QuarZone Media.

Welcome to It Could Happen here.

I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart, which they always seem to be these days.

And in particular, this is an episode about what to expect out of the next six months to a year.

If you're not sure what else to do, try and spread calm.

I first learned this lesson back in 2016,

hanging out with perennial libertarian presidential candidate,

Vermin Supreme during the protests around that year's Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.

If you've never had the pleasure of seeing

vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot

about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations. Those lessons

came in handy for me back in 2020. But the George Floyd uprising is now almost five years in the past.

Trump is once again in power. Very little seems to stand between him and the exercise of a kind

of arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders,

but has often sponsored elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump

has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more.

The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the next six months to a year.

What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available and numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers, and retired law enforcement.

There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question.

Is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's

disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast essay titled, Don't Panic. It was my most

shared episode of this podcast that year, and I felt pretty good about the response, until Trump won again,

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