Background Briefing: May 16, 2022

On By gram

 

Texas’ Social Media Censorship Law and Elon Musk Owning Twitter Will Allow More Racist Hate Speech Like the “Great Replacement” Theory

We begin with Saturday’s gun massacre in Buffalo, New York in which 10 mostly black victims were killed among the 13 shoppers shot in a supermarket by an 18 year-old white supremecist indoctrinated by the “Great Replacement” theory that Tucker Carlson has expounded on over 400 times on Fox News. Joining us is Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Propaganda Works. His latest book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and we discuss his article at The Guardian, “Buffalo shooting: How white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder” and how if the Texas social media censorship law is not put on hold by the Supreme Court and Elon Musk takes over Twitter, more racist hate speech will proliferate and more minorities will be massacred by assault rifle-totting white supremacists.

 

Last Week’s Crash of Cryptocurrency That Wiped Out a Lot of Users’ Life Savings

Then with last week’s crash of the cryptocurrency market that wiped out a lot of users’ life savings we speak with Molly White, a software engineer and cryptocurrency critic. In addition to her longer-form critical writing about the topic, she maintains the website Web3IsGoingGreat.com, where she catalogs only some of the many disasters happening in cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, NFTs, and other blockchain-based projects. We assess why it is that gullible people use real money to buy fake money on the promise of getting rich.

 

Sweden’s Entry Into NATO Along With Finland’s

Then finally we examine Sweden’s entry into NATO along with Finland’s and speak with a former Swedish diplomat who served in Moscow, Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum, a professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and a former senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. A member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, he was an economic advisor to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and his books include Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It and Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path From Market Economy to Kleptocracy.