Weekly Roundup: Wine Moms, ICE, and American Fascism

Brad Onishi: Are you really buying a car online on Auto Trader right now? Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget.

Dan Miller: You can really have it delivered or pick it up. Kid is walking up the slide. Really? Auto Trader. Buy your car online. Really.

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

Dan: Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Must feel nice, Brad, to say forthcoming, right? Instead of just like maybe when the book turns into, I don't know, something you like instead of like a millstone. That's what happens when you write books, right? You go through that phase where it's like nothing but an obligation, even though you used to love it. And then when it's done, you're like, oh, that was great. That wasn't so bad. That was fun. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that. I had a student who asked me once, who'd like, you know, students struggle with academic writing. And she was like, do you really like academic writing? I was like, I like having written. Like, once it's done, you're like, that was pretty good. It's kind of like working out or something where it sucks and you're like swearing the whole time, later like, man, that was really good, you know.

Brad: Yeah, I do enjoy writing because it means I get to be alone and I get to concentrate on something without supposed, you know, distraction. The hard part of writing this book was that rarely happened, and I just ended up having to find the hours when no one else was awake to do that. So that's that.

All right, y'all, today we're gonna continue to dig into what's happening in Minneapolis and the—I think going from ICE agents on the ground to DHS social media accounts to prominent right-wing pundits—we are unfortunately seeing fascism come to life. And I think many Americans coming to realize that we've been saying that for a long time. Others have said it's alarmist, you're overreacting. But it's here, and we'll dig into that. We'll talk about the ways that Renee Nicole Good's widow and other protesters, notably white women in the Twin Cities, are being castigated by the Trump administration and by right-wing news, and the ways that gender and femininity and race play into that, and what it means going forward for these protests and what lays ahead for us in 2026.

We'll then go to the Fed investigation of Jerome Powell and what that means and the ways it portends bad things for the economy, for the American dollar, and for the American people. Lots to cover. Let's go.

All right, Dan, usually you and I are pretty good at outlining how things are going to go, and I think both of us are feeling today like there's so many places that we could go and that we should go. And I'm going to start here, and I hope this will make sense to you, and I hope it'll make sense to everyone else.

Big article this week at Slate by Laura Jedeed, who's a writer and somebody who has a kind of liberal-left editorial stance. Laura is ex-military, served two tours in Afghanistan, signed up for the military right out of high school. Is now 38, 39 years old, has been writing and criticizing the Trump administration for like a decade. Okay, so that's the author of this article.

She went to an expo in Texas last August and wanted to learn what it was like to apply to be an ICE agent. And guess what? She thought, I might as well just apply to be an ICE agent and see what happens. She was at an arena that held 2,500 people. There was a demand ahead of time for you to make an appointment and make sure you had a time so they wouldn't be overrun. And when she showed up, there were only six people in line.

Nonetheless, she put in an application, and she left out her role as a writer for the last 10 years who's been writing articles like "Inside Mike Johnson's Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution," and put on her resume that she'd been in the armed forces, had served her enlistment, and then left. And then told the recruiter, there's a gap in my resume because I kind of went to college and kind of had a quarter-life crisis. And the lady barely looked up. The interview took six minutes, and she thought when she walked out, well, they'll like Google me and figure out who I am, and then they will never call me.

Long story short, they did call and they offered her a job. So to me, this article was a good place to start today because it shows you the lack of screening, the lack of qualifications, prerequisites—whatever you need in order to become an ICE officer.

This is only going to get worse as the ICE budget increases. In 2026, the ICE budget is so big, Dan, that we could have, as people have noted on Bluesky and other places, we could have an ICE detention network that is as big as the federal detention network already existing in the United States. That is how much money ICE has.

ICE had 12,000 new recruits last year, which is 2,000 more than the existing ICE officers previously. So there was like 10,000 previously. They had 12,000 more last year, and those 12,000 are getting those jobs after a six-minute interview in which it seems like they're not even Googling people. Because Laura Jedeed, who's a left-wing writer who's been criticizing Trump and Mike Johnson and everyone else harshly for 10 years, was hired.

I bring that up, Dan, because I want to start on the ground with the ICE officers and what's happening in Minneapolis. Ana Marie Cox said this this week, and I think it's a really good way to put it: the feds are occupying the Twin Cities. This is a blockade, a siege. They are shutting down economic and civic activity. They are conducting "papers please" stops. They are criminalizing being a bystander/witness. You could be next.

This, to me, is one of the key parts of what's happening in Minneapolis—that we are seeing so many people who are observing, who are bystanding, who are protesting by videoing, being arrested or detained. We're seeing American citizens being arrested or detained, and we're seeing an aggression with people that is making Americans realize something that I think you and I have tried to talk about for a long time, which is there is nothing stopping the Trump administration from criminalizing you for no reason other than you oppose them. That is what it's like to live under fascism.

There's a video I have pulled up, and I'm not going to play the clip because the audio is actually not that helpful. It's really a visual thing. But I'm watching a video of ICE agents in Minneapolis, and they're walking down the street, and somebody turns to look at them on the sidewalk. And it happens to be the president of the Minneapolis city council, an elected official with a really big job in Minneapolis. And the ICE agent, who's a big, burly guy, just pushes him indiscriminately. There's no real warning. There's no real reason. It's just you're in my way while I'm walking, you have a camera, and I'm going to push you.

Dan, this, coupled with the Laura Jedeed article, along with the just overwhelming number of reports that we've had from people in Minneapolis who have said that ICE agents have told them over the last week, "What is wrong with you? Why are you still protesting? Didn't the last few days teach you anything?"—meaning the killing of Renee Nicole Good.

