2020 Political Armageddon

Americans have always been a divisive lot. In fact, based on the death toll of the Civil War, we are literally, our own worst enemy. However, ever since the guns of the Civil War fell silent in 1865, we’ve generally been better behaved towards ourselves. That isn’t to say there haven’t been any number of great and even bloody upheavals over all manner of topics.

Just the opposite really, our brief national history is written in bloody pages for the struggle of everything from worker’s rights, to equal rights for minorities. The United States government once practiced open genocidal warfare on the Native Americans, and showed us all why we should never give our guns up  to the government.

Today, the political violence isn’t slowing down. Rabidly anti-American groups like Antifa pretend they are using rough violence for a good cause, but simply have become the very thing they purport to fight. Biases in mainstream journalism, weak civics lessons in our public schools, an increasing disconnect between left and right, and even an outright rejection of the idea of being an American are coming together in a new, and dangerous fashion.

The presidential election of 2020 could very well provide the sparks needed to reignite this country in a way not seen since Bleeding Kansas. So what might be coming around the bend? And what kind of survival plan will you need to prepare for the coming political armageddon?

Doom And Gloom?

I’m gonna let you folks in on a dirty little secret. I don’t like writing these kinds of articles. In fact they make me very uncomfortable. It isn’t because I fear the future, or a worst case scenario. I’d just grow a man bun and bury my head in an organic soy latte if I was afraid of things going to hell.

Rather, it is because this is the sort of material that has to be addressed carefully, otherwise it just feeds the very fires we are trying to avoid lighting. But when the good folks who run Prepper.org asked me to write this piece, I pulled up my big boy pants, put down my research books, and put fingers to keyboard. Why?

Because I’m a stark raving capitalist who likes money, and it was being offered to me. More seriously though, because I believe in America. I believe in the American people, and the American way of life. And I believe we have some of the greatest national institutions and shared cultural mindsets the world has ever seen.

As a historian, I tend to tread carefully in this thought process. Too much bias in any direction – good or bad creates bad history. But I’m not writing history here, I’m speculating on the future. And the future looks pretty bad from some perspectives. But I still have hope that Americans can come together and put on the brakes to this madness we are all rushing into.

There are some things that if you keep predicting them, they will eventually happen. Financial markets will always drop. Recessions and depressions will always happen. Economic bubbles will always burst. Civil or global unrest will always happen. The list goes on and on and on.

Pick your favorite markers for impending disaster, and run with them. Sooner or later they will happen. And that is another reason I am careful with this sort of work. You can always predict the future and keep moving the goalposts if you missed it by a couple of years. But right now, we sit at a crossroads in our grand American experiment, and the next couple of years can take us down some mighty dark paths. For instance…

The Political Divide Is Tearing Us Apart

Violence begets violence;  this is a basic Old Testament lesson. The old saying of “violence never solves anything” ceases to have meaning when you have to use violence to protect yourself or your family from the mob, or a lone wolf nutter with an agenda. The sad fact is that the unholy 24 hour news cycle empowers violent actors.

What better way to live forever than to have CNN talk about you for days? Our media glorifies violence in the name of ratings and selling advertising, and then dances in the blood of victims to promote a political agenda. Meanwhile, decent Americans are dying for no good reason at all.

I’m going to let you fill in the blanks on this one. I simply refuse to reference any recent act of senseless violence. We’ve all heard them, and I am not going to give the deranged minds of killers any more fame here. As an added demented sort of bonus, the more our society fractures and tears itself apart, the more people latch on to the extremism and act violently in the name  of their fringe causes.

Left wing violence is on the rise across the world. Anti-capitalist, and anti-free speech protesters routinely take to the streets to violently make sure only their singular opinions are heard. Nobody is safe from the violent left – not even their own people. And if the leftist mob is going to attack a Bernie Sanders supporter of all things for “fascist symbology” over simply carrying an American flag, what will they do when faced with you, the American patriot?

Of course the left is ignoring their violence problems. Coming from a party that is already fractured and split along a million identity lines, they are seemingly happy to direct the violent tendencies they created among themselves towards others. Of course leftists in large enough groups tend to regress to more primal behavior. We might remember the wave of sexual assaults that took place in Occupy Wall Street camps. Or maybe the comrades there were just seizing the means of reproduction?

It is common to invoke the parallels of the American Civil War when looking at political divide in this country. There is some logic to this approach, but I’ve always hesitated to do a 1:1 comparison to events of the present against events of the past. After all, that’s how we get lefties screaming anyone who isn’t like them is “literally Hitler.” As the old saying goes “History doesn’t repeat itself; but it does rhyme”, and we can see a lot of that happening now.

Sectarian and regional divides happen for many reasons. In the case of the Civil War, it did in fact, ultimately boil down to slavery. Of course there were a lot of associated issues that went along with that, but southern Democrats were ultimately worried about losing their slaves, or seeing their slavery based economy heavily restricted. To prop that up, they attached noble ideas like state’s rights, and created a solid wedge between the industrial north, and the big agriculture dominated south.

Then, as now, compromise did not seem to work with the Democrats. Faced with the increasing obsolescence of their economic system, Southern Democrats lost their minds. Violence erupted in border states (one might even call them “swing states”) and radicals made war on anyone who wouldn’t vote the way they wanted.

Does any of this sound familiar? Or at least seem to rhyme with stuff happening now? The Democrats are creating a solid divide in the United States once again. Big city elites are trying to spread the cancer of socialism and a wild social agenda throughout the country.

Conservatives in the rest of the country are under ideological siege. In far left dominated cities like Portland and Seattle, roving bands of violent progressives are given free reign to silence groups they don’t agree with.

Am I saying the events of today look like Bleeding Kansas? Of course not. However, it isn’t hard to imagine a situation where the low key civil unrest in a big city turns bloody if the mob encounters an idea they don’t like. Trump won in 2016 because not only had the Democrats divided their own house, (just like they did in 1860) but also because the Democrats made sure to alienate anyone who didn’t think like them.

It wasn’t enough to belong to a different political party. No, if you weren’t a Democrat, you were a “deplorable” person. You were racist, out of touch, ignorant, uneducated and probably wanted to go on a school shooting rampage just because you bought an AR-15 sporting rifle last week. NRA member? Evil incarnate. The list goes on and on and on. Every effort by the left to make conservatives and Republicans into some sort of vile caricature of evil, simply leads to greater resolution among the right wing.

In other words, the Left requires division and chaos to advance their agenda. They aren’t looking to find common ground with the Right, because their entire approach is built tearing apart the very fabric of this country.

Is it possible to find common ground? Of course there is. Once you get rid of the radical nuts, and the wheezing old deep state hags like Hillary and Pelosi, the Democrats could become a lot more approachable. However, their own party refuses to allow moderates, or anyone other than their well connected anointed ones from taking any leadership role.

Without that return to moderation and across the aisle cooperation, the Left is going to damn the United States to untold years of low level, simmering conflict that may very well boil over at the worst possible time and cause massive bloodshed.

The Left Wing Has Lost Their Mind

Turn on the TV, or pick up a newspaper. Over and over and over again you’ll see the most vicious and stupid attacks on any aspect of the American right – and sometimes America in general. Own a gun? You are probably a baby killer. Doubly so if you belong to the NRA, and heaven help us if you have an “assault rifle.” You are probably out there right now planning to murder helpless immigrants on Mars or something stupid.

It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome and it shows the utter intellectual disconnect of elements of the American left. Not content to lose an election fair and square, they started inventing everything from claims of Russian election rigging, to acting like they just discovered the Electoral College and Constitutional Republicanism for the first time.

To be fair, given the pathetic state of civics lessons in schools today, they might have just learned about these things. This leads to the more unstable on the left not only attacking President Trump for every little thing they could imagine, but also anyone who voted for him, on the grounds that somehow they were all the most vile creatures to ever walk the face of the earth.

You know, and I know that the brilliance of our American system of government means every two years we change a chunk of it, and every four we can change the leader. Most of us are smart enough to work within a system that can quickly remake itself if the people are unhappy with it. The left though, just starts wailing and gnashing their teeth, before vaguely threatening to move to Canada. Maybe they should move to the socialist paradise of Venezuela instead.

In the case of the left though, they’ve taken this fine art of mental disconnect and civic illiteracy to a new and increasingly terrifying level.

It isn’t enough that they disagree with the President, or that they aren’t in agreement with right wing politics. Instead, they have to obsess over every little damned thing, to the point of irrationality. Disagree with a tax policy? The Republicans are going to give all our money to rich corporations, and probably build death camps for out of work coal miners. Or some such stupid crap.

And race. Don’t get me going about race – the left likes to pretend they are “woke” and the champions of racial equality. Well, it turns out they are just still hauling the load of the white man’s burden that they’ve been carrying ever since the colonial days of the 19th century. Of course they are a lot more subtle about it now. But in everything from racial equality, to claiming to champion the rights of various minority groups, the American left is after exactly one thing. Utter division and tribalism. fringe

There is no unity to the left, only a set of intersectional, post-modernist checkboxes that ranks you based on how oppressed you appear to be. Of course, rich, white coastal elite liberals are exempt from that ranking system. They are in charge, and will keep building their power on the backs of the poor and oppressed for as long as they can keep playing the white saviour.

The Radical Left Will Destroy Us All

I’m really not joking here. Government in general is a threat to civil liberties, and all too often an active participant in raping our constitutional liberties. There is a reason why Thoreau wrote “That government is best which governs least.” Right now though, the American left is on a civil rights gutting rampage.

Ranging from attacks on free speech, to the ever present war on gun owners, the radical left is steadily gutting our most venerable civil liberties. When we add their fondness for illegal immigration to the mix, it is pretty clear that the left is trying to win the culture war by simply pushing aside anyone who doesn’t drink their kool-aid.

Not content with attacking the Constitution, the far left wants to trample upon it. Liberals are sowing discontent and rage by crafting a tribalist narrative that turns identity politics into a battleground for suppressing dissenting thought, and labeling anyone not left of center a racist Nazi. Of course when real racists do show up, everyone gets confused.

In a world where anyone who disagrees with that weird blue haired social justice warrior in Starbucks is automatically branded as the most vile things possible, two things happen. First, the chilling effect of being a real  radical is lost.
Without that social stigma, dangerous radicals feel empowered. Second, when everyone who doesn’t dance to the liberal’s tune is literally Hitler, they have nothing to lose when it comes to pushing back.

On their own side of the fence, the American left forces compliance with their agenda by crafting a weird neo-Marxist narrative around systemic power and racism that attempts to hold people guilty for the sins of the past – while perpetuating the very power systems over minorities that they claim to deride. Remember when I mentioned white saviours?

That’s what the left does. They sell a line of bullcrap about persecuted victims who are being held back through systemic forces,and only the enlightened white liberal elites can guide these poor helpless minorities into a bright future of equality. It’s a load of crap, and the left thrives on it. Meanwhile, they keep fracturing America all in the name of identity politics.

In reality, the left manufactures racism and markets oppression like a fine art. To the American left, everything is about identity politics, and if you try to remove that from the equation, you will be viciously attacked as “hateful”, “racist”, or “oppressive.” I’m sure there are more adjectives, but after a bit, I just tune them out. After all, I got my degree from The Evergreen State College – for as much as I gained while studying at Evergreen, the leftist mafia there embody the whole of untamed identity politics gone wrong.

The left also cowers behind the shield of claimed racism to stall real progress. There is no question that racism must be fought and stamped out. However, when it becomes a weapon in the culture war, then the very idea of racism becomes weak and meaningless.

Consider that the left thinks voter ID – something used the world over in all manner of nations, is in fact “racist.” Yet it isn’t racist to demand ID to buy a gun, drive a car, receive taxpayer-funded public assistance, cash a check, or any of the other many reasons people prove their identity every day. Could it be that the left wants to use minorities to further an agenda, regardless of the cost? Nah, they’d never do that.

Like anything the left touches, the left destroys. Instead of upholding civil rights for minorities and historically persecuted people, they simply become a pawn for the Hillary Clintons of the world to drive a vicious, anti-American agenda that will end with destroying America as we know it. And if they have to keep a few minority groups down and deny them the benefit of living in American society through the use of controlling and limiting identity politics?

Well, they’ll do that. Because they hate freedom, they hate real progress, and they hate America.

We aren’t allowed to be Americans anymore. Instead, who we are is reduced to a set of checkboxes, and woe to anyone who isn’t sufficiently persecuted enough, or happens to have been born into the wrong gender and ethnic identity, or into money. After all, how dare you not think just like our enlightened limousine liberal elite?

2020 Is Going To Be A Battlefield

Here is the thing. If the left does another stupid, and runs some unlikeable criminal like Hillary again in 2020, the right has a decent chance, even with a president that isn’t liked by all of his own party. We are fortunate that the left has been betting on the Clinton machine and their associated type, and hasn’t tried to actually find out what real Americans like. Of course that would be a novel idea unheard of in modern liberal politics, so nothing is likely to change there.

By the time 2020 rolls around, the left will have had four years of pounding two very loud drums. “Russian collusion” and “The racist right wing.” Of course Trump has colluded with Russia so much, he keeps sanctioning them every time they act up. But I suppose the left needs their distractions. They are also pretty good of taking fringe movements and selling this idea of every Republican being a KKKNeoNaziRacistFromBeyondTheGrave or some garbage like that.

Unfortunately, when you control the media, you control a lot of the narrative. This means 2020 is going to at least be a nasty war of words and ideas. We’ll have had two years to see if the economic bubble we’ve been riding has finally burst – or at least deflated some. The trade war with China will impact how people see things too.

The left isn’t clever enough to pick up on natural business cycles, and will blame the GOP for any economic hiccup we might experience between now and then, even though the instability they create often hurts market growth.

As long as the left keeps vilifying half the United States population, and trying to force a bitter wedge between the American people, things are going to get nastier. Right wing rallies and protests of all stripes keep getting met by unhinged lunatics seeking only to start fights. That brings out people willing to fight back, which brings on more violence, and the people who just want to peaceably protest are left out in the cold.

Liberal mayors are often too keen to let violence happen, and then use that to further spin a lie about the violent and hate filled right wing. Meanwhile, violent leftists who repeatedly rape and sexually assault people are given a free pass by activist judges. This isn’t exactly a recipe for a rational and calm political debate come 2020.

What Can We Do?

Sit and wait. Well, we can and should also make sure we are prepared for the worst. The left is trying to silence and disarm Americans as fast as they can. Under the guise of going after “hate speech” and “racism”, they consistently deplatform conservative speakers on social media.

However, given the scarcity of real racists, they have to manufacture enough to meet their demand, and it doesn’t take much effort for a conservative commentator to suddenly be locked out of payment platforms and social media accounts – while leftists who promote hate and violence continue to be lauded.

It is entirely possible that even if the left wins big in 2020 that we won’t see an eruption of violence in the United States. As a whole, conservatives are slow to take to the streets in mass displays of rage and fury, while the left riots if you sell them a bagel that isn’t organic and gluten free. Perhaps because we have jobs to go to, unlike many of the elitist little snowflakes who live to chant rhyming phrases in front of television cameras.

This means the violence will be brought to us. We’ll be the defending team, and the media and liberal activists will be against us. The left might smugly sit back and think they can legislate their way to some imaginary utopia. Fortunately, the Supreme Court is not going to be in their hands, and it is entirely possible we can get one more rational constitution respecting judge in there before 2020.

So in a sense, the left has already lost in many ways. They will not have control over all three branches of government for a long time. And if they do win in 2020, they probably can’t keep Congress, since they’ll probably go balls to the wall with insane policies that will sour the bellies of decent Americans.

We’ve got two years folks. To plan for the worst and hope for the best. I have a strange optimistic streak, but that is backed up by the revolver on my nightstand and the rifle in my closet. Even without a blue wave in 2020, we are still likely facing the end of the economic boom we’ve all been enjoying for so long.

Now is the time to make sure you have a cushion against economic and social unrest. What that cushion looks like is up to you and depends on your circumstances. I believe in the resiliency of the American people, and I believe we will bounce back from the coming storm.

But I also know that living through that storm will be tough and uncomfortable. It’s your job to batten down your hatches and be ready to come up and take back the ship of state when it starts to founder. Until then… plan for the worst and hope for the best.