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 thuggery of a masked American Gestapo unleashed on the mayor of Newark

and three members of Congress at an ICE detention facility in New Jersey on Friday,

which apparently happened on the orders of Trump's former lawyer and delusional ideologue,

Alina Haber, who Trump has made the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

We will discuss the extent to which we already have an authoritarian government,

while recognizing that the slide into authoritarianism is reversible,

but that no one has ever defeated

autocracy from the sidelines. Joining us is Lucan Way, a distinguished professor of democracy

in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and a fellow of the Royal Society

of Canada. His books include competitive authoritarianism, hybrid regimes after the Cold

War, and Revolution and Dictatorship, the Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism, co-authored

with Stephen Leviski, and we will discuss his article at the New York Times, How Will

We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? Then with the co-president Stephen Miller, at the New York Times, how will we know when we have lost our democracy?

Then with the co-president Stephen Miller talking about suspending habeas corpus,

taking us back before 2015 and the Magna Carta,

we'll examine the warnings from Supreme Court justices, Sotomayor, and Katangi Brown-Jackson,

and speak with James Zarin,

a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the host of the critically acclaimed television talk show conversations with Jim Zarin, which airs on PBS.

He's the author of Supremely Partisan, How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States

Supreme Court, and Plative in Chief, a portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits.

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