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

One month into Donald Trump’s second presidency, he’s mostly governed through executive orders and carried out his agenda with sweeping cuts by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the billionaire, and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, all of which has generated a slew of protests, lawsuits, judicial rebukes.

This week, Trump shared an illustration of himself wearing crown, with the headline “Long Live the King” — it looked like a Time magazine cover — as he cheered his administration’s move to end congestion pricing in New York.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk defended his work to gut whole agencies across the federal government in a joint interview with President Trump on Fox News.

ELON MUSK: I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a court filing from the White House Office of Administration lists Elon Musk as a senior adviser to the president who’s serving as an employee of the White House office, not DOGE, which the White House previously said he was leading.

To discuss this and much more, as Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw at the CPAC summit that just took place, we’re joined by David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, former senior communications adviser and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. His recent pieces for The Lever are headlined “Trump Just Limited Your Payout for Airline Mishaps,” “Elon Doesn’t Want You to Know His DEI Past,” and “Musk Just Scored More Government Cash While Pushing Education Cuts.”

Well, you’re here for a big podcast convention. You were talking about climate. But talk about what’s happening right now and the level of resistance.

DAVID SIROTA: I think what we have to understand is that — and the question that we have to ask is: Why is Donald Trump behaving the way he’s behaving when his party already controls Congress and the courts? What is the point of trying to do what he’s doing without going through the normal process of legislating? Right? If you want to close down the Department of Education, if you want to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the way to try to do that is through legislation, through passing it through Congress, having the law upheld in court. His party controls those institutions. So why hasn’t the White House tried to do that through the normal process?

And I think if you step back, what you see is what they’re trying to do is create the precedent that a president can do whatever a president wants, that it’s not a coequal branch of government, that essentially it is a king, an elected king. And I think they’re relying on the idea that people, or at least their base, doesn’t necessarily know or care about what the difference between a president in a coequal branch of government is versus an elected monarch. They’re trying to create a precedent that presidents cannot be constrained at all.

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to Elon Musk saying, “We’re talking about the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy”? I mean, you watch Fox, and all they’re talking about is laughing about people getting “DOGEd.” They’re cutting the fat out. You’re not hearing about what the services are that are being slashed, sliced and diced across this country.

DAVID SIROTA: This is an old tactic. This reminds me of the Gingrich era. Newt Gingrich, when he rose to power in Congress, would come out and pick out one or two science projects that sounds, on its face, ridiculous. “Oh, the government’s spending $2 million to study cow flatulence. Oh, this means that the entire government is wasteful.” Meanwhile, there’s a reliance that there’s not an understanding of what scientific research ends up developing. And I think they’re applying that across the board.

And we have to ask the question: Well, why? The richest man in the world is also one of the largest government contractors. So there’s an inherent conflict of interest — or, in the case of the Trump administration, I guess, an alignment of interest. The more you cut public services, the more it creates, essentially, the impetus to hire private contractors. And the guy who’s doing the overseeing of the cutting happens to be one of the largest private contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: You recently said on social media, quote, “It’s not really a political party at this point. It’s better understood as a country club, with status perks for its emeritus leaders,” and referring to the Democratic Party, in response to news that former VP, presidential candidate Kamala Harris had signed with CAA to represent her on her post-White House initiatives, including speaking engagements and possible book deals.

DAVID SIROTA: Look, the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be interested in changing, at least not yet. They reelected their same leaders who oversaw the policy and party positioning that led to Trump’s reelection. That’s the same leadership that led to Trump’s first election in 2016. The party doesn’t seem interested in changing how it approaches its own voters or its own effort to win elections. There’s some lip service to the middle — to the working class, but there’s not really a change in policy.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of Senator Sanders now going around the country and speaking in red districts that are most vulnerable? He says, “If we can turn around three,” he says, they’ve ended their extremely narrow lead in the House.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, look, I think Bernie Sanders is doing the right thing. It’s an example of what the Democrats at large should be doing, which is actually going into and trying to speak to the disaffected working class, that used to be the base of the Democratic Party.

The problem is that the Democratic Party, its leaders, are caught between the demands of their donors and the demands of voters, which is why so often the Democratic leadership sounds incoherent. If you’re trying to address what voters want, but also trying to enrich or appease your donors, you often sound like you stand for nothing. I mean, can we actually explain or answer the question: What do the Democrats stand for right now, other than, in theory, rhetorically being against Trump, even though they’re giving votes to confirm some of his nominees? Like, I think the average person has trouble even articulating: What is the Democratic Party for? What does it support? What does it advocate for? There’s not really much of an answer right now.

AMY GOODMAN: You had a recent piece on Elon Musk’s previous support for DEI policies at Tesla.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah. Well, look, only a few years ago, Tesla was touting itself as weaving DEI into its DNA. That’s a quote out of a large report that came out from Tesla. Obviously, the politics have shifted. Donald Trump is trying to demonize DEI as a way to appeal to the working class, and the Democrats haven’t made an effective argument on economics to also try to appeal to the working class. And right now if both parties aren’t really making an economic appeal, then Trump is relying on making an identity appeal.

AMY GOODMAN: In this last 20 seconds, what do you think is most important right now?

DAVID SIROTA: The most important thing is for the Democrats to try to gum up the works, to stop what’s going on. They don’t have a lot of power. And it’s also important to understand that if Donald Trump is going outside of the institutions of government, then the Democrats are going to have to rely on different kinds of tactics that don’t just rely on just press conferences in the U.S. Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s possible Republicans in the House and Senate will turn on Trump?

DAVID SIROTA: I don’t believe it’s going to happen. I just — there’s no historical precedent for the Republicans to bail out on their own president.

AMY GOODMAN: David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, we want to thank you so much for being with us, and we will link to your articles at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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

We turn now to someone who has a deep understanding of the stakes of the Trump administration’s assault on education and history. In his latest book, Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley details how educational institutions and the teaching of history have become key battlegrounds in authoritarian countries, as the Trump administration, through a dizzying series of executive orders and actions, attempts to dismantle higher education in the United States by redefining discrimination in schools, fighting so-called woke ideology, attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programs, gutting the Department of Education, and threatening funding for research and higher education.

We’re joined here in New York by Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale. His latest book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! I mean, since your books, you’ve been writing a lot, and you’ve been speaking a lot on these issues. If you can take on what’s happening right now to the major threat to higher education, whether we’re talking about the freezing of funding for pediatric cancer research throughout the United States in some of the most elite scientific departments at universities, or whether we’re talking about erasing DEI? Give us the context for this.

JASON STANLEY: Well, first of all, there are no liberal arts colleges in authoritarian countries. So, if you’re transitioning to authoritarianism, you have to target colleges and universities, as well as education. As Vladimir Putin recently said, wars are won by teachers.

Now, let’s be clear: The United States has the world’s greatest system of higher education. Everyone in the world who can sends their kids to our colleges and universities, if they can be accepted to those universities. Every professor in the world would leave their university, if their personal situation would allow, to come to a U.S. university, if they got an offer.

What the Trump administration is trying to do is take this system down. They have various reasons for — they have various excuses, not reasons. They say universities are packed with Democrats. Well, look, math and physics departments are packed with Democrats. The vast majority of mathematicians and physicists are, in fact, not Trump supporters. So, the idea is, presumably, to stock your local physics department, to stock the top medical schools with Trump supporters, just because they’re Trump supporters. This takes down the United States as a leading research place. It takes down one of the things that we do, unquestionably, the best in the world, which is higher ed.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how exactly you see history being rewritten by the current administration, and the impacts it has on your university and others.

JASON STANLEY: Right. So, they’re targeting — they say they’re targeting critical race theory. Critical race theory is the study of the practices that keep racial inequalities present, that are hangovers from Jim Crow, the institution — and, for example, things like mortgage redlining, school segregation, housing segregation, policing practices, that were formed when cities were intentionally segregated. So, they’re targeting Black history, they’re targeting minority history, and they’re trying to replace it explicitly with patriotic education.

Now, just imagine your cartoon vision of an authoritarian country. Imagine 1984. It’s a country — George Orwell’s book. It’s a country where students pledge allegiance to the flag every day. It’s a country where, instead of knowledge and learning, they are taught to be — they’re indoctrinated.

Now, this will be done, supposedly, under the banner of classical education. The idea is we’re going to restore classical education to end “wokeness.” But let’s look at classical education. Classical education is an education that is found — whose foundational elements are the works of the ancient philosophers and ancient history, like Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. Plato advocated removing children from their family at birth. In Plato’s Symposium, it’s normal to have relations between older male professors and their younger male students. So, the idea that classical education is there to promote Christianity and the nuclear family is simply just delusional. And it’s — as usual with this attack on schools and higher education, it’s merely an ideological facade for replacing critical inquiry with, you know, saluting the flag.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this moment. We’re talking to you on Friday. You’re both a German citizen and a U.S. citizen. You’re the son of Holocaust survivors. You don’t throw around these words “fascism,” “Nazism” easily. You know exactly the effects. We’re moving into a weekend, an election in Germany. If you can talk about Vice President JD Vance recently meeting with the far-right party Alternative for Germany, AfD, leader Alice Weidel? Billionaire Elon Musk sent a message to the AfD’s election campaign launch party back in January, in which he says there is too much of a focus on past guilt. I want to play that.

ELON MUSK: The German people are — are sort of really, really, an ancient nation, goes back thousands of years. You know, I was even — I, you know, sort of read Julius Caesar’s account of, like, first encountering the — the German tribes in the Gallic campaigns. And he was like, “Wow! It’s very impressive. These are — these are very, very powerful warriors.” So, like, you know, I think there’s, like, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. People — you know, children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents, maybe even.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Elon Musk addressing the AfD on a huge video screen. And, of course, as we just said, Vance just met with the AfD leader. The election is Sunday. Talk about the significance of this.

