The Revenge of Rural America

two fourteen Bundy standoff made national news. What started as a confrontation over Clive and Bundy's refusal to pay grazing fees to the Bureau of Land Management turned into a minor right wing uprising against state control. Hundreds of militiamen from all over the country, clad in body armor and packing military grade weaponry, stood against federal law enforcement agents

and made them back down. The militiamen got their way, more or less, and they got their way again two years later, when Clive and Bundy's sons led a group that occupied the malhur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I was actually near the Malhir Refuge for a little bit of that, not at the refuge itself, but in the town of Burns, Oregon, talking to locals about what it was like to live

through the armed insurrection of a far right militia. People told me stories and militiamen roaring through town and pickup trucks, carrying guns into local businesses and terrifying residents. The way they described these men reminded me more than a little of how citizens of Constantinevka, a city in eastern Ukraine, described the Russian backed separatists who briefly occupied their city.

Some of these men were literal Russian soldiers, of course, but others were foreigners and local partisans, people with no military training but a love of guns and feeling powerful. Now. In both Bundy occupations, the specific justification for what they were doing was not something with a lot of broad appeal. Their grievances were niche and rural. Most people who didn't live near Malhor viewed the entire thing as something of a silly farce. The occupiers were male, dick shaped candies

and care packages, and mocked as y'all. kDa. It is a great nickname, but I don't think most Americans really realize how fucking terrifying A true y'all Cada would be a few thousands sufficiently motivated, organized, and angry rural Americans have the power to bring this nation to its needs. In the last episode of It Could Happen Here, I envisioned the start of a second American Civil War, driven by President Trump's refusal to leave office and a series

of urban left wing uprisings. Today, we're going to look at another possibility, one that involves the other half of the American political equation. Today we're talking about the revenge of Rural America. Exit polls taken in the two thousand sixteen election revealed that a whopping three quarters of Americans felt the country was growing more divided. Ground zero for this divide was the split between rural and urban voters. One way to look at Donald Trump's upset victory is

as the revenge of Rural America. Rural areas across the country saw an unprecedented turnout, and those Americans voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Representative Tom Cole, Republican from Oklahoma, said this, at the time, we've got some big chisms out there. Rural America's much more Republican than ever before. In the two thousand eighteen midterm elections, the urban rural divide in

America was even more pronounced. Only twenty nine percent of Democratic voters lived in rural areas, the remainder being suburban or urban. For comparison, a whopping forty six percent of Republican voters live in rural areas, only nineteen percent live in cities. Urban and rural America see each other as increasingly two different nations. The one strong commonality between them is that they both believe the other chunk of America

hates them. A two thousand eighteen PU survey revealed that majorities of both urban and rural America believe the rest of the country quote looks down on them. Here's the New York Times quote. P has never asked this question before in a way that allows us to tell if the sentiment is becoming more common, but election results show that urban and rural Americans are increasingly at odds with

each other. The new survey confirms both believe the other group doesn't understand their problems or share their values, and political scientists warned that place based resentments no one respects rural America or Trump is at war with cities can

be easily exploited by politicians. Kathy Kramer, the University of what Wisconsin political scientists who helped Pew compile this report, believes this divide has gotten worse since the two thousand and sixteen election and that it represents something new and dangerous in American politics. Quote. We're at a political moment where cultural divides overlap with political divides, which overlap with geography. Now.

I find that Pew study interesting for a lot of reasons, but the most concerning thing to me is that it shows this divide between rural and urban America has not always been as bad as it is today. Here's the Times again. Quote. Registered voters in urban areas have become more likely to identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic. The opposite trend has been more pronounced among rural residents, with a notable shift after two thousand eight. Before then, rural

voters were relatively evenly divided between the two parties. You may not find this divide as frightening as I do, but I think it presages something potentially quite terrible. In addition to trending further right every year, the rural United States kind this seems to be falling the funk apart. Cattle rustling is on the rise again across the Southwest and states like Oklahoma, Texas, and California. It's reached levels not seen since literal cowboy days. Now modern wrestling is

usually driven by sky higher rates of drug abuse. In other words, people are stealing cows to buy pain killers in meth Agricultural theft of all kinds is actually on the rise across the rural US. Entire semi trucks filled with nuts and oranges are regularly hijacked via complex schemes that often involve fake trucking companies. Rural America is also growing more violent. For most of American history, living out in the middle of nowhere was the safer decision, since

cities tended to have much higher crime rates. But last year, for the first time in a decade, violent crime rates and rural areas rose above the national average. America's suicide rate also increased by more than twenty from two thousand one to two thousand fifteen. Most of that increase happened out in the country. The increases in violent crime and suicide are both due at least in part to the fact that gun ownership is vastly higher out in the country.

