It Could Happen Here - The Revenge of Rural America

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

Rural America is fed up and falling apart: what happens if they fight back? 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 don't usually think of the American right wing as protesters or activists. Conservatives tend to be older, for one thing, and they also tend to be on the side of state power, the side of law and order. Liberals and leftists are more likely on the side of state power, the side of law and order.

Liberals and leftists are more likely to agitate for major changes in the status quo. But right-wing activism isn't unheard of either, and recent experience has made it clear that, when the right stands up, they can make a serious impact. The 2014 Bundy standoff made national news. What started as a confrontation over Cliven Bundy's refusal to pay grazing fees to the Bureau of Land Management turned into a minor right-wing uprising against state control. Hundreds of militiamen from all over the country, clad in body armor and packing military-grade weaponry, stood against federal law enforcement agents and made them back down. The militiamen got their way, more or less.

And they got their way again two years later, when Clive and Bundy's sons led a group that occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I was actually near the Malheur Refuge for a little bit of that. Not at the refuge itself, but in the town of Burns, Oregon, talking to locals about what it was like to live through the armed insurrection of a far-right militia. People told me stories of militiamen roaring through town in pickup trucks, carrying guns into local businesses and terrifying residents. The way they described these men reminded me, more than a little, of how citizens of Konstantinivka, a city in eastern Ukraine,

described the Russian-backed separatists who briefly occupied their city. Some of these men were literal Russian soldiers, of course, but others were foreigners and local partisans, people with no military training but a love of guns and feeling powerful. Now, in both Bundy occupations, the specific justification for what they were doing was not something with a lot of broad appeal. Their grievances were niche and rural. Most people who didn't live near Malheur viewed the entire thing as something of a silly farce. The occupiers were mailed dick-shaped candies and care packages and mocked as Y'all Keda.

were mailed dick-shaped candies and care packages and mocked as Y'all Kata. It is a great nickname, but I don't think most Americans really realize how fucking terrifying a true Y'all Kata would be. A few thousand sufficiently motivated, organized, and angry rural Americans have the power to bring this nation to its knees. In the last episode of It Could Happen Here, I envisioned the start of a second American civil war, driven by President Trump's refusal to leave office and a series of urban left-wing uprisings. Today we're going to look at another possibility, one that involves the other half of the American political equation. Today we're talking about the revenge of rural America. Exit polls taken in the 2016 election revealed that a whopping three-quarters of Americans felt the country was growing more divided. Ground zero for this divide was the split between rural and urban

voters. One way to look at Donald Trump's upset victory is as the revenge of rural America. Rural areas across the country saw an unprecedented turnout, and those Americans voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, said this at the time, We've got some big schisms out there. Rural America is much more Republican than ever before. In the 2018 midterm elections, the urban-rural divide in America was even more pronounced.

Only 29% of Democratic voters lived in rural areas, the remainder being suburban or urban. For comparison, a whopping 46% of Republican voters live in rural areas, the remainder being suburban or urban. For comparison, a whopping 46% of Republican voters live in rural areas. Only 19% live in cities. Urban and rural America see each other as, increasingly, two different nations. The one strong commonality between them is that they both believe the other chunk of America hates them. A 2018 Pew survey revealed that majorities of both urban and rural America believe the rest of the country, quote, looks down on them. A 2018 Pew survey revealed that majorities of both urban and rural America believe the rest of the country, quote, looks down on them. Here's the New York Times, quote,

Pew has never asked this question before in a way that allows us to tell if the sentiment is becoming more common, but election results show that urban and rural Americans are increasingly at odds with each other. The new survey confirms both believe the other group doesn't understand their problems or share their values, and political scientists warn that place-based resentments, no one respects rural America, or Trump is at war with cities, can be easily exploited by politicians. Kathy Kramer, the University of Wisconsin political scientist who helped Pew compile this report, believes this divide has gotten worse since the 2016 election, and that it represents something new and dangerous in American politics. Quote, we're at a political moment where cultural divides overlap with political divides, which overlap with geography. Now I find that Pew study interesting for a lot of reasons, but the most concerning thing to me is that it shows this

divide between rural and urban America has not always been as bad as it is today. Here's the Times again. Quote, registered voters in urban areas have become more likely to identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic. The opposite trend has been more pronounced among rural residents with a notable shift after 2008. Before then, rural voters were relatively evenly divided between the two parties. You may not find this divide as frightening as I do, but I think it presages something potentially quite terrible. In addition to trending further right every year, the rural United States kind of seems to be falling the fuck apart.

Cattle rustling is on the rise again across the Southwest. In states like Oklahoma, Texas, and California, it's reached levels not seen since literal cowboy days. Now, modern rustling is usually driven by sky-high rates of drug abuse. In other words, people are stealing cows to buy painkillers and meth. Agricultural theft of all kinds is actually on the rise across the rural U.S. Entire semi-trucks filled with nuts and oranges are regularly hijacked via complex schemes that often involve fake trucking companies. Rural America is also growing more violent. For most of American history, living out in the middle of nowhere was the safer decision, since cities tended to have much higher crime rates. But last year, for the first time in a decade, violent crime rates in rural areas rose above the national

average. America's suicide rate also increased by more than 20% from 2001 to 2015. Most of that increase happened out in the country. The increases in violent crime and suicide are both due, at least in part, to the fact that gun ownership is vastly higher out in the country. 46% of rural Americans own a firearm,

compared to 19% of city dwellers and 28% of suburban Americans. Three quarters of rural Americans own more than one firearm, and 48% of gun-owning rural Americans use their firearm to hunt. So these people have practical experience using a gun out in the world to hit live moving targets. Now, stick all this together, and what do you have? It sure looks like you have all the ingredients you'd need if you wanted to cook up one ass-kicker of an insurgency. And if the second American Civil War kicks off in the rural areas, I can almost guarantee you it will start with a massive new push for national gun control. Kamala Harris, easily one of the primary front-running

Democratic candidates in the current bevy of candidates in 2020, is outspoken about her desire to ban all semi-automatic firearms. This would ban the vast majority of America's civilian-owned guns, literally making tens of millions of people into criminals overnight. The only weapons left legal would be revolvers, shotguns, and bolt-action hunting rifles, which are ironically the very weapons outside of bolt-action weapons most likely to be used in violent crime. In the immediate wake of President Trump's decision to declare a state of emergency over the border, conservative never

Trumpers like Rick Wilson took to Twitter to warn, not that Trump might seize power, that setting this precedent would inevitably lead to Democrats declaring a state of emergency of their own over gun violence once they were back in the Oval Office. On January 8th, during a CNN appearance, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg said this, quote, If we really want to start talking about the national emergency like the president likes to talk about, 40,000 Americans dying annually from gun violence is a pretty damn good one to start with. Last year, The Atlantic published an article by Elizabeth Goytin evaluating the extent of the president's emergency powers.

In February 2019, Pacific Standard Magazine applied that to the possibility of a national emergency over guns. Quote, The legal infrastructure to levy an emergency declaration, Goytin writes, exists thanks to the presidential emergency action documents developed by the Eisenhower administration, designed to address such extra-legal actions as declarations of martial law and the suppression of habeas corpus. These documents could potentially extend to encompass outright firearms confiscations, given the scope of a national crisis. Now, back during Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department ordered evacuating citizens to hand over their firearms to the police. Superintendent Edwin P.

Compass III later declared a blanket confiscation of all firearms in the city, saying, only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons. At the time, a federal court issued a restraining order to stop the weapons confiscation, so they did not go through all the way, but weapons were confiscated. And of course, that was a very different time with a Republican president and a few hundred fewer mass shootings in recent memory. President Harris's semi-automatic weapons ban would have to be followed by mass confiscation. Tens of millions of gun owners will not hand over their weapons willingly. There are literally more privately owned firearms than people in the United States, and half of those guns are owned by just 3% of gun owners. I'm going to give you one guess as to which part of the country most of those gun owners live. Earlier this year, Washington State

passed a new set of gun control regulations. The restrictions are fairly mild compared to Kamala Harris's proposition, and the new law is popular with the state's liberal majority. 59% of Washingtonians supported it. But most of those people, most of those supporters, live in urban areas like Seattle. In conservative, rural, and suburban Washington, people are pissed. 16 sheriffs have, so far, declared that they will not enforce the new law. Here's the Wall Street Journal. Quote, Sheriff Tom Jones of Grant County, also in eastern Washington, is one of a number of sheriffs who have said that they would wait for the courts to rule before telling their deputies to enforce the new law.

