The Civil War. God knows that the phrase has been horribly overused, and totally misrepresented in the age of Trump. And it always comes with the attendant misconceptions and misrepresentations.
After all, we’ve only had one Civil War in this country, and it was hideous. But because it was the only one, it was faithfully studied and reported, and taught in schools nationwide. But in the original Civil War, the country was more or less equally divided, and there was a clear line of demarcation in the dispute, slavery. It was fought, and it was finished.
But because the memory of the Civil War is so clear, and the history is so complete, the mere mention of the words today invoke automatic, knee jerk visions of unending lines of blue and gray cald soldiers, marching purposely forwards each other with blood in their eyes. Because that’s the way it happened.
But it won’t happen that way now. In the weeks and months following Traitor Tot’s humiliating defeat in 2020, and especially after the J6 insurrection, Google searches for the key words Civil War went off the charts. Which led government officials to start firing off warnings of possible civil unrest the way a kid fires off a BB gun. But there are 2 major differences this time.
For one, in 1864, there was one clear issue that divided the two opposing sides, slavery.
It cost this country immense suffering, and ripped at the moral and social fabric of the country. This time around, there is no unifying message for the rebellious side. The Big Lie is something that both legal battles and a midterm election have shown just doesn’t resonate with the majority of the country. The calls for a new Civil War are being trumpeted by far right rednecks, peckerwoods, and neo fascists with no true current sociopolitical cause. Their cause is simple, the overthrow of the United States government, just out of blind hatred. That’s all they’ve trained for.
Which brings on the second problem. Lacking a single, populist cause to rally people behind, these mental midgets are severely in the minority. Unlike 1865, these cretins can’t line up in a row in an empty field, if they can find one, against law enforcement and possibly the National Guard for the simple fact that they’d be spring lambs led to the slaughter. They just don’t have the numbers for a successful Civil War.. But they don’t have to.
The new Civil War has already started. Earlier this week, roving bands of bed wetters shot up a couple of electrical substations in North Carolina, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. And in the last day or so, they shot up another substation in the Seattle, Washington area, casting more homes and businesses into darkness.
Welcome to the 2022 Civil War my friends. These mouth breathers and bed wetters know that they can’t take on the federal government full on, so this Civil War will be more like Vietnam, a war of subversion. They know that they don’t have the strength or numbers to take on The Man directly, so they’ll instead try to disrupt the normal daily services we all depend on, and try to sow discord among the population for the government’s ability to provide basic necessary services, and hopefully induce new recruits for their holy cause. This is a subversive rebellion against the United States.
Former FBI counterintelligence head Frank Figliuzzi has been preaching this mantra on MSNBC for months, and I for one believe him. Trump unleashed these flaming fucktards, and he gave them permission and fever.
And now they’re out and operating on their own. Which is ultimately the most dangerous thing of all.
Because they’re not unified, they’re not symbiotic, and they’re not coordinating. They’re acting out on their own. Watch for the Proud Boys to become more aggressive in attacking LGBTQ and Jewish group events. Watch for other far right groups to pick their targets and inflict damage where they can. They all already know that they can’t make a direct assault. So instead, they’ll try to install fear, and make people believe that the government can’t protect them anymore. Welcome to the new Civil War.
They don’t have the numbers but they sure as hell have the weapons.
Compared to, say, the US Military? Not really. It’s just that they use them against unarmed targets.
I don’t understand why the msm is acting shocked about infrastructure attacks as many militia and white supremacy groups have made it known that such attacks are in their manifestos and website postings as part of the plan… for years actually. Time to fervently investigate said groups BEFORE another as opposed to reacting after. Investigative journalism,remember?
The mainstream media has almost no budget for “investigative journalism” since it takes reporters off other assignments (yes, plural) and, of course, almost no budget for journalists or reporters either. National TV newsrooms–even before the advent of CNN–had staff located all over the world, with bureaus or personnel largely assigned to major cities but now, you’re lucky if you’ve got a single reporter assigned to all of Europe or to all of East and South Asia or to all of the Middle East and North Africa so that when something happens away from the “home base” (London or Tokyo or Cairo), the reporters either have to make special trips to those areas or rely on truly local personnel for the initial reporting (and possibly cobble together enough to go on air–and IF the story’s important enough, then the network might approve a special trip). And the same thing with print journalists. Now print journalism tends to rely on local reporters and then cobble together the pieces into a single article (and frequently, even big papers depend on the AP more than having their own “boots on the ground”).
Vietnam is the wrong analogy here. This is more like the Irish Troubles, lots of pointless terror attacks for an agenda that can’t be done by more quiet means. And it’ll likely end the same way with a big fat zero in terms of accomplishment. But that’s not the point. The point is “we have to do something!” If this sounds familiar, it was the refrain of the ineffective folks on our side during the Trump years…let that sink in.
I don’t brink you understand Northern Ireland very well. I do. 800+years of occupation by a colonoal.power chafes,A bit. Most of the terror attacks were against British troops, not unlike the American revolution. We had fewer weapons, especially heavy artillery, o we hid behind trees and fired from safety instead of marching in nice straight lines, which the British considered terrorism.
Do you even know what started it? Religious discrimination in Derry. A nubile Protestant secretary who should have been at the bottom of the line was given council.(subsidized )/housing, pushed ahead of Catholic families who had been waiting for years. It was the equivalent of a White Southern girl.getting housing ahead of PoC. That, combined with rounding up Catholic men with Republican (not our brand of idiots) leanings that did it: often on no evidence and never being brought to trial. The Protestant police would trot prisoners out before a judge periodically, say they were still investigating,and then sending them back to.the HBlocks . The Catho?I’ve had tried peaceful.protest. On Bloody Sunday a peaceful albeit illegal.(the Protestant government suppressed the non-violent civil rights movement ) went wrong,and British troops murdered people, most of them in the back running away. Think what happened in Selma but with the Guard shoot the marchers.
Your comparison sucked
Whatever the righteous justifications, my sympathy for the cause died with the victims of too damn many IRA bombings of people who never did shit to them. THAT’S what MAGA is on the verge of becoming with even less of a rationale than that 800 years of oppression that Henry II kicked off. You can’t be bothered to actually hit proper targets, you’re just a bully and a coward who wants to feel strong.
Amen Bareshark.
Time to empty the jails of political prisoners due to the cannabis laws Nixon DELIBERATELY created to get black activists & war protesters off the street. This was done although cannabis doesn’t meet schedule 1 criteria as does alcohol & nicotine. Expunge all records. That allows millions to look for work without a criminal record & frees up law enforcement to focus resources on those who commit violence or plan to. WE can no longer afford the legal hypocrisy we have suffered under since 1970. We are in a dangerous war. Stupidity and legal hypocrisy are two things we can no longer afford. Funny how everyone thinks Russia was way out of bounds jailing Griner for breaking their drug laws. Ours have been criminalizing cannabis for over half a century, locking up millions. As a nice Jewish rabbi once remarked: first remove the log from your own eye, then you can see to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. You’d think with tens of millions going to church every Sunday, that lesson should have been learned long ago. God. What a fucking bunch of coconuts.
The US government needs to start playing hardball. These people are terrorists. Stop treating them as run-of-the-mill criminals. When they are arrested, and they will be, send a signal to the rest of them. Black-bag them, ship them straight to GITMO, and leave them there in isolation for a decade or two while the government decides on when to bring charges.
^^^^^^THIS^^^^^^
These terrorists need to be arrested for making threats, before they can act! Just making the threats make them terrorists! Just being an RWNJ should be enough to be arrested!
By the way Joe, I’m not convinced our people actually know that much about the Civil War. Have they read any award winning books on the subject? Of course not. That allows for revisionist history that reverberates today. It was all about states rights…right? Ummm. No. No one in the north supported slavery…right? Ummm. No. The money people in New York fully supported the economic exploitation of free black labor. Lincoln was all about ending slavery. Ummm. No. He was all about saving the union and said if he could do it without ending slavery, that was just fine. So on and so on. Ignorance & entitlement reign supreme in the land stolen from the Native Americans. Ripe for an ideological war full of rebels without a clue.
They don’t. In the 12 years in GA,and 6in N. FL,I was told more than once that the South didn’t lose. Heather Cox Richardson ‘s How the South Won the Civil.War shows that the South worked diligently to push the claim that it was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery. Funny how many times slavery was mentioned in the Confederate constitution and how it wss the only thing a member state could not band. Americans have Bern sold a bill.of goods with little resemblance to.actual history.
This “political” civil war may have seen it’s Gettysburg in Warnock’s win in Georgia.
More like the racists in GA were experiencing the fall of Atlanta to general Sherman. That was the day the south lost the war.
The oligarchs of this country funded this mess and have been doing so for years. They want to destroy government because they are cheap-assed psychos who think they can govern us better than the people we elect. In the 90’s, energy in this country was de-regulated creating electric companies and gas companies where there was once affordable energy to heat and light homes because the prices were regulated (just a side story, MT had some of the cheapest power in the nation until NWE and MDU took it over. Now MT has some of the highest power costs in the nation). So what you might be saying? So this: let these corporations pay for their own private security. I’ve had enough of corporate welfare. They are in the business of providing energy, electricity specifically, and they profit from this. It is way past time for them to start realizing the cost of doing business. If they do not like these costs, then perhaps we need to re-regulate our power industry since they can no longer reliably provide power/electricity. We’ve seen where de-regulated power ends up eventually down in TX and we are getting a glimpse of corporate incompetence in the Carolinas and WA. Quite frankly, I’m sick of paying them to get us to where we are now and where we’re going. Let’s go back to what works and let the government do what we pay them to do-protect us. It will give the po-po something to do other than kill people of color–they can kill wypipo and more importantly, white supremacists. Win-win people.
We’ve been in a war for some time now, if you think about all the mass shootings by some of these right-wing thugs and misfits who just want to kill blacks, Jews, women and even children. They are picking us off a few at a time, here and there, staying under the radar so we don’t think about it being a war, blaming the violence on mental health issues of a pathetic loner or some nonsense. The way these freaks have been loading up on weaponry is insane. Oregon just passed a measure to limit gun magazines to 10 rounds, and all the gun fetishists are whining that it interferes with their ability to protect themselves. How many bullets does it take to take down a burglar or whatever the threat is? How often does that actually happen? And how many innocent bystanders and cops are going to be victims while these guys are making like ‘shootout at the OK corral’? We ARE in a war, jungle warfare style. The extreme right is doing everything they can to keep the country in a state of agitation while they stockpile weapons, attack our power grid (we were worried about Putin doing that), and stoke paranoia, fear and loathing with their lies and propaganda. We need to take the threat far more seriously than we have so far. The casualties are piling up at a steady rate, whether we accept the reality of war or not.
Putin is doing it.
Hands off, by his proxies.
I do think that some of the funding and direction of militia types and other miscreants is coming from Mother Russia and Putin, as we found with the NRA and tRump’s election team. He is no doubt stoking the anti-government fervor in these susceptible puppets of his.