The Closure of the American Experiment
The American experiment is reaching its closure, despite the screaming denials of sheltered Americans. We are almost out of time, but it is not hopeless.
TL;DR: The United States is showing signs of entering its second Civil War, despite the screaming denials of sheltered Americans. The democratic process is going to end. The world is on fire. We are almost out of time, but it is not hopeless.
Hello Americans. New day, new blessings.
This long piece that I wrote for you today may be one of the last ones. There is not much more for me to say on it, unless you like hearing niche history stories and internet rabbit holes. It gets dark and despairing, but I leave some hope at the end of this one.
Disclaimer
I have to put this part up front because pedants and people who have never personally seen conflict in their lives seem incapable of understanding the following. A modern civil war is not like the war in 1860. It is not force on force like what we are seeing in Ukraine. It is not like the 1980s, hiding in the jungle like Rambo. A modern civil war looks like the Troubles, or the Years of Lead, and eventually Yugoslavia, or Syria. "But the Troubles wasn't a civil war!", the close-minded may immediately counter. Look, Snopes, we do not have time to entertain your fantasy world of pedants anymore. If you seriously can't wrap your head around this situation at this point in history, and you are not willing consider that the way people do things changes over time, you are going to have a hard time following this. However, you get to enjoy the full surprise of violence that destroys your bubble.
This is not a doomsday prepper fantasy. This is not about the end of the world. This is about a growing domestic incident on a national scale. Real life is not a film. It is not a Netflix series. It is not a video game. No superheroes are coming to save you. No Great Man Theory is going to cause one of the perpetrators to have a change of heart. We have stepped outside of civility politics years ago. If we didn't, Jan 6th would not have happened and multiple representatives and senators would not still be in office right now.
There may be the rare individuals who will actually sit through all of this, read it all, and then would love to comment "Let's go Brandon!" Ha ha. Buddy, I hate Biden more than you. I am no liberal. I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican either, or a conservative. This American idea of politics simplified down to left vs. right is not how the real world works, or really how anyone works.
There is an interview with a survivor of Bosnia who goes by the name "Laura". A Croatian woman. The interview was conducted when she was 64. She was 42 at the time of the Balkan Wars. The interviewer is Selco Begovic, a survivor of Sarajevo who has quite a few stories of his own. If you need some background to Yugoslavia and the Balkan Wars, I covered it in an earlier writing. I am going to jump between that interview and the text I have pulled together here. I stuck with the original translation1, so there are some English grammatical errors. The huge block quotes out of nowhere that you see will be that interview.
Lastly, this is not a call to violence or glorification of violence. I am going to touch on some uncomfortable subject matter. There are descriptions of death, sexual abuse, and wanton violence. Strong language is used.
Times Are Tense
Anxiety disorders are on the rise.2 The American consciousness today is buzzing with it. It occasionally moves into full on horror as well. In general terms, everything in capitalist society tries to alienate you, because the world that liberal capitalism imagines is totally alienating. It is like a funko pop. Deeply horrifying in one way, but also stupid enough to laugh at. Billionaires traveling to space just to one-up each other is funny. But the pile of bodies they climbed to get there definitely is not.
You may have noticed that, until a few weeks ago when the Supreme Court revealed their sights on Moore v. Harper, the case that can possibly nullify national elections, the majority of Americans had little interest in the spiraling state of the nation. Even within the past six years, when it was obvious to anyone looking beyond corporate news entertainment media.
Before then, being conscious of these things required someone to be plugged in to a very specific internet death matrix of cryptocurrencies, technocratic corporations, and politics. The humor and ultimate seriousness of it all only lands if you are exposed to 4channers, Elon Musk worshipers, and startup advice guys on a regular basis.
Living in this death spiral is destabilizing. You are being exposed to a world where these events can take place. Anyone on the outside looking in will call you delusional. It is a world where everybody is on the edge of homelessness.3 Where the natural world is collapsing.4 Incomprehensible horrors are seeping from the earth.5 And it is all so normalized that you can't even understand how things got this way. The world is so saturated with misery and cognitive dissonance that it leaves everyone in a state of vertigo, never quite able to orient themselves.
Here, I am trying to pull together all that doom and more. I am trying to write a shocking warning, because we are running out of time for anything less. If you can't read it all at once, just take it piecemeal. This is not easy to come to grips with.
Do you remember the period of hyperinflation when you could buy with credit and when that check came to payment it would be worth maybe 10% of the original value, some few months before the killing and chaos started?
Now when I remember that I feel like an idiot because I did not realize that everything was going to shit when something like that is possible.
Women from my bank, my colleagues, were bragging how they bought extra stuff that way with almost no money, I was proud because I did not do that.
All this "vote harder" cheer leading is not going to help you. Democrat politics are largely run by lawyers - people who have been there for decades and can't even remember when they got into politics. People who have no firm ideological convictions at all. It is largely a stopping point in the corporate consulting rotation world. You step into politics, do your one or two or three years in the administration or Congress, and then become a lobbyist or corporate consultant. Or you join a think tank funded by corporations or weapons manufacturers. Or you do Collen Group, Albright Stonebridge, Dropbox, or in the case of the Obama administration you go to Amazon. You go on the board of directors of Wal-Mart like Hillary Clinton. And then you create the next administration in waiting. Or you go back, get pissed off, and become a corporate lobbyist. Oh, and toss in some vague bourgeoisie liberal commitments.
