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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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.

So, speaking of attorneys general

Minnesota state attorney general Keith Ellison has gone on record saying he believes the recent storming of a church by protestors in Minneapolis to be a lawful act of protest.

Minnesota Statute 609.28 is titled "Interfering with religious observance" and makes it a misdemeanor to "by threats or violence, intentionally prevent another person from performing any lawful act enjoined upon or recommended to the person by the religion which the person professes".

Now, I'm not a lawyer. It seems to me that this protest very definitely did intentionally prevent people from performing a religious service. The only iffy part is whether the "by threats or violence" criteria is met by the protestors' behavior. The people in the church certainly reasonably felt threatened, which is the standard for most other crimes involving the word "threat". But not a single Democratic Party official in the state of Minnesota, or as far as I know anywhere in the country, has denounced this act, and the guy in charge of prosecuting crimes in the state of Minnesota is willing to go on a podcast and tell all of the Christian worshippers in the state of Minnesota that mobs are allowed to descend upon their services at any time for any reason despite a clear statutory prohibition on doing so.

The situation in Minnesota is thus the same as the situation you outline in Virginia - The attorney general has now demonstrated that he will use his authority to shield unlawful behavior by his political allies against his political opponents.

I am giving a lot of consideration to moving out of Minnesota.

Minnesota Statute 609.28 is titled "Interfering with religious observance" and makes it a misdemeanor to "by threats or violence, intentionally prevent another person from performing any lawful act enjoined upon or recommended to the person by the religion which the person professes".

There's also the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act of 1994 that was originally intended to nerf abortion protestors, but contains a parallel for places of religious worship:

(2) intentionally injuring, intimidating, or interfering with, or attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere, any person by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship

However, it is unclear here if the master's tools can be used to dismantle the master's house.

But not a single Democratic Party official in the state of Minnesota, or as far as I know anywhere in the country, has denounced this act

Well, it would make sense not to denounce something you support.

The situation in Minnesota is thus the same as the situation you outline in Virginia - The attorney general has now demonstrated that he will use his authority to shield unlawful behavior by his political allies against his political opponents.

james_franco_first_time.jpg

There's also the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act of 1994 that was originally intended to nerf abortion protestors, but contains a parallel for places of religious worship:

That's federal law, Minnesota can only bring prosecution for state laws. The feds are investigating prosecutions under the FACE act and, amusingly, the KKK act. But I am fairly confident that we would not be seeing federal prosecutions for this under a Harris presidency (though under a Harris presidency, these people wouldn't be rioting), which rather raises the urgency of preventing the Democrats from regaining the presidency.

Indeed, there was a leftist fad of attacking Catholic churches in the aftermath of Dobbs. Few prosecutions.

Here's a map: https://catholicvote.org/tracker-church-attacks/

Yeah, it's federal, which is good for diversification purposes; I mostly wanted to point out that there are also other paths for recourse that don't rely on that Minnesotan statute. But to the extent Nothing Ever Happens, there's still no guarantee Something Will Happen even if the DOJ is supposedly investigating.

It’s also good because the Minnesota AG recently gave an interview in which he lied about the provisions of the FACE Act in order to claim that the protestors couldn’t have violated it:

And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights, to be protected so that people for a religious reason cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers, so how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious leader is beyond me…. So I think that the FACE Act and the KKK Act are on their face inapplicable.

Interestingly, though Ellison doesn’t see a problem with protesting, harassing, and filming congregants at a church, back in 2020 his office was proud to assist in the prosecution of a woman “who has videotaped congregants at Dar al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington without their consent, causing those congregants and their children to feel intimidated and afraid.”

(Edited to include a link to the video and expand the quote.)

It’s also good because the Minnesota AG recently gave an interview in which he lied about the provisions of the FACE Act in order to claim that the protestors couldn’t have violated it

I was unaware of that video until now, but I played it and damn does it proceed like a Key & Peele sketch. Even the transcription you provided is quite charitable in smoothing over the stutters, pauses, "uh"s, and general stumbling through sentences.

I mostly wanted to point out that there are also other paths for recourse that don't rely on that Minnesotan statute.

In this instance, sure

But you can't rely on the feds to step in every single time the state engages in politically motivated prosecution practices.

At the moment, the government of Minnesota is signalling to its constituents that the policy of the state of Minnesota is that Democratic Party loyalists will be privileged under the law, which has enormous implications for anyone who is not a Democratic Party loyalist.

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.

I was curious how one does become AG in Virginia, so that we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Appointed by some evil corrupt Democratic governor? Or the coastal elites or Illuminati or Jews? Buying the post? Murdering the previous AG?

It turns out that he simply got 53% of the votes.

Now, if you are arguing that America has a systematic problem with voting for sleazebags whose (public knowledge) past statements should utterly disqualify them in the eyes of the voters, I am likely to agree with you there. I am not even going to argue that Jay Jones does not belong in that set.

His texts were strategically leaked after he had won the primaries but before the general election. But that backfired when Virginians decided that they still preferred the Democrat sleazebag to someone more aligned with Trump.

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?

I know this is confusing language-wise, but both the Democratic and the Republican party have historically been in favor of this concept called "democracy". This means that the legitimacy of an elected official is decided by vote in accordance with the relevant constitutions. If the good citizens of Virginia decide to elect fucking Hannibal Lecter as their AG, that would make Lecter their legitimate AG. It does not make him fit for office, and you are free to believe that he will be the fox guarding the chickens. You are also free to say so as much and as loud as you want, and campaign for him to be impeached over his campaign against vegetarianism or whatever. Urge people under his command to remember that they should refuse any illegal orders of his, especially when extrajudicial killings of citizens are concerned.

I would also challenge your understanding of the adjective "sincerely". A common defense of Trump is "you can not take what he says literally", even when what he says is a carefully crafted statement for public consumption. Nobody remotely sane is believing that Jones will engage in a campaign of murder against Republicans and their children. Not Republicans in general, not Gilbert in particular either. If he had published an op-ed "How to heal the rift in America by having death squads kill Republicans and their offspring" in the NYT, I would concede that he was serious. There is no indication that he contemplates killing anyone with the same sincerity as Trump contemplating an invasion of a NATO ally. My strong prediction is that his office will investigate any homicides of children, no matter who their parents are. Perhaps he will decline to investigate ambiguous, politically charged shootings where self-defense is a plausible claim, just like Pam Bondi declines to investigate the shooting of Good. But if you believe that a random gas station robber will get off the hook by just pointing out that the clerk they shot was actually a kid of a Republican mother and therefore deserved to die, you have lost all connection to reality.

I was curious how one does become AG in Virginia, so that we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Appointed by some evil corrupt Democratic governor? Or the coastal elites or Illuminati or Jews? Buying the post? Murdering the previous AG?

... this format is degrading to the discourse, the worst form of strawman, and completely ignores the objections other people are raising.

Beyond that, we have more than a single joke:

“If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, referencing the Republican colleagues who were publicly honoring the deceased Johnson’s memory, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”

Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR. According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.

Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust. Afterward, Jones continued his barrage of text messages, saying he was just asking questions. Coyner dismissed his excuse via text and chastised Jones for “hopping [sic] Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die.”

Rather than deny that he had wished death on the children, Jones responded by saying, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Faced with more pushback from his frazzled former colleague, Jones somehow took the conversation a step further: “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes,” he wrote, referring to Gilbert’s wife and two young children.

Two Dem state senators responded to the scandal by claiming that "Jay Jones has demonstrated the character, compassion, and vision that the Office of Attorney General deserves". Which, you know, isn't wrong, from a certain point of view.

... this format is degrading to the discourse, the worst form of strawman, and completely ignores the objections other people are raising.

What people were implying was basically "Jones is not legitimate because he is evil". To which I responded by pointing out that the legitimacy of an AG is not tied to his non-evilness.

Beyond that, we have more than a single joke

The rest does not technically cross the line of threatening to kill someone (though the "little fascists" comes close, but then again the Republicans might not be the ones to cast the first stone wrt dehumanizing language). "I wish your kid died in your arms so that you would learn what it is to lose someone to gun violence" is not a nice sentiment, but it is also markedly different from "I will gun down your kid so you get to experience gun-inflicted grief firsthand".

Two Dem state senators responded to the scandal by claiming that "Jay Jones has demonstrated the character, compassion, and vision that the Office of Attorney General deserves".

You make it sound like they were praising his statements about Gilbert. What they actually said before was:

Like all Virginians, we were deeply disturbed by Jay’s comments and we condemn his words without hesitation. Let us be crystal clear: There is no place for political violence or violent rhetoric in our public discourse, and Jay must take accountability for his actions. But [...]

Again, what did you expect to happen? That they would announce that they were all going to vote for the Republican candidate out of disgust?

Sometimes you may privately think that your party colleague is an asshole and still endorse him publicly.

Presumably, when it became public knowledge that Trump was bragging about groping women in situations of unclear consent and had paid for fucking a porn star while married, the Christian Right was not very thrilled about it. But still, few if any of them endorsed Clinton over it. I think that the sentiment was likely along the lines of "He is certainly a sinful man and a sex pest, but if he gets Roe overturned that will stop a lot more sin."

In both cases, the relevant voters (while probably not thrilled about the scandals either, for the most part) ended up believing that there were bigger things at stake than the scandals.

What people were implying was basically "Jones is not legitimate because he is evil". To which I responded by pointing out that the legitimacy of an AG is not tied to his non-evilness.

Trivially, you did so by throwing out irrelevant implications of antisemitism, conspiracy theory, qanon-ish schizophrenia, so on. It's not necessary for your claim, it's not supported by any of your evidence or by the motivations of your interlocutors, and it's bait, and I'm grabbing it and yanking. Either make the arguments in full, or don't bother.

And I'm pointing out that there's more information pointing to his legitimacy. He did not just joke or 'joke' about killing his political opponents. He 'joked' or joked about the innocent children of his political opponents getting murdered because he believed it would achieve a political goal. This is not a minor distinction, not does it exist outside of the realm of his elected workplace. And no one on the Blue Side of the aisle has bent over backwards to concede Trump (or Bush, or Youngkin, or Abbot, or yada yada) out of a deep alignment to small-d democratic supremacy.

(though the "little fascists" comes close, but then again the Republicans might not be the ones to cast the first stone wrt dehumanizing language).

I don't particularly care about who cast the first stone, but I would like to hear you spell out within a five-year-block when you think calling normal Republicans fascists became common discourse among the left-wing. Or, when that inevitably needs a thousand caveats, to say when it was first used to dehumanizing Red Tribe normies.

You make it sound like they were praising his statements about Gilbert.

Would you like to demonstrate what Jay Jones has done, otherwise? Because if all it takes to "demonstrated" "character, compassion, and vision" is to xerox DNC pablum, and then to normalize violence, you're just saying the same thing with extra steps.

Again, what did you expect to happen? That they would announce that they were all going to vote for the Republican candidate out of disgust?

I hoped that they'd pressure the man to resign -- a nearly costless or even beneficial option, when Spanberger would appoint his replacement, who coincidentally would not also have to dodge serious questions about fraud on a court to get past his punishment for driving recklessly. That's not happening.

I expected they'd do exactly what they did. I considered it a joke that'd they do anything else, that's how predictable this end result was. It doesn't matter. I couldn't even get the people who wrote thousands of lines and drew thick lines in the sand here, to write in secret their opposition. It's not even new, but no one cares.

Behold, the grownups in the room.

We know it's possible for people to turn on politicians, even at far greater expense, and with far less clear proof of bad behavior. We've seen it in recent years! It's happened even when the scandal was fake. It's just not something that ever realed, both ways, and now it doesn't either direction, and the only defense you can bring is that one of the latest pebbles in the avalanche belonged to the other party.

In both cases, the relevant voters (while probably not thrilled about the scandals either, for the most part) ended up believing that there were bigger things at stake than the scandals.

Yes! And worse, it's all trivial bullshit that's within the range of conventional politics, not just in the sense that the most moderate Republican would have made these 'stakes' a decade ago, but even federal Democrats! For all everyone makes huge paeans for moderation and responsible governance and de-escalation, if the revealed preferences for any and all of those places is literally any political disagreement ever overcomes all that dehumanizing rhetoric and toleration of violence against the innocent, FCFromSSC is right, WhiningCoil is right, and SteveKirk is right.

I'd like them to be wrong! But that's not going to happen because you carefully play words games.

As the OP of this subthread, I should reemphasize that I do not expect that Jay Jones would deliberately arrange for the murder of Republicans' children, nor would I expect him to deliberately botch such an investigation. However, I think that the appearance that his election and leadership creates is a very dangerous one. If Republicans' children are murdered on his watch, then many Republicans will readily blame him, and I won't really be able to blame them for blaming him.

It turns out that he simply got 53% of the votes.

Yes, you gloss over the most distressing part like that somehow makes it better. That makes it worse. Far, far worse. Virginia Democrats saw a candidate espouse that you should murder you political opponents children to make an example of them, and they went, enthusiastically, "That's our guy!" I live among them. Trust me. They are telling you exactly who they are. They want you (well probably not you, but definitely me) dead. The only thing they can't agree on is the order in which my family should be murdered to cause the most anguish to the survivors in their last moments.

If it were one bad guy, maybe the next guy won't be so bad. Maybe there will be electoral backlash. But when voters go "No, we actually want the guy that wants to murder you", that's civil war territory.

As I said before:

Nobody remotely sane is believing that Jones will engage in a campaign of murder against Republicans and their children. Not Republicans in general, not Gilbert in particular either. If he had published an op-ed "How to heal the rift in America by having death squads kill Republicans and their offspring" in the NYT, I would concede that he was serious. There is no indication that he contemplates killing anyone with the same sincerity as Trump contemplating an invasion of a NATO ally. My strong prediction is that his office will investigate any homicides of children, no matter who their parents are. Perhaps he will decline to investigate ambiguous, politically charged shootings where self-defense is a plausible claim, just like Pam Bondi declines to investigate the shooting of Good. But if you believe that a random gas station robber will get off the hook by just pointing out that the clerk they shot was actually a kid of a Republican mother and therefore deserved to die, you have lost all connection to reality.

Of the 53% who voted for him, you have perhaps 1% (e.g. lizardman level) who expect him to engage in a purge of Republicans. The other 52% voted for him because they did not actually believe that he would engage in any murders.

I think that there is a tiny but loud minority on either side of the CW who honestly thinks political murder is good idea. Actually, I think the risk is a bit hard to judge.

On the one hand, most of the time, nothing ever happens. On the other hand, widespread murder of civilians, especially women and children, is mostly not an election winner, and the people who might enact such things will not say so openly on the campaign trail.[^1]

If you are claiming that 53% of voters are willingly voting for a candidate who wants to murder you, you are imitating the professional victims who claim the same about Trump voters. "I am Hispanic/LGBTQ*!@#, and it is common knowledge that Trump wants to kill me for that. So all the people who voted for him are fine with me getting killed." It is pathetic when they do it, and it is just as pathetic when you do it.

--

[^1]: The best studied example of people voting for a party who then killed a lot of citizens is probably the rise of the NSDAP. They did not campaign on gassing any Jewish kids. Of the 37% percent who voted for them in free elections in 1932, I don't think all or even most were pro murdering their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps a third of the 1932 NSDAP voters would have been enthusiastic about the Shoa. Another third might have been indifferent. The last third might have been horrified. "When Hitler called them a parasite race, I did not think he was literal. I thought it was just empty words, and at most he would deport the Jews to Madagascar. I only voted for him because I felt he was the only one who could stop a commie takeover / I wanted to teach the other parties a lesson! I thought the police would stop him from murdering anyone!" Of course, they also lacked the lessons learns from the rise of the Nazis.

I think that there are a few different risk factors to consider.

(1) dehumanizing language. This is required, but not sufficient. It will mostly not be unambiguous, "And therefore we should kill all the Jews, including their kids." Instead, it will leave it to the listener to connect the dots or not. "The Jews are a parasite sickening the body of the German nation." If someone says "killing Nazis is good", does he mean "killing right wing extremists who are violently opposed to democracy is good" or "killing anyone who is half of a standard deviation to my right is good"? It gets even more ambiguous if you go towards symbols. A Confederate flag could mean anything from "I want to go back to the days when the only Blacks we suffered to live were slaves" to an apolitical endorsement of the South. Likewise, the motive of a Klansman getting strangled by a Confederate flag could mean anything from "I violently oppose the reintroduction of slavery" to "any white person with a Confederate bumper sticker is an irredeemable racist who should be summarily executed". If someone describes illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers, that could be the rhetoric of someone who plans to round them up and murder them at the earliest convenience, or someone who is mostly interested to bait the left into pearl-clutching about irresponsible language (which is certainly is!).

(2) nonpublic language is not especially relevant, when its interpretation is ambiguous. When someone writes in his diary how he is looking forward to rounding up and shooting all his opponents, that is concerning. If a 'Young' Republican group posts Hitler memes, that does not automatically mean that they want to bring back Auschwitz. If Jay Jones makes a joke about shooting some Republican (plus his kids), that does not mean he plans a Soviet-style purge. (Either still calls into question the suitability for public office of the posters, though.)

(3) Empirically (arguably), traditional movements are less of a danger than revolutionary ones. Traditional conservatives like GWB (bless his black little heart) may invent new American past-times like torturing foreigners, but they can mostly be relied upon to not radically change their society. "Round up all the people from the other party, declare martial law" is an idea foreign to Obama or W, for whom the struggle between R and D has been going on for a long time, but also follows certain rules both sides agree on. Beware of the outsiders who do not respect the mos maiorum. I would also argue that for the most part, Social Justice Progressivism is in fact not very revolutionary, methods-wise. The dominant ideology among 40yo woman rarely is. While there are certainly murderous proponents, I don't think they are coordinating with the big political groups (e.g. the Democrats). (The same feels also true about MAGA). If you get killed while SJP is in power, it is likely by some rioting criminal whom the SJ people did not want to oppose (because he is part of a minority and that would be racist or something) instead of a death squad directly orchestrated by them.

(4) Institutions, especially ones which serve as checks on power. While Trump might dream of getting crowned King of the US and subsequently persecute all of the people who make fun of him for lèse-majesté, the danger of that seems slim because the US has a strong institutional culture against such things. Toothless as Congress is for the most part, even his allies there would not agree to that. And while the SCOTUS is generally very friendly towards Trump, they are also not afraid of unamiously denying his claims on occasion. Likewise, the US military is very democracy-aligned (at least as far as the US is concerned). They have a long streak of not attempting any coups, and I don't see them willing to break that streak. Compare and contrast with the military in Weimar. Voting for Hitler in the US is thus a lot less bad than voting for him in Weimar, because in the US he will be much more constrained in what he can do. (Of course, I recommend neither).

If you are claiming that 53% of voters are willingly voting for a candidate who wants to murder you, you are imitating the professional victims who claim the same about Trump voters. "I am Hispanic/LGBTQ*!@#, and it is common knowledge that Trump wants to kill me for that. So all the people who voted for him are fine with me getting killed." It is pathetic when they do it, and it is just as pathetic when you do it.

Have you read Jay Jones’s texts? I don’t think complaining, “This guy actually said he wanted to see me and mine murdered, we have the receipts, he doesn’t deny it, and yet people elected him to office anyway,” is the same as complaining, “MSNBC called this guy a fascist, the Nazis were fascists, the Nazis murdered people, ergo this guy wants to murder people, and yet people elected him to office anyway.” In the one case, we are relying on what the guy actually said. In the other, we have to make several massive leaps to arrive at that objection.

