Weekly Roundup: Venezuelan Deportations, Tattoos, and Pete Hegseth the DEI Hire
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad and Dan discuss a range of controversial issues. They start with the ongoing mass deportations of Venezuelan nationals under the Trump administration, ignoring a judge's injunction.
They talk about the use of tattoos as markers for gang affiliation, comparing the treatment of Venezuelan migrants to that of Pete Hegseth, who has Crusader tattoos associated with white nationalism.
The episode also covers the recent removal of historical references, including tributes to Jackie Robinson and the Navajo code talkers, from government websites under Pete Hegseth's directive. Finally, they discuss Trump's latest interactions with Vladimir Putin, highlighting Trump's continued excessively amiable stance.
The guys wrap up with reasons for hope, including a court ruling preventing the deportation of an Indian-born Georgetown fellow and a middle school teacher's brave stand against mandated content-neutral posters in Idaho.
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That is Tom Homan, border czar and the man in charge of the plan for mass deportation in the Trump administration.
He's talking about the recent deportation of 200 Venezuelan nationals out of the country.
A judge called for a halt to this practice, put an injunction on it.
The Trump administration has yet to heed that injunction.
And Homan says here, clearly, we don't care what the judges say.
We're going to keep coming.
Today we discuss all the issues involved with the deportation of these Venezuelan folks, what that means for our country moving forward, the possibility of American citizens being detained in El Salvador or at Guantanamo or elsewhere, and how the use of tattoos as an identification of criminality fits into this case,
and also the case of Pete Hegseth, the man whose crusader tattoos flagged him.
That in addition to talking about the scrubbing of Jackie Robinson's history from government websites and Trump's latest surrender to Vladimir Putin.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Thank you.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Good to be with you on this Friday, here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, good to have a chance to catch up, Brad.
I want to hear about dodgeball, but I think in the minute or two we have, before we get serious, you should tell folks that you're getting ready for summer.
And for some people, that's like, I'm going to work out and I'm going to, like...
Try to get that, you know, beach bod thing going or whatever that is.
What do you do to prepare for summer?
So here's the thing.
It's been momentous for me, Brad.
So for like the last like four months, I've actually been working out, which I haven't done consistently forever, including the cardio.
I have a physical coming up and I'm very excited to tell my doctor that I've been doing 170 minutes a week of like strenuous cardio.
So I actually lost some weight and my daughter was making fun of me because like my pants didn't fit and stuff.
Like I'm walking around the house like pulling up my pants.
So I had to go buy new pants and new shorts, and I was confronted with this kind of existential thing.
I'm like, am I reinventing myself?
Do I, Brad, or do I not get cargo shorts?
And I thought about it.
I was like, I should maybe have, I don't know, open up some sort of vote or a podcast vote and determine.
But I was confronted.
I'm like, do I...
Do I remain the guy wearing the cargo shorts or do I be like, nope, I'm going to be cooler and more hip and not have cargo shorts?
But I ordered a whole bunch of cargo shorts.
Yep. So I'm getting ready for summer by doing the same thing I've always done.
So the good news is they're cargo shorts that fit.
They shouldn't be falling down or I'm not going to have my belt.
I had to put new holes in the belt, that kind of thing.
So I'm not doing that, but nope, still cargo shorts.
So all the people that want, like me, leaning into the cargo shorts thing, you're with me.
If that's not you, hopefully still like what we do on the podcast.
You know you're middle-aged, though, when you're working out, not to, like...
Like, look good on the beach or, like, get revenge on your ex.
Like, oh, I'll show you.
You dumped me.
Guess what?
I just want my doctor to like me.
Yeah, I just want my doctor to be, like, well done.
So this is what I want.
Like, I want a gold star, like, literally.
And so I might go in with, like, some of those sticky gold stars and give it to my...
And be like, if you could just peel one off and give it back to me, like, that's what I need out of this thing.
So, like...
I've got a great doctor and she's never been like, BMI, lose weight.
She's just like, get your heart rate up more, move more.
So I'm very excited for the external affirmation from my doctor next month.
All right, y'all.
So today we're going to talk about deportations of folks who have a Venezuelan nationality under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act.
Talk about...
What that means, why it is incredibly startling, and it could prove to be a Rubicon moment.
We will see.
We'll talk about that in relationship to Christian nationalism.
And since we're talking about tattoos, which was the premise for the Trump administration's deportation of these folks, we should probably talk about someone else's tattoos.
I'm going to leave it for everyone to guess, but that's coming in a minute.
We'll then turn to the scrubbing of various information and website
Pages from government websites, including Jackie Robinson and this happening at the DOD.
Dan will take us through that and we'll finish with a little bit on Trump and Putin and what's going on there.
So let's jump into what happened with deportation this week.
This is at the Associated Press from March 17th by Tim Sullivan and Elliot Spagett.
The U.S. deported hundreds of immigrants after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II, using the sweeping powers of a centuries-old wartime law to target alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.
The deportations over the weekend came as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring them.
So that injunction from the judge, Dan, came as the planes were in the air.
The claims...
By the administration and their lawyers are, oh, we didn't get them in time.
We just had to keep going.
The written order versus the oral order or technicalities like that are what they're appealing to.
The radio gave out.
They didn't get the Morse code.
It sounds like my daughter.
I'm like, hey, can you just finish your chicken nugget?
And it's like, I'm going to, but...
It fell on the ground.
I can't eat it.
No. Oh, it's not hot enough.
Oh, can you cut it up into another piece?
The edges are singed or like it's too brown.
Whatever. Yeah.
It touched something.
So the Alien Enemies Act allows non-citizens to be deported without the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.
Now, in order to go ahead with this, Dan, there is...
A premise that basically the Trump administration had to put forth, which is that Venezuela has somehow invaded the United States or declared war in some way or hostilities as a foreign entity, a foreign power,
a foreign nation.
The official kind of public statements have focused on the Trend de Arruga gang, which is supposedly connected to a set of tattoos that these folks...
We're identified as having.
U.S. District James E. Boesburg, who was appointed by Barack Obama, issued an order temporarily blocking the deportations, and so on and so on.
A couple things about this that have come out since then, just to add some context.
This is from yesterday by Tim Sullivan.
A crown over a soccer ball, an eyeball that looked cool.
Flowers. Those are some of the everyday tattoos that defense lawyers say helped lead to the sudden weekend deportation of roughly 200 Venezuelan men who are accused of being members of a ruthless gang.
President Donald Trump ordered the men removed from the U.S. and sent to a notorious El Salvadoran prison under an 18th century wartime law.
There's a lot of details in this piece, Dan, about the tattoos that these men had, some who had a crown tattoo, others.
Who had eyeballs, some that were modeled after their favorite soccer or football team.
We have a lot of reports from defense lawyers who are helping to represent these folks that not only did their tattoos not signify gang affiliation, but these are everyday people who are artists, who are working blue collar folks,
who are people trying to simply make a living and live.
Their lives in a normal way.
I can read a little bit from one of those defense lawyers who said this.
We last spoke to our client on Thursday before he was supposed to have a hearing in immigration court, but ICE didn't bring him.
The government ally I had run into said he wasn't there because of an unknown reason.
They emailed, they called, they didn't get him.
And she finally says, our client came to the US seeking protection.
But has spent months in ICE prisons, been falsely accused of being a gang member, and today he has been forcibly transferred to, we believe, El Salvador.
So there's just a lot of reports, Dan, that show that there's folks here who are seeking asylum, folks here who are working everyday jobs, raising families, and now they're accused of being part of a Venezuelan gang.
They're going to a prison in El Salvador, and I'll read a little bit about that prison now from back in February, February 4th.
Once again, excuse me, this one comes from NPR.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late Monday that El Salvador's president has offered to accept deportees from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent American criminals now imprisoned in the United States.
President Nayib Bukele has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world, Rubio said.
He's also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and are serving their sentence in the United States.
This, I'm not going to read the whole thing, did not exclude American citizens, and that's a whole other shark to jump, but...
It is actually mentioned here in the article and is something that was discussed by the Salvadoran president.
This prison is notoriously ruthless, some would say inhumane, sleeping on the floor, working hard labor.
We have, in essence, what it appears to be people who were either seeking asylum in the United States or here working normal, everyday jobs, living everyday lives who are now caught up.
In one of the worst prisons in the world, working hard labor, and they have had no trial, no appearances before a judge, and no due process whatsoever.
As you can imagine, I have many thoughts, but I'll throw it to you for your initial reactions.
So we're going to get into this more in a few minutes, but one is just, you know, the issue of like privilege and race and identity and tattoos and like the whole...
Really, I mean, I think a broader issue of like body art and how that's interpreted differently based on cultural background and different things like this.
And we'll get to that.
One of the things that strikes me, though, is, you know, you had all these promises from the Trump administration that I think you and I never believed and lots of other people didn't believe that when he would talk about all the deportations, about violent criminals and so forth.
And, of course, on the one hand, they're trying to present all of those deported here as violent criminals.
They have these tattoos and gang affiliations, and there's a legal reason he needs to do this to try to tie it, as you pointed out, to the Enemy Aliens Act, or excuse me, the Alien Enemies Act.
But there's also this other piece of this where, you know, you can imagine the conversation with, you know, Uncle Ron.
And you're like, but, you know, Uncle Ron, like, it turns out that, you know, you can see the images now.
They get images of some of these tattoos, and they show that they're not gang-affiliated, and, you know, whatever, and everything you're saying is just ordinary people doing this.
There are asylum seekers, many of them, etc., etc., etc.
Trump said he was only going to deport dangerous people.
And I think what you're going to get is, what's going to come into view is that for MAGA Nation, all immigrants are dangerous.
They are inherently dangerous.
They are inherently threatening.
And the question about...
Lawbreakers and violence, it becomes question-begging because if you're in the country illegally, well, you're a lawbreaker by definition.
So you get this circular logic that basically always rounds out to we should be able to remove anybody we want to remove no matter what.
We shouldn't need a rationale.
And yes, legally, if somebody is here and they're not properly documented, yes, you can remove them.
But I think for most people, there are the kind of moral...
Considerations that you're raising, and I think that they are moral considerations.
If somebody's here just being a person, raising a family, they're working, they're doing all the stuff that all of us do all the time, just trying to get through the day, like whatever.
Why? Why?
And I think that this is part of where you get the sort of, you know, just what?
It falls on deaf ears when you talk to certain people and say, Look, we were told that these people were all going to be dangerous, and there's some people that's going to matter for, but there are others, you know, and people ask me, like, why don't they seem to care about that?
My answer is, because they don't care about that, because the issue is that anybody who's not white, anybody who's not Christian, anybody who doesn't fit everything I've talked about for, you know, years about this stereotypical image of what a real American is, any of those people are, by definition,
threatening. They are a threat.
They scare us.
They make us anxious.
All the Americans who are worried about being a majority-minority country and all of that kind of stuff.
And so for them, it's not going to matter what those tattoos are.
And so you get the circularity.
I think this just brings into view that this was never about violent offenders.
This was never about violent criminals.
And we could talk about, you know, Palestinian activists being removed from the country in other contexts.
The same logic bleeds across to these different issues.
But I think it's very much in view with this.
In line with what you just talked about, here's Philip Bump writing at the Washington Post.
Importantly, those who had been removed from the United States were intentionally not granted a legal hearing to adjudicate their guilt.
