December 17, 2024 – Background Briefing

Background Briefing: December 17, 2024

We begin with Trump’s war on the media following yesterday’s press conference where he took aim at CBS, Bob Woodward and the Des Moines Register which he just sued today after getting ABC to preemptively capitulate and hand over $15 million to him. All because George Stephanopoulos used the word “rape” instead of “sexual assault” in referring to a New York verdict in which the judge said of Trump’s guilt, “The finding Ms. Carroll failed to prove she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the N.Y. Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’. Indeed, as the evidence at trial… makes clear, the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” Joining us is Paul Waldman, a journalist and opinion writer who is a former columnist at The Washington Post whose books include Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World, and most recently, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. He runs The Cross Section on Substack where his latest article we discuss is “Trump’s New Strategy to Terrorize the Media and Punish Dissent.”

Then with the latest of 323 shootings this year at elementary and secondary schools involving a 15-year old girl who killed 2 and wounded 6 then took her own life, we speak with Jonathan Metzl, professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. A prominent expert on gun violence and mental illness, he is the author of several books including Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, and his latest book is What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.

Then finally we examine the new leader of Syria and his migration from the murderous Islamic State to the more tolerant HTS and how our “Christo-fascists” compare with the Islamo-fascists we decry. Joining us from the UK is Suzanne Schneider, a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College at Oxford University and the Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, specializing in political theory and history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism.