Out Of Thin Air (feat. David Enrich)

Summary

The Daily Beans - Episode Summary: "Out Of Thin Air (feat. David Enrich)"

Release Date: March 10, 2025
Host: Alison Gill
Guest: David Enrich, New York Times Bestselling Author of Dark Towers and Murder the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment, and A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful

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1. Federal Worker Layoffs and Multi-State Lawsuit

Overview:
The episode opens with a significant focus on a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's mass layoffs of federal probationary employees. Alison Gill details how twenty Democratic attorneys general have joined forces to sue nearly two dozen federal agencies, arguing that the dismissals were conducted illegally.

Key Points:

• Lawsuit Details:
  The lawsuit claims that the Trump administration unlawfully fired approximately 24,000 federal probationary employees, citing performance issues when the real motive was a reduction in force (RIF). The administration is alleged to have bypassed mandatory 60-day notifications required under federal law, leaving states like Maryland and Illinois overwhelmed with sudden unemployment claims.

• Judicial Response:
  U.S. District Judge Amir Ali has ordered the Trump administration to expedite the payment of backlogged foreign aid invoices, rejecting the administration's broad freeze on aid funds. Additionally, a federal judge has ruled that the firing of Gwen Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was unlawful, emphasizing that presidential removal powers are not absolute.

Notable Quotes:

• Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (00:02:30):
  “If taking such steps were treated as the equivalent of a personal gift or bribe, whether under the ethics rules or bribery laws, government would literally grind to a halt.”

• Maryland Governor Wes Moore (00:29:45):
  “We can't retreat from our principles and we can't afford to let these actions stand.”

Timestamp:

• Introduction of lawsuit and dismissal details: [00:00 – 14:04]

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2. Trump Administration's Broader Actions

a. Tariffs and Foreign Policy Shifts: Trump recently withdrew tariffs and divested from Canadian aluminum stocks, signaling a potential shift in trade policies. However, Gill suggests that these changes may be short-lived.

b. Revoking Ukrainian Legal Status: Amid reports from Reuters, Trump is contemplating revoking the legal status of 240,000 Ukrainians who entered the U.S. under humanitarian parole, reversing President Biden's welcoming stance.

c. Cuts to Foreign Aid: The Trump administration faces judicial pressure to settle backlogged foreign aid payments. Judge Amir Ali's directive underscores the administration's ongoing legal battles over aid freezes.

d. Transgender Policies in Prisons: Despite multiple court rulings against such actions, transgender women continue to be transferred to men's prisons under Trump’s executive orders, raising significant human rights concerns.

e. Expansion of Timber Logging and DEI Purge: Trump has ordered extensive logging across 280 million acres of U.S. public lands, sidestepping protections for endangered species. Concurrently, the Department of Defense is purging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, including historical and minority-focused imagery.

Notable Quotes:

• Alison Gill (00:18:20):
  “It's pretty horrifying what's happening. But this coming together in Montana with Republicans to be like what the Republicans are like.”

• Trump Administration Official on Timber Logging (00:25:30):
  “It's vital we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security.”

Timestamp:

• Coverage of administration actions and policies: [00:00 – 14:04]

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3. Judicial Rulings Against the Trump Administration

a. Firing of NLRB Member: U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Trump’s termination of Gwen Wilcox from the NLRB was unlawful, stating that the president’s removal power is constrained by law. Howell emphasized, “An American president is not a king, not even an elected one, and his power to remove federal officers... is not absolute.” [00:40:15]

b. Order to Pay Foreign Aid: Judge Amir Ali set a new deadline for the Trump administration to clear foreign aid payments, highlighting the judiciary’s role in curbing executive overreach.

Timestamp:

• Detailed analysis of judicial decisions: [00:35:00 – 00:42:38]

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4. Interview with David Enrich on Defamation and Press Freedom

Overview:
Alison Gill interviews David Enrich, author of Murder the Truth, discussing the increasing weaponization of defamation lawsuits to silence critics and journalists. The conversation delves into the erosion of New York Times v. Sullivan protections and the rise of legal threats against the media.

Key Points:

• Weaponization of Defamation Lawsuits:
  Enrich explains that powerful individuals and institutions are increasingly using defamation suits to intimidate and financially cripple journalists and independent media outlets. This trend undermines democratic principles by stifling free speech and investigative reporting.

• Impact on Independent Journalism:
  Smaller news organizations and independent journalists, lacking the resources of major media houses, are particularly vulnerable to these legal threats, leading to self-censorship and reduced scrutiny of powerful figures.

• Supreme Court’s Role:
  The discussion highlights concerns over Supreme Court Justices like Clarence Thomas potentially influencing the erosion of press protections, thereby exacerbating the threats to media freedom.

Notable Quotes:

• David Enrich (00:48:00):
  “It's a systematic, very well-organized effort to sow distrust in the media and to delegitimize the media and to weaken the media.”

• Alison Gill (00:54:00):
  “When you attack trans rights, you attack LGBTQ rights, you attack human rights.”

Timestamp:

• Interview Segment: [00:42:38 – 01:00:44]

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5. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with Alison Gill encouraging listeners to engage with David Enrich's new book and emphasizing the critical importance of defending press freedom against emerging legal threats. The overarching theme underscores the fragility of democratic institutions in the face of executive and judicial overreach.

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Notable Themes and Insights

• Erosion of Democratic Norms:
  The Trump administration's actions, from mass layoffs to purging DEI content, reflect a broader strategy to restructure federal institutions in ways that undermine accountability and diversity.

• Judicial Oversight as a Check on Executive Power:
  Recent court rulings demonstrate the judiciary's role in holding the executive branch accountable, though ongoing battles indicate a contentious struggle over the balance of power.

• Press Freedom Under Threat:
  The interview with David Enrich sheds light on the escalating use of defamation lawsuits as tools for silencing the media, posing significant risks to the Fourth Estate and, by extension, democratic governance.

• Impact on Federal Workers and Public Services:
  The mass layoffs of federal probationary employees not only disrupt governmental functions but also place undue strain on state resources, highlighting the interconnectedness of federal and state operations.

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Conclusion

This episode of The Daily Beans provides a comprehensive analysis of the Trump administration's controversial policies and their implications for federal workers, environmental protections, LGBTQ rights, and press freedom. Through detailed reporting and a pivotal interview with David Enrich, the podcast underscores the urgent need to safeguard democratic institutions and uphold the freedoms essential to a functioning democracy.

Transcript

[Alison Gill]

