Today on The BradCast: You're not the only one worried about the U.S. devolving quickly into an autocracy under Trump's attempted dictatorial rule. So are many of the world's top academic democracy experts and researchers! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We've got quite a bit to get to on today's show. Here is a very quick round-up...

• Our quickly deteriorating man-baby President hates offshore wind power so much (because, years ago, he felt it would sully the view from one of his golf courses), that now we all have to pretend it causes cancer, or drives whales crazy, or is a national security risk. Whatever nonsense claim Donald Trump dreams up. His attempts to stop five nearly completed projects off the U.S. east coast were all blocked by the courts. Now, he has a new strategy: Paying a French company that won leases for two new projects (off of New York and North Carolina) during the Biden Administration, nearly a billion dollars to not move ahead with those projects. That's right, 928 million in your taxpayer dollars is being offered to the company in a settlement if they agree to not do any work to provide clean, safe, renewable energy to millions of Americans during an energy crisis sparked, in no small part, by Trump's ridiculously ill-considered war on Iran. One other thing the company must do as part of the deal, according to the settlement documents reviewed by New York Times: invest money in dirty, deadly, natural gas infrastructure in Texas.

• According to the tenth annual democracy report issued this week by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe with the U.S. and 43 other nations "autocratizing", while just 12 are becoming more democratic, out of more than 200 countries and territories examined by democracy researchers.

  "The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history," the group's Democratic Report 2026 warns. It finds that "By magnitude of decline on the [report's Liberal Democracy Index], the 2025 plunge is the largest one year drop in American history going back to 1789 "“ that is, in the entire period covered by V-Dem data."

  Among the bullet points atop the 7-page special section on "Autrocratization in the USA," included in the 52-page report [PDF] (the special section starts on page 33 and is worth a read!)...

  • Under Trump's presidency, the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.
  • Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era. In 2025, the derailment of democracy is marked by executive overreach undermining the rule of law, along with far-reaching suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices.
  • The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
  • Legislative Constraints --- the worst affected aspect of [U.S.] democracy [cited by the scholars] --- is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
  • Civil Rights and Equality before the Law are also rapidly declining, falling to late 1960s levels.
  • Freedom of Expression is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.
  • Electoral components of [U.S.] democracy remain stable [in this year's "Liberal Democracy Index". But] election-specific indicators are re-assessed only in electoral years, and the 2025 scores are based on the quality of the 2024 elections.

  "What would it take to stop autocratization in the USA, and turn it around?," the report asks rhetorically. "Roughly 70% of all 'third wave' episodes of autocratization have been reversed, making U-turns. Elections were often pivotal windows of opportunity, and the first electoral cycle was often decisive."

  See you in November!!!

• That stunning V-Dem report also cites the federal judiciary as one of the few remaining bulwarks against U.S. autocratization and the loss of freedom of expression, as the Executive branch has all but usurped the powers of the Legislative branch under a compliant GOP majority in Congress. To that end, judges in the lower courts, if not at the Supreme Court, continue, by and large, to adhere to the Constitution and Rule of Law, providing a check on the criminal excesses of the Trump Regime. Another ruling this week from a Reagan-appointed federal judge underscores that point. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered that more than 1,000 federal workers at Voice of America --- the 84-year old beacon of democracy and for a free press around the globe --- be reinstated and VOA restored to the global airwaves by next week! That, following the unlawful dismantling last year of VOA, its parent agency (the U.S. Agency for Global Media) and its sister networks around the globe by twice-failed GOP candidate and Trump loyalist Kari Lake. Last week, the same judge determined Lake was never lawfully serving in her job and her mass firings --- leaving nothing more than a skeleton crew to unlawfully run rightwing propaganda --- were therefore null and void. This week, Lamberth gave the Administration one week to bring employees back to work and for the national treasure of a radio network, established during WWII, broadcasting in 49 different languages to some 352 million people, to finally be restored as per federal statutes.

• MAGA loyalist, white nationalist, and Trump National Counterterroism Center Director Joe Kent very publicly resigned this week, citing opposition to Trump's war on Iran. One of his objections from his announcement was that Iran "posed no imminent threat to our nation". As it turns out, there is much more to that story. And yes, it ties in to testimony given, or in this case not given, by Kent's friend and fellow veteran Tulsi Gabbard to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee this week. Gabbard, Trump's Director of National Intelligence and former opponent of dumb foreign wars (you can still buy one of Tulsi's "No War With Iran" t-shirts from her failed 2020 Democratic Presidential run, if you like) refused to say outloud during her testimony to the Committee whether the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Iran actually posed an imminent threat to the U.S., as Trump falsely insist. That, in contrast to her written testimony which concedes as much. All of this attracted the ire of Dems on the Committee, including Georgia's Sen. Jon Osoff, whose sharp questioning of Gabbard we share on today's program.

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as oil and gas prices continue to skyrocket and a hunger crisis looms thanks to Trump's war; and as the autocratic Administration bigfoots California state law to order the restart of a disastrously failed crude pipeline near Santa Barbara...

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It's Happy Beginning of Daylight Saving Time Day on today's BradCast! (The actual unofficial start of Summer!) That said, thanks in (very small part) to last night's Spring Forward clock change, I'm too tired to write much today. So... [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our many stories covered today...

• Our brightest news of the day: A Reagan-appointed federal judge over the weekend ruled that former Phoenix local news anchor, twice-failed statewide candidate and election denier Kari Lake's destruction of the beloved Voice of America was all entirely illegal. Turns out she was never legally serving in her role as Trump's Acting Director of the independent executive agency that oversees it. Presumably --- barring any successful changes at the appellate level --- thousands of people unlawfully fired by Lake at the 84-year old worldwide global media outlet must be rehired.

• An update on Donald Trump's horrible, still-expanding War on Iran, including a seventh U.S. service member has been killed; new evidence that the U.S. was responsible for bombing a girls' school in the southern part of the country on Day 1 of the war, killing about 175 people, many of them children; an even harder-line cleric is chosen to be Iran's Supreme Leader, with 56-year old Mojtaba Khamenei now set to replace his assassinated 96-year father Ali Khamenei; and oil and natural gas prices are spiking as production in the region grinds to a standstill.

• And a few thoughts today --- from Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 to Hawaii's Democratic U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz in 2025, and me --- on the fact that there is always plenty of money for the U.S. military industrial complex to wage wars anywhere in the world. There's just never enough to make sure that you have food, housing, education, healthcare, good roads and a happy life.

Finally, we open the phones to listeners on all of the above, and the conversations quickly --- and, happily! --- turn to "what the hell can and should we do about it?!"

Tune in for another lively BradCast!...

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Today on The BradCast: The corporate capitulation is worse than you think. And it strikes right at the heart of what this nation's founders saw as perhaps the most important protection for freedom from monarchs and tyrants. Ya know, like the one we ended up with anyway. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First up, a few interesting results reported today from both special elections and primaries held on Tuesday in a number of local jurisdictions across the country, including Detroit, Seattle, Delaware and Rhode Island. In short, the news, as we have seen in elections virtually everywhere so far this year, was largely very good for both Democrats and democracy.

The news was less good out of D.C. last night, where the nation's embarrassing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. --- a man with no professional background in either science or medicine --- announced the Department is now cutting $500 million in grants for the development of new mRNA vaccines of the type that recently, arguably miraculously, helped the planet emerge from the most deadly pandemic in a century.

Of course, if you either didn't hear about that disturbing news from HHS or had no idea how many people are now likely to die unnecessarily because of it, you may have your own favorite corporate media outlet to blame.

Following Donald Trump's gutting of the 80-year old Voice of America earlier this year, his and the Republican Congress' ending of federal funding for NPR and PBS a week or so ago, and the absurd $16 million dollar settlements of ridiculous defamation lawsuits filed by Trump against the corporate owners of Disney/ABC and Paramount/CBS, the largest media conglomerates in the nation continue to rollover in fear, in hopes of placating and/or currying favor with our press-freedom hating, tyrannical man-baby President.

All of that in strict contradiction with the intentions of the U.S. Constitution's framers, who specifically wrote protections into our founding document for just one industry: a free press. All of that is detailed in a new report published last week by FreePress.net entitled "A More Perfect Media: Saving America's Fourth Estate from Billionaires, Broligarchy and Trump".

That report is meant as a companion to the nonprofit media watchdog's newly released "Media Capitulation Index", grading the independence --- or, far more often, lack thereof --- of the nation's 35 largest corporate media conglomerates.

We're joined today to discuss both reports and the chilling state of our formerly free press, by TIMOTHY KARR, Senior Director of Strategy and Communications at Free Press. We've got a lot to dig into, including how we might finally dig our way out of this disaster.

His group's Media Capitulation Index, amusingly, scores each of the 35 American media conglomerates examined by Karr's group from 1 to 5 Chickens, rating them from "vulnerable" to "compromising" to "capitulating" to "obeying" to "propaganda," respectively. There is one other possible score, a single Star representing "independent". Remarkably, only two of the 35 media giants examined received a Star. For the rest? A whooole lotta Chickens.

So, what distinguishes what we are seeing now under Trump from what we've seen these companies do in years past in hopes of currying favor with previous Presidents of both major parties? Karr explains that what we are witnessing now is of an entirely "different order" than anything we have ever seen in our nation's nearly 250-year history.

"Wealthy media companies were aligning themselves with an authoritarian-minded leader who had little regard for the First Amendment --- that he swore on the Bible to uphold and defend --- on January 20th," observes Karr. "This is capitulation of a different order. It's not a bending to prevailing political winds. It's a complete caving to an authoritarian, and abdicating their responsibility --- the responsibility protected under the First Amendment --- to act as a check against abuses of power, to speak truth to power. That has pretty dangerous consequences for democracy."

As we are now seeing those dangerous consequences play out, we've got a lot to discuss along that score, along with how might eventually emerge from this long national nightmare with even stronger protections for a free press. Perhaps even, with news organizations that might not find it necessary to bend over in order for their corporate owners to receive government approval in completely different industries in which the owner is massively invested. (Hint: Look to the states, not the federal government...for now.)

Anyway, far too much in our conversation today to adequately summarize here. So, I won't even try to go much further. I will urge you, however, to tune in to today's show if you value a truly independent media, and appreciate --- as our founders did --- how crucial that idea is in preventing the rise of a monarch of the very type they were hoping to break free from. (And, how did that work out?...)

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It is not some dystopian Orwellian future. It is now. Our wannabe-dictator President is --- successfully! --- assaulting and undermining free speech and press freedoms left and right, public and private. On today's BradCast we connect those dots and open the phone lines over your public airwaves (while we still have access to them!), to discuss all of that and what can be done about it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Sure, discussing the fact that Donald Trump's name is likely all over the so-called "Epstein Files" is fun too. But, if all of the major news outlets which might report on that are systematically shut down or intimidated into pulling their punches, what then?

Shortly after taking office, Trump unlawfully shut down Voice of America and its sister networks. They are funded and mandated by Congress --- by law --- to broadcast "accurate, objective, and comprehensive" news and information around the globe in dozens of languages to hundreds of millions of listeners, often in authoritarian nations without any other access to a free press. The truth about what is happening to our government must not get out to the rest of the world, apparently.

Last week, his Trump's cowardly Congressional Republicans took the rare step of rescinding $1.1 billion --- two years of previously appropriated, bipartisan funding --- from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR radio and PBS television stations across the country. That loss of funding will be particularly painful to small stations in rural areas that perform critical, often life-saving functions for their communities. That, after Trump sought the Congressional rescission by lying about the CPB, describing the private entity as a left-wing "monstrosity". (Even if they were, which they are not, it would still be an outrageous violation of the Constitution's First Amendment freedom of the press mandates.)

That move came the week after CBS, currently owned by Paramount, agreed to a ridiculous $16 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit he filed over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year. The suit would have been laughed out of court had it ever got there. But Paramount needs Trump's FCC to approve a buyout by a rightwing company named Skydance. And so, in Stephen Colbert's words early last week on CBS's The Late Show, Paramount agreed to give Trump a "big fat bribe" to make the absurd lawsuit go away.

Two days later, CBS announced The Late Show would be shutting down entirely after next season for "financial reasons". On Friday morning, Trump celebrated the "firing" of Colbert --- the nation's top-rated late night host and long-time Trump critic --- by crowing, "I absolutely love that Colbert got fired," before adding: "I hear [ABC's] Jimmy Kimmel is next." (ABC and its owner Disney previously settled a similarly ridiculous defamation suit with Trump for similarly cowardly and corrupt reasons.)

Skydance's purchase of Paramount should now go very smoothly with Trump's corrupt federal government. The company's CEO, a Trump supporter, met with Trump's FCC Chair last week and noted, according to documents filed by the company in support of the merger, that they "discussed Skydance's commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS's editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers." That, just days after Skydance held early acquisition talks to buy a far-right media outlet.

While Trump is killing public media, in the form of the 80+ year old Voice of America and its Congressionally-mandated sister networks, as well as clawing back previously approved bipartisan federal funding for NPR and PBS (the tiniest drop in the bucket in a federal budget that, as of July 4, guts health care and food assistance to millions, while giving $4 trillion in tax cuts, largely to the wealthy, while exploding the national debt by $3.4 trillion), he is also taking down major commercial broadcast outlets, their newsrooms, and even their entertainment divisions that dare to tell the truth about Donald Trump.

Moreover, it's no longer only outlets perceived as "liberal" that Trump is abusing his power to target. On Friday, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp. (which also owns Fox "News"), its owner Rupert Murdoch, and two WSJ journalist who reported last week on a birthday card that Trump allegedly penned to his former longtime friend, sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday. The card is said to include a hand-drawn sketch of a woman, signed by Trump, along with comments about the "wonderful secrets" the two men purportedly shared. That, as Trump is taking fire --- even from MAGA --- for blocking the Dept. of Justice from releasing hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence and video recordings said to document the 2019 criminal indictment of Epstein, and an unknown number of references that may implicate his longtime bestie, Donald Trump.

This is not a warning about a potential attack and an attempted undermining of the American free press. It is a loud, blaring alarm that it is ALREADY underway, and is likely to go much further still , unless we all stand up against it. All of us.

In the second part of today's show we open up the phone lines --- and our public airwaves --- to callers on all of the above...

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Going into the weekend we knew we were in for a bizarre news split-screen on Saturday, with major protest rallies scheduled across the country and Trump's military birthday parade he threw for himself (with $40+ million of your tax dollars) in D.C. But, it wasn't just two huge stories happening at once by Saturday. It was four. We try to get you caught up on all of them on today's BradCast before opening the line to callers. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

All of the stories happening all at once over the weekend, were all thanks to Donald Trump in varying ways...

• First, on Friday night, Israel unleashed a full-scale attack against Iran, killing its three top military commanders and several nuclear scientists --- among many others. The pretext for the attack was Iran's nuclear program which, had Trump not torn up the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the hard-fought and carefully constructed nuclear deal Iran agreed to in 2015 with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK and the U.S., there wouldn't even be a program for Israel to target. The strike came after Trump failed to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran, which had restarted its nuclear program after Trump reneged on the original deal. He had been begging them for the last month to agree to a new deal to limit its nuclear program that is almost identical to the one struck under Obama that Trump tore up during his first term. The ongoing volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran have also led the Trump Administration to call back the Voice of America Persian-bureau after foolishly (and unlawfully) shuttering VOA and its sister networks back in March.

• In the early Saturday morning hours, a long-time Trump supporter disguised as a policeman assassinated the Democratic leader of Minnesota's House of Representative, Rep. Melissa Hortmann, and her husband inside their own home. Hortmann, as House Speaker in 2023-2024, was a key player in passage of a host of popular progressive initiatives under Gov. Tim Walz that came to be known as the Minnesota Miracle. The same shooter also attempted to assassinate Democratic state Senator John Hoffman at his house just prior. Hoffman and his wife remain alive but in critical condition after Hoffman was shot nine times and his wife eight times. The alleged rightwing assailant, 57-year old Vance Luther Boelter, was found to have had a list of some 70 names on a target list in his car. The names were reportedly Democratic officials, both state and federal, and champions of abortion rights. Officials also say he had a number of "No Kings" flyers in the car, suggesting he might have been planning to target one of Saturday's many protests in the state. After a two-day manhunt, Boelter was captured late on Sunday in a cornfield south of Minneapolis/St. Paul. He was charged on Monday with both state and federal crimes including assassination and attempted assassination. It is just the latest example of increasing political violence by the right in the Trump Era, as warned about for years, even by his own FBI Director who conceded that domestic homegrown terror from those on the right --- not by migrants --- was, by far, the greatest threat currently facing Americans.

• The third major weekend story happening all at once that wouldn't have happened if not for Donald Trump, was the authoritarian-style military birthday parade he threw for himself (though we paid for it) that happened to fall on the U.S. Army's 250th birthday as well as Trump's 79th. It was, by almost all accounts, a sparsely attended snoozer of a parade which saw even Trump supporters streaming away long before it was over. Of course, the manhunt for the MN assassin and the war in Israel/Iran, thankfully, sucked up most of the cable TV news coverage.

• In likely --- or hopefully --- the most important news of the weekend, some five million Americans took to the streets to stand up against the President in "No Kings" protests decrying the rising fascism of Donald Trump, including his deployment of military troops against Americans on U.S. soil and his burgeoning military-style migrant round-ups by ICE. According to organizers, enormous and joyful rallies were held in more than 2,000 cities and town in all 50 states. They were almost all entirely peaceful but for a man who brandished a rifle at protesters in Salt Lake City, UT (a protester was killed); a counter-protesters who pulled a handgun on rally-goers in Phoenix, AZ; and an SUV driver who struck and injured a demonstrator before speeding away in Riverside, CA.

  In Los Angeles, late in the day, there was a bit of violence as well. But, as all reporting seems to indicate (David Dayen's at TAP was the best) it was local law enforcement officials from both the L.A. County Sheriff's Dept. and the LAPD who sparked the violence with their unannounced use of horses, rubber bullets and teargas to suddenly clear demonstrators at 4pm, hours before the rally was to have ended in Downtown L.A.

After all of that and much more, we open the phones today to our live local listeners here in Southern California to hear their own reports and personal experiences from the weekend's many "No Kings" protests...

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Gotta keep it short today. (You're welcome.) But there's plenty to make up for it on today's very lively BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage...

• Habemus Papam! And all signs are that Pope Leo XIV may be a good one...even if he's from Chicago.

• Happily, the new Pope tossed Donald Trump's dumb, first and only, but not-actually-done trade deal with U.K. right off today's front pages. But, suffice to say, it ain't much of a deal anyway, done or otherwise. At least not for the U.S.

• Speaking of deals from the world's greatest (read: worst) negotiator, the one that Trump struck last week with Ukraine, to share some profits from exploitation of rare earth minerals in the war-torn nation in exchange for our continuing support, actually is a good deal! Especially for Ukraine, which seems to have outfoxed Trump. (Which apparently isn't all that difficult.)

• In other dumb Trump trade news, California Governor Gavin Newsom and U.S. Senator Adam Schiff --- not to mention film and TV producers and unions, etc. --- are calling Trump's weekend bluff, when he claimed to want to save the U.S. film industry. He declared an unworkable, potentially industry-crushing 100% tariff on all films "produced in Foreign Lands". The serious people, however, want to see federal tax credits to encourage more production in the U.S. So, does Donny really want to keep the industry from "DYING a very fast death", as he claimed? If so, his Democratic friends in California have an actual solution. (Don't hold your breath he'll take it.)

• Arizona's two-time statewide loser and election fraud fraudster Kari Lake has a new job with the Trump Administration. She's helping him shut down the world-revered Voice of America news and culture outlet and its global sister networks, despite the Congressionally-mandated and funded outlets' charter to produce accurate and unbiased news and cultural programming --- particularly in regions where a free press is restricted. VOA has done exactly that for the past 83-years since WWII, until being silenced by the Trump Administration. As lawsuits filed by VOA journalists, unions and contractors move forward to reopen the networks, Lake announced this week that she plans to replace the programming with far-right wingnut propaganda produced by the loons at the One America News Network (OAN). Which would, of course, be against the law.

• Finally, Desi Doyen is here with some alarming news that came in after we'd already laid down today's Green News Report. We close today's program with both...

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On today's BradCast: If the 101st Day is any indication, it doesn't look like the second hundred are gonna go any better for him than the first. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• On our roundtable program yesterday with Digby and Driftglass, we discussed who was likely the first top Trump Administration official to be tossed under the bus in the wake of Donald Trump's dismal and worsening approval ratings. Today we know: Trump National Security Adviser and Signal group chat enthusiast, Mike Waltz. At least he outlasted Trump's first (of four) NSAs in the first term. The disgraced and loony Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn survived just 24 days before being tossed and eventually pleading guilty to criminal charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. At least Waltz gets a consolation prize. Trump tapped him to be U.N. Ambassador.

• Last week, Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth --- a Reagan-appointee --- ordered the rehiring of staffers and contractors at the Congressionally-mandated and funded Voice of America and its similarly critical global sister networks Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting after the Trump-order shutdown in March of its parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media. This week, Judge Lamberth ordered the Administration to restore $12 million in funding to another VOA sister network, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty --- broadcasting to dozens of countries in dozens of languages since the Cold War --- while issuing both a history lesson and an important Constitutional lesson for the Trump Administration (and, arguably, for Congress) about the important roles of the three co-equal branches of Government in his order [PDF].

• In still more Trump-is-a-Loser news today, a Trump-appointed federal judge in South Texas, issued a first-of-its-kind permanent injunction on Trump's "unlawful" use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 --- in peacetime --- to deport alleged gang members from Venezuela to a gulag in El Salvador. "The President's invocation of the AEA...exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute's terms," U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in the order [PDF], concluding that Trump's attempt to falsely proclaim the U.S. was being "invaded" by Tren de Aragua gang members at the direction of the Venezuelan government was patently false, "exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful."

• Also of note today, the Board and shareholders of one of the companies most closely associated with America, Coca-Cola, flatly rejected two proposals to abolish the company's anti-discrimination programs, often smeared by Trump and fellow wingnuts as "DEI". Shareholders and the Board of Directors at yet another iconic American company, Levi Strauss, reportedly did the same last week.

• It's not just courts and a few iconic U.S. companies that are pushing back at Trump's nonsense of late. Even Democrats, if you can believe it --- at least a couple who are clearly eye-balling Presidential runs in 2028 --- are now more aggressively doing the same, especially now that the public has turned so clearly against out tinpot dictator-wannabe. Last night, at an event in San Francisco, former Vice President and Presidential nominee Kamala Harris offered her first substantive public remarks since losing to Trump last year, deriding his "wholesale abandonment" of American values. That came on the heels of a stem-winder by Illinois' Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, taking on Trumpers and go-along, get-along, "do nothing" Dems alike, at a fundraiser on Sunday in New Hampshire. We share extended excerpts from both speeches today.

• And finally, Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report to help us close things out near the end of a week that began with a huge loss for our failing President, as his attempts at hectoring our neighbor to the north and meddling in Canada's elections completely backfired, producing not just another Liberal Party Prime Minister, whose election might have been unthinkable last December, but a climate and energy action champion at that...

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On today's BradCast: As you know, much of what we hold dear in these United States is under assault right now, thanks to the man we were collectively dumb enough to elect as President last year. But, for countless reasons, no single institution may be more important to help protect than our nation's free press, which is under far greater fire than I think most Americans realize. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Sadly, that attack has now been joined by too many of the major corporate outlets that control far too many of our previously independent mainstream news sources, all the way down to the local level. And the worst of them, as we've recently learned, are all too willing to hoax their own customers into unknowingly joining the battle.

We've got a number of U.S. media-under-attack stories for you today, from international U.S. media to national media to local media.

First, a bit of encouraging news on the international level. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered [PDF] the restoration of the 83-year old, Congressionally-mandated and funded Voice of America. The international news outlet, originally created by the U.S. to counter Nazi propaganda in Europe, had been broadcasting continuously since 1942, until Donald Trump ordered its parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) shut down last month. Some 1,300 VOA staffers and contractors were sidelined, as the airwaves of VOA and its USAGM-overseen sister networks such as Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting fell silent. A number of VOA journalists sued, and on Tuesday, the court ordered USAGM to return employees and contractors to their pre-March 14 status. That's good news, though VOA is not fully back yet, and the Administration is expected, of course, to appeal the ruling.

Nationally, corporate pressure super-charged by Trump is also threatening another American broadcast institution. 60 Minutes' longtime executive producer, Bill Owens, quit on Tuesday amid pressure from CBS' corporate owners Paramount, as the company is seeking approval from the Administration for a corporate merger with an outfit called Skydance. That approval, however, is threatened by Trump, who filed a laughable, $20 billion suit against the top-rated, long-running newsmagazine after he didn't like an interview they aired with Kamala Harris before last year's election. Since then, Trump has similarly bristled at tough reports from the notoriously independent new program, charging that they will "pay a big price" for daring to report accurately on his Administration. We don't yet know the full story of what happened at 60 Minutes. But as Paramount is hoping to settle Trump's ridiculous suit, Owens told staffers that the program's independence is threatened, so it was time for him to leave. That, even as he told the show's employees that it is "too important to the country" for them to quit in protest.

From attacks against the U.S. international free press to the national level, we finally arrive on today program at still more threats newly underway against highly-trusted local news outlets, thanks in no small part to collusion between giant corporate broadcasters and the Trump Administration's corrupted FCC.

Last month, Trump's newly-seated Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendan Carr, announced a new initiative to gut FCC radio and television rules that he described in a notice seeking public comment as his "Delete, Delete, Delete" plan [PDF].

As The Desk detailed earlier this month, the nation's largest owner of local television stations, Nexstar Media Group --- which controls more than 200 TV stations in more than 160 markets across the country --- ordered the local newsrooms at all of the stations it operates (including affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW, etc.), to create a "news" story from deceptive, misleading talking points that suggest that the FCC was seeking comment from the public on regulations that "threaten the growth of your local TV news stations". Each, nearly identical report, voiced by local anchors, aired on dozens of stations, instructing viewers to visit a weblink that resolves to a Nexstar-run page instructing them how to let the FCC know that viewers are "worried about the long-term health of my local television stations" and want to "eliminate the regulations that are threatening the growth of my local TV station."

As a number of employees at some of those stations told The Desk on background, however, they were uncomfortable running the reports as "news", but were given no choice by their corporate parents at Nexstar.

Given the national power company, which already rakes in some $5 billion per year, it's hardly a surprise that we haven't heard much about this story in the corporate media. We do our best to make up for that today.

Our guest is the longtime award-winning broadcast journalism veteran turned media activist SUE WILSON, who described some of this earlier today in an article at The BRAD BLOG headlined "Trump's FCC on Precipice of Ending All Limits on Corporate Control of Local TV News Stations". In it, she explains how Nexstar already controls two --- and sometimes three (with FCC permission) --- TV stations in virtually every major media market in the country. But now, with the FCC's Carr looking to "delete, delete, delete" as many regulations as possible, the company is hoping to do away with remaining restrictions on how many stations any single company may control both nationally and at the local market level.

Wilson details how Nexstar and fellow broadcast goliath Sinclair, a far-right outlet who ordered a similar "must-run" package for its nearly 200 stations in support of Trump back in 2018, have long been gaming the system meant to limit corporate control of local stations. Today she details how they are colluding with the new FCC Chair to simply gut regulatory ownership limits while ignoring, or somehow working around, those that have been implemented statutorily by Congress.

"What we are seeing more and more across the United States is that you can turn on your TV set, and you can watch a local news reporter do a report," she tells me today. "You turn to the next station and it's the same reporter doing the exact same report." And that, of course, is with the limits currently in place --- the ones that Nexstar are misleading their own viewers into helping them make it worse. Worse for viewers, anyway, if not more profitable for Nexstar, Sinclair and the others.

Wilson also details today --- as she did in her article earlier --- how you can, and should, respond yourself to the FCC's call for comments. But you will need to do it quickly. Final comments are supposed to be filed --- either by Twitter/X or via the FCC's Comment site --- by Monday, April 28.

"We are fighting a juggernaut in the Capitol. They want to deregulate the media. They want to take over the media, is what they are really after. We have to stop them," argues Wilson, urging listeners to remind the FCC in comments that the "publicly-owned airwaves belong to us."

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The amount of news we need to catch up with today before getting to some callers at the back end of the show is ridiculous, even by BradCast standards! [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Natural disasters, lots of court rulings and some important election news out of several states on today's program. Here are summaries and links to just some of those stories...

• More than 2,000 are dead in Myanmar following a 7.7 Magnitude earthquake over the weekend. The death toll is expected to rise sharply, thousands of building have reportedly collapsed, health officials are said to be "overwhelmed" and, though Trump vowed to send help, apparently U.S. aid workers are nowhere to be found as they have been in the past. Aid workers from China, Russia and India are on the scene, however. Also, victims received little help or critical information from Radio Free Asia either, in the wake of Trump having shut down the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent agency for RFA, Voice of America and its international sister networks.

