It Could Happen Here - School Boards: The New Fashy Frontline, Part 2

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

In part two we look at the modern origin and continued organizing efforts against "critical race theory", vax/mask mandates, and anti-LGBT+ presence in schools. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on right-wing attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups and also erode democratic institutions from the ground up catchy title yeah yeah that'll uh that'll click well oh i'm so glad we don't have to worry about clicking and titles. And that took up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison, back when back when the Internet was different.

Now we don't have to worry about that anymore. But what we do have to worry about are mobs of fascists attacking school board meetings. Yeah, it happens every week. It keeps happening more often. Yeah, boards are calling for assistance. They seem pretty. They seem pretty not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about all that. Yep.

So when we left off, I was talking about some things I found on the Gram telegram. Garrison, what's next? I'll go into my preliminary research on telegram and particularly response. Basically, I looked through every single telegram post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk on that mention school boards from the past two weeks. So, yeah, this is current stuff

ongoing. I got to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with, like the Western Chauvinist channel, which has 50,000 subs. The Stanford Students channel, which a one i was less familiar with specifically dedicated to this school board issue um one of the posts i we have on there is uh says your enemy isn't some far-off shithole country your enemy is just down the street

at your local school board meeting uh teaching your kids to hate their ancestors you and themselves so like again that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just right there um talking about yeah producing hollywood movies writing they're not even really a dog whistle no they're basically it's basically just a whistle yeah um so yeah they then they you know the same post talks about you know masks and shutting down businesses and the vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here and the fight is now. So just in terms of like, yeah, they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school board points. So like I found this, I found this post. This is a post from the Stanford Students channel. And I saw this one reshared in a lot of different channels. One of the other first ones that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkins' channel, CodeMonkeyZ.

He is one of the architects or one of the people who really pushed QAnon stuff into mainstream discourse. He's the guy who ran the physical infrastructure of 8chan and 8kun for years. Yeah, and he's trying to pivot into being like, having just his face be like a kind of alternative right-wing figure right now. He's running for office in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very

popular Telegram channel, and he made this post that had over a thousand comments on it, which is a lot for Telegram. A thousand comments on Telegram posts, especially Telegram posts of Code Mickey Z's size. I want to see how many subs it is. So just for context,

Ron Watkins has 432,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. So, yep. Anyway, CRT is being rebranded as SEL, social emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings, as you should be, do what you can to make sure you stop both SEL and CRT and make sure that they are banned in your school districts. so again just direct calls to action for getting people to show up to these school boards and also social emotional learning is not crt and of course crt is not even taught in schools i think everyone who listens to this podcast knows that crt actually critical race theory isn't taught in schools this isn't an actual thing it's it is like a legal theory we'll get into more of how this got like pushed towards the end i think chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

None of these things are actually real. It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about is people are teaching that racism is an issue that's built into a lot of American institutions and is an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past. That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call that CRT. Some of the comments from the Ron Watkins post, stuff like, these snowflakes are so annoying.

I'm about to start cutting power to any school in my community that teaches this. Great. So yeah, more again, that's just a direct threat of doing terrorism. I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise. Yeah. Does that make it better? No, it sure doesn't all right well i don't understand things the same way you zoomers do please continue yeah a lot of a lot of posts

being a shit around from channel to channel including just full nazi channels were um like trying to trying to of course like a lot of nazis are actually you know thought it was pretty funny that the that the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue. Of course they thought that was funny, but they're going to use this to spread into networks to be like, hey, the government wants to stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You, like regular folk, are being called terrorists because you're showing up at school boards, right? That's the kind of message that they're going to shoot out. So a lot of Nazi channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got shared around a lot

yeah yeah in trying to basically all tying critical race theory and you know if you protest against critical race theory they're calling you a domestic terrorist that that type of thing and this got this got shared in like the school boards channel and a whole bunch whole bunch of other stuff being being talking about how if if you if you stand up you're going to be a domestic terrorist you have to be brave and do this. A few days after the school board – not a few days. I guess this was in, like, October. The school board association retracted some of the words that they used in their letter

because of this backlash that was created. And this was also shared in lots of fascist channels uh the main one it was shared in that i saw was the honk pilled channel um which is just another type of pepe meme um yeah uh one of the other one of the other big big kind of groups active in this in this whole sphere and this has been a group going on for a while that we haven't talked about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually, is this group called White Rose. So White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been very successful in creating on-the-ground organizers who are regular people. They do a lot of sticker bombs in lots of neighborhoods. If you ever see an anti-COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a white rose sticker. These are, what was it? Like, 43?

Maybe? Maybe 44. Sophie Scholl was the person most associated with them. So they've taken the names of these heroes in order to... It's just disgusting. It's very gross.

There's a decent amount of researchers in this field who think that there's actual bad people behind White Rose. Of course, they're bad people because they're spreading COVID stuff, but more bad actors use basically astroturfing this thing. But White Rose deserves its own piece later. But because they have such a big following on Telegram, they are, of course, using the school board thing to gain more support they have about 50 000 subscribers to their specific telegram channel they they

shared a post uh a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents going out to their school boards and standing up for the children um and they they try to you know get people to do sticker bombs and stuff but the fact that that there's specifically calling out people on school boards is an extra step of beyond just putting stickers up in your neighborhood. Another White Rose post, they shared a video that was captioned as, Concerned parent absolutely destroys school board with facts. The school boards are the battlefield of our time this is how it's done and just the increasing rhetoric around like battlefields this is where like the fight is at all that kind of stuff um there was another uh the white white

chauvinist channel shared a video from uh fox news um and they they the western chauvinist uh channel which is again it's one of the most shared ones in this whole network, they captioned this saying, parents in Virginia are trying to fight back against the school board that is anti-white. Every school district in America needs to have an anti-mandate

pro-right parents running for the school board. So, that's just the, it's this type of stuff all over, and this post was the, it's this type of stuff all over. And this, this, this post was, uh, uh, got, it has like 11, 11,000, 11,000 views. Um, so these things are spreading to a lot of, a lot of these specific networks. And I mean, I, I have so many of this kind of stuff. I'm not going to go through every single one in detail. There's ones that are way more like openly antisemitic, uh, you know, saying, you know, the Jews that run, you know, X school board are trying to force vaccinations on every student over 12.

There's this fake Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram that's pretty popular. Someone who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood. Yeah, that makes sense. That spreads far-right stuff. Clint Eastwood. Yeah, that makes sense. He had a post that was shared a lot that started by saying, start taking over school boards, start taking over city councils, start taking over city boards, start being poll watchers, start being poll workers,

start taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote. So this is the other thing that we're going to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting isn't enough, you need to start doing more things. There is one of it yeah here here's here's one this is gonna this is referencing some of like the trans stuff i'll discuss in a bit i just want to tie it in now uh a post from the western chauvinist channel saying there is no political solution which is a a direct nazi a direct nazi line i mean, that's what, I did an article earlier this year on Riley Williams, the Nazi

who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot. And then like the video that we were able to identify her as a SIG-hiling Nazi. And that's how she opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a very common catchphrase

among like the, the fasc right. Yeah. So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like specific school board members harassing specific teachers there was this teacher in uh i think in california that was trying to like introduced like uh like anti-fascist type rhetoric and talking about how fascism is a modern thing they got absolutely bashed um and like doxxed um and they got i think fired because there was like hundreds of parents organizing on apps like telegram to harass this one teacher at school boards that you know they took over massive school board meetings and just talked about this one teacher endlessly um

and it was interesting because like all the parents were like yeah my i i got worried because my student actually really like liked the teacher and said that they were doing like giving really interesting points about systemic issues. And they brought their kids to the school board meetings. The kids are just standing in the back as their parents are ranting about this and talking about how the kids actually thought

they were learning things about systemic issues. And then that got people mad. You know what else gets people mad? Advertisements. Yeah. 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

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We're going to touch on the specifics. Like all the stuff we've been talking about, most of the modern, most of like the current organizing is a lot of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Like all of this, like, you know, the Stugelbord channel, all of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccines and mask stuff. Of course, there's critical race theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago. Right now it's a vaccine thing. The other kind of like ever-present thing is being upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that there are trans kids around your kids. This is a thing that's been, you you know a thing for years that people have

been fighting against and since the school board thing is becoming more popular people are are starting to uh bring basically do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues um one of like the more like astroturf type things was people getting mad that there were like two specific books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries um that one of it was like a uh like uh one of it was the memoir that robert mentioned the other one was like a graphic novel memoir about someone realizing they're genderqueer so these are books that are not in curriculums these are just books that are available at the library.

And basically there was people who found these out and turned it into a meme on Telegram essentially. People sharing information about this then you look it up to see if it's in your library. So then we have all of these coordinated attacks on school boards by these mobs of people all about these same

two books. And the goal is to not only just get the books, like, banned, but they're also trying to, like, fire or arrest the teachers and school board members for allowing these books to happen. There has been school board members who have, like, stepped down because of just how much harassment is about these things.

Quote from the Western Chauvinist Channel, Jesus Christ, straight-up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish school board member gets mad and tries to shut them down. How can you not connect the dots here? There's no political solution. Voting will not remove these people. There was the mayor of Houston.

So the mayor of Houston, Ohio, heard about this, and he went to a school board meeting and instructed all of the board members to resign, quoting the Proud Boy, Right-Wing Organizing Channel, Western Chauvinist. This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system called educators instructed kids to describe a sex scene that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course, this didn't happen. These books are not used in any kind of curriculum anyway.

So even if they were, we're not even in that reality. So the mayor of this town basically got these – instructed all these people to resign. I think in March, no, in August of this year, pride flags were banned at a school district inside southwest Oregon. I think around Newburgh, the Newburgh school district banned pride flags. So all this kind of stuff, and of course, that is in a lot of states. But again, the fact that it's in Oregon, a blue state, is people got made like you know there's like you know nbc articles about it because it's oregon it's not it's it's not it's it's not a red state so it's all big it's all portland it's all antifa right yeah yeah so again this stuff is not not not like contained to one thing and like yeah if you google the the stuff around these books if you google like genderqueer book uh school boards

you'll find this in so many school districts you'll see just mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming um and like like printing out giant like giant cardboard prints of of this comic book showing like like with like you know there's like a dick on it like there's like a drawn a drawn dick because that's what human bodies look like like you can look at like a lot of his like yeah like what are you gonna ban the statue of david because he has his dick out too like like come on like these are the same people who talk about like oh they're you know banning books burning books you know right there was that there was that tweet from James Woods about, these are the books that people want banned.

That means they're the most important ones. But these people love burning books. These people love banning books. They love cancel culture. The cult that I was in as a kid, they would have massive book and CD and DVD burnings for unholy and sinful media that you would bring in and throw your sinful music onto this giant fire. bvd burnings for like un like unholy and sinful media that you would like bring in and like throw

like your sinful music onto this giant fire like these people love love burning books they love they love banning stuff they love cancel culture um but they just lie about it yeah so that was that was most of my stuff around the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff of course you know this ties into like bathroom stuff as well, the people showing up to school board meetings to scream about kids going shit in the bathroom that they want to and feel comfortable in. It's not going to stop with trans people either. As soon as they ban trans people,

the next thing is going to be, oh, gay students. It never stops. It always keeps going. It's just an ever-present problem that is going to require a lot more dealing with. And again, with all of these flash mobs, like, no one's going to stop them because

they're like the people in power. They're the people that have all of the privilege. There's no really effective counter-organizing for these school board meetings right now. The cops aren't going to do shit. Security guards aren't going to do shit uh and regular libs and regular regular people aren't going to do shit either and it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this because there's a lot of times that the people in the school boards be like no we don't want this to turn into a giant like fistfights like don't don't come in mass to start fistfighting them

but there needs to be something to combat whether that be you know running running for school boards just showing up outside school boards having just more people there in having more presence there uh so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob of 200 anti-mask people showing up right there needs to be some type of thing happening because no one else it needs to be countered and yeah you know what they might need to get the shit kicked out of them i'm sorry but like i don't like i don't think that would actually help in this instance probably but like there needs to be fucking something like they they are the the the level of boldness that they have is evidence that they they feel they they are confident that there is no counter

to what there is going to be done and perhaps if they were being met by a wall of people in the community who were willing if they tried to force their way and to fucking throw down you know to say you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask you're not shutting down this meeting um i don't know maybe that would do something i don't actually know what would do something i think if it was like it's worked but if it was people just as regular people i think that would be yeah it's certainly not going to help if it's antifa um for the love of god don't show up in fucking black block at a school board meeting um like what would work is a bunch of other middle-aged parents showing up and

being willing to confront these people if if physically, if need be. And everything that is worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at these protests are not parents at all. They're not even from the same school district. They're just sort of like, this is just how the right-wing outrage machine has worked, and this is where they're drawing people. right when Outrage Machine has worked and this is where they're drawing people. Yeah. I mean, again, like, it's a lot of the people, there's going to be big dudes who want to fight, but a lot of the people, like, screaming are, like, you know, middle-aged women, the people who are, like, really, like, leading the charge on this

because they're able to use their privilege because, like, no one's going to stop them, right? So that's, like, when they're leading the charge of 200 people who are going to scream and harass and chase out black security guards, chase out all the school board members, they're very effective at using their privilege to gain political ground by just doing stuff on the ground. This is like the January 6th thing.

It's like the January 6th thing. This is the new future of political action. It's just showing up in mass to places where no one's going to stop you because you're like you're the you know the good relatable you know everyday man yeah you're you're anyway that's that's the stuff i had uh we'll probably have an ad break and then talk about maybe some of how this stuff started. Speaking of using your privilege, you know, what is the greatest privilege being able to purchase the products that,

yeah, that's exactly right. There's no privilege higher than being able to engage with these consumables. Yay. these consumables. Yay. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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All right. Chris, you want to close us out? Yeah, so the last thing I want to talk about that is interesting about this whole thing is we've mostly been focusing on the very furthest right elements of this but a lot of the school board stuff is tied to i mean just straight up republican party operatives and people who work in this sort of you know i mean there's there's literally a bunch of people who work for the republican party as we'll get into and then there's also this sort of network of of republican think tanks

republicans sort of yeah dark money dumps that a lot of a lot of astroturf groups and that kind of stuff yeah and and so i i want to talk about a few of these people because i think they're interesting um i i think we can start with nicole nilly who's interesting person she's so she she most recently founded parents defending education who are they're one of the big groups to sort of like spread this this sort of attack on school board stuff all over the country they have chapters they organize people and they also you know they do this thing where they collect incident reports from from school districts that they you know just distribute to all these people and they put it online they have all of these uh they they they have a lot of stuff they do

they they do a lot of anti-mask mandate stuff so they have these like template letters like template like fake yeah form letter things that you can send to schools if you don't want to wear a mask that is a staple that's a staple of this type of organizing yeah yeah and and the interesting thing about nicole nelly is that so this is not like her first org like three years so in 2018 back in the the halcyon days of of uh you know i i i'm not quite gonna say it was before the mask fully came off but it was while the mask was like a little bit more on she she previously founded a speech first yeah you might remember yeah as the republican free speech was the big talking point yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so she ran that for a while.

Now she's organizing with a whole lot of people who just want to ban it. Yeah, they just move on to the new things. It was free speech. It was critical race theory. Right now it's anti-mask stuff. Next up is going to be trans stuff going real hard. Just today we had the fucking person who BBC platformed the fucking like yeah Lily Cade

the rapist Lily Cade wrote a whole manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants to personally kill I used to know Lily oh yeah yeah yeah real dark turn I don't know I guess

it's not super surprising. She was definitely, I interviewed her for a documentary and it was, she was a bit off-putting. Didn't realize this was going on. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of reports of people

in like the sex work industry of talking about her like raping people in bathrooms. Yeah. Which again, it's like, yeah, the people always can scream about, oh no, trans women are in bathrooms. Yet the people, again, is, like, yeah, the people always can scream about, oh, no, trans women are in bathrooms,

yet the person screaming about this is an actual rapist. Yeah, like, when we say rapist here, like, she raped so many people that, like, on Twitter, like, I was scrolling through my feed, and I saw multiple people who were like, oh, I know this person, she assaulted me. Yeah, it's real bad. This is the people who the TERFs are, like, pushing as like sort of anti-trans the bbc was platforming so like yeah like trans stuff is as

soon as as soon as the anti-mask uh anti-vax stuff like dies down in the next i don't know five months or whatever uh i i foresee a massive pivot towards specifically anti-anti-trans anti-queer anti-gay stuff because that's going to to be the new thing. Yep. And I think it's worth bearing in mind that this stuff, yeah, with Nicole Nelly specifically, so she worked at the Cato Institute, which is like Murray Rothbard and Charles Koch's.

