The Second American Civil War

Are you worried about the possibility of The Second American Civil War? In Episode 1 of, 'It Could Happen Here,' Robert explains why 2016 was the first time he started to seriously worry about it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You wake up before your alarm. No sunlight peaks through
your window. It's far too early for that. You're confused
for just a moment, and then you hear another explosion.
It echoes in the night, rattling the walls in the
window of your apartment. This is not the first bomb
you've heard, and it sounds far enough away that you
know the danger isn't a minute. That surprises you a
little bit, the fact that you recognized it's not close.

(00:24):
You realize you've now heard enough explosions to have a
pretty good ear for them, and when they're close enough
to worry about. It's weird how quickly life in a
war zone becomes just life. You get up, there's no
sense trying to get back to sleep. As you stumble
over to the kitchen to grind some coffee, you hear
the crack of rifle fire. It's distant, too far enough
away that it sounds almost like firecrackers, but you know

(00:45):
it's not. You fill the grinder, put on the top,
and press down. Nothing happens. You realize, belatedly in your
sleep fogged brain that the powers out again. You wonder
which of the dozen different rebel and insurgents groups in
your state might be responsible. You don't even bother to
get at your phone and check the news. It doesn't
really matter, and you've got shipped to do. It's still
dark outside, and since you're already up, you might as

(01:07):
well take advantage of the situation and beat the crowd
to the grocery store. They've been short on everything lately,
thanks to separatists in northern California. Most nuts are basically unavailable.
Rebel insurgents have been bombing highways in West Texas, so
beef is way up. You don't tend to buy much
meat these days anyway, though. All the blackouts make your
fridge unreliable, and you can't afford to spend money on
stuff that goes bad. You throw on a light jacket

(01:29):
and roll downstairs. Two or three years ago, before all
this started, you'd have popped in your earbuds and put
on some music to accompany the walk. Today, you figure
it'd be best to have your wits about you. You're
lucky you live so close to the grocery store. There's
a police checkpoint on the way, and the vehicle line
is always a nightmare this time up day. As you
close and lock your door behind you. You try to

(01:49):
ignore the pop and chatter of not so distant gunfire.
You have friends on the separatist side of town. You
have a cousin up in the hills. You're not sure
what he's doing there exactly, but it's probably part of
why AIGs have gotten so expensive lately. They all have
reasons for what they're doing, and you don't believe the
government lying about any of the sides anymore. But you're
also not dumb enough to want to stand up and fight.
The official death toll is still just a few thousand,

(02:11):
but international monitors claim it must be much higher. There
are days when you do feel like doing something, maybe
even joining your friends, but most days, like today, you've
got shipped to do. It's twenty four, an election year.
Every candidate is doing their level best to not call
this what it is, a civil war. You hear that
phrase out on the street, though, more and more every day.

(02:32):
You reach a crosswalk and start to step across on
the left. Your eyes are drawn to the massive bulk
of a police bear cat as it trundles across the
street parallel to you. A man sits up top in
the couple up his hands on a machine gun that
for now has its nose pointed up in the air.
He stares at you, and you try not to stare back.
As you hurry along with the supermarket. You ask yourself
the question you've asked almost every day for the last

(02:54):
three years. How did it get this bad? Did that
seem far fetched? You outlandish? If so, let me try
to show you why the preceding passage might well be
reality for millions of Americans startlingly soon if something isn't done.
The second American Civil War doesn't sound like a crazy,
distant possibility to me, and it hasn't for a while.

(03:18):
I'm Robert Evans, and it's my job to help you
see what I see. Two thousand sixteen was the first
year I started seriously considering the possibility of a second
American Civil War. It was the year I reported on
the major protests surrounding the most contentious election in modern
American history. I was there at the r n C
in the d n C, and at both I saw

(03:39):
tremendous hatred on display. Leftist protesters hated Hillary Clinton and
mainstream Democrats conspicuously armed. Right wing protesters hated the leftists.
Every one hated the police, and the police certainly seemed
to hate the protesters. I also traveled to a Rack
in two thousand sixteen to report on the siege of Mosel,
but nothing I saw there, nothing I saw anywhere that year,

(04:00):
scared me more than watching Alex Jones speak on the
first day of the r n C. A huge crowd
had gathered to see him. Many of them were armed,
dozens of young men wearing body armor and packing a
R fifteens patrolled in the Ohio summer heat. The speech
was characteristically for Jones, angry, filled with shouted declarations of hatred.
That did not surprise me. What surprised me was the

(04:22):
crowd's reaction to how he labeled the Democratic Party. These
are not liberal. You can hear the reckless hate in
the audio, the sheer rage these people had. Seeing dozens
and dozens of armed Americans calling their political opponents scum

(04:42):
outdoors and broad daylight at a major party political convention. Now,
in two thousand nineteen, it's the kind of thing that
seems normal, but at the time it was new and frightening.
I was just a few feet away when adult swims
Eric Andre showed up to troll Jones. I know a
lot of people watched that moment on TV or on YouTube.
What you may not have seen was how close the

(05:02):
crowd looked to tearing Andrea apart. Some of those people
wanted to fucking kill him. Most of that armed, angry
crowd was polite enough to me, lily white bearded Southerner
that I am, but several of them made it clear
that they believed a fight was coming. We have to
take back our country no matter what. Was the general
sentiment coming from the mouth of someone dressed like they

(05:23):
just stepped out of downtown Fellujiah, It's sent a chill
down my spine. By the time September rolled around, I
had started seriously thinking about the possibility of a second
American Civil War. I decided to write an article about
it for Cracked, where I worked as an editor. I
didn't want it to just be my speculation, so I
reached out to a number of experts, ex federal agents
and military officers and civil war scholars. One of these

(05:45):
experts was David Kilcolin, former chief strategist for the U. S.
State Department and a major architect of the surge in Iraq.
He's one of the world's leading counter insurgency experts. When
I reached out to these people, I had very little
faith that any of them would respond to me. My
topic seemed too far fetched and ridiculous, and these were
all serious people. I didn't think they'd waste their time

(06:05):
with my speculative sci fi bullshit. To my surprise, every
one of them responded to me, and to my growing discomfort,
none of them thought the topic was ridiculous. David Kilcolin
told me he'd been researching the idea for a while.
He did not think a Civil War two was imminent,
but he worried about it. Everyone I talked, too, worried
about it. They all saw warning signs that our nation

(06:25):
might be inching closer to unspeakable violence. In the years since,
the rest of the world seems to be catching up
to this possibility. Since President Trump's election, we have seen
a mighty surge in political violence across the country. Antifa
in groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer have
battled in the streets of multiple American cities. Heather Higher
was murdered in a fascist terrorist attack on counter protesters

(06:48):
in Charlottesville. The magabomber and the Tree of Life synagogue
shooter both struck at political and racial enemies of the
far right in the same week. In June of two
thousand seventeen, almost exactly a year after Alex jones Is
rally at the r n C, Dana Losh of the
n r A put up a video that seems almost
tailor made to highlight how much worse things got in
the months after the election. They use their media to

(07:11):
assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children
that their president is another hitler. They use their movie
stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to
repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they
use their ex president to endorse the resistance. All to
make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism

(07:32):
and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars,
shutdown interstates and airports, fully and terrorize the law abiding
until the only option left is for the police to
do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens,
they'll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The

(07:52):
only way we stop this, the only way we save
our country and Our freedom is to fight this violence
of lies with a clenched fist of truth. I'm the
National Rifle Association of America, and I'm Freedom's safest place.
A year later, Roger Stone, famed Trump ally and recently

(08:13):
indicted asshole, had this to say, Try to impeach you,
just try it. You will have a spasm of violence
in this country, an insurrection like you've never seen. You think,
no question, You think if you go in peach like
the country sides are heavily armed, My friend, yes, absolutely,
this is not in nineteen seventy four. They the people
will not stand for impeachment of politician. Who votes for

(08:37):
it would be endangering their own life. There will be
violence on both sides. And of course Alex Jones's own
rhetoric has escalated considerably over the last two years. I
know the instinct here is to write him off as
a nut shouting into the wilderness, but more than a
million Americans watch or listen to his show each month.
He is not nearly as fringe as you want him

(08:57):
to be. You're trying to start the civil war with people.
You're taking our kindness for weakness. Do you understand the
American people will kill all of you. If you want
a real war a seventeen seventy six. I'm not the
one that's called for violence. You're gonna get wrecked, bads.
I don't want a war. I don't need some you know,

(09:18):
coming of age deal to kill a bunch of liberals.
I just can't. But I also feel like I'm in
dereliction of as a citizen of my duty not saying
we have to start getting ready for insurrection and civil war.
After two years of constantly escalating rhetoric and violence, even
America's political moderates have started to worry. Last October, the
New York Times published an opinion article titled the American

(09:40):
Civil War, Part Two. The National Review, a mainstream conservative magazine,
published The Origins of Our Second Civil War a few
months later. So maybe this all still sounds ridiculous to you,
but let the record show that a whole mess of
heavily armed people are already loudly fantasizing about mass violence.
That's not the only ingredients you need for a vicious

(10:00):
civil war, but it is certainly one of them. Even so,
to most people, the idea of a second American Civil
war feels more like science fiction than a possible future.
I even feel that way sometimes when I step away
from Twitter and ignore my news feed and walk the quiet,
tree lined streets of my neighborhood. It feels silly when
I stand in line at the d m V or

(10:21):
hop onto a public bus or train. The systems that
govern our lives here are so intricate, so seemingly stable,
and so settled that any kind of mass upset feels
almost impossible, fantastic even. But I have walked through cities
where the public buses still run, just without windows because
the blasts from mortars have blown them all out. I've
watched people stand in line and fill out forms and

