"It Happened Here 2024" A new radio play starring Edie Falco and John Turturro
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This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And for this midweek podcast, we have something kind of exciting to share with you. It's the first episode of a brand new radio play starring Edie Falco, John Turturro, and Tony Shalhoub.

Playwright and novelist Richard Dresser was inspired by Sinclair Lewis's dystopian novel, It Can't Happen Here, to write It Happened Here, 2024, a novel and now a six-part radio play, which offers a glimpse of what could happen if after the election, our democracy continues to crumble.

The story centers around the Weeks family as they brace for the election. The family of Paul and Ruth are working to defeat the so-called great leader. Paul's brother Garrett and his family are on the other side. Family get-togethers are tense.

When the great leader with a giant boost from the Supreme Court shockingly wins the, quote, most important election ever, the family's thrown into chaos. It happened here, 2024, describes a country that still has Netflix and free two-day delivery. The only thing that's lost is freedom. Hey there, I'm Louise Weeks, and I'm talking to you from Ontario, Canada in the summer of 2039.

I want to tell you the story of what happened to my family. I made this documentary so I'd understand how we ended up like this, living on a commune outside the USA. Maybe it can save you from going through what we did. It's worth a try, isn't it? I was born in a Midwestern college town. My grandfather's family and his brother Paul's family would get together every Sunday at my great-grandfather's house. He was called the General, and he ruled the family with an iron fist.

Being the youngest has its advantages. They'd forget I was there, and I'd be under the table hearing some pretty twisted tales. I tried to figure out what they were talking about, but they disagreed about everything, so I got more and more confused. Plus, I knew they weren't telling the whole story. They all had secrets.

The family started falling apart around 2024, the same time the country was cracking up. I thought there must be some kind of a connection, a mystery at the center of it, and if I could solve it then I'd know who my relatives were and why they did what they did. It would be nice if there was a single answer to the mystery, but spoiler alert, there isn't. What I did find out is that there's a killer in my family. That's what changed everything and made people take sides and basically tore the family apart.

Since they'd argue about even the basic facts of family history, I figured the only way to get the truth would be to talk to each one of them alone. It wasn't easy. The one thing they all agreed on was how their lives changed forever on November 5th, 2024. Everything that happened to our family was because of what happened that night. I recorded this over the summer of 2039, and I just want to say, if any of them has a problem with what I've done, I'd like to quote my great-uncle Paul. Fuck him.

I decided to start with my great-uncle Paul. He was always the easiest to talk to, mainly because he did all the talking. My earliest memories are of Paul telling me stories. Starting when I was maybe two, he'd talk to me as if I was a well-educated adult who'd lived all over the world and understood things like Sacco and Vanzetti and the infield fly rule. Plus, he knew he had to tell the truth because I'd find out one way or the other. Are you ready? Here we go. He's out on the porch. Hi, Uncle Paul. Hi.

Is this a good time? If you're here, it's a good time. But can I say something before I talk? I admire what you're doing, Louise, but a word of caution. There are people in the family who will not make it easy. For starters, my brother, Garrett, won't talk to you. The English language has never served him well. I love him, but he's always controlled his entire family, so I can't imagine you'll get much from his kids.

He was unbelievably strict, which is a nice word for abusive, when they were little. And, well, you've seen the results. But I do adore him. I know Garrett was horrified at our child-rearing, which he'd say was typical liberal coddling, which destroyed the nation. He's dead wrong about this and just about everything else. But I do love him, as I believe I mentioned. My side of the family presents a different problem.

They, we, don't shut up. So you're gonna have a major editing job, picking your way through the gems to find out which ones gleam the brightest.

Okay, but can we go back to 2023? Let's see. Fall of 2023, I was teaching at the university, the most popular professor in the history department, according to ratemyprofessor.com. I hate all that competitive who's the best crap, which is one more distortion to an honorable profession, so I steer clear of it.

But the facts are that I was number one year after year in a large, prestigious department, and my student evaluations were off the charts. I can show you them if you're interested. Good. Thanks. Paul's youngest kid, David, was my age, 14, back in 2023. He's a doctor, so let's see if we can catch him in the clinic. David! Hey, can you talk to me, but act like I'm not here? I've been doing that for years. Ha!

No, seriously, 2023? Great, let's start when I was in my awkward stage, which went on a really, really long time. Some think it never ended. Freshman year of high school, a bunch of us would eat lunch together and hang out at someone's house after school. We were so deeply uncool. We didn't fully understand how uncool we were. But we had our little group, and that's all we needed.

That fall, there'd been some bullying. Nothing too bad, unless you're the one getting bullied. But it became an issue when the Parents Association got involved, which led to the Stop Bullying Now Club.

They wore armbands. And they'd stop you in the hall and make sure you weren't getting bullied. My older cousin Terrence, a junior, he joined. And then one by one, my friends signed up, which meant they'd all eat lunch together and do military-type training after school. So our group shrunk down to me and Jeremy. I wanted to sign up, but my parents wouldn't let me.

I told them Terrence joined, and they said, Terrence's parents have different ideas about these things, which sounded weirdly formal, since they were talking about my Aunt Hadley and Uncle Garrett. Paul's wife, my great-aunt Ruth, didn't want any part of this, until she realized she'd better speak up or she'd get thrown under the bus by her loved ones. She's always either going on a walk in the woods or just back. I'm going to find her.

I'm going to sit next to you on the bench, Aunt Ruth. But I'm not here, okay? Uh, that's fine, Louise, but if I'm going to do this, I'm going to tell the truth. Which means talking about adult things I've never talked about with you. I know you want me to pretend you aren't here, but you are here. And if it's too uncomfortable, let me know. Got it, Aunt Ruth. My safe word is stop. This is too uncomfortable. Okay, point made.

Back in 2023, what pissed me off was people saying, what can we do? It was so plaintive. The language of defeat. That's what I'd hear at my book club from these well-meaning women in designer jeans and $200 blouses. Well, ladies, we could start by discussing the book.

I'd chosen It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis about a fascist takeover of the USA, but half of them hadn't finished it because they were so paralyzed with worry that it was happening here. One Monday morning, my last friend Jeremy told me he couldn't eat lunch with me anymore because he'd joined Stop Bullying Now. So our group was down to just me, which cut down on the conversation at lunch, but not by much.

The worst of it was I had no one to hang with after school. On the night we weren't discussing it can't happen here, I got so frustrated with the helplessness and despair, I slipped out to the back of my Subaru and drove away forever. On the way home, I decided to do something that mattered, to show the frightened, medicated ladies that it was possible. I knew it would be tough convincing Paul because he talks a big game but is naturally cautious.

I could have said fearful, but that's not fair. But kind of true. But I didn't say it. When I got home, I told Paul we were going to be a stop on the new underground railroad-type operation and take in refugees. He just smiled and said, "Honey, that's never going to happen." Ruth was totally receptive when I pitched the idea of taking in refugees. Red Hats were on the loose performing their civic duty terrorizing brown-skinned people.

Being a stop on the Underground Railroad felt like the least we could do. My parents were all about being open and honest, unless it was something that mattered. Then they'd whisper in the other room so I knew something was happening. My older brother Mickey was a freshman at the university, and he'd come for Sunday dinner

And my sister Kate was a senior in high school, but she'd worked out some independent study scam, so she was never around. Plus, she had a boyfriend at the U. For Sunday dinner, we were all there, and my dad said...

We're going to have someone living with us for a while. And my mom explained about taking in a refugee and how we can't tell anyone. She asked if I was okay with that. And before I could say anything, Kate said, what if he's not? Would that make any fucking difference? And off they went, forgetting about me.

Everyone in the family was worried about their secrets getting out, and then they'd spill their guts. With my Uncle Mickey, Paul and Ruth's oldest son, it was real. No one would talk about Mickey's secret, so I planned to do whatever it takes to break him. Mickey's a hard one to pin down. He's always working, building more cottages on the compound. Mickey, any chance you can stop yelling at your guys and talk to your adorable niece? That would be you? Huh.

Louise, I need to be clear right up front. There's something I can't talk about. And you won't get it from anyone else because I'm the only one who knows the truth about what went down. Actually, there's one other person who knows. But that person would never tell. I swear I'll be dead honest about everything else. If that's cool, then I'm good to go. I totally respect that, Uncle Mickey. I promise I won't push. Let's go back to 2023. Ah, yes. My brief incarnation as a campus hero.

What I always loved about football is that my parents hated it. The brutality, the concussions, the militaristic conformity, it challenged all their beliefs. They would have liked to prevent me from playing, but as good liberals, they wanted me to make my own choices, even if it killed them. And it nearly did, but they never missed my games. I didn't appreciate till much later how hard it must have been for them to sit in the stands with that drunken, bloodthirsty mob. The other reason I played football is, and it's better if someone else says this,

I was really fucking good. I was a wide receiver, fast with soft hands, and I loved the mass psychosis in the stadium when I scored. So when the whole Underground Railroad thing was happening at home, my head was someplace else. David was the one who had to deal with it.

When my dad asked me to help him get the room in the basement ready for our refugee, I was all over it. He even let me use power tools. As a shy, recently friendless, uncoordinated 14-year-old, I was just glad to have something to do. I have to admit, of everyone in my family, my Aunt Kate, Paul and Ruth's middle kid, was my hero growing up. Which is a little odd, considering, well, she should tell it.

She likes to hang out in the boathouse and play music, and hates to be interrupted. Kate, I'm not interrupting, am I? Of course you are, but it's you, so it's okay. Great, thanks. So, Kate, where were you in 2023? You probably know some of what happened to me. Sorry, what happened to me sounds as if I had nothing to do with it, and frankly, I've no one to blame but myself. Which I hate, because my real talent is blaming others.

But I try to be better than that now, and sometimes I am. So, 2023. Many lifetimes ago, but it feels like last week. My mission back then, when I wasn't saving the world, was saving my brother David. Couldn't be good for him to be spending so much time with our parents, and he didn't seem to have any friends. What kind of childhood is that? I always thought I had a happy childhood, but it's not as if I had another childhood to compare it to.

Freshman year of high school, I took a hard look at what I'd have to do to graduate early and get the hell out of that house. That's why I studied all the time. All three of my children, our children, sorry, are smart. But David might be the smartest, although you wouldn't know it watching him or listening to him or following him around. Being the youngest, he really benefited from Paul's and my guidance. He was such a happy kid. We inspired him to work hard, unlike his siblings.

I was still in high school, but I had a pretty loose schedule thanks to my high school guidance counselor, Mr. Groom. He was a church-going family man who prided himself on how he connected to the kids. He had a big framed photo of his family of five, all of them smiling wildly in their disturbing holiday sweaters. I proposed making a documentary about the evolution of bullying at our school.

My pitch was pretty emotional, and Mr. Groom signed off on my very independent project. It meant I could spend lots of time at the university with Glenn, this awesome senior I was dating. We'd take David to concerts and movies and rallies, and the air was crackling with drugs and sex and revolution. It was like David suddenly had a couple of bad parents to offset his good parents.

After school one day, my mom took me down to the basement and introduced me to Dr. Morales, our refugee. He got out this tiny chess set. Once I got the hang of it, we'd play every day.

My boyfriend Glenn was a revolutionary right up until he got the call from his dad to go back to Cleveland to run the family's discount furniture store. He went from organizing demonstrations and turning over police cars to developing new price points for living room sets, which freaked me out at the time.

It wasn't until much later I found out what had happened to Glenn. But he taught me about radical politics and uncivil disobedience. And when he left, I was determined to prove that I didn't need a guy to make shit happen. I read books. I practiced online and got pretty good at chess. But I never could beat Dr. Morales. There are adults who'd let a kid win once in a while, but he wasn't one of them.

After one game, when I was sure I had him but didn't, I saw his smug little smile. Like beating a kid 89 times in a row was something to be proud of. He said, David, when you beat me, you will know you earned it. I went upstairs and told my mom I wasn't going to play anymore. That went on for three boring days. Mom finally said, you could at least say hello. Dr. Morales spends so much time alone.

