The Age of Extremophiles

And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news differently than they have, and because I've been coming across some different pieces of information than they have. And I wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been feeling so optimistic, and so I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of last week, and then over the weekend a gunman attack the White House Correspondence dinner, and I actually, this hasn't

really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about that this week, probably on ED. But I did make some alterations to the episode as a result of that, although I I do think it reinforces my primary point, which is that the political era that we now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles. Extremophiles are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to

survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean, or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time, people thought it was too salty to host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The dead sea hosts life. It's just weird life, because the Dead

Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined in nineteen seventy four by R. D. McElroy to describe microorganisms scientists we're increasingly finding in places that should have been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term that literally means love of extremes, and while it is usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms and very odd locations, where its have over the years pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too.

In the journal article all about Extremophiles JOHNS. Hopkins Universities, James A. Koker wrote that quote, despite common perception, most of Earth is what is often referred to as an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home. It is simply that home. They have adapted to thrive in these environments, and in the process have evolved many

unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our human centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilock zone, not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled with all the things necessary for life to exist. To some extent, this is true. However, this view keeps us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth is

mostly a cold place. Over ninety percent of its oceans are at or below five degrees celsius, and it has an average temperature of around fifteen degrees celsius, and several conditions we humans consider normal i e. Twenty percent oxygen in the air actually make us extremophiles from the point of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like

this metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials and even Gen Z and Alpha kids too young to have known the nineties to look back on that decade as a sort of cultural goldilock zone, as if the brief period post Cold War in pre nine to eleven was some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different

reasons for this. Some of them blame nine to eleven. Some people will argue that we were in that sweet spot where the Internet existed and could tap you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along

yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come up with different justifications for this, but this view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the nineteen nineties, which is that they were full of genocides and Rwanda and Bosnia just to name two, and repeated the US military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe,

some of which ended disastrously as in Mogadishu. Our president for most of the nineties was a sex pest, and members of the far right staged a series of bloody terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic Park bombing. And while all this was happening, a new and more openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress while hapless outmaneuver Democrats

gawked in awe. The reality is that the nineties were a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just like every other period of human existence, and the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, those same neo Conservatives seemed tame next to their modern descendants, the Maga movement, but in their own time, they were

the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a fundamental reality in American politics. If survival and extreme time requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting the era of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme

choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, he was such an extreme choice that the Conservative movement had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the Maga movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal the changes from the Obama years in power. I like thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is this,

in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We Homo sapiens, have been in the business of extreme adaptations for as long as we've existed. That's all. Central heating and air vaccines, antibiotics, and the AR fifteen are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them extreme environments

and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations, and so on and so forth until we invent the Internet and satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good, but once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got

to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum has started to swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction, and you can see the first stirrings of that and the popularity of Zoron Mandani, or the fact that a former pillow of neo conservatism like Bill Crystal is currently advocating for

the abolition of ice. We are in the process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and changes that are every bit as good as the ones that Trump administration has forced through our bad To do that, we're going to have to be brave, and we're going to have to start getting our shit together now, because

this window of opportunity won't last long. The way I see it, the GOP entered office this time around, intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign.

They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt they might have had in an orgy of careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out by the least sympathetic group of Grober's imaginable, one of whom was nicknamed Big Balls, A fleury of state and local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left wing activists and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage, as have relentless ice raids on mostly non white Americans. It's

been bad, and yet we're still here. I won't pretend we're in a good situation today, not at least in terms of what we'd like good to mean in the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived the first sixteen months or so of the second Trunk President. Fewer of us are going to make it to the end. But this regime came to power with the knowledge that their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action. They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and

they missed it. You can see some evidence of this in our War of Choice against Iran. President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the evening news, so he told his military to bear down on Iran with all the speed and violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed

their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the Algorithmic Warfare cross functional team nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as per Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans previously would have gone over by hand, in order to speed up the rate at which targets were identified and struck in wartime. Project Mabon from the Jump was a product of the

worst kind of military thing. How can we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is the kind of project you pursue when your finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them to give up. The goal was to create a system that could colate and synthesize huge quantities of data in

order to allow one thousand targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, writing for The Guardian, notes that this means quote three point six seconds per decision, or from the individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every seventy two seconds. Now we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking has led US in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads.

We're back now. If you listen to the advocates of this kind of military build up that people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes talk and their podcasts and on their blogs, the reasoning behind why you need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea that a future war between the US and a peer or near peer adversary, most prominently China, right, that's what

they're planning on now. The Chinese military is also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New York Times article earlier this month in April of twenty twenty six, titled Mutually Automated destruction the escalating global AI arms race. I'm going to quote from that now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own.

Two US officials said China is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought, while Russia is building Lancet drones that can circle the sky on autonomously pick targets. They said Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In twenty seventeen, mister Putin declared that whoever leads in AI will become the ruler of the world. Mister z said in twenty twenty four that the technology would be the

main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the US military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell now. My interpretation of what I've read from most of these guys is that they see future conflict as a massive but almost instantaneous chess game. Right, whoever has the AI that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up

with target packages, and then strike those targets first wins. Right. If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand strikes in an hour and they can only make eight hundred, then we'll destroy more of them and will win the war. Right, It'll all be decided right at the start. And this may well be how a shooting war between China and the US would proceed. But given that very few people in either country want that war to happen because it

would kill us. All I think we might do best focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure. For at least the second time in my life. In two thousand and three, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than a year of build up, in years of intelligence gathering, our military planners put together a list of fifty high

value targets. The idea was, if we could use our incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, we could hobble any response to the invasion. All fifty targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed. Now that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just means we missed all the people we thought we were

going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again, the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit fifty buildings, and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. Fast forward earlier this year, the Trump administration orders the launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal of hyper advanced weaponry on the people and leaders of Iran alongside the Israeli Air Force. In the first two weeks, US forces hit six thousand targets picked with the help

of Project Mavin. One of them was the monob Girls Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing one hundred and fifty six and wounding then ninety five now Alex Krp, the CEO of Pallanteer's hyper Advanced AI, and a multi billion dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA, and the massade wasn't enough to drop us from striking a school that

we knew contained none of our targets. We had data that the people we thought were there at one point were no longer there and it was a school now. But some of the data may even relied on was old and outdated. And these machines aren't capable of real judgment and the way we think of it, And because people trusted them so much, no one thought to check

before ordering the strikes. This is a human error, This is not an AI error, but it illustrates a massive law in the fantasy that winning a war could be as easy as building a smarter machine now to be accurate, and it is important to note a lot of those six thousand targets were what we thought, and they were

accurately struck and killed. In the opening salvo of the war, President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iron Supreme Leader, alongside many other prominent military governmental officials. This seemed at first to be way more successful than the opening strikes against a Rock. They didn't get any of those fifty guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Rock.

Maybe now we're doing it right, you know, finally we'll be able to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were not enough to break Iron's will or its capacity to fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy.

Most recent AP and RC poll puts Trump's overall approval at thirty three percent, which is down five percent since just back in March, only thirty two percent of Americans approve of his leadership on Iran. Because most of this country can still see a man shooting himself in the

dick for what it is. Pete Hegseth is our most lethality obsessed Secretary of Defense and History, and in him we see the result of a long sickness first incubated during the Vietnam War, when embarrassed generals needed to spin their failure to make progress as a kind of victory, so they turned to bragging about how many fighters they had killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants, and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed

based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts as the death knell of a military entity's ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer

to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trickle down to the sare cadra of influencers who call themselves right wing intellectuals. Today, I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Ruffo who built their reputations on picking targets to drum up mobs against and uses the basis of

attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring up hat and forcing laws all over the country restricting things like drag shows, are the use of chosen pronouns and government documents. All these people are by definition huge assholes, and so are their followers, and thus when those people get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has

resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January first, twenty twenty one, by Republican activists and former school board members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols and schools. They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over

the life and mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that child to become a different kind of person than the parent, and visions must be pruned away. The group used the then fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a lever from which to force themselves into American life. In June of twenty twenty one, they started filing what would become a long series of criminal complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation.

Schools started removing books, and Moms for Liberty inspired candidates began winning school board elections around the country. It looked for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit four fifty one style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple

of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty backed candidates started losing major elections, first a series of school board races in twenty twenty three in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration kareemed towards a disastrous new election in twenty twenty four one in which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of the first was karen's Foboda, a mother of

seven in Dutchess County, New York. In twenty twenty three, she told NPR reporter Jim's Aaroli, I looked into the local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some of the social media of some of these individuals, and what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom of kids were members of that community, it was very concerning to think that these people would be trying to get onto the school board, because what does that mean

for my kids? So she started a group of her own, Defensive Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. It defeated an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in twenty twenty three, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook

page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing is that even while the twenty twenty four election took over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts across the country to fight for their children's educations. In November of twenty twenty five, the Houston suburb of Cyprus, Texas, saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take

the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats slipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an ongoing tally from Progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund Under the radar.

Trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper local interest in politics as the COVID nineteen pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the national battleground of Pennsylvania, the result of well funded campaigns orchestrated by

local leaders. Now one of my favorite details from that piece is a quote from one of the new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a superpartisan extremist majority,

folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now, I continue to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control their neighbors is upsetting, an unnatural. The way I see it,

we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on a uddle of his own flop sweat along the way. The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least right now, which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did the thing fascists off and do. He kept reaching until he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now. I don't know what's going to happen next in our absolutely

unnecessary struggle with Iran. I think there's a non zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some token ser is. Rule won't say we abandon them and tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also possible who'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic,

hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, but either action would just be the flailing of a busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of the American people seems to suggest that most of us has a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida, it's hard to find regular people who are scared of

the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get. Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even more than their enthusiastic support, and many Americans have proven themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the

Heritage Foundation and their friends want for this country. And that's a nice note to roll the ads on We're Back if you want a direct example of how weak the cultural conservatives are right now. Think back to the stunt President Trump pulled with door dasherlier in April. He ordered several bags and had them delivered by a dasher who was there to get photographed praising the president's no

tax on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval office, Trump asked the dasher if they thought trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the dasher in question was fifty eight year old Sharon Simmons, who was a I mean, it's been widely reported, is

a Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the no tax on tips policy at the House Ways and Means Committee field hearing, and even when she was under the gun next to the President, Simmons wasn't willing to agree with him on the weird anti trans stuff. She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that, and I'm not here to call her a hero for that. She's not. But it shows a crack in the rhetorical

wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support low taxes now they have to endorse a whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti scientific views that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump nowadays has to include an acknowledgment of the big, lurking question of our age what if he won't give up power?

And that's a bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of government officials, of elected leaders, military officers, and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we might call the ought to be crimes of this administration. If not unreasonable to ask what if

they want leave power without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last couple of pages of a podcast script, but I will point out that just in the last month, as I write this, Victor Orbon and his entire political movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orbon had been

previously referred to as a quasi dictatorial figure. He was the leader of the Hungarian government, and he had led a massive right wing crack down that attacked schools, that attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much of our own right wing movement. It's come out that the Orbon government was sending money helping to fund Sea Pack, they were sending money to specific right

wing influencers like Rod Dreyer. And despite the fact that Orbon was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple of years ago was saying, this is the future of American politics, Orbanism is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost an election, he and his cronies back down without a fight. Now, ultimately they did this because

they still think they're bulletproof. Right. We've got enough people in the government that we can stop Peter Magyar, the new guy, from doing any damage to us, right, and thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us avoid a civil war, and the rest of the EU won't look kindly on that. I'm sure that's a lot of their thinking, and obviously the US is

in a very different position geopolitically. But the rapidity with which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing. They think it's more personally profitable for them to not be seen standing next to the president or the MAGA movement right now. And here's more good news. Remember how basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil, right wing billionaire. Well. Americans have responded to this by

discarding social media and ever growing numbers. This has been about one of the most consequential shifts of the last few years, and just this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg published a study on shifts in US social media used from twenty twenty to twenty twenty four. Quote online platform reached aclinent, driven by growth in the share of Americans. Actually the youngest and oldest cohorts who report

using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter, slash x, and Facebook have fallen by nearly fifty percent since twenty twenty, with the declient on Twitter extrivant, primarily by reduced participation among democratic users. Now, this is broadly speaking a good thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for the future of our body politic but the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing

so hot. Over the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew markedly more right wing, as both sites shrank. In his paper, Tornberg warns as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme, or, in other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites

reward more extreme content. Less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation. Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning, as they live in these same Internet fever swamps, and they've gotten used to the Internet mattering a lot more

than it does right now. I don't mean to suggest that what happens online is an important but that importance has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI, slop, spam, and weird right wing propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned in for years. Less people are using these things than they used to, which means their reach has declined because

people find them off putting and gross. The data shows that folks, particularly over sixty five and under twenty four, are increasingly fed up with not just social media but the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won

by a comfortable margin. Republicans devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to anti trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief that anti trans propaganda had one trump the reelection in twenty twenty four, But only four percent of voters in that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now, that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards centrism shared by much of the American middle class. People don't like to stand out,

particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia voters it proved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, Oh, I don't know, guys, we shouldn't do the same thing

they keep doing in order to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair, And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversial measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, the federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional, but you know how these things go. We're off to a series of court battles now, and however those end up.

Two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms, and a clear message has been sent to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws than democrats. Now, any anarchist or left his political organizer you've ever known would have told you the right wing always benefits from an interpretation of the law that she shucks seems to deny their opponents the

right to do the same things in self defense. It's bad that things work this way, but good for rank and file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled Why Virginia went back on its word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph,

partisanship did its best impression of democracy in Virginia. On Tuesday, voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional districts to be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats, its retaliation to recent redistricting and by Texas to hand Republicans five more seats. At the best of President Donald Trump, it's a red versus Blue tit for tat over who can jerrymander more efficiently? A necessary evil, the parties say,

to protect democracy. It's actually not necessarily I mean, not that it's a necessary evil. The parties say. It's that one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans. And you didn't speak up the Washington Posts. You know, this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia. Right, And I also might point out to a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy.

You know, if your only concern is the overall health of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats merely corrects a structural imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrat. Anyway, there are other good reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle, but far to the left.

Simply as a matter of practical necessity, the Republicans have spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the Post Office, the VA, the FAA, and every other useful part of our state structure. And this is a big part of what's radicalized people, because they've very quickly come to notice that things are missing and shit is not

working right. For decades, the government has been the enemy to millions of Americans who went out in the world and relied on government services every day of their lives. And yes, that's irritating and unfair, and no, we don't have time to fix that up right now. What we can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government does stuff. You just

hate the way Republicans run the government. And the fact that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push for policies as extreme as they need to. Right this is an opportunity to convince a lot of people, oh shit, paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better than letting big

balls to lead half of civil service. Right like, that's I think the opportunity we have right now, and pushing that basic line on as many Americans as possible in the next two years is I think one of the most important things we can do at the moment. Along with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement of consequences against the cadra of billionaires and their lackeys who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while.

If I had my way about it, I'd point out to people that there are an awful lot of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the federal government put something like Elon Musk's doge in place. You can just see that in some of the texts between Mark Zuckerberget and Elon Musk. These people are enemies of the state with an awful lot of money that we could confiscate to do things like replace the books Moms for

Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now we also need to see consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can, in fact, get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing the government bully people who are just trying to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates

potential for widespread solidarity between its victims. If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the twenty twenty eight elections go even worse, the USA is new elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation as the man who just unseated Victor Orbon and his supporters. We all learned how temporary a victory can be after

twenty twenty four. I've seen more than a few comments online by liberals who decided Orbon's defeat was a good time to attack a straw man caricature of a leftist, and these posts were generally laughing at this idea that a lot of people on the left express that electoralism can't defeat fascism. Now, I do share a frustration with the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on the left champion, but every online and real life lefty

that I know was thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However, they all did share a fear, and this is one fear that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar Orbon is an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely shitty and hungary, and voters got angry enough to vote for a guy who promised to burn things down. They did come to regret that, but things are still

extremely bad and hungry. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for Trump two point zero. If we don't want to repeat that cycle, the failures and ultimate collapse of the MAGA movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics, and new politics as we seek to fill the void

that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded the first draft of this piece, as I said earlier, just a few days before, a gunman stormed into the Correspondence dinner. His manifesto has made it clear that he wanted to harm the president and members of his cabinet. Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his life was put under a microscope, as always happens with

gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man, one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack. This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this up in a lab as an excuse to crack down on democrats. I don't believe that, and here is not a place for an argument as to why. Again. We'll

talk about that, I'm sure later this week. What is interesting to me is that before any of this happened, I'd been planning to revise the ending of this episode by commenting on an article that came out in April of twenty twenty five. It's published by Oxios and the title was Democrats told to get shot for the anti

Trump resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town halls in their districts and in one on one meetings with constituents and activists, democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent. Quote. I actually said in a meeting when they light a fire,

my thought is grab an extinguisher. And someone at the table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today as they know on some level that that's the only way you survive in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands of normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice.

And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that and the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the fact that an educated and informed thirty one year old man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and attack the president represents many failures. One of them is a failure of the Democratic Party and the Liberal project to provide him with anything that felt like a useful

outlet for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking and acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw your hands up and back away, or you can try like hell to present them with a counter offer. In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns, and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place. The victory and wild popularity of Zora Mamdani is proof

that you can in fact do this. Even in twenty twenty five, the widespread support for formerly extreme positions like abolishing ice, taxing billionaires radically redistricting states, halting the construction of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court are more than enough evidence to show that people will get in line to back a candidate and a party

who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry for their own candidate who feels like Mom Donnie, hungry more than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron Whiten posted see you at Nuremberg two point zero after Christy Nome got fired, I watched a coalition of left wing radicals and centrist Dems who never came together over anything else express wild glee at the very thought

we can do this. We have the tools, and we have the opportunity. It's going to take a big old step into the unknown, but that's our only option besides waiting until we get another chance to look through the social media arts of a gunman. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.