Weekly Roundup: This Is An Invasion - Pritzker, Trump, and the Union Coming Apart + Venezuelan Boat Attack
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Brad and Dan tackle a whirlwind of pressing issues shaping the American landscape. They break down Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s bold stand against Trump’s threats to deploy the military in Chicago, explore the deeper implications of masculinity and political power through viral moments and media narratives, and discuss the targeting of marginalized groups in current policy debates. The hosts connect these events to broader themes of authoritarianism, the myth of the “Lost Cause,” and the ongoing struggle over American identity, all while offering sharp analysis, historical context, and a dose of hope for resistance and community.
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I'm Brad O'Neishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next, Founder of Access Mundi Media here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
I'm on the road this week, so we're we're doing this in a little bit of modified style, but nonetheless, we're going to talk about JB Pritzker and his fierce resistance to Trump and the press conference that to me really was a prism into what's going on in the country.
We'll then get to a coterie of issues that are really about masculinity and terrorism, which you all are like, what does that mean?
But it's going to involve discussion of what happened with the Venezuelan boat carrying 11 people that was reportedly destroyed by the U.S. military.
We'll get into trans people and the idea that they should not be able to own guns, which is floating around at the DOJ.
And Mom Donnie, the New York City candidate everybody loves except for anyone with any power in the Democratic or Republican Party.
And his push, his bench press, the controversy.
La Faire Bench Press, Dan somehow is with us.
And after that, if we have time, we'll go to some things related to RFK.
This is Straight White American Jesus.
A lot to talk about.
Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
This is one of those weeks that we just there's just so much to talk about.
And that seems to be the case every week we could spend today talking about the Epstein survivors who had a press conference that was interrupted by a flyover from the US military that was really Dan, and I'm happy for you to jump in here right away.
We're not really going to spend too much time on this, but is there anything more fitting and more disgusting than a sexual abuser and assaulter like Trump?
Basically yelling over people who survived sexual assault so no one can hear them.
That is there like any other way that you could think of that being more perfectly disgusting.
No, except just to heighten it that Trump is like this spoiled child with really big toys.
So he can like, you know, he doesn't just have to yell and throw a tantrum, he can actually have the military do his personal bidding and fly over to disrupt this.
So yeah, it's it's uh it was a disgusting display all the way around.
We will see if names are read from the house floor, which is something that is on the horizon and supposedly being talked about and promised by the likes of Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene says she will read those names and Rokana.
Now they can do that from the House floor, Dan, and not be sued because there's immunity there.
If someone else said, hey, you're on the Epstein list, Bill Clinton or someone else, they might be sued.
So we'll see what happens there.
Let's go to J.B. Pritzker.
He held a press conference this week in light of the rumors that Trump is getting ready to send military to Chicago.
And his remarks were to me up to this point, Dan, the most direct, clear, and forceful from any Democrat in the country.
Here is a clip of him talking about the kind of setup of Trump and where we've where we've come as a country.
So in the absence of significant federal coordination, we've gathered information from unauthorized patriotic officials inside the government and from well-sourced reporters about Donald Trump's plan, which is to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago.
I'm aware that the president of the United States likes to go on television and beg me to call and ask him for troops.
I find this extraordinarily strange as Chicago does not want troops on our streets.
I also have experience asking the president for assistance, just to have the rug pulled out from underneath me when execution meets reality.
I refuse to play a reality game show with Donald Trump again.
What I want are the federal dollars that have been promised to Illinois and Chicago for violence prevention programs that have proven to work.
That is money that Illinois taxpayers send to the federal government.
And it's an insult to any and every citizen to suggest that any governor should have to beg the president of any political party for resources owed their people.
He calls out something here that is so obvious and yet so often unsaid, Dan, that Trump has turned the presidency into a personal resource of riches and a place where others have to beg for influence, for protection, for help.
We've talked about this unendingly when it comes to FEMA.
They've taken money away from FEMA, and it's basically if you're nice to the president, he might send help if you have a hurricane or a fire.
They moved the space command, or they're going to from Colorado, your one of your home states, Dan, to Alabama.
And one of the reasons that Trump said is because Colorado has been mean to him because they're keeping mail in voting.
All right.
So like when Pritzker says we have to beg the president for stuff, that's what he means.
And that is not a way to live if you want anything other than an authoritarian autocracy.
But he calls out something else, and that's in the second clip.
And I'm gonna play that for you, and and then we'll get into what it means.
The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have.
We will see the Trump administration in court.
We will use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.
Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man.
To any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous.
So this is a direct challenge to the administration and those working within it, Dan.
He says, look, if you're working in this administration and you are helping with an invasion of an American city like Chicago, we're gonna remember.
We know who you are.
Dan, that is that is like calling out the people who are carrying out the banality of evil.
Those who are just following orders and saying we're gonna remember.
And to me, there's this little glimpse, Dan, of a resistance.
That's like, we know who you are, and we're not gonna, we're not gonna forget who the who the traitors were, much less the president who is ordering this.
In addition, Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago signed in an executive order that basically is aimed at making sure federal forces don't come to the city.
It's called the Protecting Chicago Initiative, and it calls on Trump to stand down from any attempts to deploy the U.S. armed forces, including the National Guard to Chicago and lays out measures to guide Chicagoans and local law enforcement in the event that they do invade the city.
I have like a bunch of thoughts here.
I want to throw it to you before I get into the heart of what I want to say about this.
Andy Craig said on Blue Sky, and I thought this was just a great summation of the Pritzker Johnson press conference.
He says that Pritzker press conference was surreal and was the governor of a state, saying plainly the union itself is being torn apart, and his state is being militarily invaded by an authoritarian regime.
I want to get to that and really zoom out to where we are in terms of this idea of the union itself being torn apart.
But let me throw it to you for some first reactions to this whole phenomenon.
Start just with that notion of begging.
We've seen that.
What happened to Zelensky in the Oval Office?
He gets lectured by J.D. Vance for not being polite enough for not saying thank you, for not saying please, for not, you know, bowing and scraping.
And every world leader who's gone in there since has known that they have to flatter Trump.
They have to effusively praise him, you know.
And so that that's a real thing.
It's not just uh I think just a rhetorical thing, it really is that because for Trump, he is the American government.
That's the unified executive theory.
That's the whole thing.
I said earlier that it's like he's like a kid with all these toys.
That's the model.
He is the government.
This is populism and authoritarianism 101, where the leader is the embodiment of the nation, and that's how he views himself.
So you're not asking for aid from the U.S. government, you're asking for aid for Trump.
So, hey, Colorado, you you you were mean to me.
Like, not, I don't know, you don't cut down enough on election fraud or this or that or your policies.
No, it's you were you were mean to me because you don't want to do what I do.
So I'm gonna take this thing away from you.
So I think all of that's like like literal.
And so to be called out on that way, I think is is crucial.
I'm like you and a lot of other people waiting to see how this the stuff in Chicago plays out.
We know a reason for hope that you know a judge ruled that the National Guard actions in LA were unconstitutional, no national injunctions, all that sort of stuff, but like that's out there now.
And if if you're in the National Guard, uh when we talk about those, like you know, the we remember, we know who you are.
If you're one of the generals or the commanders in the National Guard and you're ordered to do this, and you know about that, and you know about you know laws that are supposed to prevent this, and you choose to obey those commands anyway.
Like, I think all of these things are real, they're all present, and we're waiting to see how they play out.
We're waiting to see, I think what an executive order from the mayor looks like, what law enforcement responses actually are, all of these kind of things.
But to your point of of tearing apart, you know, the the union, it's worth just pointing out.
And I know you're gonna take us in some of these directions.
It's worth pointing out that you have a Republican Party that has you know, sort of celebrated the Confederacy and the notion of like, you know, state standing up to a you know, the war of northern aggression and whatever.
We're we're now like, what is this, the war of like MAGA aggression?
Is that what this is now?
It's just like we we talked about the reversal of you know, Democrats appealing to states' rights and so on, and this this is a really sort of stunning big level reversal where you now have blue cities, blue states decrying the occupation of the U.S. military coming into their their jurisdiction.
So I think it's really significant.
All right, I want to go to this idea of of a war of aggression and and the the Confederacy and all those things.
Let me let me bring up two more parts of the story first.
One is it it looks like Trump was trying to mobilize the Texas National Guard or members of the Texas National Guard to go to Chicago.
You just said it, there is this ruling that what he did in California was illegal.
In order to do what he seems like he wants to do, which is send Texas National Guard troops to Illinois, he would have to federalize the National Guard.
He has not done that.
To my knowledge, the only time the National Guard has been federalized in this country has been to make sure schools were desegregated, not to invade a city.
And so if the Texas National Guard just shows up in Illinois, it's essentially Texas invading Illinois.
So that just goes to the point you just made about a union being torn apart.
And I want to I want to hit that.
Before I do, let me bring something else up, Dan, that is gonna seem unrelated, but I think is directly tied to all of this.
The governors of Washington, Oregon, and California have made a health alliance to stockpile vaccines for people in light of what's happening with RFK and the CDC.
It's basically a way to say we're gonna form a coalition that will ensure public health.
And this comes with the news that Florida is going to drop vaccine mandates in school.
I I think that that's all tied together.
Because what what the three states of the the Cascadian Alliance are doing, Washington, Oregon, and California are doing is saying we have to protect ourselves from the invasion of the federal government into public health.
Like they're invading public health, they're invading the space of safety and security and health that all of us have had for 75 years because of vaccines.
They're invading that.
So what does all this mean, Dan?
Let me give you my proposal, and then I want to see what you think about it.
A lot of people, including me, have been calling Trumpism a lost cause myth for a long time.
I wrote in the New York Times, three weeks after J6, that Trumpism is a lost cause, and It is a new civil religion based on myths and symbols and resentment.
I wrote in that piece that even though he has lost this battle, the election of 2020, if unless he is banished from public life and all the people who took part on January 6th, you're going to end up with a revenge story that will fuel a movement for generations.
And unfortunately, that is coming true.
Richard Slotkin, who's a historian, puts it this way.
The lost cause symbolism carries with it a commitment to the myth's political action script of cultural and political authoritarianism.
MAGA has become a distinctly American approach to fascism.
More neo-confederate than neo-Nazi, an amalgam of American exceptionalism, racial and ethnic bigotry, Christian nationalism, and neoliberal economics.
I think most of you know that the lost cause myth is the idea that the South was attacked by the North because of greed and economic voraciousness and a desire to destroy a Southern way of life that was idyllic and Christian and noble.
It was the idea that the war was not about slavery, but was about something else.
And that in fact the Confederacy was morally in the right and had the superior society and the North ruined all of that.
It's also a myth that said the South will rise again.
Now, Heather Cox Richardson, who I know many of you are fans of, wrote a book called How the South Won the Civil War.
And she basically argues in that book that the lost cause myth created an identity that led to the emergence and re-emergence of the KKK.
Like you don't get the KKK without the revenge myth of the Confederacy.
You don't get Jim Crow, basically the segregation of American public life without the revenge myth of the lost cause.
You don't get Chinese exclusion all the way on the West Coast.
You don't get violence against Native Americans in the way that it happened without the resentment myth and symbol of the lost cause.
The idea that the Confederacy will rise again and that it should be the superior way of life in the United States.
Dan, MAGA Nation is the new Confederacy.
I'm not saying red states, because there's too many people in Texas who don't want this.
There's too many people in Florida who don't want this.
MAGA Nation, not red states, is the new Confederacy.
And here's the key, y'all.
And here's where I need you to perk up, okay?
You're washing the dishes, you're driving the car, you're looking out the window, your kids yelling.
Here's what I need you to hear.
This time, instead of seceding from the Union, like the Confederacy did, they are in control of it.
They are in control of the Union now.
They're control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive branch.
So what we now have is MAGA nation invading the rest of the country.
They're overrunning the rest of the country.
They're going to take it regardless of whether they invite they're invited or wanted.
That is what the Chicago issue says to me, Dan.
Dan, who sent troops to DC?
Who sent National Guard troops to DC?
Let me list some of them.
Former Confederate states, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina.
Now there were two others.
Ohio, all right, Ohio's Ohio.
Ohio has become very, very, very GOP heavy and far to the right.
And West Virginia.
Now, West Virginia is one of those states.
Not part of the Confederacy, but it was it was carved out in essence for a lot of reasons.
But there's a murky civil war history in West Virginia.
I'm not, we're not going to do all that today.
The point I'm trying to make is MAGA nation is an invasion over the rest of the Union.
That's the goal.
The vaccines, the CDC, it's part of all this.
They want to come into the public square, particularly in schools, and use false authority, junk science, and bad faith reasoning and say, we're doing it our way, not yours.
We don't care about science or or or or data.
We don't care about the way that you think we should do it.
We're doing it our way.
We are invading this space.
A former leader of Chicago law enforcement went on Fox News and said this, Dan, Trump cares and loves the American people.
And he's going to show it by sending the guard to Chicago.
Even though they don't want that.
Dan, that's an invasion.
That's saying, I know better than you, and I don't care what you want, I'm going to do that.
Now, here's my last, here's my last comment, and I'm done.
There's a line in a very scholarly elevated source.
I believe it's the film Captain America, the first Avenger.
I knew Dan was going to love that.
I'm exciting my sources, Dan.
Okay.
This is it's peer-reviewed, all right.
A lot of people love this movie.
What's the line?
It comes from Dr. Erskine, Abraham Erskine, the creator of the super soldier serum.
And he says this.
So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own.
And that's a way of saying they suppressed their own people.
Civil so civil liberties.
If you were not the right kind of person, if you were disabled, if you were Jewish, if you were queer, you were a target of violence.
They invaded their own country first.
That's what's happening to us right now.
Thoughts.
A few one is, you know, I like the point you make that it's not just about red states, it's about Moganation.
And so the model, you know, even more than invasion is is maybe infection.
If you're we talk about this, it's it's it's pervading the system.
It's it's like a viral spread, and that that's what it's doing.
It's trying to like sort of move into those systems that have resisted, systems that are unaffected.
By systems, I mean blue states, I mean blue cities, I mean cities with high minority populations, I mean cities with leaders who stand up to Trump, states with governors who stand up to Trump.
Like these are the targeted systems that like are now that's where the viral inspect infection is going.
They're being targeted because of that resistance.
So I think that that's that's really key to recognize.
You've got that, you have the revenge tour, you have all of this, but that language of you know, Trump cares about America so much he's doing this, whether they want it.
Remember, the same guy's gonna protect women, whether they want it or not.
We we we've heard that language before.
And he just flew a plane over women who were talking about being sexually uh abused.
So there you go.
I'm gonna silence you whether you want it or not.
We've said for years that this is how populism and nationalism work is that not everybody who lives in America is an American, not everybody who has U.S. citizen is an American, excuse me, U.S. citizenship is an American.
This is about the real quote unquote Americans.
Real Americans are those who support this MAGA agenda.
Real Americans are those who support deploying the National Guard to cities that didn't vote for Trump, with populations that didn't vote for Trump, or states that aren't gonna redistrict for Trump or whatever else it is.
And I think this is what people like have to understand.
I mean, for years we've heard that everything we say about this is hyperbole, and it keeps getting more hyperbolic and it keeps happening to a greater and greater extent.
There's no way now, for example, in light of the decision about the National Guard in LA, which of course will be will be appealed and all that kind of stuff, okay.
But the decision is there, everybody knows it.
There's now no way to say this isn't a military invasion of a blue city in a blue state with a democratic, like that it's not an ideological war, a war against those with the wrong ideology, is what I mean by that, and everything else.
There's no way to mask that or hide that, and that's exactly what's happening.
So why are they not, as Gavin Newsom has asked?
Why are they not going to Shreveport to Mike Johnson's home district where the murder rate is is much higher than most of California?
Why are they not going to Mississippi or Arkansas?
And and DC.
There was an article this week that listed, I mean, just God, city after city after city in southern red states with much higher crime rates than what you have in DC.
And yet DC is the target.
And it's it's because it's not about crime.
Yep, it's about an invasion.
Like you have to, friends, you have to think about it that way.
Whatever rhetoric you want, you know, Uncle Ron gives you, or you hear coming out of the president's mouth or whatever, this is about an invasion.
And it is not about crime.
It is there's no data that you could give Mike Johnson or Pete Heggseth or anyone else that says, here's the highest crime in the country, go there.
And they would look at you like, we're not going there.
And they're they'll try to spin it, they'll try to like, you know, they'll they'll try to like you know, play it off.
It's never gonna happen.
And now, one of the places they're they are talking about going is Louisiana.
And we'll see what happens there to New Orleans.
And you know, New Orleans is a place, Dan, where it's a very interesting interesting part of the I mean, New Orleans is a is an amazing part of the country.
It's interesting in the sense that New Orleans is one of the blackest cities in the country.
We just had the 20th anniversary of Katrina when there was a widespread sentiment that black people were abandoned when Katrina came.
But Louisiana itself is run by deep red committed MAGA extremists.
So we will see what happens there.
So again, they might go to what here's my point.
They might go to Louisiana because it's a city full of black people run by Democrats.
They're not going to go to Shreveport where Mike Johnson is.
Whatever.
So we'll, I don't know.
We'll we'll we'll get more to this down the road.
Let's take a break and come back and talk about masculinity and terrorism across a number of issues.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan, we're going to try to do something I think that's going to be tricky, but I believe in us, and I think we can do it.
So we've got a couple of things.
A Venezuelan boat that was destroyed.
We've got the idea that trans people should not be able to have firearms in the country.
And that Zoran Momdani is somehow not fit for office because he could not bench press a lot of weight and it was caught on video.
You want to take us through the Momdani issue first, then the trans firearms thing, and then we will go to Venezuela, the Venezuelan boat after that, and we'll we'll tie it all together.
Yeah.
And so for those who haven't followed it, if you have followed it, you're probably like, why in the world are we talking about this?
So here's here's the start.
Here's what happened.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a video of New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Momdani, and it went viral.
He was at an event, it was like a I think it's a men's day event in Brooklyn, and they have like some like weight benches and stuff out there, and it was just, you know, he's kind of showing up, and like people are cheering, and he's on video and all of this.
And he took a turn at the bench press, and he appeared to be attempting 135 pounds for people that are in the weightlifting world.
It's his one plate.
So the 45-pound plate on each side of the bar, the bar weighs 45, et cetera, 135 pounds, and it didn't go well.
The bench spotter was clearly supporting the weight on a lift, and after a couple reps, he gets up and he's laughing and he's grinning, and people are cheating, you know, no big deal, but it goes viral.
Why?
I mean, clearly, among other things, while he's not good at bench press.
Those who know bench press, like he's holding the bar wrong and he doesn't have his body positioned right and whatever.
Fine.
It's it's a dude like there just doing a thing with people and whatever.
But who cares?
Who cares?
It turns out people on the right really care.
This has like blown up into a thing.
And I think that that's the point because people are like, like, who cares?
This is so dumb.
You're like, well, a lot of people care, and we need to look at why that is, because it's all about the intersection of politics and masculinity and conceptions of like uh this the same notion of who are the real Americans.
Real Americans are men and people who support men.
But what kind of man?
So it comes out that this is a thing and it has blown up on the right.
So Fox News, for example, ran a story featuring a guy named Dr. Chad Teague.
He's an orthopedist of the clinic, and he's treated several NBA and NFL players.
He's there ostensibly to discuss how to properly bench press.
Like if you if you look at some of the thumbnails, that's what it'll be.
It's like orthopedics tells you how to do a bench press.
It's like, oh, okay.
But he leaned into the narrative that Mom Donnie's fail showed that he isn't a real man and he connected it to politics.
And of course, that's why he's on Fox News is to do that.
He said this.
He said, quote, if you're not able to hit that, that is the 135 pound bench press, it's like a slap to your manhood.
That that's his quote, orthopedic surgeon on Fox News.
He went on to say that he thought Biden could probably lift more than that.
And then he said, I think Trump could lift more than Mom Donnie for sure.
What we we would call that a non-sequitur, has no point at all.
Like nobody was talking about it's not about Trump and Biden, is it?
Turns out that it is, right?
The Fox headline was NFL NBA sports doctor weighs in on Mom Donnie's viral 135-pound bench press fail.
Trump could lift more.
That's what they lead with.
