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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We look now at how the Trump administration has transferred another group of immigrants to a supermax mega-prison complex in El Salvador. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday 17 immigrants from Venezuela and El Salvador accused of being gang members have been sent to the Salvadoran mega-prison Sunday, after previously being detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has expelled hundreds of immigrants and asylum seekers to El Salvador without due process, accusing many of belonging to gangs largely on the basis of having tattoos. One Venezuelan asylum seeker now held in the Salvadoran prison was removed for tattoos on each forearm that read “mom” and “dad.”

This week, the U.S. admitted in a court filing that a Salvadoran dad with protected status was also among the hundreds of immigrants who were transferred to El Salvador. He was living with his family in Maryland. Kilmar Armando Abrego had been granted protected status in 2019, blocking the federal government from sending him back to El Salvador after he fled gang violence there. The Trump administration said Garcia was removed, quote, “because of an administrative error,” and that, though, it could not bring him back, because it’s now in custody of — he’s in custody of El Salvador.

Conservatives, like MAGA podcaster Joe Rogan, are also joining in speaking out against the removal of a professional makeup artist accused of being a gang member, calling the case “horrific.”

JOE ROGAN: You’ve got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting, like, lassoed up and deported and sent to, like, El Salvador prisons. … This is kind of crazy that that could be possible. That’s horrific. And that’s — again, that’s bad for the cause. Like, the cause is let’s get the gang members out. Everybody agrees. But let’s not innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs. And then, like, how long before that guy can get out? Like, can we — can we figure out how to get him out?

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end deportation relief and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants with temporary protected status.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Aaron, thanks so much for being with us again. Can you explain what is happening right now? Talk about the Maryland dad from El Salvador who was just deported to this human rights-abusing mega-prison. The administration is paying Bukele, the president of El Salvador, millions to hold these immigrants and asylum seekers.

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah. So, on March 15th, the Trump administration sent three planes full of people to El Salvador, with people they claimed were members of MS-13 or the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The problem is, every single day now new stories are coming out showing they made a lot of mistakes. And over the weekend, we found out for the first time that they made a mistake that they are admitting. And that was the deportation of a Maryland dad, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent there despite the fact that an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that he had protection from being deported to El Salvador. It was illegal to send him to El Salvador. And so, now the Trump administration has had to admit they made a mistake there.

But more and more evidence suggests this was a rushed operation where they shoved as many people onto those planes as they could that had been entered in a database somewhere as Tren de Aragua, and they never really bothered to check whether or not that was true. They just looked at people’s tattoos and said, “Well, you know, we have an intelligence report that says people from Tren de Aragua have tattoos with crowns on them, so any person who has a crown on their body that’s tattooed is a Tren de Aragua member. We don’t need to go any further than that.” And that’s basically the level of due process people got.

They weren’t even told that they were being sent there, though. New stories coming out today confirms every person who was sent there was lied to and told that they were going to be deported to Venezuela, and they didn’t find out ’til they landed in El Salvador what had actually happened.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Aaron, even after the admission of the administration, in terms of Abrego Garcia’s case, Vice President JD Vance posted on the social media platform X that, quote, “he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.” Could you comment on that?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, that’s just simply false. And I’ll take each one of those in turn. Convicted: He’s not been convicted of anything. Mr. Abrego Garcia arrived here in 2011 as a 16-year-old fleeing the gangs himself, who had threatened to kill him if he didn’t join them. He, like many thousands of youth that left El Salvador in that period, came to the United States seeking safety, and for the last 14 years has not gotten into any serious trouble with the law at all. He’s been convicted of nothing.

But what happened is, in 2019, he was looking for day labor outside of a Home Depot in Maryland, and local cops arrested him and three other men there. Those local cops interrogated him, demanded to know whether he was connected to a gang. He denied it continuously. And then a local police detective wrote on a gang worksheet that a confidential informant had allegedly claimed that this guy was a member of a gang, a part of MS-13 that operated in Long Island. Mr. Abrego Garcia has never lived in Long Island, and he said, “This is ridiculous.” And when his lawyers, in 2019, tried to reach back out to the police to talk to the detective and say, “Hey, why did you put this down here?” they found out that the detective had been suspended, and the local police didn’t even have a record of his arrest. So, that is the only — only — evidence that the government has ever offered that he is connected to MS-13. And despite that arrest, which did not lead to charges, he has never been charged or convicted of a crime once in his life.

He also did win protection. In 2019, that arrest led to him being sent to ICE detention. He was locked in ICE detention for almost a year. And at the end, a judge granted him a protection known as “withholding of removal,” that said, “You are more likely than not to be persecuted if sent to El Salvador, so the one thing the government cannot do is deport you to El Salvador.” And that’s exactly what happened on March 15th.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you recently testified in front of the Committee on Homeland Security, the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, that Trump’s diversion of thousands of law enforcement officers to mass deportation is actually creating a greater national security risk. Could you explain that?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, so, the most important thing that people need to know about what the Trump administration is doing — well, one of the most important things — is that they have turned the entire U.S. federal law enforcement apparatus into an immigration enforcement apparatus. President Trump has diverted thousands of federal law enforcement officers away from their normal duties and told them to go carry out immigration arrests instead. One in four DEA agents, that normally are out there tracking down drug rings, are now involved in immigration enforcement instead. Eighty percent of ATF investigators are now doing immigration enforcement. They’ve taken people from the IRS who are specialized in investigating financial crimes, and they’re doing immigration enforcement. And even troublingly, they’re taking the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and making them do immigration enforcement. And Homeland Security Investigations, where investigators have the job of protecting children from sexual predators online, those people have been taken off of their duties of going after pedophiles and have been told that they have to do immigration enforcement instead. None of that is making the country safer. It’s just transforming the entire country into a dragnet for immigrants, while letting a lot of other people doing some pretty bad things off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about the U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to end deportation relief and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in TPS — with TPS. Some, what, a third of a million have TPS. They could face mass deportation. In his ruling, the judge said that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s move to terminate TPS for Venezuelans will, quote, “inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the [U.S.] billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.” The significance of this, in this minute we have left, Aaron?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: It’s enormous. There are potentially 350,000 people who are going to lose their job on April 7th, and another 300,000 in September, and then potentially 500,000 Haitians coming up this fall, as well. And what Judge Chen ruled is, if you want to terminate TPS, you’ve got to go through the right procedures, and you can’t do it based on false claims that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are all Tren de Aragua and criminals, when the status is only available to people with no criminal record.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and what do you think in terms of the numbers that the Trump administration is claiming, more than 100,000 people deported so far in his administration?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, those numbers seem likely incorrect. They don’t fit the — the Trump administration said yesterday they had also done 110,000 arrests already. That suggests they did 70,000 arrests in the last two weeks. I think somebody in the administration made a mistake.

But what we know is, these are the numbers they want. Their goal is to ramp up deportations and arrests as quickly as they can, and if that leads to a bunch of innocent people getting swept up alongside, the message that the White House is sending is they don’t care. As long as they hit their numbers, who cares who is on those planes? They just want to get them out of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Federal judge has — 

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Due process be damned.

AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funds to programs that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, to children, in immigration proceedings. Ten seconds.

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Great news. Children need lawyers. No child should have to face deportation in court alone. And the Trump administration wanted to strip away federally funded lawyers that Congress set aside money for.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Princeton has become the latest university to be targeted by the Trump administration. The federal government is pausing dozens of federal grants to Princeton. The news came a day after the Trump administration threatened to cut off nearly $9 billion to Harvard over the school’s response to student-led campus protests in solidarity with Gaza. Earlier, the Trump administration had suspended $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania and $400 million to Columbia University. At Columbia, the board of trustees responded by agreeing to a series of demands from President Trump in an effort to keep the federal funding.

This all comes as Columbia is in a state of turmoil. On Friday, Columbia’s interim President Katrina Armstrong resigned as president. Columbia’s board of trustees then elevated its own board co-chair, Claire Shipman, the journalist, to become the school’s new interim president.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia student protest leader, remains locked up in an immigration jail in Louisiana more than three weeks after he was abducted by ICE agents at his Columbia University housing, after appealing to the president of Columbia to help him. On Tuesday, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled Khalil’s lawsuit should move forward to New Jersey, where Khalil was taken before being sent to Louisiana.

We’re joined now by Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! So, how unusual is it? I mean, this is now the third woman, the first three women, to be president of Columbia University. First it was Minouche Shafik, and now Katrina Armstrong being fired and replaced by the board co-chair, the board of trustees co-chair?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, what we’re seeing is a continuation and an escalation of the board of trustees of Columbia University basically going rogue. There was also a report issued yesterday by the Columbia University Senate, almost 400-page report, documenting the ways in which the trustees abused their power over the last two years in mismanaging events at Columbia. So, Claire Shipman being appointed, outside of the normal process, president at Columbia is part of that pattern of really a takeover of the university by the trustees, by these corporate officers of the university, who quite clearly have demonstrated that they do not feel any fidelity to protecting our academic mission, but, in a way, are working hand in glove with the Trump administration to destroy that very mission.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, when you say the board is going rogue, what would be the normal process for the selection of a president at Columbia?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Juan, I’m glad you asked. I brought Columbia’s charters and statutes with me. And one section within there very clearly says that where a president or an acting president has stepped down, resigned or otherwise stepped down from office, the provost is supposed to become the acting president, until such time as the trustees conduct a regular search, that would involve many stakeholders in the university community. But instead of allowing Angela Olinto, who is the provost of Columbia, who I think is widely well regarded and, I think, would have been welcomed as an acting president by everyone in our community — instead of that, following the rules of the statutes, they appointed their own co-chair of the board of trustees.

And, Juan, I have to say it feels like Columbia University has become the Tesla of the U.S. academic community, where wealthy people buy their way onto the board of trustees and then appoint themselves CEO of the organization, only to ruin the brand of that institution. No one in their right mind wants a Tesla right now, and people are heading for the doors at Columbia. The admissions just went out for the undergraduate program, and the numbers are way down. Students don’t want to come to Columbia. So it feels very similar, that we have this kind of hostile takeover of our institution, the one that you’ve had a long legacy with, Juan, that mirrors what’s happening in other parts of the country, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about this, the Trump administration’s threat to cut off $400 million in federal funding to the university that forced it to back down on some key issues. Columbia has, by my last reading, a $14.8 billion endowment. It could easily have replaced that $400 million for the four terms of the — four years of the Trump administration from its own endowment, which I suspect that’s what an endowment is for, for emergency situations. What is your sense of how these universities over the last decades, by depending largely on either corporate donors or federal grants, have put themselves in a bind where they’re basically under control by outside forces?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, I think that’s exactly right, that the business model of a university, particularly large research universities like Columbia, is one that has come, over the last many years, to depend so heavily on federal money for its budget. It’s the largest part of our budget, that along with the fees and other income we get from running the medical school. It’s not tuition. It’s not major donors. It’s those two: the federal money and the medical school income. And when we are in alignment with the U.S. government, that’s a great thing. But when we’re not, we’re incredibly vulnerable. And so, I think this is a moment where all universities — and higher education, more generally — needs to have a kind of reckoning of a new kind of business model of how to run a university, that isn’t so incredibly dependent upon shifts in the political winds in our country.

Now, I don’t actually think that the endowment is going to save our problem. Much of those funds in Columbia’s endowment, which is the smallest endowment of all of the Ivy League schools, I’ll note, are tied up in ways where they have to be allocated to particular funding streams. They can’t just be reappropriated to fund or replace those federal grants. And it, in any event, would be a short-term Band-Aid. There’s too much of the budget to cover with these federal grants that have been pulled. It’s $400 million-plus now, but it will be a lot more. You look at Harvard, they’re talking about billions of dollars. The endowment can’t possibly fill that gap.

So it’s time for us to think about things like why are faculty or, more importantly, university presidents paid so much. We need to think about who gets paid and valued within the university. It is those very researchers in the medical school who make many times more in salary from a philosophy professor or an English professor at Columbia, in part as a reward for the fact that they’ve been drawing these federal funds to underwrite the university’s business model. So, it’s time for us to step back and not say, “Oh, the piggy bank is going to save us,” but actually think more critically about how we run our universities.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Jeff Sovern. He’s one of the four children of Columbia University’s first Jewish president, Michael Sovern. On Tuesday, Democracy Now! reached Jeff and asked him to read out loud the open letter he and his siblings just published in The Washington Post.

JEFF SOVERN: Our father, Michael I. Sovern, was the first Jewish president of Columbia University, which he served for more than 60 years. We believe that if he were alive today, he would be disgusted by the government’s coercion of Columbia, purportedly in the name of our religion. We don’t believe that President Donald Trump is sincere about protecting Jews from antisemitism. We find it more likely that an administration whose vice president has agreed with Richard M. Nixon that “professors are the enemy” is using antisemitism as a pretext to damage Columbia and America’s other elite universities. …

Our father is one of only three people interred on his beloved Columbia campus. Trump’s attack on the university desecrates a place our family holds sacred. It is both plausible and disturbing that some at Columbia are antisemitic. But we do not believe attempts to force the university to relinquish its independence are an appropriate response. And we wish the Trump administration would stop gaslighting us all.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that is Jeff Sovern, one of the four children of Columbia University’s first Jewish president, Michael Sovern. He was reading from an open letter he and his siblings had published in The Washington Post. Professor Katherine Franke, you taught at Columbia for close to a quarter of a century. You ultimately were forced to retire around your support for pro-Palestinian students, Jewish students, Muslim students, students who consider themselves atheists, whatever, but who all share their concern about Israel’s assault on Gaza. Can you talk about what he’s saying and this hammer of accusations of antisemitism, equating them with anti-Zionism?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Michael Sovern was an incredible president of our university. And his office, after he stepped down from being president, was down the hall from me, so I saw him daily. He led the university through very difficult times and actually was president when I was an undergraduate at Columbia — at Barnard. Columbia didn’t admit women at the point that I was an undergrad. And so, his children’s statement resonates so strongly with those of us who knew President Sovern very well.

I know that Lee Bollinger, our most recent — well, not most recent president, because we’ve had so many, but our most recent long-term president — is also, finally, expressing real concerns about the leadership at the university. And I’ve spoken to a number of the former provosts, who feel that Columbia has lost its way in the name of protecting Jewish students — some Jewish students — from bias.

And, of course, we shouldn’t have any form of antisemitism on our campus, but this is being used as a fig leaf for a political project. If Columbia really cared about eradicating all forms of bias from our university, then Columbia would have done something seriously about one of my male colleagues at the law school who uses the N-word in class regularly, a white male colleague who thinks that’s funny and makes him cool, or another who tells slavery jokes to Black students in the classroom and thinks that’s a very funny and appropriate thing to do in the classroom. And the Black students in those classes brought complaints to the administration, and nothing happened.

So we have an overreaction in the case of antisemitism — and again, I don’t want to say that there aren’t any incidents; there always are forms of antisemitism in all the institutions we’re part of — but we have absolutely no reaction to issues of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. In fact, they’ve taken all that language down off the university’s website at this point. I have trans colleagues at Columbia who are afraid for their own safety in the law school building. So, the environment is not one that has made any of us feel safer. It is one in which our safety has been weaponized in the name of advancing this larger political project, which is ultimately, I think, about dismantling the very university itself.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, I wanted to ask you about the Trump administration’s campaign of terror, really, against international students, revoking immigration statuses. The Times of India reports that the State Department has emailed hundreds of international students, asking them to self-deport for allegedly participating in campus activism. The United States has long been a place where students from all around the world come to study here. What’s the impact of this on not just Columbia, but all universities across the country?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Juan, I can’t overstate how terrified our students are. And it’s not just the students who are on visas or even green cards. It’s all of our students who come from other countries, who may even be citizens at this point, because it seems there’s no limit to the ways in which this administration is going to both test and violate the law in cleansing — it feels like a kind of racial and ethnic cleansing that is happening on our campuses.

One of the reasons I loved being a Columbia professor was that in many of my classes, half of the students came from other countries. They brought their experiences, their wisdom, other — notions of other legal systems, other cultures into the classroom, and it made it such a rich learning environment. I learned so much from them.

And when I talk to my colleagues now — I’m not teaching anymore, but I’m hearing that those students are not saying a word. And some of them are not even coming onto campus anymore, because they’re afraid of getting nabbed and of having the administration actually turn over their cellphones and home addresses. So, the classes are actually being emptied of those voices and of those bodies. And it’s a loss for the Columbia community, but it’s a horrible form of terror for the actual students who are so frightened.

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about what’s happening to students, I wanted to end — we only have about a minute. On Tuesday, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that Mahmoud Khalil — he was the negotiator between the students and Columbia University; he was a grad student at SIPA, who had a green card — that his case — he was taken from Columbia University housing; his green card was revoked; taken away from his wife, who is about to give birth; and sent to a Louisiana ICE jail. The judge in New Jersey ruled his case should move forward in New Jersey, where he was taken before being sent to Louisiana. What’s happening in this case? You were an adviser to Mahmoud Khalil.

KATHERINE FRANKE: I worked very closely with him for a year and a half, as did the university. They picked him as the student that they wanted to sit in the middle, between the students that were protesting and the administration itself, because they knew he was mature, he was reasonable, everyone trusted him. He was the exactly right person to be the negotiator between the university and the students. And then they put a target on his back, essentially, by allowing untruths to circulate in social media and elsewhere, to come out of the mouth of the secretary of state and other Trump administration officials. You know, it just breaks my heart, Amy, to see what’s happening to him and his family, but not only them.

