It Could Happen Here - How We Win

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

After a chaotic week, Robert sits down to explain why victory is, in fact, possible.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking

musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us,

and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls are media. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. First, no matter what happens, remember to breathe. It's always good advice to breathe, but taking good advice is easier said than done.

Sometimes the world is so overwhelming that any added weight, even the weight of oxygen in your lungs, feels like it might be enough to drag you down. This is one of those times. The last week has brought about 10 years worth of news, and we are all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden's stepping down from the nomination. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together. The last time I sat down to talk with all of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt

just before the Republican National Convention. I told you not to panic. That's still good advice. I also told you that no matter how bad or good things may look, literally anything can happen in U.S. politics, and by God, it has. I felt it was necessary to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot of people declaring, we're doomed, fascism is inevitable,

and quite frankly, I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well, it turned out I was right. A lot has happened over the last two weeks, and the situation now is very different than it was the day the former president took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is usually the case in instances like this, I've had a lot of people reach out to me since that episode saying versions of, how did you know? And as good as it might be for my career to lean into that side of my reputation, the truth is that I am white-knuckling it through every twist and turn, like everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been foolish telling people not to panic. And yes, I feel a hell of a lot better right now. Of course, I don't know what comes next.

I just know that we're done with the portion of this mess where we spiral in a hopeless mire. That was last week. This week, the outlook is a lot better. And not because Kamala Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a 3D chess master, but because men age and die. This is a fact I tried to remind myself of

as I groaned through that disastrous debate with the rest of the country. On one hand, I felt like we were all about to watch one ailing, power-hungry man hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who would be our rulers will all die someday. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long as men die, we have hope.

I stole that line from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced at great personal cost in 1940, right as Hitler and the Nazis reached the apex of their power. A rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the fall of France could be forgiven for having seen the outcome as certain. Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious in every theater, and the future of democracy and human liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family. Joseph was a man of wealth and power whose sober judgment and

cunning had seen him short the entire U.S. stock market and the kind of fortune that let him buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He was a man who had predicted the future once, one big, and he let that convince him that he had the second sight. And so in November 1940, less than a month after the release of The Great Dictator, Kennedy found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe. Looking out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling on London, he told a reporter, democracy is finished in England. It may be here. Here, of course, being the United States. Now, the resulting blowback to all of this saw Kennedy forced to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year,

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling towards annihilation and bondage under the swastika. Depending on how you count it, the Third Reich, and fascism as a whole, reached its greatest extent of territorial power in either mid-August or September 1941. By November of 1941, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the Globe, Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and the long battle to push the fascists back and drown them in the waters of their birth had begun. And so, in the end, it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy, who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because men died, many millions of them, from Kiev to Canterbury.

We live in very different times now. The armies of fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary terrain of our present conflict exists within the hearts and souls of men and women, and while populism is still a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have, in this country at least, given up on victory by sheer weight of numbers. It's true what they say, war never changes. Weapons do, but the core of all human conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people, but to blanket an area in bullets and stop the enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of a machine gun, not to kill people, but to blanket an area in bullets and

stop the enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has yielded to the firehose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been parts of the fascist arsenal, but the internet has allowed an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt-action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain that should be impossible for the fascists to counter. No matter what the bastards say, most people want to be left alone with the people they love to live their lives. The forces of hate, the people who want to throw trans kids and their parents in gas chambers and drown migrants in the Rio Grande, tap out at a little over a third of the population. Max.

If you want to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you, the monsters are stuck in tiny landlocked Germany without any gas or steel. The only way for them to access the resources and territory they need to maneuver themselves into a victory is by cutting us off from each other and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the bastards and smother them all for good. They do this by convincing you that you are isolated, alone, and surrounded by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier. When leftists in the U.S. look out at Ukrainians struggling for survival and write them off as Nazis, as deluded tools of imperialism,

when liberals in blue cities decry college students protesting on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of Hamas, the lines of solidarity between us snap, rather than wrapping like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between the cruelest and most deluded segments of the Western left, the people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Bashar al-Assad's bombs and called them the CIA,

and the agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Thiel's neo-monarchist right. The Thiels, Bannons, Putins, Erdogans, Trumps, and Modi's of the world know how lonely they are. The only way they can win is to convince you that ad in a piece like this, but here it is. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes,

entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow and admire. Join me every week for post run high.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy and very fun. Listen to post run high on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias Come Again, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. shifters this is the podcast for you we're talking real conversations with our latin stars from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories struggles and successes you

know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity community and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries don't miss miss out on the fun, el té caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. We're back. Now, I'm not a Jungian, but I do sometimes tend to think of humanity as a single vast gestalt organism, groping for survival and comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we can see. The majority of people are happy existing as part of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in our communion with the rest of the species.

But there are a few diseased minds out there that don't believe in the rest of us. These solipsists see themselves as the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power and will as the only real good. That's why men like Peter Thiel seek physical immortality, and it's why men like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality that comes from welding the edifice of a nation-state to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany will last forever. Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself, and his fantasies of space colonization are really just a fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro-natalist, and he believes his responsibility is to have as many children as possible

to secure a pro-human future. The term pro-human might confuse you, given the lack of concern he has for the children being bombed in Gaza, or who will surely die in the mass deportation camps the Republican Party is currently salivating to open. But the only real human Elon sees is himself, which is why he equates the survival of the species with his own ability to breed. As I type this, video has begun circulating around the internet from an interview Musk conducted with Jordan Peterson for the Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains why he has now fully embraced politics,

endorsing Donald Trump and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes as an existential threat to the species. He claims that what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding to transition. It happened to one of my older boys, where I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys. There was a lot of confusion. And, you know, I was told, oh, he might commit suicide. It's incredibly evil. And I agree with you that people that have been promoting this should go to prison. So I was tricked into doing this. It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs. So I lost my son, essentially.

So they call it dead naming for a reason. So the reason it's called dead naming is because... So my son's f***ing dead. Killed by the woke mind virus. Musk's child is not, in fact, dead. But they have expressed an identity utterly separate from Elon. An identity he cannot understand.

Because Musk can only see his children as an extension of himself and his ego. This is, in fact, worse than death. It is a threat to Musk's own life. This, incidentally, is why Musk and his fellow travelers see transgender kids as such a threat. Accepting a trans child, even if you don't fully understand how and why they feel the way they do, is one of the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this means that you have accepted, on a fundamental level,

that your children are autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love is to give your children to the world. This means accepting that you are finite, that the world goes on without you. If you see all humanity as an extension of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations, a glitch in the human system that starts as a glitch within the heart of an individual.

It comes as a byproduct of success in the very visible, spectacular ways that feed narcissism. When I think about stuff like this, I refer often back to a great article by the anthropologist Richard Lee, Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Lee spent years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu-speaking hunter-gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of the people still living in a manner most similar to our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show

of gratitude to his hosts, Lee purchased a massive ox for the holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift off to his new friends, and he was proud of himself for having gotten it. And he was utterly shocked when they responded to his pride with mockery of him and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit to eat. Now, this shocked Lee because the ox he had purchased was, of course, quite large, and it was eventually explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery, not to his gift, but to the evident pride he had shown in it. Bringing in a great beast's worth of meat, either as a hunter or from buying it, as Burton did,

is the kind of thing that can go to a young man's head. If you are the one with the pocketbook or the one who fires the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you, the meat that you've brought into the community, is not the product purely of your own genius, but is a product of all of the time and resources invested in you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as this tactic was called, is a time-honored way of correcting the glitch in young men of the Ikung before it can turn terminal. As one elder in the tribe eventually explained to Li, when a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man,

and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle. And speaking of cooling your heart, why don't you cool your heart with some ads? And then we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel

after a great workout well that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know, follow and admire, join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy and very fun. Listen to post run high on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep

into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you

love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. offline as 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. We're back.

