Weekly Roundup: Hegseth Declares War On the Military + Trump Declares War On You
Brad and Dan examine Pete Hegseth’s recent gathering of generals, critiquing his “warrior ethos” rhetoric and highlighting the dangers of his speech that attacked DEI, questioned due process in sexual assault cases, and called for stricter religious and fitness standards in the military.
They unpack his fat-shaming and fabricated claims, contrasting leadership with rulership in both Hegseth’s and Trump’s approaches, which lean on power rather than genuine leadership. The discussion expands to Trump’s disturbing remarks about using American cities as military training grounds and framing citizens as enemies, alongside analysis of Project 2025, the looming government shutdown, and Russ Vought’s strategy targeting blue states.
Brad and Dan also spotlight Judge William G. Young’s strong defense of pro-Palestinian speech and his rebuke of Trump’s attacks on free expression. With themes of authoritarianism, executive overreach, and the critical role of resistance, the hosts call on listeners to stay informed, resist normalization of these tactics, and engage in the ongoing fight for democracy.
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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 Axis Moundy Media Here, as always with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lammark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
Some of you are watching this.
Some of you are listening, if you're watching, you're seeing Dan in closer to HD than he's ever been, which is nice.
We get to see all of the wisdom and and beauty that is Dan Miller.
It's pretty great.
So all right, y'all.
Today we're going to talk about Pete Heggseth's gathering of the generals, the meeting that could have been an email, or just maybe not have taken place.
Just need didn't need to happen.
Yeah.
Maybe that.
We'll then get into Trump, the shutdown, and Russ Vogt, the proponent of the unitary executive theory and what he has planned for the shutdown and what we think might happen there.
We'll then go to a court case that is not being covered enough, but is in some ways one of the most notable things from the week.
So as always, lots to cover.
Let's go.
Yes.
All right.
Yeah, take us through it, Dan.
We got Heg Seth.
We got the general.
I'm so excited about Heg Seth.
So everybody probably knows some of the background of this that Heggseth called a meeting requiring the attendance of all general and like flag officer, like like admirals and generals, and as well as as their senior enlisted staff purposes, staff members.
Nobody was exactly sure why.
They were called a Quantico as over 800 of the highest ranking military officers in the country.
Uh created people talked about the cost.
It was super expensive.
Trump decided he was going to come along too.
And you know, so already you had all kinds of security issues and so forth.
As you say, nothing happened that needed to be there in person, other than Heg Seth wanting to, I think, flex and try to seem I don't know, seem important or something.
Um, but it was he essentially lectured the military commanders about his priorities for the military, you know, what he called the the warrior ethos of of what he demands for the military.
It was for those who followed Heg Seth and you know, things that we've talked about, it was nothing, nothing new, nothing different.
It was consistent with all his anti-DEI policies, his stance against women in the military.
Um, very frankly, preference for white guy grooming standards, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Um, and so what what he did is he sought to advance his vision of, as I say, this warrior ethos.
That's his language.
That's not our language, that's what he was calling this.
So a few things that he emphasized, and I've got a couple quotes from what he he said when he was speaking to them.
Uh he emphasized the imposition of male fitness standards for for all positions and so forth.
He rescinded religious exemptions to the ban on beards.
And I think most notably to me, what stands out are sick men who say that yep, have a beard for religious purposes, explicitly rescinded that.
Uh he complained about due process rules and sexual assault investigations, because you know they just do too much to attack the assailants.
Uh he complained about quote unquote, you know, sort of constraining rules of engagement and stupid rules of engagement that that need to be rescinded.
They rescinded rules for the retention of quote adverse information in personnel files.
And uh he insinuated that officers who were women or people of color attained their rank for that reason alone.
Again, the kind of you know, anti-DEI kind of thing.
And then he said some things like this.
I'm quoting, he says, I don't want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat unit with females who can't meet the same combat arms physical standards as men, or troops who are not fully proficient on their assigned weapons platform or task or underleader who is the first but not the best.
We could unpack that you've got the anti-women stuff, you've got the anti-you know, minority, any kind of minority officer is there because they're a minority officer and so forth.
Uh regarding the the not keeping so-called adverse information files, he said, quote, people make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career, end quote.
Uh it's worth noting here, several of these things were self-serving.
He has in his file that he was not allowed to participate as a National Guard member at the Biden inauguration because they determined that he had white supremacist tattoos.
We've talked about this.
It's that kind of stuff he wants to scrub from people's files.
Uh he said, he's another statement.
He said, Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops.
Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.
It is a bad look.
Lots of people have pointed out it's not clear that that's a thing, that there are lots of you know, really rotund military officers, but but he said this.
There were just straight up fabrications that he said.
He he asserted that in 2015, quote, combat arms standards were changed to ensure females could qualify.
He's made a lot of comments about the fitness standards and women not meeting the fitness standards and so forth, but he has never specified an instance where this actually happened, where there's actually been a case of like the fitness standards not being met and so forth.
Uh, other information about this, other commentators noted that no service has lowered its fitness standards to accommodate women.
Yeah.
And in one case, the army actually created an entirely new, like sort of system and test for determining physical fitness with general gender neutral scoring to determine which types of jobs new recruits are qualified to do.
So you kind of do a physical test, and if there are different positions that require sort of different physical standards based on how you fulfill the test, is like which positions you can be open to.
Gender neutral, it could be gender blind.
It's just they've got a sheet that shows how people did, and then they match them to it.
If you, if you if you just do a basic Google search of like military military standards for combat readiness or training, it's very clear.
You can read article after article after article.
I mean, you can go wherever you like and find the fact, like military.com.
I was reading this morning.
I mean, you can read this in a thousand places that in terms of combat readiness, it is a it is a gender neutral scoring system across the board.
There may be other systems at various stages of military training, but combat readiness, warriors in combat, it's it's just not what he's talking about.
Yeah, exactly.
It also pointed out, and this this just gets to some of the, I don't know, old school for the name, you know, for the sake of the old school piece, other commentators.
I should note as I was as I was prepping this and I'm looking around at different things.
There are a lot of like military trade kind of newspapers and publications that are really tuned into this that are aimed for a military audience.
They are not all sympathetic to this.
Like a lot of the critiques are coming from that perspective that is certainly not anti-military.
It is not anti-you know, Department of Defense or Department of War, whatever we want to now call it.
So these are are I I would call them critiques from those who are very, very pro-military who are critical of this.
And I'll have more to say about that in a minute.
Uh, but it also pointed out that that his review requires a justification for any standards put in place after 1990, right?
So I mean, this 35 years ago, uh, as one person said, suggesting that it prefers a default to that error's gender and age-determined scoring of push-ups and sit-ups and a run.
It's like super old school kinds of things.
He's also got stuff about, you know, height and waste ratio measurements, and you know, this is like straight out of like post-World War II kind of conceptions of fitness standards.
Uh, ways that others of his statements are self-serving.
He said, quote, we are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues, and poor performers in the driver's seat.
Hegseth is currently under investigation by the inspector general because of the whole signal app thing.
And so he's like, We're gonna do, you know, the inspector general has been politicized.
He again, he he called for troops to ignore, quote, stupid rules of engagement.
And he said this, quote, we unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.
We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.
No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, quote.
In saying this, Brad, as you probably know, he also criticized a retired U.S. Army general, Peter Chiarelli.
Why?
He formally reprimanded Heggseth's former brigade commander in 2007.
Heggseth's former commander, Michael Steele, was accused of issuing improper orders to his soldiers that led to the death of unarmed Iraqis.
And so he was chastised for this.
So lo and behold, Heg Seth says we need to, you know, do away with you know what are pretty standard rules of engagement at this point.
And then finally, in terms of what Heg Seth said, he said, I look out at this group and I see great Americans, leaders who have given decades to our great republic, a great sacrifice to yourselves and to your families.
But if the words today are making your heart sink, you should do the honorable thing and resign.
Uh so he basically tells the so-called, you know, the war fighters, as he would call them, that if they don't like what he's saying and they don't like the way that he's saying it, that they should resign.
Uh, as some thoughts about the responses to this, but I'll throw it over to you for like other just, I don't know, takeaways or things that stood out to you.
It's just every hit point of Heg Seth and the Trump administration in this speech that again didn't need to be delivered in person, didn't need to have everybody there.
Yeah, so I I wanna I I I want to zoom out.
So I think you you just gave us so many of the highlights and lowlights, however, you want to characterize them.
I think people listening, watching have probably seen some of these clips and read some of these snippets.
And so if I zoom out, there's a couple things that hit me as I watched this speech this week.
And and I think this is sometimes the benefit of doing the show on Friday is you know, sometimes I'm worried, like, oh man, this happened Tuesday, we're not going to talk about till Friday, et cetera.
But but I've had a couple days.
Everyone's had a couple days to ruminate.
And one of the things that hit me as I as I ruminated is is something that was on my mind as I watched the speech, and I've kind of been able to cultivate it is a lot of people said this this could have been an email.
Okay, great.
And it actually could not have been an email, because this kind of email doesn't do anything, just like this speech didn't do anything.
Email, speech, gathering doesn't matter.
A lot of commentary has focused on the reaction of the the admirals and the generals in attendance who seemed stonefaced.
If you watch the clip, the very end of the speech, when when Heg Seth finishes, he's you know, he says, We're the war department.
And he kind of looks at everyone, expecting them to like clap, erupt an applause, stand up, cheer, and there's no reaction whatsoever from from anyone in attendance.
And he kind of looks like he's thoroughly confused, thoroughly confused by this.
But I have a couple of like I want two points here if I zoom out at a at a at a kind of star level looking down.
One is this was the most egregious display of Pete Heggseth being divorced from reality and Donald Trump being divorced reality that I've seen in a long time.
Like watching him on stage in that blue suit that looks like a Fox News suit, it doesn't look like right, and his whimsical socks and his quaffed hair.
This guy looked and felt more like a TV man or a car salesman than he did a career military official or officer.
Everybody he's looking at in that audience is way more accomplished than him and outranks him in terms of the military.
And yet, I watching him, Dan, he I think that he truly believed this was going to be something that inspired, transformed, revolutionized.
I think he thought they were gonna hear this and go, finally, yeah, the warrior ethos is the shackles are off.
We can we can finally be the soldiers we've always wanted to be, or whatever.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you can just see the disconnect.
And as I'm watching this, Dan, like I'm not a military person.
I have people in my family who've served, I have not.
My perception of like career two and three and four-star admirals and generals, is that these are very serious people.
I may not always agree with all of them on politics, but I don't agree with anyone on politics when it comes to all the time.
These are serious people who take their roles very, very, very seriously.
Okay.
There was no way this was going to do anything but feel like paternalism and feel like it was talking down to a group that's not take kindly to being talked down to.
So that's number one.
The second part of this, though, is I want to come back to a mantra that I've had for months since Trump took office, which is they do not want to govern, they want to rule.
This was a display of not governing and not leading, but ruling and telling.
What do I mean by that?
If you take over any organization, if You take over a role as the leader of a nonprofit.
If you take over a football team, if you take over a new department in your company, if you become someone who's promoted, or you come from the outside, you know, Dan, you and I used to see this in church life.
A pastor comes from outside the church, and there's been congregants at this church for 38 years, and here's the new guy, Dan Miller, and he's got some crazy ideas.
If you want to be a leader, what do you do?
You take stock of the climate of the institution and you go to key stakeholders in that institution and you try to explain to them your vision.
You bring them on board.
You try to get them to see what you see so that they will buy in, and the people who listen to them will buy in.
What Hegseth could have done, Dan, is tirelessly, endlessly persistently gone across the globe to the command centers of each and every admiral and general and sat with them to say, here's my vision for a new chapter in the Department of War.
Here's what we're gonna do.
