And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars… Right here on this blog, Halloween night. I wrote of the coming election and the expected aftermath—at least my expectation. A Biden win, a Russian bot-campaign to foment distrust and hate among the American people. A stolen election! Widespread cheating! Elites staffing the polling places, counting the votes. The reds against the blues. Putin would continue to wreak havoc on America. This time with civil war.
I got that wrong. No massive bot invasion necessary. Putin can take the year off. He’s got Trump and his crew stirring the pot like no troll could ever imagine. Elected officials around the country receive death threats for standing by the election results. Social media users throw around accusations of treason, images of nooses. An armed militia descended on a suburban home while a mom and her child hung Christmas lights. The Vermont Secretary of State was actually threatened with execution.
Trump won’t denounce these actions. The congressional republicans won’t either. To them, winning is more important than justice and democracy… or public safety. Just like last summer, we’re on the cusp of an explosion. Another helpful teen, a la Kyle Rittenhouse, will take to heart the hateful rhetoric and murder someone for doing their job? Or if not a teen, maybe his dad.
I may have botched my prediction about Putin, but I stand by the civil war. As long as our government, our sheriffs and police, our local and state elected officials allow the threats and intimidation to continue, allow people to stalk public places with assault rifles and make death-threats via social media unpunished, we’ll move ever closer to violence. It’s irrational, uncivil, unAmerican behavior. It’s like the Hindenburg; disaster is inevitable. Here’s the worst part: guess who’s got all the guns?
The Other Stuff 
Another of those uncomfortable posts where I find myself nodding frequently while fervently hoping you have it completely wrong.
Keep ’em coming.
– Bruce
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I’m with Bruce. This is similar to the dinner conversation my family just had, too. Lots of F bombs.
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Ha. My family keeps wanting to normalize cursing around the house, and I keep pushing back. Somewhere in there lies a joke about how the guy with Tourette is the only one who doesn’t cuss.
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Yeah that’s good, you have the wick of a laugh in that that could burn all night!
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As much as I like to be right, I hope I’ve got this wrong. Do you have Trumpers in Australia?
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‘Fraid so. But nothing as anachronistically absurd as the Electoral College system. And very few guns.
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As I sit here, deep in the Purple Heart of Texas, (Austin is blue, by the way) reading your post I cringe. We are all living on the edge. I’d like to believe we will as a nation come to our good senses, but it’s a tossup.
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Pennsylvania is more striped than purple. I’m in a sea of red. But because it’s a small town there is a lot of politeness that keeps the squabbling at bay. Austin is nice. We visited once and really liked it.
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If my kids/grandkids weren’t here I’d live in France and drink citrone presse’ and eat croissants every day. Austin is a great town. More so sans Covid and creepy politicians like Cruz, Cornyn and Paxton et al. Alas.
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I’ve been saying the same thing, Jeff. It’s pretty scary! I worry about my Blog Buddies in places that aren’t so Blue. I’m in San Diego County, lots of ex-military gun nuts around.
I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that you’re wrong about this one too.
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I don’t know much about San Diego but it seems like it’s got a lot of problems. An internet friend runs a nonprofit there working with at risk young women. Seems like there is a never ending supply of young women at risk.
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I saw the election official from Georgia (a Republican) has denounced all of the craziness, although not until it was targeted at him. Seems to be the unfortunately reality for most of them, no problems until it turns on them.
Argh! But I have almost completely removed myself emotionally from this whole thing, as there’s nothing I can do to change it, and it makes me soooo depressed if I think about it too long. We just have to weather the hurricane until it passes (though it may not ever totally pass) but at least hope the worst of it will subside after January.
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Well you know me, glass just about empty… I believe it’s going to get worse when Trump leaves office. Do you have Trumpers in the UK – meaning do people identify with Trump?
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There are a small minority who do things like protest masks and lockdowns but for the most part, I’d say no. Maybe if trump were British it’d be different, but I’d guess the step removed probably keeps people from getting completely sucked in. Just my take.
