‘A racist, sexist attack’ / ‘Welcome to Fortress America’ / Quiz!

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‘A racist, sexist attack on … the true purpose of history.’ Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob calls President Trump’s executive order that the Smithsonian Institution abandon programs advancing “diverse narratives” something “straight out of Orwell.”
■ The order also puts Vice President Vance in charge of the Smithsonian-administered National Zoo—where The Daily Beast suggests giant pandas on loan from China “might want to start packing.”
■ An uninvited visit to Greenland by Vance and his wife has been scaled back under protest from Greenlanders.

Incredible shrinking government. The Washington Post (gift link, courtesy of Chicago Public Square supporters) says a “closely held” Trump administration draft plan calls for cutting up to 50 percent of government agencies’ employees.
■ Chicago-area nurses planned a lunch-hour protest today of massive cuts at Veterans Administration hospitals.
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “If the administration is working not to save money but rather to destroy the government, the cuts that threaten the well-being of American citizens make more sense.”
■ Wired has mapped the connections to Silicon Valley and corporate America for Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” …
■ … which Musk Watch—with receipts—says more aptly merits the name “Department of Government Inefficiency.”

Toddler safety on the line. The American Prospect: Amazon’s suing to abolish the one federal agency empowered to identify and recall highly flammable kids’ pajamas.
■ A Federal Trade Commission member fired by Trump tells The Guardian: “It’s remarkable that one of the last public statements I made before the president tried to fire me was denouncing the high injury rates and the working conditions at Amazon warehouse floors.”

‘Welcome to Fortress America.’ Travel Weekly editor-in-chief Arnie Weissmann’s counsel to those visiting the U.S.: Brace for “maximum vetting.”
■ A George Mason University professor of cultural studies posts to Facebook: “Surely no coincidence that my first entry into the country during 47’s reign resulted in 3-hour detention … and the searching of my phone and laptop.”
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch: The disappearing of a Turkish Tufts University graduate student—apparently for an opinion piece she wrote in the college paper—“is something I never thought I’d see in America.”
■ Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem reportedly wore a $60,000 watch as she visited an El Salvador prison camp Wednesday …
■ … a juxtaposition that historian Kristin Du Mez says furthers the dehumanization of prisoners.

‘They’re all bending and saying, Sir, thank you very much.’ That’s Trump, crowing about law firms cowering before his threats.
■ Among the latest: Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
■ Chicago-based Jenner & Block and WilmerHale are fighting back—suing Trump.

‘Why are white MAGA weenuses so scared of Jasmine Crockett?’ Columnist Evan Hurst spotlights a Democratic congresswoman from Texas, “the subject of right-wing manufactured outrage every week now.”
■ Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian celebrates Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth: “Do not mess with this woman.”

Watch that speedometer. Chicago’s activating 16 more speed cameras next week—even though Mayor Johnson campaigned on a pledge to phase them out.
■ On the plus side: The city’s waiving vehicle sticker penalties for those who buy one in April.

Tale of two cities (both Chicago).
■ A DuSable Black History Museum exhibit curated by Anjanette Young—a woman whom Chicago police handcuffed while she was naked during a wrongful raid on her home in 2019—showcases art portraying the trauma of women victimized by cops.
■ A (white) woman writes for Business Insider: “We lived in Seattle for 12 years. Life looked good on paper, but in reality we were miserable. … We finally moved back to Chicago and are thriving.”

‘Go 8 for 8 and give yourself a distinguished intelligence medal!’ Past Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner Fritz Holznagel invites you to “join our top-secret group chat” to tackle this week’s news challenge.
■ Q. 1 asks about a House bill “that would rename Greenland as what?”
■ Your columnist scored a respectable 7/8 correct this go-round.

👊🇺🇸🔥. The “Houthi PC small group” is columnist Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Week …
■ … and Elon Musk the winner of the second annual Dingus Madness championship.
■ Columnist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has named a winner—and many, many runners-up—in his “Fitting-Monument-to-Trump Contest.”
■ Amid what he calls “ the worst national emergency of our lives,” Reich sees “six small morsels of hope.”

‘We’re basically dead in the water on major news stories.’ The Associated Press’ protest of Trump’s White House ban is now in the hands of a federal judge.
■ Columnist and ex-Better Government Association chief Andy Shaw: Chicago’s media cutbacks are perilous.

‘Gathering all of this is enough to drive a sane person mad. But I am so grateful for your efforts.’ — Kind (or at least sympathetic) words from a reader.
■ We cannot guarantee that sanity is being maintained. But to the extent you find Square valuable, your support—even just $1, once—signals that it serves a purpose.

We were first. Chicago Public Square made its debut early in 2017. Please don’t confuse it with another site, publicsquare.com, founded in 2021 for a much different—and deplorable—purpose.