The administration holds it has the power to impose this punishment without such due process.
That's quite obviously because Trump and his team are working backward.
The action is meant to imply guilt, to suggest that there are countless immigrant criminals who the president is moving quickly to expel.
Stopping to assess guilt would simply reveal that some of these slated for removal weren't guilty of criminal activity at all.
If they stopped and they had due process for these 200 people, you're going to find out that whatever number it is, could be 199, could be 190, could be 180, I don't know, didn't actually have any criminal activity in their life or background.
Nonetheless, right on cue, Dan, as you just outlined.
I think they got everybody who was a bad guy.
But guess what?
If there were some innocent gardeners in there, hey, tough break for a swell guy.
That's where we stand.
We're getting these criminals out of the United States.
That's Steve Bannon, who himself just got out of jail.
So we'll just put that there.
But nonetheless, Steve Bannon's like, like Steve Bannon, a man who just got out of jail, who is a convicted criminal, is like, hey, if there's a gardener in there.
If someone who's done nothing wrong, too bad.
Hey man, sorry, you just got caught up in it and that's just how it goes.
That's exactly what you just talked about, Dan.
I want to go to one more component.
There's two more components I want to go to.
I'll go to a number.
One is we're seeing an increasing number of foreign-born academics in the United States either being deported or not being allowed in the country.
You're seeing that...
Across the board, we could mention a number, but I'll just mention one.
Aaron Reichland Melnick on social media mentions that a French researcher traveling to the United States for a conference was denied entry by CBP because a border agent searched his phone and found comments criticizing President Trump.
I learned with concern that a French researcher who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry.
And it was because there was critical comments on his phone.
There's another one I'll mention, Dan.
This is not an academic, but I'll just mention one that many folks might have seen.
This is Jasmine Mooney, who's Canadian.
She was traveling from Mexico to the United States, and she became, she's actually a somewhat famous actor.
She has worked in California for a long time as an actor, so on and so forth, went across the border.
And she tries to come back.
She's told, you didn't do anything wrong.
You're not in trouble.
You're not a criminal.
And I remember thinking, why would she say that?
Of course I'm not a criminal.
She then told me they had to send me back to Canada.
That didn't concern me.
I assumed I would simply book a flight home.
But as I sat searching for flights, a man approached me.
Come with me.
There was no explanation, no warning.
So this is on the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to get back into California.
He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands, and ordered me to put my hands against the wall.
A woman immediately began patting me down.
The commands came rapid fire, one after another, too fast to process.
Shoes, shoelaces, and it goes on and on and on.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, Dan.
Some of you have seen the story.
She spent nearly two weeks in incarceration.
She slept on the floor.
She went from trying to get back in the country to sleeping on the floor in a facility.
We are at a place where Yes, if you are Venezuelan, if you are French, if you are Canadian, it is seemingly not safe to come here or to try to get back into the country,
even if you have the right documentation.
We've jumped a shark here, Dan, that is going to be one in which I think it's going to take most Americans a while to catch up to where we are.
The world is not looking at this country as a place that is safe to go to.
Like, we're going to see significant brain drain.
We're going to see significant labor and economic drain.
But we're also just going to become seen as one of those places.
And we've all sort of had these talks with family members or others about places you want to visit.
And someone at the kitchen table says, well, is it safe to go there?
You know, should you go there?
My partner at one time in her life was a researcher who studied various...
Political and religious phenomena in the Middle East and spent time living in Egypt, spent time living in Jordan.
And of course, we had all of the aunts and uncles and friends from home like, oh, is it really safe to go there?
That's this country now, okay?
We could spend all day on this.
I want to go to something.
I want to go to two more things.
One is the last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, it was World War II, just so happened to lead my family members, Japanese Americans, to camps.
So if you think this doesn't lead to camps...
That could not happen here.
We don't do that.
It already did.
They will claim invasion.
So just think about the law, Dan, and slow me down here if you want.
Cal, I'll let you jump in.
Slow me down.
Here's the logic that the Trump administration uses.
Venezuela invaded us.
Therefore, we're going to pick up 200 Venezuelans, take them to a labor camp in El Salvador.
Judge? Nah.
Jury? Nah.
Process? Nah.
So what happens when they start claiming that about any country?
Right? I mean, what if that is Mexico?
What if that is Honduras?
What if that is Canada?
And what if the rationale is, well, we don't have enough manpower to put them on planes every day, so we've got to build this camp out here in rural Arkansas, like they did with the Japanese Americans.
We've got to build this camp out here in the Arizona desert, like they did for some of my aunts and uncles.
The premise is they're invading.
Now, in World War II, the premise was, well, Pearl Harbor means whatever.
Not going to get into that.
Think about the logic.
It's not that hard to get to a place where you're like, well, we can't just deport hundreds of thousands of people every day.
It's a lot of planes.
Be easier just to set up a labor camp like at home, wouldn't it?
That's not hard to get to, logically and or practically.
Am I being...
Something? No, I think, in fact, the one piece where you're not being alarmist enough is that you didn't have to have an accusation of invasion, right, in World War II.
Like, nobody was claiming that they were invading.
They were already here.
They were, you know, it was about maybe their loyalties don't really lie with America, whatever.
It's much more amorphous.
And so in that regard, with this claim about, you know, Venezuela, it's just they invaded us, you know, and so we have this.
But we have, I think...
You know more about the topic than I do, but I think that we have a precedent where that invasion piece didn't have to be there to be used, which, again, gives us the precedent that that could happen again.
And it's worth noting, and I think a lot of people don't realize this, that internment of Japanese Americans in particular was challenged in court.
It did go all the way to the Supreme Court, and it was affirmed in the Supreme Court.
So there's a precedent that I don't see Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito overturning if and when it comes to the Supreme Court again.
