It Could Happen Here - Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Garrison and Mia unravel whether the DHS is posting coded nazi messages, and discuss the limits of treating anti fascism as an easter egg hunt. Sources: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ https://files.libcom.org/files/[Mark_Fisher]_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_no_Alte(BookZZ.org).pdf https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752 https://michiganadvance.com/2025/04/09/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20p36e62gyo https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-refuses-us-military-flight-deporting-migrants-sources-say-2025-01-25/ https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social/post/3luq3qktltc2nSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Have you overlooked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? That's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II when they tricked the literary world with their intentionally bad poetry, setting off a major scandal. We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan, and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, Hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history.

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Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Cool Zone Media. This is It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news. Oh, no.

Which is, frankly, one of the best ways to start this episode. And one of the best ways to start this show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called, let's see, at Hill Hitler. And I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist. Oh, wow. I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communicates. And I have uncovered a secret Nazi code. Wow. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Haled Hitler.

He has posted some pictures in what I would assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like, I don't know, it's some kind of like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there are some runes on this uniform that look very similar to the Odle Rune. So I'm thinking because of the Rune, this guy might be a Nazi. Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have determined this. That's right. You can find me. at Ocent Defender online. No, no, don't send people to Osset Defender. That does it for us today, and it could happen here.

Now, so this episode, we're going to talk about something that's been slowly frustrating me the past few weeks, and that is the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends, noticing trends, in official communications. from the DHSGov online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app. But this extends outside of X, the Everything app.

This extends outside of Blue Sky, the Internet in general. This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti-fascist education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied. So bear with me. This is going to be kind of an odd episode, but I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same traps

that we maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's start by talking about some communications posted on the internet by at DHSGov. A picture of a painting titled American Progress by John Gast. Captioned, a heritage to be proud of, comma, a homeland worth defending. So, on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting, or at the very least, a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people, specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white,

cloak, bringing forth the tide of quote unquote progress as indigenous people are forced to flee from the edge of the painting. It's fun because this is a painting we literally, when they had to explain

manifest destiny, like colonialism good, this is the painting that was in my textbook in high school history class. It is like the er, the er, colonialism, good, genocide good painting. Genocide good. That's what the painting is. But what I have found through some hashtag research, there might be a hidden code

in this communication from the DHS. Already an agency that only has the best interests of really all people who strive for human rights, the DHS. So if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet, Mia? Fifteen? No, so close. So close. Fourteen. Fourteen words in this tweet, which may remind you of the 14 words, the Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric, but the 14 words, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past, I would say, 10, 15 years, usually by implanting 14s,

and usually 1488s with 88, meaning howl Hitler, because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti. You see this. embedded into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet. This is actually a 1488 because two of the H's in this post are capitalized unusually. And that means Hal Hitler. Wow. Because H's the eighth letter. Oh, but wait, actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized. But don't worry. Don't worry. This is still a dog whistle, because those other words that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters A and D, which, if you convert

those into numbers, are one and four. So it's actually another 14. Oh, wow, we're doing, we're doing numerology. We're doing Jamotria. We've become Q&O. We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing? What are we doing here? We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters to get a 1488. It's literally Gibotria. And then also counting the total words in the whole tweet while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for another 14. What do we do? it. How is this the piece of evidence that sinks, sinks the Trump administration, and finally

proves that they're fascist? You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting instead of doing numerology on tweets. People are thinking, ha ha ha, ha, ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with A-H-H-D-18-14. Nice try, Groyper's. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post. You can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny, while the administration, the DHS, is currently furthering ethno-nationalist policies. They are doing this. This is Homeland Security, right? I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland security, but like, this is the agency that is literally rounding people up and sending

them to camps. We have camps in multiple countries now. But I say they're being round up and sent to camps. It's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida. Sikot in El Salvador. Yeah. I mean, I think people have now escaped so I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp. But like, again, they're setting people to South Sudan. They're like, they're just doing this. Like, what are we doing here? So, this episode, I want to focus on how people are misusing anti-fascist education, or I would argue they're misusing anti-fascist education, and kind of missing the forest for a cardboard cutout of trees. Yeah. Not even trees. Kind of

something that could be a tree if you look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a real tree. And you don't need to sound like a Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious. Like, dog whistles don't matter. Yeah. If the regular whistle is already fast, if they're just saying things openly and furthermore doing it doing things what purpose does a dog whistle have and this is something that we're going to discuss i'm not just saying this and closing the episode we're going to get into these yeah and i think part of what's happening here everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of american politics everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that were missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has a total victory.

