by awarding their votes in the Electoral College to the loser.