The Age of Extremophiles

Summary

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It Could Happen Here — "The Age of Extremophiles" (April 27, 2026)

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Overview

In this particularly reflective solo episode, host Robert Evans examines the concept of "extremophiles"—organisms that thrive in extreme conditions—and uses it as a compelling metaphor for the current state of American politics and society. Evans delivers a cautiously optimistic analysis of the post-2024 landscape, the aftermath of the Trump administration’s return, the MAGA movement's overreach, evolving grassroots resistance, and the battle between adaptive extremism and the craving for “normalcy.” Drawing on historical, biological, and political analogies, Evans explores why the American political environment rewards extremism, the pitfalls of rapid technological militarism, and how hope for positive radical change emerges from the chaos.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Extremophile Metaphor & the Illusion of Normalcy

(01:01–06:36)

• Evans introduces his recent optimism, rooted in reinterpreting both current and historical events.
• Draws on the scientific concept of extremophiles—organisms adapted to survive the harshest environments—to reinterpret American history and politics.
• Critiques the nostalgic perception of the 1990s as a “Goldilocks zone” of American life, reminding listeners that even that era was rife with violence, extremism, and reactionary politics.
• Quote:

  “The reality is that the ‘90s were a time of extremity... just like every other period of human existence. And the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement... one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era.” (05:02–05:23)

• Asserts that in both biology and politics, extreme environments breed extreme adaptations, and that America’s political system, in crisis, consistently rewards "extremophiles."

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2. Political Adaptation: Cycles of Extremism

(05:23–08:06)

• Evans suggests the pendulum of extremism is swinging back:

  “The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction.” (07:17)

• Sees figures like Zoran Mamdani and formerly conservative icons supporting policies like abolition of ICE as evidence of this shift.
• Urges listeners to recognize the opportunity for positive, radical adaptation—provided enough collective action and bravery.

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3. The Failure of Reactionary Overreach

(08:06–09:08)

• Analysis of the GOP’s second Trump administration: A “shock and awe” approach that relied on rapid, violent policy change to suppress resistance—which ultimately failed.
• Despite significant harm inflicted (especially on marginalized groups), the administration “missed” their window to make opposition impossible.

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4. Military AI, Project Maven, and Operational Catastrophe

(09:08–17:27)

• Evans details Project Maven: the Pentagon’s AI targeting initiative, designed for rapid, automated war-fighting, with disastrous results in Iran.
• Compares this to the failed “decapitation strikes” of Iraq (2003), demonstrating how technological escalation—faster decisions, not better ones—leads to new forms of catastrophe.
• Quote:

  “The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings, and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.” (13:40)

• In Iran, high-tech strikes (6,000 targets in two weeks) killed both intended and unintended targets, including striking a school due to outdated data and unquestioning trust in AI.
• Concludes that militarist conservatism measures triumph not by outcomes but by body counts—an approach both in war and “culture war” politics.

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5. Culture War, Grassroots Backlash, and the Demand for Normalcy

(17:27–24:11)

• Evans traces the rise and decline of right-wing grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty.
• Early successes in local elections/restrictions are reversed as centrist and liberal communities organize in response, prioritizing “boring” school boards and rejection of culture war extremism.
• Quote (Leslie Gilmart, 21:53):

  “Folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy.”

• The boomerang effect: Fascist overreach catalyzes broad-based resistance.

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6. The Weakening of the New Right and Shifting Coalitions

(24:11–27:08)

• Evans details cracks in conservative unity—how even Republican activists increasingly resist “vengeance politics.”
• The decline of social media as a mass phenomenon (especially among young and old Americans) undermines the reach of right-wing propaganda, even as remaining platforms grow more extreme.
• Quote:

  “As the algorithms...reward more extreme content, less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed are the most extreme. It’s, you know, another extremophile kind of situation.” (27:03)

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7. Electoral Fightback and the Limits of Centrism

(27:08–34:44)

• Notes Democratic successes in places like Virginia, where hardline gerrymandering was met by equally aggressive countermeasures.
• Highlights a newfound willingness among liberals to fight on the same terms as the GOP; even controversial methods like aggressive redistricting are defended as necessary for democracy.
• The ongoing gutting of state infrastructure by Republicans sets the stage for a pro-government, pro-infrastructure countermovement.
• Encourages leveraging the failures of Republican overreach to build lasting, radical change—taxing billionaires, restoring public institutions, and enforcing real consequences for right-wing criminality.

