Civil Conflicts Have Humble Beginnings
Now, these people with an overwhelming “soft” power advantage are now threatening violence against dissidents.
A deeply disturbing development in Northern Virginia concerning America’s burgeoning low-intensity conflict:
Left-wing activists in Northern Virginia with close ties to its Democrat politicians plotted secretly to destroy conservatives and Christians, gleefully discussing their deaths and repeatedly scheming to get them fired, according to thousands of pages of 2022 online chat logs reviewed by The Daily Wire.
Calling themselves the “Loudoun Love Warriors,” the group chat included a campaign staffer for the county’s Soros-backed prosecutor, a consultant for its Democrat sheriff candidate, and the board members of a gay advocacy group. The activists were based in Loudoun County, an area just outside Washington, D.C.
“Someone gonna get hurt on their side and I hope I get to do it,” Derek Summers wrote. “I’m sooo ready to show up with guns lol,” added Summers, a rapper who offered firearms training to the group. On Facebook, he repeatedly posted pictures of himself with guns, with one adding the quote “all this love is waiting for you.”
The people in this groups aren’t merely private citizens with strong political views:
The group chat administrators were Andrew Pihonak, a campaign staffer for county prosecutor Buta Biberaj, who was narrowly elected with the help of $850,000 from George Soros; Heather Gottlieb, who said she met weekly with Biberaj; Meredith Ray, a board member of Loudoun 4 All, a group that tried to stop the recall of school board members following the coverup of a rape by a skirt-wearing male student; and Tori Truesdale, an organizer for Students Demand Action, an anti-gun and Democrat voter drive group bankrolled by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
It gets worse. There’s nothing innocent about any of this:
The Love Warriors spent weeks seeking to destroy the life of a 65-year old private citizen after falsely accusing him of saying he wanted to kill gays.
During the public comment portion of a meeting of the embattled Loudoun school board on December 13, 2022, Mark Winn read a scripture passage that cautions against adults failing children, quoting “If any man or woman causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for a millstone to be put around your neck and thrown into the lake.”
The group convinced itself that Winn had threatened to kill gay people and that it needed to respond accordingly. Pihonak wrote “There is NO peace or reasoning with these people who [sic] getting people like me KILLED … Actively platforming voices speaking hate gets people like me killed on a regular basis.”
“At what point can we consider a gay person committing suicide due to bullying regarding their sexuality a hate crime. In my eyes, that’s essentially 2nd degree murder,” Pihonak wrote.
“He proposed DROWNING you,” Summers wrote. “Reciprocation is our only move. And I don’t care how that comes across. There is a HUGE push to bring violence to the LGBTQ community … SOMETHING has to happen to one of them.”
“If he had said that s*** about black kids or autistic kids I would shoot him,” Summers added. “People get ended for less than that … His life needs to be PERMANENTLY disassembled.”
Summary: a group of left-wing extremists are plotting violence against their political enemies, actual and perceived. Worse, these extremists are connected to powerful figures within the Democratic Party ecosystem. They’re also neighbors and people who otherwise live among the general population. I hate instilling a sense of fear and suspicion among you all, but it’s a fact: these people could be your neighbors.
Over a year ago, when this blog was still new, I spent a lot of time talking about how the intelligentsia - its members all left-wing and Regime-aligned - was sounding the alarm about the threat of civil war and how it was going to be all the Right’s fault (you can read some of those early posts here, here, here, and here). Names like Stephen Marche (a journalist) and Barbara Walter (a university professor) were among a number of voices saying the United States was at an elevated risk of civil war thanks to right-wing militia groups, White nationalists, and even your average Republican, straight, White male because they felt they were being dispossessed of their power and privilege, so the narrative went.
A year later, those voices are still out and about, but the market for such ideas seems to have evaporated some. In large part because the narrative hasn’t been borne out, I think. Right-wing political violence, aside from that of lone wolf actors, was quite rare to begin with, whereas the Left has engaged far more consistently in organized violence under the cover of legitimate, constitutionally-protected protest. There’s no sign of teeming masses of armed right-wing Americans just chomping at the bit to launch an insurgency or even a coup d’etat as the intelligentsia claims; if there were, we’d know about it because not only are they heavily-armed, the federal government would be all over it. I mean, it’s the biggest threat to our national security, isn’t it?
Instead, all we have are occasional outbursts, a few marches here and there, but it’s all just impotent gesturing, nothing that’s going to influence any sort of political change. Real-world right-wing political violence is so rare, White supremacist gangs, who are ultimately meaningfully no different from any other gang, are often cited without context as an example of how prevalent right-wing, White supremacist violence is.
Still, these facts haven’t stopped people like our own self-touted “unifier-in-chief,” President Joe Biden, from fanning the flames of civil war in this country. Here he was over the weekend at a Black university, claiming that “White supremacy” is the biggest terrorist threat to the country:
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1657471486519652352
Biden knows, as does any cynical career politician, that mixing the truth with lies is the most effective way of shaping public opinion. The numbers don’t lie - far-right extremists are responsible for most acts of terrorism in the country and have racked up the largest body count. But most of these attacks are carried out by lone wolves (probably explains why so many incidents occur) and, a few high-profile incidents aside, isn’t a prevalent threat for most Americans.
One of the reasons why Islamist terror draws so much attention is because of the large number of fatalities per attack and because they often target the general population. White supremacist terrorism is more discriminatory, but Islamist terrorism is less so, creating the reasonable fear that we’re all at risk of being targeted. This isn’t to say White supremacist terrorists are more ethical - they’re obviously not - but simply to say they approach terror differently, meaning the scope of the threat is narrower, calling into question whether they constitute the biggest terror threat to the country.
Take gang violence as an example. It’s obviously a problem and racks up a much higher death toll per year than terrorism, right-wing or otherwise. Yet your risk of being killed by gang violence is not high unless you’re a gangster yourself or live in areas where gang activity is high. An argument can be made that gang violence is a threat greater than terrorism, but it’d be an exaggeration to say the prevalence and death toll generated by gang violence makes it the biggest public safety threat to our lives.
Put another way, the likelihood any of us will be the victim of a terrorist attack is extremely low, at least inside the U.S. If we were to be a victim of terrorism, however, and you’re a member of the general population in a major metropolitan area, you’d still be more likely to be the victim of Islamist terrorism, not White supremacy, because of the aforementioned manner in which each variant of terror targets its victims. There has never been an instance of White supremacists hijacking an airliner, for example.
If anything, right-wing terrorism seems to have dropped off the map dramatically. Last year, even the Biden-friendly Brookings Institution reported:
Let’s start with some good news. According to statistics from the New America Foundation, 2021 saw zero deaths in the United States from right-wing terrorist attacks. As discussed below, other forms of right-wing violence remained a problem, but there was no high-profile attack in 2021 like the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting or the 2019 El Paso Walmart attack, which killed 11 and 22 people respectively.
The report otherwise endorsed the view that right-wing violence poses a major national security threat to the U.S. But in the last few years, it really hasn’t been a thing. And the frequency of right-wing terrorism belies the fact that its perpetrators are quite ineffective and possibly half-hearted, unlike other extremists:
Although white supremacy and other right-wing extremist causes have many supporters, the groups themselves are disorganized, and the movement is riven by infighting. They disagree on which targets to prioritize and who should lead, and many of them are unskilled in clandestine operations, making them easy prey for law enforcement when it decides to focus on the problem. Perhaps most heartening, their violence usually backfires, decreasing public support and making it more likely that the government will crack down.
Does this sound like a serious threat to you? Certainly, any threat left unchecked will become a major problem, but not only is right-wing terrorism well-checked, they don’t see to be able to do much except raise hell on occasion with limited overall impact. The frequency of events doesn’t change the fact the threat is diffuse; it’s simply not enough to disrupt our way of life.
