If you thought the Summer of Love 2020 was crazy, just wait for the election. The incomparable Michael Anton recently wrote about the Democrats’ plan to steal the election in a piece called “The Coming Coup?“:
It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”
All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.
One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.
The leaked report from the exercise darkly concluded that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here,” promising that what would follow the November election would be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”
Two more data points (among several that could be provided). Over the summer, two former Army officers, both prominent in the Democrat-aligned “national security” think tank world, wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in which they urged him to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to drag President Trump from the Oval Office at precisely 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021.
About a month later, Hillary Clinton declared publicly that Joe Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” This doesn’t sound like the rhetoric of a political party confident it will win an upcoming election.
No, the Democrats are not confident they will win the election. Privately, at least. As I’ve been saying, the only thing the Democrats have going for them is the polls. But given the backlash against the riots, the Democratic nominee’s obvious unsuitability for office, and the fact that the Democratic Party has gone completely off the deep-end; all these signs point toward a Trump win. The signs are there if you look past the rigged polls.
The polls are rigged because the point is to get Biden supporters in the mindset that Biden is supposed to win, and when Trump wins it is due to election theft or cheating. “Trump was way behind in the polls, and somehow he won? He must’ve cheated!”
This is why, in turn, they were pushing the “Postal Service Crisis” several weeks back: to say, “See? We told you Trump would steal the election this way!” They have laid the groundwork before the election.
The nation currently feels like a powder keg waiting to explode. Something big could serve as the match to set it on fire, and that “something big” might be the election.
How the Fighting Starts
Right now, we have BLM and Antifa openly provoking a war. I’m not even going to say we’re in a “cold civil war” because it has gone past that in the past few months. It is now a civil war that only one side is fighting: everything the far left is doing–rioting, arson, vandalism, harassment, assault and even murder–is warlike in nature.
In Rochester, NY recently, normal people were under attack by the mob:
In Pittsburgh:
The main caveat is that they’re running amok and destroying cities not because of their physical power, but because of their benefactors’ political power: the police have been told to stand down and allow BLM/Antifa to run wild.
Police could crush BLM/Antifa in a matter of hours if they were allowed to. But they are not allowed to. So BLM/Antifa get to keep pretending they’re powerful and are starting a revolution.
This can end three ways, listed in order of most likely to least likely:
- The chaos gets so bad that Democratic mayors relent and allow their police forces to crack down on BLM/Antifa.
- The police turn on the Democratic mayors, refuse the stand-down orders, and start cracking BLM/Antifa heads.
- Right-wingers with guns get so fed up that they decide to take care of business themselves. We’ve already seen Trump supporters roll into Portland in truck parades to confront the angry mob. A situation like this could easily turn violent. The only thing that prevents it is gun-carrying Trump supporters’ knowledge that the Democratic Mayors & Prosecutors are looking for any reason–any reason at all–to lock them up and throw away the key, even if they have to make something up.
A disputed election could be the tipping point with BLM/Antifa. Normal America hates BLM/Antifa and the all the chaos and unrest they’re causing right now, but Normal America has to tolerate BLM/Antifa because BLM/Antifa have the media, Democratic Mayors & Prosecutors, as well as the Beltway Establishment on their side, rendering them largely untouchable. If the Silent Majority feels like the left has taken the rioting and protesting too far after the election is already over, who knows what’ll happen. Right now, the rioting and chaos is perceived as, if not “tolerable,” then expected election year antics. But if it carries on beyond the election, it will be something else entirely and perceived as a full-fledged rebellion. That’s when rightwingers might decide to put their proverbial foot down.
What the Fighting Will Be Like
We will not see a full-scale, nationwide, brother vs. brother civil war, at least I don’t think. The Elite Political Establishment is hoping for a largely bloodless coup in which the military storms the White House and deposes Trump with little to no pushback.
But the far left wants a full-scale revolution. They want violence.
The far-right also wants violence, as do many everyday rightwingers who are not aligned with any sort of political group but simply see stuff like Rochester, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and Kenosha and think to themselves, “We are under attack.” It’s far more reactive than the left, which wants to blow it all up (even though they are unaware of the fact that they are both working for and supported by “it”).
If the war becomes two-sided, I don’t think it will be very organized. I think it will be largely confined to major cities. It’ll be sporadic clashes between BLM/Antifa and right-wing Kyle Rittenhouse-types. The only missing ingredient right now is right-wingers shooting back, and if they see a coup unfolding against their president, many of them will mobilize and come to his defense. If the far left goes on a rampage in DC after the election, expect rightwingers to show up with their patience at its limit.
I strongly recommend getting out of cities in advance of the election and until things blow over. I don’t think it will last too long, but it all depends on police/military response. Rightwing Trump supporters will not shoot at cops or military, especially with Trump still in office, but if police refuse to step-in and protect the BLM/Antifa mobs in the wake of the election, then things will very ugly.
How Likely is This to Happen?
Over the past few years, I’ve gone back and forth on whether I believe a second civil war will happen. I used to think that given the ever-worsening Big Tech censorship of conservatives, as well as the sporadic but increasing attacks on Trump supporters in public, we were destined for a civil war.
Then I sort of backed off when I realized that “the civil war” was mainly happening on TV and social media–in other words, if you simply didn’t watch the news, spent a minimal amount of time on social media, and just lived your life as normal, there was no indication the country was about to go to war with itself.
Even the Summer of BLM I wrote off as largely a product of the media. Most of the images of burning buildings and looted stores and violent mobs we were seeing on TV and on social media were, while disturbing, not the reality for most Americans when they stepped outside. I live in Chicago and even I haven’t seen a hint of the chaos. If it wasn’t for social media, I would have no idea it was happening at all. Certainly I’ve gone downtown and seen the boarded-up stores in the aftermath, but that’s it.
But now I’m starting to see a plausible path to a civil war. It was not like that until the past few months: in 2018-2019, it was more like I could see things getting worse, but there was no plausible path to get from point A (unrest) to point B (war). Now it seems like there is a path.
We now have the two most essential aspects of a civil war: desire for it on both sides. A significant dispute over the election in November could light the fuse.
How do we avoid civil war? Here are the ways:
- Trump wins in a landslide. The election is so far out of reach that the Democrats cannot realistically muck things up and pull out dirty tricks to steal key swing states. At this point they’ll just have to give it up.
- Trump supporters simply sit back and allow their duly elected President to be deposed in a Latin American-style coup. This is the end of American democracy for good and the greatest political crime in US history. I don’t think Trump supporters will take this laying down: this might be the “call to arms” moment where their patience finally runs out and they grab their proverbial muskets.
- All the Democratic talk of “war games” is just talk, and once Trump wins, they don’t really contest the election all that seriously. Sure, they try “ballot harvesting” and deploy an army of lawyers, but it ends up not amounting to much.
Fortunately, on August 28, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, went on record to say that the military will have “no role” in settling a disputed Presidential election:
This is great news. He seemed to throw cold water on all the Democratic fantasies of a military coup:
“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” Milley said in written responses to several questions posed by two Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S armed forces in this process.”
Of course, he could be lying. But he didn’t have to make this public declaration. Democrats in Congress demanded written testimony from him, and they were hoping he would say the exact opposite of what he said; they were hoping he said something like, “We will protect America from the Bad Orange Man.” Milley made a point to throw cold water on the Democrats’ military coup fantasies.
At the end of the day, Trump is the Commander in Chief of the US military. While much (you could even say most) of the Pentagon’s “top brass” are Obama-Hillary neocon liberals, the troops themselves are overwhelmingly on Trump’s side. Even if the “top brass” decides to turn on Trump, they are running the risk that their troops remain loyal to Trump–again, the Commander in Chief–and the “top brass” are left twisting in the wind. In this case, they’d be hung for treason–along with all the other coup-aligned Democrats.
And that’s the real risk for all of them: if the coup fails, they’re all getting hung for treason.
Anton says the recent Atlantic fake news piece about how Trump hates the troops was all part of the effort to sway the military into being open to forcibly removing Trump from office. Of course, it wasn’t a coincidence at all that on the same day the Atlantic hit job came out, Democrats were touting some poll that showed Biden beating Trump with military voters. That pretty much gave up the game. Of course, there’s no way that poll was accurate. According to Statista, Trump won the military vote over Hillary 60-34 in 2016. The military is traditionally a heavily Republican group, and all the Fake News in the world is not going to cause them to shift from Trump to Biden massively.
Trump even acknowledged as much today:
So if the military doesn’t save Democrats’ bacon, then what’s their next play? The Secret Service, but Anton says that’s also a bust for them:
Can the Dems rely on the Secret Service to drag Trump out? I have my doubts on this one. I’ve seen the Service up close; it really is (or strongly appears to be) apolitical. It has a job to do: protect the president, whoever that is. Officers take that job very seriously. If they don’t believe Trump lost, I don’t think they can be counted on to oust him. On the other hand, were they to believe he did lose and was refusing to leave—a scenario I find impossible to imagine but the Democrats insist is just around the corner—it’s possible the Service might act.
But Trump isn’t going to lose. Most Americans with any shred of common sense can see that the Democrats do not deserve to win this election. They should not and cannot be trusted with power. So when the Democrats lose and inevitably try all their dirty tricks, most people will correctly see it for what it is: children throwing a temper tantrum.
Barring all that, what’s left? Remember that phrase from the Dem war game: “street fight.” In other words, a repeat of this summer, only much, much bigger. Crank the propaganda to ear-drum shattering decibels and fill the streets of every major city with “protesters.” Shut down the country and allow only one message to be heard: “Trump must go.”
I.e., what’s come to be known as a “color revolution,” the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it “democracy.”
The events of the last few months may be interpreted as an attempted color revolution that failed to gain enough steam, or as a trial run for the fall. Is the Trump Administration prepared?
But there’s a couple problems with all that: the media’s propaganda doesn’t matter anymore, as the 2016 election already proved. If Trump wins again and by a bigger margin than 2016, it will only prove the media’s propaganda is even less impactful than ever before. It will all fall on deaf ears.
On top of this, they have already “filled the streets of every major city with ‘protesters'”. It’s been going on for the past three months-plus. And it has all been a flop. It has backfired mightily on the elite.
The only thing more riots and chaos will do in the event of a Trump win is just piss Trump supporters off even more. People do not respond well to threats and intimidation. I know the chaos and riots could always be worse and more violent and destructive than what we’ve seen so far, but I doubt it. The next step the rioters could take would be to march into the suburbs, but I think on some level they know they’d be shot if they did.
As long as the chaos and rioting is confined to the cities, it’s largely a futile effort; little more than a mental patient thrashing around in a padded room. Burning down your own city because you’re mad your side lost an election is not going to accomplish much.
It’s hard to have a “color revolution” when the President you’re trying to depose was literally just reelected.
The only way things get out of hand is if the military does indeed step in and try to depose Trump. Then, I think the gloves come off for the right.
Ultimately, the Democrats know they’re going to lose this election. Given that they have completely abandoned any and all attachments to representative democracy, their fantasizing over “war games” and military coups is to be expected. In the long run, it does not bode well for American democracy that one of the two parties is openly anti-democratic. But for now, it’s mostly hot air.