He is still in that detention center, that horrible place in Louisiana, even though the case is in New Jersey. And his lawyers are fighting very hard — I know all of them well — to get him moved. His case has been moved, but he has not been moved. And they’re still making arguments to the judge to bring Mahmoud home, so that he’ll be — home-ish, in New Jersey, so that he’ll be closer to his family and to his lawyers. It is a horrendous object lesson of how the institutions that you think you’re part of and can trust turn on you, whether it’s Columbia or the United States government, and how hard it is to then bring him back to a place of security and freedom. And we’re all just hoping that these next arguments in court will bring Mahmoud back at least to a detention center in New Jersey, which is better than where he is now.

AMY GOODMAN: Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School, she was there for a quarter of a century, forced to retire in January.

Coming up, Trump’s immigration crackdown coming under increased criticism as the administration admits it flew a Salvadoran father, a Maryland father with protected status, to a prison in El Salvador. Back in 20 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Wisconsin, where liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated the Trump-backed Brad Schimel for a seat on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court in the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. Many viewed the race as a referendum on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump megadonor, who’s been heading the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle key federal agencies. Judge Crawford won 55% of the vote, even though Musk spent over $25 million on the race to help elect Schimel. On Sunday night, Musk gave out $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters, one of whom happened to be the chair of the Wisconsin Federation of Young Republicans. Judge Crawford made a reference to Musk during her victory speech.

JUDGE SUSAN CRAWFORD: As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won! … And Wisconsin’s stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.

AMY GOODMAN: While Democrats are celebrating the results in Wisconsin, as expected, Republicans won two closely watched House races in conservative districts in Florida, but the races were much closer than in November.

Joining us from Madison, Wisconsin, is John Nichols, The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent, his new article headlined “Wisconsin Rejects Musk’s Money, Trump’s Lies and the Right-Wing Assault on the Judiciary.”

John, overall, I think it’s being estimated that there was something like $100 million spent on this state judicial race. Can you talk about the significance of the liberal Judge Crawford’s victory by quite a large margin?

JOHN NICHOLS: It was quite a large margin, Amy. And let me tell you, I don’t think we can overestimate the significance. Going into this race, when people would ask me about it, I would say, “There’s no middle ground. If Crawford wins, it will be a huge signal that Americans are rejecting, obviously, the money that Elon Musk is using to try and buy elections, but also they’re rejecting the direction of the Trump administration.” On the other hand, if Brad Schimel had won, it would have been taken by Trump and Musk as, you know, a total vindication for what they’re doing.

The reason that was so is because Wisconsin is an absolute battleground state. It’s incredibly closely divided. In the last seven elections, five — for president of the United States, five have been decided by under 30,000 votes. So this is a state where things are usually very, very close. But it wasn’t that way on Tuesday. Susan Crawford did win by the better part of 200,000 votes. She did win that 55-45 victory. And what’s perhaps most significant is she won communities in regions of the state that had voted for Trump just five months ago in a very, very high-turnout election. So, as I suggest, I just don’t think you can overestimate the significance. This is a huge signal from a battleground state that Americans are genuinely upset, genuinely angry, I think, with Trump and with Musk.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John, that wasn’t the only race in Wisconsin. There was also an election for state superintendent of public instruction. What happened there?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, you’re sure — you’re exactly right, Juan. And the race for superintendent of public instruction, which is the state’s top education job and is a very significant job — it’s the post that current Governor Tony Evers held before he became governor — was intensely fought. It was a battle between the incumbent, Jill Underly, who has been an absolute supporter of public education — she’s a former rural educator — versus a woman named Brittany Kinser, who was supported by the Republicans and who was supported by advocates for voucher programs that would take money out of public education. Very clear choice. Kinser had a lot of resources. She was backed by a lot of the same campaigners that were out there for Brad Schimel in the Supreme Court race. And Jill Underly won. It wasn’t quite as big a victory as the Supreme Court race, but it was a roughly a 53-47 victory — a very clear, solid win. So, in both statewide races in the battleground state of Wisconsin, the progressive — the clearly progressive candidates won.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John, could you comment on the results in the two congressional special elections in Florida?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Those are important elections, because, you know, special elections in the first weeks of a new president’s term often give us an indication of, you know, kind of where sentiment is going. Now, these were heavily gerrymandered districts. They were designed to elect Republicans. There was no question of that. And the prospect that a Democrat would actually win one of these seats was, you know, pretty hopeful on the part of any Democrat who thought that would happen. However, there was a huge shift in both of the Florida districts toward the Democratic candidates, both of whom, by the way, were not famous people per se or particularly powerful figures, and they were running against very prominent officials in Florida on the Republican side. And yet what we saw is that counties in rural and more urban Florida, that had actually been pretty supportive of Trump, in some cases shifted toward the Democrats.

And overall, it was a result that I think Democrats can point to and do a sophisticated analysis. Essentially, what they need to say is this: “Look, these weren’t districts that we were going to win, but these are districts where you could get a measure of where the sentiment is moving in the United States.” And that’s what I would say. Remember, we have a lot of congressional districts across the U.S. that Republicans hold, but that are much, much more closely divided. It would be an easier run for the Democrat. So, if you see this kind of shift in districts across the country in 2026, there’s simply no question that the Democrats would take the House of Representatives.

AMY GOODMAN: So, again, those were two special elections in Florida for the seats of the embattled national security adviser Mike Waltz and for Gaetz, who was named as attorney general, nominated by Trump, but then, ultimately, had to pull out and pull out of Congress around various drug and sex scandals. But I wanted to go back to Wisconsin for one minute and ask not only the significance for the country — I mean, if you take what Elon Musk said, he said it’s for the future of Western civilization, but his candidate was defeated — but what this means, for example, in particular, about abortion rights, as the Democrats keep the majority on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, John.

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. In Wisconsin, it was a very, very clear choice. Susan Crawford has been a very strong supporter of abortion rights for a long time. In addition to being in the past a lawyer for labor unions, she was a lawyer in cases brought by Planned Parenthood. And so, there was no question of where she stood on the issue, and she put it front and center in her campaign. On the other hand, Brad Schimel is a longtime Republican politician who had been very closely associated with the anti-choice position and, in fact, was backed by ardent advocates of a ban on abortion rights. And so, the choice couldn’t have been clearer.

And I think that there are always people who like to tell you that abortion is fading as an issue, that as time passes, you know, perhaps it’s not as resonant. But when I was talking to voters yesterday, I was struck by the very strong turnout of young voters. I was at a polling place on the University of Wisconsin campus shortly before the polls closed, and there were literally young women running in to cast their vote, trying to make it in time, you know, before the closing of the polls. And in talking to these folks, you found a number of them were putting the issue of abortion rights very high on their list. So, I think it continues to be a very resonant issue.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about all this money that Elon Musk is pouring into these political campaigns. I mean, talk about taking Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision, putting it on steroids. Your sense of the legality of all of this, of offering a million dollars to particular voters?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Musk’s spending and the way he did his spending has been incredibly controversial in Wisconsin. The attorney general did bring an action against him. Other legal groups have been raising this issue. It didn’t get litigated before the election, but I don’t think there’s any question that there’s going to be a continuing examination of how Musk spent his money and of real questions of whether there were violations of Wisconsin election law.

But there’s something deeper as regards all this, Juan. Even if it was legal, what we need to understand is that we had a situation in Wisconsin where the wealthiest man in the world tried to buy an election. He poured his money in, as roughly $25 million, in addition to all these other gimmicks, all these other stunts. And I think that a lot of political analysts would have told you, “Well, that’s going to win, because money wins in politics.” But that didn’t happen in Wisconsin. So, when we talk about the significance of this, beyond the legalities, there’s a political significance. The message out of Wisconsin is that Musk’s money doesn’t win.

And that message matters for Democrats, obviously, going into the 2025 fall elections, as well as the 2026 midterm elections. It also matters for Republicans in Congress, because there’s no question Elon Musk has tried to intimidate them by threatening to use his money to punish any Republican that stands up to Donald Trump’s agenda. Well, now those Republicans have a counternarrative, another piece of information, which says that, yeah, maybe Musk’s money could protect you in a primary, but it might not be enough to protect you in a general election. And so, we’ve got a very significant signal out of Wisconsin about money in politics, in general, and about Elon Musk’s money, in particular.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it is remarkable that one of Elon Musk’s $1 million recipients went to the chairman of the Wisconsin College Republicans, a person who had worked for Ron Johnson, to get him elected, and in the fall of 2024 worked for Turning Point Action, Charlie Kirk’s group.

But I want to turn to Texas for one minute, as we wrap up. In an interview with The New York Times, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott of slow-walking a special election to replace Congressmember Sylvester Turner in Houston, who died last month. This is really significant. I mean, it looks like Abbott is not going to call a special election, at least at this point, but will keep it open, this seat, which would most likely go to Democrat, representing Houston, of course, until the November 2026 election. We just have 30 seconds.

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. I’ve written about these issues a lot in the past, governors playing with special election dates. It is an absolute assault on democracy. We need to understand that congressional seats, House seats, are filled in elections. They aren’t appointed. And so, when you have a governor of one party saying, “We’re not going to let people elect a successor to a member who has passed away,” that governor is saying that “I’m going to leave you, the people of a major American city, unrepresented for the better part of a year and a half.” It is absolutely unacceptable, and Texans should be raising an outcry about what Governor Abbott appears to be doing.

AMY GOODMAN: John Nichols, we thank you for being with us, The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent. We’ll link to your various articles at democracynow.org.

Coming up, Trump’s escalating war on universities. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show with a look at the alarming rise in censorship on university campuses across the United States. Last month, New York University abruptly canceled a presentation by the former international head of Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières, because some of her slides could be viewed as, quote, “anti-governmental.”

Dr. Joanne Liu, a Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, a professor of clinical medicine at McGill University and the former international president of Doctors Without Borders, was scheduled to speak at NYU, her alma mater, in March. She had been invited over a year ago to discuss the challenges of humanitarian crises. But the night before her speech, NYU’s vice chair of the Education Department called her to express concern over the content of some of her slides about casualties in Gaza and cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She offered to make edits, but three hours later, she was told her presentation was canceled.

In an op-ed in a French newspaper describing how elite universities are in the crosshairs of presidential cuts, Dr. Liu said she was “astonished by the institution’s posture of preemptive over-obedience.” Dr. Joanne Liu joins us now from Canada.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Explain exactly what happened, Dr. Liu.

DR. JOANNE LIU: Good morning. Yes, sure.

So, as you said, I was invited several months ahead, and it’s my alma mater. It was the first time they invited me since I graduated in the ’90s. So, you have to understand that for me it was a moment of rejoice and happiness of being invited back.

And so, the title of the presentation was “Challenges in Humanitarian Crises.” And I was covering what have happened over the last year, because things have changed. This is a normal and regular lecture that I gave, but I always update it on a regular basis. So, basically, I went to New York, and then I had submitted my presentation on the platform. And then they, as soon as I arrived, because I was living at a friend’s house, just said — by working in the ER at NYU, said, “By the way, the administration wants to talk to you.”

And then I end up talking with the lady from the education, the vice chair. And she said, “Well, listen, what do you have to say about your presentation?” I said, “Not much, but I think you have concerns. Do you want to share them with me?” And then she tells me that there was a slide that she thought that could be troubling the audience, and it could be perceived antisemitic because I was showing the number of casualties in conflict zones in aid workers. And it is an extract from the Aid Worker Security Database. And, of course, there is a fair amount of casualty in Gaza, knowing what is happening right now, but in other countries, as well, like Sudan, like South Sudan and Ukraine. In addition to that, she said, “Well, we think that it could possibly be perceived, as well, as anti-governmental, the way you talk about the U.S. cuts, the picture of Zelensky and Trump.”

So, I let her speak, and I said, “OK.” I said, “What do you want to do about that? Do you want to offer me some suggestion where I could either change the presentation, nuances how I’m going to articulate things. You know what? I’m chill. I’m really chill. I’m flexible. I want this to be a good moment.” And then she hesitated. And then I said, “OK.” And then, a few minutes after, I said, “Let me offer those three slides. I will remove. As long as I can keep the key, overarching message, I am fine. I can manage that.” And she said, “OK, listen, I’ll get back to you in a few hours.”

And basically, three hours later, I got a phone call, and the lady was really — I would say that she was really sad, anyway. I sensed some sadness. And she said, “Listen, I’m very sorry, but we’ve been talking for the last three hours, and I have to inform you that we have decided to cancel your conference.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Liu, you were for six years the president of Doctors Without Borders, one of the most prestigious medical groups in the world. Have you ever had a talk canceled before?

DR. JOANNE LIU: Actually, when a talk is canceled, it’s because I’m canceling it, but not the other way around. And it happened because for security circumstances or changes, and I could not attend. But it happened really rarely. It was from my side.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And were you — your reaction to when they told you it was canceled?

DR. JOANNE LIU: So, my reaction was I was stunned. I actually — it was not part of my scenario. I’m someone who always planned for worst-case scenario, but I could not imagine that case scenario, because these are my friends. And it was a moment of being reunited. We haven’t seen each other for a while. And they sent me regularly, I would say, emailed to me how excited they were. They told me, “Some of our staff has seen your presentation a few years ago.” They said, “You brought tears to their eyes because the content is so moving. We are so excited.” So I just thought that we would manage to find, I would say, a middle ground in all that. So, yes, completely stunned and, of course, disappointed.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in your presentation, as you mentioned, you included a table from the Aid Worker Security Database that shows one of the places with the — one of the places with the highest humanitarian casualties last year was the Gaza Strip. And you were told you could be perceived as antisemitic if you talked about this, and also, if you talked about USAID, perceived as anti-governmental. Respond to both, Dr. Liu, and what your international humanitarian work is all about.

DR. JOANNE LIU: Well, with respect to that slide is, it was not specifically, I would say, on Gaza. It was the compilation of number of casualties in conflict zone in aid worker community. And this is what I was trying to explain to the person, because, as I said, yes, this is the reason why we don’t see casualties on the other side, because it’s about aid worker.

For the cut on USAID, you just covered it, you know, in the disaster that’s happening in Myanmar, in your show earlier. It’s massive. It’s massive. The generosity of U.S. over the last years, if not decades, has been massive. They were covering the overseas developmental aid, you know, up to 30%. In terms of humanitarian aid, according to numbers, it’s something between 40 to 45% on a yearly basis. So, of course, when you do that abruptly, there’s going to be consequences.

And so, when you look in the figures, one of the things I was bringing forward is how it’s going to impact the HIV/AIDS program, where, actually, one of the most saving programs is an American program, is PEPFAR, is the presidential program to fight HIV/AIDS. And people expect there’s going to be several hundreds of thousands of kids who might die, and patients. And there’s going to be a rise in terms of numbers, because mothers who are HIV-positive will not have access to antiretroviral medicine and will transmit the infection to their child during birth. So, it’s massive, the impact.

And I was just talking, because my presentation, basically, it’s on three pillars. It talks about how to attract attention when a crisis happens, the security now in a conflict zone and in crisis time, and then the third pillar was on funding.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We only have about 30 seconds left, but there was also news that USAID is moving to end funding for the Gavi, the global Vaccine Alliance, that provides lifesaving vaccines for millions of poor children around the world. Your response?

DR. JOANNE LIU: Yes, I think it’s going to be disaster, of course.

But I would like, before we end the show, the reason why I wrote this letter is the fact that I truly and strongly believe that universities are the temple of knowledge, but, as well, of plurality of ideas. And if we do not allow that, we are basically killing the essence of what university is about. It’s about having people to be able to express a different point of view in a safety environment, where, as well, students can be exposed to it and make up their mind. That is what is necessary, and that is what makes a university, even a country, stronger, by plurality of ideas.

AMY GOODMAN: We do have 20 seconds. You are an alum of NYU. In this 20 seconds, what do you think the students lost in not hearing your speech?

DR. JOANNE LIU: Well, I think they lost the fact of getting a sort of a different point of view of someone who has been, how we say, a field aid worker. So, basically, I worked from being on ground zero to the leadership role, and I was giving, basically, the whole spectrum of what it means doing aid work nowadays.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Joanne Liu, we thank you so much for being with us, Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, associate professor of medicine at University of Montreal, professor of clinical medicine at McGill University and former head of Doctors Without Borders.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Burma, also known as Myanmar, where the death toll from Friday’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake has now topped 3,000, including 50 children who were killed when their preschool collapsed. In neighboring Thailand, where at least 21 people have been killed, more than 70 are believed to still be trapped under the rubble.

A video filmed by a teenage girl in Burma Saturday shows her ordeal as she was trapped with her sister and grandma in the wreckage of their apartment building in Mandalay, the epicenter of the quake. One of the girls can be seen banging on the rubble, crying out for help, with her grandmother’s face covered in blood.

BURMESE GIRL: [translated] Hello? Is somebody there? We are stuck in here! Please help us! I beg you! Please, pull us out!

AMY GOODMAN: The girls and their grandmother were later rescued, but the civil war that’s raged since the 2021 military coup has complicated efforts to allow aid to reach all those affected by the quake, as rebel groups accuse the junta of conducting airstrikes even after the earthquake. Amnesty International said the military junta needs to urgently allow humanitarian groups unimpeded access to all areas of Burma.

