Trivia / It Could Happen Here

• Falsely Advertised Accuracy: The podcast is presented as a detailed and realistic thought experiment of a near-future second American civil war. Evans then spends most of the podcast's runtime angrily railing against the federal government and various far-right/religious ideologies while hyping up anarchism, rather than detail how such a conflict would realistically unfold. Highlights include:
  • The podcast treats Dominion theology as if it were an organized nationwide movement for millions of Christian extremists to unite under, a la Salafism and ISIS, when it's actually a broad umbrella term coined by academics that covers many competing movements - if Christian extremists were to take up arms and seize territory during a civil war their efforts would likely be a lot more fragmented and localized.
  • Highlighting the fragility and vulnerabilty of the US's infrastructure and supply chain to attacks from bad actors, then ignoring this all-important factor on the conflict's outcome.
  • Stating the US military would automatically follow the same rules of engagement as Syrian government forces and that most US servicemembers would readily bomb American cities and commit war crimes on their fellow citizens, despite the US military's far greater goodwill with the American public (not something to discard willingly) and access to far superior equipment, training, resources, intelligence gathering and allies. Evans also assumes that for all these advantages the US government - unlike the Assad regime - still fails to stabilize the conflict and the most likely outcome is the country breaking apart.
  • The notion that civil war and balkanization of the world's largest economy, most powerful and far-reaching military and holder of the global reserve currency would all happen in a vacuum, and that every other great power on Earth wouldn't immediately scramble to aid the US government, rebels or both. There's also no mention of the inevitable disruption of global trade, or of the devastating proxy conflicts (e.g. a Chinese invasion of Taiwan - the bottleneck of nearly all modern tech) that would most likely erupt following the weakening or collapse of US military hegemony.
  • What makes this instance all the more egregious is that Evans is a veteran war correspondent who's witnessed multiple 21st century civil wars and revolutions first hand, yet still choses to ignore the most important factors of any armed conflict - logistics, allies, morale, etc. - and fixate almost entirely on ideology.