It Could Happen Here - The Second American Civil War

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Are you worried about the possibility of The Second American Civil War? In Episode 1 of, 'It Could Happen Here,' Robert explains why 2016 was the first time he started to seriously worry about it. 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. You wake up before your alarm. No sunlight peeks through your window.

It's far too early for that. You're confused for just a moment, and then you hear another explosion. It echoes in the night, rattling the walls and the window of your apartment. This is not the first bomb you've heard, and it sounds far enough away that you know the danger isn't imminent. That surprises you a little bit, the fact that you recognize it's not close.

You realize you've now heard enough explosions to have a pretty good ear for them, and when they're close enough to worry about. It's weird how quickly life in a war zone becomes just life. You get up. There's no sense trying to get back to sleep. As you stumble over to the kitchen to grind some coffee, you hear the crack of rifle fire. It's distant, too. Far enough away that it sounds almost like firecrackers, but you know it's not. You fill the grinder, put on the top, and press down. Nothing happens. You realize, belatedly, in your sleep-fogged brain, that the power's out again.

You wonder which of the dozen different rebel and insurgent groups in your state might be responsible. You don't even bother to get out your phone and check the news. It doesn't really matter, and you've got shit to do. It's still dark outside, and since you're already up, you might as well take advantage of the situation and beat the crowd to the grocery store. They've been short on everything lately. Thanks to separatists in Northern California,

most nuts are basically unavailable. Rebel insurgents have been bombing highways in West Texas, so beef is way up. You don't tend to buy much meat these days anyway, though. All the blackouts make your fridge unreliable, and you can't afford to spend money on stuff that goes bad. You throw on a light jacket and roll downstairs. Two or three years ago, before all this started, you'd have popped in your earbuds and put on some music to accompany the walk. Today, you figure it'd be best to have your wits about you. You're lucky you live so close to the grocery store. There's a police checkpoint on the way, and the vehicle line is always a nightmare this time of day. As you close and lock your door behind you, you try to ignore the pop and chatter of not-so-distant gunfire. You have friends on the separatist side of town. You have a cousin up in the hills. chatter of not-so-distant gunfire. You have friends on the separatist side

of town. You have a cousin up in the hills. You're not sure what he's doing there exactly, but it's probably part of why eggs have gotten so expensive lately. They all have reasons for what they're doing, and you don't believe the government lying about any of the sides anymore, but you're also not dumb enough to want to stand up and fight. The official death toll is still just a few thousand, but international monitors claim it must be much higher. There are days when you do feel like doing something, maybe even joining your friends. But most days, like today, you've got shit to do. It's 2024, an election year. Every candidate is doing their level best to not call this what it is, a civil war. You hear that phrase out on the street, though, more and more every day. You reach a crosswalk and start to step across. On the left, your eyes are drawn to the massive bulk of a police bearcat as it trundles

across the street parallel to you. A man sits up top in the cupola, his hands on a machine gun that, for now, has its nose pointed up in the air. He stares at you, and you try not to stare back. As you hurry along to the supermarket, you ask yourself the question you've asked almost every day for the last three years. How did it get this bad? Did that seem far-fetched to you? Outlandish? If so, let me try to show you why the preceding passage might well be reality for millions of Americans startlingly soon if something isn't done. The Second American Civil War doesn't sound like a crazy, distant

possibility to me, and it hasn't for a while. I'm Robert Evans, and it's my job to help you see what I see. 2016 was the first year I started seriously considering the possibility of a Second American Civil War. It was the year I reported on the major protests surrounding the most contentious election in modern American history. I was there at the RNC and the DNC, and at both, I saw tremendous hatred on display. Leftist protesters hated Hillary Clinton and mainstream Democrats. Conspicuously armed right-wing protesters hated the leftists. Everyone hated the police, and the police certainly seemed to hate the protesters. I also traveled to Iraq in 2016 to report on the siege of Mosul, but nothing I saw there, nothing I saw anywhere that year,

scared me more than watching Alex Jones speak on the first day of the RNC. A huge crowd had gathered to see him. Many of them were armed, dozens of young men wearing body armor and packing AR-15s patrolled in the Ohio summer heat. The speech was, characteristically for Jones, angry, filled with shouted declarations of hatred. That did not surprise me. What surprised me was the crowd's reaction to how he labeled the Democratic Party. These are not liberals. These are anti-free speech, anti-freedom scum who need to get their ass to North Korea. You can hear the reckless hate in the audio. The sheer rage these people had.

