How To Murder A City

For years the United States military has practiced saturation bombing on its enemies: today we talk about what would happen if those enemies were American cities.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M I want to start this episode with a warning.
What we're going to talk about in the next two
episodes actually is is incredibly dark and unspeakably violent. We
will be discussing the possibility of the United States descending
into the kind of apocalyptic, city annihilating violence that people
in Syria know all too well, even in the event

(00:21):
of a second American Civil War. I do not find
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.

(00:41):
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

(01:02):
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.

(01:25):
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,

(01:48):
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,

(02:08):
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

(02:29):
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

(02:52):
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

(03:16):
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

(03:37):
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

(03:59):
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

(04:20):
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

(04:42):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:23):
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

(05:46):
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

(06:09):
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

(06:29):
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

(06:51):
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

(07:12):
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

(07:33):
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

(07:54):
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

(08:14):
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

(08:35):
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

(08:58):
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

(09:21):
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

(09:44):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:50):
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,

(11:14):
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

(11:38):
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

(12:00):
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

(12:21):
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

(12:44):
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

(13:05):
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

(13:27):
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,

(13:50):
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,

(14:19):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:25):
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,

(15:46):
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

(16:07):
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

(16:29):
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,

(16:50):
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,

(17:12):
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.

(17:33):
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

(17:54):
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

(18:15):
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

(18:36):
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,

(18:58):
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

(19:20):
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

(19:42):
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,

(20:03):
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

(20:25):
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

(20:46):
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

(21:08):
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.

(21:31):
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

(21:52):
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

(22:13):
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

(22:35):
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

(22:58):
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

(23:22):
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

(23:42):
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,

(24:04):
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

(24:27):
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

(24:48):
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

(25:10):
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

(25:31):
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

(25:53):
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.

(26:17):
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,

(26:40):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:23):
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

(27:46):
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

(28:06):
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

(28:28):
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?

(28:48):
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.

(29:09):
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

(29:29):
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

(29:50):
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

(30:11):
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

(30:33):
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

(30:54):
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

(31:16):
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

(31:50):
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