Background Briefing: September 25, 2025

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The Leninists and Stalinists at the Head of MAGA and the Trump White House

We begin with the right wing Leninists and Stalinists at the head of the MAGA movement and the Trump White House including Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and the FCC’s Brendan Carr along with the far-right Opus Dei Catholic fundamentalists J.D. Vance, Project 2025’s Kevin Roberts and the Supreme Court-packer Leonard Leo. We discuss how they are executing the Trump authoritarian takeover of American democracy to reshape the country into a white Christian nationalist nation dominated by oligarchs and Tech fascists with the so-called “radical left” purged from the media, schools, universities and culture to bring about a Golden Age in a purified one-party state. Joining us is Sidney Blumenthal, the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post, Washington editor and staff writer for The New Yorker and his books include the bestsellers The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment and The Permanent Campaign. His latest book is All the Powers on Earth, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln 1856-1860, and his latest article at The Guardian is, “With Kimmel’s suspension, the FCC chair made himself Trump’s chief of comedy.”

 

Trump Trashes the UN Leaving China to Fill the Void After the US Withdraws From the World Body

Then we examine the unheralded role of the United Nations as Trump takes America out of the world body he is busy trashing only to have China fill the void. Joining us is Mark Hannah, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs, a nonprofit public education organization at the Eurasia Group and the creator and host of its “None Of The Above” podcast. Mark is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a political partner at the Truman National Security Project. A veteran of the Kerry and Obama presidential campaigns, he teaches at New York University and has an article at US News and World Report we discuss, “The U.N. Doesn’t Get Credit for the Lives It Saves.”

 

 

Silicon Valley’s Merging of Techno-Fascism and Christo-Fascism as Musk Merges X with xAI in His Latest Grift

Then finally we speak with Jacob Silverman, a contributing writer for The New Republic and a contributing editor for The Baffler, covering tech and national security. He is the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection and co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, the Golden Age of Fraud, which was a New York Times bestseller. His new book, out October 7th, is Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley and he blogs on Substack at jacobsilverman.com and we discuss his article at The Nation, “Elon Musk’s AI Grift.”