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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.
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 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.
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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" would not include a land border?
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