It Could Happen Here - The Climate Apartheid

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

As the climate changes, more and more of us will fall through the cracks. Here's a look at your future. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 3, The Climate Apartheid. By the time the heat waves subsided, at least a thousand people were dead. Those are the official numbers, at least. The numbers no one trusts. The city government and the police denied breaking up homeless encampments during the disaster, and only acknowledged a handful of outdoor exposure deaths.

On Twitter, someone shares a video of what might be a mass grave. You're not sure if it's real, and you don't really have time to find out. After the grid overloads, it takes weeks for the power situation to normalize. Bottled water, abundant at the start of the disaster, becomes scarce. In conversations with friends and snippets of time online, you learn that much of the Midwest has been subject to titanic mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit the southeast, driving up demand for disaster supplies even further and putting more stress on interstate commerce. Work is basically impossible for days.

You're not even really sure if your job's going to exist much longer anyway. Outside of a few high-end shopping districts, life just hasn't gone back to normal for most people. So you've settled into a new normal, using your car and your now copious free time to ferry supplies to and from a handful of collection points and new encampments.

You felt bad for days after fleeing when the cops broke up the first camp. Aaron, your community organizer friend, told you not to worry about it. Not everyone's ready to go face to face with riot cops. Tom, the former Marine, said the same thing, but then offered to give you some self-defense training if you wanted it. He and a couple of other combat vets had started organizing regular self-defense sessions at one of the camps, based out of an old apartment complex abandoned when its holding company went bankrupt. For a couple weeks, you lose yourself in the work. Gradually, you realize that the network of encampments you and your new friends have been working to support

have become something more than just a stopgap. For one thing, the number of folks without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress, the number of folks without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress on the power grid and the questionable ways some people dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires, which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The local economy is in free fall too. You're not the only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It helps that you're spending half your time in one camp or another anyway.

You decide your best bet at any kind of comfort in the future is to make sure life in the camps is as comfortable for everyone as possible. To that end, you and Tom scrounge up a crew and spend days flitting in and out of abandoned buildings, scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of you know much about how to use that shit, but a collective of electricians and engineers put together a list of the parts they needed and how to safely get them. By the time summer comes to an end, almost 3,000 people are living in camps with regular power and cooling stations. Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar stills to filter wastewater and deal with the drinking water shortage that's still endemic across the southern half of the country. Life is, by almost any measure, harder

than it was a year ago. But the stories of wildfires in the Northwest and massive police crackdowns across the Great Lakes region make it clear that you're not struggling alone. You feel lucky that it's been weeks since you've so much as seen a police patrol. There's been a lot more property crime in the parts of town where the economy is still functioning somewhat close to normal. You've heard shootouts several nights, and you've grown increasingly glad to be off on the margins with a good community of people who take care of each other and don't have much worth stealing. And then, in late September, things take a turn.

Some right-wing livestreamer visited the largest of the three camps, now almost 1,500 strong. He stitched together a narrative blaming a series of downtown arsons and burglaries on organized Antifa extremists in their war camp. One of Tom's friends, who's been doing armed security at night, shows you a handful of posts from far-right extremists threatening to raid the camp. You hear rumors the police might finally be planning a crackdown too. Ever fired a gun? Tom asks. You shake your head no, and he nods. Well, that's probably about time you learn. In 2018, the Camp and Woolsey fires raged across California, burning hundreds of thousands of acres and wiping out whole towns. The Camp wildfire is, so far, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history,

although that may have changed by the time this episode drops. It was the most expensive natural disaster in the world in 2018. It killed more than 80 people, destroyed 14,000 homes, and displaced 50,000 people. Not included among the ranks of the displaced were Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who hired a team of private firefighters to protect their $60 million mansion in Hidden Hills. Private firefighting has become a popular boutique service in the era of climate change-induced disaster. Large insurance companies like Chubb and AIG offer their wealthy clients private firefighters to help prevent property damage.

Wildfire Defense Systems, based in Montana, sent 53 engines to California during the fires. They protected people like Kanye and Kim, while lower-income individuals in the nearby town of Paradise lost their homes and loved ones to the blaze. On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos, occasionally the world's wealthiest man, became the second billionaire in space. Or at least, he got pretty close to space. That same day, news broke of massive flooding in China's Henan province, eclipsing even the apocalyptic floods that left more than a thousand Germans missing just a few days earlier. In Germany, whole villages were destroyed. In China, more than a hundred thousand people were forced to relocate. While Jeff Bezos took his first look

into outer space, passengers drowned on a flooded subway in Zhengzhou. At almost the same time, authorities in Oregon announced that the Bootleg Fire, the largest in the state's history, had grown big enough to generate its own weather patterns. Officials admitted that the blaze could not be extinguished until the rains returned in the fall. Many of the Oregonians caught in the smoke from the bootleg fire are transplanted Californians, men and women who fled Los Angeles or the Bay Area to escape the increasingly brutal fire season and retreat to Oregon's famously moist climate. Most of these transplants were upper-middle class, well-paid employees in the tech or entertainment sector. I'm sure some of them felt betrayed when their affluence proved insufficient to shield them from the seizing climate.

That mindset was most clearly embodied by a middle-aged German woman, interviewed by Deutsche Welle News in the wake of apocalyptic flooding. There are so many people dead. You don't expect people to die in a flood in Germany. You expect it maybe in poor countries, but you don't expect it here. But it was all too fast, too quick. It is undeniable that as extreme weather events grow more common, the victims of such catastrophes will include ever greater numbers of what was formerly the global 1%.

The truth is that we have, all of us, spent our entire lives in climate apartheid. Western nations, through extracting resources and outsourcing industrial processes to the rest of the world, have avoided the worst early consequences of industrialization. Until wildfires changed the calculus, we had no cities with air as dirty as New Delhi or Shenzhen, China. Even when climate disasters hit cities in affluent countries, the level of suffering experienced within that city still breaks down on class lines. I'm not just talking about something as obvious as who has enough money for AC or who can afford a car that drives well in the snow. When the Pacific Northwest heat dome briefly made Portland, Oregon one of the hottest cities on the planet, the actual heat experienced in different neighborhoods

varied based on income. This is because wealthy neighborhoods had lower building density, and much more trees, which provided enough shade that so-called A-grade neighborhoods were 8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler, on average, than poor neighborhoods. But as the consequences of industrial society hit harder, the wealth line necessary to avoid them rises. It is no longer simply sufficient to live in a rich country. If you aren't wealthy enough for a second or a third home, for your own private firefighters, for a bunker in New Zealand, or a space shuttle, sorry, but you're getting left behind. Welcome to the wrong side of climate apartheid.

If you want an idea of what climate apartheid will look like for tens of millions of Americans, including a sizable chunk of you listening right now, there's probably no story more important than the tale of Paradise, California. When the campfire blazed through 18,000 homes, it created a flood of climate refugees. Chico, the nearest city, gained 20,000 residents almost overnight. For a city of just 100,000, that meant a significant strain. And the people of Chico responded beautifully, with a flood of charity and mutual aid. People donated tents, sleeping bags, volunteers cooked hot food,

local kids organized team sports for the kids who'd just lost their town. Many in Chico opened their homes to strangers who'd just lost theirs. Mark Stemmon, a geography professor at California State University, described it this way to Intercept reporter Naomi Klein. A tsunami of fire and terror rolled down the hill from Paradise, but that tsunami was buffeted by a blanket of love and comfort. Unfortunately, the reaction of Chico was, by and large, a feat of charity, not of mutual aid. This is a problem because charity is something you give to less fortunate people. And when news coverage of the disaster faded, so too did sympathy and willingness to help the victims of the campfire.

Six months after the camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, more than a thousand families were still without even secondary housing. Before the fire hit, there was already a massive housing shortage in Northern California. Rates of homelessness had been on the rise for years. Now the Camp Fire inspired the city of Chico to create a climate plan, which included more affordable housing in order to make the community more resistant to displacement caused by climate disruption. But this is not what happened. From The Intercept, quote,

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing many more people in Butte County, as elsewhere, into various states of economic and social distress. Stimmon told me local activists were all geared up to hold a big rally calling for a green new decade, he said. We had banners and sunflowers and were ready to rock. Then lockdown happened, and the signs just sat in his yard for months. Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, there wasn't much room for a conversation about planning for the future when we were dealing with these immediate crises. In late August and early September 2020, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating two towns and displacing yet more people in the county. The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people who were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, but there were not nearly enough rooms for everyone who

needed shelter. Through this two-and-a-half-year period of shock after shock, housing costs in Chico have continued to soar. First, it was in response to the uptick in demand from Paradise evacuees and people working on post-disaster reconstruction, which saw a spike in rents and made Chico among the hottest housing markets in the country. Today, the boom continues, but now it is in response to a pandemic-fueled influx of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or chill out in a more affordable, low-key community. According to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a single-family house

in Butte County increased by a staggering 16.1% last year, with Chico at the center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC affiliate summed up the market's current trajectory. Up, up, up! local ABC affiliate summed up the market's current trajectory. Up, up, up! So, real estate in Chico became much more valuable very quickly, which killed any motive to create more affordable housing. Every low-income apartment building is one less set of luxury condos for Bay Area transplants, after all. Now, by 2020, most of the middle and upper-middle class paradise refugees had either bought or built new homes, but those who'd been renters or living in mobile homes got nothing. In 2019, NPR talked to Dominica Sprague,

who moved to Paradise because she'd been priced out of the Bay Area. In the six months since the campfire, she and her family had been forced to move to six different camps. They were interviewed outside of a camper on a fairground in Yuba City. They were not being hosted there by the city, nor had they been placed there by the state. The Sprague family paid $750 a month for the privilege of camping out. Many who were displaced by the campfire simply never recovered. Chico County's homeless population surged by 16% after the fire, and it has not gone back down in the years since. by 16% after the fire, and it has not gone back down in the years since. 23% of Chico's homeless are refugees from the Paradise Fire, and when these people became permanent fixtures of the town, getting in the way of a profitable real estate boom, the warm welcome and charity that

had greeted them in 2018 evaporated. In 2020, the Chico City Council elected a slate of right-wing candidates, primarily on a platform of using the cops to brutalize and break up homeless encampments for the good of local businesses. Citizens for a Safe Chico put $250,000 into a sweeping ad campaign that painted these people as vagrants and transients, despite the fact that most had resided in the county for years. In many cases, Chico police confiscated and threw away donated clothing, tents, and sleeping bags that had been given to Paradise refugees just a few years earlier. During her reporting for The Intercept, Naomi Klein talked to Alexander Hall, a 23-year-old

campfire survivor who had subsequently lost his new home in police sweeps of encampments. He told her, we're homeless. We're not a disease. You can't just get rid of us and then expect us to be gone. That's not the way it works. We're people. We're trying to survive. We're like anybody else. Everybody is one paycheck away. And the reality of the situation is that, thanks to climate change, we are all considerably less than one paycheck away from calamity. Wildfires and other natural disasters aren't the only thing that's growing more common. A less stable world means a less stable economy. We're already seeing inflation on the rise,

and everyone listening remembers how calamitous the first weeks of the pandemic were for tens of millions of people. A bad economy makes members of a community less resilient. It means they have less to donate to their neighbors in the wake of a disaster. It also means their community, their city or town or state, will have fewer resources to put into things like protecting infrastructure from natural disasters, paying emergency workers, and providing affordable housing to prepare for the inevitable. The story of Chico has told us what happens when affluent liberal enclaves find themselves forced into this position. They cut funding to everything but cops and use those cops to do violence to marginalized

communities. From The Intercept, quote, the combination of factors that has created this crisis in Chico is far from unique to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs coupled with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly turns into a matter of public safety. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. I think Chico provides a fairly realistic expectation for how most climate disaster-related scenarios will be handled by most municipal governments in the immediate future. The rich will buy new homes, invest private and public resources into protecting their neighborhoods.