Hegseth's not a leader.
Trump's not a leader.
They're rulers, they want to rule, they believe Trump is the is the is believes he's the king, and Hegseth believes he is a knight serving that king.
And they believe they have this right by legacy, by divine revelation, by so many things.
So they're not leaders, they want to be rulers.
And when it comes to this like performance, I think all of us watching were like, this is not how you get serious people to buy into your vision.
You have to go and explain.
No, and you can you can give an ultimatum.
You can sit with somebody, explain the vision for the the where things are going.
And if they don't get on board, if the if the person just doesn't want to like buy in, then it's like, well, you probably need to leave because I'm in charge.
Sorry, it's how it goes.
This looked like a car salesman yelling at a bunch of like four-star generals, thinking that that was gonna have some kind of imprint on them, and it clearly had zero.
I've got more to say.
I want to get to the Trump remarks, but you go what else you got.
Well, so to one of your points, I want to highlight there was uh yeah, I think I'm getting this from CNN, who it was it was a former senior Pentagon official who served in both the Republican and Democratic administrations, Luis to Heg has Heg Seth's speech, spoke with officials in the room.
You know, he described his remarks as quote, uninspired.
And he said it was largely what everyone expected, but still sounded more like what a platoon leader in their early 20s would say to the young enlisted troops.
Exactly, right?
To your point about the car salesman.
And then he said this.
This is a quote.
He said, These guys were captains and majors in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them wounded with silver stars and purple hearts.
And there's this guy, the youngest guy in the room, the most inexperienced guy in the room with the least amount of combat time in the room, lecturing them.
And this was a common response from lots of veterans and veteran general grade and flag grade officers that were basically like, who is this guy to like tell us this?
And to your point, I think you're right, like that it was a power play.
Let's bring them all here.
We're not gonna go around and visit them, we're gonna bring them all here.
But I think one of the things that I think is true of both Trump and Hegseth, but certainly Hegseth in this, to your point about leadership is mistaking positional authority for leadership.
Yes, and everybody, anybody out there who has a boss knows how this works, anybody who occupies a position where you supervise others, yeah, there's positional authority, and people have to do what you what you say because you're the boss, and like you have to do that.
That's not the same as leadership.
And effective leaders, even if they are in positions of of of positional authority, as you're saying that we'll try to bring people on board.
And I think I I don't I don't know that Trump and Heg Seth would understand that distinction.
I certainly don't think that they would ever do the work of actually bringing people along, but this is what it is.
I hold this position, and I think Heggseth, I think Trump just wants the positional authority and he'll just decide he's gonna crush you if you don't do what he says.
Heg Seth, I I really wonder if he knows the difference.
Because you talk about like it looked like the response he was hoping for that he has mistaken positional authority for leadership.
These dudes do not care about you, Pete Hegseth.
And guess how many secretaries of defense they have sat through in their military career?
Like You are nothing to them just because you're Pete Heggseth.
Yeah.
And that was really apparent.
And also reminds me, this is a pattern in the Trump administration.
If folks remember back to the first Trump administration, when there was all the talk about, you know, the big tax cuts for corporations, and they were going to put this all back into the thing.
They'd hire more people and it would grow the economy and whatever.
And I remember like the secretary of maybe it was commerce, I forget which person it was, but talking to the room full of CEOs.
And he asked for like the show of hands of like, you know, yeah, how many people are gonna like put this back into hiring more expanding?
Like nobody's hands went up because they're like, we're gonna buy back our stock and make our boards, our boards richer.
Our directors are gonna get more money out of this, our investors are gonna get more money out of this.
Is what we're gonna do.
And the surprise was sort of staggering when it was like this this dogma that this is how this is gonna happen.
This is an answer that's gonna work.
I feel like we saw the same thing again with and to your point of being out of touch with reality.
Who is Hexeth?
He is, as we know, he is a Fox News analyst.
He has spent his like adult professional life in the echo chamber, hearing that this is what the military wants, inventing these stories of like, I don't know, super weak women who are able to take combat roles and whatever, and confronted with reality, he really has no idea what to do.
So I feel like all of that was on display uh in this.
And I think it really ties into that notion of mistaking positional authority for leadership.
This, if we zoom in on the content, let me let me play a montage of some of clips so people can just freshly hear this.
Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way.
We became the woke department, but not anymore.
No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris.
As I've said before and will say again, we are done with that shit.
Removing the distractions, clearing the way for leaders to be leaders.
You might say we're ending the war on warriors.
I heard someone wrote a book about that.
Dan, if we just wanted to take away Pete Hegseth's vision for this military, it would be everything you and I have said for a thousand episodes on this show, which is Christian nationalists want to make this country a straight white, native-born, patriarchal, heterosexual country.
And that increasingly includes people who are able-bodied, like no disabilities, no divergence.
So if you just think of what Heg Seth's talked about here, he he railed against women endlessly in this speech.
And I don't want my son.
Okay.
And women can't meet the standards, you know, it is what it is.
What are you gonna do?
They just gotta leave the military, you know.
And he, we already talked about it.
Most of what he said can be debunked within 10 seconds.
If you think about what he's talking about with beards, with facial hair, with other exemptions for religion, what he's saying is is and he I want a military that is Christian.
And we've seen him say this in the past.
He has said in the past that the military is one of the only institutions on on the earth that is pro-God, pro-America, pro-Christian.
I mean, he's talked about it in those terms.
So you mentioned sick, people who are Sikh, and the the wearing of the beard as a religious part of their identity and practice, the wearing of the turban or or any kind of religious garb that goes on your head.
Okay.
If these standards go into effect, you're you're looking at those folks basically saying, I'm not gonna sign up for the military.
I can't.
Okay.
There was also many of these standards are related to to black soldiers who shaving every day causes injury and problems for them into their face.
So, like these standards have evolved.
Okay.
I am thinking of Japanese, so I want to give everyone just a little history here.
Japanese American soldiers serving in World War II were in a segregated unit, one of the segregated units of of World War II.
And the 442nd 100th regiment became the most decorated regiment per capita in the history of the military.
They lost more men, they got more purple hearts, more medals than ever.
And one of the things that that was true in those cases is that they were not allowed to put B on their uniform or every other, not every other, but most other soldiers were allowed to put things in the uniform that marked their religious identity.
So if you had P, it was Protestant, C, Catholic, H, Hebrew, which is for Jewish, X, nothing, no religion.
So there were like 90% Buddhists in this combat team, this combat regiment that became the most decorated, Pete Hegeth.
Okay.
And they were not allowed to put B on their uniform, meaning if they died in, right?
It would be very hard for people to recognize their religious identity and give them the proper the proper funeral rights, burial rights, and so on and so on and so on.
What's the point?
The US military is a place where diversity is our strength, because we have people in this country who are black and Sikh and of Arab descent and Latino descent, people who are East Asian and South Asian, and they all sign up to serve in our military.
And one of the basic things they asked is like, hey, I want to serve, and I may die for this country.
Can I wear a beard?
Because that's what my religion says I need to do.
And that's how I interpret my religious practice.
Pete Hegseth basically came out with a Christian, fat shaming, able-bodied, patriarchal, male only vision for the military.
And it was coded as we really like it's probably whites mainly, whites only, whites mostly, something like that.
And a lot of folks pointed out, hey, you're going to weaken the most diverse institution in the United States.
And this kind of machismo ethos exists, and it's Putin's Russian army, and that army is getting his ass kicked by a much smaller country, Ukraine, over and over and over and over again.
This all the bluster does not lead to a more effective military, despite what the Fox News host thinks about all that.
So anyway, final thoughts on this before we go to a break.
And Hegseth is, you know, you talk about the diversity.
I think the the issue of women in combat roles is here as well.
Like Ash Carter, you know, when when they opened the combat roles to women was like, we're closing these off to half of our population.
There, there was a also just a pragmatic component.
The military was not able to fill all the slots that it needed to fill.
So I mean there's there's that.
You want to talk about combat readiness?
How about like being able to actually recruit enough people to do all the things that need to happen in the military?
And you talk about it evolving, you know, hex, he's got his, you know, you can do a stupid pull-up thing with RFK Jr., you do all that stuff.
Everybody knows in the military, like the the military has thousands and thousands of people doing lots of different things.
Does the person who like works in the motor pool does does it matter how many pull-ups they can do in the same way that it does if you're like a frontline combat troop?
Probably not.
For every combat, I don't even know like how the paper pushing, the clerical work, the amount of just administration that the military takes, and all of the people in those offices who, let me be clear, are vital to combat effectiveness and combat readiness and making everything work.
Does it matter as much how many push-ups they can do?
Some of the fitness standards, to me, I'm like, we live in a world of this is not the 18th or 19th century where like people are like, you know, marching all the time and doing this.
I realize it's physically strenuous.
My point is he wants to go back to this time with like this this sort of vision of an ideal warrior physique.
You're like, does that even fit?
And it's all under the nomenclature of combat readiness, which has been code for a long time of we want to get we want to get the gays out of the military.
Now we want to get transgender people out of the military, women don't belong in the military, people from weird religions don't belong in the military.
Everybody who's not straight white Christian man has no business being in the military.
So we'll couch it under the terms of combat readiness.
What I'm trying to say is combat readiness, I think, means a lot of different things across different parts of the military.
And this is what slowly the military has come to realize and to recognize and to make room for.
And that's that's part of what he Pete Hagseth wants to to unwind.
And so just I guess my takeaway from this is let's not fall for the line that this is somehow about combat readiness.
This is not a warrior ethos.
This is a white Christian nationalist ethos.
That's what this is, and that's what this is about.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back, we'll talk, we'll get into some of what Trump said, and then we'll talk about the the shutdown.
Be right back.
Dan, one of the things that we've talked about often on the show, and is that Pete Hegseth has his eyes on quote the homeland.
And in on Monday, I did a live stream.
I did I did an episode about uh uh about Trump's war on Americans.
And one of the things that that really I I said even before this happened, and I'm I'm resisting the the temptation to play the clips from what I said the day before this happened, because I was pretty much correct, is that Heg Seth and Trump have their eyes on you, the American.
You are the enemy.
You are the one in their way.
What do you have that they want?
They want your money, your property, and your power.
And you're like, I don't have a lot of property.
Doesn't matter.
They want everything you have in terms of what they can extract from the American citizen.
And when Pete Heggseth says he wants a white Christian dude army, it's because he thinks that's the kind of army we should have.
And it's because he thinks that's the kind of country we should have.
Now, what did Trump say in his speech to the the generals?
Well, here it is.
And I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.
Because we're going into Chicago very soon.
Dan, he says that American cities should be training ground for the military.
He says that's a kind of war.
The war from within.
I'm gonna say what I said Monday, I'm gonna say it again.
They are not gonna stand up to She or Putin.
They're scared to death of those guys.
Those guys, they they cannot do that.
They are not gonna go out into the world and be people who stand up to the actual difficult smart foes of the American uh of the United States.
Could be Putin, could be She.
It could be dealing with North Korea.
They're not gonna do that.
They will talk tough and down to Ukraine or to to Europe.
But their ultimate sights are on us.
And Trump said that to the generals and the admirals.
The war is with from within.
Use our cities as training for our military.
How should you interpret that person listening to this or watching?
You should interpret it like this.
You are their enemy.
You are the one who stands in the way of what they want.
Any power you have, assembly, the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom to dissent from them, they want that power from you.
They want every dollar they can extract from this country.
They don't care if the economy plummets, they don't care if most of us lose jobs, go into a recession, suffer, health care, infrastructure, schools.
They don't care.
The the goal is to extract from you every dollar they can get.
And every piece of property we have.
That could be your house, but it could also be every national park or everything they can't get their grubby hands on to sell off to private equity or someone else.
That is what Trump told the generals.
And that's what exactly what I thought he would say.
And it is what he said.
The war is on us.
Okay.
And so, you know, my takeaway from what Trump said was that we have our eyes on you.
Now, let me just make one more point, Dan.
I'll throw it to you and then we can go to the shutdown.
Who are the people that Heggseth and and Trump have killed recently?
Civilians on boats.
They will gladly kill civilians on boats.
These these these boats that they say are full of fentanyl and everything else.
A lot of reports that there are fishermen on those boats trying to get home, but they don't care.
What did Hegseth say recently about the battle of wounded knee or the massacre at Wounded Knee, where unarmed people were were Lakota tribe were were were massacred?
Every soldier who fought in that massacre or took part in it will be restored and recognized as heroes.
They're telling you by their actions and by their historical vision that they don't see violence against civilians, unarmed people as a problem.
I mean, you all can tell me, Brad, you've lost it.
You're you're you're really like hyperbolic these days.
But on Monday I said the war is uh against you.
What did Trump say?
The war is against our cities.
How long before it's your city?
You may not live in Portland, you may not live in Memphis, you may not live in DC, you may not live.
How long until?
How long until your suburb, your apartment building is the one where ICE agents are repelling from the windows, combing the streets for people they think are dissidents.
And how long before they just call anybody they want Antifa.
So yeah, maybe maybe I'm getting on a roll here, Dan, and I've too much Diet Coke and whatever else.
But that's what I took away from the comprehensive picture of Trump saying cities are the training ground for the military.
These are people that are no problem killing civilians.
None.
And I just don't think that you can ignore the expansion of the category of civilian that they will set their eyes on.
Reel me back in if you want.
Any thoughts here?
Well, no, it fits.
I mean, he Heg saidn't like the stupid rules of engagement, right?
And based on what?
On his, you know, former unit commander, uh, who led to the death, whose whose orders led to the death of what?
Of unarmed civilians.
Trump goes out, you know, says, we are under invasion from within.
No different from than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways.
Why, Brad?
Because they don't wear uniforms.
Yeah, I mean, that that's it's just it's right there.
It's, you know, you as you say being a civilian is is no protection against military force.
Being a citizen is no protection against military force when he decides that everybody who voted blue, um, even people in those cities who didn't.
Hey, Trump, there are Republican voters in Portland.
Like, you know, there are people who voted for Trump in Portland, they exist.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if you're a civilian, you're just a training ground, you're fodder for the military to practice on.
And I think your point's exactly right.
Like one of the things to just sort of listen for is when somebody will only talk about the enemy within.
It's because, as you say, Trump Trey doesn't have the backbone or the spine to like face up to the enemy without, so to speak, right?
On the outside, as you say, he he he wants to be one of those guys.
He doesn't want to fight those guys.
He's the bully who looks up to those bullies.
Those are the bullies he wants to be, and he knows he can't play the same game as them.
He knows he can't compete with them, he doesn't have the spine for it.
He certainly doesn't have the the intelligence or the acumen for it.
So he's gonna create and generate an enemy from within, an enemy of of civilians that that you know, he hopes the military will stack up against and so forth.
Last thing to point out there was you know, the response you talk about a non-enthusiastic response.
People have noted how those those officers were sort of sitting there stone faced, silent.
They're not gonna come out and criticize the commander in chief.
They can't do that, they're not gonna boo him off stage or something, but there was no appetite in that room for this language of cities as training grounds for the military, American cities as training grounds.
These these men and women in that room, they're not there because they want to fight Americans.
They're not there because they want to, you know, attack the homeland or whatever's being called for.
They were there because they took an oath to defend the constitution in the United States, and this doesn't sit well with them.
And I think that's that's maybe the last sort of tagline of this is to watch going forward and seeing, you know, how how does this actually play out, you know, in practice as we move forward.
If you want to rule and not govern, you don't think to yourself, hey, you know what would be real?
You never ask this question.
What would be really good for the people of my community, my country?
You never ask that.
You just you're a ruler, not a governor.
You dictate what's good for the people, right?
Well, going back to what you said earlier, you have the authority.
It was the textbook definition of authoritarian.
I think people hear authoritarian all the time and they're like, what does that mean?
Well, it's like Dan Miller says, if you have the authority of the office, president, you know, head of DOD, whoever you are, and you just say you're gonna listen because I have the authority, that's authoritarian.
A leader says, Hey, why don't we why don't we do it this way?
And let me explain why that's the best way to do it.
Can I get your body?
Maybe yeah, maybe maybe let me even maybe I'll even revise what I'm saying.
If you people who've been out in the field for 30 years have some good insights, maybe I'll even take those on board.
That's not authoritarian.
That's like a leader who has authority, but who's trying to, okay.
You would, if you're a ruler and not a governor, why would you go fight Putin?
You what do you get?
What is your reward for fighting Putin or any other tough guy?
The reward structure for Trump is always, well, what do I get?
And if I wage war on my own people, I get stuff.
I get more of what I want.
So that's what he's gonna do.
All right.
Excuse me.
Now, going back to what you said about blue states, plays directly into the shutdown.
So the government is shut down.
Okay.
You know, it's been shut down about 10 times over the last four or five decades.
Trump's now overseen a couple of those.
But here's what Trump put on social media yesterday.
I have a meeting today with Russ Vogt, head of Project 2025 fame or he of Project 2025 fame.
To determine which of the many Democrat agencies, most of which are a political scam, he recommends to be cut and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.
I can't believe the radical left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.
They are not stupid people.
So maybe this is their way of wanting to quietly and quickly make America great again.
Okay.
So this got people in a tizzy because they're like, look, Project 2025, he's admitting it.
And I I you know I didn't.
You were shocked, weren't you, Brad?
I was shocked to hear that Trump's influenced by Project 2025.
I like there's no way I was gonna waste time in my brain.
Like Dan, you and I have known this for months.
Every anyone paying attention knows this.
It's the fact that Project 2025 is the playbook for the Trump presidency is just clear to anyone who's been looking.
