WEBVTT - How To Murder A City 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:06.120 M I want to start this episode with a warning. 0:00:06.400 --> 0:00:08.119 What we're going to talk about in the next two 0:00:08.119 --> 0:00:11.880 episodes actually is is incredibly dark and unspeakably violent. We 0:00:11.920 --> 0:00:14.720 will be discussing the possibility of the United States descending 0:00:14.720 --> 0:00:18.400 into the kind of apocalyptic, city annihilating violence that people 0:00:18.440 --> 0:00:21.439 in Syria know all too well, even in the event 0:00:21.520 --> 0:00:24.000 of a second American Civil War. I do not find 0:00:24.040 --> 0:00:27.760 these scenarios particularly likely. We are talking about the very 0:00:27.800 --> 0:00:30.920 worst case scenario of the very worst case scenario here. 0:00:31.520 --> 0:00:33.640 But everything I will discuss in this and the next 0:00:33.640 --> 0:00:37.280 episode has been reality for millions of people across the world, 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:41.120 and so we will talk about such possibilities here too. 0:00:41.720 --> 0:00:43.880 Please do not listen to these episodes if you feel 0:00:43.920 --> 0:00:46.360 they will be more than you can handle emotionally. Please 0:00:46.400 --> 0:00:49.080 do not take them as my prophecy for what will happen, 0:00:49.280 --> 0:00:52.200 only what might if every Domino falls in the worst 0:00:52.400 --> 0:00:56.600 possible way. With all that said, it's time for a story. 0:00:59.160 --> 0:01:02.080 Bombs bomb MS bombs between the air strikes and the 0:01:02.120 --> 0:01:04.360 mortars twenty have hit close enough to rattle the frame 0:01:04.400 --> 0:01:07.360 of your apartment building. In the last day, your windows 0:01:07.360 --> 0:01:10.720 are a distant, forlorn memory. The water pipes went weeks ago, 0:01:10.880 --> 0:01:13.479 and with that your hope of ever using your shower again. 0:01:14.040 --> 0:01:16.120 One of your neighbors managed to liberate a pallett of 0:01:16.120 --> 0:01:18.760 baby wipes, though the other day you realize that you 0:01:18.800 --> 0:01:20.960 now value a single pack of the things more than 0:01:21.000 --> 0:01:25.360 every electronic gadget you've ever owned. The day provides some relief. 0:01:25.760 --> 0:01:28.600 Someone you've heard it was the Canadians supplied the separatists 0:01:28.600 --> 0:01:31.680 in your neighborhood with man portable anti aircraft missile launchers. 0:01:31.920 --> 0:01:34.319 They knocked out a couple of helicopters last week, and 0:01:34.360 --> 0:01:36.880 ever since then the federal forces have been more cautious 0:01:36.920 --> 0:01:39.759 during the day. It's weird to think of the munitions 0:01:39.760 --> 0:01:42.240 and craft your tax dollars paid for being used to 0:01:42.280 --> 0:01:45.520 bombard your hometown. It's even weirder to look out from 0:01:45.520 --> 0:01:48.360 your roof during the day and see the dominionist militia, 0:01:48.480 --> 0:01:52.040 bedecked in their fiery crosses, firing from up armored Ford 0:01:52.160 --> 0:01:55.559 f one fifties into the separatist fighting positions around your neighborhood. 0:01:56.160 --> 0:01:59.400 Most days, they broadcast propaganda from loudspeakers built into the 0:01:59.440 --> 0:02:02.400 backs of AND's begging heathens in the city. You guess 0:02:02.400 --> 0:02:05.040 that includes you to throw down their arms and accept 0:02:05.080 --> 0:02:08.840 God and America back into their lives. At this point, 0:02:08.880 --> 0:02:11.000 you pray to just about anyone if it meant not 0:02:11.120 --> 0:02:14.520 taking indirect fire all day, every day. But you've seen 0:02:14.520 --> 0:02:16.680 pictures of what life is like in the areas under 0:02:16.680 --> 0:02:19.400 dominionist control. The other day, one of your friends showed 0:02:19.400 --> 0:02:21.960 you a video of a stoning twenty or thirty militiamen 0:02:22.000 --> 0:02:24.640 throwing rocks at a pair of trans women. You almost 0:02:24.639 --> 0:02:26.880 puked up what little food was left in your stomach. 