Point Of No Return
Yet Another Long Howl
(Definition) The point in the flight of an aircraft, beyond which remaining fuel stores are insufficient for a return to a known starting point and predictable conditions.
[Trump] voters repeatedly [use] very violent, warlike rhetoric... [from] otherwise normal people, normal Americans... And it’s one person after the next – these aren’t just a few random individuals...
In October [2022 at a Trump rally] outside Mesa, Arizona… a man came up to me; he wouldn’t [speak] on camera … then said, “You seem like a nice guy. But you’re with NBC.” Then he said, “I just want you to know -- the corporate media are going to be among the first to go.” And it took me aback; I didn’t know how to respond; ‘Among the first to go’.
...When Trump talks about revenge, and retribution – people are listening to him.
-- Vaughn Hilyard, NBC Reporter; “Fast Politics” podcast, 8/17/23 (Paraphrased)
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For a time I stood against the [ship's] rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years... It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and had borne hope -- until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man's hope and decency.
-- William L. Shirer; Returning to America from nazi Germany; "Berlin Diary" (1941)
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While from a Proud Tower in the town / Death looked gigantically down-- Edgar Allan Poe, "City In The Sea" (1845)
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I want to talk about American society preparing for civil war. I have a gut instinct that something bad is coming; have felt that for some time. I'm not alone in having that premonition.
An extraordinary series of circumstances are in play. It may be avoidable, may not. This is only my opinion; feel free to disagree, but I didn't come lightly or easily to this conclusion. I just can't see a path out of the current circumstances. If you do, please speak up.
Let me explain how I got here -- and apologies in advance: Brevity is not one of my virtues.
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And Only A Fool Would Say That
In the summer of 2021, Rightist 'anti-government' celebrity Ammon Bundy ran for governor of the state of Idaho. He publicly, falsely, accused a local hospital of participating in a child sex trafficking ring. You may have seen mention of that, and instantly dismissed it -- one more insane, baseless accusation by a Rightwing nutjob.
The hospital filed a lawsuit for defamation. A jury found Bundy's accusations about the hospital a tissue of lies, as expected, and awarded it $52 million in damages. Bundy ignored the civil action -- to him, America’s judicial system is just part of a corrupt, illegitimate power structure. An Idaho court charged him with contempt, issued an arrest warrant, and Bundy went into hiding.
A week ago, Bundy was arrested at a dinner for his son's local Idaho high school football team. He was released on August 14th, surprisingly on $10K bail, loudly declaiming, "this is absolutely a political prosecution.”
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That same day, eight hours later, a grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia, handed down the fourth criminal indictment against Donald Trump, and eighteen co-defendants, for running a 'criminal enterprise', conspiring to reverse Georgia's voting results in the 2020 election as part of a broader plot to keep Trump in power.
Trump's reaction was the same as Bundy's: the new indictment was a “political prosecution.” The Right-wing echo chamber responded, predictably; one example demanded Red-state, Republican legislatures defy the federal government. They should treat the Biden administration as “an occupying power.”
“If a judge tries to stop you, ignore them,” the pundit said. “Ignore them.”
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Won't You Sign In, Stranger
The shared narrative in these stories is, Government in America is illegitimate. Government has been infiltrated by Leftists -- Woke Democrats, Progressives; Communists; Blacks; Illegal Immigrants; LGBTQ+. All of them, they say, are our enemies.
The political and cultural Right in America do not think of the Left as their fellow citizens. We consider them to be people with whom we strongly disagree -- but still think of them as Americans. They see us as evil. Some of them believe we are literal Demons. Not even human. Their enemies.
As their enemies, the Right owes us no common dignity or compassion. We need to be dominated or destroyed. There can be, they say, no compromise with evil.
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Be Part Of The Brotherhood
One of The Last Of The Old Unit asks: Aren't you demonizing the Right? It's a fair point.
In America, the default Left position in a discussion is, criticize the behavior or the opinion, not the person. Having a different, even an uncomfortably different political opinion or lifestyle is not the result of something physically or psychologically wrong with them.
Most important, the current American Left doesn't threaten or commit violence to achieve a political outcome or make an ideological point. Historically, America has seen violence from the Left -- but in 2023, in the United States? No. Anyone claiming it's happening now is a liar and a fool.
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The Right equates holding certain opinions or living certain lifestyles with being brainwashed, corrupted, dangerous; even insane: There's something wrong with the person. 'Woke leftists believe certain things', or 'People are gay because' there's something wrong with them.
The only way the political and cultural Right in 2023 knows to win an argument is to "own" an opponent -- utterly degrade and dominate them. Unlike the Left, for whom compromise is a win-win, the Right believes win-lose is the only outcome. Compromise is gay. It's weak.
The Right also believes threats of violence, or actual violence, is acceptable. It's part of a testosterone, manly culture. It's why guns. The Right is comfortable with violence -- because their opponent, the enemy, is so fanatical, alien, threatening. We had to. They made us do it.
Talk to the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ask Emmet Till, or Martin Luther King, or Fred Hampton. Ask residents of the Greenwood district of Tulsa in 1921. Ask George Floyd. Ask Matthew Shepard.
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You Can Try To Run
As for the nazis; well, they're more like pigs than humans, if you think about it... I'm talking about real pigs: pink, overweight. Quite intelligent, certainly smarter than dogs... They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then when they get it they're happy. Blissful.-- Alan Furst, Dark Star (Paraphrased), 1991
We lived through Donald J. Trump for roughly five years. We watched as he blew past every governmental, presidential norm like a schoolyard bully (Yeah? Yeah? So I stole! So I'm fuckin' with ya! Ya gonna do somethin' to me, huh, punk?).
He claimed the 2020 election had been stolen; that there was "massive voter fraud" (but had no proof, since it was a lie), and tried to strongarm state officials into falsifying the actual vote counts in his favor. He kept highly classified information after leaving office for purposes that are still not clear, obstructed government efforts to retrieve it, then tried to cover up the obstruction.
Trump's first wife, Ivana, died and was cremated -- yet Trump placed the urn in a heavy, expensive casket, buried it near a tee-off spot on his Bedminster, NJ golf course -- then ignored it; the grave is overgrown and unkempt today; barely recognizable.
While in the White House, Trump and his children leveraged their positions to make (at least tens of) Millions. The Trumps used the White House, the presidency, America, like a pay toilet they would never have to clean.
Never has an American President been elected to office and openly, brazenly, engaged in questionable and even criminal conduct for profit, that he would be impeached twice; that he lied, pathologically and outrageously, multiple times each day that he was in office. But, we're not crazy -- all this did happen. We were here; we all saw it. And, he is running for the 2024 GOP nomination for President.
It feels like an incredible moment in America; like living in an excruciating horror / comedy film by F.W. Murnau, all Schadenfreudisch humor and razor blades, released at the 'Gloria-Palast' midnight show in Berlin on January 29, 1933. How did we come to be here?
And Trump is still in our faces: Did'ya miss me yet?
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Any World That I'm Welcome To
As background, and quickly:
The current American Right really began after Reagan's FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1984. Right-wing talk radio appeared almost immediately with Rush Limbaugh. He wasn't a William F. Buckley, having a polite dialogue with the Left to win on points; he wanted confrontation. He wanted his audience in a constant state of outrage. He wanted to taunt, insult and bait Liberals, on-air -- to his fan's delight.
"We Are At War With Our Own Government": Limbaugh, January 9, 2010
Limbaugh's program was syndicated in 1988, spawning imitators and competitors; his audience grew exponentially. His syndicators charged advertising rates Limbaugh once described as "confiscatory"; this made Limbaugh rich. He became a political force in the Right-wing world.
That business model was attractive to another Right-wing bully, Rupert Murdoch -- who had already been using it in the UK and Australia. He teamed with Roger Ailes (Nixon's former campaign TV consultant) to tap into the same demographic as Limbaugh, but via cable television. Ailes gave Murdoch an entry to America's political Right-wing world; Fox opened in 1996. Everyone knows what Fox is.
