It Could Happen Here - The Age of Extremophiles

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

After a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Robert takes a look at the current political environment to explain why previously normal people keep taking extreme action with ever-growing frequency.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart. Go to audible.com slash big age series to start listening today. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. This is It Could Happen here, and I am Robert Evans. And initially, this was supposed to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering over the fact recently that I feel weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a lot of the people that I know and spend

time around. And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news differently than they have, and because I've been coming across some different pieces of information than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been feeling so optimistic. And so I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of last week. And then over the weekend, a gunman attack the White House correspondence dinner. And actually, this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings.

We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED. But I did make some alterations to the episode as a result of that, although I do think it reinforces my primary point, which is that, the political era that we now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time people thought it was too salty to host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is a very long time.

sea hosts life, it's just weird life because the Dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined in 1974 by R.D. McElroy to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that should have been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term that literally means love of extremes. And while it is usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms and very odd locations, some experts have, over the years, pointed out that the label might well apply to hearing. humans too. In the journal article all about extremophiles, Johns Hopkins University's James A. Coker wrote that, quote, despite common perception, most of Earth is what is often referred to as an

extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home, it is simply that, home. They have adapted to thrive in these environments, and in the process, have evolved many unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our human-centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled with all the things necessary for life to exist. To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth is mostly a cold place.

Over 90% of its oceans are at or below 5 degrees Celsius, and it has an average temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius. And several conditions we humans consider normal, i.e. 20% oxygen in the air, actually make us extremophiles from the point of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like this metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials and even Gen Z and Alpha kids, too young to have known the 90s, to look back on that decade as a sort of cultural goldilocks zone, as if the brief period post-Cold War and

pre-9-11 was some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different reasons for this. Some of them blame 9-11. Some people argue that we were in that sweet spot where the internet existed and could tap you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come up with different justifications for this. But this view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the 1990s, which is that they were full of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, just to name two, and repeated U.S. military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe, some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president, for most of the

90s, was a sex pest, and members of the far right staged a series of bloody terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing. And while all this was happening, a new and more openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuvered Democrats gawked in awe. The reality is that the 90s were a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just like every other period of human existence. And the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, those same neo-conservatives seem tame next to their modern descendants, the MAGA movement. But in their own time,

they were the craziest bastards out there, and this hits at a fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, he was such an extreme choice that the conservative movement had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the MAGA movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal the changes from the Obama years in power. I like thinking

about this stuff because I find it interesting that one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is this. In extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We homo sapiens have been in the business of extreme adaptations for as long as we've existed. That's all central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR-15 are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them, extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations, and so on and so forth until we invent the internet

and satellite-guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good. But once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum has started to swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction,

and you can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity of Zoranamdani, or the fact that a former pillow of neoconservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for the abolition of ICE. We are in the process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and changes that are every bit as good as the ones that Trump administration has forced through our bad.

To do that, we're going to have to be brave and we're going to have to start getting our shit together now because this window of opportunity won't last long. The way I see it, the GOP entered office this time around intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt they might have had in an orgy of careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions, carried out by the least sympathetic group of Groyper's imaginable, one of whom was nicknamed Big Balls. A flurry of state and local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left-wing activists and queer, particularly trans people, have done tremendous damage, as have relentless ice raids on mostly non-white Americans.

It's been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't pretend we're in a good situation today, not, at least in terms of what we'd like, good to mean in the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived the first 16 months or so of the second Trump presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it to the end. But this regime came to power with the knowledge that their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action. they had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and they missed it.

You can see some evidence of this in our war of choice against Iran. President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the evening news, so he told his military to bear down on Iran with all the speed and violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the algorithmic warfare cross-functional team, nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans previously would have gone over by hand in order to speed up the rate at which targets were identified

and struck in wartime. Project Maven, from the jump, was a product of the worst kind of military thinking. How can we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is the kind of project you pursue when your finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them to give up. The goal was to create a system that could co-olate and synthesize huge quantities of data in order to allow 1,000 targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, writing for The Guardian, notes that this means, quote, 3.6 seconds per decision or from the individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every 72 seconds.

Now we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads. Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

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Listen to Saigon on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcast. Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Now, if you listen to the advocates at this kind of military buildup, the people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes, talk in their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea that a future war between the U.S. and a peer or near-peer

adversary, most prominently China, right? that's what they're planning on. Now, the Chinese military is also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New York Times article earlier this month in April of 26, titled Mutually Automated Destruction, the escalating Global AI Arms Race. I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own, two U.S. officials said.

China is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought, while Russia is building Lancet drones that can circle the sky and autonomously picked targets, they said. Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in AI will become the ruler of the world. Mr. Z said in 2024 that the technology would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth directed all branches of the U.S. military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell.

Now, my interpretation of what I've read from most of these guys is that they see future conflict as a massive but almost instantaneous chess game, right? Whoever has the AI that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins, right? If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand strikes in an hour, and they can only make 800, then we'll destroy more of them and we'll win the war, right? It'll all be decided right at the start. And this may well be how a shooting war between China and the U.S. would proceed,

but given that very few people in either country want that war to happen because it would kill us all, I think we might do best focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at least the second time in my life. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq after more than a year of buildup and years of intelligence gathering. Our military planners put together a list of 50 high-value targets. The idea was, if we could use our incredible super-advanced spying equipment and our precision-guided weapons to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, we could hobble any response to the invasion. All 50 targets were struck. None of the people

targeted were killed. Now, that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just means we missed all the people we thought we were going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article again, the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. Fast forward to earlier this year, the Trump administration orders the launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal of hyper-advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of Iran, alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks, U.S. forces hit 6,000 targets picked with the help of Project Maven. One of them was the Minab Girls Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing 156 and wounding 95. Now, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir's

hyper-advanced AI and a multi-billion-dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA and the Mossad wasn't enough to stop us from striking a school that we knew contained none of our targets. We had data that the people we thought were there at one point were no longer there and it was a school now. But some of the data may even relied on was old and outdated. And these machines aren't capable of real judgment in the way we think of it. And because people trusted them so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes. This is a human error. This is not an AI error. But it illustrates a massive flaw. in the fantasy that winning a war could be as easy as building a smarter machine.

Now, to be accurate, and it is important to note, a lot of those 6,000 targets were what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed in the opening salvo of the war. President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iran's supreme leader, alongside many other prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed at first to be way more successful than the opening strikes against Iraq. They didn't get any of those 50, guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets in this first.

wave of strikes, maybe we just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Iraq. Maybe now we're doing it right, you know? Finally, we'll be able to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were not enough to break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most recent APNORC poll puts Trump's overall approval at 33%, which is down 5% since just back in March. Only 32% of Americans approve of his leadership on Iran, because most of this country can still see a man shooting himself in the dick for what it is.

Pete Hegeseth is our most lethality-obsessed Secretary of Defense and history, and in him we see the result of a long sickness, first incubated during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their failure to make progress as a kind of victory. So they turned to bragging about how many fighters they'd killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they'd destroyed, based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era,

informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts as the death knell of a military entity's ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess and power. We've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the sorry cadre of influencers who call themselves right-wing intellectuals today. I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Rufo, who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of attack ads. These people have proven

legitimately good at stirring up hate and forcing laws all over the country restricting things like drag shows or the use of chosen pronouns on government documents. All these people are by definition, huge assholes, and so are their followers. And thus, when those people get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January 1, 2021 by Republican activists and former school board members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that

sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that child to become a different kind of person than the parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the then-fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a lever from which to force themselves into American life. In June of 2021, they started filing what would become a long series of criminal complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation. School started removing books, and Moms for Liberty-inspired candidates

began winning school board elections around the country. It looked for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit 451-style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty-backed candidates

started losing major elections. First, a series of school board races in 2023 in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and I. Iowa. But even as the Biden administration careened towards a disastrous new election in 2024, one in which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of the first was Karen's Foboda, a mother of seven in Duchess County, New York. In 2023, she told NPR reporter Jim Zeroli, I looked into the local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some of the social media of some of these

individuals, and what I saw was very upsetting, as a mom of kids who are members of that community, it was very concerning to think that these people would be trying to get onto the school board, because what does that mean for my kids? So she started a group of her own, defensive democracy, which organized like-minded parents in her community to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. They defeated an entire slate of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates in 2023, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook page and weekly Zoom calls.

And the really remarkable thing is that even while the 2024 election took over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shaped, at the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts across the country to fight for their children's educations. In November of 2025, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas, saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend was repeated elsewhere that same month per a political article by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez. Quote, in Pennsylvania, Democrats slipped at least two dozen school board seats per an ongoing tally from Progressive Recruitment Group Pipeline Fund.

The under-the-radar trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper-local interest in politics as the COVID-19 pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and the national battleground of Pennsylvania, the result of well-funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders. Now, one of my favorite details from that piece is a quote from one of the new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super-partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue to be an advocate of the thought

that Tim Walls might have made a more effective vice-presidential candidate if he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks, because they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of their fellow citizens and their naked, slavering need to control their neighbors is upsetting and unnatural. The way I see it, we're in a time of incredible. opportunity right now. The devil

has played his hand and wound up slipping on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way. The momentum is with, anyone but these fucks, at least right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did the thing fascists often do. He kept reaching until he

reached for something that exceeded his grasp. I don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non-zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces say for some token, so Israel won't say we abandon them, and tries to take out the Cuban government next.

It's also possible he'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive apocalyptic, hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, but either action would just be the flailing of a busted gambler, putting everything he has on a fantasy that Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of the American people

seems to suggest that most of us has a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida, it's hard to find regular people who are scared of the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd on its face. The further Trump reaches the angrier people get. Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses, even more than their enthusiastic support. And many Americans have proven themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And that's the a nice note to roll the ads on.

Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio, or we're ever you listen to your podcasts. On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant,

I sit down with Tiffany the budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money. What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here? We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts. Too many of us were never, ever taught. Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.

That's great. It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family. If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more. Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the I'd Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast.

American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on to Ernie. Stewart the chip. I'm Tad Ramos. I'm Tom Boe. On our podcast, inside American soccer, you'll get the real storylines.

I'm not worried about Policic. I'm not worried about balligan. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. You're going to look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team.

It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. Listen, inside American soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country.

From My Heart Podcasts, Saigon. Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk. One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire.

Deuterate me. They're pouring petrol all over him. He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine. Or freeze on. Let's get out. Freedom, vomit. Nigh!

Sun! Cigone, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict. Sting, here's madness. The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. If you want a direct example of how weak the cultural conservatives are right now, think back to the

on President Trump pulled with Door Dash earlier in April. He ordered several bags and had them delivered by a dasher who was there to get photographed, praising the president's no tax on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval Office, Trump asked the Dasher if they thought trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the Dasher in question was 58-year-old Sharon Simmons, who was a, I mean, it's been widely reported, is a Republican activist she'd previously spoken out in favor of the no-tax-on-tips policy at the House Ways and Means Committee field hearing.

And even when she was under the gun next to the president, Simmons wasn't willing to agree with him on the weird anti-trans stuff. She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that. And I'm not here to call her a hero for that. She's not, but it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support low taxes now. They have to endorse a whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti-scientific views that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump nowadays has to include an acknowledgement of the big lurking question of our age. What if he won't give up power?

And that's a bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of government officials of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we might call the ought to be crimes of this administration. It's not unreasonable to ask, what if they won't leave power without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last couple pages of a podcast script. But I will point out that just in the last month, as I write this, Victor Orban and his entire political movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orban had been previously referred to as a quasi-dictatorial figure. He was the leader of the Hungarian government,

and he had led a massive right-wing crackdown that attacked schools, that attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much of our own right-wing movement. It's come out that the Orban government was sending money, helping to fund CPAC. They were sending money to specific right-wing influence. like Rod Dreher. And despite the fact that Orban was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago was saying this is the future of American politics. Orbanism is what we want.

Despite that fact, when they lost an election, he and his cronies back down without a fight. Now, ultimately, they did this because they still think they're bulletproof, right? We've got enough people in the government that we can stop Peter Maggi are the new guy from doing any damage to us, right? And thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us avoid a civil war, and the rest of the EU won't look timely on that. I'm sure that's a lot of their thinking. And obviously, the U.S. is in a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and

Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing, they think it's more personally profitable for them to not be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how basically every social network is now owned by an open. openly evil right-wing billionaire? Well, Americans have responded to this by discarding social media and ever-growing numbers. This has been about one of the most consequential shifts of the last few years, and just this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a study

on shifts in U.S. social media use from 2020 to 2024. Quote, online platform reached a declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans, especially the youngest and oldest cohorts, who report using no social media, visiting and posting activity on Twitter slash X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter X-driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for the future of our body politic. But the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew markedly more right-wing as both sites shrank. In his paper, Tornburg warns, as casual users

disengaged while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme. Or, in other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites reward more extreme content, less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation. Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in these same internet fever swamps, and they've gotten used to the internet mattering a lot more than it does right now. I don't mean to suggest that what happens online isn't important, but that importance has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI slop, spam, and weird right-wing propaganda that we've

been forcibly drowned in for years. Less people are using these things than they used to, which means their reach has declined because people find them off-putting and gross. The data shows that folks particularly over 65 and under 24 are increasingly fed up with not just social media, but the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to anti-trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief that anti-trans propaganda had won Trump the re-election in 2024.

But only 4% of voters in that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now, that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards centrism shared by much of the American middle class. People don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, oh, I don't know, guys, we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in order to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair. And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversy

measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, the federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how these things go. We're off to a series of court battles now, and however those end up, two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms, and a clear message has been sent to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws than Democrats. Now, any anarchist or leftist or leftist's political organizer you've ever known would have told you, the right wing always benefits from an interpretation of the law that she shucks seems to deny their opponents the right to do the same things in self-defense. It's bad that

things work this way, but good for rank-and-file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled Why Virginia Went Back on Its Word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph. Partizanship did its best impression of democracy in Virginia on Tuesday. Voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats at the behest of President Donald Trump. It's a red versus

blue tit for tat over who can gerrymander more efficiently, a necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy. It's actually not necessarily. I mean, not that it's a necessary evil the party say, it's that one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans, and you didn't speak up. The Washington Post, you know, this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia, right? And I also might point out to Theo that a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy, you know, if your only concern is the overall health of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats really corrects a structural imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural areas

with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway, there are other good reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle, but far to the left, simply as a matter of practical necessity.

The Republicans have spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA, and every other useful part of our state structure, and this is a big part of what's radicalized people because they very quickly come to notice that things are missing and shit is not working right. For decades, the government has been the enemy to millions of Americans who went out

in the world and relied on government services every day of their lives. And yes, that's irritating and unfair. And no, we don't have time to fix that right now. What we can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government does stuff. You just hate the way Republicans wrong the government. And the fact that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push Republicans. as extreme as they need to, right? This is an opportunity to convince a lot of people, oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive and functional infrastructure

is a lot better than letting big balls delete half of civil service, right? Like, that's, I think, the opportunity we have right now. And pushing that basic line on as many Americans as possible in the next two years is, I think one of the most important things we can do at the moment. Along with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement of consequences against the cadre of billionaires and their lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd point out to people

that there are an awful lot of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the federal government and put something like Elon Musk's doge in place. You can just see that in some of the texts between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. These people are enemies of the state with an awful lot of money that we could confiscate to do things like replace the books,

Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now we also need to seek, consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can, in fact, get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing the government bully people who are just trying to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims. If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the 2028 elections go even worse, the USA's new elected

officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation as the man who just unseated Victor Orban and his supporters. We all learned how temporary a victory can be after 2024. I've seen more than a few comments online by liberals who decided Orban's defeat was a good time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist, and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that a lot of people on the left express that electoralism can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on the left champion, but every online and real-life lefty that I know is thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However, they all did share a fear, and this is one fear that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert on Hungarian politics that I've read,

which is winning the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar. Orban is an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely shitty in Hungary, and voters got angry enough to vote for a guy who promised to burn things down. They did come to regret that, but things are still extremely bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for Trump 2.0. If we don't want to repeat that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the Maga movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics, and new politics as we seek to fill the void that they're going to leave behind.

I wrote and recorded the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier, just a few days before a gunman stormed into the correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he wanted to harm the president and members of his cabinet. Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his life was put under a microscope, as it always happens with gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man, one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.

This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously, they cooked this up in a lab as an excuse to crack down on Democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not a place for an argument as to why. Again, we'll talk about that I'm sure later this week. What is interesting to me is that before any of this happened, I'd been planning to revise the ending of this episode by commenting on an article that came out in April of 2025. It's published by Axios, and the title was, Democrats told to get shot for the anti-Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town halls in their districts and in one-on-one meetings with constituents and activists,

Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent. Quote, I actually said in meeting. When they light a fire, my thought is, grab an extinguisher, and someone at the table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know on some level that that's the only way you survive in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands of Normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.

and we've also seen a very dark reflection of that and the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the fact that an educated and informed 31-year-old man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and attack the president represents many failures. One of them is a failure of the Democratic Party and the liberal project to provide him with anything that felt like a useful outlet

for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking and acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw your hands up and back away or you can try like hell to present them with a counter-offer. In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns, and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place.

The victory and wild popularity of Zoran Mamdani is proof that you can, in fact, do this even in 2026. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions, like abolishing ice, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court, are more than enough evidence to show that people will get in line to back a candidate and a party who promises radical change.

Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry for their own candidate who feels like Mom Dani, hungry more than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted CU at Nuremberg 2.0 after Christy got fired, I watched a coalition of left-wing radicals and centrist dims who never came together over anything else express wild glee at the very thought. We can do this. We have the tools and we have the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step into the unknown. But that's our only option, besides waiting until we get another chance to look through the social media archives of a gunman. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone 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. American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on to Ernie.

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