And so I think that that's a part that makes it potentially even more alarming than it already was as you were laying it out.
Let's take a break and come back and connect this to one more aspect of everything in the Trump ether.
right back.
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Okay, Dan, one of the things that I have not seen widespread in discussion about the deportations and the discussion of tattoos, and I know, I'm sure people have done it, and I'm not saying we're the only ones, but I have not seen this sort of as a main talking point, is the argument is,
look, if you have these tattoos, you're dangerous.
We've got to get you out of here.
And as you said, Dan, if you show Uncle Ron a picture of a Venezuelan man with his shirt off with tattoos, there's a good chance your white uncle At the birthday party or Thanksgiving or the cookouts, Uncle Ron's like, yeah, look at this guy.
You want this guy in your country?
Yeah, I don't know about this guy.
Look at this dude.
I don't even need a trial, bro.
I know this guy's dangerous.
That's what Uncle Ron's going to tell you.
Look at this dude, man.
I don't need no judge to tell me nothing.
This guy is a criminal.
And I was just thinking about tattoos.
I don't know why.
You know, sometimes, Dan, I lay awake.
I got a weird brain.
I got to shut it off.
Doesn't want to shut off.
I start thinking back to...
Just key moments in the last, I don't know, months.
And we had a Department of Defense guy, who I believe is now currently the head of the DOD, named Pete Hegseth, formerly of Fox News.
Seems to have his shirt off a lot, or seems to have a shirt on that is soaked in alcohol a lot.
And when he has his shirt off, what you can see is that he has Crusader tattoos.
And I just happened to...
Research these because of, you know, everything we do on this show and my work.
I went on TV and talked about this.
I interviewed Spencer Koontz, who's a researcher at Florida State, who's a specialist in crusader imagery and the white nationalist groups that often don the crusader tattoos that have been dubbed extremist and prevented Pete Hexeth from serving at Biden's inauguration because he was flagged as somebody who...
Might have white nationalist leanings.
Who dons the Crusader tattoos?
And this is from Spencer Kuntz, who is a researcher on this.
I interviewed Spencer.
You can go to our website, type in Hegseth, type in tattoos, type in Crusader.
You'll find the episode.
It is from just at the turn of the new year.
The Crusader tattoos are about sacred hierarchies, Kuntz says.
It's a way for the chivalric Christian knight.
Who serves in a military order to reclaim their honor from a society they feel no longer properly values them.
They are the last bastion of protection for the sacred hierarchies of heteronormative versus queer, cisgendered versus trans, nuclear family versus non-normative household.
When they don the virtual armor of the crusader, these men infuse their beliefs with holy fury.
Mundane cultural anxieties become divine imperatives to wage war against those who are judged to be heretics.
This is about having a lineage, a people, and here's a key line and I'll throw it to you.
An undocumented immigrant is someone who is both devoid of chivalric honor for not complying with immigration codes and someone whose need to immigrate in the first place marks them as an outsider to Western Christendom.
As with other nationalisms, blood and soil are cyclical identities.
Spencer goes on to point out that the three percenters have been found having these crusader tattoos.
The mass shooter who attacked Christchurch engraved his weapons with references to the crusades.
Anders Breivik referenced the crusades' efforts of the Knights Templar in his manifesto before he killed 77 people.
Men who believe themselves to be racial holy warriors eventually engage in acts of racial holy war.
There's a question here, Dan, about whose tattoos are considered dangerous and who is considered dangerous.
And I think the Hegseth versus the people who've been deported case by case, side by side.
Examples are really telling.
What do you think?
I agree.
I think it also taps into broader cultural patterns.
So all people have to think about is, you know, like you mentioned, you know, Uncle Romulo, you want this guy in your country?
And it's the way that lots of people have a different reaction to, say, even like a black professional athlete, and you get the picture of them on the shirt, and they've got tattoos everywhere, and you get the person that is kind of okay because they're an athlete, but they're also uneasy about that,
and they'll accuse them of being a thug.
And I use that word advisedly because it's often like a coded language that's used for, you know, people of color.
And within like athletics, it's a way of sort of linking them with violence and criminality or just the anxiety people will feel if they're walking down the street and there's an African-American man with like tattoos and so forth.
Versus if they're in like the hit bistro and like their waiter walks up and, you know, they've got a tattoo sleeve, but it's like, you know.
Oh, well, that's kind of cool, and they're just kind of young and hip, or let alone the response to the white college girl who goes off to spring break and gets the tattoo on her ankle or her lower back or whatever.
The point is that when it comes to body art, when it comes to just marking identity on bodies in whatever way, there are radically different, really visceral reactions that I think lots of Americans have based on...
Often just the race, to a lesser extent perhaps the gender, of the people who are marked in that way.
And I think that that maps onto this as well.
It's not just that they were tattooed.
They're people of color.
They're Venezuelan.
They're not American.
And so those tattoos evoke a sense of threat that many Americans simply don't feel if it's a white dude with tattoos.
And I think that that's a broader...
Much bigger kind of cultural issue that also just reinforces the kinds of patterns that you're talking about and these really different responses.
Dan, if you're in a gastropub and the Brussels sprouts cost $18 to $25, the tattoos are safe, Dan.
Those are safe tattoos.
Yeah. Okay?
If you are just eating Brussels sprouts to get nourishment in your body and they cost $2 at the grocery store, there's a chance you're a criminal.
That's how that goes.
Two more things and then we'll move on from this.
One is Marco Rubio and the El Salvadoran prison.
Not ruled out American citizens going there.
And some of you are like, well, I know, Brad, but, you know, like, you can't deport an American citizen.
I'm going to read from President Donald Trump, who put this on social media just this morning.
I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they're doing to Elon Musk and Tesla.
I'm going to hold my tongue.
I've got so many thoughts there, but I'm going to hold it.
Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.
So he's saying maybe you could serve that 20-year sentence in El Salvador.
Dan, I don't know if people listening feel like the arrest of a Venezuelan person in New York City or in Florida or in Texas.
Or anywhere in the country affects them.
But what we have is a regime that is starting to disappear people without any process and claiming that they had to do it because their country was invading them or they were a terrorist.
We talked all last week about Mahmoud Khalil and his arrest.
We talked about today a Canadian woman, a white Canadian woman who's somewhat famous.
Being held for nearly two weeks in a facility.
We're talking about researchers from France and other places, people who are brain surgeons or social scientists, not being allowed in the country because they've criticized the president.
We cover things that are scary every week.
We cover things that are alarming every week.
That's what we do.
It's etc.
When I think of Pete Hegseth and the Crusader, when I think of the Christian nationalist social hierarchies, When I think of the white nationalist hierarchies and the things we're going to get to in a minute related to Jackie Robinson and DOD, it's easy to think that they're not coming for you,
American citizen, and that you're not one of them.
You're not Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian.
You're not a Venezuelan migrant.
But how soon before they're willing to say, well, we just need to take this person.
Who we deem a terrorist for critical comments about Elon Musk or Donald Trump and take them to El Salvador.
We're not deporting them.
No, we're not.
We're just going to hold them there.
They're too dangerous to be in the country.
And yeah, maybe not El Salvador, but maybe we will take them to Guantanamo Bay.
Just yesterday, the New York Times reports, the Trump administration sent a new group of migrants to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay to await deportation.
How long before that is somebody who is deemed a terrorist, is deemed too dangerous to be in the American public, who is deemed something that they need to go to El Salvador.
They need to go to Guantanamo.
They need to go somewhere without process, without trial.
There's, you know, that famous poem, They Came For This Group, and I wasn't part of that group, so I didn't speak up.
And I don't want to be trite and I don't want to be cliche, but I think that if you imagine the Venezuelan migrant being deported who simply works a janitor's job or cuts people's hair for a living or works in an office as not you,
we need to A, have more empathy, and B, I think, need to consider the ramifications of what's happening.
And I'll just leave it there for now.
Any final thoughts on that?
Before we, you know, there's the Guantanamo piece.
I think one of the unfortunate, unfortunate is the wrong word, one of the really tragic parts of the Obama era was kind of allowing Guantanamo and other things to hang around.
And now when Trump does stuff like this, he can look at those Obama liberals and say, well, you know.
This is part of your legacy, too.
So anyway, any final thoughts before we go to break and move on?
This also fits, I think, to the point of how this can happen.
The Trump policy or strategy, I should say, has been since day one to stay ahead of the courts.
It's blitzkrieg.
It's like attacking hard and fast before anybody can respond.
And so with all the executive orders...
With all these kinds of moves is to do this so that by the time the courts can catch up and adjudicate this, you've already done what it is you wanted to do, and it's a lot harder to undo it than it would have been to prevent it, you know, and have it happen.
And so I think the very real possibility, as you say, that people are relocated or, you know, housed or whatever language they'll use, whatever euphemism, somewhere outside of the mainland U.S., outside of, you know, adjudication and so forth.
So by the time some court order comes down and says, well, you can't do that, you're like, well, gee, it's really hard.
I mean, they're in El Salvador.
We're having trouble finding them.
That's not our fault.
Or, you know, well, the El Salvadoran officials are not really kind of working with us here.
We're doing everything we can, but like, who knew that that was going to, you know, I think that's the other piece of the strategy has been consistently to just try to outrun the courts and to therefore, after the fact, minimize the effect of what those court orders are able to undo.
And I think that that's...
That's a strategy that could fit very easily into what you're describing.
Well, I'll just say real quickly, Representative Brandon Gill, like many Republicans and MAGA-ites this week, was raging against the court and the judge for ruling that this was not legal.
Or at least, let me back up, ruling at least that this needed to be halted for further review.
And Representative Gill went on Newsmax and said that the judge needs to be impeached.
The Newsmax host says, Why?
And here I'll play the tape for you.
Take a listen.
I have to ask you this.
For impeachment, obviously, you have to have high crimes misdemeanors.
What crime did the judge commit?
This is for usurping the executive's authority, for demeaning the impartiality of the court by making a politicized ruling and forcing a constitutional crisis.
That is a high crime and misdemeanor.
Congressman Brandon Gill, sharing that with us today.
We do appreciate the time, Congressman.
Thank you so much.
The justification is, Dan, he usurped the executive's authority.
This is an injunction.
This is a court saying, let's review this.
Let's make sure it's legal.
That's the courts.
And he's saying the judge should be impeached because he somehow overthrew the president?
Nope. Somehow, you can see where this is going.
You can see where the judges are going to be.
And this is happening all over social media right now.
It's happening all over Fox News.
The judges are the enemy.
And the line is becoming, why does a random judge in California get to decide that this isn't legal?
I mean, this is what you're hearing GOP Congress folks saying all over.
So let's take a break.
Come back.
We'll talk about what happened with Jackie Robinson this week.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
You know, sometimes when you use search terms, weird things happen.
You ever, and I don't, you know, I don't really want to know any stories about that from your past.
All I remember is, I'm old enough that I remember any time you put in any search for anything, there would be random adult sites that would come up, like in the early days of searching.
It didn't matter what you did, you know.
But yeah, we've all had the weird stuff come up.
Sometimes maybe in classes, you know, whatever.
I do feel like it's hard to explain to, like, people now.
Like, if you're not a certain age, like, what it was like going on the internet in 1998.
Yeah, the Wild West of, like, you know, you put in a term.
Yeah, and who knows what's coming up, but also just, like, you had to dial, whatever, let's not get distracted.
All right.
We bring up search terms, though, for a reason.
And what is that reason, Dan?
Yeah, so this is going to tie us back into Hegseth and some other stuff.
But as everybody knows, federal agencies and departments have been required to basically scrub data from their websites, public-facing websites in particular, anything related to supposedly DEI, diversity, equity,
inclusion, and this included the Department of Defense.
And so this week, the scope of what was removed started to come into view in a really embarrassing way for DOD.
And the Department of Defense was forced to say that, in quote, rare cases, end quote, it may have removed information it didn't intend to.
Like what, Brad?
It included two cases that were prominent this week, and these don't exhaust it.
There are lots of others, and people who are listening are probably aware of a lot more of them than I am, rather.
And I'm not trying to say these are the only ones, but two really prominent ones was a tribute to Jackie Robinson's army service, right, was removed, deemed to be an error.
They say they're going to put it back, all that.
But also, like, information articles related to the Navajo code talkers in World War II.
People probably know that the Navajo language was used as this kind of code during World War II, and it was this really significant thing for the Navajo nation and people of Navajo descent and so forth.
And that was removed and apparently is going to be brought back up and so forth.
Again, the Department of Defense insists this was a mistake, that that content is being restored, said that they were mistakenly removed as a result of a search for other DEI elements.
But what this has done, Brad, this week is bring into view some of the nuts and bolts of how these determinations were actually made.
It highlights a number of mechanisms in this that I think are worth noting.
It's going to bring us back to some things that I think are important.
It's going to bring us back to Pete Hegseth, among other things.
But we learned that there was a directive from Hegseth, Pete Hegseth, in a very, very short timeline to Department of Defense to do this scrubbing, to remove this.
And it was so vague that military units were instructed to, you know, basically they were given a list of search terms.
Like, here are the terms that you can plug in to your system.
You can, you know, use AI to help whatever.
Anything with these terms is suspect.
And it included things we might expect, terms like racism, ethnicity, LGBTQ, historic, accessibility, opportunity, belonging, justice, privilege, values, all of these words, like values determined to be, oh, that's a DEI buzzword,
let's go after it.
But it also included terms like history and first, like literally the word first.
So anytime there would be something that says such and such was the first what?
The first, I don't know.
African-American general, the first woman to serve in combat.
I don't know what all the examples would be, but all the firsts and things that were deemed to be historical were on this list.
And so, again, manual work, people doing this by, not by hand, but sitting in front of a keyboard, putting in search terms, was supplemented by AI that identified material for removal.
I think the strict timeline ensured that material was removed with minimal review.
I think that's not an accident.
We've seen that.
Like, look at all the stuff that's gone on with these federal firings and then having to bring people back or realizing that, I don't know, the nuclear weapons aren't safe because the people who oversee that were cut.
The Trump administration, again, the move is to act first and evaluate later.
And so all of this stuff was scrubbed and removed.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell tried to backtrack again as these mistakes came to light.
In other words, we didn't mean to take out, you know, the first example of this or the first example of that or to whitewash history or anything like that.
One unnamed official decried this process of removing firsts and said, quote, that's just history.
It's not really DEI.
It's just literally history.
So people were really taken aback by this and this notion that you would remove things that were quote-unquote historical firsts and so forth.
Here's the trick, though, for me, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, is you get that statement, again, history is not DEI.
For the Pete Hegsess of the world, for MAGA Nation, history is DEI, or better yet, appeals to DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion.
That's code for...
Whitewashing history.
That is code for giving a history of the country and these agencies and these departments that fits into the white Christian nationalist narrative of what this country is.
And here's why.
MAGA is about what?
Make America Great Again.
What is that again?
We've talked about this for years.
The again is this past.
It's this mythological past when the right kinds of Americans ran America.
When the right kinds of Americans were the population, when you had a straight white Christian nation, everybody who didn't fit into that was in their marginalized positions, or we just pretended they didn't exist, or we criminalized them, or we did any number of different things.
That's what America was.
That's when America was great.
That's what we're after again.
Folks, any departure from that, any historical first from there is only a move away from a great America.
So the first people of color in, say, integrated units, a famous African-American athlete who goes into the military, the Native American Navajo Nation playing this really pivotal role in helping win World War II,
that doesn't fit the historical narrative of white Christian America.
That doesn't fit the narrative of what America is and when it was great and so forth.
So my argument is that this wasn't...
You know, this wasn't a bug.
This was a feature.
The reason you put the first in there is because there is a threat.
History, historical memory, is a threat to Christian nationalism.
And we've talked about this, the willful forgetting and reshaping of the past.
You've talked and written and taught about, you know, how fast myths can be created through the reconstruction of history.
And I was reminded reading about all this, and I'll throw it over to you, of Charles Mills, who wrote the book The Racial Contract, really, you know, sort of seminal text if people want to check that out.
But he talks in that text about the intentional cultivation of ignorance, like an intentional ignorance that allows white supremacy to take root and to hold on.
And you could talk about this with issues of queer identity.
You could talk about this with issues of patriarchy.
You can extend that beyond race.
But it applies to so many of these different kinds of things.
That's what this is.
And we've seen this.
We've seen this in schools that aren't supposed to teach about the history of slavery.
We've seen in schools that aren't supposed to talk about, you know, the economic motivations of Christopher Columbus or him writing letters to the Spanish monarch about what useful slaves the Native Americans would be or whatever, of erasing these things from history, carefully cultivating a kind of cultural ignorance.
So that we can create a history that white Christian America can be proud of and look at, and that becomes the future, to aim for that once again.
So I see all this that was happening at DOD as not a mistake.
I don't think it was a mistake when somebody put the words in there.
I think they got called out for some stuff, and it blew up a little bit and turned embarrassing.
But I see it as fitting.
I see it, you know, here's Pete Hegseth, same guy that's, you know, showing up in other places.
Is another connection here.
So I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
But I looked at this and said, this wasn't a mistake.
This is what MAGA Nation has been doing with history for years at this point.
I think there's no reason to be surprised by it or to take what they say at face value.
I think one of the things I want to reflect on is DEI and its meaning.
We're getting to the point where you hear DEI hire so often that regardless of your political view, you start to think of it as meaning what?
You start to think DEI means you got hired because you're black.
You got hired because you're a woman.
You got hired because you're queer.
You got hired because some reason.
That's the idea.
And, you know, there's folks who have said this, been kind of discussing this this week, and I'll just add to the discussion that Jackie Robinson was DEI.
Why? Jackie Robinson was DEI because he was a black person in a league that was all white and actively enforcing an all white standard and rule.
When he integrated the Major League Baseball or professional baseball, he did so because there were no other black people.
So he was a very active and intentional figure.
Who was chosen for a number of reasons, but one was his demeanor, his character, his virtue, so that he could represent a more inclusive baseball league.
Was it because he was black and that's it?
No, it was also Dan because why?
He happened to be a really good baseball player and to this day is one of the best baseball players in the history of the league.
Like, he is one of the...
Best American, I mean, if you read about Jackie Robinson, baseball, Dan, was like his fourth best sport.
Like, he's one of the best baseball players in history, and baseball was his like fourth best sport.
I mean, he played football, he was a track star, so on and so forth.
He was DEI.
Why? Because he wasn't good at his job and they just needed a black guy?
No. He was better at his job than 99% of the people playing, but there was an intentional exclusion of people from a certain...
Identity, a certain race, a certain whatever.
DEI is not, oh, you got hired because you're this, but you're not qualified.
DEI is we as a country for so long have excluded certain people, whether they are Black, whether they are people of color, whether they are women, whether they are queer, whoever they may be.
So we actually need to have active intentionality to not allow ourselves to continue with that kind of program.
DEI is not, well, we certainly just need a brown person or we better get an Asian in here, so make sure we hire them.
It's about hiring people who are qualified, who can do the job well, and making sure that cultural biases and personal preferences and all the comforts and the ways that we are accustomed to things don't get in the way.
I'll just give one example, and this comes from the Academy.
Dan, I've been on hiring committees in the Academy.
And, you know, I think this isn't going to come to a shock to a lot of people, but a lot of folks who are in the academy, who are professors, come from upper middle class backgrounds, highly educated homes where their parents like met at Yale or something.
Okay? And that's great.
If that's you, awesome.
I'm not, I'm not, there's no shade.
I'm not judging you.
Nothing. But they're folks who've been trained in elite institutions their entire life.
They've gone to really good undergraduate schools and went to Princeton for a PhD or a master's and then to Columbia or then to Berkeley or then to wherever.
Great. There's a lot when you hire someone in the academy that says, we've got to do our best not to just replicate ourselves.
Because if you do, you're going to end up with nothing but...
Upper middle class white folks who've been trained at elite private institutions, and there's a good chance you're going to see that candidate who went to a state school, who does not come from the same racial class as you, who shows up with tattoos, who shows up with a different way of dressing,
a different accent, a different way of speaking, and say, I'm not sure if there's something.
And I've had this happen, and I have had to...
Put my career on the line.
I've had to go to the bathroom during these committees and look myself in the mirror and say, you're going to stand up and do the right thing, but you're not going to get fired today.
Maybe you'll get fired today.
I don't know.
You know, you never know.
And that to me is DEI.
It is not hiring someone because we need a Black person.
We need a gay person.
It is saying, Jackie Robinson, better at this than 99% of people, but you weren't allowed to do it because of your race, so we need to intentionally get you in here.
I'm not sure if that was a tangent.
I apologize if it felt like it, but back to you.
Well, no, I don't think it was a tangent because, I mean, that's the real aim and meaning of the so-called DEI initiative, is to identify qualified people who would be excluded because of bias and have historically been, and to rectify that.
It's not about a lack of qualification.
On the flip side, I think showing the ridiculousness of that argument, I'm just going to throw this out.
Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith this week...
And this was pretty funny, but very pointed.
He called Pete Hegseth a DEI hire.
And what did he mean by that?
So this is what he said, and this was about the Jackie Robinson stuff and everything else.
He said, Pete Hegseth is the head of the Defense Department.
He served our country with honor.
I'm not trying to knock him or denigrate him in any way.
We've got to root for our elected politicians or the people they assigned to departments who wish them nothing but the best in America's best interest.
But the fact of the matter is, how is he not DEI?
And what did he mean by that?
He said, how in the hell do you go from being a weekend host to being the head of over three and a half million people for the Defense Department of the United States?
In other words, he's saying, what are this guy's qualifications?
How did you go from being a TV personality?
And yes, you served in the military.
Fine. Serving the military is one thing.
Running the military is something else.
Can I just say something?
I was the captain of my high school basketball team, senior year.
And I've applied several times to be an assistant coach with the Lakers, have never gotten called back.
They say, I don't know.
They say, just because I played basketball at a very low level in 1998, for some reason I'm not qualified to be in charge of one of the most storied franchises in athletic history.
I don't know, but I don't get it.
Because if I were Pete Hegseth, it would make sense.
Well, that's what he's saying.
And basically he says he happens to be white, but we don't mention DEI when it comes to him.
And what he's saying is...
It sure looks like they hired him because he's a white guy and not because of his qualifications.
And if you follow MAGA and you follow the Trump administration and you know how they work and you know what DEI now in quotes is within that framework, that's exactly how it works.
I mean, it was, I think, a really impressive sort of hot take on it.
That the caricature of DEI is exactly what they are putting in place, hiring somebody despite a lack of qualifications because of their racial identity, when what DEI is about is finding the most qualified candidate and making sure that we are not marginalizing people because of either examined or unexamined biases that are not related to job performance and qualification.
We're going to run out of time.
Let's just spend like three minutes here on Trump and Putin.
I mean, too long didn't read Trump got played once again by Putin, but you want to give us some of the details?
Yeah. The long and short of it is the Trump administration, you know, puts forward a ceasefire proposal for 30 days.
Ukraine signs on to it and they kind of talk a big game.
Ball's in Putin's court now.
They're putting pressure on Putin.
I think they're trying to make it look like something.
Putin spends a week kind of being like, oh, gee, we're really about the ceasefire.
We like it, but we've got questions.
We've got concerns.
I need to talk to Trump.
Donald needs to have a chat.
90-minute phone conversation between Trump and Putin.
And the long and short of it is that the Trump administration now tries to declare some sort of victory of this.
Putin agreed to a 30-day cessation of targeting energy infrastructure.
The Trump administration said that they were going to stop targeting energy and infrastructure.
There was no and.
They're talking about energy infrastructure.
Pretty vacuous.
It also helps the Russians because the Ukrainians have been very effective at attacking Russian energy infrastructure.
And as you're coming into the summer, spring and summer, warmer weather, a lot of analysts are like, they can stop attacking Ukraine here and it doesn't actually serve the same strategic purpose that it did and so forth.
In the meantime, Trump spent that week...
Continuing to make all the demands that he had been making before, everything that would need to happen, demanding an end of foreign aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and assurance that Ukraine can't join NATO, rejecting the idea of European peacekeepers in Ukraine, and so forth.
So the long and short of it is, as CNN said, Putin showed Trump the art of no deal, and the Trump administration looks like they got kind of bluffed.
They don't know what to do.
They don't know how to push back.
Putin continues to be Putin.
He continues to win over the Trump administration.
He continues to outmaneuver them.
And he continues to put Trump in this position where Trump just keeps giving Putin what he wants so that eventually he can say that he made a big deal and so on.
And so it's just more of the same of what we've seen with Trump and Putin in Ukraine.
Let me play a clip real quick of Trump talking about Putin recently and his relationship there.
Putin actually said to me, if you're my friend, I'd hate to see you as my enemy.
He said that very strongly.
But with all of that, I had a very good relationship with Putin.
I had a very good relationship with President Xi, a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
Lots of good relationships.
And that's a positive thing.
That's not a negative thing.
But at the same time, I'm about our country.
So that's why we're talking about tariffs.
We'll be taking in trillions of dollars.
It's amazing to hear this supposed tough guy say that, yeah, Putin said to me very strongly, whatever that means.
How do you say something to someone strongly?
How do you say something to the President of the United States strongly?
Like, honestly.
Come on.
But, like, what kind of adverb choice is that?
Like, was he yelling?
Is that what strong means?
Or was he sincere, Don?
Don, let's have a different word choice.
Like, was he sincere?
Was he, like, vocally loud?
Was he literally, like, physically screaming?
Was he authentic?
What do you mean by strongly?
It's amazing how he's like, look, you know, he promised me he wanted to be friends.
So I had a very good relationship with him.
It's amazing that people think this guy is good at this.
We don't have time to go into the psychology of that, into the hysteria of that.
Nonetheless, it continues to happen.
All right, y'all.
We will be...
Oh, no.
Dan. Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my God.
I almost signed off without doing reason for...
Have we ever done...
A weekly roundup with no reason for hope?
I don't know if we have.
We might have.
Not for a long time.
What is your reason for hope?
I apologize.
My reason for hope relates to some of the deportations.
A federal judge ruled that an Indian-born Georgetown fellow, Badar Khan Suri, cannot be deported.
This is one of the people who was detained by the Department of Homeland Security, currently detained in Louisiana.
You mentioned this last week, the strategy of...
Removing people sort of a long way from where they are to make it harder for, you know, attorneys and things like that.
His attorneys have said no reason for detention was ever given or evidence of illegal activity other than, again, political speech.
That was targeted.
And so, again, we see, you know, the courts stepping in and recognizing that this can't stand.
Lots of bad news on the deportation front, but I took hope from seeing the courts begin to catch up with this.
I want to highlight a reason for hope coming from Idaho.
A bunch of you have sent this to me.
It's in our Discord.
I've had friends text it to me.
Sarah Inama, who teaches at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Meridian, Idaho, has a poster in her room that says, everyone is welcome here.
She was told to take it down.
And she said, look, there's only two choices.
Either everyone is welcome here or everyone is not welcome here.
And the principal, vice principal, the district said, well, you can only have content neutral posters.
And she's kind of like, what is unneutral?
What is biased, I should say, about saying everyone is welcome here?
She's now in a legal battle with them.
She continues to fight.
She's not giving in.
And that's pretty cool.
And I have to say, these are the kinds of everyday people.
Sarah Inama is a middle school teacher, did not sign up to be a culture warrior, did not sign up to be a political figure, and is out here not giving in.
And I just want to say, I know there's hundreds and thousands and ten thousands of you out there who are doing the very same thing and keep doing it.
We recognize you, we are inspired by you, and we are going to keep going.
All right.
Next week, be back.
I'm going to do more on empathy, the sin of empathy.
Which is a sin now, supposedly.
Going to get super theological, Dan.
I'm so excited.
I get to talk about incarnational theology.
And it's just, you know, for someone who's trained in theology and doesn't do it anymore, it's quite fun.
Wednesday, we'll be back with It's In The Code, Friday, the weekly roundup, and our last installment of Spirit and Power on Thursday, which is just an incredible series.
For now, we'll say thanks for being here.
Thanks for all of you who subscribe and help us do this show like we do it.
We will hope you have a great weekend and we'll catch you next time.
