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 possibility President Biden's third bout of COVID will be a cover for him to step down as Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, along with former President Obama,

appear to be weighing in to suggest to Biden that he will lose the election to Trump and take down control of the Senate

and make it impossible to take back the House for the Democrats.

Joining us is Alexander Stiller, who is a San Paolo professor of international journalism

at Columbia University.

He's the author of Excellent Cadabas, the mafia and the death of the

First Italian Republic, the sack of Rome, how a beautiful European country with a fabled history

and a storied culture was taken over by a man named Silvio Berlusconi. And his latest book is

the Sullivanians, sex, psychotherapy, and the wildlife of an American commune. We'll discuss his article at the New

Republic. We learned everything we needed to know about Biden in 1988. His stubborn refusal to

heed wise advice and bottomless belief in his own greatness were on display in his first campaign

for president.

Then we'll speak with Samuel Moyne,

the Henry Arlou's professor of jurisprudence at Yale Law School and professor of history at Yale University.

He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history,

human rights, history, and law, including Humane,

how the United States abandoned peace and

reinvented war. His latest book is liberalism against itself, Cold War intellectuals in the

making of our times, and we'll discuss his article at the New York Times. America's gerontocracy

problem goes far beyond the president. Then finally, with the Trump vance ticket poised to do lasting and perhaps irreversible damage

...