The MeidasTouch Podcast - Ben Folds on Kennedy Center Resignation and Surprise Album Release

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the impact of Donald Trump’s disastrous cuts across all sectors—from cancer research to weather forecasting to the arts. Meiselas interviews legendary musician Ben Folds, who resigned from his lead advisory position at the National Orchestra after Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center. Folds describes how he was able to release a new album recorded at the Kennedy Center while Trump wasn’t paying attention. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This podcast is supported by Talkspace. When my husband came home from his military deployment, readjusting was hard for all of us. Thankfully, I found Talkspace. Talkspace provides professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatric providers online. Military members, veterans, and their dependents ages 13 and older can get fast access to providers, all from the privacy of their computers or smartphones. I just answered a few questions online and Talkspace matched me with a therapist. We meet when it's convenient for me, and I can message her anytime. It was so easy to set up, and they accept TRICARE.

Therapy was going so well, my husband and I started seeing a couples therapist through Talkspace too. Talkspace works with most major insurers, including Tricare. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com slash military. Go to Talkspace.com slash military to get started today. That's Talkspace.com slash military. We're seeing the impact of Project 2025 in all aspects of our 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 dismantling museums, cutting back on the arts. 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. 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 that. This is a, an individual who has, who has 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 80% and your chances of being alive in five years is 20%. 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 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. Out of mine, I'm cancer free. Five years.

Now the Callahan's are 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 27th, 2024, saying how Project 2025 is designed in one

of its chapters to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here, play this clip. You know, the fact is the Republicans have put out a plan. It's called Project 2025, 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 data around what is happening to our earth. They wanna 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 2025 document. It's very scary. By contrast, what the Biden folks want to do is they want to keep delivering.

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. It was a major part 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 going to take over all aspects of the arts. They were going to 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 that has now been released on July 4th that the Trump regime is not happy about, which I wanna talk about also. But I want you to talk through first what you saw with this regime's grab and the propaganda that they were trying to, the propaganda they're trying to spew by controlling the arts.

Well, and you could help me with this too, because I'm a musician that's not used to messaging this sort of thing, but I've spent a lot of time in the last 10 or 15 years being involved in advocating for arts funding. I actually did a testimony before the House subcommittee I did a, I actually went to, did a testimony before the House Subcommittee on Arts.

I played and did panels at the Republican National Convention in 2016, as well as the Democratic. And I just, I feel like I know a lot about this, sort of the civics of this and the difference between the private sector and the public sector. What I find is when I'm trying to explain it to other people, not many people have the prerequisite knowledge for it. So maybe you could help me out with that a little bit. I mean there was why I resigned and then there's kind of another question that I

think people want to answer which is why not stay but let me say that what I saw was an abuse of power a very extreme one at the Kennedy Center people might not realize how the arts work in the government but it's very separated from the art itself the government partisan politics is separated with a firewall from what we say, how we say it, who says it. That's up to the people. And the firewall was breached in the biggest way. I mean, he let go of the board, which was bipartisan. Once the board was gone, installed loyalists, the loyalists came in and voted in, guess who? Trump to be the chairman, the head of the Kennedy Center.

The reason that that is so alarming is because now he can put, or they can put their fist on the scale of what is programmed, who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak at our greatest arts institution, the Kennedy Center. That's a real problem. The thing I have a hard time explaining to people is, why not stay and sort of fight it out? And I think I can really use some Ben, Maya, Sal, as coaching on this because I know I did the right thing.

Well, here's my thought. Here's my thought is, is that you don't want to be used as a puppet for the regime. And they're going to use someone like you with your distinguished career. And they're going to say, look, then fold supports me, you know, take a look. And what Trump does, and you see this, he brings the Juventus soccer team, an Italian football club to be behind him as he's talking about potential war with Iran.