JASON STANLEY: So, in discussions of, for example, Black education, Germany is held up as a model of facing its past. And Germany’s sort of democracy has been based upon this education system of facing the past. That was always somewhat fictional. We have to remember that 80 years ago, Germany — we’re talking about 80 years ago. We’re not talking about the 19th century. So, Germany had various ways of facing its past and various ways of evading facing its past. But across the world, it was taken as a model. So, if you take down Germany’s education system, then you take down the world model for doing this.

Now, let’s be clear: German people of my generation, their grandparents were Nazis. We know now that the Wehrmacht, the German soldiers who fought the ordinary Germans — we know now, through research, that they participated in mass slaughter. Seven of my great-uncles were murdered by the Wehrmacht, and all of their children. My mother and her sister are the only survivors of their family, of their generation.

So, this education, flawed as it was, is being targeted now. AfD is running on a platform of glorifying German soldiers in World War I and World War II. That comment of Musk, the German nations were great fighters, that links into AfD’s rhetoric and propaganda of reversing, of erasing the past, saying, “Well, we should be proud of our German soldiers in World War I and World War II.”

Now, this was always going to be the case. If you attack Black history in the United States, if you blur the history of slavery, if you say that slavery was part of what made America great, we don’t need to be ashamed of it, that is, of course, going to result in the erasure of Jewish history in Germany. And, you know, Jewish Americans, my fellow Jewish Americans, who supported this, in the case of erasing Black history, this is just coming back to bite them.

Musk is not American. He has no — he’s not from America. He has no commitment to Holocaust history being remembered. This kind of facing your past, as Germany shows, is essential to democracy. It’s essential to German democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, the Nazi Party was founded in Munich 100 years ago this week. On February 27th, 1925, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech to 3,000 people in a Munich beer hall, just out of prison for his role in a failed coup. He was relaunching the party and cementing his role as its unquestioned leader. But also out of Munich, Hans and Sophie Scholl, that brother and sister, who attended the University of Munich. They weren’t even Jewish. They were Christians who felt that the world and Germans had to know, so that they could never deny what was happening with the Holocaust, and released those six pamphlets, among them, the one that said, “We will not be silent.” They would be caught, captured, tried and beheaded, along with their professor and others. So, if you can talk about what resistance means?

JASON STANLEY: So, let’s be also clear that the attack on universities is due to the fact that universities are centers for defending democracy. Students have always been, since World War II, the antiwar protesters. They protested Vietnam. Last year, they protested the war on Gaza. They are — they protested the Iraq War. So, you have to target universities, because, as Bangladesh showed, that the students can overturn, are the main enemies of authoritarianism. Die Weiße Rose, Die Weiße Rose, The White Rose, they showed that students — they were students, and they showed how students provide the center of resistance. And that is also a central reason why authoritarians attack universities.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as you look at what’s happening in this country right now, when we talk about the erasing of history, do you see a preemptive acquiescence that is taking place? And as you heard our last discussion, what do you think university presidents should be doing? We quoted the president of Mount Holyoke, but actually very few presidents have spoken out right now.

JASON STANLEY: That’s right. It used to be that our presidents were supposed to speak out in favor of democratic values. Now university presidents are being told, “Oh, you have to preserve your institutions.” Guess what: Universities are core democratic institutions. Preserving your institutions means speaking out for core democratic values. If you’re not speaking out for core democratic values, you’re not protecting your institutions, which are core institutions of democracy. So, you might have an institution that has the same name, that’s still called Yale University, but it is no longer that institution.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Stanley, I want to thank you for being with us, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. And we’ll link to your articles that you have written in response to what’s happening right now in this country.

Coming up next, the head of The Lever, David Sirota, on what the Democrats are doing to resist what is taking place, or what they’re not doing. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration has given K-through-12 schools and universities a two-week ultimatum to end DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives or risk losing federal funding. In a letter sent on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, one week ago, to school administrators, the Education Department barred schools and colleges from, quote, “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life,” unquote. The Education Department has already canceled some $600 million in grants focused on training teachers on critical race theory, social justice and other related topics. Meanwhile, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has also declared race-based scholarships, cultural centers and even graduation ceremonies illegal.

The president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, said in a statement, quote, “There’s nothing specific enough for us to be able to act on in 14 days unless we just wipe the slate clean.” He added, “Overcompliance, anticipatory compliance, preemptive compliance is not a strategy. The strategy needs to be much more considered, much more nuanced,” unquote.

This comes as Trump’s pick to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, cleared a committee vote Thursday, and her nomination now heads to the full Senate, where it’s expected to be approved. Trump has told reporters he wants McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education.

REPORTER: Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department secretary if you’re going to get rid of the Education Department?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because I told Linda, “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.” I want her to put herself out of a job, Education Department.

AMY GOODMAN: Linda McMahon is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and a major Trump donor. During her confirmation hearing earlier this month, she was questioned by Democrat Chris Murphy on Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: My son is in a public school. He takes a class called African American history. If you’re running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this court order — of this executive order?

LINDA McMAHON: I’m not quite certain, and I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by education scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. His new piece is headlined “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?” He also helped organize the coalition Defending the Freedom to Learn and served leader — with the NAACP on education and other issues.

Thanks so much for being with us. It’s great to have you here. Professor, can you start off by talking about the response a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, when university and college presidents across the United States got a letter that said, “End DEI” — and I want to ask you exactly what that means — “in two weeks” —

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “or lose all of your federal funding”? We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Right. Well, first of all, Amy, thank you so much for having me on your show. Just glad, glad to join you.

First, you know, I want to say that I think that the higher education community, also the K-12 community, understands that this letter from the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t carry the force of law. We do know, of course, that what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is that there is uses — they’re using resources, finances, as a lever. So, we’ve seen, for example, funding from the NSF, from the NIH, IES — at Western Michigan University, for example, we’ve lost $20 million in grants in the College of Education and Human Development. And so, they’re really using the power of the purse to try — to attempt to enforce these different — you know, abolishing the Department of Education with this letter.

But I think it’s been really bewildering to K-12 and higher education, which, my understanding, is the goal. I mean, the Office of Management and Budget, the director there has said that that’s really the goal of this blitzkrieg, is for all of these requests to be bewildering. And I know in higher education, it’s been very difficult. And so you have cabinets, presidents, provosts trying to understand what are going to be the impacts of this. You could see six-figure, seven-figure, eight-figure reductions in research funding. Our attempts to find the cure for cancer, to solve the teacher shortage, to create more efficient energy, all those things are under threat, because over the last hundred years or so, higher education has seen large investments from the federal government, and historically, those investments, that search to solve the teacher shortage and create more efficient energy, etc., they didn’t come with strings attached. And now institutions, higher education institutions and K-12 districts are facing millions of dollars in reductions if they don’t pause DEI.

Now, you mentioned in your lead-up, “Well, what is DEI?” And I think it’s important to talk about what DEI is, actually. DEI is not reverse discrimination. What DEI does is, as educators — and I taught fourth grade. I taught ESL. I’ve taught college students, doctoral students. What DEI does is it helps us to create more success for historically marginalized communities. So, we want to ensure that African American students, that when we bring them to our campus, that we graduate them — Latino students, students with disabilities, veterans. It’s a wide spectrum. And so, I think it’s important to understand that DEI is not reverse discrimination. It’s our attempts to ensure success for all students on our campus, close those gaps, those equity gaps, in graduation rates, in retention rates. That’s what DEI work does. That’s why we have Black graduation ceremonies or Mexican American graduation ceremonies. We want to create the climate. We want to create the opportunity for students when they come to us in higher education, when they come to us in our K-12 schools. We want them to be successful. We want all students to be successful, whether they’re Jewish or have disabilities, etc. That’s what DEI is, and so it’s not about reverse discrimination. It’s about student success, faculty success, staff success.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a 2023 video on Donald Trump’s campaign platform website in which he proposes taking, quote, “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, finding and suing excessively large private university endowments” to create what he calls the American Academy.

DONALD TRUMP: Whether you want lectures on ancient histories or an introduction to financial accounting or training in a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly, using study groups, mentors, industry partnerships and the latest breakthrough in computing. This will be a truly top-tier education option for the people. It will be strictly nonpolitical, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that’s going to be allowed.

Most importantly, the American Academy will compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize. The Academy will award the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is very significant. Julian Vasquez Heilig, that Trump is proposing an alternative American education system. We already know what happened with his Trump University. He was successfully sued for this for-profit college. But talk about what he is proposing, the American Academy.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: So, first, I want to say — and then I’ll directly address the question. First, I want to say that universities are not ideological. So, do we have folks on our campus who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are apolitical? Absolutely. But universities are not ideological. They’re places of learning. They’re the places where the difficult conversations happen. So, I think that’s the first thing to say.

All of the politicians that you see making pronouncements about universities, they all attended universities, some of them the elite Ivy Leagues — the president and vice president, for example. So, I think that’s important to say.

I think the second important to say is that this is expected. I want to take you back in history, OK, be a scholar for a moment here. If you think about the dictator Pinochet and what he did after he took over the country of Chile, he understood that as a part of the autocratic playbook, that you have to privately control and privatize education. And so you see a push for this in K-12 education right now with school vouchers, which is that we want education to be privatized. It’s not a public good. And so what you see here, I believe, is an attempt to privatize education. And I’m sure it will be for profit. And, you know, he didn’t speak to that. And so, this is a part of that sort of classic playbook, because when something is in the public realm, it’s a public good. And so, what you see here is really an attempt to privatize education, by all indications.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, who was architect of Project 2025, the radical playbook to seize executive power, radically reshape federal agencies. Last year, undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting recorded Vought discussing his plan.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I am opposed to the Department of Education because I think it’s a department of critical race theory.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Vought speaking on television.

