It Could Happen Here - The Next American Genocide

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

The Second American Civil War opens the door for the next great American genocide. 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. We often talk about the system in purely negative terms. This is actually a thing the left and the right seem to share in America. Only the ever-vanishing center expresses much faith in the system, and even then, you won't find a lot of folks who will happily cheer the bureaucracy that runs so much of our government.

It's slow, unwieldy, myopic at best, and heartlessly inhuman at its worst. To increasing numbers of Americans, the system is one of the great evils of our modern era. The American militia movement was first incited by Ruby Ridge and the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. But rather than laying blame on specific individuals and the bad choices they made, many Americans blamed the federal government as a monolithic entity. Tim McVeigh didn't bomb the ATF's headquarters or the Pentagon or try to assassinate a bunch of congressmen. He bombed a federal building. Even if you aren't actively cleaning a gun in your bunker laughing to yourself at how I'm surely a stooge of the New World Order,

your view of bureaucracy is unlikely to be a charitable one. I'm not going to defend, say, the FBI or even the DMV here. I've got issues with both organizations myself. And as somebody with libertarian anarchist tendencies, I've always been hesitant to give any credit to bureaucracy. But then I read a book called Black Earth by Timothy D. Snyder. He's a professor of history at Yale University, and his specialty is the Holocaust. Professor Snyder is, hands down, one of the greatest minds in his field. His work is impeccably researched and mind-bogglingly thorough. And in Black Earth, he argues that bureaucracy did more than just about

anything else to save lives during the Holocaust. During his research, Professor Snyder found that the Jewish communities that saw the most complete eradication in Europe were the ones in locations that suffered from what he calls double state destruction, i.e. Poland was conquered by the Nazis and the Soviets. They basically split it down the middle, so the Polish state was destroyed. Then Germany invaded and wiped out the Soviet government in Poland, so the state was destroyed twice. According to Professor Snyder, Germans found the conditions where one could do as one pleased,

where they could kill Jews in large numbers for the first time in 1941 as they invaded the Soviet Union. It was in the zone of double occupation where Soviet rule preceded German, where the Soviet destruction of interwar states was followed by German annihilation of Soviet institutions, that a final solution took shape. Almost all of the two million or so Jews who came under German rule in 1939 would die. The same was true of the two million Jews who came under Soviet rule in 1939 and 1940. same was true of the two million Jews who came under Soviet rule in 1939 and 1940. Indeed,

the Jews who initially fell under Soviet rule were the first to be murdered en masse by the Germans. France, on the other hand, didn't really have its state destroyed. The Germans took over, but a lot of the underlying bureaucracy was left in place because it would have been just way too much trouble to rebuild from the ground up. And this left the Jews and other targeted minority groups in France with more options. According to Snyder, quote, citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews. It would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews. So long as state sovereignty persisted, so did limits and possibilities afforded by bureaucracy. In most offices, time is slowed and matters are considered, perhaps with the help of petitions or bribes.

When people in sovereign states beyond Germany wished to be noble, bureaucracy provided them with the opportunity to frame their arguments on behalf of individual Jews in the pragmatic or patriotic terms that employees of the state could understand and endorse. The bureaucracies beyond Germany also exhibited the typical tendencies of passing the buck, awaiting clear orders from higher authorities and insisting on clarity of expression and proper paperwork. Many of the things that make bureaucracies annoying in daily life could and did mean survival for Jews.

When governments collapse, they leave vacuums, and those vacuums are often filled by not just another government, but by the collected hate and rage of the most bigoted citizens in those areas. The rise of ISIS in Iraq is a fantastic example of that. The governments in Syria and Iraq had degraded enough that a large insurgent force was able to gain purchase, and once they were dominant in a region, they just started murdering all the groups of people they'd been whining about for years. dominant in a region, they just started murdering all the groups of people they'd been whining about for years. Imagine you live somewhere in the Bible Belt, a place like Georgia or Oklahoma, or even further south in Texas. For some of you, this won't require much imagination. Once the fighting starts, once cities are convulsed with protests and roads start being

bombed and cops start being shot, normal order will, as we've discussed, break down. If you grew up in that part of the world, the South, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that local megachurches would slide in to help provide order and stability. In other, less religious areas, forms of libertarian municipalism may take place, as we discussed a couple episodes back. Whether backed by churches, local councils, or communes, most of these autonomous zones will be broadly apolitical, focused on the immediate tasks of defense and ensuring survival and a decent standard of life. Ideology will matter less than getting shit done on a day-to-day basis. But some parts of this nation will be dominated by ideology. And if we're looking at extremist

ideologies that are already most dominant in the United States, we inevitably wind up at Christian fundamentalism. In 2017, when Judge Roy Moore won the Alabama Republican primary, he credited God for his win. Now that on its own is not so strange. In fact, it's pretty normal. But the more you look into Roy Moore, the more his version of God looks uncomfortably similar to the God worshipped by ISIS. I'd like to quote from a CNN article about comments Moore made while speaking at the open door Baptist church about the 9-11 attacks. He quoted Isaiah 30, 12, 13, which some fundamentalists claim predicted the attacks. Because you have despised his word and trust in perverseness and oppression and say thereon,

therefore this iniquity will be to you as a breach ready to fall, swell out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instance. After citing this, Moore said, Sounds a little bit like the Pentagon, whose breaking came suddenly at an instance, doesn't it? If you think that's coincidence, if you go to verse 25, There should be up every high mountain and upon every hill rivers and streams of water in the day of the great slaughter when the towers will fall. You know, we've suffered a lot in this country, maybe, just maybe, because we've distanced ourselves from the one that has it within his hands to heal this land. A few minutes later into his speech, Moore made it clear how he thought the United States had distanced itself from God.

We legitimize sodomy and legitimize abortion. Moore obviously lost that congressional race to the Democrat, but only barely, and only because it turned out he was a serial sexual harasser of young girls. And even then, he beat the mainstream Republican endorsed by President Trump for his primary slot. The scariest thing, however, is that by the standards of many prominent Southern Christian nationalists, Roy Moore is a moderate. Here's North Carolina pastor Charles Worley speaking in 2012. Built a great big large fence, 150 or 100 mile long, put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals.

And have that fence electrified till they can't get out, feed them. And you know what? In a few years, they'll die out. Now, this speech, of course, caused an uproar and drew widespread condemnation. But you know what else happened? More than a thousand people rallied to support Pastor Worley. He received a standing ovation. Here's preacher Matt Powell, a young wannabe Christian YouTube personality, speaking in 2018. I'm very radical. I mean, a lot of people ask me, you know, a lot of people tell me all the time, oh, you're so radical. I'm a very radical Christian, very conservative. And, you know, I believe that one of the reasons that our country is actually going downhill is because

the conservative Christians are actually being kicked out of the White House. You know, and the morals that our country are founded on. And as far as homosexuality goes, you know, I believe the Bible puts a death penalty on it. I believe it's disgusting. In 2017, Houston was hit by some apocalyptic floods. Minister Kevin Swanson, a piece of shit, blamed these floods on gay people, saying Houston's very, very aggressively pro-homosexual mayor had brought God's wrath upon the city. He said this on his radio show. Jesus sends the message home, unless Americans repent, unless Houston repents, unless New Orleans rep peaceful, not a war zone America. Just think how much more violent the rhetoric and the actions of these kinds of people would be

in the event of a second American Civil War. Gay and trans folks are already scapegoated anytime something terrible happens anywhere in this country. If the nation itself was thrown into violent turmoil, is it such a stretch to imagine fundamentalists deciding God wants them to punish such sinners? A few episodes ago, on the episode about how to save America, I played you some excerpts from one of Alex Jones's shows where he talked about his belief that the drag queen story hour was really just a coy scheme to make it easier for queer people to abduct and abuse children. Well, later in that episode, he went further. Let a child grow a little, have some love, have some parents, and be a good little person, and then they can get them in a dark pit. Oh, and then it's so good the energy these demons

suck off your child it's so much better than just giving them cancer because the parents are there when the child's dying from the cancer from the vaccine and so they still have love and it's just not as special but to have them in those dungeons all alone and then

all the guys in clown outfits pull back when Dracula comes in and they're licking their lips and they're scared of Dracula. A lot of them got abused by Dracula. But they're still hoping for a little bit of that blood. And then Dracula goes in there and rips that child to pieces and drinks that blood and takes their guts and just eats it. And then leaves. And then the vampire minions just run and just lick the blood off the altar.

Lick the blood off the altar. Lick the blood off the altar. And then Dracula's women come in, all the porn stars and all the sexy women that want to live forever, and they come in and they just eat little pieces of their feet and arms, and they revel. That's probably enough of that. Now, just so I'm being completely open, Alex wasn't just implicating gay people in the child blood sacrifice thing. He thinks the whole Democratic Party is basically complicit in this scheme to sacrifice children, but he definitely singles LGBT people out as foot soldiers in that effort. Sometime around the 5th century AD, a rumor began to spread around the more bigoted chunks of Christendom. It claimed that Jewish rabbis would,

semi-regularly, kidnap and sacrifice Christian children in order to consume their blood. Now, this is just literally the wrongest to think and be. A huge amount of Jewish religious law is actually based around the fact that human sacrifice is explicitly banned. This is one of the things that separated ancient Jews from pagans, but over the centuries, this lie was passed down and spread from nation to nation. It became known as the blood libel. By the time the 1920s rolled around, It became known as the blood libel. By the time the 1920s rolled around, it grew into a powerful part of the developing Nazi ethos. As early as 1926, Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer wrote lurid stories of the blood libel as a way to convince Germans that Jewish people were a direct danger to their children.

When you believe a group of people is abducting and sacrificing literal babies, that makes it a lot easier to justify murdering them, doesn't it? Here's Alex Jones, one more time. You know, vengeance is God's. Vengeance is God's. But God has instruments of vengeance. That's always the twist to the riddle. And so the globalists expect to try to terrorize us.

We're not one of these poor kids you got strung up in one of your dungeons. We're going to terrorize you. Now, Jones is a nut, clearly, but that's no reason to not take his calls for violence seriously. There's horrifying precedent for conspiratorial nuts on the radio inciting literal genocide. It happened in Rwanda. On April 6, 1994, Hutu president Habiarimana was assassinated. This triggered a spasm of unspeakable violence, which led to the violent murder of more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic group.

Much of this killing did not occur at the direction of the government. A huge amount of it was spontaneous, and it was all urged on by a handful of Hutu radio personalities, who directly encouraged the violence. I found a Duke University paper that analyzed many of the pertinent radio broadcasts. The author, Megan Lyon, noted, What I found especially interesting about the content of these broadcasts was the way in which its efforts to direct the extermination of the Tutsi population

was paralleled by its efforts to claim authority over the telling of history. The radio broadcasts reveal a struggle over who gets to tell history, and therefore, a struggle over a monopoly on truth. 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. 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. Now, Alex Jones and his followers certainly view themselves as engaged in a struggle with the mainstream media, which they see as holding a monopoly on truth. That's why he called his platform InfoWars.

Everyone on this podcast has already heard Jones and a number of other figures with sizable audiences either call for violence directly or go right up to the edge of calling for violence. The breakdown of order caused by a second American Civil War will not make any of these people more moderate. That said, I don't think you'd see mass murder campaigns against gay people on a national scale. Violence would occur in communities where the state retreated and extreme fundamentalist militias took hold. In suburbs and cities, they would round up and execute the people they believed were responsible for bringing God's wrath upon the United States. It's possible that the federal government, if controlled by a right-wing regime, would choose to work with some of these militias,

particularly as the military's manpower shortages became increasingly acute. We saw a version of this happen in Iraq during the fighting for Mosul, when Shia militias were allowed to fight alongside Iraqi regular army soldiers against the Sunni warriors of ISIS. And of course, anti-LGBT bigotry is far from the only kind of bigotry that exists in the United States and that has the potential to be a trigger for eliminationist violence. In the last six months, we've seen two different white supremacist terrorists attack synagogues. There may well be another attack by the time this episode drops. Anti-Semitic violence is as old as Western civilization. Much of this podcast is speculative, but one thing we can be absolutely, objectively certain of

is that a sizable number of violent people would blame the collapse of the United States on the Jews. There would be murders and pogroms. However, from where I'm sitting, the religious minority who would be most threatened by the collapse of order in the U.S. are American Muslims. During the 2008 campaign, John McCain courted the support of a pastor named Rob Parsley. McCain called Parsley, quote, Now, according to ABC News, quote, Parsley right behind McCain for photographers, apparently unconcerned about Parsley's well-established denunciations of the Islamic faith in a book, Silent No More, and on DVDs of sermons about Islam. Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world, Parsley says on the DVDs reviewed by ABC News.

America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, Parsley says. And I believe September 11, 2001 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore. Bridget Gabriel is a Lebanese-American Christian. She founded the organization Act for America in 2008. Today, it is the largest anti-Muslim organization in the country. According to Naples News, the Act for America website at one point read, Tens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government. They are here today. Many have been here for years, waiting, preparing. Now, this kind of rhetoric is staggeringly

similar, and in some cases identical, to the claims Nazi propagandists made about Jewish people in the years leading up to the Holocaust. One central Nazi claim was that Jewish Germans could not truly be loyal to Germany. They would always be loyal, first and foremost, to Judaism. During one lecture, Bridget Gabriel claimed a Muslim, quote, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America. It's not theoretical to say that this sort of language can radicalize people into acts of extermination. Six million murdered Jews are proof of where words like these can lead, given the right circumstances. In 2012, the NRA hosted retired Lieutenant General William Boykin at a speech in St. Louis.

General Boykin is on the record for claiming that there should be no mosques in America. The NRA made him the keynote speaker of a prayer breakfast, where he stated, Islam is evil and called it a totalitarian way of life, which should not be protected under the First Amendment. Now, Hispanic Americans might be targeted as well. There are already thousands of migrants in concentration camps along our southern border. These camps are not currently death camps, but people have already died in them

at a time when the country is still stable and wealthy. It is not beyond the pale to imagine the government countenancing more violence or at least worse conditions for those people as the national situation deteriorates. One thing that makes me worry, particularly for the fate of Hispanic Americans, is the increase in a very specific set of words used by American politicians to describe undocumented immigrants. Researchers at the University of Nevada have found that comparisons to vermin and viruses have grown markedly more common in the language of right-wing politicians. They've also shown that the use of this language has a distinct, dangerous impact. When these metaphors are present in a news article about immigrants,

the more participants identify as American, the more disgust they experience reading the article. As these researchers note, media can be a powerful shaper of public attitudes towards specific social groups. Hitler capitalized on this in Nazi Germany, advocating for anti-Jewish propaganda in Mein Kampf and creating movies, flyers, and other media communications portraying the Jewish people as subhuman, as rats or parasites, that is, vermin,

infiltrating Aryan society. Tutsis were routinely called cockroaches leading up to their genocide by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. And then, of course, there's the possibility of eliminationist violence against America's black population. The history of anti-black sentiment in America is literally as old as the United States. The history of eliminationist anti-black rhetoric in this country is thankfully at least a little bit shorter. But killers like Dylann Roof are proof that the desire to murder huge numbers of black people has grown more common among the fascist right in recent years. I don't see open eliminationist violence against black or

Hispanic populations by the government as particularly likely, but the growing power of white supremacist militias could pose an existential threat to large communities of both groups. Ten years ago, a large KKK rally might have attracted 20 people. Neo-Nazi demonstrations tended to be similarly small. But today, white supremacists and Nazis of all stripes have seen huge surges in both their activity and membership. Over the last 10 years, according to the Anti-Defamation League, 73% of all domestic extremist-related killings

have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, compared to 23.4% perpetrated by terrorists motivated by Salafi jihadism and 3.2% by left-wing extremism. The Center for Strategic and International Studies says that the number of far-right terrorist attacks has more than quadrupled from 2016 to 2017. We have seen that scale of surge in, again, a period of relative prosperity and stability. History shows us these fringe ideologies will become more prevalent and attract more members during times of unrest and violence. This is certainly what white supremacists are banking on. In 2018, their propaganda efforts increased by 182%, leaping from 421 reported incidents of white supremacist propaganda to 1,187 over the

course of a year. Like it or not, the Nazis and their ideological kin are growing every year. In the unrest of a second American Civil War, we can expect their numbers, and their body count, to leap exponentially. 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. 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. White supremacists will target Muslims and Jewish people as well as Black and Hispanic Americans. We know this because they've been planning to do so longer than most of you listening to this have been alive. In the 1980s, a neo-Nazi terrorist group called The Order carried out a series of daring robberies, netting millions of dollars which was used to fund hate groups and their militias around the country. These groups were connected via an early computer network and organized mostly by a fellow named Louis Beam. Beam presided over a loose alliance of white supremacist and Nazi groups with a shocking amount of access to military-grade weaponry, including law rockets, grenade launchers,

and fully automatic weapons, much of it smuggled to them by their compatriots in the military. Before they were only partly exposed and taken down, Beam and his comrades were anticipating the collapse of the U.S. government and planning what they would do after its fall. Here's what Beam said to a group of recruits in 1980. 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 we say we'll get rid of them, so we'll have to exterminate a lot of them the first time around. The biggest threat for genocide I see in the United States comes after federal power starts to fall, and fall back from certain areas. Emboldened racists will see that as their opportunity to seize a white homeland, and they will not hesitate to exterminate anyone they can.

Absent a strong military to defend members of these minority groups from violence, well-established criminal gangs might well represent the best bulwark against the violence of these neo-Nazi militias. We talked about this a little earlier in the series, the idea that gang members might act to raise the temperature due to their experience with violence. While gangs are generally vilified, often rightly so, a lot of histrionic reporting on their crimes ignores the fact that drug dealing and drive-by shootings aren't the only things these organizations do. Gangs tend to be tied rather

tightly to communities. Their members have deep connections in those communities, and you can bet they would rise to defend them from outside violence. Now, when most Americans hear the word gang, they probably think about MS-13, the Crips, or the Bloods. But for the purpose of this discussion, I think a much more relevant gang is the almighty Black P-Stone Nation. The Blackstone Nation, or Blackstone Rangers as they're often called, started out as a normal street gang in Chicago in the 1950s. They have since spread to several other cities and are reputed to have as many as 100,000 members nationwide. That makes them a vastly larger force than any militia. The Blackstone Nation is an

incredibly complicated group, and I will not be able to do their history justice in this podcast. It's important you know that, while they are a gang, they get up to a hell of a lot more than just, you know, crimes. We've talked quite a bit in this podcast about the great uprising that occurred after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April of 1968. What we haven't yet discussed is how much worse it might have been if not for the Blackstone Rangers. In two fiery days, Chicago's west side was convulsed by vicious rioting. The same sort of violence was not, however, seen on the south side of Chicago, even though, according to the song Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,

it is the baddest part of town. The Chicago Tribune explains why things there stayed peaceful. Quote, out of the public eye, police relied on south side gangs to keep the peace, according to retired police lieutenant Bob Angone. The Blackstone Rangers held up their end of the bargain, stopping a mob of people from rocking buses of students at Mount Carmel High School, Angone remembers. The gang also told businesses to whitewash their windows with messages like, the king is dead, or long live the king for

protection. The overwhelming majority of Southside was spared because of those stones, Angone said. I don't know if history will ever give them credit. This podcast will give them credit, Bob, because the Blackstone Rangers and other gangs like them represent a sizable force in American society that might act in defense of at least some vulnerable minority communities, if racist militias decide to try their hands at some genocide. American gangs have also spent much of the last several decades infiltrating the U.S. military, for much the same reason neo-Nazis do. They want the kind of combat and weapons training that only the military can provide. There's actually good reason to believe these guys would kind of wipe the floor

with any white nationalist militias they came across. For one thing, most of the large neo-Nazi and fascist groups we've seen rise up in the last few years have been, for lack of a better word, catty. They are filled with infighting and drama fit for the lamest of soap operas. Explicitly criminal gangs tend to deal with much greater threat from law enforcement, and by necessity, they're a lot better and a lot more experienced at functioning on a large scale in a disciplined and effective manner. I'm also going to guess that more gang members have first-hand experience with armed violence than white supremacist militia members.

In some ways, a civil war would just be an escalation of the violence that's gone on for years. Crips and Bloods and Blackstone Rangers squaring off against new forged armies of white nationalist and neo-Nazi militiamen, many of them led by Aryan Nations members, who would, by default, be some of the most experienced fighters that side had available. It would be bloody, nightmarish, but in some ways the people who live in areas with strong gang presences would be lucky. Without the state's protection,

and in a nation filled with violent, racist paramilitaries, the alternative might literally be annihilation. We've been chomping at the bit all summer Working till the winter come back We all know the flood gone coming Who gonna build that arc Burn it from the top down brother We can sow seeds in that ash We're in for the spark that starts it Like a Strike Anywhere match

Like a Strike Anywhere match Like a Strike Anywhere match We're in for the spark that starts it Like a Strike Anywhere match Like a Strike Anywhere match Like a Strike Anywhere match We're in for the spark that starts it I'm Robert Evans, and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this show on Twitter at HappenHerePod.

And you can find this show online at ItCouldHappenHerePod.com. Our music, as always, is from Four Fists. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lord of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast