By Gary D. Barnett

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

~ H.L. Mencken

Rarely do I wander into political arguments, or discuss politics in any manner other than to denounce all government and governmental procedures as completely insane. The most prolific liars, thieves, and murderers are politicians, and those who control them. Actually, the entirety of all politics is criminal, and ridiculously asinine. With that said, the population at large in this country, whether they participate in the idiocy of voting or not, accept the premise that politics and government are a necessity for life, and that humanity has not any ability to function properly without a governing force ruling over them. In simple terms, what this means is that almost the totality of the entire populace has accepted a master and slave relationship that requires extreme force in order to exist and survive. Under these conditions, freedom is an impossibility that cannot ever be achieved.

While this political system, and all government, has always been atrocious in nature, it has now become nothing more than a circus based only on absurdity and evil, and presented to the ‘average’ man as essential in order for a ‘rule-based’ society to function. In this light, the governing body pretends to be the protector and savior of the masses. This lie has been perpetrated throughout history, but has served the master class well. It has fooled the bulk of society who have voluntarily accepted this ruse to such an extent, that they actually continue to believe that they control their own destiny and have a say in their fate due to supporting one or the other trimmer seeking power over them in this illegitimate political scheme.

The party system is the driving force of acceptance, and the safety blanket for much of the population, but it always pits one side against the other when both (all) are supposed to be working toward the exact same goal of doing what is ‘right’ for the ‘people.’ How can this idiocy be believed? The entire political class, regardless of any feigned ideological differences, promises to take care of all citizens, protect their freedom, secure their ‘rights,’ and defend them from harm. These are of course all lies, but this should be completely obvious to any with the ability to think.

The latest round of ‘voting’ to choose the ‘supreme leader’ of the American people was a spectacle so difficult to believe, and so circuslike, that it defied all logic and imagination. Nothing could be more laughable, but it boiled down to Trump against Biden. How much more ridiculous could this circus be? Two buffoons; one whose brain was completely compromised, and one whose ego was such as to indicate self-adoration and pompous lunacy in the face of pretended intelligence. This would be comical except for the reality that one of these vile power-seekers had to be selected to ‘lead’ this country as proxy for the real power.

Biden was ‘picked’ this last time around, but I want to mainly focus on Trump, as it seems he may be ‘selected’ as the possible agent of the master class in 2024 for the Republicans. This could be so for a couple of reasons, including to stir up so much left/right hate as to stoke a civil war of sorts, where martial law could be fully activated and implemented. The other possibility of course would be to have him there to continue supporting and enforcing extreme tyranny on the path to global governance, just as he did when he was president during the last cycle of totalitarian rule.

Trump of course, like all high-level politicians, exposed to all who can see, that he is a hypocrite, a liar, a cheat, a tyrant, a warmonger, and a murderer in that he authorized terror against others here and around the world. Harsh words you might say, but all true.

The problem though, is that Trump is a cult figure, and most who support anyone with an R behind their name, tend to look upon him as some sort of political god, who is not only backed in many cases unconditionally, but worshipped. This is similar to the Democrats worship of the evil Obama.

Trump made so many promises, but failed in most all, while pushing forward every agenda necessary in order to promote the new world order, just as he was instructed to do. He did this all the while pretending to do the opposite, and his followers took the bait hook, line, and sinker. This requires a very sophisticated’ propaganda machine working continuously to fool the herd of sheep who take up space in this country. On one hand, there is the left opposition, which just by their unbridled hatred strengthens the Trump camp, while the Trump supporters just become more and more obnoxious in their quest to ignore reality. Most of the right media, and much of the alternative media, including a large percentage of so-called ‘libertarians’ as well, promote Trump as savior, while failing to report his part in the destruction of this country, which is staggering.

Two-faced politics took on a new meaning with the Trump presidency, as taking both sides of an issue was a Trump specialty. In addition, the most extreme, tyrannical, and freedom destroying policies to date, came from the Trump administration. While he was in office, his Republican base cheered, regardless of the carnage, but once he left office, that same base blamed all ills, economic destruction, and tyranny on Biden, ignoring the entire past and Trump’s policies. Biden is nothing more than a perverted, brain-dead, leftist politician, but he does not even know where he is or what he says. This is no praise or defense of this evil political monster, but he is not running anything, which means that Trump is much more cognizant of his actions, and therefore more responsible.

It would be impossible to list and describe all of the corrupt and heinous moves made by Trump and his handlers in any essay, or even a book of essays. As to ‘promises’ broken, the most honest answer is most all were broken. I will only concentrate on a few of the most egregious and terroristic policies that caused so much harm, economic catastrophe, and death.

Trump strengthened government and government enforcement on many fronts. Many of his choices of advisors and cabinet members were atrocious, including Pompeo and Haspel to name just two neocon terrorists, and he kept Fauci and Birx on board during the most horrendous destruction this country has ever encountered in the fake ‘covid’ pandemic scam. The deficits and debt soared astronomically; the opposite of what was promised. Taxes only increased while spending and ludicrous money printing out of thin air skyrocketed. There was never an ‘audit’ of the Fed of course, regardless of guaranteeing that audit in his first 100 days in office. The continued aggressive wars, bombing and murder of innocents in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere, including the continued presence of troops in Afghanistan, were pursued. One after another promise was not only ignored, but completely reversed.

The list of lies and atrocities is endless under Trump, but the worst was saved for the scam called ‘covid.’ In 2019, government spending was record-breaking, eclipsing over $4.5 trillion, and in 2020, spending was almost $7 trillion dollars. Deficits and debt were out of control, as this country fell into the worst times in its history. This began with Trump’s declaring a national emergency, turning every governor in every state loose to tyrannize every citizen. Of course, Trump vowed to go after any governor if they shut down the state or locked down the populace, and said he would never allow it, and said very aggressive measures would be forthcoming.

Only 7 states did not fully close down, but all still had massive restrictions on some or many businesses, including South Dakota, which did not mandate closings. Economies in all 50 states were decimated, and Trump did absolutely nothing to stop it. He could have rescinded the national emergency order at any time, thereby taking power out of the hands of the states, just as he said he would, but this was just another lie.

We all know what happened since that time. The economy was destroyed, travel was mostly eliminated, totalitarian policies ran rampant, loss of jobs was tremendous, psychological torture of the citizenry commenced, bankruptcies and small business devastation were rampant, police brutality and allowed terror by criminal groups like BLM and Antifa were allowed to take place, hyper-inflation occurred, as prices soared beyond imagination. Deadly mask mandates and ‘social distancing’ idiocy was ordered. This harmed everyone, except those large, rich, and protected and funded businesses supported by the Trump administration, the central banks, and the Treasury.

And then there was the bioweapon injection. Trump first said that ‘coronavirus’ was not a big deal, which was actually true, since there never was any virus called ‘covid’ or any pandemic. Shortly thereafter, he claimed he created and oversaw “Operation Warp Speed,” and said he was the “Father of the vaccine.” He changed his tone and comments on a regular basis throughout, from one position to the opposite position constantly. He said he was defunding the WHO, while at the very same time, giving almost $1.2 billion to GAVI, Bill Gate’s organization, and therefore a backdoor funding of the same WHO. Contradiction and hypocrisy abound in everything Trump says or does.

Another presidential election is coming in two years. Trump is likely to run, but at this point, who knows? Trump worshippers are delusional, and cannot see the absolute idiocy of all that he has done and said, all the lies and hypocrisy, and the immense damage caused by his presence in the White House. All presidents are evil and horrendous puppets, regardless of party affiliation, but the Trump supporters have lost all sanity in believing he is their savior, or a savior of anything or anybody. To be fooled by such obvious trickery and religious worship, and by an egotistical and arrogant stooge such as Trump, is a pathetic analysis of a large contingency of Americans.

The entirety of this political process is collectivist madness. Quit relying on political masters and elections to save you. Vote for no one; get rid of them all!

Authored by Rajan Laad via American Thinker (emphasis ours),

Whenever political leaders lose all political capital due to their misgovernance and have no real issues to base their campaign on, they often resort to focusing on the symbolic — usually referring to ‘the soul of the nation.’

This happened before in the U.S., it happened in India, it happened in the U.K. and it happened again in the U.S.

This is most typical of the left.

Instead of being humble and conceding their mistakes, they attack voters for thinking of voting against them while overlooking the myriad catastrophes they presided over. 

They often blame their opponents for what they are guilty of — i.e., bigotry and violence, and then end with the ‘soul’ plea.

Biden delivered his ‘soul’ speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the birthplace of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The manner of delivery was unhinged; he frequently waved his fists aggressively. His voice was hoarse, perhaps owing to recent bouts with Covid-19, giving the speech a scornful tone. 

Biden spoke flanked by uniformed Marines, while his backdrop was bathed in blood-red hues making it look like an ominous hellscape.

His speech was a sequel to his recent addresses where he claimed that he doesn’t respect MAGA Republicans and that MAGA philosophy is like “semi-fascism.”

Biden called for Americans to “unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.”

But Biden added a caveat that this didn’t apply to “MAGA forces’ — i.e., all those scores of millions who voted for and intend to vote for MAGA candidates.

Biden said that “too much of what’s happening in our country today isn’t normal.”

Biden is right here, but the blame for this lies on him.

Never before have government institutions been hijacked and misused to target political opponents.

Never before has a virus been misused to impose lockdowns that infringe on the right to freedom of movement and the right to earn a living.

Never before have vaccines been mandated causing people to be fired from their jobs or suffer from health issues.

Never before has the U.S. government demonized its own citizens, calling them domestic terrorists.

Never before has the U.S. government set up a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ that sits in judgment of the utterances of citizens.

Never before has the U.S. been subjected to prolonged disinformation campaigns, the Russian collusion hoax, the Ukraine call hoax, and now the insurrection hoax.

Never before has the U.S. had a president whose cognitive abilities are so impaired that he struggles to read off a teleprompter and causes citizens to wonder who is in charge.

Biden continues by claiming that the Republican party is “dominated, driven, intimidated by Donald Trump” and his supporters, calling it “a threat to this country” because “they refuse to accept the results of a free election.”

Perhaps Biden forgot the Russian collusion hoax concocted by the Democrats that baselessly attempted to delegitimize the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was the Democrats who refused to accept the results of a free election.

Perhaps Biden forgot that big media and big tech suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal prior to the 2020 elections. A recent poll shows that nearly four of five Americans believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Perhaps Biden forgot about Mark Zuckerberg spending $419 million to infiltrate sacrosanct electoral infrastructure of the 2020 elections and push for mail-in voting.

Perhaps Biden forgot that 69% of voters nationwide cast their ballot nontraditionally i.e., by mail and/or before Election Day for the 2020 elections. Mail votes are highly vulnerable to fraud.

Biden also alleged that the “MAGA forces” are aligned with white supremacists, violent extremists, and other undesirables.

Perhaps Biden forgot violent Democrat extremists threatening Supreme Court Justices, vandalizing Catholic churches, pregnancy centers, and the offices of pro-life groups. There was an assassination plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh,

Biden also accused “MAGA Republicans” of seeing a country consumed in “darkness.”

Perhaps Biden forgot that his misgovernance is the sole cause of darkness.

The open borders have caused an influx of illegal immigrants, some of whom are violent criminals. More than 4.9 million illegal migrants have crossed the southern border. 

The smuggling of illicit drugs across the border is a regular occurrence. There were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% during the same period the year before.

Inflation is at a very high 8.5 percent, causing the price of essential items to skyrocket. The price of fuels continues to be high.

The crime wave is ravaging the nation and Democrat judges refuse to prosecute misdemeanors such as drug possession, driving offenses, disturbing the peace, shoplifting, larceny, domestic violence, etc.

None of Biden-backed initiatives such as the Inflation Reduction Bill or the infrastructure bill or his climate initiative or pardoning Student Loans will reduce people’s suffering, in fact, wasteful spending will make inflation worse. 

Biden’s ‘gun safety’ red flag laws allowed instant confiscation of guns on mere suspicion; this endangers lives, especially considering the crime wave.

Biden has thus not only taken the nation into darkness but his misgovernance will blacken the darkness even further.

Biden perfunctorily claimed that “not every Republican, not even a majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans; not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”

If that were indeed the case, and the MAGA movement was just a small minority, why did Biden base his entire speech on an insignificant minority?

This was an attempt to distinguish between the Good Republicans (Lincoln Project, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and company) vs the Bad Republicans (Trump and the MAGA GOP). The truth is the “Good Republicans” are useful idiots, who will instantly become bad if they dare to run against Democrats.

Most Americans disapprove of Biden; that number is likely to rise after his hateful rhetoric.

The purpose of the address was to demonize, dehumanize and otherize Donald Trump and his supporters, which would justify any kind of persecution by government agencies.

This also creates grounds for the Democrats to reject the outcome of the midterms should the GOP, particularly the MAGA GOP win by a landslide. They could claim to stand against fascist forces. The Democrats have broken every immutable norm in recent times; they already attempted to overthrow the 2016 election; they could very well do this for the midterms.

But there is a silver lining.

Despite claims that the speech would be apolitical, Biden delivered a campaign speech.  However, it wasn’t for the Democrats it was instead for the Republicans and Donald Trump.

Even personnel from Democrats’ mouthpieces such as CNN and the Daily Beast weren’t impressed

Biden Attacks ‘MAGA Republicans’ in Angry Speech, Labels Them ‘Threat’ to Democracy | 1 Sept 2022 | Joe Biden attacked supporters of former President Donald Trump in a speech Thursday evening in Philadelphia that many across the political spectrum viewed as divisive, castigating large scores of Republican voters as “extremists” and threats to democracy. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” Biden said. “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” “They fan the flames of political violence,” Biden added. Biden’s remarks come after earlier attacks on Trump supporters in which he claimed many Republicans had embraced “semi-fascism” during a Democratic National Committee fundraiser. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has largely doubled down on Biden’s rhetoric, arguing that Biden’s characterization of many Republicans as “extremists” was accurate as they allegedly don’t share the beliefs of the majority of Americans.

Joe Biden Declares War: ‘MAGA Republicans a Clear and Present Danger – MAGA Republicans Embrace Anger, Thrive on Chaos, Live in the Shadow of Lies’ | 1 Sept 2022 | Joe Biden started his speech Thursday night attacking President Trump and his supporters — 75 million Americans. Joe Biden calls MAGA Republicans “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” (Video)

Disgraced Former FBI Official Andrew McCabe Says Joe Biden Didn’t Go Far Enough Threatening MAGA Republicans | 1 Sept 2022| Disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Thursday evening said Joe Biden didn’t go far enough threatening Trump supporters. Joe Biden on Thursday evening declared war on Trump supporters in a divisive prime time speech on the “battle for the soul of America” from Philadelphia. Joe Biden called 75-plus million Trump supporters “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” …This wasn’t enough red meat for the rabid former FBI Deputy Director who got fired for lying to federal investigators. McCabe told a CNN panel that Joe Biden should have talked about what he’s going to do to take care of the problem – the problem being the millions of Trump supporters. “People would like to have seen a bit more references to accountability. There really wasn’t much talk about what we’re doing about those insurrectionists,” McCabe said. McCabe, Biden and leftists like them won’t be happy until every Trump supporter is locked up or dead.

Over 50 Biden Administration Employees, 12 US Agencies Involved in Social Media Censorship Push – Documents | 1 Sept 2022 | More than 50 officials in Joe Biden’s administration across a dozen agencies have been involved with efforts to pressure Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation, according to documents released on Aug. 31. Senior officials in the U.S. government, including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, and onetime White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt, have been in touch with one or more major social media companies to try to get the companies to tighten rules on allegedly false and misleading information on COVID-19, and take action against users who violate the rules, the documents show. In July 2021, for instance, after Biden said that Facebook was “killing people” by not combating misinformation effectively, an executive at Meta reached out to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee, to say that government and Meta teams met after the remarks “to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on [alleged] misinformation going forward.”

‘Censorship Enterprise’: Emails Reveal Biden Administration Coordinated With Facebook, Twitter | 1 Sept 2022 | Dozens of federal officials across multiple agencies within the Biden administration communicated extensively with social media companies to coordinate censorship of information, according to internal documents released by Republican Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent emails to employees at Facebook and Twitter to flag instances of alleged misinformation and provide talking points to counter allegedly false narratives spreading on the platforms. Government officials would occasionally initiate this activity, with one message from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official requesting monthly meetings with Facebook to plan “debunking” strategies, and a White House official requesting the removal of a parody Anthony Fauci account. One collection of emails shows Facebook staff collaborating closely with staff at the the Department of Health and Human Services to remove Facebook groups, with one message describing the collaboration as “critical.” Staff from the CDC discussed setting up “regular chats” with Twitter.

by Allister Health via Telegraph

[ . . . ]

We risk ending up with calamitous poverty, civil disobedience, a new socialist government by next year, a break-up of the UK, nationalisations, price and incomes policies, punitive wealth taxes and eventually a complete economic and financial meltdown and IMF bailout. The situation in the EU is, if anything, worse.

This is not a plea for pacifism, for looking away when Ukraine is being illegally invaded by a savage regime. Britain was – and remains – morally right to back Ukraine in a carefully calibrated way. Instead, this is a plea for an economic counter-offensive, for Liz Truss, the next PM, to tackle Putin’s economic and energy war head-on.

Mass, immediate intervention is inevitable, but must be designed to avoid hastening Britain’s shift into demagoguery, welfarism and socialist central planning, all steps down Hayek’s “road to serfdom” that the Leftist and green elites are longing us to take. The wrong response – because too little is done, or because the wrong solutions are chosen – would merely advance Putin’s masterplan to cripple the West.

Cheap and plentiful energy is essential to our consumerist societies. We cannot be delusional about the scale of the developing catastrophe. Household energy and vehicle fuel costs will jump from 4.5 per cent of household spending in early 2021 to some 13.4 per cent by April next year, much higher than at any time during the past 50 years, including the 1970s, according to Carbon Brief. Households may face a rise in energy costs of £167 billion, or 7 per cent of GDP, taking total expenditure to £231 billion, more than government spending on health, and that is before the hit to business is accounted for. The rise for consumers alone is more than the combined defence and education budgets.

This is equivalent to a Depression-style shock. Pay rises will protect some workers at the expense of investors, but – until and unless energy prices fall again – our national living standards will slump massively. The nation is sending tens of billions more abroad to pay for energy imports.

The state can borrow to cushion the blow, reducing future consumption to prop up current living standards, but our impoverishment cannot be magicked away. Coming after years of QE, there is a real danger of excess borrowing triggering even higher inflation, rocketing interest rates, mass repossessions and a banking crisis, so caution is imperative.

There was little the West could do other than rely on hostile Opec nations in the 1970s, the last time an energy war almost destroyed us; but it was an unforgivable error for Europe to become so reliant on Russian supplies, and to fail so miserably to increase domestic energy production. The French even allowed their nuclear plants to break down.

Putin struck at the right time: the zombified Western economy was in the doldrums. Covid was a disaster of unpreparedness and errors, increasing national debts and inflation and entrenching a dependency culture. But the Russian tyrant’s canniest move was to understand just how suicidal our energy policy had become. A toxic brew of net zero ideology, deep hypocrisy about decarbonising without making the nuclear effort, endemic nimbyism, short-termism and state incompetence had radically weakened the West.

There are four broad emergency options. The first is targeted help: anybody under a certain income gets cash from the state, paid for by borrowing. Some needy cases would be missed, however, and can the benefits system cope? The second is to freeze energy prices for all, with the state subsidising the acquisition of gas: this looks “free”, while in fact it massively increases the national debt, as in France. The third is to cut taxes dramatically, something the Left always rejects as “untargeted” or “regressive”. The fourth is to help some or all firms.

Whenever possible, Truss must cut tax; whenever possible, she should target help on families and companies that need it and avoid bailing out the well off; if she must cap prices, given the total collapse of the system, she needs an exit strategy; and she has to launch the greatest, most urgent energy infrastructure programme in history while suspending as many green rules as possible. She needs to work visibly with business, showing voters they are delivering big investments under warlike conditions, reducing the pressure for confiscatory windfall taxes.

On top of the extra debt, all these options come with downsides. All four are being weaponised by the Left to shift politics permanently in their direction. For many activists, this is a useful crisis. They are calling for wealth taxes and income tax surcharges: they claim that this would be “just” if the “rich” benefit from untargeted handouts or price caps. They demand “social tariffs”, where the rich or bigger users pay crippling surcharges.

But once such taxes are imposed, they never go away. In France, the Left are calling for bans on private swimming pools, private planes and even detached housing: permanent green austerity. The Germans are slashing the cost of public transport, supposedly to save energy but really to undermine the private car. In Britain, there is huge support for nationalisations, even though they wouldn’t increase the supply of energy or reduce its cost. Price caps, made mainstream thanks to Theresa May, are now the norm: ever more wages and prices are set by civil servants. Will supermarkets be next?

One paradox of Putin’s neo-Soviet revanchism is that it is strengthening America’s position as leader of the West. The US emerged better from Covid. Its interest rates have gone up faster, bolstering the dollar. Its health care system hasn’t fallen over like the NHS. But it is its energy policy – “Frack, baby, frack”, as the Republicans advocated in the early 2000s – that has been the real triumph. Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University polymath, argues in a Bloomberg piece that “2022 may be remembered as the year when living standards in the US truly pulled away from those in Western Europe”.

Why, oh why, did Britain and Europe allow themselves to become Putin’s hostage?

via Washington Post

Fighting words and extremism are on the rise. We are not yet in ‘Turner Diaries’ territory, but that doesn’t mean the country will avoid violent conflict.

It’s easy and logical to conclude that the United States today stands as close to the edge of civil war as it has since 1861. A broad variety of voices — including Republican and Democratic politicians, academics who study civil strife, and extremists on both ends of the spectrum — now accept the idea that civil war is either imminent or necessary. They point to evidence that can seem persuasive: a blizzard of threats against FBI agents, judges, elected officials, school board members and elections supervisors; training camps where heavily armed radicals practice to confront their own government; and polls showing that many Americans expect violent conflict.

But it’s also easy and logical to conclude that the florid rhetoric from right-wing extremists, the worried warnings in mainstream media, and the hail of threats and individual attacks after this month’s surprise FBI search of Donald Trump’s South Florida mansion add up to something well short of the frightening prospect of civil war.

People who track such threats say this summer’s violent outbursts against federal officials and government institutions amount to one more concerning surge of rage in a pattern that has persisted throughout the pandemic, spiking after the murder of George Floyd two summers ago. But the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdog groups are not seeing the kind of specific planning by private militias and online assemblages of radicals that was evident before last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection and the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017.

“We are living in a country where disinformation, conspiracy thinking and lies have resulted in deadly attacks,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “It’s not exactly kumbaya in this society. But we have been going through this for a long time now, and I don’t see people coming together in the more coherent organizing we saw prior to Jan. 6.”

Contrast that perspective with that of Stephen Marche, author of “The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future,” who posits that as extremists’ threats have become more lurid and specific, their rhetoric has leached into the mainstream — leading, for example, the Texas state government to spell out instances in which it would defy federal authority and the Texas Republican Party to declare President Biden the “acting president” and seek a voter referendum on seceding from the United States.

When he sees small groups of armed men training for combat against government agents, Marche, a Canadian novelist, wants to ring warning bells. “The alarm is getting much more serious, and it’s accelerating very quickly,” he said. “The kind of chaos I’m describing is like internet rage: You could take it as playacting or it could be deadly serious. It could be weekend fun or actual military preparation.” He, along with some other analysts on the left, right and in between, thinks the current noise is a strong indicator that a hot civil war — one likely to feature bombings, assassinations and other assaults on federal institutions and officials — may be imminent.

This split over how seriously to take the threat of civil war is not just another example of America’s deep divisions: It has the great benefit of existing on a foundation of shared facts. Both sets of analysts — those who say we’re heading toward civil strife and those who say the threat matrix is largely limited to lone rangers and small, disorganized groups whose dangerous but scattered acts don’t constitute a civil war — agree there is little chance of an organized, violent attack on the government, or of local or state authorities taking up arms against their federal counterparts. But there remains a sharp divide over whether a mounting series of individual and small-group attacks could add up to a warlike conflict that destabilizes the country.

What both sides in the civil war debate do agree on is that a more disturbing trend — at this point more dangerous than the sporadic bursts of violence in recent years — is the pervasive loss of trust, hope and sense of belonging in a severely damaged society.

And both sides agree we have been here before.

A quarter-century ago, after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, I interviewed William Pierce, the physics professor turned neo-Nazi organizer whose novel “The Turner Diaries” had been taken by the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, as a planning document for launching civil war. In the book, white supremacists conspire to bomb FBI headquarters and spark a wider war against the government. McVeigh had excerpts from the book in his getaway car when he killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.

Pierce, a provocateur who took great pride in his book’s popularity among white supremacists and other extremists, told me that his aim — and that of those he hoped would read his book — was to overthrow the government and rid the country of Jews and Blacks.

“People don’t use the book as a blueprint, but as inspiration,” Pierce told me. “I don’t have the time to write just for entertainment. It’s to explain things to people. I’d like to see North America become a white continent.” He wrote that “if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us — if we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh — our whole race will die.”

Pierce, who died in 2002, told me he expected individual violent acts inspired by his book to become more frequent. “Terrorism only makes sense if it can be sustained,” he said. “One day, there will be real, organized terrorism done according to plan, aimed at bringing down the government.”

For several decades, “The Turner Diaries” has remained a go-to text for violent extremists, showing up frequently in online chatter by participants in and supporters of the Jan. 6 attack. In the meantime, the internet has blossomed into a far more insidiously efficient tool for those who seek to foment discord and terrorism. Yet although Pierce’s work still inspires single actors and small groups, his wider war has never come close to fruition.

Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. It was vigilantism. And more is coming.

Today, “civil war” is a rallying cry that some Americans wear on T-shirtsand others openly train for with assault weapons. Since the Mar-a-Lago search on Aug. 8, “lock and load” and “civil war” have trended on pro-Trump social media such as Gab and Telegram.

Belligerent rhetoric has also become part of everyday campaigning among some Republicans. A GOP candidate in Florida’s 11th House District, Laura Loomer, who narrowly lost her primary Tuesday, wrote on Telegram on Aug. 8 that it’s “time to take the gloves off. … If you’re a freedom loving American, you must remove the Words decorum and civility from your vocabulary. This is a WAR!” Conservative YouTuber and podcaster Steven Crowder tweeted on the day of the FBI’s descent on Mar-a-Lago that “tomorrow is war.” “It’s time to fight for every square inch,” he reiterated the next day. “It’s time to fight fire with fire.” The pro-Trump Gateway Pundit site wrote “This. Means. War.” On various pro-Trump social media platforms, people talked about buying ammunition and drilling for confrontation with federal agents. “Civil war! Pick up arms, people,” one agitated person tweeted.

Such talk has been a mainstay of the Trump years. Last summer, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), an election denier, alleged that U.S. election systems are “rigged,” which he said would “lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed.”

In a new book, “We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,”conservative writer Kurt Schlichter games out a civil war and concludes that blue states face a challenge. “It’s nice to hold cities, but if you do not also hold all the rural territory between the cities, as well as the routes to the places where you are getting your food and fuel,” he wrote, “you have a real problem.”

Trump himself, speaking against the teaching of critical race theory at a South Carolina rally this spring, said America’s fate “ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down — and they must do this — lay down their very lives to defend their country.”

One of Trump’s leading critics in his own party, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), said early this year on ABC’s “The View” that civil war could erupt. “We have to warn and talk about it so that we can recognize that and fight hard against it,” said Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.

But Kinzinger has also warned against embracing civil war rhetoric, tweeting in May: “How bout we stop the ‘civil war’ lust. Buy some GI Joes or something.”

In a nation where firearms purchases have almost doubled since the start of the pandemic — driven mainly by fears of rising crime, political unrest and the insecurity of life in the age of covid-19 — appeals like Kinzinger’s have fallen all too flat.

When the Rev. Sun Myung Moon sought to win Americans to his political and spiritual cause, the Unification Church, in the 1970s, he recruited people to sell flowers and ginseng door-to-door. Now, his son Hyung Jin Moon seeks to win followers for his Rod of Iron Ministries by sponsoring training sessions at his compounds in Texas and Pennsylvania — practice, he says, for a coming “patriots’” war against the “deep state.”

The Moons’ churches are both fringe groups, but Hyung Jin’s organization has hosted Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and current Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano at its “Freedom Festival” events.

Moon’s group is one of the many radical organizations that are increasingly open about their plans. A Brookings Institution studytracked several hundred private militia groups that use anti-government rhetoric to attract Americans worried “about changing demographics, stagnating wages, and how the shift to a multi-racial and multi-ethnic America will affect them.”

But such groups remain disparate and disjointed.

Many activists who have called for confrontation with the government now claim they meant no such thing; they have flipped the accusation, saying leftists or government agents are out to smash conservative opposition by kindling fear of a civil war launched by right-wingers. Crowder, the YouTube host, called media reports about his tweets an intentional smear.

“Decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI, and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary,” Victor Davis Hanson, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote in American Greatness, an online journal generally supportive of Trump. “Those who warn most of some mythical civil war are those most likely to incite one.”

Does all the noise add up only to vigorous opposition to the government, or is it evidence of concerted preparation for open warfare? The answer depends in part on what you think modern civil war would look like: Would large militias attack government institutions, or would a war be limited to haphazard acts by individuals and small guerrilla factions?

A new book imagines a looming civil war over the very meaning of America

Some say a war of sorts has begun: “The second American civil war is already occurring,” Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, declared in the Guardian. “But it is less of a war than a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.”

Reich foresees not a violent division of the country but rather something “analogous to Brexit — a lumbering, mutual decision to go separate ways on most things but remain connected on a few big things (such as national defense, monetary policy and civil and political rights).”

Still, many Americans believe that a true, violent civil war is coming. About half of those surveyed this spring by the University of California at Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program said they expected civil war in the next few years. Another poll, by the Survey Center on American Life, a nonpartisan project affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, found more than one-third of Americans agreeing that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

Groups seeking to battle the government have popped up regularly throughout American history.

To determine when such movements around the world have exploded into real civil wars, Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” points to two predictive factors: Countries stuck in an unstable zone between democracy and autocracy are more susceptible to armed conflict. And countries with weakened governments and a population deeply divided by identity — by race, ethnicity or religion — can fall into civil war. Walter sees the Republican Party embracing an “almost white supremacist strategy” that attracts far-right activists eager to fight the federal government.

But other scholars look at the same evidence and see the potential for violence stabilizing or diminishing. Juliette Kayyem, who heads the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, argues that violent movements either grow or shrink. As Trump increasingly looks to his supporters like a loser, she sees them wandering away. The “ideology is not defeated; it simply stops motivating people to action,” she wrote in the Atlantic this month.

The rhetoric of war is vastly more common than war itself. Violent and dark language has been at the core of Trump’s appeal for many years. Trump’s choice for governor of Arizona, former TV news anchor Kari Lake, for instance, tells crowds that the government is “rotten to the core,” meaning “America is dead.”

That kind of end-times speech strikes some disturbed or radicalized people as an invitation to uprising. But historians and security analysts who’ve studied the latest evidence of civil war planning mainly foresee the kinds of scattered terrorism that the country experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, not anything like the buildup to 1860.

Marche has dug into prepper conferences, far-right gatherings and the darkest of online rabbit holes, trying to discern whether their war plans are “weekend fun or actual military preparations. It’s hard to distinguish the fantasists from the people who actually are going to do it,” he said in an interview. In the end, he pronounces himself “really scared.”

No one would call the strife of the 1960s civil war, but “there was enormous violence in that time,” Marche said. “One hundred and forty cities burned, and that’s in a time when you still had a level of institutional trust that could mitigate the violence.”

Now, however, collapsed trust in institutions such as the police, news media, churches and government makes the country more vulnerable to internal attack, he argues. Add this year’s Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, and “you now have another situation like in 1860 where you have two legal statuses of people in different parts of the country, and it just can’t hold,” he said.

Still, Marche notes that “America changes all the time. Reinvention is in the absolute DNA of the country.”

Segal, who tracks extremism for the ADL, sees this month’s burst of war threats as one more sign that “the system is ripe for targeting,” with the FBI now the focus of violent rhetoric and attacks, like school boards, election workers and medical professionals before it. This may not trigger a wider rash of violence, but the danger has not passed. “Based on what happens in the November elections, extremists will adjust and find a boogeyman,” he said.

Segal retains hope that holding the Jan. 6 perpetrators to account and investigating Trump’s role in fomenting that attack “will somehow round the edges of the situation.”

It’s hard to see a civil war emerging from the current mess, but as Segal said, “I’m more concerned about what we can’t see.”