I think it was here that someone commented on the 60′s. He said he was with a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. He said that they had machine guns[M-60] and were firing them like crazy in Michigan. He decided that was too much for him and parted ways. Somebody pays for this.

This has happened before. I read about WWI where all sides were paying newspapers before it started to inflame people as much as possible.

I think that the powers that be would love a civil war so they could crack down.

And the people responsible got bailed out every time. What if there was no mass immigration and the trillions of bail out loans went to individuals instead. Where would the middle class be?

Besides, our identity &mdsah; or should I say identities? — are not binary, but scalar.

I have never put my feet in the USA, but due to movies, cartoons, study, and technology I have a bit of American identity. I am sure most people do, too.

Does this apply to Jews?
Does this apply to the descendants of black slaves?
Does this apply to native tribes people?
Does this apply to descendants of those American citizens once detained in camps for being Japanese?

If Dr Hanson is indeed saying that individuals with such ancestral histories ought to toss their ancestral identity in the dust bin of “cardboard racial cutouts” then let him stop pussy-footing about the issue and say it clearly.

They don’t have convince anyone anymore. They can rule by sheer force. Political correctness was once mind control, but it lost effectiveness for that purpose. Now it’s been re-purposed as protection for fragile egos. They don’t want you to agree with them; they want you to pretend to agree with them.

When they have weakened the institutions enough, those institutions will be unable to protect them. You can’t have your power and eat it too.

The question is: who or what replaces them? Not the old pre-sixties culture. It was defeated long ago. It wasn’t nimble enough and it got outmaneuvered. We need a new culture, built by salvaging the best pieces from the past, and throwing out whatever didn’t pass the test of time.

And… can we give the current regime a shove to hurry the process along?

(No wimps need apply. Any culture that dares not give a shove to topple a weakened structure is unworthy of dominance.)

One should remember that the nutters who were doing all the bombings and so forth back in the 1960s were not of the right, at all. They were mostly leftists who were angry that their programs weren’t being taken seriously. Same thing is going to happen again, and the same reaction is going to take place; Antifa is going to morph into the Weathermen, the general public is going to distance themselves at first, and then reject their ideas because of the violence, and we’re going to see a complete freak-out because of that rejection. Trump is a symptom; the reaction to him is just as much of one, and a very telling one. The left got their program in under Obama, and suffered the rejection of it very badly. If a future historian looks at the whole period, they’re likely going to date the end of the classic “left” as dating to Trump’s election and the subsequent insanity in the media.

This stuff isn’t happening as a result of their confident strength; it’s mostly a freak-out as they realize they’ve shot their bolt, and that whatever comes, they’re irrelevant. Who pays attention to the media, or believes a word they say these days…? They captured the government, and now the trust and faith in the institutions of that government are lower than ever, mostly because of the things the left did with those institutions. Only part of the government with any real trust left in it is the military, and that’s only going to last until the leftoids put into place within it manage to discredit it by losing a major war… Which ain’t entirely unlikely, either.

There is no actual capacity to resist the progressive transformation of American or Western society, barely even at the conceptual level, less at the rhetorical level, less still at the practical level. And no one capable of matching the march through the institutions even enough to reset the clock at 1992 or even 1995. It has moved too far, to fast, too thoroughly. Pity there isn’t a retrospective textbook.

Not that I can easily imagine a US one going that route now, for a whole host of reasons geographic, demographic and military, but the two kinds are not mutually exclusive.

Then again, the Civil War of 1861-5 had both, too.

Modern civil wars are not armies marching through the wheat. They are Hutu/Tutsi wars with machetes and anything available. Civilians are legitimate targets: priests at the altars, students in classrooms, shoppers in malls… Anything goes, anyone can be killed.

As such, it’s partially successful. It’s war by other means. But the dynamics are the same. The phrase “politics is the art of compromise” is for the suckers. Politics is the art of getting to where you don’t have to compromise. The strong never compromise with the weak. There’s no point.

Sun Tzu knew a lot about conflict. He says it’s best to win before you physically fight. Prepare well enough, and the enemy just might back down before it even gets ugly. If not, it’ll be over quick.

We don’t need yet another call to arms. We need a game plan. The groups in power had a game plan. That’s how they got where they are. They were empirical and pragmatic. They figured out what worked and then they executed. We may not like what they do when they’re in power, but we had better respect what got them there in the first place.

I once associated with a group of self-styled “political activists” who were all about gathering facts and arguments and then trying to persuade people by force of reason. They never amounted to anything. When they held up signs, I saw a news cameraman just walk past into the state house without slowing down. No pictures. No acknowledgement. They had no comment on that.

The idea of getting confrontational horrified them. The idea of getting empirical never even occurred to them. They flat out didn’t seem to care about actually succeeding. They only cared about feeling righteous about themselves.

I tried to reason with them and got nowhere. So much for force of reason. They were all about talking to themselves, telling themselves how right and noble they all were. Nobody listened to them, and I discovered that they listened to nobody.

The world is unkind to cowards, but they compensate by being extremely kind to themselves.