Speaker 1: M I want to start this episode with a warning.
Speaker 1: What we're going to talk about in the next two
Speaker 1: episodes actually is is incredibly dark and unspeakably violent. We
Speaker 1: will be discussing the possibility of the United States descending
Speaker 1: into the kind of apocalyptic, city annihilating violence that people
Speaker 1: in Syria know all too well, even in the event
Speaker 1: of a second American Civil War. I do not find
Speaker 1: these scenarios particularly likely. We are talking about the very
Speaker 1: worst case scenario of the very worst case scenario here.
Speaker 1: But everything I will discuss in this and the next
Speaker 1: episode has been reality for millions of people across the world,
Speaker 1: and so we will talk about such possibilities here too.
Speaker 1: Please do not listen to these episodes if you feel
Speaker 1: they will be more than you can handle emotionally. Please
Speaker 1: do not take them as my prophecy for what will happen,
Speaker 1: only what might if every Domino falls in the worst
Speaker 1: possible way. With all that said, it's time for a story.
Speaker 1: Bombs bomb MS bombs between the air strikes and the
Speaker 1: mortars twenty have hit close enough to rattle the frame
Speaker 1: of your apartment building. In the last day, your windows
Speaker 1: are a distant, forlorn memory. The water pipes went weeks ago,
Speaker 1: and with that your hope of ever using your shower again.
Speaker 1: One of your neighbors managed to liberate a pallett of
Speaker 1: baby wipes, though the other day you realize that you
Speaker 1: now value a single pack of the things more than
Speaker 1: every electronic gadget you've ever owned. The day provides some relief.
Speaker 1: Someone you've heard it was the Canadians supplied the separatists
Speaker 1: in your neighborhood with man portable anti aircraft missile launchers.
Speaker 1: They knocked out a couple of helicopters last week, and
Speaker 1: ever since then the federal forces have been more cautious
Speaker 1: during the day. It's weird to think of the munitions
Speaker 1: and craft your tax dollars paid for being used to
Speaker 1: bombard your hometown. It's even weirder to look out from
Speaker 1: your roof during the day and see the dominionist militia,
Speaker 1: bedecked in their fiery crosses, firing from up armored Ford
Speaker 1: f one fifties into the separatist fighting positions around your neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Most days, they broadcast propaganda from loudspeakers built into the
Speaker 1: backs of AND's begging heathens in the city. You guess
Speaker 1: that includes you to throw down their arms and accept
Speaker 1: God and America back into their lives. At this point,
Speaker 1: you pray to just about anyone if it meant not
Speaker 1: taking indirect fire all day, every day. But you've seen
Speaker 1: pictures of what life is like in the areas under
Speaker 1: dominionist control. The other day, one of your friends showed
Speaker 1: you a video of a stoning twenty or thirty militiamen
Speaker 1: throwing rocks at a pair of trans women. You almost
Speaker 1: puked up what little food was left in your stomach.
Speaker 1: You're not sure how much of that the federal forces
Speaker 1: know about. Surely things haven't gotten so bad that the
Speaker 1: government would approve of such brutality, But you know they
Speaker 1: need the manpower the militias provide, and maybe it's as
Speaker 1: simple as that. The government is happy to look the
Speaker 1: other way for anyone who can help them maintain control. Yesterday,
Speaker 1: one of your friends in the municipal defense units told
Speaker 1: you about a transport caravan headed out of the city
Speaker 1: through a thin strip of friendly territory leading up north
Speaker 1: to what used to be Washington State. The journey will
Speaker 1: take days. Washington wasn't exactly close before the war, and
Speaker 1: the road system has been fucked by years of i e. D.
Speaker 1: S bombings and lack of maintenance under the patchwork of
Speaker 1: sectarian militias. But if you can make it up there,
Speaker 1: you've heard there are buses that will take you up
Speaker 1: to the Canadian border. Of course, back when this all
Speaker 1: started you considered immigrating. Everyone did, but you convinced yourself
Speaker 1: that things would get better. Even a few months ago
Speaker 1: that had seemed possible. But now the boom of a
Speaker 1: howitzer rips through the air, as if to punctuate your
Speaker 1: internal debate. You instantly recognize it as incoming fire, and
Speaker 1: you dart into the bathroom to take cover. The shell
Speaker 1: lands somewhere close. The blast rattles the foundation of your building,
Speaker 1: but it clearly wasn't a direct hit. You hear the
Speaker 1: now familiar sound of wounded people shrieking in pain. Some
Speaker 1: of them are children. You want to grab your first
Speaker 1: aid kit and run to them, but you shelter in
Speaker 1: place for a while longer. The dominionists have a thing
Speaker 1: for double tap strikes, and you expect another round or
Speaker 1: two will be headed in the same direction to hit
Speaker 1: any first responders. Less than a minute later, the cannon
Speaker 1: booms again and a second blast silences the screams of
Speaker 1: your wounded napeers. You're overwhelmed with a curious mix of
Speaker 1: shame and gratitude that you guessed right. Slowly, you pick
Speaker 1: yourself up and head to the window to survey the damage,
Speaker 1: and as you look out at the still smoking rubble
Speaker 1: of yet another home, you make your decision. It's time
Speaker 1: to leave. One fine summer morning, two years ago, I
Speaker 1: stood on a hill in Mosele and watched AGED sixty
Speaker 1: four Apache attack helicopters drill thirty millimeter chain gun rounds
Speaker 1: and thermobaric hellfire missiles into city blocks filled with people.
