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Of all the boxes, the last one still hasn't been tried.
What the American right should take from analyzing this rationally is that no amount of legal or illegal remedy will ever be enough, submit to the reality that good government as they conceive of it requires at minimum a coup, and start plotting effectively.
If the punishment for dissent is the same as insurrection, there is no downside to the latter. And the powers that be know this which is why they immediately started purging the military.
No wistful demonstrations, no standing back and standing by. If any goals are ever to be met, then clearly one needs to start stockpiling weapons, making close connections, weeding out informants, subverting the military and planning for a violent confrontation.
It's either that or run your community away to another country that will protect you. But clearly, as demonstrated here, you will not get what you want by peaceful protest, votes or judicial review. Dissent is terrorism.
Your ammobox is still defined in its compliance to the state and discounts the success of prior defectors to the state.
The Amish pay no income tax. Why are they allowed to avoid the dues of the social contract so enforced on us, and how do we achieve that?
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Get thee behind me, fedposter.
That strategy is stupid. Giving up on society and becoming an outlaw has to be one of the worst possible outcomes for your life. Dying in a ditch in Idaho buys you nothing. It buys your family nothing. It’s a waste of time and effort, and it’s only by rejecting such masturbatory romanticism that we as a species have ever accomplished anything.
At least if you emigrate, you can pretend to be doing something more productive than taking a giant, steaming shit on the commons.
Emigration is a perfectly valid strategy, worked for Jews, worked for Russians, worked for a lot of people. I say as much.
But it is just cutting your losses at that point. It means giving up on the idea that a red america will ever exist again, and becoming a client minority on your own terms rather than your enemy's. Preferable, but still a defeat.
I don't think all is lost for Americans to the degree that such a surrender is necessary. Europe is very much done but the Americans still have a great deal of rightward sympathy in their military, are very disproportionally armed, have salient legal rights that any government overreach would have difficultly navigating without issue and plenty of advantageous geography to hide in. If the ammo box is not to work there, where else?
There's no place to go.
Nick Land and the white men the RAF spit out seem happy in China. Many go for the Arab world and the Emirates which retain strong traditions and a designated proper place for outsiders of the book. Ukraine used to be a popular destination before the war. And South East Asia has entire economic loops built on western expatriates. But if more grandiose are your aspirations, you can go to Africa and stake your claim to whatever you are competent at and maybe get the high reward for high risk. Or wait for things to clear up in Ukraine and help reconstruction.
There are plenty of places to go. Much of the world isn't so bigoted as to detest competent white christian men of good character for the high crime of existing. You will not be home, and you will be an outsider, but negotiating the settlement of a minority community when you have useful skills and a work ethic is something as old as the world.
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Yup.
Despite having gone through the very heart of the cathedral in my formative years I consider myself more resistant to the indoctrination than my parents are/were, than most of my peers are and than any part of my education. Whatever mutation of genes and memes created me, I believe it has to be nurtured, alerting the system to my presence will only cause an overwhelming immune response that is all but guaranteed to wipe me out. So I will attempt to nurture and grow this mutation, by genes or memes.
Going out in a blaze of glory is a winning scenario for the state. Your family line will be either eradicated or severely diminished. Your manifesto (or as they will call it "your hateful screed") will not be spread. The movies they will write about you will depict you as a desperate, ignorant loser.
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You can't. The right knows this, too. State capacity today is large enough to make Stalin's ghost (or Honecker's) blush. Overthrowing the government of the United States by force of arms is impossible, and their ability to prevent subversion is unparalleled (largely because it's run by those who subverted it).
It's certainly difficult, but since the alternative is a slower but certain annihilation, you don't really have a choice.
I think you overestimate the strength of the regime because of your penchant for pessimism however. There are weaknesses.
There's two ways Red Tribe can go. One is annihilation via essentially forced assimiliation. The other is annihilation by annihilation. The best way they can resist is basically the Afghanistan way -- make areas ungovernable and uncontrollable until the government puts a concentration of force in that area. This leads to annihilation. The Afghans were able to hold out against the USs little pinky for 20 years. The Feds aren't going to get tired of trying to control the US, and they will have vastly more resources to do so. And Red doesn't have the culture to hold out, eating poorly, freezing, and screwing goats as their women defect to the winning side.
On the other side, world's first superpower turning into Syria (or Russia 1917-1921 ) would be event shattering the whole world.
Collapse of world's reserve currency alone would have global apocalyptic consequences.
It is not granted that what remains of FedGov would in this situation have resources to subjugate whole interior of North American continent.
There is enormous number of fictional works depicting Second American Civil War, but they tend to gloss over such details (because this would make immensely grim and depressing read).
It wouldn't look like a civil war. It would look like large fairly-lawless areas; much like the inner cities during the crack epidemic, only not urban so less noticeable.
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Do you really think that the US military is going to be capable of wiping out an actual "right wing taliban" in the heartland? US anti insurgency tactics are pathetically bad (how's Afghanistan doing? Iraq? Vietnam?) and they're going to be even less effective in the parts of the US where the most competent soldiers actually come from. How many Trump voters do you think are still in the military? At the same time, I don't think you realise how little resilience there is in domestic US infrastructure. The US military couldn't wipe out the Taliban after two decades of occupation, and you think they're going to be able to do the same back home when their infrastructure is substantially more vulnerable and the population they're wiping out is the single largest supplier of effective troops? An actual domestic insurgency, if it was justified by the Feds/deep state nakedly seizing power, would not actually be stoppable by the Feds in any way that matters.
Yes, but even if they don't, they don't have to. Like I said, the US proved it could hold though not pacify Afghanistan more or less with its little finger for decades. The Feds merely need to do the same to any ungovernable areas of the US until the people die off.
They'll still have most of what was once Red on their side, because they're the Legitimate Government and that matters.
As we have seen in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan the people who are on your side when the issue is purely theoretical, and when the risk is immediate and material, are not always the same people.
The people who take material action to assist outsiders are usually corrupt. They do not care about the outsiders, or their community. They care about the money. This pattern repeated itself in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Our allies took every dollar they could get and then did as little as possible (on average, there were of course exceptions). They exerted minimal effort and took as few risks as possible.
In all three cases the leadership of the boots on the ground trended toward telling their superiors what they believed their superiors wanted to hear. Those superiors then told Washington, and the public, that the situation was trending in a positive direction.
It was not. The Afghan security forces were not improving by the month. Our Iraqi partners in democracy were not developing robust systems of administration and government. The Vietnamese military was not rooting out corruption.
We have lost the same type of war three times in a row. Our performance in Afghanistan showed no meaningful improvement in outcomes relative to our performance in Vietnam. In fact, it was even worse.
I have no doubt red tribe areas would have some elements who side against their red tribe fellows. But all arguments I have observed as to why the US military would be successful this time are "cope", as the kids say. Lessons have not been learned. Material conditions on the ground are less favorable. The dynamics between recruitment, battlefield performance, and population demographics are a nightmare for a blue tribe domestic counter insurgency force. Surface area exposed to domestic enemy action is orders of magnitude greater. The force-to-space ratio for an occupying force is nightmarish. And this does not begin to cover the potential threat of geopolitical considerations.
I've read your comments for many years. You're one of the smartest people on the motte. But you are smoothing over the nuance of an incredibly complex dynamic with many externalities and permutations of neigh impossible to predict events interacting across interconnected domains.
You are arriving at a conclusion and stitching together facts to create a narrative that supports it. I am sorry to be so blunt. I have a lot of respect for your powers of intellect. But neither you, nor anyone else, can say what would happen in a large scale domestic insurgency without investing FAR more work.
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Are you serious? The US spent over 2 trillion dollars on the Afghanistan war! How exactly do you propose that the US government maintains an occupation that's going to have to last at least twice as long, over a geographical area many times the size, targeting the same population that most of their most effective troops come from, at the same time as an economic collapse (what, are the red state rebels just going to avoid targeting economic infrastructure because that would be unfair or hurt the people in cities?). The rules of engagement are going to be substantially more difficult and onerous due to taking place in the US itself, there are multiple massive and empowered enemies (it isn't like Russia or China would cease to exist when this civil war happened) who would do their best to exacerbate the conflict and the population being repressed itself is going to be filled with experts and people who know exactly how the US military works. The US government would not be able to afford the costs of occupying the red areas of the country (ever seen a map that breaks down political affiliation and voting results by country rather than state?) for the amount of time that you're describing, and it would create such a crisis of legitimacy that balkanisation is a substantially more realistic proposal. I don't think you're aware of just how vulnerable critical US infrastructure is.
