For centuries the U.S. government conspired to persecute, attack and marginalize the native population. When open warfare became too expensive, some factions of the government proposed a different approach -- what if, they wondered, we erase native culture? This inspired a massive industry of forced assimilation. Thousands of children were forced into boarding schools where they were taught to act more 'European' while being abused, exploited and placed into forced labor. Tune in to learn more about the conspiracy of forced assimilation, and how its long-reaching consequences affect the country in the modern day.
Federal agencies will run out of money tonight unless Congress reaches a last-minute deal, with both parties still deadlocked over health care funding. President Trump unveiled a 20-point plan to end the Gaza war — including a ceasefire, hostage release, and new governance for the enclave — but Hamas has yet to respond. And hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals are gathering for a rare closed-door meeting where Trump is expected to address them directly, the Pentagon isn't saying why it summoned military leaders from around the world.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Kelsey Snell, Miguel Macias, Krishnadev Calamur, Mohamad ElBardicy and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Lindsay Totty
We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott . And our technical director is Carleigh strange .
Ahead of a midnight deadline tonight, attendees leave a White House meeting predicting a government shutdown. President Trump pressures Hamas with a new peace proposal. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth convenes an unprecedented military meeting.
Democrats announce “no deal” as officials bicker over illegal immigrant claims.
Officials in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, defy federal law enforcement amid violence against ICE, as Louisiana’s governor asks for the National Guard.
President Trump and Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu hold a press conference on plans to end the Gaza war.
Leland Vittert is one of America’s most recognizable television correspondents. You’ll know his face from years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine.
You may have followed his tumultuous exit from Fox News in 2021, after clashing with the network over its coverage of Donald Trump—and then his redemption arc, becoming the host of On Balance and the chief Washington anchor at NewsNation.
But what you might not know is that Leland is autistic. He just wrote a book about it, called Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism. In it, Leland explains that he didn’t talk until age 3, was born severely cross-eyed, and struggled with basic concepts like eye contact, humor, conversation cues, and social rules. Middle school and high school were nothing short of hell.
So how did the kid we just described go from, as he says, “socially lost” to one of America’s most recognizable and charismatic voices? Training. Relentless, nonstop work. His father knew the world wouldn’t change for Leland—Leland would have to change for the world.
It is a moving memoir about how Leland—and most notably, his father—worked to “beat” his autism. You’ll have to read it to understand how.
Leland was diagnosed about 40 years ago. Since then, conversation has shifted dramatically—and so have rates of diagnoses. In the 1980s, about one in 1,000 American children were diagnosed with autism. Today, it’s one in 31. The questions of what causes autism and how we treat it have become so politicized that the conversation has left people either resentful, anxious, confused, or scared. And most critically, still without answers.
Born Lucky is landing at an especially interesting moment given that the Trump administration has put the topic of autism at center stage. Just last week, Trump held a press conference where he alleged that there was a link between the active ingredient in Tylenol and autism, and told mothers not to take the pain reliever and fever reducer and instead “tough it out.”
That’s among the many things Leland and I talk about in this fascinating conversation.
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Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In this episode, we sit down with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, editors of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts (U Arizona Press, 2025). In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class. As the inaugural publication of the Arizona Crossroads series, readers will find Arizona featured as a central node of borderlands roots and routes. Each section of the book intentionally centers Arizona within broader comparative and cross-state dialogues. Throughout, this volume highlights the ways in which personal experience, community building, and scholarly perspectives can provide a powerful space for community voices. Contributors:
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation.
Yet, in Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke UP, 2025), Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations.
Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?
Works mentioned in the episode:
Darcie Bernhardt, an Inuvialuk/Gwichin artist from Tuktuyaaqtuuq whose work is on the cover of Jen Rose Smith’s book, Ice Geographies.
Jen Rose Smith is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and Geography at the University of Washington. She is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity.
Chrystel Oloukoï is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their upcoming manuscript, black nocturnal explores imaginations of the night in Lagos and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline.
