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 brazen and shameless hypocrisy of Christian nationalists in the MAGA

movement, as Speaker Johnson protects Representative Tony Gonzalez, who ran for Congress

on Christian Family Values, whose affair with a married staffer led her to commit suicide

by setting herself on fire, leaving

behind a young son.

At a time when the President of the United States is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl,

which the Department of Justice is covering up, we will discuss the moral collapse of the

GOP with Anne Nelson, an author and lecture in the

fields of international affairs, media and human rights.

She was the director of the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where

she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting.

Her books include Shadow Network, Media Money and The Secret Hub of the Radical Right, now

out in an updated paperback version, and the updated version of the film Bad Faith, Christian

Nationalism's War and Democracy, based on her book Shadow Network, start streaming in April,

and Anne will be speaking at local screenings. Then Sasha Lyndon Cohen will speak with Heather Ann Thompson,

an historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bankrupt Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water,

the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its legacy,

and Who's Detroit, Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City.

She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for a number of publications and her policy

work includes serving on the National Academy of Sciences Blue Ribbon Panel that studied

...