Background Briefing: October 27, 2024
Reactions to Israel’s Retaliation Against Iran Appear to Indicate a Winding Down of Escalation
We begin with Iran’s Supreme Leader saying Friday’s Israeli strikes on Iranian military sites should “neither be downplayed or exaggerated” while Israel’s Netanyahu said that their retaliation for Iran’s October first missile attack on Israel was “strong, precise and achieved all of its objectives.” Joining us to assess what looks like an attempt by all parties to dampen down the escalation is Nader Hashemi, the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A Non-Resident Fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now, he is the author of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East.
The Press Allows Trump to Be Lawless While Expecting Harris to be Flawless
Then we examine the failure of the press to report who Trump really is now that those who worked closely with him in the Oval Office are sounding the alarm that he is a fascist. Joining us to discuss the double standard in the press, on which Van Jones recently commented “Trump is allowed to be lawless while Harris is expected to be flawless” is James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose investigative reporting has triggered a series of political firestorms. Among his best-selling books are State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. He is the Senior National Security Correspondent at The Intercept and a former investigative journalist with The New York Times, his newest book is The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. We discuss his latest article at The Intercept, “Mainstream Media Was Afraid to Compare Trump to Hitler. Now the Press Has No Excuse.”
Will the Election be Won by the Billionaire Tech Bros or Will the American People Save Our Democracy?
Then finally with plutocrats who own the LA Times and The Washington Post pandering to Trump while the world’s richest plutocrat Musk tries to buy the election for him, we look into an election that will either be won by the oligarchs or the American people with our democracy hanging in the balance. Joining us is Jeffrey Winters, a professor in the Political Science department at Northwestern University where he specializes on oligarchs and elites spanning a range of historical and contemporary cases, including ancient Athens and Rome, medieval Europe, the United States, as well as Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. He is the author of Oligarchy and his forthcoming book is Domination Through Democracy: Why Oligarchs Win.