The biggest reason Biden’s remarks stung, at least for me, is that his focus on right-wing extremism and White supremacy distracts from other more prevalent threats that threaten our well-being on a daily basis, like crime. The president has had next to nothing to say about crime in the country, except to, which outpaces and racks up a body count an order of magnitude higher in a single year than all the terrorism that’s occurred in the last 20 - 30 years. It’s an open debate on how much worse it’s gotten, but there’s no question at this point that crime has definitely become a much bigger problem since hitting historic lows almost a decade ago.
It’s a stretch to call crime a form of terrorism, but crime, when left unchecked, will terrorize and destabilize society. A state that can protect its people from terrorism, but cannot protect its people from crime, isn’t really protecting its people at all. Recent events make clear we’re increasingly at the mercy of criminals who either neither deterred nor ever taken completely out of the picture, along with public officials who seem intent on allowing these criminals as free a reign as the law permits.
Maybe I’m taking him too seriously. Being that cynical politician, it’s likely Biden’s just playing politics. He’s up for re-election in 2024, after all:
Biden has long used evocative, historical references in key political moments.
In August of 2020, he told a crowd while campaigning, “They’re going to put you all back in chains.” That was followed by murmurs, and some wondered if he was specifically trying to resonate with black voters in attendance.
Then there was this line in January 2020. “Jim Crow 2.0,” he remarked.
“Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion," he said.
But some also wonder if Biden’s latest remarks are designed to help shore up support among a group that’s losing interest.
Young voters, like Bailey Scott, a South Carolina State University student told the Associated Press, “I know that the ideal person that I would like to be in office is not going to be in office. So, I'm just going to have to pick the lesser evil.”
Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator alleged poll numbers are helping drive the conversation.
“Fifty-five percent Jan, don’t want him to run. Forty percent are undecided,” Williams said.
“So, what does he do? He plays the race card,” Williams claimed. “It shows you that the president and the Democratic party, that they’re losing their most loyal and significant base.”
Whether he’s serious or not, the impact of such words can be devastating. I've already spoken about how Biden has raised the specter of civil war like no president before. Given how this country lived and died with every one of former President Donald Trump’s mean tweets, logic dictates Biden would be admonished for his own reckless speech, but I guess when you’re the manifestation of the Regime in a single figure, the rules get tossed out the window.
I’m getting a bit side-tracked, so let me bring things into focus. Without denying that the Right’s most extreme elements can be dangerous and problematic, it’s the Left that’s been doing and saying all the things that are making civil conflict more likely in the U.S. Look at what Chris Murphy, a sitting Senator from Connecticut, said what would happen if gun rights weren’t curtailed:
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1658085060191440898
If that wasn’t enough, he’s also calling the Supreme Court illegitimate. Again, President Trump and Republican politicians are always taken to the wringer for saying such things. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) was roundly criticized (including by me) for calling for “National Divorce” earlier this year, but I haven’t heard a similar outcry, not even from Republicans, about Murphy’s remarks. You can read my thoughts on it in a previous post, but I think “National Divorce” is, at best, wishful thinking, and, at worst, foolish. Yet it’s at least peaceful in theory. Murphy’s call for a popular revolt isn’t.
Then you have things taking place at lower levels, like arson against pregnancy centers by pro-abortion activists, to say nothing of all the protests, most of which become disruptive and violent. Peaceful protest means just that - no disruption nor violence - but it seems these days left-wing protesters can do whatever they want short of killing you. Even when they surround and point a gun at you, as they did to Daniel Perry, you have no choice but to be victimized, lest you be found guilty and sentenced to a quarter-century in prison. Finally, there was the Nashville school shooting committed by a transgender and the Louisville bank shooting committed by someone who wanted to provide a real-world demonstration of the need for gun control.
The Left would point out their side still commits fewer acts of terror and has killed less people than the Right and Islamists. That may be true, but terrorism is rarely employed by the side which has a preponderance of “soft” power, as the Left does. Furthermore, as I’ve argued time and again on this blog, the Left employs proxies in the form of criminals do all the killing and maiming for them, deny it as they may, to say nothing of all the violent protests and riots. You’re still more likely, in major population centers, to run into left-wing extremists than you are to run into right-wing extremists. It’s just that left-wing extremism has become normalized, while right-wing extremism is still viewed as an anomaly.
Going back to the story that opened this piece, left-wing extremists aren’t people living on the fringes of society, like right-wing extremists. They live in places like Northern Virginia, one of the most highly-developed and affluent regions of the country (Loudoun County has the highest median household income in the U.S.). They work in our school systems and other major institutions that we patronize to go about our daily lives and raise our families. They have the ability to impact and ruin our lives far more than any White supremacist ever will. Now, these people with an overwhelming “soft” power advantage are now threatening violence against dissidents. What’s next?
You know where I’m going with this. But I need to reiterate: I believe the risk of civil war to be currently low in the U.S. Things simply aren’t so bad as for that to be a possibility. By civil war, I’m talking about what we saw in 1990s Yugoslavia, what we’ve seen in Syria for the past 10 years, or even what we’re seeing unfold across the border in Mexico, currently. We aren’t in a position where armed belligerents capable of challenging the state for control of people and territory (the essence of what a civil war is) exist. That’s a good thing and nobody should be bothered by the fact a civil war remains unlikely, as the fact seems to upset many on social media.
But a low-intensity conflict is a different story (here’s a good primer on the difference between “civil war” and “low-intensity conflict”). Not only do I regard the risk as high, I think it’s happening right now and the story in Loudoun County is a manifestation of it. These are likely the early stages of a conflict certain to grow in intensity, even as it ultimately remains well below the threshold necessary to become a civil war. You might find it difficult to draw a line from a group chat to armed conflict, even at a low level, but terrible things often have innocuous beginnings. After all, what is civil conflict if not an attempt at settling political differences through violence, no matter what level the violence takes place at?
What concerns me about the story from Loudoun County is that it sounds like the how political armed groups, a.k.a. paramilitaries, form. Before you recoil and quit reading, just hear me out. Sure, much of it may be run-of-the-mill tough trash-talk from partisans, but again, politically-motivated armed groups have seemingly harmless beginnings. One of the most notorious paramilitary groups in living memory was the Serb Volunteer Guard, better-known as “Arkan’s Tigers.” They were formed out of a group of fanatical supporters - known as “ultras” - of the professional Serbian soccer club Red Star Belgrade. In case you’re not following, a bunch of fanatical soccer fans created a paramilitary group, heavily-armed and complete with uniforms, and went on to commit a stomach-churning array of war crimes during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. In the U.S., groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter are staffed with people whose greatest accomplishment in life was graduating from college. Others are criminals.
The other concerning part of the story is that political extremists aligned with those in power tend to get their way. This is explains why left-wing protests have become so normal, while right-wing political activity tends to be regarded as a disaster in progress. In Colombia, right-wing paramilitaries were aligned with the state and even trained by the U.S.; they went on to generate the highest body count during their long-running internal conflict. In Northern Ireland during The Troubles, groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) represented the predominant political force in the country and had the backing of major players on the Loyalist side. Though the Irish Republicans went on to become responsible for most casualties, a key difference was that the Ulster Loyalists overwhelmingly targeted civilians., while the former targeted primarily security forces, albeit indiscriminately. It’s a stretch to say the UVF got away with it, but it’s a lot easier to target civilians when you’re more or less aligned with those who control the institutions. History’s most notorious paramilitaries and death squads all had some sort of backing from a more powerful actor, usually the government.
It’s all scary to think about, but we should never pretend like it could never happen here, because it already kind of is. Colombia and Northern Ireland may not be great examples of where America’s headed, but all that says is that our internal conflict will end up having its own unique characteristics. Maybe we won’t see our version of the UVF or partisan paramilitaries. But a group like the “Loudoun Love Warriors” does exist and, feel the wind at their back, may decide to take matters to the next level. They do possess escalation dominance and are linked to influential, powerful political players. Whatever happens, if it does happen, might end up being confined to the local level.
The thing is, if what happens in a foreign country doesn’t apply to matter, what happens in our own country anywhere most definitely can. After all, Loudoun County isn’t the only place where the culture war battles that created groups like the Loudoun Love Warriors take place.
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!