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I think you are right on this one too. Really scary.
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Word.
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Just the weight of a feather in the balance
I believe we will Phoenix because we are already aflame
We will come through this crash landing
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Let’s hope. I’m not sure if posts like this help or hurt the cause.
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Unfortunately, I agree with you, Jeff. I think Trump would like nothing better than to foment civil unrest so that he could declare martial law and stage a coup. I never wanted January (20) to come in a hurry as much as I do this year!
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Sometimes I have day dreams (premonitions?) about this happening and having blogs like mine attract intimidation or legal issues. How far are we really from a China-like society where the gov’t controls the narrative. I think a second Trump term would have done it.
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I say we all burn some dual duty blue candles and pray to the great googly moogly that Jan 20 comes off without A hitch, Trump and his band of misfits are indicted and convicted by various state’s attorneys general – and we see them all carted off in orange jumpsuits to Guantanamo, where they are fed d-rations (they don’t rate c-rations, do they?) and given tin foil emergency blankets in memory of the thousands of immigrants who have deserved far better!
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Amen
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I am so so sad to agree with you.
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😦
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Media has you all thinking anyone who voted for trump is crazy but you see nothing wrong with the bigger picture or what? You are ready to throw half the county into Guantanamo as criminals? for what? voting?
Who cares about red or blue right now. America is a skeleton of itself. This is a fake reaction to this disease. It is about control. If it were about saving lives than why not a similar reaction to the much more deadly ‘heart disease’ that has been plaguing the nation for decades, or lack of health care in other regards. This is a power grab and its coming from both political parties.
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Since I’m not planning on responding to or countering your points, I simply want to acknowledge your comment and thank you for reading.
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At this point, I am more afraid of the political state of this country than I am of the virus.
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I’m pretty concerned about both. I think Trump is going to be a pain in the ass over the next month. Hopefully it won’t go beyond that, but I would be unsurprised if he went for a power-grab of some sort involving the military. Although I don’t think they would support him after all the crap he’s said about them. And then there’s the whole illegitimate president accusation on Biden. This won’t end in January, that’s for sure.
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I write about disasters. I’ve been in the midst of Civil Wars on deployments, seeing neighbors battling neighbors in brutal ways.
I disagree. No one has “all the guns”. Actually, most guns are owned by a handful of people, while a large number own one or two. Less than a third of Americans actually own firearms. Very, very few have any clue what it means to actually wield them against other humans, even most veterans. I’ve watched these wanna-be “militias” having fought real militias. What’s funny is you can spot one or two of the FBI plants among them if you watch carefully.
Those fringe activists on both sides are a small minority. The number of people willing to take extreme action is always low. As we learned in the Q Course at Fort Bragg, the number of French who were actually active in the Resistance was minuscule.
The Civil War was an entirely different matter, based on massive economics and other factors and was built into this country from the start. It was inevitable. A Civil War now isn’t inevitable.
This is fear mongering with little substance mentioning some isolated incidents. The larger, and more likely problems, are political instability, economic turmoil, and McConnell hamstringing and real progress on the two major threats of our time: climate change and wealth inequality. The latter is MUCH more likely to initiate armed insurrection at the rate it is going.
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All good points. I don’t disagree. I often write from a vortex of emotion, and I times I overstate the case. Weeks later, I’m happy to report that the disasters I worried about are unlikely, but ‘disaster’ is upon us all the same. Having been surrounded and confronted by men with assault rifles as I rallied for rights of Black people has had a clear impact on my feelings of safety. Thank you for reading and commenting.
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I tend to be a worst caser also. I don’t think there will be Civil War, but there will be great turmoil. Our only saving grace is Trump’s mental illness. He’s not capable of planning. He exists in the now, not tomorrow.
But someone like him will come in the future who is not mentally ill in the same way. That person won’t make the same mistakes. The person who scares me for the future is Matt Gaetz. He’s planning.
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Also, you’ve provided criticizing feedback without making me feel defensive. It’s an important skill many of us are still working on.
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