Q&N does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018, that the Q&N cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more. But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on MAGA. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the internet. And this is what, what, like, everything is. And like the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 election in like a massive fraction from reality in which they think that election was legitimately

stolen. And obviously, there was many events leading up to that, which contributed to this. And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate realities that that event was staged. And because that door was opened, now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as Blue Anon conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term. But it gets the point across. And I'm going to do a whole piece on Blue Anon very soon. I've been collecting Blue Anon Conspiracy theories for a while. But I wanted to do something specifically about this 1488 and like secret codes thing. Because it's, it's so evocative of like, you know, cue drops. And it's evocative of,

you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing for generations. And we're to talk about that more and read a little bit of, uh, of an essay on that topic after this ad break. And I will let you know, there's going to be two messages in the ad break that If you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode. So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the code. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II.

When they pulled off what was either a bold literary hoax or a grand poetic experiment, publishing over a dozen intentionally bad but highly acclaimed works of expressionist poetry under the name Earn Malley in an incident that caused a media firestorm and even a criminal trial. The Earn Malley episode made fools of believers and critics alike and still fascinates poetry lovers to this day. We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan, and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, Hoax explores an audacious fraud. or ruse from history, from forged artworks to the original fake news, to try and answer why we believe.

Listen to hoax on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist. What Screams summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you. on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more. Listen to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him. him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to yet. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was

burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's crime lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrim, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, we are back. Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I want to quote a few sections, to kind of frame what I'm talking about here. This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard Hofstetter. Richard Hofstetter, Richard Hofstetter, one of the first modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I have three paragraphs here that I selected as being relevant to the current topic at hand.

Quote, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their contact, unquote. And I like that section's specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle. We can see this used. There's aspects of people who are trying to search for this and trying to search for patterns in the communications of

admittedly fascistic government agency that I find sympathetic. Like I can understand because, yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote. Quote, The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millinerianists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days, and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as-of-yet-unaroused public,

The paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals. And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoids' sense of frustration, unquote. Hofstetter is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before, how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information. Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything. And having that informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, right, of a vortex, of like, meaningless noise. It's such a romantic idea that I alone have the info or the clue to piece this together.

And it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very romantic notion. And it's also one that is exactly perfectly anti-suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just a moment where everything that is happening is just stunningly literal. Like, it's all out of the open. Like, what is happening with the Trump administration? Okay, in 2020, there is a massive uprising to attempt to fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States to deal with its fucking class inequalities to deal with the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right? And they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward. Like if this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works. that he's so thuddingly literal

that it defies narrativization because it's just there there's no subtlety to it they're just saying it they just want to do it and they're doing it but everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy in it and it's like no they're just

doing the thing that they're saying yeah you can argue that we have a Groyper occupied government not because of counting words in posts but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge But literally ICE and DHS, as of today, which I'm recording this on Wednesday, I think because this comes out Wednesday night, are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U-Haul style rentable trucks to hunt down people to assault and kidnap. Like they're just copying the Patriot Front playbook here.

The ICE director said that he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this. You can listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the paranoid style of American politics essay. Quote, a final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove.

that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates quote-unquote evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it, unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this Nazi code hunting. It's actually a form of like self-coping, looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating.

And this is a self-preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that I was talking to about this was like arguing, like ice doesn't need to dog whistle. They have no reason to. Like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily get racist or fascist into power. while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are like one of them, right? But these guys are already in power. And the base already knows that they're in power.

There's no point in dog whistling. They're just using ICE to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit ethno state rhetoric in a post from this morning, which has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten words, not 14, ten words. Wow. DHS said, quote, serve your country.

Defend your culture. No undergraduate degree required. Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants. It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest. No. And I want to return to something else that the Hofstadter said in that in that second paragraph that you read about how like one of the central conceits is that like, you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American public doesn't know anything about it and like yeah you can you know it is distressing to a large extent the extent to which people just don't know what the government is doing but also like if you look at any polling at all about anything the people are doing

everyone hates it there isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're that all these people are Nazis because like that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already like trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like hi I'm your neighbor you also fucking hate this let's go fucking like do this your people are doing in LA

and like follow these fucking ice fans around right that is stuff that people are doing but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge

so people do it less even though it's less effective in my discussion of this like online on various cursed social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics. And what I what I see as a sort of like abuse of anti-fascist education, right? Because people like, you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know, Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually, you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right? And as an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power and we may have succeeded in education but we may

have failed in the prevention of them seizing power and that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics and it's now very odd to see things that we've you know argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense and it's it's kind of like trying to tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was lightly arguing about this online was saying, like, this is not numerology. And we don't have to be just okay

with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like, codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes. And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric. what they're actually saying, which has like proto-fascist or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric, and they're doing

it. Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS has an agency, has fascistic underpinnings, via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalize letters into numbers, it makes

a secret Nazi message? Is there one person? No. It's going to become convinced to this. No. That's not the purpose. So trying to conceptualize this as, like, we have to, we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric. That doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about. Yeah. And also, like, I think, you know, like, I, I think we've sort of kind of just, to some extent, we've just failed on the normalization front. Because again, like, it's the president of the United States. Yeah. This is, this is the official account of the Department

of Homeland Security. It has already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique, it's to like actually oppose them. But that's scary. That's scary, Mia. Do you know it's easy? Posting on X the Everything app. Yeah. This is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all-powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants, right? This is why he can stage things. This is why I can rig elections. This is why it can like, I don't know, like it can just like magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them

with anyone. It can stage any protest movement it wants to. Right. And I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where like I see people who are like genuinely well-meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to the panoptic off. Yeah. But it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right, and can hurt you, it's very, very easy to, you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right? Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking, like, hiding people in, like, fucking U-Hauls to jump out and grab people? It's because when they tried to fucking mass, we stomped them, right? And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window,

everyone follows them. People can follow them around and alert their community members on where ICE is. Like, again, motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit are like screaming at ICE agents where they try to arrest people. Like, yeah, that's the actual condition we're in. And like, we get regular people. And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self-described as like anti-fascists or self-described as as leftists almost falling into the

trap like more so than others and it's it's a little bit evident of something that like i've described as like the forever 2016 how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016 2017 2018 era and we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore we we are actually not in charlottesville this is a different situation this is 2025 and one other like defense of this you know code hunting that i've seen people say is is quote, Nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. And another person saying, quote, this is a fun, a little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote.

And like, first of all, this is not a game. This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And I think that view of like anti-fascist education risks repeating like the OK symbol debacle, where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter egg anti-fascism. It's kind of like the Barbara Streisand effect, where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like

frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology, I think, as Ratlimit put it, one of one of my favorite posters. And like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it to recap the OK symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and then having the media try to convince regular people that anyone who uses like the OK hand symbol

is secretly a fascist. And this scheme worked. And eventually the OK symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was invented as like a joke online. And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the 14 Words Dog Whistle,

with an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far-right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS Gov account and their heritage to be proud of homeland, land worth defending American Progress, like, ethno-nationalist posting. And I truly cannot say, one way or another, if that American Progress Post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside. I can't tell you that. And the point I'm trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter, but the way we talk about dog whistles does matter.

And as frustrating as it is that sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want. But you know what I do want right now? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? Another ad break. That's right. Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.

Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II. When they pulled off what was either a bold literary hoax or a grand poetic experiment, publishing over a dozen intentionally bad but highly acclaimed works of expressionist poetry under the name Earn Malley, in an incident that. caused a media firestorm and even a criminal trial. The Earned Malley episode made fools of believers and critics alike and still fascinates poetry lovers to this day. We break down the

truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan, and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history, from forged artworks to the original fake news to try and answer why we believe. Listen to hoax on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you. Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more.

Listen to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term. highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs.

Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. into shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has

DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.

And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. To briefly take a small tangent here, I think there is something very important about, like, the fact that we're all stuck in 2016, which was sort of like the peak of irony, right, as a social affect, has left us really unprepared for now where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're just doing it. and saying it, right? Yeah.

And it's not this sort of like irony-pill-deniability shit. They just do it. And people are just not prepared for that. They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts. And I think they are still pushing this. I'm going to quote from

a friend of the pod, Rat Limit, one of my favorite mutes. Quote, prediction. The Nazi salute will become common within two years. Right-wingers will half-asset for plausible deniability, memeify the backlash, and then start fully doing it, quote-unquote, as a joke to quote-unquote troll the

libs for being hysterical enough to think that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact its cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what Rat Limit predicted. There's this current trend on X the Everything app where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi-style salutes and trying to memeify the backlash, with several posts going viral

of these, like, aspiring influencers, either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes out to you, Nazi salute-style fashion. Yeah. And I think focusing media attention

on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense, right? He's like an actual person, affiliate with the government. But making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls, maybe not so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if a random, like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their instapot. I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Aussie salute and about the ways that everyone, you know, like, what,

one of the functions of capitalism is that everyone has been trained to experience the world and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things. That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do this. Let's do this. Yeah. Go for, go for it. No, I think part of this focus on on like these hidden codes and even just like these like messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself. Yeah. It's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with, like, neoliberal governing. And that's, I think, what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film, like, gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes. Those are aesthetic differences.

And those are different. And they're bad, right? I'm not saying these things are good. Those things are still bad. Yeah. But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this capitalist realism, being trapped in this like this neoliberal. Yeah, the society of the spectacle. Exactly, right?

Let's like in June, ICE arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations. In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations. Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations of. month. The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013 under Obama, averaging 36,000 a month. The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000. When the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice, that triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow U.S. military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia also barred two military planes full of migrants,

but later caved as Trump threatened punitive tariffs. And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher. And that's kind of all I have left. Yeah, I mean, it is very fitting of our styles of politics that you're going to Fisher here and I'm going to Benjamin. Benjamin is, is, quoted in these sections that Fisher is pulling from as well. Yep, yep, except I'm going to the source. I'm not going through the fucking CRU bullshit.

Like, Bob Marxist bourgeois running dog. But, no, but like, you know, like one of the things that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read, he's one of the great original theorist of fascism, and he fucking died trying to flee the Nazis. and one of his arguments was that, you know, one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics, right? That aesthetics would allow you to, you know, feel representation instead of do the action. And this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through a whole bunch of different analyses of how capitalism functions, right? This is one of the three lines of the society of spectacle.

And it's this real issue that we're dealing with now, because, again, kind of, in a sense, what has happened to everything, right? And you can argue to some extent that, like, our channel being called Cool Zone Media is sort of this, is that all politics from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows, like, allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of, through this sort of collection of images in this emotional aesthetic. and it also is doing the same thing to us

but the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't right and so if you don't fucking exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic of sort of like of fucking living in images right and you know go do the actual shit that DeBoard is talking about

in the society a spectacle where you and all your friends form workers councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of the people who are taking it from you you're just going to live in the fascist nightmare forever I mean you could look at the union resistance to ice deportations specifically in LA with Russian workers that's literally doing that

and like I would argue like now it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics but especially now it is an aestheticized politics and you can even see that insofar as its focuses on like race and like ethnic purity like blood and soil

that's why they're posting American progress driving out the indigenous people with the Aryan white lady carrying the torch of progress it is an aestheticized politics on a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, uh, the anti-goat. Quote, Mark Fisher in Catholicism, quote, ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible. Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neol liberals, the capitalist

realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space, but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core, military, and police functions. Unquote. This is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about, right, as Trump got elected, in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.

Yeah. Although, I, see, I get, I disagree with officials here because the neolibals understood what they were doing to begin with. They were never trying to with her the state away. That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses. Like, sure, I mean, that's what, contrary to their official hopes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's like, you know.

Quote, such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless, only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resort to the helpless, proliferate. Unquote, this is part of what I conceptualize as this code hunting, is almost a form of this hopeless superstition. To continue, quote, the catastrophe is neither wading down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows?

Its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being, a negative miracle, a maledation which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism, unquote. And yeah, that's what Mia is talking about with Gita Bore and society of the spectacle. That's the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still does it be that's like good, right? That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alon Badoo, quote,

To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist national. nationalist declarations like Lemosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, unquote. And already parts of this are

slightly outdated. Oh yeah, no, because we're doing this shit now. Like, but this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions people die, right? One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through aesthetics of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do. Yeah. And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane, that we should not allow at all. Yeah, I see the logic of this all the fucking time talking to people. We're like, we'll be like, okay, like no deportations. And then you get a whole bunch of people being like, well, but what about criminals? It's like, some deportations. What are you? This is the structural logic of the original like deportation blitz from Trump. creating a class of undesirables that you can then always add to and press the border on, like what Karl Schmidt talks about.

This is the structural logic of fascism. But everyone thinks about deportations this way now. And they're mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But, you know, until people actually break through the sort of pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start, you know, having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here. And this is, I think, one of the limits of... using anti-fascism as this, like, aesthetic code hunting is because a few days ago,

the THS posted a Woody Guthrie song, his song, America the Beautiful, with the DHS posting, The Promise of America is worth protecting the future of our homeland is worth defending, notably everyone in this video is all white people, which this sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words, except it has 15 words. So therefore, not a Nazi dog whistle. we're safe guys we're good i counted the words there's 15 of them so you can disregard what the actual text is saying and i think that is the is like the prime uh the prime contradiction in which i am growing increasingly frustrated so that's most of what i have to say about the the limits of nazi code hunting and the the aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in american

politics. Mia, do you have any final wise, wise notes? The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed. It is now time to end the episode right here. That's right, it is. We're late for a meeting. Oh, and if you were able to decode the hidden message in the ad break, send the contents of the message via email to your local congressman to redeem your prize. Bye-bye. What Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know Summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you. Episodes on James Bond,

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