Come on. The form "If you are in a room with ${BADDIE1}, ${BADDIE2} and ${JOKE_SUBJECT}, and you have a gun with two bullets, you would shoot ${JOKE_SUBJECT} twice" is a well known joke template which I have heard first around 2000 or so. Anyone who reads this as "Jones is clearly threatening to unearth Pol Pot and Stalin (or Hitler or whomever) to enact a bizarre situation in which he kills Gilbert with an almost empty handgun" is clearly misreading this on purpose.

You can tell this pretty well from how the recipient of the message reacted. It was not "OMG, Jones has threatened to kill Gilbert, even provided a specific method ("shoot twice"), better get the police involved before he does it." It was "WTF, Jones is joking about killing Gilbert. Cringe, terminally poor taste. Better keep that on file, might come useful later."

Also, going from "he threatened to kill Gilbert (and his family), Gilbert is a political opponent, I am also his political opponent, ergo he wants to kill me" is not following a path of valid logical inference.

You’re ignoring his follow-up phone call, the one where he said he wanted Gilbert’s children to be shot and die in their mother’s arms, so that he and his wife would change their minds on gun control. He then followed it up by texting

(Conyer) You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert’s children would die

(Jones) Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy

He then went even further, saying

I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes

He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.

None of those follow standard joke templates, at least not where I’m from. The lady he was talking to also didn’t see any humor in those heated calls and texts, and she cut him off shortly thereafter.

For the most part, this rhymes with "I hope one of the immigrants you love so much rapes your daughter so you will realize how they are". Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.

Of course, referring to the kids as "little fascists" carries for me a strong connotation of "they do not deserve to live", which is an even worse statement than "in the grand utility sum, updating the beliefs of their father weighs more than their lives". Kinda rhymes with "the way that slut dresses, she is asking for it anyhow".

He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.

TIL. This is actually the most damning of all the scandal in my mind for an AG candidate. Not that he thinks that more cops should get shot, that is merely vile.

But that he seems to think that cops live in a magic happy world where they are detached from gunshot violence, the way the operator of a predator drone might be detached from the reality of explosions, and that therefore getting them more exposure to gunshot violence will increase their empathy and make them more reluctant to rely on firearms.

I may be talking out of my armchair from the other side of the pond, but to me it sounds like this guy is out of his fucking mind. I think that even without any cop getting shot, they likely have far more exposure to gunshot violence than I would wish upon anyone. I would expect that most cops have found themselves rendering first aid to a gunshot victim, trying to stop them from bleeding out from a gut shot while waiting for the EMTs to arrive whose job it is to deal with that particular kind of shit. No cop who shoots someone will do so in the expectation that they will simply de-spawn like in some kid's video game.

While I am sure that there are cops who have shot civilians in cold blood, the central case of an unjustified police shooting to my mind is a traffic stop where the young black suspect suddenly reaches into the glove compartment to get his license, and is shot because a cop thinks he is reaching for a gun. The question if the incidence of this will go up or down if more cops are shot on the job is something which could be answered by any five-year-old.

Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.

That’s exactly the issue. I don’t think anyone expects Jones to go on a shooting spree at the closest Republican daycare, but I think it’s fair to say that he wouldn’t mind if someone else were to. That’s completely poisonous for an AG. He has given every indication that he will slow walk or prevent the prosecution of his ideological allies, even (or especially) if they commit violence against his ideological opponents.

That isn’t a theoretical fear. The members of the Weather Underground committed campaigns of terror, bombings, murder, robberies, etc., but they were given slaps on the wrist, pardoned, and ended up with cushy jobs in academia. At least one mentored a future US president. Similarly, the south had a long history of government officials overlooking, tacitly encouraging, and refusing to prosecute violence against blacks. I think it’s reasonable for the Republicans of Virginia to have the same disquiet at Jones’s election as the black residents of Virginia would have at the election of a Klansman as AG. The Klansman AG wouldn’t go out lynching people himself, but it seems like a pretty good bet that he’d try to prevent any other lynchers from facing prosecution and punishment. So also Jones.

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?

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 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

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.

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.

Not if the shooter was a long-term sleeper agent who couldn't be connected to them, a la The Americans.

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 suspension fortification 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.

drone-based violence

The Mexican cartels have been equipping themselves with drones and counter measures for a while. They're mostly focusing on intel but they've been used offensively too. The army's been capturing very capable ones.

If it gets bad enough I think you could see it move from an Irish Troubles to a Mexican Revolution, due to Burgerland’s similar federal structure. In the Mexican Revolution, you had a federal government and army of questionable legitimacy that controlled a good portion of the country, multiple state governments that were rebelling against the federal government and which had their own armed forces, individual sub-state regions that had de facto home rule enforced by paramilitaries, and large roving groups of political paramilitaries that moved around between states and regions with no defined home territory.

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.

It's a bit too early. Russia and Ukraine are paying drone pilots too well. Anyone who dreams about killing fellow men by flying into them can do it with legal and moral impunity and get paid for it. However, when the war ends, there'll be a much greater supply of people who can both design and deploy attack drones.

The biggest risk would come from across the border. You can easily get a hunting rifle with a scope in the US; no one will look at you twice if you spend a few weeks at a range improving your aim. Getting something that goes "boom" without drawing the attention of BATF is much harder for the average American radical. It isn't a problem for the average Mexican cartel, though. They can even cover the drones with patriotic messages before flying them into, say, Greg Abbott.

Rigging an FPV drone with some explosives and flying it into a target seems hardly rocket science. Few machine gunners or artillerists in WW1 made a career out of providing firepower for the mob, and I don't think this will be very different.

(I will grant you that the hard-won experience building a competitive attack drone which can bypass defenses, is cost-effective and so forth comprises a non-trivial skill set. But at the moment, for attacking soft targets in terrorism, you don't need to worry about defensive drones trying to blow up your drone early.)

I think the reason that the cartels rarely sponsor high profile assassinations in the US is that there is little profit in it for them. They have no hope of cowing other US politicians. At the moment, they are a low-profile enemy in the mind of the US public, probably ranking behind Iran. They do not want to get promoted to "urgent annoying problem". Probably Trump would bomb them, killing primarily innocents, but still cutting into their profits.

The only groups who are thrilled to kick the tiger in the balls to see what it will do next are religious nutjobs like Bin Laden who care little for earthly things like money, power or their own life.

Rigging an FPV drone with some explosives and flying it into a target seems hardly rocket science.

Not rocket science indeed, just your garden-variety subsonic aeronautical engineering

Sure, if you want to do it well. My point is that terrorists will likely not care about doing it well. If you already have a 0.5kg bomb with remote detonation, you can simply buy a large quad copter online, then affix it with duct tape. This is insufficient in a competitive environment like Ukraine, but good enough against an unsuspecting target.

Similarly, if I want to build a competitive small arm from the scratch, I could spend a decade and a few 50k$ on CNC machines and might end up with a very shitty Kalashnikov clone firing 3d-printed cartridges with a shitty accuracy (because rifling) and tending to burst the barrel after a few shots without cleaning (because the chemical propellant creates a lot of smoke). However, if you want just something able to propel a projectile at sufficient speed towards an unsuspecting target with a failure probability smaller than 10%, that would be a much smaller project. Buy steel pipe, plug one end, insert black powder, insert projectile, fire with a lighter. Hardly something I would dignify with the word "gunsmithing".

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:

Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.

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.

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:

"If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, Bin-Laden, and Toby; I would shoot Toby twice!"

hoped Gilbert’s children would die “in their mother’s arms,” saying: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

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:

Shooty Shooty pew pew pew!

Let's all learn what guns can do!

Liberals in the USA

Love to nod their heads and say,

"You bought your guns from a store!

You can't win a civil war!

Fight the army, you will lose!

They have jets and tanks to use!"

That's not where the story ends!

They have homes, and kids, and friends!

Tyrants threaten you with bombs?

Just remember: they have moms!

You can't live inside your jet!

Can we find you? Yes, you bet!

You'd send soldiers and marines

Up against AR-15's?

They're outnumbered ten to one.

That is why I need a gun.

Don't forget, because it's true:

Government is scared of you.

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?

Meta: you can add a single line break, in quotations or elsewhere, by writing <br/>.

The point being the drone pilot could certainly terrorize his fellow Americans. But does his wife, children and mom also never leave secure facilities?

This points at an ugly truth: the winning side of a protracted war will generally be a side which does not shy away from committing atrocities towards civilians. It is in the government's interest that the civilians are more afraid of them than of the rebels, and in the rebels' interest that they are more afraid of them. Solve for equilibrium and things get very ugly.

On the plus side, I don't think that either side of the US CW has the will to go full Mao on the US population to achieve victory. (Yes, that is a compliment, faint as it may be.)

The Troubles wasn't a civil war, fighting was much less intense than in the Cultural Revolution or Germany squashing the communists. The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively, if they didn't care about the media and fully committed to crushing the insurgency. What Cromwell did in Ireland, that's a civil war. There are major battles, sieges, multiple armies and an enormous death toll, mostly civilian.

Nuclear armed militaries have strong incentives to be united, they don't want to fight a nuclear war against themselves.

When it comes to inflicting atrocities, the state enjoys escalation dominance. They have everything militias have and much more. Even in the era of pikes and muskets (surely more accommodating to the untrained than today's weapons) Cromwell's army could singlehandedly dominate Britannia. People certainly tried to resist but the army crushed them. Only when the army divided could anything change.

The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively

They were hobbled by the pretence that the army was only there as a neutral peace-keeping force, that the North was nothing to do with them at all, and this was just the innocent Brits being nice, kind, good neighbours by helping out the Paddies with their little problem.

Under the hood, there were plenty of dirty tricks campaigns.

This is the main thing that continues to annoy me: the English will not take responsibility for their history. Dawkins shooting off his ignorant mouth about religion being the problem in Northern Ireland, that it was (Irish) Catholics versus (Irish) Protestants, was just one example of the view there: the nice kind Brits had nothing to do with centuries of political manipulation and setting one side against the other and colonisation, it was just stupid Paddies with their ignorant tribalism.

Not to mention the fact that the UK government was probably providing assistance to Protestant paramilitaries, and also probably directly committed the single worst attack of the Troubles, the 1974 Dublin bombings which killed 33 people. Supposedly it was the UVF, but they never demonstrated anything remotely approaching that level of capability before or after, and it handily gave the Free State enough of a bloody nose that they mostly stayed out of the UK’s business thereafter.

That link describes the activities of a British deep-cover agent in the IRA. He was there because it was important to know what the IRA was doing, and he did awful things because the IRA ordered him to.

In the nicest possible way, from the British side, 'taking responsibility for [English] history' always seems to mean 'take the blame for all the stupid stuff we did to each other and you should have magically stopped'. It's the same with the Benghal famine, a natural famine that occured in Bangladesh (and occurs again and again with monotonous regularity Empire or no Empire) but which we get it in the neck for because we didn't magically teleport food we didn't have past a blockade of U-boats.

The Brits covered up murders in order to protect an agent, even when they knew the wrong people would be murdered. Two wrongs don't make a right. Helping out terrorists is a bad thing.

What I'm saying is that if you run deep-cover agents to try and find out what terrorists are doing before they pull off something really big, then this is going to happen. Maybe you disapprove of deep-cover in general, maybe you don't think it was worth it in this case. But the IRA were emphatically responsible for the murders that they ordered their (assumed) minions to carry out and for the need to find out who was going to get murdered and bombed next.

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

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.

Are you trying to argue that a proper shooting war between "red" and "blue" would not include a land border?

A neutral third party land border that's sided fairly explicitly with a side and off limits to attack?

I could see Canada providing a sympathetic staging ground for blue aligned anti-populists.

Or more realistically, in a real shooting war, the red and blue states slip out of full federal control and militants take refuge in sympathetic states. That's what actual state failure looks like.

land border

Canada

Canada doesn't actually a significant land border with the US; if it did, it'd already be the US (they would have won in 1812). This is a mistake Canadians make all the time, too.

At least, not the "Canada" part of Canada, by which I mean Eastern Ontario and the Quebec part of Quebec (which is, completely unsurprisingly, not on the US-accessible side of the border). Sure, there's a small fragment of NB that does, but they'd have to transit a state that's not exactly sympathetic to them; then there's the West, but you're not going to find much sympathy for Blues out there outside of maybe Vancouver so the fact it has lots of land border doesn't really matter.

Yes, the bridges over the completely unfordable bodies of water that separate the two countries are major feats of engineering, but they've only existed for a tiny fraction of Canadian history and in a shooting war would be relatively easily damaged or destroyed. I don't think Canada would tolerate hosting a faction that would prompt their destruction.

Most of the border between Canada and the State of Maine is crossable on foot. Same for Vermont, New Hampshire and the Eastern portion of New York. The "completely unfordable bodies of water" IE the great lakes and St Lawrence Seaway are exceptions rather than the norm.

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America isn't Niger or Iraq, there are no other bodies that can plausibly contest the government's surveillance, targeting and striking power.

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.

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.

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.

I doubt the military would go along with any red tribe attempt to subvert the constitution.

My hope would be that the military would not go along with attempts to subvert the constitution by any tribe.

I am sure that the Obama administration picked military leadership leaning blue (or at least these able to cosplay someone caring about DEI) on general principle, just like Bush picked generals leaning red before. But I think neither picked people specifically who would more loyal to their tribe than the constitution. When Clinton lost to Trump, despite a general doomsday mood among the blue SJ people, the outgoing administration did not try to flip the game table. Nor would the military have gone along with it.

Generally, I find that different political attitudes come with different ideas on how to enact their policies. 'At the end of the day, what gets done is what men with guns and a willingness to kill want' (which I have seen expressed here, e.g. arguing against women's franchise) is very much right wing, MAGA. You will find rather few left wing activists cosplaying as a militia in military style outfits, or studying at an officer academy so they can later decolonize the US using tanks.

The SJ left really favors civilian institutions for enforcing their policies. Sure, at the end of the day, the decisions of these institutions are backed up with threat of force (e.g. the police), but that is an implementation detail any anyway their expectation is that it will not come to that. (Arguably, when protesters are hampering ICE, they are relying implicitly on institutions, e.g. due process and civil rights. In a state without these, like North Korea, it would be suicidal to annoy people enforcing the will of the government.)

The short version is that a central example of MAGA playing dirty is Trump sending his supporters to break into Congress and 'stop the steal'. A central example of the Dems playing dirty is them using prosecutorial discretion to engage in lawfare against Trump over real and imagined misconduct.

