October 8, 2025 • 18 mins
Garrison talks about how politicians and media figures weaponize public acts of violence though the lens of partisan political ideology.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/us/michigan-church-attack.html
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1972323666705973589?s=61
https://bsky.app/profile/aric.bsky.social/post/3lxmr4jq3qs2d
https://x.com/jamesstout/status/1972669516384539066
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-ice-shooters-motive
https://x.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/1975581768876237115
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/north-carolina-bar-shooting/
https://time.com/7323442/south-carolina-judge-diane-goodstein-house-fire-trump-political-violence/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On
the morning of Sunday, September twenty eighth, a forty year
old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc,
Michigan church. The man started shooting people inside and then
set the church on fire, burning the building down. Four
churchgoers died, eight others were injured but have survived, and
(00:28):
police killed the shooter on the scene. The President, the
Vice President, and the rest of the right were quick
to call this yet quote another targeted attack on Christians
in the United States, to quote Trump on truth Social
White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt went on Fox and
Friends the day after the shooting and said this.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
It's unfathomable and as the President rightfully put in his
true social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted
attacked on Christians.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
As the church was still burning, right wing podcaster Betty Johnson,
who recently rode with Ice in Chicago, posted on x
the Everything app quote church is on fire, Christianity is
under attack. Pray unquote what Betty Johnson neglected to mention
this was a Mormon church, and pretty soon it became
(01:21):
clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist ANTIFA, but
a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormon's were quote unquote
the anti christ. According to Burton City council candidate Chris Johns,
who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days
prior while canvassing, one of the shooter's friends told The
New York Times that Shoulder believed that the Mormons quote
(01:43):
are going to take over the world unquote. This guy
obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormon's stemming from a
breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago. After
the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became
more clear, the Trump badmin quite quickly stopped talking about
this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity.
(02:10):
But this attack was more deadly than any recent school
shooting or any instance of targeted violence, which the administration
has been framed as political violence happening this year. After
the shooter was identified, Rather than talk about his apparent motive,
people online argued about his political orientation. A picture spread
(02:33):
online of him wearing a Trump twenty twenty camo shirt
that read make Liberals Cry Again. The right wing outlet
The Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting
a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic
was photoshopped, with The Daily Caller sharing a version of
(02:53):
the shirt that they alleged to be the original unedited
photo without the Trump graphic. Except that version without the
Trump graphic is in fact the doctored photo. The Trump
one is the authentic version. Right Wing users on x
the Everything app spread a list of political donations to
(03:14):
progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well
as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio
that read politically Active Democratic Socialist. Except that account and
those donations were from a completely different person, just with
a similar name. Now, just because it's pretty clear that
this shooter supported Trump doesn't mean that we should frame
(03:36):
this as partisan political violence. This was a classic American shooting.
A Marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back
from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative
experiences with the Mormon church, moved to Michigan, but continued
to have very strong anti Mormon sentiments, which he held
(03:57):
until he acted on those sentiments, leading to his death
and the deaths of four other people and extremely tragic
yet extremely American sequence of events. But the conversation and
coverage surrounding this Mormon church shooting is such an open
display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to
(04:18):
care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies.
Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker went on Fox News
to discuss this shooting, where he laid blame on politicians
rhetoric calling people Nazis.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So, you know, this is a situation of you find
a manufactured grievance, if you will, and that a whole
lot of stimulus from from people either on the Internet
or even politicians. They irresponsible politicians. We all know who
they are. You know they're talking about Nazis and anarchists
and existential threats. You know, they need to crawl back
(04:56):
into their dark places. These people are out there. That
has to be taken into account when you start firing
off your mouth.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That simply has nothing to do with this specific attack.
But both politicians and the media have this obsession with
only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to
identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party, and then
weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to
(05:23):
frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the oppositional political project.
Following Charlie Kirks assassination and the media blitz around it,
fellow far right commentator Stephen Crowder has revived his long
dormant college debate series Change My Mind Now, with the
prompt they left is violent propagandists collapse political violence into
(05:49):
a simple binary, which is just a very limited way
in trying to actually understand public acts of violence, the
idea that things can only happen because because of ideologies,
not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions, or class This year,
there's been one other target attack that ties the Mormon
(06:11):
Church shooting for the highest fatalities in attacks this year,
and that was the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July,
where the gunmen attempted to shoot up the NFL offices,
motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school.
No clear ideological motivations here. Lots of shooters aren't typically
(06:42):
ideological in like the ordinary political sense. The only recent
shooter that could be accurately categorized as quote unquote leftist
is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy
staffers in May of twenty twenty five. Now are no circumstances.
Do you have to hand it to Bill Maherr. But
(07:04):
this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, just two days
after the Tri Trek assassination, demonstrates this point about how
media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of
violence through ideology, long before we have any actual clear
indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
There's a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely
to be either a white supremacist or radical Muslim. If
it is shooting of a Republican politician, it is very
likely to be a trans Antifa Marxistian.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
That is, we don't know. We don't know what this
kid is.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Wait, we do know this kid was of the left.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
We do know that.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
We do know what that this kid was of the
political left.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
That is, according to contemporarious reporting from The Guardian as
well as Tablet Magazine.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
Today, it's two days out. We don't know shit. But
here we don't know shit. They never do. The Internet
is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
It's not about the Internet. That's about the that's about
the The actual reporting by mainstream except the Guardian is
not right wing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Here's what I.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Here's what we heard. Here's what I was told so far,
And I'll tell you what was wrong. First I heard
he's a registered Republican not not true. Okay. Then he
was a donor de Trump not true. His father works
in the sheriff's office, not true. There was a picture
I'm wearing a pro Trump shirt not true. A member
of the Democratic Socialists of America not true. We don't
(08:23):
know what he is. Well, how are you so sure
he's of the left? Now I agree? When you right
on a bullet? What did he write on the bullet there's.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
A catch as fascist, which is also a gamer thing.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
Okay, But now I'm hearing he may have been part
of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right
wing enough.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Yes, I mean so that you're sure he's not that
I'm not sure that he's not there.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
You were sure? Hold on?
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Hold on, no, hold on, okay, because I meant you were.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just
because the target of violence is a political figure does
not mean that it's political violence. The attempted assassination of
Ronald Reagan is a key example of this, and for
the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a
(09:14):
personal motivation based on romantic attraction on a dog day afternoon,
over any larger partisan political motivation. It doesn't even make
sense to view the first attempted Trump assassination as political violence.
Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to
commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting,
(09:36):
he did more than sixty internet searches related to Biden,
Trump and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions.
Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to
fall into the right place at the right time. The
mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August, who shot
two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the
(09:57):
Right branded as a trans terrorist, originally planned to do
the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared
that trans girls attending the concert would be armed for
self defense. As I've previously reported on this show, this
shooting bared similarity to TCC or true crime community, not
(10:19):
as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of
usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters,
akin to neo columnbiners, who encourage each other online to
then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or
replicating those of previous school shootings or mass shootings. This
(10:41):
pseudo mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the
role of quote unquote the shooter can be its own
motivating force, beyond any culture war issues or ordinary partisan
politics that might get sprinkled on top as seasoning.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
On.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
On Wednesday, September twenty fourth, the twenty nine year old
open fire with a bolt action rifle targeting an ICE
Field office in Dallas, Texas. This attack claims the lives
of three immigrants who were detained by ICE in a
copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare
(11:21):
CEO assassination. This shooter allegedly wrote anti ICE on unfired
bullet casings. In the immediate wake of this attack, the
right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed
Democrat politicians for spreading anti ICE rhetoric. At a North
Carolina event, JD. Vance said quote, Here's what happens when
(11:43):
Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part of
an authoritarian government. When the left wing media lies about
what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting,
when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement,
what they are doing is encouraging crazy people to go
and commit violence. Here's a brief Fox News report.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
We have a problem America. We are living through a
scourge of left wing political violence that three weeks into
this month has made it bloody September today, another attack.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
On ice as is not uncommon with mass shooters. This
guy was a registered independent, and the shooter's brother told
NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics. I
find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other gen
Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions
from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or CNN. Journalist
(12:45):
Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter, who described
him as a libertarian leaning four Chan edge lord who
hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians. Friends believed
that the bulletin scriptions could have been written as a
joke intended to rile people up, they tol Klippenstein. The
(13:06):
shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted
away due to his continuous anti social edgelord behavior in
regular day to day interactions. Nancy Larson, the acting of
his attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the
shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE
operations as human trafficking. Larsen says the shooter did not
(13:30):
mention any government agency besides ICE, but left a note
for police reading quote good luck with the digital footprint.