• But there was a lot of good news out of federal district courts since we last spoke, including for Voice of America and, presumably, Radio Free Asia. A judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent Trump from violating federal law by shuttering the USAGM and the networks it oversees. The U.S. District Court judge ordered about 1,200 journalists, engineers and other staffers back to work, for now, after they were placed on leave or fired after Trump's seemingly unlawful order to shut it all down two weeks ago.

• More good news late last week from the U.S. District court for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). A judge on Friday ordered that it too be reopened and its workers rehired, after Trump/Musk attempted to gut the only federal agency that fights for consumer rights against fraud and deceptive practices by big banks, insurance companies and sleazy payday lenders.

• Another U.S. District Court on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump Administration from deporting migrants to countries from which they did not originally come without allowing a court challenge first.

• Over the weekend, two different federal judges --- both appointed by Republican President George W. Bush --- blocked the key parts of Trump's outrageous Executive Orders unconstitutionally targeting two major law firms he doesn't like (because they represented former Republican FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was tapped to investigate interference by Russia in our 2016 election during Trump's first term.)

• In Election News, Republicans took a pounding over the weekend in Louisiana's Saturday elections. All four constitutional Amendments placed on the ballot by the state's Trump-lovin' GOP Governor, Jeff Landry, went down in flames. Each lost resoundingly, with nearly two-thirds of voters rejecting each ballot issue, as turnout nearly doubled what state election officials had been expecting. For some reason, voters --- even in Republican-leaning states --- seem to be very angry of late. At Republicans. Landry tried to blame a billionaire who had nothing to do with Saturday's referendum for his embarrassing shutout, while ignoring the Republican billionaires who fruitlessly dumped billions in support of Landry's four losing amendments.

• Speaking of...it's Election Day on Tuesday in Florida and Wisconsin (and a number of other states), with two vacant U.S. House seats up for grabs in traditionally very red districts in the Sunshine State and ideological control of the state Supreme Court on the line in the Badger State. Republicans seem very concerned about all of those contests, with the President's billionaire top-funder, Elon Musk, generously spreading his "free speech" around in the form of $100 checks to Wisconsinites who signed his petition against "activist judges" and two $1 million checks given away to two lucky voters/signers-of-his-petition who showed up to his rally in Green Bay on Sunday. The richest-man-in-the-world stumped for the very Trumpy Republican state Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, who is running against Judge Susan Crawford. She is supported by the state's Democrats. For reasons discussed on today's show, that election could hardly be more important --- to the nation, in fact. The House contests down in Florida, meanwhile, may also prove to be bellwethers for GOP electoral chances in upcoming off-year and mid-year elections under a very unpopular President.

• That's just some of what we covered today before opening up the phone lines to listeners to discuss all of that and whatever else happened to be on their minds today...

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The nation's postal carriers and workers are not going down without a fight, as they've made abundantly clear with hundreds of rallies around the country in recent days, and as the head of the nation's largest postal workers union made very clear on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this link.]

Over the weekend, in hundreds of cities large and small around the country, unionized postal workers rallied outside of USPS facilities --- often joined by Democratic lawmakers --- to send the message that they don't intend to be privatized by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his DOGE Bros. The Administration, in cahoots with Trump's Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, have been suggesting as much in recent days.

Despite the U.S. Constitution's mandate for a national postal service (originally stood up by the first Postmaster General, Benjamin Franklin, in 1775), Trump and Musk have been hinting that they hope to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. "It's been just a tremendous loser for this country," Trump declared at one point during Lutnick's recent swearing-in ceremony. "Tremendous amounts of money that they've lost," he added.

But the independent agency is not funded by taxpayer dollars. It is funded by the individuals who use its services, delivering mail six days a week to every address in the nation at the same price. It is not supposed to be a money maker, even though, as my guest notes, it sometimes does nonetheless.

We're joined today by MARK DIMONDSTEIN, President of the American Postal Workers Union. They have been sending out a big flashing red siren that Trump and his wrecking crew of billionaires are hoping to privatize the Post Office, to offer fewer services at a more expensive rate, with hundreds of thousands of good public jobs lost in the bargain.

"We are really seeing a struggle between Wall Street and Main Street. Wells Fargo just put out a report about how great it would be for investors if the Postal Service was privatized because package rates would go up," Dimondstein tells me. "What they want is their hands on the public till, the public commons, the public money so they can make private profit. But that doesn't do any good for the hundreds of millions of customers, the people of this country, that use the Postal Service. It's in the interest of the people to have a public entity based on service, not business. Based on service, not profit. But it's in the interest of a few wealthy billionaire investors that want to get their hands on this public money."

"They are on a mission. They see an opportunity," he charges. "But their power is going to buck up against the power of the people of the country, who, no matter who they voted for in the last election, support the public United States Postal Service." In fact, the USPS is perhaps the most popular federal institution in the nation.

Dimondstein has much more insight on today's program, on the cost to not only its workers, but the country at large if the Postal Service is privatized, along with ways that it could bring in much more money and provide far more services to the public in every corner of the country if the agency's hands weren't tied by Congress.

He also breaks the news during today's program that the controversial Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy --- originally appointed by Trump during his first term --- had just announced his immediate resignation. Despite the various cuts and organizational restructuring that DeJoy brought to the USPS during his term, Dimondstein actually came to his defense today. Somewhat.

"DeJoy was not a privatizer," the union leader argues. "He was forced out by this administration, in our view, precisely for that reason. He was not a privatizer. He was trying to uphold, to the best of his viewpoint, the public institution, the public mission." He argues DeJoy was, therefore, in contradiction with Trump, Musk and DOGE, who simply want to tear down the Service and sell its pieces off to the highest bidder. "That's not about efficiency. That's about how to rip off the public sector and move it into the private sector."

In the meantime, Dimondstein tells me, "The message is very clear. The US Mail is not for sale. Hands off the public Postal Service. It belongs to the people, not the billionaires."

"We are going to have to send a message as workers, united with the people of the country, to these privatizers and these billionaires: No, you're not going to pick our pocket. You're not going to turn this over to the private sector. You're not going to turn it over and laugh all the way to the bank at our expense. So anything the good listeners can do to help, we welcome it. It belongs to you, the people. Keep it, it's yours."

THEN... An update from over the weekend regarding the Trump Administration's shutdown of the Voice of America and its sister networks around the globe just over a week ago. The silencing of VOA last week --- for the first time since it first began airing as an American counter to Nazi propaganda spreading across Europe in early 1942 --- has been an indescribable loss of real news and information to more than 300 million listeners each week in more than 60 languages. The loss is particularly acute for those in autocratic nations where most sources of independent media have been entirely closed down. Now, VOA is as well, thanks to American autocrat, Trump.

We reported on the Administration's shutdown of VOA last week. First in my interview with its Chief National Correspondent, Steve Herman, and later in the week with a focus on some of those who were inspired toward freedom by VOA's coverage during the darkest days of the Cold War, and on reporters for the service who have been jailed and/or tortured around the world over the years for their work.

Over the weekend, as first reported by Herman at his personal website, a lawsuit [PDF] was filed by several VOA journalists and the worldwide nonprofit journalism organization, Reporters Without Borders. Herman notes that the lead plaintiff, VOA's White House Bureau Chief, Patsy Widakuswara, "grew up under a dictatorship in Indonesia" and that "Some of the other plaintiffs...are among nearly 50 VOA journalists whose J-1 visas are being cancelled [now that they've been placed on administrative leave,] and must leave the country within 30 days. At least six of those face going home to authoritarian countries where they could be jailed, or worse."

