The brazen invasion and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last week prompted a flurry of renewed attention in the United States’ history as the longstanding imperial power in Latin America. This meant an uptick in attention for my last book and a flurry of interview and writing requests, which I was grateful for. You can read an excerpt from my piece in the New Republic below; more interviews and pieces will likely drop next week.

One podcast host asked me if I thought the Venezuela incursion and accelerating talk of annexing Greenland, etc, were distractions from something else — Trump’s growing exposure in the Epstein files, perhaps, or signs of trouble in the U.S. economy. I responded with a point I’ve been making for the last decade: In the interminable Trump Era, everything is the crisis and everything is the distraction.

To illustrate: Turning people’s attention to Venezuela is a way of both distracting from and justifying the abuses being visited by Trump’s secret police, ICE, against people across the United States. But those abuses, and fearmongering about immigrants in general, is a classic way for governments to distract from literally anything, and manufacture consent for foreign interventions. Both are bad on their own, and in the way they overwhelm and exhaust public attention to clear the ground for other crimes. This is what Steve Bannon was talking about when he told Michael Lewis that the administration’s chief media strategy was to “flood the zone with shit.”

As if to underscore my point, hours after we’d finished recording, the episode got bumped.¹ News had broken in Minneapolis that an ICE agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen, soon after identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. And while, again, a violent anti-immigrant campaign and the invasion of the homeland of a substantial number of those recent immigrants are part of the same larger story, in the mind of an assignment editor, they require a whole different framing, and thus an entirely new interview. (Which in turn must have been exhausting for the podcast team, which had to quickly research, record, and edit their second episode that day.)

Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE agent, identified by various media outlets as Jonathan Ross, is yet another case in point. From the point of view of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and potentially the world, this is yet another stimulus — a thing to think, worry, fear, cheer, protest, obsess over, or argue incessantly about online. Poring over (or avoiding) the mounting angles of cell phone videos, comments, comments about the comments, saps time and energy that could otherwise be spent addressing other crises (climate change, elite corruption, war and hunger in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, Venezuela, and on and on, not to mention the torture, imprisonment and death of all the other victims of Trump’s anti-immigration machine), not to mention what is needed simply to live and feed oneself and perhaps one’s family.

The artifice at the heart of it — a set piece whose conditions, if not directly orchestrated, were purposefully created by Stephen Miller — is accentuated by the fact that we now know the killer was literally recording his own crime as he committed it. Then he, or his superiors, leaked it to a right-wing news site on the belief that a video an ICE agent made of himself killing someone and then calling her a “fucking bitch” made him look good — a new and depraved level of doing it for the ‘Gram.²

But to Good, and those who loved her, and to an extent the larger Minneapolis community, it is of course the story, her last story, and will be for many of the survivors and witnesses the defining story of their lives. It can not be a distraction, but rather the thing that will, inevitably, be distracted from, when the next unimaginable event arises.

If you have the stomach for it and want a deeper, frame-by-frame look at Wednesday’s events on Portland Avenue³, the New York Times did yeoman’s work. As of last time I checked, Ross’ camera footage was not yet included, though that may have changed: