Introducing: It Could Happen Here Daily

Collapse is all around us. Find out what's coming next, and what you can do to build a new world from the ashes of the old, every day on this show.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
By the time the heat waves subsided, at least a
thousand people were dead. Those are the official numbers, at
least the numbers no one trusts. The city government and
the police denied breaking up homeless encampments during the disaster
and only acknowledged a handful of outdoor exposure deaths. On Twitter,
someone shares a video of what might be a mass grave.
You're not sure if it's real, and you don't really

(00:23):
have time to find out. After the grid overloads, it
takes weeks for the power situation to normalize. Bottled water,
abundant at the start of the disaster becomes scarce. In
conversations with friends and snippets of time online, you learn
that much of the Midwest has been subject to titanic
mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit the Southeast, driving up demand

(00:43):
for disaster supplies even further and putting more stress on
interstate commerce. Work is basically impossible for days. You're not
even really sure if your job is going to exist
much longer anyway. Outside of a few high end shopping districts,
life just hasn't gone back to normal for most people,
so you've settled into a new normal using your car,

(01:04):
and you're now copious free time to ferry supplies to
and from a handful of collection points in new encampments.
You felt bad for days after fleeing when the cops
broke up the first camp. Aaron, your community organizer friend,
told you not to worry about it. Not everyone's ready
to go face to face with riot cops. Tom the
former marine, said the same thing, but then offered to

(01:25):
give you some self defense training if you wanted it.
He and a couple of other combat vets had started
organizing regular self defense sessions in one of the camps,
based out of an old apartment complex abandoned when it's
holding company went bankrupt. For a couple of weeks, you
lose yourself in the work. Gradually you realize that the
network of encampments you and your new friends have been
working to support have become something more than just a

(01:47):
stop gap. For one thing, The number of folks without
housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress on
the power of bread and the questionable ways some people
dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires,
which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The
local economy is in free fall too, you're not the
only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got

(02:07):
enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that
you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility
doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It
helps that you're spending half your time in one camp
or another. Anyway, you decide your best bet at any
kind of comfort in the future is to make sure
life in the camps is as comfortable for everyone as possible.
To that end, you and Tom scrounge up a crew

(02:29):
and spend days flitting in and out of abandoned buildings,
scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of you know
much about how to use that ship, but a collective
of electricians and engineers put together a list of the
parts they needed and how to safely get them. By
the time summer comes to an end, almost three thousand
people are living in camps with regular power and cooling stations.

(02:50):
Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar stills to
filter waste water and deal with the drinking water shortage
that's still endemic across the southern half of the country.
Life is by almost any measure harder than it was
a year ago. But the stories of wildfires in the
Northwest and massive police crackdowns across the Great Lakes region
make it clear that you're not struggling alone. You feel

(03:12):
lucky that it's been weak since you've so much as
seen a police patrol. There's been a lot more property
crime in the parts of town where the economy is
still functioning somewhat close to normal. You've heard shootout several nights,
and you've grown increasingly glad to be off on the
margins with a good community of people who take care
of each other and don't have much worth stealing. And
then in late September, things take a turn. Some right

(03:35):
wing live streamer visited the largest of the three camps,
now almost fifteen hundred strong. He stitched together in narrative
blaming a series of downtown arson's and burglaries on organized
Antifa extremists in their war camp. One of Tom's friends,
who's been doing armed security at night, shows you a
handful of posts from far right extremists threatening to raid

(03:56):
the camp. You hear rumors the police might finally be
planning a crack down. Two ever fired a gun tom asks.
You shake your head no and he nods, well, that's
probably about time you learn. I'm Robert Evans and this
has been an excerpt from the continuation of my podcast
It Could Happen Here, which is now a daily series.

(04:17):
Listen to It Could Happen Here daily, starting on August
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