Background Briefing: August 8, 2019
Trump Tries to Blame the Left for Domestic Terrorism
We begin with Trump’s new tactic of false equivalence to get out from under his culpability for having inspired the shooter responsible for the El Paso massacre by blaming the left for domestic terrorism as the White House propaganda machine and Fox News attempt to make Antifa the new bogyman for the right like the Communists were in the 1950’s. An expert on U.S. white nationalism, the alt-right, Neo-Nazis and anti-Semitism, Spencer Sunshine, joins us to discuss his article at The Battleground, “Antifa Panic: Blaming the Left for Terrorism”. We discuss how this leaderless, decentralized movement that opposes fascism and the far right with their fists, not with assault rifles, is being demonized by Trump and how Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz are asking the FBI to start a RICO investigation against Antifa. Even though since 1990, between 500 and 700 people have been murdered by the far-right in the United States while during the same period Antifa-style activists killed just one Nazi skinhead during a fight in 1993. And if this attempt of false equivalence is successful against a tradition of anti-fascism in America with thousands attacking a pro-Nazi rally in New York in 1939, native Americans routing the KKK at the Battle of Hayes Pond in 1958, the 1961 armed resistance by black civil rights activists against the Klan in North Carolina and the 2006 protests against neo-Nazis in Toledo, Ohio, then white nationalists will be free to own the streets of America.
The Unworkable Deal Trump Struck With Guatemala
Then we speak with a cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, the director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies a Lehman College who has spent years uncovering evidence of genocide in Guatemala. She joins us to discuss the resignation of Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere who is rumored to have resigned in protest to the unworkable deal Trump struck with Guatemala’s corrupt outgoing President Jimmy Morales to have refugee asylum claims processed in Guatemala by those trying to flee the violence and corruption in Central America.
The Current Constitutional Crisis That Is Staring Us in the Face
Then finally we examine the current constitutional crisis that is staring us in the face as the Trump executive branch refuses to comply with any oversight by the legislative branch as Article 1 of the constitution spells out and all prior administrations have complied with. Caroline Fredrickson, the president of the American Constitution Society and the author of “The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections”, joins us to discuss Trump’s brazen criminal obstruction of any checks and balances enabled by his A.G. acting as his personal lawyer, William Barr.