By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This month marks the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her courageous act triggered the historic Montgomery bus boycott, launched the career of a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., and changed the world. Remarkable events like the boycott have long been celebrated in this country as seminal moments achieved through struggle, woven into the fabric of our collective civic life. President Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers are on a campaign to erase this history, tearing down monuments to hard-won progress and whitewashing American history to conform to their white Christian nationalist agenda. Take the recent changes to the National Park Service’s fee-free days, when the park admission fees are waived. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth have been stripped from the list of fee-free days, and Donald Trump’s birthday has been added. Gone are the only two days that celebrate Black history, which is in fact American history. Other examples are Trump’s restoration of Confederate monuments, torn down in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests that followed, and his reversal of the renaming of military bases formerly named after Confederate officers. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “No more woke bullshit.” Trump’s discrimination and erasure aren’t limited to race; within weeks of taking office, the National Park Service removed the “T” from “LGBT” on its Stonewall National Monument website. The pivotal Stonewall uprising, credited with launching the modern gay rights movement, was prominently led by transgender activists. It occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn, an LGBTQ+ bar attacked by New York City police on June 28, 1969. In recent years, Trump has been inciting virulent transphobia in his campaign to harness hate for political power. Juneteenth, June 19th, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army ordered the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas. Juneteenth is considered the longest continually celebrated African American holiday, and it is the newest federal holiday. The effort to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday was itself won only after a decades-long struggle. It was first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1986, while many stat

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat following U.S. missile strikes on September 2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the operation called a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody.” These actions, along with at least 20 additional lethal boat strikes that followed, are widely considered by legal and military experts to be war crimes. President Donald Trump has declared, without proof, that these targeted people are narcotics traffickers and thus “terrorists” with whom the U.S. is at war. “This entire operation, from the outset, is illegal,” David Cole, Georgetown University law professor, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. … They’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood.” The Intercept’s Nick Turse first reported the killing of the survivors, a week after the attack happened. In that report, Turse wrote: “A high-ranking Pentagon official … said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year.” Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends on September 3, boasting of the boat strike: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.” The Washington Post’s report provoked bipartisan concern in Congress and investigations into the strikes as potential war crimes. On Sunday, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the strike, saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.” Hegseth got the message, apparently, stating in a December 2 cabinet meeting, seated next to Trump, “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around.” The decision to kill the survivors, he said, came from the operation’s commanding officer, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. In Trump’s Air Force One comments, he added detail to his boat strike policy th

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The United Nations’ COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, known as “the Amazon COP,” wrapped on November 22nd. Powerful petrostates and large polluting nations succeeded in blocking inclusion of a roadmap away from fossil fuels in the summit’s concluding agreement. COP30 is the 30th “Conference of Parties” to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. Over 190 nations have spent a decade negotiating the implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, with little success. The alternative to COP30’s drastic compromise, abandoning the “roadmap” that many climate-impacted nations described as a “red line,” was the potentially permanent collapse of the Paris Agreement. Global climate negotiations have been fraught for years, as the process requires nations with vastly different resources and objectives to reach consensus. As the climate crisis worsens and the planetary ecosystem on which we all depend for survival nears multiple tipping points, it appears fossil fuel interests, from the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia to multinational oil corporations, are scuttling climate solutions in the interest of their own power and profit. As a result, billions of people globally are being sentenced to climate devastation. “I’m angry at a really weak outcome,” Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA’s director of policy and campaigns said on the Democracy Now! news hour after COP30. “I’m angry at the fossil fuel lobbyists roaming the venue freely, while the Indigenous activists were met with militarized repression. I’m angry at all the governments that aren’t standing up for their people.” Wu was among thousands from civil society at COP, demanding an ambitious and just transition from fossil fuels. These activists are allied with nations on the front lines of the climate crisis, like the small island states that dot the Pacific and Indian Oceans, where rising sea levels threaten their very existence. Vanuatu is a Pacific archipelago of about 80 islands, home to over 325,000 people. Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change, spoke to Democracy Now! during COP30’s final morning of scheduled negotiations: “Earlier this morning, we were informed by the presidency [of COP30] that there are about 80 countries who have put a red line on any mention of fossil fuels in the outcome from this meeting, this UNFCCC process, this COP.” Two camps emerged: About 80 nations, including the world’s major oil producers, rejected a roadmap

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan BELÉM, BRAZIL–The Amazon rainforest, often described as the lungs of the planet, is teeming with life. Thousands of Amazonian land defenders, both Indigenous people and their allies, have traveled to the tropical city of Belém, Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon, carrying their message that the rainforest is at a tipping point, but can still be saved. Their focus is on COP30, the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the official body created after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to negotiate and implement a global treaty to limit human-caused global warming. Thirty-three years later, the negotiations stagger forward at far too slow a pace than what is needed to avert catastrophic climate disaster. That became apparent as the conference wrapped up its first week. Hundreds of activists arrived on several caravans and river-borne flotillas in advance of a major civil society march. On Friday night, an Indigenous-led march arrived at the perimeter of the COP’s “Blue Zone,” a secure area accessible only to those bearing official summit credentials. The group stormed security, kicking down a door. United Nations police contained the protest, but it was a marker of the level of frustration at the failure of the deliberations to deliver just and effective climate action. Alessandra Korap Munduruku, president of the Pariri Indigenous Association, was a leader of the protest. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership and organizing, forcing British mining giant Anglo American to withdraw from Indigenous lands, including those of her people. “It was very difficult for our people who had traveled for so long to get here, and the people wanted to be heard,” Alessandra said on the Democracy Now! news hour, speaking inside the COP. “We came in a large delegation, and we wanted to speak, and we wanted to be heard, but we were blocked. I have credentials to enter COP, but many of the Munduruku who are here do not, and so we decided that we needed to stop this COP. We needed people to stop and to listen to us…because we are the ones that are saying what the forest is demanding. We are the ones that are saying what the river is asking for.” Close to 190 nations sent delegations here to hammer out a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Noticeably absent is the United States. President Donald Trump refused to send an official delegation, a first for

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in to the US House of Representatives on Wednesday, after being blocked from her duly-elected role by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson for 50 days, denying Congressional representation to Grijalva’s 800,000-plus constituents in southern Arizona. Johnson, it seemed, was far more interested in serving the interests of just one man, namely, President Donald Trump. By refusing to swear in Grijalva, Johnson was able to block the long-pending discharge petition that would force a vote on releasing the government’s files on the late, convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Well, Johnson’s delays are over. Adelita Grijalva is now a member of Congress, and, as her first official act, she signed the discharge petition. This allows an end-run around the Speaker, who sets the agenda in the House of Representatives and decides what comes to a vote and what does not. There will now be a vote in the House to compel the Justice Department to make public its full trove of Epstein files. The bill is expected to pass in the House, although its fate in the Senate is unclear. Adelita Grijalva raised the Epstein files in her first floor speech, which she delivered after receiving a rousing standing ovation from her Congressional colleagues: “Our democracy only works when everyone has a voice. This includes the millions of people across the country who have experienced violence and exploitation, including Liz Stein and Jessica Michaels, both survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse. They are here in the gallery with us this evening. Thank you for being here. [applause] Just this morning, House Democrats released more emails showing that Trump knew more about Epstein’s abuses than he previously acknowledged.” Grijalva continued, “It’s past time for Congress to restore its role as a check and balance on this administration and fight for WE the American people. We need to fight for our immigrant communities and veterans. We need to stand up for our public schools, children and educators. We need to respect tribal sovereignty and our environment. We need to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights, because that’s what the American people expect us to do: Fight for them. That is why I will sign the discharge petition right now to release the Epstein files.” Grijalva won the special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of her father, the late Congressmember Raul Grijalva. She opened her speech paying tribu

