"The Troubles" Brewing On The American Horizon
The abortion question serves as a potential jump-off point for sparking a major internal armed conflict in the U.S.
Before I get to the meat of the matter concerning the news suggesting Roe v. Wade will be overturned, I want to address the matter of the leaking of the Supreme Court document itself.
First, here are the facts:
Anyone hoping the leaker will be punished, myself included, is, unfortunately, grasping at straws. Orin Kerr later says a crime could’ve been committed somewhere in that action chain leading up the actual leak, but leaking the ruling in it of itself is, apparently, not a chargeable offense.
Nor is the leak of a Supreme Court opinion without precedent:
Yet, there’s something especially insidious about this particular leak. As noted by even Politico, the same outlet that reported on it, the release of an entire draft opinion is “very rare” and likely without precedent. It’s the sort of thing that happens when desperation sets in or outright political war has been declared and folks are tired of pretending like we still live in a republic.
But, it’s not against the law and it’s happened before. All is fair in love and war, right? And that’s just the thing - the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) isn’t the arena for politics as usual. The institution was, for generations, viewed as the ultimate arbiter of the great disputes of our time and their word was, if nothing else, considered sober, judicious, and, above all, uncompromised. But, even before this most recent development, SCOTUS was at its lowest level of approval in over 20 years, largely due to perceptions of partisanship, even as it retained greater levels of approval compared to Congress and even the criminal justice system.
Eric Weinstein (again, the smartest man on the planet) explained the stakes:
Some may say that there’s difference between leaking a SCOTUS ruling versus what Weinstein lists. However, courts cannot function properly if they cannot operate in confidence, if not outright secrecy. If it’s been decided that court rulings are fair game for public exposure before the court itself has chosen to declare its verdict, then there’s nothing else which can be justified as not worth publicly divulging. This is especially true when you consider that the leak was obviously done rather purposefully for political effect, at the high price of further de-legitimizing SCOTUS.
Trust in our institutions has been flagging for years, but this leak just about makes it unlikely that SCOTUS rulings will ever be perceived as having been rendered independently and judiciously. SCOTUS is compromised and you can only be compromised once.
The following is a typical response from the Left on the leak:
Those on the inside know best how broken the institution is. Well, then. If this is the way they feel, then expect intimidation to become the normal course of affairs in the United States. Of course, we all know what intimidation eventually leads to: violence.
This is Third World stuff. This is the stuff you see in failing states. I never thought America immune from such diseases, but that we were just good at prevention. In a matter of a few short years, that faith has been all but shattered.
It’s the topic of violence I want to primarily address in this post. Whether the ruling stands or not, this marks the beginning of a new, more fraught stage of the culture wars. Whereas, before, both sides attempted to influence the process in hopes of impacting the outcome, directly impacting the outcome is the new prerogative, norms be damned. After years of decrying the demolishing of democratic norms on the part of Donald Trump and employing “irresponsible” rhetoric, this is what we see from the Left:
“Extremist Supreme Court.” Not that different from the kind of rhetoric Trump and the Right were accused of engaging in. The Left, which swore by America’s institutions the last several years, has apparently given up on the republic after paying it lip service (while surreptitiously undermining it for decades). Even President Joe Biden, the one person you’d expect to defend the honor and integrity of SCOTUS, made no attempt to do so. Then again, the Office of the Presidency was compromised multiple administrations ago. About the only institution Americans still overwhelmingly trust is the military and even that faith is beginning to wane.
When things become this existential, it’s hard to see how violence wouldn’t become a part of the mix. In 2007, author Neal Shusterman released the book Unwind, set in a future U.S. after it had fought a civil war over abortion. It’s easy to see why the author might’ve chosen abortion as the cause of America’s next civil war: it’s a hot-button issue that whips up fiery emotions like no other. The pro-life position is that abortion is always murder, an unjustifiable killing of another human being, while the pro-choice position is that the only reason to restrict abortion is to establish a real-life Gilead, the totalitarian dictatorship serving as the setting of hugely-popular feminist novel (and adapted into a television series) The Handmaid’s Tale, a place where women are completely subservient to men under a regime representing a veritable American Taliban. Few are willing to admit, but I don’t see how we reconcile these differences. Political divisions are already stark enough to create fairly well-defined belligerent sides. The abortion question serves as a potential casus belli for sparking a major internal armed conflict in the U.S.
Don’t take my word for it: violence is already beginning to crop up. This was in Los Angeles, a day after the Roe v. Wade leak:
More ominously, churches are now apparently under threat. Look at what’s happened to Roman Catholic churches since the leak early last week:
Attacks on religious buildings happen on occasion, but, when they’re indicative of broader political tensions in the country, these attacks take on a different character. In the run-up to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Catholic churches were vandalized or, worse, torched. Priests and nuns were killed, crucified on inverted crosses, the ultimate indignity for a Christian (unless you’re St. Peter). Far from being a simple morality tale where Spain’s march to liberal democracy was halted by the emergence of dictator General Francisco Franco, the Spanish Civil War was the logical end result of an escalation of violence wrought by those who realized there was no way they were going to peacefully coexist amongst each other.
It was also one of the most destructive armed conflicts of the 20th century. An estimated half-million were killed in almost three years of fighting in a conventional war whose brutality and savagery was overshadowed by the outbreak of World War II several months after the Spanish Civil War ended.
I’m not saying a conflict as devastating as the Spanish Civil War will occur in America (see my Twitter thread for an explanation as to why). Spain’s experience merely serves as a sobering example of what happens when a society becomes so divided, these divisions turn into resentments, which turn into hatred, which turns into physically harming ideological foes because, again, the thought of living with such people is unbearable.
We appear to be in a transition period between where you hate someone and where you inflict harm upon them:
I’m not a Catholic, but burning the Eucharist isn’t just any kind of violence, it’s desecration. Somehow, I don’t think these people would ever dare try anything this brazen at a mosque, even though Islam has historically maintained attitudes towards abortion similar to that of Christianity, to say nothing of their overall social conservatism which outpaces that of anything seen in the West.
If violent protests and desecration aren’t enough to convince you this country is entering the danger zone, take a look at what the leak has done with respect to the SCOTUS justices. A map with their addresses was published so people could show up at their homes and protest directly at them. Here was the White House’s response:
Incredible. You’ve been brainwashed by propaganda if you think the Biden administration has restored any kind of calm, decency, or normalcy to the presidency. You’re not doing any of that when you declare open season on SCOTUS judges. If you find nothing wrong with the White House’s position, again, ask yourself: what if the Donald Trump White House took this position? If it’s indefensible when Trump does it, surely, it’s even more indefensible when supposedly competent Biden does it.
The results of the leak, the publishing of the addresses, and the president’s endorsement are predictable:
Unsurprisingly, the heat directed at Brett Kavanaugh seems especially intense:
In keeping with the theme of this blog, if we’re not at the end of the republic, you certainly can see it from here. Attacks on public officials, to include assassinations, aren’t alien to America. They’ve happened before and, as our core temperature rises, they can certainly happen again. We can hope and pray all we want that it won’t, but hope and prayer isn’t a plan. There’s a thin line between this sort of thing and people getting hurt:
If churches and pro-life activist offices start getting burned, it’s only a matter of time before abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood centers are targeted in response. Then, all hell will break loose. If you think our divisions are bad now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. And it doesn’t need to get Spanish Civil War-level bad. Instead, I view The Troubles of Northern Ireland as a better example of what the future holds for America.
The Troubles were a low-intensity, ethno-religious conflict between Irish republicans, who were Catholic and sought to eventually free themselves from British rule and. But, the important thing here isn’t why they fought, but how they fought. It wasn’t a war in a traditional sense like the Spanish Civil War. There weren’t any major battles nor heavy firepower employed by the belligerents. Instead, the conflict was marked by assassinations, bombings, murder, and constant rioting, with the British authorities seemingly unable to stop it.
Unlike the Spanish Civil War, The Troubles were an “extremists’ war,” where only the most militant on either side engaged in violence. Still, it led to 30 years of killing, producing over 3,000 fatalities. It may not seem like a lot, but, as scholars have noted, if a similar outbreak of violence occurred in the U.S. proportional to our population, it would result in 500,000 dead.
Half a million dead. Both the Spanish Civil War and The Troubles cost roughly the same number of lives, the only difference being the length of each conflict. But, the impact both had on their respective countries was indelible and scarred entire generations. More maddening was the utter senselessness of the violence that defined The Troubles. Neither the Irish republican nor the Ulster loyalist paramilitaries were capable of occupying and controlling territory as you would in a typical war. Yet, they killed, often for the sake of it, and not to achieve some strategic or political goal. Most of the violence constituted reprisals, carried out as vengeance or due to outright hatred of the other side. In the ultimate “violence begets violence” dynamic, a miasma of carnage consumed a geographic area no larger than some of America’s largest counties.
This is what The Troubles were and I fear it’s coming over here. Worse, I’m afraid the spark that lights the cauldron ablaze may be just over yonder. And it’s coming at a time when the economy remains one quarter away from recession, supply-chain issues remain unresolved, there seems to be no stopping inflation, and even nuclear war with Russia seems no longer a remote possibility. A storm of the century looks to be brewing, placing America under tremendous economic and political pressure the country may be unable to withstand. Even I, a non-believer, find it difficult not to bow my head in prayer, at times.
Still, as the darkness seemingly envelops us, it only makes it more important to find points of light. As often as I sound like a “doomer,” I would really rather we skip the civil war and argue politics the old-fashioned way. To do that, however, we each have to be willing to not only admit we might not be right about everything, but we don’t need to be right about everything. I’ll leave you with this clip of Bill Maher explaining how he, someone pro-choice, learned some facts about abortion which made him realize it’s not a simple morality tale for either side:
It may not be enough to stop what’s coming. Yet, I still can’t help but be inspired by those among us who are still trying to save this country from opening the gates of hell.
UPDATE: If you needed any additional reminders that the federal government is taking sides in the burgeoning internal conflict, here’s one:
While it’s true the far right has bombed abortion clinics in the past, currently, it’s left-wing extremists on the warpath. More critically, the daylight between the Left’s pro-choice extremists and the mainstream Left is quite minimal. Far right terrorists like Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to deliver an anti-abortion message, tend to be lone wolves who act entirely on their own accord and conscience. The Left’s extremists, however, enjoy institutional support, sympathetic media coverage, and are often acting under the cover of legitimate activity by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
It’s really not a stretch to think the Left could get away with some truly heinous acts. Look at the way The Hill framed the story about the torching of the Wisconsin Family Action - a pro-life advocacy group - with molotov cocktails:
The article was titled, “Police investigating possible arson at Wisconsin anti-abortion office” [emphasis mine]. Seriously? “Possible arson?” “Fire breaks out?” As if employing Molotov cocktails, which are illegal, serve any purpose besides deliberately setting people, places, and things ablaze. But, this is the same media that pretended like the vehicular assault committed by Darrell Brooks in Waukesha, Wisconsin last November that killed six and injured 62 was the result of the vehicle itself, not the driver, so what should we expect?
It’s bad enough there exists such a potent American left-wing capable of waging war against other Americans. It’s demoralizing to think the people who hold all the power in this country are aiding and abetting them.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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!
The US has no need for right-wing immigrants that parrot traitor Tulsi.
Why are you here? You aren't wanted. Leave.