It Could Happen Here - Don't Panic

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

These are frightening times, but Robert explains why now is not the time to panic. The situation is not as dire or hopeless as many people want you to believe, and there's a lot of good evidence to back that up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 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. poetry will 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. AT&T, connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. CallZone Media. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and boy, they sure seem to be, don't they? The 2024 election is terrifying a lot of people at this stage after a disastrous debate performance by Joe Biden. And this episode will be coming out

on the Monday that the Republican National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A lot of people are terrified about a Trump dictatorship, about Project 2025, and all that that entails. And I want to tell you, first off, you know, we will be having a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison, Sophie, and I are all going to be there all week. We'll start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, and then we'll probably have some summary content after that the next week. So we will be getting you our experiences here and everything that we encounter on the ground during what I think is going to wind up being a pretty important week for the American fascist movement. But right now, what I want to address is the sense of kind of unbridled terror that I've seen from a lot of people around

me, not just leftists, but regular people that I know in my life, folks who are just kind of like casual Democrats, not the kind to think much about politics, but have suddenly seen the potential of what a Trump second term might bring with it and are rightfully terrified. So I want to first off tell everyone in that bucket, don't panic. That's what this episode is about. And I'm going to try and give you some good reasons not to panic, some reasons why our situation is not as dire as it seems. And my goal here is not to lull you into inaction or stop you from preparing. You should, in fact, be preparing. And we talk about the various things you can do

organizing in your community, taking action to support migrants, to support each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women seeking reproductive justice. That's our daily bread and butter. Right now, I want to give you some reasons for optimism about victory and the overall struggle against these fucking maniacs. So, as most regular listeners will know, back in the spring of 2019, I published the first season of It Could Happen Here, which was originally a scripted podcast about the very real possibility of a civil conflict in the United States. The years since have proven several of my predictions painfully accurate. I started

the series with fictional vignettes from the perspective of an American civilian watching American tanks roll through the streets of their city. Within a year, thousands and thousands of listeners had variants of that exact experience thanks to the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled and more than a little frightened by the response that some people had to the first iteration of It Could Happen Here. During 2020, while I was on the ground in four different states, dozens and dozens of people told me the series had influenced their own choices for how to act and organize on the ground with their friends out in the world. And that is humbling and a little bit frightening. And I promise you, I'm not laying this out to brag or try to make an argument from

authority. I'm not saying I predicted something five years ago and was right, so you should listen to what I have to predict now. In fact, I kind of want to do the opposite, because in another podcast I recorded in 2019 on the anti-vax movement, this would have been an episode of Behind the Bastards, I laid out a theoretical pandemic, and I described it spreading almost exactly the way the COVID-19 pandemic really did spread just a few months later. And yet, in February of 2020, when COVID-19 had been confirmed to have entered the United States and was spreading over other parts of the world, like wildfire, I had friends ask me what I thought was going to happen. And, you know, thinking back to SARS, thinking back to bird flu, thinking back to the Ebola, you know, epidemic in

2014, my answer was, I don't know, it'll probably be fine, right? Someone, surely there's some adults out there who are gonna lock this thing down. They're not just gonna let it run rampant over the population, right? There's a term for what happened to me there, and it's called normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the tendency to assume that whatever has gone down in the past will keep happening,

often despite evidence to the contrary. Something like 80% of people display attributes of delusional thinking caused by the normalcy bias during disasters. Emergency responders sometimes call this negative panic. We got a great example of negative panic a couple of weeks ago. Video went viral of a bull that got loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon, and it started just absolutely goring. Random yokels who were like wandering around in between churro stands and beer carts behind sort of the stands. And a few of these people had the presence of mind to run. One guy even pulled a gun, and I don't know entirely how

we want to rate that as a response. But a lot of folks just stared at the bowl, which is blank looks on their faces, utterly uncomprehending. You could tell from their body language that they just couldn't believe what they were seeing, and some of those people got rammed right in the fucking gut by a bull a second later. The immediate danger that their eyes were telling them was there just seemed too far-fetched to take seriously. The normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's just one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind towards catastrophes.

And while we're on that subject, I should warn those of you who'd like to try their hand at predicting the future of a separate cognitive delusion, catastrophizing. This is the tendency to assume that the absolute worst-case scenario will come to pass, and it's often a trauma reaction. When you've been blown up, you kind of always expect the world to blow up around you. If you have been in a relationship with someone who blows up, who screams or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves during arguments, you might find yourself expecting that from anyone else that you date,

even if they've never displayed that kind of behavior. And if you've watched an in-the-bag, sure-thing presidential election collapse and usher in a new era of fascist political capture in your country, well, you might see that kind of thing happening and expect it whenever the polls open up again. The tricky part of actually predicting the future with any accuracy, which is a thing that I have been both professionally successful at and personally bad at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias with your catastrophizing. This is easier said than done, and I have noticed that my effort to reach this state has produced some peculiar cognitive effects of late.

In the six months that led up to the first presidential debate, I felt constant growing anxiety about a second Trump term. Only some of my anxiety was based on polling, which didn't look great for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I was anxious because I saw so many people around me, and I'm not talking about folks on Twitter, but in the real world,

go, well, obviously Biden's got to win. There's no way Trump gets elected again. And then go about their day. Then the debate happened. Joe went on stage, barely able to speak at a legible volume, coughing, slurring his words, and dropping into tangents rather than making cogent cases to the country. Everyone around me started to get terrified all at once,

and the mainstream media did what it does and pivoted to round-the-clock coverage of the issue of Biden's competency. Now, some people have alleged that this is because the media has some sort of an agenda here, And I really don't credit the media as someone who has spent his life working adjacent to the mainstream media with that kind of capacity to plan. What these people, what these reporters, what these news organs were doing was pivoting to the issue that was doing the most to raise our collective blood pressure. Because among other things, that's what social media has trained them to do,

because that's where the fucking money is, right? You know, not that this issue didn't exist before that. If it bleeds, it leads has been a longtime axiom in the field. But that's what's happening here too, right? And because the money is in saying and talking about the things that gets people's blood pumping the most, the question of is Joe Biden doomed soon yielded to is democracy doomed as analysts and pundits started hyping up Project 2025, a blueprint for fascist takeover of the U.S. published by the Heritage Foundation last year. Heritage Foundation last year. Now, I am not a pollster, and I don't claim to base any of what I say next on some kind of mathematic expertise, but I don't think we're doomed. I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable, even in the likely event that Biden loses, and I think our position is a lot stronger than most people realize. This is why right-wing influencers and strategists

have started going so hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like fucking Cobra Commander. The best example of how mask-off the fascist right has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who said this during a recent press conference. The reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Another of these guys is Jack Posobiec,

a former Navy intelligence officer turned supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher. a former Navy intelligence officer turned supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher. Jack spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for CPAC, where he said this. I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here. We'll replace it with this right here. We'll replace it with this right here. Amen. Now, I should note, folks, when he says this right here,

he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's not a subtle man, but he does speak for a frighteningly large and influential bloc of Republicans. Both of these guys are end results of 80 years of conspiracy theories and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and their fail sons, and at this point, fail grandsons. The mainstream media and most voters in this country did their best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power. Mouths watering, dicks hard, guns loaded, and people are freaking

out. Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people. Now, obviously, Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the fringes of the American right for years there. Nothing they're saying is new. But Trump's likely victory in the Supreme Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot of people to conclude that Project 2025 is Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office. This is something guys like Posobiec and Roberts want you to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away from confrontation.

Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding that if they can just convince you that the fight is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has spent the last two weeks since the debate quote tweeting every left-wing media person he can find and saying six months to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic. Jack is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier, he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy. One of them that I bring up often,

because I think it illustrates something important, is the ODA loop. This is the process by which people make decisions and act in combat situations. And it stands for, the different stages of this process are observe, orient, decide, act. If you can disrupt any part of the ODA loop, you can stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding or from carrying out their actions. Jack and his peers want you to panic. They want you to make plans to leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all evidence of your political

sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe that nothing matters any longer because what matters most to him is that you and people like you are out of the picture, you know, either dead or so scared that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way against him and his friends. Now, my job as a semi-professional Cassandra and as a guy who reports on the far right is to tell you this, a Trump dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look. And we will talk about all of that after some ads. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head