The communities that suffer the worst from climate change will experience a wealth drain as residents with the funds to do so leave, shrinking the tax base and leaving everyone with fewer resources to dedicate to rebuilding and resiliency. In 2017, Scientific American published an outstanding article titled, Natural Disasters by Location. It analyzed 90 years of data and found that every major environmental catastrophe, like a huge tornado, hurricane, or wildfire, increases a U.S. county's poverty rate by 1%. Quote, we found that if a county experienced two natural disasters,

migration out of that county increased by one percentage point, with the strongest reactions happening in response to hurricanes. This translates into a loss of around 600 residents from a typical county. The effect of one very large disaster, responsible for 100 or more deaths, was twice as big. Poverty rates also increased by one percentage point in areas hit by super-severe disasters. This suggests that people who aren't poor are migrating out, or that people who are poor are migrating in. It might also mean that the existing population transitioned into poverty. The researchers were particularly interested in

seeing how the creation of FEMA in 1978 impacted things. FEMA exists in theory to coordinate federal response to natural disasters and help communities rebuild. With that in mind, if FEMA does its job, you would expect residents of stricken areas to be less likely to move after the date FEMA started responding to disasters with federal relief checks. If you happen to live in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina,

you already know where I'm leading you. Quote, we found that if anything, residents were more likely to migrate out of counties struck by natural disasters after FEMA was created. This pattern is consistent with recent research documenting that the federal funds that flow to victims of disasters come mainly in the form of non-place-based programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps. It appears that many people in disaster-affected areas take the money and move to another county.

And so, the study concluded, our research suggests that the rich may have the resources to move away from areas facing natural disasters, leaving behind a population that is disproportionately poor. But of course, that study focused primarily on coastal areas and the sort of disasters suffered by people who live in those communities. 2017 was an age in which the Pacific Northwest and many other mountainous parts of the West didn't suffer from wildfires in the way they do now. In other words, it was a time in which coastal elites had real choices on where to flee. Those days appear to be coming to an end. The super wealthy will, of course, continue to run to safe places, but the number of places they consider safe will shrink. The amount of available bunker properties will decrease, and the wealthy will eventually split into two separate groups. Those with the funds to flee to truly safe locations and those who will

use their money and power to try and build islands of security within endangered communities. The people who will do this are the middle class rich, millionaires and multi-millionaires, the kind of people who sit on local business association boards, the kind of people who run towns like Chico but can't afford or don't want to flee. We've seen time and time again that these local elites tend to use the police as a cudgel to beat down any marginalized people who disrupt the look or profitability or whatever isolated parts of the city they care about. In Portland, that's downtown, and the members of the Portland Business Alliance have spent much of the last year lobbying the mayor for more brutal crackdowns on both anti-capitalist protesters and houseless people. The goal is never to actually help struggling people. Portland has

a street response unit dedicated to providing unarmed responders for people in mental health crises. Such units have proven to work extremely well, saving lives in cities like Denver. But in Portland, the unit has continually struggled with a lack of funding. In 2020, the city council voted to move $4.8 million from the police budget into a reserve fund for the street response unit. This would have expanded it from a test program in one neighborhood, Lentz, into a citywide program with six teams. In May of 2021, Ted Wheeler and two council members allied with the Business Alliance voted against this amendment. Mayor Wheeler claimed that the reason was the program needed better performance metrics in order to judge its efficacy. The fact that no such metrics exist for

measuring how police handle mental health crises does not seem to have bothered him. The money went back to the cops, and days later a Portland police officer responding to a mental health crisis in Lentz Park killed an unarmed man. Wealthy business owners in Portland, like wealthy business owners in Chico, have no interest in improving services to marginalized people. Those folks don't shop at their stores, and they don't look good in glossy magazine spreads about downtown restaurants. The number of homeless people in America has increased for the last four consecutive years. As we saw with Chico, climate change will only increase the number of desperate people sleeping rough. The nice liberal mayors of nice liberal cities like Portland will hymn and haw about metrics while they send jackbooted thugs out to clear these people away from good neighborhoods using violence.

In Chico, where the local government has shifted hard right due to the influx of homeless people, the justification was commensurately harsher. From The Intercept. One of Safe Chico's talking points is that the city's unsheltered population has suffered from something they call toxic compassion. The idea is that by

attempting to help, a culture of drug dependence and camping by choice is being enabled. According to this logic, if camping is banned and clean needles aren't available, then people will find shelter beds and get the mental health and addiction treatments they need. It's a domestic version of the discourse of deterrence at the southern border, the idea that treating people with some modicum of humanity encourages them to take risky journeys. Cruelty, therefore, is the greater compassion. Today, we see the compassion of cruelty preached by politicians on the left and the right. They just use different terms for it. And as protests against police violence continue to go viral, local elites will increasingly contract out for their violence. The most intense version of this has happened in Minneapolis, where a mercenary outfit named

Conflict Resolution Group, or CRG, has been hired by its city to provide armed security in the wake of protests over police violence. CRG guards started showing up with guns conveniently at the same time as the federal government started an investigation into the Minneapolis police. They've been accused of the same sorts of physical violence as well as the questionably legal practice of detaining citizens. But the more unsettling and much murkier story is that these guys at least brag about possessing a significant surveillance capacity. They have drones and advertise that they can use them to spy on local dissidents. Seriously, I'm going to play you an excerpt from one of their ads, and you should know that the video playing during this excerpt shows a group of armed insurgents

as viewed through a drone camera marching down a desert road. Military and law enforcement personnel, as well as utilizing specialized equipment, such as UAVs, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. The use of such specialized equipment gives Conflict Resolution Group and its clients a clear advantage for providing a better security model, thus ensuring success. It is important to remember that in a world of uncertainty, your security is paramount. Conflict Resolution Group provides the tools, resources, experience, and highly trained personnel to make that uncertainty go away. Prior to CRG, the most intense example of a private security firm being used to surveil dissidents was probably TigerSwan during the Standing Rock occupation.

They are alleged to have used technology called a dirt box mounted on aircraft to spy on the cell phone data of activists. called a dirt box mounted on aircraft to spy on the cell phone data of activists. This kind of shit is growing more normalized every day, and you're fooling yourself if you don't think it's because large corporations and local business associations want cops and even militaries of their own. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Portland Business Alliance has contracted armed and unarmed guards with Portland Patrol Incorporated for years. Most of these guards operate in what the city calls an Enhanced Services District. This is just a quirky Portland term for a nationwide trend. ESDs are more often called business improvement districts. BIDs are increasingly common all over the United States. In a legal sense, they are urban areas where private organizations are given the power to do things normally relegated to the local

government. This includes security. BIDs were developed in the 1970s as a way to fight the economic stagnation that had settled on many U.S. cities. There are more than a thousand BIDs were developed in the 1970s as a way to fight the economic stagnation that had settled on many U.S. cities. There are more than 1,000 BIDs nationwide, and the one in downtown Portland, founded in 1988, is particularly large and influential. When the Portland Business Alliance was formed in 2002, they took control of the downtown BID, called Downtown Clean and Safe. they took control of the downtown BID, called Downtown Clean and Safe. The district expanded to more than 500 blocks, and there has been talk of expanding it to include residential areas. From Teen Vogue, quote,

The formation of ESDs is patently undemocratic. To institute one in Portland, interested parties form a business nonprofit and campaign to have the city's revenue division levy fees on in-district property owners in accordance with the city code. Then, unelected ESD overseers, often some of the wealthiest enterprises in the city, use the proceeds to hire security and police, contract cleaning companies, make infrastructural improvements, and fund their lobbying and marketing efforts. Portland Alternative Weekly Willamette Week recently reported that some funds collected from property owners for Clean and Safe are actually channeled to the Portland Business Alliance for staffing and administrative costs. In response, the PBA issued a statement defending its sharing of resources.

There are few exemptions to the fees. Private, public, and non-profit properties are liable. Via this arrangement, along with revenue from parking fees and special appropriations from the city's general fund, Portland's three ESDs together take in over $8 million per year. At no point has the public permitted a voice in this process. The imposition of an ESD is a decision made exclusively by a business in collaboration with local governance. So, already, in dozens of American cities, local elites, wealthy business owners, are permitted to tax the public and deploy security forces without any accountability to voters. In 2020, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, or WRAP, a social justice organization, audited Portland's BIDs. They found that the city carried out almost no oversight, failing to review the annual budget, monitor the use of funds, or investigate complaints about violence by security officers. Quote, memo reviewed by Teen Vogue lays out the function of clean and safe officers clearly. The offers do

make arrests to be responsive to businesses' needs to conduct successful commerce in the downtown core area or allow people to use the sidewalk. These officers act in concert with the numerous security guards, some of whom are armed and ESD employ, like those of Portland Patrol, Inc., the largest clean and safe contractor. Private security guards surveil and rouse the unhoused, write exclusion orders, call in clean and safe police officers to issue citations and make arrests. City officials have argued that guard conduct is wholly unaccountable to the public. Wrote the city auditor, a district contract with a private security provider says that the city police commissioner, currently the mayor, will obtain and review reports on security officers'

activities, including complaints against officers in the resulting investigations. We did not find evidence that this was done. Now the impact of all this on marginalized people is startlingly clear. In parts of Portland outside downtown Clean and Safe, the average number of unhoused people arrested per square mile is 6.1. Inside Clean and Safe, that number jumps to more than 137. This is because things that are often not enforced or even treated as crimes elsewhere in Portland are crimes in the BID. These places can literally have their own justice systems. Up until 2020, one of these districts even had its own assistant district attorney, whose salary was paid by

private interests. This sort of anti-democratic structure is exploding in popularity. In February of 2021, the governor of Nevada announced a plan to launch innovation zones to rejuvenate the state economy. From the AP, quote, the zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts, and provide government services. And of course, government services include security. As the crumbles accelerate and more people slip through the cracks and wind up desperate, the task of policing them will increasingly fall to private interests,

empowered to act as unelected governments in the name of economic revitalization. It is a vicious cycle. The economic contractions caused by environmental disaster and unrest reduce the capacity of local governments to serve citizens. This makes the case for innovation zones or business improvement districts easier to make. Over and over again, from California and Oregon to Nevada and beyond, we see the same story. Disasters are used to justify power grabs by the same kinds of people who for decades lobbied against action on climate change. Now that the consequences are here, they will divert their resources towards establishing their own boutique legal systems

with their own boutique security forces to protect their comfort and keep you out. I haven't devoted nearly enough of this episode to the international situation, by necessity, but we can and should draw a direct line to the climate refugees at the U.S. border, facing tear gas and beatings in internment and concentration camps, and the violence being increasingly enacted by domestic political elites against U.S. citizens. increasingly enacted by domestic political elites against U.S. citizens. In June of 2021, news broke that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem had used a private donation to send 50 National Guard soldiers to the Texan border. The decision caused tremendous debate, but legal experts seemed to agree that it was, in fact, legal, although it had never been done before. Back in 2019, in the first

season of It Could Happen Here, I talked about Foucault's boomerang, the idea that tactics and weapons used to police imperial possessions inevitably rebound to police the subjects of the imperial interior. I will tell you here and now that this will not be the last time private money sends National Guardsmen on a domestic mission. And the next time it happens, it may be considerably closer to your home. Keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.