It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now 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. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. You crack open a Dr. Pepper. You know it'll only make you more thirsty in the long run, but you need some liquid in your mouth and you're saving your remaining 15 gallons for a quick shower. The U-Haul is finally almost packed up. You may be able to make it down to San Francisco in time. Living in Redwood Valley has been nice the last

few years. It's a beautiful place, but in August of 2022, the drought became too much. Late last year, California's new far-right governor lifted all water restrictions on farmers. This sparked a new statewide race to use what water was available before it ran out. Lake Mendocino was already low at the beginning of the year, and for the first time in your memory, it is now completely empty. San Francisco isn't doing great either, but it's much better off than where you live. The Russian River watershed relies almost entirely on rainfall and is isolated from state and federal aqueducts. After the governor lifted water restrictions, new almond and pot farms started sucking up groundwater, and by the end of the summer, they'd started pumping from the river to feed their thirsty crops. By mid-July, your town

implemented a 25-gallon limit per person, per day. That's about as much water as you go through during a five-minute shower. The first thing you sacrificed was your garden, and you stopped flushing after you peed. These tweaks added up, though, and without water, the lifestyle you'd loved just stopped being possible. Your brother in San Francisco offered to let you move in with him. You weren't a fan of the big city, but at least you'd be able to shower again. And so you find yourself sipping an empty soda can and loading up your last few boxes into the U-Haul. You give your brother a quick call, saying you're all packed up and about to head out.

He sounds worried and mentions something about his school letting new teachers go due to budget cuts. You can't really afford to think about that now. You just need to leave. go due to budget cuts. You can't really afford to think about that now. You just need to leave. Since you're all sweaty from loading the U-Haul the last few days, you decide to hop into the shower one last time. You knew it wouldn't last long, but you still seemed surprised when the water turned off after what felt like only two minutes. You quickly dry off and grab some clean clothes from your backpack and throw your damp towel into the passenger seat of the truck. You say goodbye to your home of 10 years and to your old succulent plants and begin the three-hour drive down to San Francisco.

Water scarcity is a problem you're probably already familiar with, especially if you live in the Southwest. California has dealt with particularly brutal droughts over the last 20 years, and the Golden State's water problems could be about to get much, much worse. Because in just a few days, California might find itself helmed by a far-right governor with a near-religious hatred of water conservation. Electoral politics are not generally a big focus on this show, but what's going on in the state of California could have serious implications for many people,

including those outside the West Coast. The ongoing recall campaign against Governor Gavin Newsom started out in June of 2020 with Republican politicians and activists unhappy with Newsom's handling of the pandemic. Newsom's opposition to President Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants also played a role. This is actually the fifth recall attempt against Newsom since he took office in 2019, but it's the first one to gain traction. It's fueled in part by Newsom's own hypocrisy and hubris. On November 6, 2020, the recall effort gained court approval for a signature gathering extension. And later that night, Governor Newsom went to a birthday party for a Sacramento lobbyist-inferended French Laundry, a pricey Napa Valley restaurant. Soon after, photos surfaced of Newsom mingling maskless at the packed restaurant. He faced heavy criticism

and apologized, but the damage was done. Republicans latched onto this as an opportunity to finally push the recall effort through. The recall petition, which had only 55,588 signatures on the day of the dinner, had nearly half a million a month after the November 6th incident. California's recall process is probably the least democratic one in the United States. Gathering signatures to authorize a recall election is a pretty standard thing, but California has among the lowest signature requirements in states that allow for the recall of an official. Most states require that the recall campaign must gather signatures equal to 25% of the votes cast in the last election. California requires just 12% for executive officials. The LA Times notes, quote, that might have been a high bar in 1911 when the

population was scattered across the 770-mile length of the state, but is it too low in 2021 when petitions for ballot measures are gathered en masse by paid staff in parking lots? And that's not the only questionable aspect of California's recall process. On recall election day, voters will face two questions on the ballot. First, yes or no on whether to recall Governor Gavin Newsom from office. Second, and this one is technically optional, if so, who among the 46 candidates do you want to take his place? The first question is decided by a simple majority, just like other ballot measures. But when it comes to the second question, the percentage requirements change. The replacement

candidate doesn't need more than 50% to win. So if more than 50% of the voters say yes on the recall question, Governor Newsom must step down, even if he has more overall support than any other individual challenger on the ballot. The replacement question is determined by who gets the most votes among the challengers on the ballot, which Newsom cannot be on. So 49.9% of the voters can back Mr. Newsom, and he can still lose to someone who is supported by only, say, 20% of the electorate, or even a smaller fraction. For other California elections, including special elections triggered by the death or resignation of an official, a candidate cannot win without the support of a majority of voters. If a candidate doesn't win

over 50% outright, then the top two compete in a runoff election. Not the case for California's recall process. Organizers of the recall campaign submitted 2.1 million signatures by the March 17th filing deadline. 1,719,900 signatures were ultimately determined to have been valid, which was enough to trigger the recall. The deadline for casting your vote is September 14th. If the recall succeeds, the new governor would be in office for the remainder of Mr. Newsom's term through January 2nd, 2023. And that leaves a lot of time for executive fuckery, especially considering the new frontrunner. Far-right radio talk show host and frequent Fox guest Larry Elder has emerged as the likely candidate to replace

Newsom in the event the recall goes through. Elder, who is 69, jumped into the race relatively late in the game, during mid-July. At that time, it was more of a toss-up between Republican candidates Kevin Falconer, a former San Diego mayor, and businessman John Cox, who lost badly to Newsom in the 2018 gubernatorial election. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley and former athlete and media personality Caitlyn Jenner polled less well. But as Larry Elder entered the race, he almost immediately became the frontrunner in polls and raised lots of money from small donors. In the three weeks after he announced his campaign, he raised nearly $4.5 million, according to fundraising disclosures. That's more than

every other Republican challenger, Sands multimillionaire businessman John Cox, who's largely funding his own campaign. Elder has been a central figurehead of the right-wing radio talk show scene since the 90s, but has always been hesitant to run for public office, deeming the state of California ungovernable due to its liberal supermajority. But after talking with his friend and mentor, Dennis Prager, of the neo-fascist propaganda outlet PragerU, he figured it might be worth a shot and has expressed desire to use the emergency powers of the governor to push the state rightwards. Elder was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Cleveland to attend law school and opened his own firm in 1980. Elder's career began as a bit of an accident.

He'd been invited on a Cleveland station as a guest. He did so well on air that, when the regular host went on vacation the following week, the program director asked Elder to fill in. Soon enough, Elder had his own weekly time slot on the Cleveland station. In the early 90s, a guest host from Los Angeles, Dennis Prager, visited Cleveland. Elder quickly impressed Prager with his on-air wit and talent, coupled with the uniqueness of a black man openly expressing extreme conservative views. Prager persuaded his home station, KABC in Los Angeles, to give Elder a shot. Quoting the LA Times, Elder returned to his hometown in 1994, two years after the civil unrest following the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, and in the midst of the O.J. Simpson murder case. The program director at rival KFI, David G. Hall, felt KABC made a creative move,

bringing on this guy from South Central who swung the other way on race. Almost from the beginning, the self-proclaimed sage from South Central whipped up a furor. He mixed soundbites from Representative Maxine Waters with a recording of a barking dog. He said blacks exaggerate the significance of racism while women did the same in regards to sexism. For nearly four years, Elder has slapped many members of his own race in the face on radio, belittling them as whiners or losers, holding himself up as a model of African American excellence. He's become a darling of white listeners who seem to almost gush when they telephone him on KABC talk radio. They are astonished to find a black man who not only isn't going to chastise them,

but who also often agreed with them, a black man who declared that race was no longer a significant factor in American society. Elder also doesn't believe that racial profiling exists. This is despite telling the Times editorial board that police pulled him over between 75 and 100 times the first year he had his driver's license. Elder's regressive, provocative content angered many Angelenos, and black citizens of California led a boycott of advertisers on the show. It worked, and by the late 90s, the show had begun losing millions in ad revenue. But thanks to syndication, changing networks, podcasts, and TV appearances, Elder has been able to remain a central figure of the

right-wing content sphere. He most recently starred in a video series for far-right propaganda organization and literal cult, The Epoch Times. According to Elder's campaign, the central recall issues he is focusing on are rampant crime, rising homelessness, out-of-control costs of living, water shortages, disastrous wildfires, rolling brownouts, and repressive COVID restrictions.

For this show, we'll be focusing on the last three as they relate to the rapidly shifting and hostile climate. For this show, we'll be focusing on the last three as they relate to the rapidly shifting and hostile climate. For the past 30 years, Elder has been a classic conservative climate denier. He had a whole section of his website devoted to debunking the Gore bull warming myth. Like Al Gore bullshit warming myth. Yeah, it's a bad pun. In a CNN interview prior to the 2008 election, Elder called global warming a false myth while disparaging and making fun of both John McCain and George W. Bush for discussing global warming as a serious issue. However, more recently, Elder has shifted his rhetoric around the climate.

In an interview last month, he expressed belief that some warming is taking place, but by using old soft denialist talking points. Climate is always changing. Of course the climate is changing. The question the climate's changing. The question is, what do we do about it? Do we deal with the effects of it, or do we force feed a renewables-based economy down the throats of people, jacking up the price of energy, a disproportionate pain for poor people?

But of course there's climate change, and the climate is getting warmer and maybe about a degree or so in the last several years, and it will likely continue. He adds, what I don't believe in is climate change alarmism. He also said that he was not sure whether climate change is making wildfires worse. Quote, fires have gotten worse because the failure of this governor to engage in sensible fire suppression. Elder also blames California's rising housing costs on environmental extremists

that jack up the cost of housing so that developers have to wait and wait and get sued over and over again so that finally when the home is built, it's way more expensive than otherwise it would be without these environmental rules and regulations. Despite the slight backpedaling on climate for better media optics, his potential policies on the topic are just as horrendous as one might assume. In a recent video news conference, Elder declared that he would end the war on oil and gas and the attack on the logging industry while also reducing regulation on fracking and stopping California's growing efforts to expand wind and solar power, which he calls not very efficient. Elder did not mention climate change during his news conference. Water scarcity will be an increasingly severe

concern for California in the coming years. Drought is already a major political talking point among voters and politicians, and it creates another rift between city folk and rural farmers. Farmers are having a harder time growing crops and feel threatened by water rationing. They're frustrated by the thought that the Democrats running cities will always prioritize pumping extra water into population-dense areas. Meanwhile, people in cities are concerned they will be forced to cut back on personal water use as almond farmers suck up tons of water to feed their droops. Just building more dams and water catchment systems or aquifers may seem like a solution, and if done properly some of those things might help, but they can't make up for a lack of rainfall and snowmelt. Relying on river

water has its own problems. Pulling too much from freshwater that flows through rivers allows for extra saltwater to intrude from the bay and ocean. Salinity in the water negatively impacts local ecosystems and dirties what is supposed to be a freshwater source. Drought is simultaneously pushing migratory fish species like Chinook salmon and steelhead trout closer to the brink of extinction. Large numbers of fish are dying off because the rivers they rely on as spawning habitats are too warm or too low. Anxiety around water, droughts, and crops is among the issues

driving some people to vote yes on the recall. A poll conducted last July by the Public Policy Institute of California found that residents cited drought and water supply as their top environmental concern, with about 25% calling it their chief concern, which makes it poll well above the related problems of wildfires, air pollution, and climate change. Republican politicians have been using anxiety around drought to drum up support for the recall by blaming the current situation on Newsom. The original recall petition against Newsom from early in 2020 warned that the governor, quote, seeks to impose additional burdens on our state, including rationing our water use.