MSW Media. Hello and welcome to the Daily beans for Monday, March 10, 2025. Today, a multi state lawsuit seeks to reverse the purge of federal workers. Trump walks back his idiotic tariffs, but probably not after he dumped all of his stock in Canadian aluminum. Republicans join Democrats in Montana to defeat anti trans legislation. The Trump administration has said it will not comply with a court order to produce agency heads to testify. A federal judge rules that firing a member of the NLRB was illegal. Another federal judge orders the Trump administration to pay our foreign aid bills. Trump is considering revoking the legal status of Ukrainians in the United States. The newly minted Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch has filed his response to the Eric Adams case and repeats that the Department of Justice is asking to dismiss the bribery charges without prejudice. Trump's DEI purge at the Pentagon included a photo of the Enola Gay. The DHS announced that it's ending the TSA collective bargaining agreement. Trans women are being transferred to men's prisons despite multiple court orders. Trump has ordered swaths of U.S. forests cut down for timber. And the USDA has eliminated two food safety advisory committees. I'm your host, Alison Gill. Well, that was almost a new record for a number of headlines and the length of the introduction. We had a lot of news happen over the weekend that we're going to be going over today. Dana is traveling, so I'll be solo. So thank you for hanging in with me. Solo. And later in the show, I'm going to be talking with David Enrich, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Towers. He has a new book called Murder the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment, and A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. And we're going to be talking all about that and Clarence Thomas and trying to overturn precedent like he does. And it's pretty frightening what the implications could be. So you'll want to definitely listen to that interview. We have so much news to cover. So let's get started with some quick hits. And to make a long story short. All right, first up, the brand spanking new Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump's private attorney, filed his response in the Eric Adams case supporting the Trump DOJ motion to dismiss the charges against Eric Adams without prejudice. Meaning we want to bring him again. Meaning we want to hold these over his head until he to make sure he acts right or we'll bring the charges again and without anyone asking him, without a single person asking him about what he thinks about the bribery laws themselves. He wrote this as a legal matter. The department's Conclusion that dismissal would serve the public good by deterring weaponization and promoting executive branch, national security and immigration objectives is entirely proper. Every action that a diligent public servant takes should be designed to advance the public good, which is what the motion seeks to achieve. If taking such steps were treated as the equivalent of a personal gift or bribe, whether under the ethics rules or bribery laws, government would literally grind to a halt. That is why a proposal to trade one public act for another, a form of log rolling, is fundamentally unlike the swap of an official act for a private payment. And that's a quote from US V. Blagojevich. So what Todd Blanche is saying here is that, hey, bribery happens all the time in government. Public favors for public favors. That's what this was. It wasn't, by the way. But he's now attacking the bribery laws, which have already been gutted by the Supreme Court in USV Blagojevich, by the way. All right, next up from Law and Crime, the Trump administration is allegedly refusing to produce a high ranking agency leader for testimony in connection with a lawsuit in which he's accused of unlawfully firing thousands of federal government workers still in the probationary period of their employment. Remember this? I was really excited about this because the judge was like, all right, bring in someone from doge, bring in someone from labor, bring in someone from Treasury. You get eight hours with all three of them. I want to hear what's going on now. Attorneys at the Justice Department's Civil Division said they will not produce Charles Ezell, the acting Director of the U.S. office of Personnel Management, despite a federal judge in San Francisco issuing a court order requiring him to testify in person later this month. That's according to a Wednesday court filing from the plaintiffs in this case. So this is the one where they needed Azelle to come in from OPM and answer questions about the agency and what they're doing. Are you firing all these probationary employees? That's why Trump had that Cabinet meeting and said, no, no, no, the agency heads are firing all of the people in the. That's you guys. It's you. They were probably surprised to learn that because they were probably taking orders from, oh, I'm sure Amy Gleason over at doge, Right, Quote, Plaintiffs respectfully request the court hold a status conference as soon as possible to discuss the defendant's notice to plaintiffs that they do not intend to comply with this court order requiring defendant acting OPM Director Charles Ezell to appear at the preliminary injunction hearing scheduled for 8am March 13, 2025. So we'll keep you posted on that from Reuters. Trump said on Thursday that he would soon decide whether to revoke the legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia following a Reuters report that his administration planned to take that step. Such a move would be a stunning reversal of the welcome that Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden's administration and potentially put them on a fast track to deportation. The planned rolled back of protections for Ukrainians would be part of a broader Trump administration effort to strip legal status from more than 1.8 million migrants allowed to enter the US under temporary humanitarian parole programs launched under the Biden administration. That's what a senior Trump official and three sources familiar told Reuters. Absolutely disgusting. And from Gerstein Politico A federal judge has set a new deadline for Monday. That's today for the Trump administration to pay a large batch of backlogged invoices for foreign aid programs. This is the USAID lawsuit. But he sharply scaled back the amount of money that will need to be sent out by then. U.S. district Judge Amir Ali issued the new directive Thursday, just a day after the Supreme Court rejected Trump's emergency appeal of an earlier order that Ali issued in a pair of lawsuits challenging Trump's broad freeze on foreign aid. The judge's earlier order had imposed a deadline of February 26th for the State Department to send out about $2 billion that the government owes to contractors and grant recipients who run aid programs abroad. This is for work that's already been completed. That was his first order. That's what they challenged up to the Supreme Court and lost when Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices. So we'll keep an eye on that, see if they pay their bills. And the court ordered bills from this Supreme Court and from the Guardian. Transgender women incarcerated in the United States prison system have been transferred to men's facilities under Donald Trump's executive order, despite multiple court rulings blocking the president's policy. That's according to civil rights lawyers and accounts from people behind bars. In three lawsuits filed on behalf of trans women housed in women's prisons, federal judges have ruled that the US Bureau of Prisons cannot withhold their medical treatment and they were barred from moving them to men's facilities. Lawyers fighting Trump's directive say the court rulings prevented the transfer of 17 trans women who are the plaintiffs in these cases, but those who are not included in the litigation are being placed in men's facilities. Absolutely unacceptable. This applies to all similarly situated people and it's cruel and unusual punishment on purpose. There'll be, you know, I mean, we've already talked about the essay numbers being higher, V coding, but they're like, well, they're not part of the lawsuit. We're moving them. It's horrific. Also from the Guardian, Donald Trump has ordered that swaths of American forests be felled for timber, evading rules to protect endangered species while doing so. And raising the prospect of chainsaws raising some of the most ecologically important trees in the United States. The President, in an executive order, has demanded an expansion in tree cutting across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands, claiming that the heavy handed federal policies have made America reliant on foreign imports of timber. We were trading with our friends. This isn't like reliance on foreign oil in the Middle East. This is timber from our friends in Canada. It's vital we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security because Canada was threatening us with the prospect of taking away our timber. Trump has instructed the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to increase logging targets and for officials to circumvent the US's Endangered Species act by using unspecified emergency powers to ignore protections placed upon vulnerable creatures habitats. Martial law for the spotted owl, I guess. So fucked up. Next up from Reuters, U.S. department of Agriculture has eliminated two committees that advise on food safety. Ah, that's awesome. Raising concerns about government oversight and the food supply as the Trump administration seeks to downsize the federal government. Slash costs. By the way, the point of slashing costs is to. So they can pocket the money in tax breaks for the wealthy. They should always, always say that. Reuters. The USDA eliminated the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection. So we don't, we don't need that anymore. Especially with a bird flu, who cares? We don't need those advisory committees at all. Also from the Guardian, Republican lawmakers in Montana voted en masse to help defeat two anti trans bills in an unprecedented move on Thursday. This makes my heart happy. And this came after powerful speeches from two trans representatives imploring them to reject the latest intent to criminalize gender nonconformity. State Representative Zoe Zephyr spoke out against a bill that sought to ban drag performances and pride parades in Montana, introduced by a Republican member of the House who has referred to transgenderism as a fetish based on cross dressing. In an unusual move, a Republican representative, Sherry Essman, also spoke out against the bill. Quote Trust the parents to do what's right and stop these crazy bills that are a waste of time, they're waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this House and having to even talk about this. That's what Essman, the Republican, said. That bill was defeated by 55 to 44 after 13 Republicans flipped to support Democrats. Then S.J. howell spoke out against a more extreme bill that sought to remove transgender children from their custody of their parents. Quote, every time a child is removed from their family, it's a tragedy. Sometimes a necessary tragedy, but it's a tragedy nonetheless. This bill does not come close to the seriousness with which those decisions should be contemplated. That's what Howell said. Put yourself in the shoes of a Child Protective service worker who's confronted with a young person living in a stable home with loving parents who is supported and has their needs met. Are they supposed to remove that child from their home and put them in the care of the state? We should absolutely not be doing that. After that speech by Howell, the bill was defeated by 71 votes to 27. 29 Republicans defected. Just a note, there are 696 bills currently under consideration in 49 states that would negatively impact trans and gender non conforming people. Texas is the state with the most anti trans policy initiatives. 97 active bills, followed by Missouri, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa and Connecticut. So far this year, 18 bills have been passed, which follows an unprecedented 87 bills in 2024. At the federal level, there are now 25 active anti trans bills across categories such as health care, student athletics, the military, incarceration and education. In addition to a slew of executive orders signed by Donald Trump in the first days of his second term. Tell me again trans rights are not under attack. One more time. Say it to my fucking face. And when you attack trans rights, you attack LGBTQ rights, you attack human rights. All right, sorry. I get mad. As you can imagine, this is horrifying what's happening. But this coming together in Montana with Republicans to be like what the Republicans are like. This is a waste of time. Why aren't we doing tax property bills, taking children out of parents homes? It was really great to see the Republicans flip and support the Democrats on this. I hope it happens everywhere. All right, we have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with the hot notes. Stick around. We'll be right back after these messages.

[Dana Goldberg]

We'll be right back.

[Alison Gill]

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Plus it only took one pot to make it so simple. Quick cleanup's a breeze and it was absolutely delicious. So users of leading meal kits have rated Home Chef number one in quality, convenience, value, taste and recipe ease. For a limited time, Home Chef is offering you 18 free meals plus free dessert for life and of course, free shipping on your first box. When you go to homechef.com with over 30 delicious recipes available each week, there's always something new to try. They cater to a variety of dietary preferences so they've got you covered. So it's a simpler way to cook. They have also the new five ingredient meals to make dinner prep really easy. Just five fresh pre portioned ingredients and simple instructions. Home Chef isn't just convenient too. As I said, it's cost effective. It saves me money. Customers save an average of 86 bucks a month on groceries while enjoying high quality home cooked meals. So if you're tired of last minute dinner decisions, let Home Chef simplify your evenings with meals that are easy, delicious and budget friendly. Again, for a limited time, Home Chef is offering you 18 free meals plus free dessert for life and of course free shipping on your first box. Just go to homechef.com dailybeans that's homechef.com dailybeans for 18 free meals and free dessert for life. You heard that right. You must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. All right, welcome back. It's time for Hot Notes. Hot Notes. All right, first up from The Washington Post. 20. Count them. 20 Democratic attorneys general have sued the Trump administration in federal court and filed for a temporary restraining order against nearly two dozen federal agencies, arguing that the mass layoffs of thousands of federal Probationary employees in recent weeks were conducted illegally. This is the lawsuit I've been waiting for. This is the granddaddy of all mass probationary layoff lawsuits. And what the Post doesn't cover here, which I think is kind of a tragedy, is all of the work and the legal information about the illegal firing of probationary employees comes from Hampton Dellinger. I encourage you to watch his interview with Rachel Maddow after he gave up his lawsuit to keep his job. He explains why he did that, because, you know, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. I think it was the 9th. No, it was a D.C. circuit. Excuse me, it was a D. C. Circuit gave him an adverse ruling and said he vacated the restraining order, which kicks him out of his job. And he could continue to pursue the lawsuit, but it would take with the Supreme Court, but the SCOTUS could gut the law. But more importantly, he'd be out on the sidelines for a year fighting this thing. So that's why he decided to give it up. But what he found and what he explained in his stay request to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Kathy Harris and Raymond Lehman or Lyman. Lyman is the one who reinstated the six people across six agencies. Kathy Harris is the one who reinstated, like, almost 6,000 probationary employees, I think, at the USDA. And so those principles, that bedrock of basically the legal argument here is that when you fire probationary employees en masse and you say that it's for performance reasons, but it wasn't, that's actually a rif. You're actually doing a reduction in force. And when you do a reduction in force, there are rules. You have to give 60 days notice unless the agency head waives the notice. Period. You have to. There are appeals rights for the workers. When you do a rif, There are legal things in the law, statutes, federal law passed by Congress, federal laws that you have to do if you, if you want to participate in a rif. That's why Musk and Trump have been trying to get everybody to voluntarily quit moving everybody back into their office that were remote workers, sticking them in bullpens and folding with folding tables and chairs and not enough computers and not enough Internet to cover everybody, not enough parking. You have to take shuttles, making everybody's lives miserable, offering them the fork in the road, offering some agencies $25,000 buyouts, Vera and Visp, which is early retirement. Because once you, once you voluntarily resign, you give up all your appeal rights. That's why they've been working so hard at this. Give me five things you did last week trying to degrade people and humiliate them into like this. I'm out. Peace out. Right. So that they don't have to riff you. Because when they riff you, lot more rules come into play. And it was Hampton Dellinger and Kathy Harris and Raymond Lehman who said, this is a RIF and you violated the law. That's what's giving the foundation for this lawsuit to talk about all probationary employees across all agencies, two dozen federal agencies brought by these state attorneys general. The lawsuit and restraining order request filed in the US District Court in Maryland on Thursday and Friday called for a federal judge to halt the planned layoffs of federal probationary workers and reinforcements. State those who've already been fired, quote, states are now left to pick up the pieces of the shattered federal workforce, addressing numerous unemployment compensation requests, helping our residents seek new jobs as each new wave of terminations crests. That's what the attorneys wrote in the papers, arguing that the manner in which the firings took place unduly overwhelmed government support systems and caused economic harm. So this court should halt the unlawful firings now. That's the harm argument, right? In order to have standing. Because remember when the unions sued and the judge was like, you don't have standing. You're not directly harmed. You're talking about maybe being harmed down the road by fewer membership dues, loss of membership, et cetera. It's all hypothetical. What the states are saying is the harm is real. It's happening now. It's not hypothetical. We're having to pour resources into helping these unemployed members of, you know, residents of our states that were fired from their federal jobs. That's the immediate harm. That's what gives us standing to sue as attorneys general, as the states representing the states. The parallel legal actions are among the latest in dozens of federal complaints from attorneys general and private groups across the country aiming to claw back or reverse the White House executive action. Since Trump took office, the process of reducing the workforce has been chaotic. On Friday, the Labor Department reinstated all fired probationary employees, at least 100 workers who had been let go in recent weeks, according to the afge. That's a big union for federal workers. Those workers have begun receiving emails saying they should return to their duties Monday. This lawsuit targets the process by which an estimated 24,000 federal probationary employees were fired so far, alleging that the workers termination letters falsely said they were fired for performance issues, when, according to the lead plaintiff and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, the firings were clearly part of the administration's attempt to restructure and downsize the entire federal government. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. That's a riff. Under federal laws and regulations, if the government terminates probationary employees en masse for reasons unrelated to performance, agencies must follow a reduction in force guideline. Oh. Those include additional job protections for military veterans, a 60 day notification to affected states so local officials can set up rapid response teams to support surges of unemployed residents. So that right there, the fact that the RIF says that there has to be a 60 day notification to the states means that the states are already perceived to have standing. Do you know what I mean? Like they thought of this already in the law. You got to notify the states, you have to notify Maryland so they can get ready for all the influx of all the unemployed people coming into their unemployment office. Huh? That's standing. That's standing. But according to the lawsuit, the Trump administration didn't do that. They didn't give the 60 day response. They didn't treat it like a riff. Quote, President Trump's unlawful mass firings of federal workers are a blatant attack on the civil service, throwing thousands of hardworking families into financial turmoil. We won't stand by while he disrupts the lives and undermines our state. The Justice Department didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Other states joining the lawsuit, Minnesota, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, as well as D.C. the District and Maryland are among the most heavily impacted by the firings. Obviously combined they home nearly 366,000 federal workers, according to federal data compiled by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments regional group. The Republican Attorney general of Virginia, where another roughly 321,500 federal employees live, did not join the lawsuit. In court documents, the Democratic attorneys general describe a host of administrative, public health and fiscal challenges onset by the firings, including remarkable upticks in unemployment claims. In Maryland, more than 800 former federal employees have applied for unemployment benefits since Trump took office. That's according to data from the state's Labor Department. During that same period last year, Maryland received 189 unemployment claims from federal workers. So it has quadrupled. I would say that's immediate harm. The state of Illinois has experienced a similar influx with the same