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Zohran Mamdani made history, winning the race to be the next mayor of New York City. The Democratic socialist is the first Muslim and the first person of South Asian descent elected to lead the largest city in the United States. At 34 years old, he is the youngest elected to the office in over a century. His meteoric rise from a little-known state assemblymember to his stunning upset on Tuesday has sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. With over 100,000 volunteers, a savvy social media presence, and a platform to make New York affordable, Zohran Mamdani charted a path to victory, defeating the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo. At his victory party at the Brooklyn Paramount late Tuesday night, Mamdani was welcomed on stage by a cheering crowd of jubilant supporters. He opened his rousing speech saying, “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but, as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” quoting one of the most famous socialists in US history. Eugene V. Debs was born to immigrant parents on November 5th, 1855. He started working at 14, laboring on the railroads, becoming a fireman, shoveling coal on steam-powered locomotives. He joined the fireman’s union, rising in its ranks. He then formed the American Railway Union (ARU), to organize all railway industry workers, including, he hoped, women and African Americans. The ARU struck against the Pullman Company, owned by George Pullman, who built and operated a massive fleet of luxury railroad sleeper cars, amassing a fortune while keeping his workers in near-indentured status in his company town of Pullman, Illinois. The strike went national, hobbling the rail industry. President William Howard Taft called in the military, violently breaking the strike, killing over 30 strikers. As the public face of the strike, Eugene V. Debs was targeted for prosecution. He was convicted and sentenced to six months in a county jail. As he read and wrote in his cell, Debs became more radicalized, and left jail a committed socialist. By 1900, he ran as the Socialist party’s candidate for president, the first of five such runs. In 1905 he co-founded the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, seeking to organize workers across industries into “One Big Union.” During his presidential run in 1912, he built so much momentum that establishment candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were seriously concerned he could w

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan As the United States government shutdown marks its fifth week, approaching the record 35-day shutdown set back in 2018-19, unleashing a worsening cascade of hardship, one explanation for the shutdown comes from long-time Republican strategist turned Never Trump activist Stuart Stevens of the Lincoln Project, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour last week: “Say what you will about Jeffrey Epstein. The guy’s dead, and he can still shut down Congress.” What does the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who, according to the official record, died by suicide inside his prison cell in 2019, have to do with a government shutdown in late 2025? The answer comes from Tucson, Arizona, and Congressmember-elect Adelita Grijalva – who recently won a special election to fill the House seat left vacant by the death of her father, longtime progressive Democratic Congressmember Raul Grijalva. Adelita Grijalva won the special election on September 23rd as the representative of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, representing Tucson. Despite her election, though, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to swear her in – more than a month after her victory. His obstruction of this essential, Constitutionally-mandated function of our democracy is without precedent. President Donald Trump is profoundly afraid that the contents of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files will see the light of day. Trump’s name reportedly appears in the files numerous times. There is currently a bipartisan discharge petition in the House of Representatives, which would force the release of the Epstein files. It needs 218 votes to pass. When Adelita Grijalva is sworn in to Congress, she has vowed she will be that deciding vote, directing the Department of Justice “to make publicly available certain records related to Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell,” Epstein’s co-conspirator, currently serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison. Why else would Johnson so blatantly violate his duty and refuse to swear in Grijalva, other than to protect Donald Trump from whatever is contained in the Epstein files? What is shocking is that release of the files was a major pledge Trump made during his 2024 presidential campaign. “Then, as soon as this administration is in office, all of a sudden there’s nothing to see here. The American people want to know what is in those files, who is implicated. And the victims need an opportunity for justice and a voice,” said C

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan In the 1979 slasher film, “When A Stranger Calls,” a babysitter getting threatening phone calls is alerted by the police, “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from within the house.” Well, life is imitating art in Washington, DC, as the White House itself is under attack – in this case, too, the perpetrator is inside the house. President Donald Trump abruptly ordered the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House. Built by enslaved workers during the 1790s on land chosen by George Washington, The White House is owned by the public, not by Trump. It is “The People’s House,” yet, there seems to be no way to prevent Trump from taking a wrecking ball to it. The demolition provides a perfect metaphor for what Trump is doing to the institutional pillars of our democracy: tearing them down with authoritarian hubris, answering to no one as he erects yet another garish monument to himself. The demolition will make way for an enormous ballroom, about 90,000 square feet in size – more than one-and-a-half times the size of a football field – that Trump boasts will hold 1,000 people. The architectural rendering depicts a cavernous gold-trimmed room betraying Trump’s obsession with gilt (that’s g-i-l-t), in a style that writer Garrett Graff called “Kremlin-esque.” In July, after the White House announced plans to build the ballroom, Trump said, “It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.” Trump often lies, and this is no exception. Far from being untouched, the East Wing has now been totally demolished. As for his love of the place, Golf Magazine in 2017 was told by a Trump golf partner that Trump said, while golfing, “That White House is a real dump.” Trump has completely ignored precedent and the legal process for making such dramatic changes to the White House. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a letter to the National Capital Planning Commission, now dominated by Trump appointees, wrote, “we are deeply concerned that the massing and height of the proposed new construction will overwhelm the White House itself—it is 55,000 square feet—and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.” You read that right: the ballroom is far bigger than the White House itself. Trump has made other changes to the h

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The bombing has stopped in Gaza. Palestinians there, still waiting for the food and other aid to reach them, are now sifting through the rubble of their homes seeking their dead. In Israel, twenty families reunited with their loved ones who endured two years of captivity in Gaza following October 7th, 2023. Their pain and joy received blanket coverage in the US, and rightly so. But the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians rarely appears in the mainstream US media. It is absolutely essential that people here, the source of Israel’s arsenal, have access to the full breadth of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One experienced participant in the Middle East peace process is Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu. On the first day of the ceasefire, she said on the Democracy Now! news hour, “While people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us. Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.” A strikingly similar analysis came from the uncle of one of the Israelis taken captive on October 7th. Joel Beinin is an emeritus professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. His niece Liat Beinin Atzili was held captive for 54 days in Gaza in 2023. The family’s story is the focus of a new documentary, Holding Liat. “The world media focuses on the Israelis,” Joel Beinin said on Democracy Now! “There’s always a serious imbalance in coverage and centering Israel and Israelis, and much less attention to Palestinians. Palestinian society, as a whole, is suffering far, far more than Israeli society has ever suffered as a result of the armed clashes, going back all the way to 1948. That’s something that we in the West don’t tend to have adequate appreciation for.” US media outlets interview current and former Israeli ambassadors to the US, US ambassadors to Israel, and policy analysts and so-called experts on the Israel/Palestine conflict. But prominent Israeli critics of Israeli government policies are rarely heard. As President Trump spoke to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, this week, two members silently held up signs that read, “Recognize Palestine.” The chamber erupted as they were escorted out, their colleagues shout

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Two plus two equals five.” That this is false would be apparent to most first graders. Yet this is, in effect, what President Donald Trump wants us to believe when he tells us that the United States is in the midst of an “insurrection” and that there is an “invasion from within” that requires US troops to quell. Of course, there is no insurrection or invasion. But Trump is using a classic tool of totalitarians, demanding absolute obedience, even including the outright rejection of reality. He is provoking conflict as a pretense to justify the deployment of US troops to Democrat-controlled cities. He has already sent the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles, and now has sent the National Guard into Chicago. He is attempting to send them into Portland, Oregon as well. These deployments are being challenged in court, with a federal judge – a Trump appointee, no less – temporarily blocking Trump from sending troops to Oregon. “Two plus two equals five” is a famous line from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.” In the story, England is under an oppressive government demanding complete obedience while conducting constant surveillance by “Big Brother.” Citizens like the book’s protagonist, Winston, are subjected to relentless propaganda to get them to believe the government’s lies. For those who fail to believe, imprisonment and torture follow. “There’s no emergency, and there’s no justification for having guards or troops here in the city of Chicago or in the Chicagoland area. In fact, what we have seen over the last few weeks is the escalation of violence and chaos conducted by ICE agents,” Ed Yohnka, ACLU of Illinois communications director, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. In one striking example, ICE agents conducted a nighttime raid on an entire apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, rappelling from a Blackhawk helicopter onto the roof, smashing down doors, and dragging residents outside in their pajamas. Children were zip-tied with their hands behind their backs. Cristóbal Cavazos, a Chicago community activist who has been organizing community defense groups, described other examples of the Trump administration’s violence on Democracy Now! “We’re seeing a historic onslaught in Chicago, the killing of Silverio Villegas González. We’re seeing it at Broadview detention center, friends of mine who have been tear-gassed, people being thrown like pancakes, ICE in the Loop, ICE going down the Chicago River o

