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 43 states being mere spectators to the most consequential election in recent

history as money and campaigning bombard seven swing states in the closing weeks before

November the 5th. With the real possibility, the election could be decided by a few counties in

Southern Pennsylvania and by the vote in Omaha, Nebraska. Joining us is Lawrence Douglas,

the James Grosfield Chair in Law, Jurisputants and Social Thought at Amherst College,

and a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian. His latest book is Will

He Go, Trump and the looming electoral meltdown in 2020, and his forthcoming book is The Criminal

State, Aggressive War, Atrocity, and the Mystique of Sovereignty. We will discuss his

article at The Guardian. The Electoral College has become a gun held to the head of U.S. democracy.

Then, with the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs describing Trump as being a fascist to the core,

we will look into how Trump has embraced Nazi policy of having the military roundup millions into concentration camps and possibly the, quote,

eradication of life, unworthy of life because of what he calls bad genes invading our country

based on what the Nazis called criminal biology. Joining us is Benjamin Carter Hett,

a professor of history at Hunter College and the graduate

center of the City University of New York. He's the author of Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler,

and Death in the Tiergarten, and The Death of Democracy, Hitler's Rise to Power and the

Downfall of the Weimar Republic, how Hitler took the world into war.

His latest book is The Nazi Menace,

Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and The Road to War.

And we'll discuss his article at the Los Angeles Times.

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