I swore an oath to defend our citizens and their constitutionally protected rights, said Mr. Jones, whose county voted against the gun control measure by more than two to one. I do not believe the popular vote overrules that. Now there are hundreds of thousands of heavily armed Americans right now who see armed resistance to the state as something aspirational, as a dream. Most of these guys, and they are mostly guys, don't have any real combat training. A lot of them are probably just LARPing, play acting. But the Bundy standoff was proof that even LARPers with a shitload of AR-15s can scare the federal government. In the face of a major gun ban, how many rural communities

and how many states would say fuck you to a Democratic president? The Yellow Vest Movement kicked off as a suburban and rural movement in France, a revolt from the more conservative sections of that country's society against a neoliberal president and his policies. I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. The movement originated in May when a woman named Priscilla Ludovsky, who has an internet cosmetics business and lives in the suburbs southeast of Paris, launched an internet petition calling for a drop in gas prices. She broke down the price into its components, noting that taxes made up more than half the cost in

France. Per liter, lead-free gas was 1.41 euros on Sunday, or about $6 per gallon. The petition went mostly unnoticed until October, when Eric Druitt, a truck driver from the same area as Ms. Lodowski, ran across it and circulated it among his Facebook friends. Newspapers began writing out the petition, and the number of signatures skyrocketed from an initial 700 to 200,000. Now, the Yellow Vest movement in France is not a purely conservative thing. Within France itself, it's actually much more divided than that. But I think it provides a good look at how an activist movement can launch amongst older and more conservative segments of a modern society. I also think rising gas prices could very well be another generator of rural rage here in America.

People who live in the country spend more on gas because they have to drive further distances. on gas because they have to drive further distances. There is a good chance that any Green New Deal-style plan to slow global warming introduced by a Democratic administration would include a gas tax. Rural areas grow our food in a very real way that keep the cities alive, and the people who live in those places know it. Just to say, air traffic controllers and stewardesses had the power to end a government shutdown by threatening air travel. Rural Americans have something they too can hold captive. In their case, it's the food supply. This would of course require a great deal of organization, lists of demands, and political figureheads to speak for the movement to lend it a shape and a sense of purpose, and I can guarantee

you that Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, would at least try to be one of them. Joey is one of the leading figures in the right-wing activist movement that's arisen since the 2016 election. Along with the Proud Boys, Joey and Patriot Prayer have spent the last two years brawling against Antifa with fists and flagpoles, but they have also held numerous armed marches in full body armor, carrying rifles. Gibson lives in Vancouver, Washington. Most members of his gang come from either suburban or rural areas around Portland, Oregon. If you watch hours and hours of their footage, marches and video rants like I have, you'll regularly hear these people describe their constant bloody rallies in Portland as something of a crusade,

Christian holy warriors descending into a decadent left-wing city to purge it of sin. In the last episode, I played several clips of Alex Jones calling for a new civil war against the left. Joey Gibson just happens to be a regular guest on InfoWars. Last December, he joined the show to talk about Washington's new gun control laws. It's out of control, and I've seen the videos on your site. You should plug some of the places people can find these. We're going to post some of these to InfoWars.com. You're getting crowds of hundreds and hundreds of people in small towns, counties coming out, and they are really pissed about this.

They're really upset. We had almost 300 people in a county with about 10,000 people in it, and they were extremely concerned. They're really upset. They're sick and tired of Seattle telling them what they can or cannot do. These people, they just want to be free. They want to be left alone. And so I think this is the key in states like Washington and Oregon.

The key is to go around to all the counties that believe in the Constitution, which is about 90% of the counties in Washington state. Most of them are conservative. Now, I've met Joey. He's not a brilliant man or a likely pick for a right-wing revolutionary warlord. He would try, but for my money, a likelier pick for rural insurrectionist warlord would be someone like Ryan Bundy. You've seen Ryan

on the news a few times, especially if you kept up with the Bundy standoff back in 2014. He's one of the sons of Cliven Bundy, the old racist rancher who masterminded that standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Bunkerville, Nevada. Ryan is the one with the facial deformity. This has led a lot of people

online to treat him as if he is a big dumb dummy, because bigotry knows no political bounds. But Ryan Bundy is not dumb. He was probably the driving force behind the 2016 occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Ryan spent months in jail over that, but he defended himself against the court and won. Some of this was due to the serious mistakes made by the prosecution, but a lot of it came down to Ryan's personal charisma, his ability to sway a jury of his peers to believe in the righteousness of his cause. Right now, Ryan is running for governor of Nevada. He's probably a long-shot candidate, but it doesn't really matter. Dozens

