A Thousand Dead By Spring Next Year?

The lesson here is that 1,000 is a high death toll - too high - and is difficult to reach absent some exceptional event.

“El Bogotazo,” April 9, 1948.

Rudyard “Whatifalthist” Lynch caused a stir during an appearance on the political talk show Timcast IRL, hosted by Tim Pool:

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Here’s the summary of Lynch’s predictions, as relayed by “Uberboyo:”

Rudyard predicts that one thousand people will be murdered between November and April 2025 due to political violence

- This will enter the West into a Crisis period as serious the French Revolution

- The French Revolution gave birth to liberal democracy, and this may be its end… and the red carpet for something new

- A Civil War will not be total social breakdown, Ukrainians and Syrians still go to work and pay bills

- You will be doing groceries as “Chicago is being shelled” a few kilometres away

—-

- Rudyards predicted catalysts for all this are:

1 - An Election legitimacy crisis leads to left wing riots or right wing calls for fraud

2 - An economic crisis triggers a recession and then a political dogfight

3 - Trump is assassinated and the right goes berserk

—-

Political violence would likely be dirty, bitter, and small scale

- Remember; the big dog puts down all the other growling dogs… but when the big dog falters, they all begin settling old scores

—-

Do you think his prediction is going to come to pass?

Even if he’s off it’s great to see him think through using logic and assert the conclusion

1,000 fatalities? Between November 2024 and April 2025? It couldn’t be.

Or could it?

Rule #1: Be Skeptical

Before assessing the validity of his claims, a few qualifiers. First, longtime readers ought to know I think highly of Lynch. I consider him, despite his young age and relative inexperience, one of the most important voices of our time due to his wisdom beyond his years and the fact he’s such a well-read, knowledgeable person. He definitely blows me out of the water in that department. The 23-year-old (yes, he’s only 23!) isn’t a crank and it’d be a stretch to call him a “doomer.” Like Neil Howe, he’s a guy who predicts a bleak future, but does so using facts and reputable, if controversial, academic theories. I’ve tried many times to collaborate with Lynch, to no avail. Maybe he’ll give me a chance, one day, before we both end up with nothing left to say.

At the same time, it’s important to remember Lynch hasn’t been right about anything. Yet. He hasn’t been wrong either, not exactly, but he’s currently being judged based on events which have yet to occur. We should be skeptical of everyone and everything, including when it confirms our priors. Put simply, don’t think of Lynch as an authority on anything, but rather as an interesting, knowledgeable guy who’s got a lot of important things to say.

So how close is he to the truth in his latest claims? Is 1,000 dead between November and April next year out of the question? Let’s critically examine it.

1,000 Is A Lot Of Dying

Election Day is November 5. That leaves 146 days between then and the start of April, two fifths of a year. Averaged out over that time, 1,000 means six to seven deaths per day. That doesn’t seem like a lot, based on existing daily mortality rates.

But we’re talking about deaths caused by political violence. As destructive as the 2020 George Floyd rebellion was, it resulted in just 20 to 30 confirmed fatalities countrywide over a roughly three-year period. Based on the 146-day average, it’d take less than a week to match that total. At the risk of sounding callous (impossible to avoid when discussing mortality at-large), getting large numbers of people killed isn’t an easy task.

However, statistics can be misleading, often failing to tell the entire story. The majority of killings attributed to the Floyd riots occurred during the most intense period of unrest, which was May through July 2020. That still doesn’t come out to an average of upwards to seven deaths per day, but it does show how most violence of this type tends to happen all at once. The deadliest day in American history, 9/11, saw almost 3,000 lives lost on a single day. When large-scale loss of life occurs, it tends to during a single event or over a short time period.

In another example, The Troubles of Northern Ireland cost the lives of over 3,500 in approximately 30 years of fighting. That averages out to 116 deaths per year, but again, life doesn’t work out in averages, nor are we talking about a 30-year conflict with respect to America, yet. The death toll in Northern Ireland varied year-over-year, with 480 lives lost to violence in 1972, by far the deadliest year of The Troubles. That’s a devastating toll, but still nowhere near 1,000. Now, I know the canned response would be that the 480 deaths came out of a population of around 1.5 million; the United States population today is around 335 million. Scaled to the population of the U.S., losing 480 people due to political violence in 1972 Northern Ireland would be like losing 96,000 people in 2024 America. That’s obviously a lot of death.

But armed conflicts are culture, geography, society, and politics-specific events. Scaling out the death toll of The Troubles to the U.S. only serves to underscore how tragic the conflict was, not predict the likelihood of such an event or how many people would actually die in a similar event elsewhere. Ultimately, death tolls caused by political violence or warfare is quite unpredictable, and using historical examples has its limits, bringing us no closer to figuring out how many casualties we can expect.

The lesson here is that 1,000 is a high death toll - too high - and is difficult to reach absent some exceptional event. At the same time, it’s not an impossibility, either. It’s not going to happen on its own, after all. If the conditions are right and something exceptional does happen, it’s possible Rudyard Lynch is correct - there will be tremendous bloodshed in the wake of the presidential election, which is certain to be contentious. Much less certain is whether 1,000 deaths are in the cards. I think I’ve shown that level of loss of life, while not impossible, is also quite difficult to reach, again unless the stuff really hits the fan.

So broadly, there’s two ways we can get to 1,000 deaths due to political violence by spring: have one or a few mass-casualty events and rack up a high body count in a short period of time, or sustain smaller numbers of casualties consistently over a third of a year. Which scenario is more likely? Let’s explore each possibility, which we’ll refer to as “high-end” and “low-end,” respectively.

American “El Bogotazo”

In a high-end scenario, we’d have one or more incidents resulting in large numbers of casualties at once. Imagine, unpleasant as it may be to do so, an Oklahoma City-style bombing, a 2020 or, worse, 1960s-like period of civil unrest, combined with mass shootings, and criminal activity catalyzed by the outcome of the 2024 election. These events could all rack up a high body count between Election Day and April, though if we go by historic death tolls, we’re still talking several hundred short of 1,000, again underscoring how difficult it is for that level of carnage to occur without a major cataclysm.

Though possible, I think it’s going to be difficult to reach 1,000 deaths this way by April. It’d be the equivalent of nine to ten Oklahoma City bombings occurring during that 146-day period to pile up that many bodies. Unless the entire country turns into a war zone for that amount of time, the most fatalities the high-end scenario could realistically generate is a few hundred at most. Still high, but still well south of 1,000.

Were a high-end scenario to materialize, it’d most likely occur in a short time period - think a few days to a week, maybe a month max - even if violence lingers well afterwards, as it always does. As I’ve explained in the past, violence is like a wildfire: it requires fuel, which eventually runs out. It’s just not easy to sustain a high-level of violence for a long period of time. But in no way does this mean it couldn’t happen. Quite the opposite. In an extreme case, we could very well lose hundreds in a single day.

Unfortunately, there exists a historical precedent for such an event: El Bogotazo. The name refers to an incredibly destructive period of rioting in Colombia following the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. In about 10 hours, much of the capital city of Bogota was destroyed. Violence erupted in the rest of the country, with the military eventually getting involved so order could be restored.

In a 1967 essay, author Norman A. Bailey summarized the events of El Bogotazo:

In April 1948 Gaitan was assassinated on a Bogota street, and for two days Bogota was in the hands of a looting, killing, raping, leaderless mob, which destroyed Conservative headquarters, Conservative newspapers and the homes of Conservative leaders. In Cali a similar outbreak was better organized and the city was briefly in the hands of an insurrectionary directorate, but the rebellion eventually was put down by the army with considerable bloodshed in both cities, all the police having gone over to the insur gents. (As a result, the urban and rural police were reorganized entirely, making them almost totally Conservative.)

El Bogotazo was the jump-off point for the mid-20th century civil war in Colombia, known as “La Violencia.” It’s one of the most poorly-documented wars in recent history, perhaps owing to its high level of violence, so accurate casualty figures are difficult to come by. Estimates range from several hundred to a few thousand fatalities, but these figures should be eyed with skepticism.

In this History Channel documentary on El Bogotazo, the narrator cites a figure of 5,000 dead, with the caveat that nobody knows for certain how many died (in Spanish):

There’s no question, however: El Bogotazo cost the lives of far too many in just a few days. It’s an example of what happens when political anger and division spills over into violence. People just lose their tempers and all sense of humanity, going on one big collective outburst of rage. Remember: El Bogotazo was triggered by an assassination. We had two assassination attempts on the life of Donald Trump in the past few months and the likelihood of further attempts remain. Consider what would happen if the unthinkable occurred. It’s not so much that I think the Right would rise up in revolt, but that such an event would end up galvanizing the Left to carry out even more acts of violence. When you smell blood, all you want is more of it.

All said, I find the high-end scenario the least likely. It’s not that I think Americans aren’t capable of that level of violence - they are - it’s just that circumstances unique to the U.S. means it’ll unfold differently and have different results from other countries. We can definitely have unrest, but these types of incidents don’t kill as many people as imagined. The 1992 Los Angeles riots, the most destructive single riot in American history, resulted in 63 deaths. That’s far too many, but again, I’m trying to show how high a total 1,000 really is. Even during the “long, hot summer of 1967, a year when the level of urban civil unrest peaked in the U.S., the estimated death toll was still less than 100. The “Red Summer” of 1919, when a literal race war occurred in America, hundreds were said to have died, but there’s nothing out there to suggest that number was ever close to a thousand. In 2021, the worst unrest in South Africa since the end of Apartheid left over 350 dead in less than a week, but eventually, they ran out of things to steal and people to kill. Violence consumes a lot of energy and it runs out quickly.

Even events like the Oklahoma City bombing, arguably the worst domestic terrorist act in American history, aren’t likely. These acts involve significant planning and logistics to pull off. It took Timothy McVeigh nearly a year before he carried out the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Unless far-left and far-right elements have been planning and preparing for at least a few months - a possibility which cannot be ruled out, unfortunately - it may be some time before we see these higher levels of violence.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Even if something bad doesn’t happen in the days and weeks following the election, 146 days is a long time. Anything could happen between now and spring. All we can hope is that whatever does happen, it doesn’t end with a thousand dead.

Days Of Rage

In a low-end scenario, we’d have large numbers of casualties sustained over a long period of time. Violence occurs more frequently, but fewer deaths occur per incident. Some incidents may result in higher numbers of deaths than others, but you have no one incident, no one time period, with a disproportionate number of lives lost than any other. Still, it happens with a high enough frequency leading to 1,000 dead over 146 days.

What would this scenario look like? Consider the riots that occurred following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Combined that with an uptick in criminal violence, then neighbors and strangers getting into deadly clashes over the results of the election. We may even see an uptick in crime during this time, using the political conflict as a cover of sorts. When considering the amount of “routine” violence occurring in America on a daily basis, it’s not difficult to imagine. Small increases are more likely than large increases, statistically speaking. Remember that politically-motivated violence, to include even mostly-peaceful unrest, happens more often than we think.

This sounds like the less problematic scenario and it’s understandable why some might think that. But people dying is still tragic, no matter the scale, and any level of political violence is deeply problematic. Another downside of the low-end scenario is that they often occur following an outburst of extreme violence. For example, The Troubles were considered a low-intensity conflict rather than a civil war. Yet violence peaked early on in the conflict, in 1972, before the death toll decreased and the conflict settled into a more sustainable rhythm for the remaining quarter-century. In other words, for the low-end scenario to materialize, a high-event event may need to happen first.

For a low-end scenario to produce 1,000 dead by spring, six to seven people would need to be killed daily on average. But if that actually were to happen, wouldn’t that be more like a war? After, say, a month of six people dying daily due to political violence, the public would be very convinced something is terribly wrong in the country. At that point, things would either escalate or de-escalate depending on public sentiment and whether the players involved think it’s in their interest to ramp things up or to cool it down.

