Pete Hegseth, No Boy Scout, Reportedly Wants to Put the “Boy” Back in Scouts – Vanity Fair

SCOUT’S DISHONOR

Pete Hegseth, No Boy Scout, Reportedly Wants to Put the “Boy” Back in Scouts

The Department of Defense won’t comment to VF on the possibly leaked “predecisional” documents, which would push Congress to cut ties with Scouting America

By Kase Wickman, November 25, 2025

Remember the good old days, when men were men and scouts were boys? US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently does, and believes that, in fact, the sun set on those golden days in 2018, when the organization then known as Boy Scouts of America amended its rules to allow girls to join. Things got darker still on February 5, 2025, when the entity officially changed its name to Scouting America.

Hegseth is now reportedly prepared to order the government to cut all ties with the organization, ending a relationship that dates back more than a century.

NPR reported Tuesday that the outlet had received drafts of memos Hegseth intends to send to Congress mandating a severing of ties with Scouting America. Hegseth, who never participated in Boy Scouts, wrote in the draft that the organization now serves to “attack boy-friendly spaces,” accusing the group of being “genderless” and promoting “gender confusion.”

“The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys,” Hegseth reportedly wrote in a memo.

According to the Scouting America website, “The mission of Scouting America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.”

Hegseth, however, reportedly believes that the group’s mission is to “cultivate masculine values,” per one memo, and that they are failing at it.

When contacted by Vanity Fair for comment, an official from the Department of Defense said, “The Department will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and that may be predecisional.” Representatives for Scouting America did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for further comment.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Pete Hegseth, No Boy Scout, Reportedly Wants to Put the “Boy” Back in Scouts | Vanity Fair

#adolesecence #boy #boyScout #boyScoutsOfAmerica #departmentOfDefense #girls #growingUpMale #masculinity #meritBadges #nationalPublicRadio #npr #peteHegseth #presidentTheodoreRoosevelt #scoutingAmerica #scouts #teens #uSCongress #vanityFair #youngMen

Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025 : NPR

Books

Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025

November 23, 20258:08 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

By Andrew Limbong, and Ayesha Rascoe 4-Minute Listen Transcript

Books We Love

Here are the Books We Love: 380+ great 2025 reads recommended by NPR

NPR’s Andrew Limbong talks about some of NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Folks, if you can, get out a pen and paper because we’re about to talk about some of our favorite books of the year, and you might want to jot a few of these titles down. With us to talk about NPR’s annual interactive books roundup, Books We Love, is Andrew Limbong, host of NPR’s Book Of The Day podcast. Thanks for being with us.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Ayesha.

RASCOE: We love this time of year. But for listeners who aren’t familiar, tell them about Books We Love.

LIMBONG: It is not just, like, a best of – here’s the 10 best books you’ve got to read in 2025, right? We ask everyone at NPR – so we got editors and producers and people on the business side and all that stuff. We asked them what their favorite books of the year were. This year, we’re in the neighborhood of 380 books, which is a lot. But the size and scope is sort of the whole point.

RASCOE: So what have you got for us?

LIMBONG: All right, well, word on the street, I hear that someone on your staff is looking for something plotty (ph).

RASCOE: OK.

LIMBONG: So one of the books I personally recommended was a Emma Pattee’s “Tilt.” Now, this is a book about a woman. She’s super-duper pregnant, and she’s at an IKEA running an errand when an earthquake happens. And it’s a really speedy book because at its core, it is a very – person has to go from point A to point B, right? She’s got to find her way home out of this IKEA in a Portland that has been ravaged by an earthquake, and she runs into a few obstacles here and there, and she sort of has to be on the move. But what it is also is a critique or a pretty funny send-up of the “Keeping Up With The Joneses” of parenthood – right? – you know, that feeling where if you don’t buy the fanciest schmanciest bajillion-dollar stroller, you are a failure.

RASCOE: Yeah.