That, as Reporters Without Borders' 2024 World Press Freedom Index finds that "The United States ranks 55th out of 180 countries and territories...having dropped an alarming 10 spots from [just] 2023."

I regard the closure of VOA as a huge canary in the coal mines for press freedoms --- and many others --- in this country right now, as we discuss at the close of today's program...

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Happy Spring! The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, flowers are in bloom and things couldn't be better! Right? (If you believe that, you may not want to listen to today's BradCast.) [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Among our roller-coaster coverage today...

• Finland, not Disneyland, is, once again, the happiest place on Earth, for the eighth year in a row, according to 2025's World Happiness Report from the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. The United States, despite this being its "golden age", according to one guy, has now fallen to its lowest-ever position on the annual happiness study. Tune in to hear why people in Finland, Iceland, Sweden and, apparently, our new enemy Denmark, are so happy...and we are not. (Even Mexico cracked the survey's top 10 this year! The U.S. didn't even crack the top 20.)

• In grimmer news, Israel has broken its ceasefire with Gaza this week, reigniting its brutal massacre of Palestinians amid one of the bloodiest weeks since the conflict began after Hamas' 2023 attack on Israel. To date, more than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th of that year, according to local health authorities. Israel claims to have begun their assault again because Gaza refused to agree to a change in the terms of the ceasefire agreement that has otherwise largely held since January. The new wave of brutal military assaults is with the full approval of Donald Trump, according to the White House.

• Meanwhile, in Russia's brutal assault on Ukraine, we do not seem to be any closer to a ceasefire either, though not for lack of Donald Trump knowingly and repeatedly spreading Russian propaganda regarding the situation on the ground in the Ukrainian held Kursk region of Russia. Trump is apparently working hard to help improve Vladimir Putin's negotiating position in peace talks. All of that according to an exclusive report today from Reuters today, which details how the U.S. intelligence community has informed Trump that he is spreading false Russian propaganda. But he keeps doing it anyway, for some reason. Ukraine has agreed to a full 30-day pause in fighting in recent days. Russia has not.

• Had the Voice of America and its affiliated global sister networks like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty not been removed from the airwaves beginning last weekend, by order of the President of the United States, it might have been pretty embarrassing for him. After all, VOA is mandated, by Congressional legislation, to be an "authoritative source of news" that is "accurate, objective, and comprehensive." The last thing Trump likely wants right now is a U.S.-funded media outlet, with "America" in its name, calling out his pro-Russia lies regarding Ukraine. That, of course, is just one of the reasons why VOA and its partner networks have been so critical around the world over the past 83 years, particularly to listeners and readers in autocratic nations --- at least until being silenced by our new autocratic President.

  The reason given by the White House for shutting down the service last week --- which couldn't be shut down by German Nazis or Soviet Communists over all of these decades --- is that VOA and its sister networks, under management of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), was broadcasting "radical propaganda" from the Left. As discussed on this show with VOA's Chief National Correspondent, Steve Herman, earlier this week, it was doing nothing of the kind. (If you missed that must-listen interview, it is right here.) Washington Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler took at a look at the White House's ten examples in support of their absurd claims, finding them to be "remarkably flimsy", to say the least.

  Today, Washington Post's Sally Jenkins tells the story of how tennis superstar Marina Navratilova grew up on --- and dreamed of freedom one day thanks to --- Voice of America broadcasts that she and her family were able to pick up each night on a red plastic transistor radio in their small country village in Czechoslovakia during the darkest days of the communist Soviet regime. We share some of that moving --- and inspiring --- story today.

  We also share the harrowing reflections on the shutdown by Ukrainian philosopher and journalist Stanislav Aseyev, who was jailed for 962 days and tortured for reporting on the ground at the time for VOA's partner network, Radio Liberty following Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

  So, yes, reminder: We are all Voice of America now.

• And finally, speaking of attacks on free speech in tyrannical times, Desi Doyen is here with our latest Green News Report with news on the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a fossil fuel company for its part in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline; a new report from the World Meteorological Organization documenting our spiraling climate crisis; and a reported breakthrough from Chinese automaker BYD, supposedly allowing their new EV batteries charge in about 5 minutes time. Don't look for those cars here, however. Though they are the world's #1 best-selling EV, they aren't allowed for sale in the U.S. With the CEO of their main competitor, Tesla, now seemingly co-running the nation, that is unlikely to change anytime soon...

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Saturday was a very dark day for the cause of democracy and the free press around the world, as detailed on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Since its very first broadcast on February 1, 1942, the Voice of America has been, as my guest today described it in his "Requiem for the voice that carried a nation's conscience" over the weekend, "a beacon that burned bright during some of the darkest hours."

"To eliminate" VOA and its sister networks around the globe, which broadcast to more than 400 million each week in more than 100 countries in more than 60 different languages, is to "turn our backs on those around the world who have counted on us. It is to surrender a unique platform that no other country can replicate."

"It was never just about America's voice," wrote STEVE HERMAN, my guest on today's show, "it was about America's integrity. There will be celebrations in the autocratic halls of power this weekend in Moscow, Minsk, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran."

Herman has been reporting for Voice of America overseas for decades --- from war zones, civil uprisings and natural disasters --- as a journalist and as VOA's Bureau Chief in India, Korea and Thailand at various times. He was serving as the federal government-funded outlet's Bureau Chief in Northeast Asia when we first got to know him during his remarkable coverage following 2011's tragic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown near Fukushima, Japan, when he was one of the first journalists allowed inside of the crippled reactor building just days after the disaster.

Over the past decade, the seemingly fearless Herman returned stateside to serve as VOA's State Department Bureau Chief, then its White House Bureau Chief and, finally, its Chief National Correspondent. At least until he was summarily placed on forced "excused absence" at the end of February by Trump officials who had wrested control of the otherwise non-partisan U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA, as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and others.

Over the weekend, following a late-night decree by Donald Trump on Friday and an order signed by USAGM's White House advisor --- and Trump's nominee to run VOA --- failed Arizona Gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake, some 1,300 journalists were placed on leave at VOA, where the air has now fallen silent, or filled by music instead of the critical news and cultural content that has been a hallmark for so many decades around the world.

"I've been in other countries when all of a sudden the broadcasting goes off the air, the programming, and it's replaced by music. That always meant there was a coup that was occurring," Herman says darkly.

"What message are we sending out to the world when the regular programming of Voice of America --- whether it's in English, or Burmese, or Swahili, or Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Pashtu, Dari, French Africa, all these services --- when it's Monday, we're supposed to be in regular programming," Herman explains. "There is no regular programming. Transmitters are now going off the air or they are silent. There's loop video running on some of the services streaming. The Voice Of America is effectively silenced as of this moment," he says.

As Herman investigates the possibility of challenging his own removal --- he was told, when placed on leave, that his social media posts are now being "investigated" --- he describes the news of the mass suspension of his colleagues over the weekend as "ten times the gut punch". He reports today that some 550 of them who were contractors have now been informed "that they are terminated effective March 31st."

After 83 years of continuously broadcasting, originally as a counterbalance to Nazi propaganda across Europe during WWII and, as mandated by federal law since then, to "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of"¦accurate, objective, and comprehensive" news --- not as political propaganda for any party or President in power --- Herman calls the decision "a national tragedy."

