It Could Happen Here Weekly 155

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Trump's Constitutional Sheriffs Remember, Remember, the (Other) 5th of November An Election Episode feat. Robert Still Don't Panic: An Election Response Trump's Deportation Plans You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources: Trump's Constitutional Sheriffs https://politicalresearch.org/the-insurgence-sheriffs Remember, Remember, the (Other) 5th of November https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/real-story-of-bonfire-night/ https://www.ajc.org/news/on-luther-and-his-lies https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/guy-fawkes-bonfire-night/index.html https://deadline.com/2024/10/lilly-wachowski-anarchists-united-grants-1236161483/ https://www.autostraddle.com/lilly-wachowski-interview/ Trump's Deportation Plans https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/MIGRATION-DEPORTATIONS/akpeoeoerpr/ https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics-fy22 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-trump-would-crack-down-immigration-second-term-2023-11-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pledges-10000-extra-border-agents-fight-with-harris-over-immigration-2024-10-13/ https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mass-deportation https://www.ice.gov/identify-and-arrest/287g See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:05Speaker 04

  Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here and the it that is on everyone's minds right now. This will be dropping two or three days before the 2024 election, possibly two or three days before everyone's life changes substantially. We have no way of knowing. I'm not optimistic or pessimistic. I have no idea what's going to happen. But one thing that everyone ought to be aware of, whether or not Trump wins, is kind of, to put it bluntly, the man has shooters, and some of those shooters are literal shooters, in that they are local sheriff's departments, people who call themselves constitutional sheriffs. This is an organization that's really got off the ground in 2012,

• 3:15Speaker 04

  and for more than a decade has been making inroads with elected Republican leaders, with Republican influencers, with groups like the Oath Keepers. And these are guys who in brief believe the sheriff is the only, is, you can, you can kind of get two versions of this, but generally either the sheriff is the only legitimate law enforcement authority in the country, or the sheriff is the highest legitimate law enforcement. I've heard, I've heard it both ways in the country. And kind of the reason for this basically is a lot of people in rural areas that are more conservative do not want to have to listen to or follow the laws made by people in cities. And more to the point, they believe that the country

• 3:54Speaker 04

  has been taken off of a good track by dangerous liberal communist types. And, you know, they, they want the ability to use force against, you know, migrants, against the undocumented, against people they see as criminals, against left wing protesters. And this is kind of a way for them to argue that they have a right to do it without any restrictions. Now, The whole story is much deeper than that. And to talk about what I think is one of the most important subjects to be discussing right now, because you know, people laugh a lot about like the gravy seals or whatever, like, you know, all these different kind of out of shape militia dudes. The kind of silly fumbling that we saw a lot at January 6th, you know, which I think is a mistake

• 4:36Speaker 04

  just because January 6th was still quite dangerous. But when we're talking about these guys, these are not just like random yahoos. These are people who have the force of law behind them. They're they're armed, they're organized, and they're quite dangerous. And to talk about how dangerous they are and where they came from, I want to bring on a wonderful journalist, investigative reporter, and PRA Research Director Chloe Cooper, who has co-executive produced a podcast on the Constitutional Sheriffs Movement called The Insurgents, which is a co-production of Political Research Associates and Quintero Productions. Chloe, I think I got that all right, right?

• 5:14Speaker 05

  That was awesome. Yes.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So let's uh, let's talk about this. Where do these guys? I gave a little brief overview, but like, where do these guys come from? And you know, what are we seeing from them in the lead up to this election? Like, what are they? What are they gonna do, do you think?

• 5:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I loved the overview that you just gave. I think that was such a like, great way to approach this all. So the leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association is this guy named former Sheriff Mack. And he was a sheriff in Arizona. But one little important detail to note is that he actually kind of got his bearings before that in Nevada. And he was courted by someone who was basically in very close company with the John Birch Society.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Always comes back to them.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  I know. He actually becomes a sheriff partially because of some of the ideas that come out of the John Birch Society and some of this kind of like emerging trend that in some cases is actually like skeptical of the federal government skeptical of state governments.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  And then they start to build out with sheriffs in different parts of the country. At times, I would say the network has really ebbed and flowed. But a couple of things that have been important to note, like throughout the six years of researching this network of sheriffs, that I think is really important, especially in advance of the elections. One is that sheriffs who are aligned with this have really embraced this idea that you can deputize anybody.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  So in some cases, you have oath keepers and other militias going to the sheriff to say, hey, you want to deputize me. But in other cases, we've actually followed sheriffs who are going into churches and saying, we're deputizing all of you.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Great.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Sheriffs in Virginia, when the state passed a law that was like a law for some gun restrictions, saying, don't worry, people, we're actually going to deputize you.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that way you can have whatever gun you want and carry it anywhere.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  And also, what we started to see is that during the former Trump administration, he was really actually courting sheriffs around the country. And I think he started to see networks like CSPOA as like part of his ground troops. And so I think that there is a potential danger in sheriffs that are part of this formal network called the CSPOA or other sheriffs, because there are hundreds more that just have like aligned with their way of thinking about things, just playing this role of deputizing more people and creating this kind of idea of like a super citizen or people who are kind of aligned with a far right way of seeing the world and then getting deputized to be part of the kind of ground troops for that.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  So that's like one thing. And then in addition to that, there is also, CSPOA itself teamed up with this group called True the Vote, which has mostly since been discredited, but it's been one of the loudest groups in the country that has been spreading this idea that the 2020 election was stolen and has been actually working with county sheriffs to try to investigate voter fraud at the local level. But in some cases, also, working with sheriffs to align with vigilante groups on the border, for example, to intimidate people from actually voting. And so there's kind of, I would say, like, a multi-pronged series of potential risks

• 8:53Speaker 05

  and dangers that could play out, particularly from this network in the coming weeks. One other quick thing I'll note is that one of the very latest things that we saw, and this actually came out of a close colleague in the movement, Devin Burkhardt, who works at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, is that he came across a plan that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association put out in Florida. And the plan is to essentially resurrect sovereign citizen-style groups in Florida, militias, citizen militias, in collaboration with sheriffs, to do old-school-style intimidation

• 9:37Speaker 05

  of election clerks, of people involved in the election process. And they plan to try to hold tribunals if, for example, the certification of election goes in a direction they disagree with.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  And now, as a hardcore leftist, you may find, what do you actually think about voting, and whether that actually changes things, and all of that. And I've had those thought bubbles in my brain for a long time also. But I think what I've started to see is that constitutional sheriffs, to me, represent, and also the groups of people who have aligned with them, are actual, not just white nationalists, but people who are neo-Confederates.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  And I think of it more of like a neo-Confederacy, and that what we could see is something like sheriffs actually coming in confrontation with potentially even police, and mayors, and governors, and them representing a different kind of politic, a different type of way of seeing society. And one person also talked about how the constitutional, what are they really referring to? Are they referring to, what is it, the organic constitution? Essentially, before slavery was abolished, before women had the right to vote, before the Native Americans had the right to vote. And so if that's the case, that that is actually the kind of constitution that they are upholding and representing, then...

• 10:56Speaker 05

  They are actually been quite successful in in building out different alliances around the country within a somewhat prominent law enforcement institution that has very little accountability.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I so this is this is where I kind of wind up in conflict with both liberals and a lot of leftists is I think that the leftists who say like there's no point in voting are wrong for the same reason that like I think people who say there's no reason for civilians to be armed. I don't happen to agree with that. And I don't happen to agree with it because I think if somebody who wants to kill you has a weapon and you have the ability to either match that weapon or take it from them, then that's probably what you should do for the sake of your own survival. And handing over complete control of the state, the military and the police apparatus to the far right is handing them

• 11:52Speaker 04

  the most powerful weapon anyone has ever made. And I just don't think that's wise. Now, at the same token, the thing that kind of liberals will bring up a lot, which is that like, just vote, just get out and vote. Well, we've been doing that. And Democrats have overwhelmingly outperformed conservatives in elections this century. And it hasn't been enough. And it hasn't been enough in part because these people don't care about the law. You know, there's a moment in your podcast where I like you have an expert on who's kind of talking about the sheriff deputizing, you know, 70 people or whatever in this small town and being like, well, he's not actually allowed to do that. Like, you know, the actual letter of the law does not give him the right to be doing this. He's misinterpreting the

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Constitution. But the reality of the situation is that like, he's allowed to do whatever he can get enough people with guns to back him in doing. And that's that's honestly, the root of all politics is how much force can you bring to bear, you know, in order to support the reality you want to support, right? Like, that's, that is how it all works. And the bet the right is making with all of these different anti-democratic strategies they're trying is that no matter what they do, and no matter how far against the Constitution. Against the rule of law, they take things, they will have the force to support their version of reality. And I don't know, I don't know how we thread this needle, right?

• 13:18Speaker 04

  The easiest thing is like, well, maybe if Kamala has a really resounding victory, there just won't be much for them to fight on, right? And they'll kind of back down. But even if she wins in 2024, which I think is the better of the options that we've got, these people aren't going away. And in fact, I think you are going to see challenges at local levels. I think it's not impossible that we wind up with like an anti-pope style situation with the presidency, whereas like Trump holds his own inauguration and a bunch of state and local leaders say like, no, we're not recognizing the Harris administration. Donald Trump is our president. Like, there's a lot of weird shit that could wind up as the result of this. And I, I just don't see us getting out of this purely through

• 14:02Speaker 04

  electoral methods. And I don't know what, I don't know how else we handle it, right? Because you also get into this situation of like, okay, well, we're going to send in the police to crack down on these sheriffs that are breaking the law. Well, what if the police don't want to do it? What if the police are more supportive of these sheriffs departments than they are of, you know, their elected leaders in the state or at the federal level, you know? What if the FBI, as has happened in the past, what if the feds are unwilling to go up against a bunch of heavily armed quote unquote patriots, you know, like we saw in, you know, some of the Bundy shit from about a decade ago, right? Like, what if, what if the people who are supposed to

• 14:41Speaker 04

  handle this for the citizenry in, in a situation that abides by the law, abrogate their responsibility because they're scared, you know? Who backs us up then?

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Wow, okay, you just put a lot out there.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Sorry, sorry.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  I like, I wanted to respond about a minute, and then I was like, oh, one more.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  I apologize. That was my, that was my bad.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  No, that was so great. I think, okay, a couple, a couple of thoughts. One is that I think that Far-right movements are very much mobilizing within the government right now. And, or you could say maybe fascism is trying to mobilize within the government.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  And so I think you ha- I think we have to grapple with that really seriously. And so, uh, like in terms of anti-fascist strategies, I don't know what is, you know, what could that actually look like right now, but you have to grapple with the reality that many far-right movements have made serious, serious headway into not just former president, but into state legislators, into the judicial system, into sheriff's departments.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  And so we are seeing a, a major fissure right now. So I don't know how to respond completely to some of the questions around, around electoral politics.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Neither do I, yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  But I think those are really important questions that you're posing. And then just to go pivot back to my wheelhouse, which is the right and the far-right and some of their strategies, one of the things that you touched on is something that a number of different far-right strategies have been practicing over the years. And it is about this idea of both nullification or interposition is what they call it. So these constitutional sheriffs, one of the tactics that they have used over the years is to get sheriffs around the country to not enforce state laws.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  And so you had a whole wave of sheriffs around the country supporting sanctuaries for the second amendment, second amendment sanctuaries. Okay. So they said in their own county, we're not going to enforce gun restriction laws. And again, think about that however you will, all good.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  But they're saying, we're not going to enforce that at the county level.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  Then you had all these sheriffs around the country being like, we're not going to enforce lockdown orders, we're not going to enforce mask mandates. What are they practicing? They're practicing the muscle of exactly what you just talked about.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Right, right. Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it, too. Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Independent of what's happening at the federal government, independent of who wins right now, there is like a confederated situation happening in the country. And these sheriffs and also others have been very much in those muscles. So it's not just kind of the militias that will back these sheriffs that are interested in that type of strategy. There is the whole, like, all these different movements that come out of the Christian Reconstructionists all talk about interposition. So the idea of getting sheriffs, other elected officials within the local magistrate to prop up and kind of protect your politics regardless of the state or federal. And so now we have this interesting moment where you've had in recent history, you know,

• 17:54Speaker 05

  a former president that actually aligned with some of those politics, and then you have a bunch of state legislators that align. And so I think, understanding some of the strategies, that's important. It's important to understand that you may have sheriffs that are backing this, and they may not always align with the police, and they may not always align with the governor. And so it's going to be a little different than what we may often think of as like systemic white supremacy, where all the state and law enforcement are lock and step together.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  I think looking at the Civil War, as you've done so many different times, is actually really important. Like, how does this reflect patterns that are more similar, actually, to, you know, the Confederacy against the North, or those, or, you know, these types of other moments in US history?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  I'm gonna throw to ads, and then I'll come back.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Uh, so yeah, everybody, here's, here's some ads.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  We're back. I, I wanted to ask, are there, are there cases you can think of, of like, some of these guys, these constitutional sheriffs who have been voted out, and like... Forced out of office and had kind of these, some of these like policies that they've been pushing reversed? Like, do we have, do we have any kind of case studies of times sheriffs went, you know, hard into this ideology and actually lost power as a result of it?

• 19:19Speaker 05

  So actually, in episode four, it touches on it briefly, but it's a really interesting and kind of rather both in some ways inspiring, but also disturbing case study to some degree.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  There is a sheriff in North Carolina, Sheriff Jim Pendergraph of Mecklenburg County. And he was really inspired by the former sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. And he is one of the people who really champions this program called 287G, which allows sheriffs to basically deputize their office as ICE, federal ICE agents, and work with ICE. So he pilots that in Mecklenburg County and then is basically picked up by ICE and kind of helps try to spread it all throughout the South. Something pretty historic and incredible happened in some ways in 2018, where you had black organizers, immigrant rights organizers pushed for this whole campaign

• 20:12Speaker 05

  to oust him and a number of other close by, kind of real white supremacist sheriffs in North Carolina. And they were successful. And there was a sheriff that ran and a number of black sheriffs were elected in the state. And some of the sheriffs ran on not complying with ICE and ending this program called the 287G agreement. And seemed like this historic moment, this historic win, in the immediate aftermath of that, as opposed to in moments where you have sheriffs saying, we're not going to enforce the lockdown order. And essentially, besides some reporters reporting on it, nothing happens. Instead, what happened is that within a few months of this sheriff ending the 287G agreement,

• 20:57Speaker 05

  the federal government comes in and issues pretty massive ICE raids through the county. And actually, you know, ends up locking up over 100 different people, many of whom got deported. Pretty soon after that, you had a number of other sheriffs in the state, including this one constitutional sheriff who also had aligned with another large anti-immigrant network called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, essentially organizing in the state for the state to push back and push an entire statewide mandate that all sheriffs comply with ICE. So that's not really an uplifting story.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  Actually.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Not quite.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  I think what it demonstrates in a tough way is more about this kind of like, when sheriffs claim all of this autonomy at the local level, which they seem to actually, in many cases, be able to practice kind of quite well. You know?

