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Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

I am Matthew Galtz, and I am here with a returning guest.

Sir, will you introduce yourself to the audience one more time?

So I'm Phil Klein.

I'm a novelist and a professor at Fairfield University and also a veteran of the Marine Corps.

And I read a lot about military policy.

So you just wrote a piece in the New York Times that really caught my eye and is kind of part and parcel with something that's been haunting me a lot lately.

It's kind of a big topic. But I would say that the piece of Trump meme world that really

caught my eye and really kind of dragged me under earlier this year, the official White

House account released a reference to Halo, which is a pretty popular game, where they

compared immigrants to like some of the monsters from that game that needed to be destroyed.

And I thought, like, as grotesque as a lot of the propaganda has been already, that one really struck me.

And it struck me because that's part of the world that I'm in.

You understand that culture culture and they're

kind of using those cultural signifiers to really just, uh, signal to their base, but also do

this other thing, uh, which is change the moral character of the country, which is kind of what

you wrote about. Um, and can you kind of walk me through your piece and, like, tell me about Augustine?

The piece came about in relation to the strikes on Venezuelan boats.

...