January 21, 2025 • 24 mins
The fascists have won. Where do we go from here, and how can we turn the tide? Robert reads an essay on just that, and Emily Gorcenski debuts a poem about the moment we've just entered.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone media, Robert Evans here and this is it
could happen here, and boy it sure is now. I
don't know where we go from this point, and neither
does anyone else. On the moment before I wrote this,
I woke up, groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to
(00:23):
a barrage of horror. Donald Trump signing Anti Tran's legislation
into law, Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute. Donald
Trump saluting and dancing with the village people, proud boys
tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in
their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because
they never really left. All the battles and street fighting
(00:47):
and organizing from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty brought us
four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued
unabated rot. It's a term I see a lot these days.
A colleague and friend ed Zeitron refers to the hell
our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the
rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament,
(01:10):
use the term rage rot to refer to now President
Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the fifty
first state. Over the last year, I've seen a slew
of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and
the deep rot at the heart of our political system.
One thing I have done over the last four years
(01:30):
is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals.
So I hunter, raise, and slaughter, but many are roadkill,
harvested from the side of the road. My family comes
from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory
that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also
changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts
(01:51):
from the bone. If you look at the back leg
of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll
see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball
and sockage. Point out. If your goal is to preserve
good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs
from the body and then the meat from the bone
sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and
how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems
(02:14):
to be the one thing that almost every political person
in the country agrees with the United States as it is,
must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone, and
changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they
refuse to start cutting. Their successors will not make the
(02:36):
same mistake on the opposing side of the isle. Today,
I see a lot of angry people arguing about what
the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better
they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That
doesn't help any of us Right now. Migrants are dying
of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists
who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future.
(02:59):
Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at knight
may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll
be made to labor for pennies. Neo Nazi's cheer as
the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the
White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far
away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who
wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where
(03:22):
does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do
in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling
outside our doors. I have an answer to this question. Yes,
now is the time to try to test the boundaries
of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment.
Since the time of the founding fathers, this country and
(03:44):
its system have been referred to as the American Experiment.
One could see the very terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic
gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the
appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always
has been a test for new, often bad ideas about
how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core
(04:07):
value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
That also happens to be the only real way to
fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring
up often, the evolution of overconfidence, which set out to
explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities.
The authors pondered quote, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments,
(04:31):
unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions. So it remains a puzzle
how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable
in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Now.
The conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant
resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing
(04:53):
to try to take said resources, even if it is
not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make
over confidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation
for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power.
Put simply, they always go for it. January sixth provides
(05:15):
us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic,
reckless burst of stupidity, mocked for years by everyone except
the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power.
They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won
because they kept trying, and the people who should have
stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair,
(05:38):
and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs,
gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and
narrative oxygen around issues like immigration and now, well, we're
here and we'll continue to talk about here after these
ads we're back. The coming days will be ugly. Yet
(06:11):
I feel it's my job to remind you that bad
as this is, we are not vymar Germany, and this
is not nineteen thirty three. Trump and his lieutenants aren't
battle hardened trench fighters. They're elon musk and a coterie
of half enthusiastic, half frightened billionaires who got rich gambling
on apps to let you rate your classmates tits. They're
foot soldiers, are used car salesmen from Encino, not freikorps.
(06:36):
The United States is not starving to death crippled by war.
It's irritated anxious because it's working people have been robbed
blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump. Now. The
one thing we do have in common with Vimar is
that our fascists now find themselves at the head of
a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent,
(06:57):
but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it
didn't really matter that last one, the feeling that nothing matters.
The system as fucked. There's no point in engaging or organizing.
That is the most powerful weapon they have right now,
because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them,
from interrupting as they reach out. Yet again to take
(07:19):
something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.
In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do
something anything, can be intense, and when we're swept up
in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the
things we know best, the things we've done before, the
marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and
(07:41):
shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those
tactics without iteration or acknowledgment of their limitations and failures
is a road to more failure. I've been to a
lot of protests, starting at Zukati Park in twenty eleven
an ending last year in Chicago. At one of the
(08:02):
most dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young
anti genocide activists bow to shut down the dn C
to quote make it great like sixty eight. This was
a reference to the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass
protests were ignited there when the favorite anti war candidate,
Eugene McCarthy was ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor
(08:23):
of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently
with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world
is watching, and it's been a chant ever since. The
world may have been watching then, but the war went on.
Nixon won election, then re election, and then finally pulled
US troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on
(08:45):
Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In twenty
twenty four, a new batch of anti war protesters chanted,
the whole world is watching, and I can say unequivocally
it was not. The Only people watching were me, several
other journalists, and of course some people on Twitter. The police,
as they kettled Macedon arrested members of the crowd barely
(09:08):
seemed to care. The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris
was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti
war candidate for party insiders to rat fuck in her favor.
Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards
that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than
its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right on
(09:31):
the stage floor. All the Democrats had to present were
aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton drooling out the same
platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the
first place, and doing their best to ignore delegates who
walked out and slept in front of the convention center
to protest the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets,
(09:51):
a lot of very nice, earnest people alongside a handful
of grifters did the only thing they could think of
doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They
walked around and shouted. The police, and the city largely
let them because they knew none of it was going
to change a goddamn thing. I'd felt tremendous optimism right
(10:13):
after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala, but
because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or
at least it seemed that way. At first, the DNC
made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieries, the powers
behind the throne, still ran the show and would not
allow any real change. The rot had spread too far,
(10:34):
spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief
in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party, broken as it was,
had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the
spread of fascism. For a short time. It was my
inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that this might still
be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost
(10:56):
any sense of actual productive optimism we lean on when
we have no ideas to brace ourselves against hope, as
George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't
fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we
are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people
who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths of capital
(11:19):
running things, are going crazy because we return to normal,
decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along,
and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a
different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw the largest
sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing fundamentally changed
in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social media set
(11:42):
to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure
no similar movement whatever gain that kind of steam again.
Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet many organizers,
be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all
still stuck in the same loops behind each march to nowhere,
(12:03):
and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social
democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark with cyclists
replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy
of other lovely things. Both political parties will fight tooth
and nail to prevent. The communists dream of a new
October revolution, but this one will work and not just
(12:25):
create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies
inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend
to be very good at seeing the flaws and the
logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups,
but they are just as bereft of ideas for how
to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe
(12:46):
even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either
living in the woods eating berries, or some kind of
solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize,
but try offering eye their future to a single mom
who can't afford her five year old's insulin and see
how excited she gets. On the other side of the
(13:07):
anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully
admit they don't know how to solve the big problem,
but they do know how to provide free eye exams
to homeless people once a month, or do water drops
down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration,
or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze
a forest and build a police training facility. If you
are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas,
(13:30):
staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good
folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what
they've been doing, but at least what they've been doing
helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if
they ever arrive, will be something new, something we haven't
tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take
(13:50):
the form of another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing
to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever.
Sean Fayne, chief of the United Autoworkers Union, has called
for a general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so
far that is the only clear plan I have heard
from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of
a chance it is audacious, and I recommend reading what
(14:12):
Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I
support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right
got to where they are right now in this country
by being bold, as I laid out earlier. Fascists win
because they try, and this is something we need to copy.
Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to
(14:33):
try different shit. Many pundits and columnists were shocked and
horrified by the mass of an instant support for Luigim
Mangioni when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both
the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating
oligarchs characterize this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did
(14:53):
the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that
the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising.
I saw something a bit different, more than the actual
killing itself. I think people were excited to see someone
try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried
it out in a novel way, and in doing so,
(15:15):
he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding
us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty is the
one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi mangione together.
The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the
simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In
(15:36):
twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince
people that he might upset the apple cart in a
way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent
wave back to the White House. The consequence of this
is that he and his are now on their way
to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of
the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating
(15:59):
their coverage of Trump. If not embracing him outright, he
is being normalized. His toadies, Musk Chief among them, are
now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
I suspect the same thing will be true of the
copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his
plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best,
(16:22):
newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they
get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will
be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail
to hit their intended targets, or do but with a
lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the
next new thing to actually work will be. But between
Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.
(16:45):
We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new
things are about to be tried, and as awful and
bloody as the fallout from some of them will be,
we all have no choice but to strap in and
roll some dice of our own is ugly, the future unwritten,
but the only way we'll make it a better one
is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little
(17:09):
over confidence of our own. And this is not the
end of the episode. We've got something else for you, folks,
But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back,
(17:31):
And obviously what you just listened to is an essay
I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first
day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that
wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came
across this morning when I woke up, before I started
subjecting myself to a barrage of Horrible News was a
poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky. It's
(17:53):
called the Time of Cowards, and I think it's a
very useful thing for you to hear right now. I
think it's a good companion to what I wrote, So
I'm going to let Emily take it away before I
do that. If you want to read the poem and
text form, or find her other work, you can go
to Emily Gorchynsky g o r ce n ski dot com.
(18:16):
That's Emily g O r c e n ski dot com. Here.
It is the time of cowards.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
It is the time of the coward. It is the
age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost
boys and a dopamine hit in fractals and velocity and
velocity and velocity, and go, go, go, don't stop. Don't
stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability,
the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates, the gatekeepers keep.
(18:52):
This is the dawn of masculine energy. Not the energy
your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once,
but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen
peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather who spent the
days you spent smoking weed behind a seven eleven, serving
on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who never
(19:13):
failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need,
or say grace before dinner, or to help you with
your math homework, or teach you not to wear a
necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting
once and never measuring, pencil in the blueprints with whatever
comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites,
and not of confidence, but confidence men, the masculine energy
(19:36):
of the Khan, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud, the
pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.
Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over,
the blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage,
and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling.
Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise
(19:58):
is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting
of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby
box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It
is an honorless time, a time of only one question,
not how or may or can or if or whether,
but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation.
(20:23):
Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory,
and the burn scars and the floodwaters, and the clear
windshields where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and
the images in the twenty year old magazine still in
the rack, and the guest bathrooms never used. That showed
how children used to go sledding. And maybe the house
is too big. No one comes by. I shoveled the
(20:45):
neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he
didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail.
He's an old man, one of the few black men
left living in this neighborhood that was theirs. Once he
sent me a letter, it went all the way to
Richmond to come to my dea. He's the last man
with dignity. In the letter, he told me he has
a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because
(21:07):
he is a big lover of history and he can
go online and read about it and I weep for
this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring
his service, because this is the era of synthesis and
generation and revision and content content content, and inverifiability and manipulation.
This is the pseudo scene. I bought a bottle of
(21:28):
wine from a century's old vineyard, destroyed in a devastating flood,
an unsyllable bottle in the retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I
kept it as a memento Mary of our changing world,
a mud covered reminder of how we all must work,
little by little to give the world forward. It broke
when I tried to move it home on my seventy
second flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy.
(21:50):
Even for those who can see hypocrisy. They may be
a vice president. And with every title change, I move
farther from God, a God I never believed in. I
was raised in New England towns named for biblical places
by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them
closer to God. The only holy men left are those
in the fields Basra and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron.
(22:15):
The people who named those towns committed a genocide to
name them, and four hundred years later in their namesakes
the same. It is the epoch of cadaverin. It is
the night of bonfires and Feuershpusche, the twilight of stories
that dared in poems and albums. And I tried to
sell a book, and I learned that there's only interest
(22:36):
in a book when you put yourself into it to
be consumed. Words are calories, measured in the amount of
heat they gave a flame. I walked over the Westminster
Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that
they can't publish two good stories at a time because
if one goes viral, it punishes the other. The arcane
footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of
(22:56):
craft and skills handed down in heritage, waxing of a
crass and pandering moon of pantomime, a frictionless night, a
night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters
and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing
the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy.
The sturdy empty shells, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and
(23:20):
a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be
taken from an idea. I think of the mimiograph machines
stuck under the floorboards of the Solidara Nosche houses, and
the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in
the public library, xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and
the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time,
once banned for obscenity. In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains.
(23:45):
The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were
only thirty minutes of broadcast TV each day. In the
crepuscular light, birds dare to sing, even though they know
the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile
in a square. They say, if you make a win
and spin around it three times, your wish will come true.
At this tile a human chain formed and spanned three countries,
(24:06):
and they sang at Hadra Kim. On the right day,
the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of
Philflow and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone five
thousand years ago, and has done so unfailingly over the
millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall, and
the solstice of retribution will come again.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Call Zone media, Robert Evans here and this is it
could happen here, and boy it sure is now. I
don't know where we go from this point, and neither
does anyone else. On the moment before I wrote this,
I woke up, groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to
(00:23):
a barrage of horror. Donald Trump signing Anti Tran's legislation
into law, Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute. Donald
Trump saluting and dancing with the village people, proud boys
tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in
their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because
they never really left. All the battles and street fighting
(00:47):
and organizing from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty brought us
four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued
unabated rot. It's a term I see a lot these days.
A colleague and friend ed Zeitron refers to the hell
our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the
rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament,
(01:10):
use the term rage rot to refer to now President
Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the fifty
first state. Over the last year, I've seen a slew
of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and
the deep rot at the heart of our political system.
One thing I have done over the last four years
(01:30):
is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals.
So I hunter, raise, and slaughter, but many are roadkill,
harvested from the side of the road. My family comes
from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory
that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also
changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts
(01:51):
from the bone. If you look at the back leg
of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll
see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball
and sockage. Point out. If your goal is to preserve
good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs
from the body and then the meat from the bone
sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and
how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems
(02:14):
to be the one thing that almost every political person
in the country agrees with the United States as it is,
must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone, and
changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they
refuse to start cutting. Their successors will not make the
(02:36):
same mistake on the opposing side of the isle. Today,
I see a lot of angry people arguing about what
the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better
they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That
doesn't help any of us Right now. Migrants are dying
of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists
who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future.
(02:59):
Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at knight
may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll
be made to labor for pennies. Neo Nazi's cheer as
the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the
White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far
away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who
wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where
(03:22):
does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do
in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling
outside our doors. I have an answer to this question. Yes,
now is the time to try to test the boundaries
of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment.
Since the time of the founding fathers, this country and
(03:44):
its system have been referred to as the American Experiment.
One could see the very terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic
gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the
appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always
has been a test for new, often bad ideas about
how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core
(04:07):
value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
That also happens to be the only real way to
fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring
up often, the evolution of overconfidence, which set out to
explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities.
The authors pondered quote, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments,
(04:31):
unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions. So it remains a puzzle
how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable
in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Now.
The conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant
resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing
(04:53):
to try to take said resources, even if it is
not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make
over confidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation
for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power.
Put simply, they always go for it. January sixth provides
(05:15):
us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic,
reckless burst of stupidity, mocked for years by everyone except
the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power.
They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won
because they kept trying, and the people who should have
stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair,
(05:38):
and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs,
gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and
narrative oxygen around issues like immigration and now, well, we're
here and we'll continue to talk about here after these
ads we're back. The coming days will be ugly. Yet
(06:11):
I feel it's my job to remind you that bad
as this is, we are not vymar Germany, and this
is not nineteen thirty three. Trump and his lieutenants aren't
battle hardened trench fighters. They're elon musk and a coterie
of half enthusiastic, half frightened billionaires who got rich gambling
on apps to let you rate your classmates tits. They're
foot soldiers, are used car salesmen from Encino, not freikorps.
(06:36):
The United States is not starving to death crippled by war.
It's irritated anxious because it's working people have been robbed
blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump. Now. The
one thing we do have in common with Vimar is
that our fascists now find themselves at the head of
a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent,
(06:57):
but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it
didn't really matter that last one, the feeling that nothing matters.
The system as fucked. There's no point in engaging or organizing.
That is the most powerful weapon they have right now,
because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them,
from interrupting as they reach out. Yet again to take
(07:19):
something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.
In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do
something anything, can be intense, and when we're swept up
in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the
things we know best, the things we've done before, the
marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and
(07:41):
shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those
tactics without iteration or acknowledgment of their limitations and failures
is a road to more failure. I've been to a
lot of protests, starting at Zukati Park in twenty eleven
an ending last year in Chicago. At one of the
(08:02):
most dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young
anti genocide activists bow to shut down the dn C
to quote make it great like sixty eight. This was
a reference to the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass
protests were ignited there when the favorite anti war candidate,
Eugene McCarthy was ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor
(08:23):
of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently
with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world
is watching, and it's been a chant ever since. The
world may have been watching then, but the war went on.
Nixon won election, then re election, and then finally pulled
US troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on
(08:45):
Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In twenty
twenty four, a new batch of anti war protesters chanted,
the whole world is watching, and I can say unequivocally
it was not. The Only people watching were me, several
other journalists, and of course some people on Twitter. The police,
as they kettled Macedon arrested members of the crowd barely
(09:08):
seemed to care. The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris
was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti
war candidate for party insiders to rat fuck in her favor.
Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards
that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than
its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right on
(09:31):
the stage floor. All the Democrats had to present were
aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton drooling out the same
platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the
first place, and doing their best to ignore delegates who
walked out and slept in front of the convention center
to protest the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets,
(09:51):
a lot of very nice, earnest people alongside a handful
of grifters did the only thing they could think of
doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They
walked around and shouted. The police, and the city largely
let them because they knew none of it was going
to change a goddamn thing. I'd felt tremendous optimism right
(10:13):
after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala, but
because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or
at least it seemed that way. At first, the DNC
made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieries, the powers
behind the throne, still ran the show and would not
allow any real change. The rot had spread too far,
(10:34):
spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief
in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party, broken as it was,
had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the
spread of fascism. For a short time. It was my
inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that this might still
be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost
(10:56):
any sense of actual productive optimism we lean on when
we have no ideas to brace ourselves against hope, as
George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't
fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we
are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people
who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths of capital
(11:19):
running things, are going crazy because we return to normal,
decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along,
and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a
different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw the largest
sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing fundamentally changed
in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social media set
(11:42):
to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure
no similar movement whatever gain that kind of steam again.
Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet many organizers,
be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all
still stuck in the same loops behind each march to nowhere,
(12:03):
and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social
democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark with cyclists
replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy
of other lovely things. Both political parties will fight tooth
and nail to prevent. The communists dream of a new
October revolution, but this one will work and not just
(12:25):
create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies
inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend
to be very good at seeing the flaws and the
logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups,
but they are just as bereft of ideas for how
to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe
(12:46):
even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either
living in the woods eating berries, or some kind of
solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize,
but try offering eye their future to a single mom
who can't afford her five year old's insulin and see
how excited she gets. On the other side of the
(13:07):
anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully
admit they don't know how to solve the big problem,
but they do know how to provide free eye exams
to homeless people once a month, or do water drops
down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration,
or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze
a forest and build a police training facility. If you
are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas,
(13:30):
staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good
folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what
they've been doing, but at least what they've been doing
helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if
they ever arrive, will be something new, something we haven't
tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take
(13:50):
the form of another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing
to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever.
Sean Fayne, chief of the United Autoworkers Union, has called
for a general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so
far that is the only clear plan I have heard
from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of
a chance it is audacious, and I recommend reading what
(14:12):
Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I
support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right
got to where they are right now in this country
by being bold, as I laid out earlier. Fascists win
because they try, and this is something we need to copy.
Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to
(14:33):
try different shit. Many pundits and columnists were shocked and
horrified by the mass of an instant support for Luigim
Mangioni when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both
the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating
oligarchs characterize this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did
(14:53):
the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that
the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising.
I saw something a bit different, more than the actual
killing itself. I think people were excited to see someone
try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried
it out in a novel way, and in doing so,
(15:15):
he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding
us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty is the
one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi mangione together.
The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the
simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In
(15:36):
twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince
people that he might upset the apple cart in a
way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent
wave back to the White House. The consequence of this
is that he and his are now on their way
to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of
the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating
(15:59):
their coverage of Trump. If not embracing him outright, he
is being normalized. His toadies, Musk Chief among them, are
now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
I suspect the same thing will be true of the
copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his
plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best,
(16:22):
newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they
get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will
be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail
to hit their intended targets, or do but with a
lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the
next new thing to actually work will be. But between
Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.
(16:45):
We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new
things are about to be tried, and as awful and
bloody as the fallout from some of them will be,
we all have no choice but to strap in and
roll some dice of our own is ugly, the future unwritten,
but the only way we'll make it a better one
is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little
(17:09):
over confidence of our own. And this is not the
end of the episode. We've got something else for you, folks,
But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back,
(17:31):
And obviously what you just listened to is an essay
I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first
day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that
wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came
across this morning when I woke up, before I started
subjecting myself to a barrage of Horrible News was a
poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky. It's
(17:53):
called the Time of Cowards, and I think it's a
very useful thing for you to hear right now. I
think it's a good companion to what I wrote, So
I'm going to let Emily take it away before I
do that. If you want to read the poem and
text form, or find her other work, you can go
to Emily Gorchynsky g o r ce n ski dot com.
(18:16):
That's Emily g O r c e n ski dot com. Here.
It is the time of cowards.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
It is the time of the coward. It is the
age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost
boys and a dopamine hit in fractals and velocity and
velocity and velocity, and go, go, go, don't stop. Don't
stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability,
the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates, the gatekeepers keep.
(18:52):
This is the dawn of masculine energy. Not the energy
your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once,
but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen
peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather who spent the
days you spent smoking weed behind a seven eleven, serving
on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who never
(19:13):
failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need,
or say grace before dinner, or to help you with
your math homework, or teach you not to wear a
necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting
once and never measuring, pencil in the blueprints with whatever
comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites,
and not of confidence, but confidence men, the masculine energy
(19:36):
of the Khan, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud, the
pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.
Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over,
the blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage,
and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling.
Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise
(19:58):
is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting
of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby
box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It
is an honorless time, a time of only one question,
not how or may or can or if or whether,
but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation.
(20:23):
Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory,
and the burn scars and the floodwaters, and the clear
windshields where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and
the images in the twenty year old magazine still in
the rack, and the guest bathrooms never used. That showed
how children used to go sledding. And maybe the house
is too big. No one comes by. I shoveled the
(20:45):
neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he
didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail.
He's an old man, one of the few black men
left living in this neighborhood that was theirs. Once he
sent me a letter, it went all the way to
Richmond to come to my dea. He's the last man
with dignity. In the letter, he told me he has
a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because
(21:07):
he is a big lover of history and he can
go online and read about it and I weep for
this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring
his service, because this is the era of synthesis and
generation and revision and content content content, and inverifiability and manipulation.
This is the pseudo scene. I bought a bottle of
(21:28):
wine from a century's old vineyard, destroyed in a devastating flood,
an unsyllable bottle in the retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I
kept it as a memento Mary of our changing world,
a mud covered reminder of how we all must work,
little by little to give the world forward. It broke
when I tried to move it home on my seventy
second flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy.
(21:50):
Even for those who can see hypocrisy. They may be
a vice president. And with every title change, I move
farther from God, a God I never believed in. I
was raised in New England towns named for biblical places
by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them
closer to God. The only holy men left are those
in the fields Basra and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron.
(22:15):
The people who named those towns committed a genocide to
name them, and four hundred years later in their namesakes
the same. It is the epoch of cadaverin. It is
the night of bonfires and Feuershpusche, the twilight of stories
that dared in poems and albums. And I tried to
sell a book, and I learned that there's only interest
(22:36):
in a book when you put yourself into it to
be consumed. Words are calories, measured in the amount of
heat they gave a flame. I walked over the Westminster
Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that
they can't publish two good stories at a time because
if one goes viral, it punishes the other. The arcane
footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of
(22:56):
craft and skills handed down in heritage, waxing of a
crass and pandering moon of pantomime, a frictionless night, a
night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters
and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing
the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy.
The sturdy empty shells, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and
(23:20):
a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be
taken from an idea. I think of the mimiograph machines
stuck under the floorboards of the Solidara Nosche houses, and
the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in
the public library, xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and
the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time,
once banned for obscenity. In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains.
(23:45):
The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were
only thirty minutes of broadcast TV each day. In the
crepuscular light, birds dare to sing, even though they know
the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile
in a square. They say, if you make a win
and spin around it three times, your wish will come true.
At this tile a human chain formed and spanned three countries,
(24:06):
and they sang at Hadra Kim. On the right day,
the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of
Philflow and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone five
thousand years ago, and has done so unfailingly over the
millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall, and
the solstice of retribution will come again.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
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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