I pulled out this quote, and I'll stop talking and I'll throw it to you after this. This is from Karl Stojka, who is an Auschwitz survivor: "It was not Hitler who arrested me, not Göring, not Goebbels. The grocer, the janitor, the tailor, the shoemaker, the baker—they suddenly got a uniform, a swastika armband, and they were the master race."

When I watch what's happening in Minneapolis, whether it's this clip or others, I think one of the things that really gave me chills this week was realizing that ICE agents, like this one that I'm watching in this video, are the banality of evil embodied. These are guys that—I don't know what they were doing before, Dan, because the recruitment process requires really no vetting or prerequisites.

Like these guys could have been police officers. They could have been ex-military. But they could have been people who are working any number of other jobs, whether that's construction, whether that is as a bartender, whether that's as a barista, whether that is—who knows what. I'm not castigating any of those jobs. What I'm saying is all of those ICE agents are now in a place where they've been given a gun, a ton of camouflage and gear and weapons, and they have been told—and I want to just make sure I read this here—they have been told that they have full immunity, that you have absolutely full immunity from prosecution.

Homeland Security says this on Twitter: "All ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties. And no one—no city, no official, no state official, no legal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties."

They're telling these guys who have not been vetted, who have not been trained, who have not been put through any kind of rigorous skill building: here's your weapons. Go get the people that we have deemed enemies of this republic and enjoy doing it. You are the master race. You are an extension of Donald Trump. You are an extension of MAGA. You are a patriot. You're a hero. You're a Christian crusader.

I'll shut up. There's no empathy here. There's no consideration of people as humans. The only sense is that we need to get you out of the way, and that is our mission to make this country great again.

I wanted to start there rather than with Trump or the elites because I want to make it clear that I think we are creating in ICE an enforcement force that is going to have so much money and so much immunity and so little accountability that when they show up in our cities—it's Minneapolis now, who knows what it will be later—there is no one who is safe, and there is no way that you will be provided any restitution if they do you wrong. They can simply do what they want, and that is it. That is called fascism. Off to you.

Dan: Yeah, I'm in the same boat you are. There's so many threads to sort of pick up and follow here. But one of the things I think about is people think back to accounts of Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, and I don't know how many times in my life, you know, when you study World War II, you get the kind of sanctimonious response, like, why would anybody do that? Why would they go along with that? Why? Like, if I had lived then, I never would have supported this, or whatever.

But we know that people do, because this feels like, I don't know, the Hitler Youth Movement or something like that. Throw people in a uniform, turn them loose, and they do this. And the other piece of this is there was an experiment—you know about it, probably most people have heard of it—just known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. People can Google it if they don't remember it or don't know what that is.

But the long and short of it was, there was a—it was in the early '70s. There was a psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo, and he was just sort of studying the psychological effects of positional authority, let's call it that. And so he took a bunch of regular people, and he divided them up into prisoners and guards. Nothing beyond that. It was just a completely arbitrary, false, artificial division of the people. And they had to cut the experiment short because they found that the people in the position of guards were abusing the people who were in the position of prisoners. Through just regular people.

That's probably the terrifying takeaway of that study for most people, is through just regular people in this study who, when they were put in this position, it sort of transformed them. And we have whole broader discussions that are beyond my purview and beyond yours of, you know, why people in particular circumstances or groups or whatever behave in ways that they would not if they were just regular, ordinary individual people.

My point is we know that this happens, known this happens for a long time, and that's what the Trump administration is doing. They're taking people who are vetted only by a perceived affiliation with MAGA or a sympathy to MAGA things. And the assumption—to give the example that you opened up with—the assumption that anybody who served in the military will somehow align with Trump politics. We know that that's not the case, but I think that's an assumption that's built in. That anybody who was formerly in law enforcement will be sympathetic to Trump and so on.

And then, as you say, you put them in that positional authority. You arm them, you put masks on them, you put uniforms on them, you have them walk around in groups, and you tell them these falsehoods about immunity. And I want to pause there too and just look at the language that's used, right? When it says these things that, you know, anybody who stops or obstructs you, well, that's technically true if you're performing your duties and carrying out your legal obligations.

The trick is, the fundamental issue is, are they performing their duties? Are they carrying out legal obligations? It is not illegal for bystanders in a public place to video things that are going on in a public space, including police actions or ICE actions or whatever else. So if you stop those people, if you detain them, if you arrest them, if you threaten them, of course you're not performing your legal obligation or your duties, and therefore you are not being obstructed.

But those kinds of nuances are not what the Trump administration is about. They inherently and intentionally want people to think, both the public and the people working there, that you are immune from anything. Nothing can touch you because, as you said, you are an arm of the executive branch, which is Donald Trump. You are an extension of Donald Trump. You are an extension of presidential immunity. You are an extension of the power of the unitary executive and so forth.

And we see this social transformation happening. It's like a really awful version of the Stanford Prison Experiment happening in front of us. And it's one of the dynamics, in my view, that aided fascism or any kind of authoritarian regime where you win people on your side simply by telling them that they're on your side. I pick you. You're on my team. You're the first pick for dodgeball. So now we're all a team. We're all in the same place. And then the ones who aren't already bullies become bullies because that's part of the socialization. And we see it. And we see, as we're going to get into as well, the demonization of anybody who opposes them.

Brad: So there's so much to say there. And I think one of the things that you've got to imagine here is, you know, if you're somebody who's 23 years old, 27 years old, and you feel like you're—like all of us—trying to make it work in 21st century America, you're month to month, you're day to day, you're working in a job that you don't feel like pays you enough to keep up, to have a family, to have whatever. And all of a sudden you can get a $50,000 signing bonus and make six figures.

There was one ICE officer who was quoted this week saying, "I can't believe they let me do this job. I would do it for free"—meaning I would beat up people of color for free, and they pay me six figures to do it, and I only graduated high school, is what he said.

And I think that's something that is on our mind. Now, I'm not going to get going. I can feel it, and I know my tendencies. I could give everyone 25 more minutes. Dan would look at me like, shut your mouth, sip my coffee, go watch. I know, I'm not going to do it, Dan. I'm not doing it. I promise.

But some of you might have said, well, you guys are talking Nazis. Come on. That's a conversation stopper. That's the rule. Once you start comparing people to Nazis, you know, that's just—we've reached hyperbole, and the conversation stops, and it's all off from there.

Let me read you a little bit here from a piece by Austin Campbell at The Intercept. Less than two days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, DHS posted on Instagram a recruitment post proclaiming "We'll Have Our Home Again." And they attached a song by Pine Tree Riots—a song by the same name, "We'll Have Our Home Again" by Pine Tree Riots.

Where does that come from? Dan, well, it's immensely popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The track features lines about reclaiming our home by "blood or sweat"—language often used in white nationalist calls for race war. "We'll Have Our Home Again," the song—some of those lyrics were used in the manifesto of the white supremacist who entered a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida in 2023 and killed three Black people. That document echoed the writings of other mass killers. There have been other instances of this song coming straight from white nationalist spaces.

Now, if that's not bad enough, Kristi Noem stood at a podium the other day with DHS insignia and the slogan "One of Ours, All of Yours," which comes from the Nazi past and as a slogan in which the Nazis used to justify destroying an entire village in Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, after one of the German soldiers were killed.

So you can tell me, oh, Brad and Dan are talking about the Nazi comparison again. They are just wacky leftist professors. And then I will point you to all of this as proof that I don't think that we have gone too far off base when making these comparisons.

Got a couple more things to say on that front. I can play a clip of Nick Fuentes, Dan. Or you want to jump in?

Dan: I just want to pick up on those themes. Just want to pick up on those themes. So the whole "talking Nazis" is supposed to be the, as you say, the game-stopper, or somebody, oh, you're talking Nazis now, now you're just being hyperbolic or whatever. And I'd pause. I want to say Nazis. I can say Stanford Prison Experiment, or I can say basic sociology, or I can say whatever. We can talk about social dynamics. If we don't want to talk Nazis, we can talk about this notion of "one of one of us, all of them."

That's also the logic of colonialism, long before the Nazis, long before fascism. This is what occupying forces did to subdue or, quote-unquote, pacify colonized populations. One thing happens—a group of villagers somewhere, like, you know, hurts a soldier or doesn't let them take their crops or whatever it is—and we raze the village, or we bombard them from offshore or whatever. And that's what this is.

So use the language of a, you know, a kind of blockade. We could call it a colonizing. This is MAGA world colonizing any place they see as not American enough. Too many people of color, too many queer white women who are going to stand in their way, too many, quote-unquote, woke leftists, whatever, who don't support them. We will come and we will colonize you.

So yeah, we don't want to talk Nazis. There are lots of other ways to come at this and highlight the same social dynamics. And I think that that's the point, because it's one of those things where people try to play that game-stopper card, and you're like, all right, let me counter it with this. Let me counter—there are so many examples of how egregious and literally textbook the Trump approach is to what they're doing that we can come at it. We can play this game all day. We can play it fine, cool. Don't let me talk about Nazis. Don't let me talk about, I don't know, sociology. Don't let me talk about 1970s psychology experiments. I can just keep the examples coming because this is an old playbook. It only feels new because we lived under the illusion that that didn't happen anymore or couldn't happen to us here in America.

Brad: And you gave great examples that are not Nazi examples, and I can already hear Uncle Ron saying, well, I mean, what? We're not allowed to say, "We'll have our home again"? Come on. And that's what a Trump official did on CNN this week.

So Uncle Ron, let me just point you to a couple of things. About two months ago, we talked about somebody who was hired in the Trump administration from the Heritage Foundation who had a background—whose background was a Nazi worship. About the same time, there was a leak of Young Republican texts, and "young" is in quotes because one of those Young Republicans was a 31-year-old man, so not necessarily a high school sophomore. And they were doing things like saying, "I love Hitler."

And just this week, The Texas Observer reports—Steven Monacelli—that the ICE prosecutor James Rodden, somebody who Dan has been outed and reported and definitely linked to running an X account, a Twitter account, that is a white nationalist account where the account says things like "America is a white nation," "Migrants are all criminals," and "All Blacks are foreign to my people," and praises Hitler—he is back at work as an ICE prosecutor.

So not only did we just talk about ICE agents, but now the man who's running the court cases is a guy we know is running an account that praises Hitler and says all of the disgusting things I just said. So there's your example, Uncle Ron, if you don't think that Kristi Noem standing in front of that podium was enough. I think that's there.

I want to take a break. You want to jump in anything on that? Or should we take—

Dan: Maybe a last point about the songs that they choose and stuff. I mean, I don't know about you, Brad, but I get some weird emails every now and then with somebody who's like, hey, you should look into this. Or we spend time doom-scrolling for a living. So the algorithms send us some weird stuff. And so sometimes I'll read something like, huh, is that real? So what do you do? You look around for a few minutes. You're like, nope, not going there. Or it turns out it's associated with some weird thing or whatever.

The point is, the songs that they choose, the slogans that they choose, it's not happenstance, it's not accident, it's not ignorance. It is not hard when you listen to a song to say, huh, if you were concerned about this, maybe I should check and see who else is into this song. Maybe I should see what else they do. It's just like when they invite a white supremacist to speak at CPAC or something like, oh, I didn't know who he was, had no idea. It's like, really? Really? Like, you couldn't Google for three seconds? We all walk around with our face buried in screens all the time.

My point is, this is not accidental. So that's the other piece of this. When someone's like, whoa, how are they supposed to know? I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, you know, "one of us, all of them"—you've got to look for that slogan. You got to go try to find it. Nobody came up with that and said, oh gee, I just had it just completely independent. I had no idea that it was affiliated with Nazism.

So I think that's the other piece of it, is the intentionality of this, followed by completely implausible denials that it has anything to do with anything.

Brad: Let's take a break, right back, keep this conversation going and switch to an angle that is focused on gender and femininity, white womanhood, and the history of white Christian supremacy in the country. Be right back.

All right, y'all, I'm going to play a clip from Nick Fuentes, and it's, you know, any clip from Nick Fuentes is triggering. And if you don't want to hear this clip, I completely understand. I'm going to stop for a minute. Fast forward about 30 seconds, okay, or 45 if that's not something you want to hear. But I am going to play it. So again, I'm going to give you one more chance to fast forward because I don't want to impose that on anybody who doesn't want to hear it. So go ahead and hit the button. But if you're still here and you do want to hang in and listen to it, here it is.

Nick Fuentes: And I really have a problem with these people that say that she is, that this is some kind of tragic situation. I don't think there's anything tragic about it at all. I think it's good, honestly. I think it's good. I think it was good that George Floyd died. I think it's good that she died. She's a complete idiot. She's a typical liberal idiot. Irredeemable, unredeemable. And people could say, well, you know, that's not Christian. Well, that's the reality. You know, 37-year-old lesbian who's out there with her wife blocking ICE in the middle of this thing—that's about as irredeemable as it gets.

Brad: Nick Fuentes in this clip says that there's nothing tragic about Renee Nicole Good dying. He says, "I think," quote, "I think it's good." He says the same thing about George Floyd. It's one less idiot in the world. And once again, Nick Fuentes, neo-Nazi, Hitler-loving, invited to talk with Tucker Carlson. After that talk, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, the most important right-wing think tank on Capitol Hill, said, "I'm not going to distance myself from Tucker Carlson just because he was talking with somebody that, you know, we might have a slight disagreement with or whatever." Not good. Not good at all.

And you might say, all right, Brad, Nick Fuentes, we know he's been mainstreamed, but once again, you expect that from Nick Fuentes. It's disgusting. Let me give you a tweet by William Wolfe. William Wolfe is one of the 15 clergy members and faith leaders invited to the White House a year ago to pray with Trump when he was inaugurated and to meet with him and so on. So this is one of the 15 faith leaders invited to the White House.

In March of 2025: "I honestly do not care how bad it looks, how loud they scream, how much they cry, how many arrests it takes, how much money it costs, how many foolish American citizens who interfere with ICE suffer the consequences of their reckless actions. I just want my country back."

So he is saying—there's an American flag with somebody on a prairie and a sunset, this is kind of the image that is on the tweet—"I don't care how loud they scream, I don't care how much they cry. I don't care if people who interfere die." That's what he's saying here. I mean, if I read between the lines, if you interfere with ICE, I don't care if you lose your life. None of that matters to me. Human suffering, pain—and I'm not talking about dividing this into any groups. Could be migrants, could be documented migrants, could be people who came here on a visa, it could be Renee Nicole Good. I don't care who it is.

If people have to die, this is what I'm taking away from the tweet, Dan: I don't care. I just want my country back. That's Christian fascism, period. I don't care how many people have to die as long as I live in a white Christian country. That's what he's saying.

So you can write off the Nick Fuentes, you can write off everything—this is William Wolfe, a faith leader who is so important he was invited to the White House with 14 others 10 months ago to pray with the new president while he took office for the second time. Thoughts on this, and then we can turn to what's going on with what Fox News calls the roving gangs of wine moms on the streets of the Twin Cities.

Dan: Yeah, I think the piece about Wolfe is interesting because, again, I say this—I've said this a lot of times on here. I say it to students—that religious traditions are what their adherents do. Because this is one of those times when people want to distance that. Be like, well, that's not really Christianity. Well, for Wolfe, it is, right? And I recognize there are lots of different kinds of Christians. There are lots of Christians who are going to talk about caring about, you know, God's unconditional love and imitating Christ. And, you know, so you have nativity scenes with ICE agents and things like that protesting this. I recognize that.

But I think this just highlights that, you know, because people can look at Wolfe, well, that's an extremist. He's not the norm. And you're like, is he not? He's a norm. Because for every one of those clergy members, there are tens of thousands of American churchgoers for whom that's what the Christian faith is.

And again, I think we have to recognize that. I think it's just that other dimension that's easy to sort of lose, because I think Christian nationalism at this point is so normalized that we kind of stopped talking about it. But that, for many of these people, many of those people on the streets loving that they get to bash heads, you know, as part of ICE—a lot of them are those same, overwhelmingly men who are being drawn into high-control religion. Again, they're being drawn back to the churches. They're being drawn back to churches where this is the gospel. It's the gospel of America. America is the highest good. America is our God. God is America. It's American. And the worship of the straight white American Jesus. That's what it is. And this is what we see. And I think that that dimension has to remain in people's minds as they sort of go out in the world and they encounter the people who hold these views.

Brad: One of the things we've talked about on this show quite often, and I'm going to have an interview with Sarah Moslener here in a few weeks, is scholarship coming from Sarah and from a host of others that really contextualizes this as an American history and the ways that white women have been used as the thing that needs to be defended.

Why does William Wolfe want his country back? Well, he wants all the good, godly women to be safe and the children—the purity of white women, and the purity of white women becomes the purity of America. America is the thing that should be protected and kept unscathed and uninfected by foreigners and others who would taint it. And that's the same for the white woman and white femininity.

This, of course, if you're listening, you probably know, is the kind of logic that the KKK used to make Black men out to be barbaric and savage and sexual predators who are going to attack white women now that they were not enslaved. This is the logic that was used against Emmett Till for, you know, supposedly brushing up against or whistling at a white woman 75, 80 years ago.

What I want to argue today, Dan, is something you'll hear me talk more about with Sarah in our interview, is that white women get this sort of elevated role in American white Christian supremacy as long as they play the role they're supposed to—something you have said about a million times on this show. As long as you're a woman who submits to the patriarchy and you're a white woman, you have a chance to do really well in the system.

You can be the emblem of racial Christian American purity. You can have an elevated status. You can be praised as the embodiment of virtue, the mother, the wife, the princess of domesticity, the one who looks how they're supposed to look. And I want to make sure we say that all the talk about Mar-a-Lago face, all the talk about how you have to look in the Trump administration—as long as you have the right kind of body, the right kind of aesthetic, the right kind of figure, the right kind of hair, the right kind of makeup, whether it's Kristi Noem or Karoline Leavitt or anyone else—then you also, as long as you reflect back to men what they want to see, you will be fine.

What we're seeing in Minnesota now are suburban white moms who don't look like their Fox News counterparts, who don't dress and make themselves up in the same way, who are on the front lines of ICE resistance. So here is a piece at Fox News by David Marcus: "What we're seeing across the country is organized gangs of wine moms organize. The gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents."

Dan, this—and I'll pass the baton to you—follows on a string of resignations at DOJ because of the Trump administration's desire to prosecute Nicole Good's widow. So tell us about that, and I think that will provide a basis for a larger conversation about gender and the women involved in these protests and how they're being turned from the potential emblems of American purity into gangs, gang members, just like Tren de Aragua and all the other Venezuelan gangs supposedly the Trump administration is hunting.

Dan: So again, the social dynamic. Everybody listen to me—knows I'm all about the social dynamics. The social dynamic here is if you pitch or code white women as the vision of American virtue, you got a problem when you get white women who don't play the right role. They don't envision the right America. They don't live in America the right way. They don't espouse the right values. They don't look the right way. They don't look the part.

So what do you have to do? You have to find a way to show them as non-virtuous. Just position them as not the right kind of women despite their skin color. And this is one of those things where gender trumps race. Normally, when it comes to this kind of hierarchy of who's really American, if you're white, by default, I mean, you've got a lot of advantages. You're halfway there, all of that. But here, for women, that's always if you play by the roles of MAGA patriarchy.

So a news story that came out this week, and I think it might have gone kind of unnoticed had this not happened, is that a number of federal prosecutors resigned from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's office. It was like a half a dozen or so attorneys—kind of an unprecedented number of attorneys who stepped down. And the reason was that they were under pressure from the Trump administration to investigate the widow of Renee Nicole Good.

Why? Remember JD Vance stands up two seconds after this thing and says that Renee Nicole Good was part of a leftist organization. And people say, well, which one? He's like, well, we're going to figure that out. Translate: we're going to invent one. We're going to come up with some way to say that she was not a good, virtuous white American woman. She was a leftist. She was a cultural Marxist. She was fill in the blank of whatever the Trump administration doesn't like.

And so here they're trying to go after her widow as well to position that and create this sense of threat. They're also queer. It's Renee Nicole Good's wife. Renee Nicole Good was not a—I don't know how she would identify, but she's married to a woman, so that doesn't fit that paradigm either. There's arguably very few things that are more threatening to a patriarchal vision of American society than queer women.

And so we see this, and people have talked about this. We could circle back around to the fascist piece. A guy named Doug Kelley, who was a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, called it the darkest day for the rule of law that he had seen in his 50 years working in this. He went on to say, "When you have six people who are of good will and have been dedicated public servants and spent their lives enforcing the law as objectively as possible, if they feel the need to resign because of orders they've gotten that will violate their conscience, to me, that's a great statement on their part that this is not tolerable by them."

This is—you and I were talking before the show—this is banana republic stuff. This is fascism 101. You oppose the Trump administration. What is the crime of Renee Nicole Good's widow? Not supporting Trump, not supporting ICE, not condemning her partner. That's all it is.

And so you have those who are still part of the mechanisms of the state who are saying, this is not what we're here for. This is not what we're about, who stepped down. And it illustrates this dynamic of an administration who made a colossal error, colossal mistake with this shooting, had an untrained agent, a trigger-happy agent. It's talked about—he'd been charged by a car before. Fine. Maybe he was PTSD or something like that. He should not have been out in the field if that was the case.

Point is, all kinds of protocols, their training manuals say that this was not an appropriate response. You're not allowed to fire—I've done more looking into this since even last time we recorded—you're not allowed to fire at vehicles that are fleeing to try to stop them. You're not allowed to try to disable them. The vehicle was turning away from the officer when he fired into the window. We talked about this last time. If you're at the driver's side window of a vehicle, it is not a threat to you. It can't hit you. On and on and on.

The Trump administration keeps doubling and tripling down, how? By demonizing not just Renee Nicole Good, but now her widow, and by extension, any women who don't embody that MAGA ideal of a good, virtuous Christian American woman.

Brad: I want to just pick up on the gender dynamics and the sexual dynamics. So Renee Nicole Good is not somebody who is reflecting back to the male gaze, the patriarchal vision of what a woman should be, right? She's not—her goal in life is not to look like a Fox News host, is married to a woman, as you say. This is basically the biggest sin you can have under patriarchy. If you are a white lady, you're not interested in men, you don't want their approval, you're not attracted to them—or at least you're attracted to women also, whatever. Again, I don't know how Renee Nicole Good would have identified.

My point, though, is the threat that that poses to the man who believes he has control and authority and power over women is—okay, you are no longer the elevated symbol of American greatness as a white woman. You are now in line with the people we are out here to excise from the public square.

It's not lost on me, Dan—I want to make two comparisons that I think people should take away from today. ICE agents were given full immunity as long as they perform their duties—is the exact language of the Trump SCOTUS immunity decision. The President has full immunity as long as the president is performing the President's duties. They just trickled it down. So as long as you are performing your duties as an ICE agent, you're immune. And if you shoot somebody at the side of a car like happened last week, the Vice President will just get up on the TV and say he was doing his duty, so he's immune. It's a pretty slick game, isn't it? Right? That's how that works.

And then the white women like Renee Nicole Good who are out on the front lines of resisting ICE and warning the community, protecting folks who are being attacked, protecting their immigrant neighbors, their Black and Brown and Asian neighbors—what are they now, Dan, according to Fox News? They're a gang. They're a gang like the Venezuelan gangs we've been hearing about for six months. They're a gang or an organization like Antifa.

They went, you went, white woman, from the emblem of American purity, greatness, and virtue to a gang like the Venezuelans and the undocumented and all the others who we have been dehumanizing for a year. That is how quickly it flips if you don't play your role in the right way under the regime.

Further thoughts on this before we take a break and go to what happened with Jerome Powell this week?

Dan: I think just one point to sort of keep in mind. And I think we're going to talk about this a lot over the next, you know, couple years, two-plus years is when it comes to Trump. We don't hear the talk of a third Trump term. Now, it's not that there probably aren't people working on that and so forth, but that's kind of gone away.

And I think what we see is Trump far beyond caring in any way what anybody thinks about what he's doing. This is just the raw exercise of power for the sake of power. And I say that because, you know, Trump will always tell you he's winning in the polls. When polling data goes his way, he loves it. He loves to talk about it.

Series of polls this week, and they're worth noting. 53% of Americans say that the shooting was unjustified. Only 35% say it was justified. 56% of people say it was unjustified. As a CNN poll, similar numbers, 47% of people say they have no trust in the government investigating this, and we talked about the government freezing out Minnesota. Only 17% say that they trust the government to do this.

So I think it's worth noting that we can talk about these national narratives and so forth. The Trump administration isn't winning the story the way that they have in the past. But they're beyond caring because for Trump, this is just an extension of his ego, his power, his self-aggrandizement. And I think that that's a piece to remember as well. Because on one hand, we can look at that and say, well, you know, that can be—polls matter, and we have elections, and you've talked a lot about, you know, the risks in 2026 and the elections and so forth. Those are all real.

But there's also a sense that when you've got a president now with nothing to lose, and he is unchained in exercising that authority. If ICE agents do eventually get burned for this, Trump doesn't care because he's never cared about anybody. He's just Trump. I think that's the other piece of this, just the raw exercise of power, which to me is another element of authoritarian populism, fascism. Call it what you want, but this notion of the state as the embodiment of its leader—that's how Trump envisions America. That's how he envisions the MAGA movement. They are all an embodiment of him.

Brad: Let me bring in one last thing that I forgot about, and I want to get your thoughts on this. So this was what a Fox News host said on air three days ago. Yeah, three days ago. "There's a weird kind of smugness, by the way, in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority. Most guys learn early in life that every confrontation is a sort of escalation chain. A joke, a push, an argument can eventually turn to violence. We spend a lifetime reading the signs, knowing when we're getting close, knowing when to pull back, knowing when we're on the edge of violence. These protesters, they seem completely oblivious."

Yeah, he's talking about an incident when a man shot a woman three times. And he's saying that the smugness is so escalating that, at least—I mean, this is, if you read between, if I wrote an essay on this, this would be: I am blaming the woman for laughing at and having no submission to the man. And so it escalated, and he shot her. What else did you want him to do? She wouldn't listen. She was smug. She wouldn't submit. Come on. I know you got thoughts on that.

Dan: It's the classic, classic abuser language. Look what she made me do. That's that. It's like that simple—a non-compliant woman who didn't submit to an unreasonable, undeserved demand of submission, so she was subdued in the final, most irrevocable way imaginable. It speaks to a number of things, including the deep masculine insecurity when confronted with anyone who is a woman who does not simply fold before masculine authority.

Brad: Let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about Jerome Powell and why it's a big deal, even though some of you might have missed the story or have not dug into it too much yet. Be right back.

All right, Dan, take us through it. What happened with Jerome Powell, and why is it such—

Dan: So Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, for those who maybe just don't know the name off the top of your head—I also realized that was a lot of rhymes just right there in one sentence, so that's a free bonus for everybody. So the head of the Fed, who has been criticized by Trump for years, not just since Trump came back into office, Trump has sought to pressure him to lower interest rates, always to lower interest rates, to do things that would benefit the Trump administration. Trump has suggested that he should help set interest rates. That is, Trump should help set interest rates. He's threatened to remove him, is clearly planning to nominate somebody else to be Fed chair when he comes along.

Well, we now found out this week from Powell that the Trump administration is using its weaponized Department of Justice to go after him. So last June, Jerome Powell testified before the Senate Banking Committee—gripping television, I'm sure everybody watched that hearing, you know, primetime fun stuff to watch—Senate Banking Committee about an estimated $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed's headquarter buildings in DC. Pretty wonky, basic, you know, kind of stuff.

Well, Sunday night, this past Sunday night, Powell issued a statement saying that the Department of Justice had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment related to the renovation project. And Powell specifically cited Trump's attacks when he was talking about this. Rather, here's what he said. He said the DOJ probe is, quote, "about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether, instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation."

He went on to say, "I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one, certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve, is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in a broader context: the administration's threats and ongoing pressure."

And so here we see—this is one thing that was notable about this—Powell is on the offensive. He comes out and just sort of brings this out into the open. He has mostly refrained from public comments in the past. He's kept his head down. Trump has been hammering him forever, and he just kind of plays the "hey, we're an independent agency, we're just going to do our thing." But he brought this out into the public, and it's produced significant pushback from people we would expect to push back—Democrats and others—but also from people within the GOP.

Trump claims he knew nothing about the probe, but he went on to badmouth Powell. He didn't distance himself from it, and he went on to say, oh, I don't know anything about it, and then badmouth Powell. But everyone else in Trump world is concerned about this. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, hardly a critic of Trump, criticized the move and said it would negatively impact markets. GOP Louisiana Senator John Kennedy—this is not a, this is not a battleground Republican. This is not a Republican who's worried about, you know, being in a purple district—

Brad: You want to jump in, or just—

Dan: Nope.

Brad: He criticized the move, and he was one of numerous Republicans to do so. He said, "We need this like we need a hole in the head." He said any litigation between the Federal Reserve and the Executive Branch, the United States government, is going to cause interest rates to go up, not down. North Carolina GOP Senator Thom Tillis said it was "amateur hour." Said it undercuts the Fed's independence, which of course is the aim of this.

And even those in Trump's immediate orbit were critical. White House officials blame DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro—we all remember her, right? Trump appointee, one of his sort of pet projects. After the probe, she apparently blindsided the White House with this. Even she sort of backed off of this some and said, well, you know, if you just responded to our inquiries, we wouldn't have had to do this.

You have GOP senators who say that they will not approve Trump's next nomination to the Fed until this is dealt with. So it's a huge sort of own goal on the part of the Trump administration.

So a lot of things going on. Number one, let's circle back around to the all-things executive, the expansion of executive power, the notion that everything in the executive branch is just an extension of Trump. This is, by all accounts, an unprecedented attack on an agency that is independent, and the independence of which is part of why everybody in the world looks to the Fed when they talk about monetary policy and interest rates and so forth.

But it's also interesting that it shows, as we've seen, one of these fracture points that is beginning to emerge between the Trump administration and a GOP that has not challenged them. It shows, I think, also this—I was talking about Trump self-aggrandizement a few minutes ago and the raw exercise of power. It shows the way that that's not about governance. This was just an idiotic strategic blunder. All they have to do is just kind of quietly wait for Jerome Powell to end his term, nominate somebody else that's more pliant that will do what Trump wants. Problem solved for Trump.

But instead they've created hindrances. Why? Because the exercise of power didn't work and couldn't think strategically and so forth. So a lot of things going on here that illustrate more of this, as I say, the raw exercise of power by Trump, but also some of these other dynamics we're beginning to see where there are fractures between a GOP that is still going to be around after Trump and has to figure out what life after Trump will look like, and Trump, who views himself as the end and purpose of American government.

Brad: I think the senators are getting pushback, not because they're beacons of virtue and hope and have a backbone. I think they know, along with anyone else in the financial sector, that if you start messing with the Fed and it becomes something of a tool or a weapon under the executive branch like it has in other countries, the value of the dollar will go—the global economy will go haywire because so much of the global economy is based on the dollar. And this will threaten all of the investments and money and whatever portfolios of those senators and many others in their orbit. So I think that is what's gotten that stark reaction so quickly from them when they are normally sort of like, well, we'll see, you know, sort of on the same plane.

Here, in the same domain, is an article from Semafor that says, just talking about the oil from Venezuela: "Revenue from the oil sales is currently being held in bank accounts controlled by the U.S. government, as indicated in Friday's order, according to the administration official. The main account, according to a second senior administration official, is located in Qatar"—which is also known as the Air Force One factory. "The second official described Qatar as a neutral location, which may not be something that's ever been said about Qatar, the country, where money can flow freely with U.S. approval and without risk of seizure."

Who is going to seize the money?

Dan: The U.S. government? Like, who? Yeah, like, you couldn't give it to—

Brad: Is Nicolás Maduro on the loose again? What's going on? Yeah, anyway, I just wanted to bring this up because, you know, Jamelle Bouie on Bluesky calls this a "smash and grab" for his own personal benefit. I mean, a lot of the people I've talked to in group chats and other places are like, this is a personal liquid account. This is a personal checking account for the president. He's got $500 million stashed after he smashed and grabbed another country.

And the reason he wants to do this to the Fed, just going back to the original point, is so he can smash and grab everything from the American economy much more easily. I don't know if you think those two things don't go together, but that's about—

Dan: All Trump. Trump is an oligarch, and he is making money as president. He's making money off of being president. You know, I wonder other things. Just the big grand ballroom he's building that's going to be, you know, privately funded. And what? How many of those donations are going to go to Trump? Who's going to be accounting for that money, you know, just all of that.

But I mean, Trump is also—why does he want interest rates to drop? He doesn't want to do it so that regular people can buy a house. He doesn't care about affordability. He wants it to happen so that he can benefit financially. And this is just another piece of that. He's a grifter who has his hand in every pot, trying to take money from every source.

His criticism of Powell is not because he cares about Americans or America or the U.S. economy or affordability. It's because he cares about Trump. And putting this money in a bank account in Qatar and not, I don't know, with the U.S. Treasury, or saying, you know, hey, we're gonna help with affordability. So here's $500—you know, here's this money that we're gonna put toward helping people to afford healthcare, or here's this money we're gonna put to driving down American gas prices or whatever, whatever you want to do if you want to do a symbolic show of being, you know, pushing affordability. It's not about any of that. It's about Trump.

So I think the two are related. His long-standing beef with Jerome Powell is not about the benefit of the U.S. It's about the benefit of the U.S. economy insofar as it benefits Trump and other wealthy people who make money from investments and interest rates and so forth.

