It Could Happen Here - Welcome to the Crumbles

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

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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. Episode one. Welcome to the crumbles. The screaming starts while you're rolling a shopping cart down the aisle of your local supermarket. You're trying to determine which canned meat looks most appetizing. The price of fresh meat has been rising steadily for the last few years, but two months ago,

a ransomware attack shut down several massive meat processing plants in Brazil and Texas. The last four months of wildfires also took their toll, burning thousands of acres of pasture land and hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. So you were trying to decide between the spam and the canned chicken when you heard the commotion start, a few aisles down from your position. You knew immediately that it had to be about coffee. In the last month, you've seen two fistfights and a dozen screaming matches start by the corner of the store that had once held dozens of friendly, colorful bags of different coffee brands. The last time it had looked that way was a long time ago,

before the great plantations of Central America had succumbed to blight, fire, and drought. There was still coffee. Capitalism always found a way. But it was harsher and more bitter than it had been before. And it was also much more expensive. Each customer was limited to one half pound per week when it was in stock. You'd gotten lucky today and bought a bag, but evidently another customer had been less fortunate. He seemed to be screaming at a staff member, berating her for the problems caused by a supply chain that had been

breaking for the last decade. You couldn't back it up with data, but you feel like this sort of thing happens more and more often every year. Not just the supply chain disruptions, but the outbursts of violence and rage. You don't even stop to watch the videos on social media anymore, of customers screaming and starting fights over the ground beef that wasn't there for their 4th of July barbecue, or whatever. You can't tell me there's no coffee! I've seen a dozen assholes with coffee in their carts! If they have a right to it, I have a right to it! You turn away from your cart and sneak a glance down the other aisle, in spite of yourself. The angry man is heavyset, around six feet tall,

and wearing a t-shirt with a faded thin blue line flag on its back. He's yelling at a reedy young man wearing the uniform of a grocery store clerk. This poor kid had probably been stalking applesauce a few minutes earlier. Now he was the target of this man's entitled rage. I know you keep more in the back. I don't give a shit about your excuses. Get it! As the young clerk tries to explain, again, that there's no coffee left in the store, a security guard rounds the corner at the other end of the aisle. He yells, Hey! and puts a hand on the taser at his belt. Sir, you need to leave. I'm not leaving without my coffee! You realize with a start that a small crowd has started to form behind you.

You feel sudden anxiety at the fact that you've left your cart undefended and pull away from the scene to put your hands on it. You were lucky enough to get coffee, and the last carton of eggs, and a lot of customers in the store would happily steal either. Mercifully, your cart has survived the altercation unmolested. You wheel it away from the ongoing confrontation, towards the self-checkout. Maybe you can avoid the worst of the line that way. The yelling stops, and as you wheel your cart up to the checkout counter, you see the angry man storm out of the grocery store, cursing under his breath. The security guard and the clerk follow, a few feet back, and stop when he exits the building.

They both sigh with relief, and for a few minutes, you lose yourself in the task of running your products through the self-checkout. As you prepare to pay, you happen to look up just in time to see the angry man re-enter the store through the front door. You see the gun in his hand an instant before he raises it up, just a few feet from the clerk's face, and fires. On June 15, 2021, Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, walked into the Big Bear supermarket in DeKalb County, Georgia. A store employee, 41-year-old Lakita Willis, noticed he was not wearing a face mask, in violation of the store's policies.

Lakita informed Victor that he would have to wear a mask to continue shopping. Lakeda informed Victor that he would have to wear a mask to continue shopping. Victor Tucker left the store in a huff and returned with a gun, which he used to murder Lakeda Willis and wound the store security guard, an off-duty sheriff's deputy. Lakeda and that security guard are not the only victims of this sort of violence. At a Flint, Michigan dollar store, a 43-year-old father of eight and employee was shot dead over a mask. The city of Stillwater, Oklahoma, was forced to reverse a mask ordinance when it led to a surge of violence against service

industry employees. We could go on, but we won't. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about collapse dedicated to chronicling where we, all of us, are headed in the very near future, if things continue on their present course. The first season of this show focused on the possibility of a second American civil war, and compared to that, perhaps a shooting in a grocery store over coffee seems low stakes. When Hollywood turns its eyes towards the subject of collapse, they nearly always focus on the exciting parts. Buildings tumbling down, mass violence in the streets, bandits and gunfights and explosions,

and all the stuff that looks rad on a silver screen. But that's not how collapse looks to most of the people who are forced to endure it. Civilizations die by paper cuts more often than by bullets. Everyone listening has, in the last year and change, watched the global society we live in take a solid body blow in the form of COVID-19. Many of the terrible things we experienced that year, the supply line crunches, the culture war over masks, the anti-lockdown protests, the explosion of conspiracism among millions of people stuck at home online, these things are easy to attribute to the freak coming of a plague. But COVID was not a

speed bump. It was the harbinger of a new era. It revealed how fragile much of the infrastructure of modern life truly was. I wrote this episode while the city of Portland, Oregon, braced itself for an unprecedented heat wave with temperatures nearing 120 degrees. Last year's fire season saw Portland blanketed in a cloud of rancid yellow smog. More than half a million people living in Oregon had to flee their homes, over 10% of the state's population. Stores ran out of respirators, fire axes, and emergency supplies. The American West's heat wave is a product of the same thing that may soon strip the coffee from your store's shelves. Climate change. In April of 2021, U.S. coffee stockpiles hit a six-year low, even with Brazil's record 2020 crop. That country is now experiencing its most severe drought in decades, which will

sink production further. The global coffee deficit, the amount the Earth's coffee production falls below demand, is expected to hit 10.7 million bags this year. The previous projection was a shortfall of 8 million. In the vignette that opened this episode, I mentioned a meat shortage caused, in part, by cyber attacks on meat processing plants. That actually happened on May 31, 2021. JBS, the world's largest meat supplier, was hacked, shutting down much of their operations in Australia, Canada, and the United States.

From a write-up in the Wall Street Journal, quote, The culprit, a ransomware attack, didn't just hit its target, it roiled the U.S. food industry, from hog farms in Iowa to small-town processing plants in New York restaurants. The hack set off a domino effect that drove up wholesale meat prices, backed up animals in barns, and forced food distributors to hurriedly search for new supplies. The attack was the latest clash between cybercriminals and companies integral to the functioning of the U.S. economy. It was another disruption to the U.S. food industry, after the COVID-19 pandemic last year forced weeks of plant shutdowns, and this year an economic rebound has stretched suppliers' ability to meet demand.

Now, I read that whole quote because it illustrates the way all these problems build upon themselves. Our supply chains are what mathematicians call a chaotic system. If your knowledge of chaos theory comes primarily from Dr. Ian Malcolm, the gist of it is this. Certain complex systems can be impacted in huge, unexpected ways by seemingly minor changes, because so many things are interacting at once that a change in one can set off a chain of other changes. The most common framing of this observation is the phrase, a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in New York, and variations of the same. fly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in New York, and variations of the same.

The world we live in, and the infrastructure that makes our daily lives possible, is such a system. We've all seen ample evidence of that over the last year. It really hit home for me earlier in 2021 when a friend of mine, who works as an ER nurse at a local hospital, sent a message to a signal chat for my local friend group, and warned, the hospital is full, don't get hurt. Initially, we all assumed coronavirus was the cause. But no, he explained, very few of the cases that had filled his ER and multiple overflow rooms had anything to do with a viral infection. Instead, the cause was a mix of things. People celebrating in dumb ways as the state reopened, overdoses and car accidents, etc. In normal times, these might not have drained the system, but a huge number of doctors and nurses quit during the worst of the plague.

My friend calls the period we're in now, where aspects of modern society that once seemed immutably solid start to fall apart all at once as the crumbles. I find this a much more useful framework for discussing the future than the dreams of collapse shared by apocalypse obsessives. One April 2nd study showed that at least one in five healthcare workers have considered quitting as a result of the virus. More than 3,600 U.S. healthcare workers died in COVID's first year. These strains hit the medical system in the midst of an ongoing drought in healthcare workers.

By 2025, the U.S. is likely to face a shortage of more than 400,000 home health aides, 29,400 nurse practitioners, and between 54,100 and 139,000 physicians. We went into the pandemic with a shortage of doctors and nurses. At least some of the 600,000 American deaths from the virus were certainly due to a lack of qualified medical professionals. And now COVID has further exacerbated that shortage, ensuring that the next great strain on our healthcare system hits even harder, which will drain away more professionals, which will make the next pandemic or natural disaster even more devastating. This is the way the crumbles work. Problems feed into calamities and turn into catastrophes. A healthy society has the wherewithal to diagnose

its problems and patch the holes in its systems when they appear. We do not live in a healthy society. The problems that will confront us over the next 50 years, rising sea levels, out-of-control wildfires, crop failures, greater waves of refugees, are no less imposing than the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus could have been halted by something as simple as getting everyone to wear masks and avoid crowded indoor spaces for a few weeks. The United States could not handle that. In April of 2020, I watched a

crowd of anti-lockdown protesters surround a group of doctors and nurses in the Oregon state capital, Salem. The healthcare professionals carried signs that said, please, we just don't want you to get sick. Protesters spat at them and screamed diaper mouth, mocking the face masks they wore. at them and screamed diaper mouth, mocking the face masks they wore. Several of these protesters carried rifles. As you've probably guessed by now, this is not a particularly optimistic podcast, but it's also not my intention to infect you with a sense of doom. The worst problems we face all have solutions, or at least strategies for adaptation and harm reduction. To my mind, our most pressing problems fall into three broad categories. 1. The Environmental Consequences of Modern Civilization This is going to be by far the most unabomber-y point I make today, but it cannot be avoided.

As I type this, fires are burning throughout Oregon, even in the famously wet northern reaches of the state. Towns in northern California with huge amounts of rainfall, 38 inches in some cases, are so low on water that citizens have been restricted to 55 gallons per day. Prior to 2021, Portland's record high temperature was 107 degrees. This June, before the hottest part of the year, it beat that record for three days straight. The year before, 2020, Australia suffered a megafire, the largest in its history, which burnt more than 2,300 square miles. All these fires are just preludes. The world is only getting hotter from here on out. As I write this, the United Nations Climate Science Advisors issued a draft report warning that the worst projected impacts of climate change are hitting much faster than previously expected.

We will probably reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2026. Now, for years, staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the goal, the target amount of warming mainstream climate scientists and climate-conscious politicians wanted to limit us to. If we were to stop all other forms of emissions right now, agriculture alone would carry us over the 1.5 degree Celsius line in just a handful of years. Most institutional messaging posits 1.5 degrees of warming as the acceptable, even relatively pleasant option. A UN climate change tweet from earlier this year made that point in image form, showing depictions of the Earth's atmosphere in green, yellow, and red, 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2 degrees Celsius, and 3 degrees

Celsius plus, with the text, the difference between 1.5, 2 degrees, and 3 to 4 degrees average global warming can sound marginal. In fact, they represent vastly different scenarios for the future of humanity. It is true that 2 or 3 degrees of warming would create a radically different world than less than 1.5. But the data and our lived experience has made it increasingly clear that 1.5 degrees, which we will hit, period, in the near future, is a calamity of almost incomprehensible dimensions. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. 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. The phenomenon we're all staring down the barrel of is called climate tipping.

down the barrel of is called climate tipping. One example of this would be unprecedented heat waves causing mass wildfires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere, which speeds up warming, which accelerates the whole cycle onward and upward. Scientists in Europe recently found that climate tipping is likely to cause sudden shifts in the Gulf Stream, which will cause sudden and massive temperature changes in normally temperate zones, like Western Europe. The last devastating heat wave to hit France in 2019 killed at least 1,500 people. This particular study was the result of scientists from 18 universities working in tandem. Their spokesman, Dr. Michael Gill, told Phys.org, quote, These results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk in the Earth system.

Even the safe operating space of 1.5 or 2 degrees above present, These results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk in the Earth system. Even the safe operating space of 1.5 or 2 degrees above present, generally assumed by the IPCC, might not be all that safe. According to the precautionary principle, we must consider abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system as a real risk, at least until we understand these phenomena better. The central problem is that our previous models were far too optimistic, largely in their assumptions about how gradual the warming caused by carbon release would be. Another recent study, published in Science Advances, analyzed 20 years of data to

study the transfer of carbon dioxide between land, plants, and the atmosphere. Its findings suggest that, if present trends continue, forests in 2040 will absorb only half as much carbon dioxide as they do now. So when we hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, which we will, permafrost will start to thaw, releasing methane, which will warm the planet. Forests will hold less carbon. More fires will burn. an estimated 150 million people will die due to pollution. These factors all make it likelier that we'll hit 2 degrees Celsius of warming, or even higher, at which point we will experience catastrophic permafrost thawing alongside another 230 billion tons of carbon burping out of the soil. The effects of this will be catastrophic for all of

us, but they will be particularly disastrous for the traditional victims of capitalism, Africans. I want to quote from an article in The Independent by Ugandan writer Vanessa Nakate. Quote, This year, abnormally warm temperatures and heavy rains have led to swarms of locusts destroying hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops in East Africa. Twelve million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are in dire need of food. Lake Chad has shrunk to a tenth of its original size over the last 50 years.

Half of Nigeria has no access to water. It is hard to be encouraged by stories of meatless burgers or moonshot technologies when communities around you are battling an endless and worsening cycle of drought, famine, cyclones, floods, and destruction. This is my world at 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming. This is not progress. Vague, distant targets for 2030 or 2050 will not keep the world well below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as the Paris Agreement promised. I can tell you, a 2 degrees Celsius hotter world is a death

sentence for countries like mine. Now when you lay it all out like that, it can be pretty overwhelming. For perspective's sake, it is important to note that nearly all of the carbon that's causing these problems was released into the atmosphere within the span of a human lifetime. It is, in short, the result of industrial society and its consequences. Right now, there is more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years, and perhaps as far back as 15 million years. But all this carbon started flowing into the atmosphere just 300 years ago, in the 1700s, when England started burning coal and kicked off a global drive to industrialization. The vast majority of the

carbon in our atmosphere was pumped out even more recently than that. As David Wallace Wells writes in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, quote, the majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is above 85%. The story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime, the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral. That fact has a tendency to inspire false hope in some. If the real problem only started a lifetime ago, perhaps we can solve it in the space of a lifetime. But reality does not work that way, my friends.

Once the carbon is out there, released from trees, burning in millions of acres of wildfires, from the exhaust pipes of hundreds of millions of cars, or from the smokestacks of factories, it is there to stay. If we transitioned entirely to nuclear power tomorrow, that carbon would still be warming us for decades. And as the globe warms up, it dries out the soil, which in turn heats the world further, which pushes more people to install AC,

which increases emissions, which dries out the soil, which leads to wildfires, which releases more carbon, and on and on and on and on it goes. And this brings me to pressing problem number two, the authoritarian renaissance. In 2011, the Syrian civil war started, sending millions of Syrian refugees fleeing into Europe. In 2014 and 15, nearly 2 million people filed for asylum in the EU. Contrary to popular opinion, experts are heavily divided on whether

or not climate change played a major role in sparking the conflict. But the refugee crisis did play a major role in sparking something else, the rise of Europe's authoritarian right wing. I'm going to quote now from a Leibniz Institute for Economic Research report by Andreas Steinmeier. Quote, in the upper Austrian state elections in 2015, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria doubled its vote share from 2009 and obtained over 30% of the vote with a fierce anti-asylum campaign. Polls indicate that support for the Freedom Party remained roughly at the level of 2009 state elections until late 2014, but subsequently increased drastically in 2015 when refugee numbers started to grow. The salience of the issue in the media, measured as the number of newspaper articles covering the refugee situation, increased almost in proportion to the number of asylum applications. Upper Austria was no exception in Europe.

The Sweden Democrats, for instance, obtained 5.7% of votes in the 2010 parliamentary elections in Sweden. After that, support increased parallel to the rising number of refugees, which increased earlier in Sweden than in other European countries. In parliamentary elections in 2014, the Sweden Democrats obtained 12.9% of the vote and polled around 20% in late 2015 at the peak of the refugee inflow into Sweden. The Alternative for Germany, AFD, was not founded until 2013. Polls show a sharp increase in support of up to 15%, along with growing refugee numbers. Now, during the 2016 election, candidate Donald Trump in the United States constantly harped on the danger of refugees, from Syria but also from places in Latin America, like Guatemala, whose economies had been devastated by climate change. These climate refugees, and the false perception that they were causing crime and violence fed into a rising American fascist movement that is still with us

today. Authoritarians have always used fear of the other, and specifically fear of foreign asylum seekers, to stoke division. That part of their job is only going to get easier. The UN projects that, by 2050, an additional 200 million people will be climate refugees. This was the entire population of planet Earth during the height of the Roman Empire, clawing desperately at the iron gates of any country better off than where they've left. Climate change doesn't just provide opportunities for authoritarian politicians. It tends to make society itself more authoritarian by increasing military conflicts and domestic crime. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense authored an annual defense review that

noted, quote, the nature and pace of observed climate changes and an emerging scientific consensus on their projected consequences pose severe risks for our national security. The report goes on to warn about conflicts over resources, particularly water, in places like Lake Mead, Nevada, and the Colorado River system, where conflicts over scarce water could spiral into violence. As I write this, a group of militiamen under the banner of Eamon Bundy have set up shop by the Klamath River in central Oregon, claiming to represent the interests of farmers being denied their normal allotment of water due to severe drought conditions. Bundy et al. have threatened to break onto federal land, armed, and release the water, as that Department of Defense report so aptly noted.

These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions, conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence. We've already seen how both main parties in the United States react to violence and the perception of violence. In 2020, President Trump responded to a popular uprising against police brutality with a wave of police brutality. He was almost universally supported in his re-election bid by

police unions. On January 6, 2021, at least 31 police officers took part in the Capitol insurrection aimed at keeping Trump in power. Despite this fact, President Biden suggested in June that communities should spend much of the $350 billion in COVID-19 aid dispensed in May to hire more police officers. A few days earlier, his administration released its plan for dealing with domestic terrorism, inspired by the violence of the Capitol riot. This included an additional $100 million in funding for local law enforcement. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters 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. All this is to say that the state only has one solution to deal with the problems we will increasingly face.

And that solution is to put more men with guns in our communities. Platoons of goons armed with grenade launchers and armored vehicles may, in fact, provide some protection to the people at the very top of our society. But they will not protect you. That's not just my own personal bias speaking. In 2020, there were more than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers serving nationwide, the highest number ever. That same year, homicides raised nearly 40% among the nation's 10 largest police departments. year, homicides raised nearly 40% among the nation's 10 largest police departments. The average clearance rate in those departments, however, dropped by 7%, to about 59%. This means a few things. Murders rose in the United States with more cops than ever before. Those cops solved fewer of the murders committed than they had in prior years. President Biden's 2021 budget included $22 billion to fight global climate

change. His 2022 budget calls for $36 billion in funding. That is a substantial rate of increase, but even $36 billion is only about one-sixth of what the United States spends on policing and incarcerating its citizens each year. The cost to stop global warming at less than 2 degrees Celsius is a contentious issue, but one estimate places it at as much as $50 trillion. Whether you buy that estimate or not, by any sober analysis, $36 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to what will be necessary to avoid the worst-case scenario. And the worst-case scenario is coming. If we want to have any chance at avoiding it, we're going to have to organize. And that brings me to pressing

problem number three. Weaponized unreality. Starting in 2016, Russian disinformation became a major media buzzword. There were stories about that nation's internet research agency, its armies of botnets and trolls aimed at stoking division and pushing certain narratives into the American consciousness. Russia absolutely has an advanced disinformation operation, but the media made a mistake focusing on them alone. The reality of the situation is that nations, corporations, political parties, extremist movements, and every other organization with its shit together does the same thing the Russians do. The name of the game is to take lies, propaganda, incendiary claims, and rage bait and use them to stoke the ire of millions of people.

I can't claim credit for creating the term weaponized unreality. That one goes to my friend Carl. But the term does a brilliant job of describing the problem. If the coronavirus has taught us one thing, it's that the right lies can be deadlier than a thousand, or 600,000, guns when properly deployed. Weaponized unreality is part of why our present problems with climate change have gotten so very dire. Starting in the 1970s, ExxonMobil, and later a host of other oil and gas companies, borrowed a public relations strategy initially invented to serve the needs of big tobacco. The Union of Concerned Scientists describes this strategy as manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence, adopted a strategy of

information laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further its desired message and therefore confuse the public, promoted scientific spokespeople who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings or cherry-pick facts, attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on global warming with misleading charges about the need for sound science. That all sounds pretty bleakly familiar to us now, after a year of dueling coronavirus conspiracy theories, metastasized QAnon bullshit,

and stop-the-steal-style election disinfo. Weaponized unreality is often used by politicians and grifters, people like Alex Jones or Andy Ngo, to make quick profits or energize their base during an election. Such individuals seldom consider, or fully anticipate, the long-term impact of building out an alternate counterfactual reality. Think of former President Trump begging his supporters to get vaccinated and trying to take credit for the creation of a vaccine that 41% of his followers think is some sort

of Chinese Bill Gates-ian genocide conspiracy. Or think of Mike Pence, whose career is built on decades of right-wing lies about abortion, climate change, terrorism, and the economy. Now think of Mike, huddled in fear behind his bodyguards as a mob of fanatics bursts through the halls of power with murder on their minds. The problem with weaponized unreality is that, to really make it work, you have to craft an entire alternate reality for the true believers, one with its own media and its own self-reinforcing cycle of disinformation. This is extremely profitable and creates a durable base of support for the precise reason

it is tremendously dangerous. Two entirely separate realities cannot coexist in the same political system. The unreality that the right wing has spent decades building is centered around the contention that its enemies, Democrats and the left, are literal servants of Satan, hell-bent on building a system that will exterminate real Americans en masse. At present, 23% of Republicans believe satanic pedophiles control the U.S. government, the media, and the financial sector. Roughly 15-20% of Americans nationwide share the same belief. Nearly 30% of Republicans believe that patriots, which their unreality has defined as white conservatives,

may need to resort to violence in order to restore their version of American values. The good news is that a clear majority of Americans do not abide by those views. But they don't need to. In 1932, the National Socialist German Workers' Party had their best performance in a legitimate election and got just 37.3% of the vote. A minority party can manage tremendous bloodshed if they are sufficiently unified, their opponents are sufficiently disorganized,

and the political system is biased in their favor. All of those things were true of the Nazis in the 1930s, and all of those things are, more or less, true of our situation now. The next three years and change will bring continued climate-related collapse. This added strain will reveal more and more of the holes in our infrastructure. As I type this, a massive condo complex in Florida has just collapsed into a sinkhole, killing dozens, and the state of Oregon has issued a warning that a chlorine shortage threatens the state's ability to properly sanitize drinking water. A new study has revealed that, despite six months of counter-disinformation efforts, one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats, the same percentage who believed that

in November. On June 23, 2021, one American News Network host, Pearson Sharp, got in front of his viewers and said this about the election he believed had been stolen. How many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency? And when all the dust settles from the audit in Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who are responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?

In their sundry internet hidey holes, QAnon believers took this broadcast as hard evidence that their long-awaited storm was coming and the mass execution of Democratic officials and journalists was about to begin. I don't think I have to spend much time here saying how dangerous this is. What I do want to do is point out that Pearson Sharp was also a major personality on Sputnik, a Russian propaganda news outlet. I don't bring this up to further any sort of Russiagate fervor, because I don't think that's one of our main problems. But the kind of content Pearson made for Sputnik is important. His job was to repeatedly slander the White Helmets, an organization of Syrian volunteers who helped provide medical aid in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime bombings.

A complex and sophisticated propaganda campaign has turned them into boogeymen for a sizable chunk of the international left. There are conspiracy theories that the White Helmets actually staged and faked all of the chemical weapons attacks and bombings Bashar al-Assad's air force did against civilian targets. On June 11, 2018, Pearson took a state-sponsored trip into Syria, escorted by the soldiers of a dictator who has killed half a million of his citizens. He posted this,

Everyone, literally everyone you meet in Syria will tell you how grateful they are to be living under government-held areas and that the Syrian army freed them from torture under Western-backed rebels. Only the terrorists complain about being liberated. That last line, only the terrorists complain about being liberated, strikes hard within my soul. The point of this digression is, again, not about Russian propaganda, but about the kind of man Pearson Sharp is.

He has made, for years, a career out of denying the violence of brutal dictators and justifying massacres with propaganda. And in 2021, he's decided that the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party is the place to be. He is not alone. The same night that One America News broadcast dropped, Tucker Carlson got on his show and, in front of a graphic of a Democratic Party donkey with the words anti-white mania written in front of it, he said this. The question that we should be meditating on day in and day out is how do we get out of this vortex, this cycle, before it's too late? How do we save this country before we

become Rwanda? It's interesting that Tucker brings up Rwanda here. Interesting and telling, because the genocide that cost a million people their lives in that country was driven in part by a talk radio station called RTLM. Scholars describe RTLM as a de facto wing of the extremist Hutu government that started the massacre. Roughly 10% of the violence that occurred has been tied directly to specific RTLM broadcasts. Now look, I promised this wasn't going to be a Doomer podcast, and I mean to keep to that. While the three factors I mentioned

are churning us all in the direction of hell, they're not the only factors to consider. We, the people, who do not want to live in a dictatorship or see the mass murder of our fellow citizens, are in the majority, and we have tools with which to fight against our enemies. The last year and the struggles of the pandemic have brought with them a tremendous rise

in the number of organizations practicing mutual aid. This term has its origins in anarchist political theory and is very different from charity. In charity, an individual or organization with plenty gives aid to people who cannot help themselves. Mutual aid is when communities rise up to serve their own needs, without waiting for their government or some NGO to do it for them. The goal of mutual aid is not just to handle immediate needs, but to build dual power.

When you build dual power, you are essentially creating organizations that fulfill the useful roles formerly filled, or poorly filled, by the state. Doing this reduces or eliminates people's reliance on the state, and as a result vastly increases the public's bargaining position. If you want to force massive sweeping changes on the system, or replace it entirely, you're going to need to build dual power first. Mutual aid is also just fucking inspiring, and when you spend as much time staring into the abyss as we all do these days,

you need inspiration. While researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece in The Guardian about the rise of mutual aid, and I want to quote from it here. During the final thousand days of the Second World War, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay Area produced 1,000 warships, a warship a day. Something like that epic, urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government, or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported, on Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become 16,000 plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to

self-organization by Bay Area makers, who have transformed makerspaces, universities, fabrication shops, and almost anyone with their own sewing machine, CNC machine, or 3D printer into an ad hoc core of medical supply manufacturers. The report called the self-organized effort involving industrial design students and teachers a distributed factory. Such decentralized efforts, organized without top-down authority, are exemplary mutual aid. In April 14th, nurses and seven doctors from the same institution set off for a one-month assignment on the Navajo Reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection.

They were coordinated by the existing UCSF HEAL initiative, which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal. Its mission statement is, we seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves. This initiative, based on the principle of solidarity, not charity, has been working with communities under stress for six years and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over. When faced with the looming specter of fascism and gangs of heavily armed racists bent on massacring the other, mutual aid may seem like a poor defense at best. This is not the case. It is in fact the only thing that can pull us back from the brink. Weaponized unreality works

because people are angry, confused, and frightened. Now, many of the 30% of Republicans willing to kill to save their concept of America are bigots, and the things that confuse and anger them are equality and progress. But those people are only dangerous at scale when there is a much larger number of less radical people scared and confused enough to buy into their lies. The one thing that can cut through lies that can build the empathy necessary to forestall terror is community. When you help people with their material needs and provide them with a community that makes them feel valued and cared for, they are unlikely to support your murder. Effective mutual aid also undercuts the ability of authoritarians to profit as much from climate change.

When the system falls apart, authoritarians always promise to fix it. The best way to put light to that promise is to build a better solution to the problems, one that works in real time. Periods of collapse, and we are right now, all living through collapse, are times in which people are more open to new modes of living, new visions of how the world could exist. That's why these times are so dangerous, but it's also why they hold so much promise. Right now, we face the risk of falling together into the darkness,

but we also have the opportunity to build a new world from the ashes of the old. Either way, we'll be doing it together. For my part, I know which option I prefer. What about you? you should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadow join me danny trails and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.