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 Musk-Trump Blitzkrieg underway to engineer a smaller and weaker government by installing loyalists, sucking up data, controlling funds,

weaking government oversight over businesses and corporations,

and delivering fewer services while being loyal and servile to the dear leader.

Joining us is Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University School of Law,

who works in the areas of legal ethics, government ethics, the law of whistleblowing,

and national security law.

She served as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and has led

anti-corruption and ethics workshops in Australia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Canada, Indonesia, Japan,

Kosovo, Nigeria, Poland, Russia and Venezuela. Then we'll look into the one-two punch of

plutocracy and theocracy taking over the country and speak with

Catherine Stewart, a journalist and the author of the Good News Club, the Christian rights

stealth assault on America's children, the power worshippers inside the dangerous rise of religious

nationalism, upon which the feature documentary God and Country by Rob Reiner is based.

Her latest book is Money, Lies, and God inside the movement to destroy American democracy,

and we will discuss her article at the New York Times.

Now will we believe what is happening right in front of us?

Then finally we'll look into Trump's use of fentanyl to justify tariffs as well as the

tinderbox in Africa as Rwandan-back forces capture more and more of the Democratic Republic of Congo,

threatening a wider regional war and speak with Vanda Feldberg-Brown, a senior fellow in the

Centre for Security Strategy and Technology

...