It Could Happen Here - The End of the United States of America

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

One way or another, the United States as we know it is going to end. How can we make sure what comes next is better than what came before? 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. Most days, the war feels distant, like a bad dream from your early childhood.

You remember it in gasps and flashes, moments of horror and pain and laughter and confusion that leap unbidden into your consciousness. Sometimes you have nightmares. Sometimes you can smell the bodies of your neighbors, buried under rubble, mingled with the acrid reek of gunpowder. But for the most part, the war hides in the back of your mind as you try to get on with your life.

After the war ended, you wound up migrating from Canada to the Pacific Northwest. The old United States had balkanized into a mishmash of functional, semi-functional, and failed nations, and of those, the Northwest seemed to be your best option. It's weathered the end of the United States and the brutality of climate change better than most places, thanks mainly to the low population density and, of course, the water. Fresh water is in short supply these days, not just in America, but across much of the world. Global agricultural output never quite recovered from the loss of the United States, and famines are common. You guess they've always been common, but not in places like Virginia and Florida. Not until now. You read

yesterday that, in much of the Old South, lack of clean water and adequate food has dropped the average life expectancy to under 50 years. You should feel bad about that, you know, but you don't. The Dominionists wound up in charge of most of those states, and to you it feels like karmic justice that they've been the ones hardest hit by the shifting climate. That's not to say that you and your new neighbors haven't suffered. The wildfire season is now a full six months, sometimes eight. Most days, the fires are the first thing you check on when you wake up. Where you live, it's not uncommon to have to evacuate two or three times a year.

So far, your apartment building hasn't burned down, though. So far. There's coffee now, at least. Your supply is rationed, and the stuff you can usually afford is cut with chicory and other herbs, but after the years without, you aren't about to complain about some adulterants. You savor two full cups every morning before you lock up your flat and head for the bus stop to go to work. None of the pre-war industries have really recovered either, so one of the few job fields that has actually expanded is border control.

The sheer frequency of tornadoes and mudslides has rendered huge chunks of the South and Midwest almost uninhabitable for much of the year. Flooding has done the same for many coastal cities. If the USA had survived, a strong federal government might have been able to mitigate some of that damage. But now, much of North America is effectively a failed state. There's no FEMA, no CDC, no one looking out for people in many, many, many parts of the old United States. And so the more stable chunks of the U.S. have become magnets for refugees.

Your job, more days than not, is to tell these people that they are not welcome. Your first customers today are a family from Alabama. They hand you their passports, ragged things printed on cheap paper and emblazoned with the all-too-familiar logo of the fiery cross. You take the documents and thumb through them. It's mostly for show. You already know you're not going to let them in. You look up at the family. The father and mother both look to be in their mid-40s, although you know they're a decade younger than that. They're both skinny, with lined, worn-looking faces and an unhealthy, malnourished yellow tinge to their skin.

Their son looks to be a little better fed, although you can tell he's still far too small for a boy of fourteen. You would have guessed ten. The woman cradles a baby girl in her arms. One look at its too-thin hand and rasping little fingers is the first thing that ignites your sympathy, just a little bit. You've seen babies that small before, and you know they don't tend to live. For a few long moments, your conscience nudges you to show mercy and let them in. Both adults look at you with pleading eyes. And, for just a second, you're back in the war,

scraping your fingers bloody trying to pull concrete and plaster off the buried bodies of your friends. You look down at the weathered, fiery cross on their passports and remember the first time you saw that logo emblazoned on the hood of a stolen Humvee. The old anger rises again, boiling up from somewhere deep in your diaphragm. You take one more hard look at the dying infant, and then into the eyes of the man and woman who used to be your fellow citizens. You tell them no. Up on my wall, next to my writing chair, is a print of a painting called The Fall of Nineveh. The painting is from 1829, but the battle it depicts occurred in 612 BC.

Nineveh was then the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which was the greatest power on earth at the time. It was torn apart when an alliance of Medes and Babylonians rebelled against the empire and destroyed it in an orgy of apocalyptic violence. The painting captures the horror of the moment quite well. A wall of flames consumes the horizon, burning through whole districts of the world's mightiest city. In the foreground, civilians wail and rend their garments as they huddle around the last of their nation's wealth, gold and silver baubles that have now lost all meaning and all power in war's fiery crucible. It's a beautiful work of art, but aesthetics alone are not why it sits in my home. Nineveh is Mosul. Mosul is of course one of those cities that's lived

long enough to accrue a handful of different names. The fall of Nineveh depicts the very first time that ancient city was torched by the fires of war. In 2017, I watched Nineveh fall again. The soldiers who conquered it were a mix of Kurdish Peshmerga, the descendants of the Medes, and Iraqi soldiers, most of whom were from the area around Baghdad, which is, of course, Babylon. Two wars, 2,600 years apart,

boiled down to a conflict between the same groups of people. It's enough to make you feel a sense of the hopeless inevitability and the cyclical nature of people. It's enough to make you feel a sense of the hopeless inevitability and the cyclical nature of history. The people I met in Mosul had no illusions that they were living at the end of history. They didn't even believe they'd seen Nineveh fall for the last time in their lives. There was a widespread, dogged acceptance that the next war was right around the corner. Here in the United States, our nation's youth and wealth has insulated us from this same sense of historical inevitability. We tend to view the American Civil War as a singular act, one shocking moment in history that will never be repeated.

But on a grand historic scale, it wouldn't be at all weird for a region as large as North America to see a civil war every century or two. In fact, it would be weirder for this continent to find itself forever at peace. Over the weeks that it could happen here as run, I've received quite a lot of feedback from my listeners. As with everything else in this country, I've noticed a distinct difference in the responses from my coastal, northern, midwestern listeners, and my listeners in the south. I think the old confederate states are the only part of this country that has a similar attitude towards the inevitability of historic cycles that I saw over in Iraq. It's obvious if you know where to look. What else is the South will rise again but an expression of

faith in the idea that the old conflicts and hatreds that tore this nation apart will do so once again. So, is a second American Civil War inevitable? Maybe. But I, for one, am going to move forward with my life as if it is not. I can't let myself believe that, because a second American Civil War would mean the end of life on Earth as we know it. The United States exports more food than any other country on the planet. We produce almost as much food, calorically, as India or China. But we do so much more efficiently, which is why cheap American foodstuff has become the backbone of much of the world's diet. Canada and Mexico are number one and number two recipients of American food exports,

respectively. It's hard to comprehend the scale of disaster a second American civil war would bring to the rest of the world, but it's worth noting that the two nations who'd be forced to take in the most American refugees are also the two nations most reliant on the food that would stop flowing during any serious civil conflict. There are other reasons for the rest of the world to fear a second American civil war. For one thing, the world is running out of fresh water. The U.S. Agency for International Development currently predicts that by 2025, one-third of all human beings will face severe and chronic water shortages. The Middle East,