Speaker 1: It didn't look at all the way it looks in movies.
Speaker 1: There were no bright orange blossoms of fire, just plumes
Speaker 1: of black and gray smoke, bursting across the horizon and
Speaker 1: curling up to the sky. That afternoon, I walked through
Speaker 1: the neighborhood those Apaches had pounded all morning. Concrete, plaster, wood,
Speaker 1: and human bodies had been pounded into a substance finer
Speaker 1: than sand, a gritty, all pervasive sort of dust that
Speaker 1: enveloped everything. The neighborhood, which hours ago had been filled
Speaker 1: with beautiful homes, and apartment blocks had been turned into
Speaker 1: something that looked like the surface of the moon. As
Speaker 1: I clambered over the collapsed apartments, giving a wide berth
Speaker 1: to unexploded bomblets still wedged in the rubble, the smell
Speaker 1: of rotten corpses bubbled up from below. It's stuck in
Speaker 1: my nose. Even now, two years later, I can still
Speaker 1: smell it. Sometimes I have nightmares about Mosele. Some nights,
Speaker 1: none of them are about the actual close calls I
Speaker 1: had in that city, the mourners and sniper rounds that
Speaker 1: landed too close for comfort. My nightmares all involve planes
Speaker 1: and helicopters, the smell of dead bodies trapped under rubble,
Speaker 1: in the sight of other cities in other countries, wreathed
Speaker 1: in the same black smoke I saw rising from Mosle.
Speaker 1: Carpet bombing has been a key aspect of American military
Speaker 1: strategy since World War Two. Precision munitions have allowed for
Speaker 1: somewhat less randomness in the process, but any one who
Speaker 1: saw Mosele or Rockaws and Syria can tell you that
Speaker 1: precision is a word with a lot of wiggle to it,
Speaker 1: and since two thousand seventeen, the trend in American military
Speaker 1: doctrine has not been towards fewer civilian casualties. By June
Speaker 1: of that year, President Trump had dropped almost as many
Speaker 1: bombs as Oboma did in all of two thousand sixteen.
Speaker 1: By the end of two thousand seventeen, the US had
Speaker 1: launched fifty more air strikes than we had in the
Speaker 1: previous year. Civilian casualties had risen by two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifteen percent. The leveling of Rocaw and Mosel were only
Speaker 1: possible because those cities were distant, foreign and filled with
Speaker 1: non white people. It's hard to imagine an American president
Speaker 1: ordering the carpet bombing of an American city, but perhaps
Speaker 1: it shouldn't be. I've begun to expect that the path
Speaker 1: to an American mosle is not as long or as
Speaker 1: winding as I had previously hoped. The book Cities under
Speaker 1: Siege points out that fifteen years ago, American military planners
Speaker 1: and tacticians were already well used to treating our own
Speaker 1: cities as targets as long as those cities were seen
Speaker 1: as majority non white quote. Some U. S Army officers
Speaker 1: discussed their highly militarized response to the Katrina disaster as
Speaker 1: an attempt to take back New Orleans from African American insurgencies.