I want to go now, in response to the threats to DEI programs and LGBTQ outreach from the Trump administration, to the president of Mount Holyoke, Danielle Holley, who recently said, “To basically comply with things that are not within our values simply because we feel a threat of investigation is something that we should not be doing as the higher education community. Instead, we need to just say ‘No! Here’s what we stand for. We will continue to stand for this. And if you believe that you can legally challenge our mission or our values, that’s up to you to try to do,’” the president of Mount Holyoke said, who herself is African American.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, if you can tell us what is happening right now across the country?

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This whole idea of obeying in advance, and, you know, because of the very real threat — 

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of losing so much money and funding, that will hurt the very people that these university presidents are trying to protect.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, yes. First, let me just address Vought. So, you know, he also said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because, increasingly, we want them viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. We want them to be put in trauma.” So I think that helps us understand the blitzkrieg from political actors right now, is that they really want to put higher education in trauma. That’s almost a direct quote from from Vought. So, I think that helps sort of contextualize.

Now, we have some difficult decisions to make as higher education leaders, as K-12 leaders, some very difficult decisions, because, as I mentioned, over the last hundred years, universities have become very dependent on solving the world’s issues through research, and so that means there’s millions of dollars that the federal government has been providing without strings attached. Well, now there’s going to be strings attached.

But who’s to say that diversity is where these conversations stop? So, what if, after diversity, the question is, “Well, we don’t want you to have unions,” or “We don’t want you to have a College of Fine Arts, because we don’t think that that’s appropriate”?

And so, when there’s strings attached — so, universities have to make two decisions. One, there will have to be courage, like the president of Mount Holyoke or the president at Wesleyan in Connecticut, or, two, patronage. So, in talking with some folks, some scholars at the University of Michigan, yesterday, there’s really those two choices for higher education institutions. And so, there’s a side where we’re going to have to innovate and rethink how higher education is funded, or we’re going to have to succumb to a system of patronage where the federal government — you know, in four years, a Democrat might come in as president and say, “You won’t receive federal funding unless you have DEI programs.” So, that’s really the road we’re headed down.

And then, I think one — just one final thought, which is that when we hire leaders in higher education, we typically look at their pedigree. Did they go to Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford? Were they department chairs or deans? But now we have to have additional criteria when we’re selecting our leaders, our deans, our department chairs. It involves courage. It involves morality. It involves empathy. So, we need special kinds of leaders in this very difficult time. I would argue that higher education hasn’t faced a crisis like this since potentially McCarthyism. And so, we need a different kind of leader to address these modern challenges also.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, are there lawsuits being planned? There’s one week to go after this letter.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah. Well, there’s already multiple lawsuits. For example, my understanding is that the NIH funding has been paused in court, from a report that I read from President Ono.

AMY GOODMAN: The freeze has been paused.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, the freeze has been paused. Yeah, exactly. So, there is. I know that the APLU and the AAU — so, these are the conglomerates of the different kinds of institutions — that they’re involved in litigation, too. I suspect that you’ll see litigation from the civil rights community. And I think that’s part of the strategy for educators. And, you know, I think it’s important for us to understand that academics, educators, we have to create alliances with students and engage in political and legal advocacy, and research and document and publicize how these things are actually impacting our institutions and who they’re impacting.

And then I think it’s also — one final thought is that we have to leverage our professional associations or organizations, accrediting bodies. There’s a reason why accrediting bodies are also being targeted, because accrediting bodies set the standards for universities. So, it’s very important that we create these coalitions, and so that as this pressure continues on higher education and K-12, that we can respond, because the number one priority of our institutions is student success. And I don’t believe — my argument is that none of this is in the best interest of students.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Vasquez Heilig, we thank you so much for joining us, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. We’ll link to your new piece, “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?”

Up next, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We’ll speak with Yale philosopher Jason Stanley. Back in 20 seconds.

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has taken vast areas of the eastern DRC and is marching on the strategic city of Uvira near the border with Burundi, triggering panic, with residents reporting widespread looting, bodies lying in the streets, and government forces commandeering boats to escape the insurgents’ advance. M23 is also advancing on the city of Butembo north of Goma, which the armed group seized in January in an offensive that killed some 3,000 people.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has accused M23 of killing children and attacking hospitals and warehouses storing humanitarian aid, and says as many as 15,000 people have fled into Burundi in recent days. On Wednesday, the Congolese foreign minister addressed the U.N. Security Council.

THÉRÈSE KAYIKWAMBA WAGNER: We are looking for a political solution, and we’re committed to it. The problem that we have is that despite the commitments that Rwanda or the lip service that Rwanda serves to the cause of a political solution, when we look on the ground, we see desolation; we see the constant advance of the M23; we see executions of children, as reported by the OHCHR yesterday; and we see that Rwanda is not being faithful or keeping their words and not being sincere in engaging in a political solution.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In an interview with CNN earlier this month, Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed he was unaware of any Rwandan military troops fighting in the eastern DRC.

LARRY MADOWO: Today, on the 3rd of February, does Rwanda currently have any troops at all in eastern DRC?

PRESIDENT PAUL KAGAME: I don’t know.

LARRY MADOWO: You’re the commander-in-chief.

PRESIDENT PAUL KAGAME: Yeah. There are many things I don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Kagame, the president of Rwanda, being interviewed by CNN’s Larry Madowo.

For more, we’re joined by the Congolese analyst and activist Kambale Musavuli, who’s now based in Accra, Ghana, policy analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, and his latest piece for Peoples Dispatch headlined “The battle for control of Goma continues.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Kambale. It’s great to have you with us again this week, but under horrible circumstances. Explain the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo for people who are not aware of what is happening, how dire it is, and what you think needs to happen.

KAMBALE MUSAVULI: Since the beginning of the year, we’ve had over 500,000 people who have been displaced in the east, added to the 6 million already displaced in the country. And this is caused by the uprising of the M23. It’s a militia group that has existed in the Congo under different names. And this is their latest uprising. As they’re taking over town after town, killings are taking place. For example, for the city of Goma, at least 3,000 people have been killed in the city during the battle of taking over Goma. And just yesterday, we’re finding out more information about the taking over of the city of Bukavu.

But this battle, which has been raging for close to 30 years, is always about the control of Congo’s mineral wealth, and Congolese are paying the price. As the world needs Congo’s resources, unfortunately, strong actions are not being taken to bring about peace and stability in the Congo. And we know what needs to happen. You know, international pressure on Rwanda, and Uganda, to some extent, will bring about peace and stability. It was done in 2012. It’s not being done now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Kambale, can you explain why you think that’s the case? The last time you were the show, you said the same thing, as indeed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that appeared yesterday, Nobel laureate Denis Mukwege, a Congolese Nobel laureate, peace laureate, made exactly the same argument. So, what is the difference between 2012 and now?

KAMBALE MUSAVULI: There seems to be, in my view, a geopolitical consideration from Western countries who benefit from Congo’s resources. If you look at an article that came out just last month from Sky News, the reporter was analyzing the European Union. The European Union has an agreement with Rwanda on getting access to critical minerals. And they are refusing to cancel that agreement, when we all know that minerals being sold by Rwanda in the quantity that it’s doing is actually coming from the DRC. The consideration for the European Union is that by canceling this contract, it will give ways to Russia and China getting access to mineral resources — clearly telling us that the lives of the millions of Congolese do not matter. That’s on one level the reason why there is no action.

The other one is the world apathy. The information being accessible or available on the DRC is there. Even African nations are not taking the necessary actions for that. So, this is about pitiful ordinary citizens. We are saying that we can’t talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution without Congo’s resources, but we should not have blood in the technology devices that we are using. So it’s up to the citizens in the biggest metropolitan, the United States, that’s benefiting from the pilfering of Congo’s resources, European nations, and including the U.K. World pressure of ordinary citizens is going to support the Congolese in the struggle to bring about peace and stability.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the West’s support for Rwanda. This goes to a number of issues. We just spoke to you a few days ago about the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat about what the U.S. did with its involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first independence leader of modern-day Congo, and using Black jazz musicians in the United States in cementing the U.S. relationship and trying to get access to all the rare metals.

Now I wanted to come here to 2025. Earlier this month, DRC’s foreign minister urged three football clubs — Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain — to end their, quote, “bloodstained” sponsorship agreements with “Visit Rwanda,” questioning the morality of such partnerships. Just today, Reuters reports Rwanda has described this criticism as a threat to regional peace and security.

Meanwhile, the musician John Legend is scheduled to headline Global Citizen’s Move Afrika tour and play in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, on Friday. The Nigerian Grammy-winning singer Tems recently canceled her appearance, saying, quote, “So I recently promoted my show in Rwanda without realizing that there is an ongoing conflict between Rwanda and Congo. I never ever intend to be insensitive to real-world issues, and I sincerely apologize if this came across that way. I simply had no idea this was going on. My heart goes out to those affected. Conflict is no joke and I truly hope and pray for peace in this time.”

If you can talk about both the concert, John Legend participating, but, of course, the bigger issue — also the sports teams — all this Western support for Rwanda and how it’s furthered the conflict in Congo?

KAMBALE MUSAVULI: This is a form of soft power that these institutions and individuals are doing. I mean, John Legend going to Rwanda in the midst of 3,000 people being killed, children being recruited by militia groups — and it’s not that he’s not aware. There have been a campaign for close to two months now letting him know that he should not attend. Now, Tems took action. So, all the people who support him — he’s not the only one. Dave Chappelle traveled to Kigali and took a picture with Paul Kagame. You have even Kendrick Lamar, who was just headlining at the NFL, had a concert in Kigali, and at the end of the concert, he was on stage with Paul Kagame. So, when people in the United States watch the news and see Kendrick Lamar, see John Legend, see Dave Chappelle with Paul Kagame, and the usual people — you know, you have Tim Cook of Apple also with him — it creates an image that this is a great leader, a noncriminal leader, who’s helping his country. So, it’s a form of soft power to actually cover that. And we have to expose it.

