by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As the United States spins out of control, the thing I keep wondering about is how serious the frothy and violent rhetoric coming from MAGA Republicans really is. Are they really willing to start murdering people like me in cold blood if they don’t get what they want?
This is a very complicated issue for a number of reasons. Trump has been spewing violent rhetoric for years now and, for the most part, other than January 6th there hasn’t been all that much actual political violence in the United States. I keep suggesting that if Trump went transactional and demanded, say, Red states leave the Union that we might have a civil war but that theory to date has, thankfully, remained untested.
So I think some of what we’re seeing is MAGA Republicans are so angry at liberals that they definitely have political violence on the brain — but they don’t want to be held criminally accountable. They dream of running around, murdering liberals with their AR-15s….and getting away with it. They want to murder people like me, but not enough to risk going to prison for her.
That’s why they keep searching for “when does the civil war start” and coming to this Website with all my dark, dystopian hellscape scenarios.
And, what’s more, I still believe that ultimately it will be Blues, not Reds who start any civil war, should there be one. I say this because Blues have a lot more reason to start a civil war than Reds do. Reds want a civil war because they’re so blinded by grievance that they don’t realize they are politically ascendant. Blues, meanwhile, may wake up at some point in late 2024, early 2025 and realize they have no choice but to leave the Union at the state level.
I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want any violence of any sort. But it’s all definitely something to think about.
