Category: 3-SometimeCommentary

On this episode of “The Kylee Cast,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway and Chief Development Officer Sara Prinzi join Kylee Griswold to highlight The Federalist’s biggest stories of 2025, preview what to look for in 2026, and talk about the excellent reporting that won our team the Dao Journalism Award grand prize. 

The Federalist Foundation is a nonprofit, and we depend entirely on our listeners and readers — not corporations. If you value fearless, independent journalism, please consider a tax-deductible gift today at TheFederalist.com/donate. Your support keeps us going.

• Drop Site news
• Ryan's 2022 piece on progressive advocacy groups
• Get 20% off when you go to trustandwill.com/BULWARK

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s new term, he issued hundreds of executive actions and his administration implemented sweeping changes to the federal government.

Changes to federal grant funding, DEI policies, the federal workforce were all met with fierce resistance and legal challenges, totaling more than 350 lawsuits so far. Judges across the country are also mulling whether Trump’s attempt to change birthright citizenship and his deployment of ICE agents for mass deportations are legal.

The administration has spent a lot of time defending its policy actions in court. We get up to speed on their record over the past year.

How successful has the administration been in the courts? And what cases from 2025 remain up in the air?

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Introducing the newest thing in higher (and we really mean higher — like look UP) education: The Flying Pig Academy. A dream of The Village Square (with support from Florida Humanities) for many years, it's finally aloft. The division in American society is big and seems impossible at times to address.

The Flying Pig Academy is kind of an insider's how to.

This Flying Pig Episode: We live in a highly individualistic society, so maybe it's not a surprise that when we're trying to solve a big wicked problem like our deepening political division our approach is based on the individual. Most of us think that we need to wrestle with the problem of political polarization in our own hearts, or we need better skills for talking to people who don't look or think like us. Of course those things are partly true, but The Village Square has learned through two decades of building trust across divisions that human beings are very groupish and that the solution to polarization is at a group level, not at an individual one. Bonus: you get bigger results way more quickly that way. It SCALES, which we need to do more quickly if we're going to really tackle of societal polarization.

Mentioned: Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind

The second in the Flying Pig Academy series is an homage to our intellectual hero (and lucky for us, our friend and colleague) Dr. Jonathan Haidt who - literally - wrote the book for Pigs With Big Dreams.

Here are the rest of our Flying Pig episodes:

• Location, Location, Location
• Carom Shots: Why Working Upstream From Conflict is So Powerful OR how to become a civility pool shark
• Criss Cross Applesauce OR Complexity Changes Everything
• Core Catalyst Model OR What Old Trees Have to Teach Us About Rebuilding Civic Life
• Walk Away from That Box OR Why Fixing Civil Discourse Requires Less Politics, not mr

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released new guidelines that dramaticaly cut down the number of childhood vaccines recommended by the federal government.

Apoorva Mandavilli and Benjamin Mueller, who cover health, explain what is being cut and how it fits into Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broader agenda.

Guest:

• Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter at The New York Times.
• Benjamin Mueller, a reporter covering health and medicine for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• Mr. Kennedy on Monday scaled back the number of vaccines recommended for children.
• Here’s what to know about the new childhood vaccine schedule.

Photo: Annie Rice/EPA, via Shutterstock

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Paris Marx is joined by Karen Hao to discuss how Sam Altman’s goal of scale at all costs has spawned a new empire founded on exploitation of people and the environment, resulting in not only the loss of valuable research into more inventive AI systems, but also exacerbated data privacy issues, intellectual property erosion, and the perpetuation of surveillance capitalism.

Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist and the author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. This episode originally aired in June 2025.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Karen was the first journalist to profile OpenAI.

• Karen has reported on the environmental impacts and human costs of AI.

• The New York Times reported on why we're unlikely to get artificial general intelligence anytime soon.

The rising cost of health care is among Americans’ biggest worries, according to recent year-end polls. Insurance coverage for prescription drugs has been decreasing as their prices have been increasing. Texas is the hardest hit state for the uninsured.array(3) { [0]=> string(38) "https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source" [1]=> string(0) "" [2]=> string(1) "0" }