TL’s latest.

The frustration I heard in the voice of a four-tour force recon vet discharged after a mortar ended his service was undeniable. It was also evident that the insults hurled from a woke mayor in a Texas city had him in a state of calm, but determined resistance. He spoke of the BLM march through the city given a route that went past the “biker bar” section of town as evidence of the taunting taking place across the country by mayors and governors who are determined to get a violent reaction. “We’re not that stupid,” he said.

From someone who has seen his share of death and destruction in the chaotic villages of a war-torn nation, he knows what is being fomented against him and those like him. They want the conflict, just like they wanted to hang the “insurrection” tag on a peaceful protest in Washington D.C. on January 6th. Unlike the woke peaceful protests all summer that were embellished with flame, wrecked buildings and murder, the January 6th peaceful protest saw only instigators (probably infiltrators) breaking a window or two. There is no comparison between the occupation of federal court buildings, looting and burning by those released from jail the day before for the same mischief and a crowd being let into the capitol on the sixth only to further the insurrection narrative.

I asked how we could fix a political system intent on inciting violence against one set of people by another. It isn’t just BLM against bikers, or school systems against parents, or black against white, or Hispanic against Asian, or young against old, or left against right, or gay against straight, or vaxers against anti-vaxers, or mask wearers against mask refusers; it is the intent of government officials to inflame these conflicts to the point of violence that is the concern. His response was a slow shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders saying what he preferred not to say.

The fact is, there is no D-Day, but rather the slow accumulation of grievances until the load can no longer be carried. His words came back to me over the whole conversation. “We’re not that stupid.” The trouble with combat veterans, like my father (Korea), is they tend to be non-confrontational in such situations, because they can smell an ambush, not because they fear engagement, but half measures won’t suffice and until they are ready to go full-on, all other responses seem tepid, but the rage builds.

This climate is being manufactured. Those who are sure they will win are goading on the conflict. Those who are not sure they will win, refuse to fight at half measure, harming only their families and friends, enraging a brutal enemy without the resolve to complete the mission. What the enemies of the people should be afraid of, if they had any sense, is a fighting force having put it off until there was nothing left to lose, but coming out dedicated to the eradication of their enemies as the only possible solution.

For whatever it might be worth—almost certain to be little or nothing—my own view is that a general, widespread military-style conflict as most people conceive of it is unlikely in the extreme, regardless of how severely the Country Class is provoked. Geo- and demographic realities militate against it, for one thing. Unlike in 1860, the two sides are NOT divided neatly into North and South; for the most part, Team Liberty and Team Tryanny live cheek-by-jowl. In CW v1.0, Johnny Reb in Charleston probably never met a Boston Bluebelly in his entire life personally, and didn’t know a single living soul who had. But today, your average Real American probably has a Kommie Karen or Ken for a next-door neighbor, with plenty more scattered around the neighborhood.

This situation tends to complicate things, as does the simple fact that, unlike in Olden Thymes, the average American middle-class schlub has precisely no (zip, zero, nada) military training or knowledge at all. Hell, most of ’em wouldn’t know the procedure for inserting a loaded mag and putting a semi-auto rifle into battery, much less be able to hit the broad side of a bull’s ass at 20 yards with it. And that’s under quiet, peaceable conditions with nobody shooting back at him. Under fire, his personal prospects would suddenly nosedive from “not too good” level down to “deader” immediately.

Admittedly, Karen and/or Ken next door viscerally LOATHE weaponry and all the other white-supremacist, misogynist, homophobic military-type trimmings that go along with revolution and war, making their odds of survival against even an all-thumbs suburban klutz even longer. So there’s that.

My own view, which shifts on the regular these days, is that if the current middling-temperature conflict ever DOES go full-on hot, the form it will most likely take will be sabotage, monkey-wrenchery, and shoot-and-scoot sniper activity, perhaps even scattered small-unit raids undertaken by people with the training and experience to pull it off. Don’t expect to see any mass-media reportage of any such things either, at least not in the beginning. Possibly not at all, unless the sabotaging and raiding become widespread and successful enough that even a press as heavily invested in the Deep State status quo as ours can no longer keep things swept neatly under the rug.

And once that line is crossed all hell breaks loose. Because the moment the idea sets in with Big Papa Gov’t that they might actually not be winning this thing after all, and their iron-fisted grip on an increasingly broad swathe of the subject-population might be loosening, the US military will be formally called to come out and play. Which also happens to be the moment when all bets are fully OFF—and, as Aesop has said, life as we’ve all known it is over for good, regardless of how things shake out in the end.

Which, of course, is not to say that Real Americans shouldn’t bother trying to regain their rightful liberty, nor to blanch at any and all means of securing it—should instead just swallow their pride, surrender their natural rights, and accept the ignominious destiny of oppression, dependency, and voiceless servitude intended for them. But it DOES help to explain the seeming reluctance of most Normals to take that last irreversible step into the unknown, don’t it? Hamlet wasn’t just whistling Dixie when he wondered:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Ahh, the eternal question. Even the Founders cautioned against intemperance and recklessness:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Every patriot must decide for himself—and soon—where he stands, what he believes. Do the Founders’ words of patience and restraint still apply? Or is the time now upon us when the words that follow them must be our guide?

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