Background Briefing: September 11, 2022
The DOJ’s Polite Request in Response to the Trump Judge’s Indefensible Ruling
We begin with the DOJ’s polite rebuke in response to the ruling by the unqualified Trump Judge Cannon on a “special master” which has blocked the investigation into Trump’s theft of highly classified government documents. Joining us is Bill Yeomans, a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School who previously taught constitutional law, civil rights, and legislation at American University Washington College of Law and also served for 26 years in the Department of Justice, serving in a series of management positions, including acting Assistant Attorney General. He is now a Senior Fellow at the Alliance for Justice and we discuss the way out for the judge’s indefensible decision offered by the DOJ and the hazards of appealing to the 11th Circuit which is stacked withTrump-appointed judges who, like Aileen Cannon, could rule to protect their sponsor rather than the national security of the nation.
The Distinction Between the Queen’s Admirable Service and Duty and the Empire and Commonwealth She Served
Then with King Charles III proclaimed king on Saturday and Queen Elizabeth the second’s funeral scheduled for September 19, we will examine the distinction between the late queen’s admirable dedication to duty and service and the empire and later the commonwealth she served. Joining us is Maya Jasanoff, Professor of History at Harvard University whose teaching and research extends from the history of the British Empire to global history. She is the author of three prize-winning books. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. And we discuss her article at the New York Times, “Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire.”
How the Billionaire Tech “Preppers” Plan to Escape the Apocalypse of Their Own Making
Then finally, we look into The Mindset, a group of “preppers”, tech billionaires who plan to escape the apocalypse of their own making through missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse. But instead of rewarding our most selfish tendencies, our next guest argues that the best way to avoid catastrophe is to ensure it doesn’t happen and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. Joining us is Douglas Rushkoff, named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, he is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. The host of the popular Team Human podcast, he has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed; written regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast, and the Guardian; and made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like” and “Merchants of Cool.” He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at the City University of New York in Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. We will discuss his latest book, just out, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.