number of former federal workers filing for unemployment benefits in the first three months of 2025 that occurred in all of 2024. But states abilities to process those unemployment claims have been complicated by what the lawsuit claims is a messy, inconsistent, non transparent firing process. One further exacerbated, the states allege, by by the potential illegality of the probationary worker terminations. So not only are you increasing the number of unemployment claims we have to deal with here in Maryland, for example, but you're also making it really difficult to figure out because you know how you want unemployment. Were you fired? Did you resign? Was it performance based, et cetera? So that's complicating this because they screwed it up so badly. Since the mass job cuts began, some federal agencies have explicitly said employees were laid off due to reduction in force, while others have said they were terminated because of unsatisfactory work performance. Other federal agencies claim some federal workers were not actually unemployed or that they had voluntarily resigned. In Illinois, state officials remain unaware of the individuals who have already been laid off and whether and when the next federal mass layoff will even occur. Because of that, the lawsuit claims, state officials had to rush to stand up a website for resource and job information that is generic and therefore less helpful to fired workers. The attorney general also said the abrupt firings will have, quote, substantial impacts on their state's finances, writing in the lawsuit that they do not know whether the Labor Department will use its discretionary authority to refund the administrative costs incurred by the states as they process an unprecedented uptick in federal employment claims. Trump won't that money will go to his rich friends. It won't go to the states to help process these. Maryland's comptroller has predicted that the mass firings will cause significant decreases to the state's income tax revenue and otherwise harm the economy. That's yet to be seen. I'm not sure that that can be considered an immediate harm. That's more hypothetical, but it's true. In a statement Friday, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the draconian actions of the Trump administration could cause tens of thousands of jobs lost, hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted, and the cratering of tens of millions of dollars in income. Here in Maryland, at a time when the state is already grappling with an estimated $3.2 billion budget deficit, quote, as our state navigates the worst financial crisis in two decades, we can't retreat from our principles and we can't afford to let these actions stand. That's what Wes Moore said. In the nation's capital, D.C. officials have estimated the city could face substantial losses in annual sales tax revenue generated by federal employees who live, work, and buy goods and services in the region. The suit argues that the losses could have been mitigated had the Trump administration given the District and the fired probationary employees the proper 60 day notice because they may have been able to secure new jobs before their paychecks abruptly stopped. So this is the granddaddy of all lawsuits about the probationary employees. I'm disappointed in Virginia. I don't know why they didn't join this lawsuit. Maybe they will. You should call your Virginia attorney general and tell them to join this lawsuit. It's the 350,000 of federal workers there. It will disrupt your economy in Virginia. Next up from the Associated Press, References to a World War II medal of honor recipient the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan and the first woman to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content. And that's according to a database obtained by the AP. The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by the Associated Press and has 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher. One official who spoke anonymously to provide details that are not public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images and posts in total when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being called for. DEI the vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women, minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. It also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months like Black History Month, Hispanic people and women. In some cases, photos seem to be flagged for removal simply because their file includes the word gay, including several service members with the last name Gay and an image of the B29 aircraft, Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan during World War II and then Nagasaki. Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. An engineer in the photo last name gay. A photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list because it mentioned they were recording data about fish, including their weight, size, hatchery and gender. So that's gone because they were recording the fish's gender. In addition, some photos of the Tuskegee Airmen as we know, the nation's first black military pilots who served in a Segregated World War II unit were listed on the database, but those may likely be protected due to historical content. Shouldn't it all? The Air Force briefly removed a new recruit training course that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen. We talked about that when it happened, that drew the White House's ire over malicious compliance, and the Air Force quickly reversed the removal. Many of the images listed in the database already have been removed, others still visible on Thursday. It's not clear if they'll be taken down at some point or be allowed to stay, including images with historical significance, such as those of the Tuskegee Airmen. Also from the Associated Press today. The Department of Homeland Security said Friday it's ending the collective bargaining agreement with tens of thousands of frontline employees at the Transportation Security Administration, marking a major effort to dismantle union protections under Trump. The TSA union called it an unprovoked attack and said they will fight it. The department criticized the union, whose staffers are responsible for keeping weapons off airplanes and protecting air travel. Officials said poor performers were being allowed to stay on the job and that the agreement was hindering the ability of the organization to safeguard our transportation systems and keep Americans safe. An assessment that faced immediate pushback from top Democrats in Congress and the union itself. Quote, this action will ensure Americans will have more effective and modernized workforces across the nation's transportation networks. That's what the agency said in a statement. But the American Federation of Government Employees, which is the union representing the TSA workers and the tsa, then administrator David Pakoski, they signed this collective bargaining agreement in May, and it came amid a push by Homeland Security to improve the pay of frontline workers. That's what they want to do, is they want to reduce their pay, which has historically lagged behind other agencies. Pokoski credited the pay increase with improving employee retention and morale. The union said the order would strip collective bargaining rights from about 47,000 transportation security officers. Those are the people responsible for staffing the airports, checking to make sure passengers don't have weapons or bombs. And the decision comes at a time of increasing passenger travel. Screeners see an average of 2.5 million passengers a day. The union said the department and the Trump administration were violating the right of staffers to join a union. Pretty clear that's why he's gutting the National Labor Relations Board, the people who determine that. I remember when this happened in the first Trump administration with the va. A guy came in and said, you no longer have any collective bargaining rights. We were like, what? Didn't get a lot of coverage back then. But the union also said the reasons the Republican administration had given for the decision, particularly the criticisms of union activity, were completely fabricated. That's true. Instead, I mean, they just, the whole cloth just lies out of thin air like he always does. Instead, the union said the decision was retaliation for the union's wider efforts, challenging a range of Trump administration actions affecting federal workers. Afge represents about 800,000 federal government employees and has been pushing back on many of the administration's actions, such as firing probationary employees. For example. The Trump administration has been laying the groundwork to weaken or eliminate protections for federal workers as it moves swiftly to shrink the federal government. Last week, OPM sent a memo to the department and agency heads demanding an accounting of time spent by employees in the last fiscal year on union matters such as contract negotiations and dispute resolutions. You could just look up the law that says how many hours have to are required for that, but they just keep going after unions. The end of the collective bargaining agreement was immediately slammed by Democratic members of Congress as well as the association of Flight Attendants, the cwa, the head of the flight attendants union, Sarah Nelson, said in a statement, the decision was terrible for aviation security and everyone who depends on safe travel. This will take us back to the days of security at the lowest price with the highest cost to our country. Bennie Thompson, Democrat, Mississippi rank and member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the decision makes zero sense. Collective bargaining agreements between an employer and a union representing workers outlines the rights and benefits of employees such as their pay schedule, their ability to challenge demotions or terminations. This agreement was supposed to expire in 2031. The TSA, by the way, was created after the terrorist attacks September 11th when hijackers smuggled knives and box cutters through security to use as weapons as they commandeered four airplanes and slammed them into the Pentagon, World Trade center towers and a field in Pennsylvania. The TSA's mandate was to prevent a similar attack in the future. So we're going to end this segment with a little good news from cbs. Federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday that President Trump's firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board was unlawful and said she must be allowed to continue in her role. This is good. We'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about it. But in a 36 page ruling, U.S. district Judge Beryl Howell, who sits on the U.S. district Court in Washington, said that the Constitution and past decisions make clear that Congress can limit the president's removal power. She ruled that the president's firing of Gwen Wilcox from the NLRB violated federal law that allows for a board member to be removed only for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, and she declared her termination void. And here's a quote under our constitutional system, such checks by design guard against executive overreach and the risk such overreach would pose of autocracy. An American president is not a king, not even an elected one, and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like the plaintiff is not absolute but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances as are present here. Howell, appointed by former President Barack Obama, by the way, wrote that Trump's quote seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law. To test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme, Wilcox, nominated to the NLRB by Joe Biden, confirmed by the Senate to a five year term in September 2023, was designated chair of the board December 2024. But soon after returning to a second term in the White House, Trump replaced Wilcox's chair and fired her from the position on the board in late January. While the National Labor Relations act requires the president to remove a member upon notice adhering for neglect of duty or malfeasance, the email sent to Wilcox on behalf of the president said she and another board member have not been operating in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration, which is the exact thing this law is supposed to prevent from happening. I don't like you isn't an excuse. That's why the law exists. Wilcox told CBS last month that she was stunned when she received the letter. I handled cases where workers were fired and retaliated against for their conduct, but I never imagined I would be the person being fired for doing my job. That's what Wilcox said. She's 71. She swiftly challenged her firing in court. In her decision, the judge noted that the 90 years since the NLRB was founded, the president has never removed a member, not once. His attempts to do so here are blatantly illegal and his constitutional arguments to excuse this illegal act are contrary to Supreme Court precedent and over a century of practice. The court found that the supreme court decision from 1935 binds the outcome of Wilcox's case. That case carved out an exception to the president's powers to remove executive officers. The Supreme Court found that Congress could impose four cause removal protections for multi member commissions of experts that are balanced along partisan lines and do not exercise any executive power like the NLRB and the MSPB Merit Systems Protection Board. But maybe not Office of Special Counsel, which is why Hampton Dellinger is out, because that's not a multi member commission balanced along partisan lines. Though he doesn't have any executive power quote, the 150 year history and tradition of multi member boards or commissions and the 90 year precedent from the Supreme Court approving removal protections for these offices dictates the same outcome for the NLRB here. Pretty much word for word this is pretty much a hundred percent against the law. Now could this conservative Supreme Court say, well, we've changed our minds from the 1935 Supreme Court decision that allows for exceptions for multi member boards along partisan lines that have no executive power like the mspb, like the nlrb. But we'll find out. We'll find out whether or not Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Roberts side with the liberals on this one because I know Kathy Harris has hired Neil Kutyal to argue this for her in Supreme Court. I'm just interested whether the NLRB case will get there first or whether the MSPB case will get there first. Howell criticized Trump for portraying himself as a king, pointing to a social media post from the White House last month that featured an illustration of the President wearing a crown along with the headline Long live the King and said that he misunderstands the role of Article 2, which lays out the scope of the President's powers. Quote, at issue in this case is the President's insistence that he has the authority to fire whomever he wants within the executive branch, overriding any congressionally mandated law in his way. Luckily, the framers anticipated such a power grab vested in Article 3, not Article 2, the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on presidential authority. The President's interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power, or more aptly, his aspiration, is flat wrong. This decision obviously sets the case on a path to the Supreme Court that could lead it to overturn, as I said, the 1935 decision. This is known as Humphreys Executor v. United States. Sarah Harris, Acting Solicitor General, wrote in a letter to Congress last month. The Trump administration believes that certain four cause removal restrictions are unconstitutional. So she's going to be arguing that the high court, which has a 6:3 conservative majority, has in recent years chipped away at the 90 year old ruling and reasserted the President's power to remove executive branch officers at will. Most notably, in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure of a single leader, removable only for inefficiency, neglect or malfeasance, was unconstitutional. But that's the single agency head, and that's probably why Hampton Dellinger would have lost at the Supreme Court, two Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have already indicated they believe the Supreme Court should reverse Humphrey's executor. So that's where we are. We'll see what Roberts and Coney Barrett do. But that is the news. There's a lot of news I didn't get to we're going to cover it tomorrow with Dana. But first, before we get to the good news, check out this interview with author New York Times best selling author of Dark Towers, David Enrich and his new book Book Murder the Truth. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey everybody, I've always been curious about how my body works, especially when it comes to metabolism. It was always such a confusing concept, but it's fascinating to think that something so central to our health can be so mysterious. That's why I was thrilled to discover Lumen. It's a tool that gives me real time insights into my metabolism and helps me make smarter choices every day. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It measures your metabolism through your breath and it tells you whether you're burning fat or carbs. The app provides tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. So here's how it works. You breathe into Lumen first thing in the morning, gives you a snapshot of your metabolism, and based on that, Lumen creates a personalized nutrition plan for your day. You can also use it before and after workouts or meals to get real time feedback on how your body's responding. Your metabolism is your body's engine. It's how your body turns fat into fuel. Optimal metabolic health translates to benefits like easier weight management, improved energy level, better fitness results, and even better sleep. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health and it can even track your cycle or the onset of menopause, adjusting the recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts. This is the ding ding ding as to why I wanted to try lumen. Using Lumen has been transformative for me personally. I've learned how different foods and activities and hormone fluctuations, how it affects my body and it's helped me make smarter choices. I think everyone who's listening could benefit from Lumen because it's like having a personal coach for your metabolism. It just tells you what's up for the day and it fits in your pocket and gives you real time, actionable insights. So take the next step to improving your health. Go to Lumen Me Dailybeans to get 20% off your lumen. That's L U M e N M E Dailybeans for 20% off your purchase. Lumen Me Dailybeans. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring the episode. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Super excited today. Joining us, New York Times best selling author. You'll remember, he wrote Dark Towers and Servants of the Damned. He and I also had a ton of discussions back in the Mueller She Wrote days about Val Brooksmit and Deutsche bank more broadly. Well, he has a new book out. It comes out tomorrow. It's called Murder the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. Please welcome David Enrich. Hey, David.

[Dana Goldberg]

How's it going?

[Alison Gill]

It's going well. I feel like I haven't spoken to you. It feels like it's been like six years, but also two weeks.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah. And it's probably been like right. Somewhere right in the middle of that range.

[Alison Gill]

Probably about two years or probably exactly that. When I think Servants of the Damned came out. I know we spoke to you then. So this new book, first of all, I want to kind of set this up by talking about some case law from the Supreme Court in a case called New York Times v. Sullivan. And that is like, that is one of the core cases that protects the press and, you know, the fourth estate against libel and defamation. It's where we get the term actual malice from. And I know that we've discussed at length here on this show with like the Eugene Carroll case, for example, the Fox News defamation case going forward, the Smartmatic defamation cases where Rudy Giuliani and Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss. We had to, you know, figure out what actual malice is. Talk a little bit about how this involves the press, where you're going with like in this book and by, by talking about, by giving some background information on New York v. Sullivan.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah. So first of all, just to kind of set this up, it sounds like you've been covering the cases where defamation lawsuits have been used to fight back against disinformation and lies. And the focus of my book is kind of the opposite. It's the cases where defamation lawsuits are being weaponized to shut down criticism of powerful people and institutions, especially on the right wing. So this case dates back to 1960, when the new York Times ran a full page ad that was paid for by supporters of Martin Luther King. And the ad kind of contained a description of all of the nasty ways in which racist Southern officials were basically trying to preserve white supremacy in the South. And the gist of the ad was completely true. They were doing terrible, violent, nasty things down there. A couple of the particulars were either wrong or exaggerated. And so a guy named L.B. sullivan, who was a city commissioner in Montgomery, Alabama, sued the Times, claiming that he had been defamed in the ad because the ad criticized the Montgomery, Alabama police force for its violent thuggery. Sullivan was not actually named in the ad, but he claimed that he had been defamed. Anyway. This went to trial in the Alabama courthouse of just like a very racist Southern judge who also happened to be a pedophile. And not surprisingly, the jury, the Alway jury, returned a verdict very quickly in favor of LB Sullivan and against the Times. This was. I mean, it was a $500,000 verdict, which doesn't sound like a lot, but at the time kind of was. And it was a real problem for the New York Times, especially when a bunch of other Southern officials kind of jumped on this bandwagon and filed their own lawsuits against the Times and other media outlets as part of just the very deliberate campaign to prevent the media from writing about the civil rights movement. Anyway, the Times appealed. The Alabama Supreme Court rejected that appeal. That left the Times one last option. And so they appealed to the U.S. supreme Court. And in 1964, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and issued eventually an unanimous decision that reversed the Alabama courts. And the findings in that case were really important and set kind of the stage for the future of investigative journalism and just free speech in this country more broadly. What the court found was that if you're a public official, in order to win a defamation case, you need to prove not only that someone said something that was false, not only that you were defamed by that something that was false, but you also need to prove that the person who wrote or said the supposedly defamatory thing either was lying or acted with reckless disregard for the accuracy of what they were saying. So basically, they had to prove that you were being just grossly irresponsible or were just outright spreading falsehoods. And the Court, the argument the Court made in supporting this was that it was really important in a democracy that values free speech to give journalists and others breathing room to make innocent mistakes. And the theory was that, you know, if you can be held financially responsible for every little inaccuracy that comes out of your mouth, you will be either sued into oblivion or you will start to self censor and just shy away from writing or saying things that involve powerful and potentially litigious. And either of those outcomes is antithetical to what the First Amendment is all about, which is that we should have unfettered free speech in this country, and especially when it Comes to people who wield a lot of power, whether it's the president or whether it's your mayor or a billionaire like Elon Musk or just like a powerful local real estate company. And people need to be able to have the right to speak freely about such people or institutions, critique them, attack them, investigate them without fear that like an innocent slip up is going to bankrupt you.

[Alison Gill]

And chilling. The free speech of journalists, for example, has long been kind of a fringe idea, very anti constitutional fringe idea from the right wing. But it kind of got shoved into the mainstream again when Clarence Thomas, as he is wont to do, opines on things that have nothing to do with the case in front of him. I'm thinking of the immunity case where, where he comes in and says yeah, but is the special council even really constitutionally funded or appointed? And that opened the, you know, the doors for Judge Eileen Cannon to write a 93 page, yeah, ridiculous screed about how special counsels don't have, are, aren't constitutionally funded or appointed. Which also caused us to probably never be able to see volume two of the Jack Smith Report. But that's neither here nor there. But Thomas comes in like a wrecking ball, like he does, and makes a statement about New York v. Sullivan in a really obscure. Was it 2019 case.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah, that's right. And it was a, it was a lot. It involved a woman who said she had been raped by Bill Cosby. Cosby and his lawyer accused, kind of smeared her as a liar. She then sued Cosby for having defamed her. And for a bunch of technical reasons that I won't get into, she was, it was basically the suit got thrown out repeatedly. And in fact she was found, it was found that she had not actually been defame for some technical reasons. She appealed to the Supreme Court with the help of a lawyer who had worked and was working for the Trump family at the time. And the Supreme Court, everyone, all the justices agreed that they should not hear this case for technical reasons. And so they rejected the case. But as part of that rejection, Thomas decided to make his opinion known, which as you said, was a little weird because he was saying he was agreeing that the case shouldn't be heard, but he just wanted his voice out there. And so he took this opportunity to argue that in a more appropriate case in the future, the court should find a way to reconsider and potentially overturn New York Times versus Sullivan. And it was basically just an open invitation to anyone out there to start bringing cases and to give The Supreme Court, a vehicle with which to attack these long standing freedom of the press precedents.

[Alison Gill]

And so this is these kinds of weird sort of backhanded invitations that seem to happen more frequently now than they used to is kind of why it feels now that this is a more mainstream idea that's being circulated. So that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, especially with the book, you know, the subtitle, the, you know, fear of the First Amendment, etc. So talk about how this, because you write this in your book about where this is leading and yeah, you know, why, why you think we need to. This is a five alarm fire. This isn't just something we should kind of roll over on.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah, it is a really important issue, I think. And it's like, you know, I started writing this book in 2022. I had no idea that Donald Trump would be president again. And I think this would have been a really important issue even if Trump were not president again. But based on what we've seen in the last, like, whatever it's been seven or eight weeks, I think this is turning out to be kind of alarmingly well timed. And what's been happening all over the country for the past probably eight or nine years at this point is that powerful and rich people and institutions are using the legal system to attack anyone who criticizes or investigates them. And that ranges from people like me, and I work at the New York Times and I've got great lawyers at the New York Times and we're going to be fine. But it also involves lawsuits and legal threats targeted at small newspapers in local towns. Independent journalists, like, for people with substack newsletters or, I don't know, independent podcasts, to just pick some random examples here.

[Alison Gill]

Like Olivia Troy, our friend who was sued.

[Dana Goldberg]

Exactly. Anyone who is engaged in public discourse on the matter of the day and has the guts or the recklessness, I guess, depending on your perspective, to speak openly and critically about people in positions of power can face these, certainly face these threats, and often will face these lawsuits as well. And that's happening even when we have the protections of New York Times versus Sullivan and some subsequent cases fully in place and those precedents exist and they are supposed to protect us, and they are not protecting a lot of people. Because it turns out even just defending against a garbage lawsuit can take years. It can be really expensive, and it's just too much for some smaller news outlets and independent journalists.

[Alison Gill]

And it's still chilling. It still has a chilling effect, regardless of whether the protections are there or not 100%.

[Dana Goldberg]

I mean, I've got a lot of examples of this that I kind of narrate in the book where journalists just really, they end up for kind of economically rational reasons shying away from writing about powerful people in their towns or their communities because they will be sued to death. They will literally be driven out of business if they continue down their path. And that's obviously really anti Democratic. I think it's really dangerous. But what's happening now at a national level is that kind of spurred on by Clarence Thomas, among others, there is this burgeoning legal movement on the right wing that is seeking to roll back Sullivan and roll back some of the subsequent cases that kind of further cemented the Sullivan precedent and the goal of that. And it's being pushed by people who often have a vested interest in it becoming easier to sue the media and often people with a vested interest in making it harder for the media to investigate them. And Trump is the clearest example of that. And he is in the White House right now trying to advance his agenda, often using lies and distortions and conspiracy theories and having a strong, robust media that will refute those lies and distortions is that's a threat to his agenda. And so it's not really that much of a secret to me why he and people like him would want to make it easier to sue the press and make it easier to just scare away the media from taking a really kind of critical, hard nosed look at what he and his allies are doing.