Elsewhere, right wing commentators pick up on this.
I watched Matt Walsh, not something I like to do, but I did it.
I did it for our listeners, Brad.
Watch Matt Walsh, he jumps on this topic too, and he he also assails Mom Donnie's manhood, says a whole bunch of other dumb stuff that he says.
And he suggested that men should be able to meet minimum physical standards to be eligible to vote.
Said, you know, maybe we need to have a bench outside, outside the voting booth.
And if men can't bench press at least 135, they don't get to vote.
And it wasn't only the right who jumps on this.
His democratic opponents did this.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams called him man mom scrawny because he couldn't lift this.
Andrew Cuomo said, this guy can't bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.
End quote.
What's the point?
Okay.
To me, it's this linking of politics and political worth to manliness.
And the definition of manliness in this sense of like literal physical strength, that this is what qualifies you to lead.
That this is what it is to be quote unquote a man.
The perception that physical prowess suits one to political leadership and vice versa.
I think this is why Trump Trump is an old man who's in bad shape.
He has said on the record that he doesn't believe physical exercise is good for you because humans are like batteries.
They're born with a finite amount of energy and they just lose it over their lifetime.
This guy's like, Yeah, he could bench press 135.
I don't think he could.
But we've talked for years about the posters of Trump with Sylvester Stallone's body, the Rambo body, and the Trump head.
You get this kind of circularity where physical ability qualifies you for politics and power, but politics and power gives you the perception of physical ability.
And it's it's literally about physical attributes.
So you have this perception that Trump is a man not only of like, I don't know, some sort of political strength or business acumen, but physical strength as well.
And it comes through.
And I think what it tells us is why is mom Donnie targeted this way?
Because he's a socialist.
Quote unquote social.
Socialism is effeminate, it's not masculine, he's not strong, he can't lead New York City.
And for those who are wondering, I think the other piece of this, because people say, well, this is ridiculous, it also shows how much none of it's based in fact.
I I went and did some hard research of my own, Brad.
I went to Sports Illustrated, which had an article that points out that the average American male who doesn't like lift weights on a regular basis, can't bench press more than 135 pounds.
You have Andrew Cuomo who's like, this guy can't lift his own body weight.
Guess what?
Most American men cannot bench press their own body weight.
You can't.
It's got nothing to do with anything.
I was talking about this with my daughter, and you know, it said the thing about the bench outside.
He's like, well, isn't that like super ableist?
I'm like, yeah, but that's the point.
If you can't do that, you aren't qualified.
This is the like middle school vision of masculinity that dominates on the right.
And our bonus episode, Brad, I told a ridiculous story about a push-up contest at a church camp.
This is literally what these people think qualifies you for political power and authority.
So if you're not a man, you don't get to lead.
But also, if you have the wrong political idology ideology, you by definition are not manly.
If mom Donnie had been able to put up 135 12 times, they'd be talking about how he's like strong and not smart or something like this.
They would have found some other way to spin it.
No matter what he does, he has the wrong political ideology, uh, ideology, he has the wrong ethnicity, he's not fit to be a real American, he's not fit to be a real Man and it ties this vision of normative masculinity to the heart of the understanding of American identity and politics.
So thoughts you had on this, and then we can take it into like the concrete ways that it plays out in something like this this idea of preventing trans people from owning guns.
He also has the wrong religion.
So I think that's one.
I think another thing to point out is you know, your daughter very astutely pointed out this is ableist, and it's also just plays right into fascist tropes.
Fascism is about an aesthetic.
It's about the idea that uh power and speed and virility is what makes you fit to lead.
It's the it's the Hitler youth model, man.
Like all those those propaganda videos of the Hitler youth running and doing sports and you know, track and all of that.
That that's what fit that that's what qualifies you for political leadership.
It's also so we spent all of last week roundup talking about RFK and eugenetics.
It's also eugenicist.
It's also this idea that the survival of the fittest and those with the superior genes are the ones that we should have in our society.
I just said that the Nazis invaded their country first, and that meant disabled people.
That meant queer people, that meant people whose bodies were not the right bodies.
Not to mention Jewish people, not to mention so many others.
Okay.
I want to point out that RFK seems to believe in no science except for steroids and crank.
Like here's an old man, RFK, who religiously takes performing enhancing drugs.
I would call them, I don't know, Dan, gender-affirming care, so he can be the kind of male masculine body that he thinks he should have.
And he does not believe in vaccines.
He does not believe in any other science, but he does believe that if he takes steroids, he'll be the right kind of man.
That's the only science he believes in, seemingly.
There's also this cringy video of Pete Hegseth and RFK working out together.
And it just plays into everything we just talked about, what you just talked about, when it comes to this vision of masculinity.
There is a conflation of physical strength with actual power.
And that is what we see here, in my opinion.
The power and ability to lead, to be somebody who can be a public servant who can take folks along a journey of working together as a democracy or a strong man.
And last comment on the strong man in every sense, a strong man in every sense of the word.
Yeah, literally and figuratively.
100%.
And I think I've made this point over and over again, and I'll just make it briefly here, is that when you envision masculinity this way, you as a man always have to make a choice because you're always going to meet a man who is bigger and stronger than you.