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8. Learning from Hungary and Embracing Radical Adaptation

(34:44–36:37)

• Reflects on Viktor Orban’s defeat and peaceful resignation—once seen as a model for American right-wing authoritarianism.
• Warns that systemic change isn't achieved by electoral victory alone; new approaches must fill the vacuum left by collapsed extremism, or cycles of reaction will repeat.
• Quote:

  “Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed... his failure opened up the way for Trump 2.0.” (35:34–35:48)

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9. Violent Extremism and the Counter-Offer of Radical Hope

(36:37–39:40)

• Responds to the recent violence at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner: the attacker was a disaffected centrist liberal.
• Frames this as a failure of the Democratic Party to channel popular rage into productive, collective action.
• Cites Axios reporting on the growing demand for Democrats to “fight dirty,” and examples like Minneapolis residents physically resisting ICE.
• Argues that embracing extreme times means offering real, radical hope and bold policies, rather than ceding ground to nihilism or centrist paralysis.
• Quote:

  “So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know on some level that that’s the only way you survive in an extreme environment.” (37:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Extreme adaptations are not always good. But once you’ve found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can’t just wish the weather was different. You’ve got to adapt.”
— Robert Evans (06:19)

“Donald did the thing Fascists often do. He kept reaching until he reached for something that exceeded his grasp.”
— Robert Evans (22:26)

“If it weren’t, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn’t be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled why Virginia Went Back on its Word...”
— Robert Evans (30:54)

“The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims.”
— Robert Evans (33:36)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:02 — Evans introduces his renewed optimism and the episode’s metaphorical theme.
• 02:04 — Explains "extremophile" biology and makes the central analogy.
• 06:40 — Critique of political nostalgia and the reality of the 1990s.
• 07:17 — Identifies the pendulum swing against Trump-era extremism.
• 09:08–17:27 — Dissects Project Maven: military AI catastrophic failures.
• 18:33–23:15 — Examines Moms for Liberty, local organizing, and resistance to culture war politics.
• 24:11 — Trump’s PR stunt with DoorDash derails as even Republican activists hesitate on social issues.
• 27:08–30:54 — Social media fragmentation and backlash to right-wing internet dominance.
• 34:44 — Lessons from Viktor Orban’s defeat in Hungary.
• 36:37 — Reflections on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attack: radicalization and the need for a real counter-offer.
• 39:40 — Hope for the future rests on bold action, not timid centrism.

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Conclusion & Takeaways

Robert Evans uses the extremophile lens to argue that America’s political reality—a harsh, ever-changing environment—rewards not centrism or nostalgia, but adaptation, boldness, and sometimes, radical change. He acknowledges both the danger and potential in this moment: the collapse of the MAGA movement, society’s disaffection from right-wing culture war politics, and the rising appetite for radical policies all point toward a window of opportunity. The challenge, Evans says, is to offer a compelling, positive vision for the future before toxic reaction or despair fill the vacuum—because in this age of extremophiles, only those who learn to thrive in extremity can shape what comes next.

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Transcript

[Host/Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

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[Robert Evans]

Cool Zone Media.

[Host/Announcer]

Hey everybody.

[Robert Evans]

This is it could happen here. And I am Robert Evans. And initially this was supposed to be a slightly different episode. I have been pondering over the fact recently that I feel weirdly optimistic, particularly in the last couple of weeks, especially compared to a lot of the people that I know and spend time around.

[Host/Announcer]

And.

[Robert Evans]

And I think it's because I've been interpreting some of the same pieces of news differently than they have, and because I've been coming across some different pieces of information than they have and I wanted to kind of walk people through why I've been feeling so optimistic. And so I wrote something and I recorded it around Thursday of last week. And then over the weekend, a gunman attacked the White House Correspondent's Dinner. And actually this hasn't really changed any of my overall feelings. We'll talk about that this week, probably on ed. But I did make some alterations to the episode as a result of that, although I do think it reinforces my primary point, which is that the political era that we now find ourselves in is one dominated by extremophiles.

[Host/Announcer]

Extremophiles are organisms with unique cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow them to survive and thrive in extreme habitats. I'm talking about places like volcanic vents at the very bottom of the ocean or the Dead Sea. If you've ever wondered why it's called the Dead Sea, it's because for a very long time, people thought it was too salty to host any life. Modern research has disabused us of this notion. The Dead Sea hosts life. It's just weird life because the Dead Sea is a weird place. The term extremophile was coined in 1974 by R.D. mcElroy to describe microorganisms scientists were increasingly finding in places that should have been devoid of life. The word is a hybrid term that literally means love of extremes. And while it is usually used in a scientific context to describe small organisms in very odd locations, some experts have over the years pointed out that the label might well apply to humans too. In the journal article All About Extremophiles, Johns Hopkins University's James A. Coker wrote that despite common perception, most of Earth is what is often referred to as an extreme environment. Yet to the organisms that call these places home, it is simply that home they have adapted to thrive in these environments, and in the process have evolved many unique adaptations at the molecular and atomic level. In our human centric view of the planet Earth, we tend to think of ourselves as being in the Goldilocks zone. Not too hot or too cold, protected from radiation, and filled with all the things necessary for life to exist. To some extent this is true. However, this view keeps us from acknowledging several basic facts, including that the Earth is mostly a cold place. Over over 90% of its oceans are at or below 5 degrees Celsius, and it has an average temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius. And several conditions we humans consider normal that is 20% oxygen in the air, actually make us extremophiles from the point of view of other species. End quote. Now, I have a bad tendency to want to apply literal knowledge like this metaphorically to my understanding of politics. It's a bit of a sickness, but it also makes more sense sometimes than you'd expect. There's a tendency among many millennials and even Gen Z and Alpha kids too young to have known the 90s to look back on that decade as a sort of cultural Goldilocks zone, as if the brief period post Cold war and pre 911 was some sort of cultural peak for our species, and everything since has been a slow downhill slide. People have different reasons for this. Some of them blame 9 11. Some people will argue that we were in that sweet spot where the Internet existed and could tap you into cool and interesting things, but social media hadn't come along yet and ruined it all. You know, different people come up with different justifications for this. But this view keeps people from acknowledging some very basic facts about the 1990s, which is that they were full of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, just to name two, and repeated US Military adventures and misadventures in other parts of the globe, some of which ended disastrously, as in Mogadishu. Our president for much of the 90s was a sex pest and and members of the far right staged a series of bloody terrorist attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing and Olympic park bombing. And while all this was happening, a new and more openly extremist Republican Party captured Congress, while hapless, outmaneuvered Democrats gawked in awe. The reality is that the 90s were a time of extremity, of extreme weirdness and darkness, just like every other period of human existence. And the extremity of the era helped birth a new conservative movement, which one radical enough to wrench power from the liberals and bring us ultimately into the slavering jaws of the Bush era. Today, those same neoconservatives seem tame next to their modern descendants, the MAGA movement. But in their own time, they were the craziest bastards out there. And this hits at a fundamental reality in American politics. If survival in extreme times requires extreme adaptations, then it's no wonder that for much of our lives, the extremists are the ones who have primarily thrived electorally. Democrats like to forget this, but Bill Clinton felt like a pretty big swing to folks exiting the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. bush, just as Barack Obama was seen as the most extreme choice imaginable by roughly half of this country. In fact, he was such an extreme choice that the conservative movement had to birth the Tea Party and eventually the MAGA movement in order to unseat the Democratic Party and repeal the changes from the Obama years in power. I like thinking about this stuff because I find it interesting that one common theme from evolutionary biology to modern politics is in extreme environments, extreme adaptations are necessary to survive. We Homo sapiens have been in the business of extreme adaptations for as long as we've existed. That's all. Central heating and air, vaccines, antibiotics and the AR15 are adaptations to extreme environments and situations, many of them. Extreme environments and situations that we created for ourselves. The problem is, our adaptations have a nasty tendency to drive even more extreme circumstances, which in turn foster further adaptations. And so on and so forth, until we invent the Internet and satellite guided thermonuclear bombs. Extreme adaptations are not always good. But once you've found yourself thrown into an extreme environment, you can't just wish the weather was different. You've got to adapt. That's the bad news about our current political situation. The good news is that the pendulum has started to swing back our way. The extremism of the Trump era is provoking its own equal but opposite reaction. And you can see the first stirrings of that in the popularity of Zoran Mamdani, or the fact that a former pillow of neoconservatism like Bill Kristol is currently advocating for the abolition of ice. We are in the process of deciding the next extreme that will dominate American politics, which means we have the opportunity to adapt with policies and changes that are every bit as good as the ones the Trump administration has forced through our bad. To do that, we're going to have to be brave and we're going to have to start getting our shit together now, because this window of opportunity won't last long.

[Robert Evans]

The way I see it, the GOP entered office this time around intent on waging the political equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. They burnt up any goodwill or benefit of the doubt they might have had in an orgy of careless and brutal cuts to basic government functions carried out by the least sympathetic group of groipers imaginable, one of whom was nicknamed Big Balls. A flurry of state and local legislative pushes and criminal investigations aimed at hurting left wing activists and queer, particularly trans people have done tremendous damage, as have relentless ICE raids on mostly non white Americans. It's been bad, and yet we're still here, and we'll pretend we're in a good situation today, not at least in terms of what we'd like good to mean in the everyday sense of the word. Many of us haven't survived the first 16 months or so of the second Trump presidency. Fewer of us are going to make it to the end, but this regime came to power with the knowledge that their success or failure hinged on speed and violence of action. They had a limited window to make resistance impossible, and they missed it.

[Host/Announcer]

You can see some evidence of this in our war of choice against Iran. President Trump wanted a quick, brutal triumph that would look good on the evening news, so he told his military to bear down on Iran with all the speed and violence of action they could muster. That plan failed, and the reasons why are weirdly similar to how the Republican Party has overplayed their hand in our ongoing culture war. Back in Trump's first term, the DoD established the algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team, nicknamed Project Maven. The goal of the project, as per Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, was to automate the analysis of drone footage and other data humans previously would have gone over by hand in order to speed up the rate at which targets were identified and struck in wartime. Project Maven from the Jump was a product of the worst kind of military thinking. How can we automate as much of our planning of warfare as possible? This is the kind of project you pursue when your finest military minds still believe that victory is as simple as killing or destroying a preset number of bad guys, causing them to give up. The goal was to create a system that could collate and synthesize huge quantities of data in order to allow 1,000 targeting decisions per hour. Kevin Baker, writing for the Guardian, notes that this means 3.6 seconds per decision, or, from the individual targeteer's perspective, one decision every 72 seconds. Now we're going to talk about where this kind of thinking has led us in our conflict with Iran. But first, here's some ads.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

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[Robert Evans]

We're back.

[Host/Announcer]

Now if you listen to the advocates of this kind of military buildup, the people who are really bullish on AI for military purposes talk in their podcasts and on their blogs. The reasoning behind why you need to be able to make a thousand targeting decisions per hour is pretty obvious. They're obsessed with the idea that a future war between the US And a peer or near peer adversary, most prominently China. Right? That's what they're planning on.

[Robert Evans]

Now.

[Host/Announcer]