Now, this, as we pointed out in the film, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, showed that in the past the State Department and CIA used artists as a ploy for soft power. Right now the same thing is happening. I think that should be exposed. It’s critical for ordinary people to challenge them, even not to go to the NBA. I mean, the NBA Africa, they are lobbying to engage on the African continent. On the day of the all-stars, there was a protest outside of the all-stars game, where ordinary Americans were saying the NBA has blood on its hands for collaborating with Rwanda.

So, we have to expose all these contradictions, but we must not forget that this battle is very dire. People are being killed on a daily basis. Congo’s territorial integrity is affected. The Congolese have called for Rwandan troops to leave. And all of us around the world, we have to do everything in our power to join the Free Congo campaign, to put pressure on Rwanda and any negative forces so the Congolese can have a chance to change the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Kambale Musavuli, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Congolese analyst and activist, now based in Accra, Ghana, policy analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa. We’ll link to your latest piece in Peoples Dispatch. It’s headlined “The battle for control of Goma continues.” To see our extended interview with Kambale from a few days ago, you can go to democracynow.org, as well as a full interview with the director of the Oscar-nominated film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, that includes a number of clips of this documentary about U.S. involvement, Belgian involvement with the assassination of the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and how the U.S. State Department deployed Black jazz musicians, who would later revolt against what they had done in Congo by protesting at the U.N. General Assembly after Lumumba was killed, shouting “assassin” and “murderer.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We look further now at the purge of the federal government underway by DOGE, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. As protests mount, the two, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, appeared on Fox News together to defend their cuts. This is Elon Musk.

ELON MUSK: I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as President Trump spoke at an investor conference in Miami Wednesday and floated the idea of sharing some of the savings he claims DOGE is making.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt, because the numbers are incredible, Elon, so many billions of dollars — billions, hundreds of billions.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism. His new piece is “Speed Up the Breakdown.” It’s about Musk’s push to do that.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Professor Slobodian, if you can start off by telling us what Elon Musk is doing? This whole question over the last two days: What is his role? Does he run the Department of Government Efficiency, that President Trump says, when questioned about it, because court papers came out that indicated he didn’t, he just said, “Well, what counts is he’s a patriot”?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, I might have something to say about the patriot question later, but I think that, first, I think it’s helpful to kind of dispel some of the fog of war and the sort of chaotic, anarchistic impressions that we’re getting out of Washington these days, with a sense of what the actual lineages are of the political projects we’re seeing unfolding here, because I think, and what I wrote about in the piece, is I think there’s basically three somewhat distinct political projects underway here that haven’t really had the chance to weave together and have the space close to power the way that they have now in the past.

The first one is the idea that the government should be run like a corporation, right? There’s a kind of a core Clintonite notion here that we should treat citizens like consumers, we should, you know, expose bureaucracy to the same kind of competitive pressures and kind of hallmarking and benchmarking that private companies are, and then you have to go in and sort of act like an asset-stripping private equity firm and peel out all the waste and abuse and put back in sort of more efficient processes. That’s how Musk sold DOGE to the American people in late 2024, and that’s actually why even some Democrats were on board with a DOGE caucus already in December still. So, there’s something kind of normal about that, and there’s a reason why Musk has been posting pictures of Clinton and Gore and saying, “Hey, I’m just doing that sort of business here.” But, obviously, things have gone to another level.

And the second, I think, strain of politics that’s plugged in here is closer to that of Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, one of the people who was critical to the Project 2025 document. And that is a more often Christian conservative sort of think tank vision of deconstructing the administrative state, not to make it more efficient and to cost cut to get to more efficiency and sort of productivity, but because you think certain things that the government has been doing are fundamentally illegitimate. So, there should be no kind of redistributive role for the government. There should be no role covering things like the protection of the environment or the provision of special education or the provision of sort of projects towards gender equity, antiracism and things of that nature. So, the idea there is you permanently sort of hobble the Leviathan of the state and, you know, hack back some of its capacity, send that back to the states and produce a government that governs intensively but not extensively, so, you know, order, military budget, maybe federal abortion bans, but all the other sort of post-civil rights, Great Society programs get sort of permanently euthanized.

The third strain, though, that sort of gets to some of the more extreme dynamics that people have been picking up on is what I think you can call right-wing accelerationism. So, this is a kind of very online ideology, often associated with people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. And there, the idea is that you don’t just sort of trim the state or kind of streamline it, but you shatter it altogether. And so, there’s a vision of total decentralization of sovereignty, back to smaller kind of fortified private enclaves, turning the United States into a kind of a patchwork of fiefdoms, or “sovcorps,” as Yarvin calls them, where people are sort of, you know, opting in, paying to get into gated communities, and then sort of in zero-sum social Darwinist competition with the world beyond them. And that’s quite sci-fi and kind of speculative, but at times I think that the sort of sense of panic that we feel is people wondering whether you can just delete all of the kind of capacities of the state and expect to be able to plug them back in at any level afterwards, or if there is a kind of irreversible process of dismantlement happening here.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Professor Slobodian, we’ll get to Curtis Yarvin in a minute, whom you mentioned, but if you could elaborate on some of the ideological precursors to these three strains you identify? I mean, you mentioned in the second, for example, deconstructing the administrative state. We heard that first from Steve Bannon. So, if you could, you know, elaborate on where these strains are coming from within the American political tradition, most recently, you know, the last Trump administration, but also prior to that?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, many of these things that we think of as kind of natural parts of the way the U.S. government operates — for example, something like income tax — are actually just over a hundred years old. So, the idea of having a federal government that oversees many parts of social life is actually — you know, it’s only a few generations in the past. And there are conservatives who see that as a kind of a project of decline.

So, famous examples would be someone like James Burnham, who wrote about what he called the managerial revolution. So, there was this fear that, you know, the kind of the essence of American enterprise was being strangled because there were just all of these civil servants producing a kind of a sclerotic layer over the economy and then pursuing their own kind of ideological projects. So, Russell Vought at OMB talks about what he calls the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.” He talks about a almost complete Marxist takeover of the government.

So, this isn’t really that much of a sort of neoliberal economic way of thinking. It’s this belief that the state is a kind of a battlefield for opposing ideologies. And that’s been, you know, pretty consistent on the American right, and certainly was informing Steve Bannon’s more cultural and political idea of the kind of wars that need to be fought inside of bureaucracy and, indeed, outside of it.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about that battle right now between Bannon and Elon Musk, and who, in fact, is winning? He’s been talking about vowing to get Elon Musk kicked out, just said, “He’s a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and most recently referred to him as a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” Talk more about these two strains.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. Yeah, I mean, this really flared up, obviously, at the end of last year with the debate about immigration, with the sort of Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Silicon Valley wing defending temporary visas, so-called H-1B visas, for their sector, because they need a lot of skilled workers kind of in the back office, and then Bannon saying that that was itself unpatriotic, and there needed to be a American-jobs-for-American-native-workers policy and a much more complete kind of exclusion of, you know, new incoming workers.

What was interesting is that got extremely heated. I mean, as you say, Bannon has been not holding back at all in the way he’s been describing Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state.” He’s even using categories that are more common on the left, like calling it “technofeudalism,” and claiming that, like, the bayonets are out, and he’s advancing, and he’s coming for Musk. But what’s symptomatic and interesting there is the way that Trump has sort of kept aloof from the whole conflict, right? I think that he is probably instinctively seeing you don’t actually need to choose a side. Actually, you can accommodate — and you will, I think, and are accommodating — both sides of this apparent schism inside of the big MAGA coalition.

So, there’s no reason why the kind of hard-border nativists can’t get the kind of sadistic roundups that you were talking about at the top of the program, can’t produce terror in the lives of young people in the way that they are doing so effectively, that will fulfill the kind of libidinal, sadistic desires of a certain sector of the MAGA coalition, even as, you know, more quietly, you keep doing more pragmatic immigration policy to fill out the programmers in the back offices of Silicon Valley. I think that, more likely than not, we’re going to get a mixture of both.

And as to who gets closest to Trump’s ear, I mean, the answer, I think, is in the bank accounts. There are 500 billion reasons why Trump is going to listen to Musk more than he’s going to listen to Bannon. And Trump is a person who doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in money. And he doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts people who are richer than him. And Musk’s ability to kind of, you know, stroll through the White House as if he has been elected himself, have his 3-year-old sort of like muttering to Trump in the middle of a press conference, I think it gives us as much evidence as we need of the fact that he has been given kind of carte blanche here to act as, effectively, unelected co-president.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go back to Curtis Yarvin, who you mentioned earlier. This is Yarvin speaking on The New York Times podcast The Interview last month. In this clip, he’s asked about his belief that the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery were bad for the formerly enslaved.

DAVID MARCHESE: But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era —

CURTIS YARVIN: The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely — and the war itself wasn’t good, either, but if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad, because, basically, this economic system has been disrupted —

DAVID MARCHESE: But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards —

CURTIS YARVIN: So —

DAVID MARCHESE: — to make people free.

CURTIS YARVIN: Sure.

DAVID MARCHESE: Like, I can’t believe I’m arguing this.

CURTIS YARVIN: Brazil — Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Curtis Yarvin, someone who Vice President JD Vance frequently invokes. And back in 2021, Vance, then Ohio candidate for U.S. Senate, he was interviewed by the conservative Jack Murphy Live podcast. Murphy just asked Vance how to root out wokeism from American institutions.

JD VANCE: There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who’s written about some of these things. And so, one is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself, right? … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need like a de-Ba’athification program, but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States, right?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could tell us, Professor Slobodian, who is Curtis Yarvin? You note in your recent New York Review of Books piece, “His idea” — this is quote — “His idea of RAGE — Retire All Government Employees — looks a lot like that of DOGE.” So, who is this guy? Where did he emerge from? And how did he become so influential?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, he was someone who moved to the Bay Area and became a computer programmer, also kind of an amateur poet, and, I guess, most importantly, a pretty widely read blogger in the 2000s, especially the late 2000s, under the name Mencius Moldbug. And he became someone who was kind of giving voice to a nascent kind of what was called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment sentiment in Silicon Valley, which I think combines, as the way I’ve been describing it, a kind of belief in economistic bottom-line thinking and productivity, but then also an idea that what we need to get back to is a proper sense of hierarchy in this country and in the world.

So, one of the problems of the administrative state is that it has been pursuing equality, and it’s been working under the false assumption that all humans are somehow equal, that in fact there are kind of hierarchies of intelligence, best measured in IQ, which people like Yarvin and increasingly Vance and Trump are seemingly quite obsessed with. It can be measured in things like race — group differences in IQ are, you know, commonly assumed to be real empirical facts in the world of the sort of Silicon Valley right — and, perhaps most importantly, into hierarchies of gender. So, the masculinity component in all of this is kind of impossible to overstate. There is a reason why the sort of apparent scrambling of gender in gender queer and trans movements is so triggering and so terrifying to people in this world. Elon Musk has described the “woke mind virus” as having killed his child, even though his child is very much alive.

So, the project, I think, is really about how, through the mechanisms of the market and the dismantlement of the sort of post-New Deal state, the post-Great Society and civil rights state, we can get back to what they see as a more natural world where men are in charge, white people are in charge, and there is a kind of restoration of the natural order of things. And that sort of wishy-washy treatment of things like slavery is sort of a provocative way of reopening those questions.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Slobodian, this is about both JD Vance and Elon Musk, the question of their stance on the far-right German party AfD. On Friday, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference where he repeatedly attacked Europe on a number of issues. And he, while in Germany, held a 30-minute meeting Friday with the head of Germany’s far-right AfD party, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuking Vance for meeting with the AfD ahead of Germany’s election. And, of course, you have Elon Musk repeatedly using his social media platform X to support what many call the neo-Nazi party, or the Nazi-curious party, for those who are more generous.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, the AfD in Germany is actually a really good example of one of these sort of strange bedfellow-type parties that I actually think is sort of unhelpfully described as either neo-Nazi or Nazi-curious. What it actually is is it was founded by ordoliberal economics professors who disliked the way Merkel was handling the eurozone crisis, and thought you needed more monetary discipline and more fiscal discipline. They then created an alliance with basically ethnonationalists, traditionalist members of the so-called New Right, who felt that modernity had produced a fallen world, and we needed to get back to more rooted links to the land and that certain populations belonged in some spaces and not others. And now they have created this kind of this far-right neoliberal party, that Alice Weidel sort of gives voice to when she says that, you know, “We’re actually a libertarian conservative party,” as she said in her Spaces chat with Musk.

The AfD is one of only many far-right parties that now Musk is aggressively platforming. In the last few days, he has promoted Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD, and in the past has gone as far as promoting Tommy Robinson, the sort of far-right figure from the U.K. He has adopted not just sort of a tame language of democracy, as Vance tends to be using, but a language as he used in the rally that he zoomed into of “Germany for the Germans” and saying that multiculturalism must not be allowed to dilute the German people. So these are now proper tropes of the far right as such, and indeed tropes of the “great replacement” theory, which suggests that liberals have used welfare policy and refugee policy to buy voters, which can then swamp and dilute the native population. This has now become a common talking point.

The thing that I think is interesting and important, and perhaps a sign of rare optimism these days, is that Germans actually don’t like Elon Musk interfering in their politics. Polls have showed that, of non-AfD voters, you know, well over three-quarters thinks he has no right to butt in. And even among AfD voters, only about half actually wants him to be involved. So, I think what we’re seeing already is a bit of a backlash against his attempt to kind of, you know, play kingmaker in countries, another country that is not his own. The Left Party in Germany has had a surge in recent weeks. They have more people entering the party now than they have since 2009. That’s partially on the back of like a really full-throated anti-fascist call for the defense of democratic principles by the young leaders, the young female leaders of that party. So I think there is a chance here of his belief that he can just, you know, play puppet master globally actually having a boomerang effect and backlashing on his own attempts at manipulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Quinn Slobodian, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We’ll also link to your New York Review of Books headlined “Speed Up the Breakdown.”

When we come back, an update on the Democratic Republic of Congo. Stay with us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Federal workers and supporters rallied in cities across the United States Wednesday to call for an end to mass firings ordered by President Trump and DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Their demand? SOS — Save Our Services.

In just one example of the impact of the cuts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday it was seeking to rehire several agency employees who had been assigned to the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak before their jobs were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings. In a statement, the USDA said the workers were fired in error, since their jobs are considered, quote, “public safety positions.”

Here in New York, public workers held several rallies Wednesday. In a minute, we’ll speak with one of the organizers, but first, this is Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing workers and their supporters who gathered in the bitter cold at an SOS rally in Foley Square Wednesday night.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO–CORTEZ: Elon Musk is not going after efficiency. He is not going after making these things better for people. He’s trying to steal Medicaid so that he can enrich himself. He is trying to steal. He’s trying to steal and gut NASA for — to line his pockets with SpaceX. He is trying to gut everything that is good in America for his own private profit.

This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about and what oligarchy seeks to do. It’s the fusion of and the capture by the billionaire class of our democracy. That’s what they’re trying to do.

But it’s very important to understand that it is not sustainable. They may seem like they have power right now, but all of this dramatic action is trying to create the sense of inevitability, the sense of power, so that we abdicate in advance.

I want everyone who is here and folks who are watching who are not here, especially our federal workers, to listen to me very carefully, because we have very specific instructions in this moment. And I don’t say this as a Democrat. I don’t say this as a person with any sort of specific political views in this moment. I say this as an American who has sworn an oath to the United States Constitution. And as someone who cares about this Constitution and who cares about this country, we have an obligation to resist kings. We have an obligation to resist oligarchs. We have a sworn duty to this nation to resist oligarchy, including any billionaire that tries to undermine our Constitution. America is not for sale.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing the Save Our Services protest in Foley Square in Manhattan Wednesday night.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds also protested outside the federal building in New York City as part of the national day of action to support public workers being purged as part of the Trump administration’s cuts under the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire Elon Musk.

For more, we’re joined by someone who still works in the building — for now, national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network who helped organize the day of action. Chris Dols works for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what’s happening across the country, with people getting emails at various times in the day to leave their work, that they are fired, and then, in the case of nuclear safety workers, in the case of disease detectors within the CDC, as we’re dealing with an avian flu epidemic, a number of them, the government then tries to refind them, because they’ve cut off their government email, to say, “Whoops, we made a mistake”?

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah, before I start, I need to, by government regulation, disclaim, because you mentioned my employer, that anything I say is my opinion in my personal capacity and does not reflect the views necessarily of the Army Corps of Engineers. And I am the president of my local and, like you said, a coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network.

I mean, they’re really not after efficiency. The attacks on probationary employees is making it much, much harder for all of us who remain.

AMY GOODMAN: And can I just — 

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — make a clarification on probationary? We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of workers, and they can be people who work under two years, but they can also be someone who worked for 30 years, was promoted, right?

CHRIS DOLS: That’s right. There’s this —

AMY GOODMAN: And that then becomes a probationary period, and they can be fired within that.

CHRIS DOLS: That’s right. There are two categories of probationary employees: those who have just started with the federal government in the last one or two years, depending on which agency, and, yes, those who were, for whatever reason, changed job series and moved to a different part of the federal government but are otherwise longtime federal employees. I think there’s a misconception that all probationary employees are recent college grads or something like that. But, like myself, I started with the federal government after working for seven-and-a-half years with a dredging contractor, and it was my dredging expertise that made me a good cost engineer for the Army Corps. The person who I spoke with last night was — is a lawyer who spent years in private sector and brought his legal expertise to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help protect against fraud there.

So, the probationary workforce is an extremely qualified workforce in the government. And, you know, I think the fact that they’re going after such high-quality employees, be they probationary or not, matches up with the chaos that they’re sowing, where they themselves now have to make up for the fact that they summarily fired all these people and have to go rehire them because, oh, it turns out they were doing something essential.

Well, it turns out all of us are doing something not only essential, but mandated by Congress. None of us do anything that’s not mandated by Congress, which, of course, gets at the deeper constitutional crisis element of what we’re talking about here. You know, the fact that all three branches of government are on board with this really begs the question of where the checks and balances are going to come from. And that’s where the federal workforce and the broader workforce and labor movement need to step in, because we’re the checks and we’re the balances that are going to be able to stop this before they go any further.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Chris, say: What is your message to other labor unions across the country?

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah. I mean, so, we picked the slogan “Save Our Services,” ”SOS,” on purpose, right? This is a distress signal coming from us in the federal sector. Yes, our workforce is under direct, immediate attack, and a lot of the media wants to tell the human interest story about how, you know, our family lives, our lives are being disrupted. And yes, that’s a story. But the bigger story, what they’re really after, is to gut the services that all Americans depend on. You think about, like, how many of us depend on home health aides. You think about the subsidies to schools that come through the Department of Education. You think about Medicaid, that’s now on the chopping block, or veterans’ healthcare. All the essential stuff that affects our ability to live our lives, that’s what they’re after, because from Elon Musk’s point of view, the more miserable we are, the less likely we are to fight back. They’re trying to immiserate the working class, and they’re doing it through the federal workforce. It’s not about efficiency. It’s not about the federal workforce. It’s about gutting the services that create a safety net in this country, because the more miserable we are, the easier it is for them to exploit us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you think, in fact, that they’re going to come after private sector employees, as well.