North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa are all currently the hardest hit, but the world demand for water doubles every 21 years, and the United States currently has the third largest freshwater reserves on the planet. It's hard to say precisely what impact a civil war would have on the global water crisis, but it would not make it better. Perhaps the most important global side effect of a second American civil war would be how that war will contribute to climate change. The U.S. military is currently the number one consumer of petroleum worldwide. It is suspected to be the number one contributor to climate change via emissions worldwide as well, although this is hard to say for sure

because in every climate change treaty we've ever signed, military emissions have been exempted from reporting requirements. We know from the DoD that the U.S. Army emitted more than 70 million metric tons of CO2 per year in 2014, just counting our domestic forces and not including our overseas bases, fleets, and forces. We know that the first four years of the Iraq War put 141 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. This means that more carbon was emitted per year by the U.S. military in Iraq

than emitted by 139 other nations combined during those years. One fairly small war equaled 139 countries' worth of carbon emissions for four years. We also know that the military produces five times as many environmental toxins as the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, and all this is in a time of domestic peace. If war consumes the homeland, we can expect to see military emissions leap accordingly. Tens of thousands of Humvees and APCs and tanks currently sitting parked somewhere in the Arizona desert will take to the highways and byways of this land,

emitting carbon every second of every day. Artillery shells, bombs, and bullets will also have their way with the climate. In 2018, California suffered its most devastating wildfires in recent memory. More than 8,000 separate fires burnt nearly 2 million acres, the largest amount of burnt acreage ever recorded in a fire season. I keep mentioning that all these terrible things happen in a time of peace, but that is really worth repeating, because every natural disaster caused by climate change gets worse when people are shooting at each other all around the country. Over in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, they face wildfires too. The journalism collective Bellingcat has monitored these fires and noted in 2018 that,

quote, Shelling with light weapons and artillery resulted in the outbreak of forest and wildfires at the parched borderlands near the north and eastern borders of Iraq. People battling these fires were hindered by landmines or other unexploded ordnance, remnants from the Iran-Iraq war. The result? Hundreds of thousands of hectares of burned lands, destroyed ecosystems and agricultural lands, air pollution, and local communities suffering from smoke and loss of land. Now, we know that climate change tends to make wildfires bigger, deadlier, and more destructive. We also know that large wildfires, like the ones California experienced in 2018,

contribute massively to climate change on their own. Currently, wildfires are estimated to emit roughly 8 billion tons of CO2 per year, out of the 32 billion tons of CO2 emitted worldwide. So more war means more wildfires means more climate change means more wildfires. And all these lurking horrors don't even take into account the possibility that a second American civil war might involve the use of nuclear weapons. The United States currently holds about 6,800 of these doomsday devices. Even I can't easily imagine the government deploying them in the event of a vicious civil war.

But I can imagine the government losing a few. In 2014, dozens of U.S. nuclear missile officers, the custodians of the deadliest arsenal ever assembled in human history, were caught up in a massive scandal that involved basically all of them cheating on regular competency exams they were forced to take, and also dealing and doing shitloads of drugs, sometimes while on duty, watching our nukes. So yeah, the possibility of some nihilistic terror group getting their hands on a nuke or three during a period of cataclysmic violence, it isn't exactly ridiculous. I think

I've made my point. The world can ill afford a second American civil war. But here's the issue. The world can't afford things to go on the way they've been in the United States either. We are the wealthiest, most influential, most powerful nation on the planet, and for the bulk of my lifetime at least, we've sort of punted on taking any sort of concerted action to fix the biggest issues of our time. Earlier this year, the UN released a report noting that, at current rates of degradation, the world's topsoil will be completely gone within 60 years. This news could not be more apocalyptic. In a way, it's even more dire than reports of global warming.

Human beings can build air conditioning and dikes and levees. We cannot survive, period, without topsoil. And yet, this story has received almost no play in the international media. Earlier this year, when Marina Halina Semeto of the Food and Agricultural Organization announced that one-third of the planet's topsoil has already been degraded, the response from the American public was a big fat fist on the snooze button. If action isn't taken right now,

the disappearance of our topsoil could be yet another problem that our political class ignores for decades until it gets so dire that people have to care. On a related note, Fox News just published an article warning that climate change could cause sea levels to rise by seven feet within the next 80 years, rendering most coastal cities uninhabitable. The United States of America cannot be allowed to die in violence, but it's just as clear that it cannot

be allowed to live on either in the form that we currently know. All of these problems are decades long in action on climate change, the rise of charlatans and grifters who have exploited and exacerbated our divisions and sown hate throughout this nation, the increasing inequality in our economic system, and the corruption and graft at the highest levels of political power. All of those problems are the result of a political status quo wherein roughly half of us vote once every four years, and that's about all we do. If you're the kind of a political status quo wherein roughly half of us vote once every four years, and that's about all we do. If you're the kind of person who actually volunteers every four years and spends a few hours handing out pamphlets or registering new voters, you qualify as among the

most politically engaged of your countrymen. If you volunteer during the midterms too, you're basically the democratic equivalent of a damned Sasquatch. Chances are, if you know anyone that consistently politically active in your life, you probably view them with a little bit of awe. The United States of America, the one where barely half the country bothers to vote for the president and someone who puts in 20 hours of volunteer time every two years is a superstar, that America has to die. Killing it is the only way we can save ourselves. No one person we can vote for will fix the problems we face. The solution to stopping the second American Civil War starts at the bottom, with everyone who prefers sanity and decency to bloodshed and murder. Now, as the previous

episodes of this podcast have run, dozens and dozens of you have reached out to me, asking for advice on what you can do to stop a new Civil War. I laid out some of my thoughts in the How to Save America episode, but here's the thing. I'm just one guy, and I'm not a particularly bright guy at that. I dropped out of college so I could do dangerous drugs in a shack for two years. I've drunkenly vomited on roughly half of my friends. I am no expert on saving the world. And now that I think of it, I guess nobody in the world is. But for this episode, I decided to look outside of myself and ask some people I respect who all had insights that I thought might provide y'all with some inspiration on how we can turn this shit around.

First off, we're going to hear from Molly Conjure. Up until 2017, she was just a normal, not particularly politically involved citizen of Charlottesville, Virginia. Then Unite the Right happened. Nazis marched through her hometown carrying torches. One of them murdered a young woman, and Molly decided she had to do something. You know, up until that point, I'd been just a regular person, busy with my job, didn't really have much of a life, I wasn't really very political, and suddenly I lost my job, and I had all this free time. And then a terrorist attack happened in my neighborhood. And I just didn't understand how this could have happened to us.

