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

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

We'll begin with the resignation of a State Department officer and a member of Feds United

for Peace who just resigned to protest U.S. complicity in Israel's war on Gaza.

Joining us is Annel Sheline, an expert on religious and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa.

She has worked as a journalist in Egypt and Yemen, was recently a fellow at Rice University's

Baker Institute for Public Policy, and is currently completing a book on the strategic use

of religious authority in Arab monarchy since 9-11, focusing on the cases of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.

She served for a year as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs

in the Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, until recently resigning

over U.S. policy on the war in Gaza, and we'll discuss her

article at CNN, why I'm resigning from the State Department. Then we'll examine a new poll

that finds a third of Americans believe Biden's election was illegitimate, which is a sharp

increase from 2021, indicating that propaganda works

as Trump's big lie metastasizes into a core Republican belief.

Joining us is Peter Pomerantsef, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins

University, an author and TV producer.

He studies propaganda and media development

and has testified on the challenges of information warfare to the United States House Foreign Affairs

Committee, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select

Committee. His books include Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, and This is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality.

And his latest book, Just Out is How to Win an Information War, the Propagandists Two Outwitted Hitler.

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