We begin with the bizarre contentious hearing today before Jim Jordan’s clown show known as the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government at which the Republican’s star witness Robert Kennedy junior, who is running for the presidency as a Democrat, denied being an anti-vaxxer and making anti-semitic remarks even though a video clip of him was shown claiming Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese were spared Covid 19 due to bioweapon engineering. Joining us to discuss the Orwellian nature of Republicans whining that they are being censored when their leader Donald Trump is hardly restrained in any way and is free to insult, impugn and incite is Lincoln Mitchell, a professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where he also serves as an associate scholar in the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author of numerous books on the former Soviet states, baseball, and democracy, the latest of which is The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992. We discuss his article at lincolnmitchell.substack.com, “Robert F. Kennedy’s Racialist and Antisemitic Fantasies.”
Then with Russia escalating attacks on grain terminals in Ukraine, mining the Black Sea and threatening any ship heading to Ukraine, we examine the impact on global food prices with US wheat futures up 8.5% today and speak with Joe Glauber, a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC where his areas of interest are price volatility, global grain reserves, crop insurance and trade. He served over 30 years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture including as Chief Economist from 2008 to 2014.
Then finally we look into the video Trump released today ahead of the midnight deadline to appear before the DC grand jury that was a naked incitement to violence in the language of a mob boss and discuss how this Houdini of scofflaws who has always been one step ahead of the sheriff and has boasted he can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a vote had avoided accountability so far. Joining us is Jonathan Zasloff, a professor of law at UCLA school of law where he teaches legal history and public policy. His recent work examines the influence of lawyers and legalism in U.S. international relations, the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses.