Speaker 1: Also media, Hey everybody, this is it could happen here.
Speaker 1: And I am Robert Evans, and initially this was supposed
Speaker 1: to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering
Speaker 1: over the fact recently that I feel weirdly optimistic, particularly
Speaker 1: in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a
Speaker 1: lot of the people that I know and spend time around.
Speaker 1: And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of
Speaker 1: the same pieces of news differently than they have, and
Speaker 1: because I've been coming across some different pieces of information
Speaker 1: than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk
Speaker 1: people through why I've been feeling so optimistic, and so
Speaker 1: I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of
Speaker 1: last week, and then over the weekend a gunman attack
Speaker 1: the White House Correspondence dinner, and I actually, this hasn't
Speaker 1: really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: that this week, probably on ED. But I did make
Speaker 1: some alterations to the episode as a result of that,
Speaker 1: although I I do think it reinforces my primary point,
Speaker 1: which is that the political era that we now find
Speaker 1: ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms
Speaker 1: with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to
Speaker 1: survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places
Speaker 1: like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean,
Speaker 1: or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's
Speaker 1: called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time,
Speaker 1: people thought it was too salty to host any life.
Speaker 1: Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The dead
Speaker 1: sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because the Dead
Speaker 1: Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy four by R. D. McElroy to describe
Speaker 1: microorganisms scientists we're increasingly finding in places that should have
Speaker 1: been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term
Speaker 1: that literally means love of extremes, and while it is
Speaker 1: usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms
Speaker 1: and very odd locations, where its have over the years
Speaker 1: pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too.
Speaker 1: In the journal article all about Extremophiles JOHNS. Hopkins Universities,
Speaker 1: James A. Koker wrote that quote, despite common perception, most
Speaker 1: of Earth is what is often referred to as an
Speaker 1: extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home.
Speaker 1: It is simply that home. They have adapted to thrive
Speaker 1: in these environments, and in the process have evolved many
Speaker 1: unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our
Speaker 1: human centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to
Speaker 1: think of ourselves as being in the Goldilock zone, not
Speaker 1: too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled
Speaker 1: with all the things necessary for life to exist. To
Speaker 1: some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us
Speaker 1: from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth is
Speaker 1: mostly a cold place. Over ninety percent of its oceans
Speaker 1: are at or below five degrees celsius, and it has
Speaker 1: an average temperature of around fifteen degrees celsius, and several
Speaker 1: conditions we humans consider normal i e. Twenty percent oxygen
Speaker 1: in the air actually make us extremophiles from the point
Speaker 1: of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have
Speaker 1: a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like
Speaker 1: this metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit
Speaker 1: of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes
Speaker 1: than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials and
Speaker 1: even Gen Z and Alpha kids too young to have
Speaker 1: known the nineties to look back on that decade as
Speaker 1: a sort of cultural goldilock zone, as if the brief
Speaker 1: period post Cold War in pre nine to eleven was
Speaker 1: some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything
Speaker 1: since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different
Speaker 1: reasons for this. Some of them blame nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: Some people will argue that we were in that sweet
Speaker 1: spot where the Internet existed and could tap you into
Speaker 1: cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along
Speaker 1: yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come
Speaker 1: up with different justifications for this, but this view keeps
Speaker 1: people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: which is that they were full of genocides and Rwanda
Speaker 1: and Bosnia just to name two, and repeated the US
Speaker 1: military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe,
Speaker 1: some of which ended disastrously as in Mogadishu. Our president
Speaker 1: for most of the nineties was a sex pest, and
Speaker 1: members of the far right staged a series of bloody
Speaker 1: terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing.
