An Election Episode feat. Robert

Robert discusses what's likely to happen, unlikely to happen, and likely to happen in unlikely ways this election season.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A zone media. You wake up before dawn. This was
once abnormal for you, but ever since the election, you
found it harder and harder to sleep. You just barely
drifted off when the sound of shouts wafted in from
across the street. Reflected sirens bounce off your bedroom window.
Through a fog of sleep, you reflect on the last

(00:22):
few days. Voting went better you'd feared. It's what happened
in the days after that's kept your spine at a
constant eerie tingle. Several Republican led states are refusing to
certify their election results. Most analysts say the blizzard of
lawsuits launched on behalf of Trump have no chance at winning,
But that didn't stop the candidate from declaring victory and

(00:42):
promising to carry out his own inauguration no matter what
the courts decide. It's all absurd, laughable. But you live
on the border of a majority red county and your
sheriffs just announced support for the real winner of the election.
Your local PD have been notably silent, while right wing
provocateurs online have started circulating allegations of election fraud that

(01:05):
the sheriff has promised to look into. That was yesterday, today,
just after five, you're jolted awake in your bed by
the sound of breaking glass and screaming. You stay low
and crawl to your front window to peep out across
your yard and into the street. Before you, three police
cruisers are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house.

(01:26):
You can't imagine why. You know he did some volunteer
canvassing a few weeks back. He volunteered at a voting precinct.
Could they be there because of that? You try a
few different search terms on social media to puzzle out
the truth. It looks like a few people around the
country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts
register is deleted before you can click on them. There's

(01:47):
more shouting from inside your neighbor's house, and within seconds
a pair of birdly deputies drag him out in front
and into a waiting squad car. It's dark outside, but
you think you might see blood.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
On his face.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Your heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to
call someone, but the cops are already here. Who else
is there? As your mind raises, one of the officers
stationed outside turns back and looks towards your window. Recognition
sparks his eyes, he sees you, He starts to walk
over you, turn back, drop the shades, and with a
pounding heart, retreat to your bedroom. Maybe he won't knock,

(02:22):
Maybe he just wanted to scare you.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Maybe hello, everyone, hand welcome to It could happen here.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
I'm Robert Evanson. Back in early twenty nineteen, I released
the first season of this show. It wasn't a daily
news and politics podcast back then. Instead, it gave a
focused argument for why a new US civil war was
more frightening and possible than you might guess. Over the
last few years, that belief has become unfortunately mainstream. It

(02:56):
is no longer fringe or unique to talk about a
new civil war or as a real possibility. There was
a blockbuster movie earlier this year based around presenting what
it called a realistic picture of such a possibility. I'll
leave my thoughts on that for another time. A Marist
poll from earlier this year showed that forty seven percent
of Americans consider a second civil war likely or very likely.

(03:20):
This is a massive shift considering where things were when
I wrote this podcast series in twenty nineteen. That number
includes an expected fifty three percent of Republicans, but also
forty percent of Democrats and forty one percent of independence.
Depending on how you want to see it, I've either
been vindicated as much as as possible for someone in
my line of work, or I've played an outsized role

(03:43):
in creating a particularly dangerous eggregore in the collective unconsciousness
of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm
really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled
on that matter ever since the first episode started coming out.
Remember midway through the first season, we dropped an extra

(04:03):
episode I hadn't initially intended as part of the run,
just trying to stop people from panicking, and ever since
I've kept that as a particular goal in my head. However,
you want to, you know, think about this. The first
season of It could happen here undoubtedly helped to make
my career today. Sophie and I run an entire network
that employees several dozen people, largely on the strength of

(04:25):
that series. And yet I have no issue telling you
that I don't have any idea how election Day is.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Going to go.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
You know, we've had a lot of polls lately that
seem much better for Harris. A number of pollsters are
starting to shift. You know, there's a good chance that
they were hurting in the direction of Trump because they
didn't want to underestimate him again. But there's also a
good chance that, you know, that Sealzer poll is an outlier,
and now these guys are hurting in the direction of
Harris winning because they don't want to be embarrassed. I

(04:55):
really have no idea what's going to happen. My official
stance is that it's probably pretty close to a coin flip,
although maybe one that favors Harris now you know, more
than one that favors Trump. Whatever happens, I don't know
what's going to happen, let alone what's going to happen
the day after. And as I sat down to write
this episode, which is going to air on the day

(05:15):
of the election, I went back and forth as to
where the focus should be. I did consider doing another
Don't Panic style episode. Perhaps that would have been the call.
You know, depending on how today goes, people might either
be listening to this and you know, relaxing, or listening
to this and in a heightened state of panic. You know,

(05:35):
it really depends on where things are and where things
are and the counting of votes by this period of time.
My reasoning on what I decided to do is pretty simple,
which is that I think there's a good chance we
either know or have a strong inkling of how this
election is going to shake out by the time this
episode airs, and at the time I write this, the
indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump, enough

(05:57):
that I'd say the election leans in her direction, and
so I think there's a lot of value in talking
about what might happen in the aftermath of that. If
Trump tries to protest the election results, and if he
goes particularly trying to protest by force, and if that's
the case, if that's the direction he lands in, I
think these shooters that we have to worry about. And

(06:19):
I mean that in the figurative sense, right, you know,
people who support him, will who will put skin in
the game in order to try to force him into office.
I think they're different than they were last time. I
don't think the threat here is that a bunch of
proud boys and the like raid the capital next January.
I think the threat here has a lot more to
do with licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared

(06:41):
themselves in the tank for Trump. We ran an episode
just the other day about the Constitutional Sheriff's movement. There's
a lot to say about that. One in four law
enforcement officers today report to a sheriff. They make twenty
percent of all arrests in the country. Earlier this year,
Wired published an article on the are right sheriff's ready
to disrupt the election? It focused heavily on dar Leif,

(07:04):
who sits on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and
Peace Officers Association or CSPOA. Leif, a Trump supporter and
sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, has spent the lead up
to this election investigating the twenty twenty election. He's tried
to seize voting machines and run militia training courses where
he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies, and gentlemen

(07:27):
how to form an ad hoc posse, each member armed
with quote a standard Air fifteen type military grade weapon
and at least five hundred rounds of AMMO. Speaking of
five hundred rounds of AMMO, he probably can't buy that
from our sponsors, but here they are. We're back and

(07:54):
we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who sits on the
board of that organization named dar Leaf. Leif has already
promised to have his posse patrolling stations in Barry County
to watch for evidence of fraud and the legal immigrant
voting in what's expected to be one of the swing
states this election might hinge on. Deeply reported articles like

(08:14):
that Wired piece have warred in my own personal paranoia
with troubling accounts on social media. The day before the election,
which is when I wrote this, I came across a
post on the Pennsylvania subreddit from a Philly voter titled
my dad just got harassed by a police officer about
the election.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
He was driving down the Old Lincoln Highway when a
trooper stopped him and asked him if he was voting tomorrow. Trooper,
Will you be voting tomorrow, dad? That's none of your business, trooper.
Who are you voting for tomorrow?

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Dad?

Speaker 1 (08:43):
None of your business?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Trooper.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Oh sir, you're illegal now. The poster's dad, who is Hispanic,
stated that he didn't have to answer that and asked
if he was being detained. The trooper let him go,
but later, according to the poster. This happened when my
dad went to the precinct three other people there to
report the exact same story election harassment at a traffic stop.

(09:04):
Turns out the officer or officers doing it art even
from Bucks County or Pennsylvania. Their new Jersey State troopers
wild across state borders to harass people driving down the highway.
In the lead up to the twenty twenty election, we
were all deeply worried about the dangers of different far
right groups, militias and organizations like the Proud Boys who
wore right wing death squad patches and threatened to throw

(09:27):
leftists out of helicopters when their god Emperor won reelection. Today,
most of those figures are either a spent force or
something that cannot act on its own, reliant upon the
backing of groups like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs, or being
empowered by a Trump controlled White House if they want
to have any hope of being directly relevant. Again, the

(09:49):
positive side of this is that it allows us to
triage our fears. The downside is that independent paramilitary actors
are in fact something we can easily combat as individuals
and ins communities. Portland proved that when it eventually won
its five year street battle to oust these sundry right
wing groups from constant occupations of the city. When groups

(10:09):
like the Proud Boys crossed the line into outright violence,
it is legal to meet them with defensive violence, and
they can and have been beaten this way. That's simply
not something the extant left wing community defense organizations and
political groups in this country can say and do against,
For example, law enforcement entities hell bent on executing a

(10:31):
purge against the left. In rallies prior to the election,
Trump has often merged promises to prosecute his political opponents
US with promises to use ice to deport twenty million
illegals and descend in the military or federal law enforcement
to clean up cities. I want to quote now from
an article in The New Republic reporting on a rally
earlier this year in Wilmington, North Carolina. Today, I am

(10:54):
announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in
North Carolina and across our country, said Trump, no more
or sanctuary cities. As soon as I take office, we
will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that
is failing, which is a lot of them to turn
over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down and capture
every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant
criminal that is being illegally harbored. The article goes on

(11:16):
to note Trump has previously vowed to militarize US law
enforcement to restore law and order to our cities, which
he claimed to have become cesspools of bloodshed and crime
under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional federal
funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments,
but that extra help would only go to cities that
complied with ICE. Now, this is scary stuff and it

(11:38):
would necessitate some sort of response if it were to happen.
But I don't really know how to tell you to
organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns
that one would need to factor into any plans. I
could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation
or to avoid being raided for their past political activism,
and I could base those theories on, for exampample, how

(12:00):
activists in Nazi Germany helped tide people from the Gestapo.
But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where
the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond
compare to what exists today. Perhaps the most chilling article
I read this year had nothing to do with ice
or right wing paramilitaries and everything to do with the
technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years.

(12:23):
License plate recognition systems like motorolas dr in use optical
character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's
license plate and put it in a searchable database. The
policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative,
although it's far from clear if they actually work too.
The idea is that if someone carries out a drive

(12:43):
by shooting, or assaults a woman on the street, or
is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by
someone who gets the car, make and model and maybe
the first couple letters of the plate. Dn r's database
of more than fifteen billion vehicle sidings, built from automatic
recordings of license plate reading cameras on police cruisers and
tow trucks and the like, might well help identify and
stop someone before they hunter kill again. Now their serious

(13:06):
reason to question whether or not this system actually works
this way. I'm not claiming to take the stance on
this one way or the other. I'm not an expert
on this, but the issue here from a privacy standpoint,
when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump
dominated government, is that you can't train a system like
this to only pay attention to license plates, nor is

(13:28):
there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. In recent
investigations conducted by a private detective with access to dn
r's database for her work have shown that someone with
access to this database can search based on more than
just license plates. They can look up signs supporting political
candidates and match them to front yards and thus to
people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by

(13:50):
these cameras, and there are again billions of these photos wearing,
for example, planned parenthood shirts. This is not an idle fear.
This is a weapon that could very easily be used
by the enemy within months of you listening to this.
This is also a weapon that, in an event like
the one I forecasted at the start of this episode,
could be used to crack down on activists and voters

(14:12):
in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort
of national schism. Situation. Police officers already misused databases like
this with comic regularity. In twenty twenty two, a different
Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors
had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate
recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff

(14:36):
like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro
Trump cops earlier this election season. I'm talking about something
that happened in September, when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County
Bruce Sukowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment
criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the
impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio, from an article

(14:57):
in The ap by Michael Rubicam likening people in the
US illegally to human locusts, Zukowski wrote on a personal
Facebook account and his campaign's account, when people ask me,
what's going to happen if the flip flopping, laughing hyena wins,
I say write down all the addresses of the people
who had their signs in their yards that way, Zukowski continued.
When migrants need places to live, we're already have the

(15:19):
addresses of their new families who supported their arrival. Now,
as the full context of that statement makes clear, Zukowski
was not technically threatening Harris voters. But it's pretty much
impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat,
just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability and an
environment where the future ability of Zukowski and those like
him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going

(15:42):
to talk more about that, but first here's another ad break.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Now.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
I don't mean to make it sound like that there's
nothing that can be done to fight against technological tools
in the arsenal of repression like this, but I have
no doubt that if the Republicans do take total power,
they will read any positive election result for them as
a mandate to punish the left and purge the people.
Trump is already repeatedly called the enemy within, and I
worry that in the event of any sort of national schism,

(16:18):
either where there's an extended period of time where Trump
is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's
a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida
and you have a bunch of these counties and states
around the country sign up for Trump, that the first
thing we'll see law enforcement do in these areas is
punished the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on
a war footing with the rest of the country. These

(16:39):
are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here,
but they are something to keep in mind, and they
are something that represents a real danger at this point.
I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds
of thing the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that.
Now it is important to remember that whatever plan these
people try won't work as as well as they hope.

(17:01):
We've been watching them for years, and if there's one
thing you know about all of the people around Trump,
it's that they're fuck ups. That doesn't mean they can't win,
it doesn't mean they're not dangerous. It just means that
they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going
to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which
is something that should be on your mind. Bruce and
most of the Trump aligned police, local and federals still

(17:21):
feel a need to couch their threats in deniable terms, though,
but many on the far right have been less careful,
and one thing we've seen is this election has lurched
closer to its conclusion. Is a lot of people, people
like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their masks off. Now.
I think this had a lot to do with the
fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a

(17:42):
couple of weeks ago, and they felt like after years
of having to do what Bruce did, having to cover
up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to
do that now. Obviously, some influential people on the far
right have been mask off from much longer, and this
is something that should concern you as well. One of
the most sinister examples of this is Jack Pisobic, a

(18:02):
former US Navy intelligence officer whose recent book Unhumans is
framed as a secret history of communist revolutions. From an
article in Mother Jones quote they being Pisobic and his
co author, claim, for as long as there have been
beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been
the ugly liars who hate and kill, and these people
of anti civilization have always gone by different names communists, socialists, leftists,

(18:26):
and progressives. The pair contend that these folks be they
the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade,
are better called unhumans. It's a hard edged message. The
foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the
wrong policies, but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They
rob and kill. Pisobic and Lysek, his co author, maintain
they don't believe what they say. They don't care about

(18:48):
winning debates. They don't even want a quality. They just
want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse
to destroy you. Now, Jack has been a laughable character
for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric
has had an audience in the howls of power. Jd
Vance himself provided a blurb for the book, claiming it
shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon

(19:08):
meanwhile wrote the forward. Now, I started this episode with
a fictional vignette imagining what might happen if Trump chooses
to contest the election without right force, and he might.
The good news is I think that such an effort
would be doomed to fail if he sticks to the
courts trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to
the House is a better chance at succeeding, and it
is possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of

(19:31):
poll workers could play into a broader effort like this,
but doing so is a big risk. My gut tells
me that moving so openly resorting to violence first creates
a situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming
Harris administration would have to respond with force. There would
have to be consequences, and given that they currently control
the arsenal of state power, I think they would win

(19:52):
even in the event that you have all of these
sheriffs break for Trump in some sort of insurgent situation develop.
If that were to happen, and having backed this insurgency
would put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put
a lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It
might even force consequences for provocateurs like Basobic and even
Elon Musk. Backing an outright violent coup is almost the

(20:14):
only thing I can imagine putting Musk behind bars. There
are pieces of this logic train that I find comforting,
but there are also pieces that aren't. Many of us,
me included made the mistake of assuming that after January sixth,
twenty twenty one, Trumpism might finally be a spent force.
He'd gambled too much and he'd lost too big, But
despite the existential threat, he presented himself as being The

(20:36):
Democratic Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose
mercy for the main players. I suspect anything short of
armed insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year.
I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw
him in prison if Harris wins are real, or read
that instead as his own predictive justification for the violence
he'd like to support against his political enemies. That desire

(20:59):
won't go away just because Trump rides off into the
sunset and the Republican Party has to go searching for
another feurer. If we defer their dream, it will simply
sit under the floorboards, infester, waiting for the next opportunity,
and that won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken
system and a world where climate change and conflict are
on the rise. Low information voters, less literate by the day,

(21:21):
will continue to swing back and forth. The feral beast
we've heard growling all year long, will surge forward, all
the hungrier for being made to wait. If you've kept
up with our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed
that we haven't endorsed any candidates, and I haven't wasted
any time advising our listeners to vote. I happen to
be someone who does think a Harris win represents substantially

(21:42):
less harm than a Trump win to a lot of people.
But I don't think that the folks who listen to
our podcast are waiting for me to make that decision
for them. I don't agree with the anti electoralist side
of things on every matter, but one place where I
do agree with them is that a Harris win won't
fix what's broken. It represents the historic equivalent of jinking
out of the way in a dog fight. Necessary maybe,

(22:05):
but not something that guarantees future security. Hey, everybody, Robert here,
I've changed locations, so sorry if it sounds a little
bit different. I'm currently in a cabin waiting out the election,
trying not to think too much about it. But I
wrote a new ending to this because I just thought
that what I had there was incomplete. Now, when it

(22:26):
comes to what does work in the long run to
beat these people, my mind is drawn back constantly to
perhaps an odd place. A twenty eleven article in the
scientific journal Nature titled the Evolution of over Confidence. Now
The gist is that this was an attempt by two
scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning Krueger effect.

(22:49):
It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know
very little about a subject to overestimate their competence in it.
This is probably why so many Americans think they could
win fist fight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems
profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind
of benefit to evolutionary fitness? The explanation devised in this

(23:12):
paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not, because,
in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for
a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight,
the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach
for that resource. If they do, one of three things
can happen. They fight and win, they fight and lose,

(23:34):
or the other organism backs away insecure in its chances
of victory, and they get that resource. Without even fighting
for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual, so
much so that it might explain why many of us
seem to have a build in tendency to irrationally judge
our own capabilities.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Now.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
I first became aware of this research almost a decade
ago when I started work on my first published book,
A Brief History of Vice. At the time, I found
it interesting because it posited a likely adaptive basis for
a kind of bad behavior, and that's what my whole
book was about. In the years since, though, I've come
to see it as the fundamental underlying explanation for how

(24:14):
fascists win. It's well established that fascist regimes and individuals
themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up
examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union,
or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after
picking the wrong fight, and of course January sixth. There
are many examples to choose from, but as often as

(24:34):
they fail. The success of these movements is also based
entirely on their willingness to dare, and the fact that
liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to
confront them. We are still dealing with Donald Trump and
his foot soldiers in twenty twenty four because no one
quite had the guts to confront him to the degree
he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant

(24:57):
taking unprecedented legal steps and risking wing backlash that likely
would have included acts of terrorism. In the end, most
people with any say in the matter chose to either
back away or at best pull their punches until after
the election. On other episodes of this show, our correspondent
Mia and I have talked about the actual path destroying

(25:18):
the far rights organizational and electoral base. We are up
against a coalition a fused car dealers, supplement salesman, multi
level marketing goals, sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their
own power, and churches that, by any decent measure lost
their justification for tax exempt status years ago. These are
all forces that can be targeted and neutered through the

(25:40):
courts in the legislative system, with consistent activism and pressure
applied to elected leaders Sitting here, I think that the
odds the Democrats embraced such a strategy are exceptionally low,
but we do have to try to make them, because
when you're sitting across from a monster, one that's fattened
on overcome confidence, and you see him start to reach again,

(26:03):
the only same response is to swallow your fear and
take a swing.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
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