David Frum

If you have listened to or watched this program before, you will notice that this present opening looks and sounds a little different from usual.

Let me hasten to assure you that most of the show will look as normal.

There will be a dialogue between me and David Brooks, columnist at The New York Times and contributor to The Atlantic.

That will look and sound normal.

And we will conclude with a discussion of the new four-part Netflix miniseries, Death by Lightning, a dramatization based on the assassination of President Garfield.

That will look and sound like normal.

But this opening will not and does not look and sound like normal.

And I have to beg your pardon for that.

Here's my excuse.

I planned a family vacation in South America for the final two weeks in January.

I pre-recorded the dialogue and the book talk and also the opening monologue because I thought, what crazy things can possibly happen in the last two weeks of January?

Well, you know as well as I what crazy things have happened in the last two weeks of January.

um nato allies like france and britain denmark and norway moving troops into into greenland an altercation at davos between the president of the united states the prime minister of canada that concluded or has yielded members of the trump cabinet now promoting the secession of the canadian province of alberta to retaliate and threatening canada with all kinds of massive tariffs to punish canada for its prime minister getting too much attention at davos

President Trump making it clear that everything he's been doing in foreign policy is motivated by his thwarted desire for a Nobel Peace Prize.

And of course, and above all, the terrible events in the city of Minneapolis, where a second American citizen has been killed by agents reportedly enforcing the law, while that American citizen was, according to most, if not all video evidence,

completely presenting no danger to anybody, least of all officers of the law, and the terrible systematic lying that has surrounded each of these terrible incidents with their attacks on basic norms of American rights and process.

It's not just the American citizens who have been killed that are a scandal that shocks the nation coming from Minneapolis.

Forces of the law have burst into private homes without a warrant, have seized people, the wrong people, hauled them out into the streets in their underwear in a Minnesota January.

We are hearing reports of deaths in detention, people being reportedly killed in detention.

This is all on top of the previous cases of people being sent by American immigration authorities to prison.