In the early 2000's, digital social media appeared -- Yahoo; Facebook; Google; Twitter -- all designed around users being scored on popularity. With smartphones and mobile apps, in less than a decade Americans were constantly connecting: tweeting, liking (or, not liking) each other; 'sharing' -- new methods to campaign, connect with, organize voters -- and, if not well monitored, to manipulate public opinion.
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When The Razor Boy Comes
There was a fever over the land... Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow; fear of our neighbors; and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us... "There are devils among us... Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed."-- Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster); Judgement At Nuremberg (1961)
By 2016, the Republican party was addicted to grievance politics. It was the lever to unify the American Right. Not since Nixon in 1968 had the GOP electorate been so energized -- and, they were angry. No surprise -- Limbaugh and Fox had broadcast an unending river of propaganda for thirty years. An entire generation in America had grown up on a diet of lies, dreaming of revenge.
The Base believed lies over data-driven fact. They only trusted information spoon-fed by right-wing radio and the Murdochs. Each new 'revelation', every fresh, manufactured outrage was eagerly shared and reinforced in Facebook groups, on Twitter, in private chat rooms.
The world created by Fox and Limbaugh became more concrete, more 'real' than events in their actual lives. Mainstream news reporting, even scientific fact, was rejected as lies from an illegitimate government and liberal-dominated media. It was a closed, negative-feedback loop.
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The problem with creating an ever-rising stream of paranoia, outrage, anger; the constant references to an End Times, apocalyptic showdown with the enemies -- is that a time must come when all of it is resolved. If you keep promising a final, Great Cleansing to settle all scores, where the demons are made to pay -- then you have to deliver. All that crazy bullshit you've been talking had better be real.
It's a classic formula in political revolutions: The leaders are pushed by their mob of supporters to take ever-more radical action -- otherwise, the mob might turn on them. The American Right's political leaders were riding a tiger which they had raised from a cub. And it was hungry.
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Nothing mattered but Winning, and Owning the Libs. The GOP was driven by a Red Meat community that waited, primed, for a populist demagogue to lead them to that apocalyptic climax with the enemies.
Then they got one.
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A Man Of My Mind Can Do Anything
Donald Trump is the personification, the front man for America's Right wing. He is the reason America is five minutes away from a national crisis it may not survive intact. And he is loving every minute of it.
Some may have dropped out of his base. But the majority of Maga country stands by him. They identify with Trump. They believe charges against him are manufactured. They believe the narrative: It's all a lie, created by our enemies; the illegitimate deep state. Trump, like them, is just another victim.
The classic example of Trump's relationship with the Base has been QAnon: appearing on the 4chan platform in October 2017, "Q" claimed to be a power structure insider who posted hints and cryptic messages -- the world really was run by a massive global conspiracy, of pedophiles. And all the enemies were in on it.
Most important: President Trump knew. He had been chosen, by god, to confront this great, mother of all conspiracies, in a climactic battle of good and evil; to bring light and healing and truth. He was just biding his time -- and his True MAGA Followers would join him, play their part. Be ready for orders, the messages said; The Storm Is Coming. Be vigilant; be true. Wait for the word.
The Faithful wait for the word to this day.
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Trump says openly that when he returns to the presidency, he will destroy the deep state. There's even a plan, 950 pages long, prepared by Koch-funded consultants and Federalist Society lawyers, entitled 'Project 2025'. It is meant to destroy the framework of American Constitutional government. This is a goal of the political and cultural Right.
Trump has no real policy or program to benefit the American people. His top-of-mind consideration is becoming Leader again, so that he can use raw power to support a lavish lifestyle, and extract revenge. He wants to be feared, and loved: The King Of The World. And the MAGA Base loves it. This spring, Trump told CPAC convention-goers, "I am your justice -- I am your retribution."
Every time he tosses another slur, another insult at the judges and prosecutors bringing him to justice, he's throwing down the gauntlet: Try to put me in jail, he's saying; just try. It's a massive game of Chicken, daring them to incarcerate him -- so his Believers will rise to his defense. They're just waiting for the word.
It's not improbable that triggering an insurrection to topple the American government has passed through Trump's mind. But, who knows. The next 15 months, or less, for Trump is literally about his survival. His decision-making is likely to be affected by that single perspective.