CHRIS DOLS: I mean, they are. They’re already going after the NLRB. The —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain, the National — 

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Labor Relations Board, how that connects the two.

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah, the National Labor Relations Board is staffed by federal workers, many of whom are active in the Federal Unionists Network, alongside folks from all the agencies, and at the NLRB, their job is to uphold the right to organize, the ability to keep an abusive boss in check. All the things that allow for workers to push back against their exploitation and the abuse of management, people like Elon Musk, you know, really big bullies in their workplaces, that is enshrined by law, and it’s carried out by the NLRB.

And they’ve already pursued unprecedented attacks on that agency, and we know it’s going to get worse. We know that Elon Musk has lawsuits that he’s hoping to get in front of the Supreme Court soon to actually declare the NLRA, which is the act that established the NLRB, unconstitutional. So —

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think there’s a relationship between the fact that there are complaints against Elon Musk —

CHRIS DOLS: Of course.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the NLRB and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, two of the first agencies he went after?

CHRIS DOLS: Totally, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You know, Tesla has a financing operation that is meant to be regulated by the Consumer Financial Bureau. And go figure, the man is going after the very agencies that regulate his businesses.

So, we’re putting out the distress signal to the broader labor movement that we all have to enter the streets, that we all have to create — they’re creating the crisis. We’re not the ones creating the crisis. But they think they can manage the crisis. Our job is to prove to them that it’s unmanageable and to make it unmanageable. You know, this is grand theft government. They are pursuing the biggest theft in world history, probably, given the scale that we’re talking about. And it’s going to be up to not just federal workers, but to the broader public, because it’s the whole public sphere that’s at stake.

So, if I can plug our — you know, the place to get involved, whether or not you’re a federal worker, or you just want to support the federal workforce because you see the attacks, it’s go.savepublicservices.com. And there, you can sign up, and we’ll make sure to plug you into all the actions that are coming ahead, because this will be weeks or months, but we can stop them if we mobilize.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Dols is a union organizer and Army Corps of Engineer employee, national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network.

Next up, the author of Crack-Up Capitalism on Elon Musk’s push to speed up the breakdown of the federal government. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

We’re going to end with federal workers today. Federal government workers and union members are holding protests in cities across the country in what they’re calling the Save Our Services Day of Action.

For more, we’re joined by Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. He’s offering organizing support to today’s protests.

Eric, thanks so much. It was great to see you last night as you talked about your exhaustion but exhilaration around these protests. You were remembering Jane McAlevey, the great labor strategist, last night at CUNY. But, today, talk about what’s happening. Is it twice a day in cities all over the country, lunch and after work?

ERIC BLANC: Every major city in the country is going to have a big protest, and the locations and the times differ. What I would recommend for anybody who wants to support federal workers and understands the importance of protecting our services against Musk’s coup and power grab is to go to the website that we set up, where you can see your local event. That’s go.workersfiremusk.com. So, you just go to the website go.workersfiremusk.com, and then you can find your local rally. There’s noontime and 5:30 rallies in lots of places, but that’s the best place to find information.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, what’s been the actual number of federal workers already either forced out to take voluntary retirement or given layoff notices?

ERIC BLANC: I mean, to be honest, everybody’s head is spinning. We don’t even have those numbers yet. What we do know — what we do know is that the stakes couldn’t be higher — right? — for everybody. And this is not just about federal workers. And that’s their message that they’re coming out with today, is that the attacks on federal workers, they’re the canary in the coal mine. If they take out the federal unions, that’s our best block right now against Trump’s authoritarian power grab. And if you can destroy the power and resistance of federal workers and their organized efforts, then that’s going to allow Trump to go after all the services and decimate all the public sector. And, you know, who’s going to provide Social Security? Who’s going to provide Medicare? Who’s going to provide basic health and safety regulations for workers? This impacts everybody. And that’s the message that workers are getting out there.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric, all over the country — I mean, the message being put out from the Oval Office is that workers are fat. You’re the unnecessary fat. They’re the corrupt ones. They’re the ones who are bleeding the budget dry. Can you respond to that, as you talk about federal workers as the canary in the coal mine? I mean, we’re seeing it’s more than a quarter of a million probationary workers that have been fired, but probation includes people who have been there for decades who get a promotion and they then go on some kind of probationary period. They, too, get fired.

ERIC BLANC: Yeah, look, the big lie getting put out there right now is that the reason working-class Americans are hurting is because of federal employees. And there’s just no basis for this. Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, has a $412 billion net worth. That’s more — that’s significantly more than the total pay of every federal worker, 2.3 million federal workers. They get $217 billion per year. Musk makes more than all of them combined, almost double. So the idea that what’s at the root of people struggling is federal workers, rather than the billionaires that are taking our country into the ground, it’s ludicrous. And I think it’s time for people to start speaking out.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much, Eric, for being with us. We’ll be out covering those protests in New York City, both at — I think it’s, what, 12:30 and — or 12:00 and 5:30?

ERIC BLANC: Yeah, so it’s going to — in New York City, it will be noon at Foley Square and then 5:30 at Foley Square. And we’re expecting a big turnout, so hope to see you there.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, author of We Are the Union. He is organizing along with federal workers around the country.

A happy belated birthday to Neil Shibata and to Hugh Gran! And, Juan, once again, happy 29th anniversary! It is so wonderful to be here with you on this day and with all the listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. We wish we could give you slices of cake around the country and around the world, because Democracy Now! is everyone’s. Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Thank you so much to our remarkable staff, past and present. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

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

In health news, a new study is projecting as many as 20 million people could lose Medicaid coverage under a Republican congressional bill to cut the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion match rate. Republicans are also pushing for work requirements for Medicaid recipients. The American Hospital Association has harshly criticized proposals to cut funding for Medicaid, saying, “Medicaid provides health care to many of our most vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, children, the elderly, disabled and many of our working class,” unquote.

We’re joined now by Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She formerly worked at the Department of Health and Human Services and OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.

Sharon, if you can start off by talking about the significance of this congressional bill? I think what’s missing in all these national discussions is the true effect on people and how many people, what Medicaid — who it’s for.

SHARON PARROTT: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for having me this morning.

There are 72 million people in the United States that get health coverage through Medicaid. And there are many proposals moving through Congress that would take coverage away from potentially millions of people, leaving them without coverage.

And I want to drill down for just a moment on what it means to be without health coverage. When Medicaid is taken away, what does that mean? It means a parent who can’t get cancer treatment. It means a young adult, just starting out, who can’t get insulin to control their diabetes, just absolutely essential for them to be able to work and move up the economic ladder. It means older adults and people with disabilities losing the care they get in their homes so that they don’t have to move into nursing homes and institutions. It means workers who can’t get access to mental health treatment.

Medicaid provides lifesaving care and access to coverage that is both primary care and acute care. It helps people control chronic diseases, and it helps them thrive. And so, when you hear all the numbers and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being proposed to be cut, the tens of millions of people that could lose coverage, it’s important to remember what that means to an individual and to their family.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the impact, the potential impact, on Medicare, as well, because Republicans are more and more interested in shifting more retired people into Medicare Advantage rather than the regular Medicare system, which is, in essence, privatizing much of Medicare.

SHARON PARROTT: Yeah, we’ve seen a real shift over the last several decades in people moving from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage. And there are real issues emerging with Medicare Advantage, including that it is more costly for the federal government than traditional Medicare. And unfortunately, people often have healthcare access issues within Medicare Advantage.

But I think what we’re going to see this year is a more targeted approach, really targeting cuts in Medicaid, which is our healthcare coverage system for people with low and moderate incomes. And as you said at the beginning, it is kids, it is adults, it is parents, it is workers, it is seniors, and it is people with disabilities. Medicaid is an important linchpin in our health coverage system, covering, again, 72 million people, including 20 million of whom are now getting coverage because of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, very much in the crosshairs for some Republican members of Congress.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And most people don’t realize that a lot of the spending cuts are basically as a result of the tax cuts initiated during the first Trump administration that are about to expire. And so, Congress — and, of course, most of that went to the wealthiest Americans. Could you talk about that, this expiration of these cuts?

SHARON PARROTT: Absolutely. So, in 2017, massive tax cuts were enacted. Those tax cuts were very expensive, and they were highly skewed towards wealthy people and profitable corporations. Many of those tax cuts, particularly the tax cuts that relate to individual people and some business tax cuts, are due to expire at the end of this year. And Republicans in Congress are trying to put forward a budget plan that, overall, would not only extend those tax cuts, but make them larger. And to offset some of the costs, they’re pointing to making massive cuts in things like health coverage and food assistance for some of our lowest-income households in the country.

The cuts they are proposing in Medicaid and food assistance equals the cuts — the tax cuts that they want to make or extend for the people in the top 1% of income. So, there is a direct link between their desire to extend very expensive tax cuts for very wealthy people and the cuts they are putting on the table that will take health coverage and food assistance away from people that struggle to afford the basics. Just to give you a little bit of a sense of how discordant this is, households in the top 1% of the income distribution have incomes of more than $740,000. The tax cut alone for those folks would average $62,000, which is more than the entire income of most people that benefit from Medicaid and from food assistance through the SNAP program. That is how imbalanced this agenda is.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharon, last Thursday, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon warned on his podcast War Room that Medicaid is a complicated program to cut. This is what he said.

STEVE BANNON: Get into that discretionary spending. Get into the Pentagon. Get into Medicaid. Medicaid, you’ve got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.

AMY GOODMAN: So, one of the points he made is that many MAGA supporters, many Trump supporters, are on Medicaid. He also called Elon Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” But the significance of what he said, in this last minute, Sharon Parrott, what he’s representing within the Republican Party? As I speak to lobbyists who are pushing for Medicaid, talking to Republican congressmembers and their staff, these congressmembers’ staff understand well they’re in trouble on this.

