It Could Happen Here Weekly: RNC Edition
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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.

Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And boy, they sure seem to be, don't they? The 2024 election is terrifying a lot of people at this stage after a disastrous debate performance by Joe Biden. And this episode will be coming out on the Monday that the Republican National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

A lot of people are terrified about a Trump dictatorship, about Project 2025, and all that that entails. And I want to tell you, first off, you know, we will be having a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison, Sophie, and I are all going to be there all week. We'll start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, and then we'll probably have some

summary content after that the next week. So we will be getting you our experiences here and everything that we encounter on the ground during what I think is going to wind up being a pretty important week for the American fascist movement. But right now, what I want to address is

The sense of kind of unbridled terror that I've seen from a lot of people around me, not just leftists, but regular people that I know in my life, folks who are just kind of like casual Democrats, not the kind to think much about politics, but have suddenly seen the potential of what a Trump second term might bring with it and are rightfully terrified. So I want to first off tell everyone in that bucket, don't panic.

That's what this episode is about, and I'm going to try and give you some good reasons not to panic, some reasons why our situation is not as dire as it seems. And my goal here is not to lull you into inaction or stop you from preparing. You should, in fact, be preparing, and we talk about the various things you can do organizing in your community, taking action to support migrants, to support each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women seeking reproductive justice, and to support

That's our daily bread and butter. Right now, I want to give you some reasons for optimism about victory and the overall struggle against these fucking maniacs. So...

As most regular listeners will know, back in the spring of 2019, I published the first season of It Could Happen Here, which was originally a scripted podcast about the very real possibility of a civil conflict in the United States. The years since have proven several of my predictions painfully accurate. I started the series with fictional vignettes from the perspective of an American civilian watching American tanks roll through the streets of their city.

Within a year, thousands and thousands of listeners had variants of that exact experience thanks to the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled and more than a little frightened by the response that some people had to the first iteration of It Could Happen Here. During 2020, while I was on the ground in four different states, dozens and dozens of people told me the series had influenced their own choices for how to act and organize on the ground with their friends out in the world.

And that is humbling and a little bit frightening. And I promise you, I'm not laying this out to brag or try to make an argument from authority. I'm not saying I predicted something five years ago and was right, so you should listen to what I have to predict now. In fact, I kind of want to do the opposite because in another podcast I recorded in 2019 on the anti-vax movement – this would have been an episode of Behind the Bastards –

I laid out a theoretical pandemic, and I described it spreading almost exactly the way the COVID-19 pandemic really did spread just a few months later.

And yet, in February of 2020, when COVID-19 had been confirmed to have entered the United States and was spreading over other parts of the world like wildfire, I had friends ask me what I thought was going to happen. And, you know, thinking back to SARS, thinking back to bird flu, thinking back to the Ebola, you know, epidemic in 2014, my answer was nothing.

I don't know, it'll probably be fine, right? Someone, surely there's some adults out there who are going to, you know, lock this thing down. They're not just going to let it run rampant over the population, right?

There's a term for what happened to me there, and it's called normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the tendency to assume that whatever has gone down in the past will keep happening, often despite evidence to the contrary. Something like 80% of people display attributes of delusional thinking caused by the normalcy bias during disasters. Emergency responders sometimes call this negative panic.

We got a great example of negative panic a couple of weeks ago. Video went viral of a bull that got loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon, and it started just absolutely goring. Random yokels who were like wandering around in between churro stands and beer carts behind sort of the stands.

And a few of these people had the presence of mind to run. One guy even pulled a gun, and I don't know entirely how we want to rate that as a response. But a lot of folks just stared at the bowl, with just blank looks on their faces, utterly uncomprehending. You could tell from their body language

that they just couldn't believe what they were seeing, and some of those people got rammed right in the fucking gut by a bull a second later. The immediate danger that their eyes were telling them was there just seemed too far-fetched to take seriously.

The normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's just one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind towards catastrophes. And while we're on that subject, I should warn those of you who'd like to try their hand at predicting the future of a separate cognitive delusion, catastrophizing.

This is the tendency to assume that the absolute worst case scenario will come to pass. And it's often a trauma reaction. When you've been blown up, you kind of always expect the world to blow up around you. If you have been in a relationship with someone who blows up, who screams or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves during arguments, you might find yourself expecting that from anyone else that you date, even if they've never displayed that kind of behavior before.

And if you've watched an in-the-bag, sure-thing presidential election collapse and usher in a new era of fascist political capture in your country, well, you might see that kind of thing happening and expect it whenever the polls open up again.

The tricky part of actually predicting the future with any accuracy, which is a thing that I have been both professionally successful at and personally bad at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias with your catastrophizing. This is easier said than done, and I have noticed that my effort to reach this state has produced some peculiar cognitive effects of late,

In the six months that led up to the first presidential debate, I felt constant growing anxiety about a second Trump term. Only some of my anxiety was based on polling, which didn't look great for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I was anxious because I saw so many people around me, and I'm not talking about folks on Twitter, but in the real world, go, well, obviously Biden's got to win. There's no way Trump gets elected again. And then go about their day.

Then the debate happened. Joe went on stage, barely able to speak at a legible volume, coughing, slurring his words, and dropping into tangents rather than making cogent cases to the country.

Everyone around me started to get terrified all at once. And the mainstream media did what it does and pivoted to round-the-clock coverage of the issue of Biden's competency. Now, some people have alleged that this is because the media has some sort of an agenda here. And I really don't credit the media as someone who has spent his life working adjacent to the mainstream media with that kind of capacity to plan what these people, what these reporters, what these news organs were doing.

was pivoting to the issue that was doing the most to raise our collective blood pressure. Because among other things, that's what social media has trained them to do, because that's where the fucking money is, right? You know, not that this issue didn't exist before that. If it bleeds, it leads has been a long-time axiom in the field. But that's what's happening here too, right? And because...

the money is in saying and talking about the things that gets people's blood pumping the most, the question of is Joe Biden doomed soon yielded to is democracy doomed as analysts and pundits started hyping up Project 2025, a blueprint for fascist takeover of the U.S. published by the Heritage Foundation last year. Now, I am not a pollster, and I don't claim to base any of what I say next on some kind of mathematic expertise, but

But I don't think we're doomed. I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable, even in the likely event that Biden loses. And I think our position is a lot stronger than most people realize. This is why right-wing influencers and strategists have started going so hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like fucking Cobra Commander. The best example of how mask-off the fascist right has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who said this during a recent press conference. The

The reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Another of these guys is Jack Posobiec, a former Navy intelligence officer turned supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher.

Jack spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for CPAC, where he said this. I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here. We'll replace it with this right here. Amen.

Now, I should note, folks, when he says this right here, he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's not a subtle man, but he does speak for a frighteningly large and influential bloc of Republicans. Both of these guys are end results of 80 years of conspiracy theories and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and their fail-sons, and at this point, fail-grandsons.

The mainstream media and most voters in this country did their best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power. Mouths watering, dicks hard, guns loaded, and people are freaking out. Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people. Now, obviously, Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the fringes of the American right for years now.

Nothing they're saying is new. But Trump's likely victory in the Supreme Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot of people to conclude that Project 2025 is Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office.

This is something guys like Posobiec and Roberts want you to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away from confrontation. Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding that if they can just convince you that the fight is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has spent the last two weeks since the debate, quote, tweeting every left-wing media person he can find and saying six months.

to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic.

Jack is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier, he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy. One of them that I bring up often because I think it illustrates something important is the ODA loop. This is the process by which people make decisions and act in combat situations, and it stands for the different stages of this process are observe, orient, decide, act.

If you can disrupt any part of the Oda loop, you can stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding or from carrying out their actions.

Jack and his peers want you to panic. They want you to make plans to leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all evidence of your political sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe that nothing matters any longer because what matters most to him is that you and people like you are out of the picture, you know, either dead or so scared that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way against him and his friends.

Now, my job as a semi-professional Cassandra and as a guy who reports on the far right is to tell you this. A Trump dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look. And we will talk about all of that after some ads.

We're back. Now, I am not primarily an election guy, and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff. The polls are bad for Biden, and I have no interest in trying to delude anyone to thinking this is all some big nationwide polling error.

The only thing I will say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds-on bet, but if you average the swing state polls, he and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty much everywhere.

Now, you're going to get a different analysis depending on which poll expert you trust. The new guys at 538 still have it mostly as a coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver himself gives Biden under a 30% chance, which is terrible, and also about where Trump was in November of 2016. And we all do know how that election ended.

People are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying he's got a 29% chance of winning doesn't mean it's impossible for him to win, right? The situation is serious, but the future is not written. And you should remember that for good and for ill, the final results of this whole thing will come down probably to 100,000 voters or so in five or six states.

Now, it's also worth me saying this. Both of these candidates are old men. And statistically, it would not be unheard of or weird if one of them was dead before the election. Joe Biden could still lose in a palace coup from the rest of his party and get replaced. Anything can happen, and in U.S. politics, it often does.

Hey everyone, Robert here. Two days after I wrote this, something happened. There was an assassination attempt against former President Trump. I am recording this a couple of hours after it happened. A lot is unclear at the moment. Other than that, somebody shot at him. It looks like he was wounded from glass shrapnel when the teleprompter was hit. That's what the Secret Service is currently claiming. A shooter appears to have been outside the venue on a roof. And

Not much more I can say at this point. I will note, again, there's a lot of catastrophizing going on. People saying like, oh, this means he's definitely going to win reelection. When Reagan got shot, that Trump, you know, rocketed him to a reelection victory. You know, that's possible. That could be what happens here. It's definitely a solid case to be made for that. That's what happened with Reagan. But that's not always what happens when there are assassination attempts against sitting or former presidents.

On September 22nd, 1975, Sarah Jane Moore, a member of the Manson family cult, attempted to assassinate President Ford with a .38 revolver. He did not win re-election. So, you know, that's just as a note, like...

Sometimes what happens? It's impossible to say what's going to happen with this, but if you're looking to past U.S. history for precedent, you're still kind of in a situation where, well, really unclear what's going to go down. Now, that's all the horse race stuff I'm going to subject you to. We are now going to move forward with the rest of this episode trying to answer this question. What happens if Trump wins?

And I'm going to give you some very good reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first has to do with Project 2025. In short, this Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place the whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending separation of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go after dissidents, making recreational sex illegal, and criminalizing daily life for millions of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a roadmap to Christian dictatorship.

Now, I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't find this chilling, but let's be clear about what Project 2025 is. It is a 900-page document written by a think tank that has lost a lot of its influence and access to power over the last 10 years. The Heritage Foundation was once, as Molly Ball described in an article for The Atlantic, the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement.

But during the Obama years, the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started to get pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became clear that in a lot of ways, these guys were dangerously out of step with voters and kind of hard to work with. The pullback actually began in 2014 when the Heritage Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republican Study Committee retreat over a conflict around a farm bill.

Now, the think tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after Trump took office. Some of this was the result of the fact that conservative think tanks have seen a general decline in influence from the good old days, the height of their power. The Republican Party has won the popular vote in exactly one election this century, and as of 2022, we have seen them go through two disastrous midterm elections in a row and one disastrous losing presidential election.

Now, there's an interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundation's decline from 2022 by the Washington Post's Jeff Stein and Yagana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill as saying, people do not walk around in fear of the Heritage Foundation the way they did 10 years ago. And the main reason why is because Trump and the people around him were gaining a lot more influence, right? These old think tankers just didn't hold the juice that they used to. Now,

That article was published in response to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff that we have been bombarded with now for years.

This is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base, but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog shit at getting regular Americans on board because regular Americans look at this stuff and go, well, these people are fucking out of their minds.

I think the near panic around Project 2025 is potentially useful. It has the potential to line a lot of voters up and crucially, not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but against a Republican Party that has almost entirely yielded to the fascists in its midst. But I also see a lot of people describing Project 2025 as Trump's plan for when he takes office. And that's just not what it is.

These people will note that a lot of former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation, to which I say he hates a lot of the people who worked with him the last administration around. This is very common knowledge. Some people will also point out recently unearthed video of the director of Project 2025 back in 2023 telling a right-wing podcaster that Trump was very bought in with Project 2025. And maybe that's true, but I don't feel like you should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting his own.

Now, that kind of belief, though, does merge with statements you'll see from prominent progressive media figures, people like Chris Hayes, who recently tweeted,

Now, I like Chris, and I agree that it is important to set the stakes here for voters and to talk about Project 2025 because it's fucked up and we should do something about the fact that these people feel confident putting out open plans to end democracy and institute a Christian nationalist dictatorship. But...

What Chris says is not strictly accurate because Trump has a platform and it might have been influenced by Project 2025. I think it probably was. But his platform is called Agenda 47 and we have covered it on It Could Happen Here, our daily news program. This is something you should care about. Trump in his Agenda 47 plans.

Trump advocates for mass deportations of migrants, for an attack on the legal rights of the press and potentially the imprisonment of his political enemies. He threatens the use of special forces and airstrikes against cartels on Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy shit in Agenda 47. This is very serious stuff, and it is, crucially, the stuff Donald Trump has promised to do if he gets elected.

Now, a few days before I wrote this, the former president took to Truth Social to officially disavow Project 2025.

Now, do I think he's lying? Do I think he was aware of it? Do I think he cribbed some of it for Agenda 47? Yeah, he's Donald Trump. He lies all the fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy that he feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow Project 2025. And this is part of a general split between Trump and the faction of the party who want a strongman dictator type, but who aren't Christian nationalists and the chunk who are.

This is a natural cleavage, and we can see further evidence of this in the fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not call for a national ban on abortion. And if you watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable taking the standard right-wing line on this, because Trump is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner. You know, he can't...

entirely push back on the party on this, but he's clearly not motivated to do so. Now, does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban into law? No, of course not. But it means he understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have their use to him, he needs a lot of votes from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary.

If Trump does take power again, these natural cleavages will become more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power in a severely divided country that does not like him or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not made Trump more popular. Polls generally show a ceiling of around 42% of the country who like the guy, and that ceiling is remarkably stable.

There is also evidence that the sudden media focus on Project 2025 and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to end democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finished this episode, on Thursday, July 11th, Ipsos published a poll showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken after the debate, which put him and Biden close to a tie.

Now, this still isn't great for Biden because by all rights, this election should not be close. But I think a lot of people have made the mistake of conflating disgust for Biden with surging support for Trump. And that just is not what we're seeing.

More evidence for this comes from a recent ABC Your Voice poll, which showed 50% of the country having an unfavorable opinion of Biden and 59% having an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Part of why so many of these outright fascists have gone mask off is that they see these numbers too. They know that this moment right now is their best shot maybe ever at taking this country, crushing their enemies, and inflicting the pain that it is their only purpose in life to inflict—

And they might win. They might get to do that. The Heritage Foundation is not at the heart of the Trump campaign, but any step closer to total power for these people should ring alarm bells in every heart and head in this country. Yet the severity of the situation does not change this absolutely crucial fact. The fascists know the wind is no longer at their backs. And I'm going to talk about that when we come back from this ad break.

Despite how confident the Trump campaign and guys like Jack Posobiec are talking right now about their chances of winning, of dominating the government, of taking control of America for generations and purging the left, the reality is that their position is not nearly as stable as it seems.

And, you know, part of why I think a lot of folks buy into, a lot of folks on the left and liberals buy into the claims that the right is making right now about their guaranteed victory, about their looming inevitable victory, is that Americans tend to be pretty self-centered when it comes to politics. And it is understandable that this nail-biter of an election and Joe Biden's calamitous debate performance has people here feeling doomed and feeling like a new fascist world order is inevitable.

If you feel that way, though, I urge you to look around the world. Look to India, where authoritarian near-dictator Narendra Modi was just dealt a startling setback in the Indian general election. His party, the BJP, failed to win a majority for the first time since 2014. Now, this is not the end of Modi, but it is a shocking sign of where the wind is blowing and the backlash that has started to form against the far-right worldwide.

In the UK, the Labour Party just won a landslide election against the Conservatives, capping it into more than a dozen years of Conservative power. And in France, the snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron inspired the creation of a popular left-wing front against the far-right, which defeated the far-right in another historic election. Among other things, this new left alliance has promised to recognize the state of Palestine and increase support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia's invasion.

I could go on. Turkey's all-but-dictator President Erdogan has been bleeding support for years now and recently suffered a massive setback in regional elections around the country. The opposition Republican People's Party took the five largest cities in the country in an upset vote, including the capital, Istanbul, where Erdogan's party had invested massive resources.

Now, these upsets in India and Turkey are so worth discussing because both countries are years into their own version of the nightmare scenario that Donald Trump season two represents, right? They voted their fascists into power. These guys took control of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed civil violence for political gain. And yet, even with all that, even with all the power available to a modern security state, their hold on power is slipping, just as I read these words.

For many years, neo-Nazi activists sought to influence and build support within the Republican Party and talked about hiding their power level as they did so. Now, this is a term they cribbed from Dragon Ball Z, and it means, in essence, pretending not to be a crazy-ass fascist in order to get enough support from the normies that you can act like a crazy-ass fascist with the power of the state.

Well, the masks are off now. Nobody is hiding their power level anymore. And I am not so arrogant as to claim that I know that their defeat is around the corner. But I will tell you one thing. This is a make-or-break moment for the sons of bitches. If they fail now, they will find themselves exposed in a country that knows precisely who and what they are. And this means we will have the opportunity to destroy them.

How would we do that? Well, first off, I'm not going to give you a detailed, perfect roadmap for how you can participate in this and how we can easily destroy the fascists in the next, you know, five or six minutes of a podcast. But I do have some theories. I will elaborate on them more in subsequent episodes. And I want to emphasize right now that this is possible because the cultural power of the far right, which seems so mighty right now, actually does rest on a house of cards.

The Republican Party today is funded primarily by a coalition of car dealers who donate more than any other profession because their job depends on being able to scam consumers, multi-level marketing corporations, supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches, and of course, our old friends in the oil and gas industry. And...

There's a lot of ways to attack these different pillars of right-wing power, these people who are actually funding their media operations, who are funding a lot of these more radical candidates, and who are lobbying for changes in laws that hurt you and help them. And again, I'm not going to be able to give a comprehensive list of how you go about dismantling all of this. It is a formidable task, but you could do a lot of damage to the power of the far right by regulating car sales and punishing dealers who scam consumers, which is close to 100% of dealers.