upon dozens of heavily armed men and women were willing to gather and put their lives on the line for his family. Twice. There is a weird religious crusade angle to what the Bundys have been doing, based on a fringe Mormon prophecy. The fantastic podcast Bundyville, which I heartily recommend, goes into more detail on this, but the short of it is they believe that they've been chosen by God to defend the Constitution, or at least their interpretation of the Constitution. This is the kind of nut bar stuff that I think a lot of liberals are prone to laugh about. I don't find anything funny about the Bundys. Two people have already been radicalized into killing by their rhetoric. In June of 2014, Jared and Amanda Miller, fresh from taking part in the standoff at Bundy Ranch,

drove into Las Vegas and walked into a CeCe's Pizza with a small arsenal. They opened fire on two officers sitting and eating lunch, killing both. As they started shooting, the couple allegedly yelled, This is the start of a revolution. One dead officer was covered in a Gadsden flag. Another was covered in a Nazi flag. Jared and Amanda killed one more person, a random bystander, before dying in a gunfight with police. Now, the Millers had a lot of other radicalizing factors behind their rampage than just the Bundy

standoff, but it was an important step in their journey. Lavoie Finnegan is probably a better example of a man who died explicitly for the Bundys. He was shot reaching for a gun after being stopped with Ryan and his brother, Eamon, during the Malheur occupation. In June of 2016, William Keebler, a Utah militia leader and close adherent of the Bundys, was arrested and charged for trying to detonate

homemade bombs at a BLM building in Arizona. So that's three distinct cases and four individual people who have been radicalized into violent, deadly action by the rhetoric and beliefs of the Bundy clan. In a situation where order starts to break down even more in rural America and extremist groups begin to tear at the fabric of our society, you can bet the Bundys will not just sit back and watch. So far, the Bundy family have mostly agitated around land rights and what they depict

as the struggle of American ranchers against a tyrannical government. But they, and their supporters, are also huge backers of the Second Amendment, and if they were to organize, even violently, in defense of the right to bear arms, I think you would see them receive a lot of support from even mainstream conservatives. Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular conservatives in modern America. Here's a clip from a December 4th, 2017 episode of his show during an interview with a gun control advocate. The fact is, we need to have fewer guns, and we need to talk about banning entire classes of especially dangerous firearms like assault weapons and i think we have to talk about not just banning them but requiring the

people allow the government to buy them back so you're you got universal gun confiscation is what you're talking about not universal gun confiscation you're saying ban a class of firearms so that would be any rifle with you know a capacity of more than one, above a certain caliber, I mean I don't know what the criteria are that you're suggesting, but basically any gun that you would use for deer hunting would be banned. No, I would make a distinction between long guns that are technically semi-automatic, of the kind like my dad uses to hunt, and semi-automatic assault weapons that have a... To gun owners and hunters like me, these are meaningless distinctions, but let's get right

to the meat of it. What do you do to people who won't sell them back? I think you, at a bare minimum, sort of fine them severely for it and build an incentive for them to sell them back. Are you ready for the civil war that would ensue when you try and take people's guns? I'm serious. Now, I can't think of many Americans I personally despise more than Tucker Carlson, but I don't think he's wrong about that. And if large chunks of rural America declared their resistance to the federal government, the state would not have a lot of options for stopping them. Both rural and urban America have seen declines in the number of police officers in recent years, but the rural parts of this country are the only place where that drop in cops has led to a surge

in crime. So rural Americans, who grow most of our food, feel increasingly isolated from the majority of the United States. They are already dealing with a significant breakdown of civil order, and, oh yeah, they just happen to have most of America's 300-something million privately owned firearms. We don't fight, we don't riot, even when the war's outside our door. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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

or wherever you get your podcasts. I hope at this point I've established how very possible a rural revolt is. Now, let's take a look at how it might actually happen. Head north from San Francisco on the I-5, and before long the verdant green of the bay will give away to rolling yellow hills, creeping higher and higher until they become mountains. By the time you hit Redding, California, about three hours north from Silicon Valley, you'll be in a place that does not feel like California, or at least not the California that most of the world knows. Redding is not a progressive hippie town like so many small cities in Northern California.

It's filled with gun stores, gigantic trucks, Bible schools, and churches. As you near Redding, you start to see strange signs, flags that bear a yellow circle with two X's inside it on a green background. This is the flag of the state of Jefferson. The double X's stand for the fact that most rural Californians believe they have been double-crossed by the big cities where most Californians reside. The state of Jefferson movement wants to secede from California so they can pay fewer taxes,

particularly on gasoline, which California taxes at a higher rate than any other state. Jeffersonians, or wannabe Jeffersonians, however you prefer to identify them, also advocate for looser gun laws, more in line with so-called free states like Texas. You see a lot of Trump flags in this part of California, or at least more than you see in other parts of the state. Most Californians, if they've even heard of the state of Jefferson, view it as a big joke. The movement has existed for decades now,

without ever managing to move forward on their dreams of secession. But I can say with confidence that, for many people in rural NorCal, the state of Jefferson is anything but a joke. From 2013 to 2016, I spent increasing chunks of time in rural inland California, mostly in the tiny mountain communities in and around Redding. You probably haven't heard of any of the towns I lived in. They are not tourist destinations. They have names like Red Bluff, Weaverville, Dunsmuir, and Shingletown. The place I spent most of my time was Manton, a small community tucked deep in the middle of nowhere. Most residents in Manton either grew weed or cooked meth.

Some did both. There are two roads into Manton, one long and lonesome road from Red Bluff and a hairpin mountain road in from Shingletown. In all the months I spent there, over three years, I did not see a single police car. Manton is not entirely free from the long arm of the law, but most of

what transpires there is well outside of its grasp. That fact does not make Manton an oddity in rural California. In 2018, McClatchy, a media company based in Sacramento, investigated the number of law enforcement officers in rural California. Here's how the Sacramento Bee summarized things. Quote, departments in multiple jurisdictions are operating with skeleton stabs, McClatchy found, pushing response times into hours or sometimes leaving residents without a response at all. In Trinity County, deputies regularly cover hundreds of miles of territory alone. When law enforcement does arrive in many outlying places, it's often a single officer cut off from backup and, in some cases, communication with his or her department.

We have no money. We have no people, said Modoc County Sheriff Mike Poindexter, echoing more than a dozen rural California sheriffs. We don't have near enough people. We just don't. Now, McClatchy interviewed officers and citizens and reviewed crime statistics for 25 rural Californian counties. These places accounted for 41% of the state's landmass, but just 4% of its population. McClatchy found that, from 2008 to 2017, the number of rural deputies in these areas dropped from 1,758 to 1,610. This means roughly 1,600 men and women are responsible for maintaining order in nearly half of America's third largest state. Right now, the state of Jefferson is only

in favor of seceding from California. They want to be the United States' 51st state. But if you listen to how these people talk, the amount of anger they have for urban Californians, you might conclude that they could be convinced to take more extreme action. I found an LA Times article about the state of Jefferson. The journalist who wrote it went to a meeting some of these people held, and he quoted the speech of a prominent state of Jefferson advocate, Mark Baird, a rancher in Siskiyou County. Mark told his fellow rural Californians, You're the ones being exterminated by a lack of liberty. Now that language, the word exterminated, that's how you prime people for violence.

And there is enough truth behind his words to make them stick. Rural Californians are just as poor as rural Texans, but they're also burdened by California's much higher taxes. A gas tax makes sense in LA. In fact, it's necessary to keep the air breathable. But if you live in Shasta County, and you need a big truck to do the kind of work people do out in the sticks, and you've got to drive 80 miles a day paying California gas prices,

well, 12 extra cents per gallon is a real hardship. And by the way, these people love Donald Trump. The president currently enjoys a 61% approval rating in rural America. If Trump is voted out or impeached, it would not take much to get millions of people to believe this was part of some deep state conspiracy to steal liberty and also guns.

That exact fear is literally what caused the birth of the American militia movement back in the late 1980s. Now at the time they called it the New World Order, but the basic idea is that a socialist government was coming to take their guns. That's why all these militias started. People like Timothy McVeigh have killed over this stuff before. So if rural America decides to revolt, what would that look like? How could 4% of a state effectively fight back against the 96% who live in cities? It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Golden State to the rest of America, not because of Silicon Valley or Hollywood, but because California feeds this country. It leads the state in cash receipts for crops, $47 billion a year and much more at this point.

The nearest state behind it, Iowa, is only 27 billion in receipts. Texas only generates 23 and a half billion. California's cash receipts for agriculture were more than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico combined. The state leads the nation in 66 crucial crops and grows more than 90% of the nation's almonds,

artichokes, dates, figs, raisins, kiwis, olives, peaches, pistachios, prunes, pomegranates, sweet rice, and walnuts. The bulk of California's food, including nearly all its beef, comes from the densely farmed Central Valley, but 75% of California's water comes from the watersheds north of Sacramento, which means the so-called state of Jefferson, were it to organize itself and revolt, could cut off access to the water that makes California's agriculture possible. 80% of California's water demand is in the southern two-thirds of the state. Right now, it still seems like a long shot, but in the wake

of a massive sweeping gun ban? And remember, most economists say we're right around the corner from another massive economic crash. I brought up the Occupy movement last episode, too, and how a similar movement might cause a right-wing crackdown that sparks a civil war, I can see that same sort of activist movement providing an opportunity for a far-right, rural insurgent movement. After all, Occupy rose up itself after the election of a Democratic president and an economic collapse. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Beto O'Rourke, three of the most prominent potential Democratic candidates in 2020, are all very unpopular among the far left. So imagine this assault weapons ban is enacted while the economy is in the shitter and cities across the U.S. are convulsed with protests and

occupations. Even if these occupations and protests avoid the rioting I theorized about last episode, it would still take a massive toll on law enforcement, and that would look a lot like opportunity to rural separatists who are sick and tired of city folk telling them what to do. All the water that grows California's crops is pumped south. It doesn't just slide down there naturally. Pumps can be blown up. The crops grown in the Central Valley are all transported by trucks, traveling on highways. A few IEDs could cripple transit for days, and it just so happens that rural America is awash in an ingredient you would need to make a really great IED. Tannerite is a bipartite explosive compound.

It is safe to handle, not explosive until mixed, and even then, only explosive when used with a detonator or shot with a rifle. But Tannerite can be converted into something much more dangerous with ease. David Kukolin, the counterinsurgency expert and former State Department strategist, told me this. I am astounded you can buy Tannerite online. Tannerite is basically Aminol. World War II bombs were filled with the stuff that is essentially the same thing, set off by impact or a small TNT charge. I see no legitimate purpose to Tannerite. If you took the ammonium nitrate

compound, you would then have a substance called ANFO, the classic IRA explosive. Now, Kilcullen told me that anyone in a farming community has access to the chemicals you would need to turn Tannerite into ANFO, and that, quote, it's very safe to use and transport as an insurgent. So, for full disclosure, I myself have used Tannerite dozens of times over the years, and I love it. Normally, you only set up like a half pound charge, and you shoot it with a rifle from a distance, and it blows up, and it's fun. I can remember one time my friends and I set a four pound charge. One time, and only one time, because it left a fucking crater and rained dirt down on our heads from 200 feet away. A lot

of Americans own Tannerite, not just in California. When I lived in Texas, I had 20 pounds at a time delivered to my door. Tannerite gets its name from its inventor, a guy named David Tanner. Mr. Tanner lives in Oregon, and that's where most Tannerite is made. Residents of the so-called state of Jefferson would only have to drive a couple hours to buy it straight from the source. So say a rural insurgency starts, and say this insurgency strikes at Southern California's water supply, maybe going after the pumps in the Tehachapi Mountains that carry it south, or maybe they focus on bombing highways, shutting down transit on the roads of America's most populous state. A few hundred committed insurgents with a good plan and decent organization could do a tremendous amount of damage this way. Law enforcement, already wildly undermanned in rural California, would need to bring in help

from the cities. And if those cities are convulsed with big-ass Occupy-style protests, well, at some point, the government would have to deploy troops to secure the nation's food supply. This would be a terrifying precedent for a number of reasons. For one thing, most U.S. soldiers come from rural areas, and California is one of the major recruiting grounds for the United States military. The DOD would have to take great care to ensure soldiers weren't being sent to pacify unrest being generated by their own friends and family members. That might lead to the same sort of situation we see

in Afghanistan, with constant insider attacks and desertions, where soldiers take their experience and their weapons and melt into the deep woods with their comrades, their new comrades. This rural insurgency would not stay confined to California very long. Terrorist tactics have a nasty tendency to spread virally. A series of truck bombings in rural Northern California could lead rather quickly to similar attacks all around the nation, not just bombings, but hijackings. In many cases, these thefts might rely

on truck drivers themselves, allowing loads to be heisted in exchange for a cut of the money. Black market sales of food would provide more funding for the insurgency, even as food prices started to rise in the cities. Perhaps the state and the federal government could get its shit together quickly enough to restore the flow of water to Southern California in a timely manner.

Even so, a month or two, even a few weeks without sufficient water, would be crippling to those farmers and their crops. Even a short-lived and very localized insurgency would cause a massive spike in food prices. Food prices are traditionally the single biggest predictor of civil conflict. Twitter and Facebook get a lot of credit for the Arab Spring of 2011, but that series of revolutions, uprisings, and civil wars was sparked, in large part, by the price of grain. I'd like to read a couple of quotes from a wonderful Guardian article titled, Use Your Loaf, Why Food Prices Were Crucial to the Arab Spring.

When grain prices spiked in 2007 to 2008, Egypt's bread prices rose 37%. With unemployment rising as well, more people depended on subsidized bread, but the government did not make any more available. Egypt's annual food price inflation continued, and it hit 18.9% before the fall of President Mubarak. The first protests of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in December 2010 were quickly dismissed as another bout of bread riots. But of course, those protests led to the overthrow

of the Tunisian dictator. This is not just a Middle Eastern thing. Food prices are the number one predictor of unrest worldwide. If rural America decided to go to war, they have a number of very convenient choke points they could use to attack their urban enemies. Many of these insurgents would consider it revenge

for decades of mockery, neglect, and environmental policies that burdened them far more than is fair. These resentments exist right now. All it would take is a few hundred people in a geographically discreet part of the country, like Northern California, to turn this anger into action. So it should at this point be easy to imagine

rising food prices in the midst of a recession escalating the number and violence of these protests that we were already seeing in cities across the nation. Desperation causes the government to approve more and more violent tactics to deal with the insurgents, which inspires more rural anger and probably causes more attacks. We've watched this happen before in numerous countries.

The bombing of trucks and highways to cut off food is a tactic that could work in almost every part of the United States. Only 4% of the food consumed by Americans is locally produced. More than 70% of the food that gets to our cities does so via trucks. We are incredibly vulnerable to attacks on our highways, and this country is filled with people who have the means and motivation to apply this sort of violence. In November 2018, over the space of about a week, two major busts by U.S. law enforcement officers led to the arrests of more than 80 neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

They were members of gangs with names like the Unforgiven and the Aryan Brotherhood. 39 of the arrested were members of a neo-Nazi gang from rural Florida. These Nazis were found with meth, fentanyl, more than 100 firearms, several pipe bombs, and one rocket launcher. fentanyl, more than 100 firearms, several pipe bombs, and one rocket launcher. In a more violent and less settled America, those men and women could have formed the nexus of a deadly regional insurgency. And trust me, there are thousands of people like them all around the country who have not yet been busted. Hell, that same week, police in Green Bay, Wisconsin, responding to a domestic disturbance call, found a man with swastika tattoos in an underground bomb laboratory. When I start talking about the state of Jefferson

turning into a violent insurgency, when I talk about rednecks bombing water pump stations and hijacking trucks, it probably sounds far-fetched. But the kind of people who want that future, who are just itching for the chance to go Taliban on all of our asses, those people exist right now.

They aren't the majority of rural America or of conservatives, but they don't need to be. A few thousand violent extremists spread out across a few dozen states could do damage wildly out of proportion to their numbers. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal 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 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. 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. I find myself drawn back regularly to the notes I took in my interview with David Kilcullen, one of the world's great counterinsurgency experts. We were talking about the best way to cripple this country, and he said this, quote, you don't try to generate a mass movement. You don't try to get the state to crack down on you. Instead, you try to generate a sectarian civil war so intense that it makes the society ungovernable. And that's the goal for any true revolutionary movement, right or left. Make America ungovernable. If you've been paying attention to your Nazi news, you may have heard about the terrorist group Atomwaffen. With five deaths and counting to their name, they have the

highest body count of any neo-Nazi organization of the post-2016 era. While the group has been hobbled recently by some inside drama over Satanism, they have active members in several U.S. states, as well as Germany. These cells are usually three to four members, with no communication between individual groups. Here's how the German magazine Der Spiegel described them. Members are heavily armed and prepared to make use of their weapons. Indeed, they are getting ready for what they see as the coming race war and so-called hate camps. Weapons training is conducted by members of the U.S. military, who are also among the group's

members. According to one former member of the Atomwaffen division, newcomers must submit to waterboarding in addition to other such trials. Now, ProPublica, working with the fantastic conflict journalist Jake Hanrahan, interviewed a former member of Atomwaffen. I'm going to play a clip from that here. A lot of things that they talk about, other members don't know about. Of course, to keep us, keep everyone from falling down, as it's talked about in siege, hit and runs. Attack here and there. Stop. Let everyone panic. There's been no point to march around in the streets like a weak fucking pussy with white polos and khakis and tiki torches. Screaming

white lives matter. Don't care about politicians. Don't care about politics. Just wanting everyone to stop being slaves to the system that we're living in, living under. When he mentions siege, that's a reference to a white supremacist newsletter and book authored by a guy named James Mason. Mr. Mason is a founding father of American Nazism and the guy who coined the term leaderless resistance. He and his comrades have been urging exactly the kind of war I've outlined here for more than 40 years. I write this a few months after the birth of yet another new white supremacist terror group in the United States. These people called themselves the Base. Their name is literally the English translation of Al-Qaeda, who they consider to be an inspiration. They are mostly based in the Pacific Northwest. They, too, focus on weapons

training and small group preparation in order to carry out insurgent attacks against the U.S. government. That former Adam Woffenguy, interviewed by ProPublica, mentioned wanting to destroy the system. He was expressing a desire to do exactly what David Cokolin was talking about, render the country ungovernable. These people, the neo-Nazis, militiamen, and white supremacists, they all know exactly what they plan to do if civil conflict erupts across the country. What will you do? Statistically, you'll probably be in a city, watching food prices rise and seeing protest after protest convulse your downtown. There will be runs on grocery stores, maybe even mass looting of food if things get bad enough. Outside of the city, roads will be closed.

Checkpoints with soldiers and heavily armed cops will start to appear on the interstate. The Great American Highway System will become militarized as the state scrambles to pin down the insurgency. If you do live out in the country, or in a particularly conservative suburb, you will have the additional complexity of needing to live with insurgents.

The first few months of this will be particularly difficult. It takes time to deploy the National Guard or the Army. Millions of rural Americans might spend weeks or months without any realistic access to law enforcement or emergency services. Imagine a knock at the door one night, an armed insurgent asking for food or shelter. What do you do? It might be weeks before the police come back,

or the army arrives, and even when they do, they won't be at every house, every day. They may not even be able to hold on to the area. So maybe you find yourself aiding and abetting these revolutionaries, even if you consider them terrorists. For a lot of people, that will feel like the safest decision. So far on this podcast, I've focused on just how the Civil War might break out. And past a certain point, it doesn't really matter whether the fighting starts from a left

wing or a right wing movement. Just as a rural secessionist movement would take unrest in the cities as an opportunity, radical leftists would find an ungovernable America to have just as much potential for their ideals. Most of you listening probably wouldn't pick a side right away. It wouldn't even look like there were sides for a while. There'd be protests in cities, of course, activists with lists of demands, maybe demands you agree with, maybe not. And there'd be insurgents, terrorists out in the country with their own demands, strangling your city and the rest of urban America. As the government failed to restore order and normalcy, a lot of people would find themselves seriously questioning the government's legitimacy, probably for the first time. We've never really had cause to do that on

a mass level in modern America. Whatever else has happened, the state has always managed to keep the highways open, the food flowing. When that's no longer the case, a lot more people will find themselves picking sides. For some of us, that will mean backing a protest movement, demanding radical change. For others, it will mean backing a protest movement, demanding radical change. For others, it will mean supporting the government, maybe because we just want the unrest to be over. And for a growing number of Americans, it will mean deciding they don't want to be Americans anymore. The government would not call it a civil war, not right away. But we'd know.

Now, so far, we've just talked about how the fighting would start. And for my money, I think the most likely beginning would involve a mix of the things we've talked about in both of these first two episodes. City centers occupied by activists with demands, fighting the police and National Guard, while rural insurgents carry out their own attacks and make their own demands. Every attack from every side accelerates the whole process and pushes the whole country closer to chaos. Now, the state would not take all of this sitting down, of course. There would be increasingly vigorous attempts to right

the ship and to stop the cycle of violence. Federal and state governments would throw absolutely everything they had at curbing the unrest and restoring order. On the next episode, if it could happen here, I'll walk you through just what that would look like and why the system's efforts would be almost certainly doomed to fail. Right near Virginia, we watched it from our phones. Change our Facebook pictures, congratulate ourselves. Make nervous jokes and whispers about the sex that's we're sending out. NSA's always listening.

I wonder if they're turned on. Joe Strummer's been dead for too damn long. Now we're all just numb to what they've done. You give an inch and they'll just take your arm. But we don't fight, we don't write, even when the war's outside our door. No, we don't fight, we don't write, even when the war's outside our door.

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 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.