This shooter killed himself after the attack. These public acts
of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for
self annihilation while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning
(13:52):
or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a
violent act. What causes someone to do this can be
a mix of many factors, including access to guns, individual motivations,
social alienation, self annihilation. In so far as there is
an overtly political element, it's often the result of a
(14:12):
political alienation. Usually, the type of person who commits a
bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy
that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat Republican binary,
with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across
the left right spectrum. Mass shootings which are accompanied by
(14:34):
express political motivations usually stem from anti Muslim or great
replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people in Western culture
will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants. But throughout the
(14:57):
next three years, under Trump's federal government and the right
wing anti woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture,
nihilistic self destructive acts against American society may take a
form which could be characterized as quote unquote left wing violence,
despite most of these shooters being far from your average
(15:19):
DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist. Considering the Mormon
church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the iced DTAE shooting, and
the Minneapolis Catholic School shooting in the Year of our
Brain Rot twenty twenty five, I think it's pretty clear
that the current US state apparatus does not need to
stage false flags. The state just tries to take advantage
(15:43):
of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives in
an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality. No crude fabrication
of physical reality is needed. They are more than happy
to simply pick and choose, and dignify and obscure various
events to fit their preferred version of reality. The night
(16:07):
before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq war
veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina, which did
not result in nearly as many national headlines. The shooter
targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people injuring six others.
The suspect rowed a boat up to the bar, fired
(16:28):
with an ar mounted with a scope and silencer, before
speeding off on water. Police have also deemed this a
targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues,
this event will be quickly forgotten. As I'm recording this episode,
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover
(16:51):
operations to infiltrate and uproot quote leftist terror cells in Texas.
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. There
can be no compromise with those who want us dead unquote.
This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven,
which targets quote unquote domestic terrorism indicators like anti Christianity,
(17:16):
anti capitalism, anti Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration, and
hostility towards traditional American values. All this partisan rhetoric on
targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian
crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition. Meanwhile, this
(17:36):
passed Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit
Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former
state senator, and their son. The judge was out of
the house at the time. Last month, the judge temporarily
blocked a voter suppression executive order signed by President Trump.
In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge
(17:58):
had received death threats. This has been it could happen here,
See you on the other side.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. On
the morning of Sunday, September twenty eighth, a forty year
old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc,
Michigan church. The man started shooting people inside and then
set the church on fire, burning the building down. Four
churchgoers died, eight others were injured but have survived, and
(00:28):
police killed the shooter on the scene. The President, the
Vice President, and the rest of the right were quick
to call this yet quote another targeted attack on Christians
in the United States, to quote Trump on truth Social
White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt went on Fox and
Friends the day after the shooting and said this.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
It's unfathomable and as the President rightfully put in his
true social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted
attacked on Christians.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
As the church was still burning, right wing podcaster Betty Johnson,
who recently rode with Ice in Chicago, posted on x
the Everything app quote church is on fire, Christianity is
under attack. Pray unquote what Betty Johnson neglected to mention
this was a Mormon church, and pretty soon it became
(01:21):
clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist ANTIFA, but
a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormon's were quote unquote
the anti christ. According to Burton City council candidate Chris Johns,
who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days
prior while canvassing, one of the shooter's friends told The
New York Times that Shoulder believed that the Mormons quote
(01:43):
are going to take over the world unquote. This guy
obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormon's stemming from a
breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago. After
the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became
more clear, the Trump badmin quite quickly stopped talking about
this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity.
(02:10):
But this attack was more deadly than any recent school
shooting or any instance of targeted violence, which the administration
has been framed as political violence happening this year. After
the shooter was identified, Rather than talk about his apparent motive,
people online argued about his political orientation. A picture spread
(02:33):
online of him wearing a Trump twenty twenty camo shirt
that read make Liberals Cry Again. The right wing outlet
The Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting
a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic
was photoshopped, with The Daily Caller sharing a version of
(02:53):
the shirt that they alleged to be the original unedited
photo without the Trump graphic. Except that version without the
Trump graphic is in fact the doctored photo. The Trump
one is the authentic version. Right Wing users on x
the Everything app spread a list of political donations to
(03:14):
progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well
as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio
that read politically Active Democratic Socialist. Except that account and
those donations were from a completely different person, just with
a similar name. Now, just because it's pretty clear that
this shooter supported Trump doesn't mean that we should frame
(03:36):
this as partisan political violence. This was a classic American shooting.
A Marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back
from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative
experiences with the Mormon church, moved to Michigan, but continued
to have very strong anti Mormon sentiments, which he held
(03:57):
until he acted on those sentiments, leading to his death
and the deaths of four other people and extremely tragic
yet extremely American sequence of events. But the conversation and
coverage surrounding this Mormon church shooting is such an open
display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to
(04:18):
care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies.
Former Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker went on Fox News
to discuss this shooting, where he laid blame on politicians
rhetoric calling people Nazis.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So, you know, this is a situation of you find
a manufactured grievance, if you will, and that a whole
lot of stimulus from from people either on the Internet
or even politicians. They irresponsible politicians. We all know who
they are. You know they're talking about Nazis and anarchists
and existential threats. You know, they need to crawl back
(04:56):
into their dark places. These people are out there. That
has to be taken into account when you start firing
off your mouth.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That simply has nothing to do with this specific attack.
But both politicians and the media have this obsession with
only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to
identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party, and then
weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to
(05:23):
frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the oppositional political project.
Following Charlie Kirks assassination and the media blitz around it,
fellow far right commentator Stephen Crowder has revived his long
dormant college debate series Change My Mind Now, with the
prompt they left is violent propagandists collapse political violence into
(05:49):
a simple binary, which is just a very limited way
in trying to actually understand public acts of violence, the
idea that things can only happen because because of ideologies,
not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions, or class This year,
there's been one other target attack that ties the Mormon
(06:11):
Church shooting for the highest fatalities in attacks this year,
and that was the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July,
where the gunmen attempted to shoot up the NFL offices,
motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school.
No clear ideological motivations here. Lots of shooters aren't typically
(06:42):
ideological in like the ordinary political sense. The only recent
shooter that could be accurately categorized as quote unquote leftist
is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy
staffers in May of twenty twenty five. Now are no circumstances.
Do you have to hand it to Bill Maherr. But
(07:04):
this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro, just two days
after the Tri Trek assassination, demonstrates this point about how
media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of
violence through ideology, long before we have any actual clear
indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
There's a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely
to be either a white supremacist or radical Muslim. If
it is shooting of a Republican politician, it is very
likely to be a trans Antifa Marxistian.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
That is, we don't know. We don't know what this
kid is.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Wait, we do know this kid was of the left.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
We do know that.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
We do know what that this kid was of the
political left.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
That is, according to contemporarious reporting from The Guardian as
well as Tablet Magazine.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
Today, it's two days out. We don't know shit. But
here we don't know shit. They never do. The Internet
is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
It's not about the Internet. That's about the that's about
the The actual reporting by mainstream except the Guardian is
not right wing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Here's what I.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Here's what we heard. Here's what I was told so far,
And I'll tell you what was wrong. First I heard
he's a registered Republican not not true. Okay. Then he
was a donor de Trump not true. His father works
in the sheriff's office, not true. There was a picture
I'm wearing a pro Trump shirt not true. A member
of the Democratic Socialists of America not true. We don't
(08:23):
know what he is. Well, how are you so sure
he's of the left? Now I agree? When you right
on a bullet? What did he write on the bullet there's.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
A catch as fascist, which is also a gamer thing.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
Okay, But now I'm hearing he may have been part
of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right
wing enough.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
Yes, I mean so that you're sure he's not that
I'm not sure that he's not there.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
You were sure? Hold on?
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Hold on, no, hold on, okay, because I meant you were.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just
because the target of violence is a political figure does
not mean that it's political violence. The attempted assassination of
Ronald Reagan is a key example of this, and for
the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a
(09:14):
personal motivation based on romantic attraction on a dog day afternoon,
over any larger partisan political motivation. It doesn't even make
sense to view the first attempted Trump assassination as political violence.
Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to
commit a shooting at. In the month prior to the shooting,
(09:36):
he did more than sixty internet searches related to Biden,
Trump and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions.
Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to
fall into the right place at the right time. The
mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August, who shot
two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the
(09:57):
Right branded as a trans terrorist, originally planned to do
the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared
that trans girls attending the concert would be armed for
self defense. As I've previously reported on this show, this
shooting bared similarity to TCC or true crime community, not
(10:19):
as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of
usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters,
akin to neo columnbiners, who encourage each other online to
then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or
replicating those of previous school shootings or mass shootings. This
(10:41):
pseudo mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the
role of quote unquote the shooter can be its own
motivating force, beyond any culture war issues or ordinary partisan
politics that might get sprinkled on top as seasoning.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
On.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
On Wednesday, September twenty fourth, the twenty nine year old
open fire with a bolt action rifle targeting an ICE
Field office in Dallas, Texas. This attack claims the lives
of three immigrants who were detained by ICE in a
copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare
(11:21):
CEO assassination. This shooter allegedly wrote anti ICE on unfired
bullet casings. In the immediate wake of this attack, the
right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed
Democrat politicians for spreading anti ICE rhetoric. At a North
Carolina event, JD. Vance said quote, Here's what happens when
(11:43):
Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part of
an authoritarian government. When the left wing media lies about
what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting,
when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement,
what they are doing is encouraging crazy people to go
and commit violence. Here's a brief Fox News report.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
We have a problem America. We are living through a
scourge of left wing political violence that three weeks into
this month has made it bloody September today, another attack.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
On ice as is not uncommon with mass shooters. This
guy was a registered independent, and the shooter's brother told
NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics. I
find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other gen
Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions
from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or CNN. Journalist
(12:45):
Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter, who described
him as a libertarian leaning four Chan edge lord who
hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians. Friends believed
that the bulletin scriptions could have been written as a
joke intended to rile people up, they tol Klippenstein. The
(13:06):
shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted
away due to his continuous anti social edgelord behavior in
regular day to day interactions. Nancy Larson, the acting of
his attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the
shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE
operations as human trafficking. Larsen says the shooter did not
(13:30):
mention any government agency besides ICE, but left a note
for police reading quote good luck with the digital footprint.
This shooter killed himself after the attack. These public acts
of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for
self annihilation while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning
(13:52):
or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a
violent act. What causes someone to do this can be
a mix of many factors, including access to guns, individual motivations,
social alienation, self annihilation. In so far as there is
an overtly political element, it's often the result of a
(14:12):
political alienation. Usually, the type of person who commits a
bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy
that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat Republican binary,
with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across
the left right spectrum. Mass shootings which are accompanied by
(14:34):
express political motivations usually stem from anti Muslim or great
replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people in Western culture
will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants. But throughout the
(14:57):
next three years, under Trump's federal government and the right
wing anti woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture,
nihilistic self destructive acts against American society may take a
form which could be characterized as quote unquote left wing violence,
despite most of these shooters being far from your average
(15:19):
DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist. Considering the Mormon
church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the iced DTAE shooting, and
the Minneapolis Catholic School shooting in the Year of our
Brain Rot twenty twenty five, I think it's pretty clear
that the current US state apparatus does not need to
stage false flags. The state just tries to take advantage
(15:43):
of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives in
an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality. No crude fabrication
of physical reality is needed. They are more than happy
to simply pick and choose, and dignify and obscure various
events to fit their preferred version of reality. The night
(16:07):
before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq war
veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina, which did
not result in nearly as many national headlines. The shooter
targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people injuring six others.
The suspect rowed a boat up to the bar, fired
(16:28):
with an ar mounted with a scope and silencer, before
speeding off on water. Police have also deemed this a
targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues,
this event will be quickly forgotten. As I'm recording this episode,
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover
(16:51):
operations to infiltrate and uproot quote leftist terror cells in Texas.
Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. There
can be no compromise with those who want us dead unquote.
This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven,
which targets quote unquote domestic terrorism indicators like anti Christianity,
(17:16):
anti capitalism, anti Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration, and
hostility towards traditional American values. All this partisan rhetoric on
targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian
crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition. Meanwhile, this
(17:36):
passed Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit
Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former
state senator, and their son. The judge was out of
the house at the time. Last month, the judge temporarily
blocked a voter suppression executive order signed by President Trump.
In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge
(17:58):
had received death threats. This has been it could happen here,
See you on the other side.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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