You can ban the sale of unregulated supplements marketed as medical treatments, a thing that should be illegal but effectively is not. You can ban pyramid schemes and prosecute the criminals who have made fortunes off of them. These are counterattacks that will improve daily life for huge numbers of voters and do functional damage to the right's ability to move and maneuver.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that the only way to move on any of those issues is just to vote, right? Democrats have had decades to fight back against this shit, and they have failed by nearly every measure. But we have the potential of a general strike coming up in 2028 if the UAW has their way. And the catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party in this election has, I think, caused

created some space for new kinds of organizing. The last point I want to leave you with is one more piece of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards us is not so hale and hearty as it seems. In April of this year, the Atlantic published an article based on analytics of the most popular right-wing news websites in the country. They wrote,

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40% compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Writening, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet, to track right-wing media.

Some of the bigger names in the field that have been pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost 57% of its audience. Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81%. And The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91%.

Now, these numbers are startlingly consistent across right-wing media, and they are vastly worse than what liberal and left-leaning media has seen over the same time period. A number of ostensibly liberal sites like The Times have seen an increase in subscribers over the same period, and I can confirm to you that here at Cool Zone, we have more listeners and subscribers than we did in 2020. Now, should you feel like there's nothing to worry about just because the right-wing media is taking a fall? No. But what

this should be evidence of is that, again, their support has always largely been built on their ability to generate huge amounts of money and essentially buy attention from

And that's largely where guys like Ben Shapiro have gotten their cultural power. And that's made Ben Shapiro a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually brought him a lot of people who give a shit what he has to say. The actual number of people paying attention to the scary motherfuckers that you see in these clips that spread on liberal and lefty social media is very small. And it's very small because these people are crazy assholes who are not

who most of the folks around you, who are basically decent people because most people are decent, fucking hate.

What we have seen here, what we are seeing here, is the shattering of an illusion. And the popularity of a lot of right-wing media was only ever an illusion, popped up by an infusion of cash from billionaire fail-sons desperate to hold on to their money. Most people don't like or trust these folks. And the arrogance and certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and the sobeks of the country have been showing now, well...

It's caused them to expose themselves. There is precisely one thing you can always count on from fascists, and it's that they're dogshit at estimating risk. Time and time again, they convince themselves that they cannot be stopped and pick fights that they wind up losing. And that is perhaps the most reliable thing we can predict from their behavior, and maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you going forward. Now, I'm not saying that fascists are the best, but I'm saying that fascists are the best.

I also just retyped and re-recorded this ending in the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump. And I want to talk a little bit about that before we go out, because that is certainly potentially a game changer. You know, people saying this could change the whole election are not wrong.

But at this point, far from a guarantee as well, as I said earlier, there have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former presidents that have not moved the needle in an election either, at least not in a really clear way in favor of the person the attempt was against. So we don't know how this is going to play. One thing I have seen in the immediate wake of this within minutes of the attempt itself and video of it going up is

is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag fire situation. This is staged. This is obviously a fake attempt to

I don't see any evidence of that in the video that's out there. I do not believe this was faked. I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody would want to take a shot at former President Trump. The video does not show any clear weird signs that would make me suspect something odd was going on. One of the things that's come out, it looks like the shooter was on a roof nearby. Pretty clear evidence of that at this point.

There are some reports from people in the crowd who say that they pointed out the guy on the roof to police and were basically ignored. You know, the police didn't do anything. That also does not seem weird to me. And if it does to you, I want to explain something about these events because I've been to a number of events during presidential campaigns, the Secret Service is doing security and other kind of large scale, you know, events like this where there's a lot of different law enforcement agencies.

And at all of them, you will see snipers on the roof. It is not hard to find them. These guys, some of them, I assume, are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I know I've seen everyone that's around at one of these things, but...

You see a lot of them, right? And so do the cops, right? It's just not abnormal. And there are always a ton of law enforcement agencies. You know, this was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as events in, you know, a presidential campaign go, but you still have state and local cops. You still have at least the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret Service when it comes to federal agencies. So, you know, conservatively, at

At minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law enforcement agencies covering this event. Right. And there's definitely going to be some people there who know where all of the snipers are supposed to be. Right. Presumably within the Secret Service. But that is not the average cop on the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking around doing foot patrols, does not know where federal law enforcement has every single sniper set up.

And they are like – I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right? Well, that's not just a thing that can trip you up when you are trying to predict the future months or years in advance. It is a thing that can trip you up predicting something a minute in advance, right? Right.

You see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, hey, there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well, you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns. You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has some guys up on the roof, you know, sharpshooters. Not at all weird. You go, yeah, maybe you even see the guy. And the pictures I've seen, looks like he was wearing camo, looks like he was wearing the kind of combat gear that cops wear, but also that anyone can buy because cops look like...

You know, a lot of people who just buy this shit and do it recreationally, you know, go go shooting and training in the woods or whatever, like a lot of it's not hard to gain access to gear that at a glance would look enough like a cop. And my guess is that this guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my best shot at being able to get away with this is if I post up on a roof somewhere and assume that.

The cops that spot me immediately won't know right away what I am, right? And that does seem to be what happened at this moment. And, you know, I take that as a lot of things. Very unclear if this is going to, again, affect the election. But take it as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias. Because just because something seems like it's not weird, like it's not a sign of a change, of something very different about to go down...

Doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah, you can never trust your assumptions. And that goes both ways with this. I'm seeing a lot of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am someone who's about to head into the RNC, not thrilled that this has happened, but

But that doesn't mean we know what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean, among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic, but I don't know how much this moves the needle because I don't know how many people who can be convinced would be swayed by something like this, for how many people this could change their opinion on the election, and how many people are going to believe that

that this was real and not, you know, I've even seen people claiming that like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just really unclear how people are going to react, right? It's not worthless to look back to, you know, the attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that shit happened prior to the modern era of social media. All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting broken by the internet. So,

I'm not going to tell you this is a good time. I'm not going to tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But I am going to tell you the future is not written. And don't panic. Until next time, I'm Robert Evans, and this is It Could Happen Here. We'll be back later this week with coverage of the Republican convention.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And nothing says things falling apart better than as many Republicans as possible jammed into as small a place as possible with half of the cops in the United States of America there as well. With me is Sophie Lichterman and Garrison Davis, our on-the-ground reporting team for the Republican Convention National. Wow.

It's true. We're here. We are at the Republican National Convention the day after former President Donald Trump was nearly struck down by an assassin's bullet. And yeah, it's been pretty fun. Yeah, the vibes are great. Vibes are great. Actually, that's kind of the thing we should start with. I mean, the former president was shot yesterday, and the shit online has been absolutely unhinged. And I was expecting...

I was expecting a lot, but certainly a different vibe at the thing, which was, I think, basically the same vibe it would have had if the president hadn't been shot. People were, by and large, not acting different. Okay, so set the scene. We went to this red, white, and blue bar.

kickoff, festival party. Shocking amount of free alcohol. Shocking amount of free alcohol. How many people do you think were there? I don't know. Thousands. Definitely thousands of people. It was not crazy crowded, but it was big. The flyers said they were estimating 10,000 to 50,000 people over the course of like five, six hours. Yeah, that sounds about right. Trace Adkins performed and sang...

with the lyrics, Garrison. Well, this was actually a spoken word intro to a song. This was in the middle of the songs. Yes. We were in the middle. If you haven't heard, Trace is a country music star and not a good one. I'm not sure if it was him or if it was Toby Keith that Chris Christopherson said did to country music what pantyhose did to finger fucking, but that is the kind of-

It's a famous line, Sophie. He's a terrible musician. He just died. Anyways, the line that was said was Garrison. Well, he had this little preamble about how he was getting really handsy with like... With his nurse. He's sick recently. He has a nurse. She's taking great care of him and she hasn't gotten angry that he keeps touching her against her will. He's been getting really handsy and she would actually...

press charges if they weren't married, which is the punchline. Ha ha ha ha ha. Is that... And that was kind of the energy of the entire event. So just raping your wife, not even a joke, just like a celebratory statement as we are walking around a crowd of like, yeah, at least 5,000 Republicans. So we walk into this event and there are like balloon...

wavy noodle guys. It's the wacky inflatable arm flailing tube men. From like a used car dealership. I've never seen that many of them in place. Yeah. And then there's dozens. There's women on platforms. So there's a red carpet and all 50 state flags are lining it. And periodically in between the flags there are plinths where there are what we used to call booth babes.

which is if you would go to like E3, which was the video game convention, there would be scantily clad women. Car conventions do the same thing. CES used to do this too. Women wearing very little who are there to like stand next to products or whatever. In this case, they were just mostly naked women. Dancing and waving at people as they came in and one of them winked at me. Thank you so much. I hope she had a fine night. Me too. Yeah.

We did not. I hope she got paid more than we're getting paid. There's almost no way. Not possible. Because I have asked a couple of different service industry people, including Uber drivers tonight, how are the tips? And everyone said, dog shit. Yeah. Not surprising. Nobody's been happy with the tips. Yeah. And it took us quite a while to actually get to this place because of all the different security checkpoints and roadblocks. Yes.

And just the absolute chaotic, unhinged amount of out-of-town cops. And this is not just the RNC. If you've never been to a political convention, you will be in whatever city. This year, it's the RNC is in Milwaukee and the DNC is going to be in Chicago. But whatever city it's in, you will run into LAPD cops, Dallas cops, like every cops from every part of the country. In addition to Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security investigations, like all of the kinds of cops are here. Correct.

the most interesting kind of cop that I've seen a great number of

is U.S. Capitol Police cops. Yeah, a lot of Capitol Police here. Which is just a little bit funny considering what happened just about four years ago. Considering how much of this crowd assaulted Capitol Police officers? It's kind of an odd dynamic because you have these Capitol Police here providing security, essentially, and protecting attendees to some degree. Well, there's a decent chance that many of them were just engaged in combat with many of these same people where there was casualties on both sides.

Which is just kind of an odd dynamic that you don't really see very often. Yeah. Honestly, again, the vibes have still been pretty much chill for an event like this. It has not been heightened in terms of levels of anger. We did see, as soon as we arrived at the airport, literally the second we got to baggage, there was a guy wearing a shirt with the picture of Trump with a bloody ear right after he was shot on it. He clearly made it last night himself. Yeah.

And it said the Iron Dawn. The Iron Dawn. But that was kind of it in terms of maybe, you know, it's going to take a little longer for there to be more shooting merch out there. But more than that, I just didn't hear a lot of like, we sat down, we got some food and some drinks when we were at this big party. We sat down with these two ladies who were delegates from Texas. Older women. One was clearly in her 80s. One looked like she was more in her 60s.

Talked with them for quite a while and they were very far right. Very strong views on religious conservatism. Very anti-trans. The older lady that I talked to, none of them said a single word about Trump getting shot. It absolutely did not come up. No. Which I was kind of surprised about. And I got here a little bit earlier than Robert and Sophie did.

And I was hanging out with some of the delegates from Idaho and North Dakota. And similarly, no one was talking about that. It was just not mentioned. It was on Fox News in the background. You could see it on the TV. Every building, yeah. It's constantly playing. But nobody in person seems to be thinking about it or discussing it as a thing. And possibly it's just because they've assumed that Trump is just always under this kind of attack, right? He's like the most attacked man, right? This isn't even like...

a big deal for them. This is just like realizing what they've already built up in their head, right? Yeah. So I think that, that could maybe just be a factor. This isn't like as impactful for them because they're like, you know, of course, like he's, he's, he's obviously being treated so unfairly. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.

The only other thing I could think of maybe would be that just it hasn't sunk in yet because it's so big and so recent and everyone coming to this probably like us was just crazy busy packing and like getting their lives in order for this. Sure. But I think you're probably onto something with that. Yeah. I mean, it's not a small thing. I mean,

The people that we talked to, one of them was a delegate for the state of Texas, and they said they had to travel all the way. Their hotel is in Madison. So they have to commute back and forth from Madison to Milwaukee to come to this event. Yeah, that is a long time. Speaking of, you know what doesn't make me go, ugh?

These products and services? Yes, we are sponsored first off by Woodman's, the grocery store that won't sell you hard liquor past midnight. Woodman's, everyone lied to you about Wisconsin being proper alcoholics. And we're back. And I have to say that the...

Today, the scariest part of our day was going to this Woodman's grocery store, which is open 24 hours, seven days a week. It was not walking into a crowd of 10,000 Republicans. It was, in fact, walking into Woodman's at midnight was astronomically more frightening on an existential level. It's like one of these massive, massive Walmart-style, but really big Walmart-style stores.

They had a whole aisle of maraschino cherries. A maraschino cherry aisle. There were a shocking number. There was a fried onion aisle. There were a shocking number of like four to seven year old children leaving the store. Walking freely in and out. Just leaving the store. So going somewhere, but with no adults. It was big. There was 25 numerical aisles plus a

full like alphabetical aisle there were so many aisles they had to switch from numbers to letters they would not sell us beer and they would not accept credit cards either uh fascinating stuff anyways you wisconsinites think you people are alcoholics i have gone there's there's nowhere that won't sell me liquor in fucking los angeles you know that's a drinking city god damn it god damn it garrison what else well there was also a security guy roaming inside women's do you know what

Where there was also security. Everywhere else? Literally the entire city of Milwaukee right now. On roofs, in the street, on bikes, on boats. Which we knew, but... Honestly, this is not abnormal. I did not notice anything that I didn't recall from previous conventions. It did not seem... I think it just might be because there can't be more cops. They could not have had more cops. I'm sure people are more...

I'm sure particularly the rooftop sniper teams are under the gun right now. But I didn't notice anything more intense than usual. Well, and we were talking with some other people from out of town who we were just getting rides with. And the amount of barricades and blockades that have been put up over the course of Sunday. It's crazy.

It changes constantly. It's constantly changing which roads are blockaded. Earlier today, people could commute downtown fairly easier. And progressively throughout the day, that became much, much harder to the point where now downtown is almost like you just can't drive. Most of downtown is just literally blocked off by the type of fence that was developed in Portland back in 2020. And that is covering almost all of Milwaukee's downtown right now. The fence is familiar from previous conventions, but

I don't remember the moving blockades of streets. That actually might be new. If it happened at the last convention, I didn't recall it. Were there any, at this party, were there any booths or things that you saw that surprised your interest? Well, there was the AR-15 giveaway. There sure was. From Daniel Defense at the U.S. Concealed Carry Association. A little in poor taste, one might say. You know what?

In a way, because Daniel Defense is number one. It's the company that made the AR-15 that the Uvalde shooter used. If you don't know guns, Daniel Defense is most famous to people who aren't gun people. It was the company that made the gun that the Uvalde shooter used. In general, they are like a middle high-end AR company. They're not like the very nicest on the market, but they're not cheap. They're expensive guns. They're pretty well made, and they have...

made direct kind of buy-in and inroads with a lot of right-wing culture war gun figures. They have outreached more to fascist types than most. Because most big gun, you go to Sig Sauer. Sig Sauer is not going to sponsor a Nazi-type adjacent person or a Christian nationalist gun-type person because they do big contracts, right? Daniel Defense has gone out on a limb with some...

Real assholes. It's weird because they didn't used to be like that as well. Even five years ago, Daniel Offense was typically one of the more apolitical, not apolitical, but very less partisan gun companies. I remember when we were first talking about different gun brands back in 2020. It was definitely different. They made some small shifts in the past few years. Yeah, it may just have been that everything was a little bit less politicized then in that space. I don't know if

I don't know enough about the company in the back end, but I'm not surprised that they were sponsoring. And the thing they were sponsoring was the U.S. Concealed Carry Association booth, which offers insurance for people who have concealed handgun licenses and the like. But they were doing a free AR-15 giveaway, which is definitely, some would say, in bad taste after what happened to the president. To be honest... No one would have thought about it. I kind of think it's like...

You are the people that you are. No, you know? Yeah. I don't think anyone thought twice about that. No. Whatsoever. And by God, I signed up to win the gun. So me too. I did not. Ah, Sophie, if we could have had an extra attempt. Sorry, not sorry. Um, was there anything today that, you know,

surprised you or like a feeling you had that was like unexpected or anything like that? Not unexpected. I had a long conversation with the older lady who was a delegate from Texas. We talked about, cause she, she first kind of wanted to know as press, uh,

She asked, like, basically, are you liars in the nice old lady way, right? Yes, yes. That's the... We basically had that exact conversation. We had the same conversation on the other side of the table. Where I come from, you know, there's truth and there's lies. And, like, one is real and one isn't. I was like, well, you know, I've been in a lot of situations where...

Different people have different recollections of the same event. And like, I don't know, because I wasn't there, like who's telling the truth. So you just kind of try to gather as... So we got onto the subject of religion and her attitude was that people should be free to do whatever they want to do more or less, but they should have to admit it's bad. Right.

Which was interesting as a take. I hadn't really heard that one before where she was like, well, you know, my husband likes to do stuff that's not godly, but he just says it's bad. And I don't think that gay people should be punished by the law, but I think that people should have to say that it's bad. And, yeah.

That was a peculiar stance to run into. Her attitude on Trump was that he was a fundamentally honest and good man. She didn't think he was perfect. She knows she's done some shady things because he's a businessman, right? But she thinks he's basically really good at

It was interesting hearing her kind of lay some things out that way. We talked about trans issues, and she is fully convinced that little kids are getting mutilated all the time with transgender surgeries. But I asked, what if a 22-year-old or a 24-year-old wants to get on hormones or gender transition surgery? And she was like, well, an adult should be able to do whatever they want.

which was interesting. That is interesting. But yeah, you know, from a lady in her eighties or whatnot, like we had a, a relatively pleasant conversation, even though she is clearly someone who thinks that Christianity should be the law of the land and the official religion of the state. And everybody should have to acknowledge that Christians are right and

That was interesting. I always fascinated by actually trying to drill down with people at these events, what they believe and how much of the rhetoric that we see online is specifically transferred over to them. And when you get right down to it, they often believe in a lot of the heart, believe that there are kids being mutilated or whatever, but also...

A lot of the rhetoric you get around like, well, we need to make it illegal to believe other things isn't as widely shared. Although I don't think that lady would actually fight against or have any real issue with people being criminalized for not being Christian. It's just clearly not her primary focus either. Besides the mistrust of media and press, the conversation that Gare and I had with the other woman, she...

was giving her version of, you know, her opinion on Roe v. Wade and abortion and things like that. And one of the things she said to us was when she found out that we lived in Portland at a time, she was like, what was it like living in a city with liberals? And I think that's funny. Yeah.