Last April, Governor Newsom did declare a drought emergency in two northwest California counties. The order allowed state officials to restrict the amount of water diverted from the Russian River and authorized the relocation of fish stranded in drying puddles. The local county government asked residents to use no more than 50 gallons per day per person. But Newsom himself hasn't mandated water rationing for individual consumers,

though he has asked Californians to voluntarily cut consumption by 15 percent and has suggested that statewide restrictions could be on the table if conditions worsen heading into the fall. Newsom and the Department of Water Resources as a whole do have ideas in mind for tackling this issue. Last year, Newsom authorized an $11 billion water infrastructure project, building a single 30-mile tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The project, which has been discussed for years, is being pushed forward in hopes that it will protect the Delta's existing wetland ecosystem and supply enough fresh, clean water to be diverted south for the rest of the state. But the tunnel concept has faced opposition both locally and

from conservation-minded folks. Some residents in the Delta region see it as just a water grab to meet the demands of Southern California and the agriculture industry, while the needs of those up north are being ignored. Ecologically focused critics say it could still increase salinity in the Delta and result in notable harm for the ecosystem. Newsom has more recently discussed other action and legislation to help mitigate the continued drought. Quoting the San Francisco Chronicle, In July, the governor signed a state budget that includes $5.1 billion over four years for new

water infrastructure and drought preparation projects, including money to repair delivery canals, help farmers irrigate crops more efficiently, and start water recycling projects. Still, Newsom's recent actions have done little to quell anger among many farmers who say the state's failure to plan for another major drought just a few years after it exited the last one has put them on the brink of ruin. Ernest Buddy-Mendez, a lifelong farmer in Fresno County and Republican County supervisor, said he was forced to let hundreds of acres where he used to grow cotton and wheat dry up this year after his allotment of river water was slashed to zero. He's relying on groundwater pumped from wells to keep his grove of almond trees alive. Mendez said he hasn't decided whom to support as a replacement candidate in the recall,

just that he will vote hell yeah to remove Newsom. Let's face it, Newsom, dam is a four-letter word, Mendez said. We haven't done anything in 20 years about building storage. California already does have one of the most extensive dam systems in the country, with nearly 1,500 reservoirs. Building new on-river dams would cost billions of dollars if such efforts even survive legal challenges, which are all but guaranteed amid the struggle to save endangered fish species. There are not many areas left that would make sense or be sustainable to build a new, large reservoir. One other, more cost-effective solution could be to store more water collected during wet years in underground aquifers. One of the solutions to this problem is the same as the solution to a number of other climate-related problems, which is that we simply have to cut the amount of resources we're consuming,

whether that means reducing our energy use or cutting down on wasteful water use. You can only build so many dams. The trend of California farmers growing thirstier crops has made an existing problem much worse. Today, the state produces three times as many acres of almonds as it did 25 years ago. With California most likely entering a third straight year of disappointing rainfall and snowmelt, anxiety around drought and increased severity of water restrictions won't get any better. And if the La Nina weather pattern hits the West Coast as it's poised to, that would mean the western U.S. will have a drier and hotter winter than average. Last August, water regulators

made an unprecedented move to begin cracking down on water use in the sprawling Sacramento River and San Joaquin River watersheds, ordering 4,500 farmers, water districts, and other landowners, including the city of San Francisco, to stop drawing water from the basins of the river, or face penalties of up to $10,000 a day. The city has enough water in its reservoirs to meet demand for at least a couple of years, and stored water is not affected by the state restrictions. Water agencies also can seek an exemption from curtailments if human health or safety are compromised. This does hit rural areas and agriculture the hardest,

because most cities have alternative supplies and stored water to tap into. Looking to attract voters, Larry Elder and other Republican challengers to Newsom have made it a recurring point to say that farmers should not have to endure such cuts. But they don't really give any prospective solutions to prevent rationing when water levels at reservoirs, lakes, and wells are all plummeting. Larry Elder said, drought is not inevitable, and said he supports building more reservoirs and dams to store runoff, but he has also voiced support for permitting desalinization projects. Desalinization devastates ocean life, costs much more than other alternatives, and uses tons of energy. Also, soon it will be made obsolete by increasing focus on water recycling.

Explaining desalinization quickly, ocean water is collected and run through pipes to remove the largest solids and then pumped through reverse osmosis filters to remove salt, while fish and other creatures die upon being sucked in or just from the force of the water flow. In a report studying a desalinization plant in the early 2000s, it was found that on average, over a five-year period, 19.4 billion larvae were caught up at intakes, and about 2.7 million fish, along with marine mammals and sea turtles, were killed by intake equipment.

For every gallon of drinking water, desalinization leaves another gallon of salty brine behind. The plants then just mix that with two parts ocean water before pumping it back into the ocean. These measures can negatively impact the environment for this generation and generations to come. This type of resource extractive thinking reflects how we got into the problem in the first place. Battling over water allotments will only get us so far when dealing with lackluster rainfall. What can help is permaculture programs to help farmers learn

ways to irrigate more effectively and cultivate healthier soils that retain water. Moving away from water-heavy crops like almonds and towards more sustainable and moisture-efficient crops must also be done if we want to stave off the worst effects. Putting Larry Elder in office won't make it rain, but it will put the state at least another year further behind on taking the kind of action necessary to ensure California remains habitable. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and dare enter. Nocturnum, 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. 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 audio books 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. The last few months in San Francisco have been, honestly, better than you expected. Still hot and dry, but now that you're in fall, the heat has become manageable. In the Bay Area, at least. Staying with your brother has been actually really nice. The first few showers felt like luxury. Recently, he's had less of a good time. He found out he was getting laid off right before the school year started. He told me over 15,000 other teachers have been fired as a part of the governor's new Reform Schools program. The teachers' union is

fighting it, but your brother isn't too optimistic regarding the outcome. He's been looking for new work, and meanwhile, you've gotten a shitty retail job to help with bills while you decide on what hospitals you want to apply to. You don't really miss your old EMS job in Redwood Valley. When you finally do get back into medical care, you'd really prefer something in a hospital or clinic setting, as opposed to the extra stress inherent in emergency services. The one chance you have had to use your medical skills since moving was during the fires last September and October. Back up north, they got really bad, and hundreds of thousands of people evacuated down south.

Some old activist friends of yours from college made their own fire relief-slash-mutual-aid setup to give out clothes and food, and to help people displaced by the fires. You haven't talked much with your old college buddies in the past few years, but upon hearing of the relief effort, you happily offered up your skills to help with minor medical issues in a small medic tent they set up. It was the first time you've helped with anything related to protests or organizing

since you moved up to Redwood Valley ten years ago. It was oddly refreshing. Politics hasn't been a major part of your life since college, But speaking of politics, midterms are finally this month. The past year has felt like it's stretched on forever. Your brother and his union buddies have been doing canvassing for a few progressive city council candidates that might actually get a shot at getting in. You haven't had time to adjust to San Francisco's local political scene, and honestly, you're not sure if you really care to. You have been keeping half an eye on the big state electoral races, though, which feels kind of weird. You know there's no way the Republican governor will get re-elected, not here in California. One thing that

has gotten you worried is the weekly anti-election fraud rallies that have been happening in LA ever since October. The governor, surrounded by state troopers, has made it down himself a few times to drum up support from his fan base. And after the rallies, roving gangs of far-right extremists have gone around randomly attacking homeless encampments. You heard that just last week after a Sunday rally, three people had to be rushed to the emergency room. It's now just a week before election day. You're on the bus home from your job at the vintage clothing store when you receive a message on signal from one of your old college mutual aid buddies you met up with again during the fire

relief effort. The message reads, hey, are you free on election day? You hadn't really thought about the day itself. You respond, maybe, nothing really planned yet. Your friend replies with a fat wall of text. My affinity group and I are heading down to LA on Tuesday. There's a big stop the steal type rally happening, and word is lots of Proud Boys are going to show up. Comrades in LA have put out some calls for support, so my crew is going to go down and probably bring some medical stuff. If you want to come, we got an extra seat in the van. The thought of driving down to Los Angeles to deal with Proud Boys doesn't excite you, especially on an already stressful day.

You think about it for a few minutes. Images of the people maimed during and after the recent rallies floods your mind. Your buddies know more about organizing and protests than you do, but you have more medical training. You decide you'll do it. You reply, I'll come with, and pack some extra IFACs and tourniquets. Among the issues Republican recall challengers have raised to attack Newsom, force mismanagement has loomed large among the recent complaints. This type of thing harkens back to Trump's old habit of blaming the governor and

not raking enough leaves for California's fiery plight. On a larger scale, this can be seen as part of an effort to push all the blame of wildfires off of oil, gas, and our transformation of the climate, and onto a simple lack of fire prevention measures. This narrative, of course, makes the fossil fuel industry more happy. The thing is, all of these things are contributing factors for California's wildfire problem. Climate change caused hotter temperatures and droughts makes fires easier to catch and spread, and inadequate forest management plus above-ground power lines do the same.

Just because there are bad faith attacks on Newsom doesn't mean there aren't actual failures he's made as governor, especially in relation to the forests. An investigation from Cap Radio and California NPR, published last June, found out Newsom had grossly misrepresented and flat-out lied about his promises of new wildfire prevention efforts. Elements of the piece were of course used by Larry Elder and the right to push for support of the recall, but the article itself is a very fine piece of journalism. Back when Newsom first took office in January of 2019, one of the first things he did was sign an executive order overhauling how California

handles wildfire prevention and forest management. The measures included removal of hazardous dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community defensible spaces, and creation of ingress and egress corridors. In January 2020, a year after Newsom's initial announcement, the Governor's Office claimed in a press release that under the Executive Order's priority projects, 90,000 acres got treated with these fire prevention measures. But according to data obtained by CapRadio and NPR, the actual number of acres treated by these priority projects was only 11,399, just 13% of the number Newsom boasted about.

Quoting the piece by CapRadio, to levels below Governor Jerry Brown's final year in office. At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire's wildfire prevention budget. In 2020, 4.3 million acres burned, the most in California's recorded history. That was more than double the previous record set in 2018 when the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, ultimately killing 85 people. A decade ago, CAL FIRE was trading a poultry 17,000 acres annually. That number has steadily climbed. Though Newsom misrepresented the number of acres treated in his priority projects, the overall amount of wildfire mitigation work carried out by CAL FIRE spiked in his first year

of office, to 64,000 acres, but in 2020, fuel reduction totals plummeted to less than 32,000 acres, a roughly 50% drop, unquote. Multiple factors contributed to 2020's subpar fire prevention and reduction efforts. In 2019, the year with the largest number of acres treated in recent history, the state budget allotted for the year with the largest number of acres treated in recent history, the state budget allotted for $355 million for wildfire prevention and resource management. But after the COVID-19 pandemic hit California in early 2020, Newsom cut the budget by 40%, down to $203 million. On top of the budget cuts, the fires themselves made prevention work more challenging. 2020's wildfire season started out early, which resulted in less time to do prescribed burns and thinnings,

because the same teams that are tasked with prevention and fuel reduction often also serve as firefighters once the fires break out. As of May 2021, CAL FIRE has treated over 23,000 acres throughout the year. This puts California on a trajectory better than last year's total, but not as high as the 60,000-plus acres treated in 2019. Newsom has been trying to make up for his missteps and gross exaggerations. Quoting the CapRadio report again, quote, Newsom is trying to play catch-up.

With the state enjoying an unexpected surplus, Newsom proposed $2 billion in spending on wildfires and emergency preparedness, with $1.2 billion going towards wildfire resiliency in the upcoming budget. Experts say the increase in prevention spending could help the state get closer to a less dangerous wildfire season over time. But they also expressed concern over whether the state will sustain that commitment for years to come. Unquote. Revelations about Newsom's and Cal Fire's lies and lackluster forest management were quickly jumped on by Larry Elder and other Republican challengers as an easy way to attack Newsom and

to move the conversation about wildfires away from climate change. Elder has said he has, quote-unquote, no idea why more prevention and reduction measures aren't being done, and when he becomes governor, he'll be, quote, implementing these commonsensical kinds of plans so that we can reduce the severity of these fires, unquote. Elder has given no concrete plans on what measures he'll be shooting to implement or any indication on how much money will be directed to prevent or fight fires. On the note of budgets, Elder has said that the more recent spending on wind and solar power has left, quote, less money for removing trees and putting power lines underground, the kind of things that

would make these fires less intense, unquote. And he promises to drastically cut spending on renewables, while also investing more in oil and gas. To be clear, Newsom's upcoming budget contains billions for both fire prevention slash fuel reduction and renewable energy such as wind and solar. Whoever ends up governing California is not only in charge of local politics, like governors in other states. What happens in California affects people across the country and even globally, whether that's wildfire smoke traveling across continents or changes to supply chains and industry rippling across the world. California is, after all, the world's fifth largest economy. There are also political ramifications that could affect the state as a whole

if Elder gets an office. The Senate is currently a 50-50 split between Republicans and Democrats, with Vice President Kamala Harris getting the tie-breaking vote. One of California's senators is 88-year-old Diane Feinstein, the oldest active senator. If she dies in office or has to step down due to medical reasons before her term is over, the governor of California gets to appoint her replacement. If Elder appoints a Republican, then the Senate will be back under GOP control. And given his connections to the

far-right mediasphere, the list of potentials that Elder could appoint is frightening. This is by no means inevitable, even if Elder gets into office. If he does, Feinstein does have the brief opportunity to step down and put a replacement in before the new governor is sworn into office. However, Feinstein has said she has no plans of doing so. Reports of her declining health have become only more common in recent years, but like many politicians and judges, she's not keen on stepping aside even to possibly help prevent a disastrous outcome. Changes in the Senate are not required for horrible outcomes in the wake of an even brief Elder governorship.

His anti-vax sentiments and plan to open up the state and remove basically all COVID restrictions will result in hospitals being pushed to max capacity. Elder has said he has plans to appoint education officials similar to former Secretary Betsy DeVos and judicial appointees like conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Elder has stated his intention of declaring states of emergency and using executive orders to push through otherwise unpopular legislation. He has discussed plans to declare an education emergency in order to fire upwards of 21,000 quote-unquote bad teachers. Elder blames teacher unions for quote protecting bad teachers, and in a recent interview stated quote, someone told me that between five percent and seven percent of public school teachers need to be fired. An emergency declaration would give the power to get rid of bad teachers faster than the system allows. Once you did that, automatically education

would improve overnight, unquote. Now, Elder has not specified who had advised him on teacher terminations, or how he plans to weed out the so-called bad teachers out of the 300,000 in the school system. He's also touted plans to declare a homeless emergency, but his solutions have nothing to do with actually helping homeless people. His homeless emergency declaration would allow him to suspend the California Environmental Quality Act, the law requiring environmental review of building projects. Elder's stated goal is to unleash developers and contractors without environmental regulation, which he claims, quote, treats developers and contractors like criminals, unquote,

and allows building projects to get suspended indefinitely, ultimately raising the cost of housing, in his opinion. One of the more frightening aspects of Larry Elder is his close ties to many far-right propagandists. He's done work for PragerU, Epoch Times, and has been a guest on Fox News at least 220 times in the past five years. In the last episode, we discussed his friendship with Dennis Prager. Also, Dave Rubin just recently campaigned for Elder at a recent rally. And a month and a half ago, Elder was on Candace Owen's show discussing how the descendants of slave owners deserve reparations for having their property, i.e. black people, stolen from them when the slaves were freed.

