Back in 2020 I published an article at American Greatness on the subject of civil war. In it I wrote:
One of the peculiarities of civil war is that it is hard to say, except in retrospect, when a nation has passed the point of no return. There is rarely anything so distinct as Caesar’s fateful crossing of the Rubicon. It is, rather, like falling into a black hole: there is an “event horizon,” at some distance from the singularity, beyond which nothing can escape. To a space-traveler falling through it, there is no visible difference, no noticeable boundary—but once you have crossed that fateful border, there’s no possibility of turning back. All future timelines must pass through the singularity.
Is that where we are today? For the answer to be “no” means either that one side in this great political conflict will simply admit defeat, or that there will be some softening of grievances, some sort of coming together in a newly formed political center. Does that seem likely?
Looking at the yawning rift in American politics—the fundamentally incompatible visions of society and government that the two factions hold, the dehumanizing mutual antipathy that finds freer expression every day, the unforgettable damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power—can any of us imagine some way forward in which Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?
That was three years ago. Things are worse now, and talk of civil war seems, especially in the last few months, to be everywhere, even as any pretense of civility, or of the “rule of law”, falls away. (The destruction of the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington, and the astonishing brazenness of blocking the Republican presidential front-runner from state ballots in the name of Democracy, are just the latest examples.) Just to throw some gas on the fire, there’s even a movie coming out about… a new American civil war. (Apparently, it features journalists as the persecuted good guys, which should tell you all you need to know about it.)
As I argued back in 2015, a real civil war isn’t an exciting Hollywood movie, or a swashbuckling adventure. It is the worst of all the forms of war, and it is a living, blood-drenched hell. Among young adults, I rather doubt that either the pierced blue-haired baristas or the “shit’s getting real!” Rambo wannabes really understand this; we have lived for so long in a kind of buffered-off, consequence-free simulation of reality that a great many people have no idea that actual war isn’t just something that happens on a glowing screen, or that when you find yourself bleeding out in a ditch you can’t just revert to your last saved game.
But… is there no point at which kinetic war against people who hate you and seek to subjugate you is justified? As stewards of the American nation we inherited from our forebears to preserve and cherish, and now crumbling before our eyes, where does our duty lie? A great many decent, patient, forgiving, and conscientious Americans are beginning to ask themselves this previously unthinkable question. Nobody else is coming to save us.
It’s easy, looking at history, to follow the stories of the decline and fall of nations and empires, in which the span of decades or centuries may pass in a day’s reading. To “zoom out”, though, when one is embedded in history in real time is another thing altogether, and far more difficult. But we are, at this point, rushing headlong past all of the familiar mile-posts.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill:
The American eagle sits on his perch, a large, strong bird with formidable beak and claws. There he sits motionless, while his keepers come day after day to prod him with a sharp pointed stick — now his neck, now under his wings, now his tail feathers. All the time the eagle keeps quite still. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that nothing is going on inside the breast of the eagle.
How much longer can this continue? What is to be done?
31 Comments
It’s apparent that one side is making plans and preparing in earnest for 2024. The crisis is existential for them and thus for us as well. The border isn’t open due to incompetence. The persecution of Trump, his associates, his lawyers, and the J6 people is part of it. Will it lead to open warfare? I don’t know, but 2024 will bring us much closer to that. What’s to be done? I think the political system, as flawed as it is,is still the best hope we have. Love him or hate him Trump is our champion. We need to do everything in our power to get him over the line.
Yesterday, as I was reading through various bits of news and analysis, it came to me completely unbidden: 2024 is the year when bullets finally start to fly. Maybe we won’t get a full, open civil war. But the left has now crossed every meaningful line, and citizens who value their American heritage need no further justification for a re-run of 1776. This coming year, someone’s going to take up the invitation, someone smart enough not to get caught straight out of the gate. Whether it then snowballs into a giant preference cascade, I do not know. But it’s coming; more correct, perhaps, to say it’s here.
“How much longer can this continue? What is to be done?”
Cuck – A – Cuck – A – Doodle – Do!
There is no way around communists and encroaching communism. The only way out is through. The cockroaches know that if MAGA regains the house, the senate and the White House they are facing the spectre of multitudinous prosecutions and lots and lots of jail time. Or worse in some cases. Rather than risk that, they’ll either blow it all up so there is no election or cheat so bad that The Right will rise up for real and then they can have Pretty Boy Lloyd Austin turn loose the woke dogs of war. I believe that the chinese, or rather the CCP, has “strongly recommended” that .mil be loosed on American patriots so they don’t have to waste so much blood and treasure when they come to claim what they believe is rightfully theirs. They have recently begun to assert that anyone in the world with chinee DNA (remember PCR tests?) is subject to their authority IE native Americans whose ancestors theoretically migrated to north America via the theoretical land-bridge between east Asia and Alaska, and that any territory that these Chinee descendants occupy berong to chinee. So there is that.