China, Russia, India, Vietnam and Thailand all quickly sent rescue teams and emergency aid. The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID has slowed the U.S. response. The day the earthquake struck, the administration said it was firing nearly all remaining USAID personnel and closing its foreign missions. On Monday, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce confirmed that a three-person assessment team from USAID will travel to Burma this week.

TAMMY BRUCE: The United States will provide up to $2 million through Burma-based humanitarian assistance organizations to support earthquake-affected communities as an immediate response to the March 28th earthquake. A USAID team of humanitarian experts based in the region are traveling to Burma now to identify the people’s most pressing needs.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Maung Zarni, Burmese dissident, human rights activist, scholar of genocide, co-founder of Forces of Renewal for Southeast Asia, or FORSEA, a grassroots network of pro-democracy scholars and human rights activists across Southeast Asia. He’s from Mandalay, the epicenter of the earthquake and Burma’s second-largest city.

Zarni, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain the situation.

MAUNG ZARNI: Well, it is really a triple whammy, Amy. You know, the coup came on the heel of COVID-19. The country was reeling from the lack of serious healthcare infrastructure and massive death tolls and spread of COVID. And then the coup triggered this civil war, which came on top of a low-intensity anti-junta resistance movement that had been going on for 60 to 70 years, depending on the ethnic regions. And then, on top of that, in the fourth year of the civil war, we were hit by earthquake. And the earthquake hit, importantly, the heartland of Burmese Buddhist majority, of the Dry Zone, including the capital of the junta. So this is really a triple whammy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Zarni, how has the continuing civil war and the military checkpoints all around the country affected the ability of search and rescue operations to get to people trapped under the rubble?

MAUNG ZARNI: Well, three things affect negatively search and rescue missions by even the locals. Number one is the infrastructural damage to freeway, highways and local lanes that have hampered movement of, you know, the rescue teams or goods and services to the affected areas. The Sagaing and Mandalay are two major cities, and then the capital, Naypyidaw.

And then, the second is, the military junta is, rightly, paranoid for its survival, because it’s losing massive territorial control across the country. So the military junta step up, you know, obstacles. They’re putting up obstacles for, you know, movement of people, particularly at nighttime. And then, like, they’re continuing aerial bombardment in areas that the junta has lost control. And so, on top of the earthquake, the military junta is bombing, you know, large villages, towns and cities in different parts of the country. And then there also groups like Arakan Army, that is also accused of committing atrocity crimes against Rohingya in western Myanmar, are taking advantage of the situation and attacking some of the junta outposts.

And so, it’s a really demoralizing and very, very dark scenario we are looking at. You know, there is no state as such. You know, there is not a single actor in Burma that can be considered representative of Myanmar as a state. And the civil society has been largely very much weakened by decades of civil war and political repression, massive poverty, mismanagement, corruption. All of that has compounded the society’s effort to come to rescue.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Also, you are from Mandalay, Burma’s second-largest city. What is the situation there, the epicenter of the earthquake?

MAUNG ZARNI: Well, we are across — you know, we are across the river, Irrawaddy, from the epicenter, which is near another — a Dry Zone city called Sagaing. And the people are very afraid of tremors, aftershocks. And these aftershocks seem to be taking place, you know, daily and nightly. So, a lot of people are sleeping on the streets in tents under 100-degree Fahrenheit scorching heat. And then, there are like, you know, an uncountable number of people buried and presumed crushed under the rubble, so the smell coming from the, you know, sadly, shelters seem to be, like, really, really strong. And, you know, Mandalay is about 2 or 3 million population. And more than 50% of the city structures have been destroyed. And then, the Sagaing, our neighbor city across the river, 90% of the Sagaing is completely crushed. And then, the aid is not reaching there.

AMY GOODMAN: Zarni —

MAUNG ZARNI: And then the — yeah. Go ahead, please.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering about aid and international aid. You know what’s going on in this country. You were a student at the University of Wisconsin. You have China, Russia, India quickly sending emergency teams. And a meager three-person team from the U.S. hasn’t even arrived yet. On Friday, some workers at USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance received layoff emails while they were preparing to respond to the earthquake. What are you calling for when it comes to international aid from the United States, but also from all over the world?

MAUNG ZARNI: [inaudible], you know, every type for humanitarian assistance from any quarter of the world that wishes to help. The military, you know, to my initial excitement, has said they would receive any international assistance from any country, whether hostile to the junta or not. So I was quite excited to hear that statement from the junta head, Min Aung Hlaing.

But I think, like, aside from how the military responds to the international offer of assistance, I think we’re not even talking about the USAID help or the American taxpayers’ money. There is one billion U.S. dollars frozen as a result of the February 2021 military coup by the Biden administration. That money, if there is any time that is, you know, good for that money to be unfrozen, it’s now. You know, I understand that, like, the Biden and Trump administration did not or do not want to release the money and then, like, put fuel into the raging civil war, but that money should be set up internationally and handled by an international party. One billion dollars for earthquake rescue and relief funds, that is something that the Trump administration and the Congress should seriously consider.

This is the darkest hour of need for the Myanmar people. Forget the regime. Forget the resistance. Forget the civil war. We need to get some kind of humanitarian ceasefire, for, like, say, a hundred days, by every actor involved in the conflict and get the rescue and reconstruction begin.

AMY GOODMAN: Maung Zarni, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We will continue to cover this disastrous 7.7-magnitude earthquake in Burma, the epicenter your home city of Mandalay. The numbers of dead are 3,000 and counting. Maung Zarni is a Burmese dissident, human rights activist and scholar of genocide.

Up next, we look at the alarming rise in censorship on U.S. campuses. We speak with a professor, a former international head of Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, after NYU canceled her presentation. She was talking, among other things, mentioning Gaza and also USAID. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago, where we’re going to stay, because in a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers Union has reached a tentative contract deal with Chicago Public Schools after more than a year of negotiations without a strike or threat of a strike for the first time in less than — in more than a decade. The full membership still has to vote before everything is final. The deal reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the ability to teach Black history and includes raises for veteran teachers and more. This comes amidst attacks on public education by the Trump administration, as well as concerns about ICE agents targeting Chicago schools.

For more, we’re joined in Chicago by Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, also wrote the afterword to the new posthumous memoir by the former Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis titled I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education. It also has a foreword by the world-renowned abolitionist, author and activist, professor Angela Davis.

Stacy Davis Gates, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain the contract victory you almost have secured.

STACY DAVIS GATES: Good morning. Thank you for having me again.

This contract provides us with the capacity to move our school district forward in a time of Trump. As you noted earlier, the destruction of the Department of Education is going to have profound impact on the least of these. This contract provides a force field of protection for both our LGBTQIA+ students and our members. It provides academic freedom to ensure that history teachers like me are able to teach about the power of Reconstruction in this country, led by enslaved Africans in the first profound general strike that this country experienced. Beyond that, this contract is a way in which our immigrant students and their families can find safety in sending their children to schools, where we will protect them, as we have already. The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use, especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected, to ensure that their ability to enjoy the public good has some guardrails on it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stacy Davis Gates, could you talk about some of the other proposals you were able to win, including more funding for sports programs and sustainable community schools?

STACY DAVIS GATES: Absolutely. Thank you for that question. Dyett High School in the Washington Park neighborhood of Chicago was closed by Rahm Emanuel, who was the mayor of Chicago. In fact, he closed over 50 schools at one time in the city. We, in coalition with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, teachers and grandmothers and alderpeople, like Jeanette Taylor, they went on a hunger strike. And in that hunger strike, they won the reopening of their schools. Our union then, in coalition with this community coalition, took their needs to the bargaining table and established community schools. We have expanded the number of community schools as an effort to support and structure spaces that don’t have to close, but provide opportunity. This year, Dyett’s boys’ basketball team is celebrating a state championship.

Again, this collective bargaining agreement provides space for progress. We have a evaluation system in the Chicago Public Schools that has deprivileged both Black children and Black teachers of a very well-rounded experience. What we’ve done is marginalized those impacts and created pathways to get more Black teachers into the system. While corporations like Target are walking away from embracing Black workers and Black employees, we are providing pathways to support more of them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the difficulty of the negotiations? Clearly, this was an unusual situation, because the current mayor, Brandon Johnson, used to be an organizer with your union, so the union striking against this mayor, who was so close to them, would have been a difficult situation. How were you able to maneuver with the negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the Mayor’s Office?

STACY DAVIS GATES: The power of our solidarity has been most vividly illustrated in our ability to strike. Karen Lewis led one in 2012 that was perhaps one of the most galvanizing moments of our nation’s labor history. But beyond that, what we’ve done is that we’ve done a few things. We’ve resisted the impacts of privatization and created spaces, through the strike, through negotiating, through the coalition space, to create power, power that enables us to do a lot of things. Yes, we can fight. We do that very well. And it is that fight, the equity that we build in that struggle, that has enabled this opportunity to push for something that has been more transformative. We’ve changed and enshrined in this contract a budgeting system that creates equity, that is embedded in making sure that children who go to school on the South and the West Sides of the city, that their budgets are prioritized in a reparatory manner. That is in this contract. That’s not just built through the negotiating table. That’s built through community coalition. That is built through supporting hunger strikes. That is built through taking it to the picket line. It is built through bold, unapologetic love for our city’s children.

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you could comment on Karen Lewis. You wrote the afterword to the new memoir by the former CTU president, Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis, the book titled I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education. It’s also got a foreword by Angela Davis. Can you talk about her life and legacy as a transformative leader and what lessons you think are key to draw upon now?

STACY DAVIS GATES: That is a wonderful question. Thank you.

Karen Lewis is the blueprint for the type of leadership that we need in this very moment. Karen Lewis took the helm of the Chicago Teachers Union when Rahm Emanuel was the mayor of this city, a mayor that used the public good for the rich. In fact, he and Elon palled around here in Chicago. We had a mayor that foreclosed on public education by shutting down 50 schools on Black children on the South and West Sides of the city. We had a mayor who covered up the murder of a Black teenager in the city. We faced a very well-funded, neoliberal establishment that was hell-bent on marginalizing everything that we needed to have life and life more abundantly.

Karen Lewis organized. She found her confederates and the community and organizations like the Kenwood Oakland and people like Jitu Brown and Northside Action for Justice, and built a movement that was based on giving Chicagoans what they deserve, because if you give Chicagoans what they deserve, the children of this city are rooted and anchored in that. And so, what I would say in this moment is that Karen Lewis was fearless. Karen Lewis looked at power and laughed. Karen Lewis created space for coalition. And Karen Lewis led with humility and with a fearlessness of love, care and legacy.

AMY GOODMAN: Stacy Davis Gates, thanks so much for being with us, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, joining us from Chicago.

When we come back, an update on Burma’s massive earthquake. Over — well, thousands have died. Aid groups say there’s still enormous need. Meanwhile, with the gutting of USAID, where is the United States in helping join with other countries around the world? Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with President Trump’s push to end collective bargaining rights for federal workers that have helped to lead the resistance to cuts by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency by signing up thousands of new members joining protests and by filing many lawsuits.

On Monday, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers in 37 federal agencies, sued the Trump administration over an executive order Trump signed Thursday night that calls the unions hostile to his agenda and could block collective bargaining rights for nearly half the federal workforce and overturn the ability of unions to represent them in negotiations or in court. Unions have called Trump’s order the biggest attack on the labor movement in U.S. history. The largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, says it will also challenge the order in court.

This comes after a federal judge recently ruled in favor of AFGE and its allies in another case, ordering the Trump administration to reinstate federal probationary workers fired at six agencies.

Meanwhile, another round of layoffs for federal workers is underway this morning, this time for as many as 10,000 workers at the Health and Human Services Department.

For more, we go directly to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

To say the least, Everett Kelley, your union is under attack. Talk about President Trump’s executive order and how you’re fighting back.

EVERETT KELLEY: OK, well, first of all, thank you for having me here today.

You know, as you know, this executive order uses national security for their actions. However, we know this is just pretext, not justification, because there’s no way that you’ve had employees, such as nurses and doctors and scientists, you know, in a collective bargaining agreement for decades, and all of a sudden now they are not able to be in an agreement. You know, that’s strictly pretextual and has nothing to do with national security. And —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Everett —

EVERETT KELLEY: — this is the thing that — go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No, no. Go ahead.

EVERETT KELLEY: You know, I was just going to say this is nothing but retaliation against our union for standing up for its members. But this is our job. This is what we should do, is stand up for our members, because, you know, it’s been proven that what this administration is trying to do to federal employees is illegal. And we will continue to fight for the membership. We will continue to fight for America. And we will continue to fight for democracy. That’s our job. And we are outraged by this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about to what extent is this historic, these attacks on federal workers? How does this compare to what other administrations have done in the past in terms of the federal workforce?

EVERETT KELLEY: You know, again, this is — you know, this workforce was under the first Trump administration. He didn’t think that there was a need at that time, when you had a pandemic going on, when you had crisis in the world — you know, he didn’t think there was a need to place these employees under this national security threat. And that’s exactly what it is. It’s designed to silence workers. It’s designed to make sure that employees keep their head down and don’t say anything, don’t hold anyone accountable. Because for decades these employees have been under contract, it’s never been a problem. Like I said, even under the Trump first administration, it wasn’t a problem.

And all of a sudden, it’s a problem. Why? Because we’ve been winning in court, we’ve been challenging this administration, and we will continue to challenge this administration. What they don’t understand is this. AFGE is here to represent the members. We will be here. We was here before this administration came on board. We’ll be here after it leaves. That’s the thing that they hadn’t understood about AFGE.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, since 1978, with the Civil Service Reform Act, all federal workplaces are considered open shops, which means the workers are not required to pay union dues. Can you talk about what’s been happening in recent months in terms of federal employees deciding to pay up union dues?

EVERETT KELLEY: Well, you know, and that’s true. You know, this is an open shop. No one is required to pay union dues. When people join this union, they voluntarily join. And over the past few months, people have been noticing the attack on federal employees. They are realizing the need for a union, and people are joining this union. I mean, it’s been massive amounts of employees that have decided, “You know what? I want to be a part of this union,” because they see that the union is standing there, you know, in the way — matter of fact, you know, I just believe this, that if we don’t stand, the very democracy of this country will soon be gone. And people realize that. Employees realize that. And so they are now saying, “You know what? I want to be a part of this union, because this union is standing for America.”

AMY GOODMAN: Everett Kelley, I’m wondering if you can respond to the federal judge ruling in favor of your union, the AFGE, ordering the Trump administration to reinstate federal probationary workers. Can you explain what kind of union protection probationary workers have? And let’s be clear, there’s different kinds of probationary workers. You’ve got the workers who’ve maybe just come on board in the last year or two, and you’ve got the longtime workers who get a promotion, and so then they’re in a period of probation. So, they could be there for 20 years, they get elevated, and suddenly they’re fired.

EVERETT KELLEY: Yeah, you know, this is unheard of. First of all, you know, to be a probationary employee is just like you said. You know, it could be a person that just had been doing such an amazing job that they got a promotion, and they’ve been on that promotion for 90 days, or they’ve been on that promotion for a year. And, you know, this administration has come in and said, “Because you’re a probationary employee, you’re fired.” Right? But this is the thing they need to understand: They’re not on probation; they’re on a probationary appointment.

And this administration was wrong. The court admits that they were wrong. The court showed that they was wrong. And, you know, we are going to continue to make sure that we point out these irregularities and these illegal actions that this administration has taken against federal employees. These probationary employees was very vulnerable, because a lot of them have very few rights. This administration knew that, and so they came after them. But AFGE stood up for them. AFGE is going to continue to stand up for any employee that is wrongfully terminated.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — DOGE and the Trump administration have pushed this reasoning for their aggressive dismantling of federal services: The federal government is too big. Can you talk about this issue, that they claim that there’s too many people working, especially since the biggest employer is the Defense Department in terms of civilian employees?

EVERETT KELLEY: OK, again, you know, it’s just pretextual. It is a way of turning people’s attention away from the real issue, because when you look at the facts, the population has exploded since 1970, but the federal workforce is the same today as it was in 1970, in the ’70s. So, that is just pretextual. That is not true.

And certainly, you know, this workforce is needed. The services that is provides to the American people, these are the people that do that. These are the workers. These are nurses that provide the services for the veterans that need assistance. These are the people that provide the services for the food inspection, to make sure that the food we eat is safe; the air we breathe, in EPA, is safe. These are the people that make sure that the public fly safely. That’s under attack.

You know, so this is just pretextual. It is not that the government is too large. You know, these are people that are trying to take over the government and give contracts to their billionaire buddies. That’s the real issue here.

AMY GOODMAN: Everett Kelley, as we begin to wrap up, there are protests at every level. You’ve got, as we speak, New Jersey Senator Booker on the floor of the Senate filibustering. You’ve got lawsuits like yours and those all over the country. And you’ve got people in the streets. You’re going to be speaking at the April 5th mass mobilization on Saturday at the “Hands Off” rally organized by Indivisible, where I think around the country there are going to be something like 800 rallies protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s, what they’re calling a power grab. Can you talk about — give us a little preview about what you’re going to say.

EVERETT KELLEY: Well, first of all, you know, we want to point out the facts. You know, we want the American people to know that what’s happening here is not what’s being said by the administration. What’s happening is that there is a power grab, because this is about power. This is about an administration wanting to have their way regardless of the rule of law, you know. And it’s so full of lawlessness, and we are trying to point that out to the American people.

We are also trying to make the point that, you know, if you continue to reach and grab the federal workforce and disallow them to do their job, it’s going to affect the services that they provided to the American people. Because, you know, the American — the federal workforce do their job so well, in my opinion, that many times they are unnoticed. When a veteran gets the services that he or she needs, you know, that veteran worker that’s doing that work is unnoticed. When the food that we eat is inspected and people are not getting sick by that, that food inspector’s job is really unnoticed. When the America fly safely, you know, the workers at TSA, it’s really unnoticed. When the air we breathe is good, that work is really unnoticed. So, they are doing their job, and they’re doing it effectively. But the minute that they are not able to do their job and they are downsizing these positions, then the American people are going to feel that. And it’s going to be dangerous and detrimental to the health and well-being of Americans.

You know, so that’s why we are making this rally known. That’s why we are asking people to participate nationwide. Like you said, we’re looking at over 800 of these events. And I appreciate Indivisible for doing what they’re doing to bring some awareness to what’s happening across this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Everett Kelley, we want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest government worker union in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the words of Robert McChesney, co-founder of the advocacy group Free Press, tireless defender of media and democracy. He’s died at the age of 72. Bob McChesney was a prolific author of nearly three dozen books on media, democracy and digital rights, including Rich Media, Poor Democracy, a beloved professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He appeared on Democracy Now! multiple times over the years. In a minute, we’ll hear Bob in his own words. But first, John, introduce him to people who did not know Bob McChesney as we remember him.

JOHN NICHOLS: Bob McChesney was one of the great public intellectuals of our era, a scholar who was respected and awarded by Harvard and every other university for his writings and for his thinking, who lectured all over the United States and all over the world. He could have easily lived in the ivory tower. Instead, he chose to become an activist, to take the ideas that he had developed, about the danger of media monopoly, about the importance of protecting a diverse and open and free press, about the need for net neutrality, into the public debate.

And, I think, to greater extent than anyone in the contemporary era, it was Bob McChesney who really introduced people to the idea that media itself could be an issue, that we could debate about whether our media system serves democracy or whether it serves corporate power. He argued that too frequently it serves corporate power and that there is a desperate need for a small-D democratic media in the United States. He loved Democracy Now! because of what it does in that regard, but he also loved independent, grassroots media across this country and the people who advocate for it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, John Nichols wrote the book with Bob McChesney The Death and Life of American Journalism. We’re going to go back in time to 2013, when Juan González and I spoke with Robert McChesney at the Democracy Now! table.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think, when the internet began, and this is — it seems like ancient history now — in the ’80s and ’90s, when we first people became aware of it, it was seen largely as a noncommercial oasis. It was a place where people could go and be equal and be empowered as citizens to take on concentrated economic and political power, to battle propaganda, and there was no advertising, there was no commercialism. That was off-limits. And there was no surveillance. People could do what they wanted and not be tracked. And that was the great democratic vision that started the internet, that Aaron Swartz believe in.

And I think what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is that’s been turned on its head. And I think most people are oblivious to what’s taken place, because the thinking is, “Well, I can still do my thing. I can go to the Democracy Now! website. I can find other cool websites and hang out there. And as long as I can do my own thing and I can text my friends and have a Facebook page, life is good.” But it doesn’t really work that way. What’s been taking place — and I think it’s really crystallized in the last five years — is that on a number of different fronts, extraordinarily large, monopolistic corporations have emerged: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, at the access level; Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, at the application and use level. And these firms have changed the nature of the internet dramatically. And they’ve done it by becoming huge monopolies with immense power.

And what they’re able to do is collect information on us that’s absolutely unbelievable — we have no privacy anymore — and use that information to sell us to advertisers. And then, I think most strikingly, what I get at in the book is that they work closely with the government and the national security state and the military. They really walk hand in hand collecting this information, monitoring people, in ways that by all democratic theory are inimical to a free society.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Bob, one of the things that you raise in your book, that critics of the media, both from the left and the right, have had a blind spot for years of not doing enough of a political-economic analysis of the developments of the various forms of media, and especially the internet. What are some of the main things that you raise, in terms of the political economy of the media, in your book?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, you have to look at the, first of all, access to the internet. And the access to the internet people get in this country is controlled by a cartel, basically, of AT&T, Verizon, with cellphones, and Comcast through cable line. And what we have in this country as a result of that is Americans pay far more for cellphones, they pay far more for broadband wired access, than any other comparable country in the world, and we get much worse service. It has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with, quote-unquote, “economics.” It has everything to do with corrupt policymaking and the power of these firms. And that gives — that gives them the power to basically try to privatize the internet as much as possible, make it their own, because they know people have no alternative. If you want a cellphone, you don’t have 14 choices; you’ve basically got one or two. And there’s — when you get that big, when you dominate a market as much as an AT&T or Verizon, you’re not really competing like 75 hot dog vendors compete. You have — see much more in common than you do in competition. And so that’s why it’s considered now a cartel.

But that’s just the beginning. Once you get through that bottleneck onto the internet, what we’ve seen is that the internet was promised to be this great engine of economic competition. It was going to spur economic growth, create all these new businesses, huge amounts of job. Remember the term “new economy” from the late ’90s? And instead what we’ve seen is the internet is arguably the biggest generator of monopoly in history. I mean, at every place you look, from Google to Apple to Amazon to Facebook to Twitter, network economics lend themselves in such a way that you get one company that runs the table and no one else really can get a peep in. And these monopolies then generate massive profits, which they use as the basis to create empires — Google going out, Microsoft going out, taking their monopoly money and gobbling up all the other enterprises to build even larger digital empires. …

The way to understand these huge empires — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon — is they’re all like continents of the world. Imagine it’s the late 19th century. They’ve each got a continent — North America, South America, Asia, Africa. And their continent is their gusher monopoly basis, where they’re the monopoly, they get these huge profits. And then they use those profits in order to branch out and take attacks on the other continents to get a bigger chunk of it, because they really know everyone’s out to take over the world, but they’re the only players in the game. If you don’t have a continent, you’re not a player. And what’s happened on the internet, too, is that with the rise of patents that these companies use to basically prevent newcomers from coming in, in addition to network economics, it’s become much more closed off than it was 10 or 15 years ago. A lot of the — Google has been the first to admit: “We could never start Google today; we’d have to go through so many lawsuits just to even get out of our office. It would be unthinkable.”

AMY GOODMAN: What does “net neutrality” mean today?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Net neutrality — in the theory of it or the practice, or both?

AMY GOODMAN: Both.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, in theory, the idea of net neutrality is it’s an acknowledgment that we have this cartel that controls access to the internet. And because we have this cartel, there’s tremendous incentive for Comcast or AT&T and Verizon to want to basically privatize the internet, say, “We control what you can get — gets on the internet and what doesn’t, if you want to be on our network.” And then they can shake people down for money. It also has immense political power, unimaginable political power. And, you know, this is something that the media reform movement, Free Press, we’ve all organized on this for the last decade to prevent companies from using their monopoly power to be able to censor what gets through on the internet, so we have an open network. Now, if we actually had a public service like a post office system, it wouldn’t be a debate you’d have, because there would be no incentive to censor off dissident voices. Everyone would have access, no questions asked. It’s a huge fight, and it’s a difficult fight, because there’s so much money on the other side. …

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What is the fate of the content providers in this world where basically the people who control the pipes and the search engines and the aggregators are — have the main economic power? What happens to the journalists, the musicians, the artists and those who produce the actual content that people want to access over these systems?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Sheer unmitigated disaster. And we all know this. Newsrooms now look like plagues. And, you know, the internet is not solely responsible for the collapse of journalism. I think that media consolidation has led to a shrinking of newsrooms, relatively, over the last 25 years. It’s not a new thing. But what the internet has done is it has greatly accelerated it and made it permanent. Right now we’re faced with a dark situation that there’s really no way to make — commercial interests can make money doing journalism, in any significant level. They might be able to do it for elites, business community, in the largest markets. But the notion of having a broad popular commercial journalism, as we understood for the last hundred years as sort of natural, that’s no longer in existence.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert McChesney, speaking in Denver at a media and democracy conference in 2013, a beloved professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He appeared on Democracy Now! many times. You can go to democracynow.org for all interviews. He’s died at the age of 72.