The Chinese military is also heavily invested in AI. There was a major New York Times article earlier this month, in April of 2026, titled Mutually Automated Destruction the Escalating Global AI Arms Race. I'm going to quote from that Now. China and Russia are experimenting with letting AI make battlefield decisions on its own. Two US Officials said China is developing systems for dozens of autonomous drones to coordinate attacks without human thought while Russia is building Lancet drones that can circle the sky and autonomously pick targets. They said even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in AI will become the ruler of the world. Mr. Z said in 2024 that the technology would be the main battleground of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the US Military to adopt AI, saying they needed to accelerate like hell. Now, my interpretation of what I've read from most of these guys is that they see future conflict as a massive but almost instantaneous chess game. Right? Whoever has the AI that can most quickly and effectively sort through their intelligence, come up with target packages, and then strike those targets first, wins, right? If we can make a thousand decisions and a thousand strikes in an hour and they can only make 800, then we'll destroy more of them and we'll win the war. Right? It'll all be decided right at the start. And this may well be how a shooting war between China and the US Would proceed. But given that very few people in either country want that war to happen because it would kill us all, I think we might do best for focusing on the war our country is currently fighting, where this logic has resulted in a catastrophic failure for at least the second time in my life. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. After more than a year of buildup and years of intelligence gathering, our military planners put together a list of 50 high value targets. The idea was if we could use our incredible super advanced spying equipment and our precision guided weapons to wipe out the most important figures of resistance in Iraq, we could hobble. Any response to the invasion. All 50 targets were struck. None of the people targeted were killed. Now, that doesn't mean no one was killed. It just means we missed all the people we thought we were going to hit. To quote from Kevin Baker's great article, again, the targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. Fast forward to earlier this year. The Trump administration orders the launch of Operation Epic Fury and unleashed a nightmare arsenal of hyper advanced weaponry on on the people and leaders of Iran. Alongside the Israeli Air force. In the first two weeks, US forces hit 6,000 targets picked with the help of Project Maven. One of them was the Manob Girls Elementary School, which was destroyed by a missile, killing 156 and wounding 95. Now, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir's Hyper Advanced AI and a multi billion dollar network of satellites backed up by decades of intelligence gathering by the CIA and the Mossad, wasn't enough to stop us from striking a school that that we knew contained none of our targets. We had data that the people we thought were there at one point were no longer there, and it was a school now. But some of the data maven relied on was old and outdated, and these machines aren't capable of real judgment in the way we think of it. And because people trusted them so much, no one thought to check before ordering the strikes. This is a human error. This is not an AI error. But it illustrates a massive flaw in the fantasy that winning a war could be as easy as building a smarter machine. Now, to be accurate, and it is important to note, a lot of those 6,000 targets were what we thought, and they were accurately struck and killed. In the opening salvo of the war, President Trump and his mouthpieces celebrated their successful assassination of Iran's supreme leader alongside many other prominent military and governmental officials. This seemed at first to be way more successful than the opening strikes against Iraq. They didn't get any of those 50 guys. We got a bunch of our initial targets in this first wave of strikes. Maybe we just didn't have the right technology when we invaded Iraq. Maybe now we're doing it right. You know, finally we'll be able to win a war this way. However, that quickly proved untrue. All of those strikes put together were not enough to break Iran's will or its capacity to fight and fight back effectively. Now Donald Trump finds himself trapped in an expensive quagmire, one that is already bleeding him advanced munitions and equipment while it crashes the global economy. The most recent AP NORC poll puts Trump's overall approval at 33%, which is down 5% since just back in March. Only 32% of Americans approve of his leadership on Iran, because most of this country can still see a man shooting himself in the dick for what it is. Pete Hegseth is our most lethality obsessed Secretary of Defense and history. And in him we see the result of a long sickness, first incubated during the Vietnam War when embarrassed generals needed to spin their failure to make progress as a kind of victory. So they turned to bragging about how many fighters they'd killed, inevitably defining many civilian dead as enemy combatants, and bragging about the tonnage of trucking that they destroyed based on wildly incomplete and inaccurate intelligence. Ever since this calamitous era, informed students of military theory have seen doing body counts as the death knell of a military entity's ability to make intelligent decisions that move their forces closer to victory. But because the entire conservative project in this country is built on the thoughtless worship of military prowess and power, we've seen this kind of thinking trigger trickle down to the sorry cadre of influencers who call themselves right wing intellectuals today. I'm talking about dudes like Matt Walsh and Chris Ruffo who've built their reputations on picking targets to drum up mobs against and use as the basis of attack ads. These people have proven legitimately good at stirring up hate and forcing laws all over the country restricting things like drag shows or the use of chosen pronouns on government documents. All these people are by definition huge assholes, and so are their followers, and thus when those people get radicalized to take action in their communities, they make those communities worse. This pisses off their neighbors, which has resulted in significant backlash across the country. As an example, Moms for Liberty was formed in Florida on January 1, 2021 by Republican activists and former school board members who were outraged about pandemic safety protocols in schools. They became a vehicle for the parental rights movement, a nebulous and deeply toxic force in American political life that sees the parent as a kind of absolute sovereign over the life and mind of their child. Any influence that might lead that child to become a different kind of person than the parent envisions must be pruned away. The group used the then fresh moral panic over critical race theory as a lever from which to force themselves into American life. In June of 2021, they started filing what would become a long series of criminal complaints against books available in specific school libraries across the nation. Schools started removing books, and Moms for Liberty inspired candidates began winning school board elections around the country. It looked for a little while like a popular wave of hysterical fear might yank America into a Fahrenheit 451 style future slightly ahead of schedule. But just a couple of years later, a funny thing happened. Moms for Liberty backed candidates started losing major elections. First a series of school board races in 2023 in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Iowa. But even as the Biden administration careened towards a disastrous new election in 2024, one in which the far right seemed to have all the momentum, regular people kept rising up and organizing to protect their schools. One of the first was Karen Svoboda, a mother of seven in Dutchess County, New York. In 2023, she told NPR reporter Jim Zaroli, I looked into the local Facebook page of Moms for Liberty and just browsed through some of the social media of some of these individuals and what I saw was very upsetting. As a mom of kids who are members of that community, it was very concerning to think that these people would be trying to get onto the school board because what does that mean for my kids? So she started a group of her own, Defense of Democracy, which organized like minded parents in her community to warn each other about Moms for Liberty. They defeated an entire slate of Moms for Liberty backed candidates in 2023, all with the infrastructure of a Facebook page and weekly zoom calls. And the really remarkable thing is that Even while the 2024 election took over the national discourse and the Democratic Party completely shat the bed, people kept connecting and organizing in school districts across the country to fight for their children's educations. In November of 2025, the Houston suburb of Cypress, Texas saw Democratic candidates sweep three school board seats and take the majority, ending two years of Republican dominance. This trend was repeated elsewhere that same month, per a political article by Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez. Quote in Pennsylvania, Democrats slipped at least two dozen school board seats per an ongoing tally from progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund. The under the radar trend was enabled by voters increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyperlocal interest in politics as the COVID 19 pandemic raged. In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and the national battleground of Pennsylvania, the result of well funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders. Now, one of my favorite details from that piece is a quote from one of the new school board members, Leslie Gilmart, who stated, folks just wanted their school boards to be boring again. They wanted normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed. Now I continue to be an advocate of the thought that Tim Walls might have made a more effective vice presidential candidate if he'd kept calling the Republicans out for being freaks because they are. Their obsession with the lives and behavior of their fellow citizens and their naked slavering need to control their neighbors is upsetting and unnatural. The way I see it, we're in a time of incredible opportunity right now. The devil has played his hand and wound up slipping on a puddle of his own flop sweat along the way. The momentum is with anyone but these fucks, at least right now. Which is why a bunch of tertiary Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson have been cutting bait. Donald did the thing Fascists often do. He kept reaching until he reached for something that exceeded his grasp. Now I don't know what's going to happen next. In our absolutely unnecessary struggle with Iran, I think there's a non zero chance Trump tries to extricate our forces, save for some token so Israel won't say we abandoned them, and tries to take out the Cuban government next. It's also possible he'll escalate the violence against Iran in some massive, apocalyptic, hideous way. In either case, the human cost will be nightmarish, but either action would just be the flailing of a busted gambler putting everything he has on a fantasy that Americans want to see foreign enemies broken while they can't afford to fill their car at home. Every poll of the American people seems to suggest that most of us have a pretty low appetite for unnecessary wars. Outside of Florida, it's hard to find regular people who are scared of the Cuban government. The idea that they represent any kind of threat to folks in Michigan or Kansas is absurd on its face. The further Trump reaches, the angrier people get. Fascist governments rely on the complicity of the masses even more than their enthusiastic support. And many Americans have proven themselves unwilling to be complicit in most of what the Heritage foundation and their friends want for this country. And that's a nice note to roll the ads on.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Let's be honest, buying cannabis shouldn't be complicated, sketchy or low quality. That's why I want to tell you about mood.com that's m o o d.com Mood ships federally legal cannabis straight to your door. No medical card, no hassle. And here's the kicker. The quality is better than anything you'll find at your local dispensary. Yeah, I said it. Whether you're into edibles, concentrates, flower, or just looking to explore, you'll find it all at Mood. And it's not just the variety that makes them stand out. Every product is sourced from small American owned family farms that care deeply about what they grow. It's cannabis you can trust, delivered discreetly and ready to elevate your mood. And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order. Just head to mood.com that's mood.com to get started.

[Robert Evans]

We're back.

[Host/Announcer]

If you want a direct example of how weak the cultural community conservatives are right now, think back to the stunt President Trump pulled with DoorDash earlier in April. He ordered several bags and had them delivered by a dasher who was there to get photographed praising the president's no tax on tips policy. While they were standing outside the Oval Office, Trump asked the dasher if they thought trans woman should be allowed to compete in women's sports. And the dasher in question was 58 year old Sharon Simmons, who was a. I mean, it's been widely reported, is a Republican activist. She'd previously spoken out in favor of the no tax on tips policy at the House Ways and Means Committee field hearing. And even when she was under the gun next to the president, Simmons wasn't willing to agree with him on the weird anti trans stuff. She replied, I don't really have an opinion on that and I'm not here to call her a hero for that. She's not. But it shows a crack in the rhetorical wall these people have built for themselves. A Republican can't just support low taxes. Now they have to endorse a whole raft of psychotic vengeance politics and anti scientific views that are deeply alienating to anyone who has a chance of being called normal. Any discussion of life after Trump nowadays has to include an acknowledgment of the big lurking question of our what if he won't give up power? And that's a bigger question than the just Trump. A large number of government officials, of elected leaders, military officers and law enforcement officers have implicated themselves in the crimes and what we might call the ought to be crimes of this administration. It's not unreasonable to ask what if they won't leave power without a fight? And I don't have a comprehensive answer for you that I feel comfortable putting in the last couple pages of a podcast script. But I will point out that just in the last month as I write this, Viktor Orban and his entire political movement faced sweeping defeat at the polls. Orban had been previously referred to as a quasi dictatorial figure. He was the leader of the Hungarian government and he had led a massive right wing crackdown that attacked schools, that attacked the LGBT movement, and that became a major funder for much of our own right wing movement. It's come out that the Orban government was sending money helping to fund cpac. They were sending money to specific right wing influencers like Rod Dreher. And despite the fact that Orban was the guy that people like Tucker Carlson a couple years ago was saying, this is the future of American politics. Urbanism is what we want. Despite that fact, when they lost an election, he and his cronies backed down without a fight. Now ultimately they did this because they still think they're bulletproof, right? We've got enough people in the government that we can stop Peter Magyar the new guy, from doing any damage to us. Right? And thus temporarily leaving power is an acceptable sacrifice because that lets us avoid a civil war and the rest of the EU won't look kindly on that. I'm sure that's a lot of their thinking, and obviously the US is in a very different position geopolitically.

[Robert Evans]

But the rapidity with which some former Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have abandoned MAGA suggests one thing. They think it's more personally profitable for them to not be seen standing next to the President or the MAGA movement right now.

[Host/Announcer]

And here's more good news. Remember how basically every social network is now owned by an openly evil right wing billionaire? Well, Americans have responded to this by discarding social media in ever growing numbers. This has been about one of the most consequential shifts of the last few years. And just this week, University of Amsterdam professor Peter Thornberg published a study on shifts in U.S. social media use from 2020 to 2024. Quote, Online platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans, especially the youngest and oldest cohorts who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. Now this is, broadly speaking, a good thing for the mental health of Americans overall and for the future of our body politic. But the Americans who remain in social media aren't all doing so hot. Over the same time period, traffic on Twitter and Facebook grew markedly more right wing as both sites shrank. In his paper, Tornberg as casual users disengaged while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme. Or in other words, as the algorithms that govern what gets seen on these shrinking social media sites reward more extreme content, less extreme users leave, and the ones who succeed and become more widely shared are the most extreme. It's, you know, another extremophile kind of situation. Part of why the people near Trump all believe they're winning is they live in these same Internet fever swamps, and they've gotten used to the Internet mattering a lot more than it does right now. I don't mean to suggest that what happens online isn't important, but that importance has been softened by the sheer deluge of AI slop, spam and weird right wing propaganda that we've been forcibly drowned in for years. Less people are using these things than they used to which means their reach has declined because people find them off putting and gross. The data shows that folks, particularly over 65 and under 24, are increasingly fed up with not just social media, but the whole state of affairs we've been locked in politically. In the recent Virginia governor's race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won by a comfortable margin. Republicans devoted a huge amount of their budget against her to anti trans attack ads, writing high off their inaccurate belief that anti trans propaganda had won Trump the re election 2024. But only 4% of voters in that election listed transgender policies as a top issue. Now that alone might just point to the overwhelming impulse towards centrism shared by much of the American middle class. People don't like to stand out, particularly as a political radical. But a year after Spanberger's election, a majority of Virginia voters approved a radical redistricting measure. This was entirely framed as a response to the Republican Party fighting for the right to redistrict several states in their favor. The usual chorus of voices piped up to say, oh, I don't know guys, we shouldn't do the same thing they keep doing in order to defend ourselves. That doesn't seem fair. And this time, thank goodness, most people ignored them. The controversial measure outperformed Kamala Harris by eight points. And yes, a federal judge did immediately rule the measure unconstitutional. But you know how these things go. We're off to a series of court battles now, and however those end up, two useful things have been accomplished. The liberal majority of a state has banded together to fight the Republicans on their own terms, and a clear message has been sent to those same people that Republicans benefit from a different set of laws than Democrats. Now, any anarchist or leftist political organizer you've ever known would have told you the right wing always benefits from an interpretation of the law that, she shucks, seems to deny their opponents the right to do the same things in self defense. It's bad that things work this way, but good for rank and file liberals to be reminded of that reality. If it weren't, the current gatekeepers of our news media wouldn't be rallying so hard against this measure. The same day I wrote all of this, the Washington Post published an opinion column by Theodore Johnson titled why Virginia Went Back on its Word. It opens with a particularly idiotic paragraph. Partisanship did its best impression of democracy in Virginia. On Tuesday, voters approved a referendum permitting the state's congressional district to be redrawn to help Democrats win four additional seats. It's retaliation to recent redistricting by Texas to hand Republicans, five more seats at the behest of President Donald Trump. It's a red versus blue tit for tat over who can gerrymander more efficiently. A necessary evil, the parties say, to protect democracy. It's actually not necessarily. I mean, not that it's a necessary evil, the parties say. It's that one party was already doing this for years, the Republicans, and you didn't speak up the Washington Post. You know, this guy didn't write the same column when this shit's been happening other states. He only does it when Democrats do it in Virginia. Right. And I also might point out to Theo that a majority of voters approving a measure is democracy. You know, if your only concern is the overall health of democracy, redistricting that favors Democrats merely corrects a structural imbalance in our political system that favors loosely populated rural areas with an unfair proportion of political power and marginalizes the greater number of citizens who live in urban areas and tend to vote Democrats anyway. There are other good reasons to see hope for a fierce swing in American politics, not merely back to the middle, but far to the left, simply as a matter of practical necessity. The Republicans have spent their time in power gutting the Parks Department, the post Office, the va, the faa, and every other useful part of our state structure. And this is a big part of what's radicalized people because they very quickly come to notice that things are missing and shit is not working. Right. For decades, the government has been the enemy to millions of Americans who went out in the world and relied on government services every day of their lives. And yes, that's irritating and unfair. And no, we don't have time to fix that right now. What we can do is use the fact that the Republicans broke all these systems to point out to people, actually, you don't hate it when the government does stuff. You just hate the way Republicans run the government and the fact that the Democrats have usually been too scared to push for policies as extreme as they need to. Right? This is an opportunity to convince a lot of people. Oh, shit. Paying taxes to support a vibrant civil society with extensive and functional infrastructure is a lot better than letting big balls delete half of civil service. Right? Like, that's, I think, the opportunity we have right now. And pushing that basic line on as many Americans as possible in the next two years is, I think, one of the most important things we can do at the moment. Along with that, we need to keep building support for enforcement of consequences against the cadre of billionaires and their lackeys who. Who have been robbing our shared heritage blind this whole while. If I had my way about it, I'd point out to people that there are an awful lot of billionaires who we knew colluded to take over the federal government and put something like Elon Musk's Doge in place. You can just see that in some of the texts between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. These people are enemies of the state with an awful lot of money that we could confiscate to do things like replace the books Moms for Liberty tore out of public libraries. Now we also need to seek consequences for the criminals who have weaponized the organs of the state to fight their war against transgender Americans. This is an issue you can in fact get centrist voters to support. The average swing voter may not be particularly woke on gender theory, but they don't like seeing the government bully people who are just trying to get by. The widespread suffering created by the MAGA movement also creates potential for widespread solidarity between its victims. If the midterms go badly for the GOP and the 2028 elections go even worse, the USA's new elected officials and surviving citizens will find themselves in the same situation as the man who just unseated Viktor Orban and his supporters. We all learned how temporary a victory

