Category: TEOTWAWKI

“Without law, Commander, there is no civilization.” – Bridge on the River Kwai

You’d be surprised at the number of Civil War battles that were fought on National Parks.

We’re at part II of the review of Thomas W. Chittum’s book, Civil War Two:  The Coming Breakup of America.  You can find part I here (Book Review: Civil War Two, Part I).

I’m happy to report that I was wrong – you can buy Civil War Two:  The Coming Breakup of America on Amazon© on their Kindle® store.  Doing a normal search will take you only to the used hard copies, and those hard copies are still only available from resellers.

I encourage you to buy a copy of the Kindle® edition if you’ve downloaded the book on .pdf.  I bought one – because it puts money in the author’s pocket.  I’ve left a link below, and, as usual, I don’t make a dime if you buy anything linked here.  I’ve been thinking about it, but not right now.  Anyway, buy it.  As of this writing it’s only three bucks.  It’s a bargain at that price, so, pony up.

How did I find out that Mr. Chittum’s book was still available on Amazon?  Mr. Chittum emailed me and told me so.  I’m glad, and I’ve already revised my previous post, as well.

Last week we left off at the end of Phase I, the Foundational phase.  This week, we start off at Phase II – The Terrorist Phase.  Chittum felt that this phase would last between five and twenty years.  It’s been over twenty since it was written.  What did Chittum predict?

And we can prevent Civil War II if we just hold hands, because then no one will have hands to hold guns.

1. More of Phase I.
2. More riots, driven by ethnic conflict, some of multiple day duration, involving barricades and heavy weapons. This is spot on from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, with the exception of heavy weapons, which to my knowledge have not been employed.
3. Ethnic militias, cults, gangs. I’ve certainly seen the gangs, but if “militias” and cults have been increasing, I’ve missed them.
4. Increasing talk of secession and civil war. I read once that couples that use the word “divorce” are more likely to have one, so I’ve forbidden the use inside the house.  People talk about what they want, and these terms on the tips of tongues from Ticonderoga to Tallahassee to Tacoma to Toluca Lake.  Oh, yeah.
5. Increasing bombing and sabotage against the government. This is another item that seems to be missing – people are mad at each other, not at the government.
6. Increasing small group attacks.
7. Small scale ethnic cleansing. I’ve read multiple articles about displacement of one ethnic group by another.  The one that comes immediately to mind are blacks being driven out of traditionally black areas in Los Angeles by Hispanics.
8. Demographic and political Reconquista of the Southwest. In progress, as I keep hearing that schools find the American flag . . . racist?
9. Food riots as government attempts to shut of welfare.   Welfare is in full swing.
10. Racial factions and politicizing of the military. I have no idea if the military is racially fragmenting.  I’m willing to bet this will light up the comment section.  But the officer corps seems to be broadly moving left, based on the rumors I’ve heard about elimination of upper ranks due to political reasons.   West Point appears to be corrupted to the point a communist graduated.  Although they kicked him out, it would appear that Congress has a place waiting for him.
11. Splitting American institutions based on ethnic or political lines. In progress.  When a the FBI® has groups attempting to overthrow the government, and the Boy Scouts™ are admitting girls, the institutions of the country are splitting apart.  A little.
12. Abandonment of certain city areas by the police.
13. Gangs will have political goals and militarize. Outