Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the possibility that the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles,

might be sidelined after her embarrassing tell-all interview with Chris Whipple in Vanity Fair,

and that as a result, the Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller might gain more power and influence,

although he is arguably already the second most powerful person in the White House.

Joining us for a profile of the dark force behind the indiscriminate roundup of immigrants

and the revival of the paranoid politics of the McCarthy-Rad Scare era is Greg Sargent, a staff writer at the New Republic,

and the host of the podcast, The Daily Blast, a seasoned political commentator with over two decades

of experience. He was a prominent columnist and a blogger at the Washington Post from 2010 to

2023 and is the author most recently of an uncivil war,

taking back our democracy in an age of disinformation and Thunderdome politics.

We will discuss his latest article at the New Republic,

inside Stephen Miller's dark plot to build a Maga-Terror state.

Then, since the majority of young Americans reject today's capitalism,

we'll do a deep dive into the history of capitalism,

which is more of a fact of life than an ideology,

with the irony that the former Communist Soviet Union, now Russia,

and today's Communist China, are

among the most ruthless, unequal and rapacious capitalist societies on Earth.

Joining us is Sven Beckett, the Laird Bell Professor of History, co-chair of the program

on the Study of Capitalism, and co-chair of the Weatherhead

...