LIMBONG: It’s sort of poking at that and asking some interesting questions about motherhood and marriage and relationships, all while being straight up an action-adventure book.

Another sort of plotty book is Kashana Cauley’s “The Payback.” This is a bit of a heist novel about a woman and her friends who concoct a bit of a “Ocean’s Eleven” type caper to wipe out everyone’s student loans. This isn’t necessarily taking place in our world. It’s in a bit of a heightened world where there are these special cops on the hunt for anyone who is late to repay their debts, and they will track you down and kind of assault you if you’re late on your repayment. It’s a pretty thrilling read.

RASCOE: OK. Well, what about nonfiction?

LIMBONG: Yeah. I know – we’re at the time of year where a lot of families are traveling, right? And traveling can be stressful. So a book I’ve been thinking about is called “A Marriage At Sea” by Sophie Elmhirst, right? It’s about a young British couple in the ’70s who decide they want to sell everything off and sail to New Zealand. Things don’t go great (laughter). And they end up floating on a life raft in the Pacific. It’s a deeply reported book, but it does also make me think, like, oh, maybe me dragging my partner to the airport and the plane is delayed – things could be worse than having to eat stale McDonald’s fries. You know what I mean?

RASCOE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LIMBONG: (Laughter) While we’re talking about nonfiction, there’s also this book called “Fetishized” by Kaila Yu. And this is a essay collection about having mixed feelings about being objectified. She was a former model, and so she cops to catering for what we might call the male gaze, but she is also aware of the broader political, cultural baggage that doing that can have. And so I think it’s an interesting insight into a weird slice of life.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Books We Love: These were NPR staffers’ favorite plot-driven books of 2025 : NPR

#2025 #andrewLimbong #ayeshaRascoe #bookOfTheDay #books #booksWeLove #favorite #nationalPublicRadio #npr #nprStaff #podcast #sunday #weekendEdition

Mustard on? Some people know exactly what we meant! :)

Quote below is 34:23 of 35-min interview with Governor Spencer Cox for #NationalPublicRadio on Nov 25, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/11/25/nx-s1-5615342/spencer-cox-utah-trump-charlie-kirk-civility

“We’ve lost connection….We’re desperate for tribes….If I don’t have any real friends, now we can hate the same people on Facebook or TikTok.”

[or #Mastodon ]

We encourage listening not just to 7-mins but entire 35:26 interview by Steve Inskeep of #NationalPublicRadio w/ Governor Spencer Cox at Western Governors Conference, for Nov 25 #NPR https://www.npr.org/2025/11/25/nx-s1-5615342/spencer-cox-utah-trump-charlie-kirk-civility

On USA social change 31:56-35:26.

On Artificial Intelligence 24:46- 31:50— a snippet @ 30:49:
“We’ve gotten into this mode, I’d say on both the right and left, where we’ve become subservient to technology. Instead of technology serving us, we’ve become slaves to the #technology. And I think that’s going to happen with #AI if we’re not very careful….We’ve started an AI policy lab in Utah, it’s the #first of its kind anywhere in the world, where we have experts now, in the government, working directly with the companies, to make sure their products are safe, passing legislation that gives them a safe harbor so that they can do what they wanna do, as long as it protects our #people.”
#DataScience #connection #SocialMedia #Meta #ChatBots #loneliness #BowlingAlone #MentalHealth #BlueCollar #WhiteCollar #job

One of our favorite #NPR Tiny
Desk Concerts.
Robert Plant: vocals, harmonica
Suzi Dian: vocals, accordion
Matt Worley: guitar, banjo, cuatro, background vocals
Tony Kelsey: guitar
Barney Morse-Brown: cello
Oli Jefferson: drums

"Gospel Plough"
"Higher Rock"
"Everybody's Song"
"It's a Beautiful Day Today"
"Gallows Pole"

Wonder how much time it takes the dusters to maintain those packed shelves

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/21/g-s1-97414/robert-plant-tiny-desk-concert

Giving thanks for #NationalPublicRadio : https://www.npr.org/donations/support

Trump moves closer to closing the Education Department – Consider This from NPR – NPR

Consider This from NPR

Trump moves closer to closing the Education Department

November 21, 20255:24 PM ET 8-Minute Listen

When President Trump nominated Linda McMahon as education secretary, he told her to put herself out of a job. She moved one step closer to that this week when the Trump administration shifted the responsibility of several departments to other federal agencies. NPR’s Juana Summers speaks with former Obama education secretary John King about what this could mean for public education in America and some of the most vulnerable students.

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Lauren Hodges, with audio engineering by Simon Laslo-Janssen and Tiffany Vera Castro.

It was edited by Courtney Dorning.

Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump moves closer to closing the Education Department : Consider This from NPR : NPR

#closingEducationDepartment #considerThis #departmentOfEducation #johnKing #juanaSummers #lindaMcmahon #nationalPublicRadio #npr #podcast #transferResponsibility

Will millennials be able to buy homes? – It’s Been a Minute – NPR

It’s Been a Minute

Do you want out of The Cult of Homeownership?

November 21, 20253:00 AM ET

By Brittany Luse. Scott Horsley, Rhaina Cohen, Alexis Williams, Neena Pathak, and Mika Ellison 19-Minute Listen

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or the FHFA, said the administration is “working on” a plan to introduce 50 year mortgage terms for homebuyers. But some Americans have already been working on their own plans towards homeownership… and it’s not the ‘nuclear family’ route.

NPR Embedded producer and editor and author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, Rhaina Cohen and NPR chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley join the show to get into the cult of homeownership in America and how we may have to reframe our ideas of what ‘adulthood’ looks like.

Episode Highlights, Whether 50-year mortgages are a solution

Economy

3 questions about Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan

HORSLEY: The 50-year mortgage is sort of a superficial way to try to make homeownership seem more affordable. But if you scrape just a smidge below the surface, there’s not a lot of substance here. Housing affordability is a real challenge. A 50-year mortgage is not a real solution. It would have the effect, potentially, of lowering people’s monthly payments a little bit…

LUSE: But you have that payment way longer, right?

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Will millennials be able to buy homes? : It’s Been a Minute : NPR

#2025 #50YearMortgage #america #cult #donaldTrump #history #homeownership #itsBeenAMinute #nationalPublicRadio #npr #opinion #pocast #politics #resistance #rhainaCohen #science #scottHorsley #trump #trumpAdministration

How to work with your social anxiety – Life Kit – NPR

Life Kit

How to work with your social anxiety

November 18, 2025, 3:00 AM ET, 23-Minute Listen

It’s easy to spiral and feel anxious when you’re on a first date, at your office holiday party or heading to your high school reunion. The stakes feel high and you want to make a good impression. But social anxiety can get in the way of connection, fun and feeling good. In this episode, we give you tools to survive small talk, practice social courage and embrace the awkward.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How to work with your social anxiety : Life Kit : NPR

#anxiety #connecting #embraceTheAwkward #lifeKit #nationalPublicRadio #npr #others #socialAnxiety #socialCourage

CPB revives $36 million NPR deal killed after Trump’s pressure – NPR

Media

CPB agrees to revive a $36 million deal with NPR killed after Trump’s pressure

Updated November 17, 20258:20 PM ET

By David Folkenflik

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting agreed Monday to fulfill a $36 million, multi-year contract with NPR that it had yanked after pressure from the Trump White House.

The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump’s demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. The argument, part of a broader lawsuit by NPR and several stations against the Trump administration, focused on CPB funding for NPR’s operation of a satellite distribution system for local public radio stations. NPR announced Monday it would waive all fees for the stations associated with the satellite service.

The judge in the case had explicitly told CPB’s legal team he did not find its defense credible. CPB lawyers had argued that the decision to award the contract to a new consortium of public media institutions was driven by a desire to foster digital innovations more swiftly.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: CPB revives $36 million NPR deal killed after Trump’s pressure : NPR

#36Million #2025CreativeArtsEmmyAward #corporationForPublicBroadcasting #deal #houseOversightAndGovernmentReformCommittee #katherineMaher #nationalPublicRadio #npr #patriciaHarrison #trumpsPressure

Trump Defends Ordering Epstein Investigation: “I’m Allowed To” https://drwebdomain.blog/2025/11/14/trump-defends-ordering-epstein-investigation-im-allowed-to/ #2025, #America, #CNN, #DonaldTrump, #Education, #Epstein, #EpsteinFiles, #Health, #History, #KaitlanCollins, #Libraries, #Library, #LibraryOfCongress, #NationalPublicRadio, #Politics, #Resistance, #Science, #Spotify, #Technology, #TheSource, #Trump, #TrumpAdministration, #UnitedStates

Ken Burns’ ‘The American Revolution’ revisits the country’s founding – NPR

Review

TV Reviews

Ken Burns’ ‘American Revolution’ will make you think differently about U.S. history

November 12, 202512:02 PM ET

Heard on Fresh Air

By David Bianculli, 8-Minute Listen

Documentary producer and director Ken Burns came to prominence 35 years ago with The Civil War, a massively popular multi-part nonfiction series on PBS.His latest effort is a six-part series called The American Revolution.

By focusing on the Revolutionary War, Burns is revisiting some very familiar territory. His long and impressive filmography includes a history of Congress, and biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He’s done deep dives into American military conflicts, including World War II and the Vietnam War.

Throughout his career, Burns has developed and perfected the tricks of his particular trade: the evocative use of music and quotations from speeches and correspondence; the use of actors to read the words of historical participants; the zooming in and out to reveal key details in period photos; and the painstaking attention to sound effects, from birds to bullets, to help bring those images to life.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ken Burns’ ‘The American Revolution’ revisits the country’s founding : NPR

#documentary #freshAir #kenBurns #nationalPublicRadio #npr #theAmericanRevolution #tvReviews #tvShow #uSHistory #upcoming

How to get lower prices on prescription drugs – Lifekit – NPR

Prescription drug prices can be costly. What are you supposed to do if you can’t afford medication? In this episode, Dan Weissmann, host of KUOW’s podcast An Arm and a Leg, shares how to find discounts on prescription medications and navigate the health care system when drugs cost more than you expected.

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#Cheaper #Drugs #Lifekit #LowerCosts #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Prescriptions

Today is a very special day for a very special radio host. 40 years ago, Scott Simon began broadcasting on #NationalPublicRadio. When he mentioned it to his audience today, Scott said that broadcasting is fun and it's an honor. His intelligence, sense of humor, good judgment, and pleasant speaking voice combined to make his broadcast #WeekendEditionSaturday a '40 years and counting' success.
#media #NPR #entertainment

When to step back from a difficult relationship – National Public Radio (NPR)

Life Kit, Tools To Help You Get It Together

How to decide whether to step back from a difficult relationship — or stick it out

October 28, 20254:01 PM ET, By Marielle Segarra, Clare Marie Schneider, and Malaka Gharib

You have a strained relationship with your father, but he recently developed health issues and needs someone to care for him. You don’t feel emotionally fulfilled in your marriage, but you’ve been with your partner for 10 years. You’ve made a new friend who’s nice most of the time, but is mean when she’s angry.

Life Kit, Frustrated by a relationship? Questions to ask yourself to move forward

Should you step back from these relationships or stick them out?

These are the kinds of dilemmas that therapist KC Davis tackles in her book published earlier this year, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen or End Any Relationship. It offers practical advice on how to move forward when relationships with family members, romantic partners or friends become difficult.

