On March 12, 2025, our MidPoint listeners got to program the show as we hosted them in our quarterly MidPoint Talk Back Town Hall. Shelley, and guest host Matt Newton, welcomed the listeners to steer the conversation to the topics that interested them, and they came through!
Some of the liveliest discussion occurred around the topic of the list of words recently banned by the government as President Trump seeks to purge federal government agencies of “woke” initiatives, according to a compilation of government documents by the New York Times. The banned words include women and female (but not men or male,) disability, victim, clean energy, and political, along with sex, race, and gender, and many more. After some comments that this effort to ban words was “Orwellian” and evoked “1984,” another listener remarked that the reference to the novel 1984 was unrecognizable to many of our young people because that book itself had been banned in many school curricula.
Another listener remarked that U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin is encouraging all U.S. citizens to join him this week in filing formal demands for access to their personal data obtained by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk and suggested that the WMNF community should be filing such FOIA requests. Here is the Press Release from Rep. Raskin that contains a link to a fillable Privacy Act request form should you want access to your personal data.
Matt shared the plans of New College to host Alan Dershowitz as their commencement speaker. We also covered the Florida legislature’s exploration of ending the position of Lieutenant Governor and doing away with Florida property taxes, a bill to lower the age for gun purchases, and their push to make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for citizen initiatives to get on the ballot in the future.
After further discussion about the “disappearance” of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil by what is presumed to be federal immigration ICE agents, we wrapped up the show until next time.
Many thanks to the listeners for their great contributions to the show. We love the feedback!
The audio of the show is available here, on the WMNF app, and as a WMNF MidPoint podcast on Spotify and Apple Music.
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