Background Briefing

Background Briefing – July 3, 2023

We begin with a series of unpopular rulings by the Supreme Court that ended affirmative action in college admissions, stopped President Biden from cancelling student debt and sanctified bigotry by a lying web designer who was not even in business when she said a gay couple wanted her to work for them, claiming it was a violation of her religious liberty even though the potential customer she cited was a straight man married for 15 years. Joining us to discuss the ruling against student loan forgiveness which has forced the Biden administration to go back to the drawing board using the Higher Education Act of 1965 is René Christian Moya, an organizer with the Debt Collective who is also a tenant organizer who has worked to cancel rents during the COVID-19 pandemic and is a student debt holder. We discuss Senator Sanders’ plan to use the same Act to cancel debt immediately and challenge Chief Justice Roberts to come back and impose a debt burden on millions of struggling young American students.

Then we discuss the widely accepted observation that Trump has a cult-like following of supporters and that as a cult leader he is able to keep his followers immune from facts and information as they double down in loyalty to their guru or Fuhrer in the face of more and more evidence of Trump’s criminality and treason. Joining us is Dr. Steven Hassan, one of the foremost authorities on cults and mind control and the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center. He is a Nationally Certified Counselor, Licensed Mental Health Counselor and the author of three of the most respected books on the subject of cults which include Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves, Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs and the latest The Cult of Trump.

Then finally we get an update on the aftermath of the mutiny inside the Russian military and the Ukrainian counteroffensive underway and speak with Olga Lautman, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who is also the creator and co-host of the Kremlin File podcast series, which features expert discussions on the Kremlin’s internal affairs, global operations, and tactics used from their hybrid warfare toolkit to destabilize Western democracies. She has a new Substack newsletter covering Russia, Ukraine, Eastern, and Central Europe with a focus on Russia’s intelligence operations available at olgalautman.substack.com.