Hey, withpod listeners, before we get in today's episode, a big thank you to all of our devoted with pod fans for voting for us to win a People's Voice Webby Award in the category of Best Interviewer Talk Show, a very crowded competitive category with lots of amazing podcasts.

So it was all you, your votes really helped to put us over the top.

Thank you.

Donnie and I are just so,

so appreciative. I'm confident that the people of this great country and some who might be sleeping

right now and not paying attention will wake up.

And I am confident that they will take to the streets and raise their voices and push back

against those authoritarian impulses and demand that our democracy be restored.

Hello, and welcome to why this is happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, one of the, I think, frustrating at times depressing and dispiriting themes of the first

three months of the new Trump administration

has been watching lots of institutions basically fold, capitulate, roll over, sort of, you know,

preemptively comply with an administration or a regime that is clearly aspiring towards kind of authoritarian control over

particularly civil society. That's the part that I found most disturbing, you know,

universities and law firms that are independent pillar institutions of an open society,

that under our system of government, under our constitution, under our norms and traditions,

and under our sort of theoretical conception of American liberty, are free to act however they want

and then do whatever they want. And yes, they have to obey the law. There's regulations.

There's interfaces they have with the federal government. But generally a pillar of our free and open

society is that, you know, if you want to start

Liberty University and make a religious higher ed university, you can do that. If you want to have a

super lefty school where people go out to the desert and some remarks, you can do that and everything in

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