Something I find myself thinking about a lot these days is what will happen on a personal basis to different people if any of my political dystopian hellscape nightmares come true.
I would suggest you keep an eye on some of the more bonkers MAGA people in Congress if it seems as though we’re going to have some sort of Secession Crisis. If Ted Cruz leaves the Senate to help organize a Trumplandia government then, welp, we’re going to the show. But if he doesn’t leave….then maybe things will kind of fizzle out.
Meanwhile, there are a number of notable Blues that I think could see their lives turned upside down if we have something akin to a civil war. Jon Stewart, in particular, seems like just the sort of guy who would stand and fight, rather than flee the country to have a circle jerk podcast that he did in the South of France. In fact, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and even Jimmy Fallen might shock us all with how they might be forced into some sort of political leadership position.
They may become political prisoners under the watchful eye of MAGA goons, if things get bad enough.
If things get as bad as I fear, everything and I mean EVERYTHING is going to be scrambled in a rather shocking, startling manner. The Woke Era will end because we’ll all be so busy trying to avoid artillery shells that we don’t have time to think about what pronouns we want people to use in reference to us.
And, I can’t predict the future and I hope — HOPE — I’m wrong. I just can’t help myself when it comes to trying to make my abstract fears concrete.
Let me again say, I can’t predict the future. There is every reason to believe that in the end, the US will simply shrug and we either have four more years of Biden or we turn into a MAGA America First nightmare and it’s all a lulz.
But because I like to make my abstract fears concrete, let’s really think about the nuts and bolts of a possible Second American Civil War starting in late 2024, early 2025.
The state we should keep an eye on in this situation is Texas. The state is already an autocratic MAGA bastion, and so it makes a lot of sense that if Red States feel they need to bounce that Texas would be the first state to do it. Tradition would suggest that South Carolina might be the first out the door, but there are so many African Americans in the state….whoa buddy…that, in practical terms might not be as sure a thing.
But Texas has just the right demographic composition that if Trump lost in 2024, or if he won then went full tyrant in 2025 and was deposed, they seem to be the state that would call up a snap secessionist convention on the fly. Now, there are some obvious complications to this idea. On the ground, Texas — as I understand — is s l o w l y — shifting to Purple.
As such, even if Texas MAGA Nazis were able to sucker punch the populace by calling up a Secessionist Convention overnight, there would be some pretty dire consequences going forward. You could easily imagine a scenario where the state capital of Austin went full Paris Commune on the rest of the state and there was some sort of Siege of Austin.
Ok, let’s also think about how things might play out with other Red States. I think pretty much all the low population Red States of the Mountain area would flee the Union the moment Texas made it clear they were serious. Utah is one of those states that could go either way because it’s a hotbed of NeverTrump support…but one of its Senators is Mike Lee, so lulz?
Now we get to even MORE complication. States like Oregon and Virginia would likely implode because of how diverse they are. If we started to have a serious secessionist crisis, there would be A LOT of self-selection across the country as people bounced to states that better fit their own personal political views. And then, of course, there is the issue of places like Austin and other Blue dots in Red States that would either be razed by Red forces or see a huge amount of depopulation as their political difference became untenable.
And don’t even get me started about my fears of Trump going Pol Pot on us an emptying the “Godless cities” so American Killing Fields can be filled with the bodies of Blues.
And, remember, none of this will happen in a geopolitical vacuum. World War 3 would start the moment it became clear that the US was too pre-occupied blowing itself up to do anything about various regional conflicts around the globe. What’s more, if any sort of Second American Civil War dragged out long enough, then the outside world would begin to get involved, too.
I could totally see the DPRK dropping a few H-bombs on the US to kick us while we’re down.
Anyway, if things get so bad that we have states leaving the Union….yikes. May God have mercy on our souls.
I was raised in the church and have a lot of relatives who are still Christians, so I know all about how alienated many modern conservative Christians feel. They tend to think that all of America’s problems could be solved if everyone turned to Jesus.
While I suppose this is true, some of my relatives really, really wanted a white Christian ethnostate without thinking about the consequences of doing such a thing. They want whites and men on top and they want there to be only one gender and none of this “pronouns” business.
They don’t have a problem with people being gay, but they should be quiet about it. And if pressed, they probably wouldn’t have a problem with someone getting an abortion as long as it was a deep personal shame that the person never spoke of to anyone.
What the Christians I know seem to want is to replace the Administrative State with the Moralistic State. They think taxation is theft and they want a total ban on abortion, birth control in general and online porn. They want to gut the modern safety net, even as they require any human egg that is fertilized by sperm to be carried to term, damn whatever horrific life the child may have once they’re born.
With that it in mind, that is yet more indication that the U.S. is tearing itself apart and there is a better-than-zero-sum chance that there will be a civil war (Reds if Trump loses) or a revolution (Blues if Trump wins.)
And, yet, there is every reason to believe that just like in 2020, somehow we’ll find an off ramp, a “third way” that allows us to punt our problems down the road again. And, hell, who knows, maybe the fabric of the nation is strong enough that no matter what, we’ll muddle through in some way and all my political dystopian hellscapes will seem rather amusing.
I really, really want that to happen.
If some of the things I fear will happen, happen, it will s u c k.
Because I just can’t game out what will happen with Election 2024 at the moment, I will tell you my Big Prediction for 2024 — an AI generated movie better looking than Toy Story will be development by some wildcat technology firm.
It might not come out until 2025, but it will begin production in 2024. And as technology advances, within a few years the whole process will be so sped up that AI digital personal assistants will be able to create personalized versions of movies — or stories in general — simply by you, the user, asking for it.
All of this means that ALL human creativity will get nuked by AI to the point that human created art will begin to have a lot of cultural value because…it was created by humans.
I’d like to think that I will be able to get at least one of my planned novels published before the Petite Singularity, but only time will tell.
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