Caller 10
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
The early stages of the plan, of course, date back well before Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. They began when a coalition of would-be oligarchs tried to overthrow FDR in what has become known as the business plot and were thwarted by a Marine general named Smedley Butler. These men wanted revenge for the New Deal, but they found seizing power at the top harder than they'd hoped.
Behind the Bastards
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And so they embarked on a slower, bottom-up approach. Hence the John Birch Society, the creation of countless think tanks and the generations-long effort to stack the Supreme Court. The war on abortion was a concerted step towards this plan, an artificial creation alongside the birth of the religious right as a political coalition.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
There was initially a small group of men at the center of the web, guys like William Rigneri I and William Rigneri II or Paul Weyrich. But the engine of cultural and political change forged from the late 40s to the 1970s was so successful that at some point it became self-perpetuating.
Behind the Bastards
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And when a gaggle of tech bros found themselves with more wealth than any humans had ever held, the machine was there to mold them and to be used by them. It's all worked so damn well that many people I know have lost hope entirely. We're fucked, goes the script. They're going to send us to the camps, and they can't be stopped, at least not without apocalyptic bloodshed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Well, that's not necessarily so. Now, people have already died as a result of this administration, a lot of them, and that will continue to happen. But a collapse into total carnage is not inevitable, nor is a future that offers us nothing but a boot upon our necks.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Despite the money that went into building it, this is a new house made with cheap materials, and there are already cracks in the foundation. So my first prediction for the coming months is this. The cracks will widen. And we'll talk about that. But first, as we're obligated to do, here's some ads. Trump and the men who swim in his wake signal only strength.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Honesty is neither in their interest nor a strong suit. But Curtis Yarvin, chief prophet of the neoreactionaries and Peter Thiel's pet philosopher, is in a different position. He knows people in power listen to some of what he has to say, and over the last few months, his profile has risen enormously. I can take credit for at least a tiny amount of that.
Behind the Bastards
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Many normal liberals and elected Democrats now know who he is. This exposes him to a danger that was not present for him during Trump's first term. If the current fascist salient should be pushed back and this movement fails, there could be, and should be, prosecutions.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
And he rightly fears that if this happens, he might follow in the footsteps of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi high theoretician who was executed in Nuremberg. That's why, on March 6th, he published a messy, sprawling 7,000-word essay titled Barbarians and Mandarins in his trademark, nigh-unreadable style. It comes with the subheading, As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
If you want to spare yourself the headache of reading through one-tenth of a novel of Yarvin's at-best turgid prose, there's a good article by the nerd Reich that breaks all of this down. We'll link it in the show notes. But the gist is that Yarvin thinks Musk and Trump have been too slow, have embraced too many half-measures, and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards disaster.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Quote, Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power, which is too high to sustain but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. Now, the weeks since have seen massive and rising public awareness of SECOT, the terrorism detention facility in El Salvador being used as a concentration camp by the Trump regime. This might rightly be called a new and unprecedented abuse. But there's a couple of issues here, at least as far as Yarvin sees them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
For one thing, the people targeted there have been... Migrants, people who are in the U.S. either illegally or in the U.S. on visas that have been revoked, people who have been accused of being part of Trindagua, but not the people that Yarvin wants to see liquidated.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Because as he writes in this column, the thing that he thinks the Trump administration should be doing right now is quite literally gassing media personalities and politicians who don't align with his viewpoint, basically literally killing the opposition. And since he's shown to be unwilling to do that, the fact that he's shipping people to concentration camps on its own isn't terrifying enough.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Now, the other thing that's concerning, Yarvin, is that while the use of this facility in El Salvador as a foreign concentration camp by the Trump regime is terrifying and is unprecedented, it's also been met with a significant response, one that burges on unprecedented itself. I'm not just talking about the protests.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
or of the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering a temporary halt to such deportations. I'm referring to something else that's happened due to the sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our president has a concentration camp and has been talking about shipping U.S. citizen dissidents there.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
I'm talking about stuff like the fact that formerly conservative columnist Bill Kristol is now calling for the outright abolition of ICE. And the arch-neoliberal mealy-mouth David Brooks calling for a general strike in the pages of the New York Times while quoting from the Communist Manifesto. This is more than just a vibe shift.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
It's an open realization and acceptance by prominent people who are neither radical nor revolutionaries that any action, even the formerly unimaginable, might be necessary and justified to end this regime. Now, make no mistake, first off, this is because a lot of these people are worried about their own privileges going away under a dictatorial regime.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
But that doesn't change the fact that this is a crack in the very foundation of the authoritarian power structure. Yarvin is scared then because we weren't supposed to be here now. Harvard was supposed to have folded like Columbia and then have been slowly and quietly liquidated.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
The tame press was supposed to turn wholly for the regime or be disappeared, not quote Karl Marx and urge people into the streets to do a general strike. So I don't find all this cheery because I think David Brooks is going to become shithead Che Guevara. I am braced, however, by the failure that this represents for them and above us who seek unchecked dominance.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Cracks are also visible in the recent history of Elon Musk, who has watched the value of the stock that underpins his whole empire collapse. He fought desperately to convince Trump not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it further. The result?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
We see Trump assuring his inner circle that Elon is on the way out, while Musk himself prepares to step back from Doge in the hope that it will somehow protect the remainder of his ambitions. These are all good signs, and the damage will continue to spread. However, and this brings me to my next prediction, the empire's gonna strike back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
We are in for a hot summer, my friends, and there's no way around that. I mean this in the literal sense that it will probably be the hottest summer on record, although that fact will be true of every subsequent summer in our lives. But I also mean this in the sense that things are going to cook off in the streets very soon.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
This is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to see. Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the Insurrection Act, not only at the border, but to send U.S. troops into U.S. cities to crush riots and punish leftist demonstrators.
Behind the Bastards
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This was a desire hatched in reaction to the George Floyd uprising, and it always seems to be envisioned by the right as targeted against black-clad Antifa types. The reality is that anti-fascists have not been a consistent presence on the ground around the country for some time, at least not organizing in the way that they were back when Antifa was a buzzword.
Behind the Bastards
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There are numerous reasons for this, but the biggest is that the fascist movement has moved beyond waving flags in the street and getting into fistfights to try and scare people. A lot of them are running federal law enforcement agencies and the military now. Proud Boys just ain't a priority. not for those on the left who want to stop this or, frankly, for the administration.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
I expect protests around the country in the coming months for several reasons, but the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption is a rise in food prices and the rise of everything else in price, as well as a collapsing economy courtesy of the president's tariffs.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
There were already numerous signs of this, both in terms of the volume of shipping coming into the United States and early signs of collapsing crop yields in the United States. And this is where a study of history helps one out, because nothing but nothing brings down regimes like rising bread prices.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
And any attempt to crack down will be stymied by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites who backed Trump before will be suffering, too. Obviously, the people closest to him are making bank off the economic upswings and downswings over the whole tariff issue.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
But there's a lot of other people, people who supported him, people who thought he had their back, who aren't quite close enough to power. And they're watching Trump shoot their own fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free trade.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
I won't pretend to know where things are going to pop off or will be the hottest, but the evidence shows the regime at least expects Washington, D.C. to play a central role in what comes next. Republican Congress members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal D.C.
Behind the Bastards
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's self-rule, and Trump appointed Ed Martin to be the city attorney, a man who, in the words of USA Today columnist Chris Brennan, quote, lacks experience but loves revenge.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, the fact that Elon Musk and his Doge cronies left so many in the city and the surrounding area unemployed after their purge of the administrative state means that there's an even higher number of motivated, angry people with free time and experiencing organizing large, complex systems who have nothing to do right now. A similar set of circumstances brought us to the 2020 uprisings.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
This was not just a product of the months of isolation or of the brutality of George Floyd's murder, but of the sheer number of people who were out of work and who were finally given a chance to take out their anxiety at an authoritarian president tightening his grip. And today, that grip is even tighter and the danger more real.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
We have a president openly discussing his desire to put American citizens in a foreign concentration camp. Trump and his inner circle are hoping for protests that stay isolated to D.C. and perhaps a few major blue cities, Portland and the like.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
This would provide an opportunity to send in the troops to utilize the Insurrection Act, to shoot people in the street, and to send some ringleaders off to El Salvador. This would be the riskiest option for Trump in some ways. Pete Hegseth has not been a competent or popular Secretary of Defense, and asking U.S.
Behind the Bastards
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troops to fire on protesters opens up the risk that some junior officer might balk at that order, which could create a cascading chain of disobedience. Such things have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout history. There's also the chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the cradle.
Behind the Bastards
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So we might call this the high-risk, high-reward option. And I should note that Donald Trump has, more than a few times in the past, chosen the high-risk, high-reward option. So I don't consider this unlikely. But it won't be lost on Trump or his cronies that the violence which met the first protest in 2020 provoked the largest domestic uprising in living memory.
Behind the Bastards
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People have not forgotten this, and some blue state Democrats have even made, let's say, confusing noises to that effect. Case in point, Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington just signed a bill barring other state National Guard units from entering Washington without his approval, unless they were mobilized by the president.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, as that last part might key you in on, this bill doesn't have a lot of legal force, or any really at all, but it's a sign that even fairly milquetoast elected Democrats are starting to consider the real possibility of a federal invasion of their states.
Behind the Bastards
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The president has discussed sending out-of-state troops into blue cities before, largely in the context of cracking down on immigration in sanctuary cities. This is all dangerous language, but going further than just language carries risk for the regime, too. I would not be shocked if we were to see the Texas National Guard or whoever, whichever state,
Behind the Bastards
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occupying, let's say, Chicago, after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats that have been made by members of the Trump administration to arrest governors who aid and abet undocumented migrants like J.B. Pritzker. And an act like that would surely spark mass protests in Chicago and very likely elsewhere.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
The fact that a move like that would have such a risk of sparking mass resistance, as well as further legal challenges, might keep the Trump administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous outrages, at least for the time being. And if that's the route they choose, I think something different might be likely, and I call this potential path forward, the pressure cooker.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
And we'll talk about that, but first, here's more ads. When public unrest exploded in 2020, it did so after four solid years of buildup. If you'll remember, the earliest fascist-antifascist street clashes of that period started before the 2016 election. These were largely focused around speeches at campuses by right-wing provocateurs and dueling demonstrations in a handful of cities.
Behind the Bastards
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The first wave of such activity crested in Charlottesville 2017 with tragic results. But the vibe it set and the people it trained continued to take part in street actions, and many of them formed the infrastructural core of the movement that exploded onto the scene after George Floyd's murder.
Behind the Bastards
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The last year of serious protests have focused more on the genocide in Gaza than anything, and it's not coincidental that the first wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took part in those demonstrations. Since Trump took office and Doge started doing its thing, there have been more large-scale demos that focus directly on the regime.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Now, these have been quite manageable from the regime's point of view, and they have not yet attracted the same kind of crackdown, but that won't remain the case as people grow more desperate.
Behind the Bastards
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Any fool can see that the apparatus of repression constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on Democrats, former federal employees, and people who are just hungry and pissed about rising food prices. However, this represents another tightrope scenario for the regime.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
These demonstrations are large, and unlike student protests against Israel, the media has proved less eager to marginalize the participants as extremists. As time goes on and things get worse, folks who last year scoffed at college students occupying campus buildings may themselves consider if, perhaps, it might be time to fuck some shit up.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
This will be an uneven process, with sudden leaps forward and pulls back, and it will provoke an equally uneven state response. There will be attempts to send so-called instigators and organizers overseas to El Salvador unless the public reaction to this, which is building as I type, continues to escalate to the extent that it becomes unfeasible.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
If so, there are ample domestic locations to detain or even disappear those the regime considers dangerous. First on the chopping block will be the people whose heads are currently closest to the blade, organizers and demonstrators against genocide whose citizenship is not at all in question.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
I expect if large, disruptive demonstrations do threaten the administration's hold, they will also start to target Antifa again, which will start with the targeting of longtime activists, many of whom would have been people arrested or at least heavily surveilled in 2020. However, it won't end there, and it will quickly expand to...
Behind the Bastards
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elected Democrats, new people organizing protests, folks who have never had anything to do with any of the kind of anti-fascist actions that so captivated Fox News back in 2020.
Behind the Bastards
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I will be shocked if we make it more than another year without a serious attempt to brand Antifa a domestic terror organization, and if that succeeds in a way that has legal force, then the fact that there is no such organization won't matter. Trump's feds will do what we've watched ICE do with Trend Agua—
Behind the Bastards
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They'll break down the door of whoever they wish, argue tattoos or possessions of certain literature or whatever as proof of membership, and then those who survive the raids will find themselves in the most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them in. If things follow what I suspect is the likeliest path, we will watch this process ebb and flow over the next several months.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Each spring and summer, protests will grow and peak in the hottest months, with new cities and tactics being attempted regularly by groups constantly reeling from raids that are devastating and terrifying, but, due to the incompetence of an FBI whose investigative capacity has been neutered, fail to really disrupt things.
Behind the Bastards
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As the weather cools off, exhausted activists will lick their wounds and make new plans. Scattered acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual cells will occur year-round. But I expect large-scale demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement to follow a pattern not so different from what Afghanistan veterans knew as fighting season.
Behind the Bastards
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Hot summers of mass activity, winters of raids and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's offensive. And as time goes on, the energy will build, the tension will build, and, of course, we might find ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not-too-distant future, perhaps a year or two down the line.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, of course, none of this will occur in a vacuum or independent of the news churn that we've been drowning in for years. And this brings me to my next prediction, which is the coming of politics as unusual.
Behind the Bastards
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I apologize for coming back to the David Brooks of it all, but seeing a man who in 2017 wrote that Trump had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over him, and then wrote a column attacking millennials for their tribalism, call for a general strike is a sign. And it's not a sign that Brooks has gotten smarter.
Behind the Bastards
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It's a sign that we've entered radical times and that radicalization spares not even the centrist. If the worst-case scenario occurs, and a few weeks from now U.S. soldiers are gunning down demonstrators while ICE officers cart elected Democrats off to Seacott, feel free to disregard this passage.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
But if the somewhat slower path prevails, I expect to see more politicians and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left, or at least away, from the dissolving center. We've watched this process occur on the right during the Biden years, and to a degree it is still occurring out of a fear of reprisals under the Trump regime.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
I'm finalizing the script on the day 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens stepped down over interference from Paramount executives into his coverage of Donald Trump. But the polls have started moving against the right.
Behind the Bastards
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Trump's public approval on immigration policy is underwater for the first time in years, and his approval on everything else is, while not always at record lows, diving with significant speed. The next several months of shipping data, as well as concerning early reporting on farm yields, suggests a near future in which a lot less will be available for everyone.
Behind the Bastards
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We saw what a rising price of eggs did to Biden. And we've also seen Senator Chris Van Hollen go almost overnight from a marginal figure in U.S. politics to one of the most famous Democrats in the nation, all because he had the modest courage to fly to El Salvador and call the president's use of a foreign black site what it was.
Behind the Bastards
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There will be more people like Van Hollen who display courage previously unseen in a moment of trial. But much more than that, there will be opportunists, those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval of crowds more willing to countenance radical action in the streets than they were a year ago.
Behind the Bastards
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Most politicians and most thought leaders in the old media are reactive, and I'm not saying that this will change.
Behind the Bastards
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I almost saw her as, like, yeah, a lot of these kind of American revolutionary figures, right? Where you have this person who holds a fairly high position in the colonial state as a result of, you know, their birth and the family they come into. Yeah. but also is identifies more as a member of that state of the colony than of the colonizing state. Yep.
Behind the Bastards
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Merely that what they react to will change because of who is in charge now and because of the desperation of the times brought on by Republican policies, which is going to paint a target on the backs of conservative leaders as large as the targets they've been painting on the backs of dissidents. And all of this means one thing, which is we're approaching the age of weird terror.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
So much has happened in this shitty, stupid year that I think we've all forgotten 2025 opened with a military veteran blowing himself up in a Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Behind the Bastards
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His reasoning was based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered in his service as it was on his exposure to right-wing propaganda, which convinced him that the Democrats needed to be dealt with. But he saw things clearly enough to know that yet another mass shooting or self-immolation or even a run-of-the-mill bomb wouldn't have garnered him or his manifesto any attention.
Behind the Bastards
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So instead, he picked a Cybertruck and a Trump building, symbols of the two most viral men of our very stupid era, and he blew one of those up in front of the other. And by gummit, we all did pay attention. For a few days, at least.
Behind the Bastards
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Late last year, an anonymous gunman, the government believes to be Luigi Mangione, was even more successful at holding our attention with an even stranger attack, a brazen and nigh-perfectly executed assassination carried out by a man with a dazzling smile and the wisdom to pick the most universally hated target that exists today, a healthcare CEO.
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We have all watched so many mass shootings at schools, at grocery stores, nightclubs, everywhere imaginable, that they've lost the ability to shock us. But targeted assassinations of people at the top of the food chain are so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs. And sheer, rollicking strangeness, like we saw in Vegas, has a captivating power all its own.
Behind the Bastards
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We will see more of both kinds of attacks in the arson attempt on Governor Shapiro's home, bizarre at least for the extensive damage done, might be seen as another data point on this list. But as new figures rise to prominence within new protest movements, we will see attempts to kill them.
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Furious and deranged Trump supporters armed with cars and guns and Trump-branded pocket dives will do as they've been doing. And this part won't be new. What I do expect will be new is the increased threat felt by the oligarchs at the top of the system as intelligent and patient young people continue to plot ways to go after them in the places and times where they feel invulnerable.
Behind the Bastards
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And I also expect that editors and journalists will continue to learn that these actions draw eyeballs more than almost anything else. And while all that's going on, the truly unbalanced among us will find ways to hitchhike off the well-publicized turmoil coming our way and make their own confounding statements.
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There will be public suicides and attacks utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet imagine, at least not openly on a podcast without receiving a visit from some friendly alphabet boy or another. I don't know what exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very, very silly. And, of course, as we talk about weird terrorism, I don't mean to discount the Nazi accelerationist types here.
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They'll keep trying. But if they want to raise above the chatter in an even more crowded media ecosystem, even they're going to find ways to get weird with it. After all, an attack no one notices isn't likely to accelerate much of anything. And I guess that's what I've got right now. I've got 10 pages or so on what I see coming.
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I didn't come up with a smooth, sexy ending for this, like a writer should, because I'm tired. And thinking about this isn't fun. But I did a lot, and there you are. I suppose the thing you're asking now is, what the fuck do I do about it? And, you know, that's what we talk about a lot on this show. Organize with your friends. Get involved. Find ways to help people. Take a stop the bleed class.
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You have to live several more decades to, like, outlive the Pope officially. Yeah. I think he was 88, so. He was 88.
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I'm thinking back to my catechism classes and trying to remember, like, Pope dead on Easter, good sign or bad. Bad. Yeah. That's definitely a sign. It's some kind of sign. How do we take that?
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We'd love to see it. Did Pope Francis have a strong opinion on the Pistons that he expressed at some point? Because I may have missed that.
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He was a huge Mackle fan. Yeah. A lot of people don't know this, but the entire time the Pope is lying in state, they're just going to be looping thrift shop. So, yeah. As Pope Francis wanted. Yeah, that was his dying wish.
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Because, I mean, it says so much, both about, like, what's going on in Pete Hedgeseth's brain, but of the quality of lawyer. Because any lawyer worth a salt would be like, please remove me.
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You need to get me out of this chat. What is wrong with you?
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You can tell a really good lawyer in a room where legal things are being discussed. And I've had this happen several times because they just leave. They bounce. They get the fuck out of the room. And that's a smart lawyer.
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I bet the AI would be able to tell you don't text your wife, lawyer, and son classified information about missile strikes.
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Always bad. So I'm going to talk in general about what RFK, the things that he has said, not just about autistic Americans, but about people who are receiving psychiatric medication, people who are addicted to to opiates, people who are utilizing stimulants, by which I mean ADHD medicine, which if you have ADHD, that's not exactly the way it functions, but that's the way he frames it.
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Because these are all tied together, right? I have some frustrations with kind of how it's been taken on social media that I think are... not causing people to worry when they don't need to worry, but look at maybe sort of the wrong area to see the immediate threat coming from. So first I'm going to start with like what has been said.
Behind the Bastards
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And before we get to the registry, we have to go back to what he was talking about on the campaign trail. Because prior, and this is prior to him endorsing Donald Trump, when RFK Jr. was like an individual, like running for president on his own under his independent campaign, he started talking about wellness farms. Right.
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And these were specifically in the language that he used places that people who were addicted to psychiatric medication, antidepressants, he named specifically antidepressants and stimulants, as well as people with opiate addictions. Right. And he has since talked about other drug addictions as well, could go to spend three or four years working on a farm.
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He always frames it as also like learning skills. So it's this mix of, I want people to be able to work in this lovely, bucolic, agrarian setting where they'll gain working skills. And then there's also peppered in these very frightening phrases like they need to be reparented, right? Now,
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In addition to this, he's not just – this is all focused on Americans who are taking medications that he thinks are overprescribed or purely unnecessary, right? That's always the way – like psychiatric medication, he almost has a Scientologist attitude towards it that like this is all essentially unnecessary.
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And obviously, you know, all of this stuff comes out of – there are elements of this that were true at one point. For example, back in the 90s, like Ritalin was wildly overprescribed to kids. But the way in which he's translated this now is that basically everyone on a stimulant, everyone on an antidepressant is on it unnecessarily.
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And in a podcast in 2024, he went further by kind of tying a lot of this to race specifically, stating, quote, every black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence. And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented. So that's all deeply concerning. It's like kidnapping children and forcibly de-medicating.
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I will say, that's not how he has framed it. So one of the things is people, I've heard it phrased as like, RFK has admitted he wants to imprison millions of Americans in camps. And that's not what he said. The direct quotes about this are not framed as a mandatory thing. It's framed as a replacement for other treatments that people can choose to go into and choose to leave.
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That's what he said, right? Okay. Now, perfectly reasonable when a guy in an administration like this is talking about putting up camps to be like, well, I don't know if I believe him, but it's not accurate that he said he wants to arrest millions of people and force them onto camps. He just has not said that, right? Yeah. And I think it behooves us to be honest about what he said.
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I think it also behooves us to talk about where – this idea comes from, right, and what he's looking back to. And again, a lot of the issue here is not necessarily what RFK might do, but the fact that he might not be there forever. And if he starts establishing this, this kind of kind of program that starts in an attempt to be something that is more you can choose to be on these camps or not.
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There's certainly willingness within the Republican Party to force people to into different kinds of quote-unquote treatment like this. And one thing I think particularly is the way in which the right has liked to shift blame for gun violence and mass shootings off of the availability of firearms and onto people who are on psychiatric medication, right?
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And this is an area in which I could see someone taking over from RFK or pushing past the things he specifically has stated he wants to do, because I think he does come out of a more quack medicine goal here. Putting people forcibly in camps and colonies like this.
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But it is worth noting as there's a very good Teen Vogue article on the matter called RFK wants to send people to wellness farms. The U.S. already tried that. That talks about the actual like background that he is hearkening back to.
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Because his vision of wellness farms is not like the Nazi concentration camp, which doesn't mean that it's not possible that things could wind up in a much darker direction. But this gives you an idea of the history that he is specifically calling back to.
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Quote, "...beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the first decades of the 20th century, epileptic and feeble-minded colonies sprung up around the U.S., The initial purpose of these colonies was to remove patients from overcrowded, badly run asylums and poorhouses in favor of farm life, where they would have access to the outdoors.
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Under the colony model, patients generally lived in cottages, designed to be more home-like than institutional. Patients were also given jobs, and many were expected to work on colony farms where they grew their own food.
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Dr. William Spratling, the medical superintendent of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in New York, declared that the farm model meant nature, the great restorer, will have an opportunity to do her best. It didn't work. Supporters of the colony model argued that with time, clean air, sunshine, and a restricted diet, physical labor could heal patients. But that didn't happen.
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Data from the Craig Colony, one of America's first epileptic colonies, illustrates this point. During the 1940s, thanks to funding and staff limitations because of World War II, conditions in North American institutions were particularly grim.
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The institution's 1943 to 1944 annual report to the State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene shows that less than 1% of patients were discharged as cured that year. During that same period, over 200 patients attempted to leave the colony without permission, and 5% of the total patient population died. Jesus. And so that's, I mean, that's... Reason enough to be deeply worried, right?
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The fact that, without saying, like, RFK wants to do what the Nazis did, RFK wants to do what America already did, and it killed a huge number of the people who were interned in those camps. And I guess the thing I keep bringing up is that when I think about what the threat model is, more than fucking Auschwitz for people who are on SSRIs, it's a Judge Rotenberg center on every corner.
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It's camps like these where... costs are going to be cut and there's not going to be good access for any kind of independent monitors to make sure health and safety are being followed. It's not that people are going to be shoveled into ovens.
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It's that as a result of this system being incompetently applied to the most vulnerable, and I'm not even talking about my worry at the moment being that everyone on an SSR will be forced in, it's going to be poor kids. And RFK has already talked about that, right? Like that's why he's focusing on black kids, right? That's who they're going for.
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We've had some people post up in the subreddit being like, I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have autism. Or I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have ADHD. And I'm telling you, I'm not saying... Don't be scared of fascism. I'm saying this is where to fight right now. It's not RFK wants to send every adult on an SSRI into a death camp.
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It's that they're going to try and be putting these kids instead of the different juvenile programs that exist instead of any kind of functional medical program. they're going to force them into facilities like this. And it's going to become easier for facilities like the Judge Rotenberg Center, which horribly abuses and tortures autistic kids, to spread and to get state and federal funding.
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And that's the threat, right? It's an extension of what we're doing and what we've done. It's not a carbon copy of what the Nazis are doing. Or did. Speaking of the Nazis... And we're back. So a couple of things happen in quick succession that is responsible in part for like why people are so freaked out and rightfully so.
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One of them is that RFK gave a speech on the back of new data that showed yet another rise in the rate of autism diagnoses. And as I said on a previous episode, it's because we're looking for it more. But he made a statement about people with profound autism not being able to pay taxes or write poems, you know, or that sort of thing.
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And while he was he was specifically talking about people with, quote, unquote, profound autism, it's reasonable for people to assume like, yeah, but that's just kind of what he sees is basically everyone. Right. And I don't think that that's an unfair assumption. And then coming right up on the heels of that, there was an announcement from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, about RFK Jr.
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's new effort to, quote, unquote, study autism. And basically what they're going to be doing is collecting comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of the U.S. population and kind of organizing it within the NIH. This is the first time this has been done, but they are going to be grabbing basically everything they can get their hands on.
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And we're talking about a mix of medication records from pharmacies, lab testing records, genomic data from people who like go to the, you Data taken by the VA, data taken by the Indian Health Service, as well as data from private insurers. And they're also going to be buying data from smartwatches, from stuff like Fitbits, right?
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Who does sell their data to anybody with like $20 hanging out the back of their pocket. And as a heads up, if you are looking for a fitness tracker, you should look more into this. There are a few that have reasonably good data protection histories. Garmin is one of them. This does not mean it's perfect. All of them will hand over your data if given a court order to do so.
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None of them are going to break the law to hold onto your data. But Garmin doesn't just like sell willy-nilly to anybody who wants to like advertise based on it, right? That said, most of them do. The last thing I'd write was something like 12 out of 15 different free fitness tracking apps they checked sold data pretty widely. Yeah, about 80%. Yeah, it's the vast majority, right? Yeah.
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So the NIH is basically looking at taking the data that exists. They're not talking about really gathering new data, but they are talking about collecting everything that exists and putting it under one roof for the first time. And this is for a couple of purposes, right? They want to be able to track the spread of different illnesses and different health problems within the population.
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These are their claims. But also... They want to create a disease registry specifically to track Americans with autism, right? And this is because Kennedy describes autism as a preventable disease, which is not accurate. And the fact that this database and these other databases are being made should be very worrisome, right?
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It's both important to talk about the fact that he is specifically signaling out autism while also stating like that's not the only thing they're looking into, right? They want data on people who are on SSRIs, who are on ADHD medication. They probably want data on drug use, right? There are a lot of things they are looking to be gathering, and none of it is shit that they should have access for.
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And again, the immediate plan – I'm sorry. I simply don't – I don't think that RFK Jr. 's master plan is the mass arrest of everybody with autism in the United States and forcing them into a camp. I don't think that's what he wants to impart because – Number one, his base of support is a lot of the parents of these kids.
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And I'm not saying those parents aren't already doing things to their kids that are harmful, but those parents want control over what they see as their kids' health care. They want the freedom to experiment with medications on their kids to, quote-unquote, fix them. And this data is going to be used both to provide—
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basically to be massaged to provide evidence that different treatments that don't do shit do in fact work. And I think I have suspicions of financial interests there. I keep getting questioned like, well, what do you think is going to happen when the autism cures don't work? Well, then they're going to put people in camps. No, the autism cures already don't work. This is an industry.
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They make money off of this. They make money off of drugging and medically torturing these children. And as far—that is the threat, is that it is going to get easier to do at a larger scale, and it is going to be harder to fight, even illegal, to provide good information on what does and does not work.
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And that is what's happening right now, as opposed to something we might be worried about, you know— Years down the line. And yes, we should fight any time the government is trying to put populations of people into a motherfucking database like this. We should fight all of this tooth and nail. I just think this is what I see as the danger, you know?
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And that is what I see when we talk about these farms. Again, my worry is not RFK wants to forcibly put everybody into fucking Auschwitz part two. It's RFK wants a hundred times as many teen treatment facilities where kids who disobey or get in trouble with the law get caught at five. fucking protests can be forced to labor and an amount of them will die.
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And all of them will suffer permanent mental and physical damage as a result of being put in these places.
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Yeah. It's extensions of what we do. It's extremely American. You know, I just, that, that's, that's where my head is.
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Yes. And I love that you bring that up because it gets to the failure to see that. And this is especially common with people who kind of idolize the 1917 revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that. I mean, in every revolution, you have people who
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who are fans of that revolution or who see it as a model for what they want to do and also ignore the realities on the ground that, like, made it possible. I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that, like, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Well, I don't know.
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In those pictures of the 1917 revolution, I see a lot of Mosins that used to be property of the Tsar, right? Like, it happens all the time. Yeah. And I think that we always need to be cautious of like seeing just what we want to see in revolutionary history as opposed to seeing what was there. And the thing is, is Lenin understood this, right?
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Honestly, iconic. You know, I hate to say it, but iconic.
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Well, because there were all those stories for the first couple of weeks about how smooth and well-run it was and everything. Lol.
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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people that's one of the sickest things to me like it's just that there's information coming out now that there's that horrible video of that ice agent smashing the window of that woman's car to deport her and then the information's come out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy and
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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is, you know, these days normally about the fact that it's happening here. But today we're here to talk about a show where it happens somewhere else, a place that people aren't yet, but may one day be in the future. We're talking about the Martian Revolution with the great Mike Duncan of the Revolutions podcast.
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What's really happened, if you look at it, is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the Einsatzgruppe. Instead of having a centralized state having to raise these organizations that are going to be carrying out this kind of violence, it's largely become something that vigilantes have gotten into on their own as part of their special interest in hurting people at scale.
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And it's it's such a uniquely it's so uniquely tied to like this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here that that's happening like that wouldn't have happened. Not that Germany is not that German culture in the 30s was better, but it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different kind of culture. Yeah, for sure.
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We're not supposed to do anything alone. We're not supposed to be doing anything alone. And that's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast, is that Martian society develops this very communal, because it's We're living in like an artificial habitat. And if shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once.
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You have to have this more collaborative, collective attitude towards safety and security that is just so completely absent from American culture. It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest spirals is because there's no fixing the fundamental underlying problems without fixing that. Yeah.
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Mia Wong joining me on this interview. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. So let's talk about this because, you know, I've kept up and been listening to revolutions for years. And I started seeing messages earlier this year that like Mike Duncan is doing this fictional revolution podcast on the Martian revolution.
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I'm a big fan of the don't Fed post on social media or in your podcast thing.
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And it seems to map really, really closely with a lot of stuff that's happening right now in the United States. And I'm wondering kind of to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes? I did not expect that at all.
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And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully, right? Like the atomization isn't just a byproduct of incentives, right? Like it is a directed move. I mean, you just got to look back to some of the shit Thatcher was saying, right? There's no such thing as a society. There are men and women and there are families, right? This is a directed change.
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And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial sense. I'm saying this at a, this is what a lot of people, a lot of the worst people in our society believe because it's convenient for them. And they have pushed to make that belief more common and done so by funding think tanks and funding media organizations in part. Right.
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I think the key thing is here is that we see throughout time, like, really extreme societies that try to mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently changing them. And what happens in the past, at least to every one of those societies, is that the society dies and people go on being people, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah, and I think that's something I always try to keep in mind. It's not that societies can't alter or improve aspects of how things are by changing the incentives, but by altering the way things work, you can change reduce the prevalence of certain problems.
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You can make things better in some ways, but there's certain stuff that you're just never going to like, when I look at, when I look at what the white supremacists want to do, right? Well, you're never going to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people. You simply can't, it's never worked and it never will. Right. Like that. That's an impossible dream.
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So I can just say, like, that's a thing. No matter what, how tightly you grab a hold of the reins of state and how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the long term of doing this because it's just not something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling.
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Yeah, it does. Like that's that's so much of our of our present society is like, well, yeah, this is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening. You know, like and we are we are staring down the barrel of the worst case scenario. Right. Like that's that's the thing everyone's had to make peace with. You know, even even once Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well.
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I guess we'll see, and we've seen, right? And we do just kind of have to guide off that without pretending it's otherwise. That's one of the few things that does give me hope, is that the people who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see.
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Gavin Newsom still hasn't been sort of choked off of access to the public, but the statements he's been making recently about Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't I can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party if this is just looking at where popular discourse is right now.
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Yeah, I guess kind of for me, the most important belief I ever came to was the understanding that like, I don't care about citizenship and I don't care about who is supposed to be in a specific place, right? I think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that like your rights as a person are dependent on where you were born, right? Yeah, that's just the thing I'll never believe.
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And it's the fight we've lost the worst as the left or, you know, I should even say getting beyond left and right, because I I really think those are not the most useful ways to look at things. It's like human beings.
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The fact that that that battle, the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans, regardless on their place of birth, the fact that that has been botched so badly is. is maybe the greatest calamity of the 21st century. Although there's a few, there's a few contenders. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. There's a lot.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we're encroaching on an hour here, so I think we need to probably call this for the day. Mike, I really appreciate your time. You've been so generous, and I can't wait to see where you end. I know that you also can't wait to see where you land on all of this. Right, right, right.
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Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the struggle of releasing fiction before you're entirely done with it.
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Yeah. Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an exquisite hell. I'm enjoying listening to it. I know everyone else is. Oh, it's great. I love it. All right. That's the episode, everybody. Thank you. Bye.
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Well, that's what's so interesting is because, yeah, so much of the initial, as you imagine it, the opening stages of the Martian revolution in your series are based on a guy who is a, quote unquote, partly an autodidact.
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like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas are good because they're his ideas and that he can kind of jump into any field of human endeavor and make things work better than the people who have been studying and working in that field for their entire lives. And he just starts changing everything based on his whims.
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Now, you don't have him staying up until four in the morning on ketamine benders and then tweeting out his ideas for how to change the government. But I guess I'd say that's the one... the one thing that doesn't map onto right now, and I think this almost just goes inherently with the act of crafting fiction, even your bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones.
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Yeah, which I think is to your credit, but I've enjoyed the degree to which The decisions that are being made that are kind of making this Martian revolution inevitable are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able to run things because like that's the that's the strata that you come from.
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And it maps directly to like what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that convince them that they know how to do everything. But it also maps back to like Versailles. I find that compelling.
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He's allowed to be in the same room as all of them.
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No, I mean, yeah, we, we talk about that constantly on, uh, on the show. Like we just did that four-parter on the Zizians that who come out of like the rationalist Bay area tech industry cult, which is both influential that a lot of the people who
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wound up working at doge and just to the general tech mindset and it is it's the human embodiment of that idea that like well i know what a code coding's difficult that means i'm smart this must mean i know how to run the schools right this must mean i know how to replace medicare right um and and it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles without ever actually like having to sit face to face with the
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how that cascades into a calamity and in a way that feels very realistic, even though we're talking about Mars and there's also like gravity generators and the like.
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Yeah. Yeah, I've had that same experience of like, I'm writing out kind of like this possible, you know, this story about what a future conflict is civil conflict in the US might look like. And I'm just I'm just taking from stuff that happened in the last like 10 years and a lot of cases that I saw in different countries and people are like, how, you know, how did you like anticipate this?
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And my answer is like, I didn't. this is just stuff that happens all the time, right? Because people don't learn from history as a rule. Like no one's ever learned a lesson from history is the thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few years. As I continue to fail to learn lessons from history.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart, which they always seem to be these days. And in particular, this is an episode about what to expect out of the next six months to a year. If you're not sure what else to do, try and spread calm.
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I first learned this lesson back in 2016, hanging out with perennial libertarian presidential candidate Vermin Supreme during the protests around that year's Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
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If you've never had the pleasure of seeing Vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations. Those lessons came in handy for me back in 2020. But the George Floyd uprising is now almost five years in the past. Trump is once again in power.
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Very little seems to stand between him and the exercise of a kind of arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders, but has often sponsored elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more.
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The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the next six months to a year. What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available and numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers and retired law enforcement.
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There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question. Is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast essay titled Don't Panic. It was my most shared episode of this podcast that year, and I felt pretty good about the response.
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Until Trump won again, and I found it briefly impossible to take my own advice. Since January of 2025, the fascist takeover has only accelerated, and I have lost count of the number of people who've asked me, is it time to panic? The answer to that is still no, but not because there's no reason to panic. In fact, panic is a natural reaction to our present moment.
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If your fight-or-flight reflexes haven't been triggered, well, they might be broken. Even so, don't panic, because in combat, in disasters, in any dangerous situation you might find yourself, panic is what will kill you as surely as anything else. There's a concept in military theory I bring up often, something introduced to soldiers undergoing training today. It's called the Oda Loop.
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It describes the process people go through while acting and reacting under fire, and particularly while deciding how to act and react under fire. It stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. If you can interrupt any part of that loop, you can stop your enemy from fighting back effectively.
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The basic principle of the OTA loop functions on the grand strategy scale as well as it does in a gunfight. This is the point behind the flood-the-zone strategy orchestrated by Stephen Miller and the other intellectual luminaries behind Trump II.
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The fire hose of outrage is to distract you from observing everything that's happening, to keep you off balance so you can't orient yourself, to stop you from deciding and acting. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit canon. AI accelerated the spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst nightmares.
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And this has helped blind and divide the people who should have linked arms to stop this shit before it got to the point that it's at today. I want you to think of how many prominent leftists have fallen repeatedly for right-wing propaganda, like that Russia would never invade Ukraine, or that Trump might actually be somehow better for Gaza.
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These and a million other things have blinded and hobbled potential resistance. I might also bring up the whole MAGA communist movement, but the less said about those people, the better.
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Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like The Times have fallen for every hyped-up story about transgender athletes or woke kids on college campuses and the danger the liberal left poses to free speech. They've denied genocide and demonized those who protest against it, and too many elected Democrats have taken their lead as the path of least resistance.
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Many have pulled right for reasons far more sinister. The fact that Gavin Newsom, governor of California, is hosting fascists on his new podcast while mailing burner phones to tech CEOs points towards something dark, immediate, and deadly.
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Wouldn't want the dollar is their reserve currency.
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We live now in the culmination of a successful, decades-long plot to, in the words of Curtis Yarvin, repeal the 20th century and turn this nation into a dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money or invested in Facebook back in like 2005.