Weekly Roundup: Minnesota vs. ICE: Neighbors, Authoritarianism, and the Future of Democracy

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Glad to be with you, Brad.

Brad: You too. Lots to talk about as always. Want to return, I think, as many of you are daily, to Minnesota and the occupation of the Twin Cities. Want to frame that in terms that may be helpful in regard to the Trump administration's approach to the ICE operation there and the overwhelming, organized, and inspiring response of ordinary Minnesotans to the violence in their cities. Want to then go to issues surrounding the Second Amendment and the ways that Trump and people in his administration have framed Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse who was killed by ICE agents last week. Finally, we will talk about the raid on the Georgia election office and what that portends for our elections this year, the dangers in that move, and what they mean. Lots to cover. Let's go.

All right, Dan, I have been reading, as I like to do—reading, still my favorite thing to do—and I want to start today by framing something that I think might help us understand in very clear and basic terms what's happening in Minnesota. So I'm reading from a book called The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and they argue this: "Our argument in this book is that for liberty to emerge and flourish, both state and society must be strong." So you have to have a strong state to control violence, enforce laws, and provide public services. That makes sense. If your state can't do that, they can't enforce the laws. If there's rogue agents or pirates or mercenaries or warlords or anyone else who can override the state, then, no, you're out of luck. You're not going to have a great country, government, et cetera.

However, a strong, mobilized society is needed to control and shackle the strong state. So you need a society that is built on the ground culturally, in terms of norms, in terms of practices, in terms of community and belief, to make the laws and the ideas of that country something that are a reality on an everyday level. The authors then go on to give numerous examples of a state that is strong, but in the way that it is actually strong in its viciousness against its own citizens. So instead of being strong in the sense of being able to enforce laws and provide public services, the Nazis, for example, waged a war of the state against its citizens. And there's plenty of examples from history, whether that's Mao's China, whether that's Mussolini, whether that's whoever may be—Pol Pot. It's kind of the distinction between a strong state and an authoritarian state.

Dan: An authoritarian, autocratic state is not what they mean by a strong state that would preserve rights and make sure that rule—you know, laws are enacted equally for everybody and so forth.

Brad: Completely. And this is an area where you're so much more well-read and an expert than I am in terms of social theory, but yeah, I agree with everything you just said. And so they say later on page 24, this will be my last quote: "We need a state that has the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts, and provide public services, but is still tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organized society."

One of the arguments I've made, Dan, over the last six months is that democracy has become a kind of empty signifier for people, that when you say "save democracy," a lot of people are like, "Well, what does that even mean? What does the government do for me? What does my participation in society actually affect? Why would I think that, like, quote-unquote 'saving democracy' would make my life better, or my family's life better, or give me more ability to, like, buy a home or be safe or have a good future for my children?"

And the reason I bring all that up is I gestured at this last week, but I want to flesh it out a little further in our first segment today. I think what we're seeing in Minnesota is basically a battle of tyranny and an authoritarian state, as you just said, versus an assertive and strong locally organized movement of the people. And that's how I think we should think about what's going on there. This is how democracy is born.

Democracy—and I know there's plenty of podcasts out there, there's plenty of wonks out there, there's plenty of folks out there that are like, "Hey, what does this mean for the Democratic Party? Trump's overplayed his hand. Trump has gone too far. This is an opening for the Dems." And you know what? I understand that. We've done plenty of those kind of conversations on the show. This is a moment to me that feels more about the people in Minnesota and what they are inspiring and showing and demonstrating, rather than what talking points the Dems might use today in order to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I know that stuff's important. I know what happens in terms of process in parliamentary order in the Senate is important, but I don't want to do that today.

So let me say one more thing, and then I'll throw it to you and see what you think here. But Adam Serwer just had a blockbuster piece this week at The Atlantic. I think Adam Serwer is one of the most insightful and poignant writers out there. He was on the ground in Minnesota. He was doing ride-alongs with activists and organizers. He wrote "Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong." What they discovered in the frozen north, talking about ICE, was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers, at the very least, risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.

So here we have a decentralized but organized, nonviolent movement of the people trying to keep tyranny out of their communities. The number of Minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans—people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. They can be divided into a few groups, but for the most part, Dan, these are not people who are like you and I, thinking about politics all day, every day, or religion. They're not people who are at protests every week for one issue or another. Some of them are at the most risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents. These are the people who are known as ICE Watch, and this is where you would categorize Alex Pretti.

But let me just finish with this, Dan, and I'll throw it to you. If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, Serwer writes, you could call it "neighborism"—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn't be more extreme. Vice President Vance said, "It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, 'I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don't want to live next to four families of strangers.'" Covered that on this show, talked at length about that quote from Vance.

Minnesotans, Serwer continues, are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors, whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is arguably a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America. Thoughts on this whole idea of neighborism versus tyranny, democracy versus authoritarianism on the ground in the Twin Cities?

Dan: Yeah, it's a powerful citation there, and that article—I like that term "neighborism." We've talked about this, and I get, you know, sort of wonky on the Democratic stuff. So when people talk about democracy, they've got institutional notions of democracy and parties and institutions and practices like voting, and those things are all real and important and so forth. But you have what people would call sort of substantive conceptions of democracy. I think that's what this is. And I was maybe cliché, but it's still powerful—like Lincoln's language of a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, that concept of the people.

And one of the things I've talked about and that I write about is that the democratic people, the demos, I think in that organic sense, is defined because it's expansive. It really is, in principle, all the people, as opposed to populism, which is about some of the people—the elite, or whoever the real Americans are, or whatever. And that's what you have. You have a populist people versus a democratic people here. And I think that notion of neighborism captures that this is everybody who's my neighbor, my goddamn neighbor—that's who, like, the person who lives near me, the person who's in my neighborhood, the person who's in my area.

And I think this is—I think it has been powerful and inspiring to see. I think there's all kinds of directions you can go with this. There's all the "Minnesota nice" stuff, and I've read criticisms of that from people on the right who say that they're all nice and neighborly, and look how they're treating law enforcement. Look what they're doing to be, quote-unquote, "nice" to their actual neighbors—risking their lives, standing up, and doing these things.

I think the notion that, to go back to the quote you were reading from The Narrow Corridor text, the notion of an assertive, well-organized society—all that the Trump world can call this is obstruction. They keep swinging at it and wanting to say it's obstruction of justice. Being in public is not obstruction of justice. Blowing whistles is not obstruction of justice. Knowing your constitutional rights and doing things like saying, "You know what, I can video-record what's happening in a public space if I want to, and I'm not violating anybody's rights"—none of that is obstruction. It is an assertive, well-organized society that, in this case, is using that organization and asserting itself for the protection of those around it and for the protection—if we wanted to put a Christian spin on it, we don't have to do that—but as I said, arguably a Christian principle for the least of these, for the marginalized, for the people who are being oppressed, for the victims of state power, and standing up for them.

So I think it's incredibly moving. The staying power of it, I think, is really significant. Every time the Trump administration has tried to turn up the heat, they've been met with equal resistance. And I think it's—I don't think there's enough we can say about how significant this is, and the blueprint that this is for opposition to the authoritarian, populist ideology and practices of the Trump administration.

Brad: What's amazing to me—I agree with everything you just said. And so, again, I think I said this last week, I'll say it again: If in 50 or 100 years we still have books, and there's still humans to read them, and all of that stuff, you're going to look at a moment like this, and we're going to think about it like we used to think of the Roman Empire. I remember first starting to study the Roman Empire in sixth grade, seventh grade. And you read these accounts, and you read about the Roman Empire, about the Senate having debates, you know, off in a corner of the empire in the capital, and then people on the ground doing something else.

I just think this is a moment where there is a chasm between Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and what those moms and nurses and neighbors and organizers and everyday people are doing in minus-10-degree weather in Minnesota. And I don't say this often, and I know that it's been hard to find ways for many of you out there to feel this over the last years and decades, but when I see what's happening in Minnesota with those people, I am proud to be an American. If you want to think about a movement that would emerge from what is happening in the Twin Cities, it is a nonviolent, decentralized organization of people who say, "We will not allow tyranny to rule us. We will not allow coercive, manipulative, powerful men to overrun us. We will not let you kidnap us. We will not let you take us." I've never been more proud to be an American than when I see what they're doing and then the inspiration they're spreading all over the country, small towns and big cities. That's number one.

The only way that folks on the MAGA side can interpret this is—and I'm quoting now a Fox News article—as a "national network of socialist, communist, and Marxist-Leninist cells." What editor allowed that to go through, Dan? Socialist, they're socialist, communist, and Marxist-Leninist. Is that possible, Dan Miller, you, a learned man who has studied these things? Can you be all three of those things? Is that possible?

Dan: Usually communist and Marxist-Leninist would be redundant for—I mean, you know, we can get detailed about it. Anyway, I'll put that out there.

Brad: Kash Patel is supposedly opening an investigation into the Signal group text chats that Minnesota residents are using, saying that he wants to know if, by them sharing the locations of ICE agents, they are putting, quote, "those agents in harm's way." It's amazing that he's against Signal chats when, apparently, that's how the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense plan wars against foreign enemies. But I guess, you know, the moms and the nurses, the school teachers and the clergy in Minnesota aren't allowed to do that. That's interesting to me.

Let me make a quick point. I'll throw it to you, and we can move on. Was talking with somebody in our Discord who I often converse with about these things, and they framed it this way. They said, "Look, this is Dawson"—thanks, Dawson, for all your contributions. They said, "Look, ICE is doing counterinsurgency work. It's counterinsurgency warfare. If you look at it that way, not as immigration enforcement, not as taking criminals out of communities, but as counterinsurgency, as an invasion, then it makes sense."

And Dan, I have said this for a long time on this show: Donald Trump is invading America. MAGA nation is invading the rest of the country. It is not secession of the Confederacy. It is invasion of the MAGA. That is what we have here. If you just think about it that way, they're invading the country. MAGA nation is invading the country—LA, Memphis, DC, and the Twin Cities.

You know, if you remember when Trump and Hegseth had all the generals in the same place—remember when Hegseth got all the generals in the same place and he did his Jazzercise pump-up speech thing? Trump said after him, we should use American cities as military training for the military. Now, why would you use counterinsurgency tactics? Because you think your enemies are terrorists. This is how Freddy and Renee Good were labeled after their murders. They were called terrorists. And what jarred the country, unfortunately, as we've noted several times on the show, is that when it's a white woman in a car or a white man who's a nurse, more of the nation looks up, unfortunately, than when it's Philando Castile or Trayvon Martin or Breonna Taylor or anyone else.

But they were called terrorists. You do counterinsurgency. You invade these cities because you think that the people there are domestic enemies. So they want to suppress political opposition, and they want to do that with very poorly trained ICE agents—people who have been trained for 47 days. These are not specialists. This is not the Green Berets. This is not the Navy SEALs. These are people who have no idea what they're doing. Clearly. Nonetheless, ICE is engaging in an explicitly wartime recruiting policy. They are saying we're in a war. And Dan, you and I have covered on this show for years—my book is, Dan, my book is called Preparing for War. I had a couple times when I would show up at events and people like, "Hey, loved your book, you know, kind of an aggressive title. I don't know. I just didn't appreciate it."

Dan: Aren't you painting with a broad brush, Brad? Aren't you—not a little broad? Is it not a little aggressive? It's not a little hyperbolic to call it that? And then here we are.

Brad: So here's Steve Bannon: "If you blink in Minneapolis, you'll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philly, to Los Angeles, to New York." Bannon says Trump must, quote, "put the insurgency down immediately." Dan, this is neighborism, which, to me, is the seed of real democracy. Neighborism is the seed of democracy—the people sharing power, the people saying no to a tyrant, the people saying no to coercion, manipulation, to people taking their freedom away through violence. The people saying, "My neighbor is my neighbor, that together you cannot defeat us" and counterinsurgency against people considered terrorists at the whim of an aging, demented, sad, narcissistic tyrant who thinks this is the way to win the world. Thoughts on this?

Dan: Yeah, so I've got a few that tie in with that, with different points that you're making. One is, I think, is worth noting—and this is a lesson from other civil rights movements, the African American civil rights movement, queer civil rights movements—one of the things that happens when you get, again, that assertive, well-organized society, a social resistance to authoritarian or dictatorial policies is, unfortunately, it leads to sacrifice, because what it does is it shows the violence that is being enacted against Americans. And I think the blueprint for this, for many people, is fire hoses and attack dogs in the African American civil rights movement. It's clubbing queer people out of a club, you know, in Stonewall, or whatever it is, that kind of thing. And we've seen that.

And so it works because it is bringing into view what this really is. And we could get into the sort of real politic of it. We could get into the polling of it. We could get into image after image after image of heavily armed military figures storming into buildings and knocking people down and doing all these kinds of things. It brings that violence into view, and that's—it's having an effect. That is part of how these resistance movements work, is by refusing to give into authority, the authoritarians have to exercise that force.

Brad: Yes, and that's when we see them for what they are. That's what sort of brings that into view.

Dan: And I think that it's worth noting that, but we can see those parallels, I think, with other kinds of civil rights movements that have happened in the past. I think I agree with you absolutely in talking about, you know, if somebody were to say, "Show me democracy," I'm going to point at Minnesota. I'm not going to point at shutdown discussions in DC. But at the same time, I recognize, like, if I want to put my wonky or academic hat on, we talk about institutional democracy and what I call substantive democracy. They're both on display there. And when they can work in tandem, it can be really powerful.

So when you can wake up the DC Democrats, the institutional mechanisms of democracy, to use that leverage from popular democracy to try to create the opening for undertaking real action against ICE—by breaking it off from funding bills and the other things that they're talking about in Washington—I think that's significant. I think that's what we have to have, is like those two pieces together. And I think rarely do we actually get to see that happen.

And then the last one, you know, talking about Patel opening an investigation. There's also an element of this where, you know, people talk about the "taco idea"—Trump always chickens out. And I was reading this week about, you know, Wall Street has basically started tuning out his tariff threats. And there was an analysis by, maybe it was Bloomberg, maybe it was Fortune—I forget who did it—but it was something like 23% of his tariff threats have actually kind of gone into effect. And so they've started shrugging that off.

I think we're starting to get some of the same thing with the whole "we're opening an investigation into dot-dot-dot." Opening an investigation is easy. Taking a politicized Department of Justice and an FBI and saying, "Go investigate them" is easy. Prosecuting is hard—actually doing something with the investigation. And I think that it's starting to lose its teeth because it's such an overused weapon by the Trump administration, and they lose over and over and over and over again when it comes to prosecution and enforcement that I think that's also one of the mechanisms they've had that's starting to creak under the strain of not really doing anything. It's okay, fine—launch the investigation, send the FBI person who's going to interview a legislator about saying that soldiers don't have to follow unlawful orders. Cool. They interviewed me. Now, what? What do you got? Because, you know, it's not going to stand up in court. You know that it's not going to lead to a prosecution. And I think that's another piece to watch is if some of these mechanisms that have felt really effective for the last year start to lose that efficacy, because it's a lot of sound and fury, and it signifies nothing, oftentimes.

Brad: Just to close out this segment, I want to comment on the fact that Bovino is gone, which feels like a victory. Tom Homan has been put in. And I think that Trump is trying a kind of bait-and-switch here. And here's what I mean. I think when it was announced that Bovino was going to be sent back to El Centro, California, which, by the way, if you've been to El Centro, California, it is the furthest corner of the United States. I have been there many times, actually, for various reasons. And El Centro could not—I mean, it is one of the furthest southwest points of the United States. There is—it is a very small place. There's no offense to El Centro, but it is not a place where things are happening in terms of national events.

Dan: Bovino has been put out to pasture, is what you're saying. He's been essentially banished to the outer reaches of ICE and Border Patrol sorts of areas.

Brad: So I think a lot of folks were like, "Okay, victory." And it was, don't get me wrong. Bovino being gone—his whole shtick, his whole like, "I'm walking and I'm ordering, and I'm doing my little order, my little hand gestures, and I'm a tough guy"—that feels good. Homan is in. They are in their back heels when it comes to what happened with the two murders. It was too far. We've got Republican senators, we've got Republican mayors. We've got people saying that we've got to recalibrate. According to Abbott, governor of Texas, this seems like victory.