Speaker 1: Rather than organizing a massive humanitarian response that treated Katrina's
Speaker 1: victims as city pisons who required immediate help, officials eventually
Speaker 1: executed a largely military operation. Such a response merely reinforced
Speaker 1: the idea that it is equally fitting to treat both
Speaker 1: external and internal geographies as the sites of state backed
Speaker 1: wars against racialized and bio politically disposable their word others,
Speaker 1: The Katrina operation dealt with those abandoned in the central
Speaker 1: city as a threat to be contained, targeted, and addressed
Speaker 1: as a means of protecting the property of the largely
Speaker 1: white suburban and ex urban populations who had escaped in
Speaker 1: their own cars. In the process, African American citizens of
Speaker 1: New Orleans were made refugees within their own country. As
Speaker 1: Robert Starn and Ellis Show had contend, Katrina not only
Speaker 1: ripped the roofs off of Gulf Coast houses, but also
Speaker 1: ripped the facade off the national security state in the
Speaker 1: event of a second American Civil War with armed resistance
Speaker 1: against the state and whole cities, or at least chunks
Speaker 1: of whole cities standing an open revolt, that facade would
Speaker 1: slip further. This would not happen quickly. There would be
Speaker 1: great resistance to the idea of deploying American power against
Speaker 1: our own cities. But imagine our military pushed past its
Speaker 1: limits of manpower, dealing with thousands of injured and dead,
Speaker 1: and probably just as many deserters. As I mentioned in
Speaker 1: the last episode. Tiny Iraq and large sparsely populated Afghanistan
Speaker 1: already did this to our forces, minus the desertion in
Speaker 1: that much less severe situation. Are Military and political leaders
Speaker 1: responded with a vast escalation in the air war, more
Speaker 1: drones and more bombs to compensate for fewer available boots
Speaker 1: on the ground. Remember Jeremy Christian's words after stabbing two
Speaker 1: men to death on the Portland Max train, that's what
Speaker 1: liberalism gets you. Two years or so into the Second
Speaker 1: American Civil War, with military casualties rising, the economy collapsed,
Speaker 1: and of course months of hateful propaganda directed against the
Speaker 1: separatists and insurgents, well, I don't have trouble imagining the
Speaker 1: American government and a chunk of the country who chose
Speaker 1: to back them, supporting a violent air war against their
Speaker 1: former countrymen. That's what separatism gets you. Gregory Clancy is
Speaker 1: a professor of history at the University of Singing, a poor,
Speaker 1: a full Bright scholar, and an expert in the evolution
Speaker 1: of U S military doctrine. He's quoted liberally in Cities
Speaker 1: under Siege discussing the left right divide in this country. Quote,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, the grand division in
Speaker 1: American politics is not East. First, is west or north
Speaker 1: versus South. It's not even rural versus urban middle class,
Speaker 1: because the really powerful Republican squares are suburbs and exurbs
Speaker 1: full of more recent settler refugees from the Blue flex themselves.
Speaker 1: No one dislikes the Blue Democratic urban flex more than
Speaker 1: those who resettled its edges, the trekkers in that great
Speaker 1: exodus that began in the nineteen forties and continues strongly today. Now,
Speaker 1: that was written back in two thousand ten, but it's
Speaker 1: only grown truer with the passage of years. A two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen Washington Post article humorously titled breaking Partisans of
Speaker 1: the two parties hate each other noted quote, seventy nine
Speaker 1: percent of Democrats have unfavorable attitudes about the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: Eighty two percent of Republicans have unfavorable attitudes about the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party. Absolutist rejection is quite common. Roughly one third
Speaker 1: of partisans believe the opposition is a threat to the
Speaker 1: nation's well being. Only around thirty percent of each party
Speaker 1: viewed the other party in a hugely unfavorable light. That number, then,
Speaker 1: has almost tripled in twenty years, and as I outlined
Speaker 1: in the first episode of this series, things have only
Speaker 1: grown more viciously polarized in the years since that Washington
Speaker 1: Post article from two thousand nineteen. It is distinctly normal
Speaker 1: to run into what's called eliminationist rhetoric directed against the
Speaker 1: political other. In mid April two thousand nineteen, Pacific Standard
Speaker 1: magazine published an article titled the far right doesn't want
Speaker 1: to beat the left, it wants to exterminate it. That
Speaker 1: article noted quote. Right wing pundits have joked about murdering
Speaker 1: people on the left for years. In the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: talk radio show host Brush Limbaugh equipped I tell people,
Speaker 1: don't kill all the liberals, leave enough so that we
Speaker 1: can have two on every campus, living fossils, so that
Speaker 1: we will never forget what these people stood for. His
Speaker 1: words were echoed recently by the neo Nazi Chris Cantwell,
Speaker 1: who ranted in a gap post that leftist should face
Speaker 1: complete and total destruction. Memes and jokes about free helicopter
Speaker 1: rides for leftists like Bernie Sanders have become common on
Speaker 1: the right as well. This is a reference to Chilean
Speaker 1: dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered some of his left wing
Speaker 1: opponents by throwing them from helicopters. In two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: John Russell Houser opened fire in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie
Speaker 1: theater during a showing of Amy Schumer's train wreck. His
Speaker 1: explicit goal was to kill liberals. Before his shooting, Houser
Speaker 1: wrote this about Dylan Rufe's murder of nine worshippers at
Speaker 1: a black church in Charleston. Had Dylan Rufe reached political maturity,
Speaker 1: he would have seen that the word is not the
Speaker 1: N word but liberal. David NewART, a journalist and expert
Speaker 1: on far right radicalization, has been warning about this for
Speaker 1: quite some time. His two thousand nine book The Eliminationists,
Speaker 1: published one year before Cities under Siege, traced out an
Speaker 1: already compelling and terrifying trend of far right violence against liberals.
Speaker 1: NewART wrote about a number of murders and attempted murders,
Speaker 1: most of which I hadn't read about before reading his book.
Speaker 1: The most shocking of them happened in July two thousan
Speaker 1: an eight, when Jim David Atkinson opened fire in the
Speaker 1: Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, killing two people.
Speaker 1: His four page manifesto included the line all liberals should
Speaker 1: be killed. Atkinson explained that he had targeted the church
Speaker 1: because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all
Speaker 1: liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country,
Speaker 1: and that he had felt that democrats had tied his
Speaker 1: country's hands in the war on terror and they had
Speaker 1: ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.
Speaker 1: When police later combed through Atkinson's home, they found books
Speaker 1: written by a number of mainstream conservatives, Liberalism is a
Speaker 1: Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity,
Speaker 1: and The o'iley Factor by Bill o'reiley. In his manifesto,
Speaker 1: Atkinson expressed frustration at his inability to reach and attack
Speaker 1: any democratic elected leaders. I couldn't get to the generals
Speaker 1: and high ranking officers of the Marxist movement, so I
Speaker 1: went after the foot soldiers, the chicken ship liberals that
Speaker 1: vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the
Speaker 1: ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same.
Speaker 1: It's the only way we can read America of this
Speaker 1: cancerous pestilence. In January of this year, I ran across
Speaker 1: a Facebook post by a member of the right wing
Speaker 1: street gang Patriot Prayer, Carmen Estel. She said this, we
Speaker 1: are deep into spiritual warfare. Now. This is why the
Speaker 1: evildoers don't even realize how evil they truly are. They
Speaker 1: have become robotic. They are simply a vessel for the darkness.
Speaker 1: When you start seeing words like robotic used to describe
Speaker 1: human beings, what you're seeing is called dehumanization. It's one
Speaker 1: of the first steps necessary if you plan to prepare
Speaker 1: one group of human beings to kill another group of
Speaker 1: human beings. Every genocide and mass killing and history has
Speaker 1: involved some degree of dehumanization. The book Less than Human
Speaker 1: by David Livingstone Smith deals with this phenomenon in great detail.
Speaker 1: He notes quote dehumanization is the belief that some beings
Speaker 1: only appear human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts,
Speaker 1: they aren't human at all. The Nazis labeled Jews as
Speaker 1: unter mentioned subhumans because they were convinced that although Jews
Speaker 1: looked every bit as human as the average Arian, this
Speaker 1: was a facade, and that concealed beneath it, Jews were
Speaker 1: really filthy, parasitic vermin. In as the Holocaust was ramping up,
Speaker 1: Hitler delivered a speech in which he described international jewelry
Speaker 1: as the ferment of decomposition of people's and states. Just
Speaker 1: as it was an antiquity, it will remain that way
Speaker 1: as long as people do not find the strength to
Speaker 1: get rid of the virus. Such language has grown increasingly
Speaker 1: common in our current political discourse. In two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: Fox News published an article titled, Wake Up America, Liberalism
Speaker 1: is a virus too. The article, written at the height
Speaker 1: of the Ebola outbreak, directly compared liberalism to that virulent disease.
Speaker 1: It's not so different from Adolph Hitler's constant comparisons of
Speaker 1: Jewish people to typhus than the most terrifying illness of
Speaker 1: the day now, in the interest of fairness, I googled
Speaker 1: around to see if could find examples of liberals and
Speaker 1: leftists making the same claim about conservatives. It took about
Speaker 1: half a second to find a meme saying literally that
Speaker 1: conservatism is a virus that is destroying America. It seems
Speaker 1: to have been the creation of a very lame tumbler
Speaker 1: titled conservatism is destroying our future. The humanization is not
Speaker 1: a one sided process in this country, and that kind
Speaker 1: of language should concern you no matter what side of
Speaker 1: the isle it comes from. People are not viruses. Jim
Speaker 1: Hodgkinson was a politically active liberal and small business owner.
Speaker 1: He was active in the occupy movement in two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven and was interviewed by Fox two News and St.
Speaker 1: Louis about his support. At the time, Jim said, the
Speaker 1: nine and nine percent are getting pushed around and the
Speaker 1: one percent are just not giving a dam, so we've
Speaker 1: got to speak up for the whole country. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and twelve, he wrote letters to his local newspapers stating,
Speaker 1: let's vote all Republicans out of Congress and get this
Speaker 1: country back on track. At this point, Jim seemed to
Speaker 1: be a pretty normal Democrat, and like most Democrats, Jim
Speaker 1: was horrified by the election of Donald Trump. At some
Speaker 1: point between November two thousand sixteen and June two thousand seventeen,
Speaker 1: Jim Hodgkinson decided that protesting and voting was no longer enough.
Speaker 1: He took a rifle to a baseball field where several
Speaker 1: Republican congress people and their aids were practicing for a
Speaker 1: charity baseball game and opened fire. He injured five people,
Speaker 1: including Congressman Steve Scalise, before being fatally wounded by law enforcement.
Speaker 1: We do not have as complete a log of Hodgkinson's
Speaker 1: Internet history as I would like. Prominent right wing terrorists
Speaker 1: like the Magabomber left us with more data to work with,
Speaker 1: but we do know a few things about Hodgkinson. Within
Speaker 1: a year of Trump selection, his business failed and he
Speaker 1: wound up homeless, living out of his vehicle in a
Speaker 1: gym bag showering at the local y m c A.
Speaker 1: Now I have found significantly more examples of violent far
Speaker 1: right radicalism than violent far left radicalism. It's worth repeating
Speaker 1: that every single American killed by domestic terrorists in two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen died at the hands of a right wing extremist. However,
Speaker 1: Jim is proof that violent radicalization occurs across the political spectrum.
Speaker 1: And I think that as the economy drops and the
Speaker 1: impact of climate change becomes more severe, leave more people
Speaker 1: homeless and destitute, we will see more people on the
Speaker 1: left lose hope in the ballot and turn to the
Speaker 1: bullet I don't know what path of dehumanizing rhetoric helped
Speaker 1: lead Jim to open fire on a group of strangers,
Speaker 1: but considering how much time I'm about to spend talking
Speaker 1: about right wing eliminationism, I should probably talk about another
Speaker 1: aspect of it on the left that seriously worries me.
Speaker 1: Guillotine fetishism. Now I get it. I've spent hundreds of
Speaker 1: collective hours of my life reading about the unspeakable crimes
Speaker 1: of various billionaires, most recently the Sackler family. I understand
Speaker 1: wanting to give some of these people an exceptionally short haircut.
Speaker 1: And I get that a lot of you are probably
Speaker 1: rolling your eyes and maybe even getting ready to switch podcasts,
Speaker 1: because clearly Twitter posts like this one from we Dress
Speaker 1: Elba are just jokes. If your boss ever tells you
Speaker 1: you don't need a union, it's because you need a guillotine.
Speaker 1: Prominent leftist magazine Jacobin recently started selling a faux i
Speaker 1: kea guillotine poster. The tweet announcing it said so much
Speaker 1: for the tolerant left. I could find another dozen examples
Speaker 1: if I really wanted to keep harping on us all day,
Speaker 1: and all these examples could be easily defended as harmless comedy. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to compare this to say the ironic
Speaker 1: comments about genocide and Nazism that are so often a
Speaker 1: catalyst for fascist right wing radicalization. But given how prevalent
Speaker 1: guillotine talk has become on the left, I think it
Speaker 1: behooves us to talk for a minute about the French Revolution. Now,
Speaker 1: you could absolutely argue that a lot of those guillotined
Speaker 1: Knobby Fox had it coming, as they had spent their
Speaker 1: lives deploying oppressive violence far in excess of what was
Speaker 1: eventually returned to them. As a general rule, I support
Speaker 1: despotic leaders, be they kings or dictators losing their heads.
Speaker 1: But tens of thousands of people were killed in the
Speaker 1: violence that flowed from the French Revolution, and most of
Speaker 1: them did not have it coming. It turns out that
Speaker 1: Once a collective of angry people starts murdering, it's fucking
Speaker 1: hard to get them to stop. Where I worry about
Speaker 1: this specifically is when it comes to what happens and
Speaker 1: the chunks of urban and suburban areas occupied by leftist separatists.
Speaker 1: In place where the government retreats without too much violence,
Speaker 1: things will likely remain pleasant for the reasons we discussed
Speaker 1: in the last episode. Most people tend to want things
Speaker 1: to stay reasonable. However, in the areas where the fighting
Speaker 1: is more vicious, the trunks of cities that wind up
Speaker 1: under long term sieges separatists are likely to become correspondingly
Speaker 1: more brutal on the areas they control. This leads me
Speaker 1: to something called the brutalization effect. It's mostly been documented
Speaker 1: in the context of the death penalty, but quite a
Speaker 1: lot of the data gathered suggests that highly publicized executions
Speaker 1: lead to more violence. I'd like to quote from a
Speaker 1: University of Maryland study. It was found that the incidents
Speaker 1: of Thursday Friday homicides was greater than expected for those
Speaker 1: weeks with executions, and the incidents of Saturday Sunday homicides
Speaker 1: was less than expected for those weeks with executions. From
Speaker 1: this pattern, it was concluded that the deterrent effect of
Speaker 1: an execution, or more precisely, the publicity surrounding an execution,
Speaker 1: was canceled by its earlier brutalizing effect. Now it's hard
Speaker 1: to say how much of the brutalization effect is due
Speaker 1: to the death penalty and how much of it is
Speaker 1: due to the publicity surrounding executions, but still this suggests
Speaker 1: that the early stages of the Second Americans have a war.