[Alison Gill]

Yeah, and we're already seeing it. We're seeing what the capitulation of the Washington Post, not publishing the Kamala Harris endorsement or you know, I mean, it's just that we've seen it a million times, all the firings of certain anchors, closing up shop, laying off production people.

[Dana Goldberg]

Well, in settling these lawsuits also that Trump has brought, it's literally pure capitulation. And the reasons, yeah, abc, Disney, CBS and Paramount are now in settlement discussions over what almost all legal observers who do not work for the President say is a garbage lawsuit. And they're thinking about settling it. And it's not, there's no mystery about why they're thinking about it, about settling it. It's not like for intangible Reasons, is that CBS's parent company has a multi billion dollar merger that needs approval of the federal government. And they are worried that if the, if this lawsuit doesn't get settled, the Trump administration will block that. And that's not me speculating on what their motives might be. That's literally like that. That's what a reporting shows they are concerned about.

[Alison Gill]

So now you remove this last little bit of protection that we have under New York, Reese Sullivan, and the floodgates are open. And I mean, the fourth estate.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah. I mean, I think the first ones to go down will be people who don't have the institutional backing of a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal or a CNN or something like that. It's going like one of, to me, like there's lots of dark spots in the media right now. One of the bright spots, I think, is the proliferation of all these independent voices that. Whether it's, you know, newsletters or podcasts or blogs or whatever, and you can agree or disagree with the viewpoints people are espousing, but it's just kind of the definition of democracy to me that you have all of these voices spring up and it's like the great thing the Internet always said it would do but never really did, and now it's kind of happening. Those are going to be the first people who get killed by these lawsuits and these threats if Sullivan were to be reversed or even watered down. And there's just not much question about that. We, the. The big media companies can afford to hire very good lawyers. We have good libel insurance. We have deep pockets and owners that have existed for generations. That's not something that most independent publishers and journalists have. And again, even with strong constitutional protections in place, we've already seen a lot of places either fold or just. Just shy away from critical coverage of certain litigious individuals. Because of the legal climate.

[Alison Gill]

Yeah. And because it just, you know, it costs as, I mean, like six figures easy to defend yourself in one of these lawsuits. And easy. Those that don't have the, you know, can confirm. Those that don't have the. That don't have the. The resources are the first to go. Which is a shame, because citizen journalism, I think, is crucial. Like you said. Said so I could talk to you about this for hours, but we only have another minute or so left. So I wanted to ask you, what do we do?

[Dana Goldberg]

I don't know. I don't know. Like, I think.

[Alison Gill]

I think number one step is to understand the problem. And I think that's why your book is so critical right now.

[Dana Goldberg]

See, that's perfect. That's the best answer I'm gonna. So we can try it again. What we should do is buy my book and try and understand the problem. No, I think seriously, like people. Well, to me, honestly, one of the things is that it's become very popular to bash the media. And that's something that's popular on the right, is popular on the left. And I get it, right. We make mistakes. We're humans, we're biased. We sometimes, as a result of those biases, are blinded to things. Maybe we are too hard on one person and too soft on another. We screw up and we don't always hold ourselves accountable enough. And so it's like really easy to beat up on us. And we should be beaten up on when we get things wrong. I get that. But I also think that it's important to realize that a lot of the beating up on the media that's happening, at least on the right and from people in power, it's not like because they're upset that we got something wrong or something like that. It's a systematic, very well organized effort to sow distrust in the media and to delegitimize the media and to weaken the media, because the media is one of the best things to hold account to or hold people in power to account. And so, like, I feel like people who are just so prone to, like, say, I'm never reading anything in the New York Times because they're complicit in all this, like, you're totally entitled to your opinion. I'm not going to dissuade you from feeling that way. But just be careful that you're not like, also discrediting the same thing that the right is trying to discredit as part of an effort. Effort to break down our democratic norms and protections.

[Alison Gill]

Yeah, and in this particular case, outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post and, and outlets like, you know, Heather Cox Richardson's Substack and my podcast are inextricably linked. And even more so, those citizen journalists and independent journalists are going to have their neck stuck out first in, in this, in this fight. So you can't, you know, hold anybody separate in this particular case because it impacts all.

[Dana Goldberg]

You can like us less and not subscribe to us. And what. But like, when. It's when you're arguing about the legal protections that protect journalists. We are all in this together. And it's not about right or left. It's about just democracy and free speech or not.

[Alison Gill]

Yeah, 100%. Well, thank you so much, my friend. I really encourage everybody to pick up your book. It's, it's available everywhere. You can get it tomorrow, but I'm sure you can pre order it now if you. Because like our patrons, our, our subscribers get this podcast the night before it comes out. But the book is fully out on the 11th. You can get it wherever you get your books. It's called Murder, the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment, and A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. So I. I really appreciate you coming on today. Do you have any final thoughts or any last words you want to share with us?

[Dana Goldberg]

No, just thanks as always for having me. I love talking to you.

[Alison Gill]

Did I say do you have any last words? That sounds really.

[Dana Goldberg]

Yeah. I don't know what you have planned for me for later in the day. It doesn't sound like it's good to have I.

[Alison Gill]

Just final thoughts, I guess. But thank you so much and. And I hope to have you on again soon.

[Dana Goldberg]

My pleasure, anytime.

[Alison Gill]