Seeing dozens and dozens of armed Americans calling their political opponents scum, outdoors, in broad daylight, at a major party political convention. Now in 2019, it's the kind of thing that seems normal, but at the time it was new and frightening. I was just a few feet away when Adult Swim's Eric Andre showed up to troll Jones. I know a lot of people watched that moment on TV or on YouTube. What you may not have seen was how close the crowd looked to tearing Andre apart. Some of those people wanted to fucking kill him. Most of that armed, angry crowd was polite enough to me, lily-white, bearded southerner that I am. But several of them made it clear that they believed a fight was coming.

We have to take back our country, no matter what was the general sentiment. Coming from the mouth of someone dressed like they just stepped out of downtown Fallujah, it sent a chill down my spine. By the time September rolled around, I'd started seriously thinking about the possibility of a second American Civil War. I decided to write an article about it for Cracked, where I worked as an editor. I didn't want it to just be my speculation, so I reached out to a number of experts, ex-federal agents and military officers and Civil War scholars. One of these experts was David Kilcolan, former chief strategist for the U.S. State Department and a major architect of the surge in Iraq. He's one of the world's leading

counterinsurgency experts. When I reached out to these people, I had very little faith that any of them would respond to me. My topic seemed too far-fetched and ridiculous, and these were all serious people. I didn't think they'd waste their time with my speculative sci-fi bullshit. To my surprise, every one of them responded to me, and to my growing discomfort, none of them thought the topic was ridiculous. David Kilcullen told me he'd been researching the idea for a while. He did not think a Civil War II was imminent, but he worried about it. Everyone I talked to worried about it. They all saw warning signs that our nation might be inching closer to unspeakable violence. In the years since, the rest of the world seems to be catching up to this possibility. Since President Trump's election, we have seen a mighty surge in political violence across the country.

Antifa and groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer have battled in the streets of multiple American cities. Heather Heyer was murdered in a fascist terrorist attack on counter-protesters in Charlottesville. The MAGA bomber and the Tree of Life synagogue shooter both struck at political and racial enemies of the far right in the same week. In June of 2017, almost exactly a year after Alex Jones' rally at the RNC, Dana Loesch of the NRA put up a video that seems almost tailor-made to highlight how much worse things got in the months after the election. They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.

And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding, until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they'll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I'm the National Rifle Association of America, and I'm freedom's safest place.

A year later, Roger Stone, famed Trump ally and recently indicted asshole, had this to say. Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you've never seen. You think? No question. You think if he got impeached, like the country would go to... Both sides are heavily armed, my friend. Yes, absolutely. This is not 1974.

The people will not stand for impeachment. A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life. There will be violence on both sides. And, of course, Alex Jones' own rhetoric has escalated considerably over the last two years. I know the instinct here is to write him off as a nut shouting into the wilderness, but more than a million Americans watch or listen to his show each month. He is not nearly as fringe as you want him to be. You're trying to start a civil war with people. You're taking our kindness for weakness. Do you understand the American people

will kill all of you if you want a real war? A 1776. I'm not the one that's calling for violence. You're going to get wrecked bad. I don't want a war. I don't need some, you know, coming-of-age deal to kill a bunch of liberals. I just can't. But I also feel like I'm in dereliction as a citizen of my duty, not saying we have to start getting ready for insurrection and civil war. After two years of constantly escalating rhetoric and violence,

even America's political moderates have started to worry. Last October, the New York Times published an opinion article titled The American Civil War, Part Two. The National Review, a mainstream conservative magazine, published The Origins of Our Second Civil War a few months later. So maybe this all still sounds ridiculous to you, but let the record show that a whole mess of heavily armed people are already loudly fantasizing about mass violence. That's not the only ingredient you need for a vicious civil war, but it is certainly one of them. Even so, to most people, the idea of a second American civil war feels more like science fiction than a possible future. I even feel that way sometimes, when I step away from Twitter and ignore my news feed and walk the quiet, tree-lined streets of my neighborhood. It feels silly when I stand in line

at the DMV or hop onto a public bus or train. The systems that govern our lives here are so intricate, so seemingly stable, and so settled that any kind of mass upset feels almost impossible, fantastic even. But I have walked through cities where the public buses still run, just without windows, because the blasts from mortars have blown them all out. I've watched people stand in line and fill out forms in government buildings while howitzers shake the foundation and machine guns chatter half a mile away. I have seen systems collapse.

Everything I've seen, and everything I've read over the last two years, has convinced me that the United States is closer to that kind of terror than almost anyone is willing to admit. And so I can't ignore Alex Jones as a kook on the fringe. I think he's dangerous, and I think he represents a strain of ideology that could collapse this nation into apocalyptic violence. 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 as 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where, every season, I take some fantastic, unlikely scenario

and explain how it could happen, why it might be closer than you'd think, and how it will look when, or if, it comes. This season, we are talking about the Second American Civil War. In this episode, we're exploring one possible way that war could start. Today, the perpetrators will be Donald Trump and the American far right in its most armed, vicious, and violent incarnation. The shoe will be on the other foot for the next episode. My sympathies are with the left, but my goal here is not partisan fear-mongering. It's an exploration of the possibilities.

I want to start by dispelling some myths. I think the main reason many people have trouble imagining a second civil war is the first civil war. And if you think of the second civil war as a replay of the first, where a huge chunk of the nation decides to secede, there are two cleanly defined sides and two opposing militaries that clash in the field, then yes, it probably does seem impossible. But war doesn't look like that anymore. In 1861, an army was just a bunch of men with rifles, horses, and some cannons.

Most of the kit a modern soldier would take into battle was stuff that many normal people owned already. The existence of aircraft, drones, satellite-guided missiles, and tanks has changed things. A bunch of dudes with rifles marching on Washington, D.C. would be wiped out by a single A-10 Warthog. Older wars tend to have real clear beginnings. The U.S. Civil War started with the capture of Fort Sumter. The Revolutionary War started with a fighting at Lexington and Concord. World War II started with the invasion of Poland. But the Syrian Civil War didn't suddenly start so much as it evolved, from popular protests and clashes with police in the street, to brutal state repression of those protesters, and eventually to a shooting war. And when that war started, there were way the fuck more than two sides. The Free Syrian Army,

Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS, the YPG, and dozens of other groups all took different positions, many fighting against both the Syrian state and other rebel groups. It's a gigantic, confusing mess. Any mass civil conflict in the U.S. would probably look similar. So forget the Union and the Confederacy. Forget clear sides and a clear beginning. Imagine you're sitting at home one day, browsing the internet. You read about the beginning of a protest in Wall Street. The first pictures and videos that start circulating on social media probably look a lot like Occupy once did. I imagine these protesters are angry at Trump.

As I write this in February of 2019, protesters have assembled in D.C. and several other points around the nation to attack the president's declaration of a state of emergency over what he calls a crisis at the border. So let's say Trump does something else fucked up, a set of mass deportations maybe.

People take to the street to protest in huge numbers, millions of folk across the country. Some of the largest protests are in New York, right outside of Trump Tower. It will be hot. Most large protests occur in the dead of summer, and as I write this, we're edging ever closer to that time of the year. So you'll have thousands of people crowding in around Trump Tower. They're hot, sweaty, and furious.

So far, nothing new. The first pictures and video clips that you see look normal to anyone who's paid attention to the news for the last decade. Folks with funny signs, people in costume, packed crowds of marchers. You go about your day, checking Twitter or Facebook every now and again. You visit the gym and see footage from the rally on CNN. Wolf Blitzer talking to some black-clad activist with a mask over his face. Lines of riot cops stand ominously in the background, sweating through their body armor. It seems pretty normal, at least for 2019. And then, rather suddenly, it's not. The tone of the news dripping out from New York changes. It becomes chaotic, erratic, and violent. Now you see

people running away. Blurry footage of blood and bodies on the street. Evidence that something terrible has happened. For a while, all you know is that people are dying in the Big Apple. Gradually, the story comes out. The police open fire with what were supposed to be less than lethal rounds. But they were pissed off, or legitimately scared, and they hit several people in their faces and heads. Several of those folks died, and others were horribly injured. For the rest of the day, for the next week,

every news station rotates the same grim footage of corpses under streets and weeping activists shaking from the aftermath of lethal violence. There's video of the shooting. When I see it, I'm sure it looks like the police fired without cause. My conservative parents disagree, pointing to what might be protesters throwing something. We get into a fight about exactly how much force that could possibly justify. The whole country has that argument. Who you blame for the deaths winds up depending on where you stand politically. Remember the confrontation between Nathan

Phillips and Nick Sandman at the March for Life in January of 2019? As I write this, it's just a few weeks old. You can watch hours of video from multiple angles, and yet, on social media, right-wing pundits say the full video completely exonerates those kids, left-wing pundits say the exact opposite. And these people are all working from the same evidence. The inciting incident for our theoretical civil war will be like that. What was done will matter less than how it's interpreted by different segments of America in their different social media bubbles. After the murder of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville, a narrative developed on the fascist side of things that claimed James Fields, the killer, had been assaulted by Antifa while in his car. They argued that he'd accelerated into the crowd in a panic and that Heather Heyer had actually died from a heart attack.

None of this was true, but hours of video and countless picture-based arguments were concocted by internet Nazis in an attempt to exonerate their guy. This narrative did not spread widely because fucking nobody wanted to be associated with the Charlottesville Nazis. But that will not be the case for this protest we're imagining. No one's wearing a swastika or holding a tiki torch. You've got cops in riot gear and activists in black masks.

Both sides are sympathetic to one chunk of the country and reviled by the other. Even at Charlottesville, President Trump was unwilling to fully condemn the neo-Nazi demonstrators, declaring that there were good people on both sides. So who do you think he'll support in a battle between cops and protesters outside of his big dumb tower? He literally ran as the law and order president.

Just last October, 2018, President Trump declared Democrats to be anti-police and the party of crime. Now, this one bloody protest would not lead inevitably to a civil war. It just starts a process. Crossing the bridge from civil unrest to civil warfare doesn't require a magical and improbable shift in the firmament of reality. It just takes a bunch of the same fucked up shit that's always happening in America, happening all at once and in quick succession. One bloody protest on Wall Street and a defensive response from the Republican president

would lead to more protests all around the country. Activists across the nation would take to the streets in numbers not seen since the Iraq War protests in 2003. We can look to our last two years of history to guess where these demonstrations would be most violent. Berkeley, California, and Portland, Oregon are probably right at the top of that list. For the last two years, far-right and far-left activists have clashed bloodily in the streets of both cities. Portland has seen more street action in the last two years than any other city in the country. This is thanks in large part to the activism of a fellow named Joey Gibson. He's the head of a far-right protest group called Patriot Prayer,

and he's led dozens of rallies that have ended with hundreds of injuries, from minor to life-threatening. Recently, the Portland Police Bureau were revealed to have been collaborating with Patriot Prayer and Joey Gibson via text messages. The collaboration seems to have gone as far as to include police advising right-wing demonstrators where smaller groups of leftist activists were located and giving them suggestions on how they might avoid being searched for weapons. At one demonstration last summer, Patriot prayer members were caught on the roof of a nearby building with rifles, presumably so they could open fire if Antifa did something they considered to be a step out of line. Now, Portland is a famously liberal city, but it's lodged in the middle of some extremely conservative rural and suburban communities,

in a state with an extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership. Portland, Oregon is actually a great microcosm for the entire country that way. You've got conservative gun-owning America versus bleeding-heart gun-grabbing liberals. So tempers are high in that area, and at this set of protests we're imagining, the crowd is huge and furious about what they see as the murder of their comrades in New York. In the middle of this, Joey Gibson and his goons show up to rep their side of what's still just a culture war. They're shoving and punches, as there have been so many times before in Portland. But this time, someone pulls a gun. This person kills two people. There's video of the event. It's blurry, confusing, but we get one

clear shot of the shooter, his hand on a smoking gun and a MAGA hat on his head. The left sees a mass murderer firing on unarmed demonstrators. The president embraces his supporter. There's an investigation, of course, but rather than shutting up, the shooter does what people do now in 2019 when something like this happens. He goes on TV. Nick Sandman's response to his kerfuffle with Nate Phillips is now the blueprint for how to deal with this kind of public incident.

So the shooter is embraced as a hero by a lot of people. His name becomes a catchphrase on the far right, the term used to describe giving protesters what they deserve. Right-wingers on Twitter post gifs of him holding his gun when they get into arguments with liberals. The left responds, of course, with more protests, some outside of the same Fox News offices where this man talks to Morning Joe or Laura Ingraham or whoever. Americans see what they want to see in that too. A murderer being celebrated for killing liberals or a horde of unhinged leftists banging at the gates. The cops in New York and the Portland shooter all have their trials,

and the nation holds its breath waiting to see whose version of justice will be done. The Portland shooter walks free. So do the NYPD officers. will be done. The Portland shooter walks free. So do the NYPD officers. In April 1992, a jury acquitted four LAPD officers for the violent and videotaped beating of Rodney King. Tens of thousands of primarily black and Latino citizens took to the streets, overwhelming the police and doing more than a billion dollars in damage. The 7th Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Division, along with every federal law enforcement agency imaginable, were called in to contain the violence. Now that was one city. Imagine riots like that in three or four cities, while dozens of other cities host peaceful but still massive and disruptive protests. That's how I imagine this would go, rage spreading virally in

the age of the smartphone. Occupy Wall Street was the first clear example of this, and I think it was important of things to come. In a matter of weeks, more than 600 communities in the United States hosted their own Occupy rallies and camps. So imagine large chunks of multiple American cities effectively rendered uncontrollable to the federal government. Government buildings, ICE headquarters, and the like

occupied and blockaded. In the cities that host riots, the Army and the Marines, as well as the National Guard, are called in to restore order, or at least to attempt to do that. What if they can't? In 2013, protesters in Ukraine, angry about policies introduced by a controversial right-wing president, Viktor Yanukovych, organized in their nation's capital. Yanukovych was an unspeakably wealthy, out-of-touch asshole who deliberately inflamed divisions between the rural and urban parts of his country and stole huge amounts of money from the taxpayers. The man had a private lake with a private boat restaurant in his private palace, all built with grifted cash. Many modern liberals and leftists certainly look

at Donald Trump as if he is that sort of man. The protest started in Kiev's Independence Square, otherwise known as the Maidan. It's essentially like a giant protest in the National Lawn or Wall Street. It's that kind of central location to the Ukrainian people. And these protesters basically, you know, picked a central chunk of valuable real estate in a place that the government couldn't ignore, right in the middle of the capital. Now, the Maidan protests were a normal example of street activism until they weren't. The police cracked down on protesters brutally, and suddenly social media flooded with pictures of beaten and battered college students. This prompted more people to take to the streets, friends and family members of those activists who were livid at the violence done to their loved ones. For days, the violence escalated and the number of protesters grew.

The activists turned the Maidan into a camp, something like a temporary city within a city. grew. The activists turned the Maidan into a camp, something like a temporary city within a city. What happened in Kiev was not, at that point, so very different from things we have experienced in the United States. Occupy Wall Street and the Standing Rock protests were both examples of activists essentially seizing a crucial chunk of real estate and refusing to leave. Unlike those protests, the Maidan occupation did not fizzle out. The activists did not go home. They fought with the police and battled the federal government for several epic and bloody weeks until, finally, President Yanukovych was forced to flee power and the country. The Ukrainians resisted the worst violence their state could throw at them. It was not an easy task. More than 100 people died,

mostly to a combination of police snipers and brutal hand-to-hand combat. When I reported on the Maidan revolution in 2014, I did not think that American activists would be capable of the same badassery. I was at Occupy Wall Street for a couple of nights back in 2011, and at the time I wrote it off as kind of a bust. But what I didn't see then, because I was young and dumber, was that all these links were being formed between different left-wing organizations and activists. I met people at Standing Rock five years later who'd started their activist careers at Occupy and been at protests all over the country ever since. They'd gotten good at organizing and at being organized. With a long enough history of unrest

and street activism, a nation's people build up a sort of protest infrastructure that can sustain hardcore resistance to the state for longer and longer periods of time. Occupy Wall Street was not good at sustaining itself. Standing Rock did better. Those protests cost the state of North Dakota $39 million to suppress and cost the company building the pipeline as much as $4.4 billion. As time has gone on and political tensions have ratcheted up, the American people have grown more capable of resisting their government in the streets in an organized way. Now, assuming all this happens later in 2019 or 2020, this unrest would be going on at the same time as the economy shifts its metaphorical pants.

Most economists agree that our nation is currently heading towards a pretty steep fiscal cliff. I'm going to quote from the Washington Post here. More than a third of top economic forecasters now predict a U.S. recession in 2020, according to the latest blue-chip forecast, and 44% of fund managers in the latest Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey expect global growth to slow in the next year, the worst outlook for the world economy since November 2008. So let's say the economists are right, and that happens.

The economy slides off a ledge and into the goddamn sea. So in the middle of all these protests, all these murders, all this fury, there are waves of layoffs and foreclosures. Not only does the greatest recession in a generation cause more unrest, more anger at Donald Trump and his fellow billionaires, but it frees a shitload of people up for street activism. The recently laid off, the evicted, the desperate all flood the ranks of a left-wing activist movement with enough experienced organizers to make use of them. Now, mass protests and bloody riots

have long been a part of American life. So far, none of these has ever sparked a civil war. It's kind of like how literal sparks don't always start fires. You need more than just a spark. You need fuel to burn, dry logs, and sticks with plenty of tinder, or big rolling hills covered in dead grass. In past bloody civil disturbances like the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, the Kent State shootings, or the LA riots, there just

wasn't enough fuel in the rest of the country for the fire to really spread. Modern American history is filled with examples of individuals who've tried to spark civil wars or revolutions in this country. That was the stated goal of the Columbine shooters when they started their rampage. It was Tim McVeigh's goal when he bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Neither of those sparks caught either. That's because the most critical ingredient for any hypothetical civil war, the tender for this blazing inferno, exists in the hearts and minds of the populace. the tinder for this blazing inferno, exists in the hearts and minds of the populace. Before a civil war can start, before any of this could be real,

enough people have to want to kill their countrymen. I don't know if we're there yet, but I think we're getting close. In 1972, the National Opinion Research Center carried out a survey rating each region of the country based on what percentage of its population believed most people could be trusted. In the Old South, the former Confederate states, that number ranged from between 30 and 40%. In the rest of the country, it was between 50 and 70%. The national average was 46.2%. Now in 2012, the same NORC survey found very different results.

Most regions in the nation were well under 40%, with the national average dropping from 46.2% to 32.4%. Other surveys back up this unsettling trend. Up on our site, itcouldhappenherepod.com, we'll showcase a graph. It charts the results from several decades' worth of Pew survey questions, from 1958 to 2015, all asking whether or not respondents, quote, trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. That number peaked at nearly 80% of the population in 1961. By 2015, it had dropped to roughly 20%. With some brief spikes during the Carter administration and immediately after September 11th, the graph has shown a

shockingly steady rate of decline. There's actually a huge amount of data that tracks the decline in trust among Americans toward their fellow Americans. Edelman, a global communications marketing firm, has run a trust barometer for several years now. It marked a 14% decline in trust of the U.S. government from 2017 to 2018. Trust in businesses, in NGOs, and in the media all suffered similarly steep declines. These are the sharpest drops Edelman has seen in its 18 years of measuring trust. Here's Richard Edelman, head of the firm. This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact,

it's the ultimate irony that it's happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and unemployment rates in the U.S. at record highs. Now, it's worth noting that this quote from Edelman came from a January 2018 Atlantic article. Back then, the economy was booming. It is currently somewhat less booming, and it's my opinion that we're unlikely to trust each other more in the midst of the deep recession most economists say is coming. Now, back in 2014, only 20% of California residents supported peaceful secession from the United States. By January of 2017, 33% of Californians supported secession. This poll was talking about peaceful secession, of course.

Californians aren't champing at the bit to take up arms against the Union, but the numbers are still compelling. Only 60% of California Republicans were against the idea of a peaceful secession. Data from the other states supports this simple fact. More Americans in more states now support secession than at any point within the lifetime of anyone listening to this podcast. Nationwide, 22% of Americans support their state seceding. One way to look at this is that 78% of Americans don't want to secede. But it's worth noting that

back when the whole Revolutionary War thing kicked off, most people in the colonies did not support seceding from Great Britain, or at least not openly. Now, obviously, Ipsos and Gallup weren't doing surveys back then. People still drank mercury to cure their colds. Statistics were not anyone's back in 1776. But historians have spent a lot of time trying to figure out precisely how many people in the 13 colonies supported independence. Most estimates you'll find suggest that about a third of colonists were loyal to the crown, a third were fence-sitters who didn't really land on either side of the issue, and only a third of early Americans actively supported the revolution. So if that's the threshold, 33%, well then the 22% of Americans

who currently support secession is a little bit more worrying. And it gets worrying-er, because this increased support for the idea of secession has occurred alongside something darker. More Americans hate their fellow Americans now than at any point in living memory. I'd like to quote from a 2016 Pew Research Center report on partisanship and political animosity. Quote, For the first time in surveys dating back to 1992, majorities in both parties expressed not just unfavorable, but very unfavorable views of the other party. And today, sizable shares of both Democrats and Republicans

say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger. More than half of Democrats, 55%, say the Republican Party makes them afraid, while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party. Among those highly engaged in politics, those who say they vote regularly and either volunteer for or donate to campaigns, fully 70% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party. This increasing fear has led both sides to arm themselves to an unprecedented level. That's been happening on the right since at least 2008, but the American left has not been associated with gun ownership until recently. In the wake of the 2016 election, the BBC published an article titled, Why U.S. Liberals Are Now