SHARON PARROTT: Look, Medicaid provides health coverage, lifesaving health coverage, to 72 million Americans. That is more than one in four people in the United States. People in every state, people in every community, people of all ages, people of all races and ethnicities get health coverage through Medicaid.

And so, what I think Mr. Bannon was referring to is that millions of people will be adversely affected by cuts that take coverage away from people. Those are the people that are directly impacted, that have coverage, that will lose it and their access to healthcare. And it is also their family members, who, when their family members lose Medicaid, extended family have to try to scrimp and save and bring together resources that they don’t have when someone has a life-threatening health condition or a chronic condition. And so, the ripple effects of Medicaid are vast.

It is an essential part of our health coverage system. And policymakers should not want to take health coverage away from people for whom the cost of healthcare and food is far more important to them than the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharon Parrott, I want to thank you for being with us, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. I’m sure we’re going to be calling on you again.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, on our 29th anniversary of this daily global news broadcast.

We turn now to the impact of a flood of immigration policy changes and crackdowns over the last few weeks. President Trump has now moved to allow agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to carry out enforcement operations at courthouses, including in immigration courts. This comes as people are also widely reporting they’ve also faced detention or deportation after their regular ICE check-ins, as ICE has reportedly set new arrest quotas.

We go first to Arizona, where the Tucson-based independent outlet Arizona Luminaria has been following the case of a Venezuelan family torn apart after a mother of four was pulled by Arizona Public Safety troopers for driving under the speed limit. She and two of her children, aged 6 and 9, were quickly deported to Mexico, but her other two kids, aged 8 and 14, remain in Tucson. The deportations occurred just hours after the minor traffic stop. The mother described being handcuffed in front of her kids as the troopers called Border Patrol agents, who later turned them over to Mexican immigration officials in the border city of Nogales before they were put on a bus and driven about 2,000 miles away to the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The mother was incommunicado for days, until she was finally able to call her family, letting them know of her whereabouts. We’re not saying the names of the mother or her kids in order to protect the family at the request of their attorney.

For more, we’re joined first in Tucson by John Washington, reporter for Arizona Luminaria. He covered this in a story headlined “Venezuelan migrant mother and two children deported to México just hours after Tucson traffic stop.” He’s the author of The Case for Open Borders and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the U.S.-Mexican Border and Beyond.

John, welcome back to Democracy Now! Fill out this story for us. Tell us what happened to this woman.

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, thanks for having me back on, and congrats on the 29 years.

So, what happened, this started last week. This mother of four was with two of her children, and she was selling empanadas outside of a gas station in Tucson, when she says that she was verbally attacked by someone who was leaving the gas station. And that person then called the police. The responding officers were state troopers. And this woman packed up her things and packed up her children and started driving away. And the officers made a stop down the road. The pretext was that she was driving too slowly, 25 miles a hour in a 40-mile-an-hour zone. She was taken out of the car. She was extensively questioned. And as that was happening, the Border Patrol were already on their way. The troopers had allegedly called the Border Patrol. She was handcuffed, as you mentioned, by Border Patrol officers in front of her children. And her children were then taken away to a short-term detention facility elsewhere in Tucson that was run by Border Patrol.

She says, from there, that she suffered a night of interrogation, that Border Patrol officers were accusing her of being in a Venezuelan gang. They were accusing her husband of being in a gang. They actually were questioning her 6-year-old daughter and saying that her dad was a gang member. All of these claims, the family vehemently denies.

And just hours later, after a really difficult night and with the 9-year-old son trying to protect his mom and his younger sister from what he saw as aggressive Border Patrol agents, they were deported to Mexico. And from there, they were taken about 2,000 miles south. And not until they arrived to their destination were they able to make the first call. So, the mother tells me that she pleaded with first the state troopers, then the Border Patrol agents who were arresting her, and then multiple times during the night, to please let her have a phone call to let her family know where she is, where she and her two children were, to check in with her other two kids and let them know. But she was repeatedly denied calls both in the U.S. and then also in Mexico.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John, could you clarify, when you say she was deported to Mexico and then transported 2,000 miles? Was this — in other words, she’s a Venezuelan, so did the Mexican government willingly participate, and did the Mexican government transport her from the border further down into Mexico?

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, that’s right. So, Mexico has for some time been accepting Venezuelan and people from a couple other countries deported from the United States. This is a growing trend. The Trump administration has negotiated or strong-armed a number of other countries already to start accepting third-country deportees. And, yes, so, the Mexican government did willingly receive this woman and her two kids, and then they did transport her south.

This is something that we’ve been seeing increasingly, not just under Trump but in the past year, where after the Biden administration and now Trump has really been really trying to convince Mexico to do more to crack down. Mexico doesn’t have the funds or maybe the willingness to actually effect a lot of these deportations, these secondary deportations after people are removed from the United States. So what they’re doing is that they’re busing them south and just making their journey potentially back to the United States much more arduous, much more dangerous and potentially much more deadly.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Washington, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria. He’s in Tucson. We also want to bring into this conversation Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream Action, the largest youth-led immigrant network in the United States. She’s a DACA recipient. That’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And her new guest essay for The New York Times is headlined “Why Democrats Fail the Immigration Test Every Time.” She’s joining us from New Haven, Connecticut.

Greisa, thanks so much for being with us. You know, there is John in Arizona. He has two Democratic senators, Gallego and Kelly. Both voted for the Laken Riley Act. If you can talk about how that fits in to your op-ed piece about why you’re blaming the Democrats for what’s happening today?

GREISA MARTÍNEZ ROSAS: Well, thank you so much for having me this morning.

I’ll also note that newly elected Senator Gallego, who won with a lot of Latino support this last November, was the co-sponsor of the bill. So, not only did he vote for it, but co-sponsor it.

And I think that there’s enough blame to go around in this moment. There is a clear strategy that Republicans and the GOP have, like, advanced that — on the backs of immigrants. We know that this is not a strategy of enforcement or only a strategy of enforcement or deportation, but this is a strategy for low wages and legal limbo. We know that immigrants are a necessary part of, like, the workforce economy, and that when there are stories like the heartbreaking ones that we just heard today, it makes it more likely for low-wage workers to not go and ask for the wages that they deserve, not to ask for help when they’ve been hurt.

But this is a democracy. It requires all of us to take action, and most of all, our elected officials, people that are trusted by millions of us to take action and to change the government. And that is where some of the responsibility lies on Democrats. We know that in this moment we need a true opposition power and party. They have been elected to ensure that there is a pro-immigrant agenda in this country. They have, for the last 40 years, promised action on this. And when the most dark moment in American history for immigrants in recent history happens, what we’re hearing from Democrats is, “We don’t have enough power. They’re the ones that won. We’ve got to wait for him to make a mistake.”

What we know in this moment is that we have to flip the con. We have to flip the script on them. This is not about safety or, like, the remembrance of a past time. This is about the control and the ensuring that billionaires and corporations continue to squeeze out money from everyday working Americans, not only undocumented immigrants, not only immigrants to the U.S., but also native-born people. So, it is time for all of us to not turn away, and keep our attention on what’s happening at the White House, what Elon Musk is doing in ravaging our government, and we must have worthy stewards of that agenda and that vision. And Democrats have an opportunity to do that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Greisa, I wanted to ask you — in your op-ed, you write, quote, “Many Latinos don’t primarily see themselves through the lens of systemic” racism, and they see themselves more as other European immigrants. But I’m wondering — there is some agency in the Latino community around these issues and the growing number of them voting for Trump. To what extent does the class character of the migration to the United States have an impact on how people see the Trump policies? Because increasingly, more and more middle-class people from Latin America have fled and come to the United States. And to what degree their class origins have an impact on how they vote or how they perceive the issue of immigration?

GREISA MARTÍNEZ ROSAS: What we know is that class and power define the conditions of the political landscape. And I guess I want to start off by saying that even if every Latino had voted on the Democratic side this last election, we would still see the outcome of the election having Donald Trump won. So I just want to make sure that, like, in the narrative, we’re not overstating the impact of Latinos voting for Trump in the outcome of the election.

And I think it’s important for us to note that there have been some significant shifts. And I think that that’s both connected to, like, the experiences that immigrants and Latinos carry from Latin America and what it felt like to have to survive under authoritarian regimes, and people are moving in a way that ensures the maximum survival. I also think that class and, like, the transition of class, as we’ve seen in the cases of Irish Americans, Italian Americans, that there is a pull that both the culture sort of like moves us to wanting to be more absorbed into this country, and therefore reject some of our origin spaces.

But the truth of the moment right now is that the conditions are being set by our ability to be workers and labor for this country. And so, there is a — there is a story being sold to not only Latinos but some Black Americans, white Americans in the U.S. that are working-class, that the reason why we don’t have enough for our table, why we don’t have enough to pay rent, it’s because of immigrants. And that’s the con that we have to flip. We know that that’s not the truth. It’s been historic disinvestment in those communities. It’s been systemic laws that have kept our people in detention centers and in prisons. It’s been the divestment in our education system, the housing crisis that we currently find ourselves in. Those are the reasons. And the greed, the corporate greed, is the reasons why Americans don’t have enough on the table and why it’s hard to pay rent.

And that’s why it’s important for Democrats, for people like myself, for people in larger civil society to not give in to the simple story that the GOP and MAGA are trying to drive, but to ask more questions and to be clear about what are the current conditions in place, not only because it helps us understand this moment, but because it impacts real lives. The mother of the story that we just heard right now, that’s the nightmare for millions of mothers in this country right now that are holding their kids tight at night. It’s the nightmare that my family had to go through when I was 17, when my father was deported in a little — over a couple of days. It’s the nightmare that, like, every single American should not look away from, because once they come for immigrants, we understand and we’re seeing that they will come for all of us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask, bring John Washington back into the conversation. We mentioned the Laken Riley Act, the first act passed by the new Congress. Part of the act also allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government for not enforcing immigration. Could you talk about the significance of that particular provision and what that could portend?

