Month: February 2022

Briefings

Background Briefing: February 3, 2022

On By gram

 

The Crisis of American Sanity As We Tolerate Our Own Division and Destruction

We begin with the crisis of American sanity which is allowing a criminal who only cares about himself, not the country, to rip the U.S. further apart and even provoke a civil war to stay out of jail. We look into why we are tolerating our own destruction as we slide into an authoritarian one-party state led by a pathetic man who can’t accept defeat because that would make him a loser, so he is taking the country down with a large number of Americans helping as willing accomplices. Joining us is Dr. Allen Frances, a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University. He is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Saving Normal and the reference work Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis and his latest book is Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, now out in an updated  paperback version. We assess what can be done to save American democracy and society from Trump and the selfish and short-sighted plutocrats behind him who are exploiting phony populism, promoting stupidity and propagating lies and disinformation to divide and turn Americans against each other.

 

Updates From a Leading Expert on ISIS Just Back From Ukraine

Then we examine the killing of the ISIS leader in Syria and get the latest news from Ukraine from a reporter who is a leading analyst of both theaters of war, Michael Weiss, the News Director at Newlines Magazine. He has reported on international affairs for over ten years with a focus on the Middle East and Russia having interviewed ISIS operatives and Russian spies; published and curated a series of still-classified KGB training manuals; reported from rebel-held Syria and war-torn Ukraine; broken major stories about financial corruption; and exposed the Russian intelligence services’ ongoing subversion efforts in the United States and Europe. The author of The Menace of Unreality: How Russia Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money and coauthor of The New York Times Bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, he just returned from Ukraine and joins us for an update on how Ukraine’s leaders are calm about the threats from Russia but annoyed by Biden’s National Security advisor and others who are trying to force them into swallowing the one-sided Minsk agreement.