Ben Folds on Kennedy Center Resignation and Surprise Album Release
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How is Project 2025 affecting arts funding and the Kennedy Center?
We're seeing the impact of Project 2025 in all aspects of our uh government right now, whether it's cancer research being cut, whether it's weather forecasting and the devastating impacts we're seeing when you cut emergency weather forecasting and when you say you want to eliminate FEMA, what happens? We're also seeing the Trump regime um uh dismantling museums, cutting back on the You have Donald Trump like literally doing a coup of the Kennedy Center, and people just really aren't going there anymore. Just all aspects of it are dystopian, and it's resulting in systemic failure in our country. I'll give you just different data points as well. I mean, one data point you talk about Cancer research. How could that be partisan?
But the Trump regime is cutting cancer research across the board, pancreatic cancer research where major breakthroughs are taking place. Like, watch this. This is a an individual who has who has uh been able to recover with a promising new vaccine and is now in fear that that's going to be taken away. Here, play this clip.
Your chances of recurrence are eighty percent and your chances of being alive in five years is twenty percent. He is four and a half years out without recurrence, part of a small cohort of patients who received the vaccine on that trial, who are like him, doing well without recurrence. Could it be anything other than the vaccine? We don't believe so. This is not a cancer where sometimes it looks um less aggressive than other times. This is a cancer that uniformly, it doesn't matter who you are, it comes back. So far it hasn't. It has not. Bottom line, uh I'm cancer free. Five years. Now the Callahan's concerned the cuts at NIH could interfere with or even stop Kevin's vaccine trial. They claim that they're not cutting back on any of the science, on any of the people who are really doing the research.
I don't believe that for a minute. But if I say to you Is it worth the money that the American public is investing, the tax money? What price do you put on life?
People were warning about this as well. Everybody was saying, here's what Project 2025 is going to do. And again, we're seeing what happens when you cut weather forecasting, when you cut emergency FEMA relief. And we're now in the heart of hurricane season. Here was a professor back on August 27, 2024, saying how Project 2025 is designed in one of its chapters to get rid of the national oceanic and atmosphere. Atmospheric administration. Here, play this clip.
You know, the fact is the Republicans have put out a plan. It's called Project Twenty Twenty Five, and people like Bill McKibben have written about this in the nation. And it is a very detailed plan for how to dismantle our federal infrastructure. Things like getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which literally just keeps track of, you know, data around what is happening to our Earth. You know, they want to dismantle the environmental protection agency. We saw what a first Trump administration would do, rolling back, you know, almost a hundred environmental rules, pulling us out of the Paris climate agreement. And what does a well organized second Trump administration look like?
If you want to know what it looks like, look at that project twenty twenty five document. It's very scary. By contrast, what the Biden folks want to do is they want to keep delivering and and
It was all out there and Donald Trump's trying to prop this up. With North Korea-style propaganda, state regime media like Fox, and also trying to control the arts. Control the arts. That's what fascist dictators do. I want to bring in legendary musician Ben Folds, because Ben, you were the first artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra. Um, it was a major part of Of your life for a long time. You resigned February 12th, like literally in a minute after the Trump regime announced it was taking over the Kennedy Center and it was gonna take over all aspect of the arts. They were gonna dominate it. I want you to talk through that decision, but you were able to record something with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center.
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