Background Briefing: October 6, 2019
Conspiracy Theories as Our Government’s Top Priority
We begin with how conspiracy theories have metastasized into the top priority guiding U.S. foreign policy as the president conducts his war against reality in conjunction with State TV, Fox News, by diverting the resources of our government into rewriting recent history according to Alex Jones-like conspiratorial fantasies which Trump’s Attorney General has been dispatched around the world to bully allies and vulnerable states like Ukraine into accepting as alternative facts. Adele Stan, the editor of Right Wing Watch and a weekly columnist for The American Prospect where her latest article is “Conspiracy Theories at the Heart of Power”, joins us to discuss how as ridiculous these theories are, it doesn’t matter that you know better than to believe them. When effectively employed by the leader of the free world and his right-wing propaganda machine, the effect is disorienting to the whole body politic. And since as Adele Stan points out, gaslighting is a classic tactic of authoritarian leaders who explain the world, not through ideas, policies and goals, but through conspiracies and propaganda so that we are devoid of hope and idealism, we are demoralized into accepting the rule of a criminal fraudster who accuses everyone else of being as corrupt as he is.
Trump Continues to Be a Godsend for the Kremlin
Then with a second whistleblower coming forward with more first-hand knowledge of the abuse of power detailed in the complaint that the first CIA whistleblower brought forth which has led to an impeachment inquiry, we will look into how Trump’s reaction is to purge the National Security Council. As evidence mounts that Trump’s undermining of our national security and his entire foreign policy appears to be a godsend for the Kremlin, it is becoming clear that we are led to a logical conclusion that we have a traitor in the Oval Office. Roger Morris, who served in the United States Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning with Anthony Lake over the invasion of Cambodia, joins us to discuss this unprecedented moment in American political life when no amount of fact-based information and smoking guns can penetrate the shield of propaganda that keeps 40% of the population blindly loyal to their treasonous leader.
The Author of “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control”
Then finally we speak with Stephen Kinzer, an award-winning foreign correspondent who served as the New York Times Bureau Chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua and as the Boston Globe’s Latin America correspondent. His latest book just out is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control and we discuss the irony that today with a CIA whistleblower at the heart of Trump’s impeachment, many are counting on the so-called “deep state” to free the country from Trump’s disastrous misrule. But the appalling Cold War history that Stephen Kinzer’s new book reveals, tells another story.