Background Briefing: May 25, 2023
The Meltdown of DeSantis’ Big Announcement on Elon Musk’s Troubled $44 Billion Platform
We begin with the meltdown of the official launch of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign which he chose to do on Twitter in conversation with Elon Musk which crashed and burned due to technical glitches with most of the callers fawning over Musk instead of boosting DeSantis as their infantile banter focused on the war against wokeness while the platform was flooded with crypto scams. Joining us is David Roth, who has written about sports, politics, and culture in Deadspin, The New Republic, SB Nation, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, and other publications. He is the co-founder of Defector Media where his latest articles at defector.com include “The Man Who Invented Himself” and “Burning Down The House” which explains how Musk wants to be seen as brilliant and heterodox and fearless, but has the opinions and tastes and politics of a very rich middle-aged man who isn’t especially curious or literate; he sees himself, or anyway sells himself, as a visionary and a pioneer, but has revealed himself time after time to be a classically cretinous capitalist.
A Chief Justice Out of Touch With Reality and a Call For Justice Thomas to Resign
Then we discuss a speech yesterday by Chief Justice Roberts in which he revealed how totally out of touch he is with reality in dismissing calls for ethical reform as if there was nothing wrong with Justice Thomas’s behavior. Joining us is Steven Greenhouse, a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation who was previously a reporter for The New York Times where he covered labor and the workplace for nineteen years. He also served as a business and economics reporter and a diplomatic and foreign correspondent. He is the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, and we discuss his article at The Guardian, “Clarence Thomas should resign from the supreme court, for the good of the court.”
Time to Deal With the One State Reality of Israel
Then finally we look into a call for the U.S. to deal with the one state reality of Israel following Monday’s address by the Palestinian president to the UN General Assembly on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba or catastrophe as the Palestinians call it. Joining us is Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, the Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has advised every U.S. administration from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, serving as Advisor to the US Mission to the United Nations as well as on the Iraq Study Group and as a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State. He is the author of a number of books including The Stakes: America in the Middle East and The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East. He is the co-author of the new book, just out, The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine? and the co-author of an article at Foreign Affairs “Israel’s One State Reality.“