And any of you listening to this show know that too.
You you already know you're you're clued in.
Now, let's talk about Russ Vogt.
Russ Vogt is is the guy who we've talked about on this show quite often.
He is Trump's, as the the uh Huffington Post put it, he is Trump's hatchet man in charge of the office of OMB.
But what you really should take away about Russell Vogt are a couple things that we've already said on the show, and we'll say again.
He's a self-identified Christian nationalist.
He's somebody who loves that term and says, I I take that term.
He is somebody who probably knows more about the parliamentary process, executionary details of the U.S. government, and I will say this seriously than anyone on earth.
He knows every in and out of how the government works, every button, every lever, every process, everything.
And he, as Mike Lee, Senator from Utah said, has been training for this since puberty, which is kind of creepy, A. But B, he lives to chop down his mission in life is to make a war on the administrative aspects of the executive branch.
Dan, you you've mentioned this on the show so many times.
This is the commander-in-chief of the unitary executive theory.
The idea that the executive branch should have unilateral power over the federal workforce, over all administrative agencies, and the ability to act without any kind of roadblocks to its will when it comes to what they want to do.
Okay.
And so here is here are some quotes from The Atlantic from a recent piece.
I'm not going to say it's misdirection play, but the trauma-inducing shock troops, Steve Bannon said, talking about Elon Musk and Doge, Russ has got a vision.
He's not an anarchist, he's a true believer.
What Bannon is saying there is like, remember when Doge was doing what they were doing?
Everybody got mad at Elon and ran him out of town.
And Russ Vogt has just been doing the work ever since largely unnoticed.
Vogt's agenda includes shrieking the government, but it goes deeper than that.
His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it.
A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.
Dan, he seems to think that what Congress says to do are suggestions, not policies or laws.
It's not like Congress is doing much anyway to stop him.
So all of this to say, when Trump posted that on social media, what he was saying is, well, now I have my chance to work with Russ Vogt and destroy agencies that are that are being that are, excuse me, agencies that we see as unnecessary, politicized, or roadblocks to our will.
Now I want to get to some of those in a minute, and I want to tell you the things he's cut and he's already gotten rid of.
But Dan, did what are your reactions to the shutdown to to vote?
We can get into why the Democrats did this if you want, if you want to go there, what do you think?
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of directions to go.
One like overarching thing to point out is that typically, and everybody knows this, the party that is not the president, doesn't hold the the Oval Office with a shutdown, kind of takes the blame for the shutdown.
That's what typically happens.
That's why that's why Democrats avoided the shut shutdown last time.
That's why some were reluctant to do it this time, is they don't want to shoulder the blame for it.
But polls show that people are holding the Trump administration responsible.
It's it's you know, whether that matters to the Trump administration, that's a whole different, a whole different thing to understand.
So all of the the threats to fire people to permanently do away with agencies and things like this.
We'll we'll see it's intended to punish the Democrats.
We'll see what it does with voters and and play and and different things like that.
But another piece of this is the targeting of blue states and blue projects.
They've withheld and and very explicitly, being like, you know, if you were a blue state, oh, sorry, you had federal funding for a rail project, not anymore.
It's just too expensive in a shutdown.
Oh, New York City, you had like a bridge project or a tunnel project, and well, that's gone now.
So, like explicitly politicizing the cuts to target again places that didn't vote for Donald Trump.
Why?
Because they're not the real Americans, right?
We're gonna shut down the government, we're not gonna shut down the government for everybody.
We're not gonna take away money from everybody.
We're gonna take away money from those whom Trump views as what the internal enemy, the same people he wants to target with the military, uh, the same people the Heggseth wants to make sure can't be in the military.
I think it's just the way that all these things sort of fit together into a unite uh a unified program is worth noting.
And I think just one one other thought on this, is that we'll see as we move forward, how the rest of the GOP responds to this.
You you mentioned that the reason for this, the the reason why the Democrats are holding on to this is trying to fight to keep subsidies for Obamacare in play and have those restored after the big beautiful bill got rid of them and all that sort of stuff.
The GOP says that they support this and they're doing what they always do, which like now is not the time to talk about it.
We can talk about it before the end of the year and and so forth.
I think it'll be interesting, depending how long this goes on, to see what those GOP members hear from constituents and whether or not that plays a role.
But right now it's all about Trump.
Unified executive, doesn't really matter what Congress does.
Trump is doing what Trump wants to do, trying to pin it on the Democrats, polls say that that's not working, and we'll see what happens because he doesn't seem to care about polling anymore.
He only cares about exercising power, and this is a great chance for him to do that.
Well, so what they've done, and we won't go through all of it because we're kind of running out of time today, but what they've already done is target things in California, New York, Illinois, yep, Colorado, other states that they consider to be blue states.
So they've they have stopped things like the building of bridges in New York.
And when vote was asked about it, he was like, Well, there was just unconstitutional DEI aspects to that.
And Jamel Bowie was like, you know, the writer for the New York Times was like, so like a black person was going to use the bridge or something.
Like what is DEI and unconstitutional about a bid bridge project that's already been funded?
So what they're doing is saying we are this is political war in the form of the Office of Management and Budget.
So if you're California, if you're New York, if you're Colorado, if you're Massachusetts, we're gonna cut your stuff.
So it's not just government agencies, it's not just firing federal workers, it's revenge against those who Trump thinks of his enemies.
Again, we're talking today about a war from within.
Yeah, this is revenge against American people, revenge against U.S. citizens, like just keeping that out front, not even revenge against politicians in the other party, not even revenge against activist organizations, revenge against all the Americans who didn't vote for you because they're not really Americans because they didn't vote for you.
Yeah.
Well, he posted last night an AI video of him as the Grim Reaper attacking quote unquote blue states with Russ Vote as kind of his like you know, henchman.
And one thing that people have said online is like, why are California like if you think about how this is their gonna act?
Why would you, California, New York, other states, Massachusetts, send in tax dollars to the federal government so they can attack you?