Okay, everybody, stick around. We'll be right back with the good news. Everybody, welcome back. It's time for the good news. Good news everyone. Then good news, everyone. Solo ag Good news. I'm bringing it to you today if you have any good news, confessions, corrections, shout outs to loved ones, yourself, the community, activism, a small business in your area that could use a boost. Your small business shout outs to government programs that have helped you or a loved one. Whether it's SNAP or WIC or Head Start, the Affordable Care act, great VA health care you've received, student debt forgiveness, somebody who at the Social Security Administration who helped you out. Anything like that? Anything at all. Send it to us any good [e-mail] click on contact. All you got to do to get your submission read on the air is to pay your pod pet tax, which means attach a photo of your pet. If you want us to guess the breeds in your shelter, pup or kitten, we can try to do that. We're not very good at it, but we love to try. If you don't have a pet, you can attach an adoptable pet in your area and we'll see if we can find him a home. If you don't have that any animal photo really, just get one off the Internet. I like capybaras, that's my favorite. Or baby photos. If you don't have any animal photos, you can send us your baby pics. And if all else fails, we are doing bird watching for the foreseeable future. Which is can be a picture of an actual bird or you and family and friends flipping the bird to musk and Trump properties. All of that dailybeanspod.com click on contact. First up from Keith Pronouns, he himself Minor pedantic correction about Zelensky, Trump, the shit show and the Oval, the orange peel puppet repeatedly called rare earth minerals, raw earth and more concerning. Frequently talked about Ukraine's raw earth or at one point Ukrainians raw Ukrainia's raw earth. Oh good Lord, Keith. I hope reporters resist the urge to autocorrect him and simply quote what spills out of his mouth. I'm sorry I didn't watch it. Keith. I just heard C span posted the 49 minute video to YouTube and it's a slog of Zelensky getting needled by man baby and baby man while holding firm. If you've only seen the blow up, you'll be glad to know the rest was more of the same, but with calmer voices and waiting for the other person to finish speaking like an uncomfortable shakedown. Props to Zelensky for making it through that with composure and without throwing hands. Right for podbet tax I'm sharing my orange blanket named Cassie showing off her turn with the brain cell. It's her turn with the brain cell. Oh it's so good to see a ginger girl. Thank you so much Keith. We had a ginger girl when I was growing up named Copper and she had babies. Two tuxies and two gingers. They were adorable. Next up, Daniel Duncan. He him. Hello fellow Leguminati. I'm trying to coalesce my thoughts on how to shout out all the lovely things involved in this, but long story short, my lovely wife and I went to dinner and a movie with some cool new friends on Friday. So firstly, my wife Chrissy is awesome and was willing to take a chance at meeting some strangers. Secondly, the county library was awesome for allowing a flyer for a local Discord group. No military secrets are being shared here that I've seen, but the main focus for my shout out are the folks in the Upstate SC Community Project Discord server. I found them after the election and they're just awesome progressive people. People. They remind me of a Leguminati server, except they're all within driving distance and they're constantly having local events and encouraging community building. I guess it does say that on the tin for folks that are more comfortable with online interaction, they have a bunch of lively channels. I strongly suggest finding out if fellow Beans listeners have such a server in their area and any Upstate SC legumes. Join me on this one. Discord has become my primary social media because I can curate things like the old Yahoo groups or BBS boards for Pet Tax. I'm Cher, the winner of our March Madness Style Fernder Dome tournament. Watson the Rabbit Daniel Duncan awesome. You should just Turn that discord into get everyone on the discord listening to the beans and then you'll have a bunch of Leguminati within driving distance. Look at the bunny. Oh my God, I love buns. Fernder Dome. So great. Daniel Duncan, you're amazing. All right, next up from Kate Pronoun. She and her in these times of what the fuck? Your presence and work has been a beacon. So thank you. You're welcome. I thought y'all might enjoy a few the Kids are all right stories to take the edge off. Upon hearing I was heading to a protest, my 8 year old insisted on making a sign. They created a true masterpiece, an illustrated fascist Cheeto in a trash can with the words Trumpy in the Dumpy emblazoned across the top. Alas, the sign didn't survive the Pacific Northwest weather, but it sure as hell made me cackle to hear my fellow protesters take up our new battle cry of Trumpy in the Dumpy. In additional kid news, one day while observing my kids class, there was a commotion at the art table. It was soon revealed that a picture of Trump had been found in a magazine the kids were using for collage purposes. What followed next was the elementary school version of Torches and Pitchforks as the group of children marched the offending photo to the trash can, gleefully ripping it to pieces and screaming about what a gross awful bully he is. Amazing. For my podpet Dax, I'm sharing our new inherited cat, Timo, who came to us after my father in law passed away unexpectedly. I'm so sorry. We miss him so much, but having Timo around to chirp at us constantly and give us sweet headbutts is a reminder of my father in law's kind legacy. I'm also sharing a photo of my amazing kid working on a protest sign and our grumpy old man cat Finnegan, who as you can see by his bared fangs, is always ready for a bout of fisticuffs. Thanks again for all you do. Oh, look at the sweet babies. Trumpy and the Dumpy. I love it. The kids are all right. Thank you, Kate. All right, next up, Hope for Idaho. Hello bean buddies. First, let me say thank you for providing some much needed respite from Idaho conservative news. I wake up to your podcast each morning. Sadly, I gave up caffeine around the time Trump took office and I needed some foul mouthed humor and hope to accompany the hellscape of our current political landscape. Landscape. This is a shout out to the Department of Education and all the public educators across America. But Especially those in our conservative states who are just trying to hold on. I'm a teacher here in Idaho. We're fighting a fight, but our legislators and governor just created huge tax cuts for so called school choice, which is a really far right school voucher law. The public schools in Idaho already ranked 48th in the nation for funding. Having already made school district funding based on enrollment, the new law has now offered private schools and homeschooling schoolers tax incentives for pulling their children from public schools. Since these private and home schools have no testing, ADA special education or any other requirements to speak of, the public schools lose students and the funding that goes with them. We hemorrhage students to parents, pulling their kids for the money they can make off of it with little to no accountability even though these same public schools still serve the same students for any elective classes, sports and other extracurriculars they want. Our governor and state superintendent stand and watch as public education is replaced by often inept homeschooling parents and religious private schools, many of whom are the very book banners and bible thumpers who oppress in the name of God and Trump. Public schools have already have to pass local and maintenance and operations levies simply to keep the heat on in long neglected and dangerous schools. In districts where the levies don't pass, schools shut down, teachers lose jobs, students lose activities, sports, extracurriculars and electives. Years ago, our district pared down our two or four school days per week to save money and we have one last chance to run and M and O levy this May. Teachers are exhausted, sick, underpaid. They feel underappreciated. Despite all this, According to new U.S. and world reports, Idaho public schools are still ranked 18th in the nation in educational accomplishments while operating one of the lowest per student budgets in the nation. What's that tell you? We've done so much for so long with so little. Unquote. So those fuckers will do what they will. We'll keep teaching so that we can raise better voters. We will teach the dystopian works. Teach the students to compare presidential speeches. Teach real science. We don't have to influence the students politics. Once they learn how to discern fact from misinformation and think for themselves, they'll be smart enough to figure out the lessons for their own lives. For my podpet tax, here's my rescue buddy, BB aka Bruce or shithead, booger butt, etc. He had bare balls caused by urine scald from living in a small pet carrier. All so the shelter named him accordingly. BB's when he was neutered. He's my best cuddle buddy and keeps my blood pressure in check. Thanks for all you do. Keep up the good work. What a beautiful baby. I love the dark ring around the nose. Thank you for that submission. Our last submission comes From Jules in D.C. pronoun she and her hello lovely ladies of the Legumina. I have no corrections or anything like that, just something that struck me as funny and I hope it makes you laugh as well. I have four cats at the moment, two adopted, two via the cat distribution system. My boy Deuce, so named because he has one green eye and one blue eye, had his name take on an iconic heir in 2020 when he started having trouble pooping. Yes, my Deuce had trouble making a deuce. After a trip to the emergency room, he was put on an all wet food diet with a dose of Miralax and fiber mixed in. This seems to have fixed most issues. Most of the and only occasional dose of prescription lactulose is needed if he's really stopped up in light of his issues. I have a dry erase calendar in the kitchen and I mark whether he has pooped that day or not, so I can keep track of if he needs a double dose of Miralax or fiber or if he's progressed to needing the lactulose. It sounds ridiculous, but as I find out when we had emergency room trip when he was shaking all over. Constipation can kill if left too long. I say all that to say this. I never think much about this calendar except to log poops or Deuce Doosers. However, the other day I looked at it and it struck me in a whole different way. I stopped in my tracks and my first thought was, well, that's a stark social commentary and it truly is a whole lot of poop all month long. Here's a picture of the calendar so you can see that it indeed matches our current state of affairs. Also a picture of Deuce giving me a slight stink eye for not giving him part of what I was eating. Keep doing what you're doing ladies. You're a beacon of light and all the madness. Deuce is adorable. Yeah, and this is if you think about February 2025. Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop. It about sums up the political climate. That's so hilarious, Jules. That does strike me as funny as well. So you're not alone. Thank you and thanks to everybody for sending in your good news. Dana will be back in your ears. Tomorrow, everybody. Send your Good news to DailyBeansPod.com click on Contact. Anything at all. Reach out. Be part of the community. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, take care of the planet, take care of your mental health and take care of your friends. I've been AG and them's the Beans. The Daily Beans is written and executive produced by Alison Gill with additional research and reporting by Dana Goldberg. Sound design and editing is by Desiree McFarlane with art and web design by Joelle Reader with Moxie Design Studios. Music for the Daily Beans is written and performed by they Might Be Giants and the show is a proud member of the MSW Media Network, a collection of creator owned podcasts dedicated to news, politics and justice. For more information please visit mswmedia.com commsw media.