Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon and that’s chilling!
A large study confirms one in five Americans believes violence motivated by political reasons is—at least sometimes—justified. Nearly half expect a civil war, and many say they would trade democracy for a strong leader, a preprint posted today on medRxiv found.
“This is not a study that’s meant to shock,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was not involved in the research. “But it should be shocking.”
Firearm deaths in the United States grew by nearly 43% between 2010 and 2020, and gun sales surged during the coronavirus pandemic. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and longtime gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, wondered what those trends portend for civil unrest. “Sometimes being an ER [emergency room] doc is like being the bowman on the Titanic going, ‘Look at that iceberg!’” he says.
He and his colleagues surveyed more than 8600 adults in English and Spanish about their views on democracy in the United States, racial attitudes in U.S. society, and their own attitudes toward political violence. The respondents were part of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel—an online research panel that has been used widely, including by Wintemute for research on violence and firearm ownership. The team then applied statistical methods to extrapolate the survey results to the entire country.
Although almost all respondents thought it’s important for the United States to remain a democracy, about 40% said having a strong leader is more important. Half expect a civil war in the United States in the next few years. (The survey didn’t specify when.)
“The fact that basically half the country is expecting a civil war is just chilling,” Wintemute says. And many expect to take part. If found in a situation where they think violence is justified to advance an important political objective, about one in five respondents thinks they will likely be armed with a gun. About 7% of participants—which would correspond to about 18 million U.S. adults—said they would be willing to kill a person in such a situation.
Kleinfeld says the study’s findings are compelling because of the large number of participants and because it asked about specific scenarios in which participants think violence is justified—such as for self-defense or to stop people with different political beliefs from voting. The sample does slightly overrepresent older people, who are not known to commit much violence worldwide, she says. “So the fact that you’re [still] getting these high numbers … is really quite concerning.”
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Bracken and articles point to the likelihood of a modified CW; the electronic/IT capability changes things; you can have the tech overlords sitting pretty in New Zealand ordering the cancellation and social annihilation of everyone and do it in perfect safely.
So, the question always becomes, who do you fight in a kinetic sense? Small-scale ‘blue hive’ skirmishes for sure. But actually campaigns?
But the real purpose of this comment is to point to the need to look at things from a multilevel perspective, granted that at one level it’s always: “my family, my friends, my community, my people.’ I’ll just bet Appalachia fares the best of all, because of terrain, training (formal or just by the way folks grow up), and blood ties.
Here in Texas suburbia, maybe maybe not, largely depending on state government. (With Abbott, who knows? I voted for Allen West in the primary).
(Sub-comment 2: our greatest enemies are – by far – the traitor class. Every republican who folds, almost all ‘leaders’. We were so gullible, so asleep, and not it is VERY late).
I do NOT look forward to the kinetic but expect it, but as Herr Trudeau has shown defending the ‘electronic gulag’ is not easy, given so many ‘in the middle’ still go along to get along and will NOT boycott or buck the system.
I wonder if Austin would be ground zero for a lot of personal actions…
“…a modified CW; the electronic/IT capability changes things; you can have the tech overlords sitting pretty in New Zealand ordering the cancellation and social annihilation of everyone and do it in perfect safely….So, the question always becomes, who do you fight in a kinetic sense?”
Interesting thoughts. Ref the paste up of the SOE PL Handbook on this site 2 days ago, The section highlighted discussed an early insurgency where the G’s go home between operations and only take to the hills permanently when the counter insurgency kicks in and likely G homesteads become targeted. I can think of nothing that will move things from a low level, part time, go home for some rest civil war ( or the smoldering not quite a war we have now), to a full kinetic insurgency faster than utterly ruining people in large volumes. Taking or burning homes, businesses, property, along with killing and incarceration will send the common man into the hills and ignite kinetic resistance. I predict it will be more than they can manage. You cannot sit in a NZ bunker and ruin millions of people’s lives elsewhere and expect to exploit those ill gotten gains without someone on the ground locally to make sure that the dispossession takes place. Those local enforcers, whatever they may look like or call themselves, will have to be the ones to make it happen. That is the “Who?” you ask about above. If enough of the local enforcers are rendered unable to enforce, the plan fails.
The farmer rebellion in Holland is worth watching to see how this strategy plays out against people with limited means of rendering enforcers. We in America are not handicapped in such a way.