When Clinton lost to Trump, despite a general doomsday mood among the blue SJ people, the outgoing administration did not try to flip the game table. Nor would the military have gone along with it.

They did. It was called Crossfire Hurricane, and the intelligence community and FBI did go along with it. And it was extremely dangerous to our democracy.

But that wouldn't be a civil war, it'd be like Korea where the martial law attempt failed because the military didn't really want to do a coup. If the military goes blue then the country is blue. If red then the country is red.

Only if the military actually divides then there would be a civil war. The US military really does not want to fight a potential nuclear war on US soil, against other Americans, they'll stay united, they might well decide to run the country from the Pentagon but they won't fight eachother. The moment they see the wind heading towards the blue side, they'll unite down that path, or vis versa. The Oklahomah National Guard or whoever do not want to fight massively outnumbered and outgunned, they'd lose.

Only if the military actually divides then there would be a civil war.

And that's the point — our military does appear to be pretty divided. Hegseth vs. Obama-era generals. Red-tribe "tip of the spear" fighting men vs. women and "diversity" in the more logistical roles. Blue state National Guard vs. red state National Guard.

And I don't see how your "fear of internal nuclear war" will force them to stay united. The existence of nukes didn't prevent any of the post-1945 international wars, did it? Russia and NATO both having nukes hasn't prevented conventional war in Ukraine, has it?

My point is that either Hegseth or the Obama era generals get arrested or shot as the military assesses its position. It's not like there are two Pentagons, one for each side.

No nuclear power has ever fought a civil war, nor have there been any major wars between nuclear powers. NATO and Russia are not at war, Pakistan and India skirmish at most.

And the whole idea is very unlikely. Look at January 6th. Red Americans didn't even bring their guns to overthrow the govt. It was the fakest coup attempt in history, riddled with intelligence assets too. America is not prepared for a civil war, fundamentally unserious in political violence.

It's not like there are two Pentagons, one for each side.

Hegseth sends his loyal men try to arrest/shoot the Obama Generals and their men; while, at the same time, the Obama Generals send their loyal men try to arrest Hegseth and his men, while both happen to be at different places — one side visiting the White House, the other at the Pentagon. Or, say, Hegseth's out at Cheyenne mountain when they try.

So picture this: you've got the Obama generals holed up in the Pentagon, issuing orders to the US military to uphold their oath and defend the Constitution from the domestic enemy, the rogue Hegseth and his lackeys who are illegally occupying NORAD; and you've got Hegseth holed up in Cheyenne Mountain, issuing orders to the US military to uphold their oath and defend the Constitution from the domestic enemy, the traitorous generals illegally occupying the Pentagon.

As for the rest of the military, the rank-and-file?

Oh, they're perfectly unified and in 100% agreement that it's their sworn duty to take action and protect the Legitimate Government from the Domestic Enemy…

…but they disagree quite strongly as to which is which.

What happens then?

Why would the officer corps as a whole be split? Either Hegseth commands the loyalty of the military (via purging and promoting the right cadres into key positions) or he doesn't and they topple him.

I don't see why they'd split evenly rather than cluster on one side. The key actors are all in Washington I think, the Pentagon, White House, NSA, DIA, Senate, Supreme Court and House. Controlling all that confers legitimacy and a fair bit of power.

Someone would control the troops in Washington and then they'd set the tone, determine who's the legitimate govt and who's the traitorous rats being swiftly brought to justice.

I mean, even leaving Washington during a major political crisis is a serious show of weakness, it kind of means they don't trust the troops there doesn't it? If they don't have authority over the capital, where would they have authority? It's a bad look to not control the capital.

Also, the US military (left and right) agrees that China is a massive threat, why would they decide to start killing eachother in the face of this powerful adversary rather than working out some compromise?

Thinking backwards, surely post-Soviet Russia is a far more favourable environment for a civil war than America today? Yeltsin torpedoed the economy, it sank like a stone. Oligarchs looting everything and a huge communist party - toxic combination! Military shelling Parliament with tanks. Very dodgy elections. No good reason to accept the legitimacy of the government, they created it only a few years ago. The national culture of Russia seems to be less law-abiding than the US too. But they kept it together. There seem to be structural reasons preventing civil wars.

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.

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.

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.

Why, after everything the Right has pulled over the past year, would any elected Democrat step down for being too anti-Republican?

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.

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.

Want to list the things the right has “pulled?”

Where I’m sitting they haven’t done close to enough.

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.

It's a pretty crazy and specific series of far-fetched events and I never literally expected it to play out exactly.

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.

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)

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.

Damn. I think the wife's heard too many horror stories about the wildlife to be willing to pack up and move there.

You get used to it.

If you broke up the problem into the phases needed to get to civil war, you'd find more offramps than onramps,

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.

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.

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.

I mean, the one recent example of the federal government backing down in conflict with a state was... Texas seizing control of the border from Joe Biden.

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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