Speaker 1: And while all this was happening, a new and more
Speaker 1: openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuver Democrats
Speaker 1: gawked in awe. The reality is that the nineties were
Speaker 1: a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just
Speaker 1: like every other period of human existence, and the extremity
Speaker 1: of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one
Speaker 1: radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring
Speaker 1: us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today,
Speaker 1: those same neo Conservatives seemed tame next to their modern descendants,
Speaker 1: the Maga movement, but in their own time, they were
Speaker 1: the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a
Speaker 1: fundamental reality in American politics. If survival and extreme time
Speaker 1: requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much
Speaker 1: of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have
Speaker 1: primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting
Speaker 1: the era of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
Speaker 1: just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme
Speaker 1: choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact,
Speaker 1: he was such an extreme choice that the Conservative movement
Speaker 1: had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the Maga
Speaker 1: movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal
Speaker 1: the changes from the Obama years in power. I like
Speaker 1: thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that
Speaker 1: one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is this,
Speaker 1: in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens, have been in the business of extreme adaptations
Speaker 1: for as long as we've existed. That's all. Central heating
Speaker 1: and air vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR fifteen are adaptations
Speaker 1: to extreme environments and situations, many of them extreme environments
Speaker 1: and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is
Speaker 1: our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more
Speaker 1: extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth until we invent the Internet and
Speaker 1: satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good,
Speaker 1: but once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment,
Speaker 1: you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got
Speaker 1: to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation.
Speaker 1: The good news is that the pendulum has started to
Speaker 1: swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era
Speaker 1: is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction, and you
Speaker 1: can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity
Speaker 1: of Zoron Mandani, or the fact that a former pillow
Speaker 1: of neo conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for
Speaker 1: the abolition of ice. We are in the process of
Speaker 1: deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which
Speaker 1: means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and
Speaker 1: changes that are every bit as good as the ones
Speaker 1: that Trump administration has forced through our bad To do that,
Speaker 1: we're going to have to be brave, and we're going
Speaker 1: to have to start getting our shit together now, because
Speaker 1: this window of opportunity won't last long. The way I
Speaker 1: see it, the GOP entered office this time around, intent
Speaker 1: on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign.
Speaker 1: They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt
Speaker 1: they might have had in an orgy of careless and
Speaker 1: brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out by the
Speaker 1: least sympathetic group of Grober's imaginable, one of whom was
Speaker 1: nicknamed Big Balls, A fleury of state and local legislative
Speaker 1: pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left wing activists
Speaker 1: and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage, as
Speaker 1: have relentless ice raids on mostly non white Americans. It's
Speaker 1: been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't pretend
Speaker 1: we're in a good situation today, not at least in
Speaker 1: terms of what we'd like good to mean in the
Speaker 1: everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived
Speaker 1: the first sixteen months or so of the second Trunk President.
Speaker 1: Fewer of us are going to make it to the end.
Speaker 1: But this regime came to power with the knowledge that
Speaker 1: their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action.
Speaker 1: They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and
Speaker 1: they missed it. You can see some evidence of this
Speaker 1: in our War of Choice against Iran. President Trump wanted
Speaker 1: a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the
Speaker 1: evening news, so he told his military to bear down
Speaker 1: on Iran with all the speed and violence of action
Speaker 1: they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why
Speaker 1: are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed
Speaker 1: their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's
Speaker 1: first term, the DoD established the Algorithmic Warfare cross functional
Speaker 1: team nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as
Speaker 1: per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis
Speaker 1: of drone footage and other data humans previously would have
Speaker 1: gone over by hand, in order to speed up the
Speaker 1: rate at which targets were identified and struck in wartime.
Speaker 1: Project Mabon from the Jump was a product of the
Speaker 1: worst kind of military thing. How can we automate as
Speaker 1: much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is
Speaker 1: the kind of project you pursue when your finest military
Speaker 1: minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing
Speaker 1: or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them
Speaker 1: to give up. The goal was to create a system
Speaker 1: that could colate and synthesize huge quantities of data in
Speaker 1: order to allow one thousand targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker,
Speaker 1: writing for The Guardian, notes that this means quote three
Speaker 1: point six seconds per decision, or from the individual targeteer's perspective,
Speaker 1: one decision every seventy two seconds. Now we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about where this kind of thinking has led US
Speaker 1: in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads.
Speaker 1: We're back now. If you listen to the advocates of
Speaker 1: this kind of military build up that people who are
Speaker 1: really bullish on AI for military purposes talk and their
Speaker 1: podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you
Speaker 1: need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions
Speaker 1: per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea
Speaker 1: that a future war between the US and a peer
Speaker 1: or near peer adversary, most prominently China, right, that's what
Speaker 1: they're planning on now. The Chinese military is also heavily
Speaker 1: invested in AI. There was a major New York Times
Speaker 1: article earlier this month in April of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: titled Mutually Automated destruction the escalating global AI arms race.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia
Speaker 1: are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own.
Speaker 1: Two US officials said China is developing systems for dozens
Speaker 1: of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought, while
Speaker 1: Russia is building Lancet drones that can circle the sky
Speaker 1: on autonomously pick targets. They said Even as the specifics
Speaker 1: of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, mister Putin declared that whoever leads in AI
Speaker 1: will become the ruler of the world. Mister z said
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four that the technology would be the
Speaker 1: main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete
Speaker 1: Hegseth directed all branches of the US military to adopt AI,
Speaker 1: saying they needed to accelerate like hell now. My interpretation
Speaker 1: of what I've read from most of these guys is
Speaker 1: that they see future conflict as a massive but almost
Speaker 1: instantaneous chess game. Right, whoever has the AI that can
Speaker 1: most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up
Speaker 1: with target packages, and then strike those targets first wins. Right.
Speaker 1: If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand
Speaker 1: strikes in an hour and they can only make eight hundred,
Speaker 1: then we'll destroy more of them and will win the war. Right,
Speaker 1: It'll all be decided right at the start. And this
Speaker 1: may well be how a shooting war between China and
Speaker 1: the US would proceed. But given that very few people
Speaker 1: in either country want that war to happen because it
Speaker 1: would kill us. All I think we might do best
Speaker 1: focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where
Speaker 1: this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure. For at
Speaker 1: least the second time in my life. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than
Speaker 1: a year of build up, in years of intelligence gathering,
Speaker 1: our military planners put together a list of fifty high
Speaker 1: value targets. The idea was, if we could use our
Speaker 1: incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons
Speaker 1: to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq,
Speaker 1: we could hobble any response to the invasion. All fifty
Speaker 1: targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just
Speaker 1: means we missed all the people we thought we were
Speaker 1: going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again,
Speaker 1: the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty buildings,
Speaker 1: and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
Speaker 1: Fast forward earlier this year, the Trump administration orders the
Speaker 1: launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal
Speaker 1: of hyper advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of
Speaker 1: Iran alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks,
Speaker 1: US forces hit six thousand targets picked with the help
Speaker 1: of Project Mavin. One of them was the monob Girls
Speaker 1: Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six and wounding then ninety five now
Speaker 1: Alex Krp, the CEO of Pallanteer's hyper Advanced AI, and
Speaker 1: a multi billion dollar network of satellites backed up by
Speaker 1: decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA, and the massade
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to drop us from striking a school that
Speaker 1: we knew contained none of our targets. We had data
Speaker 1: that the people we thought were there at one point
Speaker 1: were no longer there and it was a school now.
Speaker 1: But some of the data may even relied on was
Speaker 1: old and outdated. And these machines aren't capable of real
Speaker 1: judgment and the way we think of it, And because
Speaker 1: people trusted them so much, no one thought to check
Speaker 1: before ordering the strikes. This is a human error, This
Speaker 1: is not an AI error, but it illustrates a massive
Speaker 1: law in the fantasy that winning a war could be
Speaker 1: as easy as building a smarter machine now to be accurate,
Speaker 1: and it is important to note a lot of those
Speaker 1: six thousand targets were what we thought, and they were
Speaker 1: accurately struck and killed. In the opening salvo of the war,
Speaker 1: President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of
Speaker 1: Iron Supreme Leader, alongside many other prominent military governmental officials.
Speaker 1: This seemed at first to be way more successful than
Speaker 1: the opening strikes against a Rock. They didn't get any
Speaker 1: of those fifty guys. We got a bunch of our
Speaker 1: initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we
Speaker 1: just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Rock.
Speaker 1: Maybe now we're doing it right, you know, finally we'll
Speaker 1: be able to win a war this way. However, that
Speaker 1: quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were
Speaker 1: not enough to break Iron's will or its capacity to
Speaker 1: fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself
Speaker 1: trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding
Speaker 1: him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy.
Speaker 1: Most recent AP and RC poll puts Trump's overall approval
Speaker 1: at thirty three percent, which is down five percent since
Speaker 1: just back in March, only thirty two percent of Americans
Speaker 1: approve of his leadership on Iran. Because most of this
Speaker 1: country can still see a man shooting himself in the
Speaker 1: dick for what it is. Pete Hegseth is our most
Speaker 1: lethality obsessed Secretary of Defense and History, and in him
Speaker 1: we see the result of a long sickness first incubated
Speaker 1: during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin
Speaker 1: their failure to make progress as a kind of victory,
Speaker 1: so they turned to bragging about how many fighters they
Speaker 1: had killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants,
Speaker 1: and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed
Speaker 1: based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this
Speaker 1: calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing
Speaker 1: body counts as the death knell of a military entity's
Speaker 1: ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer
Speaker 1: to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this
Speaker 1: country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess
Speaker 1: and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down
Speaker 1: to the sare cadra of influencers who call themselves right
Speaker 1: wing intellectuals. Today, I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh
Speaker 1: and Chris Ruffo who built their reputations on picking targets
Speaker 1: to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of
Speaker 1: attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring
Speaker 1: up hat and forcing laws all over the country restricting
Speaker 1: things like drag shows, are the use of chosen pronouns
Speaker 1: and government documents. All these people are by definition huge assholes,
Speaker 1: and so are their followers, and thus when those people
Speaker 1: get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make
Speaker 1: those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has
Speaker 1: resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example,
Speaker 1: Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January first,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, by Republican activists and former school board
Speaker 1: members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools.
Speaker 1: They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a
Speaker 1: nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that
Speaker 1: sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over
Speaker 1: the life and mind of their child. Any influence that
Speaker 1: might lead that child to become a different kind of
Speaker 1: person than the parent, and visions must be pruned away.
Speaker 1: The group used the then fresh moral panic over critical
Speaker 1: race theory as a lever from which to force themselves
Speaker 1: into American life. In June of twenty twenty one, they
Speaker 1: started filing what would become a long series of criminal
Speaker 1: complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation.
Speaker 1: Schools started removing books, and Moms for Liberty inspired candidates
Speaker 1: began winning school board elections around the country. It looked
Speaker 1: for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical
Speaker 1: fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit four fifty one
Speaker 1: style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple
Speaker 1: of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty
Speaker 1: backed candidates started losing major elections, first a series of
Speaker 1: school board races in twenty twenty three in Pennsylvania, Virginia,
Speaker 1: and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration kareemed towards
Speaker 1: a disastrous new election in twenty twenty four one in
Speaker 1: which the far right seemed to have all the momentum,
Speaker 1: regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools.
Speaker 1: One of the first was karen's Foboda, a mother of
Speaker 1: seven in Dutchess County, New York. In twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: she told NPR reporter Jim's Aaroli, I looked into the
Speaker 1: local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed
Speaker 1: through some of the social media of some of these individuals,
Speaker 1: and what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom
Speaker 1: of kids were members of that community, it was very
Speaker 1: concerning to think that these people would be trying to
Speaker 1: get onto the school board, because what does that mean
Speaker 1: for my kids? So she started a group of her own,
Speaker 1: Defensive Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community
Speaker 1: to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated
Speaker 1: an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook
Speaker 1: page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing
Speaker 1: is that even while the twenty twenty four election took
Speaker 1: over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat
Speaker 1: the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts
Speaker 1: across the country to fight for their children's educations. In
Speaker 1: November of twenty twenty five, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas,
Speaker 1: saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take
Speaker 1: the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend
Speaker 1: was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article
Speaker 1: by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats
Speaker 1: slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an
Speaker 1: ongoing tally from Progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund Under the radar.
Speaker 1: Trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with the culture
Speaker 1: wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers
Speaker 1: and generate hyper local interest in politics as the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats
Speaker 1: in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the national battleground
Speaker 1: of Pennsylvania, the result of well funded campaigns orchestrated by
Speaker 1: local leaders. Now one of my favorite details from that
Speaker 1: piece is a quote from one of the new school
Speaker 1: board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated folks just wanted their
Speaker 1: school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once
Speaker 1: the board was taken over by a superpartisan extremist majority,
Speaker 1: folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue
Speaker 1: to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls
Speaker 1: might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if
Speaker 1: he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because
Speaker 1: they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of
Speaker 1: their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control
Speaker 1: their neighbors is upsetting, an unnatural. The way I see it,
Speaker 1: we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The
Speaker 1: devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on
Speaker 1: a uddle of his own flop sweat along the way.
Speaker 1: The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least
Speaker 1: right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump
Speaker 1: supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did
Speaker 1: the thing fascists off and do. He kept reaching until
Speaker 1: he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now. I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely
Speaker 1: unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non zero
Speaker 1: chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some
Speaker 1: token ser is. Rule won't say we abandon them and
Speaker 1: tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also
Speaker 1: possible who'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic,
Speaker 1: hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish,
Speaker 1: but either action would just be the flailing of a
Speaker 1: busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that
Speaker 1: Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't
Speaker 1: afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of
Speaker 1: the American people seems to suggest that most of us
Speaker 1: has a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida,
Speaker 1: it's hard to find regular people who are scared of
Speaker 1: the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind
Speaker 1: of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd
Speaker 1: on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get.
Speaker 1: Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even
Speaker 1: more than their enthusiastic support, and many Americans have proven
Speaker 1: themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And
Speaker 1: that's a nice note to roll the ads on We're
Speaker 1: Back if you want a direct example of how weak
Speaker 1: the cultural conservatives are right now. Think back to the
Speaker 1: stunt President Trump pulled with door dasherlier in April. He
Speaker 1: ordered several bags and had them delivered by a dasher
Speaker 1: who was there to get photographed praising the president's no
Speaker 1: tax on tips policy. While they were standing outside the
Speaker 1: Oval office, Trump asked the dasher if they thought trans
Speaker 1: women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And
Speaker 1: the dasher in question was fifty eight year old Sharon Simmons,
Speaker 1: who was a I mean, it's been widely reported, is
Speaker 1: a Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of
Speaker 1: the no tax on tips policy at the House Ways
Speaker 1: and Means Committee field hearing, and even when she was
Speaker 1: under the gun next to the President, Simmons wasn't willing
Speaker 1: to agree with him on the weird anti trans stuff.
Speaker 1: She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that,
Speaker 1: and I'm not here to call her a hero for that.
Speaker 1: She's not. But it shows a crack in the rhetorical
Speaker 1: wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't
Speaker 1: just support low taxes now they have to endorse a
Speaker 1: whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti scientific views
Speaker 1: that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance
Speaker 1: of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump
Speaker 1: nowadays has to include an acknowledgment of the big, lurking
Speaker 1: question of our age what if he won't give up power?
Speaker 1: And that's a bigger question than the just Trump. A
Speaker 1: large number of government officials, of elected leaders, military officers,
Speaker 1: and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes
Speaker 1: and what we might call the ought to be crimes
Speaker 1: of this administration. If not unreasonable to ask what if
Speaker 1: they want leave power without a fight? And I don't
Speaker 1: have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable
Speaker 1: putting in the last couple of pages of a podcast script,
Speaker 1: but I will point out that just in the last month,
Speaker 1: as I write this, Victor Orbon and his entire political
Speaker 1: movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orbon had been
Speaker 1: previously referred to as a quasi dictatorial figure. He was
Speaker 1: the leader of the Hungarian government, and he had led
Speaker 1: a massive right wing crack down that attacked schools, that
Speaker 1: attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder
Speaker 1: for much of our own right wing movement. It's come
Speaker 1: out that the Orbon government was sending money helping to
Speaker 1: fund Sea Pack, they were sending money to specific right
Speaker 1: wing influencers like Rod Dreyer. And despite the fact that
Speaker 1: Orbon was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago was saying, this is the future
Speaker 1: of American politics, Orbanism is what we want. Despite that fact,
Speaker 1: when they lost an election, he and his cronies back
Speaker 1: down without a fight. Now, ultimately they did this because
Speaker 1: they still think they're bulletproof. Right. We've got enough people
Speaker 1: in the government that we can stop Peter Magyar, the
Speaker 1: new guy, from doing any damage to us, right, and
Speaker 1: thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that
Speaker 1: lets us avoid a civil war, and the rest of
Speaker 1: the EU won't look kindly on that. I'm sure that's
Speaker 1: a lot of their thinking, and obviously the US is
Speaker 1: in a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with
Speaker 1: which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and
Speaker 1: Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing.
Speaker 1: They think it's more personally profitable for them to not
Speaker 1: be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA
Speaker 1: movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how
Speaker 1: basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil,
Speaker 1: right wing billionaire. Well. Americans have responded to this by
Speaker 1: discarding social media and ever growing numbers. This has been
Speaker 1: about one of the most consequential shifts of the last
Speaker 1: few years, and just this week, University of Amsterdam professor
Speaker 1: Peter Tornberg published a study on shifts in US social
Speaker 1: media used from twenty twenty to twenty twenty four. Quote
Speaker 1: online platform reached aclinent, driven by growth in the share
Speaker 1: of Americans. Actually the youngest and oldest cohorts who report
Speaker 1: using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter,
Speaker 1: slash x, and Facebook have fallen by nearly fifty percent
Speaker 1: since twenty twenty, with the declient on Twitter extrivant, primarily
Speaker 1: by reduced participation among democratic users. Now, this is broadly
Speaker 1: speaking a good thing for the mental health of Americans
Speaker 1: overall and for the future of our body politic but
Speaker 1: the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing
Speaker 1: so hot. Over the same time period, traffic on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook grew markedly more right wing, as both sites shrank.
Speaker 1: In his paper, Tornberg warns as casual users disengaged while
Speaker 1: polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more
Speaker 1: ideologically extreme, or, in other words, as the algorithms that
Speaker 1: govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites
Speaker 1: reward more extreme content. Less extreme users leave, and the
Speaker 1: ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the
Speaker 1: most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation.
Speaker 1: Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning,
Speaker 1: as they live in these same Internet fever swamps, and
Speaker 1: they've gotten used to the Internet mattering a lot more
Speaker 1: than it does right now. I don't mean to suggest
Speaker 1: that what happens online is an important but that importance
Speaker 1: has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI, slop, spam,
Speaker 1: and weird right wing propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned
Speaker 1: in for years. Less people are using these things than
Speaker 1: they used to, which means their reach has declined because
Speaker 1: people find them off putting and gross. The data shows
Speaker 1: that folks, particularly over sixty five and under twenty four,
Speaker 1: are increasingly fed up with not just social media but
Speaker 1: the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically.
Speaker 1: In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won
Speaker 1: by a comfortable margin. Republicans devoted a huge amount of
Speaker 1: their budget against her to anti trans attack ads, writing
Speaker 1: high off their inaccurate belief that anti trans propaganda had
Speaker 1: one trump the reelection in twenty twenty four, But only
Speaker 1: four percent of voters in that election listed transgender policies
Speaker 1: as a top issue. Now, that alone might just point
Speaker 1: to the overwhelming impulse towards centrism shared by much of
Speaker 1: the American middle class. People don't like to stand out,
Speaker 1: particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election,
Speaker 1: a majority of Virginia voters it proved a radical redistricting measure.
Speaker 1: This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican
Speaker 1: Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in
Speaker 1: their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, guys, we shouldn't do the same thing
Speaker 1: they keep doing in order to defend ourselves. That doesn't
Speaker 1: seem fair, And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored them.
Speaker 1: The controversial measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes,
Speaker 1: the federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but
Speaker 1: you know how these things go. We're off to a
Speaker 1: series of court battles now, and however those end up.
Speaker 1: Two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of
Speaker 1: a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on
Speaker 1: their own terms, and a clear message has been sent
Speaker 1: to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different
Speaker 1: set of laws than democrats. Now, any anarchist or left
Speaker 1: his political organizer you've ever known would have told you
Speaker 1: the right wing always benefits from an interpretation of the
Speaker 1: law that she shucks seems to deny their opponents the
Speaker 1: right to do the same things in self defense. It's
Speaker 1: bad that things work this way, but good for rank
Speaker 1: and file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If
Speaker 1: it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't
Speaker 1: be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day
Speaker 1: I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an
Speaker 1: opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled Why Virginia went back
Speaker 1: on its word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph,
Speaker 1: partisanship did its best impression of democracy in Virginia. On Tuesday,
Speaker 1: voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to
Speaker 1: be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats, its
Speaker 1: retaliation to recent redistricting and by Texas to hand Republicans
Speaker 1: five more seats. At the best of President Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: it's a red versus Blue tit for tat over who
Speaker 1: can jerrymander more efficiently? A necessary evil, the parties say,
Speaker 1: to protect democracy. It's actually not necessarily I mean, not
Speaker 1: that it's a necessary evil. The parties say. It's that
Speaker 1: one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans.
Speaker 1: And you didn't speak up the Washington Posts. You know,
Speaker 1: this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's
Speaker 1: been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats
Speaker 1: do it in Virginia. Right, And I also might point
Speaker 1: out to a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy.
Speaker 1: You know, if your only concern is the overall health
Speaker 1: of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats merely corrects a structural
Speaker 1: imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural
Speaker 1: areas with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes
Speaker 1: the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas
Speaker 1: and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway, there are other good
Speaker 1: reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics,
Speaker 1: not merely back to the middle, but far to the left.
Speaker 1: Simply as a matter of practical necessity, the Republicans have
Speaker 1: spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the
Speaker 1: Post Office, the VA, the FAA, and every other useful
Speaker 1: part of our state structure. And this is a big
Speaker 1: part of what's radicalized people, because they've very quickly come
Speaker 1: to notice that things are missing and shit is not
Speaker 1: working right. For decades, the government has been the enemy
Speaker 1: to millions of Americans who went out in the world
Speaker 1: and relied on government services every day of their lives.
Speaker 1: And yes, that's irritating and unfair, and no, we don't
Speaker 1: have time to fix that up right now. What we
Speaker 1: can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke
Speaker 1: all these systems to point out to people, actually, you
Speaker 1: don't hate it when the government does stuff. You just
Speaker 1: hate the way Republicans run the government. And the fact
Speaker 1: that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push
Speaker 1: for policies as extreme as they need to. Right this
Speaker 1: is an opportunity to convince a lot of people, oh shit,
Speaker 1: paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive
Speaker 1: and functional infrastructure is a lot better than letting big
Speaker 1: balls to lead half of civil service. Right like, that's
Speaker 1: I think the opportunity we have right now, and pushing
Speaker 1: that basic line on as many Americans as possible in
Speaker 1: the next two years is I think one of the
Speaker 1: most important things we can do at the moment. Along
Speaker 1: with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement
Speaker 1: of consequences against the cadra of billionaires and their lackeys
Speaker 1: who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while.
Speaker 1: If I had my way about it, I'd point out
Speaker 1: to people that there are an awful lot of billionaires
Speaker 1: who we knew colluded to take over the federal government
Speaker 1: put something like Elon Musk's doge in place. You can
Speaker 1: just see that in some of the texts between Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberget and Elon Musk. These people are enemies of the
Speaker 1: state with an awful lot of money that we could
Speaker 1: confiscate to do things like replace the books Moms for
Speaker 1: Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now we also need
Speaker 1: to see consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the
Speaker 1: organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans.
Speaker 1: This is an issue you can, in fact, get centrist
Speaker 1: voters to support. The average swing voter may not be
Speaker 1: particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing
Speaker 1: the government bully people who are just trying to get by.
Speaker 1: The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates
Speaker 1: potential for widespread solidarity between its victims. If the midterms
Speaker 1: go badly for the GOP and the twenty twenty eight
Speaker 1: elections go even worse, the USA is new elected officials
Speaker 1: and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation
Speaker 1: as the man who just unseated Victor Orbon and his supporters.
Speaker 1: We all learned how temporary a victory can be after
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. I've seen more than a few comments
Speaker 1: online by liberals who decided Orbon's defeat was a good
Speaker 1: time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist,
Speaker 1: and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that
Speaker 1: a lot of people on the left express that electoralism
Speaker 1: can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with
Speaker 1: the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on
Speaker 1: the left champion, but every online and real life lefty
Speaker 1: that I know was thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However,
Speaker 1: they all did share a fear, and this is one
Speaker 1: fear that I've seen in common with every analyst and
Speaker 1: expert on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning
Speaker 1: the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar Orbon
Speaker 1: is an extremist, someone who took power because things were
Speaker 1: extremely shitty and hungary, and voters got angry enough to
Speaker 1: vote for a guy who promised to burn things down.
Speaker 1: They did come to regret that, but things are still
Speaker 1: extremely bad and hungry. Joe Biden was a moderate who
Speaker 1: tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His
Speaker 1: promise was that he would bring things back to the
Speaker 1: normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that
Speaker 1: because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way
Speaker 1: for Trump two point zero. If we don't want to
Speaker 1: repeat that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the
Speaker 1: MAGA movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics,
Speaker 1: and new politics as we seek to fill the void
Speaker 1: that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded
Speaker 1: the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier,
Speaker 1: just a few days before, a gunman stormed into the
Speaker 1: Correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he
Speaker 1: wanted to harm the president and members of his cabinet.
Speaker 1: Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his
Speaker 1: life was put under a microscope, as always happens with
Speaker 1: gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man,
Speaker 1: one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including
Speaker 1: a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people
Speaker 1: to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.
Speaker 1: This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this
Speaker 1: up in a lab as an excuse to crack down
Speaker 1: on democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not
Speaker 1: a place for an argument as to why. Again. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that, I'm sure later this week. What is
Speaker 1: interesting to me is that before any of this happened,
Speaker 1: I'd been planning to revise the ending of this episode
Speaker 1: by commenting on an article that came out in April
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five. It's published by Oxios and the
Speaker 1: title was Democrats told to get shot for the anti
Speaker 1: Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town
Speaker 1: halls in their districts and in one on one meetings
Speaker 1: with constituents and activists, democratic members of Congress are facing
Speaker 1: a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty,
Speaker 1: and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the
Speaker 1: lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a
Speaker 1: conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent. Quote.
Speaker 1: I actually said in a meeting when they light a fire,
Speaker 1: my thought is grab an extinguisher. And someone at the
Speaker 1: table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular liberals
Speaker 1: are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today as they know
Speaker 1: on some level that that's the only way you survive
Speaker 1: in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands
Speaker 1: of normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager
Speaker 1: to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their
Speaker 1: own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.
Speaker 1: And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that
Speaker 1: and the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the
Speaker 1: fact that an educated and informed thirty one year old
Speaker 1: man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and
Speaker 1: attack the president represents many failures. One of them is
Speaker 1: a failure of the Democratic Party and the Liberal project
Speaker 1: to provide him with anything that felt like a useful
Speaker 1: outlet for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking
Speaker 1: and acting like this guy was acting, you can either
Speaker 1: throw your hands up and back away, or you can
Speaker 1: try like hell to present them with a counter offer.
Speaker 1: In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns,
Speaker 1: and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place.
Speaker 1: The victory and wild popularity of Zora Mamdani is proof
Speaker 1: that you can in fact do this. Even in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, the widespread support for formerly extreme positions like
Speaker 1: abolishing ice, taxing billionaires radically redistricting states, halting the construction
Speaker 1: of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: are more than enough evidence to show that people will
Speaker 1: get in line to back a candidate and a party
Speaker 1: who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests
Speaker 1: that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry
Speaker 1: for their own candidate who feels like Mom Donnie, hungry
Speaker 1: more than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator
Speaker 1: Ron Whiten posted see you at Nuremberg two point zero
Speaker 1: after Christy Nome got fired, I watched a coalition of
Speaker 1: left wing radicals and centrist Dems who never came together
Speaker 1: over anything else express wild glee at the very thought
Speaker 1: we can do this. We have the tools, and we
Speaker 1: have the opportunity. It's going to take a big old
Speaker 1: step into the unknown, but that's our only option besides
Speaker 1: waiting until we get another chance to look through the
Speaker 1: social media arts of a gunman. It Could Happen Here
Speaker 1: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find
Speaker 1: sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.