It will be most felt by those in closed, autocratic societies, where VOA and its sister networks long-served as a beacon of light, hope, democracy, American values and a template for what a free, non-biased media outlet sounds like.

"Everybody is astonished and shocked," Herman tells me, describing a meeting earlier today which a bunch of his colleagues. "But every person is more concerned about the institution than they are with their individual job. That that was the utmost concern. What's being lost is not just the livelihoods of thousands of people. When you also put into that what's happening at Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, it's these institutions being silenced."

"To extinguish the entire operation over a weekend," he laments, "what is being lost is not replaceable. And it is a national tragedy. I don't opine much, as you know, but I think that's a fair way to look at what's happening," he says.

Why is all of this happening? What (and whose) purpose does it ultimately serve? What does it all mean and where will it go from here? Those are just some of the points of discussion in today's must-listen conversation with Herman, who has been a helpful source and friend of this program --- and as a champion of a free press --- for years now.

Kari Lake has recently referred to the USAGM networks as "radical Leftist advocacy organizations." Elon Musk, whose DOGE Bros have reportedly been camping out at the agency for weeks, recently tweeted, "It's just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money."

Herman responds to say that the networks "talk to the hundreds of millions of people who listen to VOA, who listen to Radio Free Europe or Radio Free Asia, or watch the TV programs, or go online to check the news. Obviously we are not just talking to ourselves. We have a huge audience."

"Dollar for dollar," he continues, "US international broadcasting funded by the government --- whether it's totally 100% funded under the government but with a [political and editorial] firewall, or their grantees like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia --- people who study public diplomacy will tell you that VOA and these other broadcasters are probably the best bang for the buck out there, in terms of soft power of the United States."

As to whether his reporting and that of his colleagues --- whose work had to pass muster of an editorial firewall and be checked for "balance" before publication or air --- was that of "radical left crazy people" or "radical Leftist advocacy organizations", Herman tells me today, as he has in the past, that he believes the work speaks for itself.

You can check out his work for yourself, at least until it is disappeared from the Internet, at the VOANews.com website. I also recommend you sign up for his personal newsletter and check out his book (which we discussed in studio on air when he was in town last Summer), Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist's Story of Covering the President --- and Why It Matters.

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Hey, we beat COVID again over the weekend! So, we're back on today's BradCast and with a fearless in-studio guest for that matter! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Very quickly, at top of show, an update on our seemingly never-ending personal COVID nightmares. (Yup, I got it again last week, but kicked it by showtime today! And I ain't the only one.); A bit of breaking news on a spate of wildfires breaking out around Southern (and Northern) California; And some news on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wartime coalition "unity" cabinet falling apart, even as the military seems to turn on the PM, who has reportedly undermined ceasefire and hostage release negotiations "due to political considerations" and his need to stay in power to avoid pending criminal charges.

THEN, we are joined in-studio by veteran journalist STEVE HERMAN of the non-profit, non-partisan, independent, government-funded media outlet known as Voice of America. After spending nearly three decades as an overseas bureau chief for VOA, mostly in Asia, Herman moved back stateside to become White House Bureau Chief during the four years of the Trump Administration and first eight months of Biden's. Now, he has a brand new book detailing insider observations and lessons from those years, titled Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist's Story of Covering the President --- and Why It Matters.

While I just got over my latest bout with COVID this past weekend, I was somewhat concerned that Herman might not want to join me in person in a small radio studio for an hour. Then I remembered that he was among the very first civilians to enter the Fukushima Nuclear Plant after its 2011 meltdown and would later go on to serve in the cramped, poorly ventilated basement confines with the White House Press Corps during Trump's mishandling of the worse pandemic in 100 years. So, yeah, he doesn't seem easily shaken.

Among the many topics of my discussion with Herman today, based on details, stories and history lessons from his fascinating new book...

• Details on working as a radio pool reporter during critical historic events during the Trump presidency.
• That time Donald Trump tested positive for COVID, didn't tell the public (or the press corps working in close quarters with him) for four days, became gravely ill, and the White House lied about all of it.
• Which was more unnerving? Walking into the nuclear plant at Fukushima just after a meltdown, or showing up each day in the White House during the worst of COVID, with a President who routinely violated WH safety protocols himself?
• How --- and why --- the Trump Administration tried to capture VOA as a propaganda tool (the agency is prohibited, by law, from engaging in such practices and must remain independent), and how Herman was specifically targeted with a "dossier" compiled by Trump's henchmen at VOA's parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
• Herman discusses that time he was banned from Mike Pence's Air Force Two after revealing that the Vice President was told in advance of his maskless visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota that masking was mandatory under the legendary health facilities house rules.
• The need for skepticism of government officials by journalists, and how should be the role of WH correspondents to not only report what officials say, but to report on when and how they are not telling the truth to the American public.
• The differences in the pressures facing journalists at commercial news outlets reporting on the White House, versus that of non-commercial new organizations like VOA.

To give you a quick taste of the conversation today: On the Trump Administration's failed effort to capture Voice of America as a MAGA outlet, Herman tells me "...he was just looking for a head on a pike...And I would have been a good head on a pike. There was a perception that Voice of America was not stepping in line with the Trump Administration. That I and others were guilty of anti-Trump bias, allegedly. And anytime anyone has said that, whether they think I'm anti-Trump or anti-Biden or anti-whoever, go look at the stories we write, and show me where the bias is."

Of course, having the President of the United States himself furious at Voice of America for not being a propaganda outlet, kinda proves the point that, as Herman explains in his fascinating book, VOA, for some eight decades now has not served as a mouthpiece for any particular Presidential Administration. It has proven itself over and again to be a service that its stake holders --- the people of the U.S. whose Government funds it, even as VOA is barred from broadcasting here --- should be proud of. It has long served as a trusted source of news to uncountable millions across the globe in dozens of countries and languages where the service has played a critical role in countering disinformation --- either foreign or domestic --- since the outlets founding in 1942...

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Of course, just as COVID and other respiratory viruses are surging in L.A. (and California, and much of the rest of the country), we have our first in-studio guest on The BradCast since the pandemic. Oh, well. Wish us luck! [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

We're joined today by the great STEVE HERMAN of Voice of America who spent some 26 years covering various regions in Asia and serving as VOA correspondent and Bureau Chief in India, Korea, Thailand. In 2016, he returned stateside to serve as VOA's Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, for a brief stint, before becoming the eight decade-old, U.S. funded media outlet's White House Bureau Chief. After serving 4 totally easy-peasy years at the White House during the Trump Administration and several months during Biden's, Herman is now on the road as VOA's Chief National Correspondent covering the 2024 campaign. (I know, I know...we're not even done with 2022 around here!)

In a broad, in-studio conversation today --- including questions from listener callers --- we cover, among many other things...

• Herman's initial visit to the Fukushima nuclear plant just after the 2011 meltdown disaster...without any sort of physical protection! (That was when he first appeared as a guest on our program.)

• How VOA stands virtually alone as a state-funded news outlet given its special charter, a "firewall" enshrined by federal statute that prevents the government from meddling in its coverage. "The White House, or even the head of our parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, cannot tell me or my editors what we have to report or cannot report. They cannot be involved editorially," says Herman.

• How and why that makes VOA different from state-funded propaganda outlets in Russia, China, Iran and elsewhere. "I like to say VOA is probably the only news organization in the world that is mandated by law to be fair and effective," Herman explains. "In that charter it says we must reflect the different views of what's going on in the United States."