He brings a group of construction workers to sit next to him and says, look, you see, they like me, but what he loves the most is celebrity. And when he just has Kid Rock over and over and over again, he wants a Ben Folds to say, look, here's an artist with kind of deep intellectual roots who supports me and a Ben Folds support, you should too. So that's my belief about why you have to leave

because you're just being used as a prop. Yeah, no, that's a really good point and part of what I should use to explain that. I mean, where I've been before with it is to say, well, I mean, look, we all grew up seeing there are abuses of power that I saw on television. There was Watergate. So in Watergate, you know, the Saturday Night Massacre occurs

and people are asked to do a task that they can't do. You know, like they can't morally or ethically do the things that the president is pressuring them to do, but they don't want to be subordinate either, so the only thing they can do is publicly resign. But then there are like the generals that are like the adults in the room like you know If the if you're talking about like, you know We're worried that that he's gonna have a you know a bad day and wake up and nuke somebody then it's good to have But that's not the that's not the case with me. There's nothing I could do there. I was curatorial

so, you know, I couldn't curate within the bounds of whatever I couldn't curate within the bounds of whatever kind of white Christian thing that they wanted to do there was another problem of it. But people's kind of, you know, earnest ignorance of the way that the arts work in the private and public sector is too, I find, a little frustrating when I'm trying to explain it.

Well, also, it's not fully funded by the federal government, I mean, the Kennedy Center. I mean, a lot of the money actually comes from private sources. And the most was like 90%. And the market was speaking that this was a viable, thriving, successful model. Of course, it has wear and tear

and always could be improved. But to me, it was a shining example relative to what we saw in the Soviet Union and how their arts were fully controlled by a central planning regime. In fact, and I know you've talked about this before, a lot of the origins of the Kennedy Center and the celebration was that it was different from what existed in the Soviet Union. And now it has essentially followed the Soviet regime central planning style control of the arts, which the original leadership of the Kennedy Center was kind of a reaction to. Can you speak to that?

Yeah. I mean, one of the legendary directors and conductors at the Kennedy Center was, they called him Slava, his name's too long to pronounce, but Slava Rostropovich, cellist from the USSR, but also a conductor, and the right-hand man, essentially to Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was like, he was, you know, his classical music does now, but he was a big celebrity.

Stalin really cared what this guy, you know, thought. He was like Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift. And Stalin would go and intimidate Shostakovich at his performances. He would show up and he'd laugh at Shostakovich from the stage, point at him, his generals were there flanking him. And Shostakovich was like, oh my God, my family's gonna get imprisoned.

I'm gonna get in prison. Someone's gonna get killed. And it's the same thing as tweeting out, I hate Shostakovich, right? I hate Taylor Swift. It might seem funny. Yeah, he's just up there laughing, but the pressure and the intimidation

put his thumb on the scale of the arts. So Rostropovich saw this and he defected from the USSR and he found himself directing the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. And what he enjoyed about that was a complete sacred firewall that existed protecting him from that kind of intimidation, from that kind of pressure and that kind of influence.

I thought about him when I resigned in that minute because I could feel suddenly, I sounded crazy before, and all of a sudden it's real. All of a sudden it's like, this is real. It's like, okay, there's not a firewall there anymore. When I bring in artists as a curator, are they safe? I don't know. I mean, can they say what they want to?

Yeah, I guess they can, but what's the consequence gonna be? They can't trust me anymore. And I can't trust them. And there's no trust. You know, before there wasn't a law that said you couldn't do this, so Trump did it. But the reason the norms are there

and the reason that America is America is because of the people that stewarded, not the institutions. And so, yeah, that was a real thing and I hate to step away from it, but we'll have to do our work outside of the Kennedy Center, I'm afraid, for a while. Let's talk about the album,

Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra. You were able to record this in the Kennedy Center. It kind of slipped through the cracks, if you will, and the Trump regime wasn't able to clamp down on it. Talk to us about the album, where people can download it, and why it's such an important endeavor for you and the release on Independence Day? Well one, you know for me personally it commemorates eight years of working with that orchestra and that's our nation's symphony orchestra. Incredibly proud of them. They're still our nation's symphony orchestra and they still need to be supported. A little tougher because they're a bit demoralized because their subscriptions are so down.

You know, I think a Washington Post reported they were down 80% across the board. I don't know if that directly is a number that applies to the orchestra, but they're feeling it. And so to me, this memorializes that, and I love that. Secondly, it stands to me for sort of a golden period where we were getting the orchestra to the point again of being an original, an orchestra that does original music.

You know, that is really difficult and expensive to do. When we did that concert and we recorded it, it meant enough to me to have this just recorded to pay for it essentially myself. And there was something that was funded otherwise, but it pretty much was me giving my fee and all this kind of stuff to make it work because it's really expensive to do. So it wasn't a capitalistic endeavor for me,

though I dig some capitalism at the right time. So this is recorded one night, two nights, and it was before the election, things were feeling a little bit eerie. I had chosen a selection of songs like a song called boat wait, there's more, which I'd written a few years ago, and the first part of Trump, which is like, it seemed like every day was like we were titillated at the next weird story. And we were all paying attention and like, that's the weirdest thing

I've ever seen. Like the, you know, the press conference in the landscaping parking lot next to the dildo shop. Wow, that's pretty weird. That's crazy. What's next? Then it's old. And then the next thing is even crazier.

So that's what we started the concert on was like, look, we're still, it's getting crazier and crazier. Are we really out of this? There's a song on there about families and friends being torn apart by misinformation. It was all very much in the air. That was recorded and then, you know, put away. And when the Trump regime staged their Kennedy Center coup,

we completely expected this to be shelved. I thought well, that's it I'm never even gonna hear the recordings there. They're somewhere in a vault But what you find about people that take things over like this is they're not really paying attention to the day-to-day I mean Deborah Rudder was running the center at a surplus some years Like by six million dollars. I hear crazy. That's nuts. I mean, they're not supposed center at a surplus some years. Like by six million dollars I hear? Crazy, that's nuts. I mean, they're not supposed to run a surplus. It's not a private business.

These guys have already got the subscriptions are down, artists won't play there anymore, and people are in general enduring a circus. And times I never saw people boo one time at a concert. Now, now it's like, you know, some kind of wrestling show or something. It's one of the things too, it's just not doing well. Like, you know, that there was a marketplace of ideas that was performing well. We were selling out every single show we did in my series.

Biggest audiences, the biggest crowds, the biggest everything. And then he puts his fingers. This is this is his history, though, right? He puts his finger on the scale. He tries to use artists as props, and he thinks that he's the most creative person and he wants to program. And then it fails. And then and then and then we pay the price. What's the last thing you just wanna say to everybody else out there who's seeing you

take in public stances in these difficult times when a lot of artists are not? Yeah, I mean, I'd like to say first of all, the people my age and my generation, we came through, maybe hit it in the 90s. We were all part of the shut up and sing generation and I regret that and I hope that you do too if you've at all withheld the things that you need

to take a stand on. We don't need to go full like South Park, caricature of ourselves and go out and everything's green but I think it is important to take a stand personally. Who are you? Where do you stand? Like they say, you can't be neutral in a moving train. You don't have to go full advocate of everything,

but let's not be afraid of losing half our audience anymore. The country is sliding quickly from the democracy we knew, and freedom of expression is more important than anything. So that would be to my contemporaries. To kids, be yourself, be a free. Take a stand on something. How you feel, who you are, what's going on around you. If we've been told for a whole life

that we can't spend money on the arts because it's not important, it's not important. Then why did the first thing they do go in and take over the Kennedy Center and our arts? Why would that be the first thing if it's not important? It's extremely important. It's the bedrock of self-expression. That's what I would tell people.

And I would now say we need to do a while we can it's feeling a little spookier by the day out there but look around we can still do what we're doing we're having this conversation you can go out and tell the truth with your music and use your microphone. Speaking of doing what you can do with your music your microphone your voice everybody go and download Ben Folds Live with the National Symphony Orchestra. You can stream it, purchase it, go and get it. Ben Folds live with the National Symphony Orchestra. Thanks, Ben Folds.

Thank you very much, Ben, myself. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to six million subscribers. The truth is more important than ever. Check out our new Truth Over Lies collection at store.mitustouch.com. All 100% USA Union made.