And if you're listening right now, you're like, wait a minute, doesn't that sound like civil war?
Like California is not gonna pay the 85 billion dollars that it contributes to the federal budget through taxes.
Like it it gives 85 billion more than it takes, and it's not gonna pay that.
Well, if New York didn't do that and Massachusetts didn't do it and Minnesota didn't do it, and wait a minute, and Washington do it.
Huh.
It seems like we have a bunch of states not participating in the union anymore, kind of.
Is that what wait a minute?
What are you guys talking about?
That's that's what happens when you attack your own people, whether with the military or through money and cutting infrastructure and things that make it so your citizens can eat and survive and live and drive over bridges and go to schools that are in any way functioning.
That's how it goes.
So you know, Russ vote is the guy getting all the attention right now.
If if you go to our website, straight white American Jesus.com, you go to the episodes tab and you type in Project 2025, you will find probably five episodes we've done on Rust vote, explaining who he is, where he comes from, why this is the thing that he dreams about at night and has been thinking about since puberty.
But the ultimate goal, Dan, and this is the last comment, we'll go to a break.
If you don't want to govern, you want to rule, you probably don't like democracy.
And if you want an unbound executive who is unfettered by the other branches of government, you probably want something that looks more like autocracy, dictatorship, monarchy, whatever you want to call it, then democracy, the sharing of powers, checks and balances, separation of the different branches of government.
The unitary executive theory is moving the United States government to a place where they're that the president can just do whatever he wants and there will be nothing standing in his way.
And we're already there.
Like this guy is coming up with tariffs on a whim.
Executive orders on a whim.
Revenge against companies, revenge against universities.
And Congress is not stood in his way.
That's that's what this is about.
Do you want to say anything about the Democrats and why they're doing it?
They're doing this, Dan, because they don't want the Affordable Care Act to be gutted.
They want the subsidy, the premium subsidies to continue.
They want NPR and PBS funded, they want other things to happen.
Any thoughts on if this is good or bad for the Democrats before we we take a break and go to our final segment?
I think I I think overall, I mean it's risky, but I think it's good for the Democrats.
I think it's good to, I don't know, stand up for something.
I think again, we'll see if this matters as we move forward.
But this is actually something that lots of people in the GOP also want to do.
There are lots of people in the GOP who want to extend Obamacare subsidies in particular.
So, you know, never mind PBS, all of that.
Why?
Because it's hugely popular.
They're gonna bump millions of people off of health insurance.
20 million.
They yeah, they don't want to do that before the midterms.
So they would like to, they don't want to extend these forever because they they don't give a shit about people in insurance.
The GOP never has.
It's why they've never had a health care policy.
But they now have millions of constituents who rely on that, and so they don't want to cut that out from under them before the midterms.
So I think I think the Democrats have some leverage, actually, there.
I think that that is what some people are hearing.
As I say, I think that's what the polling is showing.
People know, especially the Trump faithful are one thing, the anti-Trump faithful are another thing.
Okay, but those undecided voters who are there, the people who voted for Trump this time who hadn't before, the inroads he had made with with African Americans with other minority communities, many of those are eroding, and many of those people are dependent on these, and they are listening and watching.
So I I think it's I think it's worth doing for the Democrats.
I mean, the Democrats are in a position where they can't do much, you know, they simply can't.
And so I think it's it's something to do.
I at the end of the day, I don't I don't know that it works, but I think it it brings this into view.
And again, I think the polling shows right now that the the GOP is actually bearing the responsibility for this among voters, and that perception is reality when it comes to politics.
When voters say, you know, who caused this, they're not blaming the Democrats.
So I think overall it's it's it's a good move to make.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about some a court case you probably don't know enough about.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, take us away.
Yeah, so briefly, I know we're running out of time, but Judge William G. Young this this week issued a really long, like 161-page opinion.
You read it, people will talk about it being a book-length opinion, and really slamming the Trump administration's targeting of pro-Palestinian students and professors for deportation.
So non-citizen pro-Palestinian academics, basically, and and deporting them on the grounds that they're they're saying things that are anti-Semitic and so forth.
And he reasserted that their political speech is protected by the First Amendment.
And so that that's fine.
That's important.
That's really central.
I think that's really key.
This decision, though, or the write-up of it, the delivery of the decision made a lot of waves this week because of the way that it was delivered and the things that Judge Young said.
And I think it's worth noting some of these.
He criticized the administration for attacking free speech, quote, under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of anti-Semitism.
He said Trump's conduct violated the sacred oath of a president to quote preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and that the actions of the administration represented a quote, full-throated assault on the First Amendment.
He wrote, quote, I fear President Trump believes that the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values as long as they're lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.
And I think that that's an absolutely true statement.
We could say more about this.
I mean, I invite people, go take a look at some of the stuff that he wrote and stuff that he said, and people note this.
I think it's significant because it didn't just say you know the sort of legal ease of it, their speech is protected by the First Amendment, don't deport them.
He said, and and I read one commentator who said this, he said in his decision what a lot of people have thought about and what they feel about the Trump administration.
And I thought that that was really significant.
The way that he rebuked this, the way that he brings this out into the open.
We'll see how this plays out.
But I think this was an important decision.
You know, for the outcome, I I agree absolutely that pro-Palestinian political speech should be protected speech.
I don't think it's inherently anti-Semitic.
I don't think people should be deported on the basis of their political views, all of those kinds of things.
But I think the the reason why this court case was so interesting to so many and created the the sort of buzz that it did was the rationale that was given and the kind of commentary that came with it.
And for anybody who wants to sit there say judges shouldn't be giving commentary, like just look at look at SCOTUS.
That's all Scottish like Scotus gives commentary on everything.
So like please don't start with the whole the judiciary shouldn't be like giving commentary on stuff.
If you've got Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, you know, comment commenting on everything and doing public speeches and writing their books and doing everything else that they want to do.
