How To Murder A City

these scenarios particularly likely. We are talking about the very worst case scenario of the very worst case scenario here. But everything I will discuss in this and the next episode has been reality for millions of people across the world, and so we will talk about such possibilities here too. Please do not listen to these episodes if you feel

they will be more than you can handle emotionally. Please do not take them as my prophecy for what will happen, only what might if every Domino falls in the worst possible way. With all that said, it's time for a story. Bombs bomb MS bombs between the air strikes and the mortars twenty have hit close enough to rattle the frame of your apartment building. In the last day, your windows

are a distant, forlorn memory. The water pipes went weeks ago, and with that your hope of ever using your shower again. One of your neighbors managed to liberate a pallett of baby wipes, though the other day you realize that you now value a single pack of the things more than every electronic gadget you've ever owned. The day provides some relief. Someone you've heard it was the Canadians supplied the separatists in your neighborhood with man portable anti aircraft missile launchers.

They knocked out a couple of helicopters last week, and ever since then the federal forces have been more cautious during the day. It's weird to think of the munitions and craft your tax dollars paid for being used to bombard your hometown. It's even weirder to look out from your roof during the day and see the dominionist militia, bedecked in their fiery crosses, firing from up armored Ford f one fifties into the separatist fighting positions around your neighborhood.

Most days, they broadcast propaganda from loudspeakers built into the backs of AND's begging heathens in the city. You guess that includes you to throw down their arms and accept God and America back into their lives. At this point, you pray to just about anyone if it meant not taking indirect fire all day, every day. But you've seen pictures of what life is like in the areas under dominionist control. The other day, one of your friends showed you a video of a stoning twenty or thirty militiamen

throwing rocks at a pair of trans women. You almost puked up what little food was left in your stomach. You're not sure how much of that the federal forces know about. Surely things haven't gotten so bad that the government would approve of such brutality, But you know they need the manpower the militias provide, and maybe it's as simple as that. The government is happy to look the

other way for anyone who can help them maintain control. Yesterday, one of your friends in the municipal defense units told you about a transport caravan headed out of the city through a thin strip of friendly territory leading up north to what used to be Washington State. The journey will take days. Washington wasn't exactly close before the war, and the road system has been fucked by years of i e. D. S bombings and lack of maintenance under the patchwork of

sectarian militias. But if you can make it up there, you've heard there are buses that will take you up to the Canadian border. Of course, back when this all started you considered immigrating. Everyone did, but you convinced yourself that things would get better. Even a few months ago that had seemed possible. But now the boom of a howitzer rips through the air, as if to punctuate your internal debate. You instantly recognize it as incoming fire, and

you dart into the bathroom to take cover. The shell lands somewhere close. The blast rattles the foundation of your building, but it clearly wasn't a direct hit. You hear the now familiar sound of wounded people shrieking in pain. Some of them are children. You want to grab your first aid kit and run to them, but you shelter in place for a while longer. The dominionists have a thing for double tap strikes, and you expect another round or two will be headed in the same direction to hit

any first responders. Less than a minute later, the cannon booms again and a second blast silences the screams of your wounded napeers. You're overwhelmed with a curious mix of shame and gratitude that you guessed right. Slowly, you pick yourself up and head to the window to survey the damage, and as you look out at the still smoking rubble of yet another home, you make your decision. It's time

to leave. One fine summer morning, two years ago, I stood on a hill in Mosele and watched AGED sixty four Apache attack helicopters drill thirty millimeter chain gun rounds and thermobaric hellfire missiles into city blocks filled with people. It didn't look at all the way it looks in movies. There were no bright orange blossoms of fire, just plumes of black and gray smoke, bursting across the horizon and curling up to the sky. That afternoon, I walked through

the neighborhood those Apaches had pounded all morning. Concrete, plaster, wood, and human bodies had been pounded into a substance finer than sand, a gritty, all pervasive sort of dust that enveloped everything. The neighborhood, which hours ago had been filled with beautiful homes, and apartment blocks had been turned into

something that looked like the surface of the moon. As I clambered over the collapsed apartments, giving a wide berth to unexploded bomblets still wedged in the rubble, the smell of rotten corpses bubbled up from below. It's stuck in my nose. Even now, two years later, I can still smell it. Sometimes I have nightmares about Mosele. Some nights, none of them are about the actual close calls I had in that city, the mourners and sniper rounds that

landed too close for comfort. My nightmares all involve planes and helicopters, the smell of dead bodies trapped under rubble, in the sight of other cities in other countries, wreathed in the same black smoke I saw rising from Mosle. Carpet bombing has been a key aspect of American military

strategy since World War Two. Precision munitions have allowed for somewhat less randomness in the process, but any one who saw Mosele or Rockaws and Syria can tell you that precision is a word with a lot of wiggle to it, and since two thousand seventeen, the trend in American military doctrine has not been towards fewer civilian casualties. By June of that year, President Trump had dropped almost as many bombs as Oboma did in all of two thousand sixteen.

By the end of two thousand seventeen, the US had launched fifty more air strikes than we had in the previous year. Civilian casualties had risen by two hundred and fifteen percent. The leveling of Rocaw and Mosel were only possible because those cities were distant, foreign and filled with non white people. It's hard to imagine an American president ordering the carpet bombing of an American city, but perhaps

it shouldn't be. I've begun to expect that the path to an American mosle is not as long or as winding as I had previously hoped. The book Cities under Siege points out that fifteen years ago, American military planners and tacticians were already well used to treating our own cities as targets as long as those cities were seen

as majority non white quote. Some U. S Army officers discussed their highly militarized response to the Katrina disaster as an attempt to take back New Orleans from African American insurgencies. Rather than organizing a massive humanitarian response that treated Katrina's victims as city pisons who required immediate help, officials eventually

executed a largely military operation. Such a response merely reinforced the idea that it is equally fitting to treat both external and internal geographies as the sites of state backed wars against racialized and bio politically disposable their word others, The Katrina operation dealt with those abandoned in the central city as a threat to be contained, targeted, and addressed as a means of protecting the property of the largely white suburban and ex urban populations who had escaped in

their own cars. In the process, African American citizens of New Orleans were made refugees within their own country. As Robert Starn and Ellis Show had contend, Katrina not only ripped the roofs off of Gulf Coast houses, but also ripped the facade off the national security state in the event of a second American Civil War with armed resistance against the state and whole cities, or at least chunks of whole cities standing an open revolt, that facade would

slip further. This would not happen quickly. There would be great resistance to the idea of deploying American power against our own cities. But imagine our military pushed past its limits of manpower, dealing with thousands of injured and dead, and probably just as many deserters. As I mentioned in the last episode. Tiny Iraq and large sparsely populated Afghanistan already did this to our forces, minus the desertion in

that much less severe situation. Are Military and political leaders responded with a vast escalation in the air war, more drones and more bombs to compensate for fewer available boots on the ground. Remember Jeremy Christian's words after stabbing two men to death on the Portland Max train, that's what

liberalism gets you. Two years or so into the Second American Civil War, with military casualties rising, the economy collapsed, and of course months of hateful propaganda directed against the separatists and insurgents, well, I don't have trouble imagining the American government and a chunk of the country who chose to back them, supporting a violent air war against their

former countrymen. That's what separatism gets you. Gregory Clancy is a professor of history at the University of Singing, a poor, a full Bright scholar, and an expert in the evolution of U S military doctrine. He's quoted liberally in Cities under Siege discussing the left right divide in this country. Quote, at the end of the day, the grand division in American politics is not East. First, is west or north

versus South. It's not even rural versus urban middle class, because the really powerful Republican squares are suburbs and exurbs full of more recent settler refugees from the Blue flex themselves. No one dislikes the Blue Democratic urban flex more than those who resettled its edges, the trekkers in that great exodus that began in the nineteen forties and continues strongly today. Now, that was written back in two thousand ten, but it's

only grown truer with the passage of years. A two thousand fourteen Washington Post article humorously titled breaking Partisans of the two parties hate each other noted quote, seventy nine percent of Democrats have unfavorable attitudes about the Republican Party. Eighty two percent of Republicans have unfavorable attitudes about the Democratic Party. Absolutist rejection is quite common. Roughly one third of partisans believe the opposition is a threat to the

nation's well being. Only around thirty percent of each party viewed the other party in a hugely unfavorable light. That number, then, has almost tripled in twenty years, and as I outlined in the first episode of this series, things have only grown more viciously polarized in the years since that Washington Post article from two thousand nineteen. It is distinctly normal to run into what's called eliminationist rhetoric directed against the

political other. In mid April two thousand nineteen, Pacific Standard magazine published an article titled the far right doesn't want to beat the left, it wants to exterminate it. That article noted quote. Right wing pundits have joked about murdering people on the left for years. In the nineteen nineties, talk radio show host Brush Limbaugh equipped I tell people, don't kill all the liberals, leave enough so that we can have two on every campus, living fossils, so that

we will never forget what these people stood for. His words were echoed recently by the neo Nazi Chris Cantwell, who ranted in a gap post that leftist should face complete and total destruction. Memes and jokes about free helicopter rides for leftists like Bernie Sanders have become common on the right as well. This is a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered some of his left wing

opponents by throwing them from helicopters. In two thousand fifteen, John Russell Houser opened fire in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater during a showing of Amy Schumer's train wreck. His explicit goal was to kill liberals. Before his shooting, Houser wrote this about Dylan Rufe's murder of nine worshippers at a black church in Charleston. Had Dylan Rufe reached political maturity, he would have seen that the word is not the

N word but liberal. David NewART, a journalist and expert on far right radicalization, has been warning about this for quite some time. His two thousand nine book The Eliminationists, published one year before Cities under Siege, traced out an already compelling and terrifying trend of far right violence against liberals. NewART wrote about a number of murders and attempted murders, most of which I hadn't read about before reading his book.

The most shocking of them happened in July two thousan an eight, when Jim David Atkinson opened fire in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, killing two people. His four page manifesto included the line all liberals should

be killed. Atkinson explained that he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he had felt that democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.

When police later combed through Atkinson's home, they found books written by a number of mainstream conservatives, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage, let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The o'iley Factor by Bill o'reiley. In his manifesto, Atkinson expressed frustration at his inability to reach and attack

any democratic elected leaders. I couldn't get to the generals and high ranking officers of the Marxist movement, so I went after the foot soldiers, the chicken ship liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can read America of this cancerous pestilence. In January of this year, I ran across a Facebook post by a member of the right wing

street gang Patriot Prayer, Carmen Estel. She said this, we are deep into spiritual warfare. Now. This is why the evildoers don't even realize how evil they truly are. They have become robotic. They are simply a vessel for the darkness. When you start seeing words like robotic used to describe human beings, what you're seeing is called dehumanization. It's one of the first steps necessary if you plan to prepare one group of human beings to kill another group of

human beings. Every genocide and mass killing and history has involved some degree of dehumanization. The book Less than Human by David Livingstone Smith deals with this phenomenon in great detail. He notes quote dehumanization is the belief that some beings only appear human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts,

they aren't human at all. The Nazis labeled Jews as unter mentioned subhumans because they were convinced that although Jews looked every bit as human as the average Arian, this was a facade, and that concealed beneath it, Jews were really filthy, parasitic vermin. In as the Holocaust was ramping up, Hitler delivered a speech in which he described international jewelry

as the ferment of decomposition of people's and states. Just as it was an antiquity, it will remain that way as long as people do not find the strength to get rid of the virus. Such language has grown increasingly common in our current political discourse. In two thousand fourteen, Fox News published an article titled, Wake Up America, Liberalism is a virus too. The article, written at the height of the Ebola outbreak, directly compared liberalism to that virulent disease.

It's not so different from Adolph Hitler's constant comparisons of Jewish people to typhus than the most terrifying illness of the day now, in the interest of fairness, I googled around to see if could find examples of liberals and leftists making the same claim about conservatives. It took about half a second to find a meme saying literally that conservatism is a virus that is destroying America. It seems to have been the creation of a very lame tumbler

titled conservatism is destroying our future. The humanization is not a one sided process in this country, and that kind of language should concern you no matter what side of the isle it comes from. People are not viruses. Jim Hodgkinson was a politically active liberal and small business owner. He was active in the occupy movement in two thousand eleven and was interviewed by Fox two News and St.

Louis about his support. At the time, Jim said, the nine and nine percent are getting pushed around and the one percent are just not giving a dam, so we've got to speak up for the whole country. In two thousand and twelve, he wrote letters to his local newspapers stating, let's vote all Republicans out of Congress and get this country back on track. At this point, Jim seemed to be a pretty normal Democrat, and like most Democrats, Jim

was horrified by the election of Donald Trump. At some point between November two thousand sixteen and June two thousand seventeen, Jim Hodgkinson decided that protesting and voting was no longer enough. He took a rifle to a baseball field where several Republican congress people and their aids were practicing for a charity baseball game and opened fire. He injured five people, including Congressman Steve Scalise, before being fatally wounded by law enforcement.

We do not have as complete a log of Hodgkinson's Internet history as I would like. Prominent right wing terrorists like the Magabomber left us with more data to work with, but we do know a few things about Hodgkinson. Within a year of Trump selection, his business failed and he wound up homeless, living out of his vehicle in a gym bag showering at the local y m c A. Now I have found significantly more examples of violent far

right radicalism than violent far left radicalism. It's worth repeating that every single American killed by domestic terrorists in two thousand eighteen died at the hands of a right wing extremist. However, Jim is proof that violent radicalization occurs across the political spectrum.

And I think that as the economy drops and the impact of climate change becomes more severe, leave more people homeless and destitute, we will see more people on the left lose hope in the ballot and turn to the bullet I don't know what path of dehumanizing rhetoric helped lead Jim to open fire on a group of strangers, but considering how much time I'm about to spend talking about right wing eliminationism, I should probably talk about another aspect of it on the left that seriously worries me.

Guillotine fetishism. Now I get it. I've spent hundreds of collective hours of my life reading about the unspeakable crimes of various billionaires, most recently the Sackler family. I understand wanting to give some of these people an exceptionally short haircut. And I get that a lot of you are probably rolling your eyes and maybe even getting ready to switch podcasts, because clearly Twitter posts like this one from we Dress

Elba are just jokes. If your boss ever tells you you don't need a union, it's because you need a guillotine. Prominent leftist magazine Jacobin recently started selling a faux i kea guillotine poster. The tweet announcing it said so much for the tolerant left. I could find another dozen examples if I really wanted to keep harping on us all day, and all these examples could be easily defended as harmless comedy. Now.

I'm not going to compare this to say the ironic comments about genocide and Nazism that are so often a catalyst for fascist right wing radicalization. But given how prevalent guillotine talk has become on the left, I think it behooves us to talk for a minute about the French Revolution. Now, you could absolutely argue that a lot of those guillotined Knobby Fox had it coming, as they had spent their lives deploying oppressive violence far in excess of what was

eventually returned to them. As a general rule, I support despotic leaders, be they kings or dictators losing their heads. But tens of thousands of people were killed in the violence that flowed from the French Revolution, and most of them did not have it coming. It turns out that Once a collective of angry people starts murdering, it's fucking

hard to get them to stop. Where I worry about this specifically is when it comes to what happens and the chunks of urban and suburban areas occupied by leftist separatists. In place where the government retreats without too much violence, things will likely remain pleasant for the reasons we discussed in the last episode. Most people tend to want things

to stay reasonable. However, in the areas where the fighting is more vicious, the trunks of cities that wind up under long term sieges separatists are likely to become correspondingly more brutal on the areas they control. This leads me to something called the brutalization effect. It's mostly been documented in the context of the death penalty, but quite a lot of the data gathered suggests that highly publicized executions lead to more violence. I'd like to quote from a

University of Maryland study. It was found that the incidents of Thursday Friday homicides was greater than expected for those weeks with executions, and the incidents of Saturday Sunday homicides was less than expected for those weeks with executions. From this pattern, it was concluded that the deterrent effect of an execution, or more precisely, the publicity surrounding an execution,

was canceled by its earlier brutalizing effect. Now it's hard to say how much of the brutalization effect is due to the death penalty and how much of it is due to the publicity surrounding executions, but still this suggests that the early stages of the Second Americans have a war.

The deaths and violence that would cause would make people, even traditionally peaceful liberala leftist people more comfortable with deadly violence, and in the face of daily mortar fire, sniper attacks, and bombings, these rebels are likely to lead mass purges of the people who they feel represent their suffering. In most cases, I imagine it would be wealthy families, law enforcement officers and the families of law enforcement officers, as well as political activists on the other side of the

political spectrum. This violence would also become heavily publicized elsewhere in the nation and regions still controlled by the regime, Regions where most people are on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum and the violence they see being done to their fellow travelers will make them more comfortable with the government dishing out mass violence to separatists. They are already signs right now that political leaders on the right are pushing the idea that leftists and liberals are not

really Americans. On the day I wrote most of this episode, in mid April, I came upon an email by the Trump campaign to his donors and supporters. I would like to read an excerpt. In two thousand sixteen, I was simply your voice, but you were the one that took our country back and made the liberal swamp and political insiders furious. Now headed into we have to remind them that this is your country, not theirs, and then it

turns into a plug for donations. It would be easy to write this off as just meaningless bullshit from a campaign used to tossing out hurtful words like used tissues under a high school boy's bed. But I found this wording deeply disturbing. This is your country, not theirs is the kind of language that could be used to, for example, justify the carpet bombing of a city occupied by leftist separatists.

After all, if they are an Americans, not really then why shouldn't the government treat them like it treated Iraqi and Syrian civilians in the cities that defied us, we don't fight. The leveling of Recaw is not something that received a great deal of airtime in US media. The Battle of Mosele, for whatever reason, dominated the public consciousness

much longer than the battle for isis is capital. Excessive force was used on both cities, but in my opinion, at least what was done in Mosel was more justified or at least defensible than the destruction of Recaw. For some background, during the two thousand sixteen campaign, one issued Donald Trump ran on was to bomb the ship out

of Isis. After he was sworn in, President Trump handed decision making power for air strikes to military commanders on the ground, essentially removing much of the civilian oversight from that process. Correspondingly, civilian casualties leapt upward. In May two seventeen, Defense Secretary Maddis told CBS News that the campaign against

Isis had shifted from attrition tactics to annihilation tactics. I think the reality of those annihilation tactics gives us an idea of how an air war against leftist separatists in a US city might look now, I'm imagining it conducted against leftists. But in our last episode we also brought up the possibility of Christian dominionist groups organizing and effectively ruling over large suburban chunks of the country in the wake of a US government pull out from certain areas.

It's certainly also possible to imagine a liberal dominated US government eventually deploying the kind of force against a group of Christian extremists occupying urban and suburban areas against essentially an American version of ISIS. In both cases, I can imagine annihilation tactics being justified by the people with power over the bombers in artillery. So let's talk about what those annihilation tactics look like. Racaw was hit by an

overwhelming mix of air strikes and artillery barrages. Of the air strikes were carried out by the United States, of the artillery barrages involved American artillery. In four months, we dropped a shot around twenty one thousand munitions into a city that had hosted around two hundred and twenty thousand people before the bombardment. That's roughly the same size as Baton, Rouge des Moines or Spokene, Washington. More than of Racall was leveled by this bombardment. The city was turned into

a smoking war and of rubble. The exact death toll would never be known, just as it would be deliberately obscured in the event of an air war against the U. S. City. Now, the best I can do to make this feel real is to bring you the stories of real Serians who survived the bombardment. Mohanted Tadfi A age forty four, was one such survivor. He buried his mother, brother, sister in law, and seven nieces and nephews. He later told in PR ten people a plane came and hit the house in

the building of five floors fell on their heads. When the Syrian Democratic forces arrived on foot in his part of the neighborhood, he and his brother were forced out of the area. Told it was too dangerous for civilians, Mohanned begged the soldiers, please, there are children under the rebel. My brother's children, young kids, maybe even just one of them is still alive. But those soldiers had a job and they could not risk leaving civilians behind. To act

as possible insurgeons. The soldiers who refused to let him search for his buried loved ones were not monsters. There were people doing a nightmarish job and nightmarish circumstances, and what we in peacetime consider simple humanity is often an

unacceptable risk under the rigors of war. Colonel Ryan, the spokesperson for the Combined Joint Task Force responsible for leveling RACAW, justified its actions by saying the coalition was quote fighting a ruthless enemy that was systematically killing innocent civilians, and unfortunately, some were unintentionally killed trying to liberate them, something we tried to avoid. I'm sure the U. S forces quote unquote liberating separatist urban areas would try to avoid unintentionally

killing civilians in the act of liberating them. I'm equally sure the end result will be a lot of men and women like Mohanned Tadfi, forced to return to their shattered homes months later to dig the corpses of their loved ones out of the rubble with shovels. Of course, given some of the things some voices on the far right have suggested, Mohanned's American counterpart might be lucky to survive the Battle of Spokane, assuming the city was occupied

by leftist separatists. Republican Matt Shay is an elected representative in the state of Washington. Representative Shay is the Minority Caucus chair in the State House of Representatives. In two thousand and eighteen, he wrote and distributed a document that outlined what he called a biblical basis for war. I'd like to read an excerpt of that title. Rules of War. Conduct a census of all able bodied males eighteen to forty five. Identify exemptions. Appoint captains of tens, fifties, hundreds,

and thousands. Avoid bloodshed if possible. Make an offer of peace before declaring war, not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness. Must surrender on terms of justice and righteousness. Number one. Stop all abortions, Number two, no same sex marriage, Number three, no idolatry or occultism. Number four no communism, and number five. Must obey biblical law if they yield. Must pay share of worker taxes if they do not yield. Kill all males. Now.

After this document came out, Representative Shay insisted he was just summarizing rules he found in the Bible for how to conduct war and that he wasn't distributing some guide for how a dominionist militia should purge decadent liberal cities of all resistance. The same day I wrote this article, Jason Wilson, writing for The Guardian, published another article about

Matt Shay. This article was based on a number of private chats between Shay and several members of his militia back in two thousand seventeen when they believed an Antifa revolution was scheduled to occur. Quote all of the men used screen aliases. Schayes was veram bellatour Latin for true Warrior. The Guardian con arm the identity of those in the chat by cross checking phone numbers attached to the signal accounts.

The group included Jack Robertson, who broadcasts the far right radio show Radio Free Redoubt under the alias John Jacob Schmidt. The chat also included Anthony Bosworth, whose history includes a public altercation with his own daughter and bringing guns to a court house. Bosworth participated in the two thousand and sixteen occupation of the Malher National Wildlife Refuge, reportedly at

Shay's request. I quoted all that because it's important for you to understand that Shay is not some lone, isolated nut. He is connected to a sizeable, organized ecosystem of Christo fascist extremists who are champing at the bit for a chance to purge decadent leftist cities like Spokane. Shay's connections extend beyond just Washington. His involvement with the Malhir occupation as proof of that. During the leaked conversations, Shay and his inner circle discussed how they planned to deal with

any anti fascist activists they captured. Jack Robinson noted his desire to face slam them into a Jersey barrier quote, treat him like communist revolutionaries, then shave her bald with a k bar usmc field knife. He noted that the nipple rings on the activists would quote make good attachment points for hoisting communists up flagpoles. A few days after this article dropped, Jason Wilson published another piece based on leaked audio from a Godden Country rally held in two

thousand eighteen. Representative Shay and Jack Robertson both spoke there. Here's part of what Robertson said. Of course, guys, although fifteen and a thousand runs animal rived as anti falls, kicking up and getting ready to defend. Right, defend, why defend for when the bad guy comes? Right, how many of you have told your trigger on your air are fifteen and the fight that we're in yet not one? But there's a fight right now. The war is here

the bad guy. Representative Shay has been ostracized from mainstream Republican circle since his document on Biblical war leaked out. Robertson could accurately be described as a fringe right wing figure. However, both men speak for thousands of heavily armed, deeply paranoid Americans. In the event of a civil war that seriously drained the manpower reserves of the United States military, it's possible that the state would turn to ideologically aligned militia's to

help it retake separatist strongholds. We have seen this exact same pattern play out in Syria, with militias loyal to Bashar al Assad and in a rack with Sheia militia's prosecuting a brutal war against the Sunni extremists who aligned with ISIS, And if it were to happen here, as it has happened in many other parts of the globe, we can expect to see the extremists, and these militias used the opportunity to execute vengeance against their ideological enemies.

Representative Shay is proof that the ingredients are already here and as cities under siege. Noted back in two thousand ten, the idea of Christian extremists cheering on the violent destruction of leftist enclaves is not exactly beyond the pale quote. Some Christian fundamentalist preachers have even suggested that both the nine eleven attacks and Hurricane Katrina were are actually part of God's wrath against the sins of urban life, especially homosexuality.

Although loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. Repent America director Michael Markovitch suggested in the two thousand five press release from Girls Gone Wild the Southern decadence, New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation, may a city full of righteousness emerge now? In this episode, we have focused primarily on mass murder of the political variety. The elephant in

the room. The thing left unset so far is the possibility of mass violence against a racial or religious minority in the wake of a tremendous calamity on our next week's episode will delve into that topic and discuss what might happen when annihilation tactics turn from pacification to genocide. I'll be watching one of the concrete cracking the first back talking when the cable snap one of the tables of the Lords of Trouble. In this guys trust clous on us far they flide with sauce. It's on a

game blust across the heart beat is going. Don't start with me. It's a nightly Wait. Wait, I test one more. Wait, wait when I do kill and tell? When we get the rule of script of course, get things. Get a sip from the fluster, accept the ship's sake. I know it's hard. Eye turner from the top down. Purler. Yeah, let's screen. It's like we're supposed to start ru on my back in my coup, and you can crawl around the camp like a creep. So we ghost. Night night,

good night, night, night night. But I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay. You can find this show on Twitter at happen here pod, and you can find a show online at it could happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always, is from four Fists