The News for 11/8/25
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We’ll get back to the music on 120 Minutes in just a moment, but first, it’s 12:30 and it’s time to check the news, for this week, November 8th.
The Kentucky Kernel reported Tuesday that a group called Peaceful Bluegrass Resistance led a walk through campus earlier this week and said they were in protest against the University of Kentucky’s restrictions on free speech and constitutional rights. The organization vocalizes its support to UK faculty, staff and students who feel “pressured by UK’s administration to remain silent,” according to the Kernel. Its founder told the Kernel that UK’s actions are a “bend to the knee” toward the Trump administration and Project 2025 and go against the image and values that Kentucky should portray. Over the past year, UK has taken a litany of anti-diversity and anti-speech actions in what its administration says is an effort to comply with federal and state laws, most recently freezing the accounts of what it calls “identity-based” student organizations that are primarily run by minorities and preventing preferred name and gender updates on student records, as the Kernel reported last month.
In other news, elections were held across the country this week on Tuesday. As reported by the New York Times, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Democrats were also elected as the governors of New Jersey and Virginia by wide margins over Republicans whose campaigns focused on anti-trans attack ads, and California’s proposition 50, which will redistrict the state with up to 5 extra seats in Congress for Democrats to counter against gerrymandering by Texas and other states, passed in a 2-to-1 landslide. These election results come on the heels of a new Washington Post poll out this week that shows Trump is underwater with the public on nearly every major issue. In commentary Tuesday night on MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes expressed surprise at how he says major institutions and corporations continue to be compliant and surrender to a president that is unpopular and only won his own election by 1 1/2 percentage points last year.
New York Times columnist M. Gessen wrote on Friday about the Supreme Court this week allowing Trump’s executive order to go into effect that requires U.S. passports to list the earliest assigned sex at birth of the person rather than their current or accurate sex or gender. Gessen said, “But if the new rule weakens passports’ manifest function, it greatly strengthens their other function: as a tool to enforce a gendered social hierarchy and to punish those who do not conform to it.”
In media news, The Guardian reported last week that the widely respected CBS News anchor John Dickerson is leaving the network after 16 years. His departure follows the recent appointment of right-leaning contrarian Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News by David Ellison, the new billionaire CEO of Paramount Skydance. CBS News also laid off 100 employees last week in what The Guardian refers to as a bloodbath.
Here at home, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford wrote on Wednesday that the federal government shutdown for the past month has restricted access to SNAP, the most basic aid to help people buy groceries. The temporary closure has sparked lawsuits, strained local food banks, and put 600,000 of Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens at more risk of hunger and malnutrition, Blackford said. She also reported that the Center for Economic Policy estimates as many as 114,000 Kentuckians could lose SNAP benefits altogether soon thanks to Trump’s 2025 budget bill. Last year, Trump got 64% of the vote in Kentucky.
Finally tonight, ABC News reported Friday that the death toll has now risen to 13 after a UPS plane departing the Louisville airport crashed and went up in flames earlier this week. Although unrelated, this comes at the same time that the Federal Aviation Administration is gradually reducing air traffic at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports by 10%. NPR reported on Friday that Thanksgiving air travel, which can be a headache any year, it says, is “one big question mark as the shutdown stretches on.”
And that’s… the news.