January 25 - Trump's Imaginary 5 Million Illegal Voters; Trump's Selective Muslim Ban; The New Authoritarian Threat

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Donald Trump’s latest tweets as he doubles down promising a "major investigation" into his bizarre conspiracy theory that between 3 and 5 million illegals voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election thus robbing him of a victory in the popular vote. A nationally-recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, Richard Hasen, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, joins us to discuss how the Republicans, who since the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, have been proactive and aggressive in pushing strict voter ID laws and other voting restrictions that Democrats and the courts have labelled as voter suppression, could somehow have allowed the Democrats to keep 5 million extra illegal votes up their sleeves for so long without saying anything about it.

Part 2

Then we speak with Arun Kundnani, a Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of “The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror”. He joins us to discuss Donald Trump’s forthcoming executive order banning entry of Muslims into the U.S. from 5 countries the U.S. is currently bombing, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. We also discuss the absence on the list of countries from which perpetrators of domestic terrorism came or from where attacks were planned, launched or financed, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the creeping authoritarian nature of the new presidency of Donald Trump where already signs of censorship, propaganda, fake news, alternative facts, lies, intimidation and a thirst for adulation are emerging. Kevin O’Leary, a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine and the author of the forthcoming book “The New Authoritarian Threat and What to do About It” joins us to discuss Pope Francis’s concern expressed about the rise of populism in the United States and Europe, warning that “Hitler did not steal the power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people”.