Not to pull the Bill Maher "new rule" schtick, but there should be a rule for anyone who starts talking about or (more hilariously for Trump cultists) "threatening" a "civil war" (or "cival" if you're in illiterate MLB chumpire).
As John Rogers correctly points out, if you think you're serious about such a thing, you need to figure out the logistics first. Your best case scenario is that your Oathkeeper militia overtakes, secures, and maintains an area with the help of local law enforcement (unlikely, but technically possible in some parts of the country), and then what? Hold off the armed forces of the United States? (Posse Comitatus does not apply to armed, violent insurrections seeking to overthrow legitimately elected government.)
I should (and probably will, may post them if they're worth a shit) cook up a few short fiction scenes to game this out, but beyond spasms of regionalized ethnic cleansing of some sort, mass casualty episodes of domestic terrorism, perhaps assassinating political figures, there is no strategy, no endgame, no game plan for this sort of thing.
The very second you kill someone, whether it's some antifa type or a law-enforcement officer sent to take yer gun-slash-erotic-totem (what, you didn't seriously think Beto O'Rourke was literally, personally going to go house-to-house by himself to grab your AR-15, did you?), you're a killer, a mur-diddly-urderer, and there's walking that back.
Second Amendment fetishists fascinate me anyway, because they seriously do prize that sole attribute above literally everything else they profess to love about this country. The preferred framing of the situation is that of a bulwark against the overweening intrusions of Big Gubmint. And yet every time they board a plane, they take off their shoes and surrender their toothpaste, like the compliant little sheeple they really are.
All the Trump cultist, like the cult leader himself, has to keep themselves going is the fight. Struggle. Kampf. Jihad. The resurrection of long-lost terms such as Dolchstosslegende, Blut und Boden, and herrenvolk does not necessarily mean they are literal nazis, just that they are a lot less uncomfortable with the actual rhetoric and narrative that the originals had adapted to inform and excuse their subsequent actions. Those terms have suddenly become very useful again to describe some things that have become more prevalent. For starters, they seem to be perfectly okay with the children of asylum-seeking refugees being given to strangers as adoptees. Last I heard, that's human trafficking.
Any society, no matter how "modernized" or "sophisticated" or even "progressive" it may fancy itself, has a certain portion that is the polar opposite of all that. Maybe it's John Rogers' famous 27% figure, or a little bit higher or lower. My guess is that for just about every European or Anglosphere nation, the window is going to be somewhere between one-quarter and one-third, mostly but certainly not solely rural and non-college-educated, white and for some bizarre reason feeling persecuted.
They don't know anything about history "rhyming" or "repeating" itself, because you have to read it in the first place to be aware of those concepts and when they occur. All they know is that they didn't get the deal out of life that they think they deserved, and they know that no one will give them that deal. So the next best thing for them is to actualize through the candidate that ventriloquizes that anger most effectively, spouting lies and racist jabber in defiance of what the smart set claims as "good" and "right".
Doesn't matter to them that his cognitive skills are clearly impaired and worsening, that he consistently meets and exceeds the clinical checklists for narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy, that he's incompetent and completely unfit for any office, that he lies constantly and is dumber than a sack of manure. It doesn't even seem to matter to them that, contrary to their delusion that he (hurrr!) "makes libturds cry," what he really has done is enrage and motivate the liberal base against him, as well as turn away key Republican electoral blocs, such as suburban voters and college-educated women.
And he hasn't even tried to fix any of the issues that they claim to care about -- health care, infrastructure, opioid deaths, good jobs. They don't care. It's a fucking cult, and should be treated as such. They might as well go to the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood and ask the folks there how they feel about L. Ron Hubbard.
You'd think that might dissuade idiot journos from skulking out to these desiccated holes to transcribe the tedious rants of interchangeable fist-shaking codgers, but no. There's money to be made in stoking the anger and fanning the flames, and pretending that two-thirds of the people in this country don't flat out despise that motherfucker. It's their revenue model.
So of course the chatter eventually turns to "civil war," but it's clear that hardly anyone across the political spectrum has really thought that term through. I think that to the extent we can have one, it's been in motion for some time. Mass shootings committed by people who just happen to have 8chan "manifestos" and the like, folders of photos of themselves with confederate flags and throwback Rhodesia patches on their fake army-surplus khaki jackets. "Lone wolf" types who are strangely connected in the bowels of social media, feeding and goading each other to commit an act for the cause and take one for the team.
Because most people simply don't read books anymore, certainly not history books, they tend to have a very antiquated notion of what a civil war looks like. They cannot help but frame it in the outdated context of the war of confederate secession, but there is no organized movement on the part of any state governments to secede, nor any clear "cause" around which to organize such a movement. Not to mention that aside from Texas and Florida, none of the other "red states" can afford to leave, since they all take more from the eeevil federal gubmint than they pay in.
Oddly, the Purge movies probably provide the closest idea to what a modern civil war might look like -- bouts of mostly urbanized stochastic terrorism, where law enforcement at every level either can't or won't interfere or mediate, and there are no clear sides, just random people fighting and killing each other for unclear reasons. And in more gang-infested areas of large metropolitan areas, that's basically what happens. But that's not politically-motivated warfare, just violent people doing business and crazy people doing crazy.
There's conceivably a path or paths in which interconnected cadres of bad actors could coordinate and organize systematic attacks on their perceived enemies, and do real damage. They could even fund themselves with sophisticated forms of highway banditry and various forms of theft. But taking and holding territory and fending off legitimate government enforcement would be beyond the capabilities of even sober-minded, intelligent groups of well-trained individuals.
And I'll be goddamned if I've ever seen so much as a single cultist who remotely fits that bill. Most of the camera pans at the hate rallies show vast swaths of paunchy middle-aged (or older) assholes who talk a big tee-shirt, but probably couldn't run a quarter-mile in ten minutes if you put a gun to their head. And that's just the women. [Hi-yoooooo!]
I wouldn't get too worried about the prospect of a Rascal Revolution. Their idiotic Red Dawn fantasies would peter out right about the time they lose the Fox News signal at the cabin. They hate the gubmint until that fucking check comes. They're loud and obnoxious, but there are fewer of them than they think, and there are definitely fewer of them than there are of us. And a lot of us have guns as well, and know how to use them.
Again, when we look back at this weird period of time, ten or twenty years or more from now, what will (or at least should) stand out prominently is the utterly credulous nature of these wannabe warriors, not only the passion with which they spewed their impotent virtual rage, but that they did it all on behalf of a ridiculous fucking clown who never did a goddamned thing for them, and in reality wouldn't have crossed the street to piss on them if they were on fire.
As John Rogers correctly points out, if you think you're serious about such a thing, you need to figure out the logistics first. Your best case scenario is that your Oathkeeper militia overtakes, secures, and maintains an area with the help of local law enforcement (unlikely, but technically possible in some parts of the country), and then what? Hold off the armed forces of the United States? (Posse Comitatus does not apply to armed, violent insurrections seeking to overthrow legitimately elected government.)
I should (and probably will, may post them if they're worth a shit) cook up a few short fiction scenes to game this out, but beyond spasms of regionalized ethnic cleansing of some sort, mass casualty episodes of domestic terrorism, perhaps assassinating political figures, there is no strategy, no endgame, no game plan for this sort of thing.
The very second you kill someone, whether it's some antifa type or a law-enforcement officer sent to take yer gun-slash-erotic-totem (what, you didn't seriously think Beto O'Rourke was literally, personally going to go house-to-house by himself to grab your AR-15, did you?), you're a killer, a mur-diddly-urderer, and there's walking that back.
Second Amendment fetishists fascinate me anyway, because they seriously do prize that sole attribute above literally everything else they profess to love about this country. The preferred framing of the situation is that of a bulwark against the overweening intrusions of Big Gubmint. And yet every time they board a plane, they take off their shoes and surrender their toothpaste, like the compliant little sheeple they really are.
All the Trump cultist, like the cult leader himself, has to keep themselves going is the fight. Struggle. Kampf. Jihad. The resurrection of long-lost terms such as Dolchstosslegende, Blut und Boden, and herrenvolk does not necessarily mean they are literal nazis, just that they are a lot less uncomfortable with the actual rhetoric and narrative that the originals had adapted to inform and excuse their subsequent actions. Those terms have suddenly become very useful again to describe some things that have become more prevalent. For starters, they seem to be perfectly okay with the children of asylum-seeking refugees being given to strangers as adoptees. Last I heard, that's human trafficking.
Any society, no matter how "modernized" or "sophisticated" or even "progressive" it may fancy itself, has a certain portion that is the polar opposite of all that. Maybe it's John Rogers' famous 27% figure, or a little bit higher or lower. My guess is that for just about every European or Anglosphere nation, the window is going to be somewhere between one-quarter and one-third, mostly but certainly not solely rural and non-college-educated, white and for some bizarre reason feeling persecuted.
They don't know anything about history "rhyming" or "repeating" itself, because you have to read it in the first place to be aware of those concepts and when they occur. All they know is that they didn't get the deal out of life that they think they deserved, and they know that no one will give them that deal. So the next best thing for them is to actualize through the candidate that ventriloquizes that anger most effectively, spouting lies and racist jabber in defiance of what the smart set claims as "good" and "right".
Doesn't matter to them that his cognitive skills are clearly impaired and worsening, that he consistently meets and exceeds the clinical checklists for narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy, that he's incompetent and completely unfit for any office, that he lies constantly and is dumber than a sack of manure. It doesn't even seem to matter to them that, contrary to their delusion that he (hurrr!) "makes libturds cry," what he really has done is enrage and motivate the liberal base against him, as well as turn away key Republican electoral blocs, such as suburban voters and college-educated women.
And he hasn't even tried to fix any of the issues that they claim to care about -- health care, infrastructure, opioid deaths, good jobs. They don't care. It's a fucking cult, and should be treated as such. They might as well go to the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood and ask the folks there how they feel about L. Ron Hubbard.
You'd think that might dissuade idiot journos from skulking out to these desiccated holes to transcribe the tedious rants of interchangeable fist-shaking codgers, but no. There's money to be made in stoking the anger and fanning the flames, and pretending that two-thirds of the people in this country don't flat out despise that motherfucker. It's their revenue model.
So of course the chatter eventually turns to "civil war," but it's clear that hardly anyone across the political spectrum has really thought that term through. I think that to the extent we can have one, it's been in motion for some time. Mass shootings committed by people who just happen to have 8chan "manifestos" and the like, folders of photos of themselves with confederate flags and throwback Rhodesia patches on their fake army-surplus khaki jackets. "Lone wolf" types who are strangely connected in the bowels of social media, feeding and goading each other to commit an act for the cause and take one for the team.
Because most people simply don't read books anymore, certainly not history books, they tend to have a very antiquated notion of what a civil war looks like. They cannot help but frame it in the outdated context of the war of confederate secession, but there is no organized movement on the part of any state governments to secede, nor any clear "cause" around which to organize such a movement. Not to mention that aside from Texas and Florida, none of the other "red states" can afford to leave, since they all take more from the eeevil federal gubmint than they pay in.
Oddly, the Purge movies probably provide the closest idea to what a modern civil war might look like -- bouts of mostly urbanized stochastic terrorism, where law enforcement at every level either can't or won't interfere or mediate, and there are no clear sides, just random people fighting and killing each other for unclear reasons. And in more gang-infested areas of large metropolitan areas, that's basically what happens. But that's not politically-motivated warfare, just violent people doing business and crazy people doing crazy.
There's conceivably a path or paths in which interconnected cadres of bad actors could coordinate and organize systematic attacks on their perceived enemies, and do real damage. They could even fund themselves with sophisticated forms of highway banditry and various forms of theft. But taking and holding territory and fending off legitimate government enforcement would be beyond the capabilities of even sober-minded, intelligent groups of well-trained individuals.
And I'll be goddamned if I've ever seen so much as a single cultist who remotely fits that bill. Most of the camera pans at the hate rallies show vast swaths of paunchy middle-aged (or older) assholes who talk a big tee-shirt, but probably couldn't run a quarter-mile in ten minutes if you put a gun to their head. And that's just the women. [Hi-yoooooo!]
I wouldn't get too worried about the prospect of a Rascal Revolution. Their idiotic Red Dawn fantasies would peter out right about the time they lose the Fox News signal at the cabin. They hate the gubmint until that fucking check comes. They're loud and obnoxious, but there are fewer of them than they think, and there are definitely fewer of them than there are of us. And a lot of us have guns as well, and know how to use them.
Again, when we look back at this weird period of time, ten or twenty years or more from now, what will (or at least should) stand out prominently is the utterly credulous nature of these wannabe warriors, not only the passion with which they spewed their impotent virtual rage, but that they did it all on behalf of a ridiculous fucking clown who never did a goddamned thing for them, and in reality wouldn't have crossed the street to piss on them if they were on fire.
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