Almost no one in DC believes the reality that this country is in. People still believe in the Obama American exceptionalism hopium. They think Americans are "flush" with cash.6 They were lucky that the Jan 6 rioters were a horde of inbred morons. They will not be a second time.
To them, America will last forever and if there is a problem they can just throw money at it. Then, there is the geographic isolation that prevents them from actually seeing the problems first-hand. There is a reason why a lot of republican representatives don’t really live in their rural districts and spend all of their time in DC.
There is also the fact that 90% of the staffers and admin officials are white, almost always upper-middle class or rich, Ivy League or flagship state school graduates. That leads to some serious tunnel vision about issues that are not politically important or career advancing. The people who are aware of the problems are working class people who have worked their way up. However, they have very little influence or none if they don’t drink the “America Über Alles” kool-aid. Say one thing bad about Trump’s or Biden’s America and there goes your career.
The Democratic Party's only move is hand wringing. That is their entire ideology. Hand wringing on things that they know their widest voting base actually wants them to do. But who else are you going to vote for?
When the war started in Croatia, I, like most of us, believed that somehow someone would recognize that we are all the same people, Socialists and Communists, and that we just needed to stick together, and everything would be fine.
And then one day my husband came home earlier from work. He looked badly shaken.
He told me that his coworker was absent from work for two weeks, officially he was ill, with pneumonia.
Rumors were that he was volunteering as a fighter in Croatia. Some people believed and some did not believe.
But when he came back to work he had golden necklaces around his neck, golden rings, and big smile on his face.
Some folks said that he was bragging around that there in Croatia if you are willing to fight there were a lot of things to plunder, money and gold, and he whispered with a sick smile that it you have the will and you wanted there were lot of "available" women, too.
I believe we are already stepping into the second civil war, but this time it will be a lot more decentralized and the majority of the country will deny its existence until it affects them personally. There are no "both sides" here. It is not coming from "the left". The violence is not originating from the NPR listening Subaru and Birkenstock crowd.
A modern civil war is something that heats up slowly until it quickly becomes hot. Perhaps there will be some more shooting incidents here and there. A couple of bombings that get quickly shuffled out of the news cycle. But it won't be in your city. It won't be in your semi-rural town. It will always be "over there". Somewhere else. It will happen with increasing frequency until it is everywhere, and you wonder how it possibly got like this.
An easy early flash point was the election of 2016. Donald Trump won. The failed talk-show host. The man who managed to make his own casino bankrupt, twice. New York's golden ass. He is the one who won. Suddenly tens of millions of Americans could say the quiet part out loud. Climate change was made up. Immigrants must get deported. Dismantle everything that Obama breathed in the direction of, no matter what it was. Make America Great Again.
An ugly truth is that the Democrats are going to lose these midterms in terrible fashion. There has been no abolishment of student loan debt. No legalization of marijuana. No healthcare. No codification of Roe v. Wade (too late now). No minimum wage hike. No court expansion. No pandemic plan. No eviction moratorium. All of the campaign promises of 2020 were a lie. This past week Congress had a hearing trying to justify a gun ban like the 1994 one. The bill just cleared the House Judiciary Committee. It can be called to vote in the full House this coming week. When the gun ban passed back in 1994, the Democrats got massacred in the following midterms. The Democrats are about to commit political suicide.
When you operate under the liberal belief that the organized right (which is controlled by the far right now) is operating in good faith, and that if you reward the reasonable conservative, then they will play the game outright. So now you have a right wing that does not play by any rules, supports mobs storming the capitol, and is supporting a president that incited a coup attempt. You have a right wing that increasingly works with its openly fascist and white nationalists elements. It doesn't give a shit about precedent, or good faith, or decorum. It doesn't care about any of these things that liberals care about. The people who have the guns are not the ones trying to make it easier for you to vote.
You can't "yes, and" these things away. Voting harder will not make it magically solve itself. We are far beyond that now.
Husband said that guy was always bit weird when it came to women and alcohol, but after he returned from that "weekend fighting" for money, he always had a sick smile on his face, like he had seen that you can get money, gold, and women in much easier ways that standing all day long in a decades-old bus and selling tickets to angry workers and confused school kids.
My husband was never a brave man. He was a good man, but he liked to pull back from situations where people used fists or knives.
You could say he was coward in some way.
After a few stories he heard from the colleague, the fear installed in him for real and forever. Anyway, that forever did not last long.
Shit moved from Croatia to our town pretty soon. One morning I realized that my coworkers who were other nationalities were missing from work.
And I realized too, that their workplaces were empty more or less. While I was talking about how we should stick together in the spirit of socialism, they were organizing how to get the hell out of town.
We have reached the point where the mainstream Republican party, the official Texas GOP, has issued a certain statement at their annual convention last month7. To any historian worth their salt, this language, in this climate, in the context of recent laws and events, reads way too close to a certain type of rhetoric.
A few days after that, the GOP introduced a national anti-trans bill to Congress: House Bill 8170.8 Over 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states thus far.9
More books have been banned in the past couple of years than since the start of logging book bans in the US.10 Even teachers are being targeted for violent attacks.11 History is a flat circle I guess.
Why do I keep referencing running out of time? With the January 6th hearings, Donald Trump will be facing legal peril. The DoJ is already on the move now with the conclusion of Day 8. Not to be underestimated, Trump will probably do the smart thing and announce his candidacy for 2024. That is not going to protect him, obviously. But it will put some bodies upon the bureaucratic gears. He may even do it after midterms so that Democrats cannot use it to campaign off of. Yes, I am aware that the Republican Party is not in full support of Donald Trump. They are currently split. Some of them are Trumpists, some of them are never-Trumpers, and some of them are doing their best to ignore it and continue attempting politics as usual. The problem is that while the Trumpists are losing support of the American populace, their radicalism hasn’t gone anywhere and continues to drag down the Republican Party as a whole. If Trump is able to get back on that campaign stage he can just steamroll them. It is going to lead to discourse and events much worse than 2016-2017 or 2020. Heck, some people are expecting major violence even if he gets indicted.12
That is only one chunk of the urgency. The other will occur regardless of who the candidates for 2024 are. It comes from our favorite institution of democracy; the Supreme Court of the United States. The other month they announced that their sights were set on Moore v. Harper. That case is very important because it is what rejected the Independent State Legislature Theory. That theory, in short, would allow state legislatures to nullify election results for any minute reason. For instance, a Democrat legislature could say that this district which voted for a moderate Republican started counting one minute too early, so all of those results can be thrown out. Or say, a Republican legislature noticed a district accepted mail-in votes, so they decide to invalidate that entire district. That’s correct. On the national level, voting will actually not mean anything anymore. Moore v. Harper has been rejected from being re-examined by every Supreme Court until this one. This is because it will be the death of democracy. The Court said it was on the docket for next term, which begins in October of this year. These next elections of the midterms and the national, will be the last.
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has made it clear that they are going after Moore v. Harper, future strife is inevitable. We've had our Beer Hall Putch. This is the Reichstag fire. Without hyperbole, the American experiment will end.
The current Supreme Court's antics are centered around the idea of "originalism". This idea is basically that every idea written down in the Constitution has to be interpreted in exactly the way that the Founding Fathers intended it. You cannot simply read the Constitution from a modern perspective, but you must read it as if you were a white slave owner. That means stuff like Brown v. Board of Education is in flux, along with Loving v. Virginia.
Every judge that has been nominated has been asked by Democrats during the questioning process "Will you overturn Roe v. Wade?" and each one responded with that it was a settled decision, it's been 50 years, you can trust us wink wink nudge nudge. And then we saw what happened as soon as they got the opportunity and ability.
If you read this far and want an ETA of when it will happen so you can get out, I say get your paperwork now. All of your papers, visa applications, passports, get them sorted right now. Get it now before midterms. Before the expected wipe out of Democrat seats. Before the slew of petty laws and standstill of government. Before whatever purges of Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) can happen and make what few processes we have left even more difficult. Do not expect immigration to be fast-tracked. There is no longer time to spare.
And then one morning my husband came earlier from his job, He told me that people in uniforms came and confiscated the buses in the name of the "Cause" and the state. Nobody said what cause or state, but he saw that they had blood in their eyes, and nobody was willing to ask too many questions.
They told the workers that they need to go home and follow the orders of the local "crisis government".
In that time, there were already several of those crisis governments, each with their own agendas, militias, and orders. People still tried to understand which of those governments represented the state.
What they did not understand was that the state was already gone. There were wars between those people too.
My husband finally beat his fear and went to the local criminals to buy a rifle. He gave almost half of the money that we had saved for a new car for that thing.
This will probably be the most misunderstood section, so I will attempt to cover some common arguments here.
We need to stop pretending like owning a gun is some kind of moral defect or indicator of fascist ideology. It's a tool. No matter how you feel about guns, you should educate yourself on the historical facts of disarmed populations. If you erect enough barriers to legal gun sales, do you think Americans will simply stop buying and selling guns?
Gun laws are not going to change. The United States of America is not Australia. It is not Europe. It is not Canada. The guns are not going away. And a third of this country is salivating at slaughtering another third. But hey, you can disarm yourself all you want. It is a free country after all.
"There won't be much shooting!" There will be quite a lot of shooting. No, it will not be like Red Dawn. Think more like Red State. There is almost zero chance that a foreign invasion will collapse the United States. That is not what American citizens have been stockpiling guns that past few years for.
When Obama came into office, the huge chunk of Republicans who had jumped on board the gun craze under Bush’s presidency and LaPierre’s NRA campaigns started stockpiling ammunition and buying reloading benches. Those stockpiles have only grown larger, and the sentiment has always been the same among these people: “They can try to take my guns, but they’ll get my bullets first.” A paranoid “defensive” position has been put in place for years on their part. If they choose to switch to the offensive, which they blatantly have been itching to do, then no amount of proposed gun control is going to do jack shit.
There are the smug leftists who say "Ah yes. The guns for the revolution, comrade." No, comrade. The guns aren't for the revolution. The guns are for resisting the makings of a genocide.
"Your gun is not going to win against the government!" Probably not. Simply owning them though, that might save you from being targeted by non-state actors.
"In a real apocalypse, there won't be much shooting at all. People prefer stability. Talking about guns is a ridiculous unhinged fantasy." I like your optimism. But there is truth in that argument. In the more common forms of collapse, or better termed the Crumbles, there is not much shooting. We already experienced that with the initial COVID-19 outbreak. It is rare for there to be a big apocalyptic event. Things just get incrementally worse and people have to adjust to them, often by coercion from an authoritarian figure. We don't have the fortune of our American collapse being so mellow. Instead we have tens of millions of Americans that think you are the devil, are whipped into a frenzy of hatred, and are gunning to wipe you out.
America has had worse times, but not since the Civil War has a greater domestic danger been present to its existence. A civil war does not look like a bunch of guys lining up and firing at each other. The United States' Civil War is not the only civil war that has happened in history. A civil war looks like the Years of Lead, or the Troubles, or Syria.
Insurgencies have changed a lot in the past 20 years. Read The Jakarta Method. It’s about Indonesia. Most people never expect a civil war to be as close as it is. Things can spark off very quickly. The only type of civil war that is near impossible here is another north/south conflict like the first time.
Another online argument that I have seen is that a civil war is impossible, because "a civil war requires an established power structure and an insurgency. If the right wing was going to start a civil war today, they wouldn't be against random leftists, they would be against the United States government! That's the established power structure, and they failed challenging it with the militia movement!" The argument may go on to claim that although the Proud Boys are around, "that's not a civil war and they just get fought off by pepper spray!"
For everyone who has the above arguments, I need you to look up "the day of the rope". It is an event from one of the core documents to white nationalism: The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce13. That poorly written book is also like the framework of Tucker Carlson's entire persona for at least the past six years.
Maybe you stuck around and read all of this and are still not convinced. How many times do you need to hear "when do we get to use the guns?"14 at mainstream ultra-popular far right events? How many young men, who are not even drinking age, raised on 4chan need to go on a shooting spree; either because they believed the Great Replacement conspiracy, or far-right media death sphere, or just schizoposting acting out in real life?15 How many calls for execution of people in the LGBT+ community being met with applause do you need? How many boomers cosplaying as soldiers need to stand around while people die? How much evidence of seditious conspiracy do you need out of the Jan 6th hearings going on right now? How many anecdotes of kids sharing that their parents said "all the gays and trannies and people who do abortions need to die" do you need to hear? How many indicators of planned mass violence do you need? Do we really have to reach "cut down the tall trees" before you take this threat seriously?
Gun buybacks, increased gun laws, and tighter background checks seem like "common sense" solutions, especially to those living on the coasts where laws like these are already commonplace. They are not. I don’t think many people arguing for stricter gun control realize just how far gone those proposals are.
Guns in America are extremely easy to get. Easier than getting healthcare. Today, in 2022, it is not a massive feat of engineering to just build a gun either. For those people who just got an incredulous smile on their face: it does not involve physically beating metal into the parts for a gun. And no, the plastic part does not take the pressure of the expanding gunpowder gases. We have come a very very long way from the Liberator.
Even more DIY weapon possibilities are open with 3d printing other than fitting pistol parts into a plastic frame. The FGC-916 was designed from the ground up to be created from scratch.
It was intended that anyone with access to a bike shop can construct it. It is what the young people of Myanmar have integrated into their resistance against the military junta there. It even popped up in Northern Ireland recently.17
No one has to do all that by the way. Shinzo Abe got his back blown out by a few pipes duct-taped to a block of wood.
When he came home with the rifle, he was even more afraid.
He did not talk too much, but I understood that he was more afraid to use the rifle than to be without it.
He was a weak man. He could not help it.
Somewhere around that day when he bought the rifle, we sent our kids to my sister, some 200km from our place.
It was the first and probably last time when my husband's fear was used to make a good decision. I did not want to be separated from my kids, but he just kept on telling me, "Laura, you do not know what is happening, and what people are saying outside. The kids need to go away from here."
They left town in the last of the Red Cross organized convoys. Their small faces were confused behind the glass. While I was waving them at the local market where the transport was organized, my husband was in our backyard trying to kill beer bottles with bullets from his rifle.
Our neighbor was trying to teach him how to operate the rifle. Rumors in town were that this neighbor had some violent history. Some even said that he was in the French Foreign Legion.
My husband was a cook during the basic training in the army, and he forgot even the basic stuff he learned in the army.
"name is jonathan and today seems like a good day to die" wrote the 20-year-old Greenwood Mall shooter on 4chan right before he embarked on his spree.
Thankfully, that spree barely got started and didn't last long at all. It was stopped by an ordinary gun-carrying American. 15 seconds. 10 shots. 8 hits. 40 yards. Elisjsha Dicken shot that kid dead. Multiple would-be victims got to go home to their families that day. It didn't take 400 cops standing around to do it.
I realize that there is a loud percentage of Americans that are absolutely terrified of guns. Some of them would have a panic attack if they discovered to be in the same room as one. I need them to understand this: a gun is not a magical item. It is an inanimate object. It is not good or bad. It is a tool and how it is used is dependent on the person using it.
You don't have to be as ill-trained as the Congolese military. Or as the Uvalde police in that cringe "tactical" photo-op they took inside of the school after the shooting. It is not difficult to get proper training as a regular civilian in the United States.18 It is common knowledge now that American police do not have that level of training. However, little is stopping ordinary Americans from learning how to properly defend themselves and others.
After we got word from Red Cross that our kids got to their destination in good order, we were kind of more relaxed, but silence moved into the house.
For days we listened to the radio on our car battery. Electricity, water, and all other services were gone. We still were trying to figure out who was fighting, who was defending who was liberating, and who was representing law in our city.
"But what are the sides??? I haven't seen anything about them so this is all made up!" You haven't seen anything because anyone semi-serious is keeping their mouth shut. In some states, you can be arrested and imprisoned for just saying such a thing online.19 Like I mentioned earlier: real life is not a Netflix series, or a film, or a video game. Relying on such defined story beats to prove something is happening is ridiculous.
This is not a simple urban vs rural divide. Although many clashes will be like that. Small pockets of people shooting at each other forever while the ruling class continues to soak up money and live above the fray is more likely.
"The military will stop it!" Like they did on Jan 6th? I need you to understand this: 1) The armed forces are composed of soldiers and officers with their own political leanings, regardless of the aims of the Joint Chiefs, West Point, the Pentagon. 2) The armed forces are extremely good at putting down incidents in a population center, like what we saw with the Boston Bombing. They are not good at putting down incidents in four dozen population centers at the same time, like we saw in 2020. What we are potentially dealing with is the latter.
Look at where the DoD's budget goes. Look at our defense acquisition programs. Look where the overwhelming majority of dollars are going. It is not to the new innovative technologies. It is to last century legacy systems. We have the image of the most modern military force on the face of the planet, but that does not hold up at scale. We are making the same structural mistakes as Russia, just with a couple hundred billion more dollars. We are more like them than we think in our ability to sustain a major war. We do have world-class staff and organizations, but it is for a world that no longer exists. The latest and necessary innovative tools are no longer inside federally funded research labs. Those advantages are not getting into the hands of the warfighter. Instead that chunk of the budget gets blasted on a shitty AR-10 that uses a special cartridge designed for a non-existent adversary.
We have seen what happens when an industrialized 20th century army faces off against an agile 21st century force. The results are at the bottom of the Black Sea and established in the offices of Kabul.
Anyone with a couple thousand dollars can get a fleet of drones and drop IEDs fitted with 3d printed stabilization fins. It is quite effective. It is being used in Ukraine and Myanmar right now. There is no real counter to it either. The minds at West Point were tearing their hair out over it a few months ago.
The conflicts of a modern American civil war are not going to be orderly and squad-based tactical action.
And then one night we awakened to strong kicks at the door.
"Police!" they shouted. "Open the door, now!"
My husband shouted at me, "Where is the rifle?"
I did not know of course, and I still believe that he simply forgot where he put it. He was completely lost in fear.
Anyway, he opened the door. They told him that they were the newly organized police and that they were trying to organize law in the city.
Of course, he believed them. They had uniforms, helmets, weapons, and authority. He simply was that kind of man. He wanted to trust.
He even remembered where he left his rifle when they asked him. And then they told him that he needed to go with them to the police station and fill out some simple paperwork because that rifle, nothing more.
I never saw him again.
There are some extreme right wing prepper groups and forums on the internet. There are fewer of them than you think actually, contrary to the popular image of preppers. I don't mean the common right-leaning prepper groups. There are plenty of those. The kind I am talking about aren't into the chem-trail type of stuff either. These particular communities are not populated with crochety Gen Xers and boomers. They lean more towards the Buffalo shooter's manifesto. They are filled with people who are younger, able-bodied, and willing.
Whenever someone there asks where to start, the very first step for them, every time, is "gun". After securing a firearm, they describe other important things but in the most zero sum individualist way possible. Things like buy the biggest full-sized truck you can, buy at least 3 dozen acres of land so that everyone else stays far away without trespassing. Start planning a bunker, get a bunch of security cameras, etc. After their list of essentials is exhausted, they immediately discuss how to meet up at a range, at church, form support groups, gardening, fireteams, scouting parties, and so on. The point I am making here is that these people are not dumb. They are not neglecting food, water, and community. But they do those things with the focus of offense, instead of just survival like what prepping is about for everyone else. They are building communities. Their communities are like-minded enclaves in parts of Montana, Idaho, Florida, and a number of other places. Building skills, training together, and family values are how they operate.
The common internet refrain is "They will die alone in a bunker surrounded by MREs!" Well, sure, maybe. A much higher probability is that they are going to spread a lot of death and suffering before that happens. Specifically to people who refused to take them seriously. Because they will have the tools to do so, and those people will not.
A few days after Elon Musk announced his intentions to buy Twitter, Lucas Botkin posted this video in a tweet "Twitter is where people post edgy stuff."20 on April 29th 2022.
Botkin's family is one of the big adherents to the Quiverfull movement. It is another fundamentalist evangelical Christian off-shoot. Quiverfull emphasizes having as many kids as possible. Not just in "be fruitful and multiply" but in a later sense of "onward, Christian soldiers". Kathryn Joyce clarified some of their goals: "They speak about, 'If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we'll be able to do,'" she said. "'We'll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we'll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we'll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God's will.'"21
Lucas himself is a youtuber. He makes content themed around shooting guns, and advertising for his family's store that sells firearm accessories. The funny thing is that Lucas is not even good at shooting. The one time he ran in a match he didn't even place. Anyway, a bit before that tweet he made a video demonstrating his group's preferred tactic for using a U-Haul truck to get into ostensibly a combat zone.22 That video was posted on March 22, 2022. On June 12th, 2022, the Patriot Front guys tried to pull a similar stunt where 30 of them packed into a U-Haul van and traveled to a Pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho with the intention of starting a riot.
I still remember how he was calmly putting his jacket on while he was having a conversation with those guys. He had trust on his face. He was happy there was someone finally who he could trust, who would tell him what to do.
What else does a law abiding citizen need? Fuck!
I never saw him again.
But I saw those people again that very night.
They did not knock or yell this time. One of them simply crushed the doorknob with his boot.
When they entered the house one of them punched me in the face right away, and he said to me just one word. "Gold?"
He kicked me with his boot few more times before the meaning of the word finally got through my brain and then he kicked me few more times before I caught my breath and strength to tell him where my gold necklaces and rings were.
Why are my representatives and politicians allowing this to get so bad? Because they are millionaires in gated communities. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and their ruling on Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, dark money can outbid anything and everything you say to any representative or politician. They. Do. Not. Care. A significant chunk of the American population is actively preparing to kill another chunk of the American population. And the ruling class with the ability to influence it all is content to sit, watch, and either cheer them on or simply scream "vote".
"For God’s sake, there’s an election in November. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote." Joe Biden said in response to questioning about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the criminalization of abortion by over a dozen states.23 There are so many additional things that you need to be doing right now. Biden is reaching the ranks of one of the most unpopular Presidents in US history. Mitch McConnell is running circles around him.24 The DNC is even floating Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg for 2024 because of how bad it is.
The candidates for 2024 will not matter, neither from the Republican or the Democrat side. Why? Aside from the Moore v. Harper domino mentioned earlier, our remaining elections are about Trumpism, not the candidacy. Trumpism has become a rallying cry for ultra-conservatism. It has surpassed being about Donald Trump himself. That is why we saw Trump hats in the middle of the Canadian trucker convoy.
I've seen many conservatives that feel persecuted that they can't be horrible to other people freely anymore. I've seen even more conservatives that are appalled by Trumpism. But those conservatives would still vote for the people who worship him instead of a candidate who would be objectively better for them, aside from knowing absolutely nothing about their lifestyle.
We've Got A Bigger Problem Now
It is like history, collapse, is moving faster than previous observed patterns. Institutions are crumbling faster. Climate change is moving faster. We probably won't make it to 2050. There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.
This is not civility politics anymore like the DNC suicidally believes. The GOP sees this as war, and they are going scorched earth. With the January 6th hearings going on now, all the things we used to say "allegedly" before, are now confirmed fact. No op-ed by this or that upper middle class individual is going to convey the immense danger and urgency of what is happening. They always stop short of facing the reality that maintaining the status quo will not guarantee their quality of life, or their life at all soon enough. Even a pro status quo fed can understand25 the tumultuous moment we are approaching right now. But try not to take her cope and fresh neoliberal terminology to heart. It is much worse than that.
It is always easier for the defenders of the status quo to stick together. The status quo is a tangible, existing thing. It is the here and now. It is what exists. Unity of purpose is simply defending what exists - protecting how things are. Not only that, they have the tangible resources to defend themselves because what they are defending are those tangible resources. Meanwhile, the fight to replace the status quo means creating something new. Something that only exists in the imagination. It is a blank slate of infinite possibilities. It is what some people claim or accuse is a "utopia", which is approachable from an infinite number of paths. Some of those paths lead in wildly different directions.
Because there is an infinite number of places to go and an infinite number of ways to get there, the critics of the status quo - the enemies of the status quo - can divide into an infinite number of factions. While the defenders of the status quo can just sit tight stay put. That's literally all they have to do. That's all they ever want to do. That's all they ever will do.
Hence the eternal leftist infighting, how all shades of the right can work together, and how the boomers are perfectly happy defending it and watching it all go down.
We are on watching the tumble of not a recession, but a depression. We are facing down the barrels of war. What stands before us is something great and terrible. So finally, what is to be done?
Get out there. Get off of Twitter. Show up to town hall meetings, school boards, etc. Know about and go to every local election. All of this "Electoralism is meaningless! Harm reduction is stupid and for libs!" is dumb. Stop it. We don't have time for that nonsense. Soon there won't be any elections anymore. You can't just protest and refuse to do any other engagement. All protesting is is public begging. The people you are trying to convince, meet them in normal settings like at restaurants, malls, stores. You can legally make these people uncomfortable. When they break the law, don't "just vote", file a lawsuit. Do everything you legally can, because that is what the far right has done and that is why they are in power now.26
Do you know who your local electorates are? Do you know when your next local elections are? Do your neighbors know? Does everyone in your discord know? The geriatric boomers on Facebook who are about to make it illegal for you to marry whoever you want sure do. Watering down civic engagement to "jUsT vOtE" is why many of you may not be alive in a few years.
"But what if that fails? What if things look really bad? Things already look bad! It has never succeeded before, so why even bother?"
You are not doomed to fail. But in the event of the worst, it may be some solace to know that that has also succeeded before. Quite recently. A pro-democratic guerrilla force (the YPG/YPJ) fought and defeated an opposing fundamentalist guerrilla force (ISIS) in the middle of a nation that had collapsed into civil war (Syria) and established their own free, democratic territory (Rojava). I am cutting out a ton there, like how the momentum shifted to possible thanks to Obama's Air Force dropping bombs with AC-130s and A-10s.
Regardless, the Kurds created a place where women could live free and in equality. It wasn't easy. It's not perfect, and they still have much stabilization to do. But they crossed that destructive hurtle of uncertainty. It is not a utopia or anything so romanticized. But if you don't want to wear a hijab anymore, then you can take it off! If you like to keep it on, then that's fine too! You are allowed to wear nail polish without being penalized by the state. You are allowed to be unmarried without the threat of being beaten with stones. You are allowed to exist in Rojava regardless of what type of Muslim or Christian or atheist you are. It is a free country.
It is not impossible.
There is no time for purity tests and gatekeeping when discussing this. You must understand that not everyone is going to care or even want to have the dialogue about which theories support which practices in the world we are going to inherit. Gatekeeping is for the well-fed.
That doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility to communicate basic ideas of community, but that you have to consider the real conditions people are in and understand the foundational knowledge that you need to share in some capacity.
Most people don't give a shit about the theory that provided the foundation for their community. Just that the community works and is equitable. Words like "socialism", "communism", "anarchism", "libertarianism" do not translate into good things for many people. You are not going to undo over a century of propaganda and counter-propaganda.
Developing local networks is the core foundation of all resilient communities. That does not mean you need to turn your neighbor into a communist or anything. People don’t need to think like you, or look like you. Everyone is going to be affected by the coming collapse. Someone marginalized and targeted last year, could be different this year, and next year it could be you. All of you are allies. If you can’t build resistance together, then you are lost.
Anyone can plant a few trees and a couple of tomato plants and own a gun. Being able to do those things as a group of people mutually helping each other is what separates it from being a hobby to being a mode of survival. It is another thing entirely to build real networks in your community. Virtue signaling isn't worth shit if you can't get off your ass and help people materially in an expedient way.
This does not mean everyone needs to grow food. That may not be an option and you may not even like it. Dynamic and resilient systems require specialists. That's where you can find your niche in your community. There are needs for just about every skill, and how you bring that to your community is how you can develop it. The entire reason people prep across a variety of skills is because we must be able to adapt to the conditions of collapse. It could be scattered apocalyptic events, like the wildfire in Colorado last year27, where all you can take with you is a bug-out bag. In such cases, all those decades of land management won't matter. In those times and after, you need to be able to survive, have clean water, and build communities - helping yourselves and the ones you love.
The outcome for the next few years of the United States is not guaranteed. Extremist militias can falter and be repulsed. Leftists can fail to organize. Politicians can retire and be replaced. The Troubles was a sectarian civil war in Northern Ireland. The IRA wanted Ireland to be united, Goidelic, socialist, and free. That obviously did not happen. The nationalists of the separate Yugoslav countries wanted to be reforged into western liberal capitalist democracies. That did not really turn out to be the case. Nothing is guaranteed. Everything is how much you care to influence it.
A certain Italian once wrote that there is no joy in sacrifice, death, and revenge. The greatest weapon of any struggle, of any revolution, is joy. We must be able to desire joy. Otherwise we would be lost.
"Angry? There's plenty of angry right now. How can you have more? [...] The world is a mess. The world is as angry as it gets. What, you think this is going to cause a little more anger? The world is an angry place."
Selco Begovic. SHTF Survival Stories: Memories from the Balkan War. Luther Publishing, 2020.
“Lack of Adequate Mental Health Care Places Heavy Burden on Young People.” PBS NewsHour, 29 June 2022, https://archive.ph/dxlR7.
Serah Louls. “Living Paycheck to Paycheck Is Now ‘the Most Common Financial Lifestyle’ in the US — Even the Wealthy Aren’t Immune.” Yahoo! Finance, 15 July 2022, https://archive.ph/X8CPS.
Rousi, Efi, et al. “Accelerated Western European Heatwave Trends Linked to More-Persistent Double Jets over Eurasia.” Nature Communications, vol. 13, no. 1, 1, July 2022, p. 3851. www.nature.com, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31432-y. https://archive.ph/tpxMx.
Lois Parshley. “Don’t Look Down: The Ground beneath Alaska Is Collapsing.” Grist, 20 Apr. 2022, https://archive.ph/6tuop.
Juliana Kaplan and Joseph Zeballos-Roig. “Mitch McConnell Says the Labor Shortage Will Be Solved When People Run out of Stimulus Money Because Americans Are ‘Flush for the Moment.’” Business Insider, 6 July 2022, https://archive.ph/1FHIZ.
Texas GOP. Report of the Permanent 2022 Platform & Resolutions Committee. 16 June 2022, https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-Platform-Committee-FINAL-REPORT- 6-16-2022.pdf.
“US Congress HB8170 | 2021-2022 | 117th Congress.” LegiScan, 22 June 2022, https://legiscan.com/US/text/HB8170/id/2600193.
Arthur Jones II and Aaron Navarro. “This Year on Pace to See Record Anti-Transgender Bills Passed by States, Says Human Rights Campaign.” PBS News, 22 Apr. 2022, https://archive.ph/uWqgF.
Gabbatt, Adam. “‘Unparalleled in Intensity’ – 1,500 Book Bans in US School Districts.” The Guardian, 7 Apr. 2022. The Guardian, https://archive.ph/TH5HO.
Tanya Basu. “The Book Ban Movement Has a Chilling New Tactic: Harassing Teachers on Social Media.” MIT Technology Review, 15 July 2022, https://archive.ph/FB9Ef.
DeVega, Chauncey. “Joe Walsh’s MAGA Warning: If Trump Is Indicted, Expect ‘Major Violence.’” Salon, 18 July 2022, archive.ph/9yGru.
Seyward Darby and Johnathon Kelso. “The Father, the Son and the Racist Spirit: Being Raised by a White Supremacist.” The Guardian, 31 Mar. 2021. The Guardian, https://archive.ph/AtD45.
Media Matters Staff. “Pushing Election Lies, TPUSA Audience Member Asks Charlie Kirk When They Can ‘Use the Guns’ and ‘Kill These People.’” Media Matters for America, 26 Oct. 2021, https://archive.ph/mhQHd.
Purdue, Simon. “Ideological Nihilism and Aesthetic Violence: Mass Shooters and Online Antisocial Subcultures.” GNET, 21 July 2022, https://archive.ph/iJkTN.
Plastic Defence: Secret 3D Printed Guns in Europe. Directed by Popular Front, 2020. YouTube,
War Noir [@war_noir]. “Northern #Ireland ????: Armed Members of Republican Group ‘Óglaigh Na HÉireann’ (#ONH) Released a Statement in #Belfast, Threaten Loyalist Leadership Figures. Also One of Their Members Appears to Be Carrying a Rather Interesting 3D-Printed #JStark’s FGC-9 Pistol- Caliber Carbine. Https://T.Co/UD55KXkEul.” Twitter, 18 Apr. 2022,
https://archive.ph/aJA26.
Monroe, Rachel. “I Am Not a Soldier, but I Have Been Trained to Kill.” Wired, 15 Jan. 2021. www.wired.com, https://archive.ph/CXoq7.
Natasha Lennard. “A Florida Anarchist Will Spend Years in Prison for Online Posts Prompted by Jan. 6 Riot.” The Intercept, 16 Oct. 2021, https://archive.ph/s1ZYx.
Felbin, Sarah. “Let’s Unpack The Quiverfull Movement Mentioned In Netflix’s ‘Our Father.’” Women’s Health, 12 May 2022, https://archive.ph/b2uPw.
JSOC HK 416D “Gold Gun.” Directed by T.REX ARMS, 2022. YouTube,
Shear, Michael D., and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. “Under Pressure, Biden Issues Executive Order on Abortion.” The New York Times, 8 July 2022. NYTimes.com, https://archive.ph/MIN1e.
Khaleda Rahman. “Joe Biden a ‘Moron’ for Making Deal with Mitch McConnell–Ana Kasparian.” Newsweek, 30 June 2022, https://archive.ph/pz3kY.
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RAW VIDEO: “Craziness” in a Colorado Chuck E. Cheese as a Grass Fire Destroys Hundreds of Homes. 2021. www.kktv.com, https://archive.ph/zqBuC.
We have things to discuss. You know who this is. downtheriver84@protonmail.com
Does the OP mention at all how the initial violence was directed at conservative speakers who were visiting college campuses to critique far left politics? The first death threats and acts of violence were done by leftist radicals. The first group to demand censorship of political opinions were far leftists. The problem is not right or left alone. It is an American problem. I really hope people don't forget this.