However, nothing has changed on the ground. There are still 3,000 agents in Minnesota. Tom Homan confirmed that. Ryan Cooper, writing for The Prospect, has said basically nothing has changed when it comes to the lived experience of ICE in the Twin Cities. So do not think that Trump has backed off. Do not think that he sent 1,500 ICE agents away, or 80% of the manpower somewhere else. That's not happened, and this is still very much ongoing.

And just one example of that is this morning, Don Lemon was arrested, along with other Black people, and those people were—there's a journalist, and also journalists like Don Lemon, and there were activists in the Black community that were arrested. To me, that was strategic. When you arrest the Black journalists and activists, you're throwing something to the Fox News crowd and the Matt Walsh, William Wolfe, Nick Fuentes crowd of like, "Look, we arrested the Black people. We're still doing stuff, guys, don't worry."

When we got rid of Bovino, we're still—I think they're trying to toe the line here. I think they're trying to do an optics shift of like, "Oh yeah, we're recalibrating. We're backing off a little bit. The senators are scared. The governors are a little worried." But they're also, on the other side, saying to their base, saying to their hardcore "I want a race war" people, "Oh no, we're still there. We still got 3,000 guys there. We're still arresting people like these Black clergy and these Black journalists. Don't worry, we're still doing the race war that you wanted. Don't need to think we backed off."

So I just want to make sure people understand that ICE is not out of the Twin Cities. So final thoughts, or should we go to Second Amendment?

Dan: I'll go to the Second Amendment.

Brad: All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back. We'll get into the Second Amendment is now woke. Who knew?

Brad: All right, Dan, take us through the ways that the Second Amendment has become front-page news in the wake of the murder of Alex Pretti.

Dan: Yeah. So Alex Pretti, as people know—I think by now, everybody has seen the videos and the video analyses and so forth—various things. He's prone on the ground, disarmed at the time that he is shot and killed, multiple shots, multiple agents. Initially, they said he was brandishing a weapon. It was a phone. They said he was attacking agents. He was moving away from them, trying to help somebody stand up. All of that sort of stuff.

Well, what I think really pushed us over the top—and we talked about this—it was the notion that he was accused of brandishing a weapon. But it turns out that, yes, he had a concealed weapon, but he was a licensed concealed-carry permit holder. Had a loaded firearm and, I guess, a couple magazines of ammunition. Did not make any move to do anything with the gun. Did not reach for the gun, as I say, was disarmed by ICE agents at the time that he was killed.

And what's interesting about this, a number of things—number one, you had, and we keep getting this, Brad, like we've talked about a million times, the states' rights thing is now a Democratic cause and the Democratic language, when for years it's been the Republicans who talk about states' rights and so forth. Well, here you had a bunch of right-wing MAGA people who suddenly, as you say, were opposed to Second Amendment interpretations.

Now I'm setting aside personal views of the Second Amendment and how has it been interpreted, and should it be interpreted the way that SCOTUS has for decades, and all that sort of stuff. The bottom line is, in Minnesota, he was a legal carrier. In that context, at a protest, had a legal right to carry a concealed weapon.

So what did you have? Well, you had Greg Bovino, who said this: "We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don't count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct, and impede law enforcement officers, and most especially when you mean to do that beforehand." That language of "those"—imagine this, somebody on the extreme right in the US saying "your Second Amendment rights don't count."

Kash Patel, we just mentioned, said, "You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines." Kash Patel is one of the highest law enforcement officers in the country and just baldly misstates the facts of Minnesota law and the laws in a lot of other places that would have allowed the same thing.

There was a prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles who made news because he was on social media and he said, "If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there's a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don't do it."

Kristi Noem: "I don't know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign."

Stephen Miller described Freddy as an attempted assassin. That was the initial assessment there.

And then Donald Trump said, "Certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun. Hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room would view that as a very unfortunate incident. Okay, everyone, unless you're a stupid person." But then he went on to say, "I don't like that he had a gun. I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say it's a very unfortunate incident," on and on and on.

What's the point? You had, number one, the role reversal again, where you have—remember, this is Minnesota. This is a state that the GOP wants to win. We have talked before all of this really blew up about Walz saying he's not going to run for reelection, and they were targeted with a childcare scandal, childcare fraud investigations, and all of these other things. GOP hoping to make inroads there. And now you have this largely Democratic state and Democrats of different kinds and legal experts coming out and saying, "Hold up. GOP, you've spent decades arguing for these rights, defending these rights, arguing that this is how the Second Amendment should be interpreted, arguing that these are fundamental rights. And now you're the ones who are coming out when it's convenient and saying that this doesn't work."

The Trump administration has the NRA and all kinds of other groups, gun rights groups, Minnesota groups, national groups, coming against them now because of their Second Amendment swing here. So this is another piece of this that has turned into a big deal.

What stands out to me the most, though, is this. So we talked about, as you said at the opening here, it raised a lot of Americans' awareness when a white woman was killed, and we talked—we did a whole segment about the myth of white feminine virtue and innocence as this image of America. And this is why they had to try to demonize Renee Good and try to show that she wasn't a good white woman, because many Americans who may not pay attention when it's people of color, or it feels too foreign to them, or whatever, when it's a white woman, all of a sudden they perked up.

What put it over the top was a man exercising his Second Amendment rights, a man who serves veterans. And I think that's significant. And I think it's significant that if we were to talk about within the sort of right-wing imaginary of who are the real Americans, men are at the top of the list. It's a patriarchy. It's a patriarchal society. It's real men. Men should be in authority. Men being men. And one of the signs of masculinity is gun culture and Second Amendment rights, and expansive Second Amendment rights, I think, have been coded very strongly by people on the right and the left as a kind of conservative issue, as a sign of conservative patriotism and so forth.

And I think it's telling that what finally brought the GOP around to opposition on this—what finally got GOP congresspeople to say, "Yeah, maybe we need to rethink Kristi Noem. Maybe she does need to step down. Maybe she needs to be fired. We don't support her"—was not even the execution of a white woman. It's the execution of a white man and the criticism of him exercising his Second Amendment rights. So I think there's a lot of significance here with the Second Amendment as it relates to how this has played out.

Brad: It's a white gun-owning man. I mean, this is, you know, if you go back to the Confederacy, if you go back to a long time, the white gun-owning man is the citizen, and everyone else doesn't count. And I think, to me, this just goes back to the counterinsurgency against terrorists versus neighborism and democracy framing. When I heard Patel and Trump and Bovino saying, "Well, you can't bring a gun and you can't do this"—I mean, Sean Duffy, Sean Road Rules Duffy said this, you know, "Obviously, you know, you can't brandish the gun at the law enforcement." To me, they were getting really close to saying, "When you are a Democrat, when you are not on our side, your rights don't count. You don't have rights."

And if you listen to the most rabid and disgusting sectors of MAGA nation—Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, William Wolfe, and others—they even—Megyn Kelly said this, Dan. Megyn—here, I'll play the clip.

Megyn Kelly: I know I'm supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don't. I don't. Do you know why I wasn't shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations. It's very simple. If I felt strongly enough about something the government was doing that I would go out and protest, I would do it peacefully on the sidewalk, without interfering, via a whistle, via shouting, via my body, via any other way.

Brad: So she says "I was supposed to feel bad about Alex Pretti dying, but I don't." Nick Fuentes said—I'm not going to play the Nick Fuentes quote—"just another asshole, a race traitor who is no longer in the world." William Wolfe said, "I don't care." What they're saying is you're not human enough to have rights. The Second Amendment doesn't really apply to you. I don't really care if the Second Amendment says your right to own a gun shall not be infringed. I think they were the ones getting really close, and then the people recalibrating were like, "Well, this is a white guy with a gun. I don't know if we want to go too far down this road, you know, I think we want to kind of back up a little bit here, guys."

That to me was the NRA, that to me was some of these Republican senators, that to me was some of these Republican governors.

Dan: And I think to tie into that—I think the aspect you're highlighting are those voices on the right for whom the political ideology was completely determinative. Rights are something that Republicans and conservative people get to exercise. I think the NRA response and responses from organizations like that also highlight the racial dimension of this. And I've talked about it before, and it's an obvious comparison, but we all remember the tragedy of Philando Castile, who gets pulled over and says, "I have a weapon, licensed to carry it," and is shot dead because the officer freaks out about it. And the NRA was nowhere to be heard. The NRA did not come rushing to the defense of a person of color who had a license to carry a concealed weapon and disclosed it to a police officer in a traffic stop.

But when it's the white guy, when it's the white guy who works at the VA who ticks a bunch of boxes that, quite frankly, matter to leadership in places like the NRA, all of a sudden they're up in arms about that. So again, just a lot of dimensions, and I think also some of those fracture points in the MAGA coalition coming into view around this issue in the person of Freddy.

Brad: And none of that is meant to devalue or—none of this is meant to turn our attention and our feeling away from the fact that absolutely what happened to Alex Pretti was an absolute travesty. It is disgusting. It was—and again, when you think about what is going to galvanize neighborism in a place like the Twin Cities, it is taking a man, putting him on the ground, and executing him on video. That is not going to lessen the opposition to your counterinsurgency movement. I'm sorry. It's just not. Much less Renee Good, much less Tong Lai Tao, who was pulled out of his house in his underwear. Much less the five-year-old boy who was sent to Texas and is now sick and is in poor health.

So all of that is there. I think that if we stay on the Second Amendment, Alex Pretti, NRA kind of thing, I think that this opens up this moment of like, if people like Trump, Patel, Bovino, Noem, et cetera, are basically willing to say you don't have rights if you show up to a protest like this one—and obviously, I think everyone listening is already aware, we could make the Kyle Rittenhouse comparison. We could do 20 minutes right now on Kyle Rittenhouse, and he's a hero. He's famous. He's rich because he showed up to a protest with an automatic weapon, semi-automatic weapon—don't email me. I don't know, and I don't care. Don't email me about the specifications of his handheld killing machine. I'm just going to delete it, so don't waste your breath.

He showed up with a handheld killing machine to a protest and killed two people, and he's now rich, famous, and speaks at conventions and travels the country because he's a hero. Do you remember the McCloskeys who stood outside their mansion with guns, and they're in the pink polo shirt and—and they are now famous and speak at conventions? These are—this is low-hanging fruit. We can spend 20 minutes on that. We can play all the clips. "Oh, they're hypocrites." That's why that's not this show.

To me, the more in-depth analysis here is that we're very close to an administration saying, "If you're on the wrong side of us, you don't have rights. You just don't have rights. The Second Amendment, the First Amendment, the Sixth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment—search and seizure, warrant, entering your home, carrying a firearm, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly—doesn't apply. You're on the wrong side of Donald Trump. Sorry."

Doesn't that sound like the tyranny I talked about at the start? Doesn't that sound like the authoritarianism you talked about at the start? Doesn't that just sound like might is right, and Trump is in the king's seat? So if you're with him, you're right. If not, you have no rights, period. Anyway. Final thoughts on this before we jump into—I think the one final—

Dan: I think it illustrates this—remember the "All Lives Matter" mantra coming from the right? They opposed Black Lives Matter. You say it's only Black lives—all lives matter. We're opposed that you're being too exclusive. Turns out, if you're on the right, and we knew this, we said this—this is what the last 10 years have been, is everybody saying "this is what we told you they believe and think and feel." Turns out all lives don't matter. We knew that lives of color didn't matter to them, but now it turns out as well, yeah, if you're on the wrong side of the protest line, your life doesn't matter either, and it brings it directly into view.

Brad: Okay, so Dan, just let's do three minutes here on this. You ready? And I know you're going to have plenty to say. So Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. People, like hundreds of people, lost their jobs because they said negative things about Charlie Kirk, or they dared to quote Charlie Kirk on social media after—just quoting, just quoting what he said. They lost their jobs because they quoted Charlie Kirk after he was killed. There was all of this talk about decorum and wanting blood and death and not, you know, celebrating Charlie Kirk dying. Can you believe the left? And we were on the show—

Dan: And political leaders saying, "Dox them, tell them—call their employers and tell them what they said. Take screenshots of their posts that are behind privacy walls and make them public. Expose them, seek them out, cost them their jobs, get them fired, do these things."

Brad: JD "the Drizzler" Vance on the Charlie Kirk Show using his best reply-guy moral outrage: "Well, I just think it's disgusting. I just think it's really disgusting that anyone would make light of it."

And then we have—Dan, the very same voices, the exact same people—Matt Walsh, Megyn Kelly, all of the Christian pastor, theologian, theo bros that I follow and track online, saying, literally, "I don't care that Alex Pretti was executed on the street. It's one more asshole no longer in the world. I don't care. I don't care how many scream. I don't care how many die. I don't care how many go—"

We can pick apart hypocrisy. We're past that. That's blasé. It's 10 years ago. The hypocrisy of MAGA nation is 10 years ago. We're facing violence and threat. It's just—when Charlie Kirk dies, you will lose your job if you say anything bad. And when Alex Pretti is executed, it is literally "I don't care, good." It's probably a good thing that this happened. That is the sentiment coming from those corners of MAGA nation.

Hypocrisy, to me, is not the point. To me, the point is we're facing people who are telling you you're not human enough to care if you die. Do you think they won't do this? Do you think that Minneapolis is isolated? Do you think that this is not the plan—a counterinsurgency invasion of the entire nation where you don't matter if you're not on the right side of the king? Do you think that history is not full of Pol Pots and regimes ranging from Mussolini to Hitler to Stalin to everyone else who just did not care and convinced many people not to care when they murdered or put in camps millions and millions of people?

Anyway. Charlie Kirk, thoughts on that, and then I promise—

Dan: This is just the last thought on this. You already cited, you know, Bannon earlier, who said exactly that, who said, "If you blink here, that's the stakes. We have to win here. We have to stamp this out in Minnesota, or it's not going to work in Chicago, and it's not going to work in LA, and it's not going to work in New York." He stated the strategy out loud, that this is the aim, and we have to succeed here in dehumanizing and eradicating those who we just don't think are real Americans. Because that's what you're saying. You're saying they don't have the rights. That's what you're saying—these are American rights, and they're not the real Americans. He said it. He said it out loud. It's not us speculating. It's not us being hyperbolic, when people can just go listen to what Steve Bannon says.

Brad: All right, let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about something that is actually really, really, really worrying and really important, and that is an FBI raid on an election office in Georgia. Be right back.

Brad: All right, Dan. What happened in Georgia? Why is it a big deal?

Dan: So the long and short of it is in Fulton County—and for those who don't remember, this is the epicenter, one of the epicenter points of Trump's big lie about the election, election fraud and so forth. This is the county of fame of Trump calling election officials and saying they need to find the votes to get him the election and so forth. This was one of the regions of a majority district of color, lots of votes from non-white voters and so forth. And the Trump administration saying at the time that there was widespread voter fraud. It has been investigated. They did audits, they did recounts, they accounted for the ballots. They did all of these things.

And, you know, as we know, Trump has continued to play the "2020 was a stolen election" card. Well, this week, the FBI raided the Fulton County Elections Office and seized all the ballots, and a number of interesting things—election officials there made the comment—and I think that this is what happens when you have this politicized, weaponized DOJ. They said, "We have known where these ballots are. We've stored them properly. We've followed all the procedures and court orders and everything else to make sure that they weren't destroyed, that they weren't moved and so forth." And they said, "We don't know what happens to their chain of custody now. We don't trust that the FBI has seized these and that now we can trust what's going to happen to them, that they aren't going to fall off the truck on the way to Virginia or DC or wherever it is that they're being taken and so forth."

So it's really chilling. The Trump—you have Trump continuing to use the Department of Justice, both with a rear-view look still fixated on an election, the last election when he lost to Biden, still fixated on that and holding on to that and ensuring that this is what happened and so forth, and at the same time looking forward to the implicit threats that this is to election integrity coming into the midterms, coming into the next presidential election.

So very significant chilling effect. Election officials all over the country, secretaries of state in different states, everybody has talked about how chilling this is, that you have the executive or the federal executive using the Department of Justice to come after what are perceived to be political enemies just because they voted for the wrong person.

