BhTV: The Wright Show (audio)

Is Boris Johnson like Trump but in on the joke? ... Eli says it was dumb for Trump to pick a fight with the Squad ... The Mueller report and liberal xenophobia ... Was Ilhan Omar’s "Benjamins" comment anti-Semitic? ... Is the left unduly obsessed with Israel? ... Eli: The MAGA people who hate Omar probably hate Jews too ... Bob worries about the weakness of the Democratic presidential field ... Bob vs. Eli on America vs. Iran ... Eli: Dictatorships are inherently unstable ...

Should Democrats be freaking out about their presidential field? ... The base activation strategy vs. the swing voter strategy ... Who are the top tier candidates, and who could still enter the top tier? ... How would a Trump-leaning swing voter view the Biden-Harris dustup? ... Why Warren may have the winning message ... Has Warren put the "Native American thing" to bed? ... Who would do best against Trump on the debate stage? ... Trump's "go back" tweet as a new low ... By attacking Biden now, is Trump being crazy or crazy like a fox? ...

What would a war with Iran look like? ... Ilan: The recent attacks on tankers were "almost definitely" Iranian ... How tit-for-tat attacks could spiral into war ... Bob: Trump is abusing America's central role in the global financial system ... What happens after the 2020 election? ... Signs that hardliners are winning the argument within Iran ... Debating whether Iran is a uniquely bad actor in the Middle East ...

Chris’s new book, Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy ... Are libertarians, generally speaking, anti-war? ... Chris: The U.S. is powerful because people want to emulate us ... Libertarianism and international law ... Why has Congress let presidents usurp its war powers? ... The sorrows and joys of international weapons inspection treaties ... Why libertarian foreign policy is conducive to American security ... Does America have an imperialist foreign policy? ...

The Trump administration’s "Iran Disinformation Project," which Negar helped expose ... Following the State Department money ... Will Congress cancel funding for the project? ... Heshmat Alavi, the Iran expert who turns out not to exist ... How is Trump viewed in Iran? ... Negar: Sanctions, though painful, won’t bring the Iranian regime down ... Could Trump cut a new nuclear deal? ...

Oliver's recent essay in the Guardian, "How the news took over reality" ... The vanished distinction between private and public spheres ... Oliver: Maybe our problem is too much participation in democracy ... Bob on the halcyon early days at Slate, when writers didn't know their traffic stats ... Oliver: We've put the fear in our pockets ... Is it possible to be enlightened on Twitter? ... Tending our community gardens ...

Gabe, just returned from a stint in China, on the controversial tech giant Huawei ... Is the battle over Huawei in fact just about curbing China's power? ... The "did we get China wrong?" debate ... Gabe (kind of) defends Trump's tariff policy ... Thirty years after Tiananmen Square, is political reform dead? ... What outsiders don't understand about the oppression of the Uighurs ...

David's new book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet ... Did social media companies treat Alex Jones unfairly? ... Why online censorship is much easier than it was 15 years ago ... Bob proposes a "free market of algorithms" ... Why the Global South loses out ... How Facebook helped Trump's anti-Iran policy ... David: American sensibilities shouldn't dominate online moderation ... The Chinese government's mastery of online control ... International human rights law as a guiding light ...

Bob introduces the idea of Mindful Resistance ... Mindfulness is all about clarity ... Mindfulness as a weapon against Trumpian tribalism ... Buddhism opposes an essentialist view of Trump supporters (and of anything else) ... Salvation of self and salvation of the world ... Question and answer session ...

Max's new book, The Management of Savagery ... How arming rebels in Afghanistan put America on the path to 9/11 ... Threat inflation in the War on Terror ... The "seamless continuity" between the Iraq War and the Syrian civil war ... Max: US actions in Syria caused Russia to intervene ... Critiquing Obama's foreign policy ... Max's case against the White Helmets in Syria ...

Richard's new book, A Brief History of Doom ... The forgotten causes of the Great Depression ... Parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession ... Richard: If Obama had done more for consumers, Trump would not be president ... How railroads led to lots of financial crises in the nineteenth century ... The real economic story of the 1980s ... The late twentieth-century Japanese boom and bust, all due to debt ... Richard: The China crash is coming ... About that BuzzFeed story saying Richard may run for president... ...

William's new book, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason ... Is William's view of history Marxian or Hegelian? ... Are we experiencing a crisis of expertise or a revolt against the elites? ... The Internet as a massive crowd we are all wired into ... The populist power of calling BS on the establishment ... Politics as total war ... Was the March for Science a mistake? ...

Politics after the Mueller report ... Glenn: Twitter "fosters the worst in all of us" ... The origins of Glenn's Russiagate skepticism ... Glenn: Trump is more belligerent toward Russia than Obama was ... Is Russiagate the Benghazi of the left? ... Did Marcy Wheeler go too far? ... Why Glenn takes Trump's charges of FBI wrongdoing seriously ...

Michael's new podcast, Against the Rules ... Michael: Referees across society are under assault ... Is technology making umpires obsolete in tennis and baseball? ... The credibility crisis facing federal judges ... The half-billion-dollar Da Vinci painting that Da Vinci probably didn’t paint ... The need for good referees in the financial sector ... Why Cambridge Analytica wasn’t as nefarious as we thought ... Referees in new media and old ...

A libertarian view of foreign policy ... Why John knew from the start that Trump would be a hawk ... What explains the "long peace"? ... Why think-tankers and academics view foreign policy differently ... The Trump administration's Iran obsession ... John: Terrorism is a "minor and manageable problem" ... How likely is war with Iran? ... Why oil is a ridiculous rationale for a militaristic Middle East policy ...