Episode 8:P2 | “Signalgate” & Erasure

Okay y’all. We’re back with part 2. Here we finish the conversation we started by circling back to Signalgate, you know…the one where Jeff Goldberg’s phone got sucked into a national security conversation. We also talk about the attempt to erase aspects of our history that are less than savory or make dominant culture uncomfortable. This is personal for us because of who our family is. I know that stories have the power to uplift and maybe even save us, so collecting and recording stories is more important than ever now - we can’t lose the fullness of who we are. Thanks for joining us for round two!

Episode 8:P1 | Return to the DOE

We are doing this week’s podcast in two parts because we’ve been given much to discuss. This first part refers to the Department of Education and the continued threats to universities and students who attend them. We’ve seen several more apprehensions of students here legally and lists of universities perceived to be espousing “woke ideology” or allowing their students to engage in civil disobedience. Many universities missed an opportunity to engage with students and band together to resist what is happening. Now, they are scrambling and face a loss of federal funding for essential programs such as Title VI and Title IX that protect student equity and representation.

Later this week, we’ll discuss “signal-gate” and the proposed erasure of critical histories in national museums, parks, and other cultural bodies in more detail. Stay tuned for part 2!

Episode 7 | The DEMS and DOE

Another week, another onslaught. There is more that we don’t talk about than what we do. To talk about everything would require 90 minutes or more, and frankly, who has 90 minutes for a podcast!?

One of the things we respond to is the role of the Democrats at this moment and whether they are rising to the challenge of resisting the Trump agenda. Peering over from this side, they seem a bit bewildered, which may not be an entirely bad thing. When Judicial and Congressional resistance fails, the people rise up, and this moment may be what we need to shake us up as voters and activists. The question is, who’s listening?

We don’t yet know the implications of the executive order seeking to dismantle the Department of Education, but we do know that it is not abstract. The DOE protects student rights and disseminates federal funding to meet their needs on a state and local level. States are tasked with distributing funds among districts and implementing policies to ensure equitable access to resources. By dismantling the DOE and lacking a plan to engage other departments to share the load (many of whom are losing up to 40 and 50% of their workforce), this sweeping action might actually affect a child’s access to dyslexia services in Rockwall County, Texas. What happens at the large level impacts the small.

So, what is yours to do? What is ours to not do? What need in your community are you uniquely qualified to meet or address? Answering those questions is how we make small, sustainable changes that serve the most people.

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A few links:

1) First, the good news…Watch here: “US Marine Band forced to cancel concert with students of color after Trump DEI order”

2) A little more on the DOE executive order here.

Episode 6 | The Rise of Authoritarianism

I don’t want to be an alarmist, but if we look at a playbook for “How to Become an Authoritarian Country,” we are in the opening chapters. Last week, green-card-holding Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was detained for participating in protests on campus. He has yet to be convicted of a crime and is here legally. His detainment is intended to make a point—both about the tenuousness of being an immigrant in this country and our protected right to free speech and dissent.

What does this have to do with authoritarianism? Authoritarianism is a process of centralizing power in an individual, party, or cabal that has four primary symptoms: fear, division, distortion of the truth, and suppression of dissent. All of these ingredients are currently present in our political environment. There is resistance to it, but make no mistake about the aims of this administration.

My mentor mentioned a 59-page book by Brian McLaren this week called Authoritarianism: Coming to a Country Near You. You can find it here. We need to keep finding ways to resist, and we’ve got to stay committed to integrity, freedom, and justice.

Please send us good news that we can share here!

Episode 5 | A Conversation with Jaime González

We are so lucky to know incredible people. I hope you heard Barry’s song last week and Casey’s poem. This week, we are joined by Jaime González, an environmental educator and conservationist. He is in a field directly impacted by some of the cuts to funding and personnel in the last weeks, yet he continues to try to navigate the space with an open mind. Jaime is a bridge builder, someone interested in finding common ground. The most basic shared aspect of our humanity is that we share this planet, we breathe the same air, and on any given Sunday, you will find an incredible cross section of Houston’s diverse population using our public parks. He gives us some great perspective on how the divisiveness we face gets in the way of connecting across shared values. He also encourages us to consider ourselves as part of the natural world, such that we realize the impact of everything we do on everyone and everything around us. We are connected to a much more extensive biodiversity network than our human selves. For Jaime, conservation work is rooted in science, personal values, and spirituality. It is about so much more than just the self. The undoing of certain groups and policies will have long-term impacts…and we can still keep doing small repeatable acts in accordance with our values. We are so grateful to Jaime for joining us.

Episode 4 | The Ambush

Last week gave us one of the ugliest pictures of an abuse of power (and I would say abusive power) that I have seen in this country in my lifetime. Trump and Vance ambushed Ukrainian President Zelensky in a way that full-on demonstrated their bullying tactics. Y’all, the cruelty is the point. They wanted to shame him, make him seem like the “bad guy” — a classic move of the schoolyard bully. He throws a lot of punches and then acts like he got punched first. It’s glaringly apparent.

That, coupled with the limitations on the free press, are significant challenges to some foundational tenets of democracy. Trump broke with our allies on live TV, limiting who could cover the issue. On the one hand, we saw it live, and hopefully, our own eyes can tell us what is true. On the other hand, what has happened has a far-reaching impact regardless of what we know to be true. Trump will only entertain people and press outlets that are favorable to him, which will start to slant information, which will begin to slant our thinking.

So how do we resist? What do we do? This is when artists get to work. We document and make stuff. We write poetry and songs of lament. We make public art and perform. We use our creativity to lend our voices to collective freedom. We are interconnected - this is a foregone fact. Everything we do impacts everyone around us. Here, we’ll share two pieces of resistance: a poem by my friend Casey Kelly and a song by our friend Barry Stiles. Use your gifts to lift your voice in whatever small ways you can. This is what we do — small, repeatable, creative acts — that can build and sustain a movement.

You can find Barry’s song here.

You can see the full ambush, ahem press conference, between Trump/Vance and Zelensky here.

Episode 3 | The Art of the Con

This episode centers around a couple of direct quotes from Trump regarding President Zelensky and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump called Zelensky “a dictator without elections” and went on to blame him for starting the war. “Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years {ago} — you should never have started it. You could have made a deal.”

Trump has a way of convincing us that his narrative is the truth. We discuss his tactics, their impact on international relations, and their effect on our media. All of these things are braided, and it is up to journalism and individuals to maintain integrity and call a spade a spade, as the saying goes. Our encouragement is to keep using your voice, the one instrument you can always play. When a strongman speaks, people often walk away feeling overwhelmed and confused. This is intentional, meant to silence us, but notice where people speak out and where fissures occur. A tidal wave begins with a single drop of water. Thanks for joining — please leave a comment or a review!

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Sources:

1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/21/us-president-trumps-claims-about-zelenskyy-and-ukraine-fact-checked

2. https://6abc.com/post/maine-governor-janet-mills-president-donald-trump-clashes-executive-order-banning-transgender-athletes-womens-sports/15943839/

3. https://apple.news/AaPWjsfqmS5GBXcyX8jc9Bg

Episode 2 | FAFO*

In talking to my dad this week, an 82-year-old just-right-of-centrist disappointed with the Republican Party, he asked if he could contribute information to our podcast. He has been writing short essays to friends over the last few years to try and either convince them or commiserate with them about the danger of Trumpism. Below is a segment he shared, which we will call “Letters From a Disgruntled Old Guy.” He and Josh are two of the few people I know who read entire periodicals regularly. They are absolutely information consumers with deep intellectual capacity.

In this podcast, we review the framework that undergirds the mission of this presidency: Project 2025. It’s essential to know the broad categories the Trump administration is trying to dismantle and why. We will follow the impacts of these broad categories throughout. Second, we go way back to civics class and reintroduce you to the branches of government and why they must keep each other in check. Josh described them as a game of rock paper scissors where no one branch ever gets too powerful. Trump is going for the “I have the right to do whatever I want as President” approach. We’ll see how this shakes down, but it ain’t comfortable to experience, that’s for sure.

From the Disgruntled Old Guy:

So, how do we get a constitutional crisis?

Recall on January 6, 2021 that Trump pretty much showed his disdain for our rule of law. Suppose after appeals to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Robert's validates contempt of court and says, "Send in the marshals.” So, the federal marshals work for DOJ. Imagine Ms. Bondi allowing her boss to be handcuffed? Ummm…

Sadly, very few voters follow, much less understand what is going on here. To the Trump administration, this is all just a game. Balance of power and the rule of law is not a concept they care about. Maubury v Madison was long ago, but ultimately the political solution is quicker. A little recent history from the Nixon era gathered straight from Wikipedia:

U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson had appointed Cox in May 1973 after promising mising the House JudiciaryCommittee that he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the events surrounding the break-in of the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. The appointment was created as a career reserved position in the Justice Department, meaning it came under the authority of the attorney general, who could only remove the special prosecutor "for cause", e.g., gross improprieties or malfeasance in office. Richardson had, in his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, promised not to use his authority to dismiss the Watergate special prosecutor unless for cause.

When Cox issued a subpoena to Nixon, asking for copies of taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office, the president refused to comply. On October 12, 1973, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the subpoena, rejecting Nixon's claims of executive privilege. On Friday, October 19, Nixon offered what was later known as the Stennis Compromise – asking the infamously hard-of-hearing Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi to review and summarize the tapes for the special prosecutor's office. Cox refused the compromise that same evening, and it was believed that there would be a short rest in the legal maneuvering while government offices were closed for the weekend.

However, on the following day (Saturday), Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned.

Nixon then ordered the Solicitor General of the United States, Robert Bork, as acting head of the Justice Department, to fire Cox. Both Richardson and Ruckelshaus had given personal assurances to Congressional oversight committees that they would not interfere, but Bork had not. Although Bork later claimed he believed Nixon's order to be valid and appropriate, he still considered resigning to avoid being "perceived as a man who did the President's bidding to save my job". Nevertheless, having been brought to the White House by limousine and sworn in as acting attorney general, Bork wrote the letter dismissing Cox. 

It took that to finally shake congress enough to convince Nixon to resign. Problem is that Trump has already proven that he is oblivious to a request from congress or the Supreme Court. After Nixon's resignation there was much clamoring about how the system worked. It takes broad support for that. Today I am not sure the support is broad enough, yet Nixon won the election by much more than Trump. It’s interesting to make the parallel here, however. Several judiciary branch resignations have occurred when they were asked to compromise their commitment to the legal process in the dismissal of New York City Mayor Eric Adams with one prosectutor declaring: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion…but it was never going to be me.” (1)

So, we really do have a burgeoning constitutional crisis that can be handled (or not) in the courts or if the Trump team finds itself in contempt. At the very least, we have a state failure of the highest degree. My dad lived through the Nixon debacle, and I think he’s wondering if history will repeat itself in his waning years.

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(1) https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298040/justice-department-eric-adams-fallout

Other references:

• Democracy Forward is the organization responsible for filing injunctions to many of these executive orders

• A brief summary of Project 2025

• The Pope calls out the president

• bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, ˆ2010

• FAFO = F*#k Around and Find Out…We are in the finding out phase

Episode 1

This week, we discuss some of the impacts of mass deportation, a private citizen running DOGE, and withdrawal from the international economy. One edit: Ta-Nehisi Coates conversed with Kiese Laymon in Houston. We initially thought it was before the election, but it was actually November 18, after the election.

A few references that we mention:

1) Justice for All Immigrants, an affordable legal service for immigrants who want to get their status in order, is offering an online “know your rights” workshop.

2) If you haven’t already, you can view Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde's full sermon here.

3) A few sources we like are Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From an American, The Contrarian, and Stacy Abrams’ podcast “Assembly Required.”

We all have a part to play in this grand design, y’all, so let’s figure out the best version of ourselves to be!

The Trailer

We have talked about this for years, folks. My husband and I have wanted to do something together (besides just being married I mean), and we are finally putting it out there. This podcast is dedicated to siphoning out the wheat from the chaff as we enter the chaos of Trump’s second term. There is so much coming at us each day, so we decided we would take 3-4 bullet points each week and talk about what they mean and why they are important. Josh is the research department, the play-by-play, and I am the color commentator. I am interested in the spiritual, moral, and psychological impact of what is going on, while Josh is interested in the details. First episode airing Monday, February 10. Enjoy our goofy trailer!