Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen here,
Speaker 2: a podcast about things falling apart, and boy, they sure
Speaker 2: seem to be, don't they. The twenty twenty four election
Speaker 2: is terrifying a lot of people at this stage after
Speaker 2: a disastrous debate performance by Joe Biden, And this episode
Speaker 2: will be coming out on the Monday that the Republican
Speaker 2: National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A lot of people
Speaker 2: are terrified about a Trump dictatorship, about Project twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five and all that that entails. And I want to
Speaker 2: tell you first off, you know, we will be having
Speaker 2: a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison, Sophie and
Speaker 2: I are all going to be there all week. We'll
Speaker 2: start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,
Speaker 2: and then we'll probably have some summary content after that
Speaker 2: the next week. So we will be getting you our
Speaker 2: experiences here and everything that we encounter on the ground
Speaker 2: during what I think is going to wind up a
Speaker 2: pretty important week for the American fascist movement. But right now,
Speaker 2: what I want to address is the sense of kind
Speaker 2: of unbridled terror that I've seen for a lot of
Speaker 2: people around me, not just leftists, but regular people that
Speaker 2: I know in my life, folks who are just kind
Speaker 2: of like casual democrats, not the kind to think much
Speaker 2: about politics, but have suddenly seen the potential of what
Speaker 2: a Trump second term might bring with it and are
Speaker 2: rightfully terrified. So I want to first off, tell everyone
Speaker 2: in that bucket, don't panic. That's what this episode is about.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to try and give you some good
Speaker 2: reasons not to panic, some reasons why our situation is
Speaker 2: not as dire as it seems. And my goal here
Speaker 2: is not to lull you into an action or stop
Speaker 2: you from preparing. You should, in fact be preparing, And
Speaker 2: we talk about the various things you can do organizing
Speaker 2: in your community, taking action to support migrants, to support
Speaker 2: each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women seeking reproductive justice.
Speaker 2: That's our daily bread and butter. Right now, I want
Speaker 2: to give you some reasons for optimism about victory and
Speaker 2: the overall struggle against these fucking maniacs. So, as most
Speaker 2: regular listeners will know, back in the spring of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: I published the first season of It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 2: which was originally a scripted podcast about the very real
Speaker 2: possibility of a civil conflict in the United States. The
Speaker 2: years since have proven several of my predictions painfully accurate.
Speaker 2: I started the series with fictional vignettes from the perspective
Speaker 2: of an American civilian watching American tanks roll through the
Speaker 2: streets of their city. Within a year, thousands and thousands
Speaker 2: of listeners had variants of that exact experience thanks to
Speaker 2: the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled and more than
Speaker 2: a little frightened by the response that some people had
Speaker 2: to the first iteration of it could happen here. During
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, while I was on the ground in four
Speaker 2: different states, dozens and dozens of people told me the
Speaker 2: series had influenced their own choices for how to act
Speaker 2: and organize on the ground with their friends out in
Speaker 2: the world. And that is humbling and a little bit frightening.
Speaker 2: And I promise you I'm not laying this out to
Speaker 2: brag or try to make an argument from authority. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying I predicted something five years ago and was right,
Speaker 2: so you should listen to what I have to predict now.
Speaker 2: In fact, I kind of want to do the opposite
Speaker 2: because in another podcast, I recorded in twenty nineteen on
Speaker 2: the anti Vaxx movement. This would have been an episode
Speaker 2: of Behind the Bastards. I laid out a theoretical pandemic,
Speaker 2: and I described it spreading almost exactly the way the
Speaker 2: COVID nineteen pandemic really did spread. Just a few months later.
Speaker 2: And yet, in February of twenty twenty, when COVID nineteen
Speaker 2: had been confirmed to have entered the United States and
Speaker 2: was spreading over other parts of the world like wildfire,
Speaker 2: I had friends ask me what I thought was going
Speaker 2: to happen, and, you know, thinking back to SARS, thinking
Speaker 2: back to bird flu, thinking back to the Ebola, you know,
Speaker 2: epidemic in twenty fourteen. My answer was, I don't know.
Speaker 2: It'll be fine, right, someone, surely there's some adults out
Speaker 2: there who were gonna, you know, lock this thing down.
Speaker 2: They're not just gonna let it run rampant over the population. Right.
Speaker 2: There's a term for what happened to me there, and
Speaker 2: it's called normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the tendency to
Speaker 2: assume that whatever has gone down in the past will
Speaker 2: keep happening, often despite evidence to the contrary. Something like
Speaker 2: eighty percent of people display attributes of delusional thinking caused
Speaker 2: by the normalcy bias during disasters. Emergency responders sometimes called
Speaker 2: this negative panic. We got a great example of negative
Speaker 2: panic a couple of weeks ago. Video went viral of
Speaker 2: a bowl that got loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon,
Speaker 2: and it started just just absolutely goring random yocals who
Speaker 2: were like wandering around in between chiro stands and beer
Speaker 2: cards behind sort of the stands, and a few of
Speaker 2: these people had the presence of mind to run. One
Speaker 2: guy even pulled a gun. And I don't know entirely
Speaker 2: how we want to rate that as a response, but
Speaker 2: a lot of folks just stared at the bowl, which
Speaker 2: is blank looks on their faces, utterly uncomprehended. You can
Speaker 2: tell from their body language that they just couldn't believe
Speaker 2: what they were seeing. And some of those people got
Speaker 2: rammed right in the fucking gut by a bull a
Speaker 2: second later. The immediate danger that their eyes were telling
Speaker 2: them was there just seemed too far fetched to take seriously.
Speaker 2: The normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's
Speaker 2: just one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind
Speaker 2: towards catastrophes. And while we're on that subject, I should
Speaker 2: warn those of you who'd like to try their hand
Speaker 2: at predicting the future of a separate cognitive delusion catastrophizing.
Speaker 2: This is the tendency to assume that the absolute worst
Speaker 2: case scenario will come to pass, and it's often a
Speaker 2: trauma reaction. When you've been blown up, you kind of
Speaker 2: always expect the world to blow up around you. If
Speaker 2: you've been in a relationship with someone who blows up,
Speaker 2: who screams or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves
Speaker 2: during arguments, you might find yourself expecting that from anyone
Speaker 2: else that you did, even if they've never displayed that
Speaker 2: kind of behavior. And if you've watched an in the
Speaker 2: bag sheer thing presidential election collapse and usher in a
Speaker 2: new era of fascist political capture in your country, well
Speaker 2: you might see that kind of thing happening and expect
Speaker 2: it whenever the polls open up again. The tricky part
Speaker 2: of actually predicting the future with any accuracy, which is
Speaker 2: a thing that I have been both professionally successful at
Speaker 2: and personally bad at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias
Speaker 2: with your catastrophizing This is easier said than done, and
Speaker 2: I have noticed that my effort to reach this state
Speaker 2: has produced some peculiar cognitive effects of late. In the
Speaker 2: six months that led up to the first presidential debate,
Speaker 2: I felt constant growing anxiety about a second Trump term.
Speaker 2: Only some of my anxiety was based on polling, which
Speaker 2: didn't look great for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I
Speaker 2: was anxious because I saw so many people around me,
Speaker 2: and I'm not talking about folks on Twitter, but in
Speaker 2: the real world, go, well, obviously Biden's got a win,
Speaker 2: there's no way Trump gets elected again, and go about
Speaker 2: their day. Then the debate happened. Joe went on stage,
Speaker 2: barely able to speak at a legible volume, coughing, slurring
Speaker 2: his words, and dropping into tangents. Rather than making cogent
Speaker 2: cases to the country. Everyone around me started to get
Speaker 2: terrified all at once, and the mainstream media did what
Speaker 2: it does and pivoted to round the clock coverage of
Speaker 2: the issue of Biden's competency. You know, some people have
Speaker 2: alleged that this is because the media has some sort
Speaker 2: of an agenda here, and I really don't credit the
Speaker 2: media as someone who has spent his life working adjacent
Speaker 2: to the mainstream media with that kind of capacity to plan.
Speaker 2: What these people, what these reporters, what these news organs
Speaker 2: were doing, was pivoting to the issue that was doing
Speaker 2: the most to raise our collective blood pressure, because, among
Speaker 2: other things, that's what social media has trained them to do,
Speaker 2: because that's where the fucking money is, right, you know,
Speaker 2: not that this issue didn't exist before that If it bleeds,
Speaker 2: it leads has been a long time axiom in the field.
Speaker 2: But that's what's happening here too, right, And because the
Speaker 2: money is in saying and talking about the things that
Speaker 2: gets people's blood pumping the most. The question of is
Speaker 2: Joe Biden doomed soon yielded to is democracy doomed, as
Speaker 2: analysts and pundits started hyping up Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: a blueprint for fascist takeover of the US, published by
Speaker 2: the Heritage Foundation last year. Now, I am not a polster,
Speaker 2: and I don't claim debase any of what I say
Speaker 2: next on some kind of mathematic expertise. But I don't
Speaker 2: think we're doomed. I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable,
Speaker 2: even in the likely event that Biden loses, And I
Speaker 2: think our position is a lot stronger than most people realize.
Speaker 2: This is why right wing influencers and strategists have started
Speaker 2: going so hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like
Speaker 2: fucking Cobra commander. The best example of how mask off
Speaker 2: the fascist right has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of
Speaker 2: the Heritage Foundation, who said this during a recent press conference.
Speaker 3: The reason that so many anchors on MSNB, for example,
Speaker 3: are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
Speaker 3: And so I come full circle in this response and
Speaker 3: just want to encourage you with some substance that we
Speaker 3: are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which
Speaker 3: will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Speaker 2: Another of these guys is Jack Pasobc, a former Navy
Speaker 2: intelligence officer turned to supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher.
Speaker 2: Jack spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for
Speaker 2: Seapak where he said this, but.
Speaker 4: I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy.
Speaker 4: We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all
Speaker 4: the way there on January sixth, but we will endeavor
Speaker 4: to get rid of it and replace it with this
Speaker 4: right here. We'll replace it with this amen.
Speaker 2: Now, I should note, folks, when he says this, right here,
Speaker 2: he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's
Speaker 2: not a subtle man, but he does speak for a
Speaker 2: frighteningly large and influential block of Republicans. Both of these
Speaker 2: guys are end results of eighty years of conspiracy theories
Speaker 2: and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and
Speaker 2: their fail sons, and at this point fail grandsons. The
Speaker 2: mainstream media and most voters in this country did their
Speaker 2: best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now
Speaker 2: they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power,
Speaker 2: mouths watering, dishard, guns loaded, and people are freaking out.
Speaker 2: Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within
Speaker 2: the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate
Speaker 2: has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people now. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the
Speaker 2: fringes of the American right four years. There Nothing they're
Speaker 2: saying is new, but Trump's likely victory in the Supreme
Speaker 2: Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot
Speaker 2: of people to conclude that project twenty twenty five is
Speaker 2: Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office.
Speaker 2: This is something guys like Pasobic and Roberts want you
Speaker 2: to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away
Speaker 2: from confrontation. Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding
Speaker 2: that if they can just convince you that the fight
Speaker 2: is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has
Speaker 2: spent the last two weeks since the debate quote tweeting
Speaker 2: every left wing media person he can find and saying
Speaker 2: six months to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps
Speaker 2: after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic. Jack
Speaker 2: is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier,
Speaker 2: he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy.
Speaker 2: One of them that I bring up often because I
Speaker 2: think it illustrates something important is the ODE loop. This
Speaker 2: is the process by which people make decisions and act
Speaker 2: in combat situations, and it stands for the different stages
Speaker 2: of this process are observe, orient, decide. Act. If you
Speaker 2: can disrupt any part of the ODE loop, you can
Speaker 2: stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding, or
Speaker 2: from carrying out their actions. Jack and his peers want
Speaker 2: you to panic. They want you to make plans to
Speaker 2: leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all
Speaker 2: evidence of your political sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make
Speaker 2: this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He
Speaker 2: wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe
Speaker 2: that nothing matters any longer, because what matters most to
Speaker 2: him is that you and people like you are out
Speaker 2: of the picture. You know, either dead or so scared
Speaker 2: that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way
Speaker 2: against him and his friends. Now, my job, as a
Speaker 2: semi professional Cassandra, and as a guy who reports in
Speaker 2: the far right, is to tell you this, a Trump
Speaker 2: dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look,
Speaker 2: and we will talk about all of that after some ads.
Speaker 2: We're back now. I am not primarily an election guy,
Speaker 2: and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff.
Speaker 2: The polls are bad for byis, and I have no
Speaker 2: interest in trying to elude anyone to thinking there's all
Speaker 2: some big nationwide polling error. The only thing I will
Speaker 2: say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to
Speaker 2: note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling
Speaker 2: fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds on
Speaker 2: bet but if you average the swing state polls, he
Speaker 2: and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty
Speaker 2: much everywhere. Now you're going to get a different analysis
Speaker 2: depending on which pole expert you trust. The new guys
Speaker 2: at five thirty eight still have it mostly as a
Speaker 2: coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver
Speaker 2: himself gives Biden under a thirty percent chance, which is
Speaker 2: terrible and also about where Trump was in November of
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, and we all do know how that election ended.
Speaker 2: People are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying
Speaker 2: he's got a twenty nine percent chance of winning doesn't
Speaker 2: mean it's impossible for him to win.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The situation is serious, but the future is not written,
Speaker 2: and you should remember that, for good and for ill,
Speaker 2: the final results of this whole thing will come down
Speaker 2: probably to one hundred thousand voters or so in five
Speaker 2: or six states. Now, it's also worth me saying this.
Speaker 2: Both of these candidates are old men, and statistically it
Speaker 2: would not be unheard of or weird. If one of
Speaker 2: them was dead before the election, Joe Biden could still
Speaker 2: lose in a palace coup from the rest of his
Speaker 2: party and get replaced. Anything can happen, and in US
Speaker 2: politics it often does. Hey, everyone, Robert here. Two days
Speaker 2: after I wrote this, something happened. There was an assassination
Speaker 2: attempt against former President Trump. I am recording this a
Speaker 2: couple of hours after it happened. A lot is unclear
Speaker 2: at the moment, other than that somebody shot at him.
Speaker 2: It looks like he was wounded with from glass shrapnel
Speaker 2: when the teleprompter is hit. That Secret Service is currently
Speaker 2: claiming a shooter appears to have been outside the venue
Speaker 2: on a roof. Not much more I can say at
Speaker 2: this point. I will note again there's a lot of
Speaker 2: catastrophizing going on, people saying like, oh, this means he's
Speaker 2: definitely gonna win reelection. When Reagan got shot that Trump,
Speaker 2: you know, rocketed him to a reelection victory. You know,
Speaker 2: that's possible, that could be what happens here. That's definitely
Speaker 2: a solid case to be made for that that's what
Speaker 2: happened with Reagan. But that's not always what happens when
Speaker 2: there are assassination attempts against sitting or former presidents. On
Speaker 2: September twenty second, nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore, a
Speaker 2: member of the Manson Family cult, attempted to assassinate President
Speaker 2: Ford with a thirty eight revolver. He did not win reelection.
Speaker 2: So you know, that's just as a note, like sometimes
Speaker 2: what happens, it's impossible to say what's going to happen
Speaker 2: with this, but if you're looking to past us history
Speaker 2: for president, you're still kind of in a situation where, well,
Speaker 2: really unclear what's going to go down. Now that's all
Speaker 2: the horse race stuff I'm going to subject you to.
Speaker 2: We are now going to move forward with the rest
Speaker 2: of this episode trying to answer this question what happens
Speaker 2: if Trump wins. Going to give you some very good
Speaker 2: reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first has
Speaker 2: to do with Project twenty twenty five. In short, this
Speaker 2: Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place the
Speaker 2: whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending separation
Speaker 2: of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go after dissidents,
Speaker 2: making recreational sects illegal, and criminalizing daily life for millions
Speaker 2: of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a roadmap to
Speaker 2: Christian dictatorship. Now I'm not going to tell you shouldn't
Speaker 2: find this chilling, but let's be clear about what Project
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five is. It is a nine hundred page
Speaker 2: document written by a think tank that has lost a
Speaker 2: lot of its influence and access to power over the
Speaker 2: last ten years. The Heritage Foundation was once, as Molly
Speaker 2: Ball described in an article for The Atlantic, the intellectual
Speaker 2: backbone of the conservative movement. But during the Obama years,
Speaker 2: the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started to get
Speaker 2: pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became clear that
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways, these guys were dangerously out
Speaker 2: of step with voters and kind of hard to work with.
Speaker 2: The pullback actually began in twenty fourteen, when the Heritage
Speaker 2: Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republicans Study Committee Retreat
Speaker 2: over a conflict around a farm bill. Now, the think
Speaker 2: tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after Trump took office.
Speaker 2: Some of this was the result of the fact that
Speaker 2: conservative tanks have seen a general decline in influence from
Speaker 2: the good old days the height of their power. The
Speaker 2: Republican Party has won the popular vote in exactly one
Speaker 2: election this century, and as of twenty twenty two, we
Speaker 2: have seen them go through two disastrous midterm elections in
Speaker 2: a row and one disastrous, losing presidential election. Now, there's
Speaker 2: an interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundation's decline
Speaker 2: from twenty twenty two by the Washington Posts Jeff Stein
Speaker 2: and Yegana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill
Speaker 2: as saying people do not walk around in fear of
Speaker 2: the Heritage Foundation the way they did ten years ago.
Speaker 2: And the main reason why is because Trump and the
Speaker 2: people around him were gaining a lot more influence. Right,
Speaker 2: these old things tankers just didn't hold the juice that
Speaker 2: they used to. Now, that article was published in response
Speaker 2: to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which
Speaker 2: is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies,
Speaker 2: and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic
Speaker 2: concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of
Speaker 2: trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff
Speaker 2: that we have been bombarded with now for years. This
Speaker 2: is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base,
Speaker 2: but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog
Speaker 2: shit at getting regular Americans on board, because regular Americans
Speaker 2: look at this stuff and go while these people are
Speaker 2: fucking out of their minds. I think the near panic
Speaker 2: around Project twenty twenty five is potentially useful. It has
Speaker 2: the potential to line a lot of voters up, and
Speaker 2: crucially not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but
Speaker 2: against a Republican party that has almost entirely yielded to
Speaker 2: the fascists in its midst But I also see a
Speaker 2: lot of people describing Project twenty twenty five as Trump's
Speaker 2: plan for when he takes office, and that's just not
Speaker 2: what it is. These people will note that a lot
Speaker 2: of former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation,
Speaker 2: to which I say, he hates a lot of the
Speaker 2: people who worked with him the last administration. Around this
Speaker 2: is very common knowledge. Some people will also point out
Speaker 2: recently unearthed video of the director of Project twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five back in twenty twenty three telling a right wing
Speaker 2: podcaster that Trump was very bought in with Project twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. And maybe that's true, but I don't feel
Speaker 2: like you should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting
Speaker 2: his own horn. Now. That kind of belief, though, does
Speaker 2: merge with statements you'll see from prominent progressive media figures,
Speaker 2: people like Chris Hayes, who recently tweeted A big reason
Speaker 2: Project twenty twenty five is so salient is because the
Speaker 2: actual Trump campaign has essentially zero policy apparatus and the
Speaker 2: platform is just Trump social posts strung together. Now, I
Speaker 2: like Chris, and I agree that it is important to
Speaker 2: set the stakes here for voters and to talk about
Speaker 2: Project twenty twenty five because it's fucked up and we
Speaker 2: should do something about the fact that these people feel
Speaker 2: confident putting out open plans to in democracy and institute
Speaker 2: a Christian nationalist dictatorship. But what Chris says is not
Speaker 2: strictly accurate because Trump has a platform and it might
Speaker 2: have been influenced by Project twenty twenty five. I think
Speaker 2: it probably was. But his platform is called Agenda forty seven,
Speaker 2: and we have covered it on it could happen here
Speaker 2: our daily news program. This is something you should care about. Trump.
Speaker 2: In his Agenda forty seven plans, Trump advocates for mass
Speaker 2: deportations of migrants for an attack on the legal rights
Speaker 2: of the press and potentially the imprisonment of his political enemies.
Speaker 2: He threatens the use of special forces and airstrikes against
Speaker 2: cartels on Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy
Speaker 2: shit in Agenda forty seven. This is very serious stuff,
Speaker 2: and it is crucially the stuff Donald Trump has promised
Speaker 2: to do if he gets elected. Now, a few days
Speaker 2: before I wrote this, a former president took to truth
Speaker 2: Social to officially disavow Project twenty twenty five. Now, do
Speaker 2: I think he's lying? Do I think he was aware
Speaker 2: of it? Do I think he cribbed some of it
Speaker 2: for Ajenda forty seven. Yeah, He's Donald Trump. He lies
Speaker 2: all the fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy
Speaker 2: that he feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow
Speaker 2: Project twenty twenty five. And this is part of a
Speaker 2: general split between Trump and the faction of the party
Speaker 2: who want a strongman dictator type but who aren't Christian nationalists,
Speaker 2: and the chunk who are. This is a natural cleavage,
Speaker 2: and we can see further evidence of this in the
Speaker 2: fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time
Speaker 2: in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not
Speaker 2: call for a national ban on abortion, And if you
Speaker 2: watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable
Speaker 2: taking the standard right wing line on this because Trump
Speaker 2: is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a
Speaker 2: shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner.
Speaker 2: You know, he can't entirely push back on the party
Speaker 2: on this, but he's clearly not motivated to do so.
Speaker 2: Now does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban
Speaker 2: into law. Now, of course not. But it means he
Speaker 2: understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have
Speaker 2: their use to him, he needs a lot of votes
Speaker 2: from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary. If
Speaker 2: Trump does take power again, these natural cleavages will become
Speaker 2: more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power
Speaker 2: in a severely divided country that does not like him
Speaker 2: or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling
Speaker 2: has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not
Speaker 2: made Trump more popular. Poles generally show a ceiling of
Speaker 2: around forty two percent of the country who like the guy,
Speaker 2: and that ceiling is remarkably stable. There is also evidence
Speaker 2: that these sudden media focus on Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to in
Speaker 2: democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finish
Speaker 2: this episode, on Thursday, July eleventh, IPSOS published a poll
Speaker 2: showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken
Speaker 2: after the which put him in Biden close to a tie. Now,
Speaker 2: this still isn't great for Biden, because they all writes
Speaker 2: this election should not be close. But I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people have made the mistake of conflating disgust
Speaker 2: for Biden with surging support for Trump, and that just
Speaker 2: is not what we're seeing. More evidence for this comes
Speaker 2: from a recent ABC Your Voice poll which showed fifty
Speaker 2: percent of the country having an unfavorable opinion of Biden
Speaker 2: and fifty nine percent having an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
Speaker 2: Part of why so many of these outright fascists have
Speaker 2: gone mask off is that they see these numbers too.
Speaker 2: They know that this moment right now is their best shot,
Speaker 2: maybe ever, at taking this country, crushing their enemies and
Speaker 2: inflicting the pain that it is their only purpose in
Speaker 2: life to inflict, and they might win. They might get
Speaker 2: to do that the Heritage Foundation is not at the
Speaker 2: heart of the Trump campaign, but any step closer to
Speaker 2: total power for these people should ring alarm bells in
Speaker 2: every heart and head in this country. Yet the severity
Speaker 2: of the situation does not change this absolutely crucial fact.
Speaker 2: The fascists snow the wind is no longer at their backs,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to talk about that when we come
Speaker 2: back from this ad break. Despite how confident Trump campaign
Speaker 2: and guys like Jack Bisobek are talking right now about
Speaker 2: their chances of winning, of dominating the government, of taking
Speaker 2: control of America for generations, and purging the left, the
Speaker 2: reality is that their position is not nearly as stable
Speaker 2: as it seems. And you know, part of why I
Speaker 2: think a lot of folks buy into a lot of
Speaker 2: folks on the left and liberals buy into the claims
Speaker 2: that the right is making right now about their guaranteed victory,
Speaker 2: about their looming inevitable victory, is that Americans tend to
Speaker 2: be pretty self centered when it comes to politics, and
Speaker 2: it is understandable that this nail biighter of an election
Speaker 2: in Joe Biden's calamitist debate performance has people here feeling
Speaker 2: doomed and feeling like a new fascist world order is inevitable.
Speaker 2: If you feel that way, though, I urge you to
Speaker 2: look around the world. Look to India, where authoritarian near
Speaker 2: dictator Narindramodi was just dealt a startling setback in the
Speaker 2: Indian general election. His party, the BJP, failed to win
Speaker 2: a majority for the first time since twenty fourteen. Now,
Speaker 2: this is not the end of Mody, but it is
Speaker 2: a shocking sign of where the wind is blowing and
Speaker 2: the backlash that has started to form against the far
Speaker 2: right worldwide. In the UK, the Labor Party just won
Speaker 2: a landslide election against the Conservatives, tapping it into more
Speaker 2: than a dozen years of conservative power. And in France,
Speaker 2: the snap election called by President Emmanuel mccron inspired the
Speaker 2: creation of a popular left wing front against the far right,
Speaker 2: which defeated the far right in another historic election. Among
Speaker 2: other things, this new left alliance has promised to recognize
Speaker 2: the state of Palestine and increase support for Ukrainian resistance
Speaker 2: to Rush's invasion. I could go on Turkey's all, but
Speaker 2: dictator President Erduwan has been bleeding support for years now
Speaker 2: and recently suffered a massive setback in regional elections around
Speaker 2: the country. The opposition Republican People's Party took the five
Speaker 2: largest cities in the country in an upset vote, including
Speaker 2: the capital Istanbul, where Duin's party had invested massive resources.
Speaker 2: Now these upsets in India and Turkey are so worth
Speaker 2: discussing because both countries are years into their own version
Speaker 2: of the nightmare scenario that Donald Trump Season two represents. Right,
Speaker 2: they voted their fascists into power. These guys took control
Speaker 2: of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed civil violence for political gain.
Speaker 2: And yet even with all that, even with all the
Speaker 2: power available to a modern security state, their hold on
Speaker 2: power is slipping, just as I read these words. For
Speaker 2: many years, neo Nazi activists sought to influence and build
Speaker 2: support within the Republican Party and talked about hiding their
Speaker 2: power level as they did so. This is a term
Speaker 2: they cribbed from Dragon ball Z and it means, in essence,
Speaker 2: pretending not to be a crazy ass fascist in order
Speaker 2: to get enough support from the normies that you can
Speaker 2: act like a crazy ass fascist with the power of
Speaker 2: the state. Well, the masks are off now nobody is
Speaker 2: hiding their power level anymore, and I am not so
Speaker 2: arrogant as to claim that I know that their defeat
Speaker 2: is around the corner. But I will tell you one thing.
Speaker 2: This is a make or break moment for the sons
Speaker 2: of bitches. If they fail now, they will find themselves
Speaker 2: exposed in a country that knows precisely who and what
Speaker 2: they are. And this means we will have the opportunity
Speaker 2: to destroy them. Now how would we do that? Well,
Speaker 2: first off, I'm not going to give you a detailed,
Speaker 2: perfect roadmap for how you can participate in this and
Speaker 2: how we can easily destroy the fascists and the next
Speaker 2: you know, five or six minutes of a podcast. But
Speaker 2: I do have some theories. I will elaborate on them
Speaker 2: more in subsequent episodes. And I want to emphasize right
Speaker 2: now that this is possible because the cultural power of
Speaker 2: the far right, which seems so mighty right now, actually
Speaker 2: does rest on a house of cards. The Republican Party
Speaker 2: today is funded primarily by a coalition of car dealers
Speaker 2: who donate more than any other profession because their job
Speaker 2: depends on being able to scam consumers, multi level marketing corporations,
Speaker 2: supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches, and of course are old
Speaker 2: friends in the oil and gas industry. And there's a
Speaker 2: lot of ways to attack these different pillars of right
Speaker 2: wing power, these people who are actually funding their media operations,
Speaker 2: who are funding a lot of these more radical candidates,
Speaker 2: and who are lobbying for changes in laws that hurt
Speaker 2: you and help them. And again, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: be able to give a comprehensive list of how you
Speaker 2: go about dismantling all of this. It is a formidable task,
Speaker 2: but you could do a lot of damage to the
Speaker 2: power of the far right by regulating car sales and
Speaker 2: punishing dealers who scam consumers, which is close to one
Speaker 2: hundred percent of dealers. You can ban the sale of
Speaker 2: unregulated supplements marketed as medical treatment's a thing that should
Speaker 2: be illegal, but effectctively as not. You can ban pyramid
Speaker 2: schemes and prosecute the criminals who have made fortunes off
Speaker 2: of them. These are counterattacks that will improve daily life
Speaker 2: for huge numbers of voters and do functional damage to
Speaker 2: the rights ability to move and maneuver. Now, I don't
Speaker 2: mean to suggest that the only way to move on
Speaker 2: any of those issues is just to vote right. Democrats
Speaker 2: have had decades to fight back against this shit, and
Speaker 2: they have failed by nearly every measure. But we have
Speaker 2: the potential of a general strike coming up in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty eight if the UAW has their way, and the
Speaker 2: catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party in this election has
Speaker 2: I think created some space for new kinds of organizing.
Speaker 2: The last point I want to leave you with is
Speaker 2: one more piece of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards
Speaker 2: us is not so hail and hardy as it seems.
Speaker 2: In April of this year, The Atlantic published an article
Speaker 2: based on analytics of the most popular right wing news
Speaker 2: websites in the country. They wrote, this past February, readership
Speaker 2: of the ten largest conservative websites was down forty percent
Speaker 2: compared with the same month in twenty twenty, According to
Speaker 2: The Rightening, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Commscore,
Speaker 2: essentially the Nielsen ratings of the Internet to track right
Speaker 2: wing media. Some of the bigger names in the field
Speaker 2: that have been pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost
Speaker 2: fifty seven percent of its audience, Drudge Report, the Granddaddy
Speaker 2: of conservative aggregation, was down eighty one percent, and The
Speaker 2: Federalist founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering
Speaker 2: ninety one percent. Now, these numbers are startlingly consistent across
Speaker 2: right wing media, and they are vastly worse than what
Speaker 2: liberal and left leaning media has seen over the same
Speaker 2: time period. A number of ostensibly liberal sites like The
Speaker 2: Times have seen an increase in subscribers over the same period,
Speaker 2: and I can confirm to you that here at Coolzone
Speaker 2: we have more listeners and subscribers than we did in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. Now, should you feel like there's nothing to
Speaker 2: worry about just because the right wing media is taking
Speaker 2: a fall, No, But what this should be evidence of
Speaker 2: is that, again, their support has always largely been built
Speaker 2: on their ability to generate huge amounts of money and
Speaker 2: essentially buy attention, you know, And that's largely where guys
Speaker 2: like Ben Shapiro have gotten their cultural power. And that's
Speaker 2: made Ben Shapiro a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually
Speaker 2: brought him a lot of people who give a shit
Speaker 2: what he has to say. The actual number of people
Speaker 2: paying attention to the scary motherfuckers that you see in
Speaker 2: these clips that spread on liberal and lefty social media
Speaker 2: is very small, and it's very small because these people
Speaker 2: are crazy assholes who most of the folks around you,
Speaker 2: who are basically decent people, because most people are decent,
Speaker 2: fucking hate what we have seen here. What we are
Speaker 2: seeing here is the shattering of an illusion, and the
Speaker 2: popularity of a lot of right wing media was only
Speaker 2: ever an illusion, popped up by an infusion of cash
Speaker 2: from billionaire fail suns desperate to hold on to their money.
Speaker 2: Most people don't like or trust these folks, and the
Speaker 2: arrogance and certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and
Speaker 2: the Sobics of the country have been showing now, well,
Speaker 2: it's caused them to expose themselves. There is precisely one
Speaker 2: thing you can always count on from fascists, and it's
Speaker 2: that they're dogshit at estimating risk. Time and time again,
Speaker 2: they convince themselves that they cannot be stopped in pick
Speaker 2: fights that they wind up losing. And that is perhaps
Speaker 2: the most reliable thing that we can predict from their behavior,
Speaker 2: and maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you
Speaker 2: going forward.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I also just retyped and re recorded this ending in
Speaker 2: the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump,
Speaker 2: and I want to talk a little bit about that
Speaker 2: before we go out, because that is certainly potentially a
Speaker 2: game changer. You know, people saying this could change the
Speaker 2: whole election are not wrong, but at this point far
Speaker 2: from a guarantee. As well, as I said earlier, there
Speaker 2: have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former presidents
Speaker 2: that have not moved the needle in an election, either
Speaker 2: at least not in a really clear way in favor
Speaker 2: of the person the attempt was against. So we don't
Speaker 2: know how this is going to play. One thing I
Speaker 2: have seen in the immediate wake of this, within minutes
Speaker 2: of the attempt itself and video of it going up,
Speaker 2: is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people
Speaker 2: on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag
Speaker 2: fire situation, this is staged, This is obviously a fake attempt.
Speaker 2: I don't see any evidence of that in the video
Speaker 2: that's out there. I do not believe this was faked.
Speaker 2: I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody
Speaker 2: would want to take a shot at former President Trump.
Speaker 2: The video does not show any clear weird signs that
Speaker 2: would make me suspect something odd was going on. One
Speaker 2: of the things that's come out it looks like the
Speaker 2: shooter was on a roof nearby, pretty clear evidence of
Speaker 2: that at this point. There are some reports from people
Speaker 2: in the crowd who say that they pointed out the
Speaker 2: guy on the roof to police and were basically ignored.
Speaker 2: You know, the police didn't do anything. That also does
Speaker 2: not seem weird to me, and if it does to you.
Speaker 2: I want to explain something about these events because I've
Speaker 2: been to a number of events during presidential campaig with
Speaker 2: the Secret Service is doing security and other kind of
Speaker 2: large scale, you know, events like this where there's a
Speaker 2: lot of different law enforcement agencies and at all of
Speaker 2: them you will see snipers on the roof. It is
Speaker 2: not hard to find them. These guys, some of them,
Speaker 2: I assume are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I
Speaker 2: know I've seen everyone that's around at one of these things,
Speaker 2: but you see a lot of them, right, and so
Speaker 2: do the cops. Right. It's just not abnormal, and there
Speaker 2: are always a ton of law enforcement agencies. You know,
Speaker 2: this was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as
Speaker 2: events in you know, a presidential campaign go. But you
Speaker 2: still have state and local cops. You still have at
Speaker 2: least the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret
Speaker 2: Service when it comes to federal agencies. So you know, conservatively,
Speaker 2: at minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law
Speaker 2: enforcement agencies covering this event, right, And there's definitely going
Speaker 2: to be some people there who know where all of
Speaker 2: the snipers are supposed to be, right, presumably within the
Speaker 2: Secret Service. But that is not the average cop on
Speaker 2: the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking
Speaker 2: around doing foot patrol, does not know where federal law
Speaker 2: enforcement has every single sniper set up, and they are like, anyway,
Speaker 2: I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right, Well,
Speaker 2: that's not just a thing that you can trip you
Speaker 2: up when you are trying to predict the future months
Speaker 2: or years in advance. It is a thing that can
Speaker 2: trip you up predicting something a minute in advance. Right.
Speaker 2: You see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, hey,
Speaker 2: there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well,
Speaker 2: you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns.
Speaker 2: You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service
Speaker 2: and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has
Speaker 2: some guys up on the roof you know, sharpshooters not
Speaker 2: at all weird. You go, yeah, it's maybe You even
Speaker 2: see the guy and the pictures I've seen, looks like
Speaker 2: he was wearing camo. Looks like he was wearing the
Speaker 2: kind of combat gear that cops wear, but also that
Speaker 2: anyone can buy, because cops look like you know a
Speaker 2: lot of people who just buy this shit and do
Speaker 2: it recreationally, you know, go go shooting and training in
Speaker 2: the woods or whatever. Like a lot of it's not
Speaker 2: hard to gain access to gear that at a glance
Speaker 2: would look like a cop. And my guess is that
Speaker 2: this guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my
Speaker 2: best shot at being able to get away with this
Speaker 2: is if I post up on a roof somewhere and
Speaker 2: assume that the cops that spot me immediately won't know
Speaker 2: right away what I am, right, And that does seem
Speaker 2: to be what happened at this moment, And you know,
Speaker 2: I take that as a lot of things very unclear.
Speaker 2: This is going to again affect the election, but take
Speaker 2: it as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias,
Speaker 2: because just because something seems like it's not weird, like,
Speaker 2: it's not a sign of a change of something very
Speaker 2: different about to go down doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can never trust your assumptions, and that goes both
Speaker 2: with both ways. With this, I am seeing a lot
Speaker 2: of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am
Speaker 2: someone who's about to head into the RNC not thrilled
Speaker 2: that this has happened. But that doesn't mean we know
Speaker 2: what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean
Speaker 2: we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean,
Speaker 2: for among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic.
Speaker 2: But I don't know how much this moves the needle
Speaker 2: because I don't know how many people who can be
Speaker 2: convinced would be swayed by something like this, For how
Speaker 2: many people this could change their opinion on the election,
Speaker 2: and how many people are going to believe that this
Speaker 2: was real and not. You know, I've even seen people
Speaker 2: claiming that like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a
Speaker 2: wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just
Speaker 2: really unclear how people are going to react, right. It's
Speaker 2: not worthless to look back to you know, there's an
Speaker 2: attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination
Speaker 2: attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that
Speaker 2: shit happened prior to the modern era of social media.
Speaker 2: All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting
Speaker 2: broken by the Internet. So I'm not going to tell
Speaker 2: you this is a good time. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But
Speaker 2: i am going to tell you the future is not written,
Speaker 2: and don't panic until next time. I'm Robert Evans and
Speaker 2: this is It Could Happen Here back later this week
Speaker 2: with coverage of the Republican Convention.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
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