As explained in the preceding paragraph, prolonged periods of violence often follow a large burst of violence, after which violence becomes normalized, a feature of the landscape. If, after a month, several deaths were occurring each day, there would be calls for the state to restore order by any means necessary. This means either the start of a much longer-term conflict resulting in a death count far past 1,000, or a de-escalation that ends the violence or brings the loss of life down to less alarming levels. Either way, the scenario doesn’t sound like it could last very long, for better or for worse.

Still, I consider a high-frequency, low-death-per-incident environment more likely than the alternative. Low-level political violence is common and there’s going to be a lot of angry people no matter who wins, but especially if Trump wins. We’ve already seen the Left possesses the capability to ramp up violence when needed and with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris currently at the top of the power structure, you can imagine them sending the signal to take to the streets, maybe even execute pre-planned actions. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. The Left is primed for political violence like no other.

The vice president herself seems to be laying the groundwork for something to happen post-election, if Trump wins:

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Wait - How Old Are You?

Yes, that very boring matter of demographics is an important ingredient in determining the outcome of whatever is coming up the road. It’s interesting how everyone likes talking demographics when it comes to discussing how low birth rates will lead to social stagnation or ethnic/racial displacement, but nobody wants to talk about it when it comes to how it dictates whether wars or revolutions happen. You can’t ruin anyone’s good time, after all.

A few essays ago, I cited this excellent video by YouTuber “KaiserBauch,” where he explains the impact age structure has on whether wars or revolutions happen. Watch it when you can; it’s high-quality analysis:

KaiserBauch cited studies showing that not a single country with at least 55% of the population aged 30 and over was experiencing civil war or revolution. Over 55% of the U.S. population is past age 30. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s taking so long for the next civil war/revolution to kick off here. Young people, young males, specifically, are what fuels war and violence in general. Without a disproportionate number of them relative to the population at-large, high levels of violence are tough to sustain.

To use Northern Ireland as an example once again, look at how fatalities caused by The Troubles broke down by age:

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In fact, the most common profile of a fatality during The Troubles was a 19-year-old male. Past age 21, deaths fall off a cliff. Past around age 28, the number of deaths declines even more, highlighting just how much armed conflict really is fueled by young people. In order to have lots of young people, you need a young population overall. Check me if I’m wrong, as I have not since watched the video, but I believe KaiserBauch noted that the median age of Northern Ireland’s population at the start of The Troubles was in the late-20s. Today, it’s now 40. It’s not inaccurate to say the conflagration burned itself out.

Remember: The Troubles was a low-intensity conflict, not a full-blown civil war. If even a low-intensity conflict requires disproportionately large numbers of young men in order to fuel, what does that say about the prospect of such a conflict occurring in America, where the median age is already close to 40?

It seems to annoy people, specifically on my side of the divide, when you say that age enables or constrains violence. No man, especially, wants to hear that he and his other 40 to 60-somethings can’t put up a fight when needed. But we’re not talking about the ability of individuals to defend themselves, we’re talking about the sustainability of violence over the long term, organized violence in particular. Older people don’t wage war. They just don’t and they don’t get into many fights, either.

Young men do, however. They often compete against other young men, which is why having a large proportion of them compared to the rest of the population is such an important indication of whether a society is headed for war/revolution. They’re not going to fight older people. Furthermore, in order to sustain violence over long periods of time, you need to be able to replenish losses. If a society like ours fought a major war on the scale of the American Civil War, we’d be in an unrecoverable demographic crisis within a generation. Just look at Russia and Ukraine. No matter who wins that war, both sides will lose in the long run. Similarly, if we fought our own “Troubles,” with the death toll scaled to our population, we’d probably end up a very old society 30 years from now, considering America’s median age is already close to 40.

You can’t escape aging. Sorry.

Does This Mean No Civil War?

No, not exactly. I think something will still happen. It has to. My mind is settled on that fact. We have two trends running on parallel tracks, tracks that are set to converge at a single point in time and space in the near future: the Fourth Turning on one track, demographics on the other. The Fourth Turning says America has to see a major upheaval of the violent variety around about now because it’s happened at least the last four times right on schedule every 80-some years. On the other track, the aging of our population is a feature absent from prior Fourth Turnings. So while I still believe a war or revolution will occur in the next five to ten years, I also believe it’ll be something far less dramatic than what we’ve seen during past Fourth Turnings.

The violence we’ll see in the next civil war/revolution is likely to be of shorter-duration and cyclical in nature. It’s just that the cycles will quicken over time, with civil unrest and spikes in crime occurring more frequently. I think a return to the level of instability seen in the 1960s and 1970s is quite likely, though individual incidents are probably going to be less severe than in the past, due to demographic realities. At the same time, I think 2020-level quasi-wars are still going to punctuate the coming conflict and I also think the death toll will be much higher. There are still large numbers of young men out there and as the internal situation deteriorates, there will be less and less standing in the way of them getting into a fight.

Age structure puts a cap on how widespread and prolonged violence can get, but it doesn’t mean mass violence won’t happen, either. Most violence is carried out by who I like to call the “young, dumb, and fat,” anyway. We have plenty of that in this country. More ominously, consider the millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, who’ve entered this country in the past four years. The majority are young-ish males. They use the term “fighting age” for a reason - they’re the masses you build armies out of. So even if Americans are balanced age-wise with a slight lean in the older direction, there may be large numbers of people in this country unaccounted for who can provide that toxic surplus of young males who’ll commit violence for one reason or another.

Economic conditions are a key determinant. At some point, we’ll enter a recession or worse, something like a debt crisis. I don’t see it happening any time soon, but it’s strange that we’ve gone this long without one. Anyway, until the economy goes and the bread and circuses become harder to come by, the status quo is more likely to hold than not. Unless the election and its aftermath happens to coincide with an economic crisis, I see violence being more limited than not following November 5. Barring, of course, one side or the other engaging in a bluntly escalatory act, like an assassination.

I’m disgressing a bit, since what began this discussion was the prediction by Rudyard Lynch that 1,000 people would die between November 5 and spring, not a debate over what the long-term future holds. Nobody knows for sure what lies ahead, but I feel safe in saying that whatever happens the remainder of the year into the next won’t be the civil war, but instead the opening shots in a longer-term internal conflict. There are still too many dominoes which need to fall first - the economy, foreign policy defeat, political crisis - before we find ourselves on the brink of civil war. Though the violence peaked early on, The Troubles didn’t come close to civil war until three years after the deployment of British troops to Northern Ireland. In America’s own civil war, the two sides jaw-jawed back and forth, with events like Bleeding Kansas serving as preludes to war, before it finally blew up.

I therefore stand by my prediction that the risk of civil war will peak around the 2032 - 2033 time frame and whatever happens after this year’s election will serve as a turn-off, but not a tipping point, for the country.

Nobody Likes To Talk About It, But We Must

As I wrote this essay, I started watching this debate between Rudyard Lynch and Scott Greer about whether the election two weeks from now will spark a civil war. Lynch obviously argues in favor, Greer argues against.

I don’t think anyone won the debate; both Lynch and Greer argue their positions effectively, but they didn’t prove each other wrong, either. As you can tell, I fall somewhere in between the two, with a noticeable lean in Lynch’s direction. Something will happen, probably following the election, but I also think the really bad stuff is still years down the road. Above all, I think I’ve provided ample evidence showing that 1,000 deaths is a lot and not something likely to happen, unless things really, and I mean really, hit the fan.

I hope I didn’t come off as callous in this essay. I honestly felt a bit sick writing this, because the loss of human life should never be something to be flippant about. But there’s just no denying something bad is coming our way. We need to come to terms with it now, for there won’t be time to do so later. I don’t want a thousand people to die between 11/5/24 and 4/1/25, nor do I believe nobody will die during that time. All we can hope is that come what may, you, me, and everyone we care about will still be here when it’s all over.

What about you? Do you think Lynch’s dark prediction correct? Why or why not? What do you think will happen between Election Day and spring next year? What do you think our future looks like? What are your thoughts on my assessment of the situation?

Let’s discuss in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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