Buying Guns Too. Quote, FBI background checks for gun transactions soared to a new record for a single day, 185,713 during the Black Friday sales on 25 November. Some of this has been put down to gun retailers selling off stock at reduced prices, but there have also been reports of more non-traditional buyers, such as African Americans and other minorities, turning up at gun shops and shooting ranges. Laura Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, says her organization has seen a huge rise in inquiry since November's election and a 10% increase in paid members. In the years since Trump's election and the subsequent street fighting between fascists and anti-fascists, there have been a surge in new left-wing gun organizations. These include Redneck Revolt, the John Brown Gun Club,

and the Socialist Rifle Association. There are now numerous left-wing and right-wing political groups that center their identities around being armed advocates of a political ideology. Back in 2016, before any of those far-left gun groups existed, former State Department strategist David Kilcolan told me this. Quote, I think what we're seeing now is what I would describe as a proto-insurgency situation. The ingredients are out there if somebody knew what they were doing, they could pull together an effective movement.

In places like Kurdistan, you see political parties that have their own armed wing. Every political party has its own armed wing. It's an artifact of a broken political system that people start arming themselves just in case. I might be arming defensively, and that looks offensive to you, and it starts to escalate. On my first trip to Iraq, I was embedded with the Peshmerga, a Kurdish military force made up primarily of soldiers loyal to the two major Kurdish political parties. It's the equivalent of the Republican and Democratic parties each having armed wings. That sounds silly to imagine here in America, but only because most Americans trust

their political process more than they trust a gun. That trust erodes a little more every day. As Edelman researcher David Bursoff explained to The Atlantic, quote, The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise. When that goes away, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken. On a campaign stop in February, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren publicly questioned whether or not Donald Trump would even be a free person in 2020. A lot of people want the president at least impeached. Imagine how much more firm and more aggressive the calls to force him out of office will become in the wake of mass rioting and protests. 38% of Americans, roughly, support

the wall Donald Trump just called a state of emergency to build. That number probably represents a pretty good estimate for his floor of support. There is, ideologically, nothing but daylight between these people and the liberals they despise. There are already calls on the far right for the president to assume what amounts to dictatorial powers. On January 9th, 2019, President Donald Trump addressed the nation on what he called the border crisis. Rampant speculation at the time theorized that he would declare a state of emergency that night. Here's what Alex Jones's guest, Mike Adams, wanted the president to do. It's the appropriate role of the military. It's a constitutional role for the military to defend the borders. And also, wanted the president to do. It's the appropriate role of the military. It's a constitutional role for the military to defend the borders. And also, by the way, Alex, you know,

posse comitatus, it prevents the military from acting as police on the streets of America, but it does not prevent military police from pursuing enemy combatants and domestic enemies of America who are on American soil. Military police can be dispatched to arrest and seek out treasonous traitors, you know, war criminals, enemy combatants who are on U.S. soil. There is no restriction against that. Let's just keep all of this in mind because America is under attack. Now, Alex Jones has been suggesting that the president violently suppresses enemies for quite some time. Dan, host of the fantastic Alex Jones-focused podcast Knowledge Fight, sent me this clip from a show in mid-2017. Donald Trump could have them all arrested just like Lincoln did.

Lincoln had members of the State Department arrested. Lincoln had judges arrested and hundreds of newspaper editors arrested because they were in open sedition calling for the overthrow of the republic. There's already some evidence that President Trump's most violent fans are willing to go out shooting in order to ensure his political survival. Early in 2019, Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hassan was busted by the FBI with a kill list of the president's political enemies and a sizable arsenal. a kill list of the president's political enemies, and a sizable arsenal. In the weeks prior to his arrest, Hassan's Google searches included, what if Trump illegally impeached, and civil war if Trump impeached. In a situation where President Trump's very political survival is imperiled, and where police around the country find themselves overwhelmed and pushed past the breaking point, it's not hard to imagine Donald Trump turning to his most fervent supporters for help,

point, it's not hard to imagine Donald Trump turning to his most fervent supporters for help, militiamen and so-called Second Amendment people like Lieutenant Hassan. He already called on those folks coyly during the election. You think there's no chance he would call for violence if his freedom was at stake? Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's lawyer and close confidant for 15 years, seems to hold the same worries I do. Near the end of his multi-hour House hearing in February 2019, Cohen made these closing remarks. Indeed, given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. And this is why I agreed to appear before you today. In the event the president was impeached, or in the likelier event he has voted out of power in

2020, the threat of violence is very real. When I first wrote those words in February of 2019, it did seem kind of unlikely to me that the president would call on militias to help him maintain power. But then just a couple of weeks after I wrote those words, in an interview with Breitbart News, President Donald Trump said this, I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad. Very bad. And let me note, just for your reference, when I listened to Alex Jones speak at the Republican National Convention in 2016, the don't riot, even when the walls outside our door.

Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me as 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. Tens of thousands of Americans on the far right are already preparing for violence. It's an almost religious belief for some of them. If you spend enough time browsing QAnon-focused subreddits and Twitter conversations, you will find ample evidence of this. These people believe, with the dedication of a cultist, that the Democratic Party is the center of a vast pedophilic conspiracy. There have already been three attacks by deranged QAnon followers, including one man who tried to block off transit to the Hoover Dam. It was an attempt to force the

president to openly go after his political enemies. As the days and weeks wear on, the hardened core of QAnon believers grow angrier and more prone to violence. Here's one post I found on AR15.com, the largest firearms forum on the internet. It's from a thread full of QAnon discussion. Quote, the left is used to getting their way, so much so that they will do anything to retain their power. If we the people truly desire to remain free, then we shall, in small or large groups, have to do what can be done. And here's another post from a QAnon fan I found, part of a Twitter exchange in which one person threatened the impeachment of Donald Trump and called the QAnon-er a cultist. Go ahead, my cult is winning, and after you place articles of impeachment, you just wait to see how many patriots pick up their guns and solve this problem. You may want

to join my cult before it's too late for you and your family and friends. How many deaths would it take? How many soldiers deployed to quell the rioting before we'd recognize this conflict as what it was, the Second American Civil War? That fact is anyone's guess, but every society has a breaking point, and I can guarantee you that point would take almost everyone by surprise. That's sort of how conflict starts. It boils up from protests and police violence and builds to gunfights, bombings, and dead cities. Back in 2016, when I was working on that Civil War article for Cracked, I interviewed Stathis Kalvius. He's a scholar who specifically studies the sociology of civil wars, and he's also the survivor of a civil war. During our interview, I brought up

some of my experiences in Ukraine, conversations I'd had with people who'd been at the Maidan. I mentioned to Stathis that these people had all felt bewildered by the speed with which the situation had gone from protests to shooting. Stathis told me this, quote, What most other people experience in civil wars is that they seem to come out of nowhere. Everybody's shocked, even the people who are studying these conflicts. There is an element I found another salient quote in a Fortune article from 2018, talking about how the Brexit vote had spurred support for secession among many Americans. The speaker is Sanford Levinson, a poli-sci professor of the University at Texas at Austin. Quote,

On May 26, 2017, Jeremy Christian got on a Portland Max Light Rail train. Christian had an extensive violent criminal history. He was also a member of the far-right protest group Patriot Prayer. One popular clothing item among Patriot Prayer members is a t-shirt with Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong written on the front and RWDS written on the sleeves. That stands for Right Wing Death Squad. During his ride, Jeremy Christian saw two young Muslim teenage girls. He began cursing at them and hurling racial epithets. Three male passengers intervened and tried to get him to back down.

He pulled a knife, stabbing two of them to death and critically wounding the third. When police took him away, Jeremy Christian shouted, That's what liberalism gets you. Whatever else you take out of this episode, I want you to remember one thing. The Second American Civil War is not theoretical for everybody. For some people, it's already started. They're just waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Most times gunshots are cherry bombs around here. We could be sleepier.

We could sure sleep easier. But sometimes them cherry bombs mean I mean Wars outside our door No, we don't fight, we don't ride Even when wars outside our door 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 I Write OK. 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 Broth. 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 lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.