An Election Episode feat. Robert

constant eerie tingle. Several Republican led states are refusing to certify their election results. Most analysts say the blizzard of lawsuits launched on behalf of Trump have no chance at winning, But that didn't stop the candidate from declaring victory and promising to carry out his own inauguration no matter what the courts decide. It's all absurd, laughable. But you live on the border of a majority red county and your sheriffs just announced support for the real winner of the election.

Your local PD have been notably silent, while right wing provocateurs online have started circulating allegations of election fraud that the sheriff has promised to look into. That was yesterday, today, just after five, you're jolted awake in your bed by the sound of breaking glass and screaming. You stay low and crawl to your front window to peep out across your yard and into the street. Before you, three police cruisers are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house.

You can't imagine why. You know he did some volunteer canvassing a few weeks back. He volunteered at a voting precinct. Could they be there because of that? You try a few different search terms on social media to puzzle out the truth. It looks like a few people around the country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts

register is deleted before you can click on them. There's more shouting from inside your neighbor's house, and within seconds a pair of birdly deputies drag him out in front and into a waiting squad car. It's dark outside, but you think you might see blood.

new civil war or as a real possibility. There was a blockbuster movie earlier this year based around presenting what it called a realistic picture of such a possibility. I'll leave my thoughts on that for another time. A Marist poll from earlier this year showed that forty seven percent of Americans consider a second civil war likely or very likely. This is a massive shift considering where things were when

I wrote this podcast series in twenty nineteen. That number includes an expected fifty three percent of Republicans, but also forty percent of Democrats and forty one percent of independence. Depending on how you want to see it, I've either been vindicated as much as as possible for someone in my line of work, or I've played an outsized role in creating a particularly dangerous eggregore in the collective unconsciousness of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm

really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled on that matter ever since the first episode started coming out. Remember midway through the first season, we dropped an extra episode I hadn't initially intended as part of the run, just trying to stop people from panicking, and ever since I've kept that as a particular goal in my head. However, you want to, you know, think about this. The first season of It could happen here undoubtedly helped to make

my career today. Sophie and I run an entire network that employees several dozen people, largely on the strength of that series. And yet I have no issue telling you that I don't have any idea how election Day is.

really have no idea what's going to happen. My official stance is that it's probably pretty close to a coin flip, although maybe one that favors Harris now you know, more than one that favors Trump. Whatever happens, I don't know what's going to happen, let alone what's going to happen the day after. And as I sat down to write this episode, which is going to air on the day of the election, I went back and forth as to where the focus should be. I did consider doing another

Don't Panic style episode. Perhaps that would have been the call. You know, depending on how today goes, people might either be listening to this and you know, relaxing, or listening to this and in a heightened state of panic. You know, it really depends on where things are and where things are and the counting of votes by this period of time.

My reasoning on what I decided to do is pretty simple, which is that I think there's a good chance we either know or have a strong inkling of how this election is going to shake out by the time this episode airs, and at the time I write this, the indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump, enough that I'd say the election leans in her direction, and so I think there's a lot of value in talking

about what might happen in the aftermath of that. If Trump tries to protest the election results, and if he goes particularly trying to protest by force, and if that's the case, if that's the direction he lands in, I think these shooters that we have to worry about. And I mean that in the figurative sense, right, you know, people who support him, will who will put skin in the game in order to try to force him into office.

I think they're different than they were last time. I don't think the threat here is that a bunch of proud boys and the like raid the capital next January. I think the threat here has a lot more to do with licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared themselves in the tank for Trump. We ran an episode just the other day about the Constitutional Sheriff's movement. There's a lot to say about that. One in four law enforcement officers today report to a sheriff. They make twenty

percent of all arrests in the country. Earlier this year, Wired published an article on the are right sheriff's ready to disrupt the election? It focused heavily on dar Leif, who sits on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association or CSPOA. Leif, a Trump supporter and sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, has spent the lead up

to this election investigating the twenty twenty election. He's tried to seize voting machines and run militia training courses where he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies, and gentlemen how to form an ad hoc posse, each member armed with quote a standard Air fifteen type military grade weapon and at least five hundred rounds of AMMO. Speaking of five hundred rounds of AMMO, he probably can't buy that

from our sponsors, but here they are. We're back and we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who sits on the board of that organization named dar Leaf. Leif has already promised to have his posse patrolling stations in Barry County to watch for evidence of fraud and the legal immigrant voting in what's expected to be one of the swing states this election might hinge on. Deeply reported articles like that Wired piece have warred in my own personal paranoia

with troubling accounts on social media. The day before the election, which is when I wrote this, I came across a post on the Pennsylvania subreddit from a Philly voter titled my dad just got harassed by a police officer about the election.

from Bucks County or Pennsylvania. Their new Jersey State troopers wild across state borders to harass people driving down the highway. In the lead up to the twenty twenty election, we were all deeply worried about the dangers of different far right groups, militias and organizations like the Proud Boys who wore right wing death squad patches and threatened to throw

leftists out of helicopters when their god Emperor won reelection. Today, most of those figures are either a spent force or something that cannot act on its own, reliant upon the backing of groups like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs, or being empowered by a Trump controlled White House if they want to have any hope of being directly relevant. Again, the positive side of this is that it allows us to

triage our fears. The downside is that independent paramilitary actors are in fact something we can easily combat as individuals and ins communities. Portland proved that when it eventually won its five year street battle to oust these sundry right wing groups from constant occupations of the city. When groups like the Proud Boys crossed the line into outright violence, it is legal to meet them with defensive violence, and

they can and have been beaten this way. That's simply not something the extant left wing community defense organizations and political groups in this country can say and do against, For example, law enforcement entities hell bent on executing a purge against the left. In rallies prior to the election, Trump has often merged promises to prosecute his political opponents US with promises to use ice to deport twenty million illegals and descend in the military or federal law enforcement

to clean up cities. I want to quote now from an article in The New Republic reporting on a rally earlier this year in Wilmington, North Carolina. Today, I am announcing a new plan to end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina and across our country, said Trump, no more

or sanctuary cities. As soon as I take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to every city that is failing, which is a lot of them to turn over criminal aliens, and we will hunt down and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer, and migrant

criminal that is being illegally harbored. The article goes on to note Trump has previously vowed to militarize US law enforcement to restore law and order to our cities, which he claimed to have become cesspools of bloodshed and crime under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments, but that extra help would only go to cities that

complied with ICE. Now, this is scary stuff and it would necessitate some sort of response if it were to happen. But I don't really know how to tell you to organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns

that one would need to factor into any plans. I could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation or to avoid being raided for their past political activism, and I could base those theories on, for exampample, how activists in Nazi Germany helped tide people from the Gestapo. But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond

compare to what exists today. Perhaps the most chilling article I read this year had nothing to do with ice or right wing paramilitaries and everything to do with the technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years. License plate recognition systems like motorolas dr in use optical character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's

license plate and put it in a searchable database. The policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative, although it's far from clear if they actually work too. The idea is that if someone carries out a drive by shooting, or assaults a woman on the street, or is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by someone who gets the car, make and model and maybe

the first couple letters of the plate. Dn r's database of more than fifteen billion vehicle sidings, built from automatic recordings of license plate reading cameras on police cruisers and tow trucks and the like, might well help identify and stop someone before they hunter kill again. Now their serious reason to question whether or not this system actually works this way. I'm not claiming to take the stance on

this one way or the other. I'm not an expert on this, but the issue here from a privacy standpoint, when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump dominated government, is that you can't train a system like this to only pay attention to license plates, nor is there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. In recent investigations conducted by a private detective with access to dn r's database for her work have shown that someone with access to this database can search based on more than

just license plates. They can look up signs supporting political candidates and match them to front yards and thus to people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by these cameras, and there are again billions of these photos wearing, for example, planned parenthood shirts. This is not an idle fear. This is a weapon that could very easily be used by the enemy within months of you listening to this.

This is also a weapon that, in an event like the one I forecasted at the start of this episode, could be used to crack down on activists and voters in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort of national schism. Situation. Police officers already misused databases like this with comic regularity. In twenty twenty two, a different Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate

recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro

Trump cops earlier this election season. I'm talking about something that happened in September, when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County Bruce Sukowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio, from an article in The ap by Michael Rubicam likening people in the US illegally to human locusts, Zukowski wrote on a personal

Facebook account and his campaign's account, when people ask me, what's going to happen if the flip flopping, laughing hyena wins, I say write down all the addresses of the people who had their signs in their yards that way, Zukowski continued. When migrants need places to live, we're already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival. Now, as the full context of that statement makes clear, Zukowski

was not technically threatening Harris voters. But it's pretty much impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat, just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability and an environment where the future ability of Zukowski and those like him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going to talk more about that, but first here's another ad break.

Trump is already repeatedly called the enemy within, and I worry that in the event of any sort of national schism, either where there's an extended period of time where Trump is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida and you have a bunch of these counties and states around the country sign up for Trump, that the first thing we'll see law enforcement do in these areas is

punished the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on a war footing with the rest of the country. These are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here, but they are something to keep in mind, and they are something that represents a real danger at this point. I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds of thing the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that.

Now it is important to remember that whatever plan these people try won't work as as well as they hope. We've been watching them for years, and if there's one thing you know about all of the people around Trump, it's that they're fuck ups. That doesn't mean they can't win, it doesn't mean they're not dangerous. It just means that they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which

is something that should be on your mind. Bruce and most of the Trump aligned police, local and federals still feel a need to couch their threats in deniable terms, though, but many on the far right have been less careful, and one thing we've seen is this election has lurched closer to its conclusion. Is a lot of people, people like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their masks off. Now.

I think this had a lot to do with the fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a couple of weeks ago, and they felt like after years of having to do what Bruce did, having to cover up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to do that now. Obviously, some influential people on the far right have been mask off from much longer, and this

is something that should concern you as well. One of the most sinister examples of this is Jack Pisobic, a former US Navy intelligence officer whose recent book Unhumans is

framed as a secret history of communist revolutions. From an article in Mother Jones quote they being Pisobic and his co author, claim, for as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill, and these people of anti civilization have always gone by different names communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The pair contend that these folks be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade,

are better called unhumans. It's a hard edged message. The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies, but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They rob and kill. Pisobic and Lysek, his co author, maintain they don't believe what they say. They don't care about winning debates. They don't even want a quality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse

to destroy you. Now, Jack has been a laughable character for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric has had an audience in the howls of power. Jd Vance himself provided a blurb for the book, claiming it shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon meanwhile wrote the forward. Now, I started this episode with a fictional vignette imagining what might happen if Trump chooses to contest the election without right force, and he might.

The good news is I think that such an effort would be doomed to fail if he sticks to the courts trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to the House is a better chance at succeeding, and it is possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of poll workers could play into a broader effort like this, but doing so is a big risk. My gut tells me that moving so openly resorting to violence first creates a situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming

Harris administration would have to respond with force. There would have to be consequences, and given that they currently control the arsenal of state power, I think they would win even in the event that you have all of these sheriffs break for Trump in some sort of insurgent situation develop. If that were to happen, and having backed this insurgency would put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put

a lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It might even force consequences for provocateurs like Basobic and even Elon Musk. Backing an outright violent coup is almost the only thing I can imagine putting Musk behind bars. There are pieces of this logic train that I find comforting, but there are also pieces that aren't. Many of us, me included made the mistake of assuming that after January sixth, twenty twenty one, Trumpism might finally be a spent force.

He'd gambled too much and he'd lost too big, But despite the existential threat, he presented himself as being The Democratic Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose mercy for the main players. I suspect anything short of armed insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year. I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw him in prison if Harris wins are real, or read that instead as his own predictive justification for the violence

he'd like to support against his political enemies. That desire won't go away just because Trump rides off into the sunset and the Republican Party has to go searching for another feurer. If we defer their dream, it will simply sit under the floorboards, infester, waiting for the next opportunity, and that won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken system and a world where climate change and conflict are on the rise. Low information voters, less literate by the day,

will continue to swing back and forth. The feral beast we've heard growling all year long, will surge forward, all the hungrier for being made to wait. If you've kept up with our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed that we haven't endorsed any candidates, and I haven't wasted any time advising our listeners to vote. I happen to be someone who does think a Harris win represents substantially less harm than a Trump win to a lot of people.

But I don't think that the folks who listen to our podcast are waiting for me to make that decision for them. I don't agree with the anti electoralist side of things on every matter, but one place where I do agree with them is that a Harris win won't fix what's broken. It represents the historic equivalent of jinking out of the way in a dog fight. Necessary maybe,

but not something that guarantees future security. Hey, everybody, Robert here, I've changed locations, so sorry if it sounds a little bit different. I'm currently in a cabin waiting out the election, trying not to think too much about it. But I wrote a new ending to this because I just thought that what I had there was incomplete. Now, when it comes to what does work in the long run to beat these people, my mind is drawn back constantly to perhaps an odd place. A twenty eleven article in the

scientific journal Nature titled the Evolution of over Confidence. Now The gist is that this was an attempt by two scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning Krueger effect. It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know very little about a subject to overestimate their competence in it. This is probably why so many Americans think they could win fist fight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems

profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind of benefit to evolutionary fitness? The explanation devised in this paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not, because, in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight, the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach for that resource. If they do, one of three things

can happen. They fight and win, they fight and lose, or the other organism backs away insecure in its chances of victory, and they get that resource. Without even fighting for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual, so much so that it might explain why many of us seem to have a build in tendency to irrationally judge our own capabilities.

themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union, or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after picking the wrong fight, and of course January sixth. There are many examples to choose from, but as often as they fail. The success of these movements is also based entirely on their willingness to dare, and the fact that liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to

confront them. We are still dealing with Donald Trump and his foot soldiers in twenty twenty four because no one quite had the guts to confront him to the degree he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant taking unprecedented legal steps and risking wing backlash that likely would have included acts of terrorism. In the end, most people with any say in the matter chose to either back away or at best pull their punches until after

the election. On other episodes of this show, our correspondent Mia and I have talked about the actual path destroying the far rights organizational and electoral base. We are up against a coalition a fused car dealers, supplement salesman, multi level marketing goals, sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their own power, and churches that, by any decent measure lost

their justification for tax exempt status years ago. These are all forces that can be targeted and neutered through the courts in the legislative system, with consistent activism and pressure applied to elected leaders Sitting here, I think that the odds the Democrats embraced such a strategy are exceptionally low, but we do have to try to make them, because when you're sitting across from a monster, one that's fattened on overcome confidence, and you see him start to reach again,

the only same response is to swallow your fear and take a swing.