It Could Happen Here - Robert's Guide to The Next Six Months of Danger and Resistance

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Robert walks through several of the likeliest scenarios for what we're going to see over the next six months to a year, from domestic unrest and fascism's next power grab to the age of weird terrorism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Sam Mullins and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about

radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast. It brings different creators to tell 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true.

This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Delama painting. We could do this together. Listen to The Set Up on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart, which they always seem to be these days. And in particular, this is an episode about what to expect out of the next six months to a year.

If you're not sure what else to do, try and spread calm. I first learned this lesson back in 2016, hanging out with perennial libertarian presidential candidate Vermin Supreme during the protests around that year's Democratic convention in Philadelphia. If you've never had the pleasure of seeing Vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations. Those lessons came in handy, for me, back in 2020. But the George Floyd uprising is now almost five years in the past. Trump is,

once again, in power. Very little seems to stand between him and the exercise of a kind of arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders, but has often sponsored elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more. The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the next six months to a year. What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available and numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers, and retired law enforcement.

There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question. Is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast essay titled �Don't Panic.� It was my most shared episode of this podcast that year, and I felt pretty good about the response. Until Trump won again, and I found it briefly impossible to take my own advice. Since January of 2025, the fascist takeover has only accelerated, and I have lost count of the number of people who've asked me, is it time to panic? The answer to that is still no.

But not because there's no reason to panic. In fact, panic is a natural reaction to our present moment. If your fight or flight reflexes haven't been triggered, well, they might be broken. Even so, don't panic. Because in combat, in disasters, in any dangerous situation you might find yourself, panic is what will kill you as surely as anything else. There's a concept in military theory I bring up often, something introduced to soldiers undergoing training today, it's called the Oda Loop.

It describes the process people go through while acting and reacting under fire, and particularly, while deciding how to act and react under fire. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. If you can interrupt any part of that loop, you can stop your enemy from fighting back effectively. The basic principle of the Oda loop functions on the grand strategy scale as well as it does in a gunfight. This is the point behind the Fled the Zone strategy, orchestrated by Stephen Miller and

the other intellectual luminaries behind Trump 2. The fire hose of outrage is to distract you from observing everything that's happening, to keep you off balance so you can't orient yourself, to stop you from deciding and acting. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit cannon. AI accelerated the spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst nightmares. And this has helped blind and divide the people who should have linked arms to stop this shit before it got to the point that it's at today. I want you to think of how many prominent leftists have fallen repeatedly for right-wing

propaganda like that Russia would never invade Ukraine, or that Trump might actually be somehow better for Gaza. These and a million other things have blinded and hobbled potential resistance. I might also bring up the whole MAGA Communist movement, but the less said about those people, the better. Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like the Times have fallen for every hyped-up story about transgender athletes or woke kids on college campuses, and the danger the illiberal left poses to free speech.

They've denied genocide and demonized those who protest against it, and too many elected Democrats have taken their lead as the path of least resistance. Many have pulled right for reasons far more sinister. The fact that Gavin Newsom, governor of California, is hosting fascists on his new podcast while mailing burner phones to tech CEOs points towards something dark, immediate, deadly. We live now in the culmination of a successful decades-long plot to, in the words of Curtis

Yarvin, repeal the 20th century and turn this nation into a dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money or invested in Facebook back in like 2005. The early stages of the plan, of course, date back well before Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. They began when a coalition of would-be oligarchs tried to overthrow FDR in what has become known as the Business Plot and were thwarted by a Marine general named Smedley Butler.

These men wanted revenge for the New Deal, but they found seizing power at the top harder than they'd hoped. And so they embarked on a slower, bottom-up approach. Hence the John Birch Society, the creation of countless think tanks and the generations-long effort to stack the Supreme Court. The war on abortion was a concerted step towards this plan, an artificial creation alongside the birth of the religious right as a political coalition. There was initially a small group of men at the center of the web, guys like William Regnari

I and William Regnari II, or Paul Weyrich. But the engine of cultural and political change forged from the late 40s to the 1970s was so successful that at some point it became self-perpetuating. And when a gaggle of tech bros found themselves with more wealth than any humans had ever held, the machine was there to mold them. And to be used by them. It's all worked so damn well that many people I know have lost hope entirely. We're fucked, goes the script.

They're gonna send us to the camps, and they can't be stopped, at least not without apocalyptic bloodshed. Well, that's not necessarily so. Now, people have already died as a result of this administration, a lot of them, and that will continue to happen. But a collapse into total carnage is not inevitable, nor is a future that offers us nothing but a boot upon our necks. Despite the money that went into building this is a new house made with cheap materials, and there are already cracks in the foundation. So my first prediction

for the coming months is this. The cracks will widen. And we'll talk about that, but first, as we're obligated to do, here's some ads. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure.

We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Israel Gutierrez and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions.

From the building of the core that included Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the sport. I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down. Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive,

in large part because of a scrawny six-foot-two Hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Russmore for guys that have changed it. Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. This is Dubb Dynasty. The Dubb's Dynasty is still very much alive. Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Sonoro and iHeart's MyCultura podcast network present The Setup, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life... Well, I guess I'm saying I like you.

You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you. To get the Delano painting, we could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close. And jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito.

But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando's never going to love you as much as he loves this dog. ["The Last Post-Credit Scene"] Chulito, that painting is ours. Listen to The Setup as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are we ready to fight?

I'm ready to fight. Is that what I thought it was? Oh, this is fighting words. Okay. I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words.

We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of Black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history.

Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Trump and the men who swim in his wake signal only strength. Honesty is neither in their interest nor a strong suit, but Curtis Yarvin, chief prophet of the Neo-Reactionaries and Peter Thiel's pet philosopher, is in a different position. He knows people in power listen to some of what he has to say, and over the last few months his profile has risen enormously. I can take credit for at least tiny amount of that.

Many normal liberals and elected Democrats now know who he is. This exposes him to a danger that was not present for him during Trump's first term. If the current fascist salient should be pushed back and this movement fails, there could be and should be prosecutions, and he rightly fears that if this happens, he might follow in the footsteps of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi high theoretician who was executed at Nuremberg. That's why, on March 6th, he published a messy, sprawling, 7,000-word essay titled Barbarians and Mandarins in his trademark, nigh-unreadable style.

It comes with the subheading, As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. If you want to spare yourself the headache of reading through one-tenth of a novel of Yarvin's, at best, turgid prose, there's a good article by the nerd Reich that breaks all this down. We'll link it in the show notes. But the gist is that Yarvin thinks Musk and Trump have been too slow, have embraced too many half measures, and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards disaster. Quote, unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate.

It cannot stay at its current level of power, which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes." Now the weeks since have seen massive and rising public awareness of CICOT, the terrorism detention facility in El Salvador being used as a concentration camp by the Trump regime. This might rightly be called a new and unprecedented abuse. But there's a couple of issues here, at least as far as Yarvin sees them.

For one thing, the people targeted there have been migrants. People who are in the U.S. either illegally or in the U.S. on visas that have been revoked, people who have been accused of being part of Trinidad, but not the people that Yarvin wants to see liquidated. Because as he writes in this column, the thing that he thinks the Trump administration should be doing right now is quite literally gassing media personalities and politicians who don't align with his viewpoint, basically literally killing the opposition. And since he's shown to be unwilling to do that, the fact that he's shipping

people to concentration camps on its own isn't terrifying enough. The other thing that's concerning, Yarvin, is that while the use of this facility in El Salvador as a foreign concentration camp by the Trump regime is terrifying and is unprecedented, it's also been met with a significant response, one that burges on unprecedented itself. I'm not just talking about the protests, or of the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering a temporary halt to such deportations. I'm referring to something else that's happened, due to the sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our President has a concentration camp and has been talking about shipping US citizen

dissidents there. I'm talking about stuff like the fact that formerly conservative columnist Bill Kristol is now calling for the outright abolition of ICE, and the arch-neoliberal mealy-mouth David Brooks calling for a general strike in the pages of the New York Times while quoting from the Communist Manifesto. This is more than just a vibe shift, it's an open realization and acceptance by prominent people who are neither radical nor revolutionaries that any action, even the formerly unimaginable, might be necessary and justified in this regime.

Make no mistake, first off, this is because a lot of these people are worried about their own privileges going away under a dictatorial regime. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a crack in the very foundation of the authoritarian power structure. Yarvin is scared, then, because we weren't supposed to be here now. Harvard was supposed to have folded like Columbia, and then have been slowly and quietly liquidated. The tame press was supposed to turn wholly for the regime or be disappeared, not quote Karl Marx and urge people into the streets to do a general

strike. So I don't find all this cheery because I think David Brooks is going to become shithead Che Guevara. I am braced, however, by the failure that this represents for the men above us who seek unchecked dominance. Cracks are also visible in the recent history of Elon Musk, who has watched the value of the stock that underpins his whole empire collapse. He fought desperately to convince Trump not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it further. The result? We see Trump assuring his inner circle that Elon is on the way out, while Musk himself

prepares to step back from Doge in the hope that it will somehow protect the remainder of his ambitions. These are all good signs, and the damage will continue to spread. However, and this brings me to my next prediction, the Empire's gonna strike back. We are in for a hot summer, my friends, and there's no way around that. I mean this in the literal sense that it will probably be the hottest summer on record, although that fact will be true of every subsequent summer in our lives. But I also mean this in the sense that things are going to cook off in the streets very soon.

This is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to see. Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the Insurrection Act, not only at the border but to send US troops into US cities to crush riots and punish leftist demonstrators. This was a desire hatched in reaction to the George Floyd uprising, and it always seems to be envisioned by the right as targeted against black-clad Antifa types. The reality is that anti-fascists have not been a consistent presence on the ground around the country for some time, at least not organizing in the way that they were back when Antifa was a buzzword. There are numerous reasons for this,

but the biggest is that the fascist movement has moved beyond waving flags in the street and getting into fistfights to try and scare people. A lot of them are running federal law enforcement agencies in the military now. Proud Boys just ain't a priority. Not for those on the left who want to stop this, or frankly, for the administration. I expect protests around the country in the coming months for several reasons, but the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption is a rise in food prices and the rise of everything else in price, as well as a collapsing economy courtesy of the President's tariffs. There are already numerous signs of this, both in terms of the volume of shipping coming into the United States and early signs of collapsing crop yields in the United States.

And this is where a study of history helps one out, because nothing but nothing brings down regimes like rising bread prices. And any attempt to crack down will be stymied by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites who backed Trump before will be suffering too. Obviously, the people closest to him are making bank off the economic upswings and downswings over the whole tariff issue, but there's a lot of other people, people who supported him, people who thought he had their back, who aren't quite close enough to power, and they're watching Trump shoot their own fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free trade.

I won't pretend to know where things are going to pop off or will be the hottest, but the evidence shows the regime at least expects Washington, D.C. to play a central role in what comes next. Republican Congress members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal D.C. self-rule, and Trump appointed Ed Martin to be the city attorney, a man who, in the words of USA Today columnist Chris Brennan, quote, lacks experience, but loves revenge. Now, the fact that Elon Musk and his Doge cronies left so many in the city and the surrounding

area unemployed after their purge of the administrative state, means that there's an even higher number of motivated, angry people with free time and experiencing, organizing large, complex systems who have nothing to do right now. A similar set of circumstances brought us to the 2020 uprisings. This was not just a product of the months of isolation or of the brutality of George Floyd's murder, but of the sheer number of people who were out of work and who were finally given a chance to take out their anxiety at an authoritarian president tightening his grip. And today, that grip is even tighter, and the danger more real. We have a president openly discussing his desire to put American citizens in a foreign

concentration camp. Trump and his inner circle are hoping for protests that stay isolated to D.C. and perhaps a few major blue cities, Portland and the like. This would provide an opportunity to send in the troops to utilize the Insurrection Act to shoot people in the street, and to send some ringleaders off to El Salvador. This would be the riskiest option for Trump in some ways. Pete Hegseth has not been a competent or popular Secretary of Defense, and asking US troops to fire on protesters opens up the risk that some junior officer might balk at that order,

which could create a cascading chain of disobedience. Such things have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout history. There's also the chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the cradle. So we might call this the high risk, high reward option, and I should note that Donald Trump has, more than a few times in the past, chosen the high risk, high reward option. So I don't consider this unlikely. But it won't be lost on Trump or his cronies that the violence which met the first protest

in 2020 provoked the largest domestic uprising in living memory. People have not forgotten this, and some blue state Democrats have even made, let's say, confusing noises to that effect. Case in point, Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington just signed a bill barring other state National Guard units from entering Washington without his approval, unless they were mobilized by the President. Now, as that last part might key you in on, this bill doesn't have a lot of legal force, or any really at all, but it's a sign that even fairly milquetoast-elect Democrats are starting to consider the real possibility of a federal invasion of their states.

The President has discussed sending out-of of state troops into blue cities before, largely in the context of cracking down on immigration and sanctuary cities. This is all dangerous language, but going further than just language carries risk for the regime, too. I would not be shocked if we were to see the Texas National Guard, or whoever, whichever state, occupying, let's say, Chicago, after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats that have been made by members of the Trump administration to arrest governors who aid and abet undocumented migrants, like

J.B. Pritzker. And an act like that would surely spark mass protests in Chicago and very likely elsewhere. The fact that a move like that would have such a risk of sparking mass resistance, as well as further legal challenges, might keep the Trump administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous outrages, at least for the time being. And if that's the route they choose, I think something different might be likely, and I call this potential path forward. The pressure cooker. And we'll talk about that, but first, here's more ads. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.

And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it?

A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, D***less Me

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sonoro and iHeart's MyCultura Podcast Network present The Set Up, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Set Up follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life. Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true.

This is a con. I'm conning you. To get the gelato painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close. And jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito.

But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. That painting is hours. Listen to the set as part of the Mike with the podcast network available on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez and I'm hosting a new podcast dub dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade.

From the building of the core that included clay Thompson and Draymond green to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the sport. I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down. Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive,

in large part because of a scrawny six foot two hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Rushmore for guys that have changed it. Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. This is Dubb Dynasty. The Dubb's Dynasty is still very much alive.

Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. As you always have. Is that what I thought it was? Oh, this is fighting words. Okay.

I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of black history or queer history,

any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. the teaching of Black history, queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people have never, ever, depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. When public unrest exploded in 2020, it did so after four solid years of buildup. If you'll remember, the earliest fascist-antifascist street clashes of that period started before the 2016 election. These were largely focused around speeches at campuses by right-wing provocateurs and dueling demonstrations in a handful of cities. The first wave of such activity crested in Charlottesville 2017 with tragic results. But the vibe it set and the people it trained continued to take part in street actions,

and many of them formed the infrastructural core of the movement that exploded onto the scene after George Floyd's murder. The last year of serious protests have focused more on the genocide in Gaza than anything, and it's not coincidental that the first wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took part in those demonstrations. Since Trump took office and Doze started doing its thing, there have been more large scale demos that focus directly on the regime. These have been quite manageable from the regime's point of view and they have not yet

attracted the same kind of crackdown, but that won't remain the case as people grow more desperate. Any fool can see that the apparatus of repression constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on Democrats, former federal employees, and people who are just hungry and pissed about rising food prices. However, this represents another tightrope scenario for the regime. These demonstrations are large, and unlike student protests against Israel, the media has proved less eager to marginalize the participants as extremists.

As time goes on and things get worse, folks who last year scoffed at college students occupying campus buildings made themselves consider if perhaps it might be time to fuck some shit up. This will be an uneven process, with sudden leaps forward and pulls back, and it will provoke an equally uneven state response. There will be attempts to send so-called instigators and organizers overseas, to El Salvador unless the public reaction to this, which is building as I type, continues to escalate to the extent that it becomes unfeasible.

If so, there are ample domestic locations to detain, or even disappear, those the regime considers dangerous. First on the chopping block will be the people whose heads are currently closest to the blade, organizers and demonstrators against genocide whose citizenship is not at all in question. I expect if large, disruptive demonstrations do threaten the administration's hold, they will also start to target Antifa again, which will start with the targeting of long-time activists, many of whom would have been people arrested or at least heavily surveilled in 2020. However, it won't end there, and it will quickly expand to elected Democrats, new people organizing protests, folks who have never had anything to do with any of the kind of anti-fascist actions that so captivated Fox News back in 2020. I will be shocked if we make it

more than another year without a serious attempt to brand Antifa a domestic terror organization, and if that succeeds in a way that has legal force, then the fact that there is no such organization won't matter. Trump's feds will do what we've watched ICE do with Trinidad. They'll break down the door of whoever they wish, argue tattoos or possessions of certain literature or whatever as proof of membership, and then those who survive the raids will find themselves in the most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them in. If things follow what I suspect is the likeliest path, we will watch this process ebb and flow over the next several months. Each spring and summer protests will grow

and peak in the hottest months, with new cities and tactics being attempted regularly by groups constantly reeling from raids that are devastating and terrifying but, due to the incompetence of an FBI whose investigative capacity has been neutered, fail to really disrupt things. As the weather cools off, exhausted activists will lick their wounds and make new plans. Scattered acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual cells will occur year round, but I expect large-scale demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement to follow a pattern not so different from what Afghanistan veterans knew as fighting season.

Hot summers of mass activity, winters of raids and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's offensive. And as time goes on, the energy will build, the tension will build, and of course, we might find ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not too distant future, perhaps a year or two down the line. Now, of course, none of this will occur in a vacuum or independent of the news churn that we've been drowning in for years. And this brings me to my next prediction, which is the coming of politics as unusual.

I apologize for coming back to the David Brooks of it all, but seeing a man who in 2017 wrote that Trump had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over him, and then wrote a column attacking millennials for their tribalism, call for a general strike is a sign, and it's not a sign that Brooks has gotten smarter, it's a sign that we've entered radical times, and that radicalization spares not even the centrist. If the worst-case scenario occurs, and a few weeks from now U.S. soldiers are gunning down demonstrators while ICE officers cart elected Democrats off to CICOT, feel free to disregard this passage. But if the somewhat slower path prevails, I expect to see more politicians and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left, or at least away, from the dissolving center.

We've watched this process occur on the right during the Biden years, and to a degree it is still occurring out of a fear of reprisals under the Trump regime. I'm finalizing the script on the day 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens stepped down over interference from Paramount executives into his coverage of Donald Trump. But the polls have started moving against the right. Trump's public approval on immigration policy is underwater for the first time in years, and his approval on everything else is, while not always at record lows, diving with significant speed. The next several months of shipping data, as well as concerning early reporting on farm yields, suggests a near future in which a lot less will be available for everyone.

We saw what a rising price of eggs did to Biden. We've also seen Senator Chris Van Hollen go almost overnight from a marginal figure in US politics to one of the most famous Democrats in the nation, all because he had the modest courage to fly to El Salvador and call the President's use of a foreign black site what it was. There will be more people like Van Hollen, who display courage previously unseen in a moment of trial. But much more than that, there will be opportunists, those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval of crowds more willing to countenance radical action in the streets than they were a year ago. Most politicians, and most thought leaders in the old media, are reactive, and I'm not

saying that this will change. Merely that what they react to will change, because of who is in charge now, and because of the desperation of the times brought on by Republican policies, which is going to paint a target on the backs of conservative leaders as large as the targets they've been painting on the backs of dissidents. And all of this means one thing, which is, we're approaching the age of weird terror. So much has happened in this shitty, stupid year that I think we've all forgotten, 2025 opened with a military veteran blowing himself up in a cyber truck

in front of the Trump Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. His reasoning was based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered in his service as it was on his exposure to right-wing propaganda, which convinced him that the Democrats needed to be dealt with. But he saw things clearly enough to know that yet another mass shooting or self-immolation or even a run-of-the-mill bomb wouldn't have garnered him or his manifesto any attention. So instead, he picked a cyber truck and a Trump building, symbols of the two most viral men of our very stupid era, and he blew one of those up in front of the other.

And by gummit, we all did pay attention. For a few days at least. Late last year, an anonymous gunman, the government believes to be Luigi Mangione, was even more successful at holding our attention, with an even stranger attack, a brazen and nigh perfectly executed assassination carried out by a man with a dazzling smile, and the wisdom to pick the most universally hated target that exists today, a healthcare CEO. We have all watched so many mass shootings at schools, at grocery stores, nightclubs, everywhere imaginable, that they've lost the ability to shock us.

But targeted assassinations of people at the top of the food chain are so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs. And sheer, rollicking strangeness, like we saw in Vegas, has a captivating power all its own. We will see more of both kinds of attacks in the months to come. The arson attempt on Governor Shapiro's home, bizarre at least for the extensive damage done, might be seen as another data point on this list. But as new figures rise to prominence, within new protest movements, we will see attempts

to kill them. Furious and deranged Trump supporters armed with cars and guns and Trump-branded pocket dives will do as they've been doing. And this part won't be new. What I do expect will be new is the increased threat felt by the oligarchs at the top of the system, as intelligent and patient young people continue to plot ways to go after them in the places and times where they feel invulnerable. And I also expect that editors and journalists will continue to learn that these actions

draw eyeballs more than almost anything else. And while all that's going on, the truly unbalanced among us will find ways to hitchhike off the well-publicized turmoil coming our way and make their own confounding statements. There will be public suicides and attacks utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet imagine, at least not openly on a podcast without receiving a visit from some friendly alphabet boy or another. I don't know what exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very, very silly. And of course, as we talk about weird terrorism, I don't mean to discount the Nazi accelerationist

types here. They'll keep trying. But if they want to raise above the chatter in an even more crowded media ecosystem, even they're going to find ways to get weird with it. After all, an attack no one notices isn't likely to accelerate much of anything. And I guess that's what I've got right now. I've got 10 pages or so on what I see coming. I didn't come up with a smooth, sexy ending for this like a writer should because I'm tired and

thinking about this isn't fun, but I did a lot and there you are. I suppose the thing you're asking now is what the fuck do I do about it? And you know, that's what we talk about a lot on this show. Organize with your friends, get involved, find ways to help people, take a stop the bleed class, and for the love of God, keep your eyes open. If What Happened Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty, true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. That spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling.

From Campside Media and iHeart podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brendan Patrick Hughes My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast, The Setup.

The Setup follows a lonely museum curator, but when the perfect man walks into his life, he actually is too good to be true. Listen to The Setup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions! Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive, in large part because of a scrawny 6'2 hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Rushhorn.

Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.