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King Of The World
One way or another, Trump has everything to lose. He either wins the presidency, pardons himself / escapes state charges in Georgia and elsewhere, or he likely goes to prison.
There are many twists and turns between now and an early November day in 2024. Many things can happen -- but the basic possibilities appear to be:
- Trump dies during GOP primary season (and the world mourns)
- GOP finds another candidate
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump faces incarceration for any reason before / during GOP primaries
- He calls for help from the Maga faithful; they show up, with guns
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- [Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump loses the GOP primaries to a challenger
- Challenger wins General Election; pardons Trump
- Challenger executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
- Challenger loses General Election
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump wins the primaries; the GOP nominates him
- Faces incarceration for any reason before General Election
- He calls for help from the Maga faithful; they show up, with guns
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump loses the General Election
- He contests; Maga faithful protest. Ugly, but gradually recedes
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump's legal escapades end in prison
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump flees; goes into exile (Russia, Hungary)
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump wins the 2024 General Election (lawfully, or not)
- He executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
- Trump wins 2024 General Election but dies before Inauguration
- Trump's VP executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
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I Fear The Monkey In Your Soul
Once again: The constant promise of a final, Great Cleansing to destroy the enemies and demons that plague America, where they are made to pay (and maybe Jesus will even make a guest appearance with Trump!), keeps the faithful constantly on edge, waiting for The Word.
A Maga Revolt would not be a replay of Fort Sumpter or the Whiskey Rebellion, or even January 6th. It might be a 'patriot militia' taking control of important infrastructure. It could be asymmetric warfare, IEDs, snipers; destruction of power substations; truck bombs, like Oklahoma City. It could go on for a long time.
At some point, an Ammon Bundy-type will appear and declare a portion of some state as 'Sovereign territory', the Republic Of Christ Church, or some such bullshit. Vladimir Putin announces the Russian Federation diplomatically recognizes the new "breakaway republic", offering military assistance and a warning "not to interfere with the progress of democracy". North Korea and Iran follow suit.
Twenty years ago, these scenarios were laughable. That they're being considered by security analysts and risk consultants today should tell you just how serious our situation is.
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In The Proud Tower, popular historian Barbara Tuchman focused on describing Western culture in the decades leading up to the Great War -- a huge, red line of demarcation that finally separated the generations of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.
Her story is a chronicle of human folly (one of Tuchman's favorite themes). Because we know how the story will end, the leitmotif of nostalgia we sense in the background is really the collective despair of survivors who lost everything familiar, an entire frame of reference for living.
But we don't know the next chapters in this story. No one knows how it ends. The majority of people reading this (myself, three other people, and a giant parakeet) will probably be around to find out. But it doesn't prevent any of us, feeling some massive change is coming, from already feeling nostalgic; that we may be about to lose the trusted and safe and familiar.
Many people will say this -- but the election to come will actually determine whether the American Experiment continues, or ends at 11:59:59 AM EST on January 21, 2025. It isn't hyperbole.
What they don't say is, this election will be just one more battle. Even if the Democrats win, the struggle is far from over. For over thirty years, the American political and cultural Right has been developing a generational project to pack the courts, suppress voting; roll America back.
When we are at a crossroads of climate deterioration, when collaboration and cooperation may be the only things that save us as a species: the only thing the Right can do is plan on how to Own the Libs, to take more for themselves -- and fuck the Peasantry: that's us, by the way.
And to make this work, they are willing to do anything -- sacrifice their honor, their sacred bonds of love and fellowship; the basic tenets of common decency -- for this Trump person. This one truth about our current situation never ceases to amaze me; that they will give it all up... for that.
What happens will depend on how far the Right is willing to go -- how vicious, how violent, how delusional they can be. And on what we're willing to do to stop them.
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He who writes this book, in which hate is not hidden, was formerly a pacifist...For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck with such violence, that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him in this state of hatred, that his conscience becomes diminished -- he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.-- Emile Verhaeren, Belgian Poet; Dedicating a book of his poems to his former self, 1915
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