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Judge William Young of the Federal District Court in Boston is a Reagan appointee who has been on the bench for 47 years. Last June, he received a threatening postcard. Handwritten in all caps, it read, “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS…WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” The date is significant: June 19th was just five days after Trump’s ostentatious Washington, DC military parade, part of the birthday party Trump threw for himself and the US Army, at public expense. The parade was little more than a multi-hour display of tank after tank rolling by the temporary bleachers where Trump sat among his loyalists. Judge Young opened an order he issued this week with an image of that postcard. He followed with a message to the cards sender: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States –- you and me – have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case —” What followed was a 161-page excoriation of the Trump administration’s attack on free speech. The case was filed by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and other academic organizations, alleging the government had criminalized “any speech supportive of Palestinian human rights or critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza,” and was targeting pro-Palestinian visiting students and scholars for deportation. Ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, Judge Young wrote, “This case — perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court — squarely presents the issue of whether non-citizens lawfully present here in [the] United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally 'yes, they do.'” The non-citizens referred to are Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Badar Khan Suri. Each of them was in the United States legally, and had publicly supported Palestinian rights. As the nine-day trial presided over by Judge Young proceeded, facts accumulated that the Trump administration, and specifically Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and their subordinates had targeted these individuals for deportation largely because of their speech. “If free speech means anything in this country, it means masked government agents can’t pick you up off the street and throw you into jail because of what you’ve said,” said one of th

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Let’s be clear, statehood for the Palestinians is a right, not a reward.” So said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the General Assembly’s meeting on the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. This week, ten more nations have recognized the Palestinian State: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Malta, Monaco, and Andorra. Over 150 countries now recognize Palestine as a state, including 14 of 15 members of the United Nations Security Council. The only outlier: the United States, which consistently wields its Security Council veto power in defense of Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leaving Tel Aviv en route to the UN General Assembly, again rejected Palestinian statehood, vowing, “This will not happen.” Israeli protesters gathered at the airport to denounce him. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic, with yet another report, this one from UN, that Israel is committing genocide. On top of the slaughter and starvation of civilians, the Israeli military is ethnically cleansing Gaza City, a city of one million people, leveling it. The BBC reported that Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich said last week that Gaza could be a “real estate bonanza,” adding, “We’ve done the demolition phase… Now we need to build.” The situation is dire and worsening as well in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, where a sophisticated system of apartheid has been imposed on the millions of Palestinians who have been living under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Palestinians are daily subjected to military raids, mass arrests, home demolitions and land seizures. Israeli settlers regularly assault and kill Palestinians with complete impunity – often while Israeli soldiers look on. Illegal settlements continue to expand while new ones are built. Israel recently approved a controversial new settlement in the so-called “E-1” zone, which would effectively cut the West Bank in two, making a two-state solution practically impossible. “We’ve seen over the course of this hideous conflict the U.S. and Israel’s isolation deepening on the world stage,” Ishaan Tharoor, global affairs columnist at The Washington Post, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “You’ve seen all these governments, especially now in Western Europe, recognizing that — no one’s under the illusion that making this move creates a Palestinian state, but it shows a

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Follow the money.” That is one of the most legendary lines ever from a Hollywood movie, spoken by Hal Holbrook in the role of “Deep Throat,” a Nixon administration whistleblower in “All the President’s Men.” Deep Throat secretly met with reporter Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, advising Woodward as he investigated the Watergate scandal with Post colleague Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein exposed a web of corruption in the White House that ultimately forced President Richard Nixon to resign. Woodward was played by Robert Redford, the legendary actor, director and activist, who died this week at his home in Utah, at the age of 89. Democracy Now! Frequently interviewed Robert Redford over the years. In 2012, he reflected on that role: “To me, stories that were worth telling were stories about what’s the truth beneath the truth that you’re given, or you think you know. And I think that, like All the President’s Men, was, what’s the truth? What’s the story about two guys that did something other people weren’t doing that managed to take down a top figure in government? How did that work?” Renowned for roles in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Way We Were, Redford won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People and numerous other awards over his storied career. But what mattered most to him was independent film. Pursuing truth and confronting power was central to Redford’s long career. The power of Hollywood studios inspired him to found The Sundance Film Festival, as he explained on Democracy Now! in 2015: “What if we can start a development process where young artists can have a voice, help them develop their skills so they can at least get their films made?’ That was the labs that started in 1980. Then, once that happened…there was nowhere to go, because the mainstream had not allowed any space for them. That led to the idea of a festival. Originally, it was just a community of filmmakers coming together to share each other’s work. And maybe if we were lucky, somebody will come.” And come they did. The Sundance Film Festival is the largest independent film festival in the US, drawing upwards of 120,000 attendees for ten days in late January to the tiny mountain town of Park City, Utah. The festival may be a victim of its own success; this January’s festival will be the final one in Park City, after which it will relocate to the larger city of Boulder, Colorado. In 2010, Redford explained o

