What Would US Civil War Look Like?
Whenever I hear Americans speculating about a civil war here, I usually roll my eyes and remind them that it is impossible to resist a force as large and well-equipped as the US military. In this Twitter thread, the Swedish Marxist commenter Malcom Kyeyune says that’s not how an American civil war in the 21st century would work.
In this follow-up thread, Kyeyune expands his analysis. Excerpts:
I would say that all these backlashes will accelerate determination inside the State, along with its corporate allies, to devise and implement a social credit system, to track the citizenry and to make sure they do as they are told.
Look at this from Kyeyune:
Once you start seeing stuff like this, you actually have a real – if slow moving – crisis on your hands. pic.twitter.com/LJXJhJMgO6
— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021
Here is something that happened to me today, that is so incredibly minor I almost didn’t put it here. But I think it reveals something important. Longtime readers will know that I used to not only defend NPR, but used to celebrate it, despite its liberal bias. I really liked public radio. But after Trump’s election, NPR rushed hard to the Left — and became unlistenable. I used to turn it on all the time when I was in the car, but it started making me so mad I would either listen to podcasts or drive in silence. Understand that I have been a fan, and sometimes a donor, of NPR for decades, even though it’s significantly to the Left of my own politics and cultural beliefs. I was not even a Trump fan. Still, the obsession with race, gender ideology, and immigration — all of which was talked about exclusively from a radical-left point of view — was deeply alienating.
Today I was in the car driving back from Jimmy John’s, and I turned on NPR. There was a locally produced news show that had a feature about “pregnant people” and their “fetuses.” I finally got so angry I turned it off. Nothing new about that. But the thought that came into my head this time was that I had been listening to the radio of an occupying power, and I was sick of it. Again, I get that this is an ultra-bourgeois right-wing moment — middle-aged fat conservative rages at NPR in his Honda! — but something had flipped slightly in my usual rantiness. For what I think was the first time, I began to regard these people — the ruling class that runs NPR and all the institutions — as people who despise normal people so much that they are trying to colonize our culture.
Mind you, Live Not By Lies is all about the creeping soft totalitarianism in the US, and in the West broadly, so this isn’t exactly new. What is new, at least for me, is how I associate this kind of thing with a hostile regime. Maybe it’s because I was in Washington last week for the TAC Gala — the first visit to DC in two years — and driving through the nation’s capital in the back of a taxicab, I was struck by the difference within me. I used to feel a sense of pride being in DC. Now it feels hostile, or at least I feel cold towards it. This has never happened with me. I don’t like it, but there it is.
I’m not one of these right-wing anti-government types, not at all. I have no interest — none — in any kind of violent protest. You want to talk non-violence, I’ll be there with you, but violence? No. Just to make that clear. But it is a strange thing for someone like me to confront the growing conviction within myself that we are living not under a government, but within a regime. What is the difference? For me — and I confess this is a bit idiosyncratic — the government is the administrative state and its elected officials, while a regime is the broader ruling class, including corporate and institutional elites from the private sector. “Regime” has in English a whiff of the strongman, of illegitimacy.
So, it’s the little things: I hear on a radio network funded by the government and rich liberals a change of language designed to compel us to think that men can have babies, and immediately I understand that these people, these power-holders, intend to dispossess us in our own country. They want to take away our common-sense understanding of male and female, and of the family, and force their twisted obsessions onto us all — and punish us if we don’t accept it. In the past, I would have just inwardly rolled my eyes at NPR’s political correctness. But now, these ruling-class people and their malignant ideas gain and exercise power that they have no right to do. Who asked any of us whether we should speak of “pregnant people” and “Latinx”?
It’s hard to get people to understand why this is such a big deal, the changing of the language we use to describe reality. Well, here’s something that brings it home. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire reported that Scott Smith, a Loudoun County, Virginia, parent who was arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct at a school board meeting, had been there for a shocking reason. I’m not linking to Rosiak’s report, because it’s paywalled, but here’s a Fox News summary of Rosiak’s findings. Excerpt:
Smith’s image went viral among left-wingers as an example of parents run amok, and the National School Boards Association cited his arrest in a letter last week requesting the Department of Justice to provide federal law enforcement to respond to an increase in violence against school officials across the country. Attorney General Merrick Garland later pledged to have the Department of Justice and the FBI investigate harassment of school board members.
Now, Smith says there’s much more to his story, telling The Daily Wire that his behavior at the June 22 meeting stemmed from an incident weeks earlier at his ninth-grade daughter’s school, Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, in which he said a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls’ bathroom and assaulted his daughter on May 28.
“We can confirm a May 28, 2021 case that involved a thorough 2-month-long investigation that was conducted to determine the facts of the case prior to arrest,” the sheriff’s office told Fox News. “This case is still pending court proceedings. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is not able to provide any documents that pertain to a pending case.” The sheriff’s office confirmed that the case involved sexual assault.
All juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that the boy was subsequently charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.
In response to a public records request by The Daily Wire, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that a May 28 report with “Offense: Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery” at Stone Bridge High School does exist.
The suspect was arrested two months later following an investigation by the sheriff’s office.
Minutes before Smith’s arrest at the June 22 board meeting, Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” and that to his knowledge, “we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” The Daily Wire reported.
Scott Smith is a father whose daughter was sexually assaulted by a boy in a skirt, in the girls bathroom — and the superintendent apparently lied about it to the public. Why? Because the ruling class believes transgenderism is a sacred cause? Well, guess what: the suspect in the first attack went on allegedly to sexually assault another schoolgirl last week. More:
“It has been so hard to keep my mouth shut and wait this out. It has been the most powerless thing I’ve ever been through,” Scott Smith told The Daily Wire. “I don’t care if he’s homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual. He’s a sexual predator.”
Now, don’t misread me here: I do not believe that all, or even most, transgendered people are sexual predators. My complaint here is that the school leadership adopted a policy that puts female minors at risk of sexual assault, and hid from the public a story about a female-identified male charged with sexually assaulting a ninth-grade girl in the girls bathroom, to which he had been given access by the school system. And they vilified the father who came to speak out for his daughter. The regime is gaslighting us constantly about this woke stuff. When I hear NPR and others in the regime going about about “birthing persons,” “pregnant people,” and “they” as nonbinary single pronouns, I recognize that they are changing the language as a way of compelling everybody to accept their vision. What the Loudoun County school board did to Scott Smith is connected to this. Ordinary people may find a claim that changing language in the media and in ruling-class discourse is a serious threat to be esoteric. But everybody can sympathize with poor Scott Smith, a dad who is just trying to defend his daughter from these ideologues who left her vulnerable to sexual predation, then lied about it for woke reasons.
We are being lied to constantly by the regime. At some point, you should not be surprised when people either regard it as hostile to them and their interests, or at least not worth respecting. And that is the point where what Malcom Kyeyune forecasts becomes more likely. I spoke the other day to a highly educated man who holds a key job in the tech industry. His wife is a well-respected academic. He told me that they have both resolved to resign their positions if they are compelled to take the vaccine. He told me that there are others at his facility who are prepared to walk out on the same principle. They’ve had it. They don’t trust the authorities anymore.
I wrote here the other day about the vaccine resisters at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Did you know it’s going on at Los Alamos too? Here’s a media report about the lawsuit the employees filed. I received this e-mail from one of the Los Alamos employees leading the resistance:
My name is Jeff Williams, I am a senior safety analyst at Los Alamos National Labs.This issue at ORNL is not a regional issue – it is a NATIONAL CRISIS. The Biden Admin is CRUSHING the greatest scientific engine in the world – ALL OF DOE labs are being RIPPED APART. Most are small tight knit communities and are being pitted against each other and the lab they support.You cannot simply replace these people. I have been in the business of managing highly technical and dangerous operations in DOE for 31 years – the damage being done is immeasurable and presents a national security crisis behind the veil of COVID SAFETY – TOTAL BULL$#!T –We have formed a large group here at LANL (12, 000 employees – lead nuclear weapons lab) and filed a lawsuit against Triad, which is also Battelle Corp. First hearing is October 14th in State District Court.Please help us elevate the attention of this to the American public – before we do irreversible damage to our world standing and national security posture.Thank you for your attention.Jeff WilliamsLos Alamos New Mexico
As you know, I have been vaccinated, and I think people should be vaccinated. But I do not support these mandates, and I do support these walkouts and lawsuits. What we might be starting to witness — might — is the governed beginning to withdraw consent from the regime.
UPDATE: New thread from Kyeyune this morning about the fragility of the US regime.