• "Facts are facts," he tells me, regarding so much mis- and disinformation by both the Right and Left. "What they are reporting at RT [Russia Today] and Sputnik is not factual, especially about the war in Ukraine. ... It's a situation that we see from Chinese state media and Iranian state media. And this goes back all the way to why VOA was created after the start of World War II, because you had Nazi Germany on the airwaves, uncontested to a great degree, spitting out anti-American and pro-Nazi propaganda. What VOA was set up to do was to tell the audiences, initially in German and also in Japanese, what's going on with the war, whether it's good or bad."

• The efforts by the Trump Administration, while Herman served as VOA's WH Bureau Chief, to affect the agency's news coverage and attempts to pressure Herman himself. "When these things have happened over the decades in various administrations, it also demonstrates that VOA is not a propaganda service," he argues. "If it were a propaganda service, we would not be getting complaints from within the United States government on some of the stories we've been doing."

• - Herman's thoughts on the insane response by Donald Trump over the weekend to Matt Taibbi's "Twitter Files" thread detailing internal discussion/debate among Twitter executives in the run-up to the 2020 election when deciding whether or not to suppress questionably sourced reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop.

• All of that and much more, including praise for sushi in Los Angeles from a guy who worked for decades in Asia!

Also covered today, a few news headlines at the top of the show...

• Flu, COVID and other respiratory illness is "off the charts" in California, Los Angeles County and elsewhere around the country.
• Russia's latest missile assault on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, and the nearly 600 documented cases of apparent war crimes by the aggressor nation since Putin's invasion in February.
• The apparent coordinated domestic terror attacks on electric substations in Moore County, North Carolina that has knocked out power and water to tens of thousands of residents.
• Early voting is over and Election Day now awaits on Tuesday in Georgia's U.S. Senate runoff between Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Trump-backed sociopathic liar Hershel Walker.
• The weekend's aforementioned insane (and largely pointless) Twitter thread by Matt Taibbi, how it has been misreported by MAGA Republicans including Donald Trump, who dishonestly represented the reporting in order to call for "termination" of the U.S. Constitution (seriously!) in its wake...

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In what would be a dream world for our previous President, who declared the media to be "the enemy of the people" just before his infamous 2018 meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Russia has now criminalized pretty much any and all independent media. But our guests on today's BradCast have a really cool and, yes, retro idea about how to help counter Russia's media blackout. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among other restrictions, Putin's new censorship law, adopted just after his invasion of Ukraine, mandates harsh penalties, including jail time, for the crime of reporting on the invasion as an "invasion" or "war". Independent outlets have been forced to shutter or have stopped covering the war at all. Western media outlets have pulled their reporters and Russia has closed Internet access to websites of foreign state-run media outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Deutsche Welle.

Kremlin-approved propaganda is now all that many Russians have access to, where they are being told that Russia's barbaric military assault on its sovereign neighbor --- including its civilian population --- is little more than a minor, "special military operation" meant to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine. Civilians are not being harmed, and anyone who says otherwise is reporting "fake news," the Kremlin insists.

Of late, however, as Julia Davis reported yesterday at The Daily Beast, some cracks are beginning to appear, even on Kremlin-approved television, including one of Moscow's most popular evening news programs, whose Putin-friendly host has been sanctioned by the EU and where nightly broadcasts frequently end with clips of monologues by Fox 'News' star Tucker Carlson.

For most Russians, however, there is very little access to independent, outside reporting to counter the official state media narrative. Our guests today, attorney KATE NEISWENDER and former longtime Voice of America employee and shortwave radio enthusiast KIM ANDREW ELLIOTT are part of a small, grassroots effort aiming to revive a Cold War technology in hopes of helping counter the information desert inside of Putin's new Iron Curtain.

Dubbed #ShortwavesForFreedom on social media, the new project has begun raising money to fund re-broadcasts of Voice of America (VOA) programming into Ukraine and Russia via shortwave frequencies. While the BBC World Service announced this week they were reviving their old shortwave broadcasts into the former Soviet Union, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty --- both managed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) --- have declined to do so, at least so far.

Neiswender, Elliott and a number of other VOA veterans and supporters aim to fill that gap with a crowd-funded effort. The group has already raised enough over just the past week or so to get up and running --- rebroadcasting some of VOA's programming (which is all public domain) --- into Europe via shortwave transmission from Florida station, WRMI Radio Miami International.

They both join us today to explain, among other things: How this effort came together in just over a week's time; how they hope to expand from English-language programming to broadcasts in both Ukrainian and Russian; why they believe VOA (actually, USAGM) has yet to take this step themselves; and how a very small amount of money can go a very long way in this project, as they seek additional broadcasters to help transmit shortwave programming from both the U.S. and Europe.

Does anyone in Russia still even have access to the equipment needed to listen to the broadcasts? "Well, nowadays for sure, fewer people will be listening to shortwave and fewer people have shortwave radios," Elliott explains. "But, when the Internet is cut, squeezed, blocked, and at some point maybe even with lines into the country cut off, radio will be the only way to get in to the country. And then, the people in those countries will have to try to find their old Soviet-era shortwave radios." He believes "that audience can pass the information on to the larger audience in those countries."

Will Russian audiences have any more confidence that what they are hearing from Western state-run outlets like VOA is any more reliable than what their own state-approved outlets are telling them? "VOA and RFE (Radio Free Europe) have a government-imposed, in-the-code-written-by-Congress, can't-get-around-it mandate to be fair," Neiswender argues. She's referring to USAGM's Charter, adopted during the Ford Administration, which one VOA journalist has explained to me, means that, "We're probably the only news organization in the world that is mandated to be fair, objective and unbiased."

Whether VOA and RFE's reports are perceived as such by listeners inside of Russia and Ukraine is another matter, but their broadcasts did serve as an information lifeline to many behind the old Iron Curtain for many decades of the Cold War.

For now, the effort is already working. Elliott, who spent more than 30 years as a broadcaster and audience analyst at VOA tells us that "the signal is getting through to a very large extent, and sometimes with really good reception quality. Direct feedback from the audience, that will take some days and weeks as the word gets around that these transmissions are available. Already, WRMI received a note from a diplomat in Egypt who heard the Russian transmission. It is getting through."

Neiswender says that the project's success is only a matter of raising funds to keep going and expand their reach. The effort is crowdsourced with a fund raiser at Fundrazr.com/RadioWaves. A very small amount of money goes a long way here, she insists. They are already up and broadcasting after raising just over $6,000.

All of the money, "goes directly to the stations. No one is getting a dime from this that is organizing it or running it. Every cent of the money that is coming in is going directly back out to fund these transmissions," she notes.

It's a fascinating conversation about a fascinating project that I believe is well worth your time today, even as these are very strange days indeed.

Finally, we close with one more fascinating story, and a song. The story comes, ironically enough, courtesy of Fox "News", regarding Marina Baronova, the now-former Managing Editor of Russia's state-owned media outlet Russia Today (RT). She resigned her post last week in protest of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. She now fears for her life, though not necessarily for the reasons you may assume. And her interview with Fox concludes with this message: "Russians love their children, too."

As it happens, Grammy-winner Sting, last weekend, posted an Instagram video singing his 1985 tune called "Russians" which, he says, he has rarely sung since the end of the Cold War. Now, as you'll hear, it has new relevance. Apparently even for Baronova...

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MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)