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday sent shockwaves across the country and around the world, not only through its raw violence, with a single, deadly sniper shot, but as a hallmark of worsening political divisions wracking the United States. President Donald Trump could and should use his enormous platform to calm tempers. Instead, he immediately blamed, without evidence, the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder. This came just days after Trump threatened war against Chicago and while he’s assembling a paramilitary force for domestic deployment against citizens, immigrants, and anyone else he cares to target. Trump has been threatening for weeks to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. On September 5th, Trump renamed the Pentagon the “Department of War.” He had no authority to do so – only Congress can – so his order specifies “Department of War” as a “secondary title” and instructs the executive branch to use the name. Sporting his new title “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced in the Oval Office, “We’re going to go on offence, not just on defence. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” Trump then issued a disturbing post on his Truth Social platform, declaring, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” along with the phrase, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” The post included an image of Trump in a US Army cavalry officer’s uniform, squatting before a smoke and flame-engulfed Chicago skyline, with the phrase, “Chipocalypse Now.” The image was based on a scene from the 1979 Vietnam war film, “Apocalypse Now,” in which Lt. Col. Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, massacred a Vietnamese village so he and his troops could safely surf on a nearby beach. Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Trump had already recently deployed troops without reason, request by state or local authorities, or legal justification in Los Angeles. This, from the president desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize. A federal judge in California has already ruled this was a violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the military in domestic law enforcement except in limited cases like insurrection. “Trump has always wanted his own muscle,” investigative reporter Radley Balko said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “He’s always expressed envy for dictators and authoritarians overseas who have f

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Donald Trump is on a losing streak this week. Just look at the latest judicial decisions challenging his policies, from mass deportations to tariffs to his troop deployments to US cities. The courts are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power. These cases illustrate the point: Immigration Over Labor Day weekend, ICE attempted to begin deporting up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. In the dead of night, the first children were loaded onto planes in south Texas. “These are unaccompanied children who do not have a parent or a guardian with them,” Efrén Olivares, an attorney representing the minors, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. At 1am on Sunday morning, Olivares and his colleagues filed an emergency complaint with the federal court in Washington, DC. Judge Sparkle Sooknanam was woken after 2am, and by 4am she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportations until the children had the immigration hearings to which they have a legal right. Meanwhile in Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the nation’s most conservative, ruled that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport people was illegal. Tariffs The Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal and unconstitutional, noting that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs. The ruling was “a sweeping decision that unequivocally rebukes President Trump’s idea that he can impose tariffs on American consumers on his own,” Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued the case, said on Democracy Now! Domestic Deployment of the Military Trump says, “We’re going in,” threatening to invade Chicago using, among other forces, the Texas National Guard. But in California, a federal judge, invoking the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of military in domestic law enforcement, ruled in favor of Governor Gavin Newsom, finding Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, along with several hundred US Marines, was illegal. Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops [from] engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control,

