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On this week's show...
Donald Trump’s drive to autocracy is hitting some speed bumps and accelerating at the same time. Just this week:
Kristi Noem’s partisan video diatribe over the government shutdown is being banned by airports across Michigan and the nation
One more Trump opponent is indicted while a future target, former special counsel Jack Smith, ended his silence … and unloaded on the President indicted for a crime virtually identical to the charges of mishandling classified documents used to indict John Bolton
The often timid news media told former Fox News couch-sitter Pete Hegseth to take his Pentagon news coverage rules and shove them. They walked out of the Pentagon press room en masse … even Fox News took a hike!
Portland is keeping it weird by ridiculing the Goons of ICE with an early Halloween parade of animal costumes
Marjorie Taylor Greene ramped up her criticism of Trump on the shutdown, healthcare budget cuts and most pointedly on the continuing Epstein Files coverup
Rand Paul says publicly what a lot of Republicans are saying privately: the Trump ordered executions of boaters in the Caribbean are illegal
On the MAGA+ side, the President managed to find time between multiple rounds of golf for a Middle East victory lap … a victory that is already showing signs of falling apart
In non-Trump news, new campaign finance reports show all three Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate raised more money than unopposed Republican Mike Rogers
And young Republicans are learning the hard way that it’s politically harmful to put the phrase “I Love Hitler” and jokes about gas chambers into Telegram chats
In the age of crypto and endless Trump crime family grifting, there’s never been a more important time to understand white collar crime. They don’t use guns and goons: the weapons for these criminals are banking laws, off-shore accounts and trading on the ignorance of their victims. Joining this week's conversation is Jennifer Taub, a legal scholar and advocate whose writing focuses on “follow the money” matters— promoting transparency and opposing corruption.
Taub was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law in fall 2019 at Harvard Law School and is now a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law. A former associate general counsel at Fidelity Investments, she is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School. Taub's most recent book was “Big Dirty Money” published in 2020 by Viking Press. Her first book was Other People's Houses, published in 2014 by the Yale Press. She posts daily on YouTube.
This episode is sponsored in part by
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We're joined this week by veteran journalist and media monitor Jennifer Schulze for a deep dive into the right-wing takeover of where we get our news.
Jennifer Schulze is a longtime journalist, mostly broadcast news and mostly in Chicago. She headed the WGN TV newsroom and lead the team that created the WGN Morning News. She writes media cricitism and other articles for The Contrarian, Lincoln Square, Heartland Signal, etc. She does regular media roundups for Civic Media and Courier Newsroom with host Pat Krietlow and for WCPT Radio with host Joan Esposito. Her fellow Chicago journalist Mark Jacob joins her on both of those regular segments. Jennifer’s Substack is called Indistinct Chatter and you can find her on Blue Sky and threads @NewsJennifer.