In response to the announcement by the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, that he is ending in-person briefings to Congress on election interference, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Maine Senator Angus King, says the American people deserve to know what their government knows about foreign interference in our election. Aired on 8/31/2020.
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Hurricane Laura has slammed ashore as an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm, bringing sustained winds of 150 miles per hour to the Gulf Coast. The strongest storm to hit Louisiana in over a century, Laura made landfall near the border of Louisiana and Texas. At least six people have been killed. Residents near Lake Charles were told to stay indoors with windows and doors shut when a chemical fire broke out at a Biolab plant. Hilton Kelley, the executive director of the Community In Power and Development Association, says local communities are dealing with multiple crises amid the devastation of the hurricane. “People are ingesting all of these dangerous toxins and at the same time dealing with COVID-19 and the extreme heat,” he says.
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President Donald Trump formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination at the RNC on Thursday. Historian Rick Perlstein says Trump’s rhetoric is driving people to the type of violence that was on full display this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where white 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse gunned down protesters who had mobilized against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Perlstein says Trump draws directly from a history of Republican authoritarian propaganda dating back at least to Reagan. “Ronald Reagan would definitely say two plus two equals five — there’s no question about it. But when he would say things like that, it would tend to be the off-the-cuff stuff,” says Perlstein. “Whereas when Donald Trump takes a podium and he’s reading a speech — that’s when he lies the most adamantly. And it shows that the kind of lying, deception, propaganda, authoritarianism is qualitatively more systematic than under Ronald Reagan.”
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Republicans held a televised naturalization ceremony at this week’s RNC featuring president Trump congratulating a group of five new citizens. Journalist Jean Guerrero says it was an attempt to create a “false dichotomy between legal and illegal immigration,” meant to signal that the Trump administration supports this “legal” immigration. But Guerrero points out that many of the administration’s immigration policies, led by top advisor Stephen Miller, have been aimed at dismantling many of those legal pathways — including, most consequentially, asylum protections for refugee families at the border. “Stephen Miller primarily has been targeting families,” says Guerrero. “This is not about national security. This is not about keeping out criminals. This is about reengineering the ethnic flows into this country to keep Brown and Black families out.” In her new book, “Hatemonger,” Guerrero shows that Stephen Miller pulls directly from eugenicist and white supremacist playbooks in crafting immigration policy.
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We speak with Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and air excerpts from the families of Jacob Blake and George Floyd at the massive protest marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington. Kendi also discusses President Trump’s planned visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he blames Democrats for violence during protests there and in Portland, Oregon. “Racism has spread to every part of the body,” says Kendi, comparing U.S. racism to cancer, “and then we have a president who is claiming that it doesn’t exist.”
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As party loyalists gather for the Republican National Convention, a group of veteran Republican operatives who want to defeat President Trump have launched a $4 million advertising blitz targeting voters in swing states. The anti-Trump ads are funded by The Lincoln Project, a super PAC that can raise and spend an unlimited amount of money. We speak with longtime Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens, a senior adviser to The Lincoln Project who worked as a strategist on five Republican presidential campaigns, about Trump’s takeover of the party and efforts by so-called “Never Trump” Republicans to prevent his reelection, and why he says “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.
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Transition Studies 