I didn't understand how this had been allowed to happen. So I started going to meetings. I went to my first Charlottesville City Council meeting on August 21st, 2017. two meetings. I went to my first Charlottesville City Council meeting on August 21st, 2017. And that was not your average city council meeting, even by our rather raucous standards here since then. You know, people were screaming and people were being dragged from chambers by cops. And it was, it was dramatic. People were traumatized. I don't really know what i expected to get from that meeting or from any of the meetings i went to after that i just i thought it would help me understand um so sorry you have to edit a lot of this out no no you're doing a lot of thinking

yeah it helped you yeah you wanted to understand what the hell was going on that allowed this to happen and so it sounds like that's what you're saying and it sounds like the only way you could think of to really do that was to just kind of stick your head inside the local government and be like what the what what's happening here right and you know eventually the meetings calmed down um we're a fairly civically engaged community but you know those first few meetings were a lot of people like myself who'd never been to a meeting before and they just wanted to know what the fuck happened um you know eventually they calmed down eventually they became more mundane and about the business of

governing a city again and it became clear to me that the violence of that summer was a symptom of a disease that we'd had for a long time. It was a very visible, ugly flare-up of what is a chronic illness. That there was white supremacy just deeply baked into the way the government works. You know, we think of that Nazi violence as, we think of that violence as the Nazis who marched in the streets, but really that was just a flare-up. It was a cold sore caused by the virus that reproduces in these meetings day in and day out. You know, it became less about spectacle, and it was more about the process of government and the decisions that get made in city council, or based on decisions made in other meetings and boards and commissions and work sessions. I still didn't have a job then. I didn't really know what I was doing.

I was kind of adrift and I had a lot of time to kill, so I went to another meeting and another meeting. And I realized that a lot of the governing happening in our city was going on in meetings that were open and name only. There's no one at these meetings. A lot of this is happening in the dark. And it strikes me that you're talking about sort of the disease of white supremacy,

that another disease that's at play here is the fact that because of how little engagement the average person has in their local government, that's another illness in and of itself. Like, the fact that there are these meetings where a lot of decisions that affect the day-to-day life of people enough that, like, some of them led to this deadly rally, that they're not even really happening, because, like, you know that nobody's going to show up, so it's just whatever handful of people are actually going to put themselves out there kind of make the decisions and conversations with each

other and most people don't know anything about it like that's a disease too um and it's a disease that's not just in charlottesville that's every town in this country as far as you know i'm aware it's everywhere and you know the news is supposed to be dispassionate right you know it's just facts um but there's you know there's, you know, there's no shortage of sterile, detached coverage of the sort of the day in, day out mundanities of running a city. And, you know, with absolutely no offense intended towards the, you know, real reporters, I've gotten to know sharing a beat with them. A lot of the coverage of this kind of stuff that exists just doesn't connect with people. You know, I found that people want something more than that.

Totally by accident, I discovered there's a real desire for news with what I guess you could call an audience surrogate. And that's what you've been doing is you've been showing up at these meetings and working as an audience surrogate to give people sort of, to help everyone else stick their heads into your local government so that these things aren't happening behind closed doors. Right, and it started by accident. I think the first city council meeting that I live-tweeted, I was not a Twitter user. I didn't, you know, sort of a, you know, I'll be 30 this year,

but I'm sort of a grandma when it comes to these things. I was not extremely online until two years ago. And I started tweeting from this meeting because, you know, people were being arrested and people were screaming and standing on tables and standing on chairs and there's chaos. But it sort of became more than that. I think, you know, as I kept going and as it calmed down, I kept keeping meeting minutes. And that's really what I do now for a living, I guess, is just keep meeting minutes.

A lot of people have been taken by surprise by the sudden and vicious surge of incredibly restrictive anti-abortion laws across much of the South, a law that would prescribe the death penalty to women who get abortions is even being discussed in Texas right now. The stuff that's actually been passed is shocking, but it shouldn't be. If you've paid attention to the religious right for the last 20 years, everything happening right now is what they've been working towards, methodically, and they've accomplished their goals in large part by spending thousands of cumulative hours calling representatives, putting up flyers, spreading pamphlets, registering voters, and forcing their elected leaders to listen to them. The same strategy that will stop these people from establishing a theocracy is also the same

strategy that will lead us towards taking the sane, necessary actions to reduce climate change. It's the same strategy that can lead to effective action against the spread of white supremacist terror. The solutions to all of these problems start with all of us getting involved right now. Let's see. I do just want to underscore showing up. That is the most important message here. A good friend of mine, Vidya, a graduate student union organizer at the University of Michigan, describes her work as just being a dumb bitch who cares a lot. And I laughed at that at first, but she's right. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to read all the books. You don't need to know where you're going. You don't need to be a leader. You just have to care about the people around you.

Jump in, show up, and start helping, I didn't go to journalism school. I don't know what I'm doing. I think a lot of people are hesitant to get more involved until there's a clearer spot for them, until there's a path forward. But there's no assigned seats here. You just show up. Just show up. If you want to follow Molly online, you can find her on Twitter at Socialist Dog Mom. You can also find her on Patreon under the same name, Socialist Dog Mom. Molly is good people, and she's a good example of achievable activism. You don't have to make local government a full-time

job, like she did, but you can do something, even if that's just showing up. And if everyone does something, we can fix some shit. We don't fight. We don't riot. Even when the war's outside our door. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of fixing some shit, I've talked an awful lot in this series about Nazis, white supremacists, and the less extreme but more numerous militias and right-wing street gangs that enable and support those literal Nazis.

Something has to be done about all of them, and while many of the outright fascists probably can't be talked down, there are organizations who specialize in de-radicalizing these people. I mentioned Light Upon Light and Life After Hate in the How to Save America episodes. The work of those groups is worth supporting. But there are an awful lot of people who haven't yet made the full jump to fascism. Folks who may be enthralled with militias of various stripes, or fashy groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, but haven't fallen fully off the cliff and bought an SS uniform. These people actually make up the bulk of the far-right street movement that's been

involved in so much of the political violence we've seen over the last three years. Joey Gibson, founder of Portland's Patriot Prayer, is probably the patron saint of this sort of extremist. I opened this series by discussing my deep worry about how one of these rallies might very easily provide the spark that ignites the Second American Civil War. If that is the case, then one way to make that war less likely is to try to reach and de-radicalize some of these men. Many of them probably can't be reached, but you only really need to reach a few of them to reduce their numbers enough

that the rest are too scared to take to the streets. Every unhinged militiaman and proud boy who gets brought back to sanity lowers our national temperature by just a little bit. I wanted to provide some advice on how to do that, so I talked to my friend Marielle Eaton. She's a Portland-based activist, and she's been present for some of the very ugly stuff that's gone down in the streets of that city. I think her story provides a blueprint other people can use to try and reach the other side. I do want to know that I am mainly talking about my fellow white folks here. When it comes to white supremacists and white supremacist adjacent folks, the burden does fall more heavily on us,

in large part because it's more dangerous for people of color to even attempt that work. So, without further ado, here's Marielle. So without further ado, here's Marielle. I was at, I believe it was the biggest and one of the early rallies that happened where Joey Gibson and his crew and a bunch of three percenters and Oath Keepers and other groups came together and people from the left showed up in very large numbers. And we were kind of separated. It was a little bit before Portland police started cracking down and trying to create barriers between the groups. So we just had a street blocking us. And I was spending a bit of time, a fair bit of time,

just yelling across the street at how cute their outfits were. And I was just saying, oh, that's so cute. Oh, you're adorable. Kind of belittling them on purpose because that felt like something that was cathartic and would maybe be effective. After a while, though, I realized I wanted to go across the street and see what was going on. I, of course, saw Confederate flags. I saw some people who had swastika tattoos or patches on their jackets. And then just a lot of people kind of looked a little bit like Comic-Con. A lot of people dressing up in outfits.

I'm sure anyone who has been to these rallies or seen pictures have seen some of the people that come out. Yeah. A lot of people LARPing as, you know, soldiers or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. But not just, you know, the people who look like they're in military garb, but real just interesting Comic-Con style costumes. Like that guy who dressed up like a Spartan warrior. Yeah.

And you saw the photo of me confronting him. Like that guy who dressed up like a Spartan warrior. my fearless survivor shirt on and I had some people tell me that my I deserved my rape and a lot of other really wonderful things and after a while I you know I had a few people come up to me and start talking to me because apparently the day before there was video of me that was put on 4chan and so some people were like I saw you on 4chan. And some were taunting me, but some started trying to bring up conversation points. And a lot of them were conspiracy theories, white genocide style conversations that, ones that you don't even quite know where to begin. And then I went, looped around and got into an argument with some three percenters and oath keepers. And

before you know it, there were quite, I'd say, 15, mostly men, I think only one or two people who identified as women around me. And they all were kind of bringing up various points. And clearly most of them were wanting to belittle me in some way. But some of them seemed to really want to have conversations. And I realized with all the noise and everything, you couldn't even begin to have a helpful conversation with anyone. And so at some point when I got a few people who I thought I could really sit down and try to have a conversation with to try to show them because they seem to have a lot of misconceptions of my viewpoints and the viewpoints of the left in general I said hey does anyone want to get together to have coffee and have a conversation and a few of them were interested and one in particular ended up emailing me and saying, hey, you know,

I really think that was interesting that you wanted to do that. You weren't just wanting to shut down views. You were actually trying to answer people. And you were, of course, unable to do that in that kind of environment. I would love to get together for coffee with you and talk about this. And so we got together and he seemed really nervous. And this is a man that was probably 6'3 to 6'5 and large as well. Just a large man compared to me. I'm a 5' five woman. And he seemed a lot more nervous than I was. I, of course, let people know where I was going and what I was doing just in case. But I intentionally left my knife at home, which I usually keep with me, especially since I bus around and am around late at night. I like to keep a knife on me, left it at home. And I don't know exactly

what drove me to do that. It's like I wanted to go in with the intention that I didn't need to be armed in this situation. And so I arrive. He says, oh, I was afraid that you were going to show up with your anarchist buddies and, you know, you seem so much nicer than I had thought you were going to be. You know, I came armed and everything. And I was like, well, I intentionally didn't come armed. And he was so taken aback by that. And he said, but you're a petite woman.

Why would you do that? And I just explained to him, I want to have a conversation. Would you do that? And I just explained to him, I want to have a conversation. I didn't want to come with any assumption that I needed to be afraid of you. I wanted to just come with open hands and have a good conversation with you. And we sat there for about four hours and just had this really long conversation, covered a lot of topics. I didn't start with politics with him.

I asked him who he was and what he cared about and where he was from and then you know he learned a little bit more about me and then we got into politics and what I realized really quickly into talking with him and it is probably something that I came with an assumption about is that he didn't really he didn't really explore a lot of the topics as deeply as I had and when I brought them up there was a lot that he wasn't aware of and the news sources that he got were a lot of the ones that are riddled with misinformation, whether intentional or unintentional. And what sort of stuff specifically was he bringing up?

Alex Jones, Daily Stormer, a lot of the ones that have Fox News, a lot of the ones that just have a reputation for not being very reliable and even intentionally misleading and he had even stated as well that he he wasn't even sure if he liked trump he just felt like from the information he was getting that he needed to vote for trump in order to keep the rule of the land in order and you know i a lot of what he was saying i could understand where he got to that conclusion and when i brought up some of the new sources that i looked at uh ones that he wasn't even aware of like al jazeera he was like oh is that the

terrorist organization one and so there's just there was. Yeah, I mean, he he was somebody who. Any I believe and he had said, if Trump does some of the horrible things people think that he's going to do, I will stop supporting him and I will fight against him actively. and I will fight against him actively. And I asked him, what would that take? And he didn't have a really clear, concrete answer. And I actually, when you asked me to retell this story, I decided to reach out to him again. And so we'll see if he wants to get together again and I can see if he's now changed any of his views and where that's gone.

Yeah, so. Did you feel like you made progress, sort of, at least in kind of bridging a gap in understanding by the end of the conversation? Yeah, I think I made him think. And I think that it reinstilled a sense that I had that a lot of the problems we're seeing have to do with misinformation that somebody who supports like he was talking about the three percenters how he was not yet a

three percenter but was thinking of becoming. And when I talked to him a little bit about the background of groups like that and some of the racist pieces that people bring up a lot, he almost seemed surprised. And he said, no, we really just care about patriotism. We care about defending our country. And I think he was genuine. I think some of the other things perhaps he hadn't encountered yet directly and didn't believe them or he he was just searching for community. And I think that's what I see a lot with especially young white men who join these groups as they're looking for community in the wrong places. as they're looking for community in the wrong places. So, yeah, I think that that's why, as I mentioned, groups like Rural Organizing Project really inspire me because they realize that information and education are the things that we need most to fight these extremist groups.