And then another wrinkle in this is that all these photos of Tulsi Gabbard present in the truck with the ballots, and she's—it's all grainy. She's got a baseball cap pulled down. She's on the phone. Tulsi Gabbard, for those who don't remember, as the Director of National Intelligence, she is prohibited by law, in her position, from aiding in domestic law enforcement actions, and yet she is there, sort of appearing to be involved, directing this—we don't know, present there. And so just lots of tendrils and themes and threads running through this, but really, really chilling, very disturbing, again, highlighting both just the fact that Trump can't let go of a perceived injustice, but I think also very clearly a kind of symbolic shot across the bow going into the midterms and the next presidential election.

Brad: So one wrinkle of this that I think is worth mentioning, and I'm reading from Bloomberg here: The St. Louis–based US Attorney overseeing the FBI search warrant executed on Fulton County election office Wednesday received a special appointment by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Dan: Yep.

Brad: So instead of it being the Northern District of Georgia, which would make sense because of where Fulton County is and the jurisdiction, it was a special appointment. Excuse me, it was a special appointment to Thomas Albus, a Trump-appointed chief prosecutor in the Eastern District of Missouri.

Now, who is he? Well, Albus is the former top assistant to then Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt is now a senator in Missouri. Now, does anyone remember Eric Schmidt? I'm just trying to recall from the archives here of the show. Ah yes, Eric Schmidt was the senator who stood up at a national conference recently and said that the United States is a white homeland. There's a video of it on our YouTube. It's archived in our podcast. Eric Schmidt was trying to outdo his colleague in Missouri, Josh Hawley, by being the most white Christian nationalist senator in Missouri.

So you're like, "Well, who cares, Brad?" Well, I care because Thomas Albus was that guy's right-hand man forever. So what this means to me, Dan, is in order to do what they did and raid this election office, they went to a guy who's been the number one to a white nationalist senator for a long time, and we're like, "Hey, man, you got the jurisdiction now. You've got the special appointment. You're the prosecutor. It's all yours."

Why—you want to talk about states' rights? Why is a guy in Missouri authorizing anything to do with elections in Georgia, unless A) you don't care about states' rights, and B) you're a tyrant who's trying to steal elections?

Two more points. Lost in the fray for some people, at least, was when Bovino and Noem and all of them were making a circus after Alex Pretti was murdered, Pam Bondi approached Minnesota, the state government, and said, "Hey, we'll get out of the Twin Cities. Just give us the voter rolls."

Dan: The voter roll has been denied in Oregon and other places, right, where the courts have ruled they don't have access to them. Basically tried to extort the state of Minnesota into giving them the voter data that they want.

Brad: If you all remember, from like three, four months ago, I was constantly talking about Project 2026 as the project to make sure the elections in 2026 are not what they're supposed to be. And I know it's easy to characterize that as doomerism, "Brad's going down a doomerist path." And my argument would be, look, I think we're going to vote in 2026. I don't think that the Trump regime can do something where we just don't go to the polls. I do think there will be intimidation tactics deployed. Whether those are effective, we will see. How widespread they are—can they really send CBP and ICE and others all the way from Philly to Baltimore to Jersey to Seattle and back again? I don't know. But I will say that, Dan, to me the proof's in the pudding. They just raided the office where Trump famously called and was like, "Hey, find me 11,000 votes."

After they murdered a citizen in the Twin Cities, they were like, "Yeah, we'll leave. Hey, man, counterinsurgency, it's over. We'll get out of here. No problem, bro. No more terrorizing your community. Just give us the voter rolls so the votes don't count next time. Then we'll be good. We're good, bro." It's a mafia shakedown.

So there's going to be way more to talk about here in the coming months. Our elections are not safe, and you can email me and say, "Quit with the doomerism," and I'll just send you right back to what Dan Miller just explained. All this proof is in the pudding.

All right, Dan, are you there?

Dan: I'm here. I'm here. Yeah, there's just—it's so much, right? It's so much that it's like, where do you even go with it?

Brad: Okay, let me give you one more, and then we'll go to reasons for hope. All right. So I remember a year ago, 11 months ago really, when Elon Musk and Big Balls were over there at the Treasury. This is from PBS a couple weeks ago. Well, actually, this is from PBS four days ago. The Social Security Administration says members of Elon Musk's DOGE team working at the agency accessed and shared sensitive data. The latest disclosure from the Trump admin confirmed some key concerns first raised in a whistleblower complaint filed by the agency's chief data officer, Chuck Borhees.

So the Social Security Administration is basically like, "Yeah, when the 19-year-olds and Elon showed up and they got access to everyone's Social Security data, surprise, surprise, they took some of it and shared it with some other people."

Dan: Almost, Brad, what millions of people said was going to happen if you gave that information to Musk and his cronies?

Brad: Yeah, you mean Elon Musk, the non-elected non—just some rogue DOGE agency that wasn't even ratified, and it was not really a real thing, and not part of something Congress commissioned? You mean the guy—the richest man in the world who we just let have access to everyone's data—didn't handle it like he was supposed to? Wow. Have you ever read a comic book film? Does Lex Luthor do stuff like—a comic book? Does Lex Luthor do this kind of thing, Dan? I don't know. I can't remember. I'm not really one to watch DC movies or Marvel. I don't know anything about anything. I just read French detective novels, so I don't know about this stuff. But from my memory, Lex Luthor and other villains, when they get access to everyone's data and information and money, they don't do good things with it. But I guess Elon is different because he's so smart and he'll save us all.

The overarching point here is data, voter rolls—they want it. They want to use it. They want to leverage it. They want to steal elections. They want to make it so your vote doesn't count. This is not over, and so I'll leave it there. Reasons for hope, Dan.

Dan: So my reason for hope, it does come more into the—let's say, the political calculations. I say this not to minimize the real costs of what is going on in Minnesota and what has been going on in Minnesota. But, you know, I referenced this earlier. We remember that there was a time not that long ago where the Trump administration was really bullish on winning the governorship of Minnesota and punishing Minnesota and winning it back, and that has largely disappeared from view because of the debacle that their ICE enforcement in Minnesota has turned into.

We—you remember not that long ago, the GOP was busy talking about how, "Well, we have a branding problem. People need to hear about the one big, beautiful bill and how good it's going to be and how important affordability is," and whatever, and all of that is gone. I guess what I'm getting at is we've rounded the corner. We're in 2026. The GOP has been talking since fall about how they need to get their messaging in order. They need to win over Americans. They're sliding in the polls and so forth.

And I think this is one concrete political piece of fallout from what they're doing in Minnesota, is they are losing that battle. They're losing on what was their strongest issue, which is immigration. Americans now don't trust the GOP on immigration. They're just strengthening the resolve of the people in Minnesota. I mean, how many people in Minnesota right now are probably going to vote for a Trump-backed Republican for governor when all of this is going on?

So I think that—I guess what I'm saying is we look at the terrible things that are going on there, and if I'm looking for some of the signs of hope, we've been talking about those all episode of like a substantive democratic response. But I think there are also broader signs of hope as we come into the midterms, as we try to counter things like efforts to steal elections and to weaken them and so forth. And I think that those signs are there as we continue to see Trump executing a policy that's just about Trump. It's not strategic. It's not about making something lasting. And I think that we continue to see how this is unraveling for him.

Brad: Yeah, my reason for hope is along similar lines. You know, I think that a couple of months ago, I said something on a bonus episode, and I teased it out in other episodes about democracy is an empty signifier. And to me, if you wanted to somehow imagine what a grassroots, decentralized, local resurgence of democracy—what Robinson and Acemoglu talk about in the book I quoted, an assertive society—you would talk about, you would envision what's happening in Minnesota: everyday Americans saying "I can't sit at home tonight and watch TV. I can't just, you know, go to the big box store and buy something. I can't just queue up the Netflix. I've got to go take food to my neighbor who can't leave their house because they're afraid they'll get detained. I've got to go do ICE Watch. I've got to make sure the kids going to school are safe this morning."

If you wanted to envision a grassroots resurgence of democracy in the United States, it would be the neighborism of the Twin Cities, and that gives me hope, because an assertive society is not how I would characterize the United States over the last few decades. We have been lulled into the idea that our institutions are so strong, our norms and processes are so unbreakable that even a narcissist like Donald Trump cannot destroy them. And we got right up to the precipice in his first term, and then Biden won by a hair. And everyone kind of took a breath. And I remember when people were like, "Hey, Biden won. Are you guys going to end Straight White American Jesus? There's probably nothing more to talk about, huh?" And we were like, "There might—I don't know, a few things, probably a few things."

And then Trump didn't answer for his crimes. Do we all still remember what was going to happen in Georgia, in New York? What was going—I mean, all of the places—Merrick Garland and Jack Smith—he never answered for his crimes. And we talked about it. Then I wrote it. I wrote it in my book: If you don't make him answer for J6, they will come back and they will come back harder, and they have.

But the reason for hope here is that they are activating grassroots democracy in the United States. They are giving everyone around the country a model: If you don't want to be ruled by ruthless tyrants, by people who care about nothing but extracting from you everything they can get—your money, your capital, your land, your worth, your dignity—then you got to go with your neighbors and link arms and say, "Not today." And you've got to say, "Look, you think you're stronger than us?"

What MAGA men do all the time is beat their chest and wave their guns and say, "We are the really tough ones. We're the strong ones." And it ends up that when the nurses and the moms, when the teachers and the nonprofit leaders, when the clergy get together and they hold themselves together, they are so scary to those big, strong men that they're characterized as communist, socialist, Leninist, Marxist agitators who hate America. They are a national network of cells that has been paid and is professional. They are well-trained agitators. They're so scary because they work together. They're so scary because they are not people who think that life is just "get all you can every time."

Let me read you one more quote from Adam Serwer that is just, I think, pretty amazing. He says this: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about, quote, 'Western civilization,' while armed brutes try to tear it down by force."

That's beautiful, and that's a reason for hope.

All right, y'all, starting this weekend, our interview will be on Sunday, and guess what? It's a doozy. Me and Sarah Moslener are talking about After Purity. It's really great. Going forward, we will have, starting on February 9th, me on Mondays, live streaming Brad Unfiltered, and then our regular programming—It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup.

One thing I really want to highlight—well, two things. Go to our website, please. We spend so much time on our website, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com. You'll find playlists, you'll find the episode archives. You'll find so many ways to connect with us. Go to axismundi.us and check that out too. And soon, very soon, we'll be launching a very robust, very beautiful, very informative, and very fun newsletter that you will not want to miss. And so we'll be sending that out here in the next week, week and a half and launching that. Cannot wait for you all to see it. Big, big stuff coming from us. We are super stoked about it. We care and love—we care about all of you. We love all of you. Thank you for making this show happen. Until next time, have a good one.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.