• 21:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  When they say they want to enforce the statewide gun restrictions or mask mandates, again, from what I understand, and I've been in touch with some of the like, leading constitutional lawyers who are trying to look into it further.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  Almost nothing happens. But then if you have, let's say, a sheriff, in this case, you know, not enforcing, ending the agreement with ICE, there is a pretty serious and significant backlash. There has also, though, been, you know, there was an amazing campaign to eventually get Sheriff, former Sheriff Joe Arpaio out, that took like, a ton of organizing by immigrant rights organizers in Arizona. And that was pretty incredible and sustained. And there's been a lot of good stuff written about it. So it's not, it's not not the case that people have built campaigns and have been able to unseat their sheriffs.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's, that's good to know because like, I much prefer the like, slow disassembling of this in a world in which they don't just get full power and start, you know, going after people with the wrong signs on their front yards than any other option here. I, it, it just, it seems like, i- it's one of those situations where the deck is very much stacked in their favor, right? In part because of how long I think this problem has been ignored. Like, it's really just now, I'm, I'm so glad that y'all's podcast is out because I, I still don't think there's nearly enough attention on like, what these sheriffs are doing, because this

• 23:19Speaker 04

  Really is, it's so fundamentally anti-democratic in a way that is also has a great deal of legitimacy in the eyes and ears of at least a lot of the people living in these areas, right? Like, this is not just some yahoo declaring himself, you know, a militia. It's not like the state of Jefferson movement saying like, we're totally gonna secede from California. These are guys with real power. So I guess kind of where I'd like to close by is asking, do you see a shift in rhetoric from these people from like 2020 to 2024?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Like, because I feel like right now, the rhetoric is much more like aggressively anti like the enemy within. Whereas, you know, in 2020, it was much more focused on gun rights and going after migrants. But I think you would have a better, better sense of that than I do.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  So one thing is that immediately following 2020, there was some effort on the part of CSPOA to start to slightly distance themselves from the Oath Keepers.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  CSP and the Oath Keepers, I mean, the former Sheriff Mack, that was the founder of the CSPOA, was on the board of the Oath Keepers. And Stuart Rhodes, who's been charged with seditious conspiracy for his role planning J6, has been working closely with CSPOA for the entire time that CSPOA, for the most part, has been around. So they were working really, really, really closely together. So there was a little bit of a shift after J6 where CSPOA tried to distance themselves from the Oath Keepers. But I would say that the other thing that you touched on is also true. As opposed to focusing so much on kind of nullification of any sort of creating, you know, Second Amendment sanctuaries or those types of things. They've really leaned hard into.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Investigating election fraud and kind of Stop the Steal style rhetoric.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  And they've really leaned hard in a very frightening way into more like really harsh and horrible anti-immigrant rhetoric.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  And so, you know, back literally at their 2024 Spring CSPOA convening, they're talking about the Great Replacement Theory. They're talking about doing every single thing in their powers to make sure that there is not election fraud. They're talking about, you know, making sure that, I don't want to use the terms here, but that undocumented people don't vote in the elections and those types of things.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  And then what was really frightening in this plan that I spoke about briefly in Florida that the state director of CSPOA released is that they are actually embracing more far-right views overtly in that plan than they have in any other time, actually, since they were formed. So they're explicitly quoting, for any of your nerds out here that follow this stuff, this guy Matthew Truhella.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  And he openly advocated for political violence and was one of the people who actually justified violence against abortion providers in the 1990s. They quote him numerous times when talking about setting up citizen militias to actually essentially target election clerks in the event that they are not happy with how the elections turn out.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 05

  So there is a shift, I would say, in like, in multiple directions that, that some of which are very, very much just in line with Trump and the Trump campaign to some degree, and some of which are already kind of, you know, plans for a different type of insurgents at the local level in the event that things don't go in their direction.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm gonna throw us to ads once more and then we will come back and kind of close ourselves out. So everybody, have an ad.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  And we're back. So Chloe, yeah, just kind of in closing, what are you kind of keeping your ear to the ground on as we as we near Election Day? Like, what are kind of your, do you have any like particular sort of red lines that you're keeping an eye out for from these people?

• 27:34Speaker 05

  I am looking closely at Florida and whether some of the plans that they've actually laid out in Florida.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Might happen. I'm also keeping a close ear to battleground states where it seems like a number of these militias are kind of activated, aligned with some sheriff's departments. And I want to particularly see if there's any type of cases that that kind of show up in terms of either voter intimidation or those types of things. And it's just been dawning on me more and more that a number of the people who are in the CSPOA network are actually in battleground states. And I just wonder to what degree that's a coincidence or not. I think I'm just trying to kind of get a sense of how also some of the framing from

• 28:28Speaker 05

  these sheriffs continue to shift and whether they actually become activated, whether there are posses or citizen militias that become kind of mobilized as they did to some degree in 2020.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Well, that's what I will be keeping an eye on, too. Thank you. Um, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for putting together this podcast series. Everyone listen to The Insurgents Sheriffs, co-produced by Political Research Associates and Quintero Productions. Again, that's The Insurgents Sheriffs. You can find it wherever podcasts are found. Thank you for coming on. Everybody check this out and hopefully we will have a drop of the podcast in the Bastards feed so people can listen in on that, too. Thank you so much, Chloe.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  And thank you, listeners.

• 29:35Speaker 06

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• 30:40Speaker 06

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast taking place on a day that will live in infamy and set a country ablaze. I am, of course, referring to Guy Fawkes Day. I'm your host, Bia Wong. With me is James. Hi, I'm excited. I'm excited to share with people some of our national traditions in the United Kingdom. Yeah, and so as a person from the country who won, who won the revolution, I get to do the British episode because you should have fucking... Relegated to listener status. Yes. So, all right, the thing about the Gunpowder plot is that, like another event occurring on November 5th, there are no heroes and everyone, like, sucks shit. Yes.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  So, in order, in order to return to a type of heroes and to get the context of what the fuck is going on here, we're taking a digression because I am never going to get another chance to talk about this part of history unless I write a Martin Luther episode. So, we're going all the way back to the origins of the split between Protestantism and Catholicism.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  Good, bit about Luther. Yeah, I was raised a Lutheran. Okay. So I got a very, very sanitized version of who Martin Luther was and then I read about who Martin Luther actually was and I was like, holy shit. Yeah, different dude. Martin Luther, and this is the part also that doesn't really get talked about in the sort of Lutheran tradition because Lutheran, the Lutheran tradition is not a revolutionary tradition, shall we say that.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  The thing that Lutheran did, we started Protestantism by accident, was accidentally kicked off a genuine, full-scale social revolution in Europe with his attacks on the Catholic Church. He was not trying to do this, but he very quickly has, has in fact accidentally done this. And through the sort of breach that he'd opened and like the ironclad walls of Catholic monarchical rule came the German peasants wars. And my favorite dude in this entire period of time, Florian Geyer. I don't think I'm actually familiar with Florian. Good name. Oh, this guy rules. This guy fucking rips. Okay. There is a knight who, there's a lot of debate about this, but the sources that I've read a long time ago when I was reading about this guy,

• 32:56Speaker 06

  says that he is the only, like, they are the only, like, knights, like, mounted knights in, like, the entire history of Europe to defect and join a peasant revolution. Oh, they're these guys. They're like the black knights or something? Yep, yep, the Black Company. Yeah, he fucking rules. Yeah, it slaps. So the German peasant wars kickoff and he enjoys the peasant revolution with this sword that is supposedly inscribed with the words neither cross nor crown. Which is just unbelievably based. He fucking rules. Yeah, yeah. And his thing, him and the Black Company, which is part like, it's part knights, part like peasants, just basically run around Thiria and kill the shit out of nobles and priests.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  And like, spread the glorious fire of the peasant revolution. What hero. Yeah. It's awesome. I found a picture of him. Strong chin as well, I will say. Powerful jawline. Yeah, and he, I mean, he has an interesting sort of conflicting legacy. So he gets killed eventually because the, the, the giant peasant revolution is, is eventually destroyed. And we'll talk about Martin Luther's role in that in a second. But he has this interesting legacy where he's taken up as a national hero by like every kind of non-establishment faction of, of German politics. So he's like, like there's an SS division named after him. Oh dear. He's also like one of the heroes of East Germany. Yeah, I can see this. Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  And like, this is one of these things where like, in like, in like 2030 Germany, you will have communists, social democrats, and the Nazis all singing like the same songs about this guy. Yeah. You know, he's one of the few sort of redeemable figures in German history. Yeah, they go. Cause he fucking rips. Yeah. And this is what happens with national myth making, right? You just take this thing and make it plastic. It's like you mold it to whatever you want it to be, whatever you want your national story to be. Yeah, yeah. And like, like this happens with Makhno in Ukraine. This happens with, oh, when we talked to this on, on Margaret's show and I did, we did a bunch of episodes about anarchism in Korea. And like, they do this with a bunch of Korean anarchists too. They become like national, like state heroes. And it's like, well, okay.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  This guy would have absolutely shot you. Like this is one of these things where it's like, like if you, if, if you, if you were to show, if you were to show this guy the SS, he'd be like, what the fuck? Yeah, yeah. I must immediately get my sword out again. Yeah. It's time to, it's, it's, it's time to start the killing again. Yeah. And very specifically, Geyer is like, he actually had known Martin Luther back before he like joined the peasants. And like specifically the fact that they're, they're like, these peasants are like sacking castles and killing priests and like the ruling class very specifically makes is like, like the fact that the ruling class could conceivably be in danger is the thing that convinces Martin Luther to become.

• 35:37Speaker 06

  I think I've been this argument on the show before, but I think he is at very worst, like the second greatest kind of revolutionary in my, in like the last four, four or 500 years. Because I, I, I hold that the, the greatest kind of revolutionary is the one who starts the revolution and then realizes, holy shit, I can't control this and I don't like where it's going. And then immediately turns kind of revolutionary to kill everyone who was involved. No, not like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so the product of this is that Martin Luther writes this book, kind of long pamphlet called Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  And aligns himself with the princes. Yeah. And, you know, so thi- thi- thi- this is the start of what is eventually a- a- a century, you know, there- there's a couple centuries of religious war in here we're gonna get to. But this is in a lot of ways, I think, the beginning of the reproach ma between Catholicism and Protestantism because. Sure. Yeah, because class is more important. Yeah, yeah, and tha- tha- that actually weirdly is an extremely important part of the story of Guy Fawkes Day. Yes.

• 36:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and, you know, the other thing that Luther's up to in this period is trying to outflank the Catholics on antisemitism, which is pretty hard because like, so thi- this is the early, this is the early, like, 1500s, right? Yeah. We are like forty years out from two Spanish monarchs, uh, like, expelling the Jews from Spain. Yeah. So like. Sixteenth century antisemitism is like peak. I don't know, i- i- it's hard to exactly, like, tier list the, like, periods of antisemitism, but like. Right. Like, the Holocaust, Holocaust is obviously number one, and then like this period, like the Kolmanitsky pogrom and like some of the stuff in late nineteen, in like, late eighteen hundreds Russia are like. Yeah. Something like the worst periods in human history for this. Yeah, this is pretty horrific shit.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  And, and Luther decides that he's going to, like, outflank the Catholics and antisemitism. And so he writes this book called On the Jews and Their Lies, which is like. Yeah. The first version of this that I wrote had a joke here about how it could have been written by Hitler, but then I, then I, I like did a little bit of reading about it and was like, holy shit, thi- thi- this specific thing was used by, like, Nazi, like. I'm sure. Lutheran pastors specifically to justify the end of the Holocaust in like thirty-eight. So, that's great. Um, yeah, how cool. Yeah, so thi- this is, this is, you know, this is the sort of formation of like, what you could call like, the Protestant counter-revolution against the sort of social revolutionary forces they kicked off, right?

• 38:10Speaker 06

  Well, the antisemitism, like, hardline stuff is a bit later, but there's, there's one more kind of big uprising, which is very funny, which is the Anabaptist and Moonster who formed this like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, pretty base democratic commune that eventually kind of turns into like a sex cult thing, but like, in a way that's more like, people realize they could be poly than it is, like, normal sex cult. Yeah, it's people, it's people like, like.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  emerging from an extremely constrained like

• 38:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  socialized sexuality, I guess.

• 38:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you know, so and and and this is like, this is, you know, the those are the two sort of the periods of like high of like the highest levels of class conflict that that are the result of the Protestant information. And this kind of ends with Moonster when they all get killed.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  By by the monarchies. And this is something about the European peasantry that I I don't know, maybe one day I'll do a project on why the European peasantry was so much worse at doing revolt than the Chinese peasantry. Because the Chinese peasantry knocks off dynasties all the time. Like, the Chinese central government is like a hundred thousand times more formidable as a force than like any of these dipshit like holy Roman Empire principalities, but the Chinese peasantry did it anyways. The dirt that, I don't know, the the the German peasantry fought hard. It it doesn't go great for them.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the entirety of the European society is structured along like the state monopoly on violence and how.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  The feudalism is like the sine qua non of feudalism is having the ability to kill all your peasants.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's it's a it's a it's a system, and I think this is something that

• 39:47Speaker 06

  like, you know, this is the this reflection of this you see in sort of like fantasy a lot, right? Where like people will write monarchies. And then you'll get like, or like he's using like science fiction, right? Where like people people understand what's bad about a democracy because you've all lived in one and you know all the ways that it sucks. But because most of us like haven't lived under an actual monarchy, you don't.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Speak for yourself, man.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Well, okay, even then, even then, that like, compared to this shit, like, like, people don't understand how just hideous this shit is. And this is going to play a role. I mean, this is like, again, this is like the thing that starts the French Revolution, where the first time that, not the first time, but like when people actually like start beating the monarchists seriously. People have this tendency to remember like the violence of the French Revolution. It's like, yeah, there was a lot of shit that was very bad, but also like these people, these people that they are fighting, these are, these are people who for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, anytime anyone has like even dared to talk back to them, has just fucking murdered them, their families and everyone around them.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, like as horribly as possible.

• 40:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and like as as the process of their them holding on to their fucking deranged hereditary power system.

• 41:05Speaker 06

  And the consequence of this is that once, once these revolutions are put down, sort of Protestantism versus Catholicism, like, it's not fully this, because it's like, there, there are sort of popular, I mean, not in a good sense, but there are sort of like, more mass, like Catholicism versus Protestantism stuff, but like, a lot of it politically becomes the domain of, like, princes, who are either sort of running wars that are, like, nominally religious based, although, like, go, go, go look on what side France enters on the Thirty Years' War in about 20 years, when, when France enters on the side of the Protestants to figure out exactly how much, right, but like, you know, but this

• 41:46Speaker 06

  kind of conflict becomes this, this kind of more, the, the actual politics becomes centralized in the ruling class.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  The metaphor that popped in mind to me is one that will make sense to about four people, but it's, it's kind of like the way that all politics became centralized in the Baath Party in Syria over the course of, of like, the 60s and 70s, like, all, where, like, you have this mass politics, but the only politics that matters is the military and the military factions, the military fighting it out, like, that's kind of what's happening here, is that, like, all of these princes are sort of centralizing religious power, but this means that, like, religious wars, quote unquote, and conflict becomes the domain of, like, these coups and counter coups by, like, princes and their, like, noble factions and shit.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  And that's where we find ourselves in the year 1604, at the beginning of, of the gunpowder treason. And before, before we get that, do you know what else supports the gunpowder treason? The 17th century.

• 42:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely Chumba Casino.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, the really, the major funders of the gunpowder treason.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's okay if you lose your money at Chumba Casino, guys, because they're trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  We are back, we are back to the past, we're back to, I guess, the future of where we were several seconds before that. So, England famously became Protestant when King Henry VIII wanted a new wife and the Pope wouldn't let him get a new wife.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, another new wife, right, like, was it?

• 43:18Speaker 06

  Like, no, this was, this was a new wife, wait.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  There's a rhyme for this, divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  Had survived, yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, yeah, it was the first divorced, because after that, he just went.

