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

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

We begin on this Christmas Eve as Christians celebrate the birth of the prophet Jesus

with an appraisal of the relationship between church and state made more precarious with

the new house speaker who is an ardent believer of historical fiction when it comes to the founder's

intent with the First Amendment, which if Mike Johnson gets his way, could put us on a path

towards intolerance and theocracy. Joining us is Anne Nelson, an author and lecturer in the

fields of international affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist, she covered the

conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala and won the Livingston Award for Best International Reporting

from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was

a director of the International Program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the

first curriculum in human rights reporting. Her books include Red Orchestra, the Berlin Underground

and the Circle of Friends who resisted Hitler, and Suzanne's children, a daring rescue in Nazi

Paris. Her latest book is Shadow Network, Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical

Right, now out in an updated paperback version, and she will be speaking at the Palm Springs

International Film Festival on January the 10th about the new film Bad Faith, Christian Nationalism's

War on Democracy, which is based on her book Shadow Network.

Then we'll play an interview from our archives broadcast in October with Astra Taylor,

a documentary filmmaker, writer and political organizer.

She's the director of What is Democracy and the author of Remake the World.

Essays, reflections, rebellions, democracy may not exist,

but we will miss it when it's gone, and the American Book Award winner, The People's Platform,

...