Speaker 1: We don't usually think of the American right wing as
Speaker 1: protesters or activists. Conservatives tend to be older, for one thing,
Speaker 1: and they also tend to be on the side of
Speaker 1: state power, the side of law and order. Liberals and
Speaker 1: leftists are more likely to agitate for major changes in
Speaker 1: the status quo. But right wing activism isn't unheard of either,
Speaker 1: and recent experience has made it clear that when the
Speaker 1: right stands up, they can make a serious impact. The
Speaker 1: two fourteen Bundy standoff made national news. What started as
Speaker 1: a confrontation over Clive and Bundy's refusal to pay grazing
Speaker 1: fees to the Bureau of Land Management turned into a
Speaker 1: minor right wing uprising against state control. Hundreds of militiamen
Speaker 1: from all over the country, clad in body armor and
Speaker 1: packing military grade weaponry, stood against federal law enforcement agents
Speaker 1: and made them back down. The militiamen got their way,
Speaker 1: more or less, and they got their way again two
Speaker 1: years later, when Clive and Bundy's sons led a group
Speaker 1: that occupied the malhur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I was
Speaker 1: actually near the Malhir Refuge for a little bit of that,
Speaker 1: not at the refuge itself, but in the town of Burns, Oregon,
Speaker 1: talking to locals about what it was like to live
Speaker 1: through the armed insurrection of a far right militia. People
Speaker 1: told me stories and militiamen roaring through town and pickup trucks,
Speaker 1: carrying guns into local businesses and terrifying residents. The way
Speaker 1: they described these men reminded me more than a little
Speaker 1: of how citizens of Constantinevka, a city in eastern Ukraine,
Speaker 1: described the Russian backed separatists who briefly occupied their city.
Speaker 1: Some of these men were literal Russian soldiers, of course,
Speaker 1: but others were foreigners and local partisans, people with no
Speaker 1: military training but a love of guns and feeling powerful. Now.
Speaker 1: In both Bundy occupations, the specific justification for what they
Speaker 1: were doing was not something with a lot of broad appeal.
Speaker 1: Their grievances were niche and rural. Most people who didn't
Speaker 1: live near Malhor viewed the entire thing as something of
Speaker 1: a silly farce. The occupiers were male, dick shaped candies
Speaker 1: and care packages, and mocked as y'all. kDa. It is
Speaker 1: a great nickname, but I don't think most Americans really
Speaker 1: realize how fucking terrifying A true y'all Cada would be
Speaker 1: a few thousands sufficiently motivated, organized, and angry rural Americans
Speaker 1: have the power to bring this nation to its needs.
Speaker 1: In the last episode of It Could Happen Here, I
Speaker 1: envisioned the start of a second American Civil War, driven
Speaker 1: by President Trump's refusal to leave office and a series
Speaker 1: of urban left wing uprisings. Today, we're going to look
Speaker 1: at another possibility, one that involves the other half of
Speaker 1: the American political equation. Today we're talking about the revenge
Speaker 1: of Rural America. Exit polls taken in the two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen election revealed that a whopping three quarters of Americans
Speaker 1: felt the country was growing more divided. Ground zero for
Speaker 1: this divide was the split between rural and urban voters.
Speaker 1: One way to look at Donald Trump's upset victory is
Speaker 1: as the revenge of Rural America. Rural areas across the
Speaker 1: country saw an unprecedented turnout, and those Americans voted overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: for Donald Trump. Representative Tom Cole, Republican from Oklahoma, said this,
Speaker 1: at the time, we've got some big chisms out there.
Speaker 1: Rural America's much more Republican than ever before. In the
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen midterm elections, the urban rural divide in
Speaker 1: America was even more pronounced. Only twenty nine percent of
Speaker 1: Democratic voters lived in rural areas, the remainder being suburban
Speaker 1: or urban. For comparison, a whopping forty six percent of
Speaker 1: Republican voters live in rural areas, only nineteen percent live
Speaker 1: in cities. Urban and rural America see each other as
Speaker 1: increasingly two different nations. The one strong commonality between them
Speaker 1: is that they both believe the other chunk of America
Speaker 1: hates them. A two thousand eighteen PU survey revealed that
Speaker 1: majorities of both urban and rural America believe the rest
Speaker 1: of the country quote looks down on them. Here's the
Speaker 1: New York Times quote. P has never asked this question
Speaker 1: before in a way that allows us to tell if
Speaker 1: the sentiment is becoming more common, but election results show
Speaker 1: that urban and rural Americans are increasingly at odds with
Speaker 1: each other. The new survey confirms both believe the other
Speaker 1: group doesn't understand their problems or share their values, and
Speaker 1: political scientists warned that place based resentments no one respects
Speaker 1: rural America or Trump is at war with cities can
Speaker 1: be easily exploited by politicians. Kathy Kramer, the University of
Speaker 1: what Wisconsin political scientists who helped Pew compile this report,
Speaker 1: believes this divide has gotten worse since the two thousand
Speaker 1: and sixteen election and that it represents something new and
Speaker 1: dangerous in American politics. Quote. We're at a political moment
Speaker 1: where cultural divides overlap with political divides, which overlap with geography. Now.
Speaker 1: I find that Pew study interesting for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 1: but the most concerning thing to me is that it
Speaker 1: shows this divide between rural and urban America has not
Speaker 1: always been as bad as it is today. Here's the
Speaker 1: Times again. Quote. Registered voters in urban areas have become
Speaker 1: more likely to identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic. The
Speaker 1: opposite trend has been more pronounced among rural residents, with
Speaker 1: a notable shift after two thousand eight. Before then, rural
Speaker 1: voters were relatively evenly divided between the two parties. You
Speaker 1: may not find this divide as frightening as I do,
Speaker 1: but I think it presages something potentially quite terrible. In
Speaker 1: addition to trending further right every year, the rural United
Speaker 1: States kind this seems to be falling the funk apart.
Speaker 1: Cattle rustling is on the rise again across the Southwest
Speaker 1: and states like Oklahoma, Texas, and California. It's reached levels
Speaker 1: not seen since literal cowboy days. Now modern wrestling is
Speaker 1: usually driven by sky higher rates of drug abuse. In
Speaker 1: other words, people are stealing cows to buy pain killers
Speaker 1: in meth Agricultural theft of all kinds is actually on
Speaker 1: the rise across the rural US. Entire semi trucks filled
Speaker 1: with nuts and oranges are regularly hijacked via complex schemes
Speaker 1: that often involve fake trucking companies. Rural America is also
Speaker 1: growing more violent. For most of American history, living out
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere was the safer decision, since
Speaker 1: cities tended to have much higher crime rates. But last year,
Speaker 1: for the first time in a decade, violent crime rates
Speaker 1: and rural areas rose above the national average. America's suicide
Speaker 1: rate also increased by more than twenty from two thousand
Speaker 1: one to two thousand fifteen. Most of that increase happened
Speaker 1: out in the country. The increases in violent crime and
Speaker 1: suicide are both due at least in part to the
Speaker 1: fact that gun ownership is vastly higher out in the country.
Speaker 1: Scent of rural Americans own a firearm compared to nineteen
Speaker 1: percent of city dwellers and twenty eight percent of suburban Americans.
Speaker 1: Three quarters of rural Americans own more than one firearm,
Speaker 1: and forty eight percent of gun owning rural Americans use
Speaker 1: their firearm to hunt. So these people have practical experience
Speaker 1: using a gun out in the world to hit live,
Speaker 1: moving targets. Now stick all this together, and what do
Speaker 1: you have? It sure looks like you have all the
Speaker 1: ingredients you'd need if you wanted to cook up one
Speaker 1: ass kicker of an insurgency. And if the second American
Speaker 1: Civil War kicks off in the rural areas, I can
Speaker 1: almost guarantee you it will start with a massive new
Speaker 1: push for national gun control. Kamala Harris, easily one of
Speaker 1: the primary front running Democratic candidates in the current bevy
Speaker 1: of candidates, is outspoken about her desire to ban all
Speaker 1: semi automatic firearms. This would ban the vast majority of
Speaker 1: America's civilian owned guns, literally making tens of millions of
Speaker 1: people into criminals overnight. The only weapons left legal would
Speaker 1: be revolvers, shotguns, and bolt action hunting rifles, which are
Speaker 1: ironically the very weapons outside of bolt action weapons most
Speaker 1: likely to be used in violent crime. In the immediate
Speaker 1: wake of President Trump's decision to declare a state of
Speaker 1: emergency over the border, conservative never trumpers like Rick Wilson
Speaker 1: took to Twitter to warn not that Trump might seize power,
Speaker 1: that setting this precedent would inevitably lead to Democrats declaring
Speaker 1: a state of emergency of their own over gun violence
Speaker 1: once they were back in the Oval Office. On January eight,
Speaker 1: during a scene and appearance, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg
Speaker 1: said this quote, if we really want to start talking
Speaker 1: about the national emergency, like the President likes to talk about,
Speaker 1: forty Americans dying annually from gun violence, is a pretty
Speaker 1: damn good one to start with. Last year, The Atlantic
Speaker 1: published an article by Elizabeth Gaitin evaluating the extent of
Speaker 1: the president's emergency hours. In February two thousand, nineteen, Pacific
Speaker 1: Standard Magazine applied that to the possibility of a national
Speaker 1: emergency over guns. Quote. The legal infrastructure to levy an
Speaker 1: emergency declaration Goyton rights exists thanks to the Presidential Emergency
Speaker 1: Action documents developed by the Eisenhower administration designed to address
Speaker 1: such extra legal actions as declarations of martial law and
Speaker 1: the suppression of habeas corpus. These documents could potentially extend
Speaker 1: to encompass outright firearms confiscations given the scope of a
Speaker 1: national crisis. Now. Back during Hurricane KATRAINA, the New Orleans
Speaker 1: Police Department ordered evacuating citizens to hand over their firearms
Speaker 1: to the police Superintendent Edwin P. Compass the third later
Speaker 1: declared a blanket confiscation of all firearms in the city,
Speaker 1: saying only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons. At
Speaker 1: the time, a federal court issued a restraining order to
Speaker 1: stop the weapons confiscations, so they did not go through
Speaker 1: all the way, but weapons were confiscated. And of course
Speaker 1: that was a very different time with a Republican president
Speaker 1: and a few hundred fewer mass shootings in recent memory.
Speaker 1: President Harris's semi automatic weapons ban would have to be
Speaker 1: followed by mass confiscation. Tens of millions of gun owners
Speaker 1: will not hand over their weapons willingly. There are literally
Speaker 1: more privately owned firearms than people in the United States,
Speaker 1: and half of those guns are owned by just three
Speaker 1: percent of gun owners. I'm going to give you one
Speaker 1: guess as to which part of the country most of
Speaker 1: those gun owners live. Earlier this year, Washington State passed
Speaker 1: a new set of gun control regulations. The restrictions are
Speaker 1: fairly mild compared to Kamala Harris's proposition, and the new
Speaker 1: law is popular with the state's liberal majority. Fifty nine
Speaker 1: percent of Washingtonian supported it, but most of those people.
Speaker 1: Most of those supporters live in urban areas like Seattle.
Speaker 1: In conservative, rural and suburban Washington, people are pissed. Sixteen
Speaker 1: sheriffs have so far declared that they will not enforce
Speaker 1: the new law. Here's the Wall Street Journal quote. Sheriff
Speaker 1: Tom Jones of Grant County, also in eastern Washington, is
Speaker 1: one of a number of sheriffs who have said that
Speaker 1: they would wait for the courts to rule before telling
Speaker 1: their deputies to enforce the new law. I swore an
Speaker 1: oath to defend our citizens and their constitutionally protected rights,
Speaker 1: said mister Jones, whose county voted against the gun control
Speaker 1: measure by more than two to one. I do not
Speaker 1: believe the popular vote over rules that now there are
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of heavily armed Americans right now who
Speaker 1: see armed resistance to the state as something aspirational as
Speaker 1: a dream. Most of these guys, and they are mostly guys,
Speaker 1: don't have any real combat training. A lot of them
Speaker 1: are probably just LARPing, play acting. But the Bundy standoff
Speaker 1: was proof that even Larper's with a shipload of a
Speaker 1: r fifteens can scare the federal government in the face
Speaker 1: of a major gun band. How many rural communities and
Speaker 1: how many states would say fuck you to a democratic president.
Speaker 1: The Yellow vest movement kicked off as a suburban and
Speaker 1: rural movement in France, a revolt from the more conservative
Speaker 1: sections of that country society against a neoliberal president and
Speaker 1: his policies. I'm going to quote from the New York
Speaker 1: Times here. The movement originated in May when a woman
Speaker 1: named Priscilla Ludovski, who has an internet cosmetics business and
Speaker 1: lives in the suburb southeast of Paris, launched an internet
Speaker 1: petition calling for a drop in gas prices. She broke
Speaker 1: down the price into its components, noting the taxes made
Speaker 1: up more than half the cost. In France per leader
Speaker 1: lead free gas was one point four one euros on Sunday,
Speaker 1: or about six dollars per gallon. The petition went mostly
Speaker 1: unnoticed until October when Eric drew it. A truck driver
Speaker 1: from the same area as miss Ladowski ran across it
Speaker 1: and circulated it among his Facebook friends. Newspapers began writing
Speaker 1: out the petition, and the number of signature skyrocketed from
Speaker 1: an initial seven hundred to two hundred thousand. Now, the
Speaker 1: yellowvest movement in France is not a purely conservative thing
Speaker 1: within France itself. It's actually much more divided than that.
Speaker 1: But I think it provides a good look at how
Speaker 1: an activist movement can launch amongst older and more conservative
Speaker 1: segments of a modern society. I also think rising gas
Speaker 1: prices could very well be another generator of rural rage
Speaker 1: here in America. People who live in the country spend
Speaker 1: more on gas because they have to drive further distances.
Speaker 1: There is a good chance that any Green New Deal
Speaker 1: style plan to slow global warming introduced by a democratic
Speaker 1: administration would include to gas tax. Rural areas grow our
Speaker 1: food in a very real way that keep the cities alive,
Speaker 1: and the people who live in those places know it.
Speaker 1: Just to say, air traffic controllers and stewardesses had the
Speaker 1: power to ind a government shutdown by threatening air travel.
Speaker 1: Rural Americans have something they too can hold captive. In
Speaker 1: their case, it's the food supply. This would of course
Speaker 1: require a great deal of organization, lists of demands, and
Speaker 1: political figureheads to speak for the movement, to lend it
Speaker 1: a shape and a sense of purpose, and I can
Speaker 1: guarantee you that Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer,
Speaker 1: would at least try to be one of them. Joey
Speaker 1: is one of the leading figures in the right wing
Speaker 1: activist movement that's arisen since the two thousand sixteen election.
Speaker 1: Along with the Proud Boys, Joey and Patriot Prayer have
Speaker 1: spent the last two years brawling against Antifa with fists
Speaker 1: and flagpoles, but they have also held numerous armed marches
Speaker 1: in full body armor carrying rifles. Gibson lives in Vancouver, Washington.
Speaker 1: Most members of his gang come from either suburban or
Speaker 1: rural areas around Portland, Oregon. If you watch hours and
Speaker 1: hourage of their footage marches and ee O rants like
Speaker 1: I have, you'll regularly hear these people describe their constant
Speaker 1: bloody rallies in Portland as something of a crusade. Christian
Speaker 1: Holy warriors descending into a decadent left wing city to
Speaker 1: purchase of sin. In the last episode, I played several
Speaker 1: clips of Alex Jones calling for a new civil war
Speaker 1: against the left. Joey Gibson just happens to be a
Speaker 1: regular guest on Info Wars. Last December, he joined the
Speaker 1: show to talk about Washington's new gun control laws. It's
Speaker 1: out of control and I've seen the videos on your shite.
Speaker 1: You should plug no place people can find these. We're
Speaker 1: gonna post some of these tempful wars dot com. You're
Speaker 1: getting crowds of hundreds and hundreds of people in small towns,
Speaker 1: counties coming out and they are really pitched about this.
Speaker 1: They're really upset. We had almost three people in the
Speaker 1: county with about ten thousand people in it, and they
Speaker 1: were extremely concerned. They're really upset. They're sick and tired
Speaker 1: of Seattle telling them what they can or cannot do.
Speaker 1: These people just they just want to be free, They
Speaker 1: want to be left alone. And so I think this
Speaker 1: is the key in states like Washington and Oregon, the
Speaker 1: keys to go around to all the counties that believe
Speaker 1: in the car Institution, which is about nine of the
Speaker 1: counties of Washington State, most of our conservative Now I've
Speaker 1: met Joey. He's not a brilliant man or a likely
Speaker 1: pick for a right wing revolutionary war lord. He would try,
Speaker 1: but for my money, a likelier pick for rural insurrectionist
Speaker 1: war lord would be someone like Ryan Bundy. You've seen
Speaker 1: Ryan on the news a few times, especially if you
Speaker 1: kept up with the Bundy standoff back in two thousand fourteen.
Speaker 1: He's one of the sons of Clive and Bunny, the
Speaker 1: old racist rancher who masterminded that standoff with the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Land Management in Bunkerville, Nevada. Ryan is the one
Speaker 1: with the facial deformity. This has led a lot of
Speaker 1: people online to treat him as if he is a
Speaker 1: big dum dummy because bigotry knows no political bounds. But
Speaker 1: Ryan Bundy is not dumb. He was probably the driving
Speaker 1: force behind the two thousand sixteen occupation of the Malhir
Speaker 1: Wildlife Refuge. Ryan spent months in jail over that, but
Speaker 1: he defended himself against the court and one. Some of
Speaker 1: this was due to the serious mistakes made by the prosecution,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it came down to Ryan's personal charisma,
Speaker 1: his ability to sway a jury of his peers to
Speaker 1: believe in the righteousness of his cause. Right now, Ryan
Speaker 1: is running for governor of Nevada. He's probably a long
Speaker 1: shot candidate, but it doesn't really matter. Dozens upon dozens
Speaker 1: of heavily armed men and women were willing to gather
Speaker 1: and put their lives on the line for his family twice.
Speaker 1: There is a weird religious crusade angle to what the
Speaker 1: Bundees have been doing, based on a fringe Mormon prophecy.
Speaker 1: The fantastic podcast Bundyville, which I heartily recommend, goes into
Speaker 1: more detail on this, but the short of it is
Speaker 1: they believe that they've been chosen by God to defend
Speaker 1: the Constitution, or at least their interpretation of the Constitution.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of nutbar stuff that I think
Speaker 1: a lot of liberals are prone to laugh about. I
Speaker 1: don't find anything funny about the Bundees. Two people have
Speaker 1: already been radicalized into killing by their rhetoric. In June
Speaker 1: of two thousand fourteen, Jerried and Amanda Miller, fresh from
Speaker 1: taking part in the standoff at Bundy Ranch, drove into
Speaker 1: Las Vegas and walked into a Cisi's Pizza with a
Speaker 1: small arsenal. They opened fire on two officers sitting and
Speaker 1: eating lunch, killing both. As they started shooting, the couple
Speaker 1: allegedly yelled this is the start of a revolution. One
Speaker 1: dead officer was covered in a Gadsden flag, another was
Speaker 1: covered in a Nazi flag. Jared and Amanda killed one
Speaker 1: more person, a random bystander, before dying in a gunfight
Speaker 1: with police. Now, the Millers had a lot of other
Speaker 1: radicalizing factors behind their rampage than just the Bundy standoff,
Speaker 1: but it was an important step in their journey. Lavoy
Speaker 1: Finnickham is probably a better example of a man who
Speaker 1: died explicitly for the Bundy's. He was shot reaching for
Speaker 1: a gun after being stopped with Ryan and his brother
Speaker 1: Amon during the Malhir occupation. In June of two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: William Keiebler, a Utah militia leader and close adherent of
Speaker 1: the Bundies, was arrested and charged for trying to detonate
Speaker 1: homemade bombs at a BLM building in Arizona. So that's
Speaker 1: three distinct cases and four individual people who have been
Speaker 1: radicalized into violent, deadly action by the rhetoric and beliefs
Speaker 1: of the Bundy clan. In a situation where order starts
Speaker 1: to break down even more in rural America and extremist
Speaker 1: groups begin to tear at the fabric of our society,
Speaker 1: you can bet the Bundy's will not just sit back
Speaker 1: and watch. So far, the Bundy family have mostly agitated
Speaker 1: around land rights and what they depict as the struggle
Speaker 1: of American ranchers against the tyrannical government. But they and
Speaker 1: their supporters are also huge backers of the Second Amendment,
Speaker 1: and if they were to organize even violently in defense
Speaker 1: of the right to bear arms, I think you would
Speaker 1: see them receive a lot of support from even mainstream conservatives.
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular conservatives in
Speaker 1: modern America. Here's a clip from a December four, two
Speaker 1: seventeen episode of his show. During an interview with a
Speaker 1: gun control advocate, the fact is, we need to have
Speaker 1: fewer guns, and we need to talk about banning entire
Speaker 1: classes of especially dangerous firearms like US all weapons. And
Speaker 1: I think we have to talk about not just banning them,
Speaker 1: but requiring them people allow the government to buy them back.
Speaker 1: So you're universal gun confiscations. What you're talking about about
Speaker 1: universal gun confiscations. So you're saying ban a class of
Speaker 1: firearms that would be any rifle with you know, a
Speaker 1: capacity of more than one above a certain caliber. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the criteria are that you're suggesting,
Speaker 1: but basically any gun they would use for deer hunting
Speaker 1: would be banned. No, I would make a distinction between
Speaker 1: long guns that are technically semi automatic of the kind
Speaker 1: like my dad uses the taunts, and semi automatic assault
Speaker 1: weapons that have to gon owners and hunters like me.
Speaker 1: These are meaningless distinctions. But let's just go right to
Speaker 1: the meat of it. What do you do to people
Speaker 1: who won't sell them back? Um? I think you. I
Speaker 1: think you had a bare minimum sort of find them
Speaker 1: severely for it, and build an incentive for them to
Speaker 1: selve them ready for the civil war that would ensue
Speaker 1: when you try and take people's guns. And I'm serious. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't think of many Americans I personally despise more
Speaker 1: than Tucker Carlson, but I don't think he's wrong about that.
Speaker 1: And if large chunks of rural America declared their resistance
Speaker 1: to the federal government, the state would not have a
Speaker 1: lot of options for stopping them. Both rural and urban
Speaker 1: America have seen declines in the number of police officers
Speaker 1: in recent years, but the rural parts of this country
Speaker 1: are the only place where that dropping cops has led
Speaker 1: to a surge in crime. So rural Americans, who grow
Speaker 1: most of our food feel increasingly isolated from the majority
Speaker 1: of the United States. They are already dealing with a
Speaker 1: significant breakdown of civil order. And oh yeah, they just
Speaker 1: happen to have most of America's three hundred something million
Speaker 1: privately owned firearms. We don't, don't, I hope. At this point,
Speaker 1: I've established how very possible a rural revolt is. Now
Speaker 1: let's take a look at how it might actually happen.
Speaker 1: Head north from San Francisco on the I five, and
Speaker 1: before long, the verdant green of the Bay will give
Speaker 1: away to rolling yellow hills, creeping higher and higher until
Speaker 1: they become mountains. By the time you hit Read in California,
Speaker 1: about three hours north from Silicon Valley, you'll be in
Speaker 1: a place that does not feel like cal Alifornia, or
Speaker 1: at least not the California that most of the world knows.
Speaker 1: Reading is not a progressive hippie town like so many
Speaker 1: small cities in northern California. It's filled with gun stores,
Speaker 1: gigantic trucks, Bible schools, and churches. As you near reading,
Speaker 1: you start to see strange signs, flags that bear a
Speaker 1: yellow circle with two exes inside it on a green background.
Speaker 1: This is the flag of the State of Jefferson. The
Speaker 1: double exes stand for the fact that most rural Californians
Speaker 1: believe they have been double crossed by the big cities
Speaker 1: where most Californians reside. The State of Jefferson movement wants
Speaker 1: to secede from California so they can pay fewer taxes,
Speaker 1: particularly on gasoline, which California taxes at a higher rate
Speaker 1: than any other state. Jeffersonians or wanna be Jeffersonians, however
Speaker 1: you prefer to identify them, also advocate for looser gun laws,
Speaker 1: more in line with so called free states like Texas.
Speaker 1: You see a lot of Trump flags in this part
Speaker 1: of California, at least more than you see in other
Speaker 1: parts of the state. Most Californians, if they've even heard
Speaker 1: of the state of Jefferson, view it is a big joke.
Speaker 1: The movement has existed for decades now without ever managing
Speaker 1: to move forward on their dreams of secession. But I
Speaker 1: can say with confidence that for many people in rural
Speaker 1: nor Caw, the state of Jefferson is anything but a joke.
Speaker 1: From two thousand thirteen to two thousand sixteen, I spent
Speaker 1: increasing chunks of time in rural inland California, mostly in
Speaker 1: the tiny mountain communities in and around Reading. You probably
Speaker 1: haven't heard of any of the towns I lived in.
Speaker 1: They are not tourist destinations. They have names like red Bluff, Weaverville, Dunsmere,
Speaker 1: and Shingletown. The place I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: was Manton, a small community tucked deep in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere. Most residents in Manton either grew weed or
Speaker 1: cooked meth. Some did both. There are two roads into Manton,
Speaker 1: one long and lonesome road from red Bluff and a
Speaker 1: harrepin mountain road in from Shingletown, and all the months
Speaker 1: I spent there over three years, I did not see
Speaker 1: a single police car. Manton is not entirely free from
Speaker 1: the long arm of the law, but most of what
Speaker 1: transpires there is well outside of its grasp. That fact
Speaker 1: does not make Manton an oddity in rural California. In
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, McClatchy, a media company based in Sacramento,
Speaker 1: investigated the number of law enforcement officers in rural California.
Speaker 1: Here's how the Sacramento Be summarized things quote. Departments in
Speaker 1: multiple jurisdictions are operating with skeleton stabs, McClatchy found, pushing
Speaker 1: response times into hours, or sometimes leaving residents without a
Speaker 1: response at all. In Trinity County, deputies regularly cover hundreds
Speaker 1: of miles of territory alone. When law enforcement does arrive
Speaker 1: in many outlying places, it's often a single officer, cut
Speaker 1: off from back up and in some cases communication with
Speaker 1: his or her department. We have no money, we have
Speaker 1: no people, said Modoc County Sheriff Mike Pointdexter, echoing more
Speaker 1: than a dozen rural California sheriffs. We don't have near
Speaker 1: enough people. We just don't now. McClatchy interviewed officers and
Speaker 1: citizens and reviewed crime statistics for twenty five rural Californian counties.
Speaker 1: These places accounted for forty one percent of the state's
Speaker 1: land mass but just four percent of its population. McClatchy
Speaker 1: found that from two thousand eight to two thousands. Seventeen,
Speaker 1: the number of rural deputies in these areas dropped from
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred and fifty eight to sixteen hundred and ten.
Speaker 1: This means roughly sixteen hundred men and women are responsible
Speaker 1: for maintaining order in nearly half of America's third largest state.
Speaker 1: Right now, the state of Jefferson is only in favor
Speaker 1: of seceding from California. They want to be the United
Speaker 1: States is fifty first state. But if you listen to
Speaker 1: how these people talk, the amount of anger they have
Speaker 1: for urban Californians, you might conclude that they could be
Speaker 1: convinced to take more extreme action. I found an l
Speaker 1: A Times article about the state of Jefferson. The journalist
Speaker 1: who wrote it went to a meeting some of these
Speaker 1: people held, and he quoted the speech of a prominent
Speaker 1: State of Jefferson advocate, Mark Baird, a rancher in Siskiyou County.
Speaker 1: Mark told his fellow rural Californians, you're the ones being
Speaker 1: exterminated by a lack of liberty. Now that language, the
Speaker 1: word exterminated. That's how you prime people for violence. And
Speaker 1: there is enough truth behind his words to make them stick.
Speaker 1: Rural Californians are just as poor as rural Texans, but
Speaker 1: they're also burden by California's much higher taxes. A gas
Speaker 1: tax makes sense in l a in fact, it's necessary
Speaker 1: to keep the air breathable. But if you live in
Speaker 1: Shasta County and you need a big truck to do
Speaker 1: the kind of work people do out in the sticks,
Speaker 1: and you've got to drive eighty miles a day paying
Speaker 1: California gas prices well twelve extra since per gallon, is
Speaker 1: a real hardship. And by the way, these people love
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. The president currently enjoys a s approval rating
Speaker 1: in rural America. If Trump is voted out or impeached,
Speaker 1: it would not take much to get millions of people
Speaker 1: to believe this was part of some deep state conspiracy
Speaker 1: to steal liberty and also guns. That exact fear is
Speaker 1: literally what caused the birth of the American militia movement
Speaker 1: back in the late nineteen eighties. Now at the time
Speaker 1: they called it the New World Order, but the basic
Speaker 1: idea is that a socialist government was coming to take
Speaker 1: their guns. That's why all these militias started. People like
Speaker 1: Timothy McVeigh have killed over this stuff before So if
Speaker 1: rural America decides to revolt, what would that look like.
Speaker 1: How could four percent of a state effectively fight back
Speaker 1: against the night the six percent who live in cities.
Speaker 1: It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Golden
Speaker 1: State to the rest of America, not because of Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley or Hollywood, but because California feeds this country. It
Speaker 1: leads the state in cash receipts for crops forty seven
Speaker 1: billion dollars a year and much more. At this point.
Speaker 1: The nearest state behind it, Iowa, is only twenty seven
Speaker 1: billion in receipts. Texas only generates twenty three and a
Speaker 1: half billion. California's cash receipts for agriculture were more than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona,
Speaker 1: and New Mexico combined. The state leads the nation in
Speaker 1: sixty six crucial crops and grows more than nine of
Speaker 1: the nation's almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, raisins, kiwi's olives, peaches, pistachios, prunes, pomegranates,
Speaker 1: sweet rice, and walnuts. The bulk of California's food, including
Speaker 1: nearly all its beef, comes from the densely farmed Central Valley,
Speaker 1: but seven many five percent of California's water comes from
Speaker 1: the watersheds north of Sacramento, which means the so called
Speaker 1: state of Jefferson, were it to organize itself and revolt,
Speaker 1: could cut off access to the water that makes California's
Speaker 1: agriculture possible. Eight percent of California's water demand is in
Speaker 1: the southern two thirds of the state. Right now, it
Speaker 1: still seems like a long shot. But in the wake
Speaker 1: of a massive, sweeping gun band and remember most economists
Speaker 1: say we're right around the corner from another massive economic crash.
Speaker 1: I brought up the Occupy movement last episode two and
Speaker 1: how a similar movement might cause a right wing crackdown
Speaker 1: that sparks the Civil War. I can see that same
Speaker 1: sort of activist movement providing an opportunity for a far
Speaker 1: right rural insurgent movement. After all, Occupy rose up itself
Speaker 1: after the election of a Democratic president in an economic collapse.
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Beto O'Rourke, three of the
Speaker 1: most prominent potential Democratic candidates, are all very unpopular among
Speaker 1: the far left. So imagine this assault weapons band is
Speaker 1: enacted while the economy is in the shitter, and cities
Speaker 1: across the US are convulsed with protests and of patients.
Speaker 1: Even if these occupations and protests avoid the rioting I
Speaker 1: theorized about last episode, it would still take a massive
Speaker 1: toll on law enforcement, and that would look a lot
Speaker 1: like opportunity to rural separatists who are sick and tired
Speaker 1: of city folk telling them what to do. All the
Speaker 1: water that grows California's crops is pumped south. It doesn't
Speaker 1: just slide down there naturally. Pumps can be blown up.
Speaker 1: The crops grown in the Central Valley are all transported
Speaker 1: by trucks traveling on highways. Few I e d s
Speaker 1: could cripple transit for days, and it just so happens
Speaker 1: that rural America is a wash in and ingredient you
Speaker 1: would need to make a really great I E D.
Speaker 1: Tanna write is a bipartite explosive compound. It is safe
Speaker 1: to handle, not explosive until mixed, and even then only
Speaker 1: explosive when used with a detonator or shot with a rifle.
Speaker 1: But tanna wite can be converted into something much more
Speaker 1: dangerous with ease David Cocolin, the counterinsurgency expert in former
Speaker 1: State Department strategists, told me this. I am astounded. You
Speaker 1: can buy Tanna Write online. Tanna Write is basically amin.
Speaker 1: All World War two bombs were filled with this stuff
Speaker 1: that is essentially the same thing set up by impact
Speaker 1: or a small T and T charge. I see no
Speaker 1: legitimate purpose to tanner wite. If you took the ammonium
Speaker 1: nitrate compound, you would then have a substance called ANFO,
Speaker 1: the classic ira a explosive. Now, Kilcolan told me that
Speaker 1: anyone in a farming community has access to the chemicals
Speaker 1: you would need to turn tanner wite into anto and
Speaker 1: that quote it's very safe to use and transport as
Speaker 1: an insurgent. So for full disclosure, I myself have used
Speaker 1: Tanna Write dozens of times over the years and I
Speaker 1: love it. Normally, you only set up like a half
Speaker 1: pound charge and you shoot it with a rifle from
Speaker 1: a distance and it blows up and it's fun. I
Speaker 1: can remember one time my friends and I set a
Speaker 1: four pound charge one time, and only one time, because
Speaker 1: it left a fucking crater and rained dirt down on
Speaker 1: our heads from two hundred feet away. A lot of
Speaker 1: Americans owned tanner Write, not just in California. When I
Speaker 1: lived in Texas, I had twenty pounds at a time
Speaker 1: delivered to my door. Tanna Wite gets its name from
Speaker 1: its inventor, a guy named David Tanner. Mr. Tanner lives
Speaker 1: in Oregon, and that's where most tanner Wite is made.
Speaker 1: Residents of the so called state of Jefferson would only
Speaker 1: have to drive a couple hours to buy it straight
Speaker 1: from the source. So say a rural insurgency starts, and
Speaker 1: say this insurgency strikes at southern California's water supply, maybe
Speaker 1: going after the pumps and the Taha Choppi mountains that
Speaker 1: carry it south. Or maybe they focus on bombing highways,
Speaker 1: shutting down transit on the roads of America's most populous state.
Speaker 1: A few hundred committed insurgents with a good plan and
Speaker 1: decent organization could do a tremendous amount of damage this way.
Speaker 1: Law enforcement, already wildly undermanned in rural California, would need
Speaker 1: to bring in help from the cities, and if those
Speaker 1: cities are convulsed with big gas occupy style protests, well,
Speaker 1: at some point the government would have to deploy troops
Speaker 1: to secure the nation's food supply. This would be a
Speaker 1: terrifying precedent for a number of reasons. For one thing,
Speaker 1: most U S soldiers come from rural areas, and California
Speaker 1: is one of the major recruiting grounds for the United
Speaker 1: States military. The d o D would have to take
Speaker 1: great care to ensure soldiers weren't being sent to pacify
Speaker 1: unrest being generated by their own friends and family members.
Speaker 1: That might lead to the same sort of situation we
Speaker 1: see in Afghanistan, constant insider attacks and desertions, where soldiers
Speaker 1: take their experience and their weapons and melt into the
Speaker 1: deep woods with their comrades. Their new comrades, this rural
Speaker 1: insurgency would not stay confined to California very long. Terrorist
Speaker 1: tactics have a nasty tendency to spread virally. A series
Speaker 1: of truck bombings and rural northern California could lead rather
Speaker 1: quickly to similar attacks all around the nation, not just bombings,
Speaker 1: but hijackings. In many cases, these thefts might rely on
Speaker 1: truck drivers themselves, allowing loads to be hoisted in exchange
Speaker 1: for a cut of the money. Black market sales of
Speaker 1: food would provide more funding for the insurgency, even as
Speaker 1: food prices started to rise in the cities. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: state and the federal government could get its shipped together
Speaker 1: quickly enough to restore the flow of water to southern
Speaker 1: California in a timely manner. Even so, a month or two,
Speaker 1: even a few weeks without sufficient water would be crippling
Speaker 1: to those farmers in their crops. Even a short lived
Speaker 1: and very localized insurgency would cause a massive spike in
Speaker 1: food prices. Now, food prices are traditionally the single biggest
Speaker 1: predictor of civil conflict. Twitter and Facebook get a lot
Speaker 1: of credit for the Arabs bring of two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: but that series of revolutions, uprisings, and civil wars was
Speaker 1: sparked in large part by the price of grain. I'd
Speaker 1: like to read a couple of quotes from a wonderful
Speaker 1: Guardian article titled use your loaf. While food prices were
Speaker 1: crucial to the Arab spring, when grain prices spiked in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven to two thousand and eight, Egypt's bread
Speaker 1: prices rose thirty seven percent, with unemployment rising as well.
Speaker 1: More people depended on subsidized bread, but the government did
Speaker 1: not make any more available. Egypt's annual food price inflation
Speaker 1: continued and had had eighteen point nine percent before the
Speaker 1: fall of President Mubarak. The first protests of the Arab
Speaker 1: Spring in Tunisia in December two thousand and ten were
Speaker 1: quickly dismissed as another bout of bread riots, but of
Speaker 1: course those protests led to the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator.
Speaker 1: This is not just a Middle Eastern thing. Food prices
Speaker 1: are the number one predictor of unrest worldwide. If rural
Speaker 1: America decided to go to war, they have a number
Speaker 1: of very convenient choke points they could use to attack
Speaker 1: their urban enemies. Many of these insurgents would consider it
Speaker 1: revenge for decades of mockery, neglect, and environmental policies that
Speaker 1: burdened them far more than is fair. These resentments exist
Speaker 1: right now. All it would take is a few hundred
Speaker 1: people in a geographically discrete part of the country like
Speaker 1: northern California to turn this anger into action. So it
Speaker 1: should at this point be easy to imagine rising food
Speaker 1: prices in the midst of a recession escalating the number
Speaker 1: and violence of these protests that we were already seeing
Speaker 1: in cities across the nation. Desperation causes the government to
Speaker 1: approve more and more violent tactics to deal with the insurgents,
Speaker 1: which inspires more rural anger and probably causes more attacks.
Speaker 1: We've watched this happen before in numerous countries. The bombing
Speaker 1: of trucks and highways to cut off food is a
Speaker 1: tactic that could work in almost every part of the
Speaker 1: United States. Only four percent of the food consumed by
Speaker 1: Americans is locally produced. More than seventy percent of the
Speaker 1: food that gets to our cities does so via trucks.
Speaker 1: We are incredibly vulnerable to attacks on our highways, and
Speaker 1: this country is filled with people who have the means
Speaker 1: and motivation to apply this sort of violence. In November eighteen,
Speaker 1: over the space of about a week, two major busts
Speaker 1: by US law enforcement officers led to the arrests of
Speaker 1: more than eighty Neo Nazis and white supremacists. They are
Speaker 1: members of gangs with names like the Unforgiven and the
Speaker 1: Aryan Brotherhood. Thirty nine of the arrested were members of
Speaker 1: a Neo Nazi gang from rural Florida. These Nazis were
Speaker 1: found with meth fentanyl more than a hundred firearms, several
Speaker 1: pipe bombs, and one rocket launcher. In a more violent
Speaker 1: and less settled America, those men and women could have
Speaker 1: formed the nexus of a deadly regional insurgency. And trust me,
Speaker 1: there are thousands of people like them all around the
Speaker 1: country who have not yet been busted hell. That same week,
Speaker 1: police in Green Bay, Wisconsin, responding to a domestic disturbance call,
Speaker 1: found a man with swastika tattoos and an underground bomb laboratory.
Speaker 1: When I start talking about the state of Jefferson turning
Speaker 1: into a violent insurgency, when I talk about rednecks bombing
Speaker 1: water pump stations and hijacking trucks, it probably sounds far fetched.
Speaker 1: But the kind of people who want that future, who
Speaker 1: are just itching for the chance to go Taliban on
Speaker 1: all of our asses, those people exist right now. They
Speaker 1: aren't the majority of rural America or of conservatives, but
Speaker 1: they don't need to be. A few thousand of violent
Speaker 1: extremists spread out across a few dozen states could do
Speaker 1: damage wildly out of proportion to their numbers. We don't.
Speaker 1: We don't. Right I find myself drawn back regularly to
Speaker 1: the notes I took in my interview with David Kilcullen,
Speaker 1: one of the world's great counterinsurgency experts. We were talking
Speaker 1: about the best way to cripple this country and he
Speaker 1: said this quote. You don't try to generate a mass movement,
Speaker 1: You don't try to get the state to crack down
Speaker 1: on you. Instead, you try to generate a sectarian civil
Speaker 1: war so intense that it makes the society ungovernable. And
Speaker 1: that's the goal for any true revolutionary movement, right or left,
Speaker 1: make America ungovernable. If you've been paying attention to your
Speaker 1: a Nazi news, you may have heard about the terrorist
Speaker 1: group Adam Woffen. With five deaths and counting to their name,
Speaker 1: they have the highest body count of any neo Nazi
Speaker 1: organization of the post two thousand sixteen era. While the
Speaker 1: group has been hobbled recently by some inside drama over
Speaker 1: Satan Them, they have active members in several US states
Speaker 1: as well as Germany. These cells are usually three to
Speaker 1: four members, with no communication between individual groups here, said
Speaker 1: the German magazine Der Spiegel described them. Members are heavily
Speaker 1: armed and prepared to make use of their weapons. Indeed,
Speaker 1: they are getting ready for what they see as the
Speaker 1: coming race war and so called hate camps. Weapons training
Speaker 1: is conducted by members of the U. S Military, who
Speaker 1: are also among the group's members. According to one former
Speaker 1: member of the Adam Waffen Division, newcomers must submit to
Speaker 1: water boarding in addition to other such trials. Now pro Publica,
Speaker 1: working with the Fantastic Conflict, journalist Jake Hanrahan interviewed a
Speaker 1: former member of Adam Waffen. I'm going to play a
Speaker 1: clip from that here. A lot of things that they
Speaker 1: talk about other members don't know about, of course, to
Speaker 1: keep us, keep everyone from falling down, as it's talked
Speaker 1: about in Siege, hit and runs. I got here and there,
Speaker 1: stop let everyone panic. There's been no point to march
Speaker 1: around the streets like a weak fucking pussy with white
Speaker 1: polos and khakis and tiki torches streaming White Lives Matter.
Speaker 1: I don't care about politicians, don't care about politics, just
Speaker 1: wanting everyone just stopped being slaves for the system that
Speaker 1: we're living in, living under. Her When he mentioned siege,
Speaker 1: that's a reference to a white supremacist newsletter and book
Speaker 1: authored by a guy named James Mason. Mr Mason is
Speaker 1: a founding father of American Nazism and the guy who
Speaker 1: coined the term leaderless resistance. He and his comrades have
Speaker 1: been urging exactly the kind of war I've outlined here
Speaker 1: for more than forty years. I write this a few
Speaker 1: months after the birth of yet another new white supremacist
Speaker 1: terror group in the United States. These people called themselves
Speaker 1: the Base. Their name is literally the English translation of
Speaker 1: Al Qaeda, who they considered to be an inspiration. They
Speaker 1: are mostly based in the Pacific Northwest. They too, focus
Speaker 1: on weapons training and small group preparation in order to
Speaker 1: carry out insurgeant attacks against the U. S government. That
Speaker 1: former Adam Woffin Gay interviewed by ProPublica, mentioned wanting to
Speaker 1: destroy the system. He was expressing a desire to do
Speaker 1: exactly what David Cocolin was talking about, render the country ungovernable.
Speaker 1: These people, the neo Nazis and militiamen and white supremacists,
Speaker 1: they all know exactly what they plan to do if
Speaker 1: civil conflict erupts across the country. What will you do? Statistically,
Speaker 1: You'll probably be in a city watching food prices rise
Speaker 1: and seeing protest after protest convulse your downtown. There will
Speaker 1: be runs on grocery stores, maybe even mass looting a
Speaker 1: food If things get bad enough outside of the city,
Speaker 1: roads will be closed, checkpoints with soldiers and heavily armed
Speaker 1: cops will start to appear on the interstate. The Great
Speaker 1: American Highway System will become militarized as the state scrambles
Speaker 1: to pin down the insurgency. If you do live out
Speaker 1: in the country or in a particularly conservative suburb, you
Speaker 1: will have the additional complexity of needing to live with insurgents.
Speaker 1: The first few months of this will be particularly difficult.
Speaker 1: It takes time to deploy the National Guard of the Army.
Speaker 1: Millions of rural Americans might spend weeks or months without
Speaker 1: any realistic access to law enforcement or emergency services. Imagine
Speaker 1: a knock at the door one night, an armed insurgent
Speaker 1: asking for food or shelter. What do you do? It
Speaker 1: might be weeks before the police come back or the
Speaker 1: army arrives, and even when they do, they won't be
Speaker 1: at every house every day. They may not even be
Speaker 1: able to hold onto the area. So maybe you find
Speaker 1: yourself aiding and abetting these revolutionaries, even if you consider
Speaker 1: them terrorists. For a lot of people, that will feel
Speaker 1: like the safest decision. So far on this podcast, I
Speaker 1: focused on just how the civil war might break out,
Speaker 1: and past a certain point, it doesn't really matter whether
Speaker 1: the fighting starts from a left wing or a right
Speaker 1: wing movement. Just as a rural secessionist movement would take
Speaker 1: unrest in the cities as an opportunity, radical leftists would
Speaker 1: find an ungovernable America to have just as much potential
Speaker 1: for their ideals. Most of you listening probably wouldn't pick
Speaker 1: a side right away. It wouldn't even look like there
Speaker 1: were sides for a while. There'd be Protestant cities, of course,
Speaker 1: activists with lists of the hands, maybe demands you agree with,
Speaker 1: maybe not. And there'd be insurgents terrorists out in the
Speaker 1: country with their own demands, strangling your city and the
Speaker 1: rest of urban America. As the government failed to restore
Speaker 1: order and normalcy, a lot of people would find themselves
Speaker 1: seriously questioning the government's legitimacy, probably for the first time.
Speaker 1: We've never really had cause to do that on a
Speaker 1: mass level in modern America. Whatever else has happened, the
Speaker 1: state has always managed to keep the highways open the
Speaker 1: food flowing. When that's no longer the case. A lot
Speaker 1: more people will find themselves picking sides. For some of
Speaker 1: us that will mean backing a protest movement demanding radical change.
Speaker 1: For others, it will mean supporting the government, maybe because
Speaker 1: we just want the unrest to be over. And for
Speaker 1: a growing number of Americans, it will mean deciding they
Speaker 1: don't want to be Americans anymore. The government would not
Speaker 1: call it a civil war, not right away, but we'd
Speaker 1: know now. So far, we've just talked about how the
Speaker 1: fighting would start, and for my money, I think the
Speaker 1: most likely beginning would involve a mix of the things
Speaker 1: we've talked about in both of these first two episodes.
Speaker 1: City centers occupied by activists with demands fighting the police
Speaker 1: in National Guard, while rural insurgents carry out their own
Speaker 1: attacks and make their own demands. Every attack from every
Speaker 1: side accelerates the whole process and pushes the whole country
Speaker 1: closer to chaos. Now, the state would not take all
Speaker 1: of this sitting down, of course. There would be increasingly
Speaker 1: vigorous attempts to right the ship and to stop the
Speaker 1: cycle of violence. Federal and state governments would throw absolutely
Speaker 1: everything they had at curbing the unrest and restoring order.
Speaker 1: On the next episode, if it could Happen Here. I'll
Speaker 1: walk you through just what that would look like and
Speaker 1: why the system's efforts would be almost certainly doomed to fail. Genia.
Speaker 1: We watched it from our phones, change our Facebook pictures,
Speaker 1: congratulating ourselves, made nervous jokes and whispers. But the sexts
Speaker 1: was sinning now and essays always listening. Wonder of this
Speaker 1: ostrum has been dead to them low now we're all
Speaker 1: it's just none. The one they've done. You can give
Speaker 1: an inch and they'll just take your own. But we
Speaker 1: don't find. We don't, right, even with Rosa Sada door. No,
Speaker 1: we don't find. We don't right even I'm Robert Evans
Speaker 1: and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You
Speaker 1: can find me on Twitter at I right, okay. You
Speaker 1: can find this show on Twitter at happen Here pod,
Speaker 1: and you can find this show online at it could
Speaker 1: Happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always, is
Speaker 1: from four Fists