And the model of masculinity says, well, that then you you submit to that person.
And there's this whole theological history here of God as the most masculine male.
God is ultimate masculinity.
And the idea that the Israelites were Israelite men were ultra masculine in public because they were always effeminate in the presence of God.
There's a book out there I've quoted many times called God's phallus, which sounds funny, but it makes this point in incredible detail with incredible insight.
I'll leave it there for now.
Take us to the DOJ and trans folks and the idea that they should not own guns.
Yeah.
So I think I think the most threatening thing to a masculinist vision of society.
And notice I said masculinist.
So women can be masculinists in the sense that I'm putting it, right?
Women can support patriarchy, women can support the whole alpha male aesthetic, women can can you know play the role that their job is to help men and all of that sort of stuff.
So a masculinist conception.
The biggest threat to that, in my view, on the right, is actually not from, you know, people who are are I identified as women at birth and fight that and whatever.
It's it's people whose gender doesn't conform to a binary model.
It is people who who are not identified as women at birth who identify later.
It is women who are identified as women at birth who identify as men, it is people who don't identify with a determined gender.
That that radically disrupts all of those systems on which This is built.
And so I think that's one of the reasons why you have the targeting of trans people by people on the right.
I think it's why it creates such a visceral reaction and so forth.
I've talked about that before.
We see it this week.
There's articles in several places that the Department of Just Justice under Trump is exploring ways to ban trans Americans from owning guns.
The ostensible justification for this is that the shooter at the Minnesota Catholic school was a trend 23-year-old trans woman.
So that that becomes the sort of the reason, but we've seen the targeting of trans people this entire administration.
This is not something that's new.
We've seen it in red states for years and so forth.
And it would be based on the premise that trans people are mentally ill and a threat to the broader population.
So a lot of a lot of issues and revelations here.
I want to throw out some of them.
First, I say this all the time, and I'll say it again.
The DSM that defines what mental illnesses is explicitly says the trans identity is not a mental illness.
There is no medical basis or any kind of documentation that anybody can point to to say that it's a mental illness.
But as you just said, people like like RFK and others that they're not concerned about facts, they're not concerned about actual science and medicine.
It's just a pretense.
Why that pretense?
Because there's a lot of talk about mental health.
There's a lot of talk about you know the GOP saying they're going to deal with the mental health issues behind shootings and so forth, which has always been a bunch of hot air.
We talked about the prayers and and hopes and prayers conversation earlier.
We talked, I think mentioned that the JD Vance said that they were going to be looking at mental health care and so forth.
Except that the GOP has routinely opposed any kind of laws that would, you know, so-called red flag laws that would prevent people with documented and serious mental illness who might be a threat to themselves and others from having access to guns.
They've always opposed that.
But now all of a sudden, when it's those who violate this gender order, when it's those who threaten this patriarchal social order, when it's those whose very existence demonstrates that there is no natural gender binary, now we're going to target them.
And we're going to suddenly lean into if we're the GOP, an argument that we've we've never actually leaned into before.
And it's also the last point here.
We've we everybody has talked about this for years.
When it's a white male who shoots a bunch of people for whatever reason, he's always the lone wolf.
It's always acting on his own.
Maybe he's mentally ill, but it's it's always an isolated thing.
It never says anything about a broader group, never says anything about a culture of violence, never says anything about a political ideology.
It's always about just that one person.
And the GOP in those contexts is always telling us that those of us on the left and others who will talk about structural issues or structural inequalities or things like this, that we're wrong to do this, that we're we're thinking in collective terms that deny individual responsibility and so forth.
But we've said for years, not when it's a Muslim person, when it's a Muslim person, it's Islam that's to blame.
And here it's not one individual who goes and does this.
Nope, it's gender ideology.
It's trans people, it's queer folk.
And we can expand out from there to see who else gets swept up in this.
So again, what sounds like if we're talking about mom Donnie, it sounds like a dumb gender thing.
Who cares?
The dude can't bench press much.
Who cares?
This is how it plays out in concrete terms when these are things that people actually believe and feel viscerally define who and what America is.
Trans people are not real Americans.
They can't be real Americans because they defy a gender order.
And so we see in really concrete terms efforts now to strip them of their the second amendment rights, the GOP is always always willing to fight for for anybody else.
The GOP for the last since Columbine, Dan, let's just say we've we had Columbine.
Yeah, we had Newtown, and you know how many massacres in between those two and since since Newtown.
And everything we heard, especially during the Obama years, when there was a black man in the off in the Oval Office, when there was a man who had parents who are immigrants or visitors to this country, when you had how many millions of people who believed he was secretly a Muslim.
The NRA gave us these lines that were infuriating.
The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
You started to see in those years, the 2010, 12, 13, the come and take it flag, the Gatson flag appear everywhere.
You started to see Alex Jones on camera screaming, yelling hysterically, come and take it, come and take it.
The gun is the ultimate right of the white American.
Congress people take pictures with it.
They put their, they give their children handheld killing machines to prove that they are real Americans who have real power, going back to what we just talked about.
And I it's just we want to talk about a phallic symbol.
Like, like if we want to do that, is there any more phallic symbol in like American society than a white man holding a gun?
And, you know, all of it.
