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So, I totally understand why there are so many threads lately about what's going on in Minnesota; that's obviously some serious shit, and significantly worse than I'd personally seen coming. I think we're currently significantly closer to civil war in the US than most realize, and if that risk is realized, Minnesota is clearly a key hotspot for where it goes off. But I think Virginia is overlooked as a similarly risky hotspot for where US political tensions might break down. And that's because, as of this past weekend, the Attorney General of Virginia is Jay Jones. It was common in the last month of the campaign trail for uncomfortable Democrats to rationalize that he could simply step down as soon as he'd won, but that notion of compromise died rapidly as time passed, people learned to stomach it by familiarity, and common knowledge was created that Democrats collectively had no problem with Jones.
So for the next four years, if any Republican is accused of a crime in the state of Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting them. Should Republicans accept the legitimacy of a state AG who explicitly and sincerely advocated that they and their children are scum who it is morally obligatory to exterminate in a campaign of revolutionary terrorism? For the next four years, if any serious episode of left-wing political violence occurs in Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting it. Will Republicans trust in the process of such a prosecution?
There are two specific boys in the single-digit age range living in Virginia right now who Jay Jones, the current Attorney General of Virginia, explicitly advocated for assassinating as a form of propaganda of the deed, because their father is a minor retired state politician in Virginia. Do those children have a Secret Service-level security detail? (And I mean an actual Secret Service-level security detail, not whatever the fuck Trump got on the 2024 campaign trail.) How about every single young child of every single Republican state politician in Virginia? Do they all have a Secret Service level security detail?
Now, to head off the obvious rejoinder: no, obviously it wouldn't be in Jay Jones' political interest to have Todd Gilbert's sons murdered, or any similarly plainly awful political murder in Virginia. But it would be extremely destabilizing to the United States. A state-level actor - Russia, China, hell, North fucking Korea - could easily arrange for some culture-war-bait crime to happen on Jay Jones' doorstep that Jay Jones and company can't solve. Remember, Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk's assassins almost got away, and as far as I can tell they were just random idiot dipshits. Would Jay Jones step down, or be forced to step down, if something on the level of Todd Gilbert's sons getting murdered by an unidentified assassin happened? I doubt it. If he had that sense of shame, or the Democratic party had that sense of shame, we wouldn't be here right now.
Oh, by the way, Jay Jones also has two sons in the single digit age range. Is the potential for devolution of the United States into an ethnic revenge cycle between the Republicans and the Democrats not glaring to everyone else?
For the past couple of months, I've been obsessing over a scenario I cooked up in my head in which the US has collapsed into a state of open civil war by the end of 2026, and one of the biggest dominoes there is that Jay Jones' presence turns Virginia into Bleeding Virginia. It's a pretty crazy and specific series of far-fetched events and I never literally expected it to play out exactly.
But in my scenario we weren't nearly this far off the rails by January 19th.
I assume republicans can trust in the process at least as much as the Dems can trust the DOJ and Trump admin to not be openly partisan now. But right now at least it will remain to be seen if Jay Jones actually behaves in a biased manner (even if it's reasonably expected) so technically there's more trust there currently.
A foreign country doing a random hit on American citizens does not sound very likely, things would go south quickly for them if they got caught.
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I agree with you that the risk of domestic conflict along political lines is underrated by most. I think tensions are the highest they’ve been in my lifetime, and probably the highest since the 1960s; however, it’s at best misleading and at worst sensationalistic to refer to the current situation as a prelude to a “civil war”, in the American sense.
A better analogy would be protracted, low-level conflict between the state and various amorphous paramilitaries, a la the Troubles in Ireland or the Years of Lead in Italy. Even a coup or a
suspensionfortification of democracy by the military, as periodically occurs in Turkey for example, is (worryingly) increasingly plausible, but not the Boogaloo.The central feature of the American Civil War that is missing today is, simply, a single, united nexus of competing state power/legitimacy that has supermajority support across a large geographic region. The CSA fielded entire armies of regulars to fight against the Union in pitched battles, conducted diplomacy with foreign powers, and executed the basic domestic functions of a government (passing and enforcing laws). When states seceded, they did so by calling special state conventions, which then voted on secession as legitimate elected officials of their respective state governments.
As bad as the situation is today, I cannot honestly say that anything remotely similar is at all likely to occur. For one, the Tribes are just too geographically dispersed and intermixed across the country: even the reddest/bluest states are no more than 65% Republican/Democrat in the popular vote. By contrast, South Carolina’s state convention voted unanimously to secede. For another, there is no single Schelling point around which literal armies of men with guns can gather: yes, there’s Antifa, the Proud Boys, whatever, but those are small fry, paramilitaries at most, not actual nation-state-tier organizations with the attendant legitimacy and bargaining power, foreign and domestic. Wake me up when they get to the level of something like Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Addendum: I don’t mean to jinx things, but I’m really surprised we haven’t seen any drone-based violence lately. The technology is there and has been for a few years, as evidenced by the Ukraine conflict. Perhaps we’ve just been lucky. I pray our luck continues.
Yeah, the immediate cause of the civil war has to be the fact that the South could present a united governmental front and thus actually secede in opposition to Lincoln. To add to your point, I think a civil war is unlikely for the same reason the Kim family wanted nuclear weapons; nukes and various other advanced weaponry provide a deterrent effect to full-on governmental rebellion. Anything that rises to the level of full-scale civil war cannot be allowed — for the sake of the launch codes if for no other reason — but it’s likely that the kind of low-level strife of people and police we’re seeing in Minneapolis will continue.
I’ve told friends and family I’m seriously worried about a Troubles-style set of social violence breaking out. Unfortunately, we’re at a point where both sides of the culture war are out for blood, and believe the other is out for blood, in an escalating cycle of fear leading to anger leading to hate. I don’t know how we stop that.
Perhaps this kind of social unrest was the inevitable result of algorithmic social media, the same way the printing press led to peasant revolts, schisms, and religious wars. Every time I get curious and open up Twitter I feel like I’m fed a firehose of misunderstandings, misattributions, misanthropy, and raw, burning, yet affectedly droll hate.
I’m reminded of the verses from the gospel of Matthew:
These are not the end-times, and Deus will not ex machina us from this crisis. But I don’t know how this ends, especially as marriage, parenthood, the family, and the community, normally the buffers against social contagion or corruption, are “in play” as part of the warfare. The theology of my religion claims that men and women together brought about the beginning of evil through their cooperation of evil; perhaps the book about the evil coming into this world through the antagonism of the sexes against each other has yet to be written.
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You know I was going to say 'while he is bad he didn't quite go that far' and it seems I misremembered, you are right. He clearly did:
One could say the first one is exaggerated but in the context of the second one...
However bad Jones is, I still think the US govt and military is far too strong for any serious civil war though. No rich industrialized nations with strong nuclear-armed militaries have ever had a civil war. Coups and smashing of dissidents are more likely. Even with an economic depression and a completely delegitimized government (suppose that the Senate and Congress were forcibly realigned under a president for life) there is still the military and if they are united on one side, that side wins. Russia in the 1990s was in a state of complete chaos and disaster and yet remained intact. The Chinese Cultural Revolution saw massive amounts of purging, street battles with heavy weapons between different factions of Maoists... but China was still united. Germany after WW1 was starving, the economy was obliterated, they'd just lost the kaiser and the war. The communists rose up and the army massacred them. Professional militaries in developed countries tend not to split into factions, I don't see why they would in the US.
America isn't Niger or Iraq, there are no other bodies that can plausibly contest the government's surveillance, targeting and striking power. Militias are LARPers rather than actual competitors against professional troops. I massively doubt this idea that guerrillas can snipe the drone pilot or whatever copypasta there is about America being vulnerable to an insurgency. Guerrilas don't have the ability to find and target professional troops, they don't have this huge targeting machine. The troops can just sit on base rather than commute and just execute everyone on the Palantir hit list with air power, while they listen in on comms, while they have informers infiltrating dissident groups. Consider what they did with the January 6th people, they found them and locked them up with intelligence resources. No strong state will lose to an insurgency if they actually want to win, only if they're obsessed with optics or don't really care is there a chance for the insurgents. That's why we have tanks, artillery, aircraft and professional armies and not just riflemen in civilian clothing. By definition a civil war is a serious war, the state will be fully committed.
"There seems to be some mistake, I was going to LARP Red Dawn and pepper your patrols with sniper fire."
"Dude I'm a Bolshevik, we don't believe in 'patrols'. We will take all the food and fuel and force obedience. We will shoot you for being bourgeois. Resist and I'll go after your family, I'll burn down your whole town. Then I'll propagandize that you started it, you deserved it and it never happened but it should've."
As you can see, the difference between a civil war and a cultural revolution/top down political violence isn't that reassuring.
The copypasta:
The point being the drone pilot could certainly terrorize his fellow Americans. But does his wife, children and mom also never leave secure facilities?
Having read about the Troubles it is not clear to me an American police state enforced by drone murders could actually stop that. The panopicon is fragile and relies on complicated systems actually working. A hypothetical ongoing civil war may break much of it.
I also notice the UK is a nuclear power. A sophisticated one with Trident missiles, etc. Somehow that didn't much help during the Troubles. Like who were they going to nuke: themselves?
The troubles had the advantage of a land border with a state that was broadly sympathetic with the struggle and reasonably off limits to incursions.
Also the actual casualties being like 50,000 over a 30 year period and fatalities being like 100 a year. The troubles generated a hell of a lot of vibes but in realistic terms weren't actually that big a deal
Are you trying to argue that a proper shooting war between "red" and "blue" wouldn't include a land border?
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You know, except for the fifty individual sub-nations that make up the US, all with their own parliamentary and executive branches, armed forces and state sponsored paramilitaries. Many of them are bigger than some European countries.
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The wrinkle there is that the military swears their oath to the constitution, and my understanding is that a good chunk of the leadership is the product of 8 years of the Obama administration selecting officers for blue tribe loyalties. I doubt the military would go along with any red tribe attempt to subvert the constitution. Blue state national guards, and maybe a lot of the red states as well, would refuse to obey the president. Then you'd have yourself civil war 2.0.
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We already know what this looks like. It looks like Minnesota. Minnesota law-enforcement doesn't seem to have any interest in policing the mob so long as is stays focused on the right targets.
Do you think Jay Jones is unique? If you don't think a double-digit percentage of political operatives (on both sides) secretly fantasize about inflicting pain on their political opponents, you don't have an accurate model of the world. Read a history book.
According to my X feed the Minnesota Sheriff's department is now guarding the ICE facility.
It's heart warming.
ICE is also not only active in Minneapolis. Every blue town has an ICE watch effort but the chaos mostly seems limited to Minneapolis for now.
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Why, after everything the Right has pulled over the past year, would any elected Democrat step down for being too anti-Republican?
Do you mean after what the Biden admin did the 4 years prior? Trump hasn't even caught up to Biden month 3 yet.
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Any chance this Democratic politician could be anti-Republican in the sense of substantive policy positions rather than murder fantasies. It's the gleeful murder fantasies I'm more concerned with.
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Want to list the things the right has “pulled?”
Where I’m sitting they haven’t done close to enough.
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One argument -
One party is actively claiming to be the party of decorum, empathy, and professionalism.
The dems need to act like the adults they claim to be or stop making claims to that end.
They did claim that in the 2000s. We're way passed that point.
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I generally teach my analysts to pretend the year is today +5 and then write a retrospective on the scenario they are predicting will play out. Where possible try to follow what historians do (allege that history was obviously going to happen that way if people had only thought things through).*
In favour of your scenario will be some macro drivers, e.g. social media. "As seen with the Arab Spring a decade prior, social media can create a social movement and drive those with standing criticisms into action. In the US context, the warning flags had been raised through COVID with the BLM movement andd the ICE protests in late 2025 and early 2026."
I'd like to see this type of thing done for your very specific example to present the hypothesis. To me, it would be hard to justify that a civil war is the obvious result. Social unrest and political upheaval, sure. But running out the clock into a new presidency still seems like the most likely scenario.
If you broke up the problem into the phases needed to get to civil war, you'd find more offramps than onramps, and that generallt means that your scenario might be the most dangerous possibility, but far off the most likely.
*Tom Clancy basically made a career out of this. He presented the most likely drivers for the Cold War to go hot, but obviously it never did. These exercises are useful nonetheless, as they force you into a holistic thinking where you're looking for baselines to compare against the new information coming in.
Where do you work that you have analysts who do stuff like that, and are you hiring?
An intelligence division in the Australian public service. You can apply, but it's a lengthy process unless you're coming from the military.
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Yes, but what if all of the parties involved are steadfastly determined to refuse every single offramp that is given to them?
In Minnesota, I think monkeys will fly out of my butt before the federal government ever does anything to create the appearance that a state can veto federal laws by just rioting hard enough. The feds pulling ICE out of Minnesota would be the end of the USA. Won't happen. The millisecond that ICE pulls out of Minnesota, every single state in the union will declare the nullification of whatever federal laws they don't like. Gun laws in the red states, immigration laws in the blue states. Federal supremacy will be over.
But on the other hand, the "we are living in the fifth reich" narrative has taken off and is well beyond the control of anyone at this point.
I think the best case is that we end up with The Troubles Part 2: Electric Boogaloo - persistent asymmetric conflict whose intensity doesn't quite ascend to Civil War status, but which certainly doesn't quality as "peace." This lasts a minimum of three years while Trump is still president, and either ends with the election of a blue president (who?) or shifts into second gear with the election of JD Vance. The understanding that another blue president would definitely throw the borders wide-fucking-open the instant they swear the oath of office would likely be the major issue of the 2028 campaign.
No. Troops will roll into the red states, not the blue. and everyone who missed it the first time will understand it was never about Federal supremacy, but Blue supremacy.
Not while Trump is still president. I'm not sure what Trump's ATF would do about states using Minnesota's example to justify nullifying federal gun laws, but I doubt it would mean troops rolling into red states.
Well, yeah, if ICE pulls out of Minnesota, Trump isn't running things any more (whether or not he has the title)
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