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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 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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