(10:42):
government buildings while howitzer shake the foundation and machine guns
chatter half a mile away. I have seen systems collapse.
Everything I've seen and everything I've read over the last
two years has convinced me that the United States is
closer to that kind of terror than almost anyone is
willing to admit. And so I can't ignore Alex Jones
as a cook on the fringe. I think he's dangerous,

(11:04):
and I think he represents a strain of ideology that
could collapse this nation into apocalyptic violence. We welcome to
It Could Happen Here, a podcast where every season I

(11:24):
take some fantastic, unlikely scenario and explain how it could happen,
why it might be closer than you'd think, and how
it will look when or if it comes. This season,
we are talking about the Second American Civil War, and
this episode we're exploring one possible way that war could start. Today,
the perpetrators will be Donald Trump and the American far
right in its most armed, vicious, and violent incarnation. The

(11:46):
show will be on the other foot for the next episode.
My sympathies are with the left, but my goal here
is not partisan fearmongering. It's an exploration of the possibilities.
I want to start by dispelling sub myths. I think
the main reason many people have trouble imagining a second
Civil war is the First Civil War. And if you
think of the second Civil War is a replay of
the first, where a huge junk of the nation decides
to secede, there are two cleanly defined sides and two

(12:09):
opposing militaries that clash in the field, then yes, it
probably does seem impossible. But war doesn't look like that anymore.
In eighteen sixty one, an army was just a bunch
of men with rifles, horses, and some cannons. Most of
the kit and modern soldier would take into battle with
stuff that many normal people owned already. The existence of aircraft, drones,
satellite guided missiles and tanks has changed things. A bunch

(12:31):
of dudes with rifles marching on Washington, d C. Would
be wiped out by a single eight in war tawk.
Older wars tend to have real clear beginnings. The U
s Civil War started with the capture of Fort Sumter,
the Revolutionary War started with a fighting at Lexington and
conquered World War two started with the invasion of Poland.
But the Syrian Civil War didn't suddenly start so much

(12:51):
as it evolved from popular protests and clashes with police
in the street, to brutal state repression of those protesters,
and eventually to a shooting war. And when that war started,
there were way the funk more than two sides, the
Free Syrian Army, Jabbat al nusra Isis, the YPG, and
dozens of other groups all took different positions, many fighting
against both the Syrian state and other rebel groups. It's

(13:13):
a gigantic, confusing mess. Any mass civil conflict in the
U s would probably look similar. So forget the Union
and the Confederacy, forget clear sides in a clear beginning.
Imagine you're sitting at home one day, browsing the Internet.
You read about the beginning of a protest in Wall Street.
The first pictures and videos that start circulating on social
media probably look a lot like Occupy Once did. I

(13:34):
imagine these protesters are angry at Trump. As I write
this in February of twenty nineteen, protesters have assembled in
d C and several other points around the nation to
attack the president's declaration of a state of emergency over
what he calls a crisis at the border. So let's
say Trump does something else, fucked up a set of
mass deportations. Maybe people take to the street to protest
in huge numbers, millions of folk across the country. Some

(13:55):
of the largest protests are in New York, right outside
of Trump Tower. It will be hot. Most large protests
occur in the dead of summer, and as I write this,
we're edging ever closer to that time of the year,
So you'll have thousands of people crowding in around Trump Tower.
They're hot, sweaty and furious. So far nothing new. The
first pictures and video clips that you see look normal
to anyone who's paid attention to the news for the

(14:16):
last decade. Folks with funny signs, people in costume packed
crowds of marchers. You go about your day, checking Twitter
or Facebook every now and again. You visit the gym
and see footage from the rally on CNN, Wolf Blitzer
talking to some black clad activist with a mask over
his face. Lines of riot cops stand ominously in the background,
sweating through their body armor. It seems pretty normal, at
least for twenty nineteen, and then, rather suddenly it's not.

(14:40):
The tone of the news dripping out from New York
Changes becomes chaotic, erratic, and violent. Now you see people
running away, blurry footage of blood and bodies on the street,
evidence that something terrible has happened. For a while, all
you know is that people are dying in the Big Apple.
Gradually the story comes out. The police opened fire with
what we're supposed to be less than the full rounds,

(15:01):
but they were piste off or legitimately scared, and they
hit several people in their faces and heads. Several of
those folks died and others were horribly injured. For the
rest of the day. For the next week, every new
station rotates the same grim footage of corpses under streets
and weeping activists shaking from the aftermath of lethal violence.
There's video of the shooting. When I see it, I'm
sure it looks like the police fired without cause. My

(15:23):
conservative parents disagree, pointing to what might be protesters throwing something.
We get into a fight about exactly how much force
that could possibly justify the whole country has that argument
who you blame for the deaths winds up depending on
where you stand politically. Remember the confrontation between Nathan Phillips
and Nick Sandman at the March for Life in January
of twenty nineteen. As I write this, it's just a

(15:44):
few weeks old. You can watch hours of video from
multiple angles, and yet on social media, right wing pundits
say the full video completely exonerates those kids. Left wing
pundits say the exact opposite, And these people are all
working from the same evidence. The inciting incident for theoretical
civil war will be like that. What was done will
matter less than how it's interpreted by different segments of

(16:05):
America in their different social media bubbles. After the murder
of Heather Higher at Charlottesville, a narrative developed on the
fascist side of things that claimed James Fields, the killer,
had been assaulted by antifa will in his car. They
argued that he'd accelerated into the crowd in a panic,
and that Heather Higher had actually died from a heart attack.
None of this was true, but hours of video and

(16:25):
countless picture based arguments were concocted by Internet Nazis in
an attempt to exonerate their guy. This narrative did not
spread widely because fucking nobody wanted to be associated with
the Charlottesville Nazis. But that will not be the case
for this protest. We're imagining no one's wearing a swastika
or holding a tiki torch. You've got cops in riot
gear and activists in black masks. Both sides are sympathetic

(16:47):
to one chunk of the country and reviled by the other.
Even at Charlottesville, President Trump was unwilling to fully condemn
the neo Nazi demonstrators, declaring that there were good people
on both sides. So who do you think he'll support?
In a battle the between cops and protesters outside of
his big dumb tower. He literally ran as the law
and order president. Just last October two thousand eighteen, President

(17:08):
Trump declared Democrats to be anti police and the party
of crime. Now, this one bloody protest would not lead
inevitably to a civil war. It just starts a process.
Crossing the bridge from civil unrest to civil warfare doesn't
require a magical and improbable shift in the firmament of reality.
It just takes a bunch of the same fucked up
ship that's always happening in America, happening all at once

(17:31):
and in quick succession. One bloody protest on Wall Street
and a defensive response from the Republican President would lead
to more protests all around the country. Activists across the
nation would take to the streets in numbers not seen
since the Iraq War protests in two thousand three. We
can look to our last two years of history to
guess where these demonstrations would be most violent. Berkeley, California,

(17:51):
and Portland, Oregon are probably right at the top of
that list. For the last two years, far right and
far left activists have clashed bloodily in the streets of
both cities. Portland has seen more street action in the
last two years than any other city in the country.
This is thanks in large part to the activism of
a fellow named Joey Gibson. He's the head of a
far right protest group called Patriot Prayer, and he's led
dozens of rallies that have ended with hundreds of injuries

(18:14):
from minor to life threatening. Recently, the Portland Police Bureau
were revealed to have been collaborating with Patriot Prayer and
Joey Gibson via text messages. The collaboration seems to have
gone as far as to include police advising right wing
demonstrators where smaller groups of leftist activists were located, and
giving them suggestions on how they might avoid being searched
for weapons. At one demonstration last summer, Patriot Prayer members

(18:36):
were caught on the roof of a nearby building with rifles,
presumably so they could open fire if ANTIFOD did something
they considered to be a step out of line. Now
Portland is a famously liberal city, but it's lodged in
the middle of some extremely conservative rural and suburban communities
in a state with an extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership. Portland,
Oregon is actually a great microcosm for the entire country.

(18:58):
That way, you've got conservative gun owning America versus bleeding
heart gun grabbing liberals. So tempers are high in that area.
And at this set of protests we're imagining the crowd
is huge and furious about what they see as the
murder of their comrades in New York. In the middle
of this, Joey Gibson and his goons show up to
rep their side of what's still just a culture war.
They're shoving and punches, as there have been so many

(19:20):
times before in Portland, but this time someone pulls a gun.
This person kills two people. There's video of the event.
It's blurry, confusing, but we get one clear shot of
the shooter, his hand on a smoking gun and a
Maga hat on his head. The left sees a mass
murderer firing on unarmed demonstrators. The president embraces his supporter.
There's an investigation, of course, but rather than shutting up,

(19:42):
the shooter does what people do now in nineteen when
something like this happens. He goes on TV. Nick Sandman's
response to his kerfuffle with Nate Phillips is now the
blueprint for how to deal with this kind of public incident.
So the shooter is embraced as a hero by a
lot of people. His name becomes a catchphrase on the
fire right, the term used to describe giving protesters what
they deserve. Right wingers on Twitter post gifts of him

(20:04):
holding his gun when they get into arguments with liberals.
The left responds, of course, with more protests, some outside
of the same Fox News offices where this man talks
to Morning Joe or Laura Ingraham or whoever. Americans see
what they want to see in that too, a murderer
being celebrated for killing liberals, or a horde of unhinged
leftists banging at the gates. The cops in New York
and the Portland shooter all have their trials, and the

(20:26):
nation holds its breath waiting to see whose version of
justice will be done. The Portland shooter walks free, so
do the NYPD officers. In April, a jury acquitted four
l a p D officers for the violent and videotaped
beating of Rodney King. Tens of thousands of primarily black
and Latino citizens took to the streets, overwhelming the police

(20:47):
and doing more than a billion dollars in damage. The
seventh Infantry Division in the first Marine Division, along with
every federal law enforcement agency imaginable, were called in to
contain the violence. Now that was one city. Imagine riots
like that in three or four cities, while dozens of
other cities hosts peaceful but still massive and disruptive protests.
That's how I imagine this would go. Rage spreading virally

(21:10):
in the age of the smartphone. Occupy Wall Street was
the first clear example of this, and I think it
was important of things to come. In a matter of weeks,
more than six hundred communities in the United States hosted
their own occupy rallies and camps. So imagine large chunks
of multiple American cities effectively rendered uncontrollable to the federal government.
Government buildings, ice headquarters and the like occupied and blockaded.

(21:32):
In the cities that host riots. The Army and the Marines,
as well as the National Guard are called in to
restore order, or at least to attempt to do that.
What if they can't. In two thousand and thirteen, protesters
in Ukraine angry about policies introduced by a controversial right
wing president, Victor Yennikovitch, organized in their nation's capital. Yenikovitch
was an unspeakably wealthy, out of touch asshole who deliberately

(21:54):
inflamed divisions between the rural and urban parts of his
country and stole huge amounts of money from the taxpayer.
The man had a private lake with a private boat
restaurant in his private palace, all built with grifted cash.
Many modern and liberals and leftists certainly look at Donald
Trump as if he is that sort of man. The
protests started in Kiv's Independent Square, otherwise known as the Maidan.

(22:15):
It's essentially like a giant protest in the National lawn
or at Wall Street. It's that kind of central location
to the Ukrainian people, and these protesters basically, you know,
picked a central chunk of valuable real estate in a
place that the government couldn't ignore, right in the middle
of the capitol. Now, the Madon protests were a normal
example of street activism until they weren't. The police cracked
down on protesters brutally, and suddenly social media flooded with

(22:38):
pictures of beaten and battered college students. This prompted more
people to take to the streets, friends and family members
of those activists who were livid at the violence done
to their loved ones. For days, the violence escalated and
the number of protesters grew. The activists turned the Midon
into a camp, something like a temporary city within a city.
When happened in keV was not at that point so
very different from things we have experienced in the United States.

(23:00):
Occupy Wall Street and the Standing Rock protests were both
examples of activists essentially seizing a crucial chunk of real
estate and refusing to leave. Unlike those protests, the Maidan
occupation did not fizzle out. The activists did not go home.
They fought with the police and battled the federal government
for several epic and bloody weeks, until finally President Yanukovich

(23:21):
was forced to flee power in the country. The Ukrainians
resisted the worst violence their state could throw at them.
It was not an easy task. More than a hundred
people died, mostly to a combination of police, snipers, and
brutal hand to hand combat. When I reported on the
Maidan Revolution in two thousand and fourteen, I did not
think that American activists would be capable of the same badassary.

(23:42):
I was at Occupy Wall Street for a couple of
nights back in two thousand eleven, and at the time
I wrote it off as kind of a bust. But
what I didn't see then, because I was young and dumber,
was that all these links were being formed between different
left wing organizations and activists. I met people at Standing
Rock five years later who started their activist careers at
occup Pie and bent a protests all over the country
Ever since, they've gotten good at organizing and it being organized.

(24:07):
With a long enough history of unrest and street activism,
a nation's people build up a sort of protest infrastructure
that can sustain hardcore resistance to the state for longer
and longer periods of time. Occupy Wall Street was not
good at sustaining itself, Standing Rock did better. Those protests
cost the state of North Dakota thirty nine million dollars
to suppress and cost the company building the pipeline as

(24:27):
much as four point four billion. As time has gone
on and political tensions have ratcheted up, the American people
have grown more capable of resisting their government in the streets.
In an organized way. Now, assuming all this happens later
in two thousand nineteen or two twenty, this unrest would
be going on at the same time as the economy
shifts its metaphorical pants. Most economists agree that our nation

(24:50):
is currently heading towards a pretty steeped fiscal cliff, and
a quote from the Washington Post here, more than a
third of top economic forecasters now predict a US recession
in according to the latest blue Chip forecast, and forty
percent of fund managers in the latest Bank of America
Maryland survey expect global growth to slow in the next year,
the worst outlook for the world economy since November two

(25:10):
thousand eight. So let's say the economists are right and
that happens, the economy slides off a ledge and into
the goddamn sea. So in the middle of all these protests,
all these murders, all this fury, there are waves of
layoffs and foreclosures. Not only does the greatest recession in
a generation cause more unrest, more anger at Donald Trump
and his fellow billionaires, but it frees a shipload of

(25:31):
people up for street activism. The recently laid off, the evicted,
the desperate, all flood the ranks of a left wing
activist movement with enough experienced organizers to make use of them. Now,
mass protests and bloody riots have long been a part
of American life. So far, none of these has ever
sparked a civil war. It's kind of like how literal
sparks don't always start fires. You need more than just

(25:52):
a spark. You need fuel to burn, dry logs and
sticks with plenty of tender or big rolling hills covered
in dead grass. In past bloody civil disturbances, like the
riots after Martin Luther King Junior's murder, the Kent State shootings,
or the l A riots, there just wasn't enough fuel
in the rest of the country for the fire to
release spread. Modern American history is filled with examples of

(26:13):
individuals who've tried to spark civil wars or revolutions in
this country. That was the stated goal of the Columbine
Shooters when they started their rampage. It was Tim mcveigh's
goal when he bombed the Murra building in Oklahoma City.
Neither of those sparks caught either. That's because the most
critical ingredient for any hypothetical civil war, the tinder for
this blazing inferno exists in the hearts and minds of

(26:33):
the populace. Before a civil war can start. Before any
of this could be real enough, people have to want
to kill their countrymen. I don't know if we're there yet,
but I think we're getting close. In nineteen seventy two,
the National Opinion Research Center carried out a survey rating
each region of the country based on what percentage of
its population believed most people can be trusted. In the

(26:55):
Old South the former Confederate States, that number ranged from
between thirty and forty In the rest of the country,
it was between fifty and seventy percent. The national average
was forty six point two percent. Now, in two thousand
and twelve, the same n o r C survey found
very different results. Most regions in the nation were well
under forty percent, with a national average dropping from forty

(27:16):
six point two percent to thirty two point four percent.
Other surveys back up this unsettling trend up on our site.
It could happen here pod dot com will showcase a graph.
It charts the results from several decades worth of Pew
Survey questions from nineteen fifty eight to two thousand fifteen,
all asking whether or not respondents quote trust the federal
government to do what is right just about always or

(27:39):
most of the time. That number peaked at nearly eighty
percent of the population in nineteen sixty one. By two
thousand fifteen, it had dropped to roughly twenty percent. With
some brief spikes during the Carter administration and immediately after
September eleventh, the graph has shown a shockingly steady rate
of decline. There's actually a huge amount of data the
tracks that decline in trust among Americans toward our fellow Americans. Edelman,

(28:01):
a global communications marketing firm, has run a trust barometer
for several years now. It marked a fourteen percent decline
and trust of the US government from two thousand seventeen
to two thousand eighteen. Trust in businesses, in in g
O s, and in the media all suffered similarly steep declines.
These are the sharpest drops Adelman has seen in its
eighteen years of measuring trust. Here's Richard Edelman, head of

(28:24):
the firm, quote. This is the first time that a
massive drop in trust has not been linked to a
pressing economic issue or catastrophe like Japan's two thousand and
eleven Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it's the ultimate irony
that it's happening at a time of prosperity, with the
stock market and unemployment rates in the US at record
highs Now, it's worth noting that this quote from Edelman
came from a January two thousand eighteen Atlantic article. Back then,

(28:47):
the economy was booming. Uh, it is currently somewhat less booming.
And uh, it's my opinion that we're unlikely to trust
each other more in the midst of the deep recession
most economists say is coming now. Back in two fourteen,
only twenty percent of California residents supported peaceful secession from
the United States. By January of two thousand seventeen, thirty

(29:07):
three percent of California supported secession. This poll was talking
about peaceful secession. Of course, Californians aren't champing at the
bit to take up arms against the Union, but the
numbers are still compelling. Only sixty percent of California Republicans
were against the idea of a peaceful secession. Data from
the other states supports this simple fact. More Americans and
more states now support secession than at any point within

(29:29):
the lifetime of anyone listening to this podcast. Nationwide, two
percent of Americans support their state secceeding. One way to
look at this is that seventy eight percent of Americans
don't want to seceed. But it's worth noting that back
when the whole Revolutionary War thing kicked off, most people
in the colonies did not support seceeding from Great Britain,
or at least not openly. Now, obviously, Epsos and Gallop

(29:52):
weren't doing surveys back then, people still drank mercury to
cure their colds. Statistics were not anyone's back in seventeen
seventy six, but historians have spent a lot of time
trying to figure out precisely how many people in the
thirteen colonies supported independence. Most estimates you'll find suggest that
about a third of colonists were loyal to the crown,
a third were fence sitters who didn't really land on
either side of the issue, and only a third of

(30:12):
early Americans actively supported the revolution. So if that's the
threshold three percent, while then the twenty tent of Americans
who currently support secession is a little bit more worrying,
and it gets worrying or because this increased support for
the idea of secession has occurred alongside something darker. More
Americans hate their fellow Americans now than at any point

(30:33):
in living memory. I'd like to quote from a two
thousand sixteen Pew Research Center report on partisanship and political animosity.
Quote for the first time and surveys dating back to
nineteen nine, two majorities in both parties expressed not just
unfavorable but very unfavorable views of the other party, and today,
sizeable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other

(30:53):
party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger.
More than half of Democrats say they're publican party makes
them afraid, while forty percent of Republicans say the same
about the Democratic Party. Among those highly engaged in politics,
those who say they vote regularly and either volunteer for
or donate to campaigns, fully seventy of Democrats and scent

(31:13):
of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party.
This increasing fear has led both sides to arm themselves
to an unprecedented level. That's been happening on the right
since at least two thousand eight, but the American left
has not been associated with gun ownership until recently. In
the wake of the two thousand sixteen election, the BBC
published an article titled y U s liberals are now

(31:35):
buying guns too quote FBI background checks for gun transactions
sewed to a new record for a single day, a
hundred and eighty five thousand, seven hundred and thirteen during
the Black Friday sales on twenty five November. Some of
this has been put down to gun retailers selling off
stock at reduced prices, but there have also been reports
of more non traditional buyers, such as African Americans and
other minorities, turning up at gun shops and shooting ranges.

(31:57):
Laura Smith, national spokesperson for the a Rural Gun Club,
says her organization has seen a huge rise in inquiries
since November's election and a ten percent increase in paid members.
In the years since Trump's election and the subsequent street
fighting between fascist and anti fascists, there have been a
surge in new left wing gun organizations. These include Redneck Revolt,

(32:18):
the John Brown Gun Club, and the Socialist Rifle Association.
There are now numerous left wing and right wing political
groups that center their identities around being armed advocates of
a political ideology. Back in two thousand sixteen, before any
of those far left gun groups existed, former State Department
strategist David Kilcolin told me this quote. I think what

(32:38):
we're seeing now is what I would describe as a
proto insurgency situation. The ingredients are out there. If somebody
knew what they were doing, they could pull together in
effective movement. In places like Kurdistan, you see political parties
that have their own armed wing. Every political party has
its own armed wing. It's an artifact of a broken
political system that people start arming themselves just in case.
I might be arming defensively and that looks offensive to you,

(33:00):
and it starts to escalate. On my first trip to Iraq,
I was embedded with the Peshmerga, a Kurdish military force
made up primarily of soldiers loyal to the two major
Kurdish political parties. It's the equivalent of the Republican and
Democratic parties each having armed wings. That sounds silly to
imagine here in America, but only because most Americans trust
their political process more than they trusted gun. That trust

(33:22):
erodes a little more every day. As Adelman researcher David
bursof explained to The Atlantic quote, the lifeblood of democracy
is a common understanding of the facts and information that
we can then use as a basis for negotiation and
for compromise. When that goes away, the whole foundation of
democracy gets shaken. On a campaign stop in February, presidential
candidate Elizabeth Warren publicly questioned whether or not Donald Trump

(33:45):
would even be a free person in a lot of
people want the president at least impeached. Imagine how much
more firm and more aggressive the calls to force him
out of office will become in the wake of mass
rioting and protests. Thirty eight percent of Americans roughly support
the wall. Donald Trump just called a state of emergency
to build. That number probably represents a pretty good estimate

(34:06):
for his floor of support. There is ideologically nothing but
daylight between these people and the liberals they despise. There
are already calls on the far right for the president
to assume what amounts to dictatorial powers. On January nine,
two thousand nineteen, President Donald Trump addressed the nation on
what he called the border crisis. Rampant speculation at the
time theorized that he would declare a state of emergency

(34:28):
that night. Here's what Alex Jones's guest Mike Adams wanted
the president to do. It's the appropriate role of the military.
It's a constitutional role for the military to defend the borders.
And also, by the way, Alice, you know posse commentatus.
It prevents the military from acting as police on the
streets of America, but it does not prevent military police

(34:48):
from pursuing enemy combatants and domestic enemies of America who
are on American soil. Military police can be dispatched to
arrest and seek out treason US traders, you know, war criminals,
enemy combatants who are on US soil that there is
no restriction against that. Let's just keep all of this
in mind because America is under attack now. Alex Jones

(35:10):
has been suggesting that the president violently suppresses enemies for
quite some time. Dan host of the fantastic Alex Jones
focused podcast Knowledge Fight, sent me this clip from a
show in mid two thousand seventeen. Donald Trump could have
them all arrested, just like Lincoln did. Lincoln had members
of the State Department arrested, Lincoln had judges arrested, and

(35:31):
hundreds of newspaper editors arrested because they were in open
sedition falling for the overthrow of the Republic. There's already
some evidence that President Trump's most violent fans are willing
to go out shooting in order to ensure his political survival.
Early in two thousand nineteen, Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson
was busted by the FBI with a kill list of
the president's political enemies and a sizeable arsenal. In the

(35:53):
weeks prior to his arrest, Hassen's Google searches included what
if Trump illegally impeached? And civil war if Trump impeached.
In a situation where President Trump's very political survival is imperiled,
and where police around the country find themselves overwhelmed and
pushed past the breaking point, it's not hard to imagine
Donald Trump turning to his most fervent supporters for help,

(36:15):
militiaman and so called Second Amendment people like Lieutenant Hassan.
He already called on those folks quickly during the election.
You think there's no chance he would call for violence
if his freedom was at stake. Michael Cohen, donald Trump's
lawyer and close confident for fifteen years seems to hold
the same worries I do. Near the end of his
multi hour house hearing in February two thousand nineteen, Cohen