and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. 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. Blacklit 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 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. 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. 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, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. We're back. Now, I am not primarily an election guy, and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff. The polls are bad for Biden, and I have no interest in trying to delude anyone to thinking this is all some big nationwide polling error. The only thing I will say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds-on bet, but if you average the swing state polls, he and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty much everywhere. Now, you're going to get a different analysis

depending on which poll expert you trust. The new guys at 538 still have it mostly as a coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver himself gives Biden under a 30% chance, which is terrible, and also about where Trump was in November of 2016. And we all do know how that election ended. People are often very bad at understanding probabilities,

but saying he's got a 29% chance of winning all do know how that election ended. People are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying he's got a 29% chance of winning doesn't mean it's impossible for him to win, right? The situation is serious, but the future is not written. And you should remember that for good and for ill, the final results of this whole thing will come down probably to 100,000 voters or so in five or six states. Now, it's also worth me saying this. Both of these candidates are old men. And statistically, it would not be unheard of or weird if one of them was dead before the election. Joe Biden could still lose in a palace coup from the rest of his party and get replaced.

Anything can happen. And in US politics, it often does. Hey, everyone. Robert here. Two days after I wrote this, something happened. There was an assassination attempt against former President Trump. I am recording this a couple of hours after it happened. A lot is unclear at the moment. Other than that, somebody shot at him.

It looks like he was wounded from glass shrapnel when the teleprompter was hit. That's what the Secret Service is currently claiming. A shooter appears to have been outside the venue on a roof. Not much more I can say at this point. I will note, again, there's a lot of catastrophizing going on. People saying like, oh, this means he's definitely going to win re-election. When Reagan got shot, that Trump, you know, rocketed him to a re- reelection victory. You know, that's possible. That could be what happens here. It's definitely a solid case to be made for that. That's what happened with Reagan. But that's not always what happens when there are assassination attempts

against sitting or former presidents. On September 22nd, 1975, Sarah Jane Moore, a member of the Manson family cult, attempted to assassinate President Ford with a.38 revolver. He did not win re-election. So, you know, that's just as a note, like, sometimes what happens? It's impossible to say what's going to happen with this. But if you're looking to past U.S. history for precedent, you're still kind of in a situation where, well, really unclear what's going to go down. Now, that's all the horse race stuff I'm going to subject you to. We are now going to move forward with the rest of this episode trying to answer

this question. What happens if Trump wins? And I'm going to give you some very good reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first has to do with Project 2025. In short, this Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place the whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending separation of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go after dissidents, making recreational sex illegal, and criminalizing daily life for millions of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a roadmap to Christian dictatorship. Now, I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't find this chilling, but let's be clear about what Project 2025 is. It is a 900-page document written by a think tank that has lost a

lot of its influence and access to power over the last 10 years. The Heritage Foundation was once, as Molly Ball described in an article for The Atlantic, the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement. But during the Obama years, the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started to get pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became clear that, in a lot of ways, these guys were dangerously out of step with voters

and kind of hard to work with. The pullback actually began in 2014, when the Heritage Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republican Study Committee retreat over a conflict around a farm bill. Now, the think tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after Trump took office. Some of this was the result of the fact that conservative think tanks have seen a general decline in influence from the good old days, the height of their power. The Republican Party has won the popular vote in exactly one election this century, and as of 2022, we have seen them go through two disastrous midterm elections in a row

and one disastrous losing presidential election. Now, there's an interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundation's decline from 2022 by the Washington Post's Jeff Stein and Yagana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill as saying, people do not walk around in fear of the Heritage Foundation the way they did 10 years ago. And the main reason why is because Trump and the people around him were gaining a lot more influence, right? These old think tankers just didn't hold the juice that they used to. Now, that article was published in response to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies

and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff that we have been bombarded with now for years. This is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base, but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog shit at getting regular Americans on board because regular Americans look at this stuff and go, well, these people are fucking out of their minds. I think the near panic around Project 2025 is potentially useful. It has the potential to line a lot of voters up, and crucially, not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but against a Republican party that has almost

entirely yielded to the fascists in its midst. But I also see a lot of people describing Project 2025 as Trump's plan for when he takes office, and that's just not what it is. These people will note that a lot of former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation, to which I say he hates a lot of the people who worked with him the last administration around. This is very common knowledge. Some people will also point out recently unearthed video of the director of Project 2025 back in 2023 telling a right-wing podcaster that Trump was very bought in with Project 2025. And maybe that's true, but I don't feel like you should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting his own horn. Now, that kind of belief, though, does merge with statements you'll see from

prominent progressive media figures, people like Chris Hayes, who recently tweeted, A big reason Project 2025 is so salient is because the actual Trump campaign has essentially zero policy apparatus and the platform is just Trump truth social posts strung together. Now, I like Chris and I agree that it is important to set the stakes here for voters and to talk about Project 2025 because it's fucked up and we should do something about the fact that these people feel confident putting out open plans to end democracy and institute a Christian nationalist dictatorship. But what Chris says is not strictly accurate because Trump has a platform and it might have been influenced by

Project 2025. I think it probably was, but his platform is called Agenda 47 and we have covered it on It Could Happen Here, our daily news program. This is something you should care about. Trump, in his Agenda 47 plans, Trump advocates for mass deportations of migrants, for an attack on the legal rights of the press and potentially the imprisonment of his political enemies. He threatens the use of special forces and airstrikes against cartels on Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy shit in Agenda 47. This is very serious stuff, and it is, crucially, the stuff Donald Trump has promised to do if he gets elected.

Now, a few days before I wrote this, the former president took to Truth Social to officially disavow Project 2025. Now, do I think he's lying? Do I think he was aware of it? Do I think he cribbed some of it for Agenda 47? Yeah, he's Donald Trump. He lies all the fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy that he feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow Project 2025.

And this is part of a general split between Trump and the faction of the party who want a strongman dictator type, but who aren't Christian nationalists, and the chunk who are. This is a natural cleavage, and we can see further evidence of this in the fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not call for a national ban on abortion. And if you watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable taking the standard right-wing line on this, because Trump is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner. You know, he can't entirely push back on the party on this,

but he's clearly not motivated to do so. Now, does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban into law? No, of course not. But it means he understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have their use to him, he needs a lot of votes from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary. If Trump does take power again, these natural cleavages will become more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power in a severely divided country that does not like him or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not made Trump more popular. Polls generally show a ceiling of around 42% of the country who like the guy, and that ceiling

is remarkably stable. There is also evidence that the sudden media focus on Project 2025 and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to end democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finished this episode, on Thursday, July 11th, Ipsos published a poll showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken after the debate, which put him and Biden close to a tie. Now, this still isn't great for Biden because by all rights, this election should not be close. But I think a lot of people have made the mistake of conflating disgust for Biden with surging support for Trump,

and that just is not what we're seeing. More evidence for this comes from a recent ABC Your Voice poll, which showed 50% of the country having an unfavorable opinion of Biden and 59% having an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Part of why so many of these outright fascists have gone mask off is that they see these numbers too. They know that this moment right now is their best shot, maybe ever, at taking this country, crushing their

enemies, and inflicting the pain that it is their only purpose in life to inflict. And they might win. They might get to do that. The Heritage Foundation is not at the heart of the Trump campaign, but any step closer to total power for these people should ring alarm bells in every heart and head in this country. Yet the severity of the situation does not change this absolutely crucial fact. The fascists know the wind is no longer at their backs. And I'm going to talk about that when we come back from this ad break. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.

I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. 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. 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 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. 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. Check out betteroffline.com. Despite how confident the Trump campaign and guys like Jack Posobiec are talking right now about their chances of winning, of dominating the government, of winning, of dominating the government, of taking control of America for generations and purging the left,

the reality is that their position is not nearly as stable as it seems. And, you know, part of why I think a lot of folks buy into, a lot of folks on the left and liberals buy into the claims that the right is making right now about their guaranteed victory, about their looming inevitable victory, is that Americans tend to be pretty self-centered when it comes to politics. And it is understandable that this nail-biter of an election and Joe Biden's calamitous debate performance

has people here feeling doomed and feeling like a new fascist world order is inevitable. If you feel that way, though, I urge you to look around the world. Look to India, where authoritarian near-dictator Narendra Modi was just dealt a startling setback in the Indian general election. His party, the BJP, failed to win a majority for the first time since 2014. Now, this is not the end of Modi, but it is a shocking sign of where the wind is blowing

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

I could go on. Turkey's all-but-dictator, President Erdogan, has been bleeding support for years now and recently suffered a massive setback in regional elections around the country. The opposition Republican People's Party took the five largest cities in the country in an upset vote, including the capital, Istanbul, where Erdogan's party had invested massive resources. Now, these upsets in India and Turkey are so worth discussing because both countries are years into their own version of the nightmare scenario that Donald Trump season two represents, right?

They voted their fascists into power. These guys took control of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed civil violence for political gain. And yet, even with all that, even with all the power available to a modern security state, their hold on power is slipping, just as I read these words. For many years, neo-Nazi activists sought to influence and build support within the Republican Party and talked about hiding their power level as they did so. Now, this is a term they cribbed from Dragon Ball Z, and it means, in essence,

pretending not to be a crazy-ass fascist in order to get enough support from the normies that you can act like a crazy-ass fascist with the power of the state. Well, the masks are off now. Nobody is hiding their power level anymore. And I am not so arrogant as to claim that I know that their defeat is around the corner. But I will tell you one thing. This is a make-or-break moment for the sons of bitches. If they fail now, they will find themselves exposed in a country that knows precisely who and what they are. And this means we will have the opportunity to destroy them. Now, how would we do that? Well, first off, I'm not going to give you a detailed, perfect roadmap for how you can participate in

this and how we can easily destroy the fascists in the next, you know, five or six minutes of a podcast. But I do have some theories. I will elaborate on them more in subsequent episodes. And I want to emphasize right now that this is possible because the cultural power of the far right, which seems so mighty right now, actually does rest on a house of cards. mighty right now actually does rest on a house of cards. The Republican Party today is funded primarily by a coalition of car dealers who donate more than any other profession because their job depends on being able to scam consumers, multi-level marketing corporations, supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches, and of course, our old friends in the oil and gas industry. And there's a lot of ways to attack these different pillars

of right-wing power, these people who are actually funding their media operations, who are funding a lot of these more radical candidates, and who are lobbying for changes in laws that hurt you and help them. And again, I'm not going to be able to give a comprehensive list of how you go about dismantling all of this. It is a formidable task, but you could do a lot of damage to the power of the far right by regulating car sales and punishing dealers who scam consumers, which is close to 100% of dealers. You can ban the sale of unregulated supplements marketed as medical treatments, a thing that should be illegal but effectively is not. You can ban pyramid schemes and prosecute the criminals who have made fortunes off of them. These are counterattacks that will improve daily life for huge numbers of voters and do functional damage

to the right's ability to move and maneuver. Now, I don't mean to suggest that the only way to move on any of those issues is just to vote, right? Democrats have had decades to fight back against this shit, and they have failed by nearly every measure. But we have the potential of a general strike coming up in 2028 if the UAW has their way, and the catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party in this election has, I think, created some space for new kinds of organizing. The last point I want to leave you with is one more piece of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards us is not so hale and hearty as it seems. In April of this year, The Atlantic published an article based on analytics of the most popular right-wing news websites in the country. They wrote,

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40% compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Reitening, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet to track right-wing media. Some of the bigger names in the field that have been pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost 57% of its audience. Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81%. And The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91%. and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91%. Now, these numbers are startlingly consistent across right-wing media, and they are vastly worse than what liberal and left-leaning media has seen over the same time period. A number of ostensibly liberal sites, like The Times, have seen an increase in subscribers over the same period,

and I can confirm to you that here at CoolZone, we have more listeners and subscribers than we did in 2020. Now, should you feel like there's nothing to worry about just because the right-wing media is taking a fall? No. But what this should be evidence of is that, again, their support has always largely been built on their ability to generate huge amounts of money and essentially buy attention. And that's largely where guys like Ben Shapiro have gotten their cultural power. And that's made Ben Shapiro a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually brought him a lot of people who give a shit what he has to say. The actual number of people paying attention to the scary motherfuckers that you see in these clips that spread on liberal and lefty social media is very small.

And it's very small because these people are crazy assholes who most of the folks around you, who are basically decent people because most people are decent, fucking hate. What we have seen here, what we are seeing here, is the shattering of an illusion. And the popularity of a lot of right-wing media was only ever an illusion, popped up by an infusion of cash from billionaire fail-sons desperate to hold on to their money. Most people don't like or trust these folks, and the arrogance and certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and the sobeks of the country have been showing now, well, it's caused them to expose themselves. There is precisely one thing you can always count on from fascists, and it's that they're dogshit at estimating risk.

Time and time again, they convince themselves that they cannot be stopped and pick fights that they wind up losing. And that is perhaps the most reliable thing we can predict from their behavior, and maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you going forward. Now, I also just retyped and re-recorded this ending in the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump. And I want to talk a little bit about that before we go out, because that is certainly potentially a game changer. You know, people saying this could change the whole election

are not wrong. But at this point, far from a guarantee as well. As I said earlier, there have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former presidents that have not moved the needle in an election either, at least not in a really clear way in favor of the person the attempt was against. So we don't know how this is going to play. One thing I have seen in the immediate wake of this within minutes of the attempt itself and video of it going up is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag fire situation. This is staged. This is obviously a fake attempt. I don't see any evidence of that in the video that's out there.

I do not believe this was faked. I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody would want to take a shot at former President Trump. The video does not show any clear weird signs that would make me suspect something odd was going on. One of the things that's come out, it looks like the shooter was on a roof nearby. Pretty clear evidence of that at this point. There are some reports from people in the crowd who say that they pointed out the guy on the roof to police and were basically ignored. You know, the police didn't do anything. That also does not seem weird to me.

And if it does to you, I want to explain something about these events, because I've been to a number of events during presidential campaigns, the Secret Service is doing security and other kind of large scale, you know, events like this, where there's a lot of different law enforcement agencies. And in all of them, you will see snipers on the roof. It is not hard to find them. These guys, some of them, I assume, are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I know I've seen everyone that's around at one of these things, but you see a lot of them, right? And so do the cops, right? It's just not abnormal. And there are always a ton of law enforcement agencies. This was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as events in a presidential campaign go, but you still have

state and local cops. You still have at least the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret Service when it comes to federal agencies. So conservatively, at minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law enforcement agencies covering this event, right? And there's definitely going to be some people there who know where all of the snipers are supposed to be, right? Presumably within the Secret Service, but that is not the average cop on the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking around doing foot patrols, does not know where federal law enforcement has every single sniper set up. And they are like any, I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right? Well, that's not just a thing that can trip you up

when you are trying to predict the future months or years in advance. It is a thing that can trip you up predicting something a minute in advance, right? You see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, hey, there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well, you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns. You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has some guys up on the roof, you know, sharpshooters. Not at all weird. You go, yeah, maybe you even see the guy. And the pictures I've seen, looks like he was wearing camo, looks like he was wearing the kind of combat gear that cops wear, but also that anyone can buy because cops look like, you know, a lot of people who just buy this shit and do it recreationally, you know, go shooting and training in the woods or whatever.

Like a lot of it's not hard to gain access to gear that at a glance would look enough like a cop. And my guess is that this guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my best shot at being able to get away with this is if I post up on a roof somewhere and assume that the cops that spot me immediately won't know right away what I am, right? And that does seem to be what happened at this moment. And, you know, take that as a lot of things, very unclear if this is going to, again, affect the election, but take it as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias, because just because something seems like it's not weird, like it's not a sign of a change of something very different about to go down, doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah, you can never trust your

assumptions. And that goes both ways with this. I am seeing a lot of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am someone who's about to head into the RNC, not thrilled that this has happened. But that doesn't mean we know what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean, among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic, but I don't know how much this moves the needle because I don't know how many people who can be convinced would be swayed by something like this, for how many people this could change their opinion on the election, and how many people are going to believe that this was real and not,

you know, I've even seen people claiming that like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just really unclear how people are going to react, right? It's not worthless to look back to, you know, the attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that shit happened prior to the modern era of social media. All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting broken by the internet. So I'm not going to tell you this is a good time. I'm not going to tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But I am going to tell you the future is not written. And don't panic. Until next time, I'm Robert Evans, and this is It Could Happen Here.

We'll be back later this week with coverage of the Republican convention. Republican convention. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 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.

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