Background Briefing: October 25, 2021

On By gram

 

The Red State Secession to Create a Permanent Tyranny of the Minority

We begin with the accumulating evidence that the January 6 coup attempt was planned at the highest level of the Trump administration with as Trump said to his acting AG, his Republicans in the House doing the rest to overturn the election. Joining us to discuss the history of insurrection in this country is Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University whose books include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, Bob Dylan in America, and The Politicians and the Egalitarians and his latest, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. We look into his essay in the journal Liberties, “The Tyranny of the Minority, from Calhoun to Trump,” and assess the possibility that we already have a virtual secession of the Red States determined to hold onto white power and privilege and how “the McConnell Filibuster feeds the anti-government fervor skillfully exploited by the charlatan Trump, who claims that he alone can set things right. Above all, it solidifies the modern Republicans’ strategy to succeed where the Slave Power and the Jim Crow segregationists ultimately failed: to bend the nation permanently to the will of a fiercely determined minority.”

 

Top Saudi Intelligence Official Calls MBS a Psychopath Threatening His People, Americans and the Planet

Then we look into the explosive charges made by a former top Saudi intelligence official on CBS’s 60 Minutes that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman is a “psychopath, killer, in the Middle East with infinite resources, who poses a threat to his people, to the Americans and to the planet”.  Dr. Ali Alyami, who is the founder and director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, joins us.  A native of Saudi Arabia, he has lived in the United States for many years where he has advocated for political reforms in Saudi Arabia and provided testimony regarding human rights in Saudi Arabia before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

 

Erdogan Walks Back Kicking Out 10 Western Ambassadors as Turkey’s Economy Takes a Hit

Then finally we speak with Henri Barkey, professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff working primarily on the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and intelligence and joins us to discuss how Turkey’s President Erdogan who has issued a warrant for Henri Barkey’s arrest, is trying to walk back his order to kick out Ambassadors from 10 Western countries which has backfired, hurting the already battered economy as Turkey’s currency takes a hit.