• 43:28Speaker 06

  He went ham on the wives. And through this incredibly silly chain of events, they leave the Catholic Church and become Protestants through Anglicanism, which is. Catholicism light, like. Yeah, and I think it's more Catholicism light. Lutheranism also gets described as Catholicism light. Yeah. But I can emphatically state there was a major difference because I was raised Lutheran and I fucking have no guilt whatsoever. It rules. No guilt. Zero. I feel bad about nothing. It's awesome. No shame Catholicism. Church of England is more or less Catholicism minus Pope. Yeah, yeah. And obviously they differ over time because. Yeah, because just the drift of of history. They evolved differently. Yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, but then, but this, this starts like actual a series of kind of horrendous religious conflicts inside of the UK. Where just like a bunch of random people get killed because once princes become the people controlling religions, everything gets unbelievably stupid really quickly. Yeah, it's just a vehicle for like elite fucking ambition. Yeah. Right? They can pick a faction and use that to get a little bit higher up the ladder. So there's like, there's a series of like coups and counter coups to attempt to like reinstall Catholic rule or get rid of Catholic. And like, it's all really boring. Like, it's, it's so boring. I cannot emphasize, like.

• 44:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. Let me tell you, Mia, I did that in history in school for years. Somehow I overcame that to get a PhD in history, but that shit was dull. It's, it's hideously boring, like, which is insane because like, like Bloody Mary is involved in this and it's still boring. Oh yeah, there's a lot of beheadings, princes in the tower, famously with the little dead children. Lot of, lot of murder. Yeah, but boring murder, which is staggering. How do you make murder boring? Easy. Ah, you do this shit. Yeah, Shakespeare wrote some good plays about this shit.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  For those of you who are interested.

• 45:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, go, go consult that.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  I don't know. So by sixteen oh four, a group of guys that would eventually extend to like thirteen Catholic guys. Start to form a, a frankly, not very good plan to do a coup. And appoint a child king to restore Catholic rule to England. Or child queen. Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  They love a child king.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  So this plan has, okay, I'm separating it out into three stages. I don't know whether it's fair to, but I'm doing it. So part one, use a bunch of gunpowder and blow up the English Parliament.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Now, and this is something that's very important to, to understand what's happening here. This is not a parliament in the sense that we understand it today. Like this is not like a representative body, like the parliament is basically, it's an assembly, assembly of nobles.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  It is the instrument of power of the English aristocracy.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 06

  Which is one of the greatest forces for human evil in the entirety of, like the three hundred thousand year history of humanity.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't have it. Britain doesn't have a universal franchise until after eighteen thirty two. So like.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this is, this is, this is sixteen oh five.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Right? Like, and throughout that whole period, the, the, the power of the aristocracy like waves, but this, this is, they are unbelievably powerful.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  I think they don't have a universal manhood suffrage even until later, eighteen forty eight. Before that, every constituency has its own franchise rules, which makes Parliament even fucking weirder.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  You have some that like proto-democratic and you have some where it's just a guy.

• 46:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  And he, he just shows up to Parliament and represents himself.

• 46:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's great.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, you know, this part of the plan, the blowing up the Parliament plan, great, we love it. We support destroying the English aristocracy. I, yeah, always great.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Get the king, why not? It's gonna, was it gonna be at the state opening of Parliament?

• 47:14Speaker 06

  I, I think, I, it was, it was going to be at some session of Parliament where the king was gonna be there. And that was part two of the plan.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Bigger Parliament.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  Fun fact, Britain still does this.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  Incredibly antiquated, like- Barbaric country. Yeah, this is where the- We, we, we, we need China to conquer the UK and establish civilization there, like, failed it, they're like, Britain, Britain couldn't even do a bourgeois revolution. Do you know how easy it is to do a bourgeois revolution? Like, Sun Yat-sen pulled it off. No, but, but, but, because Britain has the most established fucking aristocracy in the world. So- Oh, my god. At the British State Opening of Parliament, which still happens to this day, right? Incredibly like antiquated procedure. They search the cellars of Parliament beforehand to check that no one else is trying to blow them up. Like, this is now part of the, uh, part of the, uh, and like, there's a whole, there's like an exchange of hostages.

• 48:08Speaker 06

  Uh, like, like, there are all these things that are built in from bizarre episodes in British history. They, they send someone from Parliament to Buckingham Palace to be like a hostage for the- Oh, my god. For the duration of the ceremony. It's incredible. Yeah. This is the stupidest system in the, like, it, it, the British, the British system, like, I think functionally, it, it is a more advanced democratic system than the American system. But in terms of the way that it's like procedure works- Oh, yeah. It is like, like, the, the American constitution, which is like, one of the most regressive constitutions, like, a, a constitution that failed to enshrine one person, one vote. Yeah. Right? Like, that constitution looks like fucking Star Trek compared to like,

• 48:53Speaker 06

  watching the stupid ass king hauling around a scepter. Yeah, and some dude bangs on the door three times and then, yeah, a sausage thing just gets in there and reads his speech. Yeah, so, so part two of the gunpowder plot is to kill the king who's gonna be there too. Um, this is also great. We, we like killing the king. The, the Cool Zone Media is a pro-killing the king. Yeah, regicide. Media establishment. Yes, is, regicide rules. We, we love it. It's great. Part three is to install a Catholic theocracy to replace the Protestant one.

• 49:21Speaker 06

  And we simply do not love this. This shit sucks. That's where we diverge sadly. Yeah, this part's very bad. V for Vendetta may have misled you about the intentions of Guy Fawkes. Yes, and we'll get to V for Vendetta because that's, I think, that's an important part of the closing of this story. So the plan falls apart, the plotters get betrayed, Guy Fawkes, who's the guy who's supposed to light the gunpowder, gets caught and tortured. Which is really funny because you'll read accounts, I'm gonna read a bit from an account from the somewhat dubiously named english-heritage.org. That is like, they're just quite pretty good on this. Yeah, they like, they own lots of like big old houses and stuff. Like if you wanna go and see like a manor house, you're probably gonna give them some money to go in.

• 50:05Speaker 06

  It's not like as bad as something named English Heritage could be, I guess. It could be a lot more racist in an open and explicit way. Yeah, yeah. Now, but like, the thing about this, right, is like, they don't actually describe what happened to him during his interrogation as torture, even though they tortured the shit out of this guy. Oh, yeah. Like, the king was there while they tortured the shit out of this guy. Yeah, yeah. Very unpleasant, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. And so eventually, like, all the plotters are like either captured or killed. And I'm gonna read this from that English Heritage article. Quote, "Each was found guilty and sentenced to a traitor's death by the grisly ordeal of hanging, drawing, and quartering." Oh, yeah, hung, drawn, and quartered.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  The men were hanged. It's so bad. I loved this shit when I was in school. You don't understand how great this is for like eight-year-old boys. Yeah, but like, Jesus fucking Christ. So they were hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, dismembered, and beheaded. And then their bodies were cut into quarters and displayed for all to see and for birds to feast upon. Yep. According to all accounts, all faced their fates bravely. So these, like, this is something that like is genuinely important to understand because we're going to get to the French Revolution part of the story very soon. These people are fucking drained. They're like, they're psychopaths. Like, they just, they do this as public entertainment. Oh, yeah. Like, they hang people and then cut them down and castrate them and then dismember and behead them while they're alive?

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Like, they do this like for fun? Yeah. Isn't this the opening? Scene of, uh, Dispute and Punish by Foucault, doesn't he describe this? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and like, you know, like, this is, this is the thing you have to remember about the French Revolution is that, like, these are the people who rule Europe for, like, 700 years. Oh, yeah. Or like, these motherfuckers. And so, you know, like, they, they, they stop the gunpowder treason, no one gets blown up. Um, and November 5th, like, immediately gets declared a holiday. But it's not really the same holiday as, as we have today. I'm gonna read again from that article, quote, "Since 1673 and up until the 19th century,

• 52:14Speaker 06

  some crowds had paraded an effigy of the Pope through the streets, strung up above a bonfire. This symbolized continuing prejudice, prejudice towards Catholics." Which, again, like, you motherfuckers weren't Catholics until, like, fucking 7 seconds ago. Like, what, what is wrong with you people? Like, I, you, like, you, you, you were all Catholics until your king decided to make a fake Pope so he could get divorced. Like, what the fuck?

• 52:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, the, uh, the anti-catholicism goes pretty hard. Like, for, like, for a country where, like, you, like, you were all literally Catholics until the king decided you weren't. What is, oh my god, I hate Christianity so much. This shit sucks so badly. Talking of parades, have you, uh, have you read about the, uh, the Lewis bonfire in Sussex? No. Okay, they, like, they go super hard for bonfire night. They also, like, I think it was the same day or something that some Protestants were burned at a stake there. Oh, great. Uh, but they have this big parade where they, like, they drag, like, I think it's burning barrels of, like, pitch or tar. Oh, my god. Or possibly those are the same thing.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  Uh, they have, like, I, I'm gonna invite you to Google Lewis, uh, Lewis bonfire. Just, just tell me what the first image you see is. Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, no! Oh, no, that's a parade of burning crosses! Yeah. Oh, no! That's correct, yeah, yeah. What you're gonna see is a, is a burning crosses. Jump scare! So you don't just burn Guy Fawkes. In effigy, they they have these big sort of every every year they'll have like the person of the year they're gonna burn. So like effigies that they've burned include David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson, and Seth Blatter.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Like, some of it goes surprisingly hard. Like, I think at some point, like, there's like a formal, like, they've been investigated by the police for hate crimes. Nearly all of them are against politicians, so like. You know. We probably should have mentioned that they also burned a Romani caravan once, which is pretty fucking terrible. Yeah. All right. Speaking, speaking, speaking of burning David Cameron, do you know who else burns David Cameron? Is it the goods and services that support this podcast? Yeah, yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 06

  We're now returning. Let's go back to that thing I was reading about what happened to to them, them hanging the Pope. Yeah. So this symbolized continuing prejudice against Catholics. However, during the French Revolution, English and Irish Catholics fought for Britain, which found itself on the same side of the Pope. And perhaps because of this, in around 1800, Guy Fawkes seems to have finally entered the picture as the boogeyman of bonfire night, rather than the Pope. Fawkes was barely mentioned in 5th November sermons in the 18th century, and his name doesn't feature in the titles of books or tracts before 1800. But after that date, his name began to appear, and Fawkes seems to have quickly become a central character in English popular culture, often portrayed as a dashing doomed anti-hero. Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 06

  And and this is, this is a reminder that Protestantism versus Catholic Catholicism is a fucking joke. The ruling class has always had one religion counter-revolution, and when their asses are on the line, Protestant terrorists and Catholic Supreme Court justices can work together just fine to make sure you can't get a fucking abortion. Yep. So, you know, what we have here, and this is an interesting thing in the sense that, like, like, Guy Fawkes becoming the guy that Guy Fawkes Day is about and not like the Pope is literally an icon of sort of like of kind of revolution. Yeah. That's a good point. Like specifically against the French Revolution. But it's interesting because it's like this eventually seems to kind of have backfired. Because Guy Fawkes kind of like becomes the central figure, right?

• 56:13Speaker 06

  But then, and this is something that like this article also mentions that I want to go into more. Everything sort of changes again about this when the movie V for Vendetta gets made. Yeah, it's very strange. Yeah, unless actually, so before we do V for Vendetta, can you talk a little bit more about like what people do during during Guy Fawkes Day? Because it's fun. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So it is fun. It is. It's a nice like a little as as burnings in effigy go. You know, a fun one. At least what we used to do, I grew up in a more rural area. Uh, is we'd all, everyone would, if you had like wood or you chopped down a tree, you know, and in on your land or you had old furniture, you'd all bring it to one place, right? Big field. You pile and you're with, it's fucking high. It's like a couple of stories high by the time. Damn.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  And then you go down on the 5th of November, everyone gets fireworks. This is where I'll tell my fireworks story. Very amusingly, when I was younger, uh, everyone in my village club together to buy one of those fireworks displays, you know, where it's like a box and you light one fuse and they all go off. Yeah. Oh shit. So we've set that up, my dad and his mate, and uh, we're in the van there. We've lit it.

• 57:21Speaker 06

  And then we've, we're sort of standing there like ready to go, woo, ah. Um, unfortunately, we've placed it upside down. Oh no. Fucking bouncing off the ground. And then it flips on the side. And it just, we're now behind the van and it's just fucking smashing the van. So yeah, what you do is you get fireworks, you shoot them at your friends, you shoot them in the air. Uh, you have a massive bonfire like, and it's, this is November in Britain, right? So, you know, days are short, nights are long, everything's wet. So you're using a lot of petrol, uh, to start the bonfire, like, you know, irresponsible amount. You just have a huge fire and then if you have old clothes, at least I'm sure it's different if you grow up in like a more urban setting.

• 58:07Speaker 06

  What we would do is we get our old clothes, tie the bottom of the trousers together, tie the wrists together. And then you stuff all that with straw, that you have, right? And then you put a head on it, a pet like a bag, like a plastic bag or flower bag and draw a little face on it. And that's your guy. You can go around to people's houses and ask for a penny for the guy. That's that had sort of become quite old fashioned by the time I was a child. But you make these guys and then you take them down there and then you you put them on top of the bonfire before you light it. And everyone watches as he catches on fire and burns to death. And you have toffee apples at the other thing.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Dipped in toffee. Yeah, I used to like it and you have sparklers, you know, which is, you know, a little little sparkler on a stick. Yeah, it was fun. It's got something for every age, you know, little kid, you have a sparkler and then once you get to, you know, like 10, 12, you can shoot fireworks at your friends. And like, really, it's something for everyone, I guess, unless you're Catholic. Yeah, but that's the thing, though, that Catholicism and Protestantism. It's very, it's secularized. Yeah, like they've been united, they've been united in the single great British religion of Counter-Revolution. So now everyone can celebrate Guy Fawkes Day together. Yeah, it's true. And it's supposed to like reinforce the state and be like, if you fuck with the state, we will burn you. Which V for Vendetta kind of, I guess, messes with a little bit, but.

• 59:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, and this, I think it's actually a really interesting process because I think Guy Fawkes now is most known for the Guy Fawkes mask, which was one of the symbol, the symbol of anonymous and like one of the symbols of. Yeah, but it wasn't before that. Yeah, yeah. And parts of how this happens is so is is a character named Guy Fawkes in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. And V for Vendetta is not about a Catholic plot to establish. The Catholic rule in in in Britain. Yeah. This is about like effectively the government of the UK is going to have in five years when they just like completely descended to fascism. Um, yeah, we're not that far away now, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, and it's about that government getting overthrown by an anarchist revolution. Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 06

  And and it's like this because like, you know, Alan Moore is leftist. Um, it's made by the Wachowskis of like of Matrix fame, who are also trans leftists. We're gonna close on them actually, but you know, sort of what happens here, right? It's like this mask becomes a symbol of like, kind of like really altogether detached from the original figure of Guy Fawkes. And like through the form of this movie, like this becomes the symbol of like the 2011, like Occupy cycle revolutions everywhere. Yeah. And like, like one of my most sort of like harrowing memories, like coming up in that movement was of this, like 2014, everything's going, everything's by 2014, everything's going to shit, right? Like the streets of war has kicked off, the Rabab massacre in Egypt has like slaughtered a bunch of protesters and Egypt's like just under full military rule.

• 1:00:58Speaker 06

  And there's a, like, there are like Palestinian kids like wearing Guy Fawkes masks. And there's like this image that haunts me is this video and an image of it of this kid is like, this kid's like 17, maybe like 16, 17, like wearing this mask and he walks around a quarter and his Israeli sniper just fucking shoots him in the head. And there's this picture of him with like this, just like mask with a hole in it next to his face and he's just like lying there on the floor. And it's like one of the things that is like the reason why I the way I am now is because of that shit. Yeah. And, you know, in some sense, like he's become weirdly an enduring danger to the state in ways that he would be extremely pissed about, which is very funny to me. Yeah. It started as a graphic novel, right? It was a graphic novel before.

