Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
This is It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news. Oh, no. Which is, frankly, one of the best ways to start this episode. And one of the best ways to start the show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called, let's see, at hell Hitler.
And I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist. Oh, wow. I have decoded some of at hell Hitler's communiques. And I have uncovered a secret, a secret Nazi code. Oh, wow. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hail Hitler.
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Chapter 2: What insights are shared about the misuse of dog whistles?
And he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as-of-yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals.
And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration." Hofstadter is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before, how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information. Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything.
And having that informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, of a vortex of meaningless noise, it's such a romantic idea that I alone have the info or the clue to piece this together, and it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very romantic notion. And it's also one that is exactly perfectly anti-suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just...
A moment where everything that is happening is just so clear, literally literal, like it's all out of the open. Like what is happening with the Trump administration?
OK, in 2020, there was a massive uprising to attempt to attempt to fundamentally change, like the structurally racist nature of the United States to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with the structural violence of the state.
This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world. Right. And they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward.
This is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety to it. They're just saying it. They just want to do it and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy in it. It's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying. Yeah.
You can argue that we have a griper occupied government, not because of counting words in posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS as of today, which I'm recording this on Wednesday, I think because this comes out Wednesday night.
are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U-Haul style rentable trucks to hunt down people to assault and kidnap. Like they're just copying the Patriot Front playbook here. The ICE director said that he wants an Amazon-like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote, Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the DHS communications?
Right. That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge. So people do it less, even though it's less effective.
In my discussion of this online on various cursed social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics and what I see as abuse of anti-fascist education. People like Robert Evans, myself, Molly Conger, spent the past eight years trying to actually educate people about Nazi rhetoric and Nazi signals and dog whistles. As an attempt to
hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things that we've argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense.
It's kind of like trying to tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was was lightly arguing about this online was was saying, like, this is not numerology. And we don't have to be just OK with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And first of all, codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes.
And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric. What they're actually saying, which has proto-fascist or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric. And they're doing it.
Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalized letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message? Is there one person who's going to become convinced of this? No, that's not the purpose.
So we're trying to conceptualize this as like we have to we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about. Yeah. And also, like, I think, you know, like, I think we've sort of kind of just to some extent we've just failed on the normalization front because, again, like it's the president of the United States. Yeah.
This is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security. It has already become normalized because they have power. The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique. It's to, like, actually oppose them. But that's scary. That's scary, right? That's scary, Mia. Do you know what's easy? Posting on X the Everything app. Yeah.
This is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state, because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all-powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants, right? This is why it can stage things. This is why it can rig elections. This is why it can, like...
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Chapter 4: How does the discussion relate to the history of US intervention in Panama?
It can stage any protest movement it wants to. Right. And I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where like I see people who are like genuinely well-meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda.
Yeah, you're falling victim to the panopticon. Yeah. But it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right, and can hurt you, it's very, very easy to, you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core issues.
of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda people are resisting the state every day right why is ice fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like fucking u-hauls to jump out and grab people it's because when they tried to fucking mass we stomped them right and when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window anyone follows them people can follow them around and alert their community members on where ice is
Like, again, motherfuckers and fucking Lululemon shit are like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people. Like, yeah, that's the actual condition we're in. And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self-described as like anti-fascists or self-described as leftists. almost falling into this trap more so than others.
And it's a little bit evident of something that I've described as the forever 2016. How we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016, 2017, 2018 era. And we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This is a different situation. This is 2025.
And one other defense of this code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote, Nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote. And like, first of all, this is not a game.
This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are not games. And I think that view of like,
anti-fascist like education it risks repeating like the ok symbol debacle right where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like easter egg anti-fascism it's kind of like the barbara streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing which nazis always have have that like frustrating impulse
because they're the little bitch boy ideology, I think, as Rat Limit put it, one of my favorite posters. And I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it.
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Chapter 5: How did the U.S. intervention reshape Panama's political landscape?
officers were assigned to supervise 22 Panamanian ministries and state agencies effectively running the country for months. At the same time, the military crippled what remained of Panama's civilian administration by seizing roughly 15,000 boxes of government documents. Wow.
The invasion permanently reshaped Panama's political reality, dividing it between those absorbed into Noriega's nationalist rhetoric and those who had welcomed foreign intervention. It also sends a clear message to every political actor that Panama's sovereignty was conditional on their cooperation with the U.S.
Meanwhile, in the US, there was barely a murmur against the government's claimed right to invade Panama, remove its government, dismantle its military, and inflict costs on Panama's poor Black and Mestizo communities. The US kind of moved on from Panama after the invasion.
I mean, they continued to meddle and intervene, but they had basically gotten what they wanted at that point, which was the removal of someone who was not going to cooperate with them anymore. Yeah.
And lest you believe that they disrupted the drug trade with the arrest of Doriega, Panama continued to function as a transit point for cocaine and a center for money laundering at basically the same scale as before.
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Chapter 6: What parallels exist between Panama and Venezuela regarding U.S. intervention?
So finally, what exactly is the connection with Venezuela, if any? James, you want to go first? I mean, there's a very obvious parallel in that they have deposed a leader that you don't need to go carry water for the guy they deposed. You can say something is bad without, like, the person it happened to does not therefore become a perfect angel. Things cannot be binary. That's okay.
But, like, it is wild that we look to what happened in Panama and we're like, you know what? We can do better than that. We don't even have to declare a war. We don't even have to do an invasion, right? We can just kidnap a guy.
I mean, they did do an invasion. They kind of bombed a bunch of people and stuff, too.
Yes, they did. Yeah, they did an airborne invasion, I guess would be the way to describe it. And in a sense, right, I'm happy that they didn't sort of go through the streets of Caracas with bombs and artillery and mortars. Yeah, they didn't do scorched earth this time. But at the same time, like we have now, like I've literally have spoken to several people in Venezuela in the last 24 hours.
Right. And they are in that situation now of not knowing.
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Chapter 7: What are the complexities surrounding U.S. foreign intervention in Latin America?
Right. Like who is the relevant authority? The U.S. in this case doesn't seem to have replaced the regime. They've just in again, a parallel to what we saw in Panama, just installed another person. Right.
Not even necessarily install another person because, I mean... Let it trickle down and see how it rides. Rodriguez was already in power.
Yeah, like, I guess maybe they looked at Rodriguez and were like, because she's previously worked with, like, I guess the analogy would be the Chamber of Commerce, maybe something like that, like Venezuelan business interests. Maybe they were just like, yeah, well, maybe we can force her to be compliant with what we want. The only shit getting liberated is the oil in Venezuela, right?
And it's actually not very good oil. The same happened in Panama, right? The U.S. didn't go to liberate people. It went to liberate the canal. It's so disappointing to see people still look at foreign policy in binary terms.
And like you said before, I think one of the things that the Venezuelan people I'm speaking to express deep, deep frustration with is that when they take a risk, right, and go online and share information, their frustrations with both Chavismo and with the United States invading their country.
They are told by Western leftists that they must be either CIA agents or pretend Venezuelans, like Americans posing as Venezuelans.
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Chapter 8: How do activists in the U.S. respond to ICE actions and protests?
Yeah, or like gusanos or whatever.
Yeah, like there is this... I mean, in the case of Venezuela, right, if you thought it was great, you could have gone. You had two decades to go. I went when I was in undergraduate, right, to see it, to study it, to understand it. It was formative in the way that my politics are now, which is politics that doesn't see human liberation coming from the state.
It's not to say that there's nothing positive happening in Venezuela in terms of experiments with communal initiatives and cooperative economic projects. Despite the US sanctions, despite what they are enduring, Venezuelan people have managed to innovate and managed to create these kinds of projects. Where they can exercise their autonomy, exercise their voice and their self-determination. Yeah.
I think, of course, that there is a level of... I think co-optation or attempts by the government of Venezuela to use those projects or to integrate those projects into their apparatus or to gain legitimacy through those projects.
But as always, the situation on the ground is very complex and people are going to have different perspectives and feelings on the levels of government involvement in their communes and whatnot. I think the best outcome for Venezuelans would have been, of course, primarily the lifting of U.S. sanctions.
And, you know, secondarily, their own self-directed liberation from the imposition of the government on their projects. But, you know, there are those who have those projects who support the government's involvement, who get received funding and that kind of thing. So, yeah. It's complex. Like you say, right, that these things aren't binaries. It's not like always good, always bad.
But as you said, right, like our solidarity should be with the Venezuelan people. They should be the ones who get to decide who rules Venezuela.
Yeah. I mean, even if I disagree with that. Yeah. I still think it's ultimately up to them.
We should want a world in which they can choose, even if they don't choose what we want. Otherwise, it's just another kind of colonial project, right? And I think that colonial impulse... And let's also be honest, there is a racialized component to the way that the American left talks to people in the global South, right?
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