Weekly Roundup: American Authoritarian Empire: From Minneapolis to Venezuela to Greenland

Brad Onishi: Axis Mundi. Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, back after a two week break from our Fridays. Author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next. Founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with my co-host...

Dan Miller: Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. It's good to be with you, Brad. And anybody watching, I want you to know I'm drinking coffee from my new coffee machine out of one of my mugs. Brad, there it is. We talked. So, you know, do what you will.

Brad: This is one of those days, Dan, where easing into the weekly roundup seems necessary because it's been a week. It's been a couple of weeks of things from Venezuela to Greenland all the way to Minneapolis, and there's a lot to cover. We're going to start with what happened in Minneapolis a couple days ago and the murder of Renee Nicole Good. We'll then go to Venezuela and the arrest of Maduro and what's happening there, and the overtures of the Trump administration to invade Greenland and the larger picture emerging of Trump as a wannabe monarch. Lot to cover. Let's go.

All right, Dan, Happy New Year. There is a ton to cover, but I haven't seen you in a few weeks. You've got new coffee machine, new coffee mug. You're on a roll. You're doing a great job, and thanks for carrying the water here the last two Fridays. Really appreciate it.

Dan: Yeah. Well, the big news is that my football team is doing well, and I like to think that that's because of my fandom, clearly. So, you know, I'm pulling my weight.

Brad: That's good. You know, it's interesting. I feel like, I promise friends, we'll get going here soon. We're not going to do too much.

Dan: We're just in denial. Just like, yeah, oh, you know, let's pretend the world is normal for a couple minutes.

Brad: I just, I think, because the world is not normal, and it is such a harrowing time, I find myself trying to hold on to things that do give me these little bolts of joy and stuff. And so I, you know, I look at pictures of my kids, and, you know, my daughter is four. She got a skateboard for Christmas, and we're learning how to skateboard.

Dan: So hold on—the "we're learning how to skateboard" now, is that the parental, you know, I'm including the kids, or are you actively learning? I mean, do you know how to skateboard? Or is this like a first time you watch a YouTube video then walk the kid out to the driveway?

Brad: No, no. So, growing up, my main interest was surfing and bodyboarding, but I, you know, Southern California, a lot of skating, and so I actually was part of skate culture for a while. And I actually, during my youth pastor days, I ran a skate park, and there are, like, if you look at early 2000s skate videos, you will see me in the background because my skate park was, like—the pros would show up and they would do crazy shit in the church parking lot. And I'd have to be like, hey, the ramps are—no, you can't use it. Never mind whatever. Just go ahead.

Dan: You're young enough not to be thinking about, like, insurance liability and stuff. Like, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Hey guys, can you sign the waiver?

Brad: No, okay, go fuck myself. All right, see ya. Okay, no problem. Yeah, thanks so much. Jesus loves you. Launch some fish. You know, here's a pamphlet, here's a Bible you can carry in your pocket.

All right, here we go, friends. Let's get to Minneapolis and what is truly just a stomach-turning set of events over the last couple of days. I, you know, Dan, I think you and I are used to covering things that are really, really hard and tragic and painful, but I will admit this is a particularly difficult day to even jump into this stuff and to really analyze it in depth. But I think we have to, and I want to. I want to just start with—I have kind of a two tier approach I want to take here. I want to talk about what happened and why it's the same and different. And then I want to talk about the response, which I think is really illuminating and what I think is actually so telling about where we are in a very, very, very frightening way.

So here's what happened from my vantage point. The videos show this police officer who's now been identified walking up and putting a gun into a car and murdering a person. Her name is Renee Nicole Good. She's in her late 30s. She was a poet. She was a mother. She had just moved to Minneapolis with her wife and her six year old. To me, that's clear watching the videos, and if you read accounts that are not biased, and if you—it's—I'm not going to be gaslit into saying anything else. That's what happened. If you are not spinning propaganda, I think that this is such a momentous event because of who got shot.

And I want everyone to take a breath and please don't cancel me here in the next 30 seconds. Okay, we have covered on this show, we have in my work and your work, Dan, we have tried to convey—you as a white person, me as a mixed race person with a white mom—that for a long time, black people, indigenous people, undocumented people, have known that in this country it is possible for law enforcement to act with impunity against you and for the system to be not even close on your side. In Minneapolis, we had the murder of George Floyd. In Minnesota a couple of years ago, the murder of Philando Castile in his car. Okay, Philando Castile was shot in his car in ways that are different, but not totally different from what happened a couple of days ago.

This is not new, Dan, and I think that if you know—I'll let you jump in here in a minute, and I think you're going to agree with me—that putting the gun in the car and shooting you has been something that black people, indigenous people, undocumented people, have been trying to say for a long time will happen to you. I'm a Japanese American. They will put you in camp if they want. So this is not new, and I think, you know, feel free to jump in there if you want.

The second part I want to say, and I can say it after you go if you want, is it is another chapter in the ICE crusade. However, because it's a blonde white lady—now, does that mean she's more important? No. So don't get—don't email me and say that I think that white lives matter more, or this woman matters more because she's a white woman with blonde hair. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the people they've been scapegoating—it was first violent criminals have to get out of the country. And then it was, well, if you're brown at all, we will approach you wherever you are, at Target, at your kid's school, at the daycare, outside of Home Depot, and we will just detain you whether or not you're a criminal. We don't care.

And ICE—there have been nine ICE shootings so far. There have been people who've died fleeing ICE. The conditions in ICE detention centers are, from all reports that we have, disgusting and inhumane. People disappeared for weeks. Grad students grabbed off the street. That is all—that has all been happening. What they've been telling people who are not in the scapegoat groups, the immigrant group, the undocumented group, the non-white group—well, you're not part of that.

And now when you, in cold blood, put—or maybe hot blood, because it was whatever—but you put a gun in a car and you shoot a blonde woman, a lot of Americans look up and say, oh, they might put a gun in my car because I'm a blonde woman or I'm a white guy. So to me, this is a turning point, because they're basically saying it's not that you are part of the scapegoat group and your life doesn't matter. It is that if you stand against us, your life doesn't matter.

Adam Serwer, the writer, said the shooting in Minnesota is a reminder that while authoritarian governments may justify abuses of power by directing them at scapegoats or vulnerable populations, the goal is ultimately to deploy them against anyone they wish. And so they would tell you, it's Haitians, it's Somalis, it's trans people, it's Venezuelans, it's members of whatever gang they're talking about this week. And now it's this woman who is a poet in her mid-30s, is an American citizen, is white, and is blonde.

This is not new, Dan, and I want everyone to hear me. People of color, undocumented folks, vulnerable populations, have known for a long time they will do this. It is a next chapter in this, because all of a sudden, the white American who's been told they're not in the out group is now like, oh, so you're telling me if I even go watch the secret police that serve Trump, I might get—I might have someone just put their gun in my car and shoot me. I got way more to say. That's where I landed on the first bit of what happened.

Dan: Yeah, so I think the points you're making, I think I do agree with them all. I think this is one of those incidents that—we're not saying that this is new, but for many Americans who maybe didn't tune in to some of those other things, or didn't, it just didn't resonate with them because it wasn't part of their community, or it wasn't somebody like them, or it wasn't, you know, in a place that they knew, I think it does suddenly get the attention of some of those people who, for reasons I really, really don't understand, still don't understand why there was such a big deal about, you know, Floyd or Castile or whomever. And suddenly it kind of awakens that it feels like a threat, the threat that many people have been feeling and knowing since long before Trump. But I think that that's significant.

I think it's also just this notion of an expansion of the notion of impunity, of acting with impunity. So we've been talking since before Trump was in office about the unitary executive theory, this idea that the President has this kind of near absolute power and so forth. John Roberts and the Supreme Court basically handed him a huge win and said that, yes, the President acting in his official capacity—whatever. But I think for Trump, in his mind and in the minds of those around him, everything attached to the executive branch is like an extension of him. It all acts with impunity. Now it doesn't, but that takes a long time to work out, and you have to have Congress at times willing to stand up to Trump, and we've seen that in Minneapolis, they're not allowing local police to investigate. So you have the politicized Department of Justice, another branch of Trump's government, shielding the investigation from any kind of look from people on the outside.

But the point is that, though, you know, everybody else isn't immune, but right now, I think Trump thinks that they are, acts as if they are. Kristi Noem acts as if she's an extension of this. Pete Hegseth acts as if he's an extension of this. Marco Rubio, talking about Venezuela, talks as if they are an extension of this. And so you have this notion of expanding impunity. So it's not just criminals, it's not just people of color. Now it's anybody, as you say, anybody who opposes them, and can be defined as a threat simply because they oppose them.

Right now, maybe new facts will come out. Sure, but I'm talking about the same video you are, the same thing. The line was that this was undertaken as an act of defense because she was under imminent threat, because she was using her vehicle as a weapon or whatever. I just want folks to think about this. If you are standing at the driver's side window of a vehicle, it can't be a weapon. There's nothing—what are they going to do? Like, open their car door hard and hit you? Like, that's—you've neutralized any threat. You're inside a turning radius. They can't—they could only speed away from you. They can't do anything. So it's just not plausible. And we know that if somebody says, well, earlier, before the camera was rolling—think, okay, cool, but you don't get to walk up after the fact and execute somebody and then say, I did it because I was under imminent threat. That's retribution, that's vengeance, that's anger, that's not self-defense.

So I think all of those things are there. And I think that you also had, when you talk about the scapegoating and the out-grouping, the administration coming out and saying, well, she was part of a left-wing organization, you know. And somebody asked us, well, like, what? Like, which one can you tell us more? We're gonna have to find that out. We're just gonna manufacture organizations out of thin air. We're just going to assert that she's part of a left-wing organization, and when asked about it, not even try to pretend that there's an answer. We're not even going to say Antifa—that used to be the answer. We're saying, well, we're going to have to find that out. It's just thrown out to create a way to scapegoat this person who otherwise doesn't fit into those other marginalized communities that have been the scapegoats.

Brad: All right, so here's the response, and I'm not going to play clips today, because I honestly find what JD Vance said yesterday so triggering and so traumatic. The same with Kristi Noem. I'm going to read some of them, but I'm not going to play it because I honestly, it's painful for me to do it, and I don't—if you really want to listen to it, you know, you can go find it, friends. But I don't think right now I'm going to do that.

So JD Vance gave a press conference, and one of the first things he said is we need to pray for the officer. And I've maintained for a long time that who you pray for is really telling. I wrote in my book Preparing for War that for seven years I was part of a Quaker evangelical church where we had a prayer meeting every Tuesday morning and people prayed every week dozens of times for law enforcement, for the United States, for our troops, and we never one time in my seven years of going to that prayer meeting pray for peace, not one time.

So JD Vance expressed no sympathy, no sadness, for Renee Nicole Good's wife, for her children, for anyone. He just—it's pray for the officer. He then says that this was a tragedy of her own making. Quote, "What I'm certain of is that she violated the law. What I'm certain of is that the officer had every reason to think he was under very serious threat for injury, or in fact, his life." Why he's certain of that, I don't know. He doesn't explain that. It's just I'm certain, and therefore it must be true. It's a tragedy of her own making.

"You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that." Well, all of us debate that, JD. And you know, JD is really mastered to kind of bake in the bias to his responses and to his questions, so that he makes you feel like a good gaslighter—like you're the crazy one. We're all debating that, JD. We're all actually, you know, those of us who watch it, disagree. "When you look at all the angles of that video, it's very clear her vehicle went right for the guy. She actually collided with him. And then that's, of course, when he fired a shot. That's obvious." It's not obvious. And so on.

He gets to something else. He says—he talks about how they're not going to let Tim Walz and others in Minnesota go after the guy. "The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official without—with absolute immunity." He asserts, Dan, stemming from the comments you just made, that the officer involved has absolute immunity. I could go on. There's comments from Kristi Noem that I could make. I could flag.

I'll give you the probably the worst. And if you're already feeling triggered, and this is already hard to listen to, I would say, skip ahead here 30 seconds. Here's representative Randy Fine from Florida. If you don't remember Randy Fine, he's the one who says that we should nuke Gaza. So that's him. "If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what's coming to you. I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved."

So I want to make sure we talk about empathy here, Dan, because I think that's something that we've covered on this show for a long time, but I just want to talk about how this response to me is, even for somebody who spends almost every day studying this stuff, it really kind of shook me. I'll be really honest, and here's why. What we have now is a set of leaders in this country who find no reason to express remorse or sadness or sympathies to those who have been killed. There's no sense of like she has children, she had a wife. None of that matters at all. They're treating a woman who was sitting in her car as just an outright criminal who deserved to die. There's no debate. There's no—there's no investigation. There's no let's wait and see. There's no full investigation will clear the officer. There's none of that.

But more than that, I'll just skip ahead. Here is JD Vance gaslighting everyone, and he's not only telling you not to believe your own eyes. He's telling you to feel shame if you don't side with the officer who is an extension of the MAGA regime and Trump and who has full immunity. So what he's basically saying is, look, if you somehow are criticizing this officer, you should be ashamed. This officer has full immunity. Nothing will ever be done by the federal government to this officer.

So what he's really saying—and this goes off what Adam Serwer was quoted as writing earlier—we have a secret police force who wear masks and show up in communities and they can arrest whoever they want, and they can shoot whoever they want, and that is exactly what they're trained to do. And why—that's why we have them on the street, and we will not investigate them, punish them, or do internal kind of audits to make sure they're following the right procedures to keep everyone safe. The goal is not to keep everyone safe. The goal is to terrify you. The goal is to terrorize communities. The goal is to make sure that you are so frightened that you don't dare question the Dear Leader.

Vance's response here, Dan, is a couple of things. Everybody was like, oh, he was making sure the boss was watching? Oh, was Trump watching? JD did a great job. That's fine. Dan, I'm over that. JD Vance has reached a point where he is fine-tuning his role as a fascist leader. No remorse, no sympathy, no empathy, no negotiation, no ambiguity. If you audited his words, they would be certainty, obvious, clear—what I see and what I believe is JD Vance is true, and if you disagree with it, you're a leftist, woke, anti-American, disloyal person who might be next. That's what I take away from these comments.

I've had debates with colleagues—and I know I'm getting going. I'll throw it to you. I'll just let me say one more thing—I've had debates with colleagues of like, if Trump is no longer able to be President tomorrow, if he has a health issue, if he dies, whatever, does MAGA go away? Does the fever break? And I've had colleagues who I really, really, really, really respect be like, yeah, it does. And I can tell you right now I have said for a while, and I'll say it again: JD Vance is just ready to step into a role as a smarter, more strategic and as void of empathy or feeling or remorse as Trump is for anyone else.

And some people are like, oh, Marco Rubio really took the lead on Venezuela. He edged out Vance. And it's like, maybe, maybe Marco Rubio—he looks like at this point he's running on, I'm not going to say what I think he's running on, but I think he's running on certain things. And Vance is the one—if you follow the right wing Twitter people that I follow, and you check in on them every day, like I do, they all want Vance. Vance is their man. They see him as the next leader of Western civilization. This press conference scared the shit out of me, Dan, because we have a secret police who can do whatever they want, and the President and Vice President are like, and they have full immunity.

Now, whether they do or not is a thing—not is a thing we'll get to in a minute—but that's how they played it anyway. Sorry, I got going there. Jump in.

Dan: No, I think you're right. I think the right wing, as we know, loves Vance. He's fine-tuning—I think not just the fine-tuning the sort of fascist game plan that has worked really well for MAGA so far, and that the right loves. And so that's what he's doing. But, I mean, he's beginning his campaign for 2028. That's what he's doing. So he's laying down that mark, and he's going to keep laying down that mark, and at the same time, he's going to not really get into the wars that are brewing within the different parts of MAGA. He's not going to take sides, whatever. He's just going to double down on the rhetoric and keep saying it and using it and doing it and giving the clear indication, as you say.

Normally, this would—this would happen, right? In a normal world, some world that we used to live in, there would be the shooting, and you would get—and there have been sort of much more minor voices further down the food chain in the administration who've said, I don't have a comment on this yet. There hasn't been an investigation yet, you know, and so forth. But they're drowned out by the big players, the Noems, the Vances, who simply assert full immunity and innocence and, you know, all of this kind of stuff. But they would have said, we've got to figure out what happened. Yes, this is a tragedy. We don't know what happened yet. We feel terrible for her family, blah, blah, blah. This should have been avoidable, and they're going to look at things like, what were the policies for use of force? Were they followed or not? Were there other means that the officer should have used, rather than lethal force as a first resort, such as, you know, disabling a vehicle, or, you know, whatever else it is, and these kinds of things.

And normally, even if you had a presidential office that is very pro-ICE, pro-federal government, pro-whatever, they're gonna at least put forward a pretense of a kind of objective investigation. The FBI is going to look at this. We're going to look at this very seriously. The—I don't know, whatever their internal affairs thing is, or the guy is going to be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. You know, they would foreground all of that to at least give the impression that there's an actual investigation going on.

Now, you don't get that here. You get this: we're going to use the FBI not to really investigate, but to make sure that the Minneapolis Police don't get to investigate, that they're blocked out. And we're going to have the Vice President stand up and say, this guy has full immunity. There's really nothing to see here. There's nothing to investigate. And we've got the same administration that very blatantly and openly—because again, Trump can never leave the quiet part quiet—he's done nothing but direct the Department of Justice and the FBI after his political adversaries and people that he sees as enemies since he got into office.

So there's just no pretense that this is not just a kind of arm of MAGA being used to do what MAGA wants to do, and that it is self-justifying because of that. Whatever MAGA wants to do is justified because it's what Trump wants, what the Trump administration wants. So there's not even a pretense that it's anything else, which I think is the really telling point. And for me, as you say, highlights that Vance, who's always been this kind of political chameleon—he's full fascist guy now. That's where he's at. So we're just going to use power and force because we can, and we don't care about anybody else.

Brad: I think that's right. I, you know, I have so much more to say on this, and I think we could go on. I'll touch on this Monday. But you know, I just want to say one more thing, and then we can go to break and get to Venezuela, which is number one—and I won't elaborate here—there are considerations happening in Minnesota about pursuing state charges, which can happen, and I think we'll have to see if that does happen. There's also a sense of Tim Walz saying, you know, he's going to ready the National Guard, and I'm not sure how serious Tim Walz is about that. I don't know if Tim Walz has the audacity to do that, to sick the National Guard on ICE in Minnesota. That would certainly lead, I think, to the insurrection act being invoked. And it would lead to something like the beginnings of, to me, at least, of a real hot civil war, not a cold civil war. And that's—I'll just mention that here.

The last thing I'll mention is, and I'm wondering if you have any comment before we go to break, is just empathy. We have covered at length on this show—you spent however many weeks on Allie Beth Stuckey. I talked about Allie Beth Stuckey. I talked about Joe Rigney. I've talked about Elon Musk. All the people that want you to think of empathy as a bad thing. And I think one of the reasons they want you to do that is because when things like this happen, empathy is a starting point. And I've said that so many times on the show, it's not the end point. It's a starting point. Okay, what happened here? Let's put ourselves in the situation. Who acted in the way that is the right way to act?

As you mentioned earlier, Dan, if somebody attacked me earlier, or if something happened earlier and I'm angry about it, does that justify walking up to their car and putting a gun in there and shooting them? If you deny empathy from the—if you preempt it, you don't do that move, and you don't—you can get to the place where Vance does of certainty, obviousness, clear, and you can side with Vance. Everybody on right wing media, everybody watching Fox News, everybody watching Newsmax, can just say, well, tragedy of her own making. Yep. And you know, that's what's being said on at construction sites and at water coolers and in real estate agent offices and in all kinds of churches all across the world—the country. Oh, tragedy of her own making. She shouldn't have been doing that. And then we move on, and the preemption of empathy is a really important part of fascism, to my view anyway. Comment on that before we go to break.

Dan: I'm gonna go just a little further and say it's not just the preemption of empathy. It's a disavowal of empathy, by which I mean that there is empathy at play, but empathy for whom? For the officer. Pray for whom? Pray for the officer. And I talked about this when I talked about Stuckey, that she would talk about, you know, the evils and the dangers of empathy, but repeatedly, what she would do is, there's this sleight of hand where she would talk about how this is a real bad move, but then she would constantly be like, you know, if you're talking about abortion or whatever, say, we've got to think about the unborn child, and view it from their perspective, and what would it be like, and so forth.

So it's even a little more subversive than that. On the surface, it's we just shouldn't feel empathy. But it's actually sneakier, because the sleight of hand there is that they make sure, while they're saying we shouldn't feel empathy, which gives a sense of objectivity, it gives a sense of factuality—we're not giving into emotion here. We're just looking at the cold, hard facts. It's evident that she broke the law, all of that kind of stuff. We're going to pretend that we're not showing empathy, but in fact, we are also going to try to pull up those emotional strings, but always direct them toward the administration. Always direct them toward those in power. In this case, direct them toward a perpetrator of what appears to be, on a pretty plain viewing, an unjustified use of force. And so it's a disavowal, not even just a denial.

Brad: Well, if you select who deserves your empathy, you are selecting who is human. And that's what's happening there. In the abortion example, it's, well, the fetus is a human, and the woman who's somehow supporting that fetus? And that's what's happened. If you look at right wing social media on Twitter and other places right now, it's, well, this woman is a lesbian and this woman is a leftist, so she does not deserve your empathy. She's not human enough for that. Anyway, let's take a break. Be right back.

All right, Dan. Well, in other news—in other news, you know, never mind. It's like in other news, the Oakland baseball team traded, you know, middle reliever for a leadoff hitter and a minor league prospect, and now it's in other news, the United States kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and brought him here, and is directing a kind of regime—not change or regime correction—

Dan: Take us through it.

Dan: Yeah, so the background, and we know the background, but I think it's important to keep these things together. We know that the US has been applying pressure and leveling threats against Venezuela for months—the military strikes against so-called drug boats. We've all talked about that, the double tap strike, and all of that. Military strikes of questionable legality. There are lots of questions about whether they're legal or not. And I think I'm going to circle back around to this, but explicitly defended as military action. The attacks on the drug boats have been undertaken, and they've been defended as military actions to justify the use of lethal force. And you know, people say, why don't you just interdict the drug boats, or, you know, something like that. It's, you know, it's a military action. It's about national security and so forth.

Seizure of oil tankers, again, with questionable legality, complex questions of international law and so forth. And the claims by the Trump administration have been that Venezuela is funneling illegal drugs into the US, though most expert analyses show that Venezuela plays, overall, a minor role with regard to the flow of drugs, including fentanyl, the primary stated target, into the US. I don't say that to defend Nicolas Maduro. Like I'm not—I'm not here to defend Maduro or say that he's a good guy, but in the global, like, you know, sort of flow of drugs into the United States, Venezuela is not a major player.

Critics, including you, including me and lots of other people, have argued that the real target has been Venezuelan oil. Like, why go after the oil tankers? It's partly because we're after Venezuelan oil. And probably lots of people know by now, if they didn't a couple months ago, that Venezuela has arguably the largest oil deposits on Earth, and there are also other mineral resources and so on.

So what happens? We get confirmation of that after the US raid on Venezuela. In a high-speed military operation, the US entered—not just entered Venezuela, or Venezuelan airspace, or something like this—they went into the Capitol, into President Nicolas Maduro's residence, and as you say, abducted he and his wife. They were apparently trying to get to their safe room and didn't get there in time. They abduct them, they take them out of the country, they put them on a helicopter, and they fly them out and eventually to the United States. Why? Maduro faces charges that were first brought against him in 2020—charges including narco-terrorism, conspiring to import cocaine, and various weapons offenses. And the US says that he will face trial here. So that's all the background. That's the justification and so forth.

Okay, there has, of course, been international outrage and political opposition in the US, even by some within the GOP. Passing in the Senate—I forget which, just recently, yesterday, I think—passed legislation saying that Trump couldn't do things. The Senate, thank you. Senate. It's not going to go anywhere. Trump is never going to sign something like that into law. But it's kind of a break from the GOP. The actions have been denounced as violations of law and emergency UN Security Council meetings. But Trump's UN Ambassador defended the action on the grounds that it was not actually an act of war, but a law enforcement action, Brad.

So I talked earlier about the changing rationales for this. When it's boats in the open water that are claimed to be drug boats, and we don't know because nothing's recovered, they just blow them up. It's claimed to be a military action. Here, when it would be, as most people think, a pretty clear violation of international law on a number of levels, to send your military into another sovereign country and abduct their leader, they say it's a law enforcement action, because they were serving, essentially, a warrant for these charges, and that therefore the international community shouldn't be upset about it.

Okay, I have skepticism, to say the least. I think this is bullshit. I think you do too. I'll give it to you in a minute. But some reasons why people watching this don't think for a second that this was about law enforcement, that it's not really about Nicolas Maduro, and that it's not about drugs entering the US. The first, again, is that it stands in contrast to the arguments used in attacking the drug boats. We're going to call this something different. We're not going to call that a law enforcement action.

This isn't about drugs. Trump has also used the operation as a pretext to threaten other countries. We'll talk about Greenland. We'll come back to Greenland, but he's also threatened Cuba and Colombia and Mexico and said that, you know, you could be next. So there are not outstanding indictments against the leaders of all those countries from US courts. But the most obvious is this: as I said a minute ago, Trump says the quiet part out loud. All he's talked about since this happened is Venezuelan oil. That's all he's talked about.

Immediately following the attacks, Trump said that the US would run Venezuela following Maduro's ouster. But when he talks about running it, what does he talk about? He talks about oil. He talks about sending in US oil companies and so forth. And if people want to know that, I'm going to veer off for just a second. The piece of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement that is still, to me, neoliberal to its core is this idea that everything is about economics and business. And if you remember in the first Trump administration when they talked about how to fix the Middle East, remember Jared Kushner was going to be tasked with that, was talking about, like, development and building high rises and developing the beaches and, like, all of it. And people are like, what are you talking about? It's about making money. And that's all that Trump can talk about.

Brad: Trump also said, how did you not get the oil? You should have taken the oil out of the Middle East. How did you—do you remember 10 years ago? How did you not get the oil? And everyone was like, what do you mean get the oil? We're supposed to put it in bags and take it home? Like, what? But anyway—

Dan: Yeah, go ahead. So this is what he's talked about. He made no secret of the fact that this was the primary aim. And when he talks about running the country, it's all he talks about. In that press conference, there was not a single reference, for example, to democracy. We're going to build a democratic state. We're going to bring democracy back. We're going to fix elections. None of that. But there were 27 references to oil. They referred to oil 27 times.

You also get typical Trump bravado. He says they're going to go in. This is what a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, had to say. Rogers said, quote, "All of our oil companies are ready and willing to make big investments in Venezuela that will rebuild their oil infrastructure, which was destroyed by the illegitimate Maduro regime. American oil companies will do an incredible job for the people of Venezuela and will represent the United States as well."

The problem is oil companies don't actually want to do this. Here was a statement—I'm getting both of these from CNN. This was a statement from a quote, "well-placed industry source." We don't know who exactly said this, but this was their response. Quote, "The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like. The President's desire is different than the industry's, and the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday."

Trump is doing what Trump does. He's living in a fantasy land that you can just go in and take the oil and it'll just magically appear. The oil companies are ready to go. They're not. The Trump administration is meeting with them this week after the fact, I think, to try to convince them to do this. I've read things about how the oil is—I don't know, there's something weird about it, and it's hard to extract. Oil prices are low. It's not worth the investment and so forth.

The final analysis of all of this is a couple things for me. One is just the economics of it. It was always about oil, the double tap strike and all that stuff, and, you know, no consequences for that, the murdering people on boats that may or may not have anything to do with the drug trade. It's all been about circling around to this.

It's also just this personal act of ego of the Trump administration, of Trump as the powerful executive. We talk about Trump's secret police. He views the military the same way. They're like his little toys. He loves to be able to deploy them. He wants to do things with them. He wants to use them, and so he sends them into Venezuela. And he's all super excited that they were able to turn out the lights before they went in and got Maduro and all these kinds of things. There's no plan. There's no structure for this. This is about an exercise of force and will, because Trump can. Again, it's not governing. We're going to run Venezuela doesn't mean they're going to govern anything. He just wants the oil. That's all it's about, and he doesn't even have a plan for that.

I think one piece of this that's going to be interesting to see is what this continues to do with an increasingly fractious MAGA movement. Because, as many people have noted, Trump has run forever on this kind of non-interventionist America First platform, avoiding international escalations and entanglements. And there is a branch, or branches, of that MAGA movement that are not happy about this, and we'll see where that goes. But a lot of things, and that's sort of my overview of it and what it was about. Throw it to you.

Brad: Yeah, let me pick up on that last point of how the MAGA base that is behind this is spinning their rhetoric so that they can justify it. Because Trump was the one who told you that Kamala Harris would send your boys and your sons into wars, and that he would stop all foreign interventions, and he was the dove, and he didn't want to be out in the world attacking everyone and extending our resources and military power. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the tweets are there. So we could have spent an hour today saying, gotcha. Here's the tweets, here's the videos, and it's worthless at this point because they're hypocrites and they don't care. None of it matters to them.

But I think there's a couple of points to make about how this lines up with Trumpism. For the last decade, Trump has always been about economics. It's always been about money and power. How much money can he get out of the Middle East? How much money can he get from a crypto scam, from selling Bibles to selling sneakers? It doesn't matter. I mean, if there's still history in 50 years, if there are still human civilizations in 100 years, the books will say, or the whatevers that we have, the tablets will say a man who literally spent the run up—I went on MSNBC, Dan, and talked about Trump selling Bibles the week after he sold sneakers. That is the man we're talking about, a man who would sell you a Bible and a sneaker with his name on it. It was always, and always has been, about money for him.

But what is Christian Trumpism always told itself? Yeah, but he might be this guy, but he has our interest in mind. He's been chosen by God. He's the one that's going to do what needs to be done for the Lord's army. So how does this fit into that? Well, if you, if you like me, have made poor choices in life and spent a lot of time on Twitter following right wing people, you would know, and let me share that information with you now.

Marco Rubio, of course, took the lead on this. JD Vance was nowhere to be found, and Marco Rubio said, look, the US doesn't need Venezuela's oil. We have plenty. Now that's not what Trump said, as Dan Miller just chronicled for how many minutes. What we won't allow is Venezuelan oil being controlled by China, Russia, Iran. This is the Western Hemisphere, and we won't let adversaries use it as a base of operations.

What is taking place in Trump World is a redeployment of the Monroe Doctrine, the idea that this is the Western Hemisphere and the United States will control everything that happens here. Now that was originally a kind of anti-Red Scare, anti-communist revolution, idea that there would be no communists in the western hemisphere. And correct me, you know, jump in here, Dan, if you want to tell me where I need to fill in details. But whether it was Cuba, whether it was other places that were going to become communist, we were not going to allow that to happen. You know, Truman and others throughout the years have said that's not in our backyard. So that is what they're kind of redeploying.

Dan: And just, just—well, just go ahead for the context and go back and look, and we—you just had a few weeks ago this kind of statement of defense policy that very explicitly shifted back to this kind of Monroe Doctrine thing that moved away from the notion of, let's just say, United States as most influential global nation, and NATO and things like that. And basically that was the issue that sort of seeded the other half of the globe to China. It just basically said, if China stays out of the Western Hemisphere, they can do what they want. We're not going to worry about it too much, but we're going to exercise dominance in the western hemisphere. So this is not just a couple academics being wonky about this and talking about the Monroe Doctrine. This was explicitly articulated a few weeks ago by the administration as active defense strategy.

Brad: And to be clear, you guys are going to email me. So to be clear, the Monroe Doctrine, 1823, okay, and to be clear, that was about the Western Hemisphere and Europe not colonizing the Western Hemisphere, basically saying we are the ones who will colonize the western hemisphere, which is what's happening with Venezuela in essence. Later, this whole idea of staying out of the Western Hemisphere turned into a non-communist sort of thing, of we're not going to allow communism to spread to the Western Hemisphere. Anyway, we're not doing that today. I know you historians, I know you're out there, and I love you, and I know you're going to email me. Go ahead. I'm not doing it today, so please, I know I just did that in 30 seconds.

Here's Joel Webbon, a noted Christian supremacist and Christian nationalist. "Tactically speaking, the operation was phenomenal," talking about Venezuela. "Second, there is nothing wrong with American imperialism. Not only is it permissible, it is inevitable. Despite all the corruption in our government, America remains an objectively superior country to the vast majority of other countries in the world. Nationalism is an absolute necessity. Isolationism is naive." And I'm not going to say the word he put here, but it is the R word. I'll just summarize. It's good news that our government officials are talking about doing this to Colombia and to Cuba and others.

Dan, I'll just summarize what I think here, and I'll have more to say about this Monday. The way that the MAGA folks have been able to accept this despite their isolationism and their no foreign war stuff is: we need to bring Western civilization to the Western Hemisphere. Now, everyone stay with me when I say Western civilization, what I'm saying is they conceive of Western civilization starting in Greece, flowering in Rome, actualizing in medieval Christendom, going global in early modern Europe, and becoming the apotheosis, city on a hill, the United States. We, meaning the white Christian version of this country, are the apex of Western civilization. We need to bring that everywhere we feel like bringing it because we are superior. This is Western Christian supremacism.

So that means Venezuela, that means Cuba, that means Colombia. We are superior. We are civilized. They are barbarians. They are not, or they are not living in societies that are in any way humane. We need to spread the gospel of American Christian civilized western empire, and it will be good for them. It will be good for us. They should let us dominate. They should let us control.

So if you're wondering how the MAGA isolationists, who are all about no foreign wars, and I'm not going to let Kamala Harris send my son into battle—that is how they're thinking about this, at least for now. And Marco Rubio said, you know, I quoted him just a minute ago, this is about keeping that oil away from Russia and China. We are now at a clash of civilizations setting where the Trump administration thinks we are in control of the Western Hemisphere. And I, Donald Trump, am the king of the Western Hemisphere.

You can read the New York Times interview with him that just came out, where he basically says, the only thing limiting me is me, not the Constitution, not the will of the people, not checks and balances—me. So the way that Trump looks at it is, I get this part of the world that includes Venezuela, South America, Central America, that includes Cuba, that includes the Caribbean. Putin, you get Russia and probably Europe. China, Asia, Oceania. We'll see. But it's basically a clash of civilizations. The superior civilizations will take over the inferior ones, and we're going to end up with like three or four kind of, you know, feudal lords on the globe, and that's kind of what we want.

So anyway, Dan, I'm just adding on to—for Trump, economics, yes. For Trumpism, meaning JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Christian supremacists, people like Joel Webbon, people like all the folks on Twitter that I follow, it's about bringing Western, quote unquote, civilization to the western hemisphere. And the two are not one in the same. I hope I've made that point.

Dan: Yeah, it's a kind of ideological back riding, or intellectual back riding, over Trump's just action. Like Trump is just an ID. He just acts. He does it because he wants to do it. You can look at Venezuela and be like, they have a lot of oil. I want that oil. Let's go get the oil. That's what he is. This is the faux intellectualism that comes along, sort of behind that, and says, now let's invent the reasons why this was actually an America First thing. Let's invent the reasons why this makes sense. Let's invent the reasons why this is Christian and so forth.

Brad: Agreed. And I think that that's been true of Trumpism for a long, long time. Trump has been an ID, but then there's been all these other people that are like, well, if that ID takes us where we want to go, then we will get on board. Yeah. Let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about Greenland. Be right back.

All right. Dan, the same but different. Take us through Greenland. I mean, yeah, so take it away.

Dan: So again, Trump has been talking about this for a while, but he renewed the focus on Greenland immediately after the Venezuela events took place. The White House told the BBC this week that acquiring Greenland was a national security priority. So reiterated this right after going in and showing what they could do with a so-called national security priority in a place like Venezuela.

This came after European leaders issued a joint statement defending Denmark, and that joint statement followed Trump official Katie Miller, who is Stephen Miller's wife—she is also part of the administration—posting an image of Greenland covered with the American flag saying, "Soon," this notion that soon this would be an American territory.

The Trump administration says that it is actively considering a range of options to get Greenland. These include options like purchasing it from Denmark, who has shown no interest in getting rid of Greenland. The people in Greenland overwhelmingly do not want to be part of the United States. I read on none other than Fox News, Brad—look at me reading Fox News—that there's an idea of paying Greenland citizens up to $100,000 each to essentially buy them off. We talk about the economics. We'll just give you a paycheck and you'll be happy to be American.

But the administration also won't rule out military action. So here is the White House spokesperson. Quote, "The President and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the US military is always an option at the Commander in Chief's disposal."

And then White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, in interviews, and we all know who Stephen Miller is, repeatedly refused to rule out military action, and he said, quote, "Nobody's going to fight the US militarily over the future of Greenland." This, despite pretty bipartisan congressional statements against this, despite the fact that it would create a momentous crisis for NATO. I'll leave it to the foreign policy people to figure out, like, what in the world happens to NATO when one NATO country annexes a part of another NATO country and so on. And despite the fact that polling data shows that Trump's expansionism only feeds his national unpopularity.

Why does that matter? It matters because this is about Trump. It's about power. And for MAGA, as you just outlined in Venezuela, it's the same thing. It's expansionism. It's a kind of new imperialism. I say this to students all the time when we—I teach a global history course, and we talk about the colonial period, and I say, if you were a cool country at the time, like you walk into the school cafeteria and all the countries are sitting around, and you want to be at the table with a cool country, you need an empire. He wants an empire. The western hemisphere as a new American empire. This fits into that, and so it is tied in directly with Venezuela and the threats against other countries as well.

Brad: So I want to try to link what I said earlier about Renee Nicole Good and Minneapolis to this, and what I said earlier was that for a long time, people of color, black people, indigenous people, trans people, have been trying to tell you they can do this with impunity. They will shoot you with impunity. They will tell you not to believe your eyes. And that goes from Trayvon Martin to Breonna Taylor. Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her house. Okay? Philando Castile, on down the line, they will do this. So when they do it to Renee Nicole Good, it is not new. What it signals, however, is a different chapter, because they're doing it to somebody who's in a group of people that, for a lot of folks, did not seem to be under threat for this kind of violence. A blonde woman who's an American citizen with an American passport, and here she is no longer with us.

Greenland, to me, in the analogy is Renee Nicole Good, because for a long time the United States, unfortunately, has been in the business of toppling governments in South and Central America. For months now, we have been murdering people on boats—the government, at least, not we, but the government—I don't know how to phrase that. The government has been murdering people on boats, people who, by many accounts, were fishermen. Their lives matter, their stories matter. They have families. They are human beings. And yet they were sort of further from our minds as Americans than Renee Nicole Good, because they, you know—and I understand why, and I also don't understand why, and I don't want to get into that. And whatever. Email me if you want.

Okay, the United States has not been in the business of militarily overtaking colonies controlled by European countries. Does that make it different than what Venezuela or other places—in some ways, absolutely not. It's us colonizing and taking over through military might a sovereign nation. And whatever actions you know you can think of—Iran Contra, you can think about what we've done in Haiti, you can think about things we did in Libya. You can talk about all kinds of—the Foreign Affairs people and the historians of foreign policy can run that down for you.

What changes if you do this with Greenland is you completely destroy NATO and Europe looks at us as an explicit and open enemy. We are a hostile aggressor. If we will do this to Greenland, what is next? What does Iceland look like? And NATO is gone. And if NATO is gone, Dan, the post-war consensus is gone. The order that took place after World War Two, after the dropping of the atomic bombs—by reminder, we did—after the Holocaust, after Hitler, after Mussolini, the 75 years of what was put in place to make sure those things didn't happen anymore, after the Cold War, that is done. It's over.

And so Greenland is like what I said earlier. It is not new, but it's different, or it's novel, or it's a new chapter, however you want to put it. If you do this to Greenland, there is going to be consequences that reverberate throughout the globe, all the way from Denmark all the way to Brussels, all the way to Berlin, and we are going to be in a very different place, I think, as a world. Now, I could be wrong and whatever. I just don't think you do this to Greenland, and then as Americans, you expect that we are somehow friendly. Like, you're gonna go on vacation to London this summer and just be like, oh, I'm on a bus looking at Big Ben having a great time. Like, do you really think you're gonna be welcome in that way? Do you think that the world is gonna be the same as it was? I don't know, Dan, maybe I'm just—too much coffee back from vacation. Talk me down here.

Dan: I'm not gonna talk you down about that. I'm not gonna talk you down about anything. But another point of this that I think is worth thinking about—we talk about this shift—remember that Trump has decried people coming to the US from quote unquote shithole countries. He's explicitly asked why we don't have more Scandinavians, why don't more white Europeans want to come to this country? And what is he doing? He's threatening to annex a region that is under the control of one of those Scandinavian countries. It's under the authority of Denmark. It's like this forcible inclusion. Fine, you don't want to come here. You don't want to be a part of us. We're going to make you part of us. It's this mentality of consumption and control and aggression that I think underlies all of this, that is just another chilling dimension of everything that you're describing.

Brad: Let me just say one more thing before we go to reasons for hope, and that is, whether it's Greenland, whether it's Venezuela, whether it's Venezuelan people on boats, whether it's Renee Nicole Good and ICE—Jamelle Bouie said this, others have said it this week, and that is, if you stand in the way of the Trump regime, you are seen as something to conquer and colonize. And that means not just Venezuela and Greenland. It means blue states.

We haven't even talked today about what they're going to do to Minnesota and cut off funding and cut off Medicaid to blue states. If you're a blue state, they see you as a thing to colonize and conquer. I said this like months ago, Dan. This is the Lost Cause in reverse. The South is not seceding. The Trump regime, the Trump confederacy, is expanding. Instead of seceding from the union, they're like, oh no, we're going to take over the union, and that means you, Minnesota, blue state. That means you, California, blue state. That means you, Washington, DC, blue district. We will just send armed people in masks to terrorize you. That is how we look at you. So it could be Greenland, it could be Venezuela, it could be Minneapolis. That is how they see anyone who is not loyal to the King. I just think that's clear from this week. And if you're not loyal and they kill you, they'll just be like, well, tragedy of your own making. So anyway, final thoughts if you have any, or reasons for hope?

Dan: I'll go to my reason for hope, and it plays on some of the things we've been talking about. There was an interesting article I came across at Axios looking at data that found that most major conservative news apps have seen little or no growth over the past one to two years, which is wonky and weird and like, who cares? But here's why I think it matters. They suggest that, along with other factors, it reflects the splintering of the MAGA media movement. You get unity behind these things around something like what happened in Minnesota, but we're starting to see that fracturing and that splintering. We've talked about it. It was on point or on display, rather, at TPUSA, different things like this. I found this to be an interesting piece of data that shows that what had been a completely unified speak-with-one-voice echo chamber for years is beginning to fracture and fragment. And I think that that's significant. And I think that if there is a hope of undermining MAGA, if there is hope for 2026 and 2028, I think that has to be part of it. So I just came across that and found it to be a really hopeful sign.

Brad: I want to read a statement by Becca Good, who is the wife of Renee Nicole Good. Renee Nicole Macklin Good, and I'm just—I'm not gonna read all of it, but I want to read two paragraphs. I'm gonna do everything I can here not to cry. So you could do this, Brad. Let's read it.

"Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn't wear glitter, but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores all the time. You might think it was just my love talking, but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine. Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world, and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides, and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth. We are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole."

I'm just gonna say, y'all, don't forget that there is kindness and good in this world. There is love and togetherness. There is hope and there is wonder and joy. And like weeks like this, man, they're just weeks where it's easy just to think there's nothing good in this world anymore. And if we get there, then they have won. And if we get there, then there is no reason to keep fighting. And so I think these words are really, really important, that if we give up on kindness and care, if we give up on togetherness and solidarity, if we give up on the idea that we can love and be loved, then there is no more us, and we can't let them do that. So let's not.

We'll be back Monday. I'll have more to say about all of this business. Wednesday. What's in the code? Friday, with the weekly roundup. And got some big expansions coming for our show that are going to be starting here in about two weeks. One of those is that two folks are going to be helping me do interviews. That is Leah Payne, who many of you know from Spirit and Power, and Annika Brock Schmidt, who is somebody who's been on the show a bunch, and many of you listening know all about Annika and is just an amazing, amazing person. Both of those folks will be doing interviews with us on the show from time to time, and there'll be more announcements here to come.

We also have a new series that is debuting from Axis Mundi Media, and that is Reign of Error with Sarah Posner starting January 22nd, and the first guest, if everything goes as planned, will be none other than the illustrious Anthea Butler. So you're going to want to check into that. All right, thanks for being here, y'all. Happy New Year. We'll catch you next time. Thanks, Brad.