Now it's... It's basically... This is a slight oversimplification, but it's basically one of the Koch's sort of money laundering, money operation things. She also worked at FreedomWorks, who... Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, this is great. So this is one of the fun parts

of this, which is that... So FreedomWorks is another one of the Kochs sort of dark money laundering machine things. And FreedomWorks are basically the people who created the Tea Party. Like, they're the people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch of weird guys, like six weirdos into like, you know, basically the entirety of the pre-Trump conservative political machine who like rebuilt Republican Party after it was like completely discredited in the 2000s. Yeah.

And this is true of a lot of the people who are in charge of these big orgs have connections like this um the the person you found in no left turn which is uh no left turn india no for an education they're they're another one of these big sort of anti-school board things i mean they they're the people they're one of the people who like they have a list of books on their website that they want banned wow yeah it's great cool and their founder uh writes for the heritage foundations like magazine so there's there's all of this stuff and i think maybe the most emblematic one is this guy is mark ruffo who yeah fucking ruffo yeah yeah so so he's he's the guy who just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing he like threw together a bunch of

like in just like these incredibly tenuous connections like there together a bunch of like just like these incredibly tenuous connections like there's a bunch of sort of old uh uh cultural marxism conspiracy stuff in there yeah it's a lot of like frankfurt school type shit yeah yeah and and but but what i think is interesting about him is less his ideas which are just pseudo-intellectectual. Yeah, he's not actually super smart in what he says. There's a lot of videos of him talking to actual philosophers, getting schooled about what critical race theory is. He's actually not that intelligent in this side of things. But the thing is, that doesn't matter.

There's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve. Exactly. And the trick basically is Fox News. And the reason this whole thing exists is that this was, you know and then the the the trick basically is fox news and you know the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this was you know mark ruffo he's very very explicit about this that this this this was his solution to the the george floyd uprising yeah was that oh we we need to we need to find this thing to stop the momentum of this uprising and this is this is who tucker carlson brings on starts bringing on 2020 and this blows up and he immediately gets

hired by the manhattan institute which is a very not old, but they're from the 80s – but a very old, extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think – I think is less known than things like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, but he gets – they hire him immediately because the sort of mainline of the Republican Party very quickly is like, this is the thing that we can use as a hammer. And so the Manhattan Institute publishes this – Rufo works for them now. I can't – I'm not actually sure if he – I don't know if he specifically wrote this or if he was just involved in it. The byline is just the Manhattan Institute, but they have this incredibly detailed toolkit explaining how, you know, both explaining what the sort of right-wing,

like, line on critical race theory is, and they have, like, a bunch of explainers, they have, like, lists of terms. Have you ever seen, like... It's massive. Yeah, yeah. It's actually, yeah. If you've ever seen, like, lists of terms

that people want banned, like, it's all just pulled from this document, right? So this will add stuff. But the interesting part about this is this is an organizing manual. It's a specific thing that tells you how to go and how to find other people. Other people,

if you're an incensed right-wing freak in one of these school districts, it's like, here's how you talk to other people in your district. Here's a list of options of things you can do going public and then there's a very interesting thing part of this that that i think is really disturbing and allies like really what's going on here which is there's this whole like freak out thing about this

thing called minority rule where like oh the left has this like they have this like militant minority that will compel the majority to follow them by uh because they they keep on showing up they keep on doing things and if this minority like it keeps keep keeps uh you know being more intransigent than everyone else then they will inevitably win and this like three quarters of this section is this like weird fear-mongering thing about it but then the last part of it is a bunch is the thing that's saying oh we need to do this ourselves right this is how we win we win by being more intransigent we win by showing up more often yeah of course yeah and you know and this is this is the other thing is this is from like last year i think this is like the toolkit is this summer

oh yeah okay that's sorry this is this is from yeah so this is early this year but it's interesting because it's like this is the sort of, you know, this is the Republican Party, essentially. I mean, the Manhattan Institute's very, very mainstream Republican Party. Yeah, this is how they do effective in-person organizing. We talked about this a bit in our episodes about the, like, in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in Texas

and how, like, religious right-wing organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this is how they're able to get things done, which is why there's been so many school board members who either get fired, who've had to step down, who have been harassed off the job, and are now, there's people, you know, a lot of people I would describe

as people holding very extreme views are now running and taking these spots. Because if you can do this type of, again, it's not grassroots, but it is like astroturf. So like it appears grassroots, but if you can do this type of like faux grassroots organizing,

you can gain a lot of power over specific areas and make a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And that's what the goal is, right? The goal is to make trans kids' lives miserable. The goal is to get people to not wear masks and die of COVID. Those are the results of these actions.

Well, I think there's an interesting interplay here, though. Because I think, so FreedomWorks, even a lot of the specific protests that are happening, and this is especially true of the very earliest ones, I think like the very first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like a lot of these. Summer to fall of 2020 was when they started yeah to start up yeah and and those a lot of those were directly organized by by people who work for freedom works okay and and this is this is a lot of the crt ones yeah yeah yeah the crt ones yeah are very

specifically freedom works and and this is what i think is interesting about this is that you know okay freedom works it's like okay so what is freedom works out of this freedom works and and this is what i think is interesting about this is that you know okay freedom works it's like okay so what what is freedom works out of this freedom works wants a tea party again right because you know this is this is what freedom works does right they're they're they're basically the group that comes in when the when the republicans start losing election cycles they're like okay well now we need to hit the balance of power back we need to bring around the democrats out so they're they're largely trying to build a sort of electoral base and and again like this this this will look familiar to people who remember 2010 because it's the same thing except and this is the thing that i i this is the part where i genuinely can't tell whether the freedom works people whether the coax

whether that whether this sort of dark money network either i don't i can't tell whether they understand what they're doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive. But this is not 2010, right? When you start mobilizing people on the right wing to go to a place, they don't just sit there and hold signs anymore. No, you cannot contain them at this point. You cannot control the spread. not contain them at this point. You cannot control the spread.

Once you've opened this can and there's no way of putting them back in because as soon as they start organizing on Apps like Telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. Then they're being okay with cheering along people that are going to go beat up people in these meetings. This is really

the thing that... I think it's not just January 6th. We live in the shadow of January 6th. It's also about – if you look at how the anti-lockdown protests went in 2020, right? You have a bunch of people showing up with guns to the capitals. Yeah. And that stuff was extremely effective, and that and the combination between that and January 6th has – it's opened the floodgates and now yeah that was that was what led to january 6 being possible is the more and more protests around capitals with people showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone and because they're all white and because they're all like middle-class conservatives no one's going to stop them yeah and and you know and this is the thing right you know the the cokes i i i genuinely don't know what the cokes want out of this my guess guess is that the thing that they want is a new base Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating.

The thing that they're creating is a new core of fascist street fighters. And, you know, at some point, it doesn't, it literally doesn't matter whether or not this is what the Kochs are trying to do or not trying to do because they're. In the end, it's just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution. It's only violence and overwhelming people en masse is the only way to get the change that they want. The change they want is to have trans kids not exist. And yeah, just more and more fascistic policies, whether that be banning books that mention gay people existing

or what it's like to be a gay person, whether that be teaching people that racism is still an actual thing that exists or that be putting a mask on so you don't kill your grandma or whatever. Yep. Well, and, you know, and I think one last thing, right, is, you know, we saw what happened last time they were in power, right? we saw what happened last time they were in power. Right.

And it was, you know, and like, you can, you can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff is still happening. It was like, yeah, they, they put a bunch of people in concentration camps.

Right. And if they, if they take back power again, and there's a good chance that they're going to, because you know, the Democrats are being, they, they,

they, you know, the, the, the, the, the Democrats never want to be in power. The thing they want to be is a minority opposition so they can do fundraising.

Right. And if, you know, when these people, if these people take power again, it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah. The thing that looking at looking at the Virginia election, the night of recording is a great example of that. Yeah. In terms of, yeah, it turns out when Democrats just do nothing and just sit around an office, you don't convince young people to want to vote for them because they're not actually doing anything.

So then they just sit out. Then the Republicans actually do vote in people. Then we get an anti-CRT person elected to be the governor of Virginia. Mm-hmm. And that's the episode. Good times. Well, I hope everybody's optimistic, feeling nice. We'll be back with something else.

Research your school boards, who's in it, and just protest around it, and maybe show up with some of your buddies with your lattes and stand in front of the building and be like, no, we don't want you to shut stuff down because no one else is going to stop them it has to be just like regular people you can't not going to be the cops it's not going to be any elected democrat and honestly like you can't rely on teens and black block to do this that's this isn't this isn't what they need to

be doing it should be like yeah it'd be like millennials and gen x need to be like hey no we're not gonna we're going to have you doing this. Well, that's the episode. That's the episode. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast