It Could Happen Here - An Election Episode feat. Robert

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Robert discusses what's likely to happen, unlikely to happen, and likely to happen in unlikely ways this election season.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now
Starting point is 00:00:41 at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.
Starting point is 00:01:09 And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the El for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands
Starting point is 00:01:51 or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:02:08 AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:02:43 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media. You wake up before dawn. This was once abnormal for you, but ever since the election, you've found it harder and harder to sleep. You just barely drifted off when the sound of shouts wafted in from across the street, reflected sirens bounce off your bedroom window. Through a fog of sleep, you reflect on the last few days. Voting went better than you'd feared. It's what happened in the days after that's kept your spine at a constant eerie tingle. Several Republican-led states are refusing to
Starting point is 00:03:17 certify their election results. Most analysts say the blizzard of lawsuits launched on behalf of Trump have no chance at winning, but that didn't stop the candidate from declaring victory and promising to carry out his own inauguration, no matter what the courts decide. It's all absurd, laughable, but you live on the border of a majority-red county, and your sheriffs just announced support for the real winner of the election. Your local PD have been notably silent, while right-wing provocateurs online have started circulating allegations of election fraud that the sheriff has promised to look into. That was yesterday. Today, just after five, you're jolted awake in your bed by the sound of breaking glass and screaming. You stay low and crawl to your front window to peep out, across your yard
Starting point is 00:04:04 and into the street before you. Three police cruisers are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house. You can't imagine why. You know he did some volunteer canvassing a few weeks back. He volunteered at a voting precinct. Could they be there because of that? You try a few different search terms on social media to puzzle out the truth. It looks like a few people around the country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts register as deleted before you can click on them. There's more shouting from inside your neighbor's house,
Starting point is 00:04:34 and within seconds, a pair of burly deputies drag him out in front and into a waiting squad car. It's dark outside, but you think you might see blood on his face. Your heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to call someone, but you think you might see blood on his face. Your heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to call someone, but the cops are already here. Who else is there? As your mind races, one of the officers stationed outside turns back and looks towards your window. Recognition sparks his eyes.
Starting point is 00:04:57 He sees you. He starts to walk over. You turn back, drop the shades, and with a pounding heart, retreat to your bedroom. Maybe he won't knock. Maybe he just wanted to scare you. Maybe. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and back in early 2019, I released the first season of this show. It wasn't a daily news and politics podcast back then. Instead, it gave a focused argument for why a new U.S. civil war was more frightening and possible than you might guess. Over the last
Starting point is 00:05:37 few years, that belief has become, unfortunately, mainstream. It is no longer fringe or unique to talk about a new civil war as a real possibility. There was a blockbuster movie earlier this year based around presenting what it called a realistic picture of such a possibility. I'll leave my thoughts on that for another time. A Marist poll from earlier this year showed that 47% of Americans consider a second civil war likely or very likely. This is a massive shift considering where things were when I wrote the podcast series in 2019. That number includes an expected 53 percent of Republicans, but also 40 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Independents. Depending on how you want to see it, I've either been vindicated as much as is possible for someone in my line of
Starting point is 00:06:25 work, or I've played an outsized role in creating a particularly dangerous egregore in the collective unconsciousness of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled on that matter ever since the first episode started coming out. If you'll remember, midway through the first season, we dropped an extra episode I hadn't initially intended as part of the run, just trying to stop people from panicking. And ever since, I've kept that as a particular goal in my head. However you want to, you know, think about this, the first season of It Could Happen Here undoubtedly helped to make my career. Today, Sophie and I run an entire network that employs several dozen people, largely on the strength of