The moment the federal government institutes actual harsh repression against Team Red in the way that you're talking about a substantial portion of Team Red will no longer recognise them as the legitimate government. I really, really don't think you have an accurate understanding of conservatives or what they believe if this is how you think they'll act.
The US is RIGHT HERE, which obviates many of those factors. And as I said, plenty of Red will remain with the Feds. They'll do the usual empire stuff of using troops from one area in another to avoid excessive sympathy.
No, the rules of engagement will be substantially less constraining. The Feds can be much more brutal suppressing insurrection than in foreign wars. Also those in charge hate Red Tribe and have far less sympathy for them than they ever did the Taliban. "Bitter clingers" and "deplorables", and that's just what they said in public before there was an open break.
Any who do will get the scorched earth treatment.
No, what the reaction to the takeover of the institutions and the lawfare against Red Tribe have shown is that normie conservatives will accept the institutions because they are the institutions. As long as the Feds act under the color of authority, most will fall in line.
How much do you know about the demographics of the US military? This is a far bigger ask than you think it is when you consider the size of the territory involved and the populations that live in it... and good luck getting all the conservative troops out while still maintaining an effective fighting force.
Absolutely incorrect. Large portions of the reds in government will absolutely leave and switch when the government pulls a stunt like this, and the moment they start committing atrocities against red tribers the loyalty of any remaining conservative troops will evaporate. I think the US military has significant recruiting issues at the moment (so does the US military for that matter), and I don't think replacing the majority of existing troops with diversity hires is going to make it perform better.
Congratulations, you have scorched your most productive farmland and infrastructure. They wipe out vitally important economic targets and your response is to cause more damage and make it harder to recover? This is one of the victory conditions for the insurrectionists - a government that cannot provide prosperity, security or safety to the populace who give it legitimacy.
I strenuously disagree - I think that one of the things an open civil war would do is at the very least clear up a bunch of co-ordination problems. I think you have far too low an estimation of people and far too high an estimation of government capabilities, especially in the context of a domestic insurrection, i.e. the kind of fight that the US military has done nothing but expensively fail at fighting.
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At best this is a trade. The military's logistical pipelines become an order of magnitude less complex, the terrain they're fighting in becomes less rugged and more familiar, and if they're eradicating freedom fighters they'll still have 50% of the population (bootlicking soy boys) out to rat on whoever shows up at a convenience store with a Gadsden flag patch.
Don't get me wrong, I think an armed resistance in the US would do better than many people think, but I think some of the optimism here is unwarranted.
With collapse of US (and world) economy, logistical pipelines become nonexistant.
Do not imagine masses of shiny wunderwaffen crushing the rebels, imagine Second Civil War as two (at minimum) African style armies with pickup trucks and jerry rigged armored vehicles duking it out in Mad Max apocalypse land.
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They also became far, FAR more vulnerable to monkeywrenching and sabotage. A decent portion of the insurgents and freedom fighters will actually just be in the military already, and a decent portion of them will be veterans as well. How much of the military is going to be wasted patrolling and securing electricity substations or any of the other countless pieces of infrastructure required to keep cities functioning? Think about how dramatic the purges of the military will have to be to make sure that nobody with any kind of power or responsibility has any ties to the broad swathes of the country they'll have to occupy.
This only really makes sense if you believe that political affiliation is distributed in a perfect balance all through the country. In most of the areas that these insurgencies will be operating out of, that portion of the population will be vanishingly small (and it isn't like people in those areas are just going to forget about the small minority who had an I'M WITH HER sign on their lawn). The rural/urban divide in terms of political affiliation is incredibly meaningful in this kind of hypothetical scenario, and I don't think it paints a very good picture for the hypothetical Federal Occupation Force.
I'm not optimistic about it at all. A real armed resistance in the US would case immense amounts of suffering - one of the first tactics would doubtless be the total destruction of all infrastructure supplying major cities. Outside the direct military conflict, the flow-on consequences would be responsible for a lot of death and misery - economic disruption, supply chain disruption, water infrastructure destruction... Even worse, it isn't like this conflict would just cause the entire rest of the world to stop existing - Russia and China would doubtless do their best to make sure that the conflict is even worse and more destructive, not to mention mine the conflict for devastatingly effective propaganda. Footage of the US military going into small town America, stepping over dying fentanyl addicts and going door to door wiping out local prominent conservatives would probably be a big hit on foreign social media platforms.
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