Speaker 1: The deaths and violence that would cause would make people,
Speaker 1: even traditionally peaceful liberala leftist people more comfortable with deadly violence,
Speaker 1: and in the face of daily mortar fire, sniper attacks,
Speaker 1: and bombings, these rebels are likely to lead mass purges
Speaker 1: of the people who they feel represent their suffering. In
Speaker 1: most cases, I imagine it would be wealthy families, law
Speaker 1: enforcement officers and the families of law enforcement officers, as
Speaker 1: well as political activists on the other side of the
Speaker 1: political spectrum. This violence would also become heavily publicized elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the nation and regions still controlled by the regime,
Speaker 1: Regions where most people are on the opposite side of
Speaker 1: the ideological spectrum and the violence they see being done
Speaker 1: to their fellow travelers will make them more comfortable with
Speaker 1: the government dishing out mass violence to separatists. They are
Speaker 1: already signs right now that political leaders on the right
Speaker 1: are pushing the idea that leftists and liberals are not
Speaker 1: really Americans. On the day I wrote most of this episode,
Speaker 1: in mid April, I came upon an email by the
Speaker 1: Trump campaign to his donors and supporters. I would like
Speaker 1: to read an excerpt. In two thousand sixteen, I was
Speaker 1: simply your voice, but you were the one that took
Speaker 1: our country back and made the liberal swamp and political
Speaker 1: insiders furious. Now headed into we have to remind them
Speaker 1: that this is your country, not theirs, and then it
Speaker 1: turns into a plug for donations. It would be easy
Speaker 1: to write this off as just meaningless bullshit from a
Speaker 1: campaign used to tossing out hurtful words like used tissues
Speaker 1: under a high school boy's bed. But I found this
Speaker 1: wording deeply disturbing. This is your country, not theirs is
Speaker 1: the kind of language that could be used to, for example,
Speaker 1: justify the carpet bombing of a city occupied by leftist separatists.
Speaker 1: After all, if they are an Americans, not really then
Speaker 1: why shouldn't the government treat them like it treated Iraqi
Speaker 1: and Syrian civilians in the cities that defied us, we
Speaker 1: don't fight. The leveling of Recaw is not something that
Speaker 1: received a great deal of airtime in US media. The
Speaker 1: Battle of Mosele, for whatever reason, dominated the public consciousness
Speaker 1: much longer than the battle for isis is capital. Excessive
Speaker 1: force was used on both cities, but in my opinion,
Speaker 1: at least what was done in Mosel was more justified
Speaker 1: or at least defensible than the destruction of Recaw. For
Speaker 1: some background, during the two thousand sixteen campaign, one issued
Speaker 1: Donald Trump ran on was to bomb the ship out
Speaker 1: of Isis. After he was sworn in, President Trump handed
Speaker 1: decision making power for air strikes to military commanders on
Speaker 1: the ground, essentially removing much of the civilian oversight from
Speaker 1: that process. Correspondingly, civilian casualties leapt upward. In May two seventeen,
Speaker 1: Defense Secretary Maddis told CBS News that the campaign against
Speaker 1: Isis had shifted from attrition tactics to annihilation tactics. I
Speaker 1: think the reality of those annihilation tactics gives us an
Speaker 1: idea of how an air war against leftist separatists in
Speaker 1: a US city might look now, I'm imagining it conducted
Speaker 1: against leftists. But in our last episode we also brought
Speaker 1: up the possibility of Christian dominionist groups organizing and effectively
Speaker 1: ruling over large suburban chunks of the country in the
Speaker 1: wake of a US government pull out from certain areas.
Speaker 1: It's certainly also possible to imagine a liberal dominated US
Speaker 1: government eventually deploying the kind of force against a group
Speaker 1: of Christian extremists occupying urban and suburban areas against essentially
Speaker 1: an American version of ISIS. In both cases, I can
Speaker 1: imagine annihilation tactics being justified by the people with power
Speaker 1: over the bombers in artillery. So let's talk about what
Speaker 1: those annihilation tactics look like. Racaw was hit by an
Speaker 1: overwhelming mix of air strikes and artillery barrages. Of the
Speaker 1: air strikes were carried out by the United States, of
Speaker 1: the artillery barrages involved American artillery. In four months, we
Speaker 1: dropped a shot around twenty one thousand munitions into a
Speaker 1: city that had hosted around two hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 1: people before the bombardment. That's roughly the same size as Baton,
Speaker 1: Rouge des Moines or Spokene, Washington. More than of Racall
Speaker 1: was leveled by this bombardment. The city was turned into
Speaker 1: a smoking war and of rubble. The exact death toll
Speaker 1: would never be known, just as it would be deliberately
Speaker 1: obscured in the event of an air war against the U. S. City. Now,
Speaker 1: the best I can do to make this feel real
Speaker 1: is to bring you the stories of real Serians who
Speaker 1: survived the bombardment. Mohanted Tadfi A age forty four, was
Speaker 1: one such survivor. He buried his mother, brother, sister in law,
Speaker 1: and seven nieces and nephews. He later told in PR
Speaker 1: ten people a plane came and hit the house in
Speaker 1: the building of five floors fell on their heads. When
Speaker 1: the Syrian Democratic forces arrived on foot in his part
Speaker 1: of the neighborhood, he and his brother were forced out
Speaker 1: of the area. Told it was too dangerous for civilians,
Speaker 1: Mohanned begged the soldiers, please, there are children under the rebel.
Speaker 1: My brother's children, young kids, maybe even just one of
Speaker 1: them is still alive. But those soldiers had a job
Speaker 1: and they could not risk leaving civilians behind. To act
Speaker 1: as possible insurgeons. The soldiers who refused to let him
Speaker 1: search for his buried loved ones were not monsters. There
Speaker 1: were people doing a nightmarish job and nightmarish circumstances, and
Speaker 1: what we in peacetime consider simple humanity is often an
Speaker 1: unacceptable risk under the rigors of war. Colonel Ryan, the
Speaker 1: spokesperson for the Combined Joint Task Force responsible for leveling RACAW,
Speaker 1: justified its actions by saying the coalition was quote fighting
Speaker 1: a ruthless enemy that was systematically killing innocent civilians, and unfortunately,
Speaker 1: some were unintentionally killed trying to liberate them, something we
Speaker 1: tried to avoid. I'm sure the U. S forces quote
Speaker 1: unquote liberating separatist urban areas would try to avoid unintentionally
Speaker 1: killing civilians in the act of liberating them. I'm equally
Speaker 1: sure the end result will be a lot of men
Speaker 1: and women like Mohanned Tadfi, forced to return to their
Speaker 1: shattered homes months later to dig the corpses of their
Speaker 1: loved ones out of the rubble with shovels. Of course,
Speaker 1: given some of the things some voices on the far
Speaker 1: right have suggested, Mohanned's American counterpart might be lucky to
Speaker 1: survive the Battle of Spokane, assuming the city was occupied
Speaker 1: by leftist separatists. Republican Matt Shay is an elected representative
Speaker 1: in the state of Washington. Representative Shay is the Minority
Speaker 1: Caucus chair in the State House of Representatives. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eighteen, he wrote and distributed a document that
Speaker 1: outlined what he called a biblical basis for war. I'd
Speaker 1: like to read an excerpt of that title. Rules of War.
Speaker 1: Conduct a census of all able bodied males eighteen to
Speaker 1: forty five. Identify exemptions. Appoint captains of tens, fifties, hundreds,
Speaker 1: and thousands. Avoid bloodshed if possible. Make an offer of
Speaker 1: peace before declaring war, not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness.
Speaker 1: Must surrender on terms of justice and righteousness. Number one.
Speaker 1: Stop all abortions, Number two, no same sex marriage, Number three,
Speaker 1: no idolatry or occultism. Number four no communism, and number five.
Speaker 1: Must obey biblical law if they yield. Must pay share
Speaker 1: of worker taxes if they do not yield. Kill all males. Now.
Speaker 1: After this document came out, Representative Shay insisted he was
Speaker 1: just summarizing rules he found in the Bible for how
Speaker 1: to conduct war and that he wasn't distributing some guide
Speaker 1: for how a dominionist militia should purge decadent liberal cities
Speaker 1: of all resistance. The same day I wrote this article,
Speaker 1: Jason Wilson, writing for The Guardian, published another article about
Speaker 1: Matt Shay. This article was based on a number of
Speaker 1: private chats between Shay and several members of his militia
Speaker 1: back in two thousand seventeen when they believed an Antifa
Speaker 1: revolution was scheduled to occur. Quote all of the men
Speaker 1: used screen aliases. Schayes was veram bellatour Latin for true Warrior.
Speaker 1: The Guardian con arm the identity of those in the
Speaker 1: chat by cross checking phone numbers attached to the signal accounts.
Speaker 1: The group included Jack Robertson, who broadcasts the far right
Speaker 1: radio show Radio Free Redoubt under the alias John Jacob Schmidt.
Speaker 1: The chat also included Anthony Bosworth, whose history includes a
Speaker 1: public altercation with his own daughter and bringing guns to
Speaker 1: a court house. Bosworth participated in the two thousand and
Speaker 1: sixteen occupation of the Malher National Wildlife Refuge, reportedly at
Speaker 1: Shay's request. I quoted all that because it's important for
Speaker 1: you to understand that Shay is not some lone, isolated nut.