Those are his words, not mine. What's probably most concerning is Elder's connection to Stephen Miller. In fact, we wouldn't have Stephen Miller if it were not for Larry Elder. for Larry Elder. Back in the late 90s, a conservative student from Santa Monica High School would call into Larry Elder's show to rant about his school's liberal culture. Reportedly, the student would go around demanding staff and fellow students regularly recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He railed against condom giveaways and called Spanish language announcements, quote, a crutch preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own, unquote. Young Californians calling into Elder's show and agreeing with him wasn't very common,

and Elder ate it up. He loved talking with the student so much that he let the kid on basically any time he wanted a platform to rant and rave. You know where this is going. That student was Stephen Miller. According to Miller, he appeared on Elder's show 69 times throughout his time in high school and university, and calls Elder, quote, the one true guide I've always had, unquote. Miller's appearances on Elder's radio show made him a recognizable figure in the larger conservative media world,

helping him connect with Steve Bannon and eventually President Trump. By extension, Elder was Stephen Miller's on-ramp to the White House. In an email to Miller in 2016, Elder told him, quote, I hope to live to see the day when you become president. When media has brought up his friendship with Stephen Miller, Elder tries very quickly to change the subject. When pushed on the topic in a recent interview, Elder shot back with, quote, why would you bring up Stephen Miller? I'm just wondering what the agenda here is. What's the point? Am I somehow what, a Nazi, a fascist? Unquote. I think that says enough. The reason we haven't discussed the

other candidates in the recall election is because, at this point, if Newsom is recalled, it's absolutely certain that Elder will be the one to succeed him. He has a 20-point lead ahead other challengers, but that lead is still only a tiny fraction of the total electorate, which demonstrates part of the problem in California's recall process. There are other Republican challengers with concerning pasts and beliefs. Lots of anti-mask, anti-trans, anti-vax, total disbelief in climate change, people spouting QAnon-originated conspiracy claims, advocating the lie that the presidential election was stolen, and there's even a Democrat challenger that plans to use the National Guard to round up all homeless people and put them in

concentration camps. But Elder himself shares a lot of those views, and uses the fact that he's black as a shield for criticism against his racist and nationalist policies and ideas. We haven't even mentioned that last month, Elder's ex-fiancé came out and said that Elder was extremely abusive and had threatened her with a loaded gun. In early August, polls were showing pretty much neck and neck for the first question on the ballot, yes or no on the recall itself. A SurveyUSA poll from that time even had 40% of respondents

vote no on the recall and 51% vote yes to remove Newsom. Throughout August and September, results started to flip the other direction as ads against the recall hit the airwaves and internet. The latest SurveyUSA poll has 54% voting no on the recall and 41% voting yes. Other polls hover around the same 10 to 15 point lead for Newsom staying in office. Now with polls not going the way Elder and the GOP would like, we're starting to see a new yet familiar narrative being prepared. On my website, electelder.com, we have a voter integrity project. We have lawyers all set up, all ready to go to file lawsuits in a timely fashion. The reason the lawsuits did not work in the 2020 election, we know what happened there,

is because the lawsuits were filed too late and many of them were dismissed on procedural grounds. Courts don't like to overturn an election. So when you hear of anything suspicious, we've heard a lot of things that have been suspicious so far, go to electelder.com. We're going to sick our lawyers on them, file lawsuits right away. They're going to cheat. We know that. But I'll tell you what, so many people are angry about the crime, about the homelessness, about the way he shut down this state, about the fact that one third of all small businesses, many of them are owned by black and brown and Asian American people that they care about, about the declining quality of schools, about the fact that people are leaving, rolling brownouts, lack of water.

So many people are angry. The number of people that are going to vote to recall this man is going to be so overwhelming so that even when they cheat, they're still going to lose. That's Larry Elder saying that if he doesn't win, that means the election must have been stolen. Fox News has been promoting the same idea the past month. All of it is in the vein of the Stop the Steal movement

post the 2020 presidential election, culminating with the attempted insurrection on January 6th. Here's Elder again on Fox News in early September. But you're right, I am concerned about voter fraud. And that's why I'm asking people to go to electelder.com. That's my website. We have a voter integrity project set up with a bunch of lawyers ready to file lawsuits if anybody sees anything suspicious. Big 2020 election fraud conspiracy proponent and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was one of the first people to chime in

to stoke disinformation about the recall election. And I think this may well be the most rigged statewide election we've seen probably in at least a half century. And I think people should look carefully at this because there's pretty good evidence that if Newsom is in a straight, honest count, he probably has a good chance of losing. But if they can stuff every ballot box in California and they can cheat in every way possible. And of course, this type of propaganda has made it on to the most watched cable news show on air, Tucker Carlson. California does not get the credit it deserves for the corruption that's endemic there. It's a one party state and they act like it.

And you've got to have concerns about whether this recall election will be free and fair. Are you concerned? Well, of course I'm concerned, Tucker. I'm involved in election integrity efforts throughout the United States, and I'm also a member of the Republican National Committee. So we have a team of lawyers that is ready to deploy throughout the state here, and we are monitoring things every single day. Just a couple of hours ago, I filed a lawsuit to intervene in a challenge to the constitutionality of the recall statute, because frankly, I don't trust the secretary of state or the attorney general who are both appointed by the governor to defend him in this regard. And so we are going to be jumping on every potential opportunity to do that and fight back against the Democrats. Of course, they are playing fast and loose. We've seen some very alarming scenes of 300 ballots bundled together in the car of a person with a gun and some drugs. And so we are definitely looking into all of these issues. But, Tucker, ultimately, it's going to come down to how much do people want a change in California? eating, you know, lulu lemon wearing neighborhood in San Francisco. People are fed up with the crime, the drugs, the homelessness, the intermittent electricity and everything else that is

wrong with California. So people want to change here. It's just not working. And this really is a test of whether our system works. I mean, can people get better leadership? That's kind of the question. Will there be election observers on the scene so the rest of us can know this was fair? Well, 100 percent. The problem in California is that the voting doesn't just take place on election day like it would in a normal place. It takes it's taking place now on a rolling basis through mail in voting. It's 100 percent mail in ballots this time around. And it is going to take place for 30 days after the election, if it's close, because they have 30 days to count the vote. That's 60 days of voting. And of course,

a lot of shenanigans can occur and ballots can disappear. So we are going to be observing it very closely and demanding accountability and filing lawsuits wherever we need to, to hold the Democrats accountable because we cannot trust them. Yeah, I hope so. People want to believe the system works, that it's real, that they have power, that their vote matters. So I appreciate what you're doing. Harmeet Dhillon, thank you. A lot of what's said in that last clip is either extremely misrepresented or just flat out lies. Those 300 ballots found in a car were actually part of a larger mail theft thing, not related to the election at all. Voters have received new ballots. And for this election, just like the last one, Californians have the option to vote in person, to mail in ballots,

or deliver them in a drop box. The deadline to drop off, mail, or place your vote is September 14th. Counting cannot start till the 14th either, and like every election, there will be observers throughout the entire counting process. Obviously, this isn't the first time conservative media has hyped up election fraud, the last presidential election being the biggest instance to date. But what is concerning here is that they're setting up a template to use for all future elections whenever Republicans lose. Here's a Fox clip from September 7th. The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud. So as they say, stay woke, pay attention to the voter fraud going on in California, because it's going to have big

consequences not only for that state, but for upcoming elections. It's safe to assume that stop the steal-esque strategies will be used almost every time a Republican loses in an election going forward. We've seen exactly what this type of rhetoric and propaganda leads to, and it ends in blood. There were multiple attacks on state capitals during the Stop the Steal rallies prior to January 6th. In some places, like Salem, Oregon, they succeeded in getting inside the Capitol. Even if Newsom gets to stay in office, there will still be many problems. Election conspiracies and the possibility of violence like January 6th just being one. We haven't wanted to righteously defend Newsom here. He's a politician, and inept in many ways. He deserves plenty of criticism, especially on the

issues of climate change. But the criticism levied at Newsom from the likes of Elder and the GOP are based on bigotry, nationalism, and climate denial. Newsom should be our punching bag, not theirs. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. 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.

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. 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. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit 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.

Greetings, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I am a researcher and writer on the podcast team. Today, we have a roundtable discussion with a group of researchers who look into extremism and political violence, usually stemming from far-right propagandists and people in that kind of whole sphere. So we have a discussion relating to climate change and all these other things that I was able to record with these fine people. It's split up into two sections, so part one is coming out today, part two is coming out tomorrow.

Highly recommend you listen to both, maybe even back-to-back at some point, because it does really give a nice rounded-out view of what we were talking about. So, without further ado, here is my discussion with, I don't know, well, not a dozen, but a large amount of terrorism researchers, as we are all in the woods, as you will soon find out. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the daily show. I am Garrison Davis, and I am recording in an undisclosed location in the woods. Me and a few internet colleagues are all hiding from the world for a week to reset our poisoned brains. But I'm going to slightly re-poison us here for about an hour to have a discussion about climate change

and terrorism. We have a group of people here who are all, who all research the bad thing online a lot, so I'm going to try to use to take advantage of having this unique group of people all in one location

to have this nice discussion for you guys. But yeah, specifically we want to talk about how each of us as an quote-unquote expert in certain fields see climate change impacting extremism and terrorism in the next few decades. And yes, we are recording in the forest, so if you hear sounds like we're in the forest, that's because we are. You guys already know me, or you probably do,

but we're going to go around in a circle, probably starting on my left, introducing the people, and yeah, just give a brief bio, however detailed you want to get into. Okay. My name's Matt Taylor. I'm a journalist and researcher focusing on cults, conspiracy theories, and extremism.

And today is my birthday. Happy birthday, Matt, in the past. My name's Theo. I am a journalist and researcher as well. I mostly focus on the American militia movement and paramilitary groups. I'm Toothpick. I'm with Theo, Matt, Emmy, and Big Newhouse, who isn't here on Terrorism Bat. That's a podcast, by the way.

Self-plug. My research and reporting focuses mainly on conspiracy theories and where that overlaps with political extremism and the focus on connections between the US and Europe, especially Germany. I'm

Peter Smith. I'm a journalist with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and the host of The Unusual Show podcast. I'm Lily, and I focus on extremism and counterterrorism and data analysis. And I'm Emmy. I do digital propaganda and rhetoric. That is our little crew. Yeah, let's see. That is our little crew.

Yeah, let's see. The first thing we kind of want to talk about, I'm guessing, is how we see... The podcast is more about smaller local collapses. There's not going to be one big collapse. We're going to see small things start to fall apart. And how we see... When small things fall apart, what do we see filling in those gaps? Specifically, I think this will tie into the militia movement a lot

in a lot of ways. So yeah, you guys can start sprouting off your knowledge. Yeah, so one of the things that I've been thinking of and following, and I don't know if this has made as much of an impact in US media, but in the last month

parts of Germany and the Netherlands experienced really bad flooding that literally wiped out some villages and some towns. And one of the things that we've seen in Germany is far-right groups. There isn't really a militia movement because of the laws there, but far-right groups. There isn't really a militia movement because of the laws there,

but far-right groups rushing in and collecting aid and going for photo ops in those catastrophe areas. And what that does make me think of, and maybe Theo can talk more about this, is we've seen similar stuff in the U.S. with the militia movement marking themselves as emergency preparedness

or marking themselves in that way and positioning themselves where when the government is unable to respond, that these groups are able to come in and also using that for their messaging and for their rhetoric. Yeah, so

that is something that you see in the U.S. The biggest example, Garrison and I talked about this earlier, but during the wildfires in Oregon last year, you saw checkpoints being established by militia groups, whether already formed militia groups or kind of impromptu armed bands. And you also see that as a big marketing thing. I know a lot of the Virginia-based militias that I follow

went out to Tennessee one or two years ago when the tornadoes happened. Yeah, I was going to mention that. Yeah, they did a bunch of kind of aid and photo ops. Yeah, so

just not to dox myself, but'm from nashville and then uh beginning of 2020 in march right before coronavirus someone just dropped a toy gun great job guys yeah so in the beginning uh of march of last year right before covid hit nashville we had a huge tornado go through nashville itself and wipe out, like, two different neighborhoods. And then a rural town right outside of Nashville. But you saw a lot of, like, so the community comes together in this really nice display of mutual aid to do all the cleanup, basically, before any official crews could get there. But with that, you also saw, like, these far-right groups coming in for photo ops. And it just, it normalizes their presence in heavily impacted areas,

and it was not ideal. Yeah, a lot of the American militia movement, especially the modern kind of post-2008 3%er strain of it, is predicated on this idea of a complete breakdown of order or a loss of civil order, however you conceive of that. And these climate disasters that are going to hit areas are going to kind of provide a self-fulfilling prophecy

for these people to step in and say, oh no, you need some sort of armed force, you need some sort of group of people to keep order and to keep law in whatever way they conceive of that. I do think it's interesting you guys talking about the photo-op thing that they do, because when the wildfires happened in Oregon, all of the actual relief work

was done by anti-fascists. People in Portland, we set up these massive camps to help much more conservative people who had to evacuate their homes, and they were all getting fed and all their clothes and stuff were coming from anti-fascists and all the right did was

do the armed checkpoints thing. In the south where there's less anti-fascists, compared to Portland, right, how some of those groups actually do do some of the relief effort. That's definitely not the case up here in the west coast.

Last year, I remember a few county-level militias that I follow in Virginia were, like, seriously doing relief work. Like, they were gathering food. They were taking out places affected by flooding in North Carolina, by tornadoes in Tennessee.

It's not... I wouldn't go so far as to call it mutual aid because it lacks the kind of ideological framework for that, but they are providing some sort of infrastructure. I think mutual aid for their guys. Yeah. Yeah, with less of like the theory side of mutual aid. And I'm sure there's someone else who can speak more on this,

but from my perspective growing up in a super weird church, I see this interacting, I see this combining with local churches a lot as well. I'm not sure there's anyone else here who could say something more intelligently than me about how religion will combine with these militia efforts. lot of like eco eco extremists like on the far right on the very fringe far right can um start to like be very esoteric about their you know belief in climate change and they start to sort of frame it as like a reason for the collapse um that we need collapse, or attacking infrastructure, like, for the purpose of somehow saving the planet, even though it's really not going to get anywhere.

We have to do a lot of our own work on the planet. We can't just destroy everything and see if it works out. Yeah, we can definitely bring up accelerationists and accelerationism as an overarching thing that is not just... not to be like horseshoe theory about it, but accelerationism pops up in a whole lot of areas, including areas of the left where it becomes very

unuseful, and it can lead to a lot of wasted time and some destructive tendencies. I think that point also provides an interesting through line between more mainstream militias and like the really esoteric brands of eco-fascism or ecologically based extremism is that like they're both very influenced by like colonial schools of thought uh like eco-fascism and all that is kind of predicated on this idea

of, like, terra nullus. Like, there is this perfect, empty, wild land that we can have. Manifest destiny. Exactly. And, like, so much of the ideas of order and, like, peacekeeping that you find within more mainstream militia movements come from

this exact same type of thinking, where it's like a colonial order that you need to keep. Yeah, I know there's a lot of people on the left who are in, like, the kind of, um, like, you know, green green, like, eco-socialist or, like, green anarchist kind of strains. We get

very frustrated when people talk about eco-fascism, which I can understand, because no one really means the same thing when they talk about it. Sometimes they just mean any, like, any, like, quote-unquote terrorism that has, like, an environmental purpose. Some people, you know, when they think of ecofascism, they think of, like, overpopulation. You know, there's a lot of different things they mean by it, but I know we've all had talks about, like, what we personally view as, like, ecofascism, because it's not just eco-extremism. Like, eco-extremism does not equal fascism.

Like, there's a whole bunch of eco-extremists who are very anti-fascist. And there is some who kind of bridge the gap, you know, like ITS has some more fascist tendencies, but I would not accurately call them fascist based on the type of stuff they do, the type of writing they do. They do not check all of the boxes. But then we do have people who I would

accurately describe as eco-fascist who have done, who've done, you know, mass shootings, who have a lot of eco, who have eco-fascist stuff, either in the writing that they like or their own manifestos, they bring up enough points. It's like, yeah, you kind of fall into this broad category. Does someone here want to give their personal definition of ecofascism? This isn't this not necessarily exactly what we use for the pod. But I just I'm interested to hear is a lot of people with various backgrounds, everyone has their own specialized knowledge. What kind of when people say that, what do you kind of put into that category?

People believe in like this organic law and like natural order. And they believe that like there is a natural hierarchy ingrained in everything. And they think that generally, like, natural order, and they believe that, like, there is a natural hierarchy ingrained in everything. And they think that, generally, like, if we return to, like, some kind of primitive society or, like, you know, they'll assume that, like, everything has its own structure and that there's going to be people who rise to the top people who just you know don't belong in that kind of society

it's going to be really damaging for like the elderly, for disabled people and they just sort of see it as like survival of the fittest and I think that's like a much more eco-fascist point of view rather than, like, a more green anarchist point of view

where things would sort of even out rather than become a hierarchical caste system. Yeah, yeah, I think hierarchy is an important part of that and how we, you know, there is, like, a lot of green anarchists who are focusing on, like, making their own medication for, you know, people with diabetes and stuff, and that's kind of stuff

that is, like, really interesting to look at and stuff that we should absolutely pursue because we'll become less reliant on supply chains. We don't really see eco-fascists doing that. We do not see them focusing on making medication for people. Oh no. Maybe I can kind of

set some people up to say more stuff if I say this real quickly. But one of the things that I always or that is a red flag for me, is just bringing in these very traditional discussions of gender roles and relating that to the environment. Can you give an example?

I mean, I don't, we don't need to say names of specific writers or people, but there's definitely a way in which to describe the gender roles. Sure, yeah. Stop playing with the toy gun, oh my god. Just, like, establishing... And it is kind of...

It can be kind of, like, an older left thing, too, but establishing, you know, ecological discussions within the framework of traditional gender roles and kind of like what is expected of people based on their sex. Yeah, this is the dark side of cottagecore.

Yes. That's one way to put it. Emi, you want to get in here? Oh boy, yeah. Emi likes cottagecore. I like parts of cottagecore, just not when it intersects with a certain strain of politics. Oh, right. Well...

Like, queer cottagecore is extremely cute. Sure. Until. Until you're not queer. Sometimes they still are. Now, here's the thing. When we're dealing with, like, traditional gender role stuff,

it's a really slippery slope into more aggressive strains of thought. So when we're talking about the idea of the class... Stop playing with the toy gun. You are going to get the ATF

and I don't want it. It's my birthday. I don't want that. We will turn this podcast around. It's Matt's birthday, you ass. Take apologizing. Have fun editing. Continue editing. Yeah, rip to the editor.

All this stays in. Oh, good. When they're talking about the claps, they think the rod of modernity will be gone, society will be ended, they can rebuild from the ground up smaller communities, and they can build the society they want, which is largely ethno-nationalist. It's not great.

The idea that there will be this super-traditional family structure, you're going to have this combined strong warrior, also homesteading man, and your cool trad wife. Yeah. Who never ages above 30 in this society. Doesn't age above 25. I'm being generous here, assuming that at least some of these people have a little bit of pre-planning, but they don't. They don't.

And they step on each other a lot, right? Because they have this whole plan for this society-free of industry and they can't stop posting about it on the internet. Which is pretty funny. Which is really funny, right?

They're not good at it. They're way too addicted to posting to, like, actually commit to, like, the true off-the-grid trad life. At least 10K was off the grid. We don't gotta hand it to them. You gotta hand it to them. We don't gotta hand it to them. We don't gotta hand it to them.

You gotta hand it to them. You under no circumstances gotta hand it to them. Pod is divided on how much we gotta hand it to 10K. The official stance of terrorism is that terrorism is bad. Why don't we just bring them on? It is kind of a concern when they do end up... When they stop posting. I mean, yeah.

It's a concern when they're posting, but it's kind of more concerning when you see the anti-rude groups. You would rather them just keep posting sometimes. Yeah. It's the same as looking at a kid that wants to be a firefighter or something. They're just talking. They're not going to do it. But you see some of them doing it and when they're doing the thing the lifestyle influencer version of fascism yeah do you think that it's going to affect kind of like laws about living off-grid and laws about like yes for for normal people

who just want to get the fuck out. I actually just read something about this. There's some guy who's been living off-grid in Pennsylvania for like 30 years, and I don't remember the details of this, and we don't have internet out here. The old guy? Yeah, it was an old guy. He burned his house down? Yeah. He's in jail now. He's probably going to be in jail for the rest of his life, and I think

part of whether it comes from the left or the right, as people start to try to build resiliency within communities for disasters that are coming and start to seek ways of living that do not rely on supply chains and do not rely on the state the state will strike back against that as a consolidation of power because the more that people move away from it whether on the left or right the less power the state has i mean utilizing counterterrorism is an excuse to do so. Because they're giving reasons.

And it's not going to get enforced equally. I'm sure the government's going to focus on certain people doing this and be slightly more okay with other people doing it. It will. So I would like to talk about Canada a little bit because specifically climate change affecting Canada is going to be slightly different

in most of it compared to the states I've been having my waist deep in climate science books for most of 2021 and Canada's going to probably see economic boosts and they're probably the states probably just going to get actually stronger because of how... Same thing with Russia.

Both Canada and Russia are going to get more economically powerful under climate change because of how much more crops are going to get moved up. Give me your thoughts on Canada, because Canada's my backup plan. As soon as something gets too spicy in the States, I'm taking my Canadian passport and hiding in the woods. What's your thoughts on that? It's interesting to hear you guys talk about American militia culture, because we

definitely, in our rhetoric and propaganda that we see in Canada, it gets borrowed a lot. The talking points from the States, the concepts. But what we don't have are these strong, organized militia groups. We had three percenters for a while and who still exist, but

they were big about being off-grid. They were the ones who weren't posting for a long time. And it seems like, as much as all these people are still around, they've largely deflated down. Because Canada's made some efforts to call them terrorists, right?

Right. Very recently, we designated them as a terrorist organization. Which doesn't carry a criminal charge, but if you do something involved with them, you send them money, there are consequences of that, legal enhancements. But

our kind of militia culture focuses on the illegitimacy of the state, that Canada is founded. It's very kind of sobsit type rhetoric, but that Canada's establishment, its rules, and especially with all the public health measures, it's this growing kind of tide of thought in both the prairies and largely out west. I grew up in Saskatchewan.

Most of my family is in Alberta. I know when I look at, when I, because I keep a soft eye on some Canadian hate groups just because I'm Canadian. Most of them pop up around Alberta. Where do you see this stuff kind of like happening? Like, do you see any of this on the East Coast? If so, is it smaller or is this mostly on like a West Coast Canada thing? Well, that like, that conspiratorial thought we've

seen across the country. On the East Coast, just recently, we had people setting up their own version of checkpoints as a protest against the public health measures. And the whole Eastern part of Canada is in its own bubble

right now. But yeah, you had this conspiracy-based movement forming these actual checkpoints. And then the main part of it, though, is probably going to be out west. That is where these ideas are the most popular.

That makes sense. Where mainstream politicians are moving towards amplifying these types of talking points. Do you see that like, is that a mostly Alberta thing? It's mostly like prairies, Alberta, the farmland. The interesting part is that when you talk about groups, it's like in Canada, groups are an urban phenomenon for the most part.

Okay. Most of our organization takes place around the city centers. That is very different from the states. With the states, it's usually the opposite. There's always exceptions of too many people live, but generally we see it as more of a rural thing, where the groups are organized.

Whereas cities are more, like, liberal, and that's where the anti-fascist groups are based. But it's kind of these, like, these little ideological pockets that exist all over. And certainly that sentiment is probably shared. But the need to mobilize seems to mostly focus

on the urban centers. And then we never have our groups providing any kind of aid to people. Or even checkpoints. That's beyond these very recent protest movements. There has been more forest fires around B.C., around western Alberta. How do you see the government's response

to these types of things right now? Canada's in a particular situation with the Liberals having minority control. The Canadian parliamentary system is probably confusing to a lot of Americans that they don't understand it already. But, yeah, what do you see on that front? Because I know, you know, both Trudeau and Biden talk the talk around, like, pipelines and stuff, but then do the complete opposite.

How do you kind of see this kind of stuff working right now for, like, on the climate side of things? Well, yeah, our reaction to the firefighters, or, sorry, our reaction to the wildfires, I mean, the government response has always looked down on, like, it's always looked at poorly, but none of these people are taking this as an opportunity to kind of change minds,

you know, do PR. There's much less reaction to it. Like, the West also, there's this incredible feeling of alienation because of the way that our government is set up. They have substantially less voting power. Yeah, the same way the states, there's southern states or states in the Midwest

who feel like they don't really have any power politically. Same thing for almost the entire West Coast of Canada, everything from Manitoba to Alberta and parts of BC. Everyone is very frustrated at the federales and how they really don't have control for what's happening. People on the East Coast are controlling what our pipelines or what our mines are doing, and that does not fare to our workers. Because, yeah, it does suck when, you know, a mine closes and then everyone in a small town is out of business. Like, the part where

I grew up in Canada, all my family around them, you know, used to be, you know, bustling small towns that are basically all now ghost towns. Because stuff closed, people had to move to either, like, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, don't laugh. So, you know, all these specific things, you know.

We see pockets of this. We see pockets of this in, like, the Midwestern states, definitely. I don't know if it also is, like, manifest destination, because, like, a lot of it started with people kind of moving outward to try and

gain more land and make their borders larger and like live further out to like try and obtain more territory and with the like Canadian big surge in like indigenous

rights and the big focus and shift to like sort of give them land back or something? I'm not exactly clear on what the Canadian stance is on that. Oh, just like, I mean, we have a big movement from indigenous populations to... They seem very like dichotomy. Well, there's so many different bands and tribes and different types of nations. Like we have unceded territory and the dynamics of which the government is supposed to deal with and has agreed to deal with

and actually does deal with them is all vastly different but yeah that idea of this focus on these particular issues like indigenous issues, even our attempts to have a greener economy for a place that

for a long time still is an extraction economy how does that affect the for a place that for a long time still is an extraction economy. Yes. How does that affect the... It's an oil company with health care. It's more like extremist far-right groups who want to move out that way for the purpose of organizing. And you also have the indigenous focus within the liberal government.

So how do those two groups, do you think, like, interact? Like, the general conception is that the push for indigenous rights, especially on the farther right, is for the disenfranchisement of white Europeans. Like, it is...

And then, yeah, you do have this western exodus where we have very popular figures who are moving further west because there are these stronger ideas of sovereignty. I forget what exactly it was polling, but when the Western exit or Wexit movement started, you know, there was a significant amount of popular, or at least, like, not strong support, but, like, existing support. There was a large amount of support. or at least not strong support, but existing support. There was a large amount of support. Yeah, absolutely. It'll be interesting to see what happens, though, talking about collapse

in these small towns, in cloistered communities. They already feel cut off from the government and not represented. If you have a breakdown of infrastructure, that'll create... Why do we even have them in the first place if they're not helping us? Exactly. Which is true, which is like

a real thing to think about, but their solutions are wildly different than the actual solutions to help people. And we've already seen how this plays out in the past as well, with places where the infrastructure starts to break down and then people who have weapons kind of become the authority just based on the fact that they have more power.

Yeah, so one of the things that I follow is a lot of kind of like the more, let's characterize it as boomer-esque conspiracy theories, especially with anti-vax, anti-public health measures type thing. And one of the things that really is noticeable to me is how much more sovereign citizen stuff is creeping up into those areas. And especially, you know, there are two really big examples of, if there's an

anti-vax protest in your city, it's probably one of these two networks that both come from Europe that I'm not going to name right now. And those two networks also love to organize over the messaging app Telegram.

And Telegram is... Tell me if I'm stepping Telegram. And Telegram is... Tell me if I'm stepping in an Emmy. Telegram is where so much of this ideology, this far-right ideology is able to cross-mix and co-mingle. We talk about Telegram enough in the pods. People are familiar. You haven't stepped

in it yet. Keep going. Adjacent to stepping in but it's fine. My biggest framework, and I talk about this a lot, is stepped in it yet. Keep going. Adjacent to stepping in it, but it's fine. My biggest framework, and I talk about this a lot, is Telegram as this technological embodiment of the cultic milieu because there is

basically no enforcement, close to no enforcement on Telegram. And so these more malicious actors know that, and they know that they can find an audience who is interested in, you know, opposing the mainstream conspiratorial thought in these kind of, like, boomers on Telegram and conspiracy groups. And there are, you know, malicious actors planning to go in and win these people over. know a lot of these militias actors are younger people who don't have those resources but they know that they can win over these people who do have resources who own land who have savings to kind of like fund that movement yeah oh i was just gonna say i do think that the cultic

milieu is like a really important heuristic for these kind of collapse scenarios because the question of what happens when kind of infrastructure and any sort of political guidance falls away is governed a lot by that. And like this idea that there's, there are these ideas floating around in our society. And once people have nothing else to turn to, these malicious actors will bring this stuff in. And, uh,

yeah, to put it simply, then we're pretty fucked. Yeah. Telegram also has recently started to crack down on people. And because of that, you have this really interesting dichotomy of people who are saying, like, this means, like, get ready, get prepared, go off grid, get guns. And you also have on the other end people who are saying, you know, create alt-tech platforms

and, like, create more, like, self-encryption and like I don't know. I'm trying not to step in right now. But to be able to speak more peer-to-peer resources. And that wraps up part one

of the Terrorism Roundtable discussion. Thanks so much for listening. You can find us at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia on all of the socials. You can find me at HungryBowTie. And you can follow a decent amount of the researchers on their podcast, at TerrorismBadThePodcast. I think it's just at TerrorismBad.

Anyway, thanks for listening to part one. Part two drops tomorrow. Stay tuned. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal 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. 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. 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 It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. This is part two of our terrorism roundtable discussion. If you haven't listened to part one already, I would recommend you scroll back, listen to the previous episode, and then continue on from here so you have kind of context to what exactly we're talking about. Anyway, this is part two of our discussion in the woods. I hope you enjoy. Something that was talked about earlier this year after January 6th was like, should the government ban Telegram, right? That was the thing. And there's a lot of arguments

that are like, no, absolutely not. And does anyone want to speak on that? Because, you know, if I want to talk about the government's response to these things, you know, that's a very government-y thing to do. Be like, oh, people are organizing this platform, get rid of the platform, problem gone. And that's not how that works.

Emi, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Sure. Yeah, so they're... getting rid of the platform doesn't necessarily help, especially when it's something that is important, such as encrypted communication, which is something that more people than just Nazis need. Yes. And that resource should not be cut off.

And there's also kind of a bad precedent to be set if the government is deciding which forms of speech it needs to have complete access to. I don't love that. The other thing is that if we nuke Telegram, right, they don't disappear. They form new networks in other places. They're still there. And then they have to do more things in person.

Right. They're still there, they're just harder to monitor. And they're harder to track. People are absolutely correct when they say deplatforming works, because it works for the platform, and a lot of people just want that. A lot of people just don't want to see Nazi shit, and they're fine with deplatforming, and they say this works, and they have data to back up that it does work. But it works for the platform, but the people still exist.

People are still boosting their own shit. And when they bring up building their own alt-tech platforms... It only works if you get there early. Yeah. There is elements... D-platform is a wider thing. It can work especially for in-person stuff. But yeah,

for the thing you're mentioning, yes, it is definitely not that cut and dry. And Telegram's really interesting because it is kind of this middle space between social media and just a messaging app. And the thing about it, too, is that anybody can look at the public channels

without saying anything in the chat. So people could be kind of completely invisible. Nobody knows that they're there. They're watching the stuff. And they're still getting the same messaging. They're still getting the same dates for protests, they're still, like, organizing, but they can be

sort of just subscribed to a channel, and... You don't even need to be subscribed, you can just know the name. Just looking into it, and getting that flow of information without ever having, like, formal organizing, so to speak. So it's really hard to say that, like, you say that these people planned this,

because there's a lot of plausible deniability that anybody was involved. There's so much easy hyperlinking between groups and channels and everything, so it's so easy for someone to move between ideology and to go from the base level shit into the much deeper stuff

extremely quick. Very quick, yeah. Extremely quick. Well, that's like... And that's fire design. Isn't it good for them about Telegram? Is that you have all of the people that are vulnerable to, let's say, new ideas in one place. Yeah, that's a big thing you get.

Right. Recruitment. Exactly. If you're trying to plan a collapse, you're going to need a lot more people than the numbers that the people who want a collapse actually have. So the easiest way to kind of move things along is to start inserting their ideas and their

discourses and kind of altering the vibe of certain digital environments manually until they have what we can kindly call cannon fodder. Yeah. Or even starting their own and saying this is a MAGA

platform and it's actually just a bunch of accelerationists who made it. And we made it to recruit them. We definitely saw attempts of this with QAnon of people who are way more accelerationists trying to use QAnon people as cannon fodder. It was successful.

And they did it. And QAnon people died. Well, you're, I mean, that, and then also you've got, like, the idea of the Boogaloo, right, that's been co-opted to try to appeal to leftists, and I mean, there's a really good article by Left Coast Right Watch that goes into one of those chats, and they're basically like, yeah,

really try to push these ideas of, really try to push talking points like Black Lives Matter and all this, we want to get these protesters on our side. And then you also have, um, some blatant white supremacist groups who are also using the Boogaloo. And how much of that too is like, how much of that is sort of real genuine?

Like I am not racist. I believe in black lives matter. Like I want to be part of this, even though I'm a Boogaloo or like how much of it also is, like, I am not racist. I believe in Black Lives Matter. Like, I want to be part of this, even though I'm a Boogaloo. Or, like, how much of it also is, um, kind of reminiscent of what we were talking about yesterday, and I also don't want to step in it, but, like, with, you know, the idea of

from Manson, of, like, Helter Skelter, and, like, causing that race war, it's like, they, what they would do is, like, try and frame black people for it, and say, like, this was... Yeah, exactly. And so how much of it is saying this is Black Lives Matter and they want people to see that after they do a boo. The Boogaloo group that showed up in Portland in July of 2020 when the protests against the feds were happening,

they showed up and were all like, yeah, we're here to support Black Lives Matter and stand against the federal government and stuff. They showed up and were all like, yeah, we're here to support Black Lives Matter and stand against the federal government and stuff. And they had some very suspicious patches that took me about a year to figure out what they were. And it's like this accelerationist, it ties into a whole bunch of eco-fascist propaganda stuff. And yeah, they're saying these things while they have these very obscure patches. And yeah, this is an important reason why we need people who are not very smart, like I will say Jimmy Dore, who gives these people platforms, are some of the worst and are going to cause a lot of problems because they have no idea what they're doing. Or they know what they're doing and they're just bad.

Yeah. And that Boogaloo thing kind of serves a twofold purpose in that you can bring people who self-identify as leftists into the movement, but you also have a really good scapegoat for, like, actual action. Like, that was a big thing that we saw in Minneapolis when things first popped off and, like, precinct was getting burned down and suddenly people on the internet start losing their minds about the umbrella guy. Umbrella guy! Umbrella guy at the auto zone and there was a guy who was indicted he was a boogaloo boy who was indicted

for like headlines said burning down the precinct he fired a weapon he fired a gun on like near the wall exactly and so that at the same time takes away agency from left wing movements and the state's able to be like look see it's just all it's okay to crack down Exactly. And so that, at the same time, takes away agency from left-wing movements. Yes. And the state's able to be like, look, see, it's just all...

It's okay to crack down on them because they're all, you know, wild white supremacists. Exactly. Even just from any autonomous movement that forms with the people in a community that isn't... that we wouldn't necessarily refer to as leftist, it's just pissed off people. I mean, that's what we saw in every single, you know, every big city. Every big city, yeah. The young kids who are fucking pissed off and are going to go smash it. It's saying all of this is people from outside

of the town. Outside agitators! A tale as old as time. Outside agitators have been used since before the Civil Rights Act. It's a very old state talking point. What were you going to say, Matt? I was going to say also it's somewhat related to that. We were talking about

using QAnon as cannon fodder. And it also ties into the SovSit conversation we were having. So my research, I special or not specialize, I focus on Christian identity, this white supremacist ideology, and how specifically how it's grown since the 90s until now through the internet and all that fun stuff. This whole point they've been pushing lately is to... With Christian identity, the whole thing is they are preparing for the apocalypse, which they call the tribulations, and they see...

Modern CI folks see the Boogaloo as the tribulation that's coming, so what they're trying to do is go off grid and really try to like establish this new land or like to protect their kids and everything from like pollution and all that shit but also to be away from the collapse and be able to survive it and then while they're doing all that like prepping homesteads and like compounds and stuff they're also like pushing uh like election fraud conspiracies and all that on likeAnon and the MAGA crowd. Not because they believe it. They don't believe it. They know it's bullshit, but they can

use it to accelerate collapse. Just like January 6th. Yeah, exactly. There were groups when Joe Biden won the presidency or won the election, whatever, some groups being like, yeah, really try to push this theory,

this conspiracy about election fraud, even if you don't believe in it, just push it because that helps our cause. Exactly. And that's something to be really mindful of, too. I forgot where else I was going with that. Well, yeah, a lot of them don't mean what they say. They'll say things that'll push other people to do something that they don't necessarily want to do. And that's a lot of, like,

during January 6th, so much excitement because they could see that the QAnon crowd were actually mobilizing. And so they said to themselves, like, you know, get them mobilizing for the white race. Get them mobilizing for, you know, our cause.

And they've really successfully been able to infiltrate that and be able to get some people on board with some of it just based on using their rhetoric. Yeah. I know I talked about this on our podcast, but you could see it. I reported on January 6th in person, and you could watch it happen. Someone with a skull mask on, or a Proud Boy, or an Oath Keeper, would literally come back from the police line, grab a group of people, yell something at them about QAnon or the storms upon us,

and throw them up to that riot line. The New York Times did a really good visual investigation of how those extremist groups used mega people and QAnon people as their foot soldiers. The QAA folk QAA did a really good breakdown on their QAnon Anonymous podcast.

But it's also, not to link everything to Christian identity, which I have a tendency to do, but it's very ideologically similar to QAnon, like, from a Christianity point of view. Like, QAnon is, like, so close to the edge of Christian identity, it's very scary. Actually, I talked about it on Jake Hammerhan's QClearance podcast, but there's also, like, not only trying to accelerate things through them,

but also trying to recruit them through these very, very similar talking points about the synagogue of Satan and all that nonsense. Saying that Christian identity is an entry point for some of them. Some of them bring it up as an entry point into further accelerationist Nazi shit. But they will start with Christian identity because they think that it's more packageable to people who already believe in QAnon. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, like Will was saying, a lot of this comes from these kind of boomer

conspiracies and anti-vax groups, and you're not going to be able to get, you know, Meemaw and Pap-Pap into, like, Wotanism or something like that. Well, if you try hard enough. You can, sure. But, like, Christianity is something that's palatable. It's something that's normal to them. And as you can kind of slowly tweak it through QAnon, you can get them to

this much more extreme thing. Oh, yeah. Talk about Christian identity. I think we should, like, maybe, Matt, you could define it. Christian identity, it's this radical offshoot of Christianity that sees all white people as the true Israelites from the Bible. And they also think Jewish people are all literally the spawn of Satan.

There's this really dumb theory they came up with and like kind of rewrote the whole Bible off of called, can I name it? Is that okay? Okay. Dual seed line theory where they say like the story, if you know about like Adam and Eve and all that, they had Cain and Abel

so they see Cain was the offspring of Eve and the devil and he is literally the spawn of Satan and then he intermingled with all these races that were there before Adam and Eve and created this demonic race and it's really fucking

dumb. But it's still here. It's been here for a hot minute. And it's probably going to keep going. It's going to get worse. Calling it now. It's going to get worse. It's going to get worse. Yeah, but the whole thing is

they essentially worship a Nazi Jesus. They see Jesus was really only talking to the white race and that Christianity and God only is able to be perceived to the white race and that Christianity and God only is able to be perceived by the white race. Before you start laughing at these people, because yes, it does sound very silly, keep in mind that these are extremely dangerous. Yeah, I mean, you had...

Right, this is the one problem with QAnon when liberals just start laughing about how crazy it is and then they're so surprised at January 6th. We're like, no, no, like, yeah, like, they're actually dangerous. Yeah 6th we're like no no like you it's yeah you like they're actually dangerous yeah he's been mentioned in a lot yeah and he's Christian that has been mentioned in various manifestos linked to you know yes and actual warned very like organized terrorists like I mean historically you look at a big, like, with Christian identity and with a lot of these kind of, like... A lot of them base their, like, whole historical context of, like, Aryanism

on this rewriting of history based on a fake study that was done in Nazi Germany about where some proto-Indo-European languages came from. And so they believe that, like, white people came from an area that's, you know, you could generally say is sort of near the Black Sea. And that

it's based on this, like, strange idea that, like, Sanskrit is not the oldest language but like are you pointing the gun at me because I'm stepping in there? you're getting real close on the edge

the historical context I think it actually is useful there is actual things that can be traced back from this they really tried to push this. They made a lot of fake studies that you could spend a lot of time researching this and believe that it's true because there's just so much written about it. And I think this is like a tactic that they really tend to do with historical revisionism a lot is just crank out essay after essay, even if it's wrong, even if it's totally like based on false data or just skewed data,

they don't care. They just write about it and that they think that like having more written about it makes it more legitimate. And that's what we are talking, have been talking about this, this whole time we've been not recording is there's just an overflow of content that is so easy to access you know not necessarily from these specific groups they're talking about just from the further right in general oh yeah yeah they just overflow the content it's like

always the top shit on facebook to give an idea of how pervasive even that idea of like where indo-e-European languages came from, when I still went to college, I took a Religions of South Asia course and we had to spend multiple days where our professor went through these myths about what was the Aryan invasion,

which was there are Aryan people. That is a thing, historically. They're Iranian. Yes, they're not white people. But, like, going through... It depends on your definition of white people. Sure. It's based on language. They think of Aryanism as, like,

referring to a linguistic pattern. Yeah, but, like, in a university course, we still had to go through and, like, debunk these myths because they've gotten so pervasive within culture. Yeah, and another thing I want to say is that

these more entry-level conspiracy ideas, it is hard to overemphasize how small the space is between the entry-level stuff and the much harder stuff. It can happen extremely quickly. Extremely fast. It does happen extremely quickly. Extremely fast.

I'll give an example. I was reporting on an anti-vax protest, and they went straight into talking about New World Order and Project Lockstep and the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergers and the Sabatins and David Icke shit. And this was the middle of the day in a metropolitan area with a bunch of boomers and Trump hats who were getting this hardcore shit pumped at them.

We saw that a lot with the Nashville bombing too. Immediately it was like oh, it was actually an attack on Dominion and also it was orchestrated by the Rothschilds to destroy evidence of voter fraud. I forgot that that was a whole thing. There was a bunch of stuff that came up.

There was a big conspiracy that it was actually a missile strike. I had to talk my grandpa down from that. Really? I didn't know that. There was a video that circulated for a while about that, and I had to get into a conversation with my grandpa, who at the time was super isolated because of COVID, and that's a whole other story.

That's a whole other problem and I had to talk him down and show him no here's a video from somebody I knew who was somewhat in the area and saw the explosion and there was not a missile anywhere near Chelsea one of the data studies I've done

and worked on is using big pool and small pool discord servers of far-right extremists, far-right militia groups, and very, very accelerationist skull mass type networks. And looking at the big pools and the small pools and seeing the at mentions between them. Yeah. And there was not one person who was more than three nodes away from anybody else. So it's very, it can't be overstated how close people are from entry to very, very,

very extreme types of goals. Yeah. And ideologies. Ideologies that explicitly push violence. And another point I want to bring up is there's been much said about QAnon. It isn't going away. It's just not called QAnon anymore. With these anti-vax

mobilizations, those mobilizations and groups aren't going away. They're just going to continue to shift and evolve their focus. The networks stay. Oh, yeah. And they're planning for it, though. Networks, networks, networks.

They've designed it that way. So sometimes I find the normie stuff first. Sometimes I find the crazy stuff first. But, I mean, not even that long ago, I came across a particular social media profile that was explicitly calling for acts of terror and attempting to organize acts of terror and displaying acts of terror, which is an immediate problem that needs

to be dealt with. However, they had multiple alternate accounts that you follow that path, and on their other accounts, they're sharing Tucker Carlson stuff. Things that your grandparents are going to watch, right? And that is done on purpose to try to siphon people out

of more quote-unquote mainstream versions of conspiratorial thinking directly into, like, you should start exploding things. And even more, let's say, left-of-center conspiracy thinking ties into this as well.

It does. Conspiracy theories are not solely a thing of the right, which pissed me off to no end. No, I just want to back you up on that. I think there's this implicit idea that the left is immune to conspiracy theories

when it very much is not at all. Nobody is immune. I just wanted to emphasize that point. That idea, though, of never being that far from the serious stuff is something that's really, really observable

even beyond a data level. I used to consult with local newsrooms on how to report on things, and one of the big points I always tried to drill in was if you fuck this up and you frame this the wrong way, it will have consequences.

And if this is stepping in it too much, we can cut this. That's why we keep talking about stepping in it. This is literally the concept of stepping in it. But like, the, um, Dylann Roof. Dylann Roof started his journey to radicalization by reading about Trayvon Martin in local news websites and local newspapers,

and then Googling black on white crime. And his first result, the first shit that comes up. Yeah. It was some people. Yes. Same exact thing. Exactly.

And like, it does not, it did not take long for him to go from, It did not take long for him to go from, I am reading local news articles that are framed this specific way, to, I am killing people. That's not normal. Of course, a lot of people are not going to be reading local news and then suddenly start to think this way. There is a concerted effort by some very specific people who would like to make that pathway easier. It's stochastic terrorism. Well, it's interesting because we can't define it really as terrorism.

What are they doing? They're just saying things. They're just encouraging people to do things. And they're not doing anything wrong. We can't really call it terrorism. Yeah, the most dangerous people in this game are usually not the ones doing the shooting. Yes. People behind the scenes trying to get people to go on these paths in the first place.

Looking for people who are willing. And so they see somebody reading local news, maybe, and they want to make that pathway easier to go from local news to Dylann Roof. Like, because that's not a normal jump. But they really want to find people who are looking at local news like that and then say to them, like, well, okay,

look at this, now look at this. Trying to tie this back to climate change, how do you see a similar pathway? Instead of someone Googling, you know, black and white crime, like, Googling stuff about collapse and modern civilization doing the same thing. Oh yeah, Eric Stryker. I don't know, Eric Stryker's been on

about this, and I think that he's a relatively middle point that people get to. Fairly average people do listen to things like Eric Stryker. Yeah, he's a very entry-level explicit Nazi.

And another thing, cut me off if we don't want to go in this direction, but, you know, one of the biggest places where we see young people getting into conspiracy theories is TikTok. It is TikTok. Yeah, that's where I'm from.

Are we talking about TikTok now? TikTok. Ted K. memes on TikTok. It is TikTok. That's where I'm from. Are we talking about TikTok now? TikTok. Ted K. memes on TikTok. Cut that, cut that, cut that. We're not cutting that. That is within the branches of the pod. I mean, the biggest entry point I've seen for a lot of things

remains crisis. Yeah. And the thing is, this, our upcoming climate scenario is going to give people an easier jumping on point. Well, yeah, that's so, I mean, we were talking about how, like, the mythology of, like, black on white crime and all this

stuff, they're trying to create a situation that, you know, with the sense of urgency that justifies fascism, which on its own is unjustifiable and ridiculous. But when there's a crisis, that's when people sign on to it. Climate change is the existential threat that they've been trying to artificially

create, and they no longer have to. They now get to skip a lot of steps and save a lot of energy by just pointing at the fact that everything is literally on fire, and that, like, that makes it so much quicker. We have to do something. We have all the guns.

Now would be a great time to join in on our power. This is our Weimar era hyperinflation type shit. This is like when you're when you can't get food from the grocery store anymore because of supply chain problems

or when everything around you is on fire. You don't need a great replacement theory. No, you don't need any of that. You don't need to say that the Rothschilds are behind it. You just need to wait. You have enough things that you experience yourself. And it's much scarier

when you can't... How do we stop that? I can't debunk that. It's harder. The world is literally on fire. It's a problem, and something needs to be done about it. I don't like your solution, but something needs to happen. What do you think, on this path,

and this is going to get a whole lot more speculative, but what can we do to make people falling down those pathways less often? Put it with the Doomer shit. Yes. That's one of the things that we're trying to do on the pod, is make sure people do not fall down the doomer pathway. Because, yeah, that does get people

along down this path a lot. Eco-extremism is logical. Like, against most types of extremism, eco-extremism is the most logical. Like, you look at it and you say, we need a radical change right now. And that's correct.

It's just the way that they go about it is very, very different. Ecofascism is very different. It's its own type of eco-extremism. And there's green anarchy. That's a very different type of eco-extremism. These are all different parts of something that almost has the. Like, these are all different parts of

something that almost has the same goals, but wants to go about them very, very, very differently. And it's so easy to just look around and see how everything's on fire and think, like, the government's doing nothing about it. The government starts doing something about it, and then suddenly it's the state's too big, we're in communism.

You know? So they all have, like, different goals, and it's very conflicting on how to deal with it. And even the very different tactics between green anarchy and fascist extremism, they also will get to different end goals. Right?

Your basic amprim wants a very different life than your, you know, very, you know, very stepping-in-it-pilled fascist, right? But a collapse can only benefit the right. A collapse can only benefit the people who already have

power, who are already able-bodied, who are already stocked up on guns, who already, like, are higher and higher. Yeah, that does frustrate me with there being anarchists who are, like, rooting for the collapse, because you're not going to win. They're just going to get you pushed behind a fence somewhere.

You're not going back out. Or put on the wall. Yeah, well, they've got very strict ideas of which people count as human, and the goal of the majority of fascist movements is to purge the ranks of the people they see as lesser. Purge the weak. They have very precise ideas about who they plan on letting survive the collapse. Alright. So let's, I think it's time to start

talking about, and tell me if I'm taking this in the wrong direction, you know, what the fuck can someone do who's listening to this? Yeah. Recycle. No. Stop recycling. It's all getting buried in the Oregon forest. Talk to Joe Biden.

Just vote. Vote it away. Vote the collapse away. Start local. Find a local group. Find a local direct action group. Investigate that group and see who is behind it, but start locally. It has to start

at the local level, because when I'm not going to say if the collapse comes. Or, like, or... No, not the collapse, but, like, local collapses. Continue with disasters. Continuous disasters are going to affect at the local level. Talk to your fucking neighbors.

Neighbors, talk to your family. Try to get your family on these paths that lead to helping your neighbors instead of, you instead of making friends with the church militia. Before you buy a gun, learn how to fucking garden. Yes. But buying a gun and that sort of thing is good. It's good to know how to

use firearms. Basic emergency preparedness. Yes, but learn how to put on a tourniquet. Learn how to feed yourself. Learn how to grow some fucking food. Learn how to cook that fucking food. Get an IFAC. All that comes before you get to be a Fallout character or some shit. Oh, yeah.

Do you want to buy an IFAC? Oh, yeah, an individual first aid kit. You can buy them online. You can buy them in gun stores. You can buy them in some pawn shops. I like North American Rescue, or North River Rescue. I'm sure we'll talk about IFX more in the pod. Look, there are two big things.

One, we all have a moral obligation to consistently counter the Black Pill, Doomer shit, everything is coming to an end. It doesn't have to. That's optional. Things are going to get bad, but there's degrees of badness. There's degrees of bad. We can stop it from being...

We don't need civilization. Right, we don't need civilization to end. Like, that can be done. Step two, we also have an obligation to counter the individualist stuff and focus our efforts more towards community and relationships. That is so, so important, because every idiot that's going to buy a gun and have a bunker, not only is not going to make it, but is going to screw the rest of us.

Like, this has to be a communal effort. And on the civilization thing, like, we do need the civilization to change. Like, we need human society as we lay out. We have, has a lot of problems. I understand people's critiques of human civilization. But we also still need a society. But yeah, we need, we need places that, you know, people are going to gather and people, you know, provide the things that we have.

I noticed that that can be a loaded word in certain political circles, so we're not getting into civilization theory and that kind of anything. I was going to say, I would argue any ideology or idea such as the boogaloo that hypes up a collapse is

generally one you should stay away from. Anything that makes the collapse sound like a fun... It makes it sound sexy. It does. It's a personal story. As I think it's important to remember, if there was some massive civil conflict that happened, I think the people who would suffer the most are the non-combatants. As we will talk about.

Anything to deal with it. As we will talk about in our upcoming episode of Terrorism Bad. We'll do plugs to the end. Put the gun back in your pants. I was talking about historical precedent earlier, about things we've seen in the past with collapses and how people with guns and people with training

end up being the ones who gain power. Something that I was specifically reading about that was the Rwandan genocide. Yeah. It was just three months where most of the tutsi people were wiped out um there are conflicting numbers so i'm not gonna specifically say any but um you know the more recently like this year earlier this year um was only when rwanda admitted what it was that it was a genocide. And the armed forces

were the ones who became the leaders. And they were backed by the government. Good thing that can't happen in America. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like... It can't happen here, though.

Nope. We are immune to this in our response. The podcast is called It it will not happen here. Not if I can help it. The other thing is, look at where you get your information from. Seriously, no matter who you are, take a long, hard look at who you get your information from. Even if you're on the left. Especially if you're on the left.

