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Call zone media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here and the it that is on everyone's minds right now. This will be dropping two or three days before the 2024 election, possibly two or three days before everyone's life changes substantially. We have no way of knowing. I'm not optimistic or pessimistic. I have no idea what's going to happen. But one thing that everyone ought to be aware of, whether or not Trump wins, is kind of...

To put it bluntly, the man has shooters, and some of those shooters are literal shooters in that they are local sheriff's departments, people who call themselves constitutional sheriffs. This is an organization that's really got off the ground in 2012 and for more than a decade has been making inroads with elected Republican leaders, with Republican influencers, with groups like the Oath Keepers, and these are guys who in brief believe that

The sheriff is the only is you can you can kind of get two versions of this. But generally, either the sheriff is the only legitimate law enforcement authority in the country or the sheriff is the highest legitimate law enforcement. I've heard I've heard it both ways in the country.

And kind of the reason for this basically is a lot of people in rural areas that are more conservative do not want to have to listen to or follow the laws made by people in cities. And more to the point, they believe that the country has been taken off of a good track by dangerous people.

liberal communist types. And, you know, they want the ability to use force against, you know, migrants, against the undocumented, against people they see as criminals, against left-wing protesters. And this is kind of a way for them to argue that they have a right to do it without any restrictions. Now, the whole story is much deeper than that. And to talk about what I think is one of the most important issues

to be discussing right now because people laugh a lot about the gravy seals or whatever, all these different kind of out-of-shape militia dudes, the kind of silly fumbling that we saw a lot at January 6th, which I think is a mistake just because January 6th was still quite dangerous. But when we're talking about these guys, these are not just like random yahoos. These are people who have the force of law behind them. They're armed, they're organized people

And they're quite dangerous. And to talk about how dangerous they are and where they came from, I want to bring on a wonderful journalist, investigative reporter, and PRA research director, Chloe Cooper, who has co-executive produced a podcast on the constitutional sheriff's movement called The Insurgents.

which is a co-production of Political Research Associates and Quintero Productions. Chloe, I think I got that all right, right? That was awesome. Yes, you did. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So let's talk about this. Where do these guys, I gave a little brief overview, but like, where do these guys come from? And, you know, what are we seeing from them in the lead up to this election? Like, what are they going to do, do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I loved the overview that you just gave. I think that was such a great way to approach this all. So the leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association is this guy named former Sheriff Mack, and he was a sheriff in Arizona. But one little important detail to note is that

He actually kind of got his bearings before that in Nevada, and he was courted by someone who was basically in very close company with the John Birch Society. Always comes back to them. Yeah.

I know. He actually becomes a sheriff partially because of some of the ideas that come out of the John Birch Society and some of this kind of like emerging trend that in some cases is actually like skeptical of the federal government, skeptical of state governments. Yeah. And then they start to build out with sheriffs in different parts of the country. At times, I would say the network has really ebbed and flowed.

But a couple of things that have been important to note, like throughout the six years of researching this network of sheriffs that I think is really important, especially in advance of the elections. One is that sheriffs who are aligned with this have really embraced this idea that you can deputize anybody. Yeah. So in some cases you have Oath Keepers and other militias going to the sheriff to say, hey, you want to deputize me?

But in other cases, we've actually followed sheriffs who are going into churches and saying, we're deputizing all of you. Great. Sheriffs in Virginia, when the state passed a law that was like a law for some gun restrictions, saying, don't worry, people, we're actually going to deputize you. Yeah. That way you can have whatever gun you want and carry it anywhere. Yes. Yeah. And also, what we started to see is that during the former Trump administration, he

He was really actually courting sheriffs around the country. And I think he started to see networks like CSPOA as like part of his ground troops and

And so I think that there is a potential danger in sheriffs that are part of this formal network called the CSPOA or other sheriffs, because there are hundreds more that just have like aligned with their way of thinking about things, just playing this role of deputizing more people and creating this kind of idea of like a super citizen or people who are kind of aligned with a

far right way of seeing the world and then getting deputized to be part of the kind of ground troops for that. Yeah.

So that's like one thing. And then in addition to that, there is also CSPOA itself teamed up with this group called True the Vote, which has mostly since been discredited. But it's been one of the loudest groups in the country that has been spreading this idea that the 2020 election was stolen and has been actually working with county sheriffs to try to investigate voter fraud at the local level.

But in some cases, also working with sheriffs to align with vigilante groups on the border, for example, to intimidate people from actually voting. And so there's kind of, I would say, like a multi-pronged series of potential risks and dangers that could play out, particularly from this network in the coming weeks.

One other quick thing I'll note is that one of the very latest things that we saw, and this actually came out of a close kind of colleague in the movement, Devin Burkhart, who works at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, is that he came across a plan that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association put out in Florida. And the plan is to essentially resurrect kind of sovereign citizen style groups in Florida, right?

militias, citizen militias in collaboration with sheriffs to do kind of old school style, like intimidation of election clerks, of people involved in the election process. And they plan to try to hold tribunals if, for example, the certification of election goes in the direction they disagree with. Yeah. And now as a hard

core leftist, you may find like, how, what do you actually think about voting and whether that actually changes things and all of that. And I'm like, I've had those, you know, thought bubbles in my brain for a long time also. But I think what we have, what I've started to see is that constitutional sheriffs to me represent, and also the groups of people who have aligned with them are actual, not just white nationalists, but people who are neo-Confederates. And I think of it more of like a neo-Confederacy and that what we could see is something like

sheriffs actually coming in confrontation with potentially even police and mayors and governors.

and them representing a different kind of politic, a different type of way of seeing society. And one person also talked about how the constitutional, what are they really referring to? Are they referring to, you know, what is it, the organic constitution? Essentially before slavery was abolished, before women had the right to vote, before the Native Americans had the right to vote. And so if that's the case, that that is actually the kind of constitution that they are upholding and representing, then...

They are actually been quite successful in building out different alliances around the country within a somewhat prominent law enforcement institution that has very little accountability. Yeah. And I so this is this is where I kind of wind up in conflict with both liberals and a lot of leftists is I think that the leftists who say like there's no point in voting are wrong. Right.

For the same reason that, like, I think people who say there's no reason for civilians to be armed. I don't happen to agree with that. And I don't happen to agree with it because I think if somebody who wants to kill you has a weapon and you have the ability to either match that weapon or take it from them, then that's probably what you should do for the sake of your own survival. And handing over complete control of the state, the military, and the police apparatus to the far right is—

is handing them the most powerful weapon anyone has ever made. And I just don't think that's wise. Now, at the same token, the thing that kind of liberalizes

liberals will bring up a lot, which is that like, just vote, just get out and vote. Well, we've been doing that. And Democrats have overwhelmingly outperformed conservatives in elections this century. And it hasn't been enough. And it hasn't been enough in part because these people don't care about the law. You know, there's a moment in your podcast where I, you know, I like you have an expert on who's kind of talking about the sheriff deputizing, you

you know, 70 people or whatever in this small town and being like, well, he's not actually allowed to do that. Like, you know, the actual letter of the law does not give him the right to be doing this. He's misinterpreting the constitution. But the reality of the situation is that like, he's allowed to do whatever he can get enough people with guns to back him in doing. And that's honestly the root of all problems

politics is how much force can you bring to bear, you know, in order to support the reality you want to support, right? Like that's, that is how it all works. And the bet the right is making with all of these different anti-democratic strategies they're trying is that no matter what they do and no matter how far against the constitution, against the rule of law, they take things, they will have the force to support their version of reality.

And I don't know how we thread this needle, right? The easiest thing is like, well, maybe if Kamala has a really resounding victory, there just won't be much for them to fight on, right? And they'll kind of back down. But even if she wins in 2024, which I think is the better of the options that we've got,

These people aren't going away. And in fact, I think you are going to see challenges at local levels. I think it's not impossible that we wind up with like an anti-Pope style situation with the presidency. Whereas like Trump holds his own inauguration and a bunch of state and local leaders say like, no, we're not recognizing the Harris administration. Donald Trump is our president. Like there's a lot of weird shit that could wind up as the result of this. And I just don't see us getting out of this situation

purely through electoral methods. And I don't know what, I don't know how else we handle it, right? Because you also get into this situation of like, okay, well, we're gonna send in the police to crack down on these sheriffs that are breaking the law. Well, what if the police don't wanna do it? What if the police are-

are more supportive of these sheriff's departments than they are of, you know, their elected leaders in the state or at the federal level. You know, what if the FBI, as has happened in the past, what if the feds are unwilling to go up against a bunch of heavily armed, quote unquote, patriots? You know, like we saw in, you know, some of the Bundy shit from about a decade ago, right? Like, what if,

What if the people who are supposed to handle this for the citizenry in a situation that abides by the law abrogate their responsibility because they're scared? You know, who backs us up then? Wow, okay, you just put a lot out there. Sorry, sorry. I was like, I wanted to respond about a minute ago and I was like, oh, one more. I apologize, that was my bad. No, that was so great. I think, okay, a couple of thoughts. One is that I think that

Far-right movements are very much mobilizing within the government right now. And, or you could say maybe fascism is trying to mobilize within the government. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think you have, I think we have to grapple with that really seriously. And so like in terms of anti-fascist strategies, I don't know what is, you know, what could that actually look like right now, but you have to grapple with that.

the reality that many far-right movements have made serious, serious headway into not just former president, but into state legislators, into the judicial system, into sheriff's departments. Yeah. And so we are seeing a...

major fissure right now. So I don't know how to respond completely to some of the questions around electoral politics. Neither do I, yeah. But I think those are really important questions that you're posing. And then just to go pivot back to my wheelhouse, which is the right and the far right and some of their strategies, one of the things that you touched on is the

Something that a number of different far right strategies have been practicing over the years. And it is about this idea of both nullification or interposition is what they call it. So these constitutional sheriffs, one of the tactics that they have used over the years is to get sheriffs around the country to not enforce state laws. Right.

And so you had a whole wave of sheriffs around the country supporting sanctuaries for the Second Amendment, Second Amendment sanctuaries. OK, so they said in their own county, we're not going to enforce gun restriction laws. And again, think about that however you will. All good. But they're saying we're not going to enforce it at the county level. Then you had all these sheriffs around the country being like, we're not going to enforce lockdown orders. We're not going to enforce mask mandates.

What are they practicing? They're practicing the muscle of exactly what you just talked about. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it, too. Yeah. Independent of what's happening at the federal government, independent of who wins right now, there is like a confederated situation happening in the country. And these sheriffs and also others have been very much in those muscles. So

So it's not just kind of the militias that will back these sheriffs that are interested in that type of strategy. There is the whole like all these different movements that come out of the Christian Reconstructionists all talk about interposition. So the idea of getting sheriffs, other elected officials within the local magistrate to prop up and kind of protect your politics, regardless of the state or federal strategy.

And so now we have this interesting moment where you've had in recent history, you know, a former president that actually aligned with some of those politics. And then you have a bunch of state legislators that align. And so I think...

understanding some of the strategies, that's important. It's important to understand that you may have sheriffs that are backing this and they may not always align with the police and they may not always align with the governor. And so it's going to be a little different than what we may often think of as like systemic white supremacy where all the state and law enforcement are lock and step together. I think looking at the Civil War as you've done so many different times is actually really important. Like how does this reflect patterns that are more similar actually to the

you know, the Confederacy against the North or those or, you know, these types of other moments in U.S. history. I'm going to throw to ads and then I'll come back. So, yeah, everybody, here's here's some ads. We're back. I wanted to ask, are there are there cases you can think of of like some of these guys, these constitutional sheriffs who have been voted out and like

forced out of office and had kind of these some of these like policies that they've been pushing reversed? Like, do we have do we have any kind of case studies of times sheriffs went hard into this ideology and actually lost power as a result of it?

So actually in episode four, it touches on it briefly, but it's a really interesting and kind of rather both in some ways inspiring, but also disturbing case study to some degree. There was a sheriff in North Carolina, Sheriff Jim Pendergraf of Mecklenburg County. And he was really inspired by the former Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. And he is one of the people who really champions this program called 287G, which allows police

sheriffs to basically deputize their office as ICE, federal ICE agents and work with ICE. So he pilots that in Mecklenburg County and then is basically picked up by ICE and kind of helps try to spread it all throughout the South. Something pretty historic and incredible happened in some ways in 2018, where you had Black organizers, immigrant rights organizers, pushed for this whole campaign to oust him and a number of other close by kind of

real white supremacist sheriffs in North Carolina. And they were successful. And there was a sheriff that ran and a number of black sheriffs were elected in the state. And some of the sheriffs ran on not complying with ICE and ending this program called the 287G agreement. And it seemed like this historic moment, this historic win,

in the immediate aftermath of that, as opposed to in moments where you have sheriffs saying, we're not going to enforce the lockdown order. And essentially, besides some reporters reporting on it, nothing happens. Instead, what happened is that within a few months of this sheriff ending the 287G agreement, the federal government comes in and issues pretty massive ice raids through the

locking up over 100 different people, many of whom got deported.

Pretty soon after that, you had a number of other sheriffs in the state, including this one constitutional sheriff who also had aligned with another large anti-immigrant network called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, essentially organizing in the state for the state to push back and push an entire statewide mandate that all sheriffs comply with ICE. So that's not really an uplifting story. Yeah. Actually... Not quite. I think what it...

demonstrates in a tough way is more about this kind of like when sheriffs claim all of this autonomy at the local level, which they seem to actually in many cases be able to practice kind of quite well. You know, when they say they want to enforce the statewide gun restrictions or mask mandates, they're

Again, from what I understand, and I've been in touch with some of the leading constitutional lawyers who are trying to look into it further. Yeah. Almost nothing happens. But then if you have, let's say, a sheriff in this case, you know, not enforcing ending the agreement with ICE, there is a pretty serious and significant backlash. Yeah.

There has also, though, been, you know, there was an amazing campaign to eventually get Sheriff, former Sheriff Joe Arpaio out that took like a ton of organizing by immigrant rights organizers in Arizona. And that was pretty incredible and sustained. And there's been a lot of good stuff written about it. So it's not it's not not the case that people have built campaigns and have been able to unseat their sheriff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's good to know because, like, I much prefer the, like, slow disassembling of this in a world in which they don't just get full power and start, you know, going after people with the wrong signs on their front yards than any other option here. It just...

It seems like it's one of those situations where the deck is very much stacked in their favor, right? In part because of how long I think this problem has been ignored. Like it's really just now. I'm so glad that y'all's podcast is out because I still don't think there's nearly enough attention on like what these sheriffs are doing because this really is, it's so fundamentally anti-democratic in a way that,

is also has a great deal of legitimacy in the eyes and ears of at least a lot of the people living in these areas, right? Like this is not just some Yehu declaring himself, you know, a militia. It's not like the state of Jefferson movement saying like, we're totally going to secede from California. These are guys with real power.

So I guess kind of where I'd like to close by is asking, do you see a shift in rhetoric from these people from like 2020 to 2024? Like,

Because I feel like right now the rhetoric is much more aggressively anti-the enemy within, whereas in 2020 it was much more focused on gun rights and going after migrants. But I think you would have a better sense of that than I do. So one thing is that...

Immediately following 2020, there was some effort on the part of CSPOA to start to slightly distance themselves from the Oath Keepers. Yeah. CSPOA and the Oath Keepers, I mean, the former Sheriff Mack, that was...

The founder of CSPOA was on the board of the Oath Keepers, and Stuart Rhodes, who's been charged with seditious conspiracy for his role planning J6, has been working closely with CSPOA for the entire time that CSPOA, for the most part, has been around. So they were working really, really, really closely together. So there was a little bit of a shift after J6 where CSPOA tried to distance themselves from the Oath Keepers.

But I would say that the other thing that you touched on is also true. As opposed to focusing so much on kind of nullification of any sort of creating, you know, Second Amendment sanctuaries or those types of things, they've really leaned hard into, you

election fraud and kind of stop the steal style rhetoric. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. And they've really leaned hard in a very frightening way into more like really harsh and horrible anti-immigrant rhetoric. Yeah. And so...

you know, back literally at their 2024 spring CSPOA convening, they're talking about the great replacement theory. They're talking about doing every single thing in their powers to make sure that there is not election fraud. They're talking about, you know, making sure that

I don't want to use the terms here, but that undocumented people don't vote in the elections and those types of things. And then what was really frightening in this plan that I spoke about briefly in Florida that the state director of CSPOA released is that they are actually embracing more far right views overtly in that plan than they have in any other time, actually, since they were formed.

So they're explicitly quoting, for any of your nerds out here that follow this stuff, this guy, Matthew Trujillo. Yeah. And he openly advocated for political violence and was one of the people who actually justified violence against abortion providers in the 1990s. They quote him numerous times when talking about setting up citizen militias to actually essentially target election clerks in the event that they are not

happy with how the elections turn out. Yeah. So there is a shift, I would say, in like in multiple directions that that some of which are very, very much just in line with Trump and the Trump campaign to some degree, and some of which are already kind of, you know, plans for a different type of insurgence at the local level in the event that things don't go in their direction. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to throw us to ads once more, and then we will come back and kind of close ourselves out. So everybody have an ad and we're back. So Chloe, yeah, just kind of in closing, what are you kind of keeping your ear to the ground on as we, as we near election day? Like what are kind of your, do you have any like particular sort of red lines that you're keeping an eye out for from these people? I am looking closely at,

Florida and whether some of the plans that they've actually laid out in Florida might happen. I'm also keeping a close ear to battleground states where it seems like a number of these militias are kind of activated, aligned with some sheriff's departments. And I want to particularly see if there's any type of cases that, that kind of show up in terms of either the,

voter intimidation or those types of things. And it's just been dawning on me more and more that a number of the people who are in the CSPOA network are actually in battleground states. And I just wonder to what degree that's a coincidence or not. I think I'm just trying to kind of get a sense of how also some of the framing from these sheriffs continue to shift and whether they actually become activated, whether they're

or citizen militias that become kind of mobilized as they did to some degree in 2020. Well, that's what I will be keeping an eye on too. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for putting together this podcast series. Everyone listen to The Insurgents, Sheriffs, co-produced by Political Research, a Soviet podcast.

political research associates and Quintero productions. Again, that's the insurgents sheriffs. You can find it wherever podcasts are found. Thank you for coming on. Um, everybody check this out and hopefully we will have a, uh, a drop of the podcast and the bastards feed. So people can listen in on that too. Thank you so much, Chloe. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you listeners.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast taking place on a day that will live in infamy and set a country ablaze. I am, of course, referring to Guy Fawkes Day. Oh, my God.

I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James. Hi, Mia. I'm excited. I'm excited to share with people some of our national traditions in the United Kingdom. Yeah, and so as a person from the country who won the revolution, I get to do the British episode because you should have fucking relegated to listener status. Yes.

So, all right. The thing about the gunpowder plot is that like another event occurring on November 5th, there are no heroes and everyone like sucks shit. Yes. So in order to return to a type of heroes and to get the context right,

Of what the fuck is going on here. We're taking a digression because I am never going to get another chance to talk about this part of history unless I write a Martin Luther episode. So we're going all the way back to the origins of the split between Protestantism and and

Catholicism. Good. But Martin Luther. Yeah, I was raised a Lutheran. Okay. So I got a very, very sanitized version of who Martin Luther was, and then I read about who Martin Luther actually was, and I was like, holy shit! Yeah, different dude. Martin Luther... And this is the part also that doesn't really get talked about in the sort of Lutheran tradition, because Lutheran... The Lutheran tradition is not a revolutionary tradition, shall we say that. Yes.

The thing that Lutheran did when he started Protestantism by accident was...

accidentally kicked off a genuine full-scale social revolution in Europe with his attacks on the Catholic Church. He was not trying to do this, but he very quickly has in fact accidentally done this. And through the sort of breach that he'd opened and like the ironclad walls of Catholic monarchical rule came the German Peasants Wars. And my favorite dude in this entire period of time, Florian Geyer. I don't think I'm actually familiar with Florian Geyer.

Good name. Oh, this guy rules. This guy fucking rips. Okay. There is a knight who... There's a lot of debate about this, but the sources that I've read...

long time ago when I was reading about this guy says that he is the only like they are the only like knights like mounted knights in like the entire history of Europe to defect and join a peasant revolution. Oh, they're these guys. They're like the black knights or something. Yep. Yep. The black company. Yeah. Yeah. He fucking rules. Yeah. It slaps. So the German peasant wars kick off and he enjoys the peasant revolution with this sword that is supposedly inscribed with the words neither cross nor crown.

which is just unbelievably based. He fucking proto anarchist. Yeah. Yeah. And his thing, he came into black company, which is part like it's part nights, part like peasants just,

Just basically run around Thrygia and kill the shit out of nobles and priests and spread the glorious fire of the peasant revolution. What a hero, yeah. It's awesome. I found a picture of him. Strong chin as well, I will say. Powerful jawline. Yeah, and he has an interesting sort of conflicting legacy. So he gets killed eventually because the giant peasant revolution is eventually destroyed.

And we'll talk about Martin Luther's role in that in a second. But he has this interesting legacy where he's taken up as a national hero by like

every kind of non-establishment faction of German politics. So he's like, like there's an SS division named after him. He's also like one of the heroes of East Germany. Yeah, I can see this. Yeah. And like, this is one of these things where like in like 20th and 30th Germany, you will have communists, social Democrats and the Nazis all singing like the same songs about this guy. Yeah. You know, he's one of the few sort of redeemable figures in German history. Yeah.

Because he fucking rips? Yeah, and this is what happens with national myth-making, right? You just take this thing and make it plastic. It's like you mold it to whatever you want it to be, whatever you want your national story to be. Yeah, yeah. And this happens with Makhno in Ukraine. This happens with... We talked about this on Margaret's show when we did a bunch of episodes about anarchism in Korea. And they do this with a bunch of Korean anarchists, too. They become national state heroes. And it's like, well, okay, this guy would have absolutely shot you

This is one of these things where it's like, if you were to show this guy the SS, he'd be like, what the fuck? What?

Like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? I must immediately get my sword out again. Yeah, it's time to start the killing again. And very specifically, Geyer is like, he actually had known Martin Luther back before he joined the peasants. And specifically the fact that these peasants are sacking castles and killing priests and the ruling class.

Very specifically makes is like the fact that the ruling class could conceivably be in danger is the thing that convinces Martin Luther to become

I think I've made this argument on the show before, but I think he is at very worst like the second greatest kind of revolutionary in like the last four or five hundred years because I hold that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the one who starts the revolution and then realizes, holy shit, I can't control this and I don't like where it's going and then immediately turns kind of revolutionary to kill everyone who was involved. No, not like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the product of this is that Martin Luther writes this book.

kind of long pamphlet called Against the Murderers, Thieving Hordes of Peasants and aligns himself with the princes. Yeah. And, you know, so this is the start of what is eventually a century, you know, there's a couple centuries of religious war in here we're going to get to, but this is in a lot of ways, I think, the beginning of the reproach maw between Catholicism and

Sure. Yeah, because class is more important. Yeah, yeah. And that actually, weirdly, is an extremely important part of the story of Guy Fawkes Day. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing that Luther's up to in this period is...

trying to outflank the Catholics on antisemitism, which is pretty hard because like... So this is the early... This is the early like 1500s, right? Yeah. We are like 40 years out from two Spanish monarchs like expelling the Jews from Spain. Yeah. So like... 16th century antisemitism is like peak. I don't know. It's hard to exactly like tier list the like periods of antisemitism, but like... Right. Like the Holocaust... The Holocaust is obviously number one and then like this period...

like the Komenitsky pogrom and like some of the stuff in late, in like late 1800s Russia or like, yeah, something like the worst periods in human history for this. Yeah. This is pretty horrific shit. And, and Luther decides that he's going to like outflank the Catholics and anti-Semitism. And so he writes this book called on the Jews and their lies, which is like, yeah, the first version of this that I wrote,

had a joke here about how it could have been written by Hitler but then I then I like did a little bit of reading about it and was like holy shit this specific thing was used by like Nazi like I'm sure Lutheran pastors specifically to justify the Holocaust in like 38 so that's great um yeah how cool yeah so this is this is you know this is the sort of formation of like what

what you could call like the the protestant counter-revolution against the sort of social revolutionary forces they kicked off right well the anti-semitism like hardline stuff is a bit later but there's there's one more kind of big uprising which is very funny which is the the anabaptist and munster who formed this like oh yeah pretty base democratic commune that eventually kind of turns into like a sex cult thing but like in a way that's more like

People realize they could be poly than it is like normal sex cult. It's people like emerging from an extremely constrained like socialized sexuality, I guess. Yeah. And, you know, this is like, this is, you know, those are the two sort of periods of like high of like the highest levels of class conflict that are the result of the Protestant Reformation. And this kind of

ends with Munster when they all get killed by the monarchies. And this is something about the European peasantry that I don't know, maybe one day I'll do a project on why the European peasantry was so much worse at doing revolts than the Chinese peasantry. Because the Chinese peasantry knocks off dynasties all the time. The Chinese central government is like

100,000 times more formidable as a force than like any of these dipshit like holy roman empire principalities but the chinese peasantry did it anyways the dirt that i don't know but the german peasantry fought hard it doesn't go great for them yeah i mean the entirety of the european society is structured along like the state monopoly on violence and how oh yeah like feudalism is like the sine qua non of feudalism is having the ability to kill all your peasants

Yeah, and it's a system... And I think this is something that... There's reflection of this you see in fantasy a lot, right? Where people will write monarchies, and then you'll get... Or like you see this in science fiction, right? Where people...

People understand what's bad about a democracy because you've all lived in one and you know all the ways that it sucks. But because most of us like haven't lived under an actual monarchy, you don't self man. Well, OK, even then, even then, compared to this shit, like like people don't understand how just hideous this shit is.

And this is going to play a role. I mean, this is like, again, this is like the thing that starts the French Revolution where the first time that the first time, like when people actually like start beating the monarchists seriously, people have this tendency to remember like the violence, the French Revolution. It's like, yeah, there was a lot of shit that was very bad, but also like these people, these people that they are fighting. These are these are people who for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, anytime anyone has like

even dare to talk back to them has just fucking murdered them, their families, and everyone around them. Yeah, like as horribly as possible. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, as the process of them holding on to their fucking deranged hereditary power system. And the consequence of this is that once these revolutions are put down, sort of Protestantism versus Catholicism

Like, it's not fully this because it's like there are sort of popular-y, I mean, not in a good sense, but there are sort of like more mass-y

like Catholicism versus Protestantism stuff. But like a lot of it politically becomes the domain of like princes who are either sort of running wars that are like nominally religious based. Although like go, go, go look on what side France enters on the 30 years war at about 20 years. When, when France enters on the side of the Protestants to figure out exactly how much, right. But like, you know, but this kind of conflict becomes this,

This kind of more, the actual politics becomes centralized in the ruling class. Yeah. The metaphor that popped in mind to me is one that will make sense to about four people, but it's, it's kind of like the way that all politics became centralized in the bath party in Syria over the course of like the sixties and seventies, like all where like you have this mass politics, but the only politics that matters is the military and the military factions, the military fighting it out. Like that's kind of what's happening here is that like all of these princes are sort of centralizing the,

religious power but this means that like religious wars quote-unquote and conflict becomes the domain of like these coups and counter coups by like princes and they're like noble factions and shit yeah and that's where we find ourselves in the year 1604 at the beginning of the gunpowder treason and before before we get that uh do you know what else supports the gunpowder treason

17th century. Yeah, definitely Chumba Casino. Yeah, they're really major funders of the gunpowder trees. It's okay if you lose your money at Chumba Casino, guys, because they're trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament. We are back. We are back to the past. We're back to, I guess, the future of where we were several seconds before that.

So England famously became Protestant when King Henry VIII wanted a new wife and the Pope wouldn't let him get a new wife. Yeah. Another new wife, right? Like, was it like... No, this was a new wife. Wait. There's a rhyme for this. Divorce beheaded, guys. Divorce beheaded, survived. Yeah. I think it was the first divorce because after that he just went ham on the wives. And through this incredibly silly chain of events, they leave the Catholic Church and become Protestants.

through Anglicanism, which is Catholicism light. Yeah, and I think it's more Catholicism light. Lutheranism also gets described as Catholicism light, but I can emphatically state there was a major difference because I was raised Lutheran and I fucking have no guilt whatsoever.

No guilt. Zero. I feel bad about nothing. It's awesome. It's no shame, Catholicism. Church of England is more or less Catholicism minus Pope. Yeah, yeah. And obviously they differ over time because... Yeah, because it's just the drift of history. They evolve differently. Yeah. Yeah, but this starts like actual a series of kind of horrendous religious...

religious conflicts inside of the UK where just like a bunch of random people get killed because once princes become the people controlling religions, everything gets unbelievably stupid really quickly. Yeah, it's just a vehicle for like elite fucking ambition. Yeah. They can pick a faction and use that to get a little bit higher up the ladder. So there's like, there's this series of like coups and counter coups to attempt to like reinstall Catholic rule or get rid of Catholic... And like, it's all really boring. Like, it's...

It's so boring. I cannot emphasize. Let me tell you, Mia, I did that in history in school for years. Somehow I overcame that to get a PhD in history, but that shit was dull. It's hideously boring, which is insane because Bloody Mary is involved in this and it's still boring. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of beheadings, the princes in the tower, famously with the little dead children. A lot of murder.

Yeah, but boring murder, which is staggering. How do you make murder boring easy? Ah, you do this shit. Yeah, Shakespeare wrote some good plays about this shit, for those of you who are interested. Yeah, go consult that. Yeah. I don't know. So, by 1604, a group of guys that would eventually extend to, like, 13 Catholic guys start to form a...

Frankly not very good plan to do a coup um and appoint a child king to restore Catholic ruled England their child queen Yeah, they love a child King so this plan has okay. I'm separating it out into three stages I don't know whether it's fair to but I'm doing it so part one use a bunch of gunpowder to blow up the English Parliament, okay, I

Now, this is something that's very important to understand what's happening here. This is not a parliament in the sense that we understand it today. Like, this is not like a representative body. Like, the parliament is...

Basically, it's an assembly of nobles. It's the instrument of power of the English aristocracy. Which is one of the greatest forces for human evil in the entirety of human... Like the 300,000 year history of humanity. Yeah. We don't have it... Britain doesn't have a universal franchise until after 1832. So like... Yeah. And this is 1605. Yeah. Right? And throughout that whole period, the power of the aristocracy like waves. But this is... They are unbelievably powerful. I see. They don't have an...

universal manhood suffrage until later, I think 1848. Before that, every constituency has its own franchise rules, which makes parliament even fucking weirder. You have some that are like proto-democratic and you have some where it's just a guy. And he just shows up to parliament and represents himself. Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

So, you know, this part of the plan, deploying at the parliament plan, great, we love it, we support destroying the English aristocracy. Always great. Get the king, why not? Was it going to be at the state opening of parliament? I think. It was going to be at some session of parliament where the king was going to be. And that was part two of the plan. Yeah, the state opening of parliament. So, fun fact, Britain still does this.

uh incredibly antiquated uh like barbaric country yeah this is where the we we need china to conquer the uk and establish civilization there like failed it they like britain britain couldn't even do a bourgeois revolution do you know how easy it is to do a bourgeois revolution like sun yet sen pulled it off britain has the most established fucking aristocracy in the world so oh my

At the British state opening of Parliament, which still happens to this day, right? Incredibly antiquated procedure. They searched the cellars of Parliament beforehand to check that no one else is trying to blow them up. Like, this is now part of the...

part of the uh like there's a whole there's like an exchange of hostages uh like like there are all these things that are built in from bizarre episodes in british history they they send someone from parliament to buckingham palace to be like a hostage oh my god for the duration of the ceremony it's an incredible this is yeah this is the stupidest system in the like it it the british the british system like i think fuck

functionally, it is a more advanced democratic system than the American system. But in terms of the way that it's like procedure works, it is like the American Constitution, which is like

One of the most regressive constitutions like a constitution that failed to enshrine one person one vote Yeah, right like that Constitution looks like fucking Star Trek compared to like watching the stupid-ass King hauling around a scepter Yeah, it's some dude bangs on the door three times. So then yeah sausage fingers gets in there and reads his speech Yeah, so so part two of the gunpowder plot is to kill the king who's gonna be there too. Oh

This is also great. We like Killing the King. Cool Zone Media is a pro-Killing the King media establishment. Yes. Regicide rules. We love it. It's great. Part three is to install a Catholic theocracy to replace the Protestant one, and we simply do not love this. This shit sucks. That's where we diverge, sadly. Yeah. This part's

Very bad. V for Vendetta may have misled you about the intentions of Guy Fawkes. Yes. And we'll get to V for Vendetta because I think that's an important part of the closing of this story. So the plan falls apart. The plotters get betrayed. Guy Fawkes, who's the guy who's supposed to light the gunpowder, gets caught and tortured, which is really funny because you'll read accounts. I'm going to read a bit from an account from...

somewhat dubiously named englishheritage.org that is like they're just quite pretty good on this yeah they like um they own lots of like big old houses and stuff like uh if you want to go and see like a manor house you're probably gonna give them some money to go in like

It's not as bad as something named English Heritage could be, I guess. It could be a lot more racist in an open and explicit way. Yeah, yeah. But the thing about this, right, is they don't actually describe what...

happened to him during his interrogation as torture even though they tortured the shit out of this guy oh yeah like the king was there while they tortured the shit out of this guy yeah yeah very unpleasant I imagine yeah yeah and so eventually like all the plotters are like either captured or killed and I'm gonna read this from that English Heritage article quote

Each was found guilty and sentenced to a traitor's death by the grisly ordeal of hanging, drawing, and quartering. Oh yeah, hung, drawn, and quartered. The men were hanged. It's so bad. I loved this shit when I was in school. You don't understand how great this is for like eight-year-old boys. Yeah, but like, Jesus fucking Christ.

So they were hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, dismembered, and beheaded. And then their bodies were cut into quarters and displayed for all to see and for birds to feast upon. Yep. According to all accounts, all faced their fates bravely. So...

This is something that is genuinely important to understand because we're going to get to the French Revolution part of the story very soon. These people are fucking deranged. They're psychopaths. They do this as public entertainment. Oh, yeah. They hang people and then cut them down and castrate them and then dismember and behead them while they're alive. They do this for fun? Yeah. Isn't this the opening scene of Discipline and Punish by Foucault? Doesn't he describe this? Yeah. Yeah. And like,

You know, like this is this is the thing you have to remember about the French Revolution is that like these are the people who rule Europe for like 700 years. Oh, yeah. Or like these motherfuckers.

And so, you know, like they stop the gunpowder treason. No one gets blown up. And November 5th, like immediately gets declared a holiday. But it's not really the same holiday as as we have today. I'm going to read again from that article. Quote, since 1673 and up until the 19th century, some crowds have paraded an effigy of the pope through the street strung up above a bonfire.

This symbolized continuing prejudice towards Catholics, which again, like you motherfuckers weren't Catholics until like fucking seven seconds ago. Like what is wrong with you people? Like you were all Catholics until your king decided to make a fake pope so he could get divorced. Like what the fuck?

Yeah, the anti-Catholicism goes pretty hard. Like for a country where you were all literally Catholics until the king decided you weren't. Oh my god, I hate Christianity so much. This shit sucks so badly. Talking of parades, have you read about the Lewis Bonfire in Sussex? No. No.

Okay. They go super hard for Bonfire Night. They also, I think it was the same day or something that some Protestants were burned at a stake there. Oh, great. They have this big parade where they drag, I think it's burning barrels of pitch or tar. Oh my God. Or possibly those are the same thing. I'm going to invite you to Google Louis Bonfire. Just tell me what the first image you see is. Jesus Christ!

Oh no! Oh no! That's a parade of burning crosses! Yeah. Oh no! That's correct. Yeah. Oh jeez! What you're going to see is a burning crosses. Jump scared! So they don't just burn Guy Fawkes in Effigy. They have these big sort of... Every year they'll have like the person of the year they're going to burn. So like Effigies that they've burned include David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson...

Except Blasthof. Some of it goes surprisingly hard. I think at some point...

There's like a formal, like they've been investigated by the police for hate crimes. Jesus Christ. Nearly all of them are against politicians. You know. We probably should mention they also burned a Romani caravan. Jesus. Which is pretty fucking terrible. Yeah. All right. Speaking of burning David Cameron, do you know who else burns David Cameron? Is it the goods and services that support this podcast? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We're now returning. Let's go back to that thing I was reading about what happened to them, them hanging the Pope. Yeah. So this symbolized continuing prejudice against Catholics. However, during the French Revolution, English and Irish Catholics fought for Britain, which found itself on the same side of the Pope. And perhaps because of this, in around 1800, Guy Fawkes seems to have finally entered the picture as the boogeyman of Bonfire Night rather than the Pope.

Fox was barely mentioned in 5th November sermons in the 18th century, and his name doesn't feature in the titles of books or tracts before 1800. But after that date, his name began to appear, and Fox seems to have quickly become a central character in English popular culture, often portrayed as a dashing, doomed anti-hero. Yeah. And this is a reminder that...

Protestantism versus Catholicism is a fucking joke. The ruling class has always had one religion, counter-revolution, and when their asses are on the line, Protestant terrorists and Catholic Supreme Court justices can work together just fine to make sure you can't get a fucking abortion. Yep.

So, you know, what we have here, and this is an interesting thing in the sense that, like, Guy Fawkes becoming the guy that Guy Fawkes Day is about and not, like, the Pope is literally an icon of sort of, like, of kind of revolution. Yeah, that's a good point. Like, specifically against the French Revolution. But it's interesting because it's like this eventually seems to kind of have backfired because Guy Fawkes kind of, like, becomes the central figure, right? But then...

And this is something that like this article also mentions that I want to go into more. Everything sort of changes again about this when the movie V for Vendetta gets made. Yeah, it's very strange. Yeah. And let's actually say before we do V for Vendetta, can you talk a little bit more about like what people do during Guy Fawkes Day because it's fun? Yeah, totally. Yeah.

So it is fun. It is, it's a nice, like a little, as burnings in effigy go, you know, a fun one. At least what we used to do, I grew up in a more rural area, uh, is we'd all, everyone would, if you had like wood or you chopped down a tree, you know, on your land or you had old furniture, you'd all bring it to one place, right? Big field, you pile it. And you're with, it's fucking high. It's like a couple of stories high by the time. Damn. And then you go down on the 5th of November, everyone gets fireworks. It's

This is where I'll tell my fireworks story. Very amusingly, when I was younger, everyone in my village club together to buy one of those fireworks displays, you know, where it's like a box and you light one fuse and they all go off. Yeah. Oh, shit. So we've set that up. My dad and his mate and we're in the van there. We've lit it.

And then we're sort of standing there, ready to go, woo, ah. And unfortunately, we've placed it upside down. Oh, no! And it starts fucking bouncing off the ground. And then it flips on the side. And we're now behind the van, and it's just,

He's fucking smashing the van. So yeah, what you do is you get fireworks, you shoot them at your friends, you shoot them in the air. You have a massive bonfire. And this is November in Britain, right? So days are short, nights are long, everything's wet. So you're using a lot of petrol to start the bonfire, like irresponsible amounts of flammable gas.

And you just have a huge fire. And then if you have old clothes, at least I'm sure it's different if you grew up in like a more urban setting.

What we would do is we'd get our old clothes, tie the bottom of the trousers together, tie the wrists together, and then you stuff all that with straw. That you have, right? And then you put a head on it, like a bag, like a plastic bag or flower bag, and you draw a little face on it. And that's your guy. You can go around to people's houses and ask for a penny for the guy. That had sort of become quite old-fashioned by the time I was...

But you make these guys and then you take them down there and then you put them on top of the bonfire before you light it. And

And everyone watches as he catches on fire and burns to death. And you have toffee apples at the other thing. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, I used to like it. And you have sparklers, you know, which is, you know, a little sparkler on a stick. Yeah, it was fun. It's got something for every age. You're a little kid, you have a sparkler. And then once you get to, you know, like 10, 12, you can shoot fireworks at your friends. And like, really,

Really, it's something for everyone. I guess, unless you're Catholic. Yeah. But that's the thing, though. Catholicism and Protestantism... It's secularized. Yeah, like, they've been united in the single great British religion of counter-revolution. So now everyone can celebrate Guy Fawkes' day together. Yeah, it's true. And it's supposed to reinforce the state and be like, if you fuck with the state, we will burn you. Which V for Vendetta kind of, I guess, messes with a little bit. But... Yeah...

And this, I think, is actually a really interesting process because I think Guy Fawkes now is most known for the Guy Fawkes mask, which was one of the symbols of Anonymous and one of the symbols of... Yeah, but it wasn't before that. Yeah, yeah. And part of how this happens is a character named Guy Fawkes in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. And V for Vendetta is not about a Catholic plot to establish the Catholic rule in...

In Britain yeah, this is about like effectively the government of the UK is going to have in five years when they just like Completely descend into fascism. Oh, yeah, we're not that far away now to be honest Yeah, yeah, and it's about that government getting overthrown by an anarchist by an anarchist revolution Yeah, and it's like this because like you know Alan Moore is leftist on this man by the Wachowski's of like of Matris fame who are also trans leftists and

we're going to close on them actually but you know sort of what happens here right is like this mask becomes a symbol of like kind of like really altogether detached from the original figure of Guy Fawkes and like through the form of this movie like this becomes the symbol of like the 2011 like Occupy Cycle revolutions everywhere yeah and like one of my most sort of like harrowing memories like coming up in that movement is

was of this like 2014 everything's going by 2014 everything's going to shit right like the trinity war has kicked off the rabat massacre in egypt has like slaughtered a bunch of protesters and egypt's like just under full military rule and

And there's a, like, there are, like, Palestinian kids, like, wearing Guy Fawkes masks. And there's, like, this image that haunts me. There's a video and an image of it, of this kid is, like, this kid's, like, 17, maybe, like, 16, 17, like, wearing this mask. And he walks around a corner and this Israeli sniper just fucking shoots him in the head. And there's this

this picture of him with like this just like mask with a hole in it next to his face and he's just like lying there on the floor and it's like one of the things that is like the reason why the way I am now is because of that shit

Yeah. And, you know, in some sense, like, he's become weirdly an enduring danger to the state in ways that he would be extremely pissed about, which is very funny to me. He started as a graphic novel, right? It was a graphic novel before... Yeah, yeah. It was an Alan Moore graphic novel. Comic books. Yeah. Yeah. And...

I want to close on the Wachowskis. And specifically, I wanted to shout out... So again, the Wachowskis made the movie V for Fandetta, which is the thing that popularized it and is, in a lot of sense, responsible for the aesthetic of...

of the 2011 revolutions. And she's founded a new project called Anarchist United. I'm going to quote from an interview with her, quote, it will be a studio wholly owned by a foundation. It's owned by this 501c3. The 501c3 provides grants for artists and young filmmakers with marginalized points of view. Hopefully those people will create stuff, bring it over to the studio. The studio can make it and then fund the foundation. So you create this evergreen operation that can hopefully exist outside of the studio system if necessary.

And so they're making a bunch of trans shit. Like they're adapting Gretchen Falcon Martin's Manhunt, which is like the most trans femme ass like book of the last. Like it's a book about trans misogyny and it's getting and we're getting it fucking adapted. So yeah, it's really cool. And yeah,

Yeah, like I think, I don't know, that's the thing I want to close on is like a note of hope of like, even the most deranged kind of revolutionaries actions against the state can sometimes ricochet around 400 years later and turn into like a revolutionary movement. Bounce back into trans-fem films. It's like I often think about Hunger Games. Yeah. The Hunger Games symbol. I would love to interview the lady who wrote Hunger Games. I think she's quite like...

which doesn't like the media attention so much from what I've heard. But that became the symbol of the around the Milk Tea Alliance, right? In Hong Kong, Myanmar, obviously. Even in Thailand, they used it. And it's fascinating how these things have these cultural... They sort of bounce around and it becomes a bit completely different from what they were. Yeah, and it's this weird thing too, because The Hunger Games was born of Suzanne Collins'

like flipping channels between coverage of like the like watching the bombing in the Iraq war and reality TV. Yeah, I remember reading that. And you see and you watch like this rebound of this like the intense reaction of this cultural moment to 2003 2004 like the like the

one of the peaks of American, like, kind of revolution. Rebounds around and suddenly a bunch of, like, a bunch of revolutionaries of Myanmar are doing the, like, fucking two figures thing. Yeah, yeah. Doing the Cub Scouts. Yeah. And so...

you know, this is one of these things where like, you know, who knows where your story one day is going to end up and rebound to. But if we survived this, we are promised that this year was the beginning of the golden age of leftist transcendence. So let's fucking get there more. And yeah, if you're in England, enjoy burning shit tonight. Yeah. If you're in America, who knows? Maybe same. Also enjoy burning shit tonight. Yeah. Woo. Woo.

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You wake up before dawn. This was once abnormal for you, but ever since the election, you've found it harder and harder to sleep. You just barely drifted off when the sound of shouts wafted in from across the street. Reflected sirens bounce off your bedroom window. Through a fog of sleep, you reflect on the last few days. Voting went better than you'd feared. It's what happened in the days after that's kept your spine at a constant eerie tingle.

Several Republican-led states are refusing to certify their election results. Most analysts say the blizzard of lawsuits launched on behalf of Trump have no chance at winning, but that didn't stop the candidate from declaring victory and promising to carry out his own inauguration, no matter what the courts decide.

It's all absurd, laughable, but you live on the border of a majority-red county, and your sheriffs just announced support for the real winner of the election. Your local PD have been notably silent, while right-wing provocateurs online have started circulating allegations of election fraud that the sheriff has promised to look into. That was yesterday. Today, just after five, you're jolted awake in your bed by the sound of breaking glass and screaming. ♪

You stay low and crawl to your front window to peep out, across your yard and into the street before you. Three police cruisers are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house. You can't imagine why. You know he did some volunteer canvassing a few weeks back. He volunteered at a voting precinct. Could they be there because of that?

You try a few different search terms on social media to puzzle out the truth. It looks like a few people around the country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts register as deleted before you can click on them. There's more shouting from inside your neighbor's house, and within seconds, a pair of burly deputies drag him out in front and into a waiting squad car.

It's dark outside, but you think you might see blood on his face. Your heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to call someone. But the cops are already here. Who else is there? As your mind races, one of the officers stationed outside turns back and looks towards your window. Recognition sparks his eyes. He sees you. He starts to walk over. You turn back, drop the shades, and with a pounding heart, retreat to your bedroom. Maybe he won't knock. Maybe he just wanted to scare you.

Maybe. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and back in early 2019, I released the first season of this show. It wasn't a daily news and politics podcast back then. Instead, it gave a focused argument for why a new U.S. Civil War was more frightening and possible than you might guess.

Over the last few years, that belief has become, unfortunately, mainstream. It is no longer fringe or unique to talk about a new civil war as a real possibility. There was a blockbuster movie earlier this year based around presenting what it called a realistic picture of such a possibility. I'll leave...

My thoughts on that for another time. A Marist poll from earlier this year showed that 47% of Americans consider a second Civil War likely or very likely. This is a massive shift considering where things were when I wrote the podcast series in 2019. That number includes an expected 53% of Republicans, but also 40% of Democrats and 41% of Independents.

Depending on how you want to see it, I've either been vindicated as much as is possible for someone in my line of work, or I've played an outsized role in creating a particularly dangerous egregore in the collective unconsciousness of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled on that matter ever since the first episode started coming out. If you'll remember

midway through the first season, we dropped an extra episode I hadn't initially intended as part of the run, just trying to stop people from panicking. And ever since, I've kept that as a particular goal in my head. However you want to, you know, think about this, the first season of It Could Happen Here undoubtedly helped to make my career. Today, Sophie and I run an entire network that employs several dozen people, largely on the strength of that series.

And yet I have no issue telling you that I don't have any idea how election day is going to go. You know, we've had a lot of polls lately that seem much better for Harris. A number of pollsters are starting to shift. You know, there's a good chance that they were hurting in the direction of Trump because they didn't want to underestimate him again. But there's also a good chance that

You know, that Seltzer poll is an outlier. And now these guys are hurting in the direction of Harris winning because they don't want to be embarrassed. I really have no idea what's going to happen. My official stance is that it's probably pretty close to a coin flip, although maybe one that favors Harris now, you know, more than one that favors Trump.

Whatever happens, I don't know what's going to happen, let alone what's going to happen the day after. And as I sat down to write this episode, which is going to air on the day of the election, I went back and forth as to where the focus should be. I did consider doing another Don't Panic-style episode. Perhaps that would have been the call. You know, depending on how today goes, people might either be listening to this and, you know...

relaxing or listening to this and in a heightened state of panic. It really depends on where things are and where things are in the counting of votes by this period of time. My reasoning on what I decided to do is pretty simple, which is that I think there's a good chance we either know or have a strong inkling of how this election is going to shake out by the time this episode airs. And at the time I write this, the indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump, enough that I'd say the election leans in her direction.

And so I think there's a lot of value in talking about what might happen in the aftermath of that if Trump tries to protest the election results and if he goes particularly trying to protest by force. And if that's the case, if that's the direction he lands in, I think these shooters that we have to worry about. And I mean that in the figurative sense, right? You know, people who support him, people will who will put skin in the game in order to try to force him into office.

I think they're different than they were last time. I don't think the threat here is that a bunch of proud boys and the like raid the Capitol next January. I think the threat here has a lot more to do with licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared themselves in the tank for Trump.

We ran an episode just the other day about the constitutional sheriff's movement. There's a lot to say about that. One in four law enforcement officers today report to a sheriff. They make 20% of all arrests in the country. Earlier this year, Wired published an article on the far-right sheriffs ready to disrupt the election. It focused heavily on Dar Leaf, who sits on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA.

Leaf, a Trump supporter and sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, has spent the lead up to this election investigating the 2020 election. He's tried to seize voting machines and run militia training courses where he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies and gentlemen, how to form an ad hoc posse, each member armed with, quote, a standard AR-15 type military grade weapon and at least 500 rounds of ammo.

Speaking of 500 rounds of ammo, you probably can't buy that from our sponsors, but here they are. We're back and we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who sits on the board of that organization named Dar Leaf. Leaf has already promised to have his posse patrolling stations in Berry County to watch for evidence of fraud and illegal immigrant voting in what's expected to be one of the swing states this election might hinge on. D.

Deeply reported articles like that Wired piece have warred in my own personal paranoia with troubling accounts on social media. The day before the election, which is when I wrote this, I came across a post on the Pennsylvania subreddit from a Philly voter titled, My Dad Just Got Harassed by a Police Officer About the Election.

Quote, he was driving down the old Lincoln Highway when a trooper stopped him and asked him if he was voting tomorrow. Trooper, will you be voting tomorrow? Dad, that's none of your business. Trooper, who are you voting for tomorrow? Dad, none of your business. Trooper, oh, so you're illegal. Now, the poster's dad, who is Hispanic, stated that he didn't have to answer that and asked if he was being detained. The trooper let him go. But later, according to the poster, this happened.

When my dad went to the precinct, there were three other people there to report the exact same story, election harassment at a traffic stop. Turns out the officer or officers doing it aren't even from Bucks County or Pennsylvania. They're New Jersey state troopers, wild to cross state borders to harass people driving down the highway.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, we were all deeply worried about the dangers of different far-right groups, militias, and organizations like the Proud Boys, who wore right-wing death squad patches and threatened to throw leftists out of helicopters when their god-emperor won re-election.

Today, most of those figures are either a spent force or something that cannot act on its own, reliant upon the backing of groups like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs or being empowered by a Trump-controlled White House if they want to have any hope of being directly relevant again.

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

When groups like the Proud Boys cross the line into outright violence, it is legal to meet them with defensive violence, and they can and have been beaten this way.

That's simply not something the extant left-wing community defense organizations and political groups in this country can say and do against, for example, law enforcement entities hell-bent on executing a purge against the left. In rallies prior to the election, Trump has often merged promises to prosecute his political opponents, us, with promises to use ICE to deport 20 million illegals and to send in the military or federal law enforcement to clean up cities.

I want to quote now from an article in the New Republic reporting on a rally earlier this year in Wilmington, North Carolina. Today, I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina and across our country, said Trump. No more sanctuary cities. As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, which is a lot of them, to turn over criminal aliens. And we will hunt down and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored.

The article goes on to note, Trump has previously vowed to militarize U.S. law enforcement to restore law and order to our cities, which he claimed to become cesspools of bloodshed and crime under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments, but that extra help would only go to cities that complied with ICE.

Now, this is scary stuff, and it would necessitate some sort of response if it were to happen, but I don't really know how to tell you to organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns that one would need to factor into any plans. I could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation or to avoid being raided for their past political activism. And I could base those theories on, for example, how activists in Nazi Germany helped hide people from the Gestapo.

But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond compare to what exists today.

Perhaps the most chilling article I read this year had nothing to do with ICE or right-wing paramilitaries and everything to do with the technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years. License plate recognition systems like Motorola's DRN use optical character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's license plate and put it in a searchable database.

The policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative, although it's far from clear if they actually work, too. The idea is that if someone carries out a drive-by shooting or assaults a woman on the street or is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by someone who gets the car make and model and maybe the first couple letters of the plate, DNR's database of more than 15 billion vehicle sightings built from automatic recordings of license plate reading cameras on police cruisers and tow trucks and the like

might well help identify and stop someone before they hunt or kill again. Now, there's serious reason to question whether or not this system actually works this way. I'm not claiming to take a stance on this one way or the other. I'm not an expert on this. But the issue here from a privacy standpoint, when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump-dominated government, is that you can't train a system like this to only pay attention to license plates.

nor is there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. And recent investigations conducted by a private detective with access to DNR's database for her work have shown that someone with access to this database can search based on more than just license plates. They can look up signs supporting political candidates and match them to front yards and thus to people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by these cameras, and there are again billions of these photos wearing, for example, Planned Parenthood shirts.

This is not an idle fear. This is a weapon that could very easily be used by the enemy within months of you listening to this. This is also a weapon that in an event like the one I forecasted at the start of this episode could be used to crack down on activists and voters in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort of national schism situation.

Police officers already misused databases like this with comic regularity. In 2022, a different Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro-Trump cops earlier this election season.

I'm talking about something that happened in September when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County, Bruce Sukowski, posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio. From an article in the AP by Michael Rubicam.

Likening people in the U.S. illegally to human locusts, Zukowski wrote on a personal Facebook account and his campaign's account, when people ask me what's going to happen if the flip-flopping laughing hyena wins, I say, write down all the addresses of the people who had their signs in their yards. That way, Zukowski continued, when migrants need places to live, we already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival.

Now, as the full context of that statement makes clear, Zukowski was not technically threatening Harris voters. But it's pretty much impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat, just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability in an environment where the future ability of Zukowski and those like him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going to talk more about that. But first, here's another ad break.

Now, I don't mean to make it sound like that there's nothing that can be done to fight against technological tools and the arsenal of repression like this.

But I have no doubt that if the Republicans do take total power, they will read any positive election result for them as a mandate to punish the left and purge the people Trump has already repeatedly called the enemy within. And I worry that in the event of any sort of national schism, either where there's an extended period of time where Trump is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida and you have a bunch of these counties that...

states around the country sign up for Trump, that the first thing we'll see law enforcement do in these areas is punish the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on a war footing with the rest of the country. These are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here, but they are something to keep in mind and they are something that represents a real danger at this point. I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds of things the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that.

Now, it is important to remember that whatever plan these people try won't work as well as they hope. We've been watching them for years, and if there's one thing you know about all of the people around Trump, it's that they're fuck-ups. That doesn't mean they can't win. It doesn't mean they're not dangerous. It just means that they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which is something that should be on your mind.

Bruce and most of the Trump-aligned police, local and federal, still feel a need to couch their threats in deniable terms, though. But many on the far right have been less careful. And one thing we've seen as this election has lurched

closer to its conclusion is a lot of people, people like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their masks off. Now, I think this had a lot to do with the fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a couple of weeks ago, and they felt like after years of having to do what Bruce did, having to cover up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to do that. Now,

Now, obviously, some influential people on the far right have been masked off for much longer, and this is something that should concern you as well. One of the most sinister examples of this is Jack Posobiec, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer whose recent book, Unhumans, is framed as a secret history of communist revolutions.

From an article in Mother Jones, quote,

communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The pair contend that these folks, be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade, are better called unhumans. It's a hard-edged message. The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies,

but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They rob and kill Posobiec and Lissac, his co-author maintain. They don't believe what they say. They don't care about winning debates. They don't even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you.

Now, Jack has been a laughable character for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric has had an audience in the halls of power. J.D. Vance himself provided a blurb for the book, claiming it shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon, meanwhile, wrote the foreword.

Now, I started this episode with a fictional vignette, imagining what might happen if Trump chooses to contest the election with outright force, and he might. The good news is, I think that such an effort would be doomed to fail. If he sticks to the courts, trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to the House is a better chance at succeeding. And it is possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of poll workers could play into a broader effort like this. But doing so is a big risk. My

My gut tells me that moving so openly, resorting to violence first, creates a situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming Harris administration would have to respond with force. There would have to be consequences. And given that they currently control the arsenal of state power, I think they would win even in the event that you have all of these sheriffs break for Trump and some sort of insurgent situation develop.

If that were to happen, having backed this insurgency would put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put a lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It might even force consequences for provocateurs like Posobiec and even Elon Musk. Backing an outright violent coup is almost the only thing I can imagine putting Musk behind bars.

There are pieces of this logic train that I find comforting, but there are also pieces that aren't. Many of us, me included, made the mistake of assuming that after January 6th, 2021, Trumpism might finally be a spent force. He'd gambled too much and he'd lost too big. But despite the existential threat he presented himself as being, the Democratic Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose mercy for the main players.

I suspect anything short of armed insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year. I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw him in prison if Harris wins are real. I read that instead as his own predictive justification for the violence he'd like to support against his political enemies. That desire won't go away just because Trump rides off into the sunset and the Republican Party has to go searching for another Fuhrer.

If we defer their dream, it will simply sit under the floorboards and fester, waiting for the next opportunity, and that won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken system in a world where climate change and conflict are on the rise. Low-information voters, less literate by the day, will continue to swing back and forth. The feral beast we've heard growling all year long will surge forward, all the hungrier for being made to wait.

If you've kept up with our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed that we haven't endorsed any candidates and I haven't wasted any time advising our listeners to vote. I happen to be someone who does think a Harris win represents substantially less harm than a Trump win to a lot of people. But I don't think that the folks who listen to our podcast are waiting for me to make that decision for them.

I don't agree with the anti-electoralist side of things on every matter, but one place where I do agree with them is that a Harris win won't fix what's broken. It represents the historic equivalent of jinking out of the way in a dogfight. Necessary, maybe, but not something that guarantees future security. Hey everybody, Robert here. I've changed locations, so sorry if it sounds a little bit different. I'm currently in a cabin.

waiting out the election, trying not to think too much about it. But I wrote a new ending to this because I just thought that what I had there was incomplete. Now, when it comes to what does work in the long run to beat these people, my mind is drawn back constantly to perhaps an odd place. A 2011 article in the scientific journal Nature titled The Evolution of Overconfidence.

Now, the gist is that this was an attempt by two scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know very little about a subject to overestimate their competence in it. This is probably why so many Americans think they could win a fistfight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind of benefit to evolutionary fitness?

The explanation devised in this paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not because in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight, the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach for that resource. If they do, one of three things can happen. They fight and win, they fight and lose, or the other organism backs away.

insecure in its chances of victory, and they get that resource without even fighting for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual, so much so that it might explain why many of us seem to have a built-in tendency to irrationally judge our own capabilities. Now, I first became aware of this research almost a decade ago when I started work on my first published book, A Brief History of Vice.

At the time, I found it interesting because it posited a likely adaptive basis for a kind of bad behavior, and that's what my whole book was about. In the years since, though, I've come to see it as the fundamental underlying explanation for how fascists win.

It's well established that fascist regimes and individuals themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after picking the wrong fight. And of course, January 6th,

There are many examples to choose from, but as often as they fail, the success of these movements is also based entirely on their willingness to dare and the fact that liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to confront them.

We are still dealing with Donald Trump and his foot soldiers in 2024 because no one quite had the guts to confront him to the degree he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant taking unprecedented legal steps and risking right-wing backlash that likely would have included acts of terrorism. In the end, most people with any say in the matter chose to either back away or, at best, pull their punches until after the election.

On other episodes of this show, our correspondent Mia and I have talked about the actual path to destroying the far-right's organizational and electoral base. We are up against a coalition of used car dealers, supplement salesmen, multi-level marketing ghouls, sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their own power, and churches that by any decent measure lost their justification for tax-exempt status years ago.

These are all forces that can be targeted and neutered through the courts and the legislative system with consistent activism and pressure applied to elected leaders. Sitting here, I think that the odds the Democrats embrace such a strategy are exceptionally low, but we do have to try to make them. Because when you're sitting across from a monster, one that's fattened on overconfidence, and you see him start to reach again, the only sane response is to swallow your fear and

and take a swing.

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The manufacturer suggested retail price excludes tax, title, license, dealer fees, and optional equipment. Dealer sets final price. To learn more, visit chevy.com slash equinox EV. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. On today's episode, we have Robert Evans, Harrison Davis, Mia Wong, James Stout, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm Sophie Lichterman. This is the post-election episode. Robert. Yeah, it happened here.

Is happening, has continued to happen here. Yeah. Yeah, this has been a podcast from the beginning about things falling apart, which is a great business to be in, I guess, because they keep doing that.

I want to start by kind of talking about yesterday's episode, the one that I dropped before the election, because I thought a lot about what to put out on the day of the election. And I kind of made the call, which, I don't know, regrets the wrong word. I made the call yesterday that like, okay, we've got this new poll from Seltzer. People are starting to feel like

Some of this late breaking news is good for Harris. Some of the pollsters are hurting back in that direction. I probably should do something to kind of like pump the brakes on enthusiasm and remind people that even if she wins, there's still a lot of dangers out there, right? Because that's what I saw as like the big threat model is,

Harris is likely to win, and then people are going to forget about these constitutional sheriffs and all these different kind of like right-wing ghouls that will still be a problem if we don't take care of them, right? If we don't do anything to actually like hamper their ability to exercise power. So I wrote that episode with that in mind, and it turns out I was being overly optimistic. And I think I was being overly optimistic in part—

And I tend towards pessimism, which is why this show exists in the first place. One of the things that's happened is we've gotten bigger and more people have listened is whenever like shit happens in the world, we get bombarded on the subreddit and just like in emails to myself with people saying versions of like, I don't know what to do using language that's like very worrying sometimes about how hopeless they feel. And so I've kind of felt a growing responsibility to like spread calm and hope.

And I think that merged to a degree with the, you know, after my dad died, this desire to like, not just be sad and a doomer. And I think it led me to have, I guess, more of an optimistic, like I forced myself into an unreasonably optimistic frame of mind, just because I thought that was the responsible thing to do. And I guess I'm kind of like,

evaluating that now. What should I have done differently if I'd been in a more logical state of mind? And I guess the answer is, I don't know how to be in a more logical state of mind. The problem is, there's so much

You know, you've got this hyper object of a political realignment happening in our country in this very dark direction. You're also trying to deal with, and I'm sure everyone listening is dealing with versions of this on their own. You know, people you care about getting sick and dying and, you know, losing jobs or having to start new ones and embarking, you know, starting to become a parent or whatever. Like everybody's got all these massive things in their own lives and like trying to keep a completely rational perspective. Yeah.

on the political happenings in this country while remaining unaffected from like the way in which your own life is going to color your optimism and biases is probably a hopeless cause to some extent, uh, which I guess is part of why we're here to try and as a collective, um,

offer people our most reasonable sort of averaged opinion about what's going to happen. So I guess that's what we're going to try to do here. That's what I've got to start with. I mean, hope is illogical, but it is necessary. And I think that's really where we have to start. I'm going to toss over to Margaret real quick. About hope? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Margaret, fix this for us. Just to say, I woke up today with some hope. And I think a lot of that is from my friendship with Margaret. And I don't think there's a better person to talk about that than her. Yeah, Margaret. I appreciate that. I often make the joke about the fact that I named myself Killjoy in my 20s and then became a professional optimist. But I think that actually it could happen here. I think folks here do it really well. Sometimes...

is almost sometimes the right word instead of hope, right? Or like optimism isn't always the right word because you're like, well, bad things are happening and they're going to happen and they're going to keep happening, right? And so sometimes we look at like climate change, for example, which is the broader problem. You know, you're like, well, no matter what we do, it's going to get worse. And so the immediate electoral problem in front of us, like no matter what happens, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But we need to stay...

aware of that and stop pretending like the bad things aren't coming while then still looking at saying like, well, what can we do? And for me, the thing that I focus on, I have a therapist friend who talks about how agency is the opposite of trauma, you know, and that the more that we act with agency while bad things are happening, the less that they destroy us emotionally. And so I think that focusing on what can we do is just incredibly useful and necessary. And also, you

The fact that things are in turmoil right now, and that means lots of bad things are happening, the old status quo is gone. We saw that with the defeat of the Democrats. Their whole thing is that they doubled down on the old status quo. And people don't want that. People want something different. And Trump offers something different, a very horrible nightmare thing that's different. And the Democrats did not offer something different. And so I actually think in a weird way, we are in a good position to, on a grassroots level,

build something different and say that people want something different. And I think that by working towards something different and better, well, it's the best way to keep our own spirits up, you know? Yeah.

Thanks, Magpie. I absolutely agree. James, what's your perspective here? Yeah, like it goes without saying that like Trump's proposed border policies are horrific and his proposed migration policies are horrific. Harris's were also bad. I think that doesn't mean that Trump's are acceptable or the same. They're not acceptable.

but also like, I think having spent as much time as I have with refugees, having spent as much time as I have with people who have gone through things that are horrific and like state hostility, state violence, civil war, et cetera. Like I have a lot of hope that like, like Margaret said, right. There's, there's, there's this quote from Daruti that probably isn't real about how like we're not afraid of ruins and we've lived in ruins our whole lives and we'll build our future in the ruins of the old world. But like,

When I think about the next four years, like the state will be absent or hostile, right? Absent at best and hostile at worst. It's been that way at the border for a very long time. Yeah. And we've built our little community and our little world. And like when I am sad, when I'm despairing, when I'm scared, I think about the things that we did in the last year, right? We fed people.

tens of thousands of people by ourselves and in doing that we demonstrated how powerful we are in the absence of the state because the state wasn't there or the state was actively hostile we were able to step in and from nothing we were able to build something that took care of people who needed to be taken care of and that like we're not special or unique you know we didn't have like some incredible structure here before people just showed up to help people and like

More people will need to do that now. And that will mean that there are more people in difficult places who need help. Right. But that doesn't mean that you can't do it. If we can do it, you can do it. And having done it has made me less. I just, I'm not as scared as I would be if I felt like I was on my own or if I felt like that, we can't deal with this because we can. And I know that because we have, and I,

I want, obviously that's something we're going to focus on, right? We have between now and the middle of January. I have no idea how many weeks or days that is, but it's a lot of time to organize and it's a lot of time to put aside some of the differences we might have, some of the petty disagreements we might have, some of the shit that people have said on twitter.com and like get together and organize and

and build a way of taking care of each other that doesn't rely on the state because that's always been what we needed and we need it now even more so. Yeah. Speaking of what we need now,

Here's some ads. Oh, Robert, tonal, tone, bad, bad. What else was I supposed to do? What else was I supposed to do? You just can't stop him. That was just physics. There was no other way for that to go. An object in motion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. That was like the oceans forming after the moon hit the earth or whatever happened to make oceans. I don't know how oceans came about. Don't ask me that question. They call him Robert Tectonic Plate Evans.

Alright, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where it is happening here and Robert still can't help himself to make strange ad transitions. Garrison, what do you got for us? Yeah, I don't know. I...

I feel like I am not an optimist, and I also put a lot of work into not being a doomer. I try to be pretty realistic about a whole bunch of my thoughts and analysis on this sort of thing, and I tend towards survival-oriented

as kind of one of my main priorities. And I'd like to talk a little bit about kind of some of what we actually saw on election night and maybe some small misconceptions going around. Mainly this kind of idea that the country has like wildly swung to the right. Like people have like overwhelmingly, like more so than ever before, have voted for

like far right figures have voted for far right, like bills basically wanting this, this complete, like nationalistic takeover. If you look at, you know, the presidency, the Supreme court, the house, the Senate. And I mean, the final count is still coming in.

We are recording this Wednesday afternoon. It's noon on the West Coast right now. And Trump has almost the same number of votes as he got in 2020. I think it's a little bit under at this point. Now, there is some demographic changes. Certain groups may have leaned more towards or against Trump than in past elections. But the final, like, averaged popular vote number is at this point pretty much the same. Now, kind of why this has happened, why he's still kind of sweeping all of these swing states...

is we've kind of had a collapse of trust in the Democratic Party. And you could attribute this to a lot of things. I don't think it's a single thing. It is obviously a confluence of events. I think one of the big things is like 9% inflation is kind of hard to beat. If people, to Margaret's point earlier, they're looking for something different.

And Harris, meaningfully, was not offering anything substantially different. She's the VP, right? She has that legacy. I don't think Biden could have done much more to alter the inflation, but that doesn't matter. People feel this.

And that's very strong. And there's other reasons why people have kind of lost faith in the Democratic Party or aren't as willing to come out in as high numbers as we saw back in 2020. And crucially, but back in 2020, in a lot of the swing states, the vote was very close. Although the popular vote swung pretty heavily towards Biden, in a lot of the crucial swing states, in some of the states, he was only like 20,000 votes ahead. Like it was a pretty tight race in some of those states. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, the other thing I'm kind of seeing, which kind of reflects this idea that like the country hasn't wildly, like the average people haven't wildly become a more fascist. It's that even in states that have elected Trump, they have also passed like a decent number of progressive initiatives, including abortion rights, right?

Voters in Arizona and Missouri approved ballot initiatives that will serve to protect abortion rights until like further laws are in the books. And in Maryland, in Montana, Nevada and New York, where abortion is legal and Colorado, where there's no laws restricting abortion, they all passed measures that enshrine those rights into law.

Now, Florida, unfortunately, was not able to do this due to the super majority rules. Even though majority people did vote for this in Florida, they did not reach the 60 percent threshold. So that did not pass in Florida. But 57 percent, though, is close and it was an outright majority. Yeah. So people are willing to vote for these types of things, even if they're unwilling to vote for a Democrat at the top of the ticket.

And like, this is something that is worth considering when trying to figure out what exactly happened here and consider why people have kind of lost faith in the Democratic Party as a reliable institution to improve their lives or represent the things that they believe in. The Gaza issue being kind of the prime example of this in the past year. One other thing I was thinking about this morning when trying to kind of look forward and imagine what the next four years would look like is

Specifically with the concern of figures like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. being put into pretty important positions of government, right? The idea that RFK Jr. is going to be in charge of the CDC and determine public health policies for the country is a very worrying prospect.

having Elon Musk in a senior advisory role in some kind of governmental department of efficiency doesn't sound great. But as I was having my coffee next to a beautiful river in the mountains of North Georgia this morning,

I was thinking about Steve Bannon because my brain is just fucked up like that. But specifically, how Trump used Steve Bannon to get elected back in 2016, even though Bannon's actual tenure at the White House was quite short-lived for whatever reasons. Like, personality clashes with Trump happen all the time, and he loses friends and advisors at a pretty frequent rate. And I think because Trump is just like...

petty and, you know, ableist and a bad guy, he might just find RFK Jr. and Elon Musk annoying to be around. Considering RFK Jr.'s speech impediment and Elon Musk's apparent neurodiversity, Trump just might not want to be around them. So even though he did utilize both these figures to get elected, albeit slightly later on in the campaign, it took a while for Musk to kind of worm his way into Trump's orbit. But

I am not convinced that they will have direct access to Trump for very long. Now, this could happen. But if you look at Steve Bannon, who is similarly a worrying figure, he did not last very long besides Trump. So something like this could happen. Now, I don't think it'll happen the exact same way. Elon Musk has been positioning himself to have the government be reliant on him for contracting.

And he'll probably continue to exist in some form in that regard. But in terms of his direct influence on the White House and controlling sectors of government, this won't necessarily be a four-year thing. I think that is most of what I had on this topic. I guess the other thing is like,

It turns out in Harris's efforts to kind of court independents and court like Republicans that largely that largely failed. Massive failure. Massive failure. I mean, again, it turns out when you have a party that's running as kind of like a mini fascist party and then you have another party that's running as just a conservative party. We've got Dick Cheney. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not a solid opposition party. This hasn't worked for the second time in a row. The stats are almost identical to 2020 on this issue of Republicans voting for the Republican Party. In fact, it was slightly fewer of them voted Republican back in 2020. More of them voted Republican in 2024. I think it's by about 1%. Trying to court the conservative vote.

means that the conservatives are going to vote for conservatives. Maybe we should have an actual opposition party if you believe in electoral politics. Yeah. No, I mean, like the lesson people should take from Trumpism, Trump did not get where he is by courting

the conservative vote. Now Trump took over the Republican party and made it the Trump party. And yeah, like that is what worked. Right. Like, and that's, that's the actual lesson. Like the reason why Dick Cheney was fucking doing appearances with Kamala Harris was because conservatives, what we had known as conservatives prior to Trump coming to power was

are out of the picture, right? Like the new crop of guys are all weirdos that have molded themselves in the image of Trump since his rise to power, right? Yeah. And one of the things that is like, the lesson is not, we need to make our own Trump. Although by God, some people are going to take that lesson out of this. The lesson is that you have to come to people with a vision, right? Like,

Like you don't come to people by saying, well, what if we put a Republican in our cabinet? Right. What if it's basically the same as this last thing that you're not really that happy with, but instead with more Cheney? Right. Turns out that doesn't drive voter enthusiasm. And hey, like that's you know, I'm hitting the libs pretty hard because this is like the most catastrophic failure of any political party in living memory. Right. So they do deserve to be hit. But it's not like the left accomplished anything. Right. Right.

Either electorally or otherwise, right? There is no organized national left-wing movement that is worth talking about in any kind of building power way. Like it simply doesn't exist. And ignoring the blind loyalty that people have for Trump. Yeah.

was a mistake. Not considering, like targeting that audience. It doesn't seem like all of the January 6th ads did anything at all. Nope. Did fuck all. I mean... In fact, statistically, they did nothing. They did nothing to hurt Trump. Right. If Trump gets essentially the same total number of votes, they didn't do anything to...

to hurt him. Like that, like that strategy was not, that was not successful. Yeah. You have to offer something and the, just the large swath of like electoral nihilism that the, that the Democratic Party keeps, keeps running up against continues to be its most like existential threat. Robert, Gare and I at the RNC talked to a variety of people

who did not give a flying fuck about Trump's record. Oh, of course not. All they cared about was... No. No. They had blind loyalty to him. I posted this on twitter.com and I'm thinking specifically of the woman that was like, compared Trump's evil, for lack of a better word. Oh, sometimes he's ridiculous. Like my husband. And,

And that blind loyalty and the Democrats were going to fucking flip those people. That was not going to happen. They took a gamble. Wasn't even really a gamble. They took a gamble on the wrong crowd. And like that, that's not effective. But, you know, it's not really here or there at this point. It happened kind of like now what? Yeah. We haven't really heard from Mia much. So I'm going to shoot over to Mia. Yeah. And I mean, I think where I'm at is that

okay, we're in this moment. One of our biggest advantages is that we're not the Democrats, right? This has been a fairly comprehensive referendum on the failure of the Democrats to offer anything. We also, like, screwed up offering a better world, right? Yeah. You know, if you look at what happened in 2020 and you look at the places that we actually sort of, like, I mean, took power is a strong word, but, like, there are places where we ran the cops out and we screwed up making those places, like, a

a world that was like ideologically compelling enough to spread. And like, we're not going to get like a third do over of that, right? We have to be able to sort of like when the moment arrives, we have to be able to actually create a world that is better enough than this one that we can move. But that's not impossible. Yeah, I think what we have right now is we have a period of time before Trump takes power. And we have this time to sort of quash our beast. We have this time to organize. We have this time to plan.

And I think at least part of what we need to do, and we'll get into this more like in other episodes and probably later too, you know, there's the obvious tasks of organization. There's getting people involved in things. There's getting into meetings. I also think, and this is something that's, I think, easier to do

like literally immediately is that we've been fighting completely defensively on the cultural front for four years and it's been a complete disaster and we need to have a large-scale cultural offensive there needs to be something other than fucking tick-tock Mormonism like we need we need stuff alternatives to trad wife shit we need alternatives to this like prehistoric

terrible, like the fucking man fluenter sphere. There needs to be something else. We need to create that very, very fast. Yeah. Anarchist trad wife stuff like Nia. Jesus Christ. That's what's going to save us. All right. Everybody, everybody go buy a sundress right now. Get out there. Both of you to assume we don't have them, Robert. And I'm going to, I'm going to pull Robert Evans in speaking of buying things. It's time for our last ad break.

We're back. And I do want to get into a little bit more specifics of what can we do now? And I just want to say it.

A fucking lot. The cards are on the table. It's going to be a busy four years. Yeah. You know, I attended Margaret's book signing last week and I've attended lots of our events. And one of the questions and Q&As and one of the questions that gets asked all the time is how do I get involved? How do I find... How do I meet people? How do I do these things? And, you know...

I want to get into that. I also want to give some very basic, tangible advice. You know, don't post stupid things on the internet. If somebody tells you we need to go out and...

engage in revolutionary activity, maybe sit at home right now. You don't want to come into this thing with a criminal record. Nobody is making good plans right now. Go make good ones. Don't just reactively show up and follow someone with a clipboard in the streets. Don't post actionable threats on the internet. Don't post that picture of that comedian that gave that really funny joke. Just don't do it. There's no reason to. It's not cool. Yeah. Like,

If you know what community I'm talking about, you'll get it. If you're going to get messed up, use substances in order to cope with things, log out of social media on all of your devices first. Sounds like that's some advice you were giving yourself. I'm sober as a church mouse, Sophie. Just coffee and clean mountain air for me. A very basic recommendation that I have for people is to delete me. Yeah.

It is worth the investment. It is a good product.

That's what I'll say. Yes. Delete Me is a service that helps purge aspects of your public record from the internet, right? There's a lot of different sites. Like, you have been involved if you are a person who participates in the economy through the internet, right? If you buy things through the internet, your shit has been leaked, right? Their, you know, tagline is your private information is no longer private. And so essentially what they do is they scour the internet and remove your personal data

from online. And they don't do that once. They continuously do it. This is like a fantastic plug for the product that you're not paying us. Yeah. Let's just say the Church of Scientology could not find me.

Hell yeah. I will say, there are some alternatives to Delete.me that are trying to get up and running. We might do a full episode on data removal in the future. Yeah, we definitely should. It does require you to also do manual inputs. There are certain sites that Delete.me, when they send takedown requests to data brokers, certain sites will not comply. You have to send requests manually. It's pretty simple, but they will give you a list of certain sites as well to go through this process manually. Yeah.

But I think like kind of the last thing we want to talk about is like, we have 75 days, right. To like prepare for stuff. We have 75 days to prepare for the next four years. In some ways, it's going to kind of be like 2017 to 2019 again, which was a very busy time. Kind of all of the right wing ghouls that have been hiding under the rocks the past few years because of the liberal DOJ will probably start coming out of the woodwork. It's going to be, you know, a lot more stuff going on. And again,

you know, those of us that are here were able to make it through those years. Some of your friends probably weren't able to. And it is up to us to take care of each other to try to ensure that ourselves and people we know have a better chance of making it through these next four years. And I think kind of lastly, I'd like to kind of just go around talking about like what that will look like and how to kind of start that process, especially during these first 75 days. Like,

brunch is over brunch has been over for a while brunch brunch should have never started yeah but brunch is over now so what can what can we do in these next 75 days it's uh share your black coffee with friends time share your black coffee with friends maybe cork the champagne yeah

Yeah. Yeah, cork the champagne. Keep drinking that orange juice, though. You don't have enough vitamin C. Or when you and your anarchist trad wife friends get together for brunch, just make sure to actually talk about real radical things you can do. Because if you already have a way of gathering with your friends, you should just turn it into talking about more than just how your day is. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like I need to put on the record that what I said, that what I was trying to say is we need feminism, not anti-trad wife. Yeah.

I don't know how that was conveyed. I was trying to recruit you into my trad wife cult. Thank you for clarifying, Mia, but that was very much understood. But being a little bit literal right now is not bad. Yeah, Gare, so true. I just think about the ways that I've found my people and the way that I have made friends

My community, obviously, like the taglines of, you know, talk to your neighbors and things like that are absolutely important. But the recommendation, you know, obviously joining orgs are great. Sure, that's a great talking point. But that's not really how I met my community. The people that are essentially my family now

I meant by going to content and different creators shows and music and different events where we had mutual interest, even if that meant that I had to drive pretty far and found people that liked the things that I like.

And it turns out a lot of the people that like the things you like believe the things you believe. And if they don't, they're usually pretty open to hearing you out. Yeah. And I think it's super important to listen to your friends. And also, like I've said this quite a bit, support your friend's weird hobby. Yeah. That's super crucial. Listen to the people around you. And it's not easy. I...

Had basically no friends for a very long time because I did not have the right people around me. And it took a lot of effort to find my core humans. I mean, I'm not recommending this. And several of us did do this. I moved to a different state. You save up for it. It's definitely not affordable thing to do. Definitely not an easy thing to do.

But I don't know where I would be without those people. And I love them. Yeah. Politics and culture do go hand in hand in so many ways. And kind of cultural engagement and ways to kind of grow your social network, especially, you know, in places where there's probably where there's, I mean, in my case, you know, like trans people, queer people, people that I'm kind of around and people who I'm like, you know, concerned about, like personally, people I like know, you know, going into these next four years, you

I guess the biggest thing I was kind of thinking about last night is like, yes, these next four years are going to suck. And in many ways, everything will just get slightly worse. But I know that myself and those I know immediately around me will be fine. We will be okay. Things will be worse, but we already have networks. We already have community. We have these things built up to take care of each other and provide...

the things that we need. And this is something that we'll be talking more about in kind of the next few months. Like we, we, we have, we have that. And that that's taken effort. That doesn't just happen by itself. It requires effort and requires resistance to this idea of like community nihilism, this kind of belief that like community is like not a real thing that doesn't actually exist, which is a very privileged thing to believe because there's people out there who rely on this and will continue to rely on this even more in these next few years.

But there are those without that. And that's the people I'm most concerned about. It's queer kids. It's trans kids who do not have those networks, do not have those communities, people who are isolated. Like that is who I am most concerned about. And I understand the impulse to kind of isolate and just go online because that's safer than having to go out into the real world, or at least it feels safer.

but I don't think that's actually real. I think that leads to its own forms of detrimental harm. So it requires a getting off Discord and going into your community and trying to make friends, which can be scary, but it is incredibly crucial. I think we should talk about joining actual orgs as well. I think some other people on this call can speak more to that and the utility of those as well. But I think first and foremost, even getting a network of friends outside of orgs is also a very...

It's not even crutch. It's just like a life support system that is going to be super important. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to throw to Margaret for a second because she looks like she really wants to say something. Oh, and I don't actually disagree with anything that you're saying. No, not at all. I think that stuff is absolutely crucial. I wanted to just say that like... I think there's actually a weird blurriness in the lines between an organization and a friend group, right? And I've...

The problem isn't necessarily subculture. The problem is if we have this idea that there's a hegemonic subculture, like in order to be a radical, you have to be part of our clique, right? And that's a problem. Whereas if whatever clique you're already part of or any subculture you're already part of, you turn that radical. I think that is what Sophie was talking about. But then, yes, there's a lot of people who have no access to any of that. And some of it, as I think you're saying, is, well...

If you only hang out with your friends on Discord, maybe it's time to start meeting up in person. And even if that's very complicated to do. But I also think that there's a huge importance to open-door organizing. And organizing... When I say orgs, I don't mean go join PSL or any authoritarian cult. Or that there should never be one organization that says, this is the strategy that we have to use to fight this. But instead...

If you get together with the people that you want to get together with and say, this is the problem we're dealing with. How do we deal with it? And that is how you can create an organization. And if you do that, many of those organizations, I would hope would have open door policies and be public because there are so many isolated people who want to be involved, who don't have any kind of like cultural cache with which to get into a more subcultural group. I think this is why churches are very good at recruiting. Unfortunately, depending on the church,

But like, because you can just show up and they'll be like, okay, you have a community now, right? And that is what people desperately want, I think, right now. And we have to be careful. We don't want to just be like, oh, therefore we should replicate what they do. But I think that overall, what our movement needs is instead of gatekeepers, we need ushers. We need people to help people find their way into the movement, to help bring them in and figure out like, hey, what are you good at? Or what are you interested in being good at? Here's how you can apply it.

And I want to really quickly use a case study that happened from the last Trump election that I think was actually fairly useful. I was living in a small town, a small city with a fairly vibrant anarchist community. And when Trump was elected, we called for anarchist assemblies and they were open door and they were,

places where you don't get together to plan crime. But all of these different mutual aid groups would come and bring representation. People would say, this is what we're working on. This is what we can use help with. And they weren't decision-making bodies. They were information-sharing bodies. And a lot of different groups spun up out of it that are still around, like herbal clinics and different mutual aid organizations. Because we just said,

"Hey, everyone who cares about this, let's get together and talk about what we want to do." And I found that to be an incredibly useful thing. And it's like the kind of thing I would pitch to people is not necessarily, and if you're not an anarchist, don't do it as the anarchist thing. Yeah, that's what I care about. That's what I'm excited about. Yeah, I just wanted to offer, like, first of all, like get outside if you can, like touch grass. I know touch grass can be very condescending and I don't mean it like that. I just like,

I was feeling stressed last week and I went off and I climbed to the top of a mountain and I sat there by myself for a while and it was nice and it was so quiet. I could hear like this little hawk's wings beating and that was really good for me. That's what I like to hear. It would not have changed the outcome one bit if I had stayed and sat on twitter.com for four hours instead of doing that. So I want you to all take time for yourselves and do things that kind of

Make you feel hopeful. I want to build off what Margaret said. There are so many skills that all of you have that you could share with someone. I think when I started being an anarchist, it was largely because I was going to a bike co-op and like people shared their skills with me and I shared my skills with them and we all shared our stuff with each other. And I worked out that we could just rely on other people for that shit. And it didn't need to be hierarchical or based on some transfer of material goods. People just want to help each other.

And a lot of people have messaged me saying that they know that I participate in Mutal Aid and they want you to. If you can't see it, then you have to start it and that's okay. You can change the world if you make a cooler full of sandwiches and give them to people who are hungry. I guarantee if you start doing that shit, you will find other people and they will say, hey, what are you doing? Oh, I'm feeding people. Why? Because they're hungry. Can I help? Yes. It's that easy.

And like, we can build from there. We don't have to agree with them on everything, first of all, but we can build from there. And I think it can be really scary, but like now is the time to start. Not once things get worse, you know, four, eight years ago was the time to start, but we can't go back. And I want to kind of finish up with that, that like, we can't go back.

I don't care where someone was yesterday. I don't care where they were last week. I don't care where they were last year. Like all that matters is where they are now. Yeah. And we can build forward from here. We cannot go back and change things. And it is not worth doing endless recriminations. It doesn't matter. It's happened.

It's on us to decide how we react now. And you can react in a way that strengthens our communities and that builds ways of taking care of each other, which aren't ways of controlling each other. That's all that you need to do to make this so much less despairing, so much less terrible.

And so much less deadly for some people. And I know that we're doing that here. Check in on my friends. I'm in the Dallian Gap. I'm checking in on my mutual aid friends. And if you don't have that, I want you to build that. And I promise it's not something that's out of reach. You can do it. Yeah, I want to add one last thing. I think a lot of people think they don't have skills. You do have skills. The thing that I did when I started organizing was I moved chairs around so that people could have meetings by moving chairs. And I helped take care of people's kids.

And I like helped put posters up. Right. People people can do things. You have things that you can do. And it's it's time to lock in. That's that's that's what we have from here. It is it is it is time to lock in. It's time to organize. It is time to get prepared to fight. Yeah. Yeah. This is just the first episode after the election in the coming weeks, coming days, coming months. We're going to go into very specific detail on things.

We are going to provide different information and resources and continue to defend against disinformation and misinformation. And this is a fucking daily show. We will be getting into all of these topics, especially in these next 75 days to help prepare just topic by topic. Yeah. It's going to be a long four years.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things crumbling and how to pick up the pieces. Whoa.

Crumbling. We love to crumble. Yeah. And part of that is understanding what is going to happen and how it is going to happen.

and absorbing that knowledge and what you can do with it. So today, James is going to tell us about Trump's plans for migrants. Yep. Yeah. I guess in terms of what's going to happen, we don't know, right? Trump said a lot of stuff in his first term and kind of didn't stick the landing on a lot of it. He tried, but they're more experienced now. And I think crucially, they have a much more favorable Supreme Court and probably will have an even more favorable Supreme Court by the end of this term. Yeah.

So a plan to deport up to a million people this year was one of the very few concrete and tangible promises that the Trump campaign made. They had a lot of vibes, nasty vibes. But in terms of like, we will do X by Y, this was one of the very few.

Now, Trump tried to deport a lot of people in his first term, right? The one consistent part of his policy ever since he rode sideways down an escalator in 2015 and then shit-talked Mexican people has been anti-migrant policy. He didn't really stick the landing on mass deportations in his first term. In fact, Biden deported more people in 2023 than Trump did in any year of his first term. In fact, Trump also fell behind

Obama in terms of deportations per year. None of that means that he won't be able to do that this time, right? I'm just trying to put some numbers on his promises last time. So

I want to look first at how he could go about his promise in his second term. One thing that he said he will do is use Title 42 again. So if people have not listened to the series I did last May or June on Title 42, I would like to direct them there. Title 42, as a reminder, is a public health law. And it's a public health law that, in this interpretation, allowed CBP, specifically Border Patrol,

to immediately return people to Mexico without processing them first. Sometimes they call it catch and release, right? What it resulted in was these are not technically deportations, but it

When Trump says something, I don't think he's considering the exact meanings of what he's saying, right? So if we look at Title 42 expulsions, if he's going to bring back Title 42, reaching that 1 million per year number is pretty easy. In fact, that happened in 2022, again, under Biden, right? So if he considers those to be deportations, that's within his 1 million per year goal, right?

It's reasonable that he will reach to say that he will be able to reach that and he'll be able to do that with the current infrastructure, right? Without massively upgrading CBP, ICE, ICE detention facilities, immigration judges, all those things. Yeah. So like,

If we consider those to be deportations, then one million a year is very much something that we might well see. Do you know where we're at this year? Or it hasn't been released yet? I don't know. 2022 was the last stats I could find. I linked to the CBP. If people want to look at the Title 42 and Title... So Title 8, it's the immigration law under which people are normally received, right? Title 42 ended in May of 2023, May 11th, 2023, with the end of the COVID-19 emergency because...

The reason they were using public health law as immigration law was because of this health emergency, right? Now, obviously, it was used extremely cynically. For instance, there weren't exemptions for vaccinated people. But nonetheless, that's why they were using it. And when the federal emergency for COVID-19 ended, so did Biden's excuse for using Title 42. I will link to the CBP data center in the notes so people can see Title 42 versus Title 8 over the last few years.

As I pointed out last week, the US can also fund deportations of migrants further south. And it's done this in Panama. I had a series from there last week. People hadn't listened to it. I would love them to do so. But the numbers that they've been able to achieve there are pretty low. And I don't think that's really going to meaningfully impact his target. So...

Let's talk about what everyone is most afraid of, which is mass deportation to people who are already living in the United States. Right. That is definitely what his right wing trolls have been sort of hyping up, certainly over the last few weeks. Right. The idea that they are going to come to your house.

and find you if you're an undocumented person in the United States. So to talk about this, I want to talk about, first of all, the real nuts and bolts of how he would be able, or if he would be able to do this. And I draw very heavily here on a report by the American Immigration Council, who did some calculations on the cost of a single ICE detention, the cost of a single raid, the amount of agents that would be required to meet this kind of capacity. And there are...

two models that they use, and those are the models I think are most relevant. If we look at people who are in the United States without permanent legal status, we make an estimate for numbers. We're looking at about 11 million undocumented people. That's not going to be perfect, but if we use that as a ballpark...

and then 2.3 million people who have entered since the end of Title 42, and they're on various forms of bail or parole or bond, and they don't have a permanent status here either. So we're looking at somewhere in the region of 13 million if Trump wanted to deport all of those people. Now, to do that, he would need to massively expand ICE detention facilities. About half of ICE's staff aren't

contrary to what you might believe about ICE, kicking in people's doors and deporting them. Half of ICE's staff work for something called Homeland Security Investigations. It's not that those people don't do deportations, they do, but they mostly focus on human trafficking, drug trafficking, transnational crime. Now, sometimes those people also do deportations. People might be familiar with the big HSI raids on certain employers who are employing a lot of undocumented people.

Those still result in deportations, but that's not their primary tasking. And HSI has historically preferred not to do the deportation work because they feel that that makes it very hard for them to do the other work of monitoring human and drug trafficking, because evidently migrants are going to be scared to go anywhere near HSI if they know that HSI could deport them, right? So they're not going to talk to them.

Now, it would be very easy for Trump to retask those agents, right? That would obviously undermine what is done to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking. Whether or not he cares is a question that's, I don't know, I think I probably have an answer for that, but I guess I'm for debate somewhat. So Trump has already called, in addition to potentially re-equipping those HSI agents,

He said he wants to employ 10,000 more Border Patrol agents. BP agents can do deportations, but it's not BP agents who are coming to your door in Chicago and coming after you. That's ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He's also said he wants to give Border Patrol agents a $10,000 retention bonus and a 10% raise. Just to put it into perspective, there are 20,000 BP agents right now.

So that would be about a 50% increase, right? This is not something he can do quickly. They need to go through the academy. They need to be recruited, trained, background check, etc. Border Patrol has a lot of waivers right now. So we can waive requirements that other law enforcement agencies would have for you to work for them, if that makes sense, right? Be it a GED or a college degree or another language or whatever.

They are offering waivers a lot right now. They can increase that number of waivers to recruit more people, right? But that would still take a long time. So the estimate the American Immigration Council has is that to remove all of those 13 million people in that sort of in the one mass deportation, as opposed to the million people a year scenario, would require between 220 and 409,000 staff. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a lot of people. So, I mean, like, for comparison as to how many that actually is, the United States military active duty is about a million people. Yes, that's a comparison. Not the army, not the navy, the military. Yeah. All of it. This would put DHS at, like, substantially more personnel than, like, the Marine Corps, right? Yeah. Not that people don't want to do. It's just, like, it is actually...

We've talked a lot about how there are not guardrails on Trump like there were last time. That is true. And that is a very realistic thing to like be worried about and scared about. But we're not just talking about guardrails. We are talking about a logistical hurdle. It is not a

or necessarily possible thing to make an agency like that that much larger and have it actually function. Right. Like, this is just physics we're talking about here. Yeah. It's the same with anything. If CoolZone suddenly received $100 billion from Jeff Bezos and he said, do anything you want with it, we could not scale up to half a million employees. Like, it's simply, we have absolutely no capacity to handle that. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, I think what people have to remember is that every door-kicking ICE agent needs enablers, right? They need paid. They need health insurance. They need human resources. They need training. This would take a very long time. Sorry, it's 1.3 million or so. Okay. I think it's a little less. That's 2017 data. So it probably is closer to a million now, but slightly over a million. But this is close to, that's close to half. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's in addition to what they already have. 409 plus whatever they have. It would also, of course, mean substantially increasing their investigative capacity because most deportations right now, when ICE arrests someone, happen when someone else has already arrested that person. So the person who's in detention federally or on a state level for something else that they did and they're undocumented, that's when ICE can take them and deport them, right? Yeah.

They'd have to also increase their ability to search out and find people. I'm not saying they can't, but you can't take, you know, fucking Tim Pool, bring him into ICE. He's not going to instantly know how to find people, where to find people, right? So this will take time. There is a practical constraint on him doing this, even if there aren't other constraints within the balance of powers.

So Stephen Miller, dude with the giant head. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be more specific when we talk about like conservatives who are about to come into power, who have like a weirdly huge head. Yeah. Okay. That's like, find me a Californian who has strong opinions on gluten.

Yeah, that's me. I'm pro-Gluten. Yeah. Yeah. So Stephen Miller is, he is the guy who's crafted a lot of Trump's nefarious border policies, right? It was Miller who, who took out title 42. And I want to talk about this a bit later. One thing that Miller did effectively, I don't want to say well, because it was objectively horrible, but one thing that Miller was good at was finding this obscure piece of public health law and

and mobilizing it against migrants, right? I think if you'd spoken to me in 2015 and said, what do you think Trump's going to do against migrants? I wouldn't have said, I'll be title 42 of the United States code, you know, that regulates public health. He or people within his team were very effective at finding that and using that effective enough that the Biden administration kept it for three years after the Trump administration did it for one year. Right. And so Miller could find some, some niche kind of leverage,

law, what he wants to do is use the National Guard from cooperative states, right? And to use the National Guard from cooperative states in states that are not cooperative and where local law enforcement would not cooperate, right? So

Some quote-unquote sanctuary states, and there's probably an overstatement, they don't in theory refer undocumented people they arrest to ICE for deportation, right? Now, what federal fusion centers do is allow for that, even if it is a sanctuary state, actually. But in theoretical terms, a sanctuary state would not at least contact ICE about every undocumented person they arrested, right? So...

Miller's plan is to use the National Guard. Again, that's not what the National Guard does right now. They're not really trained up for doing that either. I've seen plenty of National Guard folks on the border. It's a bunch of scared 18-year-olds.