[Robert Evans]

can be after 2024. I've seen more than a few comments online by liberals who decided Orban's defeat was a good time to attack a strawman caricature of a leftist. And these posts were generally laughing at this idea that a lot of people on the left express that electoralism can't defeat fas. Now I do share a frustration with the blanket rejection of electoral politics that some people on the left champion. But every online and real life lefty that I know was thrilled to see Orban get the boot. However, they all did share a fear, and this is one fear that I've seen in common with every analyst and expert on Hungarian politics that I've read, which is winning the election isn't going to be enough for Magyar. Orban is an extremist, someone who took power because things were extremely shitty in Hungary and voters got angry enough to vote for a guy who promised to burn things down. They did come to regret that, but things are still extremely bad in Hungary. Joe Biden was a moderate who tried to govern in an environment of raging extremes. His promise was that he would bring things back to the normal of the Obama era. He failed to do that because it's impossible, and his failure opened up the way for Trump 2.0 if we don't want to repeat that cycle. The failures and ultimate collapse of the MAGA movement have to be met with new strategies, new tactics, and new politics as we seek to fill the void that they're going to leave behind. I wrote and recorded the first draft of this piece. As I said earlier, just a few days before a gunman stormed into the correspondence dinner, his manifesto has made it clear that he wanted to harm the President and members of his Cabinet. Within hours, his social media accounts were archived and his life was put under a microscope, as is always happens with gunmen these days. All of this revealed a liberal man, one who had previously expressed very common centrist opinions, including a dislike of firearms. I've seen this used by people to justify a conspiratorial narrative that immediately followed the attack.

[Host/Announcer]

This guy is a perfect patsy. Obviously they cooked this up in a

[Robert Evans]

lab as an excuse to crack down on Democrats. I don't believe that and here is not a place for an argument as to why. Again, we'll talk about that, I'm sure, later this week. What is interesting to me is that before any of this happened, I'd been planning to revise the ending of this episode by commenting on an article that came came out in April of 2025. It's published by Axios and the title was Democrats Told to Get Shot for the Anti Trump Resistance. Here's a quote from that article. At town halls in their districts and in one on one meetings with constituents and activists, Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty, and not be afraid to get hurt. One of the lawmakers that they talked to for that article related a conversation that he'd had in a meeting with a constituent quote I actually said in a meeting, when they light a fire, my thought is grab an extinguisher. And someone at the table said, have you tried gasoline? So many regular liberals are embracing extreme rhetoric and measures today because they know on some level that that's the only way you survive in an extreme environment. We see this in the thousands of normies in Minneapolis who have been willing and eager to confront armed federal agents in bathrobes and risk their own life and limb to protect their neighbors from ice. And we've also seen a very dark reflection of that in the actions of that gunman last weekend. Now, the fact that an educated and informed 31 year old man decided to buy a firearm that he hated and attacked the President represents many failures. One of them is a failure of the Democratic Party and the liberal project to provide him with anything that felt like a useful outlet for his rage and hopelessness. When people start talking and acting like this guy was acting, you can either throw your hands up and back away or. Or you can try like hell to present them with a counter offer. In this case, I mean a set of policies, activist campaigns, and organized actions to make this country a less horrific place. The victory and wild popularity of Zoran Mamdani is proof that you can in fact do this. Even in 2026. The widespread support for formerly extreme positions like abolishing ICE, taxing billionaires, radically redistricting states, halting the construction of data centers, and expanding and packing the Supreme Court are more than enough evidence to show that people will get in line to back a candidate and a party who promises radical change. Moreover, everything I've seen lately suggests that people are starving for a movement like this, hungry for their own candidate who feels like Mamdani, hungry more than anything to feel hopeful again. When Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted See you at Nuremberg 2.0 after Kristi Noem got fired, I watched a coalition of left wing radicals and centrist Dems who never came together over anything else express wild glee at the very thought we can do this. We have the tools and we have the opportunity. It's going to take a big, bold step into the unknown, but that's our only option. Besides waiting until we get another chance to look through the social media archives of a gunman.

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It could happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Let's be honest. Buying cannabis shouldn't be complicated, sketchy or low quality. That's why I want to tell you about mood.com that's mood.com Mood ships federally legal cannabis straight to your door. No medical card, no hassle. And here's the kicker. The quality is better than anything you'll find at your local dispensary. Yeah, I said it. Whether you're into edibles, concentrates, flower, or just looking to explore, you'll find it all at Mood. And it's not just the variety that makes them stand out. Every product is sourced from small American owned family farms that care deeply about what they grow. It's cannabis you can trust, delivered discreetly and ready to elevate your mood. And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order. Just head to mood. Com, that's mood.com to get started.

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