0:02:27.680 --> 0:02:29.840 You're not sure how much of that the federal forces 0:02:29.880 --> 0:02:32.320 know about. Surely things haven't gotten so bad that the 0:02:32.320 --> 0:02:35.400 government would approve of such brutality, But you know they 0:02:35.400 --> 0:02:38.080 need the manpower the militias provide, and maybe it's as 0:02:38.080 --> 0:02:40.440 simple as that. The government is happy to look the 0:02:40.480 --> 0:02:44.480 other way for anyone who can help them maintain control. Yesterday, 0:02:44.600 --> 0:02:47.160 one of your friends in the municipal defense units told 0:02:47.160 --> 0:02:49.639 you about a transport caravan headed out of the city 0:02:49.880 --> 0:02:52.560 through a thin strip of friendly territory leading up north 0:02:52.760 --> 0:02:55.639 to what used to be Washington State. The journey will 0:02:55.639 --> 0:02:59.040 take days. Washington wasn't exactly close before the war, and 0:02:59.080 --> 0:03:01.400 the road system has been fucked by years of i e. D. 0:03:01.600 --> 0:03:04.160 S bombings and lack of maintenance under the patchwork of 0:03:04.200 --> 0:03:06.919 sectarian militias. But if you can make it up there, 0:03:07.120 --> 0:03:08.960 you've heard there are buses that will take you up 0:03:08.960 --> 0:03:12.160 to the Canadian border. Of course, back when this all 0:03:12.200 --> 0:03:16.160 started you considered immigrating. Everyone did, but you convinced yourself 0:03:16.200 --> 0:03:18.359 that things would get better. Even a few months ago 0:03:18.480 --> 0:03:21.720 that had seemed possible. But now the boom of a 0:03:21.720 --> 0:03:24.120 howitzer rips through the air, as if to punctuate your 0:03:24.120 --> 0:03:27.720 internal debate. You instantly recognize it as incoming fire, and 0:03:27.760 --> 0:03:30.440 you dart into the bathroom to take cover. The shell 0:03:30.560 --> 0:03:33.880 lands somewhere close. The blast rattles the foundation of your building, 0:03:34.080 --> 0:03:37.040 but it clearly wasn't a direct hit. You hear the 0:03:37.080 --> 0:03:40.360 now familiar sound of wounded people shrieking in pain. Some 0:03:40.480 --> 0:03:42.760 of them are children. You want to grab your first 0:03:42.760 --> 0:03:44.960 aid kit and run to them, but you shelter in 0:03:45.000 --> 0:03:47.720 place for a while longer. The dominionists have a thing 0:03:47.800 --> 0:03:50.520 for double tap strikes, and you expect another round or 0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:52.600 two will be headed in the same direction to hit 0:03:52.640 --> 0:03:56.120 any first responders. Less than a minute later, the cannon 0:03:56.160 --> 0:03:59.240 booms again and a second blast silences the screams of 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:02.640 your wounded napeers. You're overwhelmed with a curious mix of 0:04:02.680 --> 0:04:06.280 shame and gratitude that you guessed right. Slowly, you pick 0:04:06.320 --> 0:04:08.920 yourself up and head to the window to survey the damage, 0:04:09.400 --> 0:04:11.520 and as you look out at the still smoking rubble 0:04:11.560 --> 0:04:15.040 of yet another home, you make your decision. It's time 0:04:15.120 --> 0:04:20.080 to leave. One fine summer morning, two years ago, I 0:04:20.120 --> 0:04:22.680 stood on a hill in Mosele and watched AGED sixty 0:04:22.760 --> 0:04:26.480 four Apache attack helicopters drill thirty millimeter chain gun rounds 0:04:26.480 --> 0:04:29.960 and thermobaric hellfire missiles into city blocks filled with people. 0:04:30.640 --> 0:04:32.960 It didn't look at all the way it looks in movies. 0:04:33.320 --> 0:04:36.039 There were no bright orange blossoms of fire, just plumes 0:04:36.080 --> 0:04:38.719 of black and gray smoke, bursting across the horizon and 0:04:38.760 --> 0:04:42.040 curling up to the sky. That afternoon, I walked through 0:04:42.040 --> 0:04:46.160 the neighborhood those Apaches had pounded all morning. Concrete, plaster, wood, 0:04:46.240 --> 0:04:48.799 and human bodies had been pounded into a substance finer 0:04:48.800 --> 0:04:51.560 than sand, a gritty, all pervasive sort of dust that 0:04:51.680 --> 0:04:55.480 enveloped everything. The neighborhood, which hours ago had been filled 0:04:55.480 --> 0:04:57.920 with beautiful homes, and apartment blocks had been turned into 0:04:58.000 --> 0:05:00.400 something that looked like the surface of the moon. As 0:05:00.400 --> 0:05:03.160 I clambered over the collapsed apartments, giving a wide berth 0:05:03.200 --> 0:05:06.000 to unexploded bomblets still wedged in the rubble, the smell 0:05:06.040 --> 0:05:08.640 of rotten corpses bubbled up from below. It's stuck in 0:05:08.720 --> 0:05:11.520 my nose. Even now, two years later, I can still 0:05:11.560 --> 0:05:15.520 smell it. Sometimes I have nightmares about Mosele. Some nights, 0:05:15.839 --> 0:05:17.800 none of them are about the actual close calls I 0:05:17.839 --> 0:05:20.200 had in that city, the mourners and sniper rounds that 0:05:20.279 --> 0:05:23.719 landed too close for comfort. My nightmares all involve planes 0:05:23.760 --> 0:05:26.719 and helicopters, the smell of dead bodies trapped under rubble, 0:05:26.839 --> 0:05:29.679 in the sight of other cities in other countries, wreathed 0:05:29.720 --> 0:05:32.640 in the same black smoke I saw rising from Mosle. 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:36.839 Carpet bombing has been a key aspect of American military 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:40.560 strategy since World War Two. Precision munitions have allowed for 0:05:40.680 --> 0:05:43.600 somewhat less randomness in the process, but any one who 0:05:43.600 --> 0:05:46.200 saw Mosele or Rockaws and Syria can tell you that 0:05:46.240 --> 0:05:48.479 precision is a word with a lot of wiggle to it, 0:05:49.000 --> 0:05:51.960 and since two thousand seventeen, the trend in American military 0:05:52.000 --> 0:05:55.919 doctrine has not been towards fewer civilian casualties. By June 0:05:55.920 --> 0:05:58.479 of that year, President Trump had dropped almost as many 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:01.080 bombs as Oboma did in all of two thousand sixteen. 0:06:01.560 --> 0:06:03.560 By the end of two thousand seventeen, the US had 0:06:03.600 --> 0:06:06.080 launched fifty more air strikes than we had in the 0:06:06.120 --> 0:06:09.680 previous year. Civilian casualties had risen by two hundred and 0:06:09.800 --> 0:06:14.240 fifteen percent. The leveling of Rocaw and Mosel were only 0:06:14.279 --> 0:06:17.760 possible because those cities were distant, foreign and filled with 0:06:17.800 --> 0:06:21.120 non white people. It's hard to imagine an American president 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:24.560 ordering the carpet bombing of an American city, but perhaps 0:06:24.640 --> 0:06:27.279 it shouldn't be. I've begun to expect that the path 0:06:27.360 --> 0:06:29.880 to an American mosle is not as long or as 0:06:29.880 --> 0:06:34.000 winding as I had previously hoped. The book Cities under 0:06:34.000 --> 0:06:37.760 Siege points out that fifteen years ago, American military planners 0:06:37.760 --> 0:06:40.400 and tacticians were already well used to treating our own 0:06:40.400 --> 0:06:43.240 cities as targets as long as those cities were seen 0:06:43.240 --> 0:06:48.000 as majority non white quote. Some U. S Army officers 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:51.240 discussed their highly militarized response to the Katrina disaster as 0:06:51.240 --> 0:06:55.560 an attempt to take back New Orleans from African American insurgencies. 0:06:55.960 --> 0:06:59.320 Rather than organizing a massive humanitarian response that treated Katrina's 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:02.719 victims as city pisons who required immediate help, officials eventually 0:07:02.720 --> 0:07:07.000 executed a largely military operation. Such a response merely reinforced 0:07:07.040 --> 0:07:09.320 the idea that it is equally fitting to treat both 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:12.440 external and internal geographies as the sites of state backed 0:07:12.440 --> 0:07:17.280 wars against racialized and bio politically disposable their word others, 0:07:18.000 --> 0:07:20.880 The Katrina operation dealt with those abandoned in the central 0:07:20.920 --> 0:07:23.880 city as a threat to be contained, targeted, and addressed 0:07:23.920 --> 0:07:26.239 as a means of protecting the property of the largely 0:07:26.280 --> 0:07:29.360 white suburban and ex urban populations who had escaped in 0:07:29.360 --> 0:07:33.040 their own cars. In the process, African American citizens of 0:07:33.080 --> 0:07:35.960 New Orleans were made refugees within their own country. As 0:07:36.040 --> 0:07:39.000 Robert Starn and Ellis Show had contend, Katrina not only 0:07:39.080 --> 0:07:41.520 ripped the roofs off of Gulf Coast houses, but also 0:07:41.640 --> 0:07:46.160 ripped the facade off the national security state in the 0:07:46.200 --> 0:07:49.040 event of a second American Civil War with armed resistance 0:07:49.080 --> 0:07:51.400 against the state and whole cities, or at least chunks 0:07:51.400 --> 0:07:54.280 of whole cities standing an open revolt, that facade would 0:07:54.280 --> 0:07:57.400 slip further. This would not happen quickly. There would be 0:07:57.440 --> 0:08:00.800 great resistance to the idea of deploying American power against 0:08:00.840 --> 0:08:04.680 our own cities. But imagine our military pushed past its 0:08:04.760 --> 0:08:07.640 limits of manpower, dealing with thousands of injured and dead, 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:10.640 and probably just as many deserters. As I mentioned in 0:08:10.640 --> 0:08:14.640 the last episode. Tiny Iraq and large sparsely populated Afghanistan 0:08:14.680 --> 0:08:17.960 already did this to our forces, minus the desertion in 0:08:18.040 --> 0:08:21.600 that much less severe situation. Are Military and political leaders 0:08:21.600 --> 0:08:24.920 responded with a vast escalation in the air war, more 0:08:25.000 --> 0:08:28.360 drones and more bombs to compensate for fewer available boots 0:08:28.360 --> 0:08:32.280 on the ground. Remember Jeremy Christian's words after stabbing two 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:34.960 men to death on the Portland Max train, that's what 0:08:35.040 --> 0:08:37.880 liberalism gets you. Two years or so into the Second 0:08:37.880 --> 0:08:41.600 American Civil War, with military casualties rising, the economy collapsed, 0:08:41.600 --> 0:08:44.400 and of course months of hateful propaganda directed against the 0:08:44.400 --> 0:08:48.040 separatists and insurgents, well, I don't have trouble imagining the 0:08:48.040 --> 0:08:50.360 American government and a chunk of the country who chose 0:08:50.360 --> 0:08:53.000 to back them, supporting a violent air war against their 0:08:53.040 --> 0:08:58.120 former countrymen. That's what separatism gets you. Gregory Clancy is 0:08:58.120 --> 0:09:00.319 a professor of history at the University of Singing, a poor, 0:09:00.480 --> 0:09:02.680 a full Bright scholar, and an expert in the evolution 0:09:02.679 --> 0:09:05.720 of U S military doctrine. He's quoted liberally in Cities 0:09:05.800 --> 0:09:09.520 under Siege discussing the left right divide in this country. Quote, 0:09:10.080 --> 0:09:11.640 at the end of the day, the grand division in 0:09:11.679 --> 0:09:14.360 American politics is not East. First, is west or north 0:09:14.440 --> 0:09:17.400 versus South. It's not even rural versus urban middle class, 0:09:17.440 --> 0:09:20.760 because the really powerful Republican squares are suburbs and exurbs 0:09:21.000 --> 0:09:24.240 full of more recent settler refugees from the Blue flex themselves. 0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:27.560 No one dislikes the Blue Democratic urban flex more than 0:09:27.600 --> 0:09:30.280 those who resettled its edges, the trekkers in that great 0:09:30.320 --> 0:09:35.199 exodus that began in the nineteen forties and continues strongly today. Now, 0:09:35.600 --> 0:09:37.400 that was written back in two thousand ten, but it's 0:09:37.400 --> 0:09:39.800 only grown truer with the passage of years. A two 0:09:39.800 --> 0:09:43.959 thousand fourteen Washington Post article humorously titled breaking Partisans of 0:09:44.000 --> 0:09:47.600 the two parties hate each other noted quote, seventy nine 0:09:47.600 --> 0:09:50.800 percent of Democrats have unfavorable attitudes about the Republican Party. 0:09:51.000 --> 0:09:54.000 Eighty two percent of Republicans have unfavorable attitudes about the 0:09:54.040 --> 0:09:58.400 Democratic Party. Absolutist rejection is quite common. Roughly one third 0:09:58.440 --> 0:10:01.080 of partisans believe the opposition is a threat to the 0:10:01.160 --> 0:10:06.120 nation's well being. Only around thirty percent of each party 0:10:06.200 --> 0:10:09.760 viewed the other party in a hugely unfavorable light. That number, then, 0:10:09.840 --> 0:10:12.679 has almost tripled in twenty years, and as I outlined 0:10:12.679 --> 0:10:14.800 in the first episode of this series, things have only 0:10:14.840 --> 0:10:17.680 grown more viciously polarized in the years since that Washington 0:10:17.720 --> 0:10:21.160 Post article from two thousand nineteen. It is distinctly normal 0:10:21.200 --> 0:10:24.560 to run into what's called eliminationist rhetoric directed against the 0:10:24.600 --> 0:10:28.960 political other. In mid April two thousand nineteen, Pacific Standard 0:10:28.960 --> 0:10:32.240 magazine published an article titled the far right doesn't want 0:10:32.240 --> 0:10:35.040 to beat the left, it wants to exterminate it. That 0:10:35.200 --> 0:10:38.920 article noted quote. Right wing pundits have joked about murdering 0:10:38.920 --> 0:10:41.480 people on the left for years. In the nineteen nineties, 0:10:41.520 --> 0:10:44.959 talk radio show host Brush Limbaugh equipped I tell people, 0:10:45.000 --> 0:10:47.640 don't kill all the liberals, leave enough so that we 0:10:47.679 --> 0:10:50.040 can have two on every campus, living fossils, so that 0:10:50.080 --> 0:10:52.760 we will never forget what these people stood for. His 0:10:52.800 --> 0:10:55.559 words were echoed recently by the neo Nazi Chris Cantwell, 0:10:55.600 --> 0:10:57.960 who ranted in a gap post that leftist should face 0:10:58.080 --> 0:11:01.920 complete and total destruction. Memes and jokes about free helicopter 0:11:02.040 --> 0:11:04.720 rides for leftists like Bernie Sanders have become common on 0:11:04.760 --> 0:11:07.199 the right as well. This is a reference to Chilean 0:11:07.240 --> 0:11:09.960 dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered some of his left wing 0:11:09.960 --> 0:11:14.440 opponents by throwing them from helicopters. In two thousand fifteen, 0:11:14.600 --> 0:11:18.080 John Russell Houser opened fire in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie 0:11:18.160 --> 0:11:21.200 theater during a showing of Amy Schumer's train wreck. His 0:11:21.240 --> 0:11:24.480 explicit goal was to kill liberals. Before his shooting, Houser 0:11:24.520 --> 0:11:27.560 wrote this about Dylan Rufe's murder of nine worshippers at 0:11:27.559 --> 0:11:31.760 a black church in Charleston. Had Dylan Rufe reached political maturity, 0:11:31.800 --> 0:11:33.520 he would have seen that the word is not the 0:11:33.679 --> 0:11:38.280 N word but liberal. David NewART, a journalist and expert 0:11:38.280 --> 0:11:40.960 on far right radicalization, has been warning about this for 0:11:41.040 --> 0:11:44.440 quite some time. His two thousand nine book The Eliminationists, 0:11:44.520 --> 0:11:47.480 published one year before Cities under Siege, traced out an 0:11:47.480 --> 0:11:51.600 already compelling and terrifying trend of far right violence against liberals. 0:11:52.080 --> 0:11:54.760 NewART wrote about a number of murders and attempted murders, 0:11:54.800 --> 0:11:57.200 most of which I hadn't read about before reading his book. 0:11:57.679 --> 0:12:00.000 The most shocking of them happened in July two thousan 0:12:00.040 --> 0:12:02.880 an eight, when Jim David Atkinson opened fire in the 0:12:02.920 --> 0:12:07.240 Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, killing two people. 0:12:07.800 --> 0:12:11.199 His four page manifesto included the line all liberals should 0:12:11.240 --> 0:12:14.360 be killed. Atkinson explained that he had targeted the church 0:12:14.440 --> 0:12:16.920 because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all 0:12:16.960 --> 0:12:19.200 liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, 0:12:19.280 --> 0:12:21.160 and that he had felt that democrats had tied his 0:12:21.160 --> 0:12:23.040 country's hands in the war on terror and they had 0:12:23.120 --> 0:12:26.280 ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets. 0:12:26.920 --> 0:12:29.760 When police later combed through Atkinson's home, they found books 0:12:29.760 --> 0:12:33.040 written by a number of mainstream conservatives, Liberalism is a 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:36.760 Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, 0:12:36.880 --> 0:12:40.520 and The o'iley Factor by Bill o'reiley. In his manifesto, 0:12:40.600 --> 0:12:44.240 Atkinson expressed frustration at his inability to reach and attack 0:12:44.440 --> 0:12:48.280 any democratic elected leaders. I couldn't get to the generals 0:12:48.280 --> 0:12:50.679 and high ranking officers of the Marxist movement, so I 0:12:50.720 --> 0:12:53.079 went after the foot soldiers, the chicken ship liberals that 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:55.880 vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the 0:12:55.880 --> 0:12:58.680 ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. 