Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the “60 Minutes” interview with the recently-fired White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon in which he accused the Republican establishment of “trying to nullify the 2016 election”, saying that the House and Senate leaders “do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented”. Adele Stan, a weekly columnist for The American Prospect who covers the intersection of religion and politics joins us to discuss how Bannon’s patron the right-wing mega-donor Robert Mercer, is ready to pour millions into primaries to defeat incumbent Republican senators Mitch McConnell supports, replacing them with Tea Party zealots from the fringes of politics and in some cases sanity, such as Arizona’s “Chemtrails” Kelli Ward and Alabama’s Judge Roy Moore who wants to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Ten Commandments.  

Part 2

Then we examine the tragic situation in Myanmar/Burma where according to the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority is being ethnically cleansed by Buddhist vigilantes and the Burmese military who have ruled the country for decades. A leading specialist and prominent scholar who has made many trip to Myanmar and is writing a book on the Buddhist/Muslim conflict who, because of his close relationship with political opposition figures at risk inside the country, prefers to remain nameless, joins us. We discuss the roots of this conflict and the silence of Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Part 3

Then finally, on the 16th anniversary of 9/11, we assess the effectiveness of the trillion dollar response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the averted attack on the capitol, and speak with Dr. John Mueller, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and professor of political science at The Ohio State University and author of “Chasing Ghost: The Policing of Terrorism”.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with growing evidence that the Russian influence attack on the election was more widespread and brazen with Facebook announcing that they had shut down several hundred accounts created by a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin who spent $100,000 pushing divisive fake news attacking Hillary Clinton in order to help elect Donald Trump. Dr. Michael Sulmeyer, the Director of the Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who was formerly the Director of Plans and Operations for Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, joins us to discuss the warning by Senator Warner, the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Facebook’s Russian ads are ”just the tip of the iceberg”.

Part 2

Then we speak with Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University who is the co-author of a new study “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 Election” which documents how, along with Russian interference, highly partisan right-wing sources like Breitbart helped shape mainstream press coverage and seize the public’s attention in the 18-month period leading up to the election.

Part 3

Then we speak with Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and author of “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information”. He joins us to discuss Facebook’s decision to get rid of human curation of the news because of bogus Republican charges of bias and the role of Cambridge Analytica’s owner Robert Mercer and Stephen Bannon in flooding social media with fake news, possibly in collusion with the Russians.

Part 4

Then finally we try to make sense of the Oval Office about face that stunned Republican leaders as President Trump suddenly embraced his new political allies Chuck and Nancy as he agreed with the Democrats on a 3 month extension of the debt limit instead of the 18 month extension that McConnell, Ryan and the Secretary of the Treasury were arguing for. Lawrence Jacobs, the Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey School of Political Affairs, joins us to discuss if there is a savvy strategy here or whether President Trump has gone rogue.