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005, breaching New Orleans’ protective levees, unleashing unprecedented destruction. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history, killing over 1,800 people, mostly poor residents of New Orleans’ historic Black neighborhoods. Katrina was also the US’ costliest natural disaster, causing over $160 billion in damage. Katrina’s deadly waters long ago receded, but in their wake, with worsening climate change, the vital lessons of Katrina have gone unheeded. Indeed, President Donald Trump, by flaunting genuine risks, is aggressively courting disaster. Take Trump’s attack on FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a statement released by the White House in May, FEMA was lumped with a slew of federal agencies that, the statement reads, represent “the weaponized rot in our Federal Government.” Targeted agencies included the EPA, the IRS, and the NIH. The document accuses FEMA of being “wasteful and woke,” engaged in “official training to indoctrinate ‘intersectionality’ and ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts’ over disaster prevention and response, culminating in aid workers being directed to skip the homes of President Trump’s supporters in the wake of a disaster.” As with most of Trump’s pronouncements, these accusations are presented without any evidence. The bulk of FEMA’s functions, according to Trump, would be delegated to the states. Of course, hurricanes and other natural disasters don’t recognize state lines, and no state could single-handedly respond to a disaster of the scale of Hurricane Katrina. Such a response requires collective action, marshalling resources from across the country to save lives in the impacted region, to recover the dead, and to rebuild. Indicative of Trump’s contempt for FEMA was his appointment of David Richardson, a former Marine with no experience in disaster recovery, as acting head of the agency. Upon his arrival at FEMA, Richardson reportedly shocked staffers by saying he was unaware the US has a hurricane season. A group of current and past FEMA workers published a letter, called The Katrina Declaration, that they sent to a Trump-appointed FEMA review council and to Congress. The letter opens, “Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator. Decisions

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the narrative long taught in US schools and documented in museums, about the abhorrent, centuries-long practice of slavery. He focused on The Smithsonian Institution, the world-renowned center of learning and culture based in Washington, DC. Trump wrote on his social media platform, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.” “How bad slavery was.” It is simply unbelievable that such a statement could be uttered by a president in 2025. Yes, slavery was bad, President Trump. It was evil and remains a stain on this country. We should never stop talking about it. Lonnie G. Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, overseeing the entire institution. Prior to that, he was the co-founder of the Smithsonian’s internationally renowned National Museum of African American History and Culture. Democracy Now! interviewed Bunch in February, 2020, just before the pandemic struck. Bunch described the importance of depicting slavery: “One of the most important things for me was to talk about the slave trade…I felt that we had to find real remnants of a slave ship,” Bunch said. “We found the São José. It was a ship that left Lisbon in 1794, went all the way to Mozambique and picked up 512 people from the Makua tribe, was on its way back to the New World when it sank off the coast of Cape Town. Half of the people were lost. The other half were rescued and sold the next day.” Bunch recalled Trump’s visit to the African American Museum in 2017, at the beginning of his first term as president: “The first place Donald Trump visited in an official capacity was the museum. I think he was stunned by the stories we told, and there was so much he didn’t know,” Bunch said. “What I realized is that if people who didn’t know but had political influence could come through the museum, I could help them understand, hopefully, something that would change the way they did it.” Given Trump’s new assault on The Smithsonian, it seems his visit to the African-American Museum didn’t have Lonnie Bunch’s hoped-for uplifting impact. In late March of this year, Trump issued an executive order targeting the museum conplex. The order alleges that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order further creates a committee to review the contents of exhibits for “improper ideolo

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.” Those were the words circulated on X and voiced on-air by Al Jazeera, of Anas Al-Sharif, a 28-year-old journalist in Gaza, after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on August 10. Anticipating his death, he wrote his statement last April. “I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification, so that God may bear witness against those who stayed silent and accepted our killing. Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.” Anas al-Sharif, a correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, was one of the most prominent journalists still working in northern Gaza, covering Israel’s ongoing siege and assault. He was killed along with his fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Nufal, and freelance media workers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Al-Khaldi when Israel bombed their press tent, located just outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Israeli military released a statement confirming its responsibility for the attack, falsely claiming Al-Sharif was a Hamas “cell leader.” Israel had long been threatening Anas Al-Sharif, prompting Irene Khan, the United Nations Special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, to issue a statement on July 31, just 10 days before Al-Sharif’s assassination. The statement read in part, “Online attacks and unfounded accusations by the Israeli army against Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif are a blatant attempt to endanger his life and silence his reporting on the genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour two days after the murder of Anas Al-Sharif and the other journalists and media workers, Irene Khan said, “Anas actually contacted me, and Al Jazeera contacted me, to tell me of this impending threat on his head. They had seen it before. He’s not the first one. There are some 26 to 30 journalists who have been targeted in this campaign of assassination. Anas wanted me to go public, he wanted others to go public, to stop what Israel was doing.” Mohamed Moawad, Al Jazeera’s managing editor, told Democracy Now!, “The pattern is clear: degrading, delegitimizing, smearing, and then killing, justifying the killing by unfounded allegations. … Anas and Mohammed were the vo