The book features a flowchart that Davis calls “The Relationship Decision Tree.” It consists of questions that Davis asks clients when their loved ones are behaving in a way that bothers them. It helps them “make decisions about whether to lean into this relationship or disengage,” she says.

Davis, author of the best-selling book How to Keep House While Drowning, talks through a few questions adapted from her framework.

Why is this behavior objectionable to you? 

This question can help you pinpoint exactly what’s “bothering you about a person you love,” Davis says, because often there are many reasons. Parsing through the “why” can help you decide how to proceed.

Let’s say your roommate isn’t doing their chores. Ask yourself what annoys you specifically about that behavior, Davis says. Is it just something you don’t like, or is it actually hurtful or harmful?

Are they willing to change? 

Once you start digging deeper, you might find that those dirty dishes in the sink “actually directly impacts me negatively,” Davis says. Maybe they’re starting to attract bugs.

Your next move is to have a conversation with your roommate. Are they willing to change their behavior? They may not do things exactly your way, so work on a solution together. Maybe you strike a deal where they cook and you clean, or they commit to doing the dishes before the end of the night.

Life Kit, This 5-step method can quickly get a messy house back in order

Does staying in this relationship violate my values?

Your most important values are your physical safety, your psychological safety and the physical and psychological safety of minor children, Davis says. “If I cannot meet those responsibilities, then it’s against my values to continue in this relationship.”

You may have other core values as well, like the safety of a dependent parent or sibling, or the keeping of your sobriety.

Would leaving this relationship violate my values? 

What happens if staying in the relationship doesn’t violate your values, but you still don’t want to maintain the relationship?

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: When to step back from a difficult relationship : NPR

#2025 #Behavior #Change #Education #Health #KCDavis #Libraries #Library #LifeKit #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Relationships #Science #StepBack #StrainedRelationship #UnitedStates #values #WhoDeservesYourLove

One of music’s best kept secrets celebrates 100 years, quietly – NPR

Music

One of music’s best kept secrets celebrates 100 years, quietly

The story of Coolidge Auditorium, at the Library of Congress, is one of American ingenuity, cultural integrity and a century of free concerts.

October 25, 20258:18 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday

Tom Huizenga 6-Minute Listen Transcript

The year is 1925. The Great Gatsby is published, the jazz age is swinging, and on October 28th, a new concert hall opens at an unlikely spot — the Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. If only its cream-colored walls could talk. For 100 years, performers of all stripes have graced the Library stage, from classical music luminaries like Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky to Stevie Wonder, Audra McDonald and Max Roach. Today, it remains one of the capitol city’s most beautiful, best sounding and perhaps best kept secrets.

The idea for a concert hall at the Library of Congress did not stem from congress. It came from philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge — and one bespoke piece of bipartisan legislation. “She was indefatigable and intrepid,” says Anne McLean, senior producer for concerts at the Library, “a remarkable woman, six feet tall, a brilliant pianist.” McLean is sitting with me on the stage, overlooking the empty auditorium. To mark the centennial, celebratory concerts and commissions have been heard in the hall all year. But not now. The government shutdown has forced the hall to close its doors, and unless a deal is reached before Tuesday, it’ll be closed on the anniversary itself.

Coolidge was born into a wealthy Chicago family in 1864. She studied music, traveled abroad, married a Harvard-trained orthopedic surgeon and, in 1924, came to Washington to establish a foothold in the nation’s capitol. She approached Carl Engel, the Library’s music chief, about the possibility of adding a small concert hall to the Library’s voluptuous — and voluminous — Thomas Jefferson building, designed after the Paris opera house and completed in 1897. You can’t see the hall from the outside, as it’s tucked inside the building’s Northwest Courtyard.

Eager to get started, Coolidge wrote a check for $60,000 to the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, on Nov. 12, 1924. And yet there was no legal mechanism in place for a civilian to make such a monetary gift to the U.S. government. Congress worked quickly, taking only a little over a month to pass a bill allowing such a contribution.