0:12:58.760 --> 0:13:00.720 It's the only way we can read America of this 0:13:00.840 --> 0:13:05.040 cancerous pestilence. In January of this year, I ran across 0:13:05.040 --> 0:13:06.840 a Facebook post by a member of the right wing 0:13:06.920 --> 0:13:11.120 street gang Patriot Prayer, Carmen Estel. She said this, we 0:13:11.200 --> 0:13:13.640 are deep into spiritual warfare. Now. This is why the 0:13:13.679 --> 0:13:16.559 evildoers don't even realize how evil they truly are. They 0:13:16.559 --> 0:13:19.720 have become robotic. They are simply a vessel for the darkness. 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:23.560 When you start seeing words like robotic used to describe 0:13:23.640 --> 0:13:27.360 human beings, what you're seeing is called dehumanization. It's one 0:13:27.400 --> 0:13:29.800 of the first steps necessary if you plan to prepare 0:13:29.880 --> 0:13:32.080 one group of human beings to kill another group of 0:13:32.120 --> 0:13:35.440 human beings. Every genocide and mass killing and history has 0:13:35.480 --> 0:13:39.520 involved some degree of dehumanization. The book Less than Human 0:13:39.600 --> 0:13:43.280 by David Livingstone Smith deals with this phenomenon in great detail. 0:13:43.800 --> 0:13:47.360 He notes quote dehumanization is the belief that some beings 0:13:47.400 --> 0:13:50.520 only appear human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts, 0:13:50.559 --> 0:13:53.560 they aren't human at all. The Nazis labeled Jews as 0:13:53.679 --> 0:13:57.199 unter mentioned subhumans because they were convinced that although Jews 0:13:57.200 --> 0:13:59.640 looked every bit as human as the average Arian, this 0:13:59.720 --> 0:14:02.920 was a facade, and that concealed beneath it, Jews were 0:14:02.920 --> 0:14:19.240 really filthy, parasitic vermin. In as the Holocaust was ramping up, 0:14:19.440 --> 0:14:22.640 Hitler delivered a speech in which he described international jewelry 0:14:22.720 --> 0:14:25.920 as the ferment of decomposition of people's and states. Just 0:14:26.000 --> 0:14:28.160 as it was an antiquity, it will remain that way 0:14:28.160 --> 0:14:30.040 as long as people do not find the strength to 0:14:30.120 --> 0:14:34.600 get rid of the virus. Such language has grown increasingly 0:14:34.640 --> 0:14:38.080 common in our current political discourse. In two thousand fourteen, 0:14:38.200 --> 0:14:42.320 Fox News published an article titled, Wake Up America, Liberalism 0:14:42.360 --> 0:14:45.760 is a virus too. The article, written at the height 0:14:45.760 --> 0:14:49.680 of the Ebola outbreak, directly compared liberalism to that virulent disease. 0:14:50.120 --> 0:14:53.240 It's not so different from Adolph Hitler's constant comparisons of 0:14:53.280 --> 0:14:56.240 Jewish people to typhus than the most terrifying illness of 0:14:56.280 --> 0:14:59.280 the day now, in the interest of fairness, I googled 0:14:59.280 --> 0:15:01.440 around to see if could find examples of liberals and 0:15:01.520 --> 0:15:05.120 leftists making the same claim about conservatives. It took about 0:15:05.120 --> 0:15:07.480 half a second to find a meme saying literally that 0:15:07.880 --> 0:15:11.520 conservatism is a virus that is destroying America. It seems 0:15:11.560 --> 0:15:13.440 to have been the creation of a very lame tumbler 0:15:13.480 --> 0:15:17.000 titled conservatism is destroying our future. The humanization is not 0:15:17.080 --> 0:15:19.520 a one sided process in this country, and that kind 0:15:19.520 --> 0:15:21.760 of language should concern you no matter what side of 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:25.920 the isle it comes from. People are not viruses. Jim 0:15:25.920 --> 0:15:29.320 Hodgkinson was a politically active liberal and small business owner. 0:15:29.440 --> 0:15:31.520 He was active in the occupy movement in two thousand 0:15:31.600 --> 0:15:34.080 eleven and was interviewed by Fox two News and St. 0:15:34.080 --> 0:15:36.640 Louis about his support. At the time, Jim said, the 0:15:36.720 --> 0:15:38.720 nine and nine percent are getting pushed around and the 0:15:38.720 --> 0:15:40.920 one percent are just not giving a dam, so we've 0:15:40.920 --> 0:15:43.200 got to speak up for the whole country. In two 0:15:43.240 --> 0:15:45.960 thousand and twelve, he wrote letters to his local newspapers stating, 0:15:46.400 --> 0:15:48.720 let's vote all Republicans out of Congress and get this 0:15:48.760 --> 0:15:51.840 country back on track. At this point, Jim seemed to 0:15:51.880 --> 0:15:54.720 be a pretty normal Democrat, and like most Democrats, Jim 0:15:54.760 --> 0:15:57.320 was horrified by the election of Donald Trump. At some 0:15:57.400 --> 0:16:01.160 point between November two thousand sixteen and June two thousand seventeen, 0:16:01.360 --> 0:16:05.000 Jim Hodgkinson decided that protesting and voting was no longer enough. 0:16:05.360 --> 0:16:07.560 He took a rifle to a baseball field where several 0:16:07.600 --> 0:16:10.320 Republican congress people and their aids were practicing for a 0:16:10.400 --> 0:16:14.200 charity baseball game and opened fire. He injured five people, 0:16:14.320 --> 0:16:18.400 including Congressman Steve Scalise, before being fatally wounded by law enforcement. 0:16:18.520 --> 0:16:20.760 We do not have as complete a log of Hodgkinson's 0:16:20.800 --> 0:16:24.040 Internet history as I would like. Prominent right wing terrorists 0:16:24.040 --> 0:16:26.640 like the Magabomber left us with more data to work with, 0:16:27.120 --> 0:16:29.640 but we do know a few things about Hodgkinson. Within 0:16:29.680 --> 0:16:31.960 a year of Trump selection, his business failed and he 0:16:31.960 --> 0:16:34.040 wound up homeless, living out of his vehicle in a 0:16:34.080 --> 0:16:36.440 gym bag showering at the local y m c A. 0:16:37.280 --> 0:16:39.960 Now I have found significantly more examples of violent far 0:16:40.040 --> 0:16:44.040 right radicalism than violent far left radicalism. It's worth repeating 0:16:44.080 --> 0:16:47.000 that every single American killed by domestic terrorists in two 0:16:47.000 --> 0:16:50.640 thousand eighteen died at the hands of a right wing extremist. However, 0:16:50.880 --> 0:16:55.320 Jim is proof that violent radicalization occurs across the political spectrum. 0:16:55.360 --> 0:16:57.440 And I think that as the economy drops and the 0:16:57.480 --> 0:17:00.600 impact of climate change becomes more severe, leave more people 0:17:00.640 --> 0:17:03.480 homeless and destitute, we will see more people on the 0:17:03.560 --> 0:17:05.840 left lose hope in the ballot and turn to the 0:17:05.880 --> 0:17:09.560 bullet I don't know what path of dehumanizing rhetoric helped 0:17:09.600 --> 0:17:12.080 lead Jim to open fire on a group of strangers, 0:17:12.480 --> 0:17:14.840 but considering how much time I'm about to spend talking 0:17:14.840 --> 0:17:17.760 about right wing eliminationism, I should probably talk about another 0:17:17.840 --> 0:17:20.240 aspect of it on the left that seriously worries me. 0:17:20.880 --> 0:17:24.200 Guillotine fetishism. Now I get it. I've spent hundreds of 0:17:24.240 --> 0:17:26.919 collective hours of my life reading about the unspeakable crimes 0:17:26.920 --> 0:17:30.640 of various billionaires, most recently the Sackler family. I understand 0:17:30.680 --> 0:17:33.600 wanting to give some of these people an exceptionally short haircut. 0:17:33.880 --> 0:17:35.399 And I get that a lot of you are probably 0:17:35.480 --> 0:17:37.919 rolling your eyes and maybe even getting ready to switch podcasts, 0:17:37.920 --> 0:17:41.040 because clearly Twitter posts like this one from we Dress 0:17:41.080 --> 0:17:44.119 Elba are just jokes. If your boss ever tells you 0:17:44.119 --> 0:17:47.120 you don't need a union, it's because you need a guillotine. 0:17:47.680 --> 0:17:50.760 Prominent leftist magazine Jacobin recently started selling a faux i 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:54.280 kea guillotine poster. The tweet announcing it said so much 0:17:54.320 --> 0:17:58.280 for the tolerant left. I could find another dozen examples 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:00.600 if I really wanted to keep harping on us all day, 0:18:00.920 --> 0:18:04.639 and all these examples could be easily defended as harmless comedy. Now. 0:18:04.640 --> 0:18:07.080 I'm not going to compare this to say the ironic 0:18:07.119 --> 0:18:09.800 comments about genocide and Nazism that are so often a 0:18:09.840 --> 0:18:13.600 catalyst for fascist right wing radicalization. But given how prevalent 0:18:13.640 --> 0:18:15.840 guillotine talk has become on the left, I think it 0:18:15.880 --> 0:18:20.080 behooves us to talk for a minute about the French Revolution. Now, 0:18:20.400 --> 0:18:23.040 you could absolutely argue that a lot of those guillotined 0:18:23.119 --> 0:18:25.280 Knobby Fox had it coming, as they had spent their 0:18:25.280 --> 0:18:27.960 lives deploying oppressive violence far in excess of what was 0:18:28.000 --> 0:18:31.240 eventually returned to them. As a general rule, I support 0:18:31.240 --> 0:18:34.399 despotic leaders, be they kings or dictators losing their heads. 0:18:34.920 --> 0:18:36.760 But tens of thousands of people were killed in the 0:18:36.840 --> 0:18:39.439 violence that flowed from the French Revolution, and most of 0:18:39.440 --> 0:18:42.119 them did not have it coming. It turns out that 0:18:42.160 --> 0:18:45.200 Once a collective of angry people starts murdering, it's fucking 0:18:45.280 --> 0:18:48.320 hard to get them to stop. Where I worry about 0:18:48.320 --> 0:18:50.920 this specifically is when it comes to what happens and 0:18:50.960 --> 0:18:54.920 the chunks of urban and suburban areas occupied by leftist separatists. 0:18:55.280 --> 0:18:58.000 In place where the government retreats without too much violence, 0:18:58.080 --> 0:19:00.760 things will likely remain pleasant for the reasons we discussed 0:19:00.760 --> 0:19:03.600 in the last episode. Most people tend to want things 0:19:03.640 --> 0:19:07.159 to stay reasonable. However, in the areas where the fighting 0:19:07.200 --> 0:19:09.280 is more vicious, the trunks of cities that wind up 0:19:09.320 --> 0:19:12.880 under long term sieges separatists are likely to become correspondingly 0:19:12.920 --> 0:19:16.199 more brutal on the areas they control. This leads me 0:19:16.280 --> 0:19:20.480 to something called the brutalization effect. It's mostly been documented 0:19:20.480 --> 0:19:22.560 in the context of the death penalty, but quite a 0:19:22.560 --> 0:19:25.719 lot of the data gathered suggests that highly publicized executions 0:19:25.800 --> 0:19:27.920 lead to more violence. I'd like to quote from a 0:19:28.000 --> 0:19:31.760 University of Maryland study. It was found that the incidents 0:19:31.800 --> 0:19:34.600 of Thursday Friday homicides was greater than expected for those 0:19:34.640 --> 0:19:37.879 weeks with executions, and the incidents of Saturday Sunday homicides 0:19:37.920 --> 0:19:40.480 was less than expected for those weeks with executions. From 0:19:40.480 --> 0:19:42.680 this pattern, it was concluded that the deterrent effect of 0:19:42.720 --> 0:19:46.000 an execution, or more precisely, the publicity surrounding an execution, 0:19:46.359 --> 0:19:50.480 was canceled by its earlier brutalizing effect. Now it's hard 0:19:50.520 --> 0:19:52.800 to say how much of the brutalization effect is due 0:19:52.840 --> 0:19:54.320 to the death penalty and how much of it is 0:19:54.359 --> 0:19:57.760 due to the publicity surrounding executions, but still this suggests 0:19:57.760 --> 0:20:00.280 that the early stages of the Second Americans have a war. 0:20:00.440 --> 0:20:03.119 The deaths and violence that would cause would make people, 0:20:03.200 --> 0:20:08.120 even traditionally peaceful liberala leftist people more comfortable with deadly violence, 0:20:08.640 --> 0:20:11.119 and in the face of daily mortar fire, sniper attacks, 0:20:11.119 --> 0:20:14.040 and bombings, these rebels are likely to lead mass purges 0:20:14.080 --> 0:20:17.080 of the people who they feel represent their suffering. In 0:20:17.119 --> 0:20:19.720 most cases, I imagine it would be wealthy families, law 0:20:19.800 --> 0:20:22.720 enforcement officers and the families of law enforcement officers, as 0:20:22.720 --> 0:20:25.080 well as political activists on the other side of the 0:20:25.080 --> 0:20:29.000 political spectrum. This violence would also become heavily publicized elsewhere 0:20:29.000 --> 0:20:31.720 in the nation and regions still controlled by the regime, 0:20:32.080 --> 0:20:34.440 Regions where most people are on the opposite side of 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:37.600 the ideological spectrum and the violence they see being done 0:20:37.640 --> 0:20:40.040 to their fellow travelers will make them more comfortable with 0:20:40.040 --> 0:20:43.840 the government dishing out mass violence to separatists. They are 0:20:43.880 --> 0:20:46.399 already signs right now that political leaders on the right 0:20:46.440 --> 0:20:48.959 are pushing the idea that leftists and liberals are not 0:20:49.040 --> 0:20:51.800 really Americans. On the day I wrote most of this episode, 0:20:51.840 --> 0:20:54.000 in mid April, I came upon an email by the 0:20:54.000 --> 0:20:57.480 Trump campaign to his donors and supporters. I would like 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:00.760