Background Briefing: January 10, 2022

On By gram

 

Has Bannon’s Precinct Strategy Caught the Democrats Napping?

We begin with perhaps the most effective strategy within the multi-layered Republican assault on democracy underway and that is what Steve Bannon calls “the precinct strategy” in which Trump loyalists are being recruited for key posts at the local and precinct level to take over election machinery to ensure Republican victories and Trump’s comeback. The strategy also involves building alliances on issues like vaccine requirements and mask mandates to take over school boards and expand the pro-Tump base. Joining us is Peter Stone, a Washington-based investigative journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign finance issues, working for the National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and the Legal Times, among other publications. He is the author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington and has recently written for The Atlantic, The New Republic and New York magazine as well as The Guardian where his latest article is “Bannon and allies bid to expand pro-Trump influence in local US politics.” We investigate the funding behind the various front groups such as Turning Point USA, America’s Future, the America Project and County Citizens Defending Freedom USA. 

 

A Warning From a Scholar of Violent Conflict That the U.S. Is Heading for a Dictatorial Takeover

Then we examine the recent warning from a Canadian scholar at the forefront of analyzing violent conflict that “by 2025 American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right wing dictatorship.” Joining us is Thomas Homer-Dixon, who is director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. Between 2009 and 2014, he was founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and his books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization; The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?; and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. His latest book is Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril and we discuss his article at The Globe and Mail, “The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare.”