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it was an Alan Moore graphic novel. Comic books. Yeah. Yeah. And. I want to close on on the Wachowskis and specifically I wanted to shout out. So again, like the Wachowskis made the movie V for Fadetta, which is the thing that like popularized it and is in a lot of sense responsible for like the aesthetic of of the 2011 revolutions and she's founded a new project called Anarchist United. I'm going to quote from an interview with her, quote, "It will be a studio wholly owned by a foundation. It's owned by this 501(c)(3). The 501(c)(3) provides grants for artists and young filmmakers with marginalized points of view. Hopefully those people will create stuff, bring it over to the studio. The studio can make it and then fund the foundation. So you create this evergreen operation that can hopefully exist outside of the studio system if necessary."

• 1:02:27Speaker 06

  And so they're making a bunch of trans shit, like they're adapting Gretchen Falcon Martin's Manhunt, which is like the most transfem ass like book of the last. Like it's a book about trans misogyny and it's getting, we're getting it fucking adapted. So yeah, it's really cool. And yeah, like I think, I think, I don't know, that, that's the thing I want to close on is like a note of hope of like even the most deranged kind of revolutionaries' actions against the state can sometimes ricochet around 400 years later and turn into like a revolutionary movement. Bounce back into transfem films and it's like, I often think about Hunger Games, like the Hunger Games symbol.

• 1:03:10Speaker 06

  I've, I would love to interview the lady who wrote Hunger Games. I think she's quite like, she doesn't like the media attention so much from what I've heard. Yeah. But like that became the symbol of the like around the, the milky alliance, right? In Hong Kong, Myanmar, obviously, even in Thailand they used. Yeah. And like, it's fascinating how these things have these cultural, um, like, yeah, they, they sort of bounce around and becomes something completely different from what they were. Yeah. Well, and, and you know, it's this weird thing too, cause like The Hunger Games was born of Suzanne Collins, like flipping channels between coverage of like, like watching the bombing in the Iraq war and reality TV. Yeah, I remember. Reading that.

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  And you see, and you watch like this rebound of this, like the intense reaction of this cultural moment to 2003, 2004, like the like, one of the peaks of of American like kind of revolution. Rebounds around and suddenly a bunch of like, a bunch of revolutionaries of B M R are doing the like fucking two fingers thing. Yeah, yeah, they're doing the Cub Scouts. Yeah. And so, you know, this is one of these things where like, you know, who who knows where where your story one day is going to end up in rebound to. But if if if if we survive this, we are promised that this year was the beginning of the golden age of leftist transcend. So let's let's fucking get there more and. Yeah. If you're in England, enjoy burning shit tonight. Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. If you're in America, who knows? I'll still enjoy burning shit tonight.

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  Woo.

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• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  You wake up before dawn. This was once abnormal for you, but ever since the election, you've found it harder and harder to sleep. You just barely drifted off when the sound of shouts wafted in from across the street. Reflected sirens bounce off your bedroom window. Through a fog of sleep, you reflect on the last few days. Voting went better, you feared. It's what happened in the days after that's kept your spine at a constant eerie tingle. Several Republican-led states are refusing to certify their election results. Most analysts say the blizzard of lawsuits launched on behalf of Trump have no chance at winning, but that didn't stop the candidate from declaring victory and promising to carry out his own inauguration, no matter what the courts decide.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  It's all absurd, laughable, but you live on the border of a majority-red county, and your sheriffs just announced support for the real winner of the election. Your local PD have been notably silent, while right-wing provocateurs online have started circulating allegations of election fraud that the sheriff has promised to "look into." That was yesterday. Today, just after five, you're jolted awake in your bed by the sound of breaking glass and screaming. You stay low and crawl to your front window to peep out. Across your yard and into the street before you, three police cruisers are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house. You can't imagine why. You know, he did some volunteer canvassing a few weeks back.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  He volunteered at a voting precinct. Could they be there because of that? You try a few different search terms on social media to puzzle out the truth. It looks like a few people around the country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts register as deleted before you can click on them. There's more shouting from inside your neighbor's house, and within seconds, a pair of burly deputies drag him out in front and into a waiting squad car. It's dark outside, but you think you might see blood on his face. Your heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to call someone, but the cops are already here. Who else is there? As your mind races, one of the officers stationed outside turns back and looks towards your window. Recognition sparks his eyes. He sees you. He starts to walk over.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  You turn back, drop the shades, and with a pounding heart, retreat to your bedroom. Maybe he won't knock. Maybe he just wanted to scare you. Maybe.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans. And back in early 2019, I released the first season of this show. It wasn't a daily news and politics podcast back then. Instead, it gave a focused argument for why a new US civil war was more frightening and possible than you might guess. Over the last few years, that belief has become, unfortunately, mainstream. It is no longer fringe or unique to talk about a new civil war as a real possibility. There was a blockbuster movie earlier this year, based around presenting what it called a "realistic picture" of such a possibility. I'll leave my thoughts on that for another time. A Merist poll from earlier this year showed that 47% of Americans consider a second

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  civil war likely or very likely. This is a massive shift, considering where things were when I wrote this podcast series in 2019. That number includes an expected 53% of Republicans, but also 40% of Democrats and 41% of independents. Depending on how you want to see it, I've either been vindicated as much as is possible for someone in my line of work, or I've played an outsized role in creating a particularly dangerous egregore in the collective unconsciousness of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled on that matter ever since the first episodes started coming out.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  If you'll remember, midway through the first season, we dropped an extra episode I hadn't initially intended as part of. Part of the run, just trying to stop people from panicking. And ever since, I've kept that as a particular goal in my head. However, you want to, you know, think about this, the first season of it could happen here. Undoubtedly helped to make my career. Today, Sophie and I run an entire network that employs several dozen people, largely on the strength of that series. And yet I have no issue telling you that I don't have any idea how election day is going to go. You know, we've had a lot of polls lately that seem much better for Harris. A number of pollsters are starting to shift. You know, there's a good chance that they were hurting in the direction of Trump,

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  because they didn't want to underestimate him again. But there's also a good chance that, you know, that Selzer poll is an outlier. And now these guys are hurting in the direction of Harris winning, because they don't want to be embarrassed. I really have no idea what's going to happen. My official stance is that it's probably pretty close to a coin flip, although maybe one that favors Harris now, you know, more than one that favors Trump. Whatever happens, I don't know what's going to happen, let alone what's going to happen the day after. And as I sat down to write this episode, which is going to air on the day of the election, I went back and forth as to where the focus should be. I did consider doing another Don't Panic! style episode. Perhaps that would have been the call.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  You know, depending on how today goes, people might either be listening to this and, you know, relaxing or listening to this and in a heightened state of panic. You know, it really depends on where things are and where things are in the counting of votes by this period of time. My reasoning on what I decided to do is is pretty simple, which is that I think there's a good chance we either know or have a strong inkling of how this election is going to shake out by the time this episode airs. And at the time I write this, the indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump. Enough that I'd say the election leans in her direction. And so I think there's a lot of value in talking about what might happen in the aftermath of that. If Trump tries to protest the election results,

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  and if he goes particularly trying to protest by force. And if that's the case, if that's the direction. He lands in, I think these shooters that we have to worry about, and I mean that in the figurative sense, right? You know, people who support him, people will, who will put skin in the game in order to try to force him into office. I think they're different than they were last time. I don't think the threat here is that a bunch of Proud Boys and the like raid the Capitol next January. I think the threat here has a lot more to do with licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared themselves in the tank for Trump. We ran an episode just the other day about the constitutional sheriffs movement. There's a lot to say about that. One in four law enforcement officers today

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  report to a sheriff. They make 20% of all arrests in the country. Earlier this year, Wired published an article on the far-right sheriffs ready to disrupt the election. It focused heavily on Dar Leaf, who sits on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA. Leaf, a Trump supporter and sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, has spent the lead-up to this election investigating the 2020 election. He's tried to seize voting machines and run militia training courses where he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies and gentlemen, how to form an ad hoc posse, each member armed with, quote, "a standard AR-15-type military-grade weapon and at least 500 rounds of ammo."

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Speaking of 500 rounds of ammo, you probably can't buy that from our sponsors, but here they are.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  We're back, and we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who sits on the board of that organization named Dar Leaf. Leaf has already promised to have his posse patrolling stations in Berry County to watch for evidence of fraud and illegal immigrant voting in what's expected to be one of the swing states this election might hinge on. Deeply reported articles like that Wired piece have worn in my own personal paranoia with troubling accounts on social media. The day before the election, which is when I wrote this, I came across a post on the Pennsylvania subreddit. From a Philly voter titled "My Dad Just Got Harassed By A Police Officer About The Election." Quote, "He was driving down the old Lincoln Highway when a trooper stopped him and asked

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  him if he was voting tomorrow. Trooper, will you be voting tomorrow? Dad, that's none of your business. Trooper, who are you voting for tomorrow? Dad, none of your business. Trooper, oh, so you're illegal." Now, the poster's dad, who is Hispanic, stated that he didn't have to answer that and asked if he was being detained. The trooper let him go. But later, according to the poster, this happened. "When my dad went to the precinct, there were three other people there to report the exact same story: election harassment at a traffic stop. Turns out the officer or officers doing it aren't even from Bucks County or Pennsylvania. They're New Jersey state troopers, wild across state borders to harass people driving down the highway."

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  In the lead-up to the 2020 election, we were all deeply worried about the dangers of different far-right groups, militias, and organizations like the Proud Boys, who wore right-wing death squad patches and threatened to throw leftists out of helicopters when their god emperor won reelection. Today, most of those figures are either a spent force or something that cannot act on its own, reliant upon the backing of groups like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs, or being empowered by a Trump-controlled White House if they want to have any hope of being directly relevant again. The positive side of this is that it allows us to triage our fears. The downside is that independent paramilitary actors are, in fact, something we can easily combat as individuals

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  and communities. Portland proved that when it eventually won its five-year street battle to oust these sundry right-wing groups from constant occupations of the city. When groups like the Proud Boys cross the line into outright violence, it is legal to meet them with defensive violence, and they can and have been beaten this way. That's simply not something the excellent left-wing community defense organizations and political groups in this country can say and do against, for example, law enforcement entities hell-bent on executing a purge against the left. In rallies prior to the election, Trump has often merged promises to prosecute his political opponents, us, with promises to use ICE to deport 20 million illegals and descend in

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  the military or federal law enforcement to clean up cities. I want to quote now from an article in The New Republic, reporting on a rally earlier this year in Wilmington, North Carolina. "Today I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina and across our country," said Trump. "No more sanctuary cities. As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, which is a lot of them, to turn over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored." The article goes on to note, "Trump has previously vowed to militarize US law enforcement, to restore law and order to our cities, which he claimed to become cesspools of bloodshed and crime under President Joe Biden.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Trump has argued that additional federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments, but that extra help would only go to cities that complied with ICE." Now, this is scary stuff, and it would necessitate some sort of response if it were to happen, but I don't really know how to tell you to organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns that one would need to factor into any plans. I could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation or to avoid being raided for their past political activism, and I could base those theories on, for example, how activists in Nazi Germany helped hide people from the Gestapo. But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond compare to what exists today.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Perhaps the most chilling article I read this year had nothing to do with ICE or right-wing paramilitaries and everything to do with a technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years. License plate recognition systems, like Motorola's DRN, use optical character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's license plate and put it in a searchable database. The policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative, although it's far from clear if they actually work, too. The idea is that if someone carries out a drive-by shooting, or assaults a woman on the street, or is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by someone who gets the car make and model and maybe the first couple of letters of the plate, DNR's database of more than 15 billion vehicle sightings, built from automatic recordings of license

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  plate-reading cameras on police cruisers and tow trucks and the like, might well help identify and stop someone before they hunt or kill again. Now, there's serious reason to question whether or not this system actually works this way. I'm not claiming to take a stance on this one way or the other. I'm not an expert on this, but the issue here from a privacy standpoint, when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump-dominated government, is that you can't train a system like this to only pay attention to license plates, nor is there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. And recent investigations conducted by a private detective with access to DNR's database for her work have shown that someone with access to this database can search based on more than just license plates.

• 1:19:36Speaker 04

  They can look up signs supporting political candidates and match them to front yards and thus to people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by these cameras, and there are, again, billions of these photos wearing, for example, Planned Parenthood shirts. This is not an idle fear. This is a weapon that could very easily be used by the enemy within months of you listening to this. This is also a weapon that, in an event like the one I forecasted at the start of this episode, could be used to crack down on activists and voters in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort of national schism situation. Police officers already misuse databases like this with comic regularity. 2022, a different Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro-Trump cops earlier this election season. I'm talking about something that happened in September when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County Bruce Sukowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio. From an article in the AP by Michael Rubicam. "Likening People in the U.S. Illegally to Human Locusts," Sukowski wrote on a personal Facebook account and his campaign's account. "When people ask me, 'What's gonna happen if the flip-flopping laughing hyena wins,'

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  I say, 'Write down all the addresses of the people who had their signs in their yards.'" That way, Sukowski continued, "When migrants need places to live, we already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival." Now, as the full context of that statement makes clear, Sukowski was not technically threatening Harris voters, but it's pretty much impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat, just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability and an environment where the futureability of Sukowski and those like him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going to talk more about that, but first, here's another ad break.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  Now, I don't mean to make it sound like that there's nothing that can be done to fight against technological tools and the arsenal of repression like this, but I have no doubt that if the Republicans do take total power, they will read any positive election result for them as a mandate to punish the left and purge the people Trump has already repeatedly called the enemy within. And I worry that in the event of any sort of national schism, either where there's an extended period of time where Trump is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida and you have a bunch of these counties and states around the country sign up for Trump, that the first thing we'll see law enforcement... ...do in these areas is punish the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on a war footing with the rest of the country.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  These are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here, but they are something to keep in mind and they are something that represents a real danger at this point. I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds of things the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that. Now, it is important to remember that whatever plan these people try won't work as well as they hope. We've been watching them for years, and if there's one thing you know about all of the people around Trump, it's that they're fuck-ups. That doesn't mean they can't win, it doesn't mean they're not dangerous, it just means that they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which is something that should be on your mind. Bruce and most of the Trump-aligned police, local and federal, still feel a need to couch

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  their threats in deniable terms, though. But many on the far-right have been less careful, and one thing we've seen as this election has lurched closer to its conclusion is a lot of people, people like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their masks off. Now, I think this had a lot to do with the fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a couple of weeks ago, and they felt like after years of, you know, having to do what Bruce did, having to cover up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to do that. Now, obviously, some influential people on the far-right have been masked off for much longer, and this is something that should concern you as well. One of the most sinister examples of this is Jack Posobiec, a former US Navy intelligence

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  officer, whose recent book, Unhumans, is framed as a secret history of communist revolutions. From an article in Mother Jones, quote, "They," they being Posobiec and his co-author, "claim, 'For as long as there have been beauty in truth, love in life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill, and these people of anti-civilization have always gone by different names: communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives.'" The pair contend that these folks, be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade, "are better called 'unhumans.'" It's a hard-edged message. "The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies, but people who seek to annihilate civilization." "They rob and kill," Posobiec and Lisek, his co-author, "maintain. They don't believe what they say, they don't care about winning debates, they don't even

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  want equality, they just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you." Now Jack has been a laughable character for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric has had an audience in the halls of power. J.D. Vance himself provided a blurb for the book claiming it shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon meanwhile, wrote the foreword. Now I started this episode with a fictional vignette, imagining what might happen if Trump chooses to contest the election with outright force, and he might. The good news is, I think that such an effort would be doomed to fail. If he sticks to the courts, trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to the House, is a better chance at succeeding. And it is possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of poll workers could play into a broader effort like this.

• 1:25:28Speaker 04

  But doing so is a big risk. My gut tells me that moving so openly, resorting to violence first, creates a situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming Harris administration would have to respond with force, there would have to be consequences. And given that they currently control the arsenal of state power, I think they would win even in the event that you have all of these sheriffs break for Trump and some sort of insurgent situation develop. If that were to happen, having backed this insurgency would put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put a lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It might even force consequences for provocateurs like Posobiec and even Elon Musk. Backing an outright violent coup is almost the only thing I can imagine putting Musk behind bars.

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  There are pieces of this logic train that I find comforting, but there are also pieces that aren't. Many of us, me included, made the mistake of assuming that after January 6th, 2021, Trumpism might finally be a spent force. He'd gambled too much and he'd lost too big. But despite the existential threat he presented himself as being, the Democratic Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose mercy for the main players. I suspect anything short of armed insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year. I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw him in prison if Harris wins are real. I read that instead as his own predictive justification for the violence he'd like to support against his political enemies.

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  That desire won't go away, just because Trump rides off into the sunset and the Republican Party has to go searching for If we defer their dream, it will simply sit under the floorboards and fester, waiting for the next opportunity, and that won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken system in a world where climate change and conflict are on the rise. Low-information voters, less literate by the day, will continue to swing back and forth. The feral beast we've heard growling all year long will surge forward, all the hungrier for being made to wait. If you've kept up with our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed that we haven't endorsed any candidates and I haven't wasted any time advising our listeners to vote. I happen to be someone who does think a Harris win represents substantially less harm than

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  a Trump win to a lot of people, but I don't think that the folks who listen to our podcast are waiting for me to make that decision for them. I don't agree with the anti-electoralist side of things on every matter, but one place where I do agree with them is that a Harris win won't fix what's broken. It represents the historic equivalent of jinking out of the way in a dogfight, necessary maybe, but not something that guarantees future security. Hey, everybody. Robert here. I've changed location, so sorry if it sounds a little bit different. I'm currently in a cabin, waiting out the election, trying not to think too much about it, but I wrote a new ending to this because I just thought that what I had there was incomplete.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  Now, when it comes to what does work in the long run to beat these people, my mind is drawn back constantly to perhaps an odd place, a 2011 article in the scientific journal Nature titled "The Evolution of Overconfidence." Now, the gist is that this was an attempt by two scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know very little about a subject to overestimate their competence in it. This is probably why so many Americans think they could win a fistfight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind of benefit to evolutionary fitness?

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  The explanation devised in this paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not, because in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight, the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach for that resource. If they do, one of three things can happen: they fight and win, they fight and lose, or the other organism backs away, insecure in its chances of victory, and they get that resource without even fighting for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual, so much so that it might explain why many of us seem to have a built-in tendency to irrationally judge our own capabilities.

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  Now, I first became aware of this research almost a decade ago, when I started work on my first published book, A Brief History of Vice. At the time, I found it interesting because it posited a likely adaptive basis for a kind of bad behavior, and that's what my whole book was about. In the years since, though, I've come to see it as the fundamental underlying explanation for how fascists win. It's well-established that fascist regimes and individuals themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union, or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after picking the wrong fight, and of course, January 6th. There are many examples to choose from,

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  but as often as they fail, the success of these movements is also based entirely on their willingness to dare, and the fact that liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to confront them. We are still dealing with Donald Trump and his foot soldiers in 2024, because no one quite had the guts to confront him to the degree he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant taking unprecedented legal steps and risking right-wing backlash that likely would have included acts of terrorism. In the end, most people with any say in the matter chose to either back away or, at best, pull their punches until after the election. On other episodes of this show, our correspondent Mia and I have talked about

• 1:31:10Speaker 04

  the actual path to destroying the far-right's organizational and electoral base. We are up against a coalition of used car dealers, supplement salesmen, multi-level marketing goons, sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their own power, and churches that by any decent measure, lost their justification for tax-exempt status years ago. These are all forces that can be targeted and neutered through the courts and the legislative system with consistent activism and pressure applied to elected leaders. Sitting here, I think that the odds the Democrats embrace such a strategy are exceptionally low, but we do have to try to make them. Because when you're sitting across from a monster, one that's fattened on overconfidence,

• 1:31:54Speaker 04

  and you see him start to reach again, the only sane response is to swallow your fear and take a swing.

• 1:32:15Speaker 06

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• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here. On today's episode, we have Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm Sophie Lichterman. This is the post-election episode. Robert?

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it happened here, is happening, has continued to happen here.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, this has been a podcast from the beginning about things falling apart, which is a great business to be in, I guess, because they keep doing that. I want to start by kind of talking about yesterday's episode, the one that I dropped before the election, because I thought a lot about like, what to put out on the day of the election. And I kind of made the call, which, I don't know, regrets the wrong word. I made the call yesterday that like, okay, we've got this new poll from Selzer. People are starting to feel like, you know, some of this late-breaking news is good for Harris. Some of the pollsters are hurting back in that direction. I probably should do something to kind of like, pump the brakes on enthusiasm

• 1:34:24Speaker 04

  and remind people that even if she wins, there's still a lot of dangers out there, right? Because that's what I saw as like, the big threat model is Harris is likely to win and then people are going to forget about these constitutional sheriffs and all these different kind of like, right-wing ghouls that will still be a problem if we don't take care of them, right? If we don't do anything to actually like, hamper their ability to exercise power. So I wrote that episode with that in mind. And it turns out, I was being overly optimistic. I think I was being overly optimistic in part, you know, I tend towards pessimism, which is why this show exists in the first place.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things that's happened is we've gotten bigger and more people have listened is, whenever like, shit happens in the world, we get bombarded on the subreddit and just like, in emails to myself with people saying versions of like, "I don't know what to do," using language that's like, very worrying sometimes about how hopeless they feel. And so I've kind of felt a growing responsibility to like, spread calm and hope. And I think that merged to a degree with the, you know, after my day. Dad died, this desire to like not just be sad and a doomer. And I think it led me to have, I guess, more of an optimistic, like I forced myself into an unreasonably optimistic frame of mind. Just because I thought that was the responsible thing to do.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  And I guess I'm kind of like evaluating that now, like what should I have done differently? You know, if I'd been in a more logical state of mind, and I guess the answer is, I don't know how to be in a more logical state of mind. Like, the problem is, there's so much. You know, you've got this hyper object of a political realignment happening in our country in this very dark direction. You're also trying to deal with, and I'm sure everyone listening is dealing with versions of this on their own. You know, people you care about getting sick and dying and, you know, losing jobs or having to start new ones and embarking, you know, starting to become a parent or whatever, like everybody's got all these massive things in their own lives and like trying to

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  keep a completely rational perspective on the political happenings in this country. While remaining unaffected from like the way in which your own life is going to color your optimism and biases is probably a hopeless cause to some extent, which I guess is part of why we're here to try and, as a collective,

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  offer people our most reasonable sort of averaged opinion about what's going to happen. So I guess that's what we're gonna try to do here. That's what I've got to start with.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  I mean, hope is illogical, but it is necessary. And I think that's really where we have to start. I'm gonna toss over to Margaret real quick.

• 1:37:11Speaker 04

  About, about hope?

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, Margaret, fix this for us.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  I will, just to say, just to say, I, I woke up today with some hope, and I think a lot of that is from my friendship with Margaret. And I, I don't think there's a better person to talk about that than her.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, Margaret. I appreciate that.

• 1:37:28Speaker 06

  I often make the joke about the fact that I named myself Killjoy in my twenties and then became a professional optimist. But I think that, and I think that actually it could happen here, I think folks here do it really well. Sometimes determination is almost sometimes the right word instead of hope, right? Because, or like optimism isn't always the right word because you're like, well, bad things are happening and they're going to happen and they're going to keep happening, right? And so sometimes we look at like, like climate change, for example, which is the broader problem. You know, you're like, well, no matter what we do, it's going to get worse. And so the immediate electoral problem in front of us, like no matter what happens, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But we need to stay aware of that and stop pretending like the bad things aren't coming

• 1:38:12Speaker 06

  while then still looking at saying like, well, what can we do? And, and for me, the thing that I focus on, I have a therapist friend who talks about how agency is the opposite of trauma, you know, and that the more that we act with agency while bad things are happening, the less that they destroy us emotionally. And so I think that focusing on what can we do is just incredibly useful and necessary. And also, the fact that things are in turmoil right now, and that means lots of bad things are happening, and the old status quo is gone. We saw that with the defeat of the Democrats. Their whole thing is that they doubled down on the old status quo. And people don't want that. People want something different. And Trump offers something different, a very horrible nightmare thing that's different.

• 1:38:55Speaker 06

  And the Democrats did not offer something different. And so I actually think in a weird way, we are in a good position to, on a grassroots level, build something different and say that people want something different. And I think that by working towards something different and better, well, it's the best way to keep our own spirits up, you know? Yeah. Thanks, Mac, right? I absolutely agree. James, what's your perspective here? Yeah, like, it goes without saying that like- Trump's proposed border policies are horrific and his proposed migration policies are horrific. Harris's were also bad. I think like that that doesn't mean that that Trumps are acceptable or the same.

• 1:39:37Speaker 06

  They're not. But also, like, I think having spent as much time as I have with refugees, having spent as much time as I have with people who have gone through things that are horrific and like state hostility, state violence, civil war, etc. Like, I have a lot of hope that, like, like Margaret said, right? There's this quote from Deruca that probably isn't real about how like we're not afraid of ruins. And we've lived in ruins our whole lives and we'll build our future in the ruins of the old world. But like, when I think about the next four years, like the state will be absent or hostile, right? Absent at best and hostile at worst. It's been that way at the border for a very long time. Yeah. And we've built our little community and our little world.

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  And like, when I am sad, when I'm despairing, when I'm scared, I think about the things that we did in the last year, right? We fed tens of thousands of people by ourselves. And in doing that, we demonstrated how powerful we are in the absence of the state. Because the state wasn't there or the state was actively hostile, we were able to step in. And from nothing, we were able to build something that took care of people who needed to be taken care of. And that, like, we're not special or unique. You know, we didn't have like some incredible structure here before. People just showed up to help people and like, more people will need to do that now. And that will mean that there are more people in in difficult places who need help, right?

• 1:41:07Speaker 06

  But that doesn't mean that you can't do it. If we can do it, you can do it. And having done it has made me less.

• 1:41:17Speaker 06

  I just, I'm not as scared as I would be if I felt like I was on my own, or if I felt like that we can't deal with this because we can, and I know that because we have. And I want, obviously, that's something we're going to focus on, right? We have, between now and the middle of January, I've no idea how many weeks or days that is, but it's a lot of time to organize and it's a lot of time to put aside some of the differences we might have, some of the petty disagreements we might have, some of the shit that people have said on twitter.com, and like, get together and organize and build a way of taking care of each other that doesn't rely on the state, because that's always been what we needed, and we need it now even more so.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Speaker 04

  Speaking of what we need now, here's some ads.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Oh, Robert, tonal, tone, bad, bad.

• 1:42:10Speaker 06

  What else was I supposed to do? What else was I supposed to do?

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  You just can't stop him. That was just physics, there was no other way for that to go.

• 1:42:18Speaker 06

  An object in motion.

• 1:42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  That was like the oceans forming after the moon hit the earth, or whatever happened to make oceans, I don't know, I don't know how oceans came about.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  They call him Robert Tectonic Plate Evans.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  All right, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where it is happening here, and Robert still can't help himself to make strange ad transitions. Garrison, what do you got for us?

• 1:42:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know, I, I feel like I am not an optimist, and I also put a lot of work into not being a doomer. I try to be pretty realistic about a whole bunch of my, like, thoughts and analysis on this sort of thing, and I tend towards survival as kind of one of my main, my main priorities. And I'd like to talk a little bit about kind of some of what we actually saw on election night, and some, maybe some small misconceptions going around.

• 1:43:24Speaker 06

  Mainly this kind of idea that the country has wildly swung to the right. Like, people have overwhelmingly, like, more so than ever before, have voted for far-right figures, have voted for far-right bills, basically wanting this complete nationalistic takeover. If you look at the presidency, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate. And, I mean, the final count is still coming in. We are recording this Wednesday afternoon. It's noon on the West Coast right now, and Trump has almost the same number of votes as he got in 2020. I think it's a little bit under at this point. Now, there is some demographic changes. Certain groups may have leaned more towards or against Trump than in past elections, but

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  the final averaged popular vote number is, at this point, pretty much the same. Now, why this has happened, why he's still sweeping all of these swing states, is we've had a collapse of trust in the Democratic Party. Mm-hmm. And you could attribute this to a lot of things. I don't think it's a single thing. It is obviously a confluence of events. I think one of the big things is 9% inflation is kind of hard to beat. If people, to Margaret's point earlier, they're looking for something different. And Harris meaningfully was not offering anything substantially different. She's the VP, right? She has that legacy. I don't think Biden could have done much more to alter the inflation, but that doesn't matter.

• 1:44:52Speaker 06

  People feel this, and that's very strong. And there's other reasons why people have lost faith in the Democratic Party or aren't as willing to come out in as high numbers as we saw back in 2020. And crucially, back in 2020, in a lot of the swing states, the vote was very close. Although the popular vote swung pretty heavily towards Biden, in a lot of the crucial swing states, in some of the states, he was only 20,000 votes ahead. It was a pretty tight race in some of those states. Yeah. Now, the other thing I'm kind of seeing, which kind of reflects this idea that like, the country hasn't wildly, like, the average people haven't wildly become more fascist. It's that even in states that have elected Trump, they have also passed like, a decent

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  number of progressive initiatives, including abortion rights. Voters in Arizona and Missouri approved ballot initiatives that will serve to protect abortion rights until like, further laws are in the books. And in Maryland, in Montana, Nevada, and New York, where abortion is legal, and Colorado, where there's no laws restricting abortion, they all passed measures that enshrine those rights into law. Now, Florida unfortunately was not able to do this due to the super two majority rules. Even though majority of people did vote for this in Florida, they did not reach the 60% threshold. So that did not pass in Florida.

• 1:46:14Speaker 04

  But 57%, though.

• 1:46:15Speaker 06

  Very close.

• 1:46:16Speaker 04

  It was close and it was an outright majority.

• 1:46:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so people are willing to vote for these types of things, even if they're unwilling to vote for a Democrat at the top of the ticket. And like, this is something that is worth considering when trying to figure out what exactly happened here and consider why people have kind of lost faith in the Democratic Party as a reliable institution to improve their lives or represent the things that they believe in. The Gaza issue being kind of the prime example of this in the past year. One other thing I was thinking about this morning when trying to kind of look forward and imagine what the next four years would look like, specifically with the concern of figures like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. being put into pretty important positions of government, right?

• 1:47:01Speaker 06

  The idea that RFK Jr. is going to be in charge of the CDC and determine public health policies for the country is a very worrying prospect. Having Elon Musk in a senior advisory role in some kind of governmental Department of Efficiency doesn't sound great. But as I was having my coffee next to a beautiful river in the mountains of North Georgia this morning. I was thinking about Steve Bannon because my brain is just fucked up like that. But specifically, how Trump used Steve Bannon to get elected back in 2016, even though Bannon's actual tenure at the White House was quite short-lived, for whatever reasons. Like, personality clashes with Trump happen all the time, and he loses friends and advisors at a pretty frequent rate.

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

  And I think because Trump is just like petty and, you know, ableist and a bad guy, he might just find RFK Jr. and Elon Musk annoying to be around. Considering RFK Jr.'s speech impediment and Elon Musk's apparent neurodiversity, Trump just might not want to be around them. So even though he did utilize both these figures to get elected, albeit slightly later on in the campaign, it took a while for Musk to kind of worm his way into Trump's orbit. I am not convinced that they will have direct access to Trump for very long. Now, this could happen, but if you look at Steve Bannon, who was similarly a worrying figure, he did not last very long besides Trump. So, something like this could happen.

• 1:48:30Speaker 06

  Now, I don't think it'll happen the exact same way. Elon Musk has been positioning himself to have the government be reliant on him for contracting, and he'll probably continue to exist in some form in that regard. But in terms of his, like, direct influence on the White House and controlling sectors of government, this won't necessarily be a four-year thing. I think that is most of what I had on this topic. I guess, I guess the other thing is like, it turns out in Harris's efforts to kind of court independents and court, like, Republicans, that largely, that largely failed.

• 1:49:08Speaker 04

  Massive failure, massive failure.

• 1:49:10Speaker 06

  Again, it turns out when you have a party that's running as kind of like a mini fascist party, and then you have another party that's running as just a conservative party.

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  We've got Dick Cheney!

• 1:49:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not a solid opposition party. Like, why, like, this hasn't worked for, like, the second time in a row. The, the stats are almost identical to 2020 on this issue of Republicans voting for the Republican Party. In fact, it was slightly fewer, slightly fewer of them voted Republican back in 2020. More of them voted Republican in 2024. I think it's by about 1%.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  Trying to court the conservative vote means that the conservatives are gonna vote for conservatives.

• 1:49:48Speaker 06

  Maybe we should have an actual opposition party if you believe in electoral politics.

• 1:49:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I mean, like, the, the, the lesson people should take from Trumpism, Trump did not get where he is by courting the conservative vote.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:50:02Speaker 04

  Trump took over the Republican Party and made it the Trump Party. And

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Speaker 04

  Like, that is what worked, right? Like, and that's, that's the actual lesson. Like, the reason why Dick Cheney was fucking doing appearances with Kamala Harris was because conservatives, what we had known as conservatives prior to Trump coming to power, largely are out of the picture, right? Like, the new crop of guys are all weirdos that have molded themselves in the image of Trump since his rise to power, right?

• 1:50:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  And one of the things that is, like, the lesson is not, we need to make our own Trump, although by God, some people are going to take that lesson out of this. The lesson is that

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:50:46Speaker 04

  You have to come to people with a vision, right? Like, you don't come to people by saying, well, what if we put a Republican in our cabinet, right? What if it's basically the same as this last thing that you're not really that happy with, but instead with more Cheney, right?

• 1:51:00Speaker 06

  It turns out that doesn't drive voter enthusiasm.

• 1:51:02Speaker 04

  And hey, like, that's, I, you know, I'm, I'm hitting the libs pretty hard because this is like, the most catastrophic failure of any political party in living memory, right? Uh, so they do deserve to be hit, but it's not like the left accomplished anything, right? I, either electorally or otherwise, right? There is no organized, national, left-wing movement that is worth talking about in any kind of building power way. Like, it simply doesn't exist.

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  And ignoring the blind loyalty that people have for Trump

• 1:51:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  was a mistake.

• 1:51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  Not considering Like targeting that audience?

• 1:51:38Speaker 06

  It doesn't seem like all of the January 6th ads did anything at all.

• 1:51:42Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Did fuck all. I mean.

• 1:51:44Speaker 06

  In fact, in fact, statistically, they did, they did nothing. They did, they did nothing to hurt Trump.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:50Speaker 06

  If Trump gets essentially the same total number of votes, they didn't do anything to, to hurt him. Like that, like that strategy was not, that was not successful.

• 1:51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:00Speaker 06

  You have to offer something and just the large swath of like electoral nihilism that the, that the Democratic party keeps, keeps running up against, continues to be its most like existential threat.

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  Robert Gare and I at the RNC talked to a variety of people who did not give a flying fuck about Trump's record.

• 1:52:20Speaker 06

  Oh, of course not.

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  All they cared about was.

• 1:52:22Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  No, they had blind loyalty to him. I posted this on twitter.com and I'm thinking specifically of the woman that was like, compared Trump's evil, for lack of a better word. Oh, sometimes he's ridiculous, like my husband. And that blind loyalty and the Democrats were gonna fucking flip those people. That was not gonna happen. They, they took a gamble, wasn't even really a gamble. They took a gamble on the wrong crowd and like that, that's not effective. But, you know, it's, it's not really here or there at this point. It happened. Kind of like, now what?

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  We haven't really heard from Mia much, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot over to Mia.

• 1:53:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, I think, I think where I'm at is that, okay, we're in this moment, our, one of our biggest advantages is that we're not the Democrats. Right? This has been a fairly comprehensive referendum on the failure of the Democrats to offer anything. We also like screwed up offering a better world, right?

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Speaker 06

  This is, you know, if you look, if you look at what happened to 2020 and you look at the places that we actually sort of like, I mean, took power is a strong word, but like there are places where we ran the cops out. And we screwed up making those places like a world that was like ideologically compelling enough to spread. And like, we're not gonna get like a third do-over of that, right? We have to be able to sort of, like when the moment arrives, we have to be able to actually create a world that is better enough than this one that we can move. But that's not impossible.

• 1:53:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think what we have right now is we have a period of time before Trump takes power and we have this time to sort of quash our beasts. We have this time to organize. We have this time to plan. And I think of at least part of what we need to do, and we'll get into this more like in other episodes and probably later too, you know, there's, there's, there's the obvious tasks of organization. There's getting people involved in things. There's getting into meetings. I also think, and this is something that's I think easier to do, like literally immediately, is that we've been fighting completely defensively on the cultural front for four years and it's been a complete disaster. And we need to have a large scale cultural offensive. There needs to be something other than fucking

• 1:54:39Speaker 06

  TikTok Mormonism, like we need, we need alternatives to trad wife shit. We need alternatives to this like terrible, like the fucking manfluencer sphere. There needs to be something else. We need to create that very, very fast. Yeah. Anarchist trad wife stuff like Mia. Christ.

• 1:54:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what's gonna save us. All right. Everybody, everybody go buy a sundress right now. Get out there. Both of you to assume we don't have them, Robert.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  And I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull Robert Evans. And speaking of buying things, it's time for our last ad break.

• 1:55:23Speaker 02

  All right. We're, we're back. And I do want to get, I do want to get into, you know, a little bit more specifics of what can we do now? And I just want to say, a fucking lot. The cards are on the table.

• 1:55:37Speaker 06

  It's gonna be a busy four years.

• 1:55:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  You know, I attended Margaret's book, book signing last week, and I've attended lots of our events. And one of the questions and Q and As, and one of the questions that gets asked all the time is, how do I get involved? How do I, how do I find, how do I meet people? How do I do these things? And, you know, I want to get into that. I also want to give some very basic tangible advice, you know, don't post stupid things on the internet.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  If somebody tells you, we need to go out and engage in revolutionary activity, maybe sit at home right now. You don't want to come into this thing with a criminal record. Nobody, nobody is making good plans right now. Uh, go make good ones. Don't just reactively show up and follow someone with a clipboard in the streets.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Don't post actionable threats on the internet.

• 1:56:26Speaker 06

  Don't post that picture of that comedian that gave that really funny joke. Just don't do it. There's no reason to. It's not cool.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33Speaker 06

  Like, don't, if, if you know what, if you know what comedian I'm talking about, you'll get it.

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you're going to, you know, get messed up, use substances in order to cope with things, log out of social media on, on all of your devices first, you know?

• 1:56:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Sounds like that's some advice you were giving yourself.

• 1:56:53Speaker 04

  I'm sober as a church mouse, Sophie. Just, just coffee and clean mountain air for me.

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  A, a very basic recommendation that I have for people is to get, delete me.

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:03Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  It is worth the investment. It is a good product. That is what I'll say.

• 1:57:09Speaker 04

  Yes. Delete Me is a service that helps purge aspects of your public record from the internet, right? There's a lot of different sites, like, you have been involved if you are a person who participates in the economy through the internet, right? If you buy things through the internet, your shit has been leaked, right?

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  Their, you know, tagline is your private information is no longer private.

• 1:57:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:57:30Speaker 02

  And so essentially what they do is they scour the internet and remove your personal data from online. And they don't do that once. They continuously do it. This is like a fantastic plug for the product that you're not paying us.

• 1:57:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  Let's just say the Church of Scientology could not find me.

• 1:57:48Speaker 06

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  So, uh...

• 1:57:50Speaker 06

  I will say, um, there is some alternatives to Delete Me that are trying to get up and running. We might do a full episode on data removal in the future.

• 1:57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we definitely should.

• 1:57:58Speaker 06

  It does require you to also do manual inputs. There are certain sites that Delete Me, when they send take down requests to data brokers, certain sites will not comply. You have to send in requests manually. It's pretty simple, but they will give you a list of certain sites as well, uh, to do, uh, to go through this process manually.

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 06

  But I think like, kind of the last thing we, we want to talk about is like, we have 75 days, right, to like, prepare, uh, for stuff. We have 75 days to prepare for the next four years. In some ways, it's gonna kind of be like 2017 to 2019 again, which was a, uh, very busy time. Kind of all of the right wing ghouls that have been hiding under the rocks the past few years because of the liberal DOJ will probably start coming out of the woodwork. There's gonna be, you know, a lot more stuff going on and, you know, those of us that are here were able to make it through those years. Some of your friends probably weren't able to. And it is up to us to take care of each other, to try to ensure that ourselves and people we know have a better chance of making it through these next four years.

• 1:58:58Speaker 06

  And I think, lastly, I'd like to just go around talking about like, what that will look like and how to start that process, especially during these first 75 days. Like brunch is over. Brunch has been over for a while. Brunch should have never started.

• 1:59:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:16Speaker 06

  But brunch is over now. So what can we do in these next 75 days?

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  It's a share your black coffee with friends time.

• 1:59:25Speaker 04

  Share your black coffee with friends, maybe cork the champagne. Yeah.

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, cork the champagne.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  Keep drinking that orange juice, though. You don't have enough vitamin C.

• 1:59:34Speaker 06

  Or when you and your anarchist trad wife friends get together for brunch, just make sure to actually talk about real radical things you can do. Because if you already have a way of gathering with your friends, you should just turn it into talking about more than just how your day is. Absolutely.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:50Speaker 06

  I feel like I need to put on the record that what I said, that what I was trying to say is we need feminism, not anti-trad wife. I don't know how that was conveyed. I was trying to recruit you into my trad wife cult. No.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Thank you for clarifying me up, but that was very much understood.

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  But being a little bit literal right now is not bad. Yeah, Gare, so true. I just think about the ways that I've found my people and the way that I have made my community. Obviously, the taglines of, you know, "Talk to your neighbors" and things like that are absolutely important. But the recommendation, you know, obviously, joining orgs are great. Sure, that's a great talking point, but that's not really how I met my community. The people that are essentially my family now, I met by going to content and different creators' shows and music and different events where we had mutual interests, even if that meant that I had to drive pretty far

• 2:00:53Speaker 02

  and found people that liked the things that I like. And it turns out, a lot of the people that like the things you like, believe the things you believe. And if they don't, they're usually pretty open to hearing you out.

• 2:01:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  And I think it's super important to listen to your friends. And also, like, I've said this quite a bit. Support your friends weird hobby.

• 2:01:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  That's super crucial. Listen to the people around you. And it's not easy. I had basically no friends for a very long time because I did not have the right people in around me. And it took a lot of effort to find my core humans. I mean, I'm not recommending this if and it and several of us did do this. I moved to a different state. You save up for it. It's definitely not affordable thing to do. Definitely not an easy thing to do. But I don't know where I would be without those people. And I love them.

• 2:01:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I politics and culture do go hand in hand in so many ways and kind of cultural engagement and ways to kind of grow your social network, especially, you know, in places where there's probably where there's, I mean, in my case, you know, like trans people, queer people, people that I'm kind of around and people who I'm like, you know, concerned about. Like personally, people are like, no, you know, going into these next four years. I guess like, the the biggest thing I was kind of thinking about last night is like, yes, these next four years are going to suck. And in many ways, it'll just be like, everything will just get slightly worse. But like, I know that myself and those I know like immediately around me will be fine. Like, we we will be okay. Things will be worse.

• 2:02:39Speaker 06

  But we already have networks. We already have community. We have these things built up to take care of each other and provide the things that we need. And this is something that we'll be talking more about in kind of the next few months. Like, we we have, we have that. And that's taken effort. That doesn't just happen by itself. It requires effort and requires resistance to this idea of like, community nihilism, this kind of belief that like, community is like, not a real thing that doesn't actually exist. Which is a very privileged thing to believe. Because there's people out there who rely on this and will continue to rely on this even more in these next few years. But there are those without that, and that's the people I'm most concerned about.

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  It's queer kids, it's trans kids who do not have those networks, do not have those communities, people who are isolated. Like, that is who I am most concerned about. And I understand the impulse to kind of isolate and just go online because that's safer than having to go out into the real world, or at least it feels safer. But I don't think that's actually real. I think that leads to its own forms of detrimental harm. So like, it requires like a getting off Discord and like a going into your community and trying to make friends, which can be scary, but it is like incredibly crucial. I think we should talk about like joining actual orgs as well. I think some other people on this call can speak more to that, and like the utility of those as well. But I think first and foremost, like even getting a network of friends outside of orgs

• 2:03:59Speaker 06

  is also a very, is a very good, it's not even crutch, it's just like a life support system that is going to be super important.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  I'd like to throw to Margaret for a second because she looks like she really wants to say something.

• 2:04:15Speaker 06

  Oh, and I don't actually disagree with anything that Gary's saying. I think-

• 2:04:17Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  -that stuff is absolutely crucial. I wanted to just say that like, I think there's actually a weird blurriness in the lines between an organization and a friend group, right? Totally. And the problem isn't necessarily subculture. The problem is a sort of, if we have this idea that there's a hegemonic subculture, like in order to be a radical, you have to be part of our clique, right? And that's a problem. Whereas- Yeah. -if whatever clique you're already part of, or any subculture you're already part of, you turn that radical. Yes. I think that is, you know, it's what Sophie was talking about. But then, yes, there's a lot of people who have no access to any of that. And some of it, as I think you're saying, is, well, if you only hang out with your friends on Discord, like, maybe it's time to start meeting up in person. And even if that's very complicated to do.

• 2:05:01Speaker 06

  But I also think that there's a huge importance to open-door organizing. And organizing, like, when I say orgs, I don't mean like go join PSL or any authoritarian cult, right? Or that there should never be a-

• 2:05:15Speaker 02

  One organization that says this is the strategy that we have to use to fight this. But instead, if you get together with the people that you want to get together with and say, this is the problem we're dealing with, how do we deal with it? And that is how you can create an organization. And if you do that, many of those organizations, I would hope, would have open door policies and be public. Because there are so many isolated people who want to be involved, who don't have any kind of like cultural cachet with which to get into a more subcultural group.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  I think this is why churches are very good at recruiting, unfortunately, depending on the church. But like, because you can just show up. And they'll be like, okay, you have a community now, right? And that is what people desperately want, I think, right now. And we have to be careful, we don't want to just be like, oh, therefore we should replicate what they do. But I think that overall, what our movement needs is instead of gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help people find their way into the movement, to help bring them in and figure out like, hey, what are you good at? Or what are you interested in being good at? Here's how you can apply it. And I want to really quickly use a case study that happened from the last Trump election that I think was actually fairly useful. I was living in a small town, a small city with a fairly vibrant anarchist community.