And yeah, but... It's like a different species to them. I played around with saying when people would ask where I'm from, either Texas or Portland, because both of those are technically accurate. And every time I said Portland, you got it. You got a look. Every single time you bring up Portland, you get a look. You can definitely tell...

that it's a shibboleth to these people. It means something. It's like it's the city of the enemy. Like it is like the representation of evil. Yeah. And that was really interesting. The other thing I noticed was just saying you were media. People's attitude changed a bit. But when we mentioned that we worked for the radio station that we worked for, I think most of them have heard, because there's a lot of right-wing talk radio that are technically coworkers of ours, that changed their attitudes back. And I think like radio, weirdly enough,

It actually makes total sense to me. It's like a nostalgia thing, right? It's not just that. It's like radio is right-wing media. The right owns particularly talk radio. And I think that when you say radio, when you say media, they start to think one thing. But when you say radio, that's not something that people have a negative attitude towards. It's not tied to the coastal elitism of newspapers, TV channels, that sort of thing. Yes. Speaking of...

Coastal elitism. Here's these ads brought to you by companies probably based on one of the coasts. Maybe not. Maybe a Midwest company. God, I hope not. Because the Midwest, again, doesn't sell liquor at Woodsman's after midnight. They're a 24-hour grocery store. Let us have some alcohol. What is wrong with you people?

Okay, we are back. We're back. So at the end of this, we are going to talk about the assassination attempt on former President Trump. More has happened since Monday. So we're going to catch you up on what we're thinking about that and kind of the conclusions that we've drawn. We wanted to talk a little bit about one last thing, i.e. the convention, which is kind of what we're expecting for the coming days.

Tomorrow, there's an AI panel. There is. Is it Women in AI? Women and Democracy. Oh my God. Sponsored by Microsoft. Sponsored by Microsoft. So that's going to be great. There's a number of other interesting panels. Unfortunately, all of the Turning Point USA panels are closed to press. Yeah. Real bummer. Another event that's closed to press is about two or three times every day.

There is a film screening of a new Ronald Reagan movie. Reagan the movie. Reagan the movie starring John Voight, which we've received some free merch for. We have these wonderful hats made in Myanmar. Made by the military junta in Myanmar. Totally fine. Totally chill. That's going to be showing every single day multiple times. Also closed to press, so that's unfortunate. There's rumors and talk that Trump might make an early appearance. They might try to secure the nomination a little bit early just so he gets out.

extra Secret Service detail because of weird laws. Interesting. Some of the speakers that are supposed to come are Nikki Haley, J.D. Vance, Ricky Rubio. For me...

Oh, did I Ricky? Did you call him Ricky Rubio? That's an NBA player. You and Ricky were so close. That's an NBA player from Spain. Okay. Marco Rubio. So sorry. I wish the Ricky Rubio from Spain was the vice president. I wish Ricky Rubio from Spain was coming. He's so sorry. I'm going to guess he doesn't know much about our laws. That said, neither does JD Vance.

Pudding Ron's gonna make an appearance. Oh, good old Pudding Ron. Interesting to me, but neither of you had any name recognition, but Amber Rose is going to speak. I don't know that broad. Jesus Christ. I'm at the Republican convention. I gotta blend in.

Yeah, we do. She used to, I don't know if she currently does, but she used to run a thing called Slut Walk in LA and dated Kanye West. Anyways, I guess it makes a little bit more sense when you add the Kanye West to it, but she's speaking, which is surprising. Yeah, when you say used to date Kanye West, if we were like nothing, nothing about what she's doing could surprise me now. And like all the,

Trump relatives are speaking besides Ivanka. Anyways, because she's not participating this time around for her kids. No. Good for her. Yeah, that's good. Although I don't know if she doesn't participate enough. She might wind up in a golf course too. Wow. Dark. Anyways, I'm just saying he did it. Speaking of that, speaking of death. Oh, no, no. Sorry. Bad transition. Anyways, it's going to be great, guys.

I'm super, super optimistic about everything in the world. I'm less worried about it. It's pretty chill. There were some protests, but the only protests were... People that were complaining that the GOP was not pro-life enough. I talked about this when talking about kind of like fracture points that are already starting to appear in the GOP. One of the big ones is Trump removed mandatory national abortion ban from the Republican parliament.

And there were a group of people protesting out in front of the RNC. Very angry about that. Yep. Most of the people I heard a couple of people talking about them seem to think they were idiots, which is interesting. But yeah,

Had that experience. Yeah, the only protests we've seen so far is people farther to the right on certain issues. People who sucked even worse than the people there. One last tip, but I will share that kind of segues into our next discussion involving a firearm. I had a little room mix-up with some North Dakota delegate because we have the same last name. So we got our rooms switched.

So I was just sitting on my laptop working. And this guy scans in and starts opening the door. He's like, oh, sorry, I didn't realize, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We figured it out. So then we got in the elevator, both to go down to the front desk to get this sorted. And he remarks to me saying, well, I'm sure glad you weren't packing when I busted in the hotel room.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I guess. And it was just a fascinating little glimpse that that was the first thing that came into his mind is that if someone opens your hotel room door is that you're just going to start shooting them. You're just going to start blasting. It's like immediate thought is that, oh, good thing.

Good thing you didn't have your gun on you. And like, there was just such like an assumption of that's like, of like, that is like the correct thing to do. Yeah. Is if you, if you see your door, you start to get open, you just start firing away. And I found that to be a really, really interesting moment.

Speaking of firearms. Speaking of firearms, let's talk about that dude who shot the president and then got shot. Barely. Barely shot the president. And also killed that guy whose Twitter presence wasn't great. Yeah, so I want to talk about the shooting a little bit because we're now at the point where some stuff has started to settle out. And we have...

It's at the point where I think it's very unlikely we're going to find much more on his social media. It would have been found by now based on the way these things work could be a manifesto somewhere. It could be a treasure trove of info somewhere, but I think something would have come out about it. So my guess is this is like the Vegas shooting. If you think back, Steven Paddock shooting where he killed like 70 something people at that country music show, something that's going to be an enigma to people for a while. And, uh,

It makes a lot of sense to me. I know it makes a lot of sense to you too, Garrison. And I kind of want to talk about why, because what we do know about them that is confirmed is some of their former classmates have talked to press. Some of those classmates have said, I don't recall the shooter being particularly political. There are some people who said, no, he was really conservative. You know, when we would have like class debates, he would sometimes be the only guy on like the right wing side of it, you know, arguing a point or whatever. And,

But no one seemed to say that he was like weirdly right. Like he was conservative the way that like right wing kids in a school are, but not in a way that people are like, oh, that kid's a fucking Nazi. In a way that makes you just kind of like antisocial and kind of alienated. Yeah. And he was not a very social kid. Some people say he was bullied.

Most kids are. I was, you know, bullied. So I don't know that he was exceptionally bullied. He tried out once for the school rifle team was not very good with so bad. They didn't let him try out again, which is interesting. He wore hunting gear to class. I mean, that's like, that's like real tree camo. We're in the Midwest. Like that's not, that's not uncommon. Not wildly weird. Oh, I guess he's in Pennsylvania, but still in Pennsylvania, it was nothing that really set anyone off.

But it is also all pretty conservative stuff. And just like the Gun YouTube channel, who's wearing a Demolition Ranch shirt, Demolition Ranch is probably the largest Gun YouTube channel. They are effectively like a media company. They're a small media empire. But they're also definitely conservative. Some of the guys who work at that company you can tell associate with further right guys, but

But as gun tubers go. Yeah. Their videos are relatively free of politics because they're big enough that that's bad for their business. Right. They don't indulge in like partisan politics or like political opinion. It is. It's not like there are guys like there's a guy named Louis Botkin who does a lot of videos where he will be doing like literally assassination drills where he's basically planning to like murder people in their cars. Yeah.

Or people who, you know, pepper their videos with like anti-trans jokes. Right. Which we're seeing lots more of. This is, this was not that. And I'm not saying that some people on Twitter when I bring this up get like angry at me like you're trying to protect the concern. No, I don't care about that. I'm just saying this isn't the shirt you wear if you want to signal that you're like far right. This is a shirt you wear if you're kind of into guns but maybe not very good with them. Yeah. Right? Like it's just kind of. Like a very light hobbyist. Yes. Yes. It means about as much as a guy wearing a John Wick t-shirt.

Yeah.

that this guy was motivated by what most people call politics. I think he was a guy who was certainly more on the conservative end of things. I don't get the hint that he thought Trump was a dictator he needed to stop. I don't get the hint he may have been an accelerationist and that he thought that this would push some sort of civil war to completion.

And, you know, that that would go well for the right. That's not impossible, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. The most interesting thing that you said to me about it, Robert, and I think Gary, you also said the same thing, is like, he was local. This was local. It was convenient. I think...

The feeling I get is that if Biden had showed up, he would have taken a shot at Biden. No, I think that the model that we can look at this is the same model people have used for a lot of school shootings. There is a degree of like apathetic, a degree of just like suicidal action and a degree of wanting to make some kind of impact, wanting to do some kind of thing that gains you a sense of like,

infamy. And school shootings simply just don't do that anymore. Mass shootings don't really do that anymore. You could kill five or six people, ten people at a grocery store. It doesn't move the needle. I believe there's a decent chance based on kind of the very unpolitical online presence this guy has had, including from his Discord account. There's just simply no evidence he was like, he had any kind of real political motivation. And instead, all of what we've heard about his behavior and his politics is

seem just way more similar to the profiles of mass shooters. And I think the Trump thing was a measure of convenience, having this happen in your hometown. I think it possibly could be just as likely if Joe Biden was doing a rally, he might have tried the same thing. I don't think this was any more politically targeted than that because we simply don't have any evidence to suggest that. And the few evidence we do have matches up with a lot of the profiles of

of these older kind of like more like Columbine style mass shootings. This seems like a Columbiner more than anything. Columbine, there's been well over a hundred different mass shootings inspired by that mass shooting. And I, the thing overwhelmingly that occurs to me just with what we get about this kid is I would, if I had to describe his politics as relates to the shooting, it's not,

he's a right winger or a left winger. His politics are, he's a mass shooter. Yeah. Right. This is a guy who worships the, probably did to some extent was obsessed with the aesthetics of mass shootings. This was a guy who wanted, yeah, to be famous. And he saw an opportunity to do it in a place where he wanted to make it in history books. And this was the only way. And he did, he'll be in them, you know? And I, I'm interested in what that means because I,

We've had a wave for years of people doing mass shootings in public places because it used to get you into the history books. Not anymore. Not anymore. This kid is in the history books now. And I kind of wonder if this is going to lead to a shift in the people who have previously been shooting up schools and grocery stores going, well, if I want to get noticed, shooting up a school won't do it.

But if I take a shot at insert political candidate, please, Secret Service, this is theoretical. The thing that actually reminds me of a great deal is this feels more similar to the John Lennon shooting, honestly. That is, I think, a much closer model. And...

I think a lot of people who are viewing this as political violence have found this to be a very confusing incident. And I don't think it's useful to view it the way that we typically view political violence. I think it's much more understandable as being akin to something like Columbine, the Las Vegas shooting, the John Lennon shooting. And when you bring that up to people, it makes them angry because it's a shooting of Donald Trump, the most politicized man who maybe has ever lived.

In the most politicized election of anyone's lifetimes. And people get really angry when you suggest this might not have been political in the way that you want to conceive of politics because they want it to fit into, even if it's a scary box, a box that makes sense. And there's something so alienated about a guy who this was just the best way for me to be, to die and be remembered.

Is so different. And this guy is younger than I am. 20. Trump for him has been a forever character of politics. He was 12 when the campaign started. He's just, Trump has always been a political character. Yeah. This is just someone who represents what politics is. Yeah. Uh,

He's not like an abnormal, you know, fascist, like threat the same way that people who've studied politics for a long time can view Trump historically being like, oh, this is like a worrying trend. This is just like what regular politics are to people younger than me. So I think that's also another interesting way to view it when it's like, this is just like, this is just who you grew up with as being

the guy. This is just the guy. And, you know, we started this talking about why it seemed like, at least from the conversations we were having, the assassination attempt was such a mild topic or such a non-topic around the people we met. And I wonder if some of it is

confusion about what it means. Because this clearly isn't an Antifa guy. Yeah, it wasn't an Antifa guy. It wasn't a trans person with blue hair. It wasn't something that fit into their narratives. It looked like probably a lot of people's grandkids. Most people here are considerably older. And wearing a gun t-shirt that probably a third of the people in this have, or at least they watch the channel. That is an interesting way to view it, is that the mass shooter looks like a lot of these people's...

Yeah. That is an interesting aspect. Yeah. Well, anyway, folks, I hope this has been enlightening. This is just the start of our week. So we're in for five more days that I'm sure each will be a worse time than the last. We're all going to go to sleep now. And never go to Woodman's ever again. No, but we're going to find a place to get liquor tomorrow. I promise you that. My God. Ladies, gentlemen, and garrisons.

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and accessories. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined with Robert Evans and Sophie Lichterman for day one of the official RNC, the Republican National Convention. Robert, Sophie, how's your day been? Well, I'm tired. It was a long day. It was very red. A lot of red. It was very loud.

The drinks were very expensive. Yeah, we got so many free drinks yesterday and not today. No, not once you're in the convention center. I don't know. We were trapped in a room with a lot of people who were either used car salesmen or spiritually were used car salesmen. Also, a lot of people who wanted to kill me specifically. Yes. We'll talk about that later. We'll talk about that more later.

Yeah, today, just structurally what happened is, you know, it was a series of speeches. So you had, first off, the big floor vote, right? So we got to watch all of the different states had their delegates and they have to formally, even though everyone knows what's happening, they have to like formally follow Robert's rules of order or whatever and like confirm that Trump is the nominee. And then they announce and confirm the VP, who you all know by now is J.D. Vance. We'll talk about that.

Might as well talk a little bit about him now. J.D. Vance is a guy who, in the wake of Trump's initial victory, he's a dude who came from Appalachia sort of part-time, went to an Ivy League school, did some time in the Marines, and then made a bunch of money in business. And then

when 2016 happened and a lot of liberals were like, wow, how could Trump have won election? He capitalized by writing a book, trying to explain the Appalachian experience, even though again, he only kind of lived there part time and mostly, yeah, had abandoned those people. And that part, like the book is about him abandoning that part of his life as soon as he possibly can. Not a great book by my opinion, as someone who grew up in a really fucking poor town in the deep South, but. Is he technically a millennial?

Yeah, he's the first millennial who might become vice president. Yeah.

That's a big part of why I think he was picked. Agreed. Yeah, that's a big part of why. So it was time for them to announce J.D. Vance. They officially approved him. Delegates officially approved him, which happened very quickly. And he came out to Chance in Ohio, where he's from, was very stoked to have him there. Lots of chants of J.D., J.D. You're right, he had a hype man. Yeah, and he advanced his way out there.

With his wife and looked emotional. And yeah, all I know is that he really fucking hates LBGTQIA people. And I really fucking hate him. Uh-huh.

Yeah, I mean, he said that he kind of like turned the corner finally on what side, because he had said some anti-Trump stuff once in the day, but he turned the corner when his movie got really bad reviews. So if we wind up going into full-fledged fascist dictatorship, we can blame Ron Howard for some of that. And to be honest, we always knew that was going to be the case. Yeah.

Valid. Yeah. After that, yeah, Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a speech. A couple other people, Tim Scott had a speech. So there was a break between sessions. We came back for the second session. The second session, uh,

opens up with what I could only describe as... I was like, Christopher Nolan, are you here? It was like Inception-sounding music. Like, wah. Dramatized. Thank you for that. Dramatized video of like... In a world. Yeah, like showing crime and people losing money. Inflation. And women and babies crying. And then there's like... Literally bad clip art of money on fire. Bad clip art of money on fire. And it's about...

It was like three to five minutes long. Very long because I took a video of it. It felt like a really bad action thriller trailer. Could have been partly AI. There was certainly some CG animation towards the end because they had this camera that was sweeping through this fake city. It was all CG and it landed on this floodlight on top of a roof. This broken flicker

We go into the floodlight, gears are turning, the music is ramping up, and finally it lightens, and we see Trump, the Trump signal, shining in the cloudy sky, calling the hero, the masked Avenger. As if it was the bat signal for Batman. Yes, it was shameful.

And then and then very silly. People loved it. Yeah, it got a great reaction. There's also a video of all the scenes. If you if you've ever seen clips from rallies, you probably seen little clips of Trump like fake dancing, doing doing that weird dance where he's moving his hands. Yeah, he does this dance when he's excited, when he's in a good mood. You know, the dance. It's what we would describe as a little wiggle. Anyways, it was a very long wiggle video and people loved it.

No, it looked like the type of video that liberals would post to make fun of Trump. Yes. And the fact that it was used as a hype video shows how useless that style of like political propaganda is. It means anything. You can't make fun of Trump for doing that little dance. That doesn't it doesn't do anything. You can't. There's no use in making fun of Trump. There is no value in satirizing him. There is no value in laughing at him.

Like, if it helps you personally, that's great. If you need that to get by. We all do it sometimes, but it does no damage to them. Like, not to shit on John Oliver, but the Trump stuff was a wild and spectacular failure. None of it accomplished anything. And everybody who ever thought that you could make fun of Trump and have any positive impact was wrong, and you should feel a little bad.

I do. Because they used it as a hype video. They used it to stitch between their different musical acts, different segments, and oh boy, the music. So the music was better than the music at the welcome party that we talked about in our last episode. But that bar is...

It's not very high. It's all country music, right? There's country music cover bands. No, it's not all country. No, there was a lot of 90s stuff. There was fucking... It's played in the style of country music. But there was that Buy Your Boat guy. We'll talk about the Buy Me a Boat guy. They had a Fleetwood Mac song. Someone did You Can Go Your Own Way. There was essentially the...

the run of the evening and dad rock and country music. My apologies. It was dad rock and country music. You know what? I have to tell you, we do not care enough to argue about this. Anyways, the music was fucking mid. It was like the way, cause I, of course, like a bunch of people have texted us today and been like, how is it? And the only way that we can describe it is if a normal person went to their favorite concert and had great seats. Yeah. And,

You Were Very Happy is the same exact...

or you went to a game seven of the NBA finals, that's exactly the reaction that the people in the crowd were having. It's a mix of like a sports event, a concert, and like a mega church. Correct. If there was some kind of concert that a whole bunch of boomers really enjoyed, that was the general vibe of the convention today. Which is not all that different from how Trump rallies feel. Totally. It had that vibe and it felt more like a...

a concert than the 2016 RNC did. Yeah. I mean, there was also, there was so much music in so few speeches. The speeches were only like two minutes long each and there would be like extended, like 10, 20 minute musical performances in between each speech. Yeah.

Like, mostly it's just people playing songs on stage. That was most of the RNC today. There was several different speeches that came after those strange videos. And we'll get into that. But first, we're going to go to an ad break. And when we come back, we're going to play...

live us from the RNC. Well, it was live when we recorded it. That's what I'm saying. Live us. We were alive back then and now questionable talking about what we were experiencing in the moment. But first ads. Okay. We are back and now we will tune in to our recording. We made on the convention floor. Dun, dun, dun.

Okay, we are, well, recording live, broadcasting a little bit later, but recording live on the ground at the Republican National Convention. We've had a very, very busy morning. It's now mid-afternoon. We're in between sessions. The first session just wrapped up. And we thought we should record some of our immediate thoughts before our little debrief tonight. I guess let's start with Robert Evans. Yeah, well, first off, my main overwhelming kind of...

takeaway is that the tone and tempo of this is a lot milder than I expected. And I think it's because the overwhelming majority of people here are extremely conservative, the most dedicated and active members of the party. But it's not like the Proud Boy crew over, definitely some of those people here. These are electoralists. These are electoralists. Most of them are a lot older. You know, I would say the average age is somewhere between the late 40s to the 60s of like people you encounter here.

And it is interesting to me that I have not, you know, as soon as we, like we said yesterday, as soon as we landed, we saw a guy with a Trump after he got shot sticking his fist in the air shirt. I haven't seen a ton of that.

on the ground here since. I've not seen a ton of it, nor have I seen a ton of direct references to it. I guess the, Sophie here, I think, I guess the main reference that I've seen is when they did the delegate official photo. That would be the big one, yeah. They all turned around and raised their fist in the way that Donald Trump did

after the attempted assassination, which was fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah, especially given the lack of otherwise direct emphasis on what happened. And maybe that's coming up. I kind of do, the way I'm interpreting it now is, because the thing that just dropped a few minutes ago is the FBI got into the shooter's phone,

So far, preliminary findings, nothing in there that makes it clear why he did it. So I kind of think they may just be sort of confused as to why one of their own seemingly carried out the shooting. Not really clear what the rhetoric on the shooter should be.

but very clear on how they should respond to the Trump photo, which is the primary takeaway from that. Is the photo, is the pose, is him cementing his image as this indestructible man who's constantly under attack, right? And so it makes sense to me that they've adopted that hand sign, and I expect we'll see more of it. And boy, howdy, does it just look exactly like the hand sign from the far right that everyone's familiar with.

So as we were kind of in between speakers, they had this little band playing and we happened to be sitting next to one of one of the younger people that I've seen attending the convention. But like still still like an adult, like a very young adult, maybe 21, maybe 20 at most. He couldn't have been older than 21 because he said this is his first election he'll be able to vote in. Yes. Presidential election.

So probably a little bit younger than me. It's interesting because yesterday we talked with some very old people, and today we talked with some very young people. And it is an interesting contrast. So yeah, this young conservative from California, but now lives in South Dakota. And I don't know, we were asking him about what focus he has in politics. He seemed really concerned about the economy. That was kind of his main issue. Almost the only thing he wanted to talk about was the economy.

He was one thing I'll say very good natured, like not in the I am doing a PR thing. I am trying to put on an image, but just in the not at all aggressive, did not react kind of negatively to the fact that we were media, which you get a lot of that at events like these.

He expressed that the only places he gets his news is Fox and News Nation on TV. He is not on social media, which I found interesting. And statistics suggest, obviously, that's not the norm, but it is a growing number of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids who avoid a lot of the Internet. Well, and especially among conservatives. I mean, there is a lot of young conservatives who do get their news on TikTok, who do get their news online.

or one of the biggest ways that young people to the right get their news. Obviously, The Daily Wire is very dominant in the podcasting scene. But no, I find that very interesting. And I assume it's probably influenced by his family, whatever's on the family TV. His uncle is about to be the mayor of Huntington Beach, California, and is the sheriff. Huntington Beach is the most conservative city in California by a pretty wide margin.

Yeah, no, he expressed a lot of frustration that we were giving lots of money to Ukraine, that he felt that Zelensky was spending on himself instead of on the military. And yeah, I mean, he seemed like a good old Christian boy. He was very, very into the praying section of the night.

I asked him at some point when J.D. Vance was coming out on stage to be announced the official vice president, like, if he thinks that they're going to win this year, like, do you think that the Republicans are going to win? And he said, yes, if it's fair. Yeah, that was the same. That was the first thing I asked him. And that was the same answer he gave me. And, you know, speaking of Vance, because Vance is my first thought and a lot of people's first thought. And I think this is probably true.

accurate thing to say about Vance. He does not provide a lot to Trump, right? He's not a guy who won by a wide margin. I'm not even confident he on his own does anything to deliver his state, Ohio. But what this kid brought up and what I suspect Trump sees in him, because when I asked, what do you think about J.D. Vance? He repeatedly said, I think he's loyal. I think he really likes Trump. I think he's loyal. And

And I did bring up the fact that Vance has said bad things about Trump in the past. And then he went on this thing where he was like, I think that DeSantis and Trump really like each other. It's all politics. And I wanted to say how deranged. But then he was like, you know, it's like Kamala and Joe. She was really mean to him during the debate. And now she's his vice president. I was like, well, that's actually a pretty reasonable way to look at the situation. I don't know that I think it's actually accurate, but I see the logical through line there. And I was kind of thought that was interesting.

I thought it was interesting when they were bringing out J.D. Vance and he was Vancing, vamping. I'm going to call it Vancing. Vancing. Vancing. That, you know, they were quick to call out that he was a Marine, quick to call him a patriot, quick to call him a family man. And I think that's what he brings to the table. He brings those three things as well as his age. And I think that's what the...

GOP is focusing on. Yeah, I mean, other than that, there was a really weird prayer thing, Gare. Yeah. That was after Vance came up. They did the benediction. Yeah. It was... What I could only express is a little bit, like, spiritually disturbing. All of, like, the LED screens behind, behind, like, the speakers all flashed, like, very, like, Facebook-esque, like...

of the Bible, of families praying. Kids and white families. Heavenly glowing light. The whole environment changed. It's usually very sports, debate, red versus blue. It's very traditional Americana. And it was a very intense shift to this strong Facebook Christianity almost. That's the best way I can describe it with words.

And I mean, you know, it was a typical Christian dominionist moment where you have, you know, one of the largest of two political parties just fully embracing and fully, you know, putting out

That, you know, this is a religious party, almost more than anything else. The religion is so important to the ceremony, and specifically not just any religion, of course, just Christianity. And, I don't know, they spent almost the last half of the prayer talking about Israel.

And, you know, specifically saying the children of Abraham and the holy city of Jerusalem and, you know, all of that kind of language. Prayer for the hostages. Talking about how the hostages are being kept against their will. But no, all of the language remind me a lot of like my childhood and the rhetoric around Israel as this place to secure so that, you know, the prophecies can come true for Jesus's second coming. And like that is the entire bit.

I'm trying to recall if there was a big benediction at the end, at the 2016 RNC when Pence was nominated, and I'm sure there was.

But for whatever reason, it doesn't stick out in my mind the way this one did. No, this will certainly stick out in my mind. Like everyone knows Republicans are, you know, the more Christian party. But just the sheer like consensus about it here. Just like everybody is like, even if they aren't themselves Christian, most people are, but like everyone's in on this thing happening. It was just an interesting moment contrasted to the overall, you know, like concert kind of sports vibe that the rest of the convention kind of carries around.

Yeah. I mean, the only other thing that I pointed out, I, at one point I went to get water and, um, I came back and, and I mentioned right before we started to record to both gear and Robert, I was like, cops keep touching me and like putting their hand on my shoulder. And, you know, it was one cop just wanted to talk to me about my day. And I was like, try to get water and going back into the convention. And then I,

that to Gare and Robert and they both said that they've been touched quite a lot too and I just think that's interesting to note and you know I don't particularly like to be touched by strangers especially cops mine has been on the shoulder by like a couple of different I would describe them as like uncle coded guys yes who I don't know and was not talking to just like walking past me putting a hand on my shoulder

like someone who is a family member would do casually, like a family event, you know, when you're on the way to do something else. But I've never met these people. We did not talk. That was odd. Hasn't happened to me before. Maybe everyone's just in a very good mood because they're that sure they're going to win. Maybe we just ran into a lot of creepy uncle types. Unclear. It'll be interesting to contrast with the DNC. But no, it certainly has been a pattern. It's a lot more like just casual touching here. And yeah, I think that is most of our thoughts right now. I guess that

The last thing I guess I'll add is the young kid that we were talking to, who was very excited about this whole deal. As Vance was coming out and the crowd was going crazy and everything, he very quietly remarked that he was going to start crying because it was just so impactful. I think it was mostly to himself. He was just acknowledging that verbally and then said he wants to become a cop. And that just, you know, that is...

That is the entire base. And then he was then immediately got into a very, a very intense prayer posture during the prayer. And that's just a good portion of this country, I guess. Yep. Yep. I, uh, yeah, it was interesting. I, we were talking about Ukraine for a while because his, his stance on it was he's fine with them getting weapons, but he's sure they're getting a lot of money that Zelensky is doing something shady with. And generally it felt like Zelensky wasn't fighting because,

which I thought was interesting. It does, it is kind of, it makes sense to me if you've skimmed the way the right reports on Ukraine a lot, that that would be his attitude. But he also said he wasn't supportive of yielding to Putin on any of Putin's demands.

And then when I talked about it, because I chatted with him about some of my experiences in Ukraine, and when he found out that I had done war reporting, his first question was, have you ever been to Israel? Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah, interesting. Just immediately asked that. Oh, one other note. We did run into a fan of the show who was working who was wearing a USS Liberty hat.

The USS Liberty was like a U.S. Navy ship that was struck by Israel. And it's under very shady circumstances. And it's kind of like one of the better ways you could be publicly critical of the Israeli military, at least at the RNC, without most people knowing what you're doing. Yeah.

I thought that was funny. The very last thing I'll say is that right as we exited the first session, we ran into friend of the pod Vivek Ramaswamy. Oh, yeah. Who was walking around. Right past Vivek. Who was a little shorter than I expected. Not a tall man. Not a tall man. And I did ask the kid that we were sitting next to, you know, I was curious about his thoughts on the future of the party. And I asked him specifically about Vivek.

And he said he likes Vivek because Vivek is a businessman, just like Trump. And he wants someone to run the country like a business. I should also note that Vivek was followed by a swarm of, like, I'm guessing his entourage.

All of the, nearly all of them were very young men who I would describe as Nick Fuentes coded. Yes. Like, like they really had that physiognomy to them. Groper types. Yeah. Groper types, which JD Vance, it's one of the things coming out right now is that he's in a group chat with a bunch of 16 year old groper. So I am excited for some of those more of those chats to come out. All right. Well, back to future us talking about the rest of the Republican national convention day one.

Wow, that sure was great. We had such a fun time. You know what else is fun? Here's some more ads. We're back. To conclude, we got a couple of things to talk about. One of them is, you know, obviously we're at a convention. We don't have a car. We're taking Ubers everywhere. We're eating at restaurants. This has taken over almost...

all of the central area of Milwaukee. And there were, because of a lot of fuck-ups, for one thing, a lot of places that in downtown were supposed to be booked are not booked. Businesses are not getting the kind of business they had expected to get during this because of some of those fuck-ups. Yeah. And kind of most interesting to us, so coming into this, one of the things the Republicans even put up billboards in Milwaukee over this, and this is a big thing that Trump is campaigning on to try to get service worker type people to vote for him is no tax on tips. Yeah.

And to make a long story short, it works out to be much worse for service workers. Kind of the compromise here is that they can continue to pay far below minimum wage and there will be no attempts to raise that at all. And of course, the kind of people who vote for Republicans don't tip.

by and large. No, because they hate service workers. We have been talking to every Uber driver, to all of the waiters, waitresses that we've had, and pretty overwhelmingly, nearly 100% of them say like, yeah, we're just not getting tipped. No one's tipping. There's extreme negative views. Yeah. Not just because of like the politics, right? Because about half, more than half of them don't really care politics-wise. Absolutely not. They're just doing business. And like,

These are just bad patrons. These are simply people that are not nice to be around. Correct. These types of events, the RNC, the DNC, cities campaign for this under the notion that this will boost local business. It will bring a whole bunch of people from out of town. People will get a lot of money to all these local businesses. And because of how the security is set up this year at RNC,

In Milwaukee, so many businesses just can get no business because they're completely inside this fence perimeter. And the rest are not seeing very good business from what it sounds like. And even hotels downtown are largely vacant because of weird scheduling errors. We went to dinner earlier tonight with some friends and we asked one of the restaurant workers like,

how it was going. And obviously she said the same thing that we've heard so many times, which is not great, not making a lot of tips. But what was interesting is she said, you know, and they really tried to throw in our faces that this was going to be a good thing for all of us. And we were all going to make a bunch of money. And it's not happening. It's just not happening. We chatted to Timothy Faust, who was a writer, great writer, great guy, and a local here. We had dinner with him. And,

And he pointed out that Milwaukee has been and was on the verge of bankruptcy, still having a lot of problems with that. And a big part of why they took the RNC was because Republicans in the state legislature, that was basically the bargaining point so that they would, uh,

allow a sales tax, which was kind of necessary in order to... There's more to it than that, but a big part of how the negotiations broke down was the Republicans wanted this in order to make it possible for the city of Milwaukee to not collapse because it was on the verge of bankruptcy. And

Hearing that made a lot of sense, made a lot of things click into place because it does – everyone we have talked to who is a local and who is working in any job that interfaces with the convention and convention goers talks like they've been scammed. Yeah. And just one more thing before we get into the rest of what we experienced speech-wise and other is –

The difference in security today versus the outdoor event we went to yesterday for the welcome party. Very surprising. Very surprising. So just the one-to-one example I'll give you listeners is yesterday, they took every single item out of my bag that I had after putting through a scanner and unzipped everything. Today...

They zipped it up because they didn't want anything to fall out and didn't open it, didn't touch a single thing. Went through a scanner. I was through security in like four seconds. Yeah, no, it was super weird. Way more lax getting into the actual convention center than it was to get into the outdoor welcome party, which is just it came off as a little surprising to us.

They made such a big deal about what you can and can't bring in and had specific measurements for bags and stuff. But we saw people with some of the largest bags. Very large backpacks. Some bags that were bigger than me. And that's just interesting to note. One last thing on the service worker thing. On our ride home from the RNC or back to the hotel...

We sat in an Uber with a very nice man who I would describe as the average Wisconsin voter. Yeah. He had a Teamsters shirt and a variety of both liberal and kind of conservative opinions. I think he kind of leaned more liberal, but he certainly had...

a variety of opinions. And he was both expressing the same thing in regards to tips, but also immense frustration at the way police were treating locals, the way police were treating local drivers, just the sheer influx of cops just have made functioning in this city just so challenging to any of these locals. And yeah, that was a very fascinating conversation that we might discuss at a later time. What we will talk about now are Catholics, those little fiends

So, after the very evangelical children of Abraham prayer that we talked about in our archival audio, as soon as we came back for the second session...

There was an opening prayer led by the Archbishop of Milwaukee, which is kind of interesting because a lot of the attendees here are very evangelical. These are not Catholics. And you could definitely see there was, you know, a little bit of groans amongst some of these people. And I found it a very interesting move. We talked to somebody who talked shit on the Catholics.

earlier. The old lady that we, or at least that I was talking to last night at the party, made a couple of comments about Catholics because she doesn't believe they really worship Jesus because Catholics, yeah, well, it's not even the papistries because Catholics, this is a thing that born-again have an issue with Catholicism, is don't believe you have to accept Christ to go to heaven. Like, if you do good things, Catholics think you can go to heaven.

Sure, sure. And that is deeply offensive to a sizable chunk of the Christian community in the United States. Yeah, so I found that very interesting. Wasn't really expecting to see an opening Catholic prayer. I want to talk to some more people tomorrow about that issue. Vance is Catholic.

That makes, that's probably why. Vance is a Catholic convert, just like the Red Scare Girl. He is a Catholic convert millennial who has taken a bunch of money from Peter Thiel. Many such cases. So one of the first people to speak after this archbishop was famed Republican figure Marjorie Taylor Greene, who we could have a lot to say, but I think the first thing that I want to mention is that

She feels more representative of most of the RNC attendees than anyone else who we've seen speak. Completely agree. She has the same energy and vibe as most of the attendees. That is why they love her so much because she is one of them to the point where she was like a Republican fan who just happened to get into office. And now she's this major figure. She was the mascot. Exactly. And was a lot more popular than Vance.

Oh, yeah. In terms of floor reaction? No, she is beloved among this crowd. She is them, right? The audience members can see her and they can see themselves in her. And she got the biggest reaction out of the crowd, probably save for Trump making a short appearance. But her speech had the biggest reaction. And we will get to that now. One of the first things she said, talking about the assassination attempt and stuff, is that Trump, she referred to him as...

the founding father of the America First movement, which is a lot of interesting loaded language there. There are a lot of words there. A very extremely loaded language for the founding father of the America First movement. She then spoke about the wonderful family man whose life was unfortunately cut short from getting shot in the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump, saying that Corey embodied the America First spirit in

But no, she had all of the typical lines that you would say about someone who was killed in an incident like this. And then she talked about the thing that got the loudest applause out of anything else today, which is the whole gender ideology issue. She talked about how President Biden turned Easter into Trans Visibility Day, which is

is factually inaccurate. Which isn't true because Easter changes holidays, Transvisibility Day is on the same day, but Easter changes the actual day it's on. But that got a massive boo and there was people sitting next to us who were just shouting evil, just super loud, shouting evil. This is the most hyped up I've ever seen the crowd.

All the other mentions. There was a few other mentions about men and women's sports, that kind of thing. The biggest boos and the biggest cheers, respectively. People saying, there are only two genders. We're brave enough to say it. We're going to keep saying it. That hyped up the crowd just more than anything else. She said, let me be clear here. There are only two genders. And the crowd went...

Just nuts. Bananas. She, right after that, made a statement about needing to stop sending money to Ukraine that Zelensky was going to embezzle or something about half the volume. Not a tiny chunk of the audience cheering. Compared to the rest of the cheering of a pretty loud reaction. Not a bad reaction, but it was clearly about half the volume of the anti-trans stuff. And mind you, listeners, she's

Spoke for like what? It was like three minutes talk. Yeah. I would be surprised if the whole speech typed out was more than about a page. No, it was wild. It was basically a bullet point list of like hate speech. If I kind of want to go back through video of the I remember the speeches of the 2016 RNC being longer, but that was a million years ago. Yeah. No, it was a lifetime ago. She had, you know, the usual comments about, you know, how we have to stop the globalists

the wealthy and the powerful few, which is just an interesting thing to speak to an RNC crowd because these are the wealthy, powerful few. You are talking to them. And the line that came right before this was talking about how we have to stand up against the establishment who promise unity but promote division. And I'm like,

This is the most we're all trying to find the guy who did this moment ever, right? You're talking about how there's these powerful establishment figures who talk about unity but actually just promote division. And, like, you were talking about yourself. And all the times that these, like, people who work in Washington start bashing, like, the establishment and stuff. Like, you...

You are the establishment. That is you. That is your job. But those are very, very common talking points in stuff like this. I'm sure many listeners are familiar with this sort of, like, doublespeak. And yeah, that was her speech. Definitely the biggest reaction we saw the crowd have. Trump and his family made a very brief appearance, kind of a surprise appearance, but...

To some people's surprise, he did not actually give a speech. He instead, I think, took what was the smarter play, show up with a very large bandage on his ear, and instead sit down and listen, just become part of the audience. It's an interesting move. He didn't immediately take over the convention. No. He's kind of playing this more statesman role. He almost looked like he was tearing up. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Sitting in the crowd. Quiet, subdued even. Yep, yep.

He looked worried at points. Worried, anxious, or somber. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a natural reaction to being in your first crowd after being shot and nearly dying. Sure. Yeah, last time you were in a crowd.

Yeah. Like, he is a person, right? That's just how people react oftentimes when that kind of thing happens. Yeah, no, he was sitting next to Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, and Michael, and Mike Johnson with his kids sitting behind him. Oh, yeah. Look, when you have a near-death experience, you know, when somebody shoots at you and damn near hits, it chronically

it crystallizes a lot. You know, what's really important. And you also know what you don't want to waste your time with anymore. And that's, that's why the Trump kids were in the back of that crowd. He doesn't want them anywhere near him. Life is short. I just want to point out what they showed Trump on the screen with, uh, with Mike Tucker. And who was the fourth person? Oh, Jamie Vance. I've already forgot his face. Harrison goes nightmare blood rotation. Yeah.

And they are correct. And that, that, that was day one of the convention. That was, I do want to get into one other thing because this, again, we had our big don't panic episode a day or two before this. You'll have heard one episode in between those two and posting stuff today, posting comments on like how extreme the rhetoric is. I see people getting scared again. You should like, you should be very concerned. Fear is not an unreasonable reaction to seeing all this happen. Um,

But this is also something that I think will contextualize the scale of the actual number of people that we're talking about here. When we were sitting, we found a quiet place to record the middle bit that you heard. So we were in kind of an empty area. And I would say close to half of the – or right about half, maybe even a little more of the actual stadium was empty. And most of them were clustered in the area that it had. And so there were a lot of areas where there's just absolutely nobody. Yeah.

And several times, what was it, three or four times, Sophie, probably, we had different people who either worked for the RNC or worked for the venue work.

come by but i'm guessing the rnc just because of their general vibe yeah and because they're lanyards yeah to try to get us to because even the areas that were full had a lot of patches in them they weren't all that full so they wanted to get us to get up from the empty areas and move to fill in the areas that were going to be on camera so it looked like it was fuller and they did that because it was not very full now

As someone, it's not very full because this is a political convention. It is not open to the masses. I don't know that it would have filled up if it was open to the masses, but there's an inherently limited guest list. But it did seem to be less people than I recall from the 2016 RNC. And more to the point, everything that you see and everything we're talking about and all of the extremity and the weirdness of these, in a lot of cases, political

freaks, assholes, creeps that we see, this is a couple of thousand of the most dedicated Republicans in the country. This is the elite of the party. These are the people who have a lot of the money, if not most of it, and do a lot of the nuts and bolts of making the Republican Party run.

These are not representative of most of the people who live around you, unless you live in a place that is real hardcore Trump country, in which case a lot of these folks are familiar, but they probably look very similar, but they got a lot more money than your neighbors. I'll tell you that much. Yeah.

No, and it is worth pointing out that they were trying to make an effort to move people around to make the seats look more full. Because also, everything that we're also seeing is theater. There's all these rituals that they're doing to confirm the nomination. It's a very ritualized, a very theatrical experience. Yeah, there is one point where both Robert and Gare were walking around and I was sitting in our intersection by myself and I had...

three separate 20 something males come up to me to try to give me Trump signs and, uh,

All three, in a very unsettling way, pointed out that I was sitting alone. And it made me feel very unsafe. Yeah, welcome to the Republican Party, Sophie. Correct. Yeah, and as I pointed out earlier, definitely a lot of unwanted touching. Yeah. But, you know...

Welcome to the Republican Party. And you know what? There's a lot of unwanted touching. Unwanted touching is essentially part of the main party platform. It literally is. And it is only day one. It is day one. Three more to go. And we will be covering it every night. We'll be back tomorrow with more. Any final thoughts, anyone? Nope. Nope. Tip your service workers. Tip your service workers, folks.

and wash your hands.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast recorded at the Republican National Convention, which I do not very much like. We're having a great time, though. Well, not really. This is the worst day we've had so far. This is one of the worst days I've ever had. Yeah. We did get to talk with Rudy Giuliani, which was a highlight of the day. You'll be hearing more about that later. But first...

Let's go around, let you know who's going to be talking on this episode. First off, we've got Garrison Davis. Hello. Finally identified as she, her by the Secret Service. There you go. Congrats. They're going woke. They're going woke. That's why it happened. That's what Rudy talked about, and I guess he was right. And then speaking of woke, DEI... Jesus Christ. Sorry, Sophie. The DEI supervisor. Sophie Lichterman. Sophie Lichterman.

I've had a day. Don't make fun of me. We are in the, like, the chunk of the, there's, like, the main stadium where all of the very red and Botox people give their speeches. And then there's this part where all of the different, like, media companies have booths set up. iHeart's got a booth there. A very large booth. Very large booth. And we are kind of above that right now because it's a relatively quiet place to record.

For some visuals here, we are sitting in this part of an arena. The Panther Arena. The Panther Arena. There is red carpet everywhere, and there are cubicle-style booths for various publications. Let's see. I see OAN. We are sitting right above the iHeart and the Daily Wire booth. They have a whole booth.

wall of Matt Walsh, a wall of Walsh, a Walsh, if you will. Breitbart's got a tiny little cube. Very small. Frank Speech has a little booth. A lot of local radio. When we met Rudy earlier today, he was at the WVON booth, which is a local radio station. They did not let him speak this year at the RNC. Did not really seem to want him to be here. That's too bad. He claimed...

to be happy that that was the case. Well. Yeah, interesting guy. Took a little tumble today. Took a little tumble today. Fell and then kept falling on the floor of the event. Classic Rudy. And when we went to lunch earlier and wound up in the same room as Ted Cruz briefly, who was also at that restaurant, a lady came up to us, a Republican alternate delegate, and said, are you a band? Are you musicians? You...

You look like musicians. Solely based off of Robert having tattoos. I do think it was entirely based on the fact that I have tattoos. Well, and you probably just look cooler than anyone else here, I believe. Thank you. I said we. That's the first time you've said that to me, Garrison. And it really... You know what? I...

It took a convention. It took a convention for that. Older than my grandparents. I will say that at this restaurant, the restaurant worker did give us all free shots of vodka because she said we had looked like we had had a week. And boy, howdy, is she right? I'm sure she's been having one too. Yeah, she was very nice. So Gary and Robert, do you want to take me? We weren't together for most of today. Do you want to take me through your day and then I can tell you about my really fun

Yeah. So we'll start by talking about our morning. So yesterday was a pro-Palestine march. That was Monday for reference. Kind of build us a march on the RNC. It was a sizable demonstration. At least 500. At least 500. Unclear to me the exact numbers, but not tiny. March is a little bit of a misnomer. It was located in the park that's kind of closest to the RNC security area. Today,

Today, it was a very different vibe. There were counter-protesters, but there were also like... There was like a church group who was there with signs. It was like a Westboro Baptist Church-style street preacher group. They do not like Catholics. They don't like gay people or Catholics or fornication or adultery, that sort of thing. If you can picture...

The big signs that people carry around, it's that. Sounds fun, guys. We saw an amazing t-shirt today. Robert, do you have a recollection of the best t-shirt that we saw today? Oh, God, is that the prolapsed rectum t-shirt? It sure is. Yeah, anal sex equals prolapsed rectum. God, it felt like a John...

quote, there was a book of the Bible that I know does not refer directly to prolapsed reptor. Romans, Romans, Paul. So, you know, Paul was not talking about rectums. Well, Paul is the most homophobic of all the New Testament writers. But basically we talked to some of these, these types of people gathered at this little, this little square, this little park. There was maybe like one or two people protesting the RNC itself, just holding signs, you know, someone with a megaphone, but the rest of the people gathered where these were these street preacher types gathered.

And then we went over to this media section earlier this morning. That's where we talked to our now good friend, Rudy Giuliani. So, again, if you're picturing this floor, it's like a bunch of large cubicles. Have you ever been to a trade show? It looks like a trade show, right? But each of the cubicles is a different radio station or internet media company.

And Rudy was just sort of chilling at a local radio station booth with Laura Loomer when we first walked up. Amazing vibes. She thanked God left. And I will say, Laura Loomer, famous on the internet for looking very peculiar, is

one of the more normal-looking people at the RNC. Which I don't think is a testament to how normal Laura Loomer looks. It's a testament to the types of people that we are seeing every day at the RNC, that everyone kind of looks a little Loomer-esque. Yeah. So she looks a little bit less bizarre in comparison to just everyone else we're seeing, who all has...

You know, a curious amount of facial surgeries going on that makes them just look a little different. Just a little different. We saw the Fox News head anchor today whose face was as smooth as a baby's ass. It looked like carved marble. It looked like carved marble and was clearly bloated with botulin toxin. Incredible. Yeah. He was a beautiful man, Sophie. He was a beautiful man. Do you think he uses retinol? He must use retinol.

And he had a chin as wide as like Glory Days Bruce Campbell. Very wide face. I bet he never forgot to wear sunscreen, unlike you two. So yeah, kind of the last thing we did at the convention before coming back was we had a little conversation with Rudy, primarily about Ukraine. His basic stance is that Ukraine is stealing all of the money.

that the government gives it. When I pointed out that that money was primarily coming in military subsidies and like military weapons, he said they were stealing the weapons and selling them. And I asked to who, and he said he didn't know at which point his handler got him out of there. And we wound up walking over to the I heart booth where one of our coworkers, Dan O'Donnell, who's a more conservative guy on the network, but who through a law enforcement contact got the story

that a man had just been shot outside of the RNC security zone, but by police who were in town for the RNC. It wound up that they are Columbus, Ohio police. So we rushed down there, split up with him pretty quickly, because I think he was mostly interested in talking to the police on scene. And we wound up

right in the middle of, you know, what is the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, the poorest zip code in the state, one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country. It is a deeply deprived area. The first guy we talked to, he was with Lighthouse Ministries, I think was the name of the organization, which is essentially he was running like a Christian halfway house. And we saw another larger halfway house even closer to the shooting. Like there were two halfway houses effectively right next to each other. That's

the kind of neighborhood this was. And when we got there, police had just started setting up cordons. They had started with about a block or two, fenced off with police tapes, but were widening it every few minutes. They were adding new blocks. Quickly expanding. And a large number of cops were on scene. There were horse cops on scene. We could not get closer than about a block from the site of the shooting itself, but we were able to get into a park where there were a lot of local people who were very angry at what had happened.

And one of the first things I encountered was a couple of guys, you know, one of whom was filming on his phone, yelling at the police, a couple of whom were sitting in lawn chairs. And one of whom was speaking about like, you know, who had clearly witnessed the shooting saying like,

You know, they were just having an argument. If you'd let us, the neighborhood, handle it, we would have handled it. The most there would have been was a black eye. What the fuck is wrong with you guys? We talked to him. His name is Emmanuel. And I'm actually just going to play a clip from that interview with Emmanuel right now. Here's all these policemen on the bikes that you see. So they park in the King Center Alley. Mm-hmm.

And they were just basically patrolling and watching us, right? So two guys had a little brawl, about to brawl, as we call it, about to fight. So they didn't really fight. And everyone on the bike, what I'm saying, police or shoppers, shot him. They emptied the clip. Every 12 officers on the bike emptied their clips because you can see the cock bite. Emptied their clips. And then when they were done doing that, they turned the guns on us.

And then now they're pushing us further and further away like we're an issue because they don't want us to tell you guys what really happened. When they cut a taste and the rest of them sent him to jail, they shot him and they was going to shoot the other guy. And then he ran. So they turned the guns on about 16 of us. Robert. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, they were. Other reason why they didn't shoot because they realized the guns were empty. So they called the backups and that's why they have more backups and more backups and more backups. And that's why we are backing up. Yeah. Yeah.

And is that the, uh, that's the plan now is my guess. They just keep on moving us around. Yeah. I can't tell the truth. Yeah. I don't know if they think we're part of the RNC. They have tear gas and, uh, gas masks. Yep. Tear gas and masks. All right. Well. Thank you, Emmanuel. Thank you, sir. Nice to meet you. Yeah. Yep. Tear gas and masks. Starting to feel like Portland again.

And yeah, I would say that what Emanuel said is consistent. We talked to two other people who had witnessed the shooting and then a couple other people who had been close by, and they all agreed with the gist of what Emanuel had said. Well, and Emanuel told you something before you started recording there about how, like,

They felt this was like a very, very solvable problem for like the community. Like this is just like an average fight that they could have, they could have ended themselves. Yeah. And you know, in the next hour, these people would have been friends again. Yeah. And instead police from out of state showed up and just started shooting. And that is what the initial thing we heard through, uh,

Our co-worker who was talking to law enforcement was a man had had a knife or knives, was brandishing them. Police told him to drop. He didn't. And they had to shoot him. Locals on scene said police did not tell him to drop anything, ran up and just started shooting. And as you heard from Emanuel, his experience of the event was that police then turned their guns on the crowd. And, you know, he felt sorry.

threatened deeply by this for reasons that are obvious. And I will say that everyone we talked to in the neighborhood had broadly consistent stories. This was not a serious fight. This was not a thing that would have escalated to lethal violence in the normal course of human events. But a huge number of out-of-state cops rolled up to the altercation unnecessarily and drew their guns and started shooting.

So there was a fairly nice homeless encampment. They had a wonderful community garden. Really nice garden. Just like a block away. And we figured, oh, this guy might have been houseless. And we started to talk to more people who knew him. And yes, we found out. We actually walked right past his tent on the way to the shooting. He had a tent by himself in this little

alleyway I guess Robert you talk more to that to that a guy that yeah knew him I i talk to a guy who knew him you he said his nickname was Jehovah because he was a Jehovah's Witness

The guy who I was speaking to was a Muslim and specifically stated to me, like, you know, I'm a Muslim. He's a Jehovah's Witness. But we always got along. He was a really nice guy. He didn't deserve this. Like he wasn't a dude who generally caused problems. He was not a dangerous person. He was maybe a guy who was having a little bit of a heated moment with another dude. And again, there happened to be a bunch of out-of-state cops who decided to make it everyone's problem.

That was his attitude. And a couple of things were noteworthy. I mean, we talked to a woman who was kind of dropping her daughter off at work who lived nearby. This is a lady who lived in a little bit nicer of a neighborhood. She wasn't quite there. An older black woman who was like,

you know, the cops show up to do this, but there's no cops. Like if this had been any other time of the year, there would have been no cops in this neighborhood ever at all. Like they're never around when anybody wants them to be, but they show up to kill a guy because the RNC is in town. And that was very much the consistent response

we got from everyone in the neighborhood. You know, we stayed there a while. Yeah, that's what happened. One of the things that I couldn't not notice is once we were down in the RNC, you know, earlier in the day, very cool, a lot of shade, tall buildings. When we were in

that neighborhood near 14th and Boulette. Right outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center. Yeah. Sun was beating down on us. There was very little cover. It was very hot. The streets were in notably poor repair. The buildings were in a lot poorer repair. But there was actually also evidence of like

street life. Like here, the RNC is, all of downtown Milwaukee has been sanitized, right? They swept encampments close to the RNC perimeter and stuff. People have had to move around. And no one you encounter lives here, right? Not during the event. That's just the way that it goes. A lot of the local buildings are shut down. And one of the things that was interesting about this was the degree to which all of these people in the most deprived neighborhood in Milwaukee are

had a really clear understanding of what had happened near and around them and knew each other. And we're talking, there were a couple of people we saw who were going around different chunks within a block or two of each other, uh,

and clearly knew all of their neighbors, which was very different from kind of the vibes that we've gotten downtown. Milwaukee is, as nice as it is, and I think we've all really enjoyed this city, one of the most segregated cities in the country. And that was very clear because I think there was one white person who was a resident of the neighborhood that we talked to, that woman who was next to the guy who knew Jehovah.

I guess that's most of what I have to say. Yeah, I mean, more and more plays kept showing up. There was basically a Riot squad with Mace and Gas Mask showed up. But

bike cops, mounted patrol cops. They just, they started to flood this area. Eventually they slowly kind of, you know, dispersed out as, as the scene got more under control and they realized there probably wasn't going to be a huge protest at this location. I believe there's going to be a vigil tonight at 8 PM near the side of the shooting. So yeah, I mean, it's just tough to go from the RNC with, you know, this massive police presence, all of these extremely wealthy, rich white Republicans, uh,

And then be reminded the real people exist and put events like this on people get killed by police to make sure that, that, that people feel comfortable going to these sorts of events and just completely unnecessarily. Yeah. And that's, that's just a good, a good, a good reminder. Every time I walk through one of these police checkpoints.

Yeah, Donald Trump, you know, survived his brush with the shooting. This young man didn't. And he died because this event was set up in his town. We know that the Secret Service and the, you know, the other agencies, because it wasn't just the Secret Service that was responsible for Trump getting shot. There were a lot of other law enforcement agencies there, failed at their job, you know, last Saturday to stop the former president from getting shot, failed very badly at that.

But still, at the RNC, the only thing that the security state knows how to do is flood the zone with cops. And the only thing those cops know how to do is when they encounter anything a little bit hostile, draw their guns and empty them. You know, that was my impression. And yeah, I think that's probably all we need to say about that right now. Sophie will tell us about her experience as me and Robert were walking around this site of this police murder after this short break.

And we're back. While my colleagues were out on the ground, I went to a super duper fun event called Giving Americans a Voice Town Hall hosted by the Moms for Liberty. It was interesting to say the least. It was a...

Three-hour event with various speakers. It was a long event. Very long. And I recorded all of it, so we can put that out at a later date. Let me just give you a quick rundown of what the event was. Moms for Liberty is like a lobbying group for parental rights. Very supportive of banning books. Banning books, parental rights, a lot of stuff around education and school. They're very active in Washington. They're the sponsor of a lot of these really horrible bills about...

limiting information to children, limiting the rights of children, that sort of thing. Yeah. And additional sponsors for this event were Conservative Partnership Institute, Heritage. Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025. Young America's... I can't even read this logo. It's like the Young Republicans Voting Association. Young Americans Foundation. We did it. Great job. And Public Square, which is...

a very strange app. And there were three separate panels and some of the people that were featured on the panel were Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made an appearance. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. The governor of Wisconsin was there? He opened. The governor? The governor of Wisconsin was there. That's upsetting.

He was like one of the first people who spoke. Not a senator, the actual governor. The 45th governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Yes, correct. Various groups of attorneys general and the Senator as well, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. And it was a strange event. What sort of things did they talk about? Well, it started off...

With them giving an excuse that the reason why that there was an attempted assassination on former President Trump was because of the media falsely reporting.

compare a kip to hitler to which they said there is only one hitler there's actually been quite a few hitlers although there's less now also i would i would like like for them to field that question to jd vance but anyway you described trump as hitler yes fair enough and then there was uh you know as there are most of these events there was a prayer and i just thought it was super interesting that the person giving the prayer referred to the panelists and various speakers as

great actors, which was just like an interesting word choice to me. Extensively like political actors, I would assume, but there's some interesting associations. And like one of the main things that they talked about at this event was education. And they said their biggest issue that they have in the United States is the creation of the Federal Department of Education. Oh, yeah. And that they were going to change that, which got huge, huge cheers from the crowd. They claim that one of the reasons why the young man had...

attempted to assassinate Donald Trump was because he had gone to a large school. They are very anti-large school. Why not? And that was one of the main reasons, as well as the media referring to former President Trump as Hitler. They were adamant that teachers unions were

do not protect kids and that they are only out for themselves and that all teachers unions have been infiltrated by the left. Well, that part is kind of true. Yeah. But no, I mean, attacks on teachers unions are, I've seen those more in the past four years among a lot of either like right-wing influencers or actual politicians. The teachers unions is a very good boogeyman. Yeah. Because some people, you know, like their individual teachers, but no, no, no. The real problem is the teachers union. Yes. Yes.

That actual distinction was brought up multiple times. There you go. There you go. And at one point, somebody in the back of the room dropped their phone, but it was very loud and an unsettling noise to the point where everybody thought that it might have been a gun. Jeez.

And everyone kind of understandably so jumped up and around. Oh, they're scared of guns, huh? The Republicans, really? Bunch of fucking babies. And the overall energy is that they hate the federal government. They want things to go back to a local level. And that the left is ruining and grooming children. Lots of weird, as you can imagine, stuff about gender issues.

Lots of stuff about sports. The trans stuff consistently got some of the biggest applause. Oh, something to note here. Anytime Elon Musk was brought up, which was quite a bit, the crowd went batshit. Yeah. Huge, wild cheers for anything to do with Elon, which I thought was, you know, not unexpected, but just that, like, he got louder cheers than anyone.

I think he got a lot of cheer than when they brought up Donald Trump. He's really one of their new great heroes. What did the attorneys general talk about? They were mostly talking about different wins they had had in terms of like their states and things they were bringing to the table and mostly like personal stories of like things that they look for in their family. Yeah.

The Missouri Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, his biggest reaction from the crowd was when he said, in Missouri, we don't co-parent with the government.

And the crowd loved that. Yeah, I mean, this is a big parental rights group. And I'm interested in the attorneys general because back in 2023, the attorneys generals from a lot of these red states drafted this very angry, kind of threatening letter to Target, kind of demanding that because some of their states own an interest in Target, they have to remove any products that cater to trans people because this is...

betraying the investors by making this poor economic decision. And really, the attorneys general have been one of the strongest forces against trans rights in a lot of these states. And I believe, because I showed up near the end of the attorney general's segment, I believe they referred to themselves as like,

The last line of defense, even if you have like a Democrat, you know, like mayor or, you know, you have more Democrat officials in like your city or state, the attorneys general are like the ones that are going to hold it down, even if the rest have kind of sold out or are liberals or Democrats. Yeah. I would say the AGs were the most transphobic of the bunch before I was doing ranking. Yeah. That and old... And DeSantis. DeSantis, yeah. One of them said, you know, in a laughing way, which again got a great reaction from the crowd,

think about a kindergartner saying, what's your pronoun? Very, very funny. Ha ha ha ha. They were laughing and like, ha ha ha about that. Yes. Very good. And just the last thing I'll say about the AGs was that, uh, that same AG from Missouri said, our rights come from God, not man. And,

Famously in the Constitution, yes. Anyways, and then DeSantis and Sir Huckabee Sanders closed it out. Which we arrived for. We arrived just in time to see DeSantis. Thank God. Old meatball Ron. DeSantis and Huckabee Sanders...

Gotta be the two most uncharismatic speakers I've seen at the convention so far. I'm not surprised they were both shunted off to the, I would call it the shame coliseum. Also, DeSantis was wearing jeans, which is just a fascinating move. The knees were very worn. Very worn jeans. That's all I'm going to say. And essentially when he got up, he basically did like a brag list of all the things that he has gotten done in Florida. Yes.

talking about, you know, taking the fight to Disney, enacting a universal school choice, making sure that there's no sex ed in his schools. Very cool. And then he talked, oddly enough, a lot about college. University is correct. Yes. He was talking about how, like, even if you raise your kid right, even if we fix, you know, public schools. You put in 18 hard years. You spend 18 years raising your kid. You do it right. We fix all of the public schools. Everything's good. Right.

As soon as they turn 18, they're going to go off to one of these liberal colleges and they're going to undo all of the good work that you've put in. And that needs to be the next thing to stop. And he said that Florida is the first state to take on higher education. We've had a lot of focus on lower education. We now have to take on higher education, including doing like performance reviews for 10 good professors every five years, in which case they can be fired for poor performance, which is kind of a wild concept for a 10-year-old professor. He also had a one-off wild line where he was like,

You didn't see Hamas over on our universities. Yes. He referred to Palestinian human rights campus protesters as Hamas, just saying that they are Hamas. He didn't say these people are like Hamas. He just said when Hamas was coming to the universities, they didn't show up in Florida. Which is a very standard Republican line. It is. Yeah. And there's just no difference between someone showing up to a protest in the United States

because they don't like that thousands and thousands of Palestinians are being murdered. And that person is now indistinguishable from Hamas, according to the Republican Party, according to all of these speakers. Yeah, and so Sarah Sanders just...

tried to kind of ride on the coattails of DeSantis being like, hey, we're also fighting the transgenders. She did the same. She listed, you know, some of her brags, mentioned always has to do. She talks about her dad. I wrote down something she said because I was like, she said, the only war on women is on conservative women from the far left. Where are the feminists? They can't even tell you what a woman is. Well, I mean,

Someone who's famously taken a woman's studies course where they never define what a woman is. Totally. I guess the main upsetting thing for me, because the police just killed a black man a few hours ago, I was just reminded, you know, there's so many real people in Milwaukee, right? All the food service workers have been very nice, but there's all these real people facing real issues in this, in the poorest part of Milwaukee, uh,

And we just saw someone whose life was ended because police were here for the RNC from a totally different state. And people with real economic concerns, real concerns about their life from police brutality, all this type of stuff. And as soon as we walked into this Moms for Liberty panel, the first thing we heard them complaining about was that they were being censored on Twitter. Yep. And that was their concern. Joe Biden censored us. Their hardest thing to them was that

They find all this gender stuff a little bit icky and that we're being censored on Twitter. And that is the level of problems that these people are dealing with. And our kids didn't turn into the people we wanted them to. Yeah. And that should be the entire country's problem. They are not fundamentally, they don't have real problems. These people, they don't have real problems, but they are unhappy that everyone in the world does not inherently act to serve and validate them.

And they are going to make that everyone's promise. You know, that is what the RNC is. The people on the floor are what we would call like successful used car dealers, like level of capitalists, right? And they are worshipping an alliance of venture capitalists, guys like Vivek, guys like J.D. Vance, and of course, people who inherited a shitload of wealth

and then eventually succeeded in making money through a combination of vice casinos and the entertainment industry, Trump, you know? Like, that's who this is. And speaking of Evake, as we were...

Getting up to leave, they quickly announced that there was one more person who was going to speak, and it was him. Yeah, he sure did speak. He gave a speech that I would say was indistinguishable from AI. Yes. Just about how good America can be. Even though we're in a tough spot right now, I feel like America can do better. And it was just, it was like, I could predict every other word. Yeah.

Hey, this is Gare recording just outside of the main arena at the RNC where Governor Greg Abbott just gave a speech. And now I'm giving you a short speech to tell you to enjoy these messages from our sponsors. We'll be right back.

This is Robert and Garrison recording from our hotel room later in the night because we have learned some new information about the police killing that happened earlier today. And also, we listened to a whole bunch of the RNC closing speeches tonight, which kind of relate to this question of police violence. I'll hand this off to Robert. Yeah. I mean, so since we were down there, the police have released both their security camera footage, body camera footage,

And we have the name of the decedent who was Samuel Sharp Jr. This is the guy everyone in the neighborhood identified as Jehovah. That was the nickname that he went by. He looked younger. I've seen some reports that he was like 43, but he doesn't look 43 from the footage. You know, and he had just he had used a community shower earlier that day that comes by the neighborhood for some of the homeless folks and, you know, told everyone he loved them.

Footage is I understand like exactly how it's going to be used and already is being used by the police. And I understand what they're saying, which is that if you look at the footage, they rush on scene. I think about 15 of them, five of them fired at once.

and immediately open fire. You can see from a distance, the two guys are five to seven feet apart and are kind of crossing the street together while it looks like they are yelling. As the police rush in, Samuel runs forward, and if you clip frames out of the video, you can make a case that he was charging the guy with his knife or knives. Police are saying multiple. It's a little unclear to me in the footage if he had two or just one.

But I can see how the police showing up on scene being trained the way that they are, why they opened fire. The problem is that he ran forward in the first place because they rushed in. Like these two guys were squared up on the street and not in an encounter that any of the locals could.

considered to be particularly threatening. If you have spent a lot of time around homeless encampments, if you have spent a lot of time in neighborhoods that have a lot of homeless residents, it is not wild or uncommon to see people yelling and to see people with knives on their person, you know, even in their hands. Obviously, that can be upsetting to some people, but like the folks who lived in the neighborhood did not consider this

an odd circumstance and was something that in the normal circumstance of events and the normal following of events would have been deescalated. And in this case, it wasn't. The police opened fire before there was any attempt at deescalation. Yeah, and like conservatives will always point out, you know, why is he just following orders? Why isn't he just doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? They will take little screenshots that make something look a certain way. And the simple fact is that these two men were not in any physical altercation before police arrived

He started running away as police started charging towards him. I think it would be very odd that he would choose that moment to suddenly lunge forward and stab this person he knew. And I think it's very clear that he's actually just running away from police, as people often do. And police have a long history of just shooting at people and killing people who are running away. You can look at what happened at the Wendy's in Atlanta in 2020.

They shoot people when they don't follow what they're saying. They shoot people when people try to run away from them. And that's just how cops work. So this video came out later in the evening, right as me and Robert arrived at the RNC second session. And the theme today for the RNC is Make America Safe Again.

And some of the first few speeches I heard, one was from the mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson. Democrats in power demonstrate they don't care about stopping the killers or the thieves who terrorize black and brown communities. They don't care about securing our border. And they don't care about dangerous homeless encampments.

And then there was also like a police chief who spoke. A former police chief who now runs a charity, I think, for like wounded police officers. Yeah. But he's like a cop who is also an activist. And so all this framing is around talking about how the Democrats are the defund the police party, how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris themselves advocate for defunding the police, which is simply not true. If you look at what they say, Joe Biden will always reiterate that he always has argued for more police funding, for more police training.

But they have framed this issue as there are not enough police around. That's what is making cities dangerous. Talking about, you know, all of the people dying of violent crime. Not a single mention, of course, that the out-of-state police just killed someone a mile away from the Republican National Convention.

The Make America Safe Again rhetoric shifted towards, you know, border rhetoric, you know, people believing genuinely, the people that are speaking in the audience, that we currently live under an open border policy, that people can just walk in totally fine, just a complete alternate reality view about what's going on in America, about what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' border policies are. And

There was a number of speeches that tried to capitalize on this, on this, on this like border framing of like there's there's ISIS terrorists pouring into the border only under Joe Biden. Right. As if no one ever crossed the border illegally under Donald Trump. I know, Robert, you were talking about some of the Ted Cruz speech tonight on on his comments around the border.

Yeah. And Cruz was interesting. I've never considered him a particularly strong speaker. And coming out, he initially went into kind of a conspiracy theory that you'll hear on the right about people being trafficked, sex trafficked, kids being sex trafficked across the border. He made a comment about them having colored wristbands, which is

Again, not a thing that happens, but a reference to a widely believed right wing conspiracy. And that got kind of a scattered amount of applause, not what I would call a reaction, given how we saw the crowd react to Marjorie Taylor Greene and how we saw them react whenever Trump comes out. Very muted. But as it went on, he started going into this kind of fear mongering spiel about migrants. He talked about the woman in San Francisco who was killed by that guy who found a gun in a bag and accidentally fired it.

He talked about a number of different other cases that were people not from the country, undocumented immigrants who killed generally white Americans. And every time he would tell a story, he had like a refrain line that was something like, and that's what happens every damn time or something. And every time he gave the refrain, more and more people started to cheer in the audience.

And by the end of it, with the last kind of couple of cases of, you know, migrant on white people crime he brought up, the crowd was like legitimately roaring, like as much as they did for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now, the cop that came up next got a much louder response. And by far the biggest response of the night, even maybe including Trump, was when the delegates on the floor launched into a series of back the blue chants. They actually interrupted the cop with back the blue chants.

And people were roaring for that. Yeah, there was a lot of a lot of these chants. And the Dallas mayor told a really funny story how in 2020, some like anti-police or defund the police activists showed up around his neighborhood to try to, you know, get him to

defund the police. And he got so scared by this that he changed from being a Democrat mayor to a Republican mayor. And now he runs the biggest Republican-led city in the country. And he had this comment talking about how he grew up in, you know, poor black neighborhoods. And the thing that they've always wanted, the thing that makes them safer, is more cops, not less cops. Folks, I grew up in high-prime neighborhoods. What we wanted...

was more and better policing, not less.

And just contrasting that with our experiences today in a very poor black community that just suffered an incident of police killing, that is just a lie, right? And everyone knows this. This is theater for the convention. Everyone at the convention is really into this sort of thing. They genuinely believe this sort of stuff. But it's just an alternate reality. We spent time in one of the poorest zip codes in the country, in the state today. And no, that's simply not true.

Yeah, these these people are angry about primarily theoretical problems. You know, this kind of specter of migrant crime, which is not really real in a demographic. We can pick out individual cases of that. You can pick out individual cases of doctors stabbing people to death. And that doesn't mean we have a wave of doctor related crime. Right.

The reality of the situation is that, like, these are super fans of the Republican Party and they are super fans of the narrative and they are cheering for some of the moments. You know, they're not there's some stuff that's gotten boring to them. I kind of think the child trafficking conspiracy theories might be boring to them, maybe because that guy from the.

child trafficking movie got disgraced or whatever. They're just not as interested. So you can see every now and then as like their interest in certain things fades, but they're reacting like an audience that like a Comic-Con would to see in like a Star Wars trailer where some guy does a thing that's evidence of something that happened in the comics or whatever, people waiting to see. Like when fucking DeSantis comes on and starts talking about banning the

children from receiving gender affirming care, that's like fucking Spider-Man showing up, right? And they react. So like the guy next to us when DeSantis started doing this started screaming and like sticking his fist out towards DeSantis and like yelling at a volume that was honestly kind of surprising. The man could project. I'll give him that. So I think ultimately the way I would sum this up is that,

These are not normal people. These are people who love politics. And again, to be clear, I'm not saying these are not normal people because they're conservative. My entire family are conservative. A lot of them are Trump voters, but they would find this audience deeply weird because these people are politics fans. And even most of the conservatives I know really dislike politics. Most normal people do.

And I guess that's kind of where I've concluded is the difference between like the crazies and the normies. Normal people don't enjoy this stuff. The term I've used the past few years is politics as fandom. And that's all this fucking is. This is a convention, just like Comic-Con, just like an anime con. This is a convention. And that is how they view politics. Anyway, back to the past versions of us to discuss a funny closing story regarding presidential footwear.

So that has been our day so far. The last thing I will leave you with is on our way to the convention site this morning, we were walking through this hotel to get through security and we found this wonderful section called

It was called The Presidential Experience. Yeah. We walked in. There was a replica of the Oval Office. The Reagan era Oval Office. The Reagan era Oval Office. It was pretty good. It was pretty good. It was not good Netflix production, but like Netflix production level quality. Bad Netflix production quality. So we walked through, and then we found just a glorious sight. And I will let past Robert and myself say,

tell you what we found at the presidential experience. We are here in the presidential shoe section. We've got Harry Truman, Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan, Warren G. Harding, who has a, quote, charming spat, requested...

by President Harding exemplifies the elegance of the Victorian era. Dwight Eisenhower's shoes are pretty good. JFK's are a little bit more fancy, but less polished. Lyndon B. Johnson's completely unsurprising, very, very versatile, very efficient. Something you can get off easy. Kick off and show his bare feet up to a table. Slip on and off to get those dogs out when you need to. Abe Lincoln has some, honestly, very stylish boots.

Theodore Roosevelt's as well. Large foot on Theodore. And Woodrow Wilson's shoe is the only white shoe in the bunch. Very small. Tiny feet. Very small feet. Kind of surprisingly.

It says he chose fashion over tradition with these white buckskins. Also, they have Ulysses S. Grant's little riding boots. The Victorian boots are very stylish, but honestly, I think I would go with Dwight D. Eisenhower's. They're just a beautiful shoe. Reagan's aren't bad, but...

I don't know. The Eisenhower shoe is just a little bit more elegant. I'm going for LBJ. Slip-on life is... That makes sense for you. That shows you're a man who's got things to do. You don't have time to be tying your shoes. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. Nixon's and Kennedy's are very similar. Welcome to the White House press briefing. Unlike my press predecessor, I will tell you the truth. Thank you all for coming in today. Pretty good.

It looks like this was presented by C-SPAN, this presidential experience. We have a Reagan-era replica of the Oval Office. Not a big room, not a big room, but overall a decent replica. Nice JFK portrait up there. It's a women's suffrage article. Oh, interesting.

Woman suffrage little table. Very controversial topic among Republicans these days. It has gotten to be increasingly so. Some old Pennsylvania packet and daily... Advertiser. Newspapers. Copy from 1787. Oh, yeah. So this is, I guess, the original Pennsylvania newspaper coverage and printing of the... 1787. Yeah, of the Constitution. Yeah, there's the preamble right there.

Yeah, and they spell establish justice as a thab-liff-just-th, because that's a lot more Fs back in the day. Yeah, but they have these little information placards about all the presidents, the first ladies, that kind of stuff. We'll try to talk to the organizer of this little shindig in a sec. But honestly, the shoe section is the most interesting thing to me, just because of how tiny, just how tiny those Woodrow Wilson shoes are.

Hey, Jay, that's a long foot. It's not a wide foot. Sure. It's a fairly long foot. Roosevelt's feet are pretty wide. Ulysses S. Grant, also very small. Also very small feet. Yeah. You know what they say about... Anyway. Who's your favorite president? Favorite? Honestly, you know, I... I think I gotta go with U.S. Grant.

He's not my favorite president in terms of what he did in office, but in terms of as a person, he's the U.S. president that I think was probably the best person. He really did try. Always been a Harrison fan myself. Oh yeah, William Henry? He was my favorite as president. Also, rhymes with my first name, so a little bit of a bias there.

I like a man who there's not much fat on that presidency. Efficient time in office. He got in and out.

Wow. Very exciting. All those little feet. I can't stop thinking about, you know what I think about that's the weirdest is that they did not have... They didn't have any Bush feet, sadly. Well, they didn't have Bush feet and there was one guy who they didn't have his shoes. They just had the U.S. Grant. They just had, they had like the model that they built the shoe around for him. Yes. Which was weird. I was like, where's your U.S. Grant shoe? You don't want to show us the hardest working man who ever lived to be president? No.

But yeah, I thought that was some important breaking news for our listeners to hear who had the smallest foot. Yeah. But as of right now, that is day two of the Republican National Convention. Until our next update, don't come here. It's unpleasant.

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America is Trump strong, okay? It is so funny. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast recorded from the Republican National Convention, specifically the hotel where the Idaho and North Dakota delegates are gathered. Fascinating elevator rides this week. And we're thinking today about the memory of that guy that Trump does not know the name of who got shot to death. Corey Kurzweil.

They've definitely pronounced... Every time they've said it wrong. Every single person who spoke the last few days pronounced his name differently. And I was like, well, finally, they have somebody's name to pronounce more incorrectly than they do Kabbalah Harris. Or Ramaswamy. Or Ramaswamy. Oh my gosh. And it's... Look, folks, I'm not going to laugh at his kids. You know, that's a...

tragedy for them. But what I will say is that objectively, it's really funny that this guy died for Donald Trump and Trump very obviously does not care. Couldn't could not be less important to him. Like there is nothing that matters less than this election. The man who took a bullet for him. And that's really funny. That's really funny. Anyways, this is it could happen here. I'm Sophie Lichterman. We're

like Gare said, at the RNC. I have Gare Sedavis with me and Robert Evans. Uh-huh. Very professional, Sophie. Thank you so much. I am your boss. Do you want to tell me a little bit about this morning? Well, I think first let's talk about some of our late night escapades. Oh, wait. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Dude.

Time travel noise. At the Shakey's Cigar Bar. Yes. Wow. I did not go with you to that event. Good call. I agree. Yeah, that was a good call. I counted on the main floor of the cigar bar where the young Republicans had their party and six of 40 people had cigars. I had a cigar. You did. You had a cigar because I brought a selection of my finest Cubans. That's very

kind of you, Robert. I had one of John F. Kennedy's favorite cigars that I had been aging for two years waiting for this moment. I did like that you had the foresight to bring cigars to the RNC. To bring extremely high quality. Our buddy Lenny had a three-year-aged Partagas. You had...

But I've been drinking and I had a lovely, lovely. Oh, really, Robert? Have you been quality? So the best cigars there. I talked to everyone who happened to be smoking a cigar and they were all smoking trash. Yeah. Nicaraguan and American garbage because none of them had any kind of look. I don't get into this often. I don't want to be like some of our friends in the in the far right and use cigars as a totem.

I enjoy my cigars privately, but we were going to a cigar bar. So I brought my nice cigars. Oh, was it a cigar bar? Were there cigars there? You just said the word cigar seven times in one sentence. It was not lost on me that none of them smoked good cigars because they're children.

You know what? We had an interview with Rudy Giuliani, and Rudy would have understood. That man has nice cigars. I'll say that about Rudy Giuliani. He knows his cigars. That's all I'm saying. Great. So we've been trying to hit kind of the after-party scene at the RNC just to see kind of what's up. This little cigar party was put on by some of the young Republicans from New York. Primarily New York. They are very confident of a victory, potentially a statewide victory in a national election.

And, you know, the evidence doesn't make it impossible. It doesn't look like it's going to happen from this cycle. But 2028, New York could be in play. And one of the interesting things is that Florida also seems to be tightening. Two polls recently show Trump just four points ahead of Biden. He won by 10 in 2020. That's a significant tightening and within kind of swing state margins. And so it is kind of interesting to conceive of the possibility that by 2028, both New York and Florida could be in play.

Yeah, so I dressed like a 1950s FBI agent in a trench coat and smoked one of these cigars as best as I could. How'd you like it? It was fine. It's a nice cigar. It's no clove. Good God. Oh, my fucking... Give me a gun. It was a nice little party. We talked to some people. The best thing about the party, though...

is that there was a series of speeches put on by these guys from New York that kind of just kept going on. And the longer that these speeches, like these three different guys kept going on, the music on the roof started to get slowly louder and louder and louder until it was completely draining out the speeches until they just stopped because like, okay, the music's too loud now.

out now and again there are heroes so someone was on that dial just every every like two minutes there's a little bit there's a guy i follow who has started who followed me back in 2020 who was like an election poll analysis expert and was like and is not a political guy but was like look if you show up at a convention after party to talk fuck you like people are there to drink all you should say is the bar is open

And, uh, I agreed with that. And then, you know what, to skip ahead credit to the heritage foundation, nobody ever said anything, but that we could drink all we wanted at the heritage foundation party. That is right. Which we will get to later. So we were up way, way too late, way too late. Uh,

at some of these after parties the other night. And we had to get up pretty early in the morning because we had an interview with the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is kind of like a mini version of the Heritage Foundation, but just for Texas. Yeah.

The former guy who ran this now runs the Heritage Foundation itself. So it's kind of like a little bit of a training ground, and they kind of swap members often. We had a pretty long interview that we will turn into some kind of future piece of content discussing everything from woke ideology to the moral rot infecting America. To why mass shootings happen in this country. Yeah. Yeah. He was very polished, very media trained. Easily the best...

interview subject in terms of his like skill at talking. Yeah. Yeah. That we've had. And similarly, I don't think he was quite prepared for our line of questioning either, you know, so that he got, he got taken aback a little bit by some of the questions we were lobbing him, probably very different from the rest of the interviews that, that he's been doing. I'm trying to think if there's any, any, anything specifically about that interview that's worth mentioning now. You know what really interests me because the shooting is so relevant. I will bring up the shooting. We talked about why, why,

the guy who tried to kill Trump had done it. And he and I were kind of of the same mind, the same mind that you are Garrison, which is that this was a school shooter type thing. And that was the primary reason behind the ideology. And this is before now some, some stuff has come out since that has made that seem even more likely, but it was interesting to like, kind of have that not be a controversial part of the conversation. This was not a radical left shooting. There was no sort of attempt by him to claim it as that he was like, yeah, this seems like a guy who,

we have a deep sickness in this country. And we clearly disagreed with him about the specifics of where the sickness comes from. But the sickness leads to some people who just want to do mass shootings that are not political. And that was interesting to me. No, and one of the big things talked about in terms of this moral rot is that there is something lacking in our country, specifically with young men. There is this lack of purpose among young men, which makes them do these kind of violent acts. I don't disagree with that.

Sure. I think I disagree with his solutions and some of his diagnosis in certain ways. Right. Because he he'll attribute that lack to certain things that we might not. Morality at the home. Sure. Right. You know, pornography, all those all those kind of things. But, you know, that was that was kind of his his take, you know. And then we also talk about everything from like the influence of of billionaires on these right wing think tanks and political candidates.

Catholics versus evangelicals. It was an interesting conversation that I'm sure you'll hear in the coming weeks. And we'll kind of explain why we want you to hear from this guy who's typically probably pretty adversarial to the type of stuff that we talk about on this show. But after this interview, I met up with Sophie Lichterman. Hey. And...

We talked to the people at the actual Heritage Foundation booth who had many a pamphlet. And I collected all of the gender ideology pamphlets, which will also be a future deep dive. Kind of curiously, they did not have a single pamphlet about Project 2025. Nope.

No, and they didn't like talking about it either. They said that Project 2025 is, you know, a coalition effort between both Heritage and all these other groups. But they're not really talking about it here today because it's not Trump's policy platform. Trump has his own policy platform. This is just a list of policy suggestions for lawmakers once they get into office. So they like to talk about a whole bunch of other stuff, you know, certain things that are kind of a part of Project 2025, but nothing about the actual, you know, document itself.

It's partially due to the kind of negative backlash that it has received. And, you know, it seems to be kind of widely unliked for various reasons. So I think it was interesting that they weren't even pushing it at an event like this. You know, again, with the Texas Policy Foundation that we talked about,

When we brought it up, he was pretty open about the fact that it's not popular. Yeah. And his attitude was that in the future, once we win, we can try and build consensus around it. But he didn't try to deny the fact that like it's widely disliked by the electorate. And it is against a lot of things that are on the Republican policy platform for the actual party.

Sophie, you had a wonderful conversation with some of these heritage folks. Let's just say that my very blonde hair and the pigtails that I wore most of this week made it very easy for these folks to talk to me, which is amazing.

Unsettling. A little bit frightening. But useful, but very, very, very scary. Yeah, a question I've been asking a lot of the folks that I've talked to this week is mostly about their opinions about education. And, you know, if there is a shift in power with Trump being elected in November, what exactly they would want to do. And the overall majority answer from these groups is that they want to take away power from Trump.

federal government and bring it to the states. And that would be universal school choice. Yeah. And so got a little bit of that from them. They also mentioned something about one of the biggest roadblocks being student loans. While also being very against student loan forgiveness. Forgiveness, specifically. So it's kind of a, it was an interesting position. I'll want to read some more of their pamphlets on that. But anyways, just talked to them more, got more of their pamphlets. And Garrison and I asked them about

about the states that they choose to operate in and specifically for their for their lobbying group as opposed to just like the think tank they have this this other thing i think called heritage action which operates differently because of certain laws around lobbying it's kind of where they try to train a lot of new people up they have a lot of advertisements that they did something like 50 more on the ground activism type stuff and gary what was the answer they gave it i thought it was interesting you you asked the question

For why they didn't go in certain states. Yeah. So they had this map of what states they were active in. And there were certain states, you know, like Oregon, Washington, a whole bunch of the New England states. They just weren't active in because they didn't think they would be very effective. They wouldn't make any leeway. It's just it's just not worth it. It's not going to move towards actual electoral victories. But there was other there's other states like Wyoming and a few others that they weren't active in for different reasons.

because of specific regulations regarding donor transparency that they were strongly against. The states that require there to be transparency for people who donate to these kind of political groups. And in protest of those regulations and laws, they are completely inactive in those states, which is a funny way of saying we just want to hide whoever gives us money. And that was a little interesting piece of information regarding, you know, there's just states they just don't operate in because they do not want to see people

or have it made public, where their kind of money is coming in and out of, at least for the Heritage Action part of the group. Yes. It was overall...

Just interesting that there was, you know, at this booth, there was about five different, I would say 20-something women. 20-something dyed blonde women. Yes. And they invited me to their heritage social party that they were having that was across from the main convention where you needed an access code to get in. And they gave me that flyer. And... You will hear all about that. We took advantage of that. At the end of the episode, you will get a special inside look at...

at the Heritage Foundation's private, invite-only, exclusive RNC party. That they made us promise was off the record. Now, does it count? No, of course not. I promised that lady that what she said to me was off the record. And I won't say any more about that. But I didn't promise that to anyone else. Do you know what's on the record, Robert? What you said later? These products and services? No, the products and services that support this podcast. Sure, that also is off the record. On the record? Whatever. Here's the ads.

We are back. And don't worry, you will hear about this special Heritage Foundation party in a sec. But first, I want to play for you a whole interview that I collected just down the hall from the Heritage Foundation booth.

The American Conservation Coalition had a pretty large section of the RNC convention fest, you know, list of vendors, kind of more typical, like, you know, convention type stuff. You know, if you go to like a Comic-Con or something, there's a lot of like vendors and booths that this kind of section of the RNC.

So they had this pretty big boost, and it was the only time I've ever seen anything mentioned about climate change. So I was interested to see what conservatives talking about climate change sound like, what they're saying. And I'll just play that interview here right now. Do you mind introducing yourself and the organization you're with? Sure. My name is Carly Matthews. I'm the vice president of communications at the American Conservation Coalition, which is the largest conservative grassroots environmental organization in the country.

So there's a few things that interest me about your group. I mean, especially if you look back in the last hundred years, like environmental conservation has been historically a much more conservative standpoint. You can look at like presidents in like the 1920s. There was a huge push for that. And somewhere along the lines, that's kind of that's kind of been lost for like a number of reasons. I guess. What is your main mission here with this organization? Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring up kind of the history of conservative conservation because we have a timeline here at the RNC showing all the Republican presidents who have really engaged on this issue from Ulysses Grant to Teddy Roosevelt to more modern presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and even H.W. Bush. So what we're really...

doing here with the American Conservation Coalition is building the conservative environmental movement, specifically among young Americans who frankly feel kind of disenfranchised by both parties on the issue of climate and the environment. The left has taken a really doom and gloom approach to these issues that isn't very inspiring for a lot of young folks. And in the last 30 years, conservatives haven't engaged very productively. So we're here showing that conservation is conservative and

Those values are inherently entwined, and it's okay to call for action on environmental issues like climate change. I guess, yeah, let's start more on the big topic, which is climate change. And then we can get into local conservation. What is your take on the current climate scenario? Because ever since the early 2000s, there's been this...

for a lot of young people, a slightly worrying trend of half the politicians just either seriously downgrading the scale of this problem or just thinking there is no problem. What is your take both on that part and then how you see the climate crisis, the climate issue that we are dealing with? Where do you see it heading? Yeah, so ACC was founded because conservatives weren't engaging on this issue. So for the last...

six, seven years, we've been really pushing conservatives, especially conservative elected leaders to re-engage in a productive way. And I think we've done that really effectively in DC where I live. The conservative climate caucus in the house, which is a group of Republican lawmakers interested in tackling the issue of climate change has 87 members. It's the fourth largest in the Republican conference. So we're seeing a big kind of shift in the Overton window there.

But yeah, I think young people want elected leaders who recognize that we have an issue, recognize that we have a challenge in climate change, and want practical solutions like expanding clean, reliable nuclear energy, like pursuing permitting reform to actually allow American energy projects to be built. So I think we take a really kind of level-headed, rational approach to these issues that really resonates with young people.

What's the main difference in how you view the climate issue as opposed to someone like AOC, right? Or like these more like progressive Democrats who view this as a very existential crisis. You have to get fossil fuels under control. These kind of timelines that we hear, you know, by 2050, by 2070, by even like something like 2030, right? How this becomes like a cascading problem. How differently do you view the current situation than, you know, these like progressive Democrats? Yeah.

Sure. Like I said, climate change is a challenge. It's certainly something that we need to tackle, but we don't view it through kind of this doom and gloom lens where we're going to die in 12, 10, 5 years, whatever the current timeline is on the left. But we do see a need for all of the above energy. So we recognize that energy demand is continuing to expand, but we also need to protect our environment. So we need to kind of contribute.

consider that trilemma, reliable, affordable, and clean, when we're looking at our energy portfolio in the future. And I think that's what really kind of distinguishes us from the left, in that we're not calling for a divestment of fossil fuels. We're calling for a rational, level-headed energy strategy that will lower emissions, but in kind of a more realistic way. Do you think that timeline's going to be more stretched out? Because, I mean, if you look at, you know, the way current levels are heading, as soon as we hit, like, 2.5 degrees...

not just that change, but the level of cascading environmental effects, right? One thing changes, now everything gets worse because when stuff melts, then it changes the way like thermal regulation of the whole planet works. And then it becomes this kind of cascading problem. And I feel like we're trying to get out in front of it before it happens. And every day that kind of feels less and less likely, at least for a lot of people like my age. And it can be a very doom and gloom scenario because you feel like no one's taking this problem seriously. Even Joe Biden's climate policy is very inadequate according to like a lot of the people that I talk to.

I guess, yeah, like how do you view like the scale of this problem right now? Yeah, climate change is the kind of environmental challenge of our time, right? It should be what, you know, we're thinking about and focusing on when it comes to environmental policy. But I really think we need to kind of take a step back and that kind of

push for urgency hasn't gotten us anywhere. To your point, Joe Biden is kind of branding himself as the climate president, but a lot of young people are unhappy with the platform that he's put forward. So I think when you're talking about the timeline, we're talking about what we can do right now to kind of unleash American energy, to reduce American emissions, but also global emissions and really think of this on a global scale. So that urgency piece isn't quite

you know, realistic or isn't quite what we want to focus on because I don't think it leads to action. There's kind of two trains of thought in terms of like climate policy stuff. There's taking like...

adaptation routes, right? Trying to adapt to a changing environment that we're going to have to face. It's going to happen versus mitigation, right? For a while, we were trying to find ways to mitigate the problem to kind of get ahead of it, right? And that is feeling less and less likely. And we are seeing more of these adaptive strategies getting adopted, right? There's everything from like

Mm-hmm.

Well, we definitely need both. To your point, we have to adapt to a changing climate, but we also need to be reducing emissions to kind of prevent future effects. So I think we kind of set a balance between adaptation and mitigation. And frankly, I think sometimes they can be really kind of connected and entwined. So something we focus on, for instance, is regenerative agriculture, which lowers emissions associated with agriculture, but also helps the land kind of adjust to a changing climate, keeps the soil healthy, things like that.

So I really think when we're talking about climate, we can talk about adaptation and mitigation kind of at the same time. How do you try to do outreach to a vast number of Republicans, conservatives who simply don't think this is a problem, who like just deny this is a problem, think this is like a scam in some way? How do you try to tackle that as, you know, coming from a similarly like an also conservative position?

Yeah. So, I mean, we're here at the Republican National Convention, and it's been really interesting talking to a lot of folks from diverse backgrounds about the issue of climate and also environmental conservation. I really do think it matters how you start the conversation. We talked earlier about kind of our timeline of the legacy of conservative environmentalism. Starting there and talking about how we can carry on that legacy and how we can tackle kind of this environmental issue of our time has been

really effective and we've gotten a lot of positive reception. You know, there's always going to be disagreement. There's always going to be detractors. But I do think that there's more and more of kind of that acceptance that we need to take care of our own backyard. And that includes, you know, tackling climate change.

How much stuff do you end up having to, you know, talk about or not necessarily focus on, but at least talk about like actual fossil fuel emissions, fracking, these types of things that are like mainstays of politics because of how much money goes into them, but undeniably are a massive contributing factor. And we do need to move to probably some more nuclear options to forgive the expression, I guess.

And, you know, as well as, like, a solar hydro, which are, you know, less good than nuclear on, like, a large scale. But, like, you know, especially for, like, the Republican Party, trying to point out certain things about how, like, we will have to scale back some degree of fossil fuels, if not, you know, a majority of it in the next 25 years if we want to not have, like, a pretty bad scenario, at least for, not even just for humans, but for, like, animals and other parts of the environment. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, I think that goes back to the all of the above energy approach and really diversifying our energy portfolio, which frankly is not only good for the environment, but good for energy security. We've seen, you know, hacking of pipelines or other kind of cyber energy attacks. So by diversifying sources, we're really setting ourselves up to have a more secure energy grid. So I think there's other ways that you can talk about

environmental actions, climate actions that have co-benefits. And we can talk about that in a really productive way with Republicans. Do you also focus on local ecology efforts? Some of the more Roosevelt-style conservation. Is that something that you also try to advocate for? It's like an on-ramp to talk about these broader climate issues.

Absolutely. I love that framing that you used as kind of the entry point to climate issues. We have 50,000 young members across the country in about 100 branches, either on college campuses or in young professional communities. And they go out and they plant trees in their communities. They do park cleanups. They clean up a water

way. They have educational speakers to learn more about these issues. And we found that that's really, really effective in building this conservative environmental movement and showing that these values are connected, they're compatible, and then that can lead to advocacy on the national level for things like we talked about nuclear energy or other clean energy sources. So that's been really effective for us. What would you like to see as a conservative climate policy in like 10 years? What would you hope

adopted to help curtail these more catastrophic scenarios? Great question. And I would hope it perhaps a little bit earlier than 10 years. Absolutely. But I'm just...

Based on how things have gone. Sure. So we have kind of a big three that we're focused on right now. Permitting reform, so getting the government out of its own way, frankly, to fight climate change and unleash American energy in the form of clean energy, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower.

and really kind of expand what we can build in this country. Again, nuclear energy is really one of the focuses for us because it's a baseload energy source that can run 24-7. It's clean and it's really secure. So we're really focused on nuclear. And then the last thing is American energy dominance. Here in the United States, we produce energy safer, cleaner, and more efficiently. And we really want to be a leader on the world stage when it comes to energy.

I think there is a lot of people, both progressive Democrats who really care about this issue, as well as a lot of Republicans and liberals who have a lot of skepticism about nuclear energy, right? For some good reasons, there have been some unfortunate events that have happened. And I know fission and fusion have been slowly getting better. I feel like we're close to some kind of breakthrough, but we do have a limited time. How do you approach talking to people who have...

a level of, like, risk in terms of nuclear energy and, like, the possible dangers that it's had based on a few accidents, even though a lot of these plants are relatively safe. Yeah, I love this question. I grew up an hour south of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. So I have a lot of experience with nuclear skepticism. Look, I mean...

Nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest form that we have in our back pocket. Yes, there have been some unfortunate incidents. Frankly, they're human error. And we understand nuclear power a lot better now. We have more safeguards in place since incidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. And we haven't seen a nuclear meltdown that we were promised in the Simpsons or the China syndrome or something like that.

The fact is nuclear, quote, waste is really nuclear spent fuel, and we can recycle that and keep producing clean nuclear power. We have incredibly well-trained nuclear experts at all of our power plants across the United States, and they produce clean, reliable energy for consumers all over the country. So we really need to kind of get over those messaging hurdles with nuclear and expand the industry here.

What do you think will happen if your concerns go unheard? Like, if this just doesn't work, if things kind of continue at the scale and, like, a timeline they have been, what worries do you have?

Yeah, that's a really existential question. Yeah, I mean, I think we're in the seven years since we've been founded, we're working really hard to build coalitions with a lot of different stakeholders and be heard by a lot of different folks in power. And frankly, I'm hopeful that we will pursue solutions to climate change, that we will

for lack of a better term, get our act together and pursue these solutions. And really, I think the biggest thing that I like to focus on when it comes to climate advocacy is optimism and this idea that, you know, the planet is our one common denominator and we can unite around that. And, you know, already in Congress, we've seen bipartisan legislation in a really polarizing time that focuses on climate.

Probably the last big package in the 118th Congress was a nuclear package to unleash next-generation nuclear. So I know I'm not exactly answering your question, but I am extremely optimistic about the future. Do you think there is a path towards some kind of bipartisan advocacy, not just in the Senate, but also in terms of environmental movements and protests? Obviously, there are certain people who employ very theatrical tactics that maybe don't correlate to much improved means.

But do you see there's a possibility of a larger public call for action on this issue? Something that we've covered on our show a while ago is, will it take something like a general strike to even get people to realize we need this to be done? Not necessarily that option, but do you see a route towards more bipartisan activism and advocacy of this issue?

Yeah, that's a great question. We do a lot of bridge building work. I was actually in Los Angeles earlier this year with a group of conservative climate advocates and progressive climate advocates. And we talked about solutions where there's common ground. And then we finished the day by doing a beach cleanup together. So I really do think there's a lot of opportunity to kind of unite on this issue, especially in younger generations. When I talked about hope earlier, they're the ones who really give me hope. And I think there's a lot of common ground that we can pursue together.

That's all I had, unless you have any other notes or points you wanted to mention. If you want to find ACC, you can find us at acc.eco or acc underscore national on social platforms. But that's it for me. Well, I hope that was slightly informative. And now we will inform you about the Heritage Foundation's private exclusive party after these messages. Okay, we are back. We are back and we are ready to tell you...

Five pigtails let us infiltrate famous hate group, the Heritage Foundation's social house party. We got all up in there. First off, a lot of microwave grade food. It was the worst food we've had in all of Milwaukee was the Heritage Foundation catering. Great meals. Yes, that is very notable that the Heritage Foundation had the worst food that we've had this entire week. Not shocked.

First of all, they let you two as well as another one of our friends come in off of my access code, which is very funny. And then we took one of the most hilarious photos we've ever taken together. We did. And then we met with one of the producers of The Daily Wire and watched him try to figure out who we are. It was very funny. As I introduced myself by name, he was just calculating. And then some lady came up and disrupted him and we just fucking...

you can see the little like thinking, thinking circle in his head. He was trying to do like third grade edition and it wasn't, the math was not math. It was like that one BBC Sherlock scene. He was trying to pull up, he was trying to pull up the files. Yes. Didn't work. Didn't work. Just didn't have enough time. We stayed in that party. Well, Robert, you stayed in that party for like five straight hours. I was there for a long time. For every drink I wanted to drink, I would order another and just pour it out. Um,

because I wanted to make them spend money. I knew it was going to go somewhere. Free for us, but not free for them. So as Robert was schmoozing with the Heritage Foundation party attendees, me and Sophie went into the convention center to hear some speeches. And most of them today, honestly, pretty boring. And even...

Even the notable ones were also kind of boring. The one I guess we'll talk about just very briefly is Don Jr.'s speech. First, he brought out his daughter, Trump's granddaughter. Before you get to that, do you want to go over what the theme of the day was?

No. I mean, maybe. We can mention it. I don't feel how relevant it was to any of the speeches. It was just make America strong again. It was make America strong once again. Sorry, once again. All right. Interesting that they didn't want to sound out NASA. You know.

Anyways, I guess it's really not that relevant. Just to point out that on the previous days for the different themes, there was very intricate backgrounds that were up. They did not really have anything for the Strong Again. They phoned it the fuck in. Yeah. And there was no interesting background. Anyways, Gare, what were you saying? So...

Donald Trump Jr.'s daughter, so Trump, the actual real one's granddaughter, gave this little speech meant to humanize her grandfather. My grandpa's a nice guy. That was basically the speech. He calls me and asks me how I am. That was basically the speech. Which is...

lovely. Sure, why not? It was her first speech. I don't think any of the other grandchildren have given speeches before. No, this is kind of the first appearance of one of Trump's grandkids. Yes, and the way it was framed is Don Jr. came up and then was like, she just called me. It was very

Very intentionally propagandized. It was also the most happy I've seen Trump this entire week, though. He might actually care about his granddaughter. Yes. Definitely more than his son. It would be hard to care less. I'm not sure how much they've shown it on TV, but, you know, I had a view of him the entire night tonight, right from where I was sitting. I was at an angle where I could see his face and they showed his face on the screen a bunch. And he was genuinely stoic, I would say. He smiled angrily.

For his granddaughter, definitely the most. And maybe once during Kimberly Guilfoyle's speech at the very end. But other than that, I did not see much emotion from him today. And it was pretty similar the rest of the week. I think you again, you have to keep in mind with him, whatever. I mean, we hate him. He's a bad man. He's he's a monster would be the worst possible president we could have.

But he's also a person who got shot and he's traumatized, you know, and like you don't have to like make up excuses for that. Like he is a human being who is scared because a man shot him in the head.

And that's really not a complicated thing to diagnose. So after the granddaughter gave her a little spiel, Trump Jr. himself had a little speech that he was basically just doing an impression of his father for the entire time. Dog shit impersonation. Not a very good impression. But compared to Vance, it was still, it was very impressive. We'll get to that in a sec. I will say the crowd did really...

really, really like him. They seemed to like him. There was chants of, you know, Trump Jr. 2028. It reminded me of when I was at my first Trump rally. This would have been in the late spring, early summer of 2016 when fucking Chris Christie conceded to Trump. There was a British naturalized citizen in the crowd of the rally. And I was like,

You want him to be president for eight years? And he was like, well, I wanted to be president for eight years to start. And I was like, to start? What happens next? And he's like, well, he's got three kids, doesn't he? Then he, like, walked through his basic plan for Trump to have a dynasty like the royal family. And I...

I wish I had said, go back home. Go back home to your fucking country with your goddamn royal family. We don't have that here. But we might. They wanted it. They wanted it here. The idea of a king is becoming increasingly popular. You have never told me that story, and I am unwell. Thank you so much. I got some great audio of that guy. Thank you so much. That is going to haunt me tonight. Garrison, what else? Yeah, I mean, Trump Jr. had a few funny lines yesterday.

making fun of Build Back Better, making some corn pop jokes. You made a corn pop joke? There were a couple of corn pop jokes. The corn pop jokes in the moment, very funny. The one line I do want to mention is that he talked about how the left wants to use the First Amendment to show kids explicit drag shows, but they want to put you into jail for making a meme, something that has never happened. Not a single time.

Not once. Not once. They barely put people into jail for assaulting the Capitol.

Yeah, so that was most of his speech. We then heard from Vance's wife, who gave a typical vice first lady speech. It wasn't notable. And then we heard from Vance himself, the hopeful future vice president. What? Sorry, I was taking a nap. Wait, Sophie, Sophie, wake up, wake up. We're recording a podcast here. Wow, sorry. Just the sound of J.D. Vance's name put me right to sleep. He gave...

what I would describe and people have since described, it's kind of a bad speech. Um, you guys were in the stadium. I was sitting at the heritage foundation party on an upper roof deck. What'd they think? There were three people during most of it. And then like four others filtered in when those guys left, every single one of them was disappointed. The only guy who liked it was a Fox news reporter. And when he left the people who had been like, well, he was okay. He said, well, I hate that I had to lie in front of that guy, but he was media. I,

I was kind of just sitting on my phone pretending to be texting and listening to them. So they didn't really notice me. But the ultimate feeling that they expressed repeatedly was that was really disappointing. It was really boring. It was really long. He is not a great speaker. There was one guy who repeatedly said, I don't like that his wife isn't white. I wish his wife was white. And then there was a guy who was kind of a more libertarian person.

of the Republican Party who I chatted with who came in and like sat down to have a drink and you know was expressing that he liked Vance's speech and the guy said what are you a Cuban and the guy said no and he's like well you're not white so that was great amazing stuff happening in the Heritage Foundation private party Foundation party was a was a good time yeah

So this is something I was even seeing in the convention. People there, you know, there was some like, you know, respectful clapping, but people weren't super into it, at least in the sections that we were at. The lady sitting next to me, who's, you know, just like a Republican woman in her maybe 50s or 60s, very, very lucid.

kind of just like kept dozing off just because she was so bored. Not like because she was sleepy, just because she was bored. Wasn't a good speech. No. She looks at me and she said, he's so dry. Yeah. So at a certain point, I just kind of whispered to Sophie, like, wow, Vance is a really dry speaker. And she kind of like nodded awake and started like nodding her head in agreement and repeated the same thing to us. And I asked her, you know, like, well, who do you think would have been a better pick?

And she said, well, I don't know. I just expected Vance to be a better rhetorical speaker. And that was all she would say. And I feel like that was kind of generally the vibe. Like something else I noticed that he was like actually okay at the certain things he was talking about, what he was actually saying. There were certain things that were interesting. It was more like the way he was saying it. It was specifically he had no ability to do crowd work.

He was just reading off the teleprompter and kind of doing a slight smile every 30 seconds. And that's all it was. He wasn't actually really seriously engaging. People make fun of the bits where Trump dances or whatever, his little moves. But those play. Those work with the crowd. Even like pointing at people, using gestures, kind of anything to connect you to the audience. Vance was just so dry, was so plain. I think the biggest action from his speech was just the people in the crowd who liked to chant things. Who were just really into chanting. Really loved to chant. Ted Cruz gave him a great...

He kind of lost them early in his speech the night before and won them back because he gave them a chance that he repeatedly went through. They like that. They like to chant. They're chanters. Want to give us some of the chanting highlights, Garrett? Yeah, so...

He was definitely leaning into like his hillbilly or faux hillbilly background. Motherfucker. Sorry, your parents made $175,000 goddamn dollars a year. Speaking of somebody who grew up in a fucking rural ass Oklahoma, like fucking carpetbagger. That was what he was using for most of his speech. He was telling stories about the woman who raised him when his own mom was dealing with addiction, who he referred to as his meemaw. Uh-huh.

And fucking God damn it. The first big chant I took note of is he told a story about how he was hanging out when he when he was like a kid or like a teen. He was hanging out with someone who was known to be like a local drug dealer. And his meemaw told him that if she saw him hanging out with that guy again, she was going to run him over in a truck, run over the drug dealer.

and no one's going to find out about it. And the crowd ate this up. They started chanting, Meemaw, Meemaw. So they were chanting about killing this drug dealer, right? They were chanting about murdering this drug dealer. J.D. Vance never met a drug dealer in his fucking life, I'll tell you that much. So that was the first one. And the next little Meemaw story he told is that when she was a little bit older...

He said that after she died, they found 19 loaded handguns all over her house. And they realized it's because she wasn't able to move very fast. So she always wanted a gun no matter where she was. She wanted to be an arm's length of a gun, whether that be in the cutlery drawer, by the TV remote under the bed. Just get a shoulder rig, people. Because she wanted to protect her family, even though she was old.

And this led into another chant. Specifically, the 19 loaded handguns just, again, went. The crowd ate that up. And the crowd even started just chanting about how good they were at chanting. It became very self-referential, very like patting yourself on the back for chanting. These people love chanting. And yeah, that was most events' speech. It wasn't very good. It was too long.

Almost unanimously, the people at the Heritage Foundation Party did not like it, so they did not get that seal of approval. Didn't run under one positive, one pseudo-positive, which was the Fox News journalist. Who I'm sure is contractually obligated. To like it, yeah, yeah, yeah. And who the people there made fun of when he left. Yes, well, we talked to a campaign manager earlier at the Heritage Party just regarding kind of the race in general, mentioning stuff about the upcoming vice presidential debates, right?

which the Trump admin put out a statement saying they don't want to lock down any details on this until they actually know who the vice president's going to be. That was good. That was solid on their part. Which is a good piece of propaganda. And so, and we were talking about that and bringing it up to some of these people at the Heritage Party. Like, who do you think actually is going to be the Democratic nominee? Many of them did not believe it was going to be Joe Biden. Many of them thought that it,

It either could be an unknown candidate at this point or more likely probably Kamala. And this is something that I've been noticing is that every time in these speeches where they're talking about Joe Biden's policies, they're not just saying Joe Biden. They're saying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Well, well, Kamala Kamala Harris in one instance, Kamala Harris's policies. So they are already preparing to start shifting their rhetoric onto Kamala.

That is something that the opposition's already planning to do. And, you know, as of today, which is Wednesday night, we've heard that both Biden made announcements in the same day that he would step down if he was to face a serious medical diagnosis. And he also got COVID the same day. The look on your face when we told you that Joe Biden had COVID. You were thrilled. Okay, well, we shouldn't say that either. Okay.

Anyway, that is kind of a brief glimpse into the Heritage Foundation party. I guess the vibes were more similar to what is, I think, well-known now as the least good episode of the boys, that private tech night party, combined with, like, a frat bro bar hop. What I'll say about this is they had an EDM track set to Country Road, Take Me Home, and I will say that, like,

If you were to put that side by side with the plane crash that killed the author of that song, I think he would agree with you. This party was worse.

One more thing I wanted to note was I did not go to the party for 700 hours like the two of you. I went home after all the speeches. I went back to the hotel after all the speeches. Did that country road take you home? That country road took me home. To a place you belong. And I had a very, very, very nice Lyft driver. Sir, if you by some chance listen to podcasts, you were very nice. Thank you. After what was a very loud day. There was a guy holding a rest in peace sign.

sign with the photo of the guy who attempted to assassinate the president with the caption, an American hero. Great stuff. Yes, I took a photo of it. And the amount of people leaving the RNC that just shouted...

Their worst, many slurs at him, were countless. And I don't know if anything else happened further after that, but very strange choice. That is an interesting move. All I know is that based on the last postings of the victim of that shoot and Corey Comperatore,

He'll get over it. The Japanese did. Well, anyway, that wraps up our coverage this week of the Republican National Convention. We will lead next week with Trump's first public speech since the shooting. That'll be dropping Sunday night. Maybe just maybe.

A little bit of Mayor Rudy. Hopefully we'll squeeze in some Rudy as a treat. Like he's squeezed out some of that hair juice. That's right. Jesus Christ. Well, thank you for listening to our initial coverage of the RNC. We have more scripted episodes, more kind of polished deep dives about the people and conversations that we have had here in beautiful Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And remember, folks, if you're going to take a bullet for somebody, Donald Trump does not care.

Not interested at all. He's not making the funeral. He is not. He is not going to show up at your funeral. Wow. That's a loud chair. Painfully loud chair. You know what else is painfully loud? The Heritage Foundation party. Anyway, we're done. Good night. Good night. Good night.

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 find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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