Speaker 1: They come for you in the night. One minute you're asleep,
Speaker 1: warm and swaddled in your blankets, and the next you're
Speaker 1: awoken by a loud, crashing sound, defended by the light
Speaker 1: on the end of a police officer's a R fifteen.
Speaker 1: You raise your hands up defensively, too shocked to think.
Speaker 1: Hand grabs you by the wrist and yanks you hard
Speaker 1: off the bed, nearly pulling your arm out of its socket.
Speaker 1: Several men shout loudly, all at once. Their voices merge
Speaker 1: together into one confusing, chaotic mess. But you know enough
Speaker 1: not to resist as they jam your arms behind your
Speaker 1: back and cut your wrists. As the fog of sleep
Speaker 1: gives way to intelligent thought, your conscious mind finally understands
Speaker 1: what this is arrayed. As they drag you out into
Speaker 1: the hallway, you realize exactly what this must be about.
Speaker 1: Two days ago, two police officers were shot dead just
Speaker 1: outside your building. They weren't the heavily armed, militarized cops
Speaker 1: you see at checkpoints near the Separates side of town.
Speaker 1: These men were normal patrol officers walking a beat when
Speaker 1: some partisan sniper gun them down. At a distance. You
Speaker 1: walked past the spot where they died just a few
Speaker 1: hours earlier, on your way home from work, someone had
Speaker 1: spray painted all cops are bastards on the wall above
Speaker 1: where both men had died. You remember staring at the
Speaker 1: blood stains on the concrete, fighting down nausea and wondering
Speaker 1: what was going to come next. Now you know. The
Speaker 1: officers drop you one ceremoniously against the outside wall of
Speaker 1: your apartment. Your next door neighbor sits opposite from you,
Speaker 1: next to his front door. His nose is broken, blood
Speaker 1: streams down his face. You lock eyes. Neither of you
Speaker 1: says anything, but you share a look that says, so,
Speaker 1: let's come to this, huh. Back behind you, armored cops
Speaker 1: tear through your living room, in bedroom, emptying pillows of stuffing,
Speaker 1: turning over your bed and couch, looking at every conceivable
Speaker 1: nook and hidy hole, where a single delirious second, you
Speaker 1: find yourself consumed with worry that they might steal some
Speaker 1: of the bags of coffee you stockpiled. You can't afford
Speaker 1: to buy more At the current prices ever since Mexico
Speaker 1: closed their border, good beans cost more than your rent.
Speaker 1: You know you should feel violated, You should be livid
Speaker 1: right now, rather than just worried about your stash. A
Speaker 1: distant part of you does feel that way, But after
Speaker 1: the last few years of escalating police patrols, after all
Speaker 1: the hours spent waiting at checkpoints in the constant vehicle searches,
Speaker 1: this just sort of feels like the inevitable culmination of events.
Speaker 1: Another group of cops rushes past you down the hallway
Speaker 1: with a clattering of body armor and heavy metal deer.
Speaker 1: All their faces are covered by goggles, helmets, and ski
Speaker 1: masks with skulls printed on the face. The skulls are
Speaker 1: black and white, just like the colorless American flags on
Speaker 1: their shoulders. You realize with some surprise that none of
Speaker 1: them have any visible rank or unit insignias on their armor.
Speaker 1: You don't even really know if they're police or soldiers.
Speaker 1: You guess at this point the difference is mainly academic.
Speaker 1: One of them carries a battering ram, but your eyes
Speaker 1: are drawn to a short man at the rear of
Speaker 1: the group. On his hip is a sheathed tomahawk. Something
Speaker 1: about that sets your skin on edge. An ax is
Speaker 1: not the kind of tool you use to restore order
Speaker 1: or to protect people. It has one purpose to cut
Speaker 1: through flesh and bone. The cops or whatever they are,
Speaker 1: batter open the next door and rush into the third
Speaker 1: and final apartment on your floor. They're shouting the sound
Speaker 1: of a struggle, and then a single gunshot shatters the night.
Speaker 1: An eerie silence descends on the hallway. You and your
Speaker 1: neighbors share another look. The dread on his face says
Speaker 1: more than any words ever could. After a few seconds,
Speaker 1: the short man with the tomahawks steps out of the room,
Speaker 1: his hand on the shoulder of a tall officer. You
Speaker 1: see a wisp of smoke curl up off the other
Speaker 1: man's rifle. His front is splattered with blood, drops of
Speaker 1: its stay in. The black and white flag on his
Speaker 1: shoulder the only color on his dismal uniform, and once
Speaker 1: again you find yourself wondering what comes next. In two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, I visited Kiev, capital of Ukraine, about a
Speaker 1: year after the successful My Dawn Revolution overthrew that country's
Speaker 1: wanna be dictator Viktor Yanukovich. This was also about a
Speaker 1: year into Ukraine's war with the Russian backed separatists. I
Speaker 1: interviewed a bunch of veterans of the Maidan Revolution. Most
Speaker 1: were young men and women. At one point I sat
Speaker 1: down with a married couple, both in their mid twenties.
Speaker 1: They were both fairly small people, of tiny build and stature.
Speaker 1: I listened while they explained how they'd faced off against
Speaker 1: the Barkut the Berkout. Where are Ukraine's elite riot police.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen an American cop at a civil
Speaker 1: disturbance or riot wearing full body armor and wielding a
Speaker 1: truncheon or a gas gridade launcher, or one of those
Speaker 1: pepper ball guns that looks like a cross between a
Speaker 1: paintball gun and an air fifteen, they looked sort of
Speaker 1: like that. All riot cops look pretty much the same.
Speaker 1: That is to say, they look like Darth Vader. You're
Speaker 1: meant to be intimidated by them, awed by the sight
Speaker 1: of dozens or hundreds of these tall armor plated badasses
Speaker 1: slowly tromping towards you while a commanding voice bellows over
Speaker 1: a painfully loud speaker on the back of a tank.
Speaker 1: Disperse this is an unlawful gathering. Now. These two people
Speaker 1: I was sitting with had gone face to face with
Speaker 1: the Verkout as part of a shield wall of volunteers
Speaker 1: who had for weeks successfully pushed back the assaults of
Speaker 1: this army of darth vaders. I knew that intellectually, but
Speaker 1: I could not square that fact with the unimposing reality
Speaker 1: of these two spindly tech geeks who were sitting in
Speaker 1: front of me. Eventually, I asked them, both of you
Speaker 1: are tiny, and your software developers not m m A fighters.
Speaker 1: How do you go face to face with armored cops
Speaker 1: and win? The young woman smiled at me and sort
Speaker 1: of raised out her arms to pantomime the shape of
Speaker 1: a riot shield. It's similar to the kinds of shields
Speaker 1: Roman legionnaires used to carry, but black, she explained, the
Speaker 1: barcoot carried these big shields, and if you're small, you
Speaker 1: can get in low and grab the shield by the
Speaker 1: bottom and flip it up. With all that armor, they're
Speaker 1: very top heavy. It's easy to get them off balance,
Speaker 1: especially with all the ice on the ground. Then when
Speaker 1: they fall on their backs, they are like a turtle,
Speaker 1: so you stomp on them. In addition to being a
Speaker 1: useful bit of practical advice, if you, dear listener, I
Speaker 1: find yourself facing off against riot cops, I found her
Speaker 1: advice to be powerfully symbolic of the nature of state power,
Speaker 1: it always looks formidable. Perception of a monopoly on the
Speaker 1: use of force is important for any government. If people
Speaker 1: don't think a revolution is possible, they're less likely to revolt.
Speaker 1: But once things get going, once push comes to literal shove,
Speaker 1: the might of the police and even the military often
Speaker 1: proves to be less imposing than it appears on paper.
Speaker 1: In other words, the man has a glass jaw. Welcome
Speaker 1: to episode three of It could happen here the Second
Speaker 1: American Civil War. To recap our hypothetical timeline, a financial
Speaker 1: crash has shattered the U S economy into pieces. Left
Speaker 1: wing activists have occupied centers of several a major American cities,
Speaker 1: including Wall Street in New York City. Several of these
Speaker 1: occupations have surely been crushed that others have successfully held
Speaker 1: off the police and created autonomous zones free of state control.
Speaker 1: Terrorist attacks, mash shootings, and perhaps even bombings against demonstrators
Speaker 1: from one side or the other have grown more common. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: out in the country, separatists resist the government calls to
Speaker 1: disarm them. A potent insurgency has cut off the water
Speaker 1: supply and the roads to some of America's most productive farmland.
Speaker 1: The body count and the cost of food rises, the
Speaker 1: stock market falls. Most people are probably still loath to
Speaker 1: call this a civil war, but deep in Washington, that's
Speaker 1: exactly how the guardians of the state have decided to
Speaker 1: treat it. The government's first line of defense would be
Speaker 1: the police and of course the power of law. So
Speaker 1: if we're going to ponder over how the system might
Speaker 1: strike back against this threat to its very existence, we'd
Speaker 1: better start with Congress. Let's assume the government starts by
Speaker 1: trying to placate the demonstrators without much success. To appease
Speaker 1: the yellow vest protesters, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, repealed
Speaker 1: the controversial gas tax on December fourth, two thousand eighteen.
Speaker 1: As of mid March when I'm writing this episode, the
Speaker 1: protests are still ongoing. Placation does not always work, So
Speaker 1: let's imagine Congress tries to wave a carrot reducing gas
Speaker 1: taxes and promising investigation into the financial industry. May be
Speaker 1: approving some federal funds to help struggling homeowners. Like most
Speaker 1: things our Congress does, it's half hearted and heavily compromised
Speaker 1: by partisan bickering. The protesters and separatists are not placated.
Speaker 1: So what happens next when the government's first attempt to
Speaker 1: restore order fails. We can find some clues to this
Speaker 1: in the Standing Rock protests and the protests in d
Speaker 1: C during present Trump's inauguration. In the immediate wake of
Speaker 1: both of these unprecedented acts of resistance, the man did
Speaker 1: what the man does, tried to stomp down on the
Speaker 1: power to actively resist. In the wake of both protests,
Speaker 1: more than twenty states proposed bills that restricted the rights
Speaker 1: of protesters and also protected the rights of people who
Speaker 1: did violence against those protesters. In response to protesters blocking
Speaker 1: pipelines under construction on Native American territory, Oklahoma past h
Speaker 1: B one one two three. This increased penalties for trespassing
Speaker 1: on critical infrastructure. Protesters who simply showed up to protest at, say,
Speaker 1: the side of a pipeline, could find themselves looking at
Speaker 1: a year in prison. Damaging equipment increase the penalty to
Speaker 1: ten years. In North Dakota, sight of the Standing Rock protest,
Speaker 1: two bills were signed into law punishing people who wear
Speaker 1: masks or cover their faces at protests and increasing the
Speaker 1: potential prison term of participating in something deemed a riot.
Speaker 1: To ten years. In Tennessee, a bill was proposed that
Speaker 1: would give quote civil immunity for the driver of an
Speaker 1: automobile who injures a protester who was blocking traffic in
Speaker 1: a public right of way if the driver is exercising
Speaker 1: do care. By the time Heather Higher was murdered by
Speaker 1: an angry fascist demonstrator in a car, six states had
Speaker 1: proposed measures similar to that Tennessee bill. In Texas, Representative
Speaker 1: Pat Fallon attempted to straight up legalize ramming protesters with cars. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to remind you of a few things. Number One,
Speaker 1: state level congress people like Pat Fallon often wind up
Speaker 1: running for and winning federal office. And number two, the
Speaker 1: inciting incidents for most of these bills were peaceful protests.
Speaker 1: So when I think of those facts and I imagine
Speaker 1: the government's response to an activist movement that has literally
Speaker 1: barricaded chunks of major American cities and said you can't
Speaker 1: come in, well, I don't imagine the federal government's first
Speaker 1: response would be violence, But I see them winding up
Speaker 1: at violence rather quickly. I don't think we start off
Speaker 1: with police snipers using live rounds on protesters as they
Speaker 1: did in Ukraine, but I can see American police being
Speaker 1: called in from other parts of the state and other states.
Speaker 1: This would bring in huge numbers of officers more used
Speaker 1: to handing up parking tickets than using tear gas. They'd
Speaker 1: be suddenly thrown in to try and clear out an angry,
Speaker 1: organized group of activists behind barricades, tossing jars of fecal
Speaker 1: matter and urine firework, stink bombs, whatever they have. I
Speaker 1: do not have any trouble imaging debts at several of
Speaker 1: these clashes. There's been a lot of talk and a
Speaker 1: lot of articles in the last few years about the
Speaker 1: rise of the warrior cop. As left wing magazine Mother
Speaker 1: Jones put it, militarized policing is a hot button issue.
Speaker 1: At the tail end of his term, President Obama tried
Speaker 1: to stem the flow of military grade weapons and vehicles
Speaker 1: to law enforcement, but that executive order was reversed in
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. The thing is, police officers aren't soldiers.
Speaker 1: Some of them are veterans, and a few are even
Speaker 1: combat veterans, but most are just cops. Looking like a
Speaker 1: soldier does not necessarily mean you can operate like one.
Speaker 1: More than two point two million Americans have served in
Speaker 1: the War on Terror and been deployed to one of
Speaker 1: its many hot spots. Most of those people are not
Speaker 1: combat veterans either, but they all hold valuable skills, the
Speaker 1: kind of skills that could help a group of protesters
Speaker 1: occupy the center of a large American city, organized their
Speaker 1: supplies and communications, and even physically resist the police. At
Speaker 1: Standing Rock, I met veterans with information security backgrounds focused
Speaker 1: on providing the protest camps with secure internet access, and
Speaker 1: Kiev during the Might on protests, old Soviet veterans of
Speaker 1: the fighting in Afghanistan helped stiffen the backs of scared,
Speaker 1: young protesters facing off against lines of riot police. American
Speaker 1: veterans are significantly more politically active than the average citizen,
Speaker 1: six percent more likely to vote. Because of their experience
Speaker 1: working as part of a large, organized whole, and because
Speaker 1: of their specialized skills, veterans make fantastic activists. They also
Speaker 1: make fantastic terrorists, insurgents, and freedom fighters. This is something
Speaker 1: that came up during my talk with David Kilcolin back
Speaker 1: in two thousand sixteen. He told me about something called
Speaker 1: Fuco's boomerang. This is an idea proposed initially by Michelle
Speaker 1: Fucot to explain why military techniques originally developed by colonial
Speaker 1: powers to put down insurrections and colonies eventually wound up
Speaker 1: being used by those same nations on their own people.
Speaker 1: One great example is the concentration camp. It was initially
Speaker 1: deployed by the Spanish against their Cuban colony, and then
Speaker 1: by the British against their South African colonies, until eventually,
Speaker 1: during the World War the technique wound up in Europe
Speaker 1: being used on Europeans. The science of finger printing and
Speaker 1: the idea of panoptic prisons are two more examples of
Speaker 1: techniques Europeans initially developed to maintain colonial order and then
Speaker 1: brought back to their own countries. Fuco himself wrote quote,
Speaker 1: it should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its
Speaker 1: techniques and its political and judicial weapons, obviously transported European
Speaker 1: models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang
Speaker 1: effect on the mechanisms of power in the West and
Speaker 1: on the apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole
Speaker 1: series of colonial models was brought back to the West,
Speaker 1: and the result was that the West could practice something
Speaker 1: resembling colonization or an internal colonization on itself. In his
Speaker 1: important book Cities under Siege the New Military Urbanism, Professor
Speaker 1: Stephen Graham argues convincingly that the same thing is happening
Speaker 1: now in the United States as a result of the
Speaker 1: techniques are military developed initially to fight insurgents in Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan. Quote. These operations act as testing grounds for
Speaker 1: technology and techniques to be sold on through the world's
Speaker 1: burgeoning homeland security markets. Through such processes of imitation, explicitly,
Speaker 1: colonial models of pacification, militarization, and control honed on the
Speaker 1: streets of the global South are spread to the cities
Speaker 1: of the capitalist heartlands in the North. In other words,
Speaker 1: if you want a picture of how our government and
Speaker 1: our military will respond to a separatist movement in the
Speaker 1: United States, just look at what they've done in other
Speaker 1: countries when their cities defied us. This is why, as
Speaker 1: this podcast goes on, I'll repeatedly refer to what the U. S.
Speaker 1: Military did in Mosul and Rocah. But right now, for
Speaker 1: this episode, what's important is that the boomerang effect cuts
Speaker 1: both ways. The state right now is armed with a
Speaker 1: whole host of weapons and tactics it perfected fighting insurgents
Speaker 1: in Iraq in Afghanistan. But American cities and the American
Speaker 1: countryside are also filled with men and women who spent
Speaker 1: years of their lives fighting those wars and those insurgents.
Speaker 1: They paid attention to what the enemy did, what worked,
Speaker 1: and what didn't. Now, I want to make it clear
Speaker 1: before we go on that I'm not saying veterans are
Speaker 1: inherently violent people or anything like that. I don't think
Speaker 1: they're more likely to become terrorists than anyone else. But
Speaker 1: if they do make that choice, they have a much
Speaker 1: wider range of capabilities than say, a radicalized former kindergarten teacher.
Speaker 1: We already have a significant history in the very recent
Speaker 1: past of U. S. Military veterans coming back from deployments
Speaker 1: abroad and embarking on one man crusades to bring the
Speaker 1: war home. We do. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber,
Speaker 1: was a combat veteran. He killed people for his country
Speaker 1: before he murdered the people of his country. Tim probably
Speaker 1: never heard of Fucot's Boomerang, but without knowing it, his
Speaker 1: life perfectly embodied the theory I'd like to quote from
Speaker 1: the book American Terrorists, probably the best buy graphye of
Speaker 1: Timothy McVeigh quote. In reaching his decision to bomb a
Speaker 1: federal building, McVeigh had been operating in a purely military
Speaker 1: state of mind. The bombing, to him, was an act
Speaker 1: of tactical aggression, nothing more, nothing less. The Army had
Speaker 1: been his teacher in the horrors of war. He had
Speaker 1: learned to cope with unthinkable cruelty, and now he would
Speaker 1: put the lessons the army had taught him to practice
Speaker 1: on native soil. You learn how to handle killing in
Speaker 1: the military, he explained. I faced the consequences, but you
Speaker 1: learn to accept it. This brings me to the story
Speaker 1: of Christopher Dorner. Before he was a Los Angeles cop,
Speaker 1: Chris Dorner was a Naval reserve officer who had been
Speaker 1: deployed to Bahrain with the Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit
Speaker 1: for two years. He was a well trained and experienced
Speaker 1: soldier and a qualified marksman with both rifle and pistol.
Speaker 1: Up until two thousand thirteen, Officer Dorner seemed like a
Speaker 1: model human being. In two thousand two, while training Advanced
Speaker 1: Air Force Base, he and a comrade found a bag
Speaker 1: with a thousand dollars of cash inside it, property of
Speaker 1: the Enid Korean Church of Grace. They turned in. They
Speaker 1: turned the money into the police. At the time. When interviewed,
Speaker 1: Dorner stated, quote, there was a couple of thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and if people are willing to give that to a church,
Speaker 1: it must be pretty important to them. He emphasized that
Speaker 1: his mother and the military had both taught him to
Speaker 1: be an honorable man. And two thousand thirteen, Christopher Dorner
Speaker 1: was fired by the l a p D. He claimed
Speaker 1: that this was because he reported on the use of
Speaker 1: excessive force within the department, beatings of suspects and homeless
Speaker 1: people for no reason. He tried to report these things
Speaker 1: and was shut down. Rather than next going to a
Speaker 1: journalist or the a c l U, or generally taking
Speaker 1: any of what we consider to be the acceptable roads
Speaker 1: our society provides people to attempt to redress these grievances,
Speaker 1: Chris Dorner decided that none of that was likely to work.
Speaker 1: He chose a redder path. On February one, two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: Anderson Cooper's office received a package from Dorner. It in
Speaker 1: included a DVD laying out his case against the department
Speaker 1: and a challenge coin issued by l a p D
Speaker 1: Chief William Bratton. Challenge coins are basically POGs for soldiers
Speaker 1: in law enforcement, metal coins and blazoned with the logo
Speaker 1: of this department, that office, through this general, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Chris Dorner had shot this coin and attached to it
Speaker 1: a note that said one m o A. An m
Speaker 1: o A is a minute of angle. By writing this,
Speaker 1: he was essentially saying that he had shot the coin
Speaker 1: from a hundred yards away with a grouping of one inch.
Speaker 1: In other words, Chris Dorner was saying, I am a
Speaker 1: very very good shot. Be afraid. On February third, two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, Chris Dorner shot and killed Monica Quan, the
Speaker 1: daughter of a former l a p D captain and
Speaker 1: Keith Lawrence, her fiancee, and a campus police officer. This
Speaker 1: kicked off a rampage that would last until February the twelfth.
Speaker 1: It was a chaotic, terrifying time for the l a
Speaker 1: p D. Many officers went to work feeling like, in essence,
Speaker 1: the predator was after them. It was also a terrifying
Speaker 1: time for black men who looked vaguely like Chris. There
Speaker 1: are pictures of one guy wearing a white T shirt
Speaker 1: with the words not Chris Dorner written on his chest
Speaker 1: and sharpie. Over the course of his rampage, Chris killed
Speaker 1: two additional police officers and wounded three others. The l
Speaker 1: a p D took all patrol officers off their motorcycles
Speaker 1: for the duration of his spree. Protection details were set
Speaker 1: up for the forty police officials named in his manifesto,
Speaker 1: and thousands of officers were redeployed to watch the highways
Speaker 1: of southern California. I went to read you some exerpts
Speaker 1: from the manifesto Chris sent out on February fourth, in
Speaker 1: the middle of his one man war against the l
Speaker 1: a p D. Citizens slash non combatants. Do not render
Speaker 1: medical aid to downed officers slash enemy combatants. They would
Speaker 1: not do the same for you. They will let you
Speaker 1: bleed out just so they can brag to other officers
Speaker 1: that they had a one eight seven caper the other
Speaker 1: day and can't wait to accrue the overtime in future
Speaker 1: court subpoenas. As they always say, that's the paramedics job,
Speaker 1: not mine. Let the balance of loss of life take place.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a reset needs to occur. This will be a
Speaker 1: war of attrition and a pyrac and Camdean victory for myself.
Speaker 1: You may have the resources in manpower, but you are
Speaker 1: reactive and predictable in your apt plans. I have the
Speaker 1: strength and benefits of being unpredictable, unconventional, and unforgiving. Do
Speaker 1: not waste your time with briefs and table tops. Chris
Speaker 1: was finally cornered in a cabin on a mountaineer big
Speaker 1: Bear Lake, California. It's presumed he shot himself after the
Speaker 1: police fired in munitions that lit the cabin on fire
Speaker 1: around him. Three years later, in two thousand sixteen, Micah
Speaker 1: Xavier Johnson followed in Chris's footsteps when he opened fire
Speaker 1: on and killed five Dallas police officers during a protest.
Speaker 1: Johnson was an Army reserve officer and veteran of the
Speaker 1: Afghan War. Later that same year, Gavin Eugene Long ambushed
Speaker 1: and shot six Louisiana police officers in Baton Rouge. Three
Speaker 1: of his victims died. Gavin Long had spent five years
Speaker 1: in the United States Marine Corps. He'd served one tour
Speaker 1: in Iraq. Now Long was not a combat soldier, but
Speaker 1: every Marine is a trained rifleman, and every Marine receives
Speaker 1: training on basic combat tactics, including how to set up
Speaker 1: the sort of ambush he carried out expertly against those
Speaker 1: baton rouge cops. The United States military has gotten extraordinarily
Speaker 1: good at training young men for battle. Even the soldiers
Speaker 1: who don't see combat can wind up quite proficient. These
Speaker 1: three cases are ample evidence of how much damage a competent,
Speaker 1: trained person can inflict on American police officers. But Chris
Speaker 1: Dorner is the case that's most interesting to me and
Speaker 1: I think most relevant to our discussion here. He was
Speaker 1: clearly a man of passionate beliefs, a man who felt
Speaker 1: that something terribly wrong had been done by the police.
Speaker 1: His actions effectively tied up the l a p D,
Speaker 1: one of the largest armed forces on this planet for
Speaker 1: more than a week. Imagine if he'd been out there
Speaker 1: hunting cops in the middle of a major protest campaign.
Speaker 1: This is part of why I can pretty easily imagine
Speaker 1: some sort of more badass occupy style movement managing to
Speaker 1: hang on and control territory in several American cities despite
Speaker 1: the best efforts of law enforcement. One angry, radicalized vet,
Speaker 1: armed with the kind of weapons you can buy just
Speaker 1: about everywhere in America could pretty easily lock down an
Speaker 1: entire cities law enforcement during a time when they would
Speaker 1: not have many officers to spare. And remember the boomerang effect,
Speaker 1: Police departments already react, shall we say, forcefully whenever an
Speaker 1: officer dies. Because Black Lives Matter was in the news
Speaker 1: when Mica Johnson and Gavin Long carried out their attacks,
Speaker 1: and because they were both black men, there were calls
Speaker 1: around the country to declare BLM a violent extremist group,
Speaker 1: despite a general lack of connections between either shooter and
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter as an organization. If an angry veteran
Speaker 1: with a bolt action sniper rifle started shooting NYPD cops
Speaker 1: while a huge chunk of Manhattan was locked down by protesters,
Speaker 1: well it doesn't exactly take a big logical leap to
Speaker 1: imagine the cops might blame those deaths on the protest movement,
Speaker 1: so their violence against the protesters would escalate, and more
Speaker 1: activists would be killed and injured. More videos of police
Speaker 1: violence would go viral. This would inspire more anti police
Speaker 1: vigilantes to start hunting cops on the streets, and the
Speaker 1: cycle would continue, driving everyone to more extreme acts of
Speaker 1: violence and gradually ratcheting up the body count. And this
Speaker 1: is where the other side of the boomerang effect would
Speaker 1: come into it, because an awful lot of police officers
Speaker 1: or veterans too, And when these guys start facing the
Speaker 1: same kinds of attacks they faced when they were deployed
Speaker 1: to Baghdad or wherever, they would respond using the same
Speaker 1: sorts of repressive measures. And as Cuko predicted, American citizens
Speaker 1: would soon find themselves and during something millions of Iraqi
Speaker 1: and Afghan people already know quite well the midnight raid.
Speaker 1: Talk to any Iraqis Edison who grew up in Kirkuk
Speaker 1: or Fellujjah in the early aughts, and they will tell
Speaker 1: you stories of American soldiers suited up like something from
Speaker 1: a science fiction movie, with giant guns and body armor
Speaker 1: and wild and sectoid looking optic equipment, breaking down doors
Speaker 1: in the dead of night and dragging people off into custody.
Speaker 1: Sometimes these people were insurgents, sometimes there were innocent civilians
Speaker 1: victims of mistaken identity. In every instance, the raids were
Speaker 1: terrifying for everyone involved. And when you've got a bunch
Speaker 1: of jumpy, armed young men breaking down doors and the
Speaker 1: dead of night looking for terrorists. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of room for error, the fatal kind of error, since
Speaker 1: most of you aren't familiar with what happens in one
Speaker 1: of these raids. I'd like to quote from several of
Speaker 1: the fifty or so veterans who were interviewed by the
Speaker 1: Nation in two thousand seven about their activities in Iraq.
Speaker 1: Sergeant John Brune served in Baghdad and Abu Grab. He
Speaker 1: carried out numerous night raids on the local people. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: you want to catch them off guard. You want to
Speaker 1: catch them in their sleep. You run in and if
Speaker 1: there's lights, you turn them on. If the lights are working,
Speaker 1: If not, you've got flash lights. You leave one rifle
Speaker 1: team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle
Speaker 1: team leader has a head set on with an earpiece
Speaker 1: and a microphone where he can communicate with the other
Speaker 1: rifle team leader that's outside. You go up the stairs,
Speaker 1: You grab the man of the house. You rip him
Speaker 1: out of bed in front of his wife. You put
Speaker 1: him up against the wall. You have junior level troops.
Speaker 1: P f c's specialists will run into the other rooms
Speaker 1: and grab the family and you'll group them all together.
Speaker 1: Then you go into a room and you tear the
Speaker 1: room to shreds, and you make sure there's no weapons
Speaker 1: or anything they can use to attack us. These police
Speaker 1: raids would surely lead to bloody accidents, as even routine
Speaker 1: traffic stops due to day. Marine Reserve Lieutenant Jonathan Morgenstein
Speaker 1: served in Ramadi from August of two thousand four to
Speaker 1: March of two thousand five. He noted, quote, I mean
Speaker 1: you physically could not do an investigation every time a
Speaker 1: civilian was wounded or killed, because it just happens a lot,
Speaker 1: and you'd spend all your time doing that. I want
Speaker 1: to remind you that these soldiers carrying out these raids,
Speaker 1: which often ended in death, have vastly more training than
Speaker 1: any police officers conducting the same raid in the United
Speaker 1: States would be likely to have. A seconds googling found
Speaker 1: me the two thousand and nine New York Times article
Speaker 1: soldiers kill Iraqi couple during raid at home is an
Speaker 1: example of the kind of headlines you might expect to
Speaker 1: see if this were to happen in the United States.
Speaker 1: So imagine being the protesters in a camp in a
Speaker 1: major American city and waking up to see a headline
Speaker 1: like that about one of your neighbors. Imagine how the
Speaker 1: other protesters in that camp will react. Imagine this being
Speaker 1: someone's last straw, the final thing that makes him decide
Speaker 1: to pick up a gun and try to ambush a cop.
Speaker 1: You see how this all works, right, Each little step
Speaker 1: forward makes everything worse and exacerbates all these tensions that
Speaker 1: in calmer times would fade back down. None of the
Speaker 1: individual pieces are unprecedented, but if they all happened close
Speaker 1: enough to each other, it creates this accelerating psyche of violence.
Speaker 1: So imagine a bunch of cops facing off against screaming
Speaker 1: protesters every night, knowing they could get shot from behind
Speaker 1: at any moment. Imagine them doing that for days on end,
Speaker 1: working double shifts like the police in Paris did during
Speaker 1: the height of the Yellow vest protests, and every few
Speaker 1: days or weeks some new nuts starts hunting cops. Some
Speaker 1: of these vigilantes will be stopped right away, others might
Speaker 1: continue to kill for weeks. To the police, everyone would
Speaker 1: start to look like an enemy. That kind of stress
Speaker 1: does not make any group of human beings better or
Speaker 1: more compassionate. I'd like to quote from one more veteran
Speaker 1: staff sergeant named Camillo maya quote the frustration that resulted
Speaker 1: from our inability to get back at those who were
Speaker 1: attacking us lead to tactics that seemed designed to simply
Speaker 1: punish the local population that was supporting we don't now.
Speaker 1: I know police violence in the United States is one
Speaker 1: of the most controversial topics in the country right now.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be as even handed as possible in
Speaker 1: my presentation of things, So I want any police officers
Speaker 1: or back the blue folks listening right now to know
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to inherently write law enforcement off as
Speaker 1: the bad guys here. This would be a terrifying and
Speaker 1: demoralizing situation for the vast majority of American law enforcement.
Speaker 1: The people they'd be fighting wouldn't all look like Christopher Dorner,
Speaker 1: a dude with a squeaky clean record of service and
Speaker 1: a clear articulated reason for his rampage. Some of them
Speaker 1: would be long standing members of violent criminal groups like
Speaker 1: m S thirteen, the Eighteenth Street Gang, or Barrio s Teca.
Speaker 1: While I was researching that two thousand sixteen Cracked article,
Speaker 1: several of the experts I interviewed independently brought up the
Speaker 1: same thing. They expected that organized criminal groups would absolutely
Speaker 1: get involved in any kind of serious fighting that broke
Speaker 1: out in a city where they had a strong presence.
Speaker 1: Is actually a pretty common occurrence in civil wars. David Kilcolin,
Speaker 1: the former State Department strategist, told me this. There's often
Speaker 1: a criminal element in early stages of insurgencies which often
Speaker 1: gets purged later. Street criminals in particular, are much more
Speaker 1: likely to use violence. You see this with gangs and
Speaker 1: early insurgent movements brought in a lot of street thugs
Speaker 1: early to just sort of raise the temperature and get
Speaker 1: everybody used to it. Raising the temperature is critical because
Speaker 1: it's how we go from mass unrest to outright revolution.
Speaker 1: Lone wolf nuts, small violent cells of people willing to
Speaker 1: use deadly force, don't inspire the masses as much as
Speaker 1: they get them increasingly used to violence, and that is
Speaker 1: a critical step on the road to turning a series
Speaker 1: of protests into a civil war. On October twenty two,
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, Business Insider ran an article with this
Speaker 1: super fun headline quote. The FBI announces gangs have infiltrated
Speaker 1: every branch of the military. It's one of those increasingly
Speaker 1: rare tidal that really accurately describes what's going on. Here's
Speaker 1: a quote from the FBI's report. Quote. Through transfers and deployments,
Speaker 1: military affiliated gang members expand their culture and operations to
Speaker 1: new regions nationwide and worldwide, undermining security and law enforcement
Speaker 1: efforts to combat crime. Gang members with military training pose
Speaker 1: a unique threat to law enforcement personnel because of their
Speaker 1: distinctive weapons and combat training skills, and their ability to
Speaker 1: transfer these skills to fellow gang members. Right now, there
Speaker 1: is no evidence that any American street gangs support any
Speaker 1: kind of organized activity against the U. S. Government other
Speaker 1: than you know, selling drugs and stuff. They're primarily money
Speaker 1: making organizations. But criminals have a long history of making
Speaker 1: fantastic revolutionaries. Abu Musab al Zarkawi, the George Washington of Isis,
Speaker 1: was a drug dealer and gangster back in Jordan before
Speaker 1: he found Allah. Joseph Stalin robbed Banks before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Speaker 1: It is not so great a jump from gang leader
Speaker 1: to revolutionary. American society is seated with people who have
Speaker 1: the know how and the tools necessary to raise the
Speaker 1: temperature in our society to uncomfortable levels, and within the
Speaker 1: affected cities themselves, the places dealing with large protest camps,
Speaker 1: police checkpoints, nighttime raids, and escalating violence, well, I think
Speaker 1: things could get hot fast. I remember one moment vividly
Speaker 1: from my second trip in the Mosle. We were embedded
Speaker 1: with a unit of the Iraqi Federal Police. Don't let
Speaker 1: the name fool you. These guys had tanks and artillery
Speaker 1: and mortars and rocket launchers and machine guns, and we
Speaker 1: watched them use all of it. The Federal police were
Speaker 1: infamous among the civilians of Mosle for using heavy weaponry
Speaker 1: with reckless abandon and crowded neighborhoods filled with sheltering families.
Speaker 1: They were nice guys outside of that, but I would
Speaker 1: not have wanted to wind up on the other side
Speaker 1: of their ire or their fire. After we spent a
Speaker 1: little time embedded with them and we're leaving, I tried
Speaker 1: to convey my gratitude to their colonel for hosting us.
Speaker 1: I think I came across more as saying thank you
Speaker 1: for what you're doing against isis than thanking him for
Speaker 1: his hospitality. And I'll always remember his response don't worry
Speaker 1: your police would do the same thing if this happened
Speaker 1: in your country. That sentence has haunted me ever since,
Speaker 1: because once the cycle of violence gets well under way,
Speaker 1: once the dead on both sides number into dozens and
Speaker 1: start edging up to the hundreds, a chain of events
Speaker 1: will have been set into motion that will lead inexorably
Speaker 1: to the direct involvement of the military and a literal
Speaker 1: war between the American government and many of its people.
Speaker 1: This is the point at which many of you might
Speaker 1: suspect the violence would rather quickly come to a close.
Speaker 1: After all, protesters with molotov cocktails and insurgents with air
Speaker 1: fifteens could not possibly last long against the unleashed might
Speaker 1: of the American military. In our next episode, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why you shouldn't be so sure about that. People
Speaker 1: cross want to tell him mom guns you should see
Speaker 1: how the jaw dropping to tell him. Why ain't talking
Speaker 1: to sorrow to keep these front door on the clock
Speaker 1: in NATO, Because I don't just the cops, y'all, says
Speaker 1: he knowing everyno' all I do is laugh that spine
Speaker 1: on the spine here. Everybody's gone test taking Norris taking
Speaker 1: no exacting where you stand and understand that this me
Speaker 1: is strapping. Hey, it's about time. I'm a little friend,
Speaker 1: spouts when speaking in It'll be your voices, Stern wings
Speaker 1: when of that stats that the dead cats, but the
Speaker 1: weapon's around black pantacton and snap back turned back and
Speaker 1: the hands on. Anybody questions he's fucked up? We all knowing, baby.
Speaker 1: The question is when the fun we wait? Some president
Speaker 1: take the name you can fix. You can fix your fix.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all
Speaker 1: of that. You can find me on Twitter at I
Speaker 1: right okay. You can find this show on Twitter at
Speaker 1: happen here pod, and you can find the show online
Speaker 1: at it could happen here pod dot com. Our music,
Speaker 1: as always, is from Four Fists