June 6 - Do We Have One Year Left to Save American Democracy?; Why Is Trump Undermining Alliances and Ceding American Leadership?; The Supreme Court to Test the Boundaries Between Technology and Privacy

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the proposition that we may only have one year left to save American democracy from an autocratic president who is increasingly isolated from reality as he and his tightening inner-circle of right wing zealots move to undo institutions and confront the truth in a fascistic approach to governance that indicates a fascist worldview. Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale who has researched and written extensively on Hitler and Stalin, joins us to discuss his latest book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” and how as the incompetence and crudeness of the Trump Administration drives down the popularity of the Republicans heading into the 2018 elections, Trump will try to stage a coup to overthrow American democracy. We will assess the extent to which American institutions already under attack from the Trump Administration like the judiciary, the military, the intelligence community, the press and now much of corporate America as well as an expanding majority of the American people, will fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

Part 2

Then we speak with Thomas Wright a fellow and director of the Project on International Order and Strategy, as well as a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He joins us to discuss his latest book “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21^st Century and the Future of American Power” and explore the reasons why Trump is undermining America’s long-standing alliances while ceding global leadership to China on trade, the environment and now human rights.

Part 3

Then finally, with the Supreme Court taking up a cell phone tracking case that will test the boundaries between technology and privacy, we examine the issues surrounding CSLI, Cell Site Location Information with Marc Rotenberg, the President and Executive Director of EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He joins us to discuss how the current Third Party Doctrine which the government relies on to justify warrantless tracking and surveillance needs to updated in the digital age as smart phones now can provide precise location information on citizens similar to GPS tracking devices which in 2012 the Supreme Court ruled against allowing the police to place on vehicles on 4thAmendment grounds.