It Could Happen Here - The Years of Lead Paint (Or Why There Will Be More Tesla Car Bombs)

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Mia talks with writer and organizer Vicky Osterweil about the Tesla car bombing, the current state of fascism, and how to defeat ithttps://www.cawshinythings.com/support-us/ Sources: https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole https://davidgraeber.org/articles/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse/ https://defector.com/how-crazy-was-the-las-vegas-cybertruck-bomberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. Welcome podcast or wherever you go to find your podcast. Welcome to Nick and Appet here a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host Mia Wong returned for the holidays returned rejuvenated returned refreshed returned to do something a little bit different. In the coming weeks, we're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism.

But what we haven't really been doing as much, what I wanna take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now, and also talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up in a cyber truck outside of a Trump building. And with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so many different things

that like, I don't know, someone's going to write a great biography in like 100 years. It is it is the one and only Vicky Osteweil. Biography in like a hundred years. It is it is the one and only Vicky Osteweil Thank you. Sorry. I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you're you find people could hear me Well, I'm glad to have you here and part part of this The initial thing that was like, okay, we need to do this was I saw you called all of this the years of lead paint. And that's just, it has stuck in my mind every, for every single second of every day since then. Yeah. Yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber

truck on fire outside the Trump hotel. Then about, you know, as we are about to talk about Matthew Livelsberger, I think is how it's pronounced, who's the green beret, then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump hotel would start not a race war, but like the purging of democratic politicians. Is that what we think his motivation was now? That seems to be it. Like politicians and like, it's kind of an evolution of the like purge,

the deep state thing where he wants Democrats gone from like the army. And right, right. You know, so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rote from the Turner diaries is kind of like Metastasized into all this right-wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race worry or like less anti-semitic Versions of it. Yes, and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by exactly Blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a truck. I So basically this guy that is being a Green Beret, which like say what you will, arguably some of the most

trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else you say about them. And this is important, you know, like I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like Green Beret to like former Green Beret. This guy was active duty. So like, yes, yes, exactly. This wasn't even like a cooked vet. This is a guy who is like in the shit. And we know that he was drinking the Kool-Aid

because he used chat GPT. We've just found out today to help plan his attack. But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise, which is undeniable, the Cybertruck, like all Teslas, is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans. And what I really mean, of course, is that they have just terrible safety protocols. And the Cybertruck, which is like a 12-year-old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly, incredibly firm stainless steel body, which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that your frail human body inside it in an accident, bashes against a wall of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside, but the car doesn't take damage. And that means that if you

leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine. So the explosion went straight up, right? So it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage to the hotel. Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say you have this guy who's like an active duty green beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an Elon Musk car will somehow lead to the murder of Democrats, but he's so tech-pilled that he takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a bomb and dies in it and just leaves this horrible image.

And I mean, I'm being flippant about this, it's an awful thing, obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself. The image was everywhere on social media for like the last three days of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that basically. Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are, because I imagine some of you, like there's probably like, like I don't know there's probably several thousand of you who are

Obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like know the name of every single guy He was implicated for these car bombings but for everyone else who's normal and I kept myself among the non-normal people because I did I spent about two years going down the Years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain same but the years of lead were this thing in down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But the years of lead were this thing in roughly the 70s and the 80s in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings 1968 and Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example, France has this huge uprising in May 68, like they nearly knock off the government like workers councils have seized control of the

factories like they lose this robot like there's you know, the president's like fleeing in a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind of never seriously threatened the French government again. In Italy, that is not true. Like 68 in Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure of the factories has been going on since, like, I I mean stuff like this has been happening since the 50s It really only stops in 1977 when like they have one last big push-up rising and it fails so as a way to contain this the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right-wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups and by terror groups I mean like the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing 1980 that kills 85 people, wounds like 290. Like it's a really,

really horrific attack and it's immediately blamed on an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an anarchist group. It is a state backed like fascist group. And yeah, like there are other ones. I will pass over to Vicky to talk about like the other thing, terrible shit that they did. Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends the years of lead. You could, you could end it there. It's sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing, the event that like sort of after 68 kind of starts it as this thing called the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which is like at an agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just like, but 17 people are killed, almost a hundred people are wounded. And the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in 68 as well.

There's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pennelli who is arrested. And then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death. It has still never been proven that he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him really hard. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. Like there's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Fo called the death of an anarchist. So anyways, they blame the anarchists. They literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer. And then of course it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordonee Nuovo, who was this neo-fascist group that had, let's say, significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think one way

of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it, is that it's like a very low level civil war. I think the closest thing we can maybe think of is the troubles in Northern Ireland. And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas the movement was in Ireland. But this is very similar, which is like, there's these armed wings, both on the right and the left, that are both meeting in combat and fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for arming

the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here. I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in, I think it's in, if you go to the Halloween episode we did where we talked about conspiracies, I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right, the reason that, you know, they're, they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks So it's designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like in having all these bombings Was specifically something they call the strategy of tension

which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as A strategy to drive people back towards the state because the idea was and this and this seems to have worked You know you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know, there's bombs going off all the time people are getting killed People are getting kidnapped. There's all of this just like horror happening and the goal is to get people to turn to the state for you know, sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need you know, we need to sort of terror to end and all of this uprising stuff because we need, you know, we need to sort of terror to end. And it was extremely effective. And the sort of knowledge of this has, I guess, proliferated through the American left in the last, like, decade. And that has led to a lot of, I think,

kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American gladio, which is gladio is those those day behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo fascist groups. And like, to refer to this sort of like, I don't know, like what's happening in the US and that's not really what's happening. And this is where I want to pass it to Vicky to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the years of lead paints and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones. Yeah, in classic American fashion, everything is more chaotic and autonomous. Yes.

And widely proliferated. And also, widely proliferated all over America, products and services. Did I do good? That's support. This podcast. That's a good one. Thank you. -♪ MUSIC PLAYING -♪

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We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. All right. Years of blood paint. Let's go. Yes. Right. So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio and it's not Gladio because that was very conscious and it was like these stay behind networks that were organized explicitly, but the US state defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the US the sort of home for military surplus,

because obviously like the military industrial complex sells lots of guns. It's a very helpful thing. That producing a reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of years of led terroristic sort of strategy of tension way, I think might actually be close. But you can tell that that's very disorganized. Yeah, very distributed through the social. It's done by, you know, volunteers. Right? Yeah. And also the people who are doing the years of lead are unbelievably cynical about it. Right? Like they don't they don't believe any of this shit. Right? Yes. Yes. No, exactly. We're Second Amendment guys, like that stuff is

driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what they were trying to do, but that's sort of, you know, that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's just like a similar thing. The years of lead paint,

which is obviously like, which is a joke about there's this big reactionary myth from like the Freakonomics guys, I think. That like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms. Which is really funny because for the Freakonomics guy, that is a downright left-wing theory like by his standards.

Yeah, exactly. Or maybe it was a dude correcting it. I don't even remember now. Anyway, so it became a meme to talk about boomers and Generation X people having the blood paint in their gasoline and in their walls, cause all this stuff. Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of ableist insult when I talk about this is a mimetic way of making fun of that concept. But all of that to say, they have completely drunk the Kool-Aid, right? Yeah. The fascists, as you're saying, Mia, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They were like making it up. But like a lot of people on the right- In Italy. Yeah, yeah. In Italy, excuse me, in Italy in the 60s in the actual years of lead. Years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January 6th was Antifa.

People whose friends were there, you know? Stuff like Q. And the other thing that the reason that this is years of lead paint and not the first Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration, there was actually pretty, pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements and they could, they could certainly come back in the US right now. There's no reason they couldn't. Yeah. And it's also worth talking about, we'll be covering this on the show, like at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents, but there was recently a massive from distributed denial secrets, a massive drop of stuff on the militia

movement from a guy who infiltrated it. There's a very good ProPublica story talking about the guy that will link in the show notes. So like the militia movement has survived, but the kind of stuff that we saw in 2017, 2018, 2020 is not. Yeah. The proud boys, the QAnon, the folks who made up J6 and the folks who made up the alt-right broadly were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street. And then the people who remained,

QAnon folks who were, I think, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-Nazis, obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right? And those people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression, I think successfully sort of put the end to that organized Q stuff. Yeah, well, and also, and also we've talked about on this show, the other thing that put an end to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you could use

literally the exact same structure of QAnon but make it about trans people. Yes. And that has been unbelievably effective. No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued. Yeah. But an on-the-ground organizing principle, it's not that functional Yeah, it's not which is really lucky But what that means is that Trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015 2016 like that was a real movement his rallies were really well attended his rallies this election people left early

You know, it was like it was like going to see a losing team and their last home game of the season You know was the vibe at those rallies. Yeah, I should do a very specific example It's like the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out So before for their owner move to Las Vegas exactly where like they've had an incredibly disappointing season Like deliberately by the owner who decided to make, who made a bad team so people wouldn't fight them, like moving the team to LA, like, it's like that kind of shit. Yeah, those were the vibes.

And yet, of course, the Democrats in their infinite, infinite capacities lost the election. And so what that means though, is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government as it's ever had. The resistance is, they're very proud of legally handing power to the man and ending all of his charges or whatever, but the street movement is disorganized.

So you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus, Fox News, Truth Social X, the everything app, you know, all of these like, all these places where the fascist, you know, and I guess Metta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean, you know, when we're recording this, so it's, it's just, there's this huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organization. You get people like this Green Beret, who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which wouldn't be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump hotel up in an attempt

to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right? The imagination of, as you said, the Turner diaries or the sort of like, you know, the right-wing terror networks in the US, you know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grids, right? They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world

of all against all and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart, whatever. It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two, question mark, question mark, step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying. I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea. But that's happening in these groups that have really, really, they believe, I think genuinely that like, I think the right does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur. Like they see them both as equally dangerous, right? They hate Liz Cheney.

Yeah. Like in the final days of the election, she was the person they were saying, we're going to go after her. Like Liz Cheney? Like really? Like, yeah, it's like, like the, the, the closest parallel I can think of this is like, there was a faction of people during the cold war who thought that like the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked.

And like there were literally guys murdering each other like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in 69 right like and there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War even as like as China is invading Vietnam are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that like and that's the secret lead like the USSR and the PRC are working together and These are not like, you know some random guys that's really like these are these are like the guys that like the peak of conservative Power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is I think yeah, I think this is the kind of thing We're in now with just like these people are completely cooked

They don't have they don't have any analytical ability whatsoever. whatsoever. They actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid. There was just a scoop, sorry, I'm just gonna drop this really quick. There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of product 2285, their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia. They want to take down Wikipedia.

Like, because that's a place you can verify facts at, right? They've already got the post, they've got the times. Like, what are they gonna do? They gotta go after Wikipedia. This is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build. Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world of unreality and then attempts to sell it to you?

Ooh, products and services? That supports this podcast. Yes. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily Show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news and pop culture. You get hilarious satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and

contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows presented by I Heart 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is

releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest actionable tips. It's about never feeling good enough. I feel like I'm always failing. You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose. We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions, we have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?

There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist.

When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a Playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the center of this murky world is an alleged predator.

You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him.

Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I'm very proud of that one. That's one of the best ones I've ever done. And I just completely off the top of my head, just came back better than ever. That was really good. She's never been so bad. So I want to move a little bit from the just what is the state look like?

How pill do these people kind of thing to, I want to talk a little bit from the just what does the state look like, how pill do these people kind of thing, to... I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here, because I think part of what's happening here, and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism, because everyone got obsessed with like, the CHIPS Act and like the capacity of the state or whatever, but I think actually if you want to understand what's going on Here a good place to go is like you going back to your David Graber And he has this line talking about neoliberalism I think this might god I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote

I think it might be from the shock of victory, but he has this line about how neoliberalism when given a choice between making their system actually work and Making it seem like any alternative to neoliberalism is impossible It will always choose making the alternative seem impossible because that's what neoliberalism is right This is you know, the sort of maxim of of Margaret Thatcher is there is no alternative It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the, you know, and this includes the possibility of a future. And the goal of this, and this is, I think the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah, that's something I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this

moment. Yeah, yeah. I was sort of vibing with what you're saying, but yeah, I think a lot of people on online have accepted sort of, you know, don't give in in advance, right? But like, I think one big thing that has been part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years, but indeed over the last four decades as well, as sort of part of neoliberalism is like the idea that you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice, right? And any choice made otherwise is doomed to failure, right?

And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut. I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous 30 years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like 12% one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right? So that's sort of like there's, there's that sense. But then on the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and breaking

down the possibility of labor solidarity, right? Because part of what the 60s was, and the reason the 60s lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the last, in Western Europe, they had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, coming up from Sicily. So they had this massive, massive factories proletarians from peasantry, like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories that have these like crazy strikes over and over again. So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism, blah, blah, blah,

breaking down labor workforce, like we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right? And like we go to the HR department to get help, right? Or we sort of get self care, We like work on ourselves. We get therapy. You know, our boss offers us, you know, thoughts and prayers, right? When things are hard. But like, there's a big attempt to allow people to define themselves. Sort of the carrot, the carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you get to like have an identity, like, okay, we won't be officially racist. Yeah, quote unquote. You know, okay, we won't be officially sexist.

They claim, okay, whatever. None of that's true. But they, but they sort of sell that. And then they say, but in return, you have to like do all of the self work. You have to be an identity in the marketplace. So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces.

Right? Like, and so that in, you know, spoonie world, we call that sort of choice paralysis. Right. And I think that's probably accepted as well that like, you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless in the face of it, you can't do anything. And so that produces a craving for authoritarianism for authority, right? That's another thing people want is like someone else decide for me, I'm sick of thinking about this. Yeah, and that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and

this demand for someone else to make choices for you to free you from this just like this Endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which health care plan you're supposed to buy and shit like that And oh my god, you know and the right has a bunch of alternatives here, right? We'd like this is the fantasy of what tread wives is it's like what if someone else did your thinking for you? It's also the the entire logic behind AI And to find this sort of AI agents thing that they're like pushing right now, you can go listen to our CES coverage and you'll hear a bunch about it,

is like what if someone just like planned your life for you, right? What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and it would tell you how to live. And this is, you know, this is also the structure of how cults work.

Like this is why cults have been able to attract people that like, I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them. This is why there's so many engineers in cults. Because it's like once people who have to make choices constantly and the cult is like, hey, what if I just like made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before, this is ultimately part of what's going on with like Trumpism, right? Because Trump is also to some extent, like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore. You just, you know, here is the guy, the guy is going to do the thing for you. This is also, if

you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right? It's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you. And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety. Also, and this is something that is very well documented

that, you know, when I get into it full here, but all of the stuff we've been talking about about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening, and to make you just give up. And when you're refusing to make a choice between like, was there a gas attack in Syria? Or was it like staged by the rebels as a false flag, right? You refusing to make the choice has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you

from sort of the field of play of action. And this has been a really important part of this to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gap that was, right? Was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them.

And you know now Tulsi Gabbard is like one of the big people in Trump world. Right. I think, um, what's his name? I disrespect him by not remembering his name, but I should for the podcast. Steve Bannon put it well when he said just flood the zone with shit, right? It's sort of the strategy. You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter.

And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of his, you know, many scandals is he would just like say the next most outrageous thing. And you know, you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing. And it was just a sort of like amplifying wave of like chaos and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it, you get exhausted.

And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets and I think like that's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic, we're in the midst of a pandemic, COVID is in another wave that like no one has named right now and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic during the election of 2024. So part of what's been going on too,

is that there has been this mass push by the Biden administration and the Democrats to make us forget what happened in 2020 in terms of the uprising and to make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy. Right? It was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be forced back to work. How do you force people back to work who evidently care about each other and their own safety? You lie to them. You confuse them about what's actually going on, right? So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that

we had to go back to work. So we had to get over the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which like people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know, whatever. Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy board of strength, right? The years of lead paint. This is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power, right? The actual base that put Trump in power, right? And their actual political base is incredibly brittle, right? They are about to tank the entire global economy, like through by by putting like 50% tariffs

on like every single country in the world, they okay, let's let's be accurate here that on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the US imports things from. Right? So like, you know, this is how you resist. This is the sound you resist your your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself. But you know, they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices, right? These fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds

and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwinds. The basis of this fucking of this entire strategy, you know, and I asked you this like dear listener, do you think these people can hold 330 million people in line by sheer force no of course not there's no fucking way this is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history right this strategy is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance yes if they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation, right?

They need you scared, they need you confused, they need you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you to forget that as the old song says, in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold. They need you to forget the next line of the song Which goes we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old Where the Union makes us strong? This is the entire fucking thing right if these people were actually strong They would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization

Yeah, exactly and and the thing is, right, the thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma, that means that you just literally any random person can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing. The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what? It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things and They are fucking terrified of this Yes

There were entire strategies to make sure that you simply do not do this and every single one of you has the power To do this and I know this because I also was just some random dipshit. Like I was just literally a random college student, right? Like I was just some asshole and I just started doing things, right? And I got together with my friends and we fucking, we made a tenets union and we did anti-ice stuff and we did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you. We just, you know, decided one day we were going to do it and it happens.

To return one last time to David Graeber, one of one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently. And together we can do that. Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important. And actually when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices as to make decisions. Because you would know what you need for the next step,

or you'll have an idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along that way, it's an easier way to do this and to feel the power of real choices rather than the false choices of like, do you want your AI from Grok or do you want it from Chagy BT?

And obviously that's a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped. We get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very, very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the

reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them or the Haitian revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French Revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French, when the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Haiti, and it has been punished ever since. The point being that these things

that they are overwhelming, this flooding, the zone was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of weakness, because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had, Obama was a position of weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country and we, and he can just go on hope like, and he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular. Like even through a, you know, a

huge economic collapse, right? That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence, and I use the phrase advisably, and there are a lot of holes and they have drunk the Kool-Aid. The right has drunk the Kool-Aid. They don't know the difference between Democrats and anarchists. Not really. They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do, their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move. That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them.

And that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness in many ways. The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were in previous times, and they're going to have to be of necessity. Because MAGA is basically, you know, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands on you, like, you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any trouble, like, you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that. But there's

a lot to do. And there's a lot of movements to make, and a lot of. I think that's as much as I'll say about that. But there's a lot to do and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power. If What Happened Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast of modern day horror stories, inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app,

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Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top. I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated.

We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.