The Revenge of Rural America

Rural America is fed up and falling apart: what happens if they fight back?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
We don't usually think of the American right wing as
protesters or activists. Conservatives tend to be older, for one thing,
and they also tend to be on the side of
state power, the side of law and order. Liberals and
leftists are more likely to agitate for major changes in
the status quo. But right wing activism isn't unheard of either,
and recent experience has made it clear that when the
right stands up, they can make a serious impact. The

(00:26):
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,

(00:49):
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,

(01:12):
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.

(01:35):
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

(01:57):
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

(02:17):
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.

(02:41):
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

(03:02):
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

(03:23):
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

(03:44):
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

(04:06):
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,

(04:28):
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

(04:51):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:33):
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

(05:56):
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.

(06:17):
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

(06:39):
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

(06:59):
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

(07:19):
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

(07:41):
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

(08:03):
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

(08:26):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:31):
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

(09:52):
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

(10:13):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:55):
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

(11:16):
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

(11:37):
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

(11:58):
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

(12:21):
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

(12:43):
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

(13:03):
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

(13:24):
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

(13:47):
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

(14:07):
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

(14:28):
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

(14:49):
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

(15:12):
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

(15:34):
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

(15:54):
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

(16:14):
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

(16:37):
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

(16:59):
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

(17:19):
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

(17:41):
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.

(18:01):
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

(18:23):
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

(18:44):
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

(19:05):
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,

(19:37):
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

(19:58):
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.

(20:20):
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

(20:43):
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

(21:05):
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,

(21:28):
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

(21:50):
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.

(22:10):
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

(22:30):
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.

(22:51):
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.

(23:14):
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

(23:34):
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.

(23:55):
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

(24:17):
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

(24:39):
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.

(25:02):
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

(25:24):
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,

(25:52):
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

(26:16):
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

(26:37):
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.

(27:01):
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.

(27:21):
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

(27:42):
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

(28:02):
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

(28:23):
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

(28:43):
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

(29:05):
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

(29:28):
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

(29:50):
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

(30:13):
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

(30:36):
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

(30:59):
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.

(31:19):
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.

(31:39):
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

(32:00):
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,

(32:22):
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

(32:44):
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

(33:06):
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,

(33:27):
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

(33:49):
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

(34:17):
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,

(34:40):
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

(35:02):
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

(35:24):
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

(35:44):
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

(36:05):
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,

(36:27):
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

(36:50):
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

(37:10):
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

(37:32):
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.

(37:56):
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

(38:16):
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

(38:38):
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,

(38:58):
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

(39:19):
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

(39:40):
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.

(40:00):
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

(40:22):
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.

(40:42):
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

(41:05):
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

(41:30):
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