I everything that it communicates with that.
And I realize that the women participate in this as well.
It's still that.
It's like the ultimate symbol of male virility, male power, male authority, all of that wrapped up in one thing.
So it's fundamentally, for me, it's fundamentally about this conception of gender, you know, all the way down.
And there's there's work that shows that.
There's there's books and articles and scholars who have spent years looking into this.
So for so many people during those Obama years and after, no matter what happened, how many kids were massacred, how many kids were shot, how many people were or were terrorized, how many orphans were created?
It was do not come for our guns.
Do not even think about it.
The NRA and so many other organizations.
The American right believes that guns are a more fundamental right than a more fundamentally protected thing than the ability to vote.
Like just look at the track record.
We've talked about it on the show, and so many others have.
They will do so many things to take your vote away.
And they want nothing to be able to take your gun away, your handheld killing machine away.
Except for if you're a trans person.
And I just want to know are we gonna see?
And I already know the answer.
I'm not an idiot.
We're gonna see the NRA, we're gonna see the gun fundamentalists.
Are we gonna see the extremist come out and say you can't take guns away from Americans no matter what, even if they are trans, we're not gonna see that.
Because the goal of the handheld killing machine in the hands of certain people and not others is invasion.
We want to be able to invade when it's time.
Like all we heard during the Obama years is well, we have all these guns, and we're prepping because the federal government might try to invade.
I'm Amon Bundy.
I'm the Tea Party.
I'm getting ready for the federal government to overstep their bounds.
I'm a states' rights advocate.
And just just real quick, Brad, can you remind us how many states Obama invaded with the National Guard during during his presidency?
How many guns did he take away?
How many guns did he take away?
And now we have a literal federal government invading states when they don't want it there, sending troops with handheld killing machines, and that government taking or trying to take handheld killing machines away from other Americans.
And guess what?
It kind of turns out it wasn't about states' rights or gun rights or American citizens having rights.
It turns out it was probably about something else.
And I think we we all know what that is.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about what happened with the Venezuelan boat and how that is also an expression of everything we just talked about in terms of masculinity and labeling certain people not worth citizenship or rights.
Go right back.
All right, Dan.
You know, just a couple minutes here to say two days ago, there was a report that the American military had destroyed a boat in the Caribbean that was carrying 11 people.
All 11 people were murdered and are no longer living.
The basic line coming from the government is that this was a Venezuelan gang narcotics carrying shipment carrying boat that was carrying a shipment of narcotics That would land in places like the United States.
JD Vance said these are literal terrorists that were going to come into the country.
And I want to just think about that word terrorist.
Because I think it's actually something that goes back to what we talked about with the invasion and the lost cause.
And that the neo-confederacy of MAGA nation taking over the rest of the country.
And you might be like, how does that work?
Dan, it it I don't want to be trite, but I will say it.
Under any other administration, the idea that you would just go and kill 11 people because supposedly they were carrying drugs would have been perhaps a presidency ending event.
If Nixon or Carter or Reagan or the first Bush, the first Bush or the second Bush or Obama or Clinton had done this, they would no longer be present.
There would probably be impeachment calls.
They they did not seem to be a threat.
There was in the sense of they did not seem to be attacking an American ship or attacking American people or holding American people hostage.
There was none of that.
And they just killed them.
That goes back to everything we talked about last segment with virility, masculinity, and the the ability to use violence to show that you have the power and the authority in any situation.
We're not going to dialogue.
We're not going to wait for due process.
We're not going to figure out a better way to detain you.
We're just going to kill you.
And the justification seems to be, well, they were terrorists carrying drugs, so we can kill them.
And I just want to remind everybody that not a week ago, Stephen Miller called the Democratic Party a terrorist organization.
So you may or may not be aware of what happened with the Venezuelan boat.
You may or may not feel like that is an existential threat to you as an American.
You may not think this has much to do with your everyday life, except for that it's not good and it's bad, and we should not operate this way.
But just like we talked about last segment with Mamdani and trans folks being outside of the category of a real American, they're going to use this category of terrorist to say, well, if you're a terrorist, we can just kill you.
We already have Steven Miller, who's kind of the the like shadow president saying the Democrats are terrorists.
Where do you think that goes next?
Like I don't know.
Talk me down, Dan.
Tell me, tell me, like, I have like, you know, I I am just too catastrophic here.
But if you if you think that calling someone a terrorist just means we can kill them, we don't have to arrest them, stop them, investigate them.
And even Rand Paul, Rand Paul, Dan, he got so close this week.
I was just, there was it was amazing to watch Rand, Randall, Randy, the Rand try.
He was really trying.
Because he said, the reason you just don't kill a boat full of people without investigating, is they might be fleeing a violent dictatorial regime instead of carrying drugs.
It was really interesting from Rand.
And I was like, you know, Rand, it's almost like we shouldn't.
I don't know, think of people who are seeking asylum or claiming to be refugees or fleeing violence in El Salvador or Venezuela, perhaps, any of those places as anything but folks trying to do their best to get away from authoritarian violent regimes.
It's almost like instead of thinking of them as vermin or poisoning the blood of our nation, we should think of them as fellow humans, thinking about how they can get to a place where they're safe, where they can eat, sleep, and not have their lives in danger.
It was really interesting to see Rand get real close there.
So to me, what happened here was uh was huge.
And I got more to say, but what do you think?
So a few things.
One I'm I'm not obviously I'm not a legal expert.
This is international waters.
There is no law or jurisdiction in international waters, which means I don't know.
If it was a drug boat, guess what?
It it didn't do anything to the U.S. Like it's it's out in international waters.
My point is there's no pretense here of an invasion or the other things that the Trump administration has done.
Lots of analysts have pointed out that you know the the U.S. military is supposed to respond to, you know, defensively when attacked, as you said, there was no sign of aggression.
After the fact, members of the military said there were a couple of Venezuelan aircraft that flew kind of close to their their boats, and that was provocative, but it didn't connect to this boat at all.
The point being there's no provocation, there's no sort of like legal basis, there's no anything here for like interdiction or anything else, which would be interdiction, not destruction.
It would be to interdict the boat, board it, search it.
I don't know, do that kind of thing.
Here's the trick for me is here.
We've got old school GOP and new school GOP coming together, because this is a trick the Bush administration owned, right?
Label anything terrorist, yep, and you take away their rights.
Yeah, you take away any due process, you take away any pretense of anything.
And the Bush administration, I mean, this this is this is old school.
People have talked about this for a long time.
They decided early on that terrorism, you know, the quote unquote war on terrorism, that terrorism was a military action, not a criminal action.
It didn't require investigation, it didn't require arrest, it didn't require due process.
They built Guantanamo Bay, the facility there, to avoid having to provide any kind of due process and to make sure that people were didn't have the protections of U.S. rights by not being on the U.S. mainland.
So here we have just just the the melding of these two pieces of MAGA nation with the what by now is for the last quarter century, the traditional GOP playbook.
Let's label them terrorists and they have no rights.
They are not human, they are there to be eradicated, they are an inherent military target, no matter what they're doing or where they are.
And to your other point, that's why it's scary when people believe that and they label their political enemies as terrorists, because that is the implicit claim.
So the Washington Post, sorry, the New York Times reported on this a day ago.
And here's one of the things that was nine paragraphs into the article.
Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.
We will find the legal authority after we kill 11 people.
That's what that means.
Buried as you say, nine paragraphs in.
They don't have like a legal justification here.
Again, Andy Craig said it this way.
They don't want to offer a legalistic argument about why it was somehow justified.
They want this to be obviously an undeniably an act of wanton murder, so they can flaunt their lawless impunity.
And you know, I'll I'll leave it there just in terms of everything we've talked about today: invasion, scalinity, power, virility, and fascism.
It's all tied up in in that statement and and this set of events.
My reason for hope.
Let's make a transition.
Everybody take a breath.
Let out the bad air.
Here we go.
My reason for hope is the fact that Washington and Oregon and California are creating a health alliance.
I think we need more of this.
I I'm not gonna lie, Dan.
If I were the Democrats, who I don't know if that party exists anymore outside of J.B. Pritzker or if they're doing things.
Oh, King Jeffries seems to be, I don't know, just sleepwalking through whatever's happening in our country.
But if I were the Democrats, I would just be setting up an alternative, like information sources.
I would be setting up like alternate the alternative CDC, the alternative health, like the alternative weather.
What whatever it was, I would just be like, hey, the the the people taking over your country, they don't want you to have this info.
We will be the ones that give it to you.
And I think the alliance with the three states is a beginning of that.
But like what what why would you not do that now if you were the Democrats, other than because the Democrats are busy writing letters and having lunches and you know, other than a few of them seemingly not doing much.
So off to you.
Mine, I you know, I mentioned one, again, it's the court cases.
I I think it is significant.
We've talked about this for months about the Trump administration sort of running out ahead of the courts and the courts catching up, and I think that there is broadly speaking hope that, as I say, the speed of the Trump administration is also its weakness because they have not built things that can sort of stand up post-Trump or post-midters if we have midterms and if they lose the house and so forth.
So I I mentioned the the decision in California that ruled that Trump's deployment of the National Guard in LA was unlawful and it violated the the passe comitatis act that says that they can't do law enforcement and so forth.
So we'll see where that goes.
DC is also now suing the federal government about the deployment of the National Guard.
And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify the rapid deportations was unlawful as well.
So the legal basis for these things is unraveling.
Does Trump care about legality?
No, we know this.
Does MAGA Nation care about legality?
No, we know this.
So people will say, well, what's the point?
The point for me is if nothing else, it brings into view what is really going on.
The GOP and the people who support Trump, and to circle back to a point that you made earlier.
The people that we're keeping an eye on that we're like, we know who you are, and you aided and abetted this the whole time.
There is no pretense anymore.
It's there, it's out in the open.
When Trump now deploys the National Guard to someplace like Chicago, it is clear that it is an invasion.
It's not to tamp down on crime or to do anything else.
It's just there to try to punish Chicago for being Chicago.
So I think that there's value in that.
And I take hope in some major court decisions.
Again, they'll be appealed.
Some will go to the Supreme Court, etc.
But I took hope in those decisions this week.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
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So uh Dan's taking a lot of photos in his cargo shorts doing bench press.