The Long March Left has broadcast their plans since Orange Man Bad came down the escalator.
Nothing burns it all down better than an internal war.
Civil War I KIA and casualties still dwarf the totals of all other wars combined.
Police Action or World War.
Laughing At Cucks,
When you’re done sniggering, how about answering the question?
Malcolm, don’t allow a fed to rile you up.
How much longer can this continue?
As long as it is profitable. As long as evils plans are being accomplished. As long as incremental change keeps moving left. I don’t see a civil war, do you really? Who is willing to lose everything? Risk arrest, death, everything for a just and honorable endeavor? Sadly not many.
Malcolm, I have been asking for veterans (preferably Army soldiers with Combat Arms experience) to come join me here in Southern Arizona for a winter vacation. Bring an RV to live in, a jeep, OHV, dirt bike for mobility, but most of all bring ALL YOUR KIT. I say again, ALL YOUR KIT. Volunteers are responsible for all their own classes of supply.
What happened to the fine men that sighed the Declaration of Independence? They lost everything. Yet here we are today, better for their actions and their sacrifice.
Saber 7
If interested shoot me an email.
With great respect, it does not seem that there is any one person who will ‘save us’. I have great love for President Trump, but it is not his job to save anyone. His task is to provide a means for you to save yourself, and that usually means getting government out of the way.
Recall, please, that any large movement, any big group, is no matter its size still composed of discrete individuals. These people make individual decisions at the individual level, so that it is necessary for each person to come to their own conclusions.
When enough people have so concluded, we call the result a consensus. The problem is that it is difficult for a large group of people to come to similar conclusions within a similar timeframe; each of us walks our own path, and at our own pace. This is why consensus is so difficult, sometimes, to achieve.
In spite of the accelerationists, who just want to get it on and get it over with because the writing is on the wall and the direction of events could not be more obvious, it is very important to allow as much time as possible for those who might be late to the game to get their conclusions in order, so that we are not standing alone on the field.
All that being said, it seems clear that the clock is nearly done ticking. I am not sure what else one would need to see, for this to be clearer than it is.
I fervently hope everyone is ready. Tempus fugit.
God Bless America.
The only thing worse than a civil war and all the horrors attending that event is surrender. Giving up and allowing the evil left to succeed in their plan to destroy freedom and enslave all of us. We have the benefits of history. We KNOW what the communists did to the Russian people, to the Chinese people and we KNOW they have the same and worse planned for us. Only a moron would choose the evil of communism over the pain and blood of a civil war. One is terrible, the other literally unspeakable evil.
Allen,
Riled? Moi?
1. Until your life’s end.
2. Nothing.
Think/Say what you will. I’ve waited for the Blightwing to get serious since handing out cans of Goldwater in 1964 and have been scorned for saying more should be done. Blighters haven’t the brains, will, courage, resources, organization, or time left to do what needs done. You’ll see. Have a nice day.
following closely… “You always got to be prepared; ya never know for what.” But we’re definitely in an apocalyptic time. Things are being unveiled. It could be THE (proto-?)Apocalypse we’re in, or just an fractal iteration of it, a late stage instar on Lincoln County Rd. on the way to the singularity. Makes little or no difference. The ratchet clicks one way until the release is pulled. Awareness, resistance, consensus are going to be widely and unevenly distributed. And surveilled. Emergence of broad-based pushback to the woke culture-tsunami and its now-embedded sleeper network; this is a bit of a stretch, but we see it ourselves in many voices, Tucker, Elon, many others, here at Malcolm’s. So we are in for some stretching. We are going to have to ‘be like water’, albeit in all different phases.
Glen,
I was around in 1964 too. It wasn’t like this.
What would “getting serious” look like, in your view?
mharko,
I think this is correct. But as Mose Allison said: “There’s always somebody playing with dynamite”.
Lolz!
If no bomb thrower steps up, they can always supply a false flag. Get things rolling.
At this time all that we would have is disorganized resistance. The Bad Orange Man is a figurehead, where are our alternative governing structures that will be necessary to draw the Sheeple and define our “movement”?
The sides should be defined. The right wants to live by and abide the U.S. Constitution and the New Bolshevik Democrats want to destroy America. The Red States must break away. It also must start with Texas and then straight up to North Dakota to create a bulkhead, then branch out to the west with Montana, WY, Idaho, Utah and Nevada. Then to the southeast all the way to Florida. Leave the Blue states geographically divided. To hell with them. Its either a peaceful divorce of a fight.
How much longer can this continue?
Time matters not.
What is to be done?
Write down the core principles. Live by them.
The libertarian paradox is that you need a big government to get rid of big government. Apparently big government is a product that sells itself. The only question is who will be in charge of big government: the makers or the takers. The host or the parasites. The competent who know how to make things or the incompetent who only know how to steal. Depending on which faction prevails, life will be either quite comfortable or extremely miserable.
We’ve been in a civil war since at least the 1960s, but only the left has been fighting. America does not have an organized political right-wing political party or movement. American conservatives have never stood for anything more than maintenance of the status quo, which they surrender with each leftward turn of the ratchet.
The notion that a restoration of some semblance of constitutional governance is going to put the political left in their place is risible. These people are Bolsheviks. They are wholly committed to their cause…
Well! I certainly seemed to have touched a nerve with this one.
I have made some minor edits to some of these comments, at the borderline where vituperation becomes blood-thirst (or even, perhaps, fedpoasting).
I too remember cans of Goldwater. And I remember Kennedy getting killed. That was the coup. Now everyone wonders when “go time” will be. I don’t know either, but I hope it’s soon enough that I can still be helpful. I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of things, but I’ve never seen such arrogance as we have now, news, politicians, judges, doing and allowing and encouraging ever more unlawful and unconstitutional administrative behavior, and arrogantly in your face. I don’t think anyone but the lord can straighten this out, but I pray when the lord does, I will still be a sharp edged tool to do his work.
Blake says,
“Leave the Blue states geographically divided. To hell with them. Its either a peaceful divorce of a fight.
I would argue there are no blue states, just states that show blue because the commies have a stranglehold in place.
Take my home state of Illinois, if you look at voting maps you will see the roughly 95 or so of the 102 counties vote republican year after year.
Unfortunately do to a hand full of counties having enough communist voting useful idiots and under total communist corruption, our votes get cancelled out.
There is a succession movement in much of the southern state, yes we know it is just symbolic for now. My county borders Missouri and a majority of us would like to be a part of Missouri not Illinois.
I have lived my 57 years in several states, Illinois, Arizona, California, Wyoming, and Wisconsin. In all those states regardless of what color the map showed there were commies, some just had more than others. And in all those states I knew people just like you and me.
Red state blue state is not black and white, its grey.
If civil war does come, don’t think you are safe living in a “red” state, because your next door neighbors are all on your side, but are you sure? (what if one is a sleeper?) maybe the guy that just moved in down the block or road is a communist?
If civil war happens, I don’t believe it will be red state vs. blue state, I believe all cities will implode and destroy themselves regardless of a political map, I also believe many rural areas will see change but not necessarily violent change, while some rural areas will see a purge whether voluntary or by force.
Now matter how it plays out, it will be complicated and not simple to categorize.
Civil Wars rarely can be traced back to a single event. The fires smolder for years before bursting full bore. But every Civil War is savage and without mercy. The Spanish, Russian, Chinese, even our own War of Northern Aggression could have been avoided but fanatics on both the right and left destroyed the common ground that made progress possible. The results are plain to the serious historian. The Left is nothing pushing a civil war, they are pushing revolution.
Tribe Up, Be a Slave/Prisoner, or Die…Those are your only three options at this point…
Secession in everything but name. Red states live according to constitutional principles, especially the 10th Amendment. Refuse to abide by diktats from the Fed that do not comport with the constitution (the Left did it already with their ‘sanctuary cities). Create parallel institutions and leave the Leftist ones to rot. There are ways to fight a civil war, and not all of them are bloody.
My my Malcolm, been awhile since I’ve noted any of your posts producing these many comments.
I’ve, though, not anything substantive to add here.
Well. Maybe this:
https://areaocho.com/antifa-organization/
JK,
Yes, many commenters on this one. I think this is due to this post having been picked up and relinked by the Western Rifle Shooters Association’s website.
I’ve also noticed how the MSM has now jumped on the Civil War II as a hot topic. Given how the media generally portrays conservatives or traditional patriotic types I dont expect their “correspondents” will be well received in those circles so by default the coverage will have to be one sided. Theyve made themselves partisan.