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan In Geneva, Switzerland’s Place des Nations, the plaza outside the United Nations campus, a replica of Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, has been installed. Like the original, the seated figure holds his chin in hand, but the hand in this version also clutches several empty plastic bottles. A baby lays across his other arm, resting its head in the Thinker’s left hand. The Thinker gazes down, past the baby, onto a sea of plastic waste that surrounds the statue. The statue’s placement coincides with a ten-day summit inside the UN, where negotiators hope to finalize the Global Plastics Treaty, an ambitious effort to reverse the overwhelming amount of plastic waste polluting the environment and negatively impacting human health in countless ways. Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong calls his piece “The Thinker’s Burden.” “Over the course of the next 10 days, we’re going to be slowly adding more and more plastic to this art installation to show the growing cost being passed on to future generations if we don’t take urgent and immediate action,” Von Wong told Agence France Press as he added plastic to the pile. “If you want to protect health, then we need to think about the toxic chemicals that are entering our environment. We need to think about limits on plastic production. We need to think about a strong, ambitious plastics treaty.” The Global Plastics Treaty was supposed to be finalized last year at a summit in Busan, South Korea. Negotiations broke down between two major blocs of nations, those seeking controls on plastics and harmful chemicals, and nations with economies largely reliant on fossil fuel production, like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia. Since then, of course, US President Donald Trump began his second term, with his MAGA mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill.” His appointees, like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking company CEO, are shutting down climate programs, attacking climate science and promoting climate deniers to key policy positions. It is in this context that The Lancet, the premier British medical journal, has launched the Lancet Countdown on health and plastics, “a health-focused, indicator-based, global monitoring system on plastics,” with a global team of scientists led by Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Boston College’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health. “The global plastic threat has been quietly worsening; global plastic production has increased 250 times since it be

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Never let your schooling get in the way of your education,” is a quote attributed to Mark Twain or a contemporary of his, the writer Grant Allen. The point has been displayed across college campuses over the past almost two years, as students mounted protests in solidarity with Palestinians, met with often violent crackdowns by campus authorities, police and vigilantes. One striking example of the suppression of dissent occurred at Virginia Commonwealth University, a public research university in Richmond, Virginia. On Monday, April 29, 2024, students gathered outside Cabell Library, protesting U.S. support for Israel’s attack on Gaza. Sereen Haddad, a Palestinian American student, was one of the organizers. Her father, Dr. Tariq Haddad, is a Virginia cardiologist who grew up in Gaza. Two months earlier, he had been invited to a roundtable meeting with then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He explained his refusal to attend, breaking down as he spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour: “Some context is necessary here to understand why I turned this invitation down. I have hundreds of family members in Gaza, both sides of my family, in the town of Khan Younis and Gaza City. I’ve had about a hundred family members at this point who have been killed, including physicians, pharmacists, lawyers, engineers, dozens and dozens of children, multiple small babies…My cousin Jamal El-Farra, his son, who is a physician, Dr. Tawfiq El-Farra, his wife who was pregnant, two of their beautiful daughters, Reem and Hala, Jamal’s brother Esam, wife Semad, and their daughters, Rusul, Tuqa and Nadian, multiple generations all killed…” Dr. Haddad continued to recite the names of family members killed. Now, 18 months later, the number is over 200. Sereen recalled the day of the VCU protest, speaking recently on Democracy Now!: “Many people at Virginia Commonwealth University set up an encampment to pressure the university to divest from death and divest from Israel. Instead of being supportive, instead of hearing the students out and understanding that students were there because they did not want their tuition dollars, our tuition dollars, going to killing our people and my family, what they did is send three different police forces that night to come and brutalize us.” Thirteen students were arrested. Sereen, bloodied and bruised, was not charged. If they were guilty of anything, it would have been for taking the university at its word. Proud