Inside the Hive

Host Brian Stelter checks in with veteran political reporter and CNN anchor Kasie Hunt fresh off her reporting trip to Iowa, where Donald Trump trounced Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and on to New Hampshire, the next stop in a GOP race that already feels all but settled. They consider whether Nikki Haley can blunt the frontrunner’s momentum, how Trump’s celebrity status is his superpower with the Republican base, and what this unusual primary cycle portends for a likely Trump-Biden rematch in November.

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Inside the Hive host Brian Stelter explores the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party with Joshua Green, Bloomberg national correspondent and author of The Rebels. Green, who in his last book charted the right-wing populism of the Trump era, is now studying to the other side of the aisle, where popular figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped lead an economic "backlash" to the 2008 financial crisis that pulled the party leftward.

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Host Brian Stelter talks with Michael Calderone, editor of Vanity Fair's The Hive, and Vanity Fair executive editor Claire Howorth about the defining issues of the 2024 election, including what's to come in the GOP primary, liberal fantasies and panic, and what's driving Trump ideology now. To an extent, the media has been preparing for how to cover Donald Trump in 2024 for almost a decade. The team discusses what the news media has learned, the forceful objectivity that has tripped up news organizations in covering the former president, and how to overcome voter political fatigue.

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Henry Kissinger, who died this year, at the age of a hundred, served in the Nixon and Ford Administrations as national-security adviser and Secretary of State; for a period, he was both at the same time. Kissinger fled Nazi Germany as a teen-ager, and went on to advise a dozen U.S. Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden. He opened up relations between the U.S. and China with Richard Nixon, pursued détente with the Soviet Union, and made decisions that led to death and destruction across Southeast Asia and beyond. Earlier this year, he travelled to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping in an attempt to massage U.S.-China relations. “There are not that many hundred-year-olds who insist upon their own relevance and actually are relevant,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Glasser calls Kissinger “the paradigmatic Washington figure,” and says that despite Kissinger’s history of destructive foreign-policy decisions, the American national-security establishment had a “collective addiction” to his thinking. How did Kissinger shape U.S. foreign policy, and what enabled him to remain a central political player in Washington long after he left office? The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to weigh in on The Political Scene.

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Host Brian Stelter breaks down Elon Musk’s erratic stewardship of Twitter, now X, with Zoë Schiffer, managing editor of Platformer and author of the forthcoming book, “Extremely Hardcore.” They discuss Musk’s rightward shift and war against the “woke mind virus,” the ramifications of him blowing up Twitter’s verification system, and whether it’s responsible to still post on X as misinformation and toxicity flow.

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Host Brian Stelter talks with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg about Joe Biden’s chances in the 2024 general election. Rosenberg’s approach to politics relies heavily on data, and he explains why he’s optimistic for Democrats about 2024. He also tells Stelter why he believes the campaign will be brutal and offers advice to the Biden campaign.

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Host Brian Stelter explores the fracturing of the evangelical church with Tim Alberta, an Atlantic staff writer and author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Alberta, the son of an evangelical pastor, charts the church’s rightward trajectory and embrace of Donald Trump, who is seen as a champion in an Us vs. Them political showdown. Stelter and Alberta also discuss how a steady diet of outrage on cable news, talk radio, and social media has helped radicalize the flock.

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Host Brian Stelter talks with Vanity Fair contributing editor Monica Lewinsky about her proposal to add six amendments to the Constitution to help safeguard democracy, such abolishing the electoral college, establishing term limits in Washington, and blocking presidents from pardoning themselves. They’re joined by Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal, who addresses the merits of Lewinsky's proposal—and the steep legislative bar to making it a reality.

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Host Brian Stelter joins author Garrett Graff for a deep dive into the world of unidentified anomalous phenomena and intelligent life elsewhere, the subject of his new book, “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—And Out There.” They discuss how we might discover another civilization and what Hollywood gets wrong, the government’s focus on greater transparency of UFO research, and where conspiracies stem from.

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Host Brian Stelter speaks with Stephen Shackelford and Davida Brook, two of the lead attorneys in Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox. "We have so much work ahead of us," Shackelford says, because even though Fox paid $787.5 million earlier this year to settle the case, Dominion is still suing many other defendants, including Newsmax and Rudy Giuliani. Those cases are "all proceeding towards trial," Brook says. Shackelford says Dominion was "put through hell" by Donald Trump's election lies in 2020 – "hell that continues to this day." Brooks says the ongoing litigation is about "setting the record straight."

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