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 will begin with the end of the American Revolution against a mad English king that lasted 249 years, only to be replaced by an American mad king, bringing about a moneyed monarchy

propped up by oligarchical barons, engineering a new techno serfdom.

Joining us is Sasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for the nation

and is the author of several books, including Inside Obama's Brain, Red Line USA, American Furies,

The American Way of Pover, and his latest, Chaos Comes Calling,

the battle against the far-right takeover of small-town America.

We will discuss his article,

At the Nation, a profoundly un-American moment.

Trump and his enablers have launched an unprecedented assault

on American society and values.

Then we'll examine Trump as a wannabe mob boss

going back to his formative years, hanging out

with mafia-made men his father dealt with and speak with John Gantz, a nation columnist and

the New York Times bestselling author of When the Clock Broke, Conman Conspiracists and

how America cracked up in the early 1990s. He writes the unpopular front newsletter on Substack,

where his latest article is Musk's hyper-McCathism. Don't take any of this at face value.

Then finally we look into Trump's mafia-style foreign policy as mob boss Putin is about to meet

with wannabe mob boss Trump in Saudi Arabia to carve up the world like mafia bosses carve up territory.

Joining us from Germany is Jacob Halbrun, the editor at the National Interest,

a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, and a columnist for The Spectator.

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