Right. Who are trying to get money for Robert and I have met Texas National Guard soldiers. They're kids. They're kids. Yeah. Now, to be fair, that's not saying they're they're like innocent or inherent, like every group of soldiers who has done any good or bad thing. And often, but usually both at the same time.

is a bunch of scared 18-year-old kids. Yes. That's been the case for 10,000 years. Yeah, that's true. Anytime you have conflict reporting, it's always shocking how young people are. It's always just like, oh, okay, all wars are fought by children. There's no non-child soldiers, with the exception of, I mean, that is the weird thing about the Ukraine war, right? Yeah. Like, I remember the first time I wound up at the front there, it was like, oh, this is actually, it is actually old men fighting this war. Old men who repeatedly told me,

It's either me or my kid shows up here and I already fucking lost my soul in Afghanistan. Yes. Like I literally had that interview with people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy to me. People who fought in Afghanistan and I'm fighting again. Yeah. I mean, I think those guys are probably out now. I'm talking about 2050. Yeah. 2024. It's 40 years later. I'm sure they're too old now, but. Robert, talking of being too old, I unfortunately am not too old to be honest.

to be obliged to transition to advertisement. So that's what we're going to do. You're never too old for that, James. In fact, the older you get, it's kind of like how if you reread Moby Dick at different points in your life, it's a completely different novel. Every 10 years, different book. Same thing is true with Ulysses. And the same thing is true with these advertisements. That's right. Save them, record them on your home device, and every couple of months, listen. And you'll learn something new from Chumba Casino. Every time.

All right, we're back. And I hope you've downloaded that Chumbler Casino advert for later. In the event of a grid down scenario, you could have a whole library of those to listen to. So talking of obscure legislations, we did, right? Trump and his team have mentioned this thing called the Alien Enemies Act. It sounds like Alien Ant Farm, but it's not in any way related, sadly. Not nearly as good as Alien. For one thing, its cover of Smooth Criminal, terrible. Terrible.

Terrible, yeah. Nowhere near the same standard. That's a joke for people who are over 30. Yes, anyone who tries to dance to that Alien Ant Farm song today not only has to think about the fact that Michael Jackson was definitely a pedophile, but also their knees no longer work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a lose-lose. Just sadly shuffling along. I can no longer skate properly. Moonwalking while crying, taking ibuprofen. No, I was at a streetlight show in Portland that was all millennials. And every time, like the pit was crazy, but also it sounded like a cement mixer when everybody's knees got going. Yeah.

They're doling out ibuprofen on the way out. So you're going to need this tomorrow, Sandra. So the Alien Enemies Act, it hasn't been used since the United States used it in the Second World War for internment camps, right? Which, at least for many of us, is a part of national shame, I guess. Like a pretty terrible fucking thing that the United States did. Obviously, for some folks in the Trump administration, this is something that they're kind of aspiring to, I guess.

Trump has said that he would like to use this to deport gang members. That's not really what it's for. And like even sources within DHS have pointed out that

they would have to prove that these migrants were sent by a foreign government, right? Or someone that the U S is at war with. This is going to be hard because like, if we look at Venezuelans who are representing a larger and larger proportion of migrants since the elections there, they will actively shit talk the government of their country at the first opportunity. I have met hundreds, if not thousands of Venezuelan migrants in California and in the Darian gap. And, uh,

Yeah, you're not going to find people who you can plausibly say were sent by Maduro that way. But Miller's pretty good at finding these obscure laws and ways of doing things. So we would be foolish to write this off entirely, but I don't think that will make up the bulk of these mass deportations.

So I want to go to that American Immigration Council report, which I'll link in the show notes, right? Assuming a million deportations a year, which is what J.D. Vance said to the New York Times, that's the sort of steady deportation scenario as opposed to the mass deportation of 13 million people scenario, which a steady one is more realistic in terms of practicality, right? The cost of that, assuming that 20% of undocumented people decided to leave on their own, would

would be about $88 billion a year, which is a large amount of money. We'll talk in a little bit about what you could get with that money. A one-off mass deportation would cost about $315 billion. The detention costs alone for that one-off mass deportation of 11 to 13 million people would be $167.8 billion.

which is probably why private prison group, GEO groups, stock soared this week, right? If Trump wants to deport people, the average deportee is detained for 59 days before they're deported. And so they are going to massively have to increase their capacity. Right now, their current detention contract includes a minimum of 29,790 beds between like

increases and other facilities they have access to. In early 2024, according to the American Immigration Council, they detained 39,000 people. Astute listeners will notice that 11 million and 39,000 are quite disparate as numbers go. Yeah.

I mean, you're talking about a huge percentage of... We'll get into this later, but in California, Texas, and Florida, it's between 5% and 6% of the population are undocumented, right? You're talking about building prison cities if you were to detain that many people in one fell swoop. Again, that takes time. But in this case, it's private sector actors like GeoGroup. They can tend to move a little bit faster, right? So to put that cost in terms of...

things that the government could do with the money instead right a decade of 1 million deportations a year means foregoing 40 450 elementary schools or 2.9 million new homes or funding the head start program for 79 years a single year of mass deportation would cost nearly twice the national institute of health's annual budget or 18 times the global annual expenditure on cancer research

So I guess that's shit that we could have instead. But that's not all because undocumented households, contrary to what you might have heard, pay taxes. And if we deported every undocumented person in the United States, we look at 2022 numbers, undocumented households paid 46.8 billion in federal taxes and 29.3 billion in state and local taxes. That's a huge amount of tax revenue foregone, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

That, again, that won't be the end of it because some industries like construction and agriculture rely heavily on undocumented labor. And if you're worried about the cost of your groceries now, if people voted for Donald Trump because their eggs cost more,

Shit will cost an awful lot more if we deport all the undocumented people working in agriculture, right? Sectors of that industry do not function economically without underpaid migrant labor. And this is something that migrants are very aware of, actually. I broadcast an interview with one of them last week where they know that they will be underpaid because they're undocumented, but they still think that that's worth it for them to be safe, right?

So forgoing that, I don't think Trump has not proposed a solution to this. This long-form thinking is not what he does, certainly in his speeches, but that would have a massive impact on the economy. What he would also need to do is persuade the countries that these migrants come from to take them back. And that has historically been something that has been extremely difficult. The State Department doesn't see...

sort of process of persuading people to accept migrants is really within its remit. And it certainly sort of bristled at having to do this. The last Trump administration, I think a mass deportation like this, it

It would trigger some nations refusing to take people back. For instance, Venezuela. Venezuela is already not taking people back from Panama. The US funds deportations for Panama. Venezuela and Panama ceased relations after the election in Venezuela and Panama, rightly claiming that that was a fraudulent election. And as a result, Panama is now looking for a third country to deport these people to. If the US attempted to deport potentially millions of people to Venezuela again, there's no guarantee that Maduro has to accept them back.

I can hear a lot of people saying, how is that allowed? To not accept to take them back? Yeah. I mean, international law is like, it's a unicorn. If everyone agrees that they see it, then they see it, but it's not real. So who is going to make them?

I guess like, like whether it's allowed or not is kind of immaterial. Maduro is not allowed to steal the election, right? You're not allowed to abuse human rights. Migrants are allowed to cross any country they want and claim asylum anywhere that they feel safe. But like, here we are. So yeah, in theory, the country should accept its citizens back in practice. Will it? I don't know. Certainly it becomes like a bigger issue when you have millions of people. Right. And if we have millions of people deported back, then like, yeah,

If we can't deport them, where are we going to detain them? That gets back to the cost of detentions, right? Talking of costs, you should probably cover the costs of our podcasting setup here by pivoting to adverts again. Yeah.

We are back. And for the final segment here, I want to talk about who Trump could pursue with these deportations, right? There's two major groups. The obvious starting point would be the 2.3 million people who crossed between January of 2023 and April of this year before Biden signed his asylum ban. To be precise, that's 2,264,830. Those people are

don't have permanent immigration status. Those are the people who you've heard from on this podcast who were in Hukumba, the people who we've interviewed for the last year and a bit now. They have various immigration status, but none of them are permanent. None of them have permanent residency. All of them are obviously registered, right? They normally have a notice to appear in court, which would make them easy to find and potentially...

easy to deport. The other group of people are the undocumented migrants who have been here for longer than that. Many of them have most have been in the country for more than a decade. They're working. They often have citizen children, right? Because of birthright citizenship, most of them pay taxes. Most of these people have some form of revocable legal status. So that might be something called a temporary protected status. We talked about a temporary protected status last week as well, but it applies to people who are already in the country when it's granted.

And it allows them to stay for a designated period of time while it's not safe to deport them to their home country. Let's say there's been a war or a natural disaster, right? It's not safe to deport them, but it gets renewed two months before the end of that period. Let's say it renews every 18 months and you find out two months before the end of that period if it's not going to be renewed. If they didn't renew those TPSs, those people could either change status or would become undocumented, right?

The TPS has existed since 1990 and there are about 860,000 people on TPS right now. The other major category that people will probably be more familiar with are DREAMers, people who came to the United States as children and are undocumented but they benefit from something called DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and about 834,000 young people benefit from this which allows them to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. Trump did

did try and go after this in his previous term in 2018. He ended up in a two-year court battle, which sort of finished up with NAACP versus Trump. And that ran out the clock on his term, and Biden reinstated DACA. But again, because people have to register for DACA, their whereabouts are easier for someone like ICE to potentially find. Then after that, we have people who entered without being detected. We have people who overstayed their visas.

those people might be harder to find. The model of the undocumented migrant people having their head comes across the border with carpet shoes, sneaks past a BP checkpoint, and then lives in the United States without ever encountering migration authorities, that's actually not the majority model, but those people do exist and they would be harder for ICE to find potentially.

Trump has also vowed to end parole programs that allow Ukrainians and Afghans to enter the USA and work. I would think that some of those would be pretty unpopular. People have been much more broadly in solidarity with Ukrainian migrants than they have with other migrants from other parts of the world, they'll say. But it would be an easy one again for him to end, right? The last thing he's really said he wanted to do is to end birthright citizenship. Yep.

That is, I spoke about this before in our agenda 47 episodes. That's pretty clear in the 14th amendment. They have some kind of fringes on the flag legal theory around this, but like,

I would think that that would require a constitutional amendment, but who knows, because he might have both houses and the Supreme Court on his side. So he might just be able to get away with doing that. This obviously wouldn't rescind citizenship from people who previously have children who are citizens. Talking of people who have children who are citizens, there are about 4 million mixed-status families in the United States. So this deportation plan could potentially separate parents from children, children from parents, children from their older parents who they take care of.

it could destroy these families, right? Deportations always destroy families. I've seen this happening myself and it's horrible. The states where this would most likely happen, the states with the highest documented population are California, Texas, and Florida. California thus far retains its sanctuary policies. Texas and Florida very much do not, right? And so those would be the states where there would be the highest risk of this happening. That's between 5% and 6% of their population. And that's kind of...

Where I want to finish up today, I've got some more stuff I wanted to say about his border policy, but I think I'm going to save that for another episode because the border and immigration are different things. And I think sometimes this is something that a lot of legacy media doesn't understand. They have immigration reporters who report on immigration law, the stuff I've spoken about today, but the

Border is not somewhere that they go and it's not something that they cover very well. If you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I've spent a lot of time at the border on the ground in the mountains and the deserts. And that's something that we've covered in great depth here. And I'm really happy that listeners have a really complete understanding of it.

Would California actually be able to enforce being a sanctuary state or no? Yes, its law enforcement doesn't have to call ICE, right? The federal government cannot compel local law enforcement, state law enforcement to do its work. That is very well established. Again, nothing's off the cards when you have both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. But again, that would take time and it would take a court battle.

So what they can do now is not report those people, right? Not say, hey, we got someone here. He came in because we found him with a bag of weed. He's undocumented. You know, he was driving 35 in a 30. He's undocumented. These are things that people who are undocumented have to worry about, right? Like for those of you who don't have undocumented folks in your life, like,

It's a speeding ticket. It's the most minor. It's not paying a parking ticket and ending up in court, right? Like this shit is so minor to so many people, but it could tear someone's life apart. And so I want to like finish up by saying that, yeah, Texas and Florida are going to be the places where we see this. 5% of the population is a large amount of your population. If he even attempts half of that,

People are going to see this. It's going to happen in your community. Now, I'm not saying he will, but if it does, like the time to start organizing to protect people you care about is now. Be that with donations to groups like Alotrolado, who have successfully sued the Trump and Biden administrations for migrants' rights.

Be that with organizing such that your undocumented friends don't end up in court because they couldn't pay a parking ticket, right? Even if that means you paying someone, giving someone 50 bucks for a parking ticket so that it doesn't ruin the rest of their life. Whatever it is, the way that we prevent this is through strong communities. We have to start building those now. I know we've said this a lot this week, but we're probably going to say a lot for the next three months. Like,

A lot of people have reached out to me since the Trump election, which was two days, but also like seven years ago, because that's how time works, saying that they want to participate in Mutilate at the Border.

I would love for you to come and join us. Of course I would. And like, I think people have heard a lot about a mutual aid set up because it's something I do a lot, but that I don't want you to come here and do mutual aid tourism. Like I want you to come here and understand and learn what we do and then do it yourself or just do it yourself. Like there was a time when this didn't exist and people started it. Right. And you can start it too.

And I'm not going to tell you the specifics of what I think you should do, because I don't know. I don't know what the legal environment will be. I don't know what the legal environment will be in your state. But whatever the legal environment is, it will be better if we have strong and cohesive communities to look after one another, right? If...

You're looking to donate your money. I've said it before, alotrolado, where I would suggest it. It's A-L-O-T-R-O-L-A-D-O.org. They've done really valuable work in defending migrants' rights in court. Haitian Bridge Alliance would be another great example of that. Will you link that? Yep. I'll put them both in the show notes, yeah. But the way we confront this is together. And it's super important that now, in the next few months, if there are undocumented people in your life, that you check in with them.

that you talk with them about what the best plan is. We don't know what's going to happen. I've outlined some scenarios here. None of them may happen, right? We don't know yet, but we have these three months and we'd be foolish not to use them. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to your friends, begin organizing. The solution is not despair. The solution is community. And I know it can be really easy to despair. And if you're listening and you are undocumented, I'm

understand how petrifying this is and just know that like we're all thinking of you and hopefully there are people in your life who are there to help you and to help you get through a difficult time

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. At Amika Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy.

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