Scent of rural Americans own a firearm compared to nineteen percent of city dwellers and twenty eight percent of suburban Americans. Three quarters of rural Americans own more than one firearm, and forty eight percent of gun owning rural Americans use their firearm to hunt. So these people have practical experience using a gun out in the world to hit live, moving targets. Now stick all this together, and what do

you have? It sure looks like you have all the ingredients you'd need if you wanted to cook up one ass kicker of an insurgency. And if the second American Civil War kicks off in the rural areas, I can almost guarantee you it will start with a massive new push for national gun control. Kamala Harris, easily one of the primary front running Democratic candidates in the current bevy of candidates, is outspoken about her desire to ban all

semi automatic firearms. This would ban the vast majority of America's civilian owned guns, literally making tens of millions of people into criminals overnight. The only weapons left legal would be revolvers, shotguns, and bolt action hunting rifles, which are ironically the very weapons outside of bolt action weapons most

likely to be used in violent crime. In the immediate wake of President Trump's decision to declare a state of emergency over the border, conservative never trumpers like Rick Wilson took to Twitter to warn not that Trump might seize power, that setting this precedent would inevitably lead to Democrats declaring a state of emergency of their own over gun violence

once they were back in the Oval Office. On January eight, during a scene and appearance, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg said this quote, if we really want to start talking about the national emergency, like the President likes to talk about, forty Americans dying annually from gun violence, is a pretty damn good one to start with. Last year, The Atlantic published an article by Elizabeth Gaitin evaluating the extent of

the president's emergency hours. In February two thousand, nineteen, Pacific Standard Magazine applied that to the possibility of a national emergency over guns. Quote. The legal infrastructure to levy an emergency declaration Goyton rights exists thanks to the Presidential Emergency Action documents developed by the Eisenhower administration designed to address such extra legal actions as declarations of martial law and

the suppression of habeas corpus. These documents could potentially extend to encompass outright firearms confiscations given the scope of a national crisis. Now. Back during Hurricane KATRAINA, the New Orleans Police Department ordered evacuating citizens to hand over their firearms to the police Superintendent Edwin P. Compass the third later declared a blanket confiscation of all firearms in the city,

saying only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons. At the time, a federal court issued a restraining order to stop the weapons confiscations, so they did not go through all the way, but weapons were confiscated. And of course that was a very different time with a Republican president and a few hundred fewer mass shootings in recent memory. President Harris's semi automatic weapons ban would have to be followed by mass confiscation. Tens of millions of gun owners

will not hand over their weapons willingly. There are literally more privately owned firearms than people in the United States, and half of those guns are owned by just three percent of gun owners. I'm going to give you one guess as to which part of the country most of those gun owners live. Earlier this year, Washington State passed a new set of gun control regulations. The restrictions are fairly mild compared to Kamala Harris's proposition, and the new

law is popular with the state's liberal majority. Fifty nine percent of Washingtonian supported it, but most of those people. Most of those supporters live in urban areas like Seattle. In conservative, rural and suburban Washington, people are pissed. Sixteen sheriffs have so far declared that they will not enforce

the new law. Here's the Wall Street Journal quote. Sheriff Tom Jones of Grant County, also in eastern Washington, is one of a number of sheriffs who have said that they would wait for the courts to rule before telling their deputies to enforce the new law. I swore an oath to defend our citizens and their constitutionally protected rights, said mister Jones, whose county voted against the gun control

measure by more than two to one. I do not believe the popular vote over rules that now there are hundreds of thousands of heavily armed Americans right now who see armed resistance to the state as something aspirational as a dream. Most of these guys, and they are mostly guys, don't have any real combat training. A lot of them are probably just LARPing, play acting. But the Bundy standoff was proof that even Larper's with a shipload of a r fifteens can scare the federal government in the face

of a major gun band. How many rural communities and how many states would say fuck you to a democratic president. The Yellow vest movement kicked off as a suburban and rural movement in France, a revolt from the more conservative sections of that country society against a neoliberal president and his policies. I'm going to quote from the New York

Times here. The movement originated in May when a woman named Priscilla Ludovski, who has an internet cosmetics business and lives in the suburb southeast of Paris, launched an internet petition calling for a drop in gas prices. She broke down the price into its components, noting the taxes made up more than half the cost. In France per leader lead free gas was one point four one euros on Sunday, or about six dollars per gallon. The petition went mostly

unnoticed until October when Eric drew it. A truck driver from the same area as miss Ladowski ran across it and circulated it among his Facebook friends. Newspapers began writing out the petition, and the number of signature skyrocketed from an initial seven hundred to two hundred thousand. Now, the yellowvest movement in France is not a purely conservative thing within France itself. It's actually much more divided than that.

But I think it provides a good look at how an activist movement can launch amongst older and more conservative segments of a modern society. I also think rising gas prices could very well be another generator of rural rage here in America. People who live in the country spend more on gas because they have to drive further distances. There is a good chance that any Green New Deal style plan to slow global warming introduced by a democratic

administration would include to gas tax. Rural areas grow our food in a very real way that keep the cities alive, and the people who live in those places know it. Just to say, air traffic controllers and stewardesses had the power to ind a government shutdown by threatening air travel. Rural Americans have something they too can hold captive. In

their case, it's the food supply. This would of course require a great deal of organization, lists of demands, and political figureheads to speak for the movement, to lend it a shape and a sense of purpose, and I can guarantee you that Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, would at least try to be one of them. Joey is one of the leading figures in the right wing activist movement that's arisen since the two thousand sixteen election.

Along with the Proud Boys, Joey and Patriot Prayer have spent the last two years brawling against Antifa with fists and flagpoles, but they have also held numerous armed marches in full body armor carrying rifles. Gibson lives in Vancouver, Washington. Most members of his gang come from either suburban or rural areas around Portland, Oregon. If you watch hours and hourage of their footage marches and ee O rants like I have, you'll regularly hear these people describe their constant

bloody rallies in Portland as something of a crusade. Christian Holy warriors descending into a decadent left wing city to purchase of sin. In the last episode, I played several clips of Alex Jones calling for a new civil war against the left. Joey Gibson just happens to be a regular guest on Info Wars. Last December, he joined the show to talk about Washington's new gun control laws. It's out of control and I've seen the videos on your shite.

You should plug no place people can find these. We're gonna post some of these tempful wars dot com. You're getting crowds of hundreds and hundreds of people in small towns, counties coming out and they are really pitched about this. They're really upset. We had almost three people in the county with about ten thousand people in it, and they were extremely concerned. They're really upset. They're sick and tired of Seattle telling them what they can or cannot do.

These people just they just want to be free, They want to be left alone. And so I think this is the key in states like Washington and Oregon, the keys to go around to all the counties that believe in the car Institution, which is about nine of the counties of Washington State, most of our conservative Now I've met Joey. He's not a brilliant man or a likely pick for a right wing revolutionary war lord. He would try, but for my money, a likelier pick for rural insurrectionist

war lord would be someone like Ryan Bundy. You've seen Ryan on the news a few times, especially if you kept up with the Bundy standoff back in two thousand fourteen. He's one of the sons of Clive and Bunny, the old racist rancher who masterminded that standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Bunkerville, Nevada. Ryan is the one with the facial deformity. This has led a lot of people online to treat him as if he is a big dum dummy because bigotry knows no political bounds. But

Ryan Bundy is not dumb. He was probably the driving force behind the two thousand sixteen occupation of the Malhir Wildlife Refuge. Ryan spent months in jail over that, but he defended himself against the court and one. Some of this was due to the serious mistakes made by the prosecution, but a lot of it came down to Ryan's personal charisma, his ability to sway a jury of his peers to believe in the righteousness of his cause. Right now, Ryan

is running for governor of Nevada. He's probably a long shot candidate, but it doesn't really matter. Dozens upon dozens of heavily armed men and women were willing to gather and put their lives on the line for his family twice. There is a weird religious crusade angle to what the Bundees have been doing, based on a fringe Mormon prophecy.

The fantastic podcast Bundyville, which I heartily recommend, goes into more detail on this, but the short of it is they believe that they've been chosen by God to defend the Constitution, or at least their interpretation of the Constitution. This is the kind of nutbar stuff that I think a lot of liberals are prone to laugh about. I don't find anything funny about the Bundees. Two people have

already been radicalized into killing by their rhetoric. In June of two thousand fourteen, Jerried and Amanda Miller, fresh from taking part in the standoff at Bundy Ranch, drove into Las Vegas and walked into a Cisi's Pizza with a small arsenal. They opened fire on two officers sitting and eating lunch, killing both. As they started shooting, the couple allegedly yelled this is the start of a revolution. One dead officer was covered in a Gadsden flag, another was

covered in a Nazi flag. Jared and Amanda killed one more person, a random bystander, before dying in a gunfight with police. Now, the Millers had a lot of other radicalizing factors behind their rampage than just the Bundy standoff, but it was an important step in their journey. Lavoy Finnickham is probably a better example of a man who died explicitly for the Bundy's. He was shot reaching for a gun after being stopped with Ryan and his brother

Amon during the Malhir occupation. In June of two thousand sixteen, William Keiebler, a Utah militia leader and close adherent of the Bundies, was arrested and charged for trying to detonate homemade bombs at a BLM building in Arizona. So that's three distinct cases and four individual people who have been radicalized into violent, deadly action by the rhetoric and beliefs

of the Bundy clan. In a situation where order starts to break down even more in rural America and extremist groups begin to tear at the fabric of our society, you can bet the Bundy's will not just sit back and watch. So far, the Bundy family have mostly agitated around land rights and what they depict as the struggle

of American ranchers against the tyrannical government. But they and their supporters are also huge backers of the Second Amendment, and if they were to organize even violently in defense of the right to bear arms, I think you would see them receive a lot of support from even mainstream conservatives. Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular conservatives in modern America. Here's a clip from a December four, two

seventeen episode of his show. During an interview with a gun control advocate, the fact is, we need to have fewer guns, and we need to talk about banning entire classes of especially dangerous firearms like US all weapons. And I think we have to talk about not just banning them, but requiring them people allow the government to buy them back. So you're universal gun confiscations. What you're talking about about

universal gun confiscations. So you're saying ban a class of firearms that would be any rifle with you know, a capacity of more than one above a certain caliber. I mean, I don't know what the criteria are that you're suggesting, but basically any gun they would use for deer hunting

would be banned. No, I would make a distinction between long guns that are technically semi automatic of the kind like my dad uses the taunts, and semi automatic assault weapons that have to gon owners and hunters like me. These are meaningless distinctions. But let's just go right to the meat of it. What do you do to people

who won't sell them back? Um? I think you. I think you had a bare minimum sort of find them severely for it, and build an incentive for them to selve them ready for the civil war that would ensue when you try and take people's guns. And I'm serious. Now, I can't think of many Americans I personally despise more than Tucker Carlson, but I don't think he's wrong about that. And if large chunks of rural America declared their resistance to the federal government, the state would not have a

lot of options for stopping them. Both rural and urban America have seen declines in the number of police officers in recent years, but the rural parts of this country are the only place where that dropping cops has led to a surge in crime. So rural Americans, who grow most of our food feel increasingly isolated from the majority of the United States. They are already dealing with a

significant breakdown of civil order. And oh yeah, they just happen to have most of America's three hundred something million privately owned firearms. We don't, don't, I hope. At this point, I've established how very possible a rural revolt is. Now let's take a look at how it might actually happen. Head north from San Francisco on the I five, and before long, the verdant green of the Bay will give away to rolling yellow hills, creeping higher and higher until

they become mountains. By the time you hit Read in California, about three hours north from Silicon Valley, you'll be in a place that does not feel like cal Alifornia, or at least not the California that most of the world knows. Reading is not a progressive hippie town like so many small cities in northern California. It's filled with gun stores,

gigantic trucks, Bible schools, and churches. As you near reading, you start to see strange signs, flags that bear a yellow circle with two exes inside it on a green background. This is the flag of the State of Jefferson. The double exes stand for the fact that most rural Californians believe they have been double crossed by the big cities

where most Californians reside. The State of Jefferson movement wants to secede from California so they can pay fewer taxes, particularly on gasoline, which California taxes at a higher rate than any other state. Jeffersonians or wanna be Jeffersonians, however you prefer to identify them, also advocate for looser gun laws, more in line with so called free states like Texas. You see a lot of Trump flags in this part of California, at least more than you see in other

