https://thebulwark.com/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-a-national-divorce/

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Loose talk about breaking up the United States has become increasingly common. While quixotic secession campaigns for California or Texas are more amusing than threatening, there seems to be something different about the right-wing movement for a “peaceful separation” or “national divorce.” If you look closely, there’s an undercurrent carrying the threat of political violence. Or even full-scale civil war.

“It’s Time For The United States To Divorce Before Things Get Dangerous,” the Federalist’s Jesse Kelly argues. Citing deep cultural divides on religion, gun rights, and immigration, Kelly warns that “sooner or later, the left-wing rage mob will start coming for the careers (and lives) of any normal American who sees things differently.”

Trump supporters face genocide or ruin, he writes in “America Is Over, But I Won’t See It Go Without An Epic Fight.” In that essay, Kelly asks readers to imagine themselves as native Lakota tribesmen who must choose between life on a reservation—“in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything”—or glorious, doomed resistance: as the Lakota who fights back and holds his enemy’s scalp in his hands.

You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others didn’t.

“Be the Lakota,” Kelly concludes.

This is just a bit from an aspiring TV pundit, right? Merely a winking step-across-the-line for clicks and attention?

Over the weekend, Iowa Rep. Steve King (last seen losing his committee assignments over white nationalist-friendly comments) shared a meme joking that the right would win the next civil war because his supporters are stockpiling ammunition while the other side obsesses about gender and bathrooms.

Such discussions aren’t limited to fringe outlets or marginalized congressmen. National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson takes the likelihood of violent conflict almost as a given. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” he asks. “We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968.”

Maybe Hanson is just being hyperbolic and we should take him seriously, and not literally, when he says that the divisions of 2018 are comparable to the divisions of 1860? After all, Hanson’s list of grievances—displacement from a globalized economy, cultural and campus radicalism, immigration, and the legacy of Barack Obama—is familiar enough, and reasonable arguments can be had about all of them. And one of his solutions—“we need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant”—seems much less arduous than any of the pathways out of the antebellum years. Hanson’s view, while it gives a frisson of danger, would probably disappoint the white nationalists who see civil strife as both necessary and desirable.

The president, of course, has long indicated his support for political violence, threatening protesters with beatings at his rallies and approving the assault of a journalist by a congressional candidate. But last week, Trump took that openness to violence in a new direction, suggesting he could unleash the police, military, and “Bikers for Trump” on “the left.”


Daniel Dale
✔
@ddale8
Trump to Breitbart on how the left plays tough: "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad."

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10:10 AM - Mar 14, 2019
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America has imported more warlord theocracy from Afghanistan than it has exported democracy.