It Could Happen Here - How To Murder A City

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

For years the United States military has practiced saturation bombing on its enemies: today we talk about what would happen if those enemies were American cities. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to start this episode with a warning. What we're going to talk about in the next two episodes, actually, is incredibly dark and unspeakably violent. We will be discussing the possibility of the United States descending into the kind of apocalyptic city-annihilating violence that people in Syria

know all too well. Even in the event of a second American civil war, I do not find these scenarios particularly likely. We are talking about the very worst-case scenario of the very worst-case scenario here. But everything I will discuss in this and the next episode has been reality for millions of people across the world. And so we will talk about such possibilities here too. Please do not listen to these episodes if you feel they will be more than you can handle emotionally. Please do not take them as my prophecy for what will happen, only what might if every domino falls in the worst possible way. With all that said, it's time for a story. Bombs, bombs, bombs. Between the airstrikes and the mortars, 20 have hit close enough to rattle

the frame of your apartment building in the last day. Your windows are a distant, forlorn memory. The water pipes went weeks ago, and with that, your hope of ever using your shower again. One of your neighbors managed to liberate a pallet of baby wipes, though. The other day, you realize that you now value a single pack of the things more than every electronic gadget you've ever owned. The day provides some relief. Someone, you've heard it was the Canadians, supplied the separatists in your neighborhood with man-portable anti-aircraft missile launchers. They knocked out a couple of helicopters last week, and ever since then, the federal forces have been more cautious during the day. It's weird to think of the munitions and craft your tax dollars paid for being used to bombard your hometown. It's even

weirder to look out from your roof during the day and see the Dominionist militia bedecked in their fiery crosses, firing from up-armored Ford F-150s into the separatist fighting positions around your neighborhood. Most days, they broadcast propaganda from loudspeakers built into the backs of vans, begging heathens in the city—you guess that includes you— to throw down their arms and accept God and America back into their lives. At this point, you'd pray to just about anyone if it meant not taking indirect fire all day, every day. But you've seen pictures of what life is like in the areas under Dominionist control. The other day, one of your friends

showed you a video of a stoning, 20 or 30 militiamen throwing rocks at a pair of trans women. You almost puked up what little food was left in your stomach. You're not sure how much of that the federal forces know about. Surely things haven't gotten so bad that the government would approve of such brutality. But you know they need the manpower the militias provide, and maybe it's as simple as that. The government is happy to look the other way for anyone who can help them maintain control. Yesterday, one of your friends in the municipal defense units told you about a transport caravan headed out of the city, through a thin strip of friendly territory leading up north, to what used to be Washington State.

The journey will take days. Washington wasn't exactly close before the war, and the road system has been fucked by years of IEDs, bombings, and lack of maintenance under the patchwork of sectarian militias. But if you can make it up there, you've heard there are buses that will take you up to the Canadian border. Of course, back when this all started, you considered immigrating. Everyone did. But you convinced yourself that things would get better. Even a few months ago, that had seemed possible. But now? The boom of a howitzer rips through the air, as if to punctuate your internal debate.

You instantly recognize it as incoming fire, and you dart into the bathroom to take cover. The shell lands somewhere close. The blast rattles the foundation of your building, but it clearly wasn't a direct hit. You hear the now-familiar sound of wounded people, shrieking in pain. Some of them are children. You want to grab your first aid kit and run to them, but you shelter in place for a while longer. The Dominionists have a thing for double-tap strikes,

and you expect another round or two will be headed in the same direction to hit any first responders. Less than a minute later, the cannon booms again, and a second blast silences the screams of your wounded neighbors. You're overwhelmed with a curious mix of shame and gratitude that you guessed right. Slowly, you pick yourself up and head to the window to survey the damage. And as you look out at the still-smoking rubble of yet another home, you make your decision. It's time to leave.

One fine summer morning, two years ago, I stood on a hill in Mosul and watched AH-64 Apache attack helicopters drill 30mm chaingun rounds and thermobaric Hellfire missiles into city blocks filled with people. It didn't look at all the way it looks in movies. There were no bright orange blossoms of fire, just plumes of black and gray smoke bursting across the horizon and curling up to the sky.

That afternoon, I walked through the neighborhood those Apaches had pounded all morning. Concrete, plaster, wood, and human bodies had been pounded into a substance finer than sand, a gritty, all-pervasive sort of dust that enveloped everything. The neighborhood, which hours ago had been filled with beautiful homes and apartment blocks, had been turned into something that looked like the surface of the moon. As I clambered over the collapsed apartments, giving a wide berth to

unexploded bomblets still wedged in the rubble, the smell of rotting corpses bubbled up from below. It's stuck in my nose. Even now, two years later, I can still smell it sometimes. I have nightmares about Mosul some nights. None of them are about the actual close calls I had in that city, the mourners and sniper rounds that landed too close for comfort. My nightmares all involve planes and helicopters, the smell of dead bodies trapped under rubble, and the sight of other cities and other countries wreathed in the same black smoke I saw rising from Mosul. Carpet bombing has been a key aspect of American military strategy since World War II. Precision munitions have allowed for somewhat less randomness

in the process. But anyone who saw Mosul or Raqqa in Syria can tell you that precision is a word with a lot of wiggle to it. And since 2017, the trend in American military doctrine has not been towards fewer civilian casualties. By June of that year, President Trump had dropped almost as many bombs as Obama did in all of 2016. By the end of 2017, the U.S. had launched 50% more airstrikes than we had in the previous year. Civilian casualties had risen by 215%. The leveling of Raqqa and Mosul were only possible because those cities were distant, foreign, and filled with non-white people. It's hard to imagine an American president ordering the carpet bombing of an American city.

But perhaps it shouldn't be. I've begun to expect that the path to an American Mosul is not as long, or as winding, as I'd previously hoped. The book Cities Under Siege points out that, 15 years ago, American military planners and tacticians were already well used to treating our own cities as targets, as long as those cities were seen as majority non-white. Quote, some U.S. Army officers discussed their highly militarized response to the Katrina disaster as an attempt to take back New Orleans from African- American insurgencies.

Rather than organizing a massive humanitarian response that treated Katrina's victims as citizens who required immediate help, officials eventually executed a largely military operation. Such a response merely reinforced the idea that it is equally fitting to treat both external and internal geographies as the sites of state-backed wars against racialized and biopolitically disposable, their word, others. The Katrina operation dealt with those abandoned in the central city as a threat, to be contained, targeted, and addressed as a means of protecting the property of the largely white, suburban, and ex-urban populations who had escaped in their own cars. In the process, African American citizens of New Orleans were made refugees within their own country. As Robert Starr and Ella Shohat contend, Katrina not only ripped the roofs off

of Gulf Coast houses, but also ripped the facade off the national security state. In the event of a Second American Civil War, with armed resistance against the state and whole cities, or at least chunks of whole cities, standing in open revolt, that facade would slip further. This would not happen quickly. There would be great resistance to the idea of deploying American air power against our own cities. But imagine our military, pushed past its limits of manpower, dealing with thousands of injured and dead and probably just as many deserters. As I mentioned in the last episode, tiny Iraq and large, sparsely populated Afghanistan already did this to our forces, minus the desertion. In that much less severe situation, our military and political leaders responded with a vast escalation in the air war.

More drones and more bombs to compensate for fewer available boots on the ground. Remember Jeremy Christian's words after stabbing two men to death on the Portland MAX train? That's what liberalism gets you. Two years or so into the Second American Civil War, with military casualties rising, the economy collapsed, and of course, months of hateful propaganda directed against the separatists and insurgents. Well, I don't have trouble imagining the American government and a chunk of the country who chose to back them, supporting a violent air war against their former countrymen.

That's what separatism gets you. Gregory Clancy is a professor of history at the University of Singapore, a Fulbright scholar, and an expert in the evolution of U.S. military doctrine. He's quoted liberally in Cities Under Siege, discussing the left-right divide in this country. Quote, At the end of the day, the grand division in American politics is not East versus West or North versus South. It's not even rural versus urban middle class, because the really powerful Republican squares are suburbs and exurbs,

full of more recent settler refugees from the blue flex themselves. No one dislikes the blue, democratic urban flex more than those who resettled its edges, the trekkers in that great exodus that began in the 1940s and continues strongly today. Now, that was written back in 2010, but it's only grown truer with the passage of years. A 2014 Washington Post article, humorously titled Breaking, Partisans of the Two Parties Hate Each Other, noted, quote, 79% of Democrats have unfavorable attitudes about the Republican Party. 82% of Republicans have unfavorable attitudes about the Democratic Party.

Absolutist rejection is quite common. Roughly one-third of partisans believe the opposition is a threat to the nation's well-being. In 1994, only around 30% of each party viewed the other party in a hugely unfavorable light. That number, then, has almost tripled in 20 years. And, as I outlined in the first episode of this series, things have only grown more viciously polarized in the years since that Washington Post article. In 2019, it is distinctly normal to run into what's called eliminationist rhetoric directed against the political other. In mid-April 2019, Pacific Standard Magazine

published an article titled, The Far Right Doesn't Want to Beat the Left, It Wants to Exterminate It. That article noted, quote, Right-wing p to Beat the Left, It Wants to Exterminate It. That article noted, quote, right-wing pundits have joked about murdering people on the left for years. In the 1990s, talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh quipped, I tell people don't kill all the liberals, leave enough so that we can have two on every campus living fossils so that we will never forget what these people stood for. His words were echoed recently by the neo-Nazi Chris Cantwell,

who ranted in a gab post that leftists should face complete and total destruction. Memes and jokes about free helicopter rides for leftists like Bernie Sanders have become common on the right as well. This is a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered some of his left-wing opponents by throwing them from helicopters. In 2015, John Russell Hauser opened fire in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater during a showing of Amy Schumer's train wreck. His explicit goal was to kill liberals. Before his shooting, Hauser wrote this about Dylann Roof's murder of nine worshipers

at a black church in Charleston. Had Dylann Roof reached political maturity, he would have seen that the word is not the N-word, but liberal. David Newart, a journalist and expert on far-right radicalization, has been warning about this for quite some time. His 2009 book, The Eliminationists, published one year before Cities Under Siege, traced out an already compelling and terrifying trend of far-right violence against liberals. Newart wrote about a number of murders and attempted murders, most of which I hadn't read about before reading his book. The most shocking of them happened in July 2008, when Jim David Adkisson opened fire in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, killing two people. His four-page manifesto included the line,

All liberals should be killed. Adkisson explained that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he had felt that Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets. When police later combed through Adkisson's home, they found books written by a number of mainstream conservatives. Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor by Bill O of mainstream conservatives. Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity,

and The O'Reilly Factor by Bill O'Reilly. In his manifesto, Adkisson expressed frustration at his inability to reach and attack any Democratic elected leaders. I couldn't get to the generals and high-ranking officers of the Marxist movement, so I went after the foot soldiers, the chicken-shit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I gang Patriot Prayer, Carmen Estill. She said this, this. We are deep into spiritual warfare now. This is why the evildoers don't even realize how

evil they truly are. They have become robotic. They are simply a vessel for the darkness. When you start seeing words like robotic used to describe human beings, what you're seeing is called dehumanization. It's one of the first steps necessary if you plan to prepare one group of human beings to kill another group of human beings. Every genocide and mass killing in history has involved some degree of dehumanization. The book Less Than Human by David Livingston Smith deals with this phenomenon in great detail. He notes, quote, Dehumanization is the belief that some beings only appear human, but beneath the surface where it really counts, they aren't human at all.

The Nazis labeled Jews as untermenschen, subhumans, because they were convinced that, although Jews looked every bit as human as the average Aryan, this was a facade, and that concealed beneath it. Jews were really filthy, parasitic vermin. We don't fight, we don't riot, even when the war's outside our door. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1943, as the Holocaust was ramping up, Hitler delivered a speech in which he described international Jewry as the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states. Just as it was in antiquity, it will remain that way as long as people do not find the strength to get rid of the virus.

Such language has grown increasingly common in our current political discourse. In 2014, Fox News published an article titled, Wake Up America, Liberalism is a Virus Too. The article, written at the height of the Ebola outbreak, directly compared liberalism to that virulent disease. It's not so different from Adolf Hitler's constant comparisons of Jewish people to typhus than the most terrifying illness of the day. Now, in the interest of fairness, I googled around to see if I could find examples of liberals and leftists making the same claim about conservatives. It took about half a second to find a meme saying literally that.

Conservatism is a virus that is destroying America. It seems to have been the creation of a very lame tumblr titled Conservatism is Destroying Our Future. Dehumanization is not a one-sided process in this country, and that kind of language should concern you no matter what side of the aisle it comes from. People are not viruses. Jim Hodgkinson was a politically active liberal and small business owner. He was active in the Occupy movement in 2011 and was interviewed by Fox 2 News in St. Louis about his support. At the time, Jim said, the 99% are getting pushed around and the 1% are just not giving a damn, so we've got to speak up for the whole country. In 2012, he wrote letters to his local

newspapers stating, let's vote all Republicans out of Congress and get this country back on track. At this point, Jim seemed to be a pretty normal Democrat, and like most Democrats, Jim was horrified by the election of Donald Trump. At some point between November 2016 and June 2017, Jim Hodgkinson decided that protesting and voting was no longer enough. He took a rifle to a baseball field where several Republican Congress people and their aides were practicing for a charity baseball game and opened fire. He injured five people, including Congressman Steve Scalise, before being fatally wounded by law enforcement. We do not have as complete a

log of Hodgkinson's internet history as I would like. Prominent right-wing terrorists like the MAGA bomber left us with more data to work with. But we do know a few things about Hodgkinson. Within a year of Trump's election, his business failed and he wound up homeless, living out of his vehicle in a gym bag, showering at the local YMCA. Now, I have found significantly more examples of violent far-right radicalism than violent far-left radicalism. It's worth repeating that every single American killed by domestic terrorists in 2018 died at the hands of a right-wing extremist. However, Jim is proof that violent radicalization occurs across the political spectrum. And I think that as the economy drops and the impact of climate change becomes more severe,

leaving more people homeless and destitute, we will see more people on the left lose hope in the ballot and turn to the bullet. I don't know what path of dehumanizing rhetoric helped lead Jim to open fire on a group of strangers. But considering how much time I'm about to spend talking about right-wing eliminationism, I should probably talk about another aspect of it on the left that seriously worries me. Guillotine fetishism. Now I get it. I've spent hundreds of collective hours of my life reading about the unspeakable crimes of various billionaires, most recently the Sackler family. I understand wanting to give some of these people an exceptionally short haircut. And I get that a lot of you are probably rolling your eyes and maybe even getting ready to switch podcasts

because clearly, Twitter posts like this one from Weedris Elba are just jokes. If your boss ever tells you you don't need a union, it's because you need a guillotine. Prominent leftist magazine Jacobin recently started selling a faux IKEA guillotine poster, the tweet announcing it said, So much for the tolerant left. I could find another dozen examples if I really wanted to keep harping on this all day, and all these examples could be easily defended as harmless comedy. Now, I'm not going to compare this to, say, the ironic comments about genocide and Nazism that are so often a catalyst for

fascist right-wing radicalization, but given how prevalent guillotine talk has become on the left, I think it behooves us to talk, for a minute, about the French Revolution. Now, you could absolutely argue that a lot of those guillotined knobby fucks had it coming, as they had spent their lives deploying oppressive violence far in excess of what was eventually returned to them. As a general rule, I support despotic leaders, be they kings or dictators, losing their heads. But tens of thousands of people were killed in the violence that flowed from the French Revolution, and most of them did not have it coming. It turns out that once a collective of angry people starts murdering, it's fucking hard to get them to stop. Where I worry about this, specifically,

is when it comes to what happens in the chunks of urban and suburban areas occupied by leftist separatists. In place where the government retreats without too much violence, things will likely remain pleasant for the reasons we discussed in the last episode. Most people tend to want things to stay reasonable. However, in the areas where the fighting is more vicious, the trumps of cities that wind up under long-term sieges, separatists are likely to become correspondingly more brutal on the areas they control. This leads me to something called the brutalization effect. It's mostly been documented in the context of the death penalty, but quite a lot of the data gathered suggests that highly

publicized executions lead to more violence. I'd like to quote from a University of Maryland study. It was found that the incidence of Thursday-Friday homicides was greater than expected for those weeks with executions, and the incidence of Saturday--Friday homicides was greater than expected for those weeks with executions, and the incidence of Saturday-Sunday homicides was less than expected for those weeks with executions. From this pattern, it was concluded that the deterrent effect of an execution, or more precisely the publicity surrounding an execution, was canceled by its earlier brutalizing effect. Now, it's hard to say how much of the brutalization effect is due to the death penalty and how much of it is due to the publicity surrounding executions.

But still, this suggests that the early stages of the Second American Civil War, the deaths and violence that would cause, would make people, even traditionally peaceful liberal and leftist people, more comfortable with deadly violence. And in the face of daily mortar fire, sniper attacks, and bombings, these rebels are likely to lead mass purges of the people who they feel represent their suffering. In most cases, I imagine it would be wealthy families, law enforcement officers, and the families of law enforcement officers, as well as political

activists on the other side of the political spectrum. This violence would also become heavily publicized elsewhere in the nation, in regions still controlled by the regime, regions where most people are on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. And the violence they see being done to their fellow travelers will make them more comfortable with the government dishing out mass violence to separatists. There are already signs right now that political leaders on the right are pushing the idea that leftists and liberals are not really Americans. On the day I wrote most of this episode, in mid-April, I came upon an email by the Trump campaign to his donors and supporters. I would like to read an excerpt. In 2016, I was simply your voice,

but you were the one that took our country back and made the liberal swamp and political insiders furious. Now, headed into 2020, we have to remind them that this is your country, not theirs. And then it turns into a plug for donations. It would be easy to write this off as just meaningless bullshit from a campaign used to tossing out hurtful words like use tissues under a high school boy's bed, but I found this wording deeply disturbing. This is your country, not theirs, is the kind of language that could be used to,

for example, justify the carpet bombing of a city occupied by leftist separatists. After all, if they aren't Americans, not really, then why shouldn't the government treat them like it treated Iraqi and Syrian civilians in the cities that defied us? I'm Danny Trell. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The leveling of Rakha is not something that received a great deal of airtime in U.S. media. The Battle of Mosul, for whatever reason, dominated the public consciousness much longer than the battle for ISIS's capital.

Excessive force was used on both cities, but, in my opinion at least, what was done in Mosul was more justified, or at least defensible, than the destruction of Raqqa. For some background, during the 2016 campaign, one issue Donald Trump ran on was to bomb the shit out of ISIS. campaign, one issue Donald Trump ran on was to bomb the shit out of ISIS. After he was sworn in, President Trump handed decision-making power for airstrikes to military commanders on the ground, essentially removing much of the civilian oversight from that process. Correspondingly, civilian casualties leapt upward. In May 2017, Defense Secretary Mattis told CBS News that the campaign against ISIS had shifted from attrition tactics to annihilation tactics. I think the reality of those annihilation tactics gives us an idea of how an air war against leftist separatists in a U.S. city might look. Now, I'm imagining it conducted against

leftists, but in our last episode, we also brought up the possibility of Christian dominionist groups organizing and effectively ruling over large suburban chunks of the country in the wake of a U.S. government pullout from certain areas. It's certainly also possible to imagine a liberal-dominated U.S. government eventually deploying this kind of force against a group of Christian extremists occupying urban and suburban areas against, essentially, an American version of ISIS. In both cases, I can imagine annihilation tactics being justified by the people with power over the bombers and artillery. So let's talk about what those annihilation tactics look like. Raqqa was hit by an overwhelming mix of airstrikes and artillery barrages.

95% of the airstrikes were carried out by the United States. 100% of the artillery barrages involved American artillery. In four months, we dropped or shot around 21,000 munitions into a city that had hosted around 220,000 people before the bombardment. That's roughly the same size as Baton Rouge, Des Moines, or Spokane, Washington. More than 80% of Raqqa was leveled by this bombardment. The city was turned into a smoking warren of rubble. The exact death toll will never be known, just as it would be deliberately obscured in the event of an air war against a U.S. city. Now the best I can do to make this

feel real is to bring you the stories of real air war against a U.S. city. Now the best I can do to make this feel real is to bring you the stories of real Syrians who survived the bombardment. Mohamed Tadfi, age 44, was one such survivor. He buried his mother, brother, sister-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews. He later told NPR, 10 people, a plane came and hit the house and the building of five floors fell on their heads. When the Syrian Democratic forces arrived on foot in his part of the neighborhood, he and his brother were forced out of the area, told it was too dangerous for civilians. Mohamed begged the soldiers, Please, there are children under the rubble, my brother's children, young kids,

maybe even just one of them is still alive. But those soldiers had a job, and they could not risk leaving civilians behind to act as possible insurgents. The soldiers who refused to let him search for his buried loved ones were not monsters, they were people doing a nightmarish job in nightmarish circumstances, and what we in peacetime consider simple humanity is often an unacceptable risk under the rigors of war. Colonel Ryan, the spokesperson for the Combined Joint Task Force responsible for leveling Rakha, justified its actions by saying the coalition was, quote, fighting a ruthless enemy that was systematically killing innocent civilians,

and unfortunately some were unintentionally killed trying to liberate them, something we tried to avoid. I'm sure the U.S. forces, quote-unquote, liberating separatist urban areas would try to avoid unintentionally killing civilians in the act of liberating them. I'm equally sure the end result will be a lot of men and women, like Mohamed Tadfi, forced to return to their shattered homes months later to dig the corpses of their loved ones out of the rubble with shovels. Of course, given some of the things some voices on the far right have suggested, Mohamed's American counterpart might be lucky to survive the Battle of Spokane, assuming the city was occupied by leftist separatists. Republican Matt Shea is an elected representative in the state of Washington.

Representative Shea is the minority caucus chair in the State House of Representatives. In 2018, he wrote and distributed a document that outlined what he called a biblical basis for war. I'd like to read an excerpt of that titled, Rules of War. Conduct a census of all able-bodied males, 18 to 45. Identify exemptions. Appoint captains of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. Avoid bloodshed, if possible. Make an offer of peace before declaring war. Not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness. Must surrender on terms of justice and righteousness. Number one, stop all abortions. Number two, no same-sex

marriage. Number three, no idolatry or occultism. Number four, no communism. And number five, must obey biblical law. If they yield, must pay share of worker taxes. If they do not yield, kill all males. Now after this document came out, Representative Shea insisted he was just summarizing rules he found in the Bible for how to conduct war, and that he wasn't distributing some guide for how a dominionist militia should purge decadent liberal cities of all resistance. The same day I wrote this article, Jason Wilson, writing for The Guardian, published another article about Matt Shea. This article was based on a number of private chats between Shea and several members of his militia back in 2017 when they believed an Antifa revolution was scheduled