It gets worse / ‘Wanted: 12 million protesters’ / Media miasma

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It gets worse. Der Spiegel reports that the private data, phone numbers and passwords for some of the president’s most important security advisers are now freely accessible on the internet.
■ Addressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s insecure group chat that revealed sensitive information about military strikes in Yemen, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth—a military veteran who lost two legs in combat—put this in an actual, real-live news release from her office: “Hegseth is a f*cking liar. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”
■ She elaborated on Rachel Maddow’s show last night.
■ Politico: President Trump himself is shifting the blame from Hegseth to Waltz.
■ Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s denial that the chat involved “war plans”: “Let’s see. ‘F-18’s launch.’… ‘First sea-based Tomahawks launched.’ Now, I’m not an expert on war—these don’t seem like peace plans to me.”
■ Axios: The story’s scrambled MAGA’s messaging machine.
■ Columnist Garrett Graff runs down five scandals at the heart of this fiasco.
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “Despite the attempts to bury the Signal story, the scandal seems … to be growing.”
■ On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder: It shows an administration “openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights.”
■ Behind the scenes in The Atlantic’s breaking of the story: Apple founder Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who Daring Fireball proprietor John Gruber calls “an owner committed to the cause.”

‘This is what Trump’s administration is doing to innocent people expressing their rights to free speech.’ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst assesses what happened at Tufts University in Boston as “immigration Nazis—in hoodies, plainclothes, and masks that hide their faces—abducted a student from the street and disappeared her.”
■ One skeptical witness to the abduction: “I can buy that badge from a fucking costume store.”
■ The Tufts Daily student newspaper: More than 2,000 last night gathered on campus for a protest.

‘Feds are watching your sarcastic posts online.’ Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein: The FBI “is pimping itself out to corporate America to protect business executives from the American people.”
■ He shares an FBI assessment titled “Heightened Threat to Chief Executive Officers Following the Shooting of a Healthcare Senior Executive” (that’s a download link), which he says conflates outrage against corporations with terrorism.
■ The American Prospect: An intelligence dossier “cites high health care costs as a key source of instability in the country.”

Sick burn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department tells CNN it’s cutting 10,000 full-time employees nationwide.
■ Inside Medicine: A respected National Institutes of Health official’s been put on leave “and it’s pretty obvious why.”
■ The New York Times (gift link): The Trump administration plans to end vaccine funds for poor nations.
■ The Guardian: Public health experts are sounding the alarm about vaccine skeptics in the Trump administration “at war with mRNA technology,” a key in the fight against COVID-19.
■ Project Democracy’s If You Can Keep It newsletter: Trump’s targeted firings, probationary purges and government layoffs are all part of a plan to assume total control of the civil service.

Car shopping? Brace yourself for Trump’s 25% tariff on auto imports beginning next month.
■ It’ll hurt even those buying domestic cars, because it’ll apply to parts—many of which are manufactured elsewhere.

‘Wanted: 12 million protesters.’ Columnist Dan Froomkin: A Harvard political scientist who’s studied hundreds of 20th-century movements says that’s a magic number for the resistance to Trump—because, she says, no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of its population without accommodating the movement or falling apart.
■ The Washington Post says the White House’s media strategy is “to promote Trump as ‘KING.’” (Gift link, funded by Square supporters.)
■ The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner spotlights next week’s “firebreak” elections across the country that could put some restraints on Trump.
■ Don’t forget Illinois communities’—outside Chicago—election Tuesday. The Square guide to voter guides is here.
Media miasma. ProPublica founder Dick Tofel: Trump allies “will very likely, sometime this year, have the votes they need to smash the current arrangement” of federal funding for public broadcasters.
■ Trump himself last night on his social media platform: “NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY.”
■ The Federal Communications Commission’s reactionary new chairman is putting the squeeze on ABC’s parent company, Disney, over its policies on diversity, equity and inclusion …
■ … even as a bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners calls on him to back off his assault on 60 Minutes.
■ The AP was back in court today to protest Trump’s retaliation for its refusal to abandon the name “Gulf of Mexico.”
■ The AP’s executive editor in a commentary piece for The Wall Street Journal (another gift link): “Today the U.S. government wants to control the AP’s speech. Tomorrow it could be someone else’s.”
■ Pulitzer winner Ann Telnaes explains in cartoons “how autocracies take over the news media.”
■ 404 Media: “AOL.com is using AI to write captions for photos, which gave cutesy captions to photos of a man … charged with attempted murder.”

‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it.’ Critic Bill Carter says that was Conan O’Brien’s biggest applause line Sunday at the Kennedy Center as he accepted the Mark Twain Prize by quoting Twain himself.
■ Scooping a Netflix special to come in May, O’Brien’s posted what Carter calls “must-watch” video of the speech to YouTube here.

After After Midnight? Squat. CBS is canning its 11:30 p.m. (Central) show—abandoning that timeslot for the first time in three decades.
■ Today marked iconic Chicago news anchor and commentator Walter Jacobson’s final “Perspective” commentary for WGN Radio.
■ It’ll be posted here.
■ Your Chicago Public Square columnist interviewed Jacobson on WGN in 2009—at 41:30 in this aircheck.

Correction. Yesterday’s Square mischaracterized Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block’s connection to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump: A then-former partner was involved.
■ Jenner alumnus Ann Courter on Facebook and in Crain’s: “It is in the interest of every business to take the very real and present danger to the rule of law into account when making the decision whether to abandon a relationship with a law firm ‘under investigation’ by a capricious government.”

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