It has been theorized that the shaming of the meat is a social construct that may help to explain one of the evolutionary values of satire, perhaps even why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part of our species' immune system. When this glitch in the hearts of young men isn't punctured, when it's allowed to take off and dominate them, then it changes them on a fundamental level, and the being that it leaves in its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter is a danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk purchased Twitter and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that White House Correspondents' Dinner set us all down the dark path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone doesn't always save us from these kinds of people either. What will? I have several times in my various shows identified myself as an

anarchist, and I tend to do that even though I don't feel fully comfortable with the title because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience, and using that word gets us close enough for the sake of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the sense that I have some sort of clear vision for how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism has some answers for how human beings might build a better world. That's why I went to Rojava. It's why we cover a lot of the things that we cover on the series. But I am primarily an anarchist because I understand that hierarchy kills, because I understand that hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a petri dish within which this glitch can propagate. I'm an anarchist

because I love the people around me, because I understand that I am human, and because I see that my role in the human immune system is to remind other people of that fact and to point a finger at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I promised in the title of this little piece that I would tell you how we can win, and I can do that in a few words. We have to remember that we are humans. Kamala Harris is an authoritarian. The fact that she wants to be president at all should make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump or a Musk.

She has not separated herself entirely from humanity. If you'll forgive the reference, she understands that she exists in the context of all that came before her. Joe Biden has been hungry for power all his life. The glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him. But as we all learned recently, not all of him. He too understands that he is a part of humanity, indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be in the Hague. But he also stepped down and gave up the thing that,

a week ago, I'd have said probably mattered most to him in the world. This was not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in large part to try and salvage his own legacy. But it is also not a thing Donald Trump could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like Vladimir Putin make a similar choice, and we've all seen the kind of slaughter Bibi Netanyahu is willing to back to hold on to power. None of this redeems Biden or makes him a good person or any less complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I think it does put us in a better position when it comes to fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone in U.S. politics knows that Biden's political end started with the surge of

uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions, but it is a punishment that has the ability to reshape the kind of risks U.S. presidents will and won't take for Israel from now on. It has also helped me make sense of something that happened in 2020. You all remember the moment. During the one presidential debate that year, President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals of his son Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried and largely failed to use his father's name to secure wealth and standing

for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing to his father. But up in front of the country and world, Biden refused to throw his son under the bus. He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden, for all the evil that he has done and the raw selfishness that allowed him to reach the presidency in the first place, is a man who loves his son. Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series of articles out in the Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta, who might be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim had the good instincts to

look behind the scenes at the team Trump picked to orchestrate his 2024 campaign, and he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some of the baffling decisions that they've made. Chief among bafflements was the selection of J.D. Vance as vice president. Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help of tens of millions of teal dollars. He is a liar without principle who has repeatedly expressed his desire to tear up the Constitution and usher in a new Red Caesar to bring this nation to heel under men like him. I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a Heritage Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right.

Not one of them offered a single word of praise. Vance was that bad. J.D. is the sort of pick Trump's handlers were sure that they could afford to make. Vance would bring the Silicon Valley billionaire set to the table, open up their purse strings, convince them they were welcome in the new ruling class. Sure, he wouldn't bring any votes, but a week ago, running against Sleepy Joe, the sick man of U.S. politics, Trump's team felt they had votes to spare. Well, now the worm has turned. The polls still point to an election that is deeply in doubt. But polls don't say everything. The panic of their responses to Biden's stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate,

points to a single truth. They don't know what to do now. The monsters are off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground. We can see some evidence of this in the fact that Musk just came out and canceled his promised $45 million monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This is the first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble, and it won't be the last. Every time that happens, we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists may well regain their footing in time to crush us, but something else has happened in the last few days as well. People, we humans as a vast blurry mob, have started to remember how many of us there are and how much potential the

weight of our numbers gives us. We have started to reconnect with each other, and that has also opened up possibilities that did not exist before. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains so much else to do, so many other fights ahead of us. But if we can crush the Republicans here, it will be the fourth election cycle in a row where the right made a war on trans people, on the concept of diversity, on any kind of open secular society, the core of their electoral efforts. And it will be the fourth time that they have done that and lost. If we break their lines and send them fleeing

into the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power and use the momentum of that victory to start building something better. There's no clean or easy route to a better future, but our chances are a hell of a lot better the more of us that stay alive and the more scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that we need each other and that we are part of each other. The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals of the world are, of course, a part of humanity as well,

but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that. And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them. So long as that is the case, we can win. 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 iHeartRadio 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. is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds

and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it.

Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.