James is joined by Venktesh Ramnath and Kaveh Hoda to discuss the potential for an end to Medicare funding for Telemedicine and challenges for healthcare under Trump.

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Margaret reports from her time at the trial of 12 environmentalists in Virginia who fought against a fracked gas pipeline through Appalachia.

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James talks to Kevin McDonald about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the history and future of peacekeeping there.

Buy Kevin's book: https://www.mayobooks.ie/A-Life-Less-Ordinary-Kevin-McDonald

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Margaret from the future reports on the dinosaur creche in Finland.

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The gang talks about Germany's election, USAID, the new podcast driven FBI, and how gay the Navy may or may not be.

Sources:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reins-in-independent-agencies-to-restore-a-government-that-answers-to-the-american-people/

https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/02/trump-signs-order-declaring-only-president-and-ag-can-interpret-us-law-for-executive-branch/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/

https://pages.devex.com/rs/685-KBL-765/images/109160-memo.pdf?version=0

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277336/gov.uscourts.dcd.277336.21.0_7.pdf

https://www.one.org/us/what-we-do/the-issues/foreign-assistance-pause-faq/

https://mutualaidsudan.org/

https://www.state.gov/emergency-humanitarian-waiver-to-foreign-assistance-pause/

https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/USAID%20OIG%20-%20Oversight%20of%20USAID-Funded%20Humanitarian%20Assistance%20Programming%20021025.pdf

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7x87ev5jyo

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/employment-based-immigration-fifth-preference-eb-5/about-the-eb-5-visa-classification

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5306990/dan-bongino-fbi-deputy-director

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/new-fbi-director-kash-patel-plans-relocate-1500-119064886

https://www.dailyuw.com/news/washington-state-congressional-candidate-set-to-lead-counterterrorism-center/article_251db152-f32f-11ef-b56b-d7ae1ea3885f.html

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/fbi-kash-patel-antifa-blm-terror-groups

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/24/neo-nazi-trump-fbi-chief

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Robert walks the audience through a document being shared by DNC employees and think tank workers about the threat Curtis Yarvin and Elon Musk pose to democracy.

Read Robert's full piece on Substack: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/democratic-insiders-are-sharing-a

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American school children receive two distinct versions of United States history depending on what state they live in: one version of the American past aimed to meet the curricular demands of the largest market, California, and an often strikingly different version to meet the increasingly rightwing expectations of the Texas legislature. Most of the other states in the union pick between the two. This episode will examine how this situation developed, the increasing national influence of one Texas evangelical author David Barton, how Americans perceive the relationship of church and state, the continuing war on the theory of evolution, and the strange story of how efforts to post the Ten Commandments in American classrooms can be traced to Hollywood marketing of the 1950s Cecile B. D. Mille epic, The Ten Commandments.

Sources:

Dana Goldstein, “Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories,” New York Times, January 12, 2020.

Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015.)

James W. Loewen, Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.)

Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.)

Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2011 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.)

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