(36:38):
made these closing remarks, indeed, give him my experience working
for mister Trump. I fear that if he loses the
election in twenty twenty, that there will never be a
peaceful transition of power. And this is why I agreed
to appear before you today. In the event the president
was impeached or in the likelier event he has voted

(36:59):
out of the threat of violence is very real. When
I first wrote those words in February of two thousand nineteen,
it did seem kind of unlikely to me that that that,
you know, the president would call on militia's to help
him maintain power. But then, just a couple of weeks
after I wrote those words, in an interview with bright

(37:20):
Bart News, President Donald Trump said this, I can tell
you I have the support of the police, the support
of the military, the support of the bikers for Trump.
I have the tough people, but they don't play it
tough until they go to a certain point, and then
it would be very bad, very bad. And let me
note just for your reference. When I listened to Alex

(37:41):
Jones speak at the Republican National Convention in two thousand sixteen,
the armed security for that event where the Bikers for Trump,
tens of thousands of Americans on the far right are

(38:03):
already preparing for violence. It's an almost religious belief for
some of them. If you spend enough time browsing q
and On Focus sub credits and Twitter conversations, you will
find ample evidence of this. These people believe, with a
dedication of a cultist, that the Democratic Party is the
center of a vast pedophilic conspiracy. There have already been
three attacks by deranged q and On followers, including one

(38:24):
man who tried to block off transit to the Hoover Dam.
It was an attempt to force the president to openly
go after his political enemies. As the days and weeks
where on, the hardened core of Q and On believers
grow angrier and more prone to violence. Here's one post
I found on a r fifteen dot com, the largest
firearms forum on the Internet. It's from a thread full
of q and On discussion. Quote. The left is used

(38:46):
to getting their way, so much so that they will
do anything to retain their power. If we the people
truly desire to remain free, then we shall, in small
or large groups, have to do what can be done.
And here's another post from a q and on fan.
I found part of a Twitter change in which one
person threatened the impeachment of Donald Trump and called the
Q and Honor a cultist. Go ahead, my cult is winning.

(39:07):
And after you placed articles of impeachment, you just wait
to see how many patriots pick up their guns and
solve this problem. You may want to join my cult
before it's too late for you and your family and friends.
How many deaths would it take? How many soldiers deployed
to quell the rioting before we'd recognize this conflict as
what it was the Second American Civil War? That fact
is anyone's guess. But every society has a breaking point,

(39:30):
and I can guarantee you that point would take almost
everyone by surprise. That's sort of how conflict starts. It
boils up from protests since police violence and builds to gunfights, bombings,
and dead cities. Back in two thousand sixteen, when I
was working on that Civil War article for Cracked, I
interviewed Status Calvious. He's a scholar who specifically studies the
sociology of civil wars, and he's also the survivor of

(39:52):
a civil war. During our interview, I brought up some
of my experiences in Ukraine, conversations i'd had with people
who'd been at the Maidawn. I mentioned the status that
these people had all felt bewildered by the speed with
which the situation had gone from protests to shooting. Statis
told me this quote, what most other people experienced in
civil wars is that they seemed to come out of nowhere.

(40:12):
Everybody shocked, even the people who are studying these conflicts.
There is an element of contingency always present. It's more
about that kind of sense of shock and fear and
loss of trust and security, which I think is one
of the key features of any civil war. I found
another salient quote in a Fortune article from eighteen talking
about how the Brexit vote had spurred support for secession
among many Americans. The speaker is Sanford Levinson, a polypy

(40:35):
professor of the University at Texas at Austin. Quote. I
grew up assuming the Soviet Union was simply part of
the status quo. All of us grew up assuming the
United Kingdom was part of the furniture. Why do we
think the United States is etched in Stone? On two
thousand seventeen, Jeremy Christian got on a Portland max Light
rail train. Christian had an extensive violent criminal history. He

(40:59):
was also a member of the far right protest group
Patriot Prayer. One popular clothing item among Patriot Prayer members
is a T shirt with pinochet did Nothing Wrong written
on the front and r w DS written on the
sleeves that stands for right Wing Death Squad. During his ride,
Jeremy Christian saw two young Muslim teenage girls. He began

(41:20):
cursing at them and hurling racial epithets. Three male passengers
intervened and tried to get him to back down. He
pulled a knife, stabbing two of them to death and
critically wounding the third. When police took him away, Jeremy
Christian shouted, that's what liberalism gets you. Whatever else you
take out of this episode, I want you to remember
one thing. The Second American Civil War is not theoretical

(41:43):
for everybody. For some people, it's already started. They're just
waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Most times,
gun shots are chair vows. Round here huh cool. Sleep

(42:06):
We could show sleep time the chair repos me. Come,
we don't fight, we don't right. Even when we don't fight,

(42:35):
we don't right. Even when I'm Robert Evans and I'm
just exhausted from reading all of that. You can find
me on Twitter at I right, okay. You can find
this show on Twitter at happen here pod, and you
can find the show online at it could happen here
pod dot com. Our music, as always, is from four

(42:56):
Fists