Speaker 1: Cool zone media.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On
Speaker 2: the morning of Sunday, September twenty eighth, a forty year
Speaker 2: old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc,
Speaker 2: Michigan church. The man started shooting people inside and then
Speaker 2: set the church on fire, burning the building down. Four
Speaker 2: churchgoers died, eight others were injured but have survived, and
Speaker 2: police killed the shooter on the scene. The President, the
Speaker 2: Vice President, and the rest of the right were quick
Speaker 2: to call this yet quote another targeted attack on Christians
Speaker 2: in the United States, to quote Trump on truth Social
Speaker 2: White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt went on Fox and
Speaker 2: Friends the day after the shooting and said this.
Speaker 1: It's unfathomable and as the President rightfully put in his
Speaker 1: true social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted
Speaker 1: attacked on Christians.
Speaker 2: As the church was still burning, right wing podcaster Betty Johnson,
Speaker 2: who recently rode with Ice in Chicago, posted on x
Speaker 2: the Everything app quote church is on fire, Christianity is
Speaker 2: under attack. Pray unquote what Betty Johnson neglected to mention
Speaker 2: this was a Mormon church, and pretty soon it became
Speaker 2: clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist ANTIFA, but
Speaker 2: a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormon's were quote unquote
Speaker 2: the anti christ. According to Burton City council candidate Chris Johns,
Speaker 2: who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days
Speaker 2: prior while canvassing, one of the shooter's friends told The
Speaker 2: New York Times that Shoulder believed that the Mormons quote
Speaker 2: are going to take over the world unquote. This guy
Speaker 2: obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormon's stemming from a
Speaker 2: breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago. After
Speaker 2: the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became
Speaker 2: more clear, the Trump badmin quite quickly stopped talking about
Speaker 2: this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity.
Speaker 2: But this attack was more deadly than any recent school
Speaker 2: shooting or any instance of targeted violence, which the administration
Speaker 2: has been framed as political violence happening this year. After
Speaker 2: the shooter was identified, Rather than talk about his apparent motive,
Speaker 2: people online argued about his political orientation. A picture spread
Speaker 2: online of him wearing a Trump twenty twenty camo shirt
Speaker 2: that read make Liberals Cry Again. The right wing outlet
Speaker 2: The Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting
Speaker 2: a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic
Speaker 2: was photoshopped, with The Daily Caller sharing a version of
Speaker 2: the shirt that they alleged to be the original unedited
Speaker 2: photo without the Trump graphic. Except that version without the
Speaker 2: Trump graphic is in fact the doctored photo. The Trump
Speaker 2: one is the authentic version. Right Wing users on x
Speaker 2: the Everything app spread a list of political donations to
Speaker 2: progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well
Speaker 2: as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio
Speaker 2: that read politically Active Democratic Socialist. Except that account and
Speaker 2: those donations were from a completely different person, just with
Speaker 2: a similar name. Now, just because it's pretty clear that
Speaker 2: this shooter supported Trump doesn't mean that we should frame
Speaker 2: this as partisan political violence. This was a classic American shooting.
Speaker 2: A Marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back
Speaker 2: from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative
Speaker 2: experiences with the Mormon church, moved to Michigan, but continued
Speaker 2: to have very strong anti Mormon sentiments, which he held
Speaker 2: until he acted on those sentiments, leading to his death
Speaker 2: and the deaths of four other people and extremely tragic
Speaker 2: yet extremely American sequence of events. But the conversation and
Speaker 2: coverage surrounding this Mormon church shooting is such an open
Speaker 2: display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to
Speaker 2: care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies.
Speaker 2: Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker went on Fox News
Speaker 2: to discuss this shooting, where he laid blame on politicians
Speaker 2: rhetoric calling people Nazis.
Speaker 3: So, you know, this is a situation of you find
Speaker 3: a manufactured grievance, if you will, and that a whole
Speaker 3: lot of stimulus from from people either on the Internet
Speaker 3: or even politicians. They irresponsible politicians. We all know who
Speaker 3: they are. You know they're talking about Nazis and anarchists
Speaker 3: and existential threats. You know, they need to crawl back
Speaker 3: into their dark places. These people are out there. That
Speaker 3: has to be taken into account when you start firing
Speaker 3: off your mouth.
Speaker 2: That simply has nothing to do with this specific attack.
Speaker 2: But both politicians and the media have this obsession with
Speaker 2: only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to
Speaker 2: identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party, and then
Speaker 2: weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to
Speaker 2: frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the oppositional political project.
Speaker 2: Following Charlie Kirks assassination and the media blitz around it,
Speaker 2: fellow far right commentator Stephen Crowder has revived his long
Speaker 2: dormant college debate series Change My Mind Now, with the
Speaker 2: prompt they left is violent propagandists collapse political violence into
Speaker 2: a simple binary, which is just a very limited way
Speaker 2: in trying to actually understand public acts of violence, the
Speaker 2: idea that things can only happen because because of ideologies,
Speaker 2: not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions, or class This year,
Speaker 2: there's been one other target attack that ties the Mormon
Speaker 2: Church shooting for the highest fatalities in attacks this year,
Speaker 2: and that was the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July,
Speaker 2: where the gunmen attempted to shoot up the NFL offices,
Speaker 2: motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school.
Speaker 2: No clear ideological motivations here. Lots of shooters aren't typically
Speaker 2: ideological in like the ordinary political sense. The only recent
Speaker 2: shooter that could be accurately categorized as quote unquote leftist
Speaker 2: is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy
Speaker 2: staffers in May of twenty twenty five. Now are no circumstances.
Speaker 2: Do you have to hand it to Bill Maherr. But
Speaker 2: this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, just two days
Speaker 2: after the Tri Trek assassination, demonstrates this point about how
Speaker 2: media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of
Speaker 2: violence through ideology, long before we have any actual clear
Speaker 2: indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.
Speaker 4: There's a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely
Speaker 4: to be either a white supremacist or radical Muslim. If
Speaker 4: it is shooting of a Republican politician, it is very
Speaker 4: likely to be a trans Antifa Marxistian.
Speaker 5: That is, we don't know. We don't know what this
Speaker 5: kid is.
Speaker 2: Wait, we do know this kid was of the left.
Speaker 4: We do know that.
Speaker 2: We do know what that this kid was of the
Speaker 2: political left.
Speaker 4: That is, according to contemporarious reporting from The Guardian as
Speaker 4: well as Tablet Magazine.
Speaker 5: Today, it's two days out. We don't know shit. But
Speaker 5: here we don't know shit. They never do. The Internet
Speaker 5: is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.
Speaker 4: It's not about the Internet. That's about the that's about
Speaker 4: the The actual reporting by mainstream except the Guardian is
Speaker 4: not right wing.
Speaker 3: Here's what I.
Speaker 5: Here's what we heard. Here's what I was told so far,
Speaker 5: And I'll tell you what was wrong. First I heard
Speaker 5: he's a registered Republican not not true. Okay. Then he
Speaker 5: was a donor de Trump not true. His father works
Speaker 5: in the sheriff's office, not true. There was a picture
Speaker 5: I'm wearing a pro Trump shirt not true. A member
Speaker 5: of the Democratic Socialists of America not true. We don't
Speaker 5: know what he is. Well, how are you so sure
Speaker 5: he's of the left? Now I agree? When you right
Speaker 5: on a bullet? What did he write on the bullet there's.
Speaker 4: A catch as fascist, which is also a gamer thing.
Speaker 5: Okay, But now I'm hearing he may have been part
Speaker 5: of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right
Speaker 5: wing enough.
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean so that you're sure he's not that
Speaker 4: I'm not sure that he's not there.
Speaker 5: You were sure? Hold on?
Speaker 4: Hold on, no, hold on, okay, because I meant you were.
Speaker 2: Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just
Speaker 2: because the target of violence is a political figure does
Speaker 2: not mean that it's political violence. The attempted assassination of
Speaker 2: Ronald Reagan is a key example of this, and for
Speaker 2: the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a
Speaker 2: personal motivation based on romantic attraction on a dog day afternoon,
Speaker 2: over any larger partisan political motivation. It doesn't even make
Speaker 2: sense to view the first attempted Trump assassination as political violence.
Speaker 2: Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to
Speaker 2: commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting,
Speaker 2: he did more than sixty internet searches related to Biden,
Speaker 2: Trump and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to
Speaker 2: fall into the right place at the right time. The
Speaker 2: mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August, who shot
Speaker 2: two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the
Speaker 2: Right branded as a trans terrorist, originally planned to do
Speaker 2: the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared
Speaker 2: that trans girls attending the concert would be armed for
Speaker 2: self defense. As I've previously reported on this show, this
Speaker 2: shooting bared similarity to TCC or true crime community, not
Speaker 2: as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of
Speaker 2: usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters,
Speaker 2: akin to neo columnbiners, who encourage each other online to
Speaker 2: then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or
Speaker 2: replicating those of previous school shootings or mass shootings. This
Speaker 2: pseudo mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the
Speaker 2: role of quote unquote the shooter can be its own
Speaker 2: motivating force, beyond any culture war issues or ordinary partisan
Speaker 2: politics that might get sprinkled on top as seasoning.
Speaker 1: On.
Speaker 2: On Wednesday, September twenty fourth, the twenty nine year old
Speaker 2: open fire with a bolt action rifle targeting an ICE
Speaker 2: Field office in Dallas, Texas. This attack claims the lives
Speaker 2: of three immigrants who were detained by ICE in a
Speaker 2: copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare
Speaker 2: CEO assassination. This shooter allegedly wrote anti ICE on unfired
Speaker 2: bullet casings. In the immediate wake of this attack, the
Speaker 2: right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed
Speaker 2: Democrat politicians for spreading anti ICE rhetoric. At a North
Speaker 2: Carolina event, JD. Vance said quote, Here's what happens when
Speaker 2: Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part of
Speaker 2: an authoritarian government. When the left wing media lies about
Speaker 2: what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting,
Speaker 2: when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement,
Speaker 2: what they are doing is encouraging crazy people to go
Speaker 2: and commit violence. Here's a brief Fox News report.
Speaker 6: We have a problem America. We are living through a
Speaker 6: scourge of left wing political violence that three weeks into
Speaker 6: this month has made it bloody September today, another attack.
Speaker 2: On ice as is not uncommon with mass shooters. This
Speaker 2: guy was a registered independent, and the shooter's brother told
Speaker 2: NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics. I
Speaker 2: find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other gen
Speaker 2: Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions
Speaker 2: from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or CNN. Journalist
Speaker 2: Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter, who described
Speaker 2: him as a libertarian leaning four Chan edge lord who
Speaker 2: hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians. Friends believed
Speaker 2: that the bulletin scriptions could have been written as a
Speaker 2: joke intended to rile people up, they tol Klippenstein. The
Speaker 2: shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted
Speaker 2: away due to his continuous anti social edgelord behavior in
Speaker 2: regular day to day interactions. Nancy Larson, the acting of
Speaker 2: his attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the
Speaker 2: shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE
Speaker 2: operations as human trafficking. Larsen says the shooter did not
Speaker 2: mention any government agency besides ICE, but left a note
Speaker 2: for police reading quote good luck with the digital footprint.
Speaker 2: This shooter killed himself after the attack. These public acts
Speaker 2: of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for
Speaker 2: self annihilation while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning
Speaker 2: or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a
Speaker 2: violent act. What causes someone to do this can be
Speaker 2: a mix of many factors, including access to guns, individual motivations,
Speaker 2: social alienation, self annihilation. In so far as there is
Speaker 2: an overtly political element, it's often the result of a
Speaker 2: political alienation. Usually, the type of person who commits a
Speaker 2: bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy
Speaker 2: that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat Republican binary,
Speaker 2: with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across
Speaker 2: the left right spectrum. Mass shootings which are accompanied by
Speaker 2: express political motivations usually stem from anti Muslim or great
Speaker 2: replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people in Western culture
Speaker 2: will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants. But throughout the
Speaker 2: next three years, under Trump's federal government and the right
Speaker 2: wing anti woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture,
Speaker 2: nihilistic self destructive acts against American society may take a
Speaker 2: form which could be characterized as quote unquote left wing violence,
Speaker 2: despite most of these shooters being far from your average
Speaker 2: DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist. Considering the Mormon
Speaker 2: church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the iced DTAE shooting, and
Speaker 2: the Minneapolis Catholic School shooting in the Year of our
Speaker 2: Brain Rot twenty twenty five, I think it's pretty clear
Speaker 2: that the current US state apparatus does not need to
Speaker 2: stage false flags. The state just tries to take advantage
Speaker 2: of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives in
Speaker 2: an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality. No crude fabrication
Speaker 2: of physical reality is needed. They are more than happy
Speaker 2: to simply pick and choose, and dignify and obscure various
Speaker 2: events to fit their preferred version of reality. The night
Speaker 2: before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq war
Speaker 2: veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina, which did
Speaker 2: not result in nearly as many national headlines. The shooter
Speaker 2: targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people injuring six others.
Speaker 2: The suspect rowed a boat up to the bar, fired
Speaker 2: with an ar mounted with a scope and silencer, before
Speaker 2: speeding off on water. Police have also deemed this a
Speaker 2: targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues,
Speaker 2: this event will be quickly forgotten. As I'm recording this episode,
Speaker 2: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover
Speaker 2: operations to infiltrate and uproot quote leftist terror cells in Texas.
Speaker 2: Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. There
Speaker 2: can be no compromise with those who want us dead unquote.
Speaker 2: This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven,
Speaker 2: which targets quote unquote domestic terrorism indicators like anti Christianity,
Speaker 2: anti capitalism, anti Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration, and
Speaker 2: hostility towards traditional American values. All this partisan rhetoric on
Speaker 2: targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian
Speaker 2: crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition. Meanwhile, this
Speaker 2: passed Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit
Speaker 2: Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former
Speaker 2: state senator, and their son. The judge was out of
Speaker 2: the house at the time. Last month, the judge temporarily
Speaker 2: blocked a voter suppression executive order signed by President Trump.
Speaker 2: In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge
Speaker 2: had received death threats. This has been it could happen here,
Speaker 2: See you on the other side.
Speaker 1: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2: You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
Speaker 1: listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.