July 15, 2024 • 38 mins
These are frightening times, but Robert explains why now is not the time to panic. The situation is not as dire or hopeless as many people want you to believe, and there's a lot of good evidence to back that up.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen here,
a podcast about things falling apart, and boy, they sure
seem to be, don't they. The twenty twenty four election
is terrifying a lot of people at this stage after
a disastrous debate performance by Joe Biden, And this episode
will be coming out on the Monday that the Republican
National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A lot of people
(00:28):
are terrified about a Trump dictatorship, about Project twenty twenty
five and all that that entails. And I want to
tell you first off, you know, we will be having
a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison, Sophie and
I are all going to be there all week. We'll
start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,
and then we'll probably have some summary content after that
(00:50):
the next week. So we will be getting you our
experiences here and everything that we encounter on the ground
during what I think is going to wind up a
pretty important week for the American fascist movement. But right now,
what I want to address is the sense of kind
of unbridled terror that I've seen for a lot of
people around me, not just leftists, but regular people that
(01:13):
I know in my life, folks who are just kind
of like casual democrats, not the kind to think much
about politics, but have suddenly seen the potential of what
a Trump second term might bring with it and are
rightfully terrified. So I want to first off, tell everyone
in that bucket, don't panic. That's what this episode is about.
(01:34):
And I'm going to try and give you some good
reasons not to panic, some reasons why our situation is
not as dire as it seems. And my goal here
is not to lull you into an action or stop
you from preparing. You should, in fact be preparing, And
we talk about the various things you can do organizing
in your community, taking action to support migrants, to support
(01:55):
each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women seeking reproductive justice.
That's our daily bread and butter. Right now, I want
to give you some reasons for optimism about victory and
the overall struggle against these fucking maniacs. So, as most
regular listeners will know, back in the spring of twenty nineteen,
(02:15):
I published the first season of It Could Happen Here,
which was originally a scripted podcast about the very real
possibility of a civil conflict in the United States. The
years since have proven several of my predictions painfully accurate.
I started the series with fictional vignettes from the perspective
of an American civilian watching American tanks roll through the
(02:36):
streets of their city. Within a year, thousands and thousands
of listeners had variants of that exact experience thanks to
the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled and more than
a little frightened by the response that some people had
to the first iteration of it could happen here. During
twenty twenty, while I was on the ground in four
different states, dozens and dozens of people told me the
(02:56):
series had influenced their own choices for how to act
and organize on the ground with their friends out in
the world. And that is humbling and a little bit frightening.
And I promise you I'm not laying this out to
brag or try to make an argument from authority. I'm
not saying I predicted something five years ago and was right,
so you should listen to what I have to predict now.
(03:17):
In fact, I kind of want to do the opposite
because in another podcast, I recorded in twenty nineteen on
the anti Vaxx movement. This would have been an episode
of Behind the Bastards. I laid out a theoretical pandemic,
and I described it spreading almost exactly the way the
COVID nineteen pandemic really did spread. Just a few months later.
And yet, in February of twenty twenty, when COVID nineteen
(03:39):
had been confirmed to have entered the United States and
was spreading over other parts of the world like wildfire,
I had friends ask me what I thought was going
to happen, and, you know, thinking back to SARS, thinking
back to bird flu, thinking back to the Ebola, you know,
epidemic in twenty fourteen. My answer was, I don't know.
(03:59):
It'll be fine, right, someone, surely there's some adults out
there who were gonna, you know, lock this thing down.
They're not just gonna let it run rampant over the population. Right.
There's a term for what happened to me there, and
it's called normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the tendency to
assume that whatever has gone down in the past will
keep happening, often despite evidence to the contrary. Something like
(04:23):
eighty percent of people display attributes of delusional thinking caused
by the normalcy bias during disasters. Emergency responders sometimes called
this negative panic. We got a great example of negative
panic a couple of weeks ago. Video went viral of
a bowl that got loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon,
and it started just just absolutely goring random yocals who
(04:44):
were like wandering around in between chiro stands and beer
cards behind sort of the stands, and a few of
these people had the presence of mind to run. One
guy even pulled a gun. And I don't know entirely
how we want to rate that as a response, but
a lot of folks just stared at the bowl, which
is blank looks on their faces, utterly uncomprehended. You can
tell from their body language that they just couldn't believe
(05:06):
what they were seeing. And some of those people got
rammed right in the fucking gut by a bull a
second later. The immediate danger that their eyes were telling
them was there just seemed too far fetched to take seriously.
The normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's
just one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind
(05:27):
towards catastrophes. And while we're on that subject, I should
warn those of you who'd like to try their hand
at predicting the future of a separate cognitive delusion catastrophizing.
This is the tendency to assume that the absolute worst
case scenario will come to pass, and it's often a
trauma reaction. When you've been blown up, you kind of
(05:47):
always expect the world to blow up around you. If
you've been in a relationship with someone who blows up,
who screams or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves
during arguments, you might find yourself expecting that from anyone
else that you did, even if they've never displayed that
kind of behavior. And if you've watched an in the
bag sheer thing presidential election collapse and usher in a
(06:08):
new era of fascist political capture in your country, well
you might see that kind of thing happening and expect
it whenever the polls open up again. The tricky part
of actually predicting the future with any accuracy, which is
a thing that I have been both professionally successful at
and personally bad at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias
(06:29):
with your catastrophizing This is easier said than done, and
I have noticed that my effort to reach this state
has produced some peculiar cognitive effects of late. In the
six months that led up to the first presidential debate,
I felt constant growing anxiety about a second Trump term.
Only some of my anxiety was based on polling, which
didn't look great for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I
(06:51):
was anxious because I saw so many people around me,
and I'm not talking about folks on Twitter, but in
the real world, go, well, obviously Biden's got a win,
there's no way Trump gets elected again, and go about
their day. Then the debate happened. Joe went on stage,
barely able to speak at a legible volume, coughing, slurring
his words, and dropping into tangents. Rather than making cogent
cases to the country. Everyone around me started to get
(07:14):
terrified all at once, and the mainstream media did what
it does and pivoted to round the clock coverage of
the issue of Biden's competency. You know, some people have
alleged that this is because the media has some sort
of an agenda here, and I really don't credit the
media as someone who has spent his life working adjacent
to the mainstream media with that kind of capacity to plan.
What these people, what these reporters, what these news organs
(07:36):
were doing, was pivoting to the issue that was doing
the most to raise our collective blood pressure, because, among
other things, that's what social media has trained them to do,
because that's where the fucking money is, right, you know,
not that this issue didn't exist before that If it bleeds,
it leads has been a long time axiom in the field.
(07:57):
But that's what's happening here too, right, And because the
money is in saying and talking about the things that
gets people's blood pumping the most. The question of is
Joe Biden doomed soon yielded to is democracy doomed, as
analysts and pundits started hyping up Project twenty twenty five,
a blueprint for fascist takeover of the US, published by
(08:19):
the Heritage Foundation last year. Now, I am not a polster,
and I don't claim debase any of what I say
next on some kind of mathematic expertise. But I don't
think we're doomed. I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable,
even in the likely event that Biden loses, And I
think our position is a lot stronger than most people realize.
This is why right wing influencers and strategists have started
(08:42):
going so hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like
fucking Cobra commander. The best example of how mask off
the fascist right has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of
the Heritage Foundation, who said this during a recent press conference.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
The reason that so many anchors on MSNB, for example,
are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle in this response and
just want to encourage you with some substance that we
are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which
will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Another of these guys is Jack Pasobc, a former Navy
intelligence officer turned to supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher.
Jack spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for
Seapak where he said this, but.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy.
We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all
the way there on January sixth, but we will endeavor
to get rid of it and replace it with this
right here. We'll replace it with this amen.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now, I should note, folks, when he says this, right here,
he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's
not a subtle man, but he does speak for a
frighteningly large and influential block of Republicans. Both of these
guys are end results of eighty years of conspiracy theories
and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and
their fail sons, and at this point fail grandsons. The
(10:08):
mainstream media and most voters in this country did their
best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now
they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power,
mouths watering, dishard, guns loaded, and people are freaking out.
Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within
the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate
has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people now. Obviously,
(10:32):
Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the
fringes of the American right four years. There Nothing they're
saying is new, but Trump's likely victory in the Supreme
Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot
of people to conclude that project twenty twenty five is
Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office.
This is something guys like Pasobic and Roberts want you
(10:54):
to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away
from confrontation. Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding
that if they can just convince you that the fight
is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has
spent the last two weeks since the debate quote tweeting
every left wing media person he can find and saying
(11:16):
six months to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps
after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic. Jack
is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier,
he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy.
One of them that I bring up often because I
think it illustrates something important is the ODE loop. This
(11:36):
is the process by which people make decisions and act
in combat situations, and it stands for the different stages
of this process are observe, orient, decide. Act. If you
can disrupt any part of the ODE loop, you can
stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding, or
from carrying out their actions. Jack and his peers want
(11:56):
you to panic. They want you to make plans to
leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all
evidence of your political sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make
this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He
wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe
that nothing matters any longer, because what matters most to
him is that you and people like you are out
of the picture. You know, either dead or so scared
(12:19):
that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way
against him and his friends. Now, my job, as a
semi professional Cassandra, and as a guy who reports in
the far right, is to tell you this, a Trump
dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look,
and we will talk about all of that after some ads.
(12:51):
We're back now. I am not primarily an election guy,
and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff.
The polls are bad for byis, and I have no
interest in trying to elude anyone to thinking there's all
some big nationwide polling error. The only thing I will
say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to
note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling
(13:14):
fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds on
bet but if you average the swing state polls, he
and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty
much everywhere. Now you're going to get a different analysis
depending on which pole expert you trust. The new guys
at five thirty eight still have it mostly as a
coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver
himself gives Biden under a thirty percent chance, which is
(13:36):
terrible and also about where Trump was in November of
twenty sixteen, and we all do know how that election ended.
People are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying
he's got a twenty nine percent chance of winning doesn't
mean it's impossible for him to win.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The situation is serious, but the future is not written,
and you should remember that, for good and for ill,
the final results of this whole thing will come down
probably to one hundred thousand voters or so in five
or six states. Now, it's also worth me saying this.
Both of these candidates are old men, and statistically it
would not be unheard of or weird. If one of
(14:13):
them was dead before the election, Joe Biden could still
lose in a palace coup from the rest of his
party and get replaced. Anything can happen, and in US
politics it often does. Hey, everyone, Robert here. Two days
after I wrote this, something happened. There was an assassination
attempt against former President Trump. I am recording this a
(14:34):
couple of hours after it happened. A lot is unclear
at the moment, other than that somebody shot at him.
It looks like he was wounded with from glass shrapnel
when the teleprompter is hit. That Secret Service is currently
claiming a shooter appears to have been outside the venue
on a roof. Not much more I can say at
this point. I will note again there's a lot of
(14:55):
catastrophizing going on, people saying like, oh, this means he's
definitely gonna win reelection. When Reagan got shot that Trump,
you know, rocketed him to a reelection victory. You know,
that's possible, that could be what happens here. That's definitely
a solid case to be made for that that's what
happened with Reagan. But that's not always what happens when
there are assassination attempts against sitting or former presidents. On
(15:17):
September twenty second, nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore, a
member of the Manson Family cult, attempted to assassinate President
Ford with a thirty eight revolver. He did not win reelection.
So you know, that's just as a note, like sometimes
what happens, it's impossible to say what's going to happen
with this, but if you're looking to past us history
(15:42):
for president, you're still kind of in a situation where, well,
really unclear what's going to go down. Now that's all
the horse race stuff I'm going to subject you to.
We are now going to move forward with the rest
of this episode trying to answer this question what happens
if Trump wins. Going to give you some very good
reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first has
(16:04):
to do with Project twenty twenty five. In short, this
Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place the
whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending separation
of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go after dissidents,
making recreational sects illegal, and criminalizing daily life for millions
of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a roadmap to
(16:26):
Christian dictatorship. Now I'm not going to tell you shouldn't
find this chilling, but let's be clear about what Project
twenty twenty five is. It is a nine hundred page
document written by a think tank that has lost a
lot of its influence and access to power over the
last ten years. The Heritage Foundation was once, as Molly
Ball described in an article for The Atlantic, the intellectual
(16:48):
backbone of the conservative movement. But during the Obama years,
the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started to get
pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became clear that
in a lot of ways, these guys were dangerously out
of step with voters and kind of hard to work with.
The pullback actually began in twenty fourteen, when the Heritage
Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republicans Study Committee Retreat
(17:10):
over a conflict around a farm bill. Now, the think
tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after Trump took office.
Some of this was the result of the fact that
conservative tanks have seen a general decline in influence from
the good old days the height of their power. The
Republican Party has won the popular vote in exactly one
election this century, and as of twenty twenty two, we
(17:31):
have seen them go through two disastrous midterm elections in
a row and one disastrous, losing presidential election. Now, there's
an interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundation's decline
from twenty twenty two by the Washington Posts Jeff Stein
and Yegana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill
as saying people do not walk around in fear of
(17:51):
the Heritage Foundation the way they did ten years ago.
And the main reason why is because Trump and the
people around him were gaining a lot more influence. Right,
these old things tankers just didn't hold the juice that
they used to. Now, that article was published in response
to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which
is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies,
and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic
(18:14):
concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of
trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff
that we have been bombarded with now for years. This
is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base,
but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog
shit at getting regular Americans on board, because regular Americans
look at this stuff and go while these people are
(18:35):
fucking out of their minds. I think the near panic
around Project twenty twenty five is potentially useful. It has
the potential to line a lot of voters up, and
crucially not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but
against a Republican party that has almost entirely yielded to
the fascists in its midst But I also see a
(18:56):
lot of people describing Project twenty twenty five as Trump's
plan for when he takes office, and that's just not
what it is. These people will note that a lot
of former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation,
to which I say, he hates a lot of the
people who worked with him the last administration. Around this
is very common knowledge. Some people will also point out
(19:17):
recently unearthed video of the director of Project twenty twenty
five back in twenty twenty three telling a right wing
podcaster that Trump was very bought in with Project twenty
twenty five. And maybe that's true, but I don't feel
like you should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting
his own horn. Now. That kind of belief, though, does
merge with statements you'll see from prominent progressive media figures,
(19:39):
people like Chris Hayes, who recently tweeted A big reason
Project twenty twenty five is so salient is because the
actual Trump campaign has essentially zero policy apparatus and the
platform is just Trump social posts strung together. Now, I
like Chris, and I agree that it is important to
set the stakes here for voters and to talk about
Project twenty twenty five because it's fucked up and we
(20:02):
should do something about the fact that these people feel
confident putting out open plans to in democracy and institute
a Christian nationalist dictatorship. But what Chris says is not
strictly accurate because Trump has a platform and it might
have been influenced by Project twenty twenty five. I think
it probably was. But his platform is called Agenda forty seven,
(20:24):
and we have covered it on it could happen here
our daily news program. This is something you should care about. Trump.
In his Agenda forty seven plans, Trump advocates for mass
deportations of migrants for an attack on the legal rights
of the press and potentially the imprisonment of his political enemies.
He threatens the use of special forces and airstrikes against
cartels on Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy
(20:47):
shit in Agenda forty seven. This is very serious stuff,
and it is crucially the stuff Donald Trump has promised
to do if he gets elected. Now, a few days
before I wrote this, a former president took to truth
Social to officially disavow Project twenty twenty five. Now, do
I think he's lying? Do I think he was aware
(21:08):
of it? Do I think he cribbed some of it
for Ajenda forty seven. Yeah, He's Donald Trump. He lies
all the fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy
that he feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow
Project twenty twenty five. And this is part of a
general split between Trump and the faction of the party
who want a strongman dictator type but who aren't Christian nationalists,
(21:30):
and the chunk who are. This is a natural cleavage,
and we can see further evidence of this in the
fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time
in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not
call for a national ban on abortion, And if you
watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable
taking the standard right wing line on this because Trump
(21:51):
is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a
shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner.
You know, he can't entirely push back on the party
on this, but he's clearly not motivated to do so.
Now does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban
into law. Now, of course not. But it means he
understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have
(22:11):
their use to him, he needs a lot of votes
from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary. If
Trump does take power again, these natural cleavages will become
more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power
in a severely divided country that does not like him
or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling
has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not
(22:34):
made Trump more popular. Poles generally show a ceiling of
around forty two percent of the country who like the guy,
and that ceiling is remarkably stable. There is also evidence
that these sudden media focus on Project twenty twenty five
and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to in
democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finish
this episode, on Thursday, July eleventh, IPSOS published a poll
(22:56):
showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken
after the which put him in Biden close to a tie. Now,
this still isn't great for Biden, because they all writes
this election should not be close. But I think a
lot of people have made the mistake of conflating disgust
for Biden with surging support for Trump, and that just
is not what we're seeing. More evidence for this comes
from a recent ABC Your Voice poll which showed fifty
(23:19):
percent of the country having an unfavorable opinion of Biden
and fifty nine percent having an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
Part of why so many of these outright fascists have
gone mask off is that they see these numbers too.
They know that this moment right now is their best shot,
maybe ever, at taking this country, crushing their enemies and
inflicting the pain that it is their only purpose in
(23:40):
life to inflict, and they might win. They might get
to do that the Heritage Foundation is not at the
heart of the Trump campaign, but any step closer to
total power for these people should ring alarm bells in
every heart and head in this country. Yet the severity
of the situation does not change this absolutely crucial fact.
(24:01):
The fascists snow the wind is no longer at their backs,
and I'm going to talk about that when we come
back from this ad break. Despite how confident Trump campaign
(24:22):
and guys like Jack Bisobek are talking right now about
their chances of winning, of dominating the government, of taking
control of America for generations, and purging the left, the
reality is that their position is not nearly as stable
as it seems. And you know, part of why I
think a lot of folks buy into a lot of
folks on the left and liberals buy into the claims
(24:43):
that the right is making right now about their guaranteed victory,
about their looming inevitable victory, is that Americans tend to
be pretty self centered when it comes to politics, and
it is understandable that this nail biighter of an election
in Joe Biden's calamitist debate performance has people here feeling
doomed and feeling like a new fascist world order is inevitable.
(25:04):
If you feel that way, though, I urge you to
look around the world. Look to India, where authoritarian near
dictator Narindramodi was just dealt a startling setback in the
Indian general election. His party, the BJP, failed to win
a majority for the first time since twenty fourteen. Now,
this is not the end of Mody, but it is
a shocking sign of where the wind is blowing and
(25:27):
the backlash that has started to form against the far
right worldwide. In the UK, the Labor Party just won
a landslide election against the Conservatives, tapping it into more
than a dozen years of conservative power. And in France,
the snap election called by President Emmanuel mccron inspired the
creation of a popular left wing front against the far right,
(25:48):
which defeated the far right in another historic election. Among
other things, this new left alliance has promised to recognize
the state of Palestine and increase support for Ukrainian resistance
to Rush's invasion. I could go on Turkey's all, but
dictator President Erduwan has been bleeding support for years now
and recently suffered a massive setback in regional elections around
(26:10):
the country. The opposition Republican People's Party took the five
largest cities in the country in an upset vote, including
the capital Istanbul, where Duin's party had invested massive resources.
Now these upsets in India and Turkey are so worth
discussing because both countries are years into their own version
of the nightmare scenario that Donald Trump Season two represents. Right,
(26:32):
they voted their fascists into power. These guys took control
of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed civil violence for political gain.
And yet even with all that, even with all the
power available to a modern security state, their hold on
power is slipping, just as I read these words. For
many years, neo Nazi activists sought to influence and build
(26:54):
support within the Republican Party and talked about hiding their
power level as they did so. This is a term
they cribbed from Dragon ball Z and it means, in essence,
pretending not to be a crazy ass fascist in order
to get enough support from the normies that you can
act like a crazy ass fascist with the power of
the state. Well, the masks are off now nobody is
(27:15):
hiding their power level anymore, and I am not so
arrogant as to claim that I know that their defeat
is around the corner. But I will tell you one thing.
This is a make or break moment for the sons
of bitches. If they fail now, they will find themselves
exposed in a country that knows precisely who and what
they are. And this means we will have the opportunity
(27:35):
to destroy them. Now how would we do that? Well,
first off, I'm not going to give you a detailed,
perfect roadmap for how you can participate in this and
how we can easily destroy the fascists and the next
you know, five or six minutes of a podcast. But
I do have some theories. I will elaborate on them
more in subsequent episodes. And I want to emphasize right
now that this is possible because the cultural power of
(27:59):
the far right, which seems so mighty right now, actually
does rest on a house of cards. The Republican Party
today is funded primarily by a coalition of car dealers
who donate more than any other profession because their job
depends on being able to scam consumers, multi level marketing corporations,
supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches, and of course are old
(28:21):
friends in the oil and gas industry. And there's a
lot of ways to attack these different pillars of right
wing power, these people who are actually funding their media operations,
who are funding a lot of these more radical candidates,
and who are lobbying for changes in laws that hurt
you and help them. And again, I'm not going to
be able to give a comprehensive list of how you
(28:42):
go about dismantling all of this. It is a formidable task,
but you could do a lot of damage to the
power of the far right by regulating car sales and
punishing dealers who scam consumers, which is close to one
hundred percent of dealers. You can ban the sale of
unregulated supplements marketed as medical treatment's a thing that should
be illegal, but effectctively as not. You can ban pyramid
(29:02):
schemes and prosecute the criminals who have made fortunes off
of them. These are counterattacks that will improve daily life
for huge numbers of voters and do functional damage to
the rights ability to move and maneuver. Now, I don't
mean to suggest that the only way to move on
any of those issues is just to vote right. Democrats
have had decades to fight back against this shit, and
(29:23):
they have failed by nearly every measure. But we have
the potential of a general strike coming up in twenty
twenty eight if the UAW has their way, and the
catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party in this election has
I think created some space for new kinds of organizing.
The last point I want to leave you with is
one more piece of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards
(29:45):
us is not so hail and hardy as it seems.
In April of this year, The Atlantic published an article
based on analytics of the most popular right wing news
websites in the country. They wrote, this past February, readership
of the ten largest conservative websites was down forty percent
compared with the same month in twenty twenty, According to
The Rightening, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Commscore,
(30:07):
essentially the Nielsen ratings of the Internet to track right
wing media. Some of the bigger names in the field
that have been pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost
fifty seven percent of its audience, Drudge Report, the Granddaddy
of conservative aggregation, was down eighty one percent, and The
Federalist founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering
ninety one percent. Now, these numbers are startlingly consistent across
(30:30):
right wing media, and they are vastly worse than what
liberal and left leaning media has seen over the same
time period. A number of ostensibly liberal sites like The
Times have seen an increase in subscribers over the same period,
and I can confirm to you that here at Coolzone
we have more listeners and subscribers than we did in
twenty twenty. Now, should you feel like there's nothing to
worry about just because the right wing media is taking
(30:52):
a fall, No, But what this should be evidence of
is that, again, their support has always largely been built
on their ability to generate huge amounts of money and
essentially buy attention, you know, And that's largely where guys
like Ben Shapiro have gotten their cultural power. And that's
made Ben Shapiro a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually
(31:14):
brought him a lot of people who give a shit
what he has to say. The actual number of people
paying attention to the scary motherfuckers that you see in
these clips that spread on liberal and lefty social media
is very small, and it's very small because these people
are crazy assholes who most of the folks around you,
who are basically decent people, because most people are decent,
(31:36):
fucking hate what we have seen here. What we are
seeing here is the shattering of an illusion, and the
popularity of a lot of right wing media was only
ever an illusion, popped up by an infusion of cash
from billionaire fail suns desperate to hold on to their money.
Most people don't like or trust these folks, and the
arrogance and certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and
(31:57):
the Sobics of the country have been showing now, well,
it's caused them to expose themselves. There is precisely one
thing you can always count on from fascists, and it's
that they're dogshit at estimating risk. Time and time again,
they convince themselves that they cannot be stopped in pick
fights that they wind up losing. And that is perhaps
(32:18):
the most reliable thing that we can predict from their behavior,
and maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you
going forward.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
I also just retyped and re recorded this ending in
the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump,
and I want to talk a little bit about that
before we go out, because that is certainly potentially a
game changer. You know, people saying this could change the
whole election are not wrong, but at this point far
from a guarantee. As well, as I said earlier, there
(32:45):
have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former presidents
that have not moved the needle in an election, either
at least not in a really clear way in favor
of the person the attempt was against. So we don't
know how this is going to play. One thing I
have seen in the immediate wake of this, within minutes
of the attempt itself and video of it going up,
is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people
(33:07):
on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag
fire situation, this is staged, This is obviously a fake attempt.
I don't see any evidence of that in the video
that's out there. I do not believe this was faked.
I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody
would want to take a shot at former President Trump.
The video does not show any clear weird signs that
(33:31):
would make me suspect something odd was going on. One
of the things that's come out it looks like the
shooter was on a roof nearby, pretty clear evidence of
that at this point. There are some reports from people
in the crowd who say that they pointed out the
guy on the roof to police and were basically ignored.
You know, the police didn't do anything. That also does
(33:52):
not seem weird to me, and if it does to you.
I want to explain something about these events because I've
been to a number of events during presidential campaig with
the Secret Service is doing security and other kind of
large scale, you know, events like this where there's a
lot of different law enforcement agencies and at all of
them you will see snipers on the roof. It is
not hard to find them. These guys, some of them,
I assume are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I
(34:15):
know I've seen everyone that's around at one of these things,
but you see a lot of them, right, and so
do the cops. Right. It's just not abnormal, and there
are always a ton of law enforcement agencies. You know,
this was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as
events in you know, a presidential campaign go. But you
still have state and local cops. You still have at
(34:35):
least the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret
Service when it comes to federal agencies. So you know, conservatively,
at minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law
enforcement agencies covering this event, right, And there's definitely going
to be some people there who know where all of
the snipers are supposed to be, right, presumably within the
Secret Service. But that is not the average cop on
(34:56):
the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking
around doing foot patrol, does not know where federal law
enforcement has every single sniper set up, and they are like, anyway,
I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right, Well,
that's not just a thing that you can trip you
up when you are trying to predict the future months
or years in advance. It is a thing that can
(35:16):
trip you up predicting something a minute in advance. Right.
You see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, hey,
there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well,
you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns.
You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service
and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has
some guys up on the roof you know, sharpshooters not
at all weird. You go, yeah, it's maybe You even
(35:38):
see the guy and the pictures I've seen, looks like
he was wearing camo. Looks like he was wearing the
kind of combat gear that cops wear, but also that
anyone can buy, because cops look like you know a
lot of people who just buy this shit and do
it recreationally, you know, go go shooting and training in
the woods or whatever. Like a lot of it's not
hard to gain access to gear that at a glance
(35:59):
would look like a cop. And my guess is that
this guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my
best shot at being able to get away with this
is if I post up on a roof somewhere and
assume that the cops that spot me immediately won't know
right away what I am, right, And that does seem
to be what happened at this moment, And you know,
I take that as a lot of things very unclear.
(36:21):
This is going to again affect the election, but take
it as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias,
because just because something seems like it's not weird, like,
it's not a sign of a change of something very
different about to go down doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah,
you can never trust your assumptions, and that goes both
with both ways. With this, I am seeing a lot
(36:43):
of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am
someone who's about to head into the RNC not thrilled
that this has happened. But that doesn't mean we know
what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean
we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean,
for among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic.
But I don't know how much this moves the needle
(37:04):
because I don't know how many people who can be
convinced would be swayed by something like this, For how
many people this could change their opinion on the election,
and how many people are going to believe that this
was real and not. You know, I've even seen people
claiming that like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a
wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just
really unclear how people are going to react, right. It's
(37:26):
not worthless to look back to you know, there's an
attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination
attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that
shit happened prior to the modern era of social media.
All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting
broken by the Internet. So I'm not going to tell
you this is a good time. I'm not going to
(37:47):
tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But
i am going to tell you the future is not written,
and don't panic until next time. I'm Robert Evans and
this is It Could Happen Here back later this week
with coverage of the Republican Convention.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Robert Evans here and this is It Could Happen here,
a podcast about things falling apart, and boy, they sure
seem to be, don't they. The twenty twenty four election
is terrifying a lot of people at this stage after
a disastrous debate performance by Joe Biden, And this episode
will be coming out on the Monday that the Republican
National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A lot of people
(00:28):
are terrified about a Trump dictatorship, about Project twenty twenty
five and all that that entails. And I want to
tell you first off, you know, we will be having
a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison, Sophie and
I are all going to be there all week. We'll
start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,
and then we'll probably have some summary content after that
(00:50):
the next week. So we will be getting you our
experiences here and everything that we encounter on the ground
during what I think is going to wind up a
pretty important week for the American fascist movement. But right now,
what I want to address is the sense of kind
of unbridled terror that I've seen for a lot of
people around me, not just leftists, but regular people that
(01:13):
I know in my life, folks who are just kind
of like casual democrats, not the kind to think much
about politics, but have suddenly seen the potential of what
a Trump second term might bring with it and are
rightfully terrified. So I want to first off, tell everyone
in that bucket, don't panic. That's what this episode is about.
(01:34):
And I'm going to try and give you some good
reasons not to panic, some reasons why our situation is
not as dire as it seems. And my goal here
is not to lull you into an action or stop
you from preparing. You should, in fact be preparing, And
we talk about the various things you can do organizing
in your community, taking action to support migrants, to support
(01:55):
each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women seeking reproductive justice.
That's our daily bread and butter. Right now, I want
to give you some reasons for optimism about victory and
the overall struggle against these fucking maniacs. So, as most
regular listeners will know, back in the spring of twenty nineteen,
(02:15):
I published the first season of It Could Happen Here,
which was originally a scripted podcast about the very real
possibility of a civil conflict in the United States. The
years since have proven several of my predictions painfully accurate.
I started the series with fictional vignettes from the perspective
of an American civilian watching American tanks roll through the
(02:36):
streets of their city. Within a year, thousands and thousands
of listeners had variants of that exact experience thanks to
the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled and more than
a little frightened by the response that some people had
to the first iteration of it could happen here. During
twenty twenty, while I was on the ground in four
different states, dozens and dozens of people told me the
(02:56):
series had influenced their own choices for how to act
and organize on the ground with their friends out in
the world. And that is humbling and a little bit frightening.
And I promise you I'm not laying this out to
brag or try to make an argument from authority. I'm
not saying I predicted something five years ago and was right,
so you should listen to what I have to predict now.
(03:17):
In fact, I kind of want to do the opposite
because in another podcast, I recorded in twenty nineteen on
the anti Vaxx movement. This would have been an episode
of Behind the Bastards. I laid out a theoretical pandemic,
and I described it spreading almost exactly the way the
COVID nineteen pandemic really did spread. Just a few months later.
And yet, in February of twenty twenty, when COVID nineteen
(03:39):
had been confirmed to have entered the United States and
was spreading over other parts of the world like wildfire,
I had friends ask me what I thought was going
to happen, and, you know, thinking back to SARS, thinking
back to bird flu, thinking back to the Ebola, you know,
epidemic in twenty fourteen. My answer was, I don't know.
(03:59):
It'll be fine, right, someone, surely there's some adults out
there who were gonna, you know, lock this thing down.
They're not just gonna let it run rampant over the population. Right.
There's a term for what happened to me there, and
it's called normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the tendency to
assume that whatever has gone down in the past will
keep happening, often despite evidence to the contrary. Something like
(04:23):
eighty percent of people display attributes of delusional thinking caused
by the normalcy bias during disasters. Emergency responders sometimes called
this negative panic. We got a great example of negative
panic a couple of weeks ago. Video went viral of
a bowl that got loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon,
and it started just just absolutely goring random yocals who
(04:44):
were like wandering around in between chiro stands and beer
cards behind sort of the stands, and a few of
these people had the presence of mind to run. One
guy even pulled a gun. And I don't know entirely
how we want to rate that as a response, but
a lot of folks just stared at the bowl, which
is blank looks on their faces, utterly uncomprehended. You can
tell from their body language that they just couldn't believe
(05:06):
what they were seeing. And some of those people got
rammed right in the fucking gut by a bull a
second later. The immediate danger that their eyes were telling
them was there just seemed too far fetched to take seriously.
The normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's
just one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind
(05:27):
towards catastrophes. And while we're on that subject, I should
warn those of you who'd like to try their hand
at predicting the future of a separate cognitive delusion catastrophizing.
This is the tendency to assume that the absolute worst
case scenario will come to pass, and it's often a
trauma reaction. When you've been blown up, you kind of
(05:47):
always expect the world to blow up around you. If
you've been in a relationship with someone who blows up,
who screams or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves
during arguments, you might find yourself expecting that from anyone
else that you did, even if they've never displayed that
kind of behavior. And if you've watched an in the
bag sheer thing presidential election collapse and usher in a
(06:08):
new era of fascist political capture in your country, well
you might see that kind of thing happening and expect
it whenever the polls open up again. The tricky part
of actually predicting the future with any accuracy, which is
a thing that I have been both professionally successful at
and personally bad at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias
(06:29):
with your catastrophizing This is easier said than done, and
I have noticed that my effort to reach this state
has produced some peculiar cognitive effects of late. In the
six months that led up to the first presidential debate,
I felt constant growing anxiety about a second Trump term.
Only some of my anxiety was based on polling, which
didn't look great for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I
(06:51):
was anxious because I saw so many people around me,
and I'm not talking about folks on Twitter, but in
the real world, go, well, obviously Biden's got a win,
there's no way Trump gets elected again, and go about
their day. Then the debate happened. Joe went on stage,
barely able to speak at a legible volume, coughing, slurring
his words, and dropping into tangents. Rather than making cogent
cases to the country. Everyone around me started to get
(07:14):
terrified all at once, and the mainstream media did what
it does and pivoted to round the clock coverage of
the issue of Biden's competency. You know, some people have
alleged that this is because the media has some sort
of an agenda here, and I really don't credit the
media as someone who has spent his life working adjacent
to the mainstream media with that kind of capacity to plan.
What these people, what these reporters, what these news organs
(07:36):
were doing, was pivoting to the issue that was doing
the most to raise our collective blood pressure, because, among
other things, that's what social media has trained them to do,
because that's where the fucking money is, right, you know,
not that this issue didn't exist before that If it bleeds,
it leads has been a long time axiom in the field.
(07:57):
But that's what's happening here too, right, And because the
money is in saying and talking about the things that
gets people's blood pumping the most. The question of is
Joe Biden doomed soon yielded to is democracy doomed, as
analysts and pundits started hyping up Project twenty twenty five,
a blueprint for fascist takeover of the US, published by
(08:19):
the Heritage Foundation last year. Now, I am not a polster,
and I don't claim debase any of what I say
next on some kind of mathematic expertise. But I don't
think we're doomed. I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable,
even in the likely event that Biden loses, And I
think our position is a lot stronger than most people realize.
This is why right wing influencers and strategists have started
(08:42):
going so hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like
fucking Cobra commander. The best example of how mask off
the fascist right has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of
the Heritage Foundation, who said this during a recent press conference.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
The reason that so many anchors on MSNB, for example,
are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle in this response and
just want to encourage you with some substance that we
are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which
will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Another of these guys is Jack Pasobc, a former Navy
intelligence officer turned to supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher.
Jack spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for
Seapak where he said this, but.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy.
We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all
the way there on January sixth, but we will endeavor
to get rid of it and replace it with this
right here. We'll replace it with this amen.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now, I should note, folks, when he says this, right here,
he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's
not a subtle man, but he does speak for a
frighteningly large and influential block of Republicans. Both of these
guys are end results of eighty years of conspiracy theories
and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and
their fail sons, and at this point fail grandsons. The
(10:08):
mainstream media and most voters in this country did their
best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now
they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power,
mouths watering, dishard, guns loaded, and people are freaking out.
Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within
the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate
has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people now. Obviously,
(10:32):
Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the
fringes of the American right four years. There Nothing they're
saying is new, but Trump's likely victory in the Supreme
Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot
of people to conclude that project twenty twenty five is
Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office.
This is something guys like Pasobic and Roberts want you
(10:54):
to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away
from confrontation. Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding
that if they can just convince you that the fight
is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has
spent the last two weeks since the debate quote tweeting
every left wing media person he can find and saying
(11:16):
six months to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps
after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic. Jack
is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier,
he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy.
One of them that I bring up often because I
think it illustrates something important is the ODE loop. This
(11:36):
is the process by which people make decisions and act
in combat situations, and it stands for the different stages
of this process are observe, orient, decide. Act. If you
can disrupt any part of the ODE loop, you can
stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding, or
from carrying out their actions. Jack and his peers want
(11:56):
you to panic. They want you to make plans to
leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all
evidence of your political sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make
this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He
wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe
that nothing matters any longer, because what matters most to
him is that you and people like you are out
of the picture. You know, either dead or so scared
(12:19):
that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way
against him and his friends. Now, my job, as a
semi professional Cassandra, and as a guy who reports in
the far right, is to tell you this, a Trump
dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look,
and we will talk about all of that after some ads.
(12:51):
We're back now. I am not primarily an election guy,
and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff.
The polls are bad for byis, and I have no
interest in trying to elude anyone to thinking there's all
some big nationwide polling error. The only thing I will
say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to
note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling
(13:14):
fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds on
bet but if you average the swing state polls, he
and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty
much everywhere. Now you're going to get a different analysis
depending on which pole expert you trust. The new guys
at five thirty eight still have it mostly as a
coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver
himself gives Biden under a thirty percent chance, which is
(13:36):
terrible and also about where Trump was in November of
twenty sixteen, and we all do know how that election ended.
People are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying
he's got a twenty nine percent chance of winning doesn't
mean it's impossible for him to win.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The situation is serious, but the future is not written,
and you should remember that, for good and for ill,
the final results of this whole thing will come down
probably to one hundred thousand voters or so in five
or six states. Now, it's also worth me saying this.
Both of these candidates are old men, and statistically it
would not be unheard of or weird. If one of
(14:13):
them was dead before the election, Joe Biden could still
lose in a palace coup from the rest of his
party and get replaced. Anything can happen, and in US
politics it often does. Hey, everyone, Robert here. Two days
after I wrote this, something happened. There was an assassination
attempt against former President Trump. I am recording this a
(14:34):
couple of hours after it happened. A lot is unclear
at the moment, other than that somebody shot at him.
It looks like he was wounded with from glass shrapnel
when the teleprompter is hit. That Secret Service is currently
claiming a shooter appears to have been outside the venue
on a roof. Not much more I can say at
this point. I will note again there's a lot of
(14:55):
catastrophizing going on, people saying like, oh, this means he's
definitely gonna win reelection. When Reagan got shot that Trump,
you know, rocketed him to a reelection victory. You know,
that's possible, that could be what happens here. That's definitely
a solid case to be made for that that's what
happened with Reagan. But that's not always what happens when
there are assassination attempts against sitting or former presidents. On
(15:17):
September twenty second, nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore, a
member of the Manson Family cult, attempted to assassinate President
Ford with a thirty eight revolver. He did not win reelection.
So you know, that's just as a note, like sometimes
what happens, it's impossible to say what's going to happen
with this, but if you're looking to past us history
(15:42):
for president, you're still kind of in a situation where, well,
really unclear what's going to go down. Now that's all
the horse race stuff I'm going to subject you to.
We are now going to move forward with the rest
of this episode trying to answer this question what happens
if Trump wins. Going to give you some very good
reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first has
(16:04):
to do with Project twenty twenty five. In short, this
Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place the
whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending separation
of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go after dissidents,
making recreational sects illegal, and criminalizing daily life for millions
of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a roadmap to
(16:26):
Christian dictatorship. Now I'm not going to tell you shouldn't
find this chilling, but let's be clear about what Project
twenty twenty five is. It is a nine hundred page
document written by a think tank that has lost a
lot of its influence and access to power over the
last ten years. The Heritage Foundation was once, as Molly
Ball described in an article for The Atlantic, the intellectual
(16:48):
backbone of the conservative movement. But during the Obama years,
the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started to get
pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became clear that
in a lot of ways, these guys were dangerously out
of step with voters and kind of hard to work with.
The pullback actually began in twenty fourteen, when the Heritage
Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republicans Study Committee Retreat
(17:10):
over a conflict around a farm bill. Now, the think
tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after Trump took office.
Some of this was the result of the fact that
conservative tanks have seen a general decline in influence from
the good old days the height of their power. The
Republican Party has won the popular vote in exactly one
election this century, and as of twenty twenty two, we
(17:31):
have seen them go through two disastrous midterm elections in
a row and one disastrous, losing presidential election. Now, there's
an interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundation's decline
from twenty twenty two by the Washington Posts Jeff Stein
and Yegana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill
as saying people do not walk around in fear of
(17:51):
the Heritage Foundation the way they did ten years ago.
And the main reason why is because Trump and the
people around him were gaining a lot more influence. Right,
these old things tankers just didn't hold the juice that
they used to. Now, that article was published in response
to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which
is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies,
and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic
(18:14):
concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of
trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff
that we have been bombarded with now for years. This
is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base,
but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog
shit at getting regular Americans on board, because regular Americans
look at this stuff and go while these people are
(18:35):
fucking out of their minds. I think the near panic
around Project twenty twenty five is potentially useful. It has
the potential to line a lot of voters up, and
crucially not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but
against a Republican party that has almost entirely yielded to
the fascists in its midst But I also see a
(18:56):
lot of people describing Project twenty twenty five as Trump's
plan for when he takes office, and that's just not
what it is. These people will note that a lot
of former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation,
to which I say, he hates a lot of the
people who worked with him the last administration. Around this
is very common knowledge. Some people will also point out
(19:17):
recently unearthed video of the director of Project twenty twenty
five back in twenty twenty three telling a right wing
podcaster that Trump was very bought in with Project twenty
twenty five. And maybe that's true, but I don't feel
like you should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting
his own horn. Now. That kind of belief, though, does
merge with statements you'll see from prominent progressive media figures,
(19:39):
people like Chris Hayes, who recently tweeted A big reason
Project twenty twenty five is so salient is because the
actual Trump campaign has essentially zero policy apparatus and the
platform is just Trump social posts strung together. Now, I
like Chris, and I agree that it is important to
set the stakes here for voters and to talk about
Project twenty twenty five because it's fucked up and we
(20:02):
should do something about the fact that these people feel
confident putting out open plans to in democracy and institute
a Christian nationalist dictatorship. But what Chris says is not
strictly accurate because Trump has a platform and it might
have been influenced by Project twenty twenty five. I think
it probably was. But his platform is called Agenda forty seven,
(20:24):
and we have covered it on it could happen here
our daily news program. This is something you should care about. Trump.
In his Agenda forty seven plans, Trump advocates for mass
deportations of migrants for an attack on the legal rights
of the press and potentially the imprisonment of his political enemies.
He threatens the use of special forces and airstrikes against
cartels on Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy
(20:47):
shit in Agenda forty seven. This is very serious stuff,
and it is crucially the stuff Donald Trump has promised
to do if he gets elected. Now, a few days
before I wrote this, a former president took to truth
Social to officially disavow Project twenty twenty five. Now, do
I think he's lying? Do I think he was aware
(21:08):
of it? Do I think he cribbed some of it
for Ajenda forty seven. Yeah, He's Donald Trump. He lies
all the fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy
that he feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow
Project twenty twenty five. And this is part of a
general split between Trump and the faction of the party
who want a strongman dictator type but who aren't Christian nationalists,
(21:30):
and the chunk who are. This is a natural cleavage,
and we can see further evidence of this in the
fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time
in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not
call for a national ban on abortion, And if you
watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable
taking the standard right wing line on this because Trump
(21:51):
is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a
shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner.
You know, he can't entirely push back on the party
on this, but he's clearly not motivated to do so.
Now does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban
into law. Now, of course not. But it means he
understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have
(22:11):
their use to him, he needs a lot of votes
from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary. If
Trump does take power again, these natural cleavages will become
more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power
in a severely divided country that does not like him
or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling
has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not
(22:34):
made Trump more popular. Poles generally show a ceiling of
around forty two percent of the country who like the guy,
and that ceiling is remarkably stable. There is also evidence
that these sudden media focus on Project twenty twenty five
and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to in
democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finish
this episode, on Thursday, July eleventh, IPSOS published a poll
(22:56):
showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken
after the which put him in Biden close to a tie. Now,
this still isn't great for Biden, because they all writes
this election should not be close. But I think a
lot of people have made the mistake of conflating disgust
for Biden with surging support for Trump, and that just
is not what we're seeing. More evidence for this comes
from a recent ABC Your Voice poll which showed fifty
(23:19):
percent of the country having an unfavorable opinion of Biden
and fifty nine percent having an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
Part of why so many of these outright fascists have
gone mask off is that they see these numbers too.
They know that this moment right now is their best shot,
maybe ever, at taking this country, crushing their enemies and
inflicting the pain that it is their only purpose in
(23:40):
life to inflict, and they might win. They might get
to do that the Heritage Foundation is not at the
heart of the Trump campaign, but any step closer to
total power for these people should ring alarm bells in
every heart and head in this country. Yet the severity
of the situation does not change this absolutely crucial fact.
(24:01):
The fascists snow the wind is no longer at their backs,
and I'm going to talk about that when we come
back from this ad break. Despite how confident Trump campaign
(24:22):
and guys like Jack Bisobek are talking right now about
their chances of winning, of dominating the government, of taking
control of America for generations, and purging the left, the
reality is that their position is not nearly as stable
as it seems. And you know, part of why I
think a lot of folks buy into a lot of
folks on the left and liberals buy into the claims
(24:43):
that the right is making right now about their guaranteed victory,
about their looming inevitable victory, is that Americans tend to
be pretty self centered when it comes to politics, and
it is understandable that this nail biighter of an election
in Joe Biden's calamitist debate performance has people here feeling
doomed and feeling like a new fascist world order is inevitable.
(25:04):
If you feel that way, though, I urge you to
look around the world. Look to India, where authoritarian near
dictator Narindramodi was just dealt a startling setback in the
Indian general election. His party, the BJP, failed to win
a majority for the first time since twenty fourteen. Now,
this is not the end of Mody, but it is
a shocking sign of where the wind is blowing and
(25:27):
the backlash that has started to form against the far
right worldwide. In the UK, the Labor Party just won
a landslide election against the Conservatives, tapping it into more
than a dozen years of conservative power. And in France,
the snap election called by President Emmanuel mccron inspired the
creation of a popular left wing front against the far right,
(25:48):
which defeated the far right in another historic election. Among
other things, this new left alliance has promised to recognize
the state of Palestine and increase support for Ukrainian resistance
to Rush's invasion. I could go on Turkey's all, but
dictator President Erduwan has been bleeding support for years now
and recently suffered a massive setback in regional elections around
(26:10):
the country. The opposition Republican People's Party took the five
largest cities in the country in an upset vote, including
the capital Istanbul, where Duin's party had invested massive resources.
Now these upsets in India and Turkey are so worth
discussing because both countries are years into their own version
of the nightmare scenario that Donald Trump Season two represents. Right,
(26:32):
they voted their fascists into power. These guys took control
of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed civil violence for political gain.
And yet even with all that, even with all the
power available to a modern security state, their hold on
power is slipping, just as I read these words. For
many years, neo Nazi activists sought to influence and build
(26:54):
support within the Republican Party and talked about hiding their
power level as they did so. This is a term
they cribbed from Dragon ball Z and it means, in essence,
pretending not to be a crazy ass fascist in order
to get enough support from the normies that you can
act like a crazy ass fascist with the power of
the state. Well, the masks are off now nobody is
(27:15):
hiding their power level anymore, and I am not so
arrogant as to claim that I know that their defeat
is around the corner. But I will tell you one thing.
This is a make or break moment for the sons
of bitches. If they fail now, they will find themselves
exposed in a country that knows precisely who and what
they are. And this means we will have the opportunity
(27:35):
to destroy them. Now how would we do that? Well,
first off, I'm not going to give you a detailed,
perfect roadmap for how you can participate in this and
how we can easily destroy the fascists and the next
you know, five or six minutes of a podcast. But
I do have some theories. I will elaborate on them
more in subsequent episodes. And I want to emphasize right
now that this is possible because the cultural power of
(27:59):
the far right, which seems so mighty right now, actually
does rest on a house of cards. The Republican Party
today is funded primarily by a coalition of car dealers
who donate more than any other profession because their job
depends on being able to scam consumers, multi level marketing corporations,
supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches, and of course are old
(28:21):
friends in the oil and gas industry. And there's a
lot of ways to attack these different pillars of right
wing power, these people who are actually funding their media operations,
who are funding a lot of these more radical candidates,
and who are lobbying for changes in laws that hurt
you and help them. And again, I'm not going to
be able to give a comprehensive list of how you
(28:42):
go about dismantling all of this. It is a formidable task,
but you could do a lot of damage to the
power of the far right by regulating car sales and
punishing dealers who scam consumers, which is close to one
hundred percent of dealers. You can ban the sale of
unregulated supplements marketed as medical treatment's a thing that should
be illegal, but effectctively as not. You can ban pyramid
(29:02):
schemes and prosecute the criminals who have made fortunes off
of them. These are counterattacks that will improve daily life
for huge numbers of voters and do functional damage to
the rights ability to move and maneuver. Now, I don't
mean to suggest that the only way to move on
any of those issues is just to vote right. Democrats
have had decades to fight back against this shit, and
(29:23):
they have failed by nearly every measure. But we have
the potential of a general strike coming up in twenty
twenty eight if the UAW has their way, and the
catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party in this election has
I think created some space for new kinds of organizing.
The last point I want to leave you with is
one more piece of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards
(29:45):
us is not so hail and hardy as it seems.
In April of this year, The Atlantic published an article
based on analytics of the most popular right wing news
websites in the country. They wrote, this past February, readership
of the ten largest conservative websites was down forty percent
compared with the same month in twenty twenty, According to
The Rightening, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Commscore,
(30:07):
essentially the Nielsen ratings of the Internet to track right
wing media. Some of the bigger names in the field
that have been pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost
fifty seven percent of its audience, Drudge Report, the Granddaddy
of conservative aggregation, was down eighty one percent, and The
Federalist founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering
ninety one percent. Now, these numbers are startlingly consistent across
(30:30):
right wing media, and they are vastly worse than what
liberal and left leaning media has seen over the same
time period. A number of ostensibly liberal sites like The
Times have seen an increase in subscribers over the same period,
and I can confirm to you that here at Coolzone
we have more listeners and subscribers than we did in
twenty twenty. Now, should you feel like there's nothing to
worry about just because the right wing media is taking
(30:52):
a fall, No, But what this should be evidence of
is that, again, their support has always largely been built
on their ability to generate huge amounts of money and
essentially buy attention, you know, And that's largely where guys
like Ben Shapiro have gotten their cultural power. And that's
made Ben Shapiro a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually
(31:14):
brought him a lot of people who give a shit
what he has to say. The actual number of people
paying attention to the scary motherfuckers that you see in
these clips that spread on liberal and lefty social media
is very small, and it's very small because these people
are crazy assholes who most of the folks around you,
who are basically decent people, because most people are decent,
(31:36):
fucking hate what we have seen here. What we are
seeing here is the shattering of an illusion, and the
popularity of a lot of right wing media was only
ever an illusion, popped up by an infusion of cash
from billionaire fail suns desperate to hold on to their money.
Most people don't like or trust these folks, and the
arrogance and certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and
(31:57):
the Sobics of the country have been showing now, well,
it's caused them to expose themselves. There is precisely one
thing you can always count on from fascists, and it's
that they're dogshit at estimating risk. Time and time again,
they convince themselves that they cannot be stopped in pick
fights that they wind up losing. And that is perhaps
(32:18):
the most reliable thing that we can predict from their behavior,
and maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you
going forward.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
I also just retyped and re recorded this ending in
the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump,
and I want to talk a little bit about that
before we go out, because that is certainly potentially a
game changer. You know, people saying this could change the
whole election are not wrong, but at this point far
from a guarantee. As well, as I said earlier, there
(32:45):
have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former presidents
that have not moved the needle in an election, either
at least not in a really clear way in favor
of the person the attempt was against. So we don't
know how this is going to play. One thing I
have seen in the immediate wake of this, within minutes
of the attempt itself and video of it going up,
is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people
(33:07):
on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag
fire situation, this is staged, This is obviously a fake attempt.
I don't see any evidence of that in the video
that's out there. I do not believe this was faked.
I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody
would want to take a shot at former President Trump.
The video does not show any clear weird signs that
(33:31):
would make me suspect something odd was going on. One
of the things that's come out it looks like the
shooter was on a roof nearby, pretty clear evidence of
that at this point. There are some reports from people
in the crowd who say that they pointed out the
guy on the roof to police and were basically ignored.
You know, the police didn't do anything. That also does
(33:52):
not seem weird to me, and if it does to you.
I want to explain something about these events because I've
been to a number of events during presidential campaig with
the Secret Service is doing security and other kind of
large scale, you know, events like this where there's a
lot of different law enforcement agencies and at all of
them you will see snipers on the roof. It is
not hard to find them. These guys, some of them,
I assume are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I
(34:15):
know I've seen everyone that's around at one of these things,
but you see a lot of them, right, and so
do the cops. Right. It's just not abnormal, and there
are always a ton of law enforcement agencies. You know,
this was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as
events in you know, a presidential campaign go. But you
still have state and local cops. You still have at
(34:35):
least the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret
Service when it comes to federal agencies. So you know, conservatively,
at minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law
enforcement agencies covering this event, right, And there's definitely going
to be some people there who know where all of
the snipers are supposed to be, right, presumably within the
Secret Service. But that is not the average cop on
(34:56):
the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking
around doing foot patrol, does not know where federal law
enforcement has every single sniper set up, and they are like, anyway,
I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right, Well,
that's not just a thing that you can trip you
up when you are trying to predict the future months
or years in advance. It is a thing that can
(35:16):
trip you up predicting something a minute in advance. Right.
You see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, hey,
there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well,
you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns.
You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service
and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has
some guys up on the roof you know, sharpshooters not
at all weird. You go, yeah, it's maybe You even
(35:38):
see the guy and the pictures I've seen, looks like
he was wearing camo. Looks like he was wearing the
kind of combat gear that cops wear, but also that
anyone can buy, because cops look like you know a
lot of people who just buy this shit and do
it recreationally, you know, go go shooting and training in
the woods or whatever. Like a lot of it's not
hard to gain access to gear that at a glance
(35:59):
would look like a cop. And my guess is that
this guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my
best shot at being able to get away with this
is if I post up on a roof somewhere and
assume that the cops that spot me immediately won't know
right away what I am, right, And that does seem
to be what happened at this moment, And you know,
I take that as a lot of things very unclear.
(36:21):
This is going to again affect the election, but take
it as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias,
because just because something seems like it's not weird, like,
it's not a sign of a change of something very
different about to go down doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah,
you can never trust your assumptions, and that goes both
with both ways. With this, I am seeing a lot
(36:43):
of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am
someone who's about to head into the RNC not thrilled
that this has happened. But that doesn't mean we know
what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean
we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean,
for among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic.
But I don't know how much this moves the needle
(37:04):
because I don't know how many people who can be
convinced would be swayed by something like this, For how
many people this could change their opinion on the election,
and how many people are going to believe that this
was real and not. You know, I've even seen people
claiming that like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a
wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just
really unclear how people are going to react, right. It's
(37:26):
not worthless to look back to you know, there's an
attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination
attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that
shit happened prior to the modern era of social media.
All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting
broken by the Internet. So I'm not going to tell
you this is a good time. I'm not going to
(37:47):
tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But
i am going to tell you the future is not written,
and don't panic until next time. I'm Robert Evans and
this is It Could Happen Here back later this week
with coverage of the Republican Convention.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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