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  And when Trump was elected, we called for anarchist assemblies. And they were open door. And they were places where you don't get together to plan crime. But all of these different mutual aid groups would come and bring representation. And people would say, this is what we're working on, this is what we can use help with. And they weren't decision-making bodies, they were information-sharing bodies. And a lot of different groups spun up out of it that are still around, like herbal clinics and different mutual aid organizations. Because we just said, hey, everyone who cares about this, let's get together and talk about what we want to do. And I found that to be an incredibly useful thing. And it's like the kind of thing I would pitch to people is not necessarily,

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  and if you're not an anarchist, don't do it as the anarchist thing. Yeah, that's what I care about, that's what I'm excited about.

• 2:07:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just wanted to offer like, first of all, like, get outside if you can. Like, touch grass, I know touch grass can be very condescending, and I don't mean it like that. I just like, I was feeling stressed last week and I went off and I climbed to the top of a mountain and I sat there by myself for a while. And it was nice and it was so quiet, I could hear like this little Wings beating and that was really good for me. That's what I like to hear. It would not have changed the outcome one bit if I had stayed and sat on twitter.com for four hours instead of doing that. So I want you to all take time for yourselves and do things that kind of make you feel hopeful. I want to build off what Margaret said. There are so many skills that all of you have that you could share with someone. I think when I started being an anarchist,

• 2:08:01Speaker 04

  it was largely because I was going to a bike co-op and like people shared their skills with me and I shared my skills with them and we all shared our stuff with each other. And I worked out that we could just rely on other people for that shit and it didn't need to be hierarchical or based on some transfer of material goods. People just want to help each other.

• 2:08:23Speaker 04

  And a lot of people have messaged me saying that like they know that I participate mutually and they want you to. If you can't see it, then you have to start it and that's okay. You can change the world if you make a cooler full of sandwiches and give them to people who are hungry. I guarantee if you start doing that shit, you will find other people and they will say, hey, what are you doing? Oh, I'm feeding people. Why? Because they're hungry. Can I help? Yes, it's that easy. And like we can build from there. We don't have to agree with them on everything first of all, but we can build from there. And I think it can be really scary, but like now is the time to start, not once things get worse.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  You know, four, eight years ago was the time to start, but we can't go back. And I want to kind of finish up with that, that like we can't go back. I don't care where someone was yesterday. I don't care where they were last week. I don't care where they were last year. Like all the madness is where they are now. Yeah. And we can build forward from here. We cannot go back and change things. And it is not worth doing endless recriminations. It doesn't matter. It's happened. It's on us to decide how we react now and.

• 2:09:35Speaker 02

  You can react in a way that strengthens our communities and that builds ways of taking care of each other, which aren't ways of controlling each other. That that's all that you need to do to make this so much less despairing, so much less terrible, and so much less deadly for some people. And I know that we're doing that here. Check in on my friends who are in the Dalian Gap. I'm checking in on my mutual aid friends. And if you don't have that, I want you to build that. And I promise it's not something that's out of reach. You can do it.

• 2:10:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I want to add one last thing. I think a lot of people think they don't have skills. You do have skills. The thing that I did when I started organizing was I moved chairs around so that people could have meetings by moving chairs. And I helped take care of people's kids. And I like helped put posters up, right? People can do things. You have things that you can do. And it's it's time to lock in. That's that's what we have from here. It is it is time to lock in. It's time to organize. It is time to get prepared to fight.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, this is just the first episode after the election. In the coming weeks, coming days, coming months, we're going to go into very specific detail on things. We are going to provide different information and resources and continue to defend against disinformation and misinformation. And this is a fucking daily show.

• 2:10:55Speaker 06

  We will we will be getting into all of all of these topics, especially in these next seventy five days to help prepare, just topic by topic.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Speaker 06

  It's gonna be it's gonna be a long four years.

• 2:11:21Speaker 07

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• 2:12:27Speaker 02

  Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things crumbling and how to pick up the pieces.

• 2:12:35Speaker 04

  Woo crumbling, we love to crumble. Yeah.

• 2:12:39Speaker 02

  And part of that is understanding what is going to happen and how it is going to happen. And absorbing that knowledge and what you can do with it. So today, James is going to tell us about Trump's plans for migrants.

• 2:12:56Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, I guess in terms of what's going to happen, we don't know, right? Trump said a lot of stuff in his first term and kind of didn't stick the landing a lot of it. He tried, but they're more experienced now. And I think crucially, they have a much more favorable Supreme Court. And then probably will have an even more favorable Supreme Court by the end of this term. So a plan to deport up to a million people this year was one of the very few concrete and tangible promises that the Trump campaign made, right? They they had a lot of vibes, nasty vibes, but like in terms of like, we will do X by Y. This was one of the very few. Now, Trump tried to deport a lot of people in his first term, right?

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  The one consistent part of his policy ever since he rode sideways down an escalator in 2015 and then shit talked Mexican people has been anti migrant policy. He didn't really stick the landing on mass deportations in his first term. In fact, Biden deported more people in 2023 than Trump did in any year of his first term. In fact, Trump also fell behind Obama in terms of deportations per year. None of that means that he won't be able to do that this time, right? I'm just trying to put some numbers on on his promises last time. So. I want to look first at how he could go about his promise in his second term, right? One thing that he said he will do is use Title 42 again.

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  So if people have not listened to the series I did last May or June on Title 42, I would like to direct them there. Title 42 is a reminder, it's a public health law and it's a public health law that in this interpretation allowed CBP, specifically Border Patrol, to immediately return people to Mexico without processing them first. Sometimes they call it catch and release, right? What it resulted in was, these are not technically deportations, but when Trump says something, I don't think he's considering the exact meanings of what he's saying, right? So if we look at Title 42 expulsions, if he's going to bring back Title 42, reaching that 1 million per year number is pretty easy.

• 2:15:04Speaker 04

  In fact, that happened in 2022 again under Biden, right? So if he considers those to be deportations, so that's within his 1 million per year goal, it's reasonable that he will reach to say that he will be able to reach that and he'll be able to do that with the current infrastructure, right? Without massively upgrading CBP, ICE, ICE detention facilities, immigration judges, all those things.

• 2:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Speaker 04

  So like, if we consider those to be deportations and 1 million a year is very much something that we might well see.

• 2:15:35Speaker 02

  Do you know where we're at this year or it hasn't been released yet?

• 2:15:38Speaker 04

  I don't know. 2022 was the last stats I could find. I linked to the CBP. If people want to look at the Title 42 and Title... So Title 8 is the immigration law under which people are normally received, right? Title 42 ended in May of 2023, May 11th, 2023, with the end of the COVID-19 emergency. Because the reason they were using public health law as immigration law was because of this health emergency, right? Now, obviously, it was used extremely cynically. For instance, there weren't exemptions for vaccinated people. But nonetheless, that's why they were using it. And when the federal emergency for COVID-19 ended, so did Biden's excuse for using Title 42. Then I will link to the CBP data center in the notes so people can see Title 42 versus Title 8 over the last few years.

• 2:16:22Speaker 04

  As I pointed out last week, the US can also fund deportations of migrants further south. And it's done this in Panama. I had a series from there last week. People hadn't listened to it. I would love them to do so. But the numbers that they've been able to achieve, they're pretty low. And I don't think that's really going to meaningfully impact his target.

• 2:16:40Speaker 04

  Let's talk about what everyone is most afraid of, which is mass deportation to people who are already living in the United States, right? That is definitely what his right wing trolls have been sort of hyping up, certainly over the last few weeks, right? The idea that they are going to come to your house and find you if you're an undocumented person in the United States. So to talk about this, I want to talk about first of all, like the real nuts and bolts of how he would be able, or if he would be able to do this, right? And I draw very heavily here on a report by the American Immigration Council, who did some calculations on the cost of a single ICE detention, right? The cost of a single raid, the amount of agents that will be required to meet this kind of capacity.

• 2:17:25Speaker 04

  And there are two models that they use, and those are the models I think are most relevant. If we look at people who are in the United States without permanent legal status, and we make an estimate for numbers, we're looking at about 11 million undocumented people. That's not going to be perfect, but if we use that as a ballpark, and then 2.3 million people who have entered since the end of Title 42, and they're on various forms of bail or parole or bond, and they don't have a permanent status here either, right? So we're looking at somewhere in the region of 13 million, if Trump wanted to deport all of those people, right?

• 2:18:06Speaker 04

  Now, to do that, he would need to massively expand ICE detention facilities. About half of ICE's staff aren't, contrary to what you might like to believe about ICE, kicking in people's doors and deporting them. Half of ICE's staff work for something called Homeland Security Investigations. It's not that those people don't do deportations, they do, but they mostly focus on human trafficking, drug trafficking, transnational crime. Now, sometimes those people also do deportations. People might be familiar with the big HSI raids on certain employers who are employing a lot of undocumented people. Those still result in deportations, but that's not their primary tasking. And HSI has historically preferred not to do the deportation work because they feel

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  that that makes it very hard for them to do the other work of like monitoring human and drug trafficking, because evidently migrants are going to be scared to go anywhere near HSI if they know that HSI could deport them, right? So they're not, they're not going to talk to them. Now, it would be very easy for Trump to re-task those agents, right? That would obviously undermine what is done to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking. Whether or not he cares is a question that's, I don't know. I think I probably have an answer for that, but I guess up for debate somewhat. So, Trump has already called, in addition to potentially re-equipped those HSI agents, he said he wants to employ 10,000 more Border Patrol agents, right?

• 2:19:34Speaker 04

  Now, BP agents can do deportations, but it's not BP agents who are coming to your door in Chicago and coming after you, right? That's ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He's also said he wants to give Border Patrol agents a $10,000 retention bonus and a 10% raise. Just to put it into perspective, there are 20,000 BP agents right now. So, that would be about a 50% increase, right? This is not something he can do quickly. They need to go through the academy, they need to be recruited, trained, background checked, etc. Border Patrol has a lot of waivers right now. So, we can waive requirements. Other law enforcement agencies would have you to work for them, if that makes sense, right? Be it a GED, or a college degree, or another language, or whatever.

• 2:20:17Speaker 04

  They are offering waivers a lot right now. They can increase that number of waivers to recruit more people, right? But that would still take a long time. So, the estimate the American Immigration Council has is that to remove all of those 13 million people in that sort of, in the one mass deportation as opposed to the million people a year scenario would require between 220 and 409,000 staff.

• 2:20:42Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:20:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a lot of people.

• 2:20:47Speaker 02

  So, I mean, like, for comparison as to how many that actually is, the United States military active duty is about a million people.

• 2:20:54Speaker 04

  Yes, that was exactly, that's the comparison.

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  Not the army, not the navy, the military.

• 2:20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Speaker 02

  All of it.

• 2:21:01Speaker 04

  This would put DHS at like substantially more personnel than like the Marine Corps, right?

• 2:21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not that people don't want to do, it's just like, it is actually, we've talked a lot about how there are not guardrails on Trump like there were last time. And that is true, and that is a very realistic thing to like be worried about and scared about, but that we're not just talking about guardrails. We are talking about a logistical hurdle.

• 2:21:23Speaker 04

  Is not a simple or necessarily possible thing to make an agency like that that much larger and have it actually function like Right. Like just this is just physics we're talking about here. Yeah. It's the same with anything. If Cool Zone suddenly received a hundred billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and he said, do anything you want with it, we could not scale up to half a million employees. Like we have, we have absolutely no capacity to handle that. Yeah. Like I think what people have to remember is that every door kicking ICE agent needs enablers, right? They need paid. They need health insurance. They need human resources. They need training. This would take a very long time. Oh, it's sorry. It's 1.3 million or so. Okay.

• 2:22:08Speaker 04

  Maybe I think it's a little less. That's 2017 data. So it probably is closer to a million now, but Yeah. slightly over a million. So, but this is close to, that's close to half. Right. Yeah. That's in addition to what they already have. Yeah. It'd be 409 plus whatever they have. It would also of course mean like substantially increasing their investigative capacity because most deportations right now, when ICE arrests someone, happen when someone else has already arrested that person. So like the person is in detention federally or on a state level for something else that they did and they're undocumented and that's when ICE can take them and deport them. Right? So they'd have to also increase their ability to search out and find people. Not saying they can't, but you can't take, you know, fucking Tim Poole, bring him into ICE.

• 2:22:51Speaker 04

  And he's not going to instantly know how to find people, where to find people. Right? So like this, this will take time. There is a practical constraint on him doing this, even if, if there aren't other constraints within the balance of powers. So Stephen Miller, dude with the giant head. Yeah, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be more specific. When we talk about like conservatives who are about to come into power, who have like a weirdly huge head. Yeah. Okay. That's like, find me a Californian who has strong opinions. On gluten.

• 2:23:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's me. I'm a pro gluten. Yeah. Yeah. So Stephen Miller is, he is the guy who's crafted a lot of Trump's nefarious border policies. Right. It was Miller who, who took out Title 42. And I want to talk about this a bit later. One thing that Miller did effectively, I don't want to say well, because it was objectively horrible. But one thing that Miller was good at was finding this obscure piece of public health law and mobilizing it against migrants. Right. I think if you'd spoken to me in 2015 and said, what do you think Trump's going to do against migrants? I wouldn't have said, oh, the Title 42 of the United States Code, you know, that regulates public health. He or people within his team were very effective at finding that and using that effective enough that the Biden administration kept it for three years.

• 2:24:06Speaker 04

  After the Trump administration did it for one year. Right. And so Miller could find some, some niche kind of law. What he wants to do is use the National Guard from cooperative states. Right? Yeah. And to use a National Guard from cooperative states in states that are not cooperative and where local law enforcement would not cooperate. Right. So some quote unquote sanctuary states, and that's probably an overstatement. They don't in theory refer undocumented people they arrest to ICE for deportation. Right? Now, what federal fusion centers do is allow for that, even if it is a sanctuary state, actually. But in theoretical terms, a sanctuary state would not at least contact ICE about every undocumented person they arrested.

• 2:24:50Speaker 04

  Right. So Miller's plan is to use the National Guard. Again, like, that's not what the National Guard does right now. They're not really trained up for doing that either. Right. I've seen plenty of National Guard folks on the border.

• 2:25:05Speaker 04

  I fuck, what did I say? It's a bunch of scared 18 year olds, right? Who are trying to get money for Robert and I have met Texas National Guard soldiers on the border. They're kids. They're kids. Yeah. Now, to be fair, that's not saying they're, they're like innocent or inherent, like every group of soldiers who has done any good or bad thing. Yes. And often, but usually both at the same time. He is a bunch of scared 18. 18 year old kids.

• 2:25:29Speaker 06

  Yes, that's been the case for 10,000 years.

• 2:25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. Anytime you have conflict reporting, it's always shocking how young people are.

• 2:25:38Speaker 06

  It's always just like, oh, okay, all wars are fought by children. There's no non-child soldiers. With the exception of, I mean, that is the weird thing about the Ukraine war, right?

• 2:25:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Speaker 06

  Like, I remember the first time I wound up at the front there, it was like, oh, this is actually, it is actually old men fighting this war. Old men who repeatedly told me, it's either me or my kid shows up here, and I already fucking lost my soul in Afghanistan.

