Background Briefing: June 20, 2021

 

The Layered Republican Electoral Strategy to Cheat Rather Than Compete

We begin with an overview of the electoral landscape ahead as the Republicans launch a multi-layered strategy to first gerrymander and suppress the vote to the extent they could win the next elections before a vote is cast. Then after voting day, partisan Republican legislatures in key states would count and certify the vote to their liking regardless of who won, ensuring GOP victories. Then to control the very mechanisms of voting in the country, a campaign is underway financed by the Koch brothers and the shadowy Opus Dei operator Leonard Leo who has stacked the Supreme Court and federal bench with right wing judges via his dark money group, the Judicial Crisis Network. Together they are financing the GOP capture of polling places and vote counting operations traditionally run by neutral poll workers who are now being driven out of their jobs often fearing for their lives so that QAnon crazies like the Cyber Ninjas conducting the bogus recount in Arizona, can take over to make sure Republicans win. A leading investigative reporter specializing in election issues, Ari Berman, joins us. He is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering voting rights and a Reporting Fellow at The Nation Institute and the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and joins us to discuss his article at Mother Jones, “14 GOP-Controlled States Have Passed Laws to Impede Free Elections.”

 

A View From Moscow of Putin’s Recent Nuclear Alert Compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis

Then we go to Moscow to speak with Nina Khrushcheva, a Professor in the Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School whose latest book is In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Eleven Time Zones. She joins us to discuss her article at Project Syndicate, “An Update on the Cuban Missile Crisis” and assess whether we are at a more dangerous moment now than we were in October of 1961 with psychological disarmament but not physical disarmament between the two big nuclear powers. Particularly since Putin recently put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on launch-on-warning full alert with thousands of his missiles mostly pointed at the U.S.