Starting point is 00:07:09 that series. And yet, I have no issue telling you that I don't have any idea how Election Day is going to go. You know, we've had a lot of polls lately that seem much better for Harris. A number of pollsters are starting to shift. You know, there's a good chance that they were hurting in the direction of Trump because they didn't want to underestimate him again. But there's also a good chance that, you know, that Seltzer poll is an outlier. And now these guys are hurting in the direction of Harris winning because they don't want to be embarrassed. I really have no idea what's going to happen. My official stance is that it's probably pretty close to a coin flip, although maybe one that favors Harris now, you know, more than one that favors Trump. Whatever happens, I don't know what's going to happen, let alone what's going to happen the day
Starting point is 00:07:55 after. And as I sat down to write this episode, which is going to air on the day of the election, I went back and forth as to where the focus should be. I did consider doing another Don't Panic-style episode. Perhaps that would have been the call. Depending on how today goes, people might either be listening to this and relaxing or listening to this and in a heightened state of panic. It really depends on where things are and where things are in the counting of votes by this period of time. My reasoning on what I decided to do is pretty simple, which is that I think there's a good chance we either know or have a strong inkling of how this election is going to shake out
Starting point is 00:08:35 by the time this episode airs. And at the time I write this, the indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump, enough that I'd say the election leans in her direction. for Harris than for Trump, enough that I'd say the election leans in her direction. And so I think there's a lot of value in talking about what might happen in the aftermath of that if Trump tries to protest the election results, and if he goes particularly trying to protest by force. And if that's the case, if that's the direction he lands in, I think these shooters that we have to worry about, and I mean that in the figurative sense, right? You know, people who support him, people who will put skin in the game in order to
Starting point is 00:09:10 try to force him into office. I think they're different than they were last time. I don't think the threat here is that a bunch of Proud Boys and the like raid the Capitol next January. I think the threat here has a lot more to do with licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared themselves in the tank for Trump. We ran an episode just the other day about the constitutional sheriff's movement. There's a lot to say about that. One in four law enforcement officers today report to a sheriff. They make 20% of all arrests in the country. Earlier this year, Wired published an article on the far-right sheriffs
Starting point is 00:09:45 ready to disrupt the election. It focused heavily on Dar Leaf, who sits on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA. Leaf, a Trump supporter and sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, has spent the lead-up to this election investigating the 2020 election. He's tried to seize voting machines and run militia training courses where he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies and gentlemen, how to form an ad hoc posse, each member armed with, quote, a standard AR-15-type military-grade weapon and at least 500 rounds of ammo.
Starting point is 00:10:21 Speaking of 500 rounds of ammo, you probably can't buy that from our sponsors, but here they are. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.
Starting point is 00:11:12 Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech
Starting point is 00:11:50 from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.
Starting point is 00:12:05 I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:12:25 Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
Starting point is 00:12:56 That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,
Starting point is 00:13:20 from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.
Starting point is 00:13:38 Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app,
Starting point is 00:13:51 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.
Starting point is 00:14:19 At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace,
Starting point is 00:14:47 the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who sits on the board of that organization named Dar Leaf. Leaf has already promised to have his posse patrolling stations in Berry County to watch for evidence of fraud and illegal immigrant voting in what's expected to be one of the swing states this election might hinge on.
Starting point is 00:15:24 expected to be one of the swing states this election might hinge on. Deeply reported articles like that Wired piece have warred in my own personal paranoia with troubling accounts on social media. The day before the election, which is when I wrote this, I came across a post on the Pennsylvania subreddit from a Philly voter titled, My Dad Just Got Harassed by a Police Officer About the Election. Quote, He was driving down the old Lincoln Highway when a trooper stopped him and asked him if he was voting tomorrow. Trooper, will you be voting tomorrow? Dad, that's none of your business. Trooper, who are you voting for tomorrow? Dad, none of your business. Trooper, oh, so you're illegal. Now, the poster's dad, who is Hispanic, stated that he didn't have to answer that and asked if he was being detained. The trooper let him go. But later,
Starting point is 00:16:05 according to the poster, this happened. When my dad went to the precinct, there were three other people there to report the exact same story, election harassment at a traffic stop. Turns out the officer or officers doing it aren't even from Bucks County or Pennsylvania. They're New Jersey state troopers, wild to cross state borders to harass people driving down the highway. Jersey state troopers, wild to cross state borders to harass people driving down the highway. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, we were all deeply worried about the dangers of different far-right groups, militias, and organizations like the Proud Boys, who wore right-wing death squad patches and threatened to throw leftists out of helicopters when their god-emperor won re-election. Today, most of those figures are either a spent force or something that cannot
Starting point is 00:16:46 act on its own, reliant upon the backing of groups like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs, or being empowered by a Trump-controlled White House if they want to have any hope of being directly relevant again. The positive side of this is that it allows us to triage our fears. The downside is that independent paramilitary actors are, in fact, something we can easily combat as individuals and communities. Portland proved that when it eventually won its five-year street battle to oust these sundry right-wing groups from constant occupations of the city. When groups like the Proud Boys cross the line into outright violence, it is legal to meet them with defensive
Starting point is 00:17:25 violence, and they can and have been beaten this way. That's simply not something the extant left-wing community defense organizations and political groups in this country can say and do against, for example, law enforcement entities hell-bent on executing a purge against the left. In rallies prior to the election, Trump has often merged promises to prosecute his political opponents, us, with promises to use ICE to deport 20 million illegals and to send in the military or federal law enforcement to clean up cities. I want to quote now from an article in the New Republic reporting on a rally earlier this year in Wilmington, North Carolina. Today I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina and across
Starting point is 00:18:08 our country, said Trump. No more sanctuary cities. As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, which is a lot of them, to turn over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored. The article goes on to note, Trump has previously vowed to militarize U.S. law enforcement to restore law and order to our cities, which he claimed to become cesspools of bloodshed and crime under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments, but that extra help would only go to cities that complied with ICE. Now, this is scary stuff, and it would necessitate some sort of
Starting point is 00:18:51 response if it were to happen, but I don't really know how to tell you to organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns that one would need to factor into any plans. I could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation or to avoid being raided for their past political activism. And I could base those theories on, for example, how activists in Nazi Germany helped hide people from the Gestapo. But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond compare to what exists today. Perhaps the most chilling article I read this year had nothing to do with ICE or right-wing paramilitaries
Starting point is 00:19:28 and everything to do with the technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years. License plate recognition systems like Motorola's DRN use optical character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's license plate and put it in a searchable database. The policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative, although it's far from clear if they actually work, too. The idea is that if someone carries out a drive-by shooting
Starting point is 00:19:54 or assaults a woman on the street or is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by someone who gets the car make and model and maybe the first couple letters of the plate, DNR's database of more than 15 billion vehicle sightings built from automatic recordings of license plate reading cameras on police cruisers and tow trucks and the like might well help identify and stop someone before they hunt or kill again. Now, there's serious reason to question whether or not this system actually works this way. I'm not claiming to take a stance on this one way or the other. I'm not an expert on this. But the issue here from a privacy standpoint, when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump-dominated government, is that you can't train a system like this to only pay attention to license plates, nor is there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. And recent
Starting point is 00:20:41 investigations conducted by a private detective with access to DNR's database for her work have shown that someone with access to this database can search based on more than just license plates. They can look up signs supporting political candidates and match them to front yards and thus to people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by these cameras, and there are again billions of these photos wearing, for example, Planned Parenthood shirts. This is not an idle fear. This is a weapon that could very easily be used by the enemy
Starting point is 00:21:11 within months of you listening to this. This is also a weapon that, in an event like the one I forecasted at the start of this episode, could be used to crack down on activists and voters in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort of national schism situation. Police officers already misused databases like this with comic regularity. In 2022, a different Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors
Starting point is 00:21:38 had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro-Trump cops earlier this election season. I'm talking about something that happened in September when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County Bruce Zukowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio. From an article in the AP by Michael Rubicam, likening people in the U.S. illegally to human locusts, Zukowski wrote on a personal Facebook account and his campaign's account, when people ask me what's going to happen if the flip-flopping
Starting point is 00:22:19 laughing hyena wins, I say, write down all the addresses of the people who had their signs in their yards. That way, Zukowski continued, when migrants need places to say, write down all the addresses of the people who had their signs in their yards. That way, Zukowski continued, when migrants need places to live, we already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival. Now, as the full context of that statement makes clear, Zukowski was not technically threatening Harris voters, but it's pretty much impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat, just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability in an environment where the future ability of Zukowski and those like him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going to talk more about that. But first, here's another ad break. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.
Starting point is 00:23:12 I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers
Starting point is 00:23:51 and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love
Starting point is 00:24:29 keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough.
Starting point is 00:24:43 So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,
Starting point is 00:25:02 the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.
Starting point is 00:25:36 Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've
Starting point is 00:26:12 been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. Looked like a little angel. I mean, he looks so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.
Starting point is 00:26:46 Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.
Starting point is 00:27:10 Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, I don't mean to make it sound like that there's nothing that can be done to fight against technological tools in the arsenal of repression like this. But I have no doubt that if the Republicans do take total power, they will read any positive election result for them as a mandate to punish the left and purge the people Trump has already repeatedly called the enemy within. And I worry that in the event of any sort of national
Starting point is 00:27:53 schism, either where there's an extended period of time where Trump is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida and you have a bunch of these counties and states around the country sign up for Trump, that the first thing we'll see law enforcement do in these areas is punish the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on a war footing with the rest of the country. These are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here, but they are something to keep in mind, and they are something that represents a real danger at this point.
Starting point is 00:28:25 I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds of things the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that. Now, it is important to remember that whatever plan these people try won't work as well as they hope. We've been watching them for years, and if there's one thing you know about all of the people around Trump, it's that they're fuck-ups. That doesn't mean they can't win.
Starting point is 00:28:44 It doesn't mean they're not dangerous. It just means that they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which is something that should be on your mind. Bruce and most of the Trump-aligned police, local and federal, still feel a need to couch their threats in deniable terms, though. But many on the far right have been less careful. And one thing we've seen as this election has lurched closer to its conclusion is a lot of people, people like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their masks off. Now, I think this had a lot to do with the fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a couple of weeks ago. And they felt like after years of, you know, having to do what Bruce did, having to cover up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to do that. Now, obviously, some influential
Starting point is 00:29:30 people on the far right have been masked off for much longer, and this is something that should concern you as well. One of the most sinister examples of this is Jack Posobiec, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer whose recent book, Unhumans, is framed as a secret history of communist revolutions. From an article in Mother Jones, quote, they, they being Posobiec and his co-author, claim, for as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. And these people of anti-civilization have always gone by different names. Communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The pair contend that these folks, be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade, are better called
Starting point is 00:30:09 unhumans. It's a hard-edged message. The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies, but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They rob and kill Posobiec and Lissac, his co-author maintain. They don't believe what they say. They don't care about winning debates. They don't even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you. Now, Jack has been a laughable character for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric has had an audience in the halls of power. J.D. Vance himself provided a blurb for the book, claiming it shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon, meanwhile,
Starting point is 00:30:45 wrote the foreword. Now, I started this episode with a fictional vignette, imagining what might happen if Trump chooses to contest the election with outright force, and he might. The good news is, I think that such an effort would be doomed to fail. If he sticks to the courts, trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to the House is a better chance at succeeding. And it is possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of poll workers could play into a broader effort like this. But doing so is a big risk. My gut tells me that moving so openly, resorting to violence first, creates a situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming Harris administration would have to respond with force. There would have to be consequences.
Starting point is 00:31:29 And given that they currently control the arsenal of state power, I think they would win even in the event that you have all of these sheriffs break for Trump and some sort of insurgent situation develop. If that were to happen, having backed this insurgency would put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put a lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It might even force consequences for provocateurs like Posobiec and even Elon Musk. Backing an outright violent coup is almost the only thing I can imagine putting Musk behind bars. There are pieces of this logic train that I find comforting, but there are also pieces that aren't. Many of us, me included, made the mistake of assuming that after January 6th, 2021, Trumpism might finally be a spent force. He'd gambled too much and he'd lost too big. But despite the existential threat he presented himself as being, the Democratic Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose
Starting point is 00:32:16 mercy for the main players. I suspect anything short of armed insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year. I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw him in prison if Harris wins are real. I'll read that instead as his own predictive justification for the violence he'd like to support against his political enemies. That desire won't go away just because Trump rides off into the sunset and the Republican party has to go searching for another Fuhrer. If we defer their dream, it will simply sit under the floorboards and fester, waiting for the next opportunity, and that won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken system and a world where climate change and conflict are on the rise. Low-information voters, less literate by the day, will continue to swing back and forth. The feral beast we've heard growling all year long will surge forward, all the hungrier for
Starting point is 00:33:04 being made to wait. If you've kept up with our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed that we haven't endorsed any candidates, and I haven't wasted any time advising our listeners to vote. I happen to be someone who does think a Harris win represents substantially less harm than a Trump win. To a lot of people. But I don't think that the folks who listen to our podcast are waiting for me to make that decision for them. I don't agree with the anti-electoralist side of things on every matter, but one place where I do agree with them is that a Harris win won't fix what's broken. It represents the historic equivalent of jinking out of the way in a dogfight,
Starting point is 00:33:40 necessary maybe, but not something that guarantees future security. Hey everybody, Robert here. I've changed locations, so sorry if it sounds a little bit different. I'm currently in a cabin, waiting out the election, trying not to think too much about it. But I wrote a new ending to this because I just thought that what I had there was incomplete. Now, when it comes to what does work in the long run to beat these people, my mind is drawn back constantly to perhaps an odd place, a 2011 article in the scientific journal Nature titled The Evolution of Overconfidence. Now, the gist is that this was an attempt by two scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know very little about a subject to overestimate their
Starting point is 00:34:31 competence in it. This is probably why so many Americans think they could win a fistfight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind of benefit to evolutionary fitness? The explanation devised in this paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not because in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight, the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach for that resource. If they do, one of three things can happen. They fight and win, they fight and lose, or the other organism backs away, insecure in
Starting point is 00:35:14 its chances of victory, and they get that resource without even fighting for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual, so much so that it might explain why many of us seem to have a built-in tendency to irrationally judge our own capabilities. Now, I first became aware of this research almost a decade ago when I started work on my first published book, A Brief History of Vice. At the time, I found it interesting because it posited a likely adaptive basis for a kind of bad behavior, and that's what my whole book was about. In the years since, though, I've come to see it as the fundamental underlying
Starting point is 00:35:49 explanation for how fascists win. It's well established that fascist regimes and individuals themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union, or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after picking the wrong fight, and of course, January 6th. There are many examples to choose from, but as often as they fail, the success of these movements is also based entirely on their willingness to dare and the fact that liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to confront them. We are still dealing with Donald Trump and his foot soldiers in 2024 because no one quite had the guts to confront him to the degree he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant taking unprecedented legal steps and risking right-wing
Starting point is 00:36:36 backlash that likely would have included acts of terrorism. In the end, most people with any say in the matter chose to either back away or, at best, pull their punches until after the election On other episodes of this show, our correspondent Mia and I have talked about the actual path to destroying the far-right's organizational and electoral base We are up against a coalition of used car dealers, supplement salesmen, multi-level marketing ghouls, sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their own power, and churches that by any decent measure lost their justification for tax-exempt status years ago. These are all forces that can be targeted and neutered through the courts and the legislative system, with consistent activism and pressure applied to elected leaders. Sitting here, I think that the odds the Democrats
Starting point is 00:37:26 embrace such a strategy are exceptionally low, but we do have to try to make them. Because when you're sitting across from a monster, one that's fattened on overconfidence, and you see him start to reach again, the only sane response is to swallow your fear and take a swing. response is to swallow your fear and take a swing. find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
Starting point is 00:38:27 Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Starting point is 00:38:52 Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story
Starting point is 00:39:32 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:40:12 AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's
Starting point is 00:40:43 Talk Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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