Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the contrast between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's reception at the Munich Security

Conference and Secretary of State Marco Rubio's, with AOC advocating for working-class-centered

politics and foreign policy, while Rubio moved on from Munich to Hungary to praise their kleptocratic authoritarian

leader Orban as, quote, essential to U.S. interests and hailed a golden era of relations as he

desperately tried to help Orban, whose ten points behind in the upcoming April elections.

Joining us to discuss how even right-wing parties in Europe are distancing themselves from Trump

and the possibility of AOC running for president is Jacob Harburn,

the editor at the National Interest and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center

and a columnist for The Spectator.

His books include They Knew They Were Right, The Rise of the Neocons, and America Last,

the Wright's century-long romance with foreign dictators.

And he's also editor-at-large of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

Then we're looking at the possibility that Trump's top-down fascism could meld with bottom-up authoritarianism

from America's police forces and police unions and speak with Stuart Schrader, a professor of history

and director of the program in racism, immigration, and citizenship at Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on security, policing, and counterinsurgency,

the entwinment of foreign and domestic policy and urbanization. And he's the author of Badgers Without Borders,

How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policingicing and his forthcoming book, Blue Power,

How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves.

And we will discuss his article at the New York Review of books, Authoritarianism from Below.

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