It was a really significant court finding, but I think it I don't know if it represents a real shift, but it was a different tone than we get sometimes.
And and I I'll say this now.
This was my reason for hope, this piece of it.
I feel like on the judicial side, it's time for the judiciary to take off the gloves and say, here's what is really happening.
We're not to use the language of of Justice John Roberts.
It's not just calling balls and strikes.
There, this is bigger, and this is more than that.
They have been under assault by the executive branch.
And I I think that this was refreshing to see them to see a member come out and say that part out loud and call out the administration for what it is.
And I hope that that does represent a shift because the Trump administration loses routinely at the lower courts till it gets to SCOTUS and 70%, 80%, whatever the number is now of what Trump wants happens.
I thought it was a significant finding, and and I think the tone and tenor and the content of it is what made it really significant.
I just can't resist like John Roberts.
You might be calling balls on strikes, but it seems like depending on who's pitching and hitting, the strike zone is different.
John, that's what it seems like to me.
Sorry for using your Christian name there.
But there you go.
My reason for hope is is that was that was a big one.
There's people in the Discord this week talking about that one.
And yeah, it it really does strike a tone, and it it these things are not trivial.
Like the judiciary putting up a fight and obstacles is not it something we should overlook.
It's a co-equal branch of government.
Yeah, it's designed that way.
So start acting like it.
The same goes for Congress.
Like, yeah, whether or not whatever happens with this shutdown, people want to see that there's a party, Democratic Party, that is actually like listening and willing to fight.
Like willing to just fight.
Yeah, and we want to talk about positional authority.
Hey, guess what, Democrats?
You are in a position of authority in Congress.
Yes, you're the minority.
Yes, you you you you can't, you don't have the votes to win minority or majorities and whatever, but you're still in a position of power and authority.
So use it.
Act like it for once instead of like trying to appease or be quiet or just stop the hand ringing about the last election.
Let's start moving forward.
Yeah.
I have two.
One of them is going to seem weird, but one of them is JB Pritzker.
And I'll play you a clip right now, J.B. Pritzker at a pressure.
I mean, what kind of a country are we in here?
The United States used to be a country where the president followed the Constitution.
Where the president believed in the rule of law, where the president didn't target people based on their views, but rather had debate with people and maybe won, maybe lost in an election and put their views forward and got them passed.
But the idea that you're going to go suggest that you're going to arrest people, or that people don't deserve to be U.S. citizens when they are, just because they oppose the president of the United States.
There is something genuinely wrong with this fan, and the 25th Amendment ought to be in vote.
Pritzker is the governor of Illinois.
Many of you know that already, or all of you know that already.
And he's calling for the 25th Amendment.
You've seen Democrats basically coming out with this line recently.
I think this line is actually somewhat effective.
Like I think you have to frame Trump as he's mentally ill.
And it's okay, you know, there are mentally ill people in the world.
I'm not demonizing them.
What I'm saying, though, is they should not be president, especially when they have such hurtful feelings towards so many other people.
This framing to me, the 25th amendment framing is one that jolts you out of the Trumpian normalization of everything he's doing.
And I think that's something that Democrats should do more of.
It's like this guy is not well.
He should not be in power.
You know, it's like the weird line.
They were taking that like Republicans or weird line in the in the Kamala Harris campaign.
The consultants told him to knock it off, and they did.
That line was effective.
That line, Stephen Miller is weird.
He's creepy.
Do you want Steven Miller around your kids' birthday party?
I don't, because every time he opens his mouth, he's just hateful.
He's weird.
He's what right?
This anyway, that's one.
Number two is this.
There was a disgusting, vile, violent attack in Chicago by ICE agents on an apartment complex.
And we could have spent all day talking about it.
And it it makes me six to my stomach.
I've seen footage of it.
I've read about it.
And every time I do, it's like I can't breathe.
I it's just it's despicable.
But one thing someone pointed out in our in our Discord was so insightful is like that story broke through to like people magazine.
And it's one of those instances where I think like, Dan, you and I spend so much of our days like reading political articles, news, who said what, what clips, what you know, policies, who is Russ vote, all that.
Normal people don't do this.
A lot of people who don't care about politics that much care about people magazine.
And if those people are seeing this, that's a moment for it to be like, this is not no, no, no, no.
That like it's one thing to deport people who are criminals, but you guys were zip tying children in apartments.
And if that breaks through, it's more a sign of what Zach Beauchamp at Vox and others have said is like they're moving too fast and too furious, and that is gonna create backlash from the non-politically interested normie suburban whoevers that are gonna see in people magazine or wherever else they get news, they'll like Chip and Joanna Gaines group.
Okay, I'm not making fun.
I'm just saying that group is normal, Dan's laughing.
Dan, I am not making fun of the Chip and Joanna Gaines segment of the population.
I'm saying that group is not like, you know, I just read Magnolia Magazine's new suggestions for like decorating for fall.
Time for this 5,000 word feature on Russ vote.
Usually not what they do.
Usually, like the person reading the 5,000 words on Russ vote, not reading Magnolia magazine.
My point is if the Magnolia magazine people magazine people end up seeing this disgusting vile stuff from ICE, it might break through in a way that changes public opinion even further against Trump.
So all right.
Thanks for listening, y'all.
I'm gonna be here Monday talking about the gospel of Peter Thiel.
So tune in on Monday at 2:30 on our YouTube channel or our Facebook live to hear me talk about the gospel of Peter Thiel.
A lot of people are confused by his views on the Antichrist on Armageddon, on the end of the world, on all kinds of Karl Schmidt and Nazi ideology.
I'm gonna break that all down from my perspective, tell you what I think.
I've been working on this for months now.
So join me Monday for that.
Otherwise, I'll be back Wednesday within the code, Friday with the weekly roundup.
Would love for you to subscribe to our upcoming show from Access Mundi Media called Theologia sinfraguenza, which is roughly translated as shameless theology.
It is a show from queer feminist Latinx theologians who are bringing together their politics and their faith in at a table that is unique.