If you want to hear about something that's happening in an area, look at the people who are actually on the ground reporting that. Don't just rely on news aggregators, especially on Twitter. Seriously. There's been a lot of very bad faith news aggregators on Twitter who are opposing us leftists. This has been a huge problem

in 2020. Even leftists who just don't do their due diligence. Or just do a very bad job. Or even people who call themselves counter-extremism or counter-terrorism researchers, and they are really talking about Antifa. They say that they are counter-extremism researchers, and they pose that way, and they look sometimes like they could be,

sometimes like they're not, but, like, you know, varying degrees of, like, legitimacy. But, like like they focus only on like the left wing stuff they don't think they don't see where the actual mass threats are coming from

it has to be this idea of like keeping it balanced, right, like not making it just like a far right issue, which I would argue, I think a lot of other people would that this kind of stuff is more concerning. It is not only a far-right issue. And there is merit, definitely,

to looking at left accelerationism, which is not anti-fascism. Acceleration came from Marxism. For the record. Left accelerationism is not talking about anti-fascist. There's really not time to getfascists. But, um...

There's really not time to get into all this. No, this is a whole other thing. But it does... Left accelerationism will be its own episode. But what some people do, posing as, you know, people who have credibility and are able to kind of sway opinion, they are not really doing what they say that they're doing. They're really just trying to shift the narrative of racially motivated violent extremism, which is a big, obviously, issue right now.

A large category. To being, like, BLM is racially motivated violent extremism, and they want to push that narrative further and further. Let's kind of probably start to wrap up and say our final thoughts on this whole topic. I know we didn't

we did not get to talk about eco-defense very much. If anyone has any final thoughts on that and how they see it kind of growing and how they see the state's response to it, that might be worth briefly mentioning. But yeah, let's kind of go around in a circle and give kind of everyone's

final thoughts on the subjects. I think collapse is bad, and I think that well, I mean, that's my main thing, but anything that's appealing to you

on like an ecological level that's collapse related is something you should be very wary of and I think you should be very wary of like generally everything I feel like that's kind of butchered be careful about everything yeah

yeah I guess, in my opinion, the idea of total collapse is very misleading because it's easy, and disasters don't work like that. You're not going to suddenly reset one day. Everything is going to suck, and you're going to need

to fight for whatever semblance of a society that you want to see in the world. Talk to your fucking neighbors. Get to know the people in your city, in your neighborhood. There are people doing good shit in whatever city, town you live in, most likely. If not, you can start it. Look at your local mutual aid network.

Look at the people who are taking action around and get involved. Seriously, it could be going out into a park Saturday mornings and just giving out food and talking to the people who are most affected. Talk to people. Seriously. Everyone's a person you need to talk to.

Touch grass. Talk to people. Yeah, if you need the most basic thing to start on any sort of mutual aid work, try to find a Food Not Bonds chapter in your area. Absolutely. They're well organized. They're easy to join. You don't have to put on block and fight a cop. Yeah, it's a good entry point.

It's great training for disaster relief. If you have money and you want to help, seriously, just give cash to unhoused people on the street. Give money to people. Give money directly to people. My last thoughts are just that I think

the idea of collapse or whether actual collapse themselves, environmental or otherwise, will always be something to rally behind, like it is always an entry point as well as a motivator from all sides from all sides, but it's like when these things become very salient, like was mentioned

before, when they're outside of your door that's when, you know that's when like the ideology kind of hits the pavement. Like, what is actually going to play out, what is actually going to happen, and how that's going to affect people is very real. So building community, you know, building connections, and just understanding, you know, who is in your community is probably one of the most important things.

Yeah, the idea of collapse is a romantic and ridiculous notion uh come up with people who are like really into like apocalyptic thinking and the version of themselves where they get to be the main character so first and foremost take care of each other there are a lot of people out there who want to manipulate you and want to change the way you think about things and they really really want you to buy in to the end times and you don't have to because you're smarter than that yeah it's it's not hopeless we really have to move away from hierarchical thinking our society really incentivizes hierarchical thinking and like you're saying toothache like we um we really need to just be focusing on people. Like, give thanks to people.

Because, you know, somebody doesn't have to, you know, earn, you know, respect and earn humanity. For some reason, we try and make it seem like that. But people are people. People are in different circumstances because of, usually, because of just the way that the world is and um yeah you need to just you need to organize locally you need to help your own people and stay away from the internet

shit don't stop posting stop posting as I'm stop posting even though I will keep doing it because I'm the good poster um who wants who wants to plug the pod which pod your pod I'm... Stop posting, even though I will keep doing it, because I'm the good poster. Who wants to plug the pod? Which pod? Your pod.

Follow at TerrorismBad. We're on... That's our app, right? What is the pod? What do y'all do? We go through portrayals of terrorism and extremism and conspiracies

in popular media and we look at it from the perspective of people who study this and say, did this succeed in portraying these things or did it, as it more often does, cause problems. Completely fail and cause us all personal problems. Become propaganda. Did you make

terror propaganda or did you make good media about terror? That is a thin line, Emmy. Such a thin line. I've made a career out of it. That is the thin terror line. Yeah. Do you want to plug your fantastic group? Yeah, absolutely. You can read anything I write at anti-hate.ca.

And we do just general reporting on far-right extremism in Canada as well as infiltration. Your podcast. Oh, and I also host a podcast called The Unusual Show. Yeah, if you want to keep up to date on extremism in Canada, their group is probably the best one around right now, in my opinion. It's really the largest. Yeah, the largest.

And you do very good work. You keep your eye on my home country, where my family lives, so thank you for that. And I'm very happy to be talking with you guys in the beautiful woods where we have no cell service, so we can't post. And that's good. And we're going to continue doing that and stop using this microphone. So goodbye. Yeah, and Terrorism Fat, the podcast. With that, that wraps up the Terrorism Roundtable Forest Discussion episodes.

Thanks for listening to all of us rant about our specific weird niche focuses and hopefully trying to have it within the useful context of climate change. You can follow me at Hungry Bowtie. You can follow the podcast Happen Here Pod and Cool Zone Media on Twitter and I believe Instagram. You can follow some of the researchers I interviewed on their podcast at Terrorism Bad. So that wraps up this discussion. Thanks for listening. See you later in the podcasting verse, the pod verse. Okay, goodbye. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro,

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 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. 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. 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. 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. Vacation, legally. You're not on vacation, allegedly, legally, but okay. Inshallah. I'm drunk. Garrison, you're in charge now. Figure it out. Garrison, Garrison, Garrison. Hi. It could happen here. Today, we are talking with somebody.

If you've listened to the past two episodes, you should actually know. Theo, who is a journalist and researcher and we are going to be uh discussing plans for an upcoming rally in washington dc that's has a lot of oh that seems good yeah this is uh it seems like bad things never happen when yeah what happened in dc what happened last time what happened last time they did this? I historically only pay attention to things that happen after May and before December. Uh-huh. So I'm unaware

of anything bad ever happening in DC. Has bad stuff happened there? You want to key us in? Last time it got a little spicy. Okay. You say spicy, but it's not like they tried to overthrow the government murder elected leaders right that is what they were just having too much fun yeah they got just boys they were just proud of their boys a little carried away building

all of the building that big uh hanging contraption whatever it's called the gallows garrison gallows yeah anyway we're, Theo, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. Hey, guys. I'm Theo. Hi, Theo. I'm a journalist and a researcher. I'm based out of Virginia, allegedly.

Allegedly. I end up covering a lot of events in D.C. because of that. Yeah. And that's my plans for this weekend. Cool. Yeah. because of that and yeah that's my plans for this weekend yeah do you want to do you want to give us like an overview of what rallies in dc have been like the past let's say like the past year um oh boy do i yeah let's just for background yeah so like pretty much immediately post-election, as the whole kind of stop the steal thing got kicked into gear, November 14th, there was a rally in D.C., and then there was one December 12th, and then there was finally one, as most people are probably aware, on January 6th um january 6th you know obviously got the bulk of the media coverage um but november 14th and especially december 12th were uh very violent situations in general um proud boys uh

general chuds a bunch of oath keepers Three percenters. A bunch of people's confused memaws and pat-paps showed up. Would kind of wander around the city. Yeah, they did. Yeah. It's pretty fucked up. I know some people who were there when they did

and it's... I don't know, it's sad. It's super dark. I think I was there with the people that you know, Robert. Oh, good. Yeah, so you, I mean, it's just, it's so fucking, I don't know, the extent of the disinformation, right? It's hard when you're talking about this to, like,

express a lot of sympathy for some of these people. And I'm not sympathetic towards their aims. I'm not trying to do the New York Times. Let's talk to the Trump voter down the street. But a lot of them are just like, they're fucking dumb people who bought into some bullshit and it destroyed them and their relationships with their families

and in some cases costing their lives. You don't have to sympathize with them to be like yeah that's bleak as shit you know yeah and i think you see that with the dc rallies really more so than like a portland proud boy event for example that is not at all a gathering of like the masses that's that's a specific group of pieces of shit yeah yeah. Yeah, and, like, you'd have big, like, units of Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. We had three percenters, some local Virginia militias, and they'd kind of be wandering around. But during the day itself, you'd normally see, like, speakers. Alex Jones was there.

Got to meet him. That was fun. Oh, good. I'm so sorry. That's always a treasure, meeting Alex. No, Alex is a great guy we all love meeting Alex it was really fun he's his neck

it's hard to exaggerate how he is just as red in person he's so red and as a guy who's good at strangling seems like he would be hard to strangle oh nearly impossible it's so big Strangling. Seems like he would be hard to strangle. Oh, nearly impossible. Like, that's so big. It's such, like, it's like a fucking train car.

Like, it's ridiculous how big that man's neck is. Look, most people aren't hard to strangle. Alex Jones would be. That's not praising him. That's just being honest. Great. So during the day, there would be speakers, you know, Alex Jones, and you'd kind of see people split up into whatever their specific brand of fuckery is there's like groups of nerdy looking groipers um there were some trad cats wearing robes those guys were fun god damn it but yeah a lot of it's you know confused like boomers on facebook and kind of to robert's point like i i normally didn't

go you know wearing press credentials because i value knives being outside of me and not inside of yeah it's it's good to not get stabbed most people appreciate that yeah yeah it's one of my favorite things and so i'd get to like talking to these people especially the older ones because i take the metro into the city and they are i mean they're just confused old people uh who've gotten in over their heads but yeah and like the sun would set and that's when the proud boys would really start uh getting into shit uh november 14th they stabbed i don't know if i'm remembering this correctly so feel free to fact check me but i believe it was two people on the 14th uh they cracked a girl's skull and then on december 12th uh they stabbed one other person and jeremy bertino got belayed on the street he sure did

he sure did and the fucking da elected not to prosecute because that was the clearest case of self-defense i have ever seen in my life um yeah so like like the dude literally tried to flee three times he drew his knife after by the third time he was blinded by having a shirt pulled and assaulted by a group he had no other choice yeah yeah he did exactly what you're supposed to do in that situation and repeatedly tried to flee and when he didn't he stabbed a motherfucker and you can't i i can't he did nothing wrong in my in my opinion the da's opinion yeah yeah we're all probably better off for it but yeah there's this kind of established uh there was this established sort of

cycle of show up a bunch of weird republican politicians that you've never heard of before give speeches you go and kind of wander around and then the proud boys come out and they fuck around

and sometimes other groups too like January the night before January 6th there were people from NSC 131 who were hanging out trying to cause trouble, getting in altercations, all their normal shit. And so, yeah, there's this kind of like general mix of groups. January 6th shifted the paradigm on that a lot. And I think that's the big thing for this weekend is we don't really know what it's gonna look like yeah can you talk about kind of what has kind of the event promotion looked like from the right like what have they what messages have they been putting

out to promote this event with so yeah a lot of like the bigger groups have been fairly explicitly saying, like, don't go, officially. Unofficially is a bit of a different story. And in fairness, it's worth noting that prior to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the Proud Boys were saying, don't go. And an awful lot of their most violent members were at Unite the Right in Charlottesville you know it some some of this is a plausible deniability game yeah so like the official

proud boys telegram channel was like oh this is i mean in different words but we're pretty much like this is a honeypot this is a trap this is an op don't go um but also like we've seen activity that really suggests otherwise. Whether it's smaller, more local groups saying that they want to go, or streamers and journalists, using the word lightly, who have pretty close relationships with these groups, hiring extra streamers for the weekend, or looking like they're preparing to report on something big. Yeah, the kind of, I know we've talked a little bit online

with some of our colleagues, and there's definitely a mixed opinion on how big the event's going to be and who's all going to be there and what kind of their goal is which makes kind of everything all the more tense because you know it's almost easier to when we know what it's going to be like we like we have a good grasp on what's going to happen and this we're not really sure um do you do you know has there been any kind of response from like local dc officials like like law enforcement or anything about what they're going to do at this uh gathering so i did see capitol police is planning to put the fence

back up um probably a good idea yeah yeah which like will cover the capitol but there's also a problem with the fence going up which is the back of the fence goes right up to the end of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC, which has been used as kind of a rallying point for antifascist activists, and when that fence is up, it's just... it's a funnel. So it goes like... this isn't a visual medium there's a street uh and that's where black lives matter plaza is and there's only two exits and both those exits lead to hotels that proud boys and chuds love to stay in so what happens almost without fail is people go and hang out in the plaza you know chuds come down the streets, police form a line, and it's pretty much a pre-made kettle.

Right. So that's, like, not good. It's good for the Capitol, but it's not good for the people that'll be on the ground. there's been some organizing locally and even anti-fascists from around the country trying to put out advice and feelers on what to do for this specific gathering.

And I know there's been a decent amount of there's always debate and conflict around how much to show up, where to show up, how pro-act people should be. But because this is the first big rally since J6,

I feel like a lot of people feel it's much more important. There's a heightened sense around this specific thing. Do you know how many people are roughly planning to show up on the anti-fascist side? It's really hard to tell. DC anti-fascist actions, I've seen a couple dozen people in block towards close to 100. From what I've heard, the main counter-demo that's happening is definitely less radical.

And it's kind of trying to establish sort of a community space thing. So I would say, I don't know, expect around 40 to 50 people who are there to throw hands.

Yeah. And a lot more people who are just kind of there. I mean, it's this thing we saw. I was in D.C. for Unite the Right 2, you know? The second rally. And it didn't turn into much of a thing, I think because of the preparation and the expectation. And I guess I'm interested if you think I'm wrong on this,

but my current expectation is that maybe that might be the most likely outcome because of the degree of... The unexpected event already occurred and was awful. I'm not expecting anyone will be given free leash.

You know? Yeah, I could definitely see that sort of unite the right to scenario playing out especially because it is very similar like there was this massive shocking event that kind of yeah uh hit the whole nation's attention yeah and so then people will i think the only big difference is like in the aftermath of Unite the Right, you kind of saw at times a misguided media focus, but still a media focus and anti-fascists, which is still, I mean, you know, that's always a thing that may happen. they see someone they see the people who killed ashley babbitt when the dc police look at these chuds they're the people who beat someone beat one of their co-workers to death and you know like there's capital police not same as d. Metro Police, but in the minds of both these groups, that doesn't really matter. And I worry about the tension there.

I don't care if they mace each other. If the Proud Boys and cops mace each other, then that's a great day for me. But if it escalates further, and we're seeing that more and more the past what's it the past two kind of major right-wing rallies in the pacific northwest have had shots fired yep yep yep one it had every every recent pNW protest has involved gunfire. Yeah.

And, like, the one... The August 22nd one had... I guess... I guess you could call it a legitimate exchange of fire. A very brief exchange, yeah. Yeah, a casual gunfight. I mean, the start of it was not legitimate. The right-winger who fired was not legitimate. But the two people on the left who responded were doing so in self-defense. Now, what happened a couple of weeks later from the video that's come out was not self-defense. It was a guy shooting at somebody, pursuing them from like 50 feet back. It was not legally what you would call self-defense for certain.

legally what you would call self-defense for certain yeah and that kind of the precedent that that set uh which i i think it's happened few enough times that we can't really say that it's it's the norm or anything like that but it's still it's an escalation it's yeah something absolutely is did like if that if that had happened in 2017 when unite the right happened like that would have been unprecedented it's very frightening you know and it it should be it doesn't matter what you think about the morality of of shooting tiny you know or whatever exchanges of fire becoming more common is a threat to everybody and it is something that should concern everybody yeah i mean it reminds me a lot of and this was kind of the impetus of the first season of it could happen here but like the early days of something like the syrian civil

war where it went from protests to exchanges of gunfire to you know what it is now yeah do you think dc's specific gun laws um will make gunfire in dc a little bit less likely do you think or i know like still like the police always have that capacity if they feel um you know if if they choose to but more specific on like the right between people i don't know it's like you know boogs are going to show up or whatever um what kind of talk do you see around firearms so yeah kind of just from experience i think my worry with dc's gun laws is only one side will be armed uh every time that Chuds come to DC, I mean, they are obviously carrying. I mean, every single

one of them is printing. You can tell that they have firearms on them. They don't really try to hide it, and none of them have ever, I mean, I guess, apart from Tario getting arrested for illegal magazines,

like, none of them have really faced any consequences for that. And the general fear among people on the left is, well, even if I do come and I carry for self-defense, if I get arrested for something unrelated, that'll enhance whatever charges I get. Yeah. No, it's sketchy and it's um i don't i'm not convinced in the situation dc is in specifically that showing up with a fucking firearm is is the

right call you know i'm not in this business to lecture people but i'm not convinced that's going to help in the pacific northwest we've seen situations where people with weapons as on the 22nd defended themselves and others and we've seen situations in which people on the web with weapons on the left escalated things so it's not a it's never a zero-sum game you know it's not it's not a simple issue right gun is a neutral tool you know yeah and i don't want to like i don't want it to come off like i'm encouraging you know every person in block to show up with a long gun good lord like that no because that would be a fucking disaster most likely but also like i i don't like the idea of you know looking at a line of proud boys or something and knowing every single one of these people has a gun,

and I do not. That's kind of like an imbalance of force that I don't like if things do escalate. Yeah. No, that's completely reasonable, in my opinion. But yeah, I think the big thing is just there's so many unknowns. But yeah, I think the big thing is just there's so many unknowns.

We've never really... There's not much of a historical precedent for group tries to overthrow the government, group shows back up in DC months later, or elements of the same kind of ideology. Yeah. Yeah, we just don't know. I mean, even, like, I think the Unite the Right 2 example is similar, but also, like, markedly different enough that I don't know if it's an all-encompassing tool

for, like, this is what it's going to look like. Yeah, is there any, any like specific players that you know is gonna show up or or have like said that they're gonna show up so one that i kind of worry about is um oh i'm gonna get fucking tweets for this god damn it um so there's a group in virginia that you may have heard of, BLM 757. Oh, God, these guys. No, yeah, I know who you're talking about, yeah. They are based out of the Virginia Beach area,

and they are the biggest pain in the ass ever. They work with, they claim to be a Black Lives Matter organization. Yeah. The local Black lives matter organizations have denounced them they work with boogaloo boys they were very tight with mike dunn before he uh snitched and dropped off the face of the earth snitched on people yeah um and then yeah they they come and i don't like the idea of them coming to a town that is not familiar with them.

Because they come to Richmond, for example. And people are like, oh, there's BLM 757. We don't fuck with them. But they come to a town, or groups like this. Like NFAC, the Not Fucking Around Coalition, tried to come to DC. And these groups that are going to be armed, are going to want to dc and i these groups that are gonna be armed are gonna want to escalate and are gonna kind of try to slide in to like a counter demo or stick around like the more left leaning parts of the crowd and then could very quickly escalate things. So they're one that I'm worried about.

Some local Virginia militia movement players have been chatting about it. I haven't seen really that much in the way of definitive statements that they're going to go. And those guys don't really worry me. They're a bunch of nerds who like to play dress up in the woods mostly but yeah it's again it's just like these kind of unknowns yeah so just like not knowing who's gonna show up and what they're gonna do and where they'll be and yeah yeah like and this was a thing definitely it reminds me a lot of the first Stop the Steal rally, where we had more concrete groups saying, we're going to be there.

There was a lot more chatter about it on social media, but it was still kind of like, I don't know what range of the sort of right-wing ideological spectrum will be here. I know your QAnon uncle will be there but like for example on november 14th uh jason kessler was there the organizer of unite the right i literally bumped into jason kessler oh god like i was walking and my shoulder hit him and i looked up and i was like oh sorry dude and then i just kind of stopped and

i was like oh shit i recognize you yeah you're that famous piece of shit yeah but yeah so like it's kind of that same thing where we don't we really just don't have that much intel and it seems like you know people with access to more streams of information than us like the feds have been saying for i guess a couple months now like we're monitoring this situation we're like preparing to stop another january 6th which take it with a grain of salt it is the feds which, take it with a grain of salt, it is the feds, but also, like, part of me, a lot of the worry I get from this is people that I know know more than I do reacting to it.

Like, chud streamers hiring stringers, feds announcing months before that it's a situation that they're preparing for. A lot of people are very interested in what's going to happen. I think people are definitely preparing for a lot of different outcomes. And that makes any kind of resistance to it hard because you don't know

if you're over-preparing, under-preparing. You don't know if you'll have what you'll need. If your preparations are too aggressive or not aggressive enough, yeah. Yeah, and always trying to feel it out once you're there is more scary because once you're there in person, a lot of communications break down

between other activists. That's what happened in the last big rally in Portland is people tried to change up plans once they got to the spot and it kind of made everything a lot more challenging because a lot of people on block don't have their phone on them. It's hard to get rides. Any kind of impromptu organizing at the site,

it's always going to be way more challenging than trying to figure this stuff out at home. And yeah, that's just kind of, I don't know. I think the Unite the Right 2 background is useful for a big event after a previous event that had a lot of coverage and had a lot of talk about it because it had a disastrous outcome. And then I think looking at November 14th and December 10th are also kind of valuable indicators. Have you seen anything around the Groypers or any of the Fuentes crew showing up to this? Or are they trying to keep good optics, I guess?

As far as I've seen, they're mostly trying to keep good optics around this. That makes sense. They also kind of fall into the category of people I'm not super worried about like some of them yeah but in like a street fight situation in a street fight less so yeah i'm not worried about a groiper yeah like the most violent encounter i've ever had with a groiper was one that was probably five feet tall, following

me around and calling me a soy boy for 30 minutes. Yeah, what I'm more concerned about is groipers kind of following the incel terrorism tradition of, you know, skinny white guys getting access to weapons and then doing something.

Yeah, any man with a gun is dangerous. Yeah, like, they're not gonna be dangerous. Yeah, like, they're not going to beat you. Yeah, here, finish what you were saying, Garrison. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, you know, all of the Grapers I've seen, they're not going to beat me in a fistfight, because they're all even more, even more lengthy than I am.

I was going to say, because you're fast as shit, but yeah. And that, and that, yeah. Yeah, I think that's kind of another thing that's always a possibility with these things. I always say the worst possible outcome is someone starts shooting.

A firefight is always the worst way this could go. But with the sort of optics surrounding this, I think there's definitely space for more extreme people, specifically more accelerationist-minded people, to try to start something, to try to cause some shit. I mean, like I said, I'm in Virginia.

I think of the Richmond gun rally in, or lobby day in, what was that, 2019? Beginning of 2020. I forget. All time is a flat circle to me now. But the members of the base that were intercepted on their way to richmond uh i think about that situation and how other people and other groups uh that we will not talk about on pod could see an opportunity here yeah and i think that's i think that's more likely happening in somewhere like D.C. than it is in Portland, right? Because in Portland, we have a pretty good grip on who shows up and why they show up.

The East Coast, the South, Northeast, Southeast, they have a lot more groups with obscure ideologies that are more prone to those types of more insurgent attacks than I think people are on the West Coast. Yeah, and I think another thing that kind of amplifies that is, like you said, Portland has kind of an established infrastructure of chud fuckery sure do it you know i mean i i'm on the other side of the country and i know the familiar faces of portland bullshit and we we do have that to an extent but dc brings people from all across the country. I was meeting people on the metro from everywhere from Tennessee to Kansas to California.

And when people are coming in from such a broad range of places, there's a lot more uncertainty. Yeah, well, I'm not sure and anything else you want to mention about kind of what you expect at this rally and any i don't know general advice as since you've been at the past three versions yeah so i mean if you're in the dc area or you're nearby and you're comfortable with it and physically able to do so i show up um the one thing that we do know for sure about these events is that the more bodies we have, the less likely it is for people to be able to prey on someone walking home from work or a houseless person just trying to sleep. Yeah.

or a houseless person just trying to sleep. Yeah. The more bodies that we have, the better it is. If you are either unable to come or you don't feel comfortable coming, I know that there will be jail support, mutual aid efforts, and Garrison, I can send you some links to local DC orgs if you want to throw it in the show notes

yeah just and if you're gonna go be prepared have have a buddy lock up bring an IFAC and get ready to party yeah I think one of the things you mentioned is like Lock up, bring an IFAC, and get ready to party.

Yeah, I think one of the things you mentioned is more numbers helps in the case of it's less likely there'll be roaming attacks. Because that's what we've seen at a lot of these rallies is that sometimes they don't ever actually cause trouble at where the people are. They wait until people are walking away or going back to their car. Or if there's no one like that, they just find some random person on the street. You know, we saw a lot of that in DC of, of Proud Boys, just finding kind of people in the area that they thought looked like Antifa, quote unquote, and then just attacking them. Um, so, you know, the, the less scattered people are, people are the less likely you'll get kind of those

roaming attacks yeah I think it's always hard to speculate on an event that hasn't happened yet but I believe by the time this airs it'll be happening tomorrow so Saturday Theo do you want to plug anything?

yeah you can find me on twitter at Theo Hansen, Theo with a zero. Listen to my podcast, Terrorism Bad. We look through portrayals of terrorism and extremism in popular media,

see how it holds up to the real world. Trying to think of anything else. I'll be there on Saturday. I'll be live tweeting the event. Uh, if I'm not live tweeting, good luck with that dead or otherwise incapacitated, or I don't have cell service. One of the cell service is always horrible at these things.

Oh, it's awful. Yeah. It's a constant problem. Yeah. Yeah. They, they were blocking signals on January 6th on the Capitol lawn.

And when I stepped off, I had like 13 texts from all my friends. They were like, hey, text me if you're still alive. It's really hard to tell what's going on, you know, when you're in. Like whether or not it's like a cell signal problem or if it's somebody like targeting you in particular. It's frustrating. Yeah. All right.

Well, thank you in particular. It's frustrating. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, CEO. Thank you for giving us the rundown on Saturday's activities. I hope you don't get shot. Thank you. I hope I do not as well. That's my general feeling towards anyone who shows up on the 18th in D.C. I hope you don't get shot. Do your best.

If you do get shot, know what to do about it. Have an IFAC. Have a tourniquet. Have some cell locks. That's ideal. Not getting shot is better. You cannot get shot. Try not to get shot.

Thanks for having me on, guys. Nice to meet for having me on guys thanks nice to meet you robert and sophie nice to meet you you can uh follow us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram and at cool zone media for all the things and we'll be back monday hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. 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.

Thanks for listening. of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno 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 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.

And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.