to occur. Quote, all of the men used screen aliases. Shays was Verum Bellator, Latin for true warrior. The Guardian confirmed the identity of those in the chat by cross-checking phone numbers attached to the signal accounts. The group included Jack Robertson, who broadcasts a far-right radio show, Radio Free Redoubt, under the alias John Jacob Schmidt. The chat also included Anthony Bosworth, whose history includes a public altercation with his own daughter and bringing guns to a courthouse. Bosworth participated

in the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, reportedly at Shea's request. I quoted all that because it's important for you to understand that Shea is not some lone, isolated nut. He is connected to a sizable, organized ecosystem of Christofascist extremists who are champing at the bit for a chance to purge decadent leftist cities like Spokane. Shea's connections extend beyond just Washington. His involvement with the Malheur occupation is proof of that. During the leaked conversations, Shea and his inner circle discussed how they planned to deal with any anti-fascist activists they captured. Jack Robinson noted his desire to face-slam them into a Jersey barrier, quote, treat them like communist

revolutionaries, then shave her bald with a K-bar USMC field knife. He noted that the nipple rings on the activists would, quote, make good attachment points for hoisting communists up flagpoles. A few days after this article dropped, Jason Wilson published another piece based on leaked audio from a God and Country rally held in 2018. Representative Shea and Jack Robertson both spoke there. Here's part of what Robertson said. Now, of course, you guys all know you should have an AR-15

and a thousand rounds of ammo, right? Because the anti-foss kicking up and you got to be ready to defend, right? Defend why? Defend for when the bad guy comes, right? How many of you have pulled your trigger on your AR-15 in the fight that we're in yet? Not one. But there is a fight.

Right now, the war is here. The bad guy is here. Representative Shea has been ostracized from mainstream Republican circles since his document on biblical war leaked out. Jack Robertson could accurately be described as a fringe right-wing figure. However, both men speak for thousands of heavily armed, deeply paranoid Americans. In the event of a civil war that seriously drained the manpower reserves of the United States military, it's possible that the state would turn to ideologically aligned militias to help it retake separatist strongholds. We have seen this exact same pattern play out in Syria, with militias loyal to Bashar al-Assad, and in Iraq, with Shia militias prosecuting a brutal

war against the Sunni extremists who aligned with ISIS. And if it were to happen here, as it has happened in many other parts of the globe, we can expect to see the extremists and these militias use the opportunity to execute vengeance against their ideological enemies. Representative Shea is proof that the ingredients are already here. And as Cities Under Siege noted back in 2010, the idea of Christian extremists cheering on the violent destruction of leftist enclaves is not exactly beyond the pale. Quote, Some Christian fundamentalist preachers have even suggested that both the 9-11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina were actually part of God's wrath against the sins of urban life, especially homosexuality.

Although loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. Repent America, director Michael Markovich suggested in a 2005 press release. From girls gone wild to southern decadence, New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge. Now, in this episode, we have focused primarily on mass murder of the political variety. The elephant in the room, the thing left unsaid so far, is the possibility of mass violence against a racial or religious minority in the wake of a tremendous calamity.

On our next week's episode, we'll delve into that topic and discuss what might happen when annihilation tactics turn from pacification to genocide. I'll be watching when the concrete cracks When the bridge collapses When they all fall back Tick tocking when the cables snap Under the table with plans On the larger scraps I got a good eye for faults And trouble in disguise Trust books but as far as they fly

When tossed Antarctica embossed Across the heart Baby it's gold Don't start with me I annihilate I mean I pulverize Wait I decimate

One more way Wait what I do Kill Deal with me Getting over on the script Poor stiff St., get a sip No force, no receptor, shit No tricks, I know it's hard out here, pimp

Burning from the top down, brother Yeah, let's Phoenix like we supposed to Circle up my back and my coven You can crawl around the camp like a creep till we ghost you Annihilate, Annihilation! I'm Robert Evans, and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this show on Twitter at HappenHerePod. And you can find this show online at ItCouldHappenHerePod.com. Our music, as always, is from Four Fists.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.