It took less than six months to build the hall itself — the intimate, 485-seat Coolidge Auditorium, with its warm precise acoustics. “There are a lot of secrets to it,” McLean says. “The back wall of the auditorium is slightly shaved to be concave and extremely responsive to string sound. Underneath the stage is hollow. But that hollowness is a factor, as is the cork floor, which was very unusual for its time.” McLean says the sound blossoms in the hall. Keen to spread the sound far and wide, Coolidge even had the building wired for the relatively new medium of radio. She added to her initial sum to establish a fund for the commissioning of new music. Engel dubbed her “The Fairy-God-Mother of Music.”

Coolidge was well-connected and fiercely advocated for music. In 1944, she took to the local Washington airwaves with another bold idea. “I could wish for music, the same governmental protection that is given to hygiene, education or public welfare,” she said over WTOP. “How wonderful, if we could have in the cabinet, a secretary of fine arts.”

Coolidge never got her wish, but what she had already created was arguably more important — a living, breathing concert hall that serves as a cultural beacon — preserving history and cultivating new music through commissions.

Perhaps the most famous commission became one of America’s most iconic pieces of music. Aaron Copland‘s ballet Appalachian Spring, written for dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, received its world premiere at Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944. “I think people knew what they were hearing,” McLean says. The ballet would win the Pulitzer prize for music the following year, along with the New York Music Critics Circle Award. It’s hard to imagine a full ballet produced on Coolidge’s modestly-sized stage.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: One of music’s best kept secrets celebrates 100 years, quietly : NPR

#100Years #AaronCopland #CoolidgeAuditorium #Culture #FreeConcerts #Ingenuity #LibraryOfCongress #MarthaGraham #Music #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #TomHuizenga #WeekendEdition

How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights – The New York Times

How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights

The White House’s assault on federal protections may bring about a new era of unchecked discrimination.

Get the Transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-rights-dei.html?showTranscript=1

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights – The New York Times

#2025 #America #AmericansRights #Books #CivilRights #CNN #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #Opinion #Politics #Reading #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #Science #Technology #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpDestroys #USConstitution #UnitedStates #VotingRightsAct #YouTube

"Too many people are trying to tear us apart, and we need to find new ways to come together. We're all Americans, and we're all patriotic. There is no 'us and them' – that's not who we are, nor is it what we should be. It's all of us. We're in this together, and it is my hope that we can embrace music as a way of celebrating and uniting each and every one of us.”—Kenny Loggins
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/20/nx-s1-5580328/kenny-loggins-donald-trump-ai-video
#KennyLoggins #musician #NationalPublicRadio #NPR

"Why more parents are riding cargo bikes, skipping the minivan” - report by
Jacob Fenston, #NationalPublicRadio - 6-minute audio with transcript

"It's such a better start to my day, that now there's truly not weather that I would rather drive in." https://www.npr.org/2025/10/18/nx-s1-5532087/why-some-parents-are-ditching-minivans-for-cargo-bikes

#NPR #CargoBikes #BikeToSchool #parents #children #BikeCommuter

Letters from an American – October 18, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, October 18, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 18, 2025

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing that democracy with a dictatorship.

Administration loyalists tried to claim the No Kings protests would be “hate America” rallies of “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard ahead of the No Kings Day protests, warning that “[v]iolence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas.”

In fact, protesters turned out waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs that demanded the release of the Epstein files and defended Lady Liberty. They laughed and danced and took selfies and sang. City police departments, including those of New York City, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., said they had made no protest-related arrests.

In Oakland, California, Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic interviewed a man named Justin, asking him if, as a Black man, he had particular concerns about the actions of the Trump administration.

Justin answered: “You know…a lot of times I have a hopeless feeling, but…being out here today just reminds me about the beauty of America and American protests. And, you know, the fact that they tried to…stomp on this, step on this, you know, say it’s non-American, because that’s what I’ve been reading a lot about. No, this is the point of America right here: to be able to have this opportunity to protest…. [This] does not look like Antifa, Hamas, none of this stuff that they’re talking about…. [Y]ou know, this is the beauty of America.”

The No Kings demonstrations ran the gamut from hundreds of thousands of protesters in large, blue cities, to smaller crowds in small towns in Republican-dominated states. Together, they demonstrate that the administration’s claims to popularity are a lie. Such a high turnout means businesses and institutions that thought they must cater to the administration to appeal to a majority of Americans will be forced to recalculate.

And the protests showed that Americans care fervently about democracy.

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing democracy with a dictatorship.

[Photo, “History has its eyes on U.S.” anonymous photographer, Boston, Massachusetts, October 18, 2025]

See Notes and Links online…

Continue/Read Original Article Here: October 18, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#2025 #America #CNN #DonaldTrump #Education #Film #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NoDictators #NoKings #NoKingsDay #NoNazis #October18 #Opinion #Politics #Protests #Resistance #Science #Television #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #YouTube

PBS head lays out how bleak this is all about to get – AV Club

PBS head lays out how bleak this is all about to get

CEO Paula Krieger also pushed back on the idea that PBS would begin altering content to appease the White House: “They’ve already taken away our funding.”

By William Hughes  |  October 17, 2025 | 6:15pm

TV News PBS

The Public Broadcasting Service is not in good shape at the moment, to put it mildly: We’re swiftly coming up on November, when the broadcaster would normally get its life-sustaining infusion of funds from the government-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Except, of course, the CPB has been basically demolished over the last few months; as we’ve previously reported, Congress (at the guidance of the White House) voted to remove more than a billion dollars in public funds from the organization, which funds both local PBS and NPR stations and the overall organization. We’ve already reported on individual PBS broadcasters, like New Jersey’s, preparing to shutter; now, PBS head Paula Krieger has given a new interview to Variety where she reveals just how bleak this is going to get.

Noting that she’s been worried the most about smaller stations—often serving markets where they’re one of the only primary news outlets—Krieger has said her focus of late has been on putting together enough money to give those channels a “glide path,” hopefully one that results in some kind of survival, and not, well, the other standard outcome of a controlled plummet toward the ground.

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Here’s Krieger:

Some of the smaller stations are looking at coming together in some sort of shared agreement, which would change the way they operate, but would keep local media in communities around the country. I think that’s a really good model. There are some stations that are looking at merging with an adjacent station and serving a larger market. And then I think there will be some that will find this a bridge too far and will decide not to continue.

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One way or another, though, change is coming to public broadcasting, because it’s simply inevitable with that kind of loss of funds. (Krieger says she holds out hope that Congress might someday walk back these cuts, but is honest about the fact that no “white knight” is going to come in and save PBS.) She also expressed some mild frustration at the suggestion that PBS has tried to curtail or edit the creators working under it in order to curry favor with legislators or the executive. (Who went ballistic, in the lead-up to the cuts, to things like local channels airing segments about drag story hours at libraries.) “They’ve already taken away our funding. I think if there was a risk of that, you would have seen it before, which we obviously did not do… I just feel like we have been buffeted through this entire year, and we have not held back from the programs that we put forward.”

Programming-wise, Krieger noted that the reduced funding will, obviously, impact which national PBS programs are tapped to continue, with top priority going to NewsHour. “Obviously, the first priority is PBS NewsHour, because that’s an ongoing news operation where you’re burning through money all the time,” according to Krieger. “And we’re looking at some of the big series where CPB was helpful, like Nova, Nature and Great Performances.” But programs like American Experience are probably screwed, at least in the short-term; the series—which recently caught flack after one of its directors accused PBS of cutting a politically charged Ronald Reagan quote from an episode—is set to go on hiatus once it finishes airing its current Kissinger series.

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