April 19 - Fox News' Top Rated Anchor and Serial Sexual Harasser Fired; A Snap Election in Britain; Authoritarian Conservatism and the Koch Brothers' "Freedom Fraud"

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the firing today of Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’s top rated anchor which was announced in a letter to staff by Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlin.  Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Farleigh Dickinson University and author of “Fox News and American Politics: How One Channel Shapes American Politics and Society”, joins us to discuss the accumulating accusations of sexual harassment that continue to emerge even after The New York Times revealed settlements with five women who were paid a total of $13 million. This prompted at least 60 advertisers to boycott O’Reilly and Fox and, with the O’Reilly scandal on top of the Ailes scandal, apparently the message finally reached Rupert Murdoch that serial sexual harassment is not only bad, it’s bad for business.    

Part 2

Then we look into the snap election called for June 8 by Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May in the hope that she can increase her majority to get through the next two years of the “Brexit” transition out of the E.U. The author of “Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union”, Harold Clarke, a Professor of Political and Policy Studies at the University of Texas, joins us. He is co-investigator of the British Election Study and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester and we will discuss the likelihood that the U.K’s. opposition Labour Party will suffer even greater loses than they did in the last election.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Christopher Arndt, who serves on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is the author of a new book “The Right’s Road To Serfdom: The Danger of Conservatism Unbound From Hayek to Trump”. He joins us to discuss the “freedom fraud” foisted on America by the Koch Brothers and the authoritarian strong-man conservatism that drives the American Right today which runs counter to the principles of liberty that conservatives and libertarians espouse.