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, that’s right. So, yeah, and, you know, I think, looking at Gallego, who bills himself as a moderate and has co-sponsored this bill, I think it’s really important to look at these contours and what the actual bill says. You know, and he says that he has the support of Latinos; when he goes back to Arizona, he has people who support these kinds of measures. But the family that I have been reporting on, the community that they come from, and a lot of the people I’ve been speaking with in southern Arizona have been aghast at Gallego for sponsoring this bill and for saying that he has the support of their community.

So, one of the things that this bill does is it creates mandatory detention. That’s no-bond detention for people who are merely accused of crimes. So, when someone claims that someone else robbed something from a grocery store or maybe took something from a gas station, that can result in what we saw with this family. And this is more or less what we did see, because this woman was originally called out by a person who was at the gas station, as well, and they called the police on them. That would result in a mandatory detention for them.

And as you mentioned, the other — one of the other provisions is giving —

AMY GOODMAN: John, we have less than a minute.

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah — is giving states much more power to force the federal government’s hand to enforce immigration policies. And also, they’re given permanent standing, so states can sue in a potential future Democratic administration that would maybe try to roll back some of the excesses that we’re seeing now. States would automatically be able to sue and block the federal government from enacting or rolling back any of these anti-immigrant provisions.

AMY GOODMAN: John Washington —

JOHN WASHINGTON: So it’s really — 

AMY GOODMAN: — we want to thank you so much for being with us and for joining us from Tucson, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria, and Greisa Martínez Rosas, a DACA recipient, executive director of United We Dream Action. We’ll link to your essay in The New York Times, “Why Democrats Fail the Immigration Test Every Time.”

Coming up, up to 20 million people could lose Medicaid. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Rata de Dos Patas,” “Two-Legged Rat,” by the iconic Mexican singer and songwriter Paquita la del Barrio. She passed away Monday in her home in Veracruz, Mexico. Her songs are praised as feminist anthems that defy machismo and misogyny and celebrate the resilience of women. Paquita was 77 years old.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. And we turn now to an issue and a story we’ve been covering for all 29 years. We turn to Leonard Peltier. “Today I am finally free! They may have imprisoned me but they never took my spirit!” Those were the words of Leonard Peltier, the longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist, who’s been released from prison after spending nearly half a century behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit.

On Tuesday morning, Leonard Peltier walked out of a federal prison in Florida a month after President Biden granted him clemency. The 80-year-old Peltier will now serve the remainder of his life sentence in home confinement. For decades, he’s maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On Tuesday, Leonard Peltier briefly spoke after his release. You have to listen carefully. There are a lot of voices.

LEONARD PELTIER: We are not going to give up. We’re going to win. We’ve been winning. We’re going to continue to win. We’re going to — we’re going to stick together. We’re going to unite. As it is right now, we’ve been united all through Indigenous countries. And we’re going to — we’re going to fight back. We’re going to — we’re going to continue ’til we are a free nation. I gave 50 years for that. And I’m going to give the rest of my life. So, they haven’t broken — they have not broke me. I am not broken.

AMY GOODMAN: After Leonard Peltier was released from the Coleman prison in Florida, he flew back to North Dakota, where he’ll live on the tribal homelands of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Supporters greeted him as he landed in North Dakota.

SUPPORTERS: [ululating]

AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Leonard Peltier also gathered in Florida Tuesday morning to greet him after his release. This is Tracker Ginamarie Rangel Quinones.

TRACKER GINAMARIE RANGEL QUINONES: So, our relative Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for 50 years in a draconian system. And I am from Arizona. We are First Nation people. And we are here to witness this as our relative walks out. … This is the most important day, because not only does it stand for the Indigenous First Nation people here on Turtle Island, but it also stands for people internationally. This represents — his incarceration represented not only other political prisoners, but people who stand in solidarity for all humankind and humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Belcourt, North Dakota, where we’re joined by Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of NDN Collective, which helped lead the push to free Leonard Peltier. He accompanied Leonard home on Tuesday. Nick is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

Nick, it’s great to have you back on with us. Can you describe the moment, as we look at that picture? For the first time, you have Leonard Peltier in a traditional Native ribbon shirt coming out of prison. Where were you? What did Leonard say? And describe the whole scene back home.

NICK TILSEN: Leonard Peltier walked out of the front doors of Coleman prison energetic and completely dignified. When he walked out, he shook the hands of all the corrections officers, and all of them were happy to see him go. They had deep respect for him. He came walking out, and I stuck my hand out to shake his hand, and he just hugged me, and he said, “I’m free. I’m finally, finally free.” And he was so excited to get out of the prison.

We hopped in the vehicle. We got him into the vehicle, and we started listening to Redbone and music, and he was dancing in the backseat of the car. And it was joy. It was absolute pure joy to watch him do that. And then we were able to do a ceremony for him and to wipe him off and to bless him and put prayers of protection over him and wipe him off from the things that happened there in prison.

And then, when we came home, when we got him back to Turtle Mountain, the streets were lined with hundreds and hundreds of people welcoming him home, holding up signs, cheering, singing, war whooping. It was a beautiful, beautiful sight. I remember seeing the sign that said, “Miigwech, Leonard Peltier,” which in the Anishinaabe language ”miigwech” means “thank you,” and the amount of love and gratitude in which he was embraced by his community, his people and his movement. It was an absolutely historic and moving day.

And Leonard was absolutely joyous when we rolled up to his home that we had got for him. And this is the first home Leonard Peltier had had since he was 9 years old, since he was taken away from Turtle Mountain to go off to boarding schools. And now he walked into this home that was prepared for him, and he loved it. And we prayed in that home, and we blessed out that home. And Leonard sat down on the couch and said, “Here, I’m finally home.”

And he thanked everybody. And that’s the thing he wants everybody to know, is he thanks everybody around the world for fighting for him and standing up for him and never giving up on him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nick, could you talk about the significance of his release for the First Nations peoples in this country and really throughout the world?

NICK TILSEN: Yeah, you know, throughout how Leonard Peltier was treated in his life, how he was treated in his overprosecution and how he was treated in his incarceration is one of great injustice. And that’s pretty consistent of how this country has treated Indigenous peoples since the inception of this country. And so, the release of Leonard Peltier is something that touches all of us, because all of us see a little bit of ourselves in Leonard Peltier, and we see a little bit of our struggle in Leonard Peltier. And so Leonard Peltier’s release is a day of victory and liberation for Indigenous people and human rights defenders everywhere, because of the symbolism of how long this has gone on and the injustice that exists in his life but also in the world.

And so, to us, it’s an acknowledgment. It’s an acknowledgment that what they did to Leonard Peltier was wrong, what they did to Indigenous people was wrong. And at that time in history, when Leonard and the American Indian Movement were rising up, they were rising up at a time in which our ceremonies were outlawed, our languages were outlawed. They were trying to terminate the tribes. And that uprising created pride and brought back our languages, and it brought back our culture, and it brought back our ceremony. And it was that very foundation that became the foundation that freed Leonard Peltier, because this effort to free Leonard would have not been possible if it wasn’t founded in prayer, if it wasn’t founded in our belief system, that he fought for and that movement fought for.

And so, that’s why this is full circle to us. That’s why this means so much to us as Indian people, that everything that this country did to try to kill us off and eradicate us, Leonard Peltier being free, his liberation, is a symbolism that no matter what they did to try to wipe us out, that they couldn’t do so successfully, because we continue to resist and rise up and be resilient people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nick, I’m wondering: In your conversations with him, did he talk at all about how he was treated while he was imprisoned, how his fellow inmates regarded him, or the prison officials, as well?

NICK TILSEN: While he was in prison, he was treated — I mean, it was hell on Earth all 49 years. And he was revered and respected by the prisoners, but it was hell on Earth. He never had proper medical care. He never had the medical attention that he needed. And he was in maximum security the entire time. Think about that. He was in maximum security the entire time. And so, you know, he was so happy to get out of there because of how he was treated in that place and how bad that place is, not just for Leonard Peltier but for all prisoners who are in there.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Nick, as we wrap up, there you are. You’re in Belcourt in North Dakota. We were in North Dakota for a time covering the Standing Rock Sioux fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. But talk about the conditions of Leonard Peltier’s release, what he will do, how limited is he in his ability to get around.

NICK TILSEN: Yeah, there’s going to be — we’ll be able to report back on that later down the road. We’re actually going to be meeting with the RRC, the residential reentry center, today, and his point of contact, to go over what those conditions are going to be. And so, we’ll have more to report back on that.

The good thing is, he’ll be able to be in and around his home. He’ll be able to walk upon the land. And he’ll be able to have a sense of freedom. He’ll be able to participate in ceremonies. He’ll be able to participate and meet with the movement and his community and families.

But the specific details of his release, we’re actually going to be — actually, right after this call, we’re going to be meeting with Leonard and meeting with RRC and working through the details of what that’s going to be like.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Nick, thanks so much for being with us and taking us on this journey with you. We look forward to talking to Leonard Peltier himself very soon. Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of NDN Collective. He’s a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, speaking to us from North Dakota, where Leonard Peltier will live. Leonard Peltier, at 80 years old, has been in prison for almost half a century, released yesterday after President Biden granted him clemency. To see all our interviews with Leonard and on the issue over the years, you can go to democracynow.org.

Coming up, we go to Tucson, where a Venezuelan mother and two children have been deported to Mexico, hours after a Tucson traffic stop. She was stopped for driving too slow. Her two other children, aged 8 and 14, are still in Tucson. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Peace and Power” by Joanne Shenandoah, the late Native American singer, songwriter, activist and citizen of the Oneida Indian Nation.