It Could Happen Here - The State Strikes Back

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

We've talked about how the violence might start: what happens when the State strikes 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. They come for you in the night. One minute you're asleep,

warm and swaddled in your blankets, and the next you're awoken by a loud crashing sound, blinded by the light on the end of a police officer's AR-15. You raise your hands up defensively, too shocked to think. A hand grabs you by the wrist and yanks you hard,

off the bed, nearly pulling your arm out of its socket. Several men shout loudly, all at once. Their voices merge together into one confusing, chaotic mess, but you know enough not to resist as they jam your arms behind your back and cuff your wrists. As the fog of sleep gives way to intelligent thought, your conscious mind finally understands what this is. A raid.

As they drag you out into the hallway, you realize exactly what this must be about. Two days ago, two police officers were shot dead just outside your building. They weren't the heavily armed, militarized cops you see at checkpoints near the separatist side of town. These men were normal patrol officers, walking a beat when some partisan sniper gunned them down at a distance. You walked past the spot where they died just a few hours earlier, on your way home from work. Someone had spray-painted, all cops are bastards, on the wall above where both men had died. You remember staring at the bloodstains on the concrete, fighting down nausea and wondering what was going to come next. Now you know.

The officers drop you unceremoniously against the outside wall of your apartment. Your next-door neighbor sits, opposite from you, next to his front door. His nose is broken, blood streams down his face. You lock eyes. Neither of you says anything, but you share a look that says, So, it's come to this, huh? Back behind you, armored cops tear through your living room and bedroom, emptying pillows of stuffing, turning over your bed and couch,

looking in every conceivable nook and hidey hole. For a single, delirious second, you find yourself consumed with worry that they might steal some of the bags of coffee you stockpiled. You can't afford to buy more at the current prices. Ever since Mexico closed their border, good beans cost more than your rent. You know you should feel violated. You should be livid right now, rather than just worried about your stash. A distant part of you does feel that way.

But after the last few years of escalating police patrols, after all the hours spent waiting at checkpoints and the constant vehicle searches, this just sort of feels like the inevitable culmination of events. Another group of cops rushes past you down the hallway with a clattering of body armor and heavy metal gear. All their faces are covered by goggles, helmets, and ski masks with skulls printed on the face. The skulls are black and white, just like the colorless American flags on their shoulders. The skulls are black and white, just like the colorless American flags on their shoulders. You realize, with some surprise, that none of them have any visible rank or unit insignias on their armor.

You don't even really know if they're police or soldiers. You guess at this point the difference is mainly academic. One of them carries a battering ram, but your eyes are drawn to a short man at the rear of the group. On his hip is a sheathed tomahawk. Something about that sets your skin on edge. An axe is not the kind of tool you use to restore order or to protect people. It has one purpose, to cut through flesh and bone. The cops, or whatever they are, batter open the next door and rush into the third and final apartment on your floor. They're shouting, the sound of a struggle, and then a single gunshot shatters

the night. An eerie silence descends on the hallway. You and your neighbors share another look. The dread on his face says more than any words ever could. After a few seconds, the short man with the tomahawk steps out of the room, his hand on the shoulder of a tall officer. You see a wisp of smoke curl up off the other man's rifle. His front is splattered with blood. Drops of it stain the black and white flag on his shoulder, the only color on his dismal uniform. And once again, you find yourself wondering, what comes next? In 2015, I visited Kiev, capital of Ukraine, about a year after the successful Maidan revolution overthrew that country's wannabe dictator, Viktor Yanukovych. This was also about a year into Ukraine's war with the Russian-backed separatists. I interviewed a bunch of veterans of the Maidan revolution.

Most were young men and women. At one point, I sat down with a married couple, both in their mid-twenties. They were both fairly small people of tiny build and stature. I listened while they explained how they'd faced off against the Berkut. The Berkut were Ukraine's elite riot police. If you've ever seen an American cop at a civil disturbance or riot wearing full body armor and wielding a truncheon or a gas grenade launcher or one of those pepperball guns that looks like a cross between a paintball gun and an AR-15. They looked sort of like that. All riot cops look pretty much the same. That is to say, they look like Darth Vader. You're meant to be intimidated by them, awed by the sight of dozens or hundreds of these tall,

armor-plated badasses slowly tromping towards you while a commanding voice bellows over a painfully loud speaker on the back of a tank. Disperse! This is an unlawful gathering! Now, these two people I was sitting with had gone face-to-face with the Berkut as part of a shield wall of volunteers who had, for weeks, successfully pushed back the assaults of this army of Darth Vader's. I knew that intellectually, but I could not square that fact with the unimposing reality of these two spindly tech geeks who were sitting in front of me. Eventually, I asked them, both of you are tiny and you're software developers, not MMA fighters.

How did you go face to face with armored cops and win? The young woman smiled at me and sort of raised out her arms to pantomime the shape of a riot shield. It's similar to the kinds of shields Roman legionnaires used to carry, but black. She explained, the barracut carry these big shields, and if you're small, you can get in low and grab the shield by the bottom and flip it up. With all that armor, they're very top-heavy. It's easy to get them off balance, especially with all the ice on the ground. Then, when they fall on their backs, they are like a turtle, so you stomp on them. In addition to being a useful bit of practical advice if you, dear listener, ever find yourself facing off against riot cops, I found her advice to be

powerfully symbolic of the nature of state power. It always looks formidable. The perception of a monopoly on the use of force is important for any government. If people don't think a revolution is possible, they're less likely to revolt. But once things get going, once push comes to literal shove, the might of the police, and even the military, often proves to be less imposing than it appears on paper. In other words, the man has a glass jaw. Welcome to Episode 3 of It Could Happen Here, the Second American Civil War. To recap our hypothetical timeline, a financial crash has shattered the U.S. economy into pieces.

Left-wing activists have occupied centers of several major American cities, including Wall Street and New York City. Several of these occupations have, surely, been crushed, but others have successfully held off the police and created autonomous zones free of state control. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and perhaps even bombings against demonstrators from one side or the other have grown more common. Meanwhile, out in the country, separatists resist the government calls to disarm them. A potent insurgency has cut off the water supply and the roads to some of America's most productive farmland. The body count and the cost of food rises. The stock market falls. Most people are probably still loathe to call this a civil war.

But deep in Washington, that's exactly how the guardians of the state have decided to treat it. The government's first line of defense would be the police and, of course, the power of law. So if we're going to ponder over how the system might strike back against this threat to its very existence, we'd better start with Congress. Let's assume the government starts by trying to placate the demonstrators, without much success. To appease the yellow vest protesters, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, repealed the controversial gas tax on December 4, 2018.

As of mid-March, when I'm writing this episode, the protests are still ongoing. Placation does not always work. So let's imagine Congress tries to wave a carrot, reducing gas taxes and promising investigation into the financial industry, maybe approving some federal funds to help struggling homeowners. Like most things our Congress does, it's half-hearted and heavily compromised by partisan bickering. The protesters and separatists are not placated. So what happens next when the government's first attempt to restore order fails? We can find some clues to this in the Standing Rock protests and the protests in D.C. during President Trump's inauguration. In the immediate wake of both

of these unprecedented acts of resistance, the man did what the man does, tried to stomp down on the power to actively resist. In the wake of both protests, more than 20 states proposed bills that restricted the rights of protesters and also protected the rights of people who did violence against those protesters. In response to protesters blocking pipelines under construction on Native American territory, Oklahoma passed HB 1123. This increased penalties for trespassing on critical infrastructure. Protesters who simply showed up to protest at, say, the site of a pipeline could find themselves looking at a year in prison. Damaging equipment increased the penalty

to 10 years. In North Dakota, site of the Standing Rock protest, two bills were signed into law punishing people who wear masks or cover their faces at protests and increasing the potential prison term of participating in something deemed a riot to 10 years. In Tennessee, a bill was proposed that would give, quote, civil immunity for the driver of an automobile who injures a protester who is blocking traffic in a public right-of-way if the driver is exercising due care. By the time Heather Heyer was murdered by an angry fascist demonstrator in a car, six states had proposed measures similar to that Tennessee bill. In Texas, Representative Pat Fallon attempted to straight-up legalize

ramming protesters with cars. Now, I want to remind you of a few things. Number one, state-level congresspeople like Pat Fallon often wind up running for and winning federal office. And number two, the inciting incidents for most of these bills were peaceful protests. So when I think of those facts, and I imagine the government's response to an activist movement that has literally barricaded chunks of major American cities and said, you can't come in, well, I don't imagine the federal government's first response would be violence. But I see them winding up at violence rather quickly. I don't think we start off with police snipers using live rounds on protesters, as they did in Ukraine.

But I can see American police being called in from other parts of the state and other states. This would bring in huge numbers of officers more used to handing out parking tickets than using tear gas. They'd be suddenly thrown in to try and clear out an angry, organized group of activists behind barricades, tossing jars of fecal matter and urine, fireworks, stink bombs, whatever they have. I do not have any trouble imagining deaths at several of these clashes. There's been a lot of talk and a lot of articles in the last few years about the rise of the warrior cop, as left-wing magazine Mother Jones put it. Militarized policing is a hot-button issue. At the tail end of his term, President Obama tried to stem the flow of military

grade weapons and vehicles to law enforcement, but that executive order was reversed in 2017. The thing is, police officers aren't soldiers. Some of them are veterans, and a few are even combat veterans, but most are just cops. Looking like a soldier does not necessarily mean you can operate like one. More than 2.2 million Americans have served in the war on terror and been deployed to one of its many hotspots. Most of those people are not combat veterans either, but they all hold valuable skills, the kind of skills that could help a group of protesters occupy the center of a large American city, organize their supplies and communications, and even physically resist the police. At Standing Rock, I met veterans with information security backgrounds

who focused on providing the protest camps with secure internet access. In Kiev, during the Maidan protests, old Soviet veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan helped stiffen the backs of scared young protesters facing off against lines of riot police. American veterans are significantly more politically active than the average citizen, 6% more likely to vote. Because of their experience working as part of a large, organized whole, and because of their specialized skills, veterans make fantastic activists. They also make fantastic terrorists, insurgents, and freedom fighters.

This is something that came up during my talk with David Gilcolan back in 2016. He told me about something called Foucault's boomerang. This is an idea proposed initially by Michel Foucault to explain why military techniques originally developed by colonial powers to put down insurrections and colonies eventually wound up being used by those same nations on their own people. One great example is the concentration camp. It was initially deployed by the Spanish against their Cuban colony, and then by the British against their South African colonies until eventually, during the Second World War, the technique wound up in Europe,

being used on Europeans. The science of fingerprinting and the idea of panoptic prisons are two more examples of techniques Europeans initially developed to maintain colonial order and then brought back to their own countries. Foucault himself wrote, quote, It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its

political and judicial weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization or an internal colonization on itself. In his important book, Cities Under Siege, The New Military Urbanism, Professor Stephen Graham argues convincingly that the same thing is happening now in the United States as a result of the techniques our military developed initially to fight insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Quote, these operations act as testing grounds for technology and techniques to be sold on through the world's burgeoning

homeland security markets. Through such processes of imitation, explicitly colonial models of pacification, militarization, and control honed on the streets of the global south are spread to the cities of the capitalist heartlands in the north. In other words, if you want a picture of how our government and our military would respond to a separatist movement in the United States, just look at what they've done in other countries when their cities defied us. This is why, as this podcast goes on, I'll repeatedly refer to what the U.S. military did in Mosul and Raqqa. But right now, for this episode, what's important is that the boomerang effect cuts both ways. The state right now is armed with a whole host of weapons and tactics it perfected fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. But American cities and the American countryside are also

filled with men and women who spent years of their lives fighting those wars and those insurgents. They paid attention to what the enemy did, what worked, and what didn't. Now, I want to make it clear before we go on that I'm not saying veterans are inherently violent people or anything like that. I don't think they're more likely to become terrorists than anyone else. But if they do make that choice, they have a much wider range of capabilities than, say, a radicalized former kindergarten teacher. We already have a significant history in the very recent past of U.S. military veterans coming back from deployments abroad and embarking on one-man crusades to bring the war home. We don't fight, we don't riot, even when the walls outside our door. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a combat veteran.

He killed people for his country before he murdered the people of his country. Tim probably never heard of Foucault's boomerang, but without knowing it, his life perfectly embodied the theory. I'd like to quote from the book American Terrorists, probably the best biography of Timothy McVeigh. Quote, in reaching his decision to bomb a federal building, McVeigh had been operating in a purely military state of mind. The bombing, to him, was an act of tactical aggression. Nothing more, nothing less. The army had been his teacher in the horrors of war. He had learned to cope with unthinkable cruelty, and now he would put the lessons the army had taught him to practice on native soil. You learn how to handle killing

in the military, he explained. I face the consequences, but you learn to accept it. This brings me to the story of Christopher Dorner. Before he was a Los Angeles cop, Chris Dorner was a Naval Reserve officer who'd been deployed to Bahrain with the Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit for two years. He was a well-trained and experienced soldier, and a qualified marksman with both rifle and pistol. Up until 2013, Officer Dorner seemed like a model human being. In 2002, while training at Vance Air Force Base, he and a comrade found a bag with $8,000 of cash inside it, property of the Enid Korean Church of Grace. They turned the money into the police.

At the time, when interviewed, Dorner stated, quote, There was a couple of thousand dollars, and if people are willing to give that to a church, it must be pretty important to them. He emphasized that his mother and the military had both taught him to be an honorable man. In 2013, Christopher Dorner was fired by the LAPD. He claimed that this was because he reported on the use of excessive force within the department, beatings of suspects and homeless people for no reason. He tried to report these things and was shut down. Rather than next going to a journalist or the ACLU or generally taking any of what we consider to be the acceptable roads our society provides people to attempt to address these grievances, Chris Dorner decided that none of that was likely to work. He chose a redder path. On February 1st, 2013, Anderson Cooper's office

received a package from Dorner. It included a DVD laying out his case against the department and a challenge coin issued by LAPD chief William Bratton. Challenge coins are basically pogs for soldiers and law enforcement, metal coins emblazoned with the logo of this department, that office, or this general, etc. Chris Dorner had shot this coin and attached to it a note that said, one MOA. An MOA is a minute of angle. By writing this, he was essentially saying that he had shot the coin from 100 yards away with a grouping of one inch. In other words, Chris Dorner was saying, I am a very, very good shot. Be afraid. On February 3, 2013, Chris Dorner shot and killed Monica Kwan, the daughter of a former LAPD captain, and Keith Lawrence, her fiancé and a campus police officer.

This kicked off a rampage that would last until February 12. It was a chaotic, terrifying time for the LAPD. Many officers went to work feeling like, in essence, the predator was after them. It was also a terrifying time for black men who looked vaguely like Chris. There are pictures of one guy wearing a white t-shirt with the words, not Chris Dorner, written on his chest in sharpie. Over the course of his rampage, Chris killed two additional police officers and wounded three others. The LAPD took all patrol officers off their motorcycles for the duration of his spree. Protection details were set up for the 40 police officials named in

his manifesto, and thousands of officers were redeployed to watch the highways of Southern California. I want to read you some excerpts from the manifesto Chris sent out on February 4th, in the middle of his one-man war against the LAPD. Citizens slash non-combatants, do not render medical aid to downed officers slash enemy combatants. They would not do the same for you. They will let you bleed out just so they can brag to other officers that they had a 187 caper the other day and can't wait to accrue the overtime in future court subpoenas. As they always say, that's the paramedic's job, not mine. Let the balance of loss of life take place.

Sometimes a reset needs to occur. This will be a war of attrition and a pyrrhic and Camdean victory for myself. You may have the resources and manpower, but you are reactive and predictable in your op plans. I have the strength and benefits of being unpredictable, unconventional, and unforgiving. Do not waste your time with briefs and tabletops. Chris was finally cornered in a cabin on a mountain near Big Bear Lake, California. It's presumed he shot himself after the police fired in munitions that lit the cabin on fire around him.

Three years later, in 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson followed in Chris's footsteps when he opened fire on and killed five Dallas police officers during a protest. Johnson was an Army Reserve officer and veteran of the Afghan war. Later that same year, Gavin Eugene Long ambushed and shot six Louisiana police officers in Baton Rouge. Three of his victims died. Gavin Long had spent five years in the United States Marine Corps. He'd served one tour in Iraq. Now, Long was not a combat soldier, but every Marine is a trained rifleman,

and every Marine receives training on basic combat tactics, including how to set up the sort of ambush he carried out expertly against those Baton Rouge cops. The United States military has gotten extraordinarily good at training young men for battle. Even the soldiers who don't see combat can wind up quite proficient. These three cases are ample evidence of how much damage a competent, trained person can inflict on American police officers. But Chris Dorner is the case that's most interesting to me, and I think most relevant to our discussion here. He was, clearly, a man of passionate beliefs, a man who felt that something terribly wrong had been done by the police. His actions effectively tied up the LAPD, one of the largest armed forces on

this planet, for more than a week. Imagine if he'd been out there hunting cops in the middle of a major protest campaign. This is part of why I can, pretty easily, imagine some sort of more badass Occupy-style movement managing to hang on and control territory in several American cities, despite the best efforts of law enforcement. One angry, radicalized vet armed with the kind of weapons you can buy just about everywhere in America could pretty easily lock down an entire city's law enforcement during a time when they would not have many officers to spare. And remember the boomerang effect. Police departments already react, shall we say, forcefully whenever an officer dies.

Because Black Lives Matter was in the news when Micah Johnson and Gavin Long carried out their attacks, and because they were both black men, there were calls around the country to declare BLM a violent extremist group, despite a general lack of connections between either shooter and Black Lives Matter as an organization. If an angry veteran with a bolt-action sniper rifle started shooting NYPD cops while a huge chunk of Manhattan was locked down by protesters, well, it doesn't exactly take a big logical leap to imagine the cops might blame those deaths on the protest movement. So their violence against the protesters would escalate, and more activists would be killed and injured.

More videos of police violence would go viral. This would inspire more anti-police vigilantes to start hunting cops in the streets, and the cycle would continue, driving everyone to more extreme acts of violence and gradually ratcheting up the body count. And this is where the other side of the boomerang effect would come into it. Because an awful lot of police officers are veterans too, and when these guys start facing the same kinds of attacks they faced when they were deployed to Baghdad or wherever, they would respond using the same sorts of repressive measures. And, as Foucault predicted, American citizens would soon find themselves

enduring something millions of Iraqi and Afghan people already know quite well. The Midnight Raid. Talk to any Iraqi citizen who grew up in Kirkuk or Fallujah in the early aughts, and they will tell you stories of American soldiers suited up like something from a science fiction movie, with giant guns and body armor and wild insectoid-looking optic equipment, breaking down doors in the dead of night and dragging people off into custody. Sometimes these people were insurgents. Sometimes they were innocent civilians, victims of mistaken identity. In every instance, the raids were terrifying for everyone involved. And when you've got a bunch of jumpy, armed young men breaking

down doors in the dead of night looking for terrorists, well, there's a lot of room for error, the fatal kind of error. Since most of you aren't familiar with what happens in one of these raids, I'd like to quote from several of the 50 or so veterans who were interviewed by The Nation in 2007 about their activities in Iraq. Sergeant John Bruins served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. He carried out numerous night raids on the local people. He said, quote, You want to catch them off guard.

You want to catch them in their sleep. You run in, and if there's lights, you turn them on. If the lights are working, if not, you've got flashlights. You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside. You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior level troops, PFCs. Specialists will run

into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room, and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything they can use to attack us. These police raids would surely lead to bloody accidents, as even routine traffic stops do today. Marine Reserve Lieutenant Jonathan Morgenstein served in Ramadi from August of 2004 to March of 2005. He noted, quote, I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that. I want to remind you that these soldiers carrying out these raids, which often

ended in death, have vastly more training than any police officers conducting the same raid in the United States would be likely to have. A second's googling found me the 2009 New York Times article, Soldiers Kill Iraqi Couple During Raid at Home, is an example of the kind of headlines you might expect to see if this were to happen in the United States. So imagine being the protesters in a camp in a major American city and waking up to see a headline like that about one of your neighbors. Imagine how the other protesters in that camp will react. Imagine this being someone's last straw, the final thing that makes him decide to pick up a gun and try to ambush a cop. You see how this all works, right? Each little step forward makes everything worse and exacerbates

all these tensions that, in calmer times, would fade back down. None of the individual pieces are unprecedented, but if they all happen close enough to each other, it creates this accelerating cycle of violence. So imagine a bunch of cops facing off against screaming protesters every night, knowing they could get shot from behind at any moment. Imagine them doing that for days on end, working double shifts like the police in Paris did during the height of the yellow vest protests. end, working double shifts like the police in Paris did during the height of the Yellow Vest protests. And every few days or weeks, some new nut starts hunting cops. Some of these vigilantes will be stopped right away. Others might continue to kill for weeks. To the police, everyone would

start to look like an enemy. That kind of stress does not make any group of human beings better or more compassionate. I'd like to quote from one more veteran, a staff sergeant named Camilo Mea. Quote, the frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed to simply punish the local population that was supporting. We don't run, even when the walls are sad at all. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows.

Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, I know police violence in the United States is one of the most controversial topics in the country right now. I'm trying to be as even-handed as possible in my presentation of things.

in my presentation of things, so I want any police officers or back-the-blue folks listening right now to know I'm not trying to inherently write law enforcement off as the bad guys here. This would be a terrifying and demoralizing situation for the vast majority of American law enforcement. The people they'd be fighting wouldn't all look like Christopher Dorner,

a dude with a squeaky-clean record of service and a clear, articulated reason for his rampage. Some of them would be long-standing members of violent criminal groups like MS-13, the 18th Street Gang, or Barrio Azteca. While I was researching that 2016 Cracked article, several of the experts I interviewed independently brought up the same thing. They expected that organized criminal groups would absolutely get involved in any kind of serious fighting that broke out in a city where they had a strong presence. This is actually a pretty common occurrence in civil wars. David Kilcolan, the former State Department strategist, told me this. There's often a criminal element in early stages of

insurgencies which often gets purged later. Street criminals in particular are much more likely to use violence. You see this with gangs, and early insurgent movements brought in a lot of street thugs early to just sort of raise the temperature and get everybody used to it. Raising the temperature is critical, because it's how we go from mass unrest to outright revolution. Lone wolf nuts, small violent cells of people willing to use deadly force, don't inspire the masses as much as they get them increasingly used to violence. And that is a critical step on the road to turning a series of protests into a civil war. On October 22, 2011, Business Insider ran an article with this super fun headline.

Quote, The FBI announces gangs have infiltrated every branch of the military. It's one of those increasingly rare titles that really accurately describes what's going on. Here's a quote from the FBI's report. Quote, through transfers and deployments, military-affiliated gang members expand their culture and operations to new regions nationwide and worldwide, undermining security and law enforcement Right now, there is no evidence that any American street gangs support any kind of organized activity against the U.S. government other than, you know, selling drugs and stuff. They're primarily money-making organizations. But criminals have a long history of making fantastic revolutionaries.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the George Washington of ISIS, was a drug dealer and gangster back in Jordan before he found Allah. Joseph Stalin robbed banks before the Bolshevik Revolution. It is not so great a jump from gang leader to revolutionary. American society is seeded with people who have the know-how and the tools necessary to raise the temperature in our society to uncomfortable levels. And within the affected cities themselves, the places dealing with large protest camps, police checkpoints, nighttime raids, and escalating violence, well, I think things could get hot fast. I remember one moment vividly from my second trip into Mosul. We were embedded with a unit of the

Iraqi Federal Police. Don't let the name fool you. These guys had tanks and artillery and mortars and rocket launchers and machine guns, and we watched them use all of it. The federal police were infamous among the civilians of Mosul for using heavy weaponry with reckless abandon in crowded neighborhoods filled with sheltering families. They were nice guys outside of that, but I would not have wanted to wind up on the other side of their ire or their fire. After we spent a little time embedded with them and were leaving, I tried to convey my gratitude to their colonel for hosting us. I think I came across more as saying, thank you for what you're doing against ISIS than thanking him for his hospitality. And I'll always remember his response. Don't worry, your police would do the same thing if this happened in your country.

That sentence has haunted me ever since. Because once the cycle of violence gets well underway, once the dead on both sides number into dozens and start edging up to the hundreds, a chain of events will have been set into motion that will lead inexorably to the direct involvement of the military and a literal war between the American government and many of its people. This is the point at which many of you might suspect the violence would, rather quickly, come to a close. After all, protesters with Molotov cocktails and insurgents with AR-15s could not possibly last long against the unleashed might of the American military.

In our next episode, I'll tell you why you shouldn't be so sure about that. Though I want a Glock and an auto Cause I don't trust the cops, y'all Say it's paranoia, paranoia All I do is laugh back Smile, smile Cause everybody's phone's Taking orders, taking over Exactly where you stand at Understand that This man's strapped

Ayy It's about time all my liberal friends start sweating Speaking in NPR voices and stern glances Pulling out stats, vested in caps, pulling weapons round blacks With their pants sagged and their snapbacks turned back With their hands up, any fucking questions? This is fucked up, we all know it baby The question is, where the fuck we waiting?

Some president to come fix the nation We taking it to fix ourselves Y'all can fix your faces 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 of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.