So I went downstairs and the chessboard was all set up as if he knew I was coming. It was the best game I ever played. And I thought I'd win because even if I screwed up at the end, he'll give it to me to make things right. But he beat me and smiled that smug little smile. I didn't cry. My life's mission became beating him.

Suddenly, this Guatemalan doctor is living in our basement. So I tell David that Dr. Morales is considered a criminal by half the country, and there's a whole lot of bad shit going down. And no one can know that Dr. Morales is living in our basement, or the Red Hats will come and we'll all go to jail. Which freaked David out, because my parents had spun it like they'd brought home a rescue puppy.

I told David that Dr. Morales would be staying with us until his wife got here. Then they would go to the next safe house and the next, and when they made it to Canada, they'd be okay. He asked if we were going to jail for taking him in, and I said, "No, but it's very important that you don't tell anyone he's here."

Kate and I had some knock-down arguments about David. I'd ask her how she knew so much about raising children. Did she have some she forgot to tell us about? And she'd tell me she didn't need to have children to know that what we were doing to David was wrong.

Being an optimist, Paul thought things would get better when Kate got older, but she was always a mystery to him. When I had a problem, I'd never tell my dad. I'd never tell my mom either, but that's normal.

Back when Kate turned 14, we had no idea what to get her for her birthday. Paul pointed out how obsessively she listened to music and suggested a guitar. I had my doubts, since back then she'd bounced from one great passion to another. But when she ripped the wrapping off a very inexpensive Yamaha guitar, she was, for the first time in her life, speechless. I still treasure those few moments of silence.

There was a lot of tension because the Stop Bullying Now Club was stopping kids in the hall and giving them a hard time. I think they saw themselves as border patrol agents in training, and it was pretty clear that non-white students got stopped more than anyone else. There used to be a lot of laughing between classes, but now we just kept our heads down and hoped we didn't get stopped.

My cousin Terrence, who was kind of my hero, was an officer in Stop Bullying Now. He used to tease me in the hall, but now I didn't even exist. So it was a big deal when he dropped by the house after school one day with the football. We went out back and he told me he really wanted to beat the adults this year and I could be the hero himself.

I used to dread going to the General's house on Thanksgiving because of the football game. It was kids against adults, and the adults always won. And I was the worst kid except for my cousin Isaac, who wouldn't play anymore, which made me the worst. But Terrence had this secret play we practiced over and over. And every time it worked, he'd be high-fiving and telling me I was the man.

The next day at school, I said, "Hey, Terrence," when I saw him in the hall. And it was like he didn't recognize me. My brother Garrett's family took the football game way too seriously. Maybe because they were all pretty good players, and except for my son Mickey, we were hopeless.

That morning, I was down in the basement playing chess with Dr. Morales, and we both knew this was the day I'd finally win. My mom called that it was time to go, so I asked if he thought I was going to win. He said, "We'll pick this up later, David." The guy never gave me a break. We got to the General's house, and the adults were boasting how they're going to kick our butts. Terrence wouldn't even look at me because he didn't want to give a hint about our secret play.

My Uncle Terrence, my mom's brother, is the one Uncle Paul said would never be a part of this. He's more comfortable with dogs than people. But he couldn't say no to me. Louise, I don't know if my dad will ever talk to you, so I better step up for our side of the family, right? Yeah, thanks for doing this, Uncle Terrence. So, 2023, how old were you? I was 18, but I have to tell you, I'm going to screw this up.

Ever since the military, my life is a jigsaw puzzle, some asshole dumped on the floor, and I'm crawling around trying to fit a few pieces together. People tell me stuff I did, and I say, "Really? Are you sure that was me?" So I'm not, like, a reliable source. Hey, whatever you remember about that football game is cool. Okay, well, it was a close game, and the general's up on the deck in his Adirondack chair, and he yells, "Next touchdown wins!"

Which pissed off everyone, because both teams knew they were winning by a lot. I get in the huddle with David. We're in the huddle, and Terrence says, "Me and Dave got this one." If I used grammar like that, my dad would have spanked me. Metaphorically, which still hurts. I knew if I messed up, it would dog me forever.

The snap goes to me and I make this huge fake pretending to throw to Mickey and Terrence comes back and I lateral the ball to him and Mickey's in the clear screaming for the ball and Terrence fakes the pass to him and I'm all alone on the other side of the field in my comfort zone totally ignored. Terrence fires the ball and it bounces off my hands and floats in the air in front of me. The

The rest of my life is up for grabs, so I throw myself forward, and it lands in my hands just before it hit the ground, inches over the goal line. Everyone goes nuts. My dad hugs me, and then Mickey and Kate and my mom and even Uncle Garrett, which never happened before or since. Terrence slams the ball in my gut and says, the ball is yours, Davey. You're the man. I still got that ball.

It's a pretty great sports memory for someone who doesn't give a damn about sports. I retired after that game. You probably read about it in the papers. Years later, I came across a video that Isaac had made. I asked David if he wanted to watch it, and he said, no, it'll never be as amazing as I remember it. But it was. I watched it by myself and cried. The whole family was together then.

David was the kid you forgot about because he did everything right and never got in trouble. But getting all that attention, you could see how much he needed it. He couldn't stop smiling. The general always made a toast before dinner, and it was usually about the military and the country and family and faith. And this time he ended with something like, And thank you, God, for David's catch. A moment we will all remember. Everyone yelled, Amen! Started cheering.

People would joke about how quiet I was, but in my family, if you put yourself out even a little, there was someone waiting to knock you down. I wasn't used to being the center of attention, which is maybe the reason I screwed up. We're leaving, and my Aunt Hadley is trying to get people to take pie, and my mom is saying, no, we'll just eat it and hate ourselves. It's all that end-of-the-party banter. Uncle Garrett was making one of his borderline offensive jokes about women to provoke me when I heard David say...

"Can we bring Pi home for Dr. Morales?" Uncle Garrett's face tightened, and then the conversation picked up as if nothing had happened, but of course everything had happened. David didn't seem to know what he'd said. He just wanted to do right by his friend, Dr. Morales.

We pull into our driveway, and I suddenly remember I'm about two moves away from checkmating Dr. Morales. I didn't know how much fun winning was, because it never happened before, and now it's twice in one day. I go running down to the basement, and the door to Dr. Morales' room is open, and it's dark, so I turn on the light, and the bed is flipped over, and the table is on its side, and the chess pieces are all over the floor, and there's no Dr. Morales.

All I could think was, "Now I'll never beat him." I went upstairs and my parents weren't there and I kind of panicked. And then I saw them in the backyard holding hands and looking up at the night sky. I went outside and they held me so hard, it hurt. That's the first time I remember seeing my parents scared. The one family member I wish I'd known is my uncle Isaac. Just the way everyone still talks about him. Kate was probably the closest to him, from what I've heard. This is probably pretty hard, but

Can you talk about your cousin Isaac? Yeah, he would have loved Isaac. There was nobody like him, and there never will be. He was allergic to everything, missed tons of school, plus he had some kind of learning disability. He was in special ed, a year behind his brother Terrence, but he might as well have been at a different school. Terrence was just like his dad, my Uncle Garrett. This tough, willful kid who got his own way because no one stood up to him.

Isaac was lucky to have such an awesome mom, my Aunt Hadley. She's another one I miss. I'm sorry you didn't know her. Me too. I've heard stories. She kind of held the family together. Anyway, she totally protected Isaac from the violence in that family. But no one protected him from the violence at school.

My brother David told me how Isaac got up on stage at a talent show and students are screaming and throwing stuff at him and he stands there all alone with his guitar and sings Blackbird from the White Album. David said it was stunning. As soon as he finished, even the bullies started clapping and cheering. No one could believe it. I didn't tell Kate what happened after Isaac sang. You'd think he'd love being popular for one minute of high school, but...

He held up his hand, and they got quiet. He had a bad stutter, except when he sang. That's why he started singing so young, to try to beat the stutter, which he never did. So when he starts to talk, he's stuttering, and he goes, We all have to decide if we're going to be in the mob or stand up to the mob. Fuck the Stop Bullying Now Club. He walks off the stage totally calm.

Okay, this is the part I've been dreading, but there's no way to tell this story without talking to my mom.

Mom, I think we would both rather not do this. Do we absolutely have to? Unless you want to totally wreck my project. Is that what you want? Because it's fine if you do. Don't be that way, Louise. The only way I can do this is if I don't look at you. So don't take it, I was going to say personally, but how else can you take it?

Anyway, I am proud you're doing this, and I really wish you weren't. It would be great if you kind of skipped all that and just talked about what you were doing back in 2023. Thanks. Let's see. High school. That's a fun, easy time for everyone, isn't it? I was 14. Your age. But you have so much more confidence than I did. Can you sort of, like, get to the friggin' point, Mom? Yeah.

Do you remember the school assembly where Isaac sang? Yes, my god. I was a freshman, and all I cared about was fitting in. Watching Isaac scared me because, selfishly, which is all anyone ever is in high school, having a brother do something like that was gonna land on me. My friends are all looking at me like, "This sucks for you, Ella."

But I was proud of him because we were all terrified of the Stop Bullying Now Club and no one was standing up to them. They understood better than anyone how things worked. Rules are for losers. Never apologize. The truth is whatever you say it is. They knew just how far they could go before the administration would bring the hammer down.

The way they terrorized Isaac after that assembly, pushing him into lockers, stealing his backpack, ripping up his homework, you know, clever high school antics. It was a shock. But after a few days, it felt like that's how it had always been. That's how everything was back then. You couldn't stay shocked all the time. For a bunch of C students, they were pretty sophisticated about using fear to control everyone. But hey, they learned from the master.

It was totally uncomfortable at our house in the morning before school. Terrence would be strutting around in his Stop Bullying Now t-shirt, and Isaac would be quietly getting ready to face another day of abuse, and I was mainly concerned with how I looked, and what boys I liked, and if my friends really liked me. I once overheard my mom telling a friend that I should have been born in the 1950s. I'd fit right in.

I don't think it was a compliment. When David told me about our cousin Isaac singing Blackbird at school, I had this idea that he and I should sing at a family party. The two of us were friendly enough when the families got together, but we never spent any time one-on-one. And I'm two years older, which is a huge gap in high school, so he was a little freaked out when I asked him to come over. But he showed up with his guitar, and I told him we'd rehearse a few songs to play at his dad's birthday.

We noodled around until we found ourselves in this groove and he started singing 100 Years From Now from Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I joined in and we barely made it to the end of the song before I started laughing. He said, what did I do wrong? And I said, Isaac, you were so fucking good. How did you get so good? He was breathtaking, actually. And the look on his face still chokes me up to think about it. I hadn't seen that look since he was a little kid.

Before the world worked its magic on him. That was one of the best times of my life, seeing Isaac come to life. We were both laughing because it was totally outrageous how our voices fit together. After Dr. Morales got taken, I wanted to sit down with Paul's brother Garrett and Hadley and find out what had happened. We knew that Garrett was on the other side, working the great leader's agenda. But we didn't know how deep it went.

The great leader had convinced his followers that the government was illegitimate and real patriots better follow him or else. After David blurted out that Dr. Morales was living at our house, I assumed that Garrett had reported it to some rogue right-wing military operative. But Paul said it could just as easily have been one of our neighbors who ratted him out. You couldn't trust anyone back then, family included.

We were all trying to figure out how to survive the upcoming election. The worst was how David took it to heart. We were finally able to convince him that what happened to Dr. Morales wasn't his fault. My parents worked so hard to convince me I wasn't responsible for Dr. Morales getting taken. I knew it was my fault. Ruth was dead set against going to Carrot's birthday party.

There was hardly anything you could bring up that didn't take a hard turn into politics, and Garrett's family lined up on the wrong side. I talked about trying to understand them, and Ruth said she understood them perfectly, which is why she didn't want to see them. I had an unlikely ally in Kate who said we had to go.

Garrett's party was making me crazy. I knew we were about one drink away from everything blowing up when Kate and Isaac stood up and Kate said, Uncle Garrett, this is our birthday present. The two of them started singing and it was just so unexpected. My dad was all about old school country. So when Isaac started singing Johnny Cash, he was a goner. I remember thinking, I'll never get that from him.

When I saw Uncle Garrett blink back a tear during Precious Memory, I thought, we've got you surrounded, you cold-hearted son of a bitch. We're gonna make you cry in front of your family. It's about the happiest I ever saw Isaac. His family got a glimpse of who he really was. After we sang and the party was winding down, Garrett said to Terrence, didn't I tell you to clean up?

There was all this birthday chaos in the living room, wrapping paper and wine glasses, and Uncle Garrett had this thing about clutter. Terrence says, I'll get on it after they leave. Garrett's voice drops to a whisper, and he says, you'll get on it now. So poor Terrence starts cleaning up like he's the help, and some of us started pitching in, and there's Garrett with that scary low voice saying, that's Terrence's job. When you hear that voice, you don't ever forget it.

His wife, Aunt Hadley, was my absolute favorite. She was this beloved kindergarten teacher. It must have been hell for her when Uncle Garrett went into that dark place. At school, there were all these awful rumors about what they were going to do to my brother Isaac. He was so brave, showing up day after day. And I think that was because of Kate. She saw something in him. She was the first.

I convinced Isaac to play with me at the university. Just a few songs in the quad on a Sunday afternoon, but the students would stop and listen. We became a thing. At first it felt strange to be tooling around with Isaac, but I realized he never tried to be anything other than who he was, which, when you're a teenager, is pretty heroic.

The big worry my parents had about football was concussions. I knew it wouldn't happen because I was 19 and invincible. So when it happened, I tried to downplay it. It was homecoming. The whole school had turned out. Near the end of the half, I made a pretty dazzling catch and was stutter-stepping to beat the first guy when I got blindsided by a helmet-to-helmet hit and went down like I'd been shot. They took me off on a gurney. And even though I was out cold, they couldn't pry the ball out of my hands. Pretty impressive, right?

I don't remember any of that, so it might be bullshit. The headaches that followed were real. I had to take fall semester off. I started going to the campus library to read. Since football was off the table, I was taking a hard look at my life.

Kate and Isaac made a few DIY recordings of the songs they wrote. The college radio station started playing Look What Happened to You, which was kind of a breakup song to the United States. Isaac had gone so far into uncool, he had come out the other side and had a following. Nothing major, just out-of-it kids who finally had a hero. There was this super serious librarian I'd see every day, D.

I'd try to get her to talk to me, but it wasn't easy. One day I told her that post-football I needed a new direction and asked what I should read. She wrote down some titles, which turned into a significant reading list. She was no bullshit, so when I made her laugh, it was big. When I returned a book, she'd quiz me on it, and if I gave a lazy answer, she'd call me out. I never studied as hard as I did for those trips to the library. I asked if I could buy her dinner to pay her back, and she took a hard pass.

The high school cafeteria was brutal.

A lot of kids would hide out in the library so they didn't have to face the anxiety of trying to eat when you could get frozen out or mocked or bullied. One Friday, some jock came up behind Isaac and cleverly flipped his tray and all that fine public high school cuisine went flying. There was a moment when the whole cafeteria went silent. Then Isaac turned and smiled at the jock.

It was so unexpected and fearless and powerful that the jock didn't know what to do. Then the goons started screaming and threatening Isaac the way they did after he spoke up at the assembly. It looked bad, so a bunch of us rallied around him, like we're gonna protect him. But some of the bullies came after us, and we all had the same thought.

We're fucked. They were the tough kids, and we were the kids who tested well. It looked like ass-kicking time. But then, all those kids who looked up to Isaac as some kind of heroic loser tore themselves away from their bean and cheese burritos to join us.

We had all the outcasts, the nerds, the freaks, the weirdos, the dweebs, the learning disabled, Isaac's people. And there were a lot more of us than them. Because face it, the ultimate truth about high school, which makes it the ultimate truth of human existence, is that more people don't fit in than do. There wasn't even a fight.

We just milled around, pretending to be brave. And the teachers took over. And things lurched back to the free-range insanity of high school normal. Those of us who jumped up to save Isaac had a bond like we'd gone to war. And we realized there were more of us than them. But it didn't stop the way they treated Isaac.

So, 2024. The big thing everyone was talking about was the presidential election. Right, Uncle Paul? Right. But it's not like the rest of your life stops. You have to keep dealing with what's in front of you. Like Mickey's concussion, which scared the hell out of us. Sitting in the stands in the middle of bedlam, watching him get wheeled off the field. Ruth and I were both thinking, what if he isn't the same?

And of course, he wasn't, even though we spent a whole lot of time pretending he was. When I went back to the university for spring semester, I got a job at the library. That's when my new friend Dee realized my one great talent. I am fucking relentless. One Friday afternoon, with everyone counting down to the weekend, I said to my American history class, if we kick out everyone who isn't a citizen and we don't let anyone else in...

What does that do to our country? Silence. Then, this earnest, grade-grubbing front row freshman, Kelly, said it was a good thing because white people would be in the minority by 2045, and if we don't take care of our own people, who will? There was a groundswell of support for what the great leader was promising. Mass deportation, detention camps, and an expanded border wall.

The election was eight months away, but sometimes it felt as if he'd already won. So I read to the class what the U.S. Office of Strategic Services concluded were the primary rules of Adolf Hitler: never allow the public to cool off.

"Never admit a fault or wrong. Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy. Never accept blame. People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. Repeat it frequently enough and people will believe it." Sound familiar? I could see the rage and contempt rising on the faces of Kelly and her cohorts. The African American, Asian and Hispanic students didn't say a word. The message was clear: "We don't want you here."

The university was getting shitloads of government money for the new psych center. And from the start, it was a mystery what happened there.

Word got out that students could make extra cash by volunteering for educational tests, and then flyers appeared with a challenge. Do you have the courage to face the real you? There had been rules against using students as subjects of testing, but during the last administration, when the great leader was calling the shots, there'd been a major push to make the country as unregulated as its leader. So students were now vulnerable to rapacious loans and mysterious research.

When I started teaching at the university, I assumed it was just a step along the way before grander things. But the longer I taught, the more I wanted to stay. I'd found a safe harbor doing something I loved, and tenure meant we'd make it through the storm until things got back to normal. That was back before normal became a sick joke. My librarian friend Dee and I were spending all our time together. I couldn't get enough of her.

Her advisor told her they didn't have a diverse enough range of students for the study at the psych center and suggested she consider it. The study was supposedly aimed at developing breakthrough educational approaches for the underserved, and who could argue with that if it happened to be true? So she volunteered. I was opposed to it, but she said she didn't have a choice. We talked endlessly about the study. What we never talked about was the excitement we felt being together. We'd never even kissed. The week before she went into the psych center, we had our first fight.

She was convinced I could never understand what life was like for her as an African American woman at the university. I said I thought she was afraid of what she was feeling for me. That's when she threw me out. It wasn't until years later I found out the real reason she signed up at the psych center. My boyfriend Glenn had a falling out with his family over politics. They cut him off financially and he was scrambling for cash, so when the psych center opened he signed up as a subject.

It didn't seem like a big thing, just bogus educational testing in exchange for beer money. He went in for three days, and afterwards, when he got a call from his dad, he hightailed it back to Cleveland to take over bedding and more the family business. It seemed strange, but those were strange days. We had no idea they'd get even stranger. We'd get nostalgia for last week when things were better.

I was falling in love with Dee. And when she said I couldn't possibly understand what was going on with her, I knew she was right. So without telling her, I signed up for the testing. You had to commit to three days, and I arranged it so we'd be going in at the same time, even though she didn't know I was doing it. The whole thing was about interrogation and coercion. As soon as you signed up, they did a deep dive into your personal history so you were vulnerable before you checked in. They were fine-tuning methods of getting whatever version of the truth they wanted.

Smashing you into a million pieces and putting you back together slightly reconfigured. Glenn used to say the problem with paranoia is that it never goes far enough. Whatever they're doing is much worse than whatever you can imagine. They had the goods on him. He'd gone to a campus shrink, and they used the most intimate parts of his life against him. When I got out of the psych center study, it was midnight. My mind was spinning, and I felt like I'd never make it back to solid ground.

I went to Dee's dorm room. She opened the door, stared at me, and said, What happened to you? I said, The same thing that happened to you. She just grabbed me, and we were both sobbing, trying to understand what had been done to us. Even with the horror of what we'd been through, it was incredibly exhilarating. I mean, how often do you tell the truth without any concern for how it makes you look? That night, Dee and I slept together, and for all the sex I'd had, this was the first time I made love.

We tried to be discreet because the whole country was hurtling forward into the past where an interracial relationship meant danger. My mom says the concussion changed me, but that diminishes everything else. Getting dinged in a football game is nothing compared to connecting with another human being on the deepest level. The summer of 2024, it sounds like you were all terrified about the election going the wrong way. You talked about it nonstop, but what did you actually do about it, Uncle Paul? Not enough.

I can't think back on 2024 without feeling anger and shame. We knew it was the end of everything we loved, and we watched it happen. Colleges had become an easy target for the great leader's party, mandating what could be taught, what could be read, what could be researched, and what could be said on campus, all of which would be under the thumb of partisan political appointees.

The great leader knew how easy it was to control the poorly educated. One Sunday night, I mentioned to Mickey I was going to the campus march for academic freedom and would he like to join me. I thought he'd be all over it, but he said, very slowly, as if he was explaining time zones to a small child,

Dad, the campus demonstrations are sanctioned by the university. They exist only to promote the lie that this is a free society and the system works. I pointed out that so far the system does work, but he said it's been corrupted and turned against us. So working within the system is fueling the tanks that are about to roll over us. He had an edge I'd never seen before.

That was the first I heard about the massive election year rally that the great leader was planning to hold in Washington, D.C. He was daring the country to accept him as their leader before he'd even been elected president. Mickey's progressive group, We the People, was heading to Washington to confront the great leader. Back when we were still doing Sunday dinners at the general's house and my brother Mickey was a high school senior, he gave a speech announcing that he'd decided to go to college at the U.

He'd been recruited everywhere, so this was a big deal that he was going to stay in town and play football for our team. He milked the moment for all it was worth, and the family was cheering as if he'd just scored a touchdown.

The next year when I graduated high school, I had big plans to go to a fancy East Coast school, but with Dad still at the U, I'd get free tuition, so it made sense to go there. I got my cheers, not as loud as Mickey, but nothing to be ashamed of, and when things died down, my cousin Terrence stood up. He wasn't much of a student, and no one knew if he'd even graduate, but he felt like he had to make an announcement about his future, like the rest of us.

It kind of broke my heart when Terrence made his little speech. He was stiff and tongue-tied, nothing like Mickey and Kate who thrive on being the center of attention. When he announced he was enlisting in the Marines, there was silence for days. Then we all cheered because what are you going to do? Paul was the one who went over to Terrence and shook his hand. Okay, I'll admit it. I'd put off talking to Grandpa Garrett.

My great-uncle Paul had convinced me that his brother Garrett wouldn't even talk to me, and honestly, I was scared of him. He'd never yelled at me the way he did with his own kids, but I was always super polite around him, just in case. I'm pretty sure Garrett thought this project of mine was dumb, and he'd been kind of avoiding me. But it was turning into the story of Paul's family, which wasn't right, so I made myself sit down with him. Grandpa Garrett, do you have time to talk to me? Hey, Louise!

I guess you've talked to everyone but me, which means you haven't got the real story if you've been talking to Paul. I'm not saying my brother's a liar, but he sometimes feels limited by the truth. It gets in his way, and it makes him look pretty bad considering what happened. But I do love my brother. The weekend after my cousin Terrence announced his plans to enlist, I took him for drinks. He kind of hero-worshipped me, which I find to be a solid basis for a relationship.

We talked about the family and football and the cottage in Canada where we used to go. There was a big hole in the conversation where politics would be if I was talking to a normal person. We started playing pool, and he looked across the table and said, "Nicky, am I doing the right thing?" He looked like a little kid who'd gotten lost in the woods. It was a beautiful day for the campus march. The streets were jammed, and we chanted and held signs and felt hopeful for a change. Then I saw my brother.

By the way Garrett was watching, it was clear he was working campus security, even though he was out of uniform. He shot me this condescending smile like he did when we were kids and he was stoking my rage. We marched some more, but my hope had been blasted into vapors and I saw the march for what it was. So innocent it could have been the Boy Scouts of America celebrating the 4th of July. Let's be clear. I love my brother.

Did I already say that? When folks meet Paul, he bowls them over with his decency and kindness. That changes when you get to know him better. The mystery is how a man who knows so much can be so naive. It might be as simple as the fact that he never served. As a clumsy, nearsighted kid with asthma, he got chosen to be the smart one.

The expectation from the general was that I would enlist, which meant I was in the business of protecting people and Paul was in the business of being protected.

I came home from the Gulf War in '91. Paul was in grad school and headed for an easy life with Ruth, which got bankrolled for too many years by the general. Anyway, it was just perfect seeing him marching along with his students, chanting and holding up their little signs. That ought to fix everything, right? Me and a couple of buddies started a home security business with no help from anyone.

We hit some bumps, but then we got the contract for university security when they were privatizing. I'd see Paul on campus with a bunch of undergrads hanging on his every word. He was just eating it up. I was dealing with the other side of campus life, sexual violence and random crime, which is a damn sight worse than you think. So him and me worked at the same place. For me, it was a war zone. For him, it was the University of Paul.

Four of us in the history department would meet for beers at Clancy's Pub. No jukebox, no TV, no students, no place better. We'd trash the university, the history department, our colleagues, our students, our loved ones, ourselves. We had what our students lobbied for: a safe space. So it wasn't anything odd when I asked the others how they were dealing with the outbreak of white nationalism on campus.

The group got quiet, which seemed strange since we were a close, opinionated, hard-drinking bunch, but they were suddenly on guard. Later, when my friend Cal, the department head, was driving me home, I asked about tenure. I'd put in my application and heard nothing. He told me this was a tough time with the university under pressure to monitor left-wing faculty bias.

He was staring straight ahead when he said, quote, my hope is that things will be different after the election. I didn't realize until that moment how much I'd been counting on tenure, a bit of security in a world spinning out of control. After election day 2020, getting together with my brother Paul's family got rough. They won the election, so they decided it was fair. We knew better.

In their minds, we were the fools who kept getting conned by the great leader. They avoided saying anything that might get the rubes riled up. From my point of view, they were living in the past. The world had changed. The migration of desperate people was real. Do we let them take over our country? Religious freaks want to kill us. Do we put a target on our back? Half the world's starving. Do we give away everything we've got?

When I looked at our big houses, our safe communities, our top-notch schools, and all the food we can eat, I feel so damn lucky because the rest of the world doesn't have that. Why did Paul and his family hate the system that provided it? Paul had read all the books, but he hadn't seen what I'd seen in the military, how the rest of the world gets by.

It's like he had no respect for those of us protecting everyone. But you couldn't talk to him because he knew he was right. So David, you were my age in 2024 when everything was up for grabs. How aware were you of what was going on politically? Embarrassingly, not very. It felt like that's all the adults were talking about, which is maybe why I kind of tuned it out. I was just trying to survive high school.

and things were changing fast on the home front with my parents. My mom was dead serious about Halloween. She'd spend weeks on her costume, and one of her greatest disappointments was when I announced I was too old to go trick-or-treating. That year, she was a witch and tried to rope me into scaring trick-or-treaters with her, but even I was too cool for that.

It was getting late when the doorbell rang, and Mom opened the door with a shriek for one last scare, and there was an Hispanic woman standing there in a cape. I asked what she was supposed to be, and she said, He's wife. They were supposed to let us know she was coming, but we had no idea until she was at the door. With Halloween and everyone in costume, no one had noticed her.

She was relieved to be in a safe house, but then I had to tell her that her husband had been taken. Ruth was so consumed by Angelica's arrival, it was days before we talked about what was going on with me. It was pretty clear my academic career was in serious jeopardy, which was more than a blow to my ego. We needed the money. We were fine, but it was a month-to-month fine, not secure future fine. Mom, 2024.

Wasn't that when your mom got sick? Right. The day I found out I'm a cheerleader, I came home super excited and started babbling about my cheerleading triumph and what a huge thing it was for a sophomore to get chosen with all these amazing juniors and seniors. The way my mom smiled, I knew something was wrong. Like she was looking past me into the future.

She'd been to her doctor and got bad news. She was always so optimistic that hearing her even say bad news was shocking. Then she said, "'Ella, we all have to go sometime.' I blurted out, "'I always hoped Daddy would die first.'" "'When I deployed, I didn't know how sick my mom was. No one put a clock on it, and she and my dad were clear that we had to carry on with our lives.'"

This was just one more thing to avoid talking about. My dad was probably terrified, because life without my mom was gonna be fucking hard for all of us. Him the most. I was distracted, because Angelica was alone in the basement, pregnant in a stranger's house, husband kidnapped by God knows who. Helping her through this trauma was one small way I could do something positive.

When Mickey told us he was going to the counter demonstration in Washington, I told him to please be careful. He said, "Mom, don't you get it? The days of being careful are over." He asked Paul to go, but Paul had other priorities.

We were shocked by what the great leader was planning in DC. And of course, that was the point. He was staging a mock inauguration, getting sworn in by one of his stooges before the election happened.

Then there would be a military parade featuring red state police forces with the military equipment they'd been stockpiling, since there's no greater deterrent to shoplifting than tanks and armored personnel carriers and flashbang grenades. Mickey asked me to go with him. Dad, stopping fascism is a wonderful father-son activity. Even knowing what happened, I wished to hell I'd gone.

When the great leader's bogus military parade got cancelled because millions of us blocked the way, there was a scream of joy I hadn't heard since football. Our work was done but nobody wanted to leave. We were chanting and hugging and promising to keep fighting until we got our country back. But we'd done our job too well. Weak men tend to overreact.

Ruth was in the basement where Angelica was giving birth, and I was just about to turn off the TV when it happened. While Gabriel was being born in the basement, I heard Paul calling to me. I rushed upstairs to see the police attacking the crowd and stomping people when they went down. The tanks from the parade started rolling through the crowd, and you could hear the screams. What the hell were local police forces doing with tanks?

What came out later was how many of the military personnel were supporting the great leader instead of the Constitution. They were part of the force that was crushing the demonstration. The election hadn't happened, but the great leader was telling us he'd already won and we better get in line. I tore myself from the carnage on TV and went down to the basement to be with Angelica where I could do some good. It was a mad scrum of desperation to live.

Whoever was macing us and beating us and shooting us and rolling over us with tanks must have believed they were saving America, just like us.

I thought I'd missed out on the experience of war by not enlisting, but it turns out all I needed to do was visit our nation's capital. I crouched in the basement, comforting Angelica, who had to stay out of sight, while upstairs Paul was drinking himself into oblivion, watching the bloody battle in the streets of D.C. That was the world Gabriel was born into. It's tough work keeping the country safe. Most Americans have the luxury of never seeing it up close.

That way they can sit back and complain about what monsters we are. The ones who put ourselves on the line. But look at the results. We still have a country. People were wandering, dazed through the streets, bleeding, looking for loved ones, spooked by what they'd seen. There were buses going back to the university, so Dee and I hopped one. We talked all the way to Washington, but going home there was nothing to say.

Up until then, we could find ways to get along, but this put it right in our faces. There are two sides and no middle ground, and we're gonna fight each other to the death. So what happened, Uncle Paul? Did everyone just give up before there was even an election? Some of us were actually pretty hopeful. Then, just before Election Day, everything swung in the right direction, and it looked as if we were finally done with the great leader.

There were no sighs of relief. We all knew the great leader was cornered. His many crimes had caught up with him, and his only hope of staying out of prison was to steal the election. Even for the great leader, it was wild. He claimed that the only ballots that should count were from those who voted in person on Election Day. No absentee ballots, no mail-in ballots, because he knew they mainly came from the left.

He wanted to single-handedly change the rules of our elections because he knew he was going to lose. He was saying so many crazy things, just melting down in public, terrified of going to prison, speaking in garbled, violent, deranged riffs that made no sense. I had to stop following the news because they were all acting as if he was a legitimate candidate, making perfect sense, who just had different ideas. And isn't that what America is all about?

Even with the press bending over backwards to be fair and not tip the scales, it was clear two days before the election that the great leader was cooked. We had dodged the bullet. I was out gardening, the only thing that gave me peace, listening to classical music on NPR when they broke in to announce the worst possible news. He'd done it.

This son of a bitch got the Supreme Court to take his lunatic rant about the election and treat it like an actual case to be soberly debated by the highest court in the land. Like everything else, this was regarded as an issue with two valid points of view. That's when we knew it was all over. There was perverse entertainment in hearing what the openly insurrectionist justices would concoct to award the great leader the White House.

The most malignantly corrupt of the robed criminals turned, as he often did when he was overturning the law, to his own warped vision of history. He boldly cited the 1695 English general election in which absentee ballots were not allowed.

conceding that, yes, absentee voting was a special circumstance in colonial America, whereby individuals living in houses vulnerable to Indian attack could use absentee voting. But he continued with a wry chuckle, "Indian attacks have dropped off considerably since then."

Another openly insurrectionist justice concurred, If you are a citizen of this country and you have nothing to hide, why would you be afraid to show your face? Should criminals and illegals determine who will be our president? The court concluded that those millions and millions of citizens who had already sent in their mail-in ballots could not vote two days before the election. And there was nothing we could do.

Election night, I was out walking and the streets were empty. I kept telling myself, it's four years, we can survive that. And then I started to cry uncontrollably. We woke up the next morning and everything was different. It all looked the same. People heading off to work, kids playing ball, frat house parties spilling into the street. But you could feel it in the air. Something had shifted. My anger turned to sadness.

What a charmed life we had in the good old USA. And now we're sleepwalking through the ashes. What I knew for sure was our lives would never be the same. And they weren't. Next time on It Happened Here 2024, the Weeks family discovers what life is like in the great leaders America.

He surrounded himself with sycophants and they jerry-rigged the government so nothing could stop his worst, most psychotic impulses. We were all trapped in the revenge fantasies of a very sick man. What happened that night changed everything. Worst night of my life. And I've had a lot of bad ones. My dad finally told me what was happening. If there's anything good that came out of that night, it's that my dad and I shared the guilt.

The shock of the 2024 election had worn off and we wondered if there'd ever be another one. What the government was doing was obscene. We kept saying we are better than this, but every day we proved we worked. It Happened Here 2024 was written by Richard Dresser and directed by Joe Cacocci.

The cast includes Molly Babos, Molly Carden, Edie Falco, Santino Fontana, Luke Kirby, Tom Pesinka, Tony Shalhoub, and John Tortoro.

Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Our composer, Jared Paul. Engineering and mixing by Justin Kaupp and Bob Poman. Digital strategy by Michael Zhao. Casting by Jack Doolin. Show art by Eleni Tsinaros. Our script supervisor is Graham Ferguson. The executive producers, Joe Cacocci, Richard Dresser, Jack Doolin, Elliot Forrest, Evangeline Morphos, and John Whalen.

This episode was recorded at Pullman Sound in New York City.

Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.