Originally published at: GOP Rep Adam Kinzinger warns that a civil war is not far-fetched: "I now believe it is a real possibility" | Boing Boing
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Good. It’s about time you lot started taking shit seriously.
Also, I think it’s time to start adjusting expectations around this. This won’t be a “civil war” in the way most Americans are used to thinking about it (two sides engaged with traditional military apparatus at a border/borders); this will be a sustained and stochastic campaign of terrorism by a minority who eventually are able to seize some government agencies at the local and state levels and begin enacting their draconian worldview. It’ll be less “send the boys off to fight” and more “my family was imprisoned for going to Temple/AME Church/women’s health clinic/local polling place”.
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I’m no expert; but I believe this is spot on. A minority of those who make noise are actually willing to do the violence themselves (although they’re perfectly okay with it being done in their name). I see small, noisy, violent groups waging guerilla campaigns with some degree of central coordination.
I shudder to think where we might be right now if the January 6 insurrection had turned into a full-on lawmaker bloodbath.
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Yep. These anti-government nuts have always been there, but their influence has spread, and way more people have been sold the lie that the election was stolen, the people in power are not legitimate, and the Democrats literally want to destroy America.
If one truly, truly believed all of that, any extreme actions would be justified in their minds.
Anyone in the GOP thinking this won’t eventually devolve further if it isn’t stopped is delusional. Anyone thinking their life time work to conservative causes will save them when they are going around killing politicians is also delusional. You have to be 100% in or you too are the enemy.
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That’s not terrifying or anything…
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More on Turchin and Goldstone. It’s a terrifying read.
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I think it would look similar to the Troubles.
You will have attacks, the State and Federal level authorities will have people in place to act as deterrents/defense, and they will be come targets for attack, and they in turn will do counter attacks/raids, etc.
It won’t be a Blue vs Grey type war.
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whitewashing the insurrection is “extremely dangerous.”
And yet that’s precisely what the current leaders of his party, the Party of Demonstrable Bad Faith, plans to do if it takes both houses of Congress later this year. The 6 January Commission will be closed down and more insurrectionists will escape justice. Kinzinger is still a member of that party and still locked into its bad-faith narratives, as he immediately demonstrates with this little turd of bothsidesism:
some militia shows up somewhere to do something, and then some counter-militia shows up
So forgive me for doubting his concern about the basic survival of this democracy. A dope like Blitzer might buy it but I don’t.
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That’s a bit dumb as rocks.
There aren’t “counter militias” running around. And the risk is not that 2 groups of armed bunker people will open fire on each other.
The risk is the right wing militias we do have, and the roving bands of violent fascists, attack government bodies like they’ve been furiously masturbating about for decades. Then subsets of Army, Police and Politicians piling in along side.
If the Jan 6 knobs had brought all those guns they lined up before hand with them it would have already happened.
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I think history books will show that we are already in a civil war that began on Jan 6th 2021.
We are in a lull right now following the opening shots, but these right-wing radicals have not changed their agenda one bit, and are laying the administrative attack right now.
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We’ve already seen a glimpse of what it will look like:
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I mean, you could construe the national guard that way. Although, more accurately, they are state militias intended for this type of event (and many more types of events).
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I see small, noisy, violent groups waging guerilla campaigns with some degree of central coordination.
Very small groups with funding and ideological views provided by sugar daddies who distance themselves from the dirty work and with tacit support from a conservative party (and sometimes from foreign meddlers) can do a lot of damage despite their small numbers.
The trucker blockade/occupation in Ottawa is a case in point. The leaders are the fringe of the fringe in Canada, actively and openly opposed to the country’s core political values (not just single-payer universal healthcare and multiculturalism but the country’s constitutional structure and geographic integrity). However, they got a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry and from American sources and some politicians from their Conservative Party came out to support them. They’ve managed to shut down the city centre of a G7 capital for more than a week and counting. American right-wingers are already planning their own Flu Trux Klan convoy to DC after beta-testing it up north.
I cannot emphasise enough that, historically speaking, it doesn’t take a majority of voters or of the population to usher fascism into a libersl democracy’s halls of power. It takes inaction or incompetence or division or appeasement on the part of liberal and centrists parties, it takes active collusion by or support from the traditional parties of conservativism, it takes an apathetic electorate, and it takes violence and bullying and terrorism by the actual fascists.
Once the sado-populists have power, the opportunists and cowards and the “Good Germans” all fall into their assigned historical roles and the victimisation of the regime’s targets begins. A Syrian-style civil war scenario won’t be much different.
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And we all know how well the last one went for the anti-federalists…
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Not comparable. This won’t be like that at all. And no guarantees on the outcome either.
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So, the next question would be… are there armed militias in the US that tend left in their politics?
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There will be those who will answer Antifa and BLM of course. However, the words “armed” and “militia” have meanings, and those does not meet them. They cannot be used to refer to “anyone who will stand up to my own stupid views.” But they will be. Hide and watch.
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“…someday, some militia shows up somewhere to do something, and then some counter-militia shows up…”
But there are no “counter-militias” on the left. Let’s not try to “both sides” this shit. Antifa, despite the right-wing boogeyman fantasy, doesn’t have a militia. What you’re going to have is a bunch of heavily armed right-wing yahoos trying to take things over (where they haven’t already), and viewing any level of resistance to their self-claimed “authority” as justification to start shooting. As separate events in a lot of different locations. More than is already happening, that is.
Yep, he’s still, in many ways, an active part of this shit. His token resistance to overt fascism doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s advancing the Republican anti-democratic agenda by supporting it in every other way.
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