parts of the state. Most Californians, if they've even heard of the state of Jefferson, view it is a big joke. The movement has existed for decades now without ever managing to move forward on their dreams of secession. But I can say with confidence that for many people in rural nor Caw, the state of Jefferson is anything but a joke. From two thousand thirteen to two thousand sixteen, I spent increasing chunks of time in rural inland California, mostly in

the tiny mountain communities in and around Reading. You probably haven't heard of any of the towns I lived in. They are not tourist destinations. They have names like red Bluff, Weaverville, Dunsmere, and Shingletown. The place I spent most of my time was Manton, a small community tucked deep in the middle of nowhere. Most residents in Manton either grew weed or

cooked meth. Some did both. There are two roads into Manton, one long and lonesome road from red Bluff and a harrepin mountain road in from Shingletown, and all the months I spent there over three years, I did not see a single police car. Manton is not entirely free from the long arm of the law, but most of what transpires there is well outside of its grasp. That fact

does not make Manton an oddity in rural California. In two thousand eighteen, McClatchy, a media company based in Sacramento, investigated the number of law enforcement officers in rural California. Here's how the Sacramento Be summarized things quote. Departments in multiple jurisdictions are operating with skeleton stabs, McClatchy found, pushing response times into hours, or sometimes leaving residents without a response at all. In Trinity County, deputies regularly cover hundreds

of miles of territory alone. When law enforcement does arrive in many outlying places, it's often a single officer, cut off from back up and in some cases communication with his or her department. We have no money, we have no people, said Modoc County Sheriff Mike Pointdexter, echoing more than a dozen rural California sheriffs. We don't have near

enough people. We just don't now. McClatchy interviewed officers and citizens and reviewed crime statistics for twenty five rural Californian counties. These places accounted for forty one percent of the state's land mass but just four percent of its population. McClatchy found that from two thousand eight to two thousands. Seventeen, the number of rural deputies in these areas dropped from seventeen hundred and fifty eight to sixteen hundred and ten.

This means roughly sixteen hundred men and women are responsible for maintaining order in nearly half of America's third largest state. Right now, the state of Jefferson is only in favor of seceding from California. They want to be the United States is fifty first state. But if you listen to how these people talk, the amount of anger they have for urban Californians, you might conclude that they could be convinced to take more extreme action. I found an l

A Times article about the state of Jefferson. The journalist who wrote it went to a meeting some of these people held, and he quoted the speech of a prominent State of Jefferson advocate, Mark Baird, a rancher in Siskiyou County. Mark told his fellow rural Californians, you're the ones being exterminated by a lack of liberty. Now that language, the word exterminated. That's how you prime people for violence. And there is enough truth behind his words to make them stick.

Rural Californians are just as poor as rural Texans, but they're also burden by California's much higher taxes. A gas tax makes sense in l a in fact, it's necessary to keep the air breathable. But if you live in Shasta County and you need a big truck to do the kind of work people do out in the sticks, and you've got to drive eighty miles a day paying California gas prices well twelve extra since per gallon, is a real hardship. And by the way, these people love

Donald Trump. The president currently enjoys a s approval rating in rural America. If Trump is voted out or impeached, it would not take much to get millions of people to believe this was part of some deep state conspiracy to steal liberty and also guns. That exact fear is literally what caused the birth of the American militia movement back in the late nineteen eighties. Now at the time they called it the New World Order, but the basic idea is that a socialist government was coming to take

their guns. That's why all these militias started. People like Timothy McVeigh have killed over this stuff before So if rural America decides to revolt, what would that look like. How could four percent of a state effectively fight back against the night the six percent who live in cities. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Golden State to the rest of America, not because of Silicon