Speaker 1: He is connected to a sizeable, organized ecosystem of Christo
Speaker 1: fascist extremists who are champing at the bit for a
Speaker 1: chance to purge decadent leftist cities like Spokane. Shay's connections
Speaker 1: extend beyond just Washington. His involvement with the Malhir occupation
Speaker 1: as proof of that. During the leaked conversations, Shay and
Speaker 1: his inner circle discussed how they planned to deal with
Speaker 1: any anti fascist activists they captured. Jack Robinson noted his
Speaker 1: desire to face slam them into a Jersey barrier quote,
Speaker 1: treat him like communist revolutionaries, then shave her bald with
Speaker 1: a k bar usmc field knife. He noted that the
Speaker 1: nipple rings on the activists would quote make good attachment
Speaker 1: points for hoisting communists up flagpoles. A few days after
Speaker 1: this article dropped, Jason Wilson published another piece based on
Speaker 1: leaked audio from a Godden Country rally held in two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen. Representative Shay and Jack Robertson both spoke there.
Speaker 1: Here's part of what Robertson said. Of course, guys, although
Speaker 1: fifteen and a thousand runs animal rived as anti falls,
Speaker 1: kicking up and getting ready to defend. Right, defend, why
Speaker 1: defend for when the bad guy comes? Right, how many
Speaker 1: of you have told your trigger on your air are
Speaker 1: fifteen and the fight that we're in yet not one?
Speaker 1: But there's a fight right now. The war is here
Speaker 1: the bad guy. Representative Shay has been ostracized from mainstream
Speaker 1: Republican circle since his document on Biblical war leaked out.
Speaker 1: Robertson could accurately be described as a fringe right wing figure. However,
Speaker 1: both men speak for thousands of heavily armed, deeply paranoid Americans.
Speaker 1: In the event of a civil war that seriously drained
Speaker 1: the manpower reserves of the United States military, it's possible
Speaker 1: that the state would turn to ideologically aligned militia's to
Speaker 1: help it retake separatist strongholds. We have seen this exact
Speaker 1: same pattern play out in Syria, with militias loyal to
Speaker 1: Bashar al Assad and in a rack with Sheia militia's
Speaker 1: prosecuting a brutal war against the Sunni extremists who aligned
Speaker 1: with ISIS, And if it were to happen here, as
Speaker 1: it has happened in many other parts of the globe,
Speaker 1: we can expect to see the extremists, and these militias
Speaker 1: used the opportunity to execute vengeance against their ideological enemies.
Speaker 1: Representative Shay is proof that the ingredients are already here
Speaker 1: and as cities under siege. Noted back in two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: the idea of Christian extremists cheering on the violent destruction
Speaker 1: of leftist enclaves is not exactly beyond the pale quote.
Speaker 1: Some Christian fundamentalist preachers have even suggested that both the
Speaker 1: nine eleven attacks and Hurricane Katrina were are actually part
Speaker 1: of God's wrath against the sins of urban life, especially homosexuality.
Speaker 1: Although loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of
Speaker 1: God destroyed a wicked city. Repent America director Michael Markovitch
Speaker 1: suggested in the two thousand five press release from Girls
Speaker 1: Gone Wild the Southern decadence, New Orleans was a city
Speaker 1: that had its doors wide open to the public celebration
Speaker 1: of sin. From the devastation, may a city full of
Speaker 1: righteousness emerge now? In this episode, we have focused primarily
Speaker 1: on mass murder of the political variety. The elephant in
Speaker 1: the room. The thing left unset so far is the
Speaker 1: possibility of mass violence against a racial or religious minority
Speaker 1: in the wake of a tremendous calamity on our next
Speaker 1: week's episode will delve into that topic and discuss what
Speaker 1: might happen when annihilation tactics turn from pacification to genocide.
Speaker 1: I'll be watching one of the concrete cracking the first
Speaker 1: back talking when the cable snap one of the tables
Speaker 1: of the Lords of Trouble. In this guys trust clous
Speaker 1: on us far they flide with sauce. It's on a
Speaker 1: game blust across the heart beat is going. Don't start
Speaker 1: with me. It's a nightly Wait. Wait, I test one more. Wait,
Speaker 1: wait when I do kill and tell? When we get
Speaker 1: the rule of script of course, get things. Get a
Speaker 1: sip from the fluster, accept the ship's sake. I know
Speaker 1: it's hard. Eye turner from the top down. Purler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's screen. It's like we're supposed to start ru on
Speaker 1: my back in my coup, and you can crawl around
Speaker 1: the camp like a creep. So we ghost. Night night,
Speaker 1: good night, night, night night. But I'm Robert Evans and
Speaker 1: I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at I right, okay. You can
Speaker 1: find this show on Twitter at happen here pod, and
Speaker 1: you can find a show online at it could happen
Speaker 1: here pod dot com. Our music, as always, is from
Speaker 1: four Fists