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Out-FM Program aired Tues., April 1, 2025

Sound file of the program is available below. Press play to stream or green down arrow to download mp3 file.

Thousands March to Demand Reversal of AIDS Funding Cuts

On March 29, 2025, two thousand AIDS and housing activists rallied and marched to the Tesla showroom in the West Village neighborhood in New York where they held a die-in. Hundreds carrying placards in the style of tombstones lay on the ground representing the victims that will die because of Elon Musk and the Trump Administration's cuts to lifesaving services and drugs. 

Out-FM​'s John Riley br​ought you some of the voices of those doing the die-in outside of Tesla's show room, as well as one of the rally speakers, longtime ACT UP member Eric Sawyer.

We also br​ought you the voices from Atlanta​, Georgia, one of the sites of 200 other Tesla Take-Down actions around the country that day.​ That report was prepared by Out-FM's Stahimili Mapp.

Attacks Escalate Against Public Broadcasters

In the second segment, our sibling producer Mimi Rosenberg (left), who hosts WBAI's "Building Bridges" and "Equal Rights and Justice," joined us for an update and analysis of the rising attacks on public broadcasting by the Trump Administration. Mimi is part of the Ad Hoc Working Group to Defend Public and Community Media.

Last Thursday, Trump called the Public Broadcasting System or PBS "a giant scam," "horrible and completely biased," and an arm "of the Radical Left Democrat Party." This is just the latest Administration attack against public broadcasting institutions.

In early February, Trump's Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, FCC, Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 Chapter on the FCC, launched a so-called investigation of PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) for allegedly arranging with their hundreds of local affiliates to abuse their noncommercial licenses -- the same type that Pacifica stations like WBAI has -- by promoting the products and services of their local corporate underwriters. Carr also launched an attack on DEI -- that's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- programs by public media. These are the hard-fought but minimal efforts to reverse decades of internal racial and gender discrimination. 

All this created the pretext for the longstanding plan, going back decades, to completely end the Congressional subsidy -- which is only a fraction of their budgets, but still significant, especially for many local stations, especially in rural areas. Although the Pacifica Foundation, which is the parent of WBAI, has not received any federal funds for several years, our network was also targeted for legal attacks in the Project 2025 report.

Last Wednesday, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene presided over a sham of a hearing by her DOGE subcommittee, skewering the heads of PBS and NPR and whipping up a climate to support zeroing out their subsidies. 

For more information about the Ad Hoc Working Group to Defend Public and Community Media​, email Mimi at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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