Brad: I can't wait for Jesse Watters to be head of the Fed and be like, hey, who wants a 75-year mortgage? I mean, that's going to be great. It's going to be great. It's going to be a 75-year mortgage, Dan. It's going to cut like $300 off your mortgage payment every month.

Dan: Only pay like five times the value of your house by the time you're done. But you know, hey, great. You know, it's a lower monthly rate.

Brad: Your grandkids will—your grandkids will pay it off. It'll be like—that's the American dream. I'll say this quickly, and then we can go to reasons for hope. Is just if Vladimir Putin were President of the United States, what would he be doing differently? And I'm serious about this. Putin is famous for crushing dissent, so that's what's happening in Minneapolis. Putin is famous for not wanting Muslims or other, quote-unquote, foreigners in Russia, and he is brutal to them. That is what is happening.

Putin controls the media. That is what's happening in this country—TikTok, CBS, Paramount, I could go on, Facebook, on and on and on and on, Twitter. Okay, that the Trump allies have the media. Putin also is the richest man in the world. I mean, often people talk about Elon Musk that way, but Putin's not brought into that list. Putin has extracted, and his oligarchs have extracted, 90% of the money and resources from Russia.

And what would he be doing differently if he were president of this country? I mean, he might be more strategic because I think he's smarter than Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. But he would be taking money like $500 million and stashing it somewhere that he could just use it whenever he needs it. He would be doing smash and grabs. He would be crushing dissent of people in a place like Minneapolis and so on.

Dan: We know he'd just be annexing territory. What's Trump not shut up about? Now it's annexation. We've said this for years that, you know, Trump looks up to Putin. Putin is one of his idols, if not mentors, somebody that he wants to be like. He's always had this fixation on strong men and those kind of leaders. And Trump, or excuse me, Putin, is a key example of that. So yeah, you just go down the checklist exactly as you're saying. He is aspiring to the status of Putin.

Brad: And I just think if you ask yourself, what would be different if Putin was president, it's hard to imagine anything—the crypto grift that Trump is doing, the whatever.

Dan: We just need to see Trump shirtless on horseback, and we'll have come full circle to all of the Putin moves.

Brad: You know, Dan, I love you, and we've known each other a long time, but don't tell me that that is something I should see. I do not—

Dan: All the years—I know you don't. The most disturbing thing you've ever said. It's close.

Brad: It is close. All right, what's your reason for—

Dan: I don't know why I was good at court cases. I'm gonna spend a lot of time following court cases, but a federal judge this week dismissed the federal lawsuit targeting unredacted voter data from California. That was—was that what you were—

Brad: Yeah, mine. Is that from Oregon?

Dan: Well, I was about to say—Judge in Oregon is poised to do the same. Yeah. So that's the reason for hope. The pushback. Just a background that they are two of the 23 states and the District of Columbia that have refused to do this, and that the Trump administration has gone after. They are all Democratic states or districts lost by Trump in the 2020 election. So I found that to be hopeful. I did not mean to steal your reason for hope.

Brad: No, no, I'll give you one, and that is just there are just account after account after account of the everyday heroism of Minnesotans and Twin Cities people right now. People who are—and it's hard not to go into this stuff without feeling emotional. But you know, there are TikToks out there and videos of people hiding folks in their basements like it's Nazi Germany outside, just to bring in the comparison again.

There are people standing up and refusing to allow ICE agents in their home because the delivery driver who was bringing them pizza is hiding now in their house. There are account after account after account of that. About a month and a half ago, Dan, we did a special episode where I sort of expressed to you that I was afraid that democracy is an empty signifier. If democracy is just this empty idea, it's never going to get people somewhere.

What I'm seeing in Minnesota now is a refilling of democracy as us. No one's going to help. People killed a woman in plain sight, and the Vice President said, "Pray for the guy that shot her." There's no one coming to help us. Democracy is us. It's the simple idea that there are more of us than them. There are more of us than ICE agents. There are more of us than Trump admin people. There are more of us than the folks that don't want us here or trying to kill us or hurt us. And democracy is the story of us. I know that's a show, but I haven't watched it.

But democracy is about there are more of us together who can share power than the few who are trying to overpower us. We have to take that away here, and it's spreading. When people talk about the wine moms, that's what I hear. And so that is a silver lining to what is a disgusting, brutal, tragic, and awful situation in Minneapolis. And if for all of you who are there, for all of you who have family there, for all of any of you who are affected, we are thinking of you.

I'm going to hopefully, early next week, be posting something on our social media about a few select nonprofits that we think would be good places to donate to and places that are really on the front lines helping Minnesotans and Twin Cities folks right now. So more on that soon.

If you're a subscriber, be on the lookout. Dan and I are going to be sending out the notice for our next special episode, live recording here very soon. And of course, next week, Thursday is the debut of Reign of Error with Sarah Posner. You don't want to miss it. Sarah has been all over this week on Greg Sargent's podcast and Talking Points Memo and everywhere else promoting it. The first guest is none other than Anthea Butler, which is just dynamite to have those two together, and they'll be talking about Trump's second presidency one year in from his inauguration. You don't want to miss that.

And as I've been announcing, starting in February, once a month, we'll have Leah Payne or Annika Brockschmidt doing interviews. They'll each be doing one per month is the way I should put it. Those will appear on Sundays. And really excited for that to start with both of them. Both people who are amazing. And I've told Dan Miller, you know, several times, if for some reason I am suddenly no longer able to do this show because of whatever reason, just open the bat phone and call either Annika or Leah and they will do a better job co-hosting the show than I've ever done. So they're amazing.

Other than that, we're just so grateful for you being here, so grateful for your support, so grateful that you chose to spend time with us today. We will catch you next week with a great interview Monday, It's in the Code Wednesday, and the weekly roundup on Friday.