That does it for our show. Happy birthday, Mike Burke!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to the Trump administration’s intensifying attacks on cultural institutions and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In February, President Trump ousted the center’s longtime chair, David Rubenstein, made himself chair of the board. Trump also fired longtime President Deborah Rutter. Last week, the Kennedy Center fired at least seven members of its Social Impact initiative, including its vice president, artistic director, the renowned artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The team aimed to expand the art center’s reach to diverse audiences, to commission new works by Black composers. The job terminations come weeks after President Trump took over the Kennedy Center and also appointed his allies, including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to the board, and her mother and second lady Usha Vance and two hosts on Fox News, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph recorded this video from his office just after he was fired.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Well, I am sitting in my office at the Kennedy Center one last time. It’s funny. I’m taking things down, like this red, black and green American flag and this extraordinary piece of artwork that my man Greg made that honors Stevie Wonder and this poster from BAM and a commemorative album that was organized by Swizz Beatz. Basically, I’m taking down everything Black in my office, just as the new leadership of the Kennedy Center is doing its best to disavow much of the literal color that has made this place special. I am grieving and angry and also ready to be rid of the moral injury that has come with being in this place. It’s hard to say goodbye, but it isn’t hard to say goodbye to an oppressive situation. So, may liberation be my liturgy. I’m proud of what we made here. We will always have an impact.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, speaking after he was fired as vice president and artistic director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the last time he was in his office. And this is a portion from Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s spoken word performance Friday, when he went back to Oakland for a timely production with the Oakland Symphony titled “The Forgiveness Suite,” accompanied by musician Daniel Bernard Roumain.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Steps to grace. Face the hurt. Unthread the truth. Choose mercy. Engage your transgressors. Say I leave this pain with you. Grace requires a loosening of other people’s stuff for American-socialized Black girls who considered shame reflexively when self-love wasn’t enough. Grace is never enough when the forgiveness isn’t deserved. But here you are, facing the truth, reconciling the pain by extending grace.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been listening to Marc Bamuthi Joseph. He joins us right now from Virginia.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bamuthi. Talk about what happened last week. Talk about what’s happening to the Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Peace, Amy. Good morning to you, and good morning to everyone listening and watching.

I feel so privileged to be the child of immigrants and having lived in the state of California for a long time. Moving to D.C. infused me with a different sense of patriotism and connection to the American promise, to the plurality that makes this country truly great.

There has been, as you’ve distilled, an infusion of a kind of binary political discourse into what’s supposed to be a sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression. The Kennedy Center, it should be said, has not officially canceled any performances or explicitly contractually removed themselves from relationship to any artists. But as you’ve been describing so diligently and so bravely over the course of your entire career, we create atmosphere through rhetoric. The stated agenda as institutionalized in spaces like the National Endowment for the Arts, let’s say, severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity. The specific attack on gay, trans and drag performers has narrowed the cultural radius at the Kennedy Center significantly, so that artists feel like they can’t in good conscience come to the Kennedy Center. So you’re seeing artists like Issa Rae or the producers of Hamilton or the artist Rhiannon Giddens remove themselves from their relationship to the Kennedy Center.

And that, in turn, trickles down to the brave staff, who are arts professionals who care about cultural providence and have to do their very best to make it possible for artists to continue to be at their best. But against the backdrop of this oppressive regime and this politically narrow board of directors, that’s extraordinarily difficult to do.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have this unbelievable moment that we just played, Jon Batiste playing “Star-Spangled Banner.” President Trump is saluting —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the Super Bowl, and he had just fired him from the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — along with many others. And then John F. Kennedy, you’ve got the portrait there in the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And when he came for his board meeting, President Trump as chair, what he put up, new portraits, himself, his wife, Usha Vance and Vice President Vance.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, you know, what you’re seeing all over government are folks who aren’t necessarily experienced in the lines or departments or vectors of action that they’re supposed to lead. And there is no formal experience in either nonprofits, arts management or the art of curation that is now present at the top of the organizational chart, beginning with the board chair. So, you know, the desire to satisfy one’s ego or the desire to be vengeful, apparently, has superseded the desire to serve this nation in terms of making a safe space for artists, particularly artists from historically marginalized communities or historically minoritized communities to thrive.

The work that we did in Social Impact — and I’m so proud of my team, my staff and all of my colleagues who supported us — you know, that work was meant to focus on the historically marginalized, but also it connected to this idea of the constitutionality of inspiration. Our belief is that you cannot be — you cannot have access to the franchise, to the American franchise, if you don’t have access to the impulse of creativity, that just like you have access to the ballot box or equal protection under the law under the 14th Amendment, you also have access and protection to inspiration. How can you be an American if you cannot hope? And who authors hope more than artists? So, this diminishment of creativity, of ideas, the diminishment of folks’ access to high-level inspired works of art is among the more un-American things, I think, that a leader would do.

AMY GOODMAN: During your time there, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, you helped launch the Culture Caucus, which offered two-year residencies with groups — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — that work with queer and trans youth, formerly incarcerated people — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the disabled community.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You also established a national partnership — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — called Conflux, which worked with the National Arab Orchestra —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the First Nations community and World Pride.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your audience, mainly wealthy and white.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the direction that Trump is now taking the performing arts center in? We heard from, what, Steve Bannon, one of his allies, that he had spoken to Ric Grenell, the new head of the Kennedy Center, that they’re going to be bringing, what, in one of the first performances, the January 6th Choir to perform there to usher —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — in a new era of culture in the new Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, I won’t speak to the president’s curatorial tastes. They speak for themselves. I think maybe what I would point to is the list of maybe more than 200 musicians who didn’t want their music played at his rallies. That speaks to a broader environment, I think, and disconnect between the arts community and the political direction of the president of the United States.

All the work that you cited, that’s the work that we stand on and that we’re proud of. You know, your listeners and your viewers know, going out to have a date night or a family night is increasingly expensive — parking and food, and, you know, not to mention the cost of the tickets themselves, child care. A lot of the work that we did was we lowered the barrier to entry from a financial standpoint, but also from a social standpoint. You know, my folks always want to know who all gonna be there, right? Well, what we did in Social Impact was we helped usher in a culture of invitation. The Kennedy Center, historically, at its best, produces more than 2,000 events a year.

So, maybe less than focus on what happens curatorially, I think we all have to ask ourselves: How many artists are willing to come into a space with such a narrow field of cultural vision? What is the scale of the Kennedy Center going to be like six months from now or a year from now?

What happens inside the building is only as powerful as the people and the artists within it. So, you know, God bless all the curators at the Kennedy Center, but maybe more importantly, God bless the artists, who now have perhaps one less venue to share their work with the world. And then, God bless the audiences, because audiences or, you know, American citizens, folks who have less access to inspiration erode the democracy from the point of a lack of sight onto the creative horizon.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also ask you, Bamuthi, about Trump’s executive order — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — signed last week, appointing the vice president, JD Vance, to eliminate, quote, “divisive, race-centered ideology,” unquote, from Smithsonian museums, research centers and the National Zoo. The order, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aims to remove exhibits and programs that portray U.S. history and values as “inherently harmful and oppressive,” unquote. It cites in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. The Smithsonian operates independently, since it was established as a public-private partnership by Congress in 1846, but roughly receives 60% of its funding from the federal government. You know, you’re an Oakland guy, but you’ve moved to Washington —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — for your job, that you were just fired from, and I’m sure you’ve spent time at the African American museum. The significance of — 

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: — putting Vance in charge of deciding what exhibits are appropriate or not, what is American or not?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah. Yeah. It is chilling. It is a harbinger. It is a signifier in the most ominous of terms.

I think about the words of John F. Kennedy inscribed on the wall at the Kennedy Center. Kennedy spoke of an America that was unafraid of grace and beauty. I think about the writers and the teachers who made me, everyone from Dr. Daniel Omotosho Black at Clark Atlanta University to the author Toni Morrison, the poet Nikki Giovanni. I think about how they all authored the story of our overcoming.

America is actually built on struggle. And, you know, it’s obviously impossible to decouple American history from a genocidal, hyper-patriarchal, hyper-capitalist frame and origin story. But the idea of democracy itself is a radical idea. The Constitution itself is a critical theory. It describes a way, a populist way, that requires participation in order to actually make the country thrive. In order to be — in order to fully participate in the democracy, you have to sublimate or suppress your apathy.

My partners at SOZO Artists and I think about the idea that the way to turn apathy into empathy is to infuse inspiration as a conversion element. These museums, these Smithsonian museums, inspire folks because they distill the story of our overcoming. You enter — even if you entered one of the Smithsonian institutions apathetic as to the idea of struggle or overcoming, you are inspired inside of that institution, and you leave a more compassionate and more empathetic human being. So, you know, this description of what the Smithsonian institutions do, particularly what we call the “Blacksonian” here locally, that description is severely un-American and disconnected from the American promise. But maybe more critically, it minimizes the opportunity to generate empathy among not only the citizens of this country, but visitors from all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, I want to thank you so much for being with us, renowned artist and playwright, fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative.

When we come back, we remember Free Press co-founder Robert McChesney, tireless defender of media and democracy. Back in 20 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Lubara Wanwa (Waiting for the Arrival of a Son)” by Aurelio Martínez, featuring Youssou N’Dour. Aurelio was killed last week at the age of 55 in a plane crash.