What Would a Second US Civil War Really Look Like?
Simon Roper of Warographics explores what may be coming.
How Civil Wars Start, one of my must-read books, is mentioned in some detail in this video from Warogaphics.
Simon is … not wrong here, but as I’m closer to the action, some of he things he characterizes as far fetched are already happening.
The second half of the video delves into what a conflict would look like. The other piece of reading I strongly recommend in this area is The Insurgent’s Dilemma. Warographics did not find this book, but I really wish they would have. Simon got most of it right, but I feel there were too many mutually exclusive “this or that” scenarios.
We have an insurgency that is ideological and infiltrational. The situation I covered in Crack Babies Of Kiwi Farms, which is precisely as silly and juvenile as it sounds, exists due to the sort of online conflict that’s spilling over into the real world and getting closer to violence with each new episode.
More Broadly:
In a less juvenile manner, we face November’s Civil War Referendum and We’re Gonna Fight: Global Edition. Last night in What The Supplemental REALLY Means I said the quiet part out loud. 2024 is akin to 1940/1941, when the winds of war were blowing just one direction and rising steadily, but the turning point battles of El Alamein, Midway, and Stalingrad were not yet envisioned.
Mike Johnson, the Christian Nationalist second in line to run our government if something should happen to both Biden and Harris, was taken aside, shown the estimate of what was coming for the Baltics. He then pushed through a the funding needed to preserve Ukraine, in a damaged fashion and much delayed, for just another six months. The globally focused among are cross our fingers that this is enough time for Europe to really come to a consensus that the Cold War’s “tense but quiet” era is truly over. They’ve been backing Ukraine, don’t get me wrong, but only some of them have been doing so in a “we’re obviously next” fashion.
The cynic in me sees a man who doesn’t want Biden to become a wartime president, which would likely scuttle the Christian Nationalist coup scheming. I hope Biden’s winter plans for the lame duck period mirror the ones I made in my late teens - knee boots, an eager black lab, a well oiled Remington 870, and a tube full of 3” shells with heavy shot for targets at a distance. I do not trust our federal law enforcement to handle this hazard properly, but the combination of three years of investigating the groundlings of January 6th and Biden’s hand hovering over the butt of that Insurrection Act weapon … we might just make it to January of 2025.
Conclusion:
And if we do make it, we’ll make it with the understanding that the GOP of 2024 are as dead as the Whigs of 1854 - no point to nominating when you can’t crack a hundred electoral seats. Trump is bad for them, no doubt, but Dobbs ending safe abortion has awakened a sleeping giant. The 70% of us who think The Handmaid’s Tale was just entertainment are coming for the 30% who see that as god’s will for this country.
I shiver when I think of how close we came to losing it all. If Pence had blinked, if that Capitol Police officer had not led the mob away, if the staffers had not had the presence of mind to take that chest of documents …