By the way, Marielle also has a message for anyone listening who might be on the opposite side of the political spectrum from her and want to talk. So if anyone wants to have a conversation with me over coffee and you're in the Portland area, you can find me on Instagram at Ellie Beaton it. E-L-L-I-E Beaten It. Now, the far-right extremists are only a part of the equation of political violence in our society. The other integers are left-wing activists, generally referred to as Antifa by the media, and, of course, the police. I'm aware of how Antifa is presented by the far-right media,

but I've actually spent a lot of time around these people and seen them in the streets of a few cities. The important thing to remember about Antifa is that they don't tend to rally on their own. Antifa is not hosting these endless marches in Portland. They haven't held a bunch of their own torchlit marches in Charlottesville. They are a reactive group. They would characterize what they do as community self-defense. If there aren't Nazis marching in their streets, most of them will stay at home and chill out. That leaves us with the police. Right now, police violence is a huge factor driving anger and instability in the United States. The most violent protests we've seen in living memory, in Ferguson and Los Angeles, have been driven by incidents of police brutality. So it would stand to reason that

de-radicalizing America's police could do a lot to stop the gears of war from cranking forward. I'm not a cop, but I sat down with a former police officer named Alex, who also happens to be a fan of this show. He worked as a California cop for 15 years, and he came to the conclusion that there were some serious, serious issues in law enforcement that needed to be fixed. The biggest moment that inspired me to kind of that changed my worldview was when my older brother was arrested and booked into my jail, actually, that I worked at. And he received a

rather resounding physical beating from law enforcement at the time he was mentally ill he still is but he was mentally psychotic he was having a psychotic episode and that was the incident it was within my first year of being hired

of him just getting the kind of dirt stomped out of him and it didn't need to happen uh yeah and it really it humanized everything for me really quickly people with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than the general population alex came face to face with evidence of this horrible reality and it radicalized him and so he decided to change his department from the inside. So a lot of people don't really understand what happens with cops when you first become a cop, and I think that's one of the issues, is there needs to be more transparency about the whole process of becoming a cop.

cop. You go to an academy, you get a certificate that says you're a baby cop now. You're not a cop cop, you're a baby cop. You have to go get a job first and then you have to pass a field training program. And then you have to stay with that department for a year and then you finally get a post certificate and then you're finally a cop. But what happens is these guys go to these academies, they get taught the right way. They get taught the, at least in my personal experience, they were taught the ideal way of dealing with people, the ideal way of de-escalation. This is how you should be interacting with the public. This is what you shouldn't be doing. And that's all hunky-dory. It's all hypothetical. It's school. And then they get out into the real world and they get a job finally somewhere. And then they go into

FTO and then they get some guy that's their FTO officer sitting in their cruiser with them. And one of the first things that guy's going to tell you is everything you learn in the academy throw it out the door it's not going to do any good it's uh that's not how the real world works is what they'll tell you and this guy holds your career in his hands uh he if he doesn't like you he can fail you and technically that doesn't end your career but it does mean you're not working at that department anymore, and it does make it harder for you to get hired at another department.

So if your heart is really set on being a law enforcement officer, and you know the score, and people have told you what this program's like, the FTO program, and it's the same everywhere you go, when this guy tells you you're going to do what I tell you if you want to pass, that's what you're going to do. You're going to become the cop that this guy wants you you're going to do what I tell you if you want to pass that's what you're going to do you're going to become the cop that this guy wants you to be

and he wants you to be a cop just like him and it's this perpetuation of you know that idea of oh well this is how we did it back in my day in my day we had it hard in my day it was rough in my day it was this and instead we had it hard. In my day, it was rough. In my day, it was this. And instead of looking forward and being like, I want the next generation to have better. Instead, they're like, no, you're going to have just what I had. And you're going to have to go through all the same crap that I went through. And I'm going to make sure that happens to you. What Alex is saying is that the way this fundamental part of training, this police apprenticeship program works, allows the biases, bigotry, and bad behavior

of one generation of cops to pass down to the other, forever and ever. I can speak to a friend of mine who went out to patrol. He had been working in the jails with us for years, and he was a good cop. He knew his stuff. He knew his penal codes. He was firm,

but fair with, uh, with our inmates and, you know, enforcing rules and regulations. And I think he was out on the FTO program for two weeks when they sent him back to the jails and the rumor mill starts running, you know,

everyone's like, Oh man, so you heard so-and-so failed. What happened? What happened? What happened? And the only thing we could kind of glean and the only thing he would tell us because he he didn't want to be well i mean he didn't want to be a snitch right um is his fto

didn't like how hands off he was during an arrest and when he told his training officer you know you don't we don't have to do these things this way anymore. He said the training officer, he didn't say anything out loud, but he gave him this long thousand mile stare. And just told him, I don't think this is going to work out for you. And then the very next day, he was done. He was back in the jails. Changing this FTO program would be a significant alteration of the way many police departments work. It's the kind of thing that would have to be approached piecemeal, in a department-by-department basis, via the work of concerned citizens getting involved in their local

communities. But it's also the sort of thing that individual officers could work to change from the inside. I know we do have some cops listening to this show, which honestly surprised me at first when y'all started reaching out to me. In case you're still listening, here's Alex's explanation for how he tried to change things in his department from the inside. So what I did back in my department that I worked at, I weaseled my way into becoming the FTO supervisor. And what I did was I started making as many people FTOs as I could.

Because what I found was nobody wanted the job. Because it had a pay boost on it. They would pay you like a 3% increase in pay during the hours in which you were actually training somebody. But nobody wanted to do it because there was a ton of paperwork just tons and tons of paperwork you had to do on top of all the other paperwork you do and cops i mean we're bureaucrats with guns on our hips i mean our lives are paperwork it really is and uh so what i did i started making as many people FTOs as I could to spread out the responsibility. Because what I found with a lot of these guys that were having that you're going to go through what I went through attitude and back in my day attitude was they were kind of just generally burnt out on the job in general.

And so we were taking a guy who was in the last 10 years of his career and having him mold the future minds of the department and in my my opinion was we take younger guys who have shown you know good skills and leadership and then have a clean record and we make these guys as many of them as we can trainers so that maybe a training officer would train one to two new hires a year. Whereas a lot of them are training somewhere between 10 and 20. And it's all they do. They're not even cops anymore. They're not really doing what they wanted to do with their career.

They became glorified examiner proctors. Because these guys, they don't even teach these new cadets. They're just evaluating them. And it's like, you know, we're going to go to this call, rookie, and even teach these new cadets. They're just evaluating them. And it's like, you know, we're going to go to this call, rookie, and you're going to do this. And then when he messes it up, he just tells them, hey, you screwed that up, don't do it again. But they don't actually sit down and go, okay, here's what you did wrong.

Let me help you out. Because, like I said, they're burned out. They're done. Yeah. So what I noticed in my department when I started spreading the responsibility out to everybody was part of the culture of trainee and rookie or, you know, the green guy. way because so many people were trainers that they started to rely on each other for help with training because it seemed like i'd created a sense of community and buy-in with the other training officers where instead of like oh it's you know it's deputy so-and-so's problem not my problem now these guys are like oh i've been there I remember what it's like to have a busy day. Maybe I'll go help that guy out, take some load off him so he can get his paperwork done for

his trainee. Now, most of what I've talked about up to this point have been preventative measures, ways to lower the temperature and potentially help unfuck this country. But in the year of our Lord 2019, very few of us are optimists. Even if the Second American Civil War does not happen, our situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Now, a lot of people have asked me some variation of the question, what can I do to prepare for this? And the answer to that question breaks down into two separate categories, things you can spend money on to prepare and things you can't. The money stuff is easy. First off, get a one-month stockpile of dried food for you and your family.

Wise Food sells one-month, one-person buckets for around $70. Amazon has a pretty wide variety of survival rations. Survival tabs are about $22 for eight days. If you want to eat a little bit fancier, one-month supply MRE crates are $140 or so. Mountain House has a one-month bucket that's $86, and in my opinion, their stuff does taste the best. I want to make it clear that I don't receive money from any of these companies. I just think buying at least a month of emergency food is a sane thing for anyone to do. Even if there's no civil war, close to 100% of the people listening to this will be hit by a natural disaster at some point in their lives. It's just sensible to have extra

food on hand. And if you want to be extra prepared, expand to a three-month supply. You should also get some water. You can buy a couple of 15-gallon containers for pretty cheap, fill them up, and just keep them in the back of a closet or in your garage just in case. You should also consider investing in water purification tablets or a survival straw. If you rely on a medication and can't afford to do so, try to get a three-month supply of whatever you need. Sometimes telling your doctor you're going overseas for an extended period of time can work to allow you to do this. Now, many people have asked me about whether or not they should buy a gun, and we'll talk more about that later. But it's important to note that owning firearms has downsides. Keeping a sensible stockpile of dried food, water, and medication has zero downsides other than the upfront cost. These are the kind of things that everybody should

do. But stockpiling can only take you so far. What should you actually do if order breaks down, the police retreat, and your community is left to fend for itself? I've never been in that situation, but Scott Crowe has. We don't fight, we don't riot, even when the walls outside our door. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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. In the How to Save America episode of this series, I talked a bit about Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, an organization I advise people to join and support. That group evolved out of something called the Common Ground Clinic, which arose in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Common Ground is a perfect example of the sort of thing you'd want to build

in the wake of a state pullout from your community. It started as a handful of street medics providing emergency medical care in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. It evolved into a network of clinics and a free public hospital, which provided care to more than 60,000 people and took in more than 20,000 volunteers. Common Ground offered everything from AIDS testing and psychiatric aid to roof tarping and neighborhood computer centers.

Common Ground established more than 100 neighborhood gardens to help feed people. Their motto, solidarity, not charity, is the same motto Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has today. Now, Common Ground was not a top-down structure. They didn't ride into impoverished areas and replace FEMA and the federal government with another system of control. Instead, they helped members of those communities organize to secure and see to their own needs. Scott Crowe was one of the people who helped organize and execute this massive effort. But when I saw the devastation there, I, you know, I was there like two days after the storm. So what I saw was actually the inefficiency of capitalism, if you want to use

those terms, or governments in general. But I also saw the inefficiency of not just governments, but also corporations to do anything about this. The two dominant things and structures in our lives that kind of permeate every part of civil society, they just felt, they just totally collapsed. And so there was nothing to do. And so people were really left to their own devices and what they wanted to do. And so from that, I started to germinate on these ideas very quickly because I needed them. And I'm like, well, you know, we could do a first aid station because we could get some anarchists to come here and do a first aid station. But what if a first aid station

became a clinic? What if a clinic became a hospital? You know, and then, and then I started to think, well, why don't we feed people so we could get food, not bombs to come down and, and, and, and begin to feed people. And then what if we began to build cooperative restaurants or we began to build, uh, anyway, just larger infrastructure. I just kept thinking about it over and over again in these larger ways. And so what we did was we started to call for volunteers and networks that we'd already built to begin this project, which we hadn't even named yet. And it was three people that kind of started it.

It was myself, this man named Malik Rahim, who was a former member of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans, had been in shootouts with the police and stuff. And then this woman named Sharon Johnson, who was a resident of Algiers and just decided to take it on. She'd been working at a bank before that. And so the three of us began to lay the foundations of not just trying to provide charity or support for people in that way that everybody does, because everybody could see that there was a disaster, but we wanted to use it as a pivoting point to begin to rebuild neighborhoods, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood,

not in our image, but in the image of what the people wanted for themselves, so every community wouldn't need the same thing. And so I took from the Zapatistas to lead by obeying the idea and the concept that, you know, if you're going to lead people, you have to ask them what they want, and then you just have to direct them and facilitate it. And so that's what we did. We began to have conversations with people while we were building stuff. But remember, the thing that made Common Ground Collective different than any other organization

is what we were willing to go against the state and the police and all the forms of governmental entities when they were doing things that were wrong. We stopped them from killing people in the streets. I took up arms against the police. I took up arms against white militia guys who were actually killing people in the streets to stop them from killing more people. Now, I'm going to stop Scott right there for a moment because he's just moved on to a topic that I don't think most people know much about. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a lot of news coverage focused on the supposed chaos, largely blamed on violent gang members and looters. In our episode on the upsides of the Second American Civil War, I dispelled those rumors.

episode on the upsides of the Second American Civil War, I dispelled those rumors. National Guard officers have come out on the record saying gang members were actually some of the most active volunteers in the relief efforts. But there was insane vigilante violence in the aftermath of Katrina. White supremacist militiamen who refused to evacuate spent days hunting down any black people who had the temerity to exist near them. You don't have to take Scott's word for this, or mine. Here's several militiamen and women bragging about what they did after Hurricane Katrina. It was great! It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota.

Right on. If it moved, you shot it. That's not a pheasant and we're not in South Dakota. What's wrong with this picture? We walked the street. We had sidearms. You know, you had no choice. It was that bad.

We said, just put them on the side because they knew they were doing wrong, you know? We said, just put them to the side. That's all we could do. I am no longer a Yankee. No. I earned my wings. He understands the N-word now. I learned my wings.

These interviews were shot during a barbecue, and everyone involved was drinking. You can hear how they briefly attempt to blame their victims by painting them as looters. I think their comments about learning the meaning of the N-word put the lie to that. There is an extraordinary amount of video evidence and interviews that attest to the exterminationist crimes of white supremacist militias during this period. I'd like to quote next from a book called A Paradise Built in Hell. Quote, the vigilantes had gotten the keys of some of their neighbors who'd evacuated, set up barricades, even felling trees to slow people's movement through the area, accumulated an arsenal, and gone on patrol. Unfortunately, there were also between the rest

of New Orleans Parish and the ferry terminal from which people were being evacuated. A lot of people had good reason, as well as every right, to walk through those streets. At one point, they even demanded a black man leave the neighborhood, even though he lived a few blocks from where his neighbors threatened him. Suddenly, in that mixed neighborhood, blacks were intruders. The vigilantes were convinced that their picturesque neighborhood on the other side of the river would be overrun by looters, but they did not report the loss of even a garden hose or flower pot from a single front yard. There's a good article in The Nation about this, called Katrina's Hidden Race War. It notes that right-wing news website Cox News called these murderers

the ultimate neighborhood watch. And while police claims about gang snipers shooting at them have been largely debunked, substantial evidence exists to back up Scott's claims of police brutality against black residents. I recommend the ProPublica article, Body of Evidence, if you want to read more about that. militias did in Katrina, and what neo-Nazi organizer Louis Beam planned back in the 1980s, when he attempted to organize an underground neo-Nazi army for the race war he believed was imminent. I quoted Beam in an earlier episode, and I'd like to quote him again here. Quote, we'll set up our own state here and announce that all non-whites have 24 hours to leave. Lots of them won't believe it or won't believe us when they say we'll get rid of them, so we'll have to exterminate a lot of them the first time around. This brings me to the subject of armed self-defense and whether or not you should consider purchasing a firearm.

I can't make that decision for any of you. I can't answer that question for any of you. And I'm not an NRA-loving evangelist of firearms as magical talismans against danger. And I'm not an NRA-loving evangelist of firearms as magical talismans against danger. Having a gun does not guarantee anything. But it does provide you with options that people without firearms do not have. And because Scott and his fellow activists at Common Ground had guns with them in the wake of Katrina, they had the option of defending their community against rampaging racist militiamen. So again, taking a page from anarchist books and also from the Zapatistas,

what we did was we wanted to create an area within a few square blocks that was under our control mostly. And I say our control, that means community control, not the people in common ground, but the people in the neighborhood. And so that gave us safety to be able to build the clinic, to build the food distribution and the hygiene distribution,

to begin to build the programs, to begin to do the free schools and things like that. But the armed defense was a major component at the beginning because the police were out of control, and they turned a blind eye to white militias in Algiers and in the French Quarter who were killing black men largely, unarmed black men. And the thing is, it wasn't a lot of them. It didn't take a lot, but what they did was they shot at a lot of them. And so two white guys from Texas, myself and another guy, we joined with three guys in the neighborhood.

This is in the early days. This is when we first came to do the search and rescue. And that was one of the things that people needed. They said, we need people to stop. We need to form community patrols to stop these white militia guys from killing people. Because they were driving around like the Klan in the back of trucks, drunk, totally armed, shooting people. I mean, it looked like something out of Somalia or something, except it was totally white dudes, you know.

And they weren't sensitive, and they were just drunk rednecks is what they were. And so, you know, and I'm a redneck myself, so I could see myself in them, but that's, you know, we had to stop them. So we ended up in an armed standoff with them that really literally lasted for minutes. But it changed the shape of power in that block of neighborhoods, just us doing that, because they stopped patrolling as often as they did. Now, the police still turned a blind eye to it, but the police were also killing people. And when I say the police, I'm not talking about just random police. I'm talking about New Orleans Police Department were actually randomly killing people. And when I say the police, I'm not talking about just random police. I'm talking about New Orleans Police Department, who were actually randomly killing people. And many of

the officers were indicted later for many atrocities of crimes, and then they walked away with many other ones. And so the arms self-defense component was only a piece to hold a space while we began to create this other stuff. And again, taking a page out of the Zapatista playbook, what they did was they rose up in 1994 with arms, and then they said, we will put our arms away when we have enough safety and security from those around us in civil society who are paying attention to what's going on.

And so we used the same thing. The arms, because the way I want to build liberatory community armed self-defense is not that we perpetuate the problems of power, of those with guns have more power than the rest of the people in communities. And so the whole idea was to take up arms and put them away when we didn't need them anymore because there's enough people on the ground doing the things. And we could use other forms. We could use media to talk to people. We could use community control within the community to actually stop people from being killed, just physical protection. And, it's political, it's economic, and war. These are all forms of disasters that have very similar things where everything that you think you know about the world disappears immediately and people begin to die.

And as human-induced climate change is causing more and more calamities and disasters, I think that what we need to do is build more autonomy, more communities that are autonomous but networked. So while firearms are important tools to have in the event of a civil collapse, focusing on building an arsenal is probably a mistake. Having a gun can be part of a survival plan, but guns alone will not keep you safe. When you get right down to it, the only thing that really provides long-term security in a disaster is a community. That's what Scott Crowe in the Common Ground Clinic proved in Katrina. Training with a rifle has its place, but you'll gain more benefit from volunteering with street

medic collectives and organizations like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief because that will help you build connections with local networks of people you can rely on and cooperate with in the event the state falls apart. This is not just your hunky-dory scenario where we're just like, oh, everything's okay and we can do this and we can have time. We had to build all this from scratch with no money, no infrastructure, except for the larger networks that anarchists had built around the country over the preceding 15 or 20 years and the rise of the alternative globalization movement. We had created these networks of like street medics, anarchist street medics who had been showing up at all these protests around the country and providing support for protesters

or Food Not Bombs chapters that had been around for 30 years, but had also formed these networks, we were able to call these networks in. And so these people were willing to risk felonious arrest to feed people, to risk felonious arrest or to be killed to just provide basic Medicare, medical care to people. And so with that, it's like we just started to build. And as more people came, they brought ideas of building more and more projects and more and more programs. And so, you know, we started with three people and, you know, and self-defense and community armed defense. And then from that, we began to build this incredibly beautiful train wreck called the Common Ground Collective. The state is fragile. It never looks that way when times are good,

but disasters like Katrina are a peek behind the curtain. They reveal that behind the armored riot cops and tanks and flags is a naked old magician relying on smoke and mirrors. The state is as brittle as the power lines. Infrastructure, the things that we rely on, the electricity grid, the food grid, the deliveries, the fuel grids, they all go down really fast. It doesn't take very long for them to – it just takes a few key places for them to go down. So if it floods somewhere, like on the coastline, all the oil production in Texas stops. And when oil production stops in Texas, it's the refineries and stuff, the actual processing, then that means it stops for the whole country, the whole United States, like quickly. So this happened at Harvey, this happened at Katrina, this happened at Ike, it just

keeps happening over and over, but it hasn't had a complete stop yet, but it's coming. And so I don't even live in, I don't live in fear about things, but so just recognizing that, I watched what happened at Katrina as an isolated thing, like in the region that happened like in three or four states, like most hurricanes do. But what I watched was that the stores that had their delivery warehouses are all predicated on this very minimal thing where they just barely keep them stocked. And so they can run out really fast, food, water, like, you know, like all the things that would be in a warehouse for Walmart, not, you know, pitching them, but anywhere. And so it's concentric circles.

So, like, it's New Orleans and, say, it's Mississippi and Alabama, like, isolated storms, right, that have happened. But then all of a sudden the infrastructure spreads to the northern and western parts of those states where there's, like in concentric rings where there's no supplies available. And then within two more weeks, there's nothing available within the states nearby. And then it keeps going until, at Katrina, people didn't start to bring supplies in until it was like four states away. There was nothing to get. Even in Texas, you couldn't bring water to people in Katrina unless you were far, like you were getting it in El Paso. This was only in the first few weeks.

So watching that, watching the grids go down really quickly really changed the way I think about stuff. But I am not somebody who wants to sit in fear and worry about how we're going to do this, because I can tell you all the fear mongers like that asshole Alex Jones, the fucking dumb fucker that he is, those guys, they make their money on fear, but fear only goes so far. Preppers and militiamen and their ilk like to present an aura of power and preparedness, but many of them are ultimately quite fragile too. A network of human beings working together to protect one another are stronger than any bunker. They're stronger than any state. Those bonds are not just what will save us if the state collapses. They're the only thing that can carry us through to a better future. We've all seen, in the months and years since

2016, the fragility of the world order most of us grew up taking for granted. As the climate worsens, as disasters grow more frequent, as fascism surges forward, we find ourselves in a position where just patching holes in the dike isn't enough. We need to build new, more resilient systems if the things we love about our culture, our society, our species are going to survive. I know the task of building a new world is a scary thing to consider.

In its own way, it's as frightening as the thought of collapse. When I was young, I read a book by Steven Pressfield called The Gates of Fire. It's a fictional retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, and a much more historically accurate depiction of events than the one seen in Frank Miller's 300. There's a running question in the book, asked by several of the characters. What is the opposite of fear? What is the thing that binds people together in the book asked by several of the characters. What is the opposite of fear? What is the thing that binds people together in the most desperate and hopeless of situations? By the end of the book, one of the characters, Dianikes, finally answers that question.

The opposite of fear, he says, is love. I hope this series has had an impact on all of you. I hope it inspires you to read Cities Under Siege and Scott Crowe's own book about Katrina, Black Flags and Windmills. I hope it convinces you to study democratic confederalism and what's happening in Rojava. I hope that many of you will start volunteering on farms, studying emergency medicine,

and volunteering with groups like Mutual Aid, Disaster Relief, and Food Not Bombs. More than anything, I hope it convinces you that the only antidote to the hatred and suspicion tearing apart our society is solidarity. And at the core of solidarity is love. At the end of the first episode of this series, I talked about Jeremy Christian,

the fascist extremist who stabbed two people to death on a Portland Max light rail train in 2017. I talked a fair amount about Christian in that episode, his support for the right-wing street gang Patriot Prayer, his belief that his murders were justified by the perceived liberalism of his victims. To me, Jeremy Christian is a human microcosm of everything pushing this country to madness. It is important to talk about him, but it might be more important to talk about the men he killed. On that terrible summer day in Portland, Christian had focused on two young women,

one of whom was black and the other of whom wore a hijab. He'd started screaming in their faces about how all Muslims needed to be exterminated when several men on the train decided to intervene. The two men who would die defending those young women could not have appeared more different from each other, at least on paper. Taliesin Mirden Namkheim-Mesch was a 23-year-old social justice advocate from Ashland, Oregon.

He was passionate about environmental issues and wrote eloquently about Islam in an effort to counter the prejudices many Americans have towards the faith. Ricky John Best was a 53-year-old Army veteran, a father of four, a devout Catholic, and a registered Republican. Based on the conventional political wisdom of our increasingly polarized times, Taliesin and Rickey should have been yelling at each other. But when two young, vulnerable members of their community needed defending, both Rickey and Taliesin stood up and put their bodies in harm's way to protect strangers. The emotion that propelled them forward in those last moments was love. As he bled out on the floor of that train, Taliesin told the woman attempting to render first

aid to him, tell everyone on this train I love them. Having love in your heart, like having a gun in your hand, does not guarantee anything. It does not mean victory. But I also know that we can't turn this shit around without it. And that's it. That's all I got. It's up to you all now to go out and unfuck this country. So, good luck and godspeed. One last time, I'm going to turn to four fists to play us out. I ain't never been to war. Knock on fucking wood. Neither of you. So so I'm doing pretty good. I ain't never killed a man. Once I stole the heat, I knew I wouldn't starve.

This all just make-believe. I think I'm George Patton, Herbert Hoover, speaking Shakespeare to the stones. Hope that they'll be moved by words, turn rivers into reservoirs. I think I'm, fuck it, I used to think I was Casanova, but I crumble nowadays. Whenever I sleep without her, I used to think I was cashing over, but I crumble nowadays. Whenever I sleep without her, I used to worship Papa.

Spanish Civil War, fishing off the keys. We're racing cigars, man, that shit don't work for me. I'm on some fuckowski, heaven help us, Isaac Brock was right. Turning over every single stone in search of signs of life. Kind of nice, quiet life, yeah. Far from guns of war, run my fingers through the grass. Thank you. They are frontiers, they are endless, and they in our everything This one ain't set on me I ain't got much, but I'm not alone Inside each black metal four-fist We are the only one, we're Broken Jaws

Broken Jaws I'm ready, I'm patient, I'll wait Wait, wait, no I ain't I'm scared and I'm quick to escape He went that-a-way Maybe flatter than scattering Or flattened than shattering Or collecting data that don't have an idea

That isn't unraveling Free where the breeze will take me Helium and balloon but no string This where nobody wanted, we stuffed so far under We so out of sync Just remember to breathe Just remember to breathe Just remember how beast to be reached for like anything

Do that shit easy, nothing comes easy Just take it easy, do what the needs be There ain't no freebies, earn what you're keeping Or think they do not need me Cause they don't if you're sleeping Caught in the romance and drama, ohe is me stop them from catching the opening and they won't be credits this won't stop happening ever i'm learning to never make sense.

That's okay. Life is a weapon itself. The sharpest blade. There's not a heaven or hell. Just each day. Life is a death in itself. And I can't change. I'm learning to let go as well.

So strange. The past is a part of me now I'm made up about by myself You're racing past me back when I lost it I ain't dead I ain't I ain't dead I ain't I ain't dead

I ain't I ain't dead I ain't Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. I ain't dead I ain't I ain't dead

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.