April 30 - Netanyahu Reveals Iran's Secret Nuclear Weapons Program; Trump Threatens to "Close Down the Country" Unless He Gets His Border Wall; Trump Force-Feeds the "Deep State" While Claiming It Is Out To Get Him

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the announcement today by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was exposing Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program contained in 55,000 documents secretly obtained by Israeli intelligence. With President Trump quickly claiming Netanyahu’s revelations prove him 100% right, and with the new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling Iran “the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world”, we will analyze what appears to be an orchestrated campaign ahead of an expected U.S. pullout of the P5+1 Iran agreement by Trump on May 12.  Mansour Farhang, a professor of international relations at Bennington College who resigned as revolutionary Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations and is the author of “The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference”, joins us. We will discuss what appears to be an impending collision between Iran and Israel over Syria where a number of bases were struck by missiles and Iranian personnel were killed on Sunday night. We will assess the extent to which both the right wing government of Israel and the theocratic regime in Iran feed off each other’s propaganda and the possibility that they could stumble into a war that neither wants which could engulf the region.

Part 2

Then, with Vice President Pence visiting the southern border today and President Trump calling our immigration laws a “total disaster”, we will examine the plight of immigrants from a caravan of 1,500 mostly El Salvadoran refugees who have crossed through Mexico and have now dwindled to about 300 and are now arriving in Tijuana showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry claiming political asylum. Mae Ngai, a Professor of History at Columbia University and author of “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America”, joins us to discuss how Trump has threatened to “close down the country” if he did not get his border wall and that shutting the door on those claiming political asylum is a form of cruel theater meant to rile up Trump’s nativist base and distract Americans from his ruinous presidency.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with a 28-year veteran of Congress, Mike Lofgren, who was a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget Committees and is the author of “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government”. He joins us to discuss his article at The Washington Monthly “The Deep State Strikes Back – Against Torture: Why generals oppose the nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA director” and how Trump is force-feeding the “deep state” while conning his followers into believing the “deep state” is out to get him.