• 2:25:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:26:00Speaker 06

  Like, I literally had that interview with people.

• 2:26:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:26:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's crazy to me, people who fought in Afghanistan and are fighting again.

• 2:26:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I think those guys are probably out now, because I'm talking back in 2050.

• 2:26:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2024, it's 40 years later.

• 2:26:12Speaker 06

  I'm sure they're too old now, but.

• 2:26:14Speaker 04

  Robert, talking of being too old, I unfortunately am not too old to be obliged to transition to advertisement, so that's what we're gonna do.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  You're never too old for that, James. In fact, the older you get, it's kind of like how if you reread Moby Dick at different points in your life, it's a completely different novel. Every 10 years, different book. You know, same thing is true with Ulysses. And the same thing is true with these advertisements.

• 2:26:37Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:26:38Speaker 06

  Save them, record them on your home device, and every couple of months, listen, and you'll learn something new from Chumba Casino.

• 2:26:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, every time.

• 2:26:56Speaker 04

  All right, we're back, and I hope you've downloaded that Chumba Casino advert for later. And in the event of a grid down scenario, you could have a whole library of those to listen to. So, talking of obscure legislations, we did, right? Trump and his team have mentioned this thing called the Alien Enemies Act. It's like Alien Ant Farm, but it's not in any way related, sadly.

• 2:27:16Speaker 06

  Not nearly as good as it is. For one thing, it's cover of Smooth Criminal. Terrible.

• 2:27:20Speaker 04

  Terrible, yeah. Nowhere near of the same standard. That's a joke for people who are over 30.

• 2:27:26Speaker 06

  Yes, anyone who tries to dance to that Alien Ant Farm song today not only has to think about the fact that Michael Jackson was definitely a pedophile, but also their knees no longer work.

• 2:27:36Speaker 04

  It's a lose-lose.

• 2:27:39Speaker 04

  Just sadly shuffling along.

• 2:27:42Speaker 06

  I can no longer skate properly.

• 2:27:47Speaker 04

  Moonwalking while crying, taking ibuprofen.

• 2:27:50Speaker 06

  No, I was at a streetlight show in Portland that was all millennials, and every time, like-

• 2:27:54Speaker 04

  The pit was crazy, but also it sounded like a cement mixer when everybody's knees got going.

• 2:28:02Speaker 04

  They're doling out ibuprofen on the way out. So you're gonna need this tomorrow.

• 2:28:09Speaker 04

  So the Alien Enemies Act, it hasn't been used since the United States used it in the Second World War for in tournament camps, right? Which, at least for many of us, is a part of national shame, I guess, like a pretty terrible fucking thing that the United States did. Obviously, for some folks in the Trump administration, this is something that they're kind of aspiring to, I guess. Trump has said that he would like to use this to deport gang members. That's not really what it's for. And like even sources within DHS have pointed out that they would have to prove that these migrants were sent by a foreign government. Right? Or someone that the US is at war with. This is going to be hard because like if we look at Venezuelans, who are representing a larger and larger proportion of migrants since the elections there.

• 2:28:53Speaker 04

  They will actively shit talk the government of their country at the first opportunity. I have met hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan migrants in California and in the Dalian Gap. And yeah, you're not going to find people who you can plausibly say were sent by Maduro that way. Yeah. But Miller's pretty good at finding these obscure laws and ways of doing things. So we would be foolish to write this off entirely, but I don't think that will make up the bulk of these mass deportations. So I want to go to that American Immigration Council report, which I'll link in the show notes, right? Assuming a million deportations a year, which is what J.D. Vance said to the New York Times. That's the sort of steady deportation scenario as opposed to the mass deportation of 13 million people scenario.

• 2:29:38Speaker 04

  Which a steady one is more realistic in terms of practicality, right? The cost of that, assuming that 20% of undocumented people decided to leave on their own, would be about 88 billion a year. Which is a large amount of money. Well, we'll talk in a little bit about what you could get with that money. A one-off mass deportation would cost about 315 billion. The detention costs alone for that one-off mass deportation of 11 to Thirteen million people would be one hundred and sixty seven point eight billion dollars, which is probably why private prison group, Geo Group's stock soared this week, right? Like if Trump wants to deport people, the average deportee is detained for fifty nine days before they're deported.

• 2:30:22Speaker 04

  And so they are going to massively have to increase their capacity. Right now, their current detention contract includes a minimum of twenty nine thousand seven hundred and ninety beds. Between like increases and other facilities they have access to. In early twenty twenty four, recalling to the American Immigration Council, they detained thirty nine thousand people. Astute listeners will notice that eleven million and thirty nine thousand are quite disparate as numbers go, so. Uh, yeah.

• 2:30:51Speaker 04

  I mean, you're talking about a huge percentage of like, we'll get into this later, but in California, Texas and Florida, it's between five and six percent of the population are undocumented, right? And you're talking about building prison cities. If you if you were to detain that many people in one fell swoop, again, that takes time. But in this case, it's private sector actors like Geo Group, they can tend to move a little bit faster, right? So. Yeah. To put that cost in terms of things that the government could do with the money instead, right? A decade of one million deportations a year means foregoing forty thousand four hundred and fifty elementary schools or two point nine million new homes or funding the Head Start program for seventy nine years.

• 2:31:34Speaker 04

  A single year of mass deportation would cost nearly twice the National Institute of Health's annual budget or eighteen times the global annual expenditure on cancer research. So I guess that's shit that we could have instead, but that's not all. Because undocumented households, contrary to what you might have heard, pay taxes. And if we deported every undocumented person in the United States, we look at twenty twenty two numbers, undocumented households paid forty six point eight billion in federal taxes and twenty nine point three billion in state and local taxes. That's a huge amount of tax revenue foregone, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That, again, that won't be the end of it, because some industries, like construction and agriculture,

• 2:32:18Speaker 04

  rely heavily on undocumented labor. And if you're worried about the cost of your groceries now, if people voted for Donald Trump because their eggs cost more, shit will cost an awful lot more if we deport the undocumented people working in agriculture, right? Sectors of that industry do not function economically without underpaid migrant labor. And this is something that migrants are very aware of, actually. I broadcasted an interview with one of them last week, where they know that they will be underpaid because they're undocumented. But they still think that that's worth it for them to be safe, right? So foregoing that, I don't think Trump has not proposed a solution to this, right? Like this sort of, this long-form thinking is not what he does, certainly in his speeches, but that would have a massive impact on the economy.

• 2:33:03Speaker 04

  What he would also need to do is persuade the countries that these migrants come from to take them back. And that has historically been something that has been extremely difficult. The State Department doesn't see the sort of process of persuading people to accept migrants is really within its remit. And it certainly sort of bristled at having to do this. The last Trump administration, I think, a mass deportation like this, it would trigger some nations refusing to take people back. For instance, Venezuela, right? Venezuela is already not taking people back from Panama. You at the US funds deportations from Panama. Venezuela and Panama ceased relations after the election in Venezuela and Panama, rightly claiming that that was a fraudulent election.

• 2:33:47Speaker 04

  And as a result, Panama is now looking for a third country to deport these people to. If the US attempted to deport potentially millions of people to Venezuela, again, there's no guarantee that Maduro has to accept them back, right? I can hear a lot of people saying. How is that allowed? To not accept, take them back? Yeah. I mean, international law is like, it's a unicorn. Like, you know, if everyone agrees that they see it and they see it, but it's not real. Right. So like, who is going to make them? I guess, like, whether it's allowed or not, it is kind of immaterial. Maduro is not allowed to steal the election, right? You're not allowed to abuse human rights. Migrants are allowed to cross any country they want and claim asylum anywhere that they feel safe, but like, here we are.

• 2:34:32Speaker 04

  So, yeah, in theory, a country should accept its citizens back. In practice, will it? I don't know. Certainly, it becomes like a bigger issue when you have millions of people, right? And if we have millions of people deported back, then like, if we can't deport them, where are we going to detain them? That gets back to the cost of detentions, right? Talking of costs, should probably cover the costs of our podcasting setup here by pivoting to adverts again. Yeah.

• 2:35:11Speaker 04

  We are back. And for the final segment here, I want to talk about who Trump could pursue with these deportations, right? There's two major groups. The obvious starting point would be the 2.3 million people who crossed between January of 2023 and April of this year before Biden signed his asylum ban. To be precise, that's 2,264,830. Those people don't have permanent immigration status. Those are the people who you've heard from on this podcast, who were in Hacumbia, right? The people who we've interviewed for the last year and a bit now. They have various immigration status, but none of them are permanent. None of them have permanent residency. All of them are obviously registered, right?

• 2:35:54Speaker 04

  They normally have a notice to appear in court, which would make them easy to find and potentially easy to deport. The other group of people are the undocumented migrants who have been here for longer than that. Many of them have, most have been in the country for more than a decade. They're working, they often have citizen children, right? Because of birthright citizenship. Most of them pay taxes. Most of these people have some form of revocable legal status. So that might be something called a temporary protected status. We talked about a temporary protected status last week as well. But it applies to people who are already in the country when it's granted. And it allows them to stay for a designated period of time. While it's not safe to deport them to their home country. Let's say there's been a war or a natural disaster, right?

• 2:36:37Speaker 04

  It's not safe to deport them, but it gets renewed two months before the end of that period. As I say, it renews every 18 months and you find out two months before the end of that period if it's not going to be renewed. If they didn't renew those TPSs, those people could either change status or would become undocumented, right? The TPS has existed since 1990 and there are about 860,000 people on TPS right now. The other major category that people will probably be more familiar with are dreamers. People who came to the United States as children and are undocumented, but they benefit from something called DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. And about 834,000 young people benefit from this, which allows them to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation.

• 2:37:21Speaker 04

  Trump did try and go after this in his previous term in 2018. He ended up in a two-year court battle, which sort of finished up with NAACP versus Trump. And that ran out the clock on his term and Biden reinstated DACA. But again, because people have to register for DACA, their whereabouts are easier for someone like ICE to potentially find. Then after that, we have people who entered without being detected. We have people who overstayed their visas. Those people might be harder to find, right? The model of the undocumented migrant that people have in their head is that comes across the border with carpet shoes, sneaks past a BP checkpoint and then lives in the United States without ever encountering migration authorities.

• 2:38:05Speaker 04

  That's actually not the majority model, but those people do exist and they would be harder for ICE to find potentially. Trump has also vowed to end parole programs that allow Ukrainians and Afghans to enter the USA and work. I would think that some of those would be pretty unpopular. People have been much more broadly in solidarity with Ukrainian migrants than they have with other migrants from other parts of the world, they'll say. But it would be an easy one again for him to end, right? The last thing he's really said he wanted to do is to end birthright citizenship. Yep. That is, I spoke about this before in our Agenda 47 episodes. That's pretty clear in the 14th amendment. They have some kind of fringes on the flag legal theory around

• 2:38:48Speaker 04

  this, but like, I would think that that would require a constitutional amendment, but who knows? Because he might have both houses and the Supreme Court on his side. So he might just be able to get away with doing that. This obviously wouldn't rescind citizenship from people who have previously have children who are citizens. Talking of people who have children who are citizens, there are about 4 million mixed status families in the United States. So this deportation plan could potentially separate parents from children, children from parents, children from their older parents who they take care of. It could destroy these families, right? Deportations always destroy families. I've seen this happening myself and it's horrible. The states where this would most likely happen, the states with the highest undocumented population are California, Texas and Florida. California thus far retains

• 2:39:33Speaker 04

  its sanctuary policies. Texas and Florida very much do not, right? Yeah. And so those would be the states where there will be the highest risk of this happening. That's between 5 and 6% of their population. And that's kind of where I want to finish up today. I've got some more stuff I wanted to say about his border policy, but I think I'm going to save that for another episode because the border and immigration are different things, right? And I think sometimes this is something that a lot of legacy media doesn't understand. They have immigration reporters who report on immigration law, the stuff I've spoken about today. But the border is not somewhere that they go and it's not something that they cover very well. If you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I've spent a lot of time at the border, on the ground, in the mountains, in the deserts. And

• 2:40:17Speaker 04

  that's something that we've covered in great depth here and I'm really happy that listeners have a really complete understanding of it.

• 2:40:23Speaker 02

  Would California actually be able to enforce being a sanctuary state or no?

• 2:40:29Speaker 04

  Yes, in the it's law enforcement doesn't have to call ICE, right? The federal government cannot compel local law enforcement, state law enforcement to do its work. That is very well established. Again, like nothing's off the cards when you have both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. But again, that would take time and it would take a court battle. So what they can do now is not report those people, right? Not say, hey, we got someone here. He came in because we found him with a bag of weed. He's undocumented. You know, he was driving thirty five in a thirty. He's undocumented. These are things that people who are undocumented have to worry about, right? Like for for those of you who don't have undocumented folks in your life, like it's a speeding ticket.

• 2:41:14Speaker 04

  It's the most minor. It's not paying a parking ticket and ending up in court, right? Like this shit is so minor to so many people, but it could tear someone's life apart. And so I want to like finish up by saying that Texas and Florida are going to be the places where we see this. Yeah. Five percent of the population is a large amount of your population. If he even attempts half of that, people are going to see this. It's going to happen in your community. Now, I'm not saying he will, but if it does, like the time to start organizing to protect people you care about is now. Be that with donations to groups like Al Otralado, who have successfully sued the Trump and Biden administrations for migrants' rights.

• 2:41:58Speaker 04

  Be that with organizing such that your undocumented friends don't end up in court because they couldn't pay a parking ticket. Right? Even if that means you paying someone, giving someone fifty bucks for a parking ticket so that it doesn't ruin the rest of their life. Whatever it is, the way that we prevent this is through strong communities. We have to start building those now. I know we've said this a lot this week, but we're probably going to say it a lot for the next three months. Like, a lot of people have reached out to me since the Trump election, which was two days, but also like seven years ago. Because that's how time works, saying that they want to participate in mutilate at the border. I would love for you to come and join us, of course I would. And like, I think people have heard a lot about our mutual aid setup because it's something I do a lot.

• 2:42:42Speaker 04

  But that, I don't want you to come here and do mutual aid tourism. Like, I want you to come here and understand and learn what we do and then do it yourself. Or just do it yourself. Like, there was a time when this didn't exist and people started it, right? And you can start it too. And like, I'm not going to tell you like, the specifics of what I think you should do because I don't know. I don't know what the legal environment will be. I don't know what the legal environment will be in your state. But whatever the legal environment is, it will be better if we have strong and cohesive communities to look after one another, right? If you're looking to donate your money, I've said it before, Alotrolado are where I would suggest it. It's A L O T R O L A D O dot org.

• 2:43:26Speaker 04

  They've done really valuable work in defending migrants' rights in court. Haitian Bridge Alliance would be another great example of that. Will you link that? Yep, I'll put the both in the show notes, yeah. But the way we confront this is together. And it's super important that now, in the next three months, if there are undocumented people in your life, that you check in with them. Right, that you talk with them about what the best plan is. We don't know what's going to happen. I've outlined some scenarios here. None of them may happen, right? We don't know yet, but we have these three months and we'd be foolish not to use them. Yep, yeah, talk to your friends, begin organizing. The solution is not despair. The solution is community and I know it can be really easy to despair.

• 2:44:06Speaker 04

  And if you're listening and you are undocumented, I understand how petrifying this is. And just know that like, we're all thinking of you and hopefully there are people in your life who are there to help you and to help you get through a difficult time.

• 2:44:22Speaker 04

  Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every

• 2:44:25Speaker 02

  Week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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