Valley or Hollywood, but because California feeds this country. It leads the state in cash receipts for crops forty seven billion dollars a year and much more. At this point. The nearest state behind it, Iowa, is only twenty seven billion in receipts. Texas only generates twenty three and a half billion. California's cash receipts for agriculture were more than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona,

and New Mexico combined. The state leads the nation in sixty six crucial crops and grows more than nine of the nation's almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, raisins, kiwi's olives, peaches, pistachios, prunes, pomegranates,

sweet rice, and walnuts. The bulk of California's food, including nearly all its beef, comes from the densely farmed Central Valley, but seven many five percent of California's water comes from the watersheds north of Sacramento, which means the so called state of Jefferson, were it to organize itself and revolt, could cut off access to the water that makes California's agriculture possible. Eight percent of California's water demand is in the southern two thirds of the state. Right now, it

still seems like a long shot. But in the wake of a massive, sweeping gun band and remember most economists say we're right around the corner from another massive economic crash. I brought up the Occupy movement last episode two and how a similar movement might cause a right wing crackdown that sparks the Civil War. I can see that same sort of activist movement providing an opportunity for a far

right rural insurgent movement. After all, Occupy rose up itself after the election of a Democratic president in an economic collapse. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Beto O'Rourke, three of the most prominent potential Democratic candidates, are all very unpopular among the far left. So imagine this assault weapons band is enacted while the economy is in the shitter, and cities across the US are convulsed with protests and of patients.

Even if these occupations and protests avoid the rioting I theorized about last episode, it would still take a massive toll on law enforcement, and that would look a lot like opportunity to rural separatists who are sick and tired of city folk telling them what to do. All the water that grows California's crops is pumped south. It doesn't just slide down there naturally. Pumps can be blown up. The crops grown in the Central Valley are all transported

by trucks traveling on highways. Few I e d s could cripple transit for days, and it just so happens that rural America is a wash in and ingredient you would need to make a really great I E D. Tanna write is a bipartite explosive compound. It is safe to handle, not explosive until mixed, and even then only explosive when used with a detonator or shot with a rifle. But tanna wite can be converted into something much more dangerous with ease David Cocolin, the counterinsurgency expert in former

State Department strategists, told me this. I am astounded. You can buy Tanna Write online. Tanna Write is basically amin. All World War two bombs were filled with this stuff that is essentially the same thing set up by impact or a small T and T charge. I see no legitimate purpose to tanner wite. If you took the ammonium nitrate compound, you would then have a substance called ANFO,

the classic ira a explosive. Now, Kilcolan told me that anyone in a farming community has access to the chemicals you would need to turn tanner wite into anto and that quote it's very safe to use and transport as an insurgent. So for full disclosure, I myself have used Tanna Write dozens of times over the years and I love it. Normally, you only set up like a half pound charge and you shoot it with a rifle from

a distance and it blows up and it's fun. I can remember one time my friends and I set a four pound charge one time, and only one time, because it left a fucking crater and rained dirt down on our heads from two hundred feet away. A lot of Americans owned tanner Write, not just in California. When I lived in Texas, I had twenty pounds at a time delivered to my door. Tanna Wite gets its name from

its inventor, a guy named David Tanner. Mr. Tanner lives in Oregon, and that's where most tanner Wite is made. Residents of the so called state of Jefferson would only have to drive a couple hours to buy it straight from the source. So say a rural insurgency starts, and say this insurgency strikes at southern California's water supply, maybe going after the pumps and the Taha Choppi mountains that

carry it south. Or maybe they focus on bombing highways, shutting down transit on the roads of America's most populous state. A few hundred committed insurgents with a good plan and decent organization could do a tremendous amount of damage this way. Law enforcement, already wildly undermanned in rural California, would need to bring in help from the cities, and if those cities are convulsed with big gas occupy style protests, well, at some point the government would have to deploy troops

to secure the nation's food supply. This would be a terrifying precedent for a number of reasons. For one thing, most U S soldiers come from rural areas, and California is one of the major recruiting grounds for the United States military. The d o D would have to take great care to ensure soldiers weren't being sent to pacify unrest being generated by their own friends and family members.

That might lead to the same sort of situation we see in Afghanistan, constant insider attacks and desertions, where soldiers take their experience and their weapons and melt into the deep woods with their comrades. Their new comrades, this rural insurgency would not stay confined to California very long. Terrorist

tactics have a nasty tendency to spread virally. A series of truck bombings and rural northern California could lead rather quickly to similar attacks all around the nation, not just bombings, but hijackings. In many cases, these thefts might rely on truck drivers themselves, allowing loads to be hoisted in exchange for a cut of the money. Black market sales of food would provide more funding for the insurgency, even as

food prices started to rise in the cities. Perhaps the state and the federal government could get its shipped together quickly enough to restore the flow of water to southern California in a timely manner. Even so, a month or two, even a few weeks without sufficient water would be crippling to those farmers in their crops. Even a short lived and very localized insurgency would cause a massive spike in food prices. Now, food prices are traditionally the single biggest

predictor of civil conflict. Twitter and Facebook get a lot of credit for the Arabs bring of two thousand eleven, but that series of revolutions, uprisings, and civil wars was sparked in large part by the price of grain. I'd like to read a couple of quotes from a wonderful

Guardian article titled use your loaf. While food prices were crucial to the Arab spring, when grain prices spiked in two thousand seven to two thousand and eight, Egypt's bread prices rose thirty seven percent, with unemployment rising as well. More people depended on subsidized bread, but the government did not make any more available. Egypt's annual food price inflation continued and had had eighteen point nine percent before the

fall of President Mubarak. The first protests of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in December two thousand and ten were quickly dismissed as another bout of bread riots, but of course those protests led to the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator. This is not just a Middle Eastern thing. Food prices are the number one predictor of unrest worldwide. If rural America decided to go to war, they have a number of very convenient choke points they could use to attack

their urban enemies. Many of these insurgents would consider it revenge for decades of mockery, neglect, and environmental policies that burdened them far more than is fair. These resentments exist right now. All it would take is a few hundred people in a geographically discrete part of the country like

northern California to turn this anger into action. So it should at this point be easy to imagine rising food prices in the midst of a recession escalating the number and violence of these protests that we were already seeing in cities across the nation. Desperation causes the government to approve more and more violent tactics to deal with the insurgents, which inspires more rural anger and probably causes more attacks.

We've watched this happen before in numerous countries. The bombing of trucks and highways to cut off food is a tactic that could work in almost every part of the United States. Only four percent of the food consumed by Americans is locally produced. More than seventy percent of the food that gets to our cities does so via trucks. We are incredibly vulnerable to attacks on our highways, and this country is filled with people who have the means

and motivation to apply this sort of violence. In November eighteen, over the space of about a week, two major busts by US law enforcement officers led to the arrests of more than eighty Neo Nazis and white supremacists. They are members of gangs with names like the Unforgiven and the Aryan Brotherhood. Thirty nine of the arrested were members of a Neo Nazi gang from rural Florida. These Nazis were found with meth fentanyl more than a hundred firearms, several

pipe bombs, and one rocket launcher. In a more violent and less settled America, those men and women could have formed the nexus of a deadly regional insurgency. And trust me, there are thousands of people like them all around the country who have not yet been busted hell. That same week, police in Green Bay, Wisconsin, responding to a domestic disturbance call, found a man with swastika tattoos and an underground bomb laboratory.

When I start talking about the state of Jefferson turning into a violent insurgency, when I talk about rednecks bombing water pump stations and hijacking trucks, it probably sounds far fetched. But the kind of people who want that future, who are just itching for the chance to go Taliban on all of our asses, those people exist right now. They aren't the majority of rural America or of conservatives, but

they don't need to be. A few thousand of violent extremists spread out across a few dozen states could do damage wildly out of proportion to their numbers. We don't. We don't. Right I find myself drawn back regularly to the notes I took in my interview with David Kilcullen, one of the world's great counterinsurgency experts. We were talking about the best way to cripple this country and he said this quote. You don't try to generate a mass movement, You don't try to get the state to crack down

on you. Instead, you try to generate a sectarian civil war so intense that it makes the society ungovernable. And that's the goal for any true revolutionary movement, right or left, make America ungovernable. If you've been paying attention to your a Nazi news, you may have heard about the terrorist group Adam Woffen. With five deaths and counting to their name, they have the highest body count of any neo Nazi

organization of the post two thousand sixteen era. While the group has been hobbled recently by some inside drama over Satan Them, they have active members in several US states as well as Germany. These cells are usually three to four members, with no communication between individual groups here, said the German magazine Der Spiegel described them. Members are heavily armed and prepared to make use of their weapons. Indeed, they are getting ready for what they see as the

coming race war and so called hate camps. Weapons training is conducted by members of the U. S Military, who are also among the group's members. According to one former member of the Adam Waffen Division, newcomers must submit to water boarding in addition to other such trials. Now pro Publica, working with the Fantastic Conflict, journalist Jake Hanrahan interviewed a former member of Adam Waffen. I'm going to play a

clip from that here. A lot of things that they talk about other members don't know about, of course, to keep us, keep everyone from falling down, as it's talked about in Siege, hit and runs. I got here and there, stop let everyone panic. There's been no point to march around the streets like a weak fucking pussy with white polos and khakis and tiki torches streaming White Lives Matter.

I don't care about politicians, don't care about politics, just wanting everyone just stopped being slaves for the system that we're living in, living under. Her When he mentioned siege, that's a reference to a white supremacist newsletter and book authored by a guy named James Mason. Mr Mason is a founding father of American Nazism and the guy who coined the term leaderless resistance. He and his comrades have been urging exactly the kind of war I've outlined here

for more than forty years. I write this a few months after the birth of yet another new white supremacist terror group in the United States. These people called themselves the Base. Their name is literally the English translation of Al Qaeda, who they considered to be an inspiration. They are mostly based in the Pacific Northwest. They too, focus on weapons training and small group preparation in order to

carry out insurgeant attacks against the U. S government. That former Adam Woffin Gay interviewed by ProPublica, mentioned wanting to destroy the system. He was expressing a desire to do exactly what David Cocolin was talking about, render the country ungovernable. These people, the neo Nazis and militiamen and white supremacists, they all know exactly what they plan to do if

civil conflict erupts across the country. What will you do? Statistically, You'll probably be in a city watching food prices rise and seeing protest after protest convulse your downtown. There will be runs on grocery stores, maybe even mass looting a food If things get bad enough outside of the city, roads will be closed, checkpoints with soldiers and heavily armed cops will start to appear on the interstate. The Great American Highway System will become militarized as the state scrambles

to pin down the insurgency. If you do live out in the country or in a particularly conservative suburb, you will have the additional complexity of needing to live with insurgents. The first few months of this will be particularly difficult. It takes time to deploy the National Guard of the Army. Millions of rural Americans might spend weeks or months without any realistic access to law enforcement or emergency services. Imagine a knock at the door one night, an armed insurgent

asking for food or shelter. What do you do? It might be weeks before the police come back or the army arrives, and even when they do, they won't be at every house every day. They may not even be able to hold onto the area. So maybe you find yourself aiding and abetting these revolutionaries, even if you consider them terrorists. For a lot of people, that will feel

like the safest decision. So far on this podcast, I focused on just how the civil war might break out, and past a certain point, it doesn't really matter whether the fighting starts from a left wing or a right wing movement. Just as a rural secessionist movement would take unrest in the cities as an opportunity, radical leftists would find an ungovernable America to have just as much potential for their ideals. Most of you listening probably wouldn't pick

a side right away. It wouldn't even look like there were sides for a while. There'd be Protestant cities, of course, activists with lists of the hands, maybe demands you agree with, maybe not. And there'd be insurgents terrorists out in the country with their own demands, strangling your city and the rest of urban America. As the government failed to restore order and normalcy, a lot of people would find themselves seriously questioning the government's legitimacy, probably for the first time.

We've never really had cause to do that on a mass level in modern America. Whatever else has happened, the state has always managed to keep the highways open the food flowing. When that's no longer the case. A lot more people will find themselves picking sides. For some of us that will mean backing a protest movement demanding radical change. For others, it will mean supporting the government, maybe because

we just want the unrest to be over. And for a growing number of Americans, it will mean deciding they don't want to be Americans anymore. The government would not call it a civil war, not right away, but we'd know now. So far, we've just talked about how the fighting would start, and for my money, I think the most likely beginning would involve a mix of the things we've talked about in both of these first two episodes.

City centers occupied by activists with demands fighting the police in National Guard, while rural insurgents carry out their own attacks and make their own demands. Every attack from every side accelerates the whole process and pushes the whole country closer to chaos. Now, the state would not take all of this sitting down, of course. There would be increasingly vigorous attempts to right the ship and to stop the

cycle of violence. Federal and state governments would throw absolutely everything they had at curbing the unrest and restoring order. On the next episode, if it could Happen Here. I'll walk you through just what that would look like and why the system's efforts would be almost certainly doomed to fail. Genia. We watched it from our phones, change our Facebook pictures, congratulating ourselves, made nervous jokes and whispers. But the sexts

was sinning now and essays always listening. Wonder of this ostrum has been dead to them low now we're all it's just none. The one they've done. You can give an inch and they'll just take your own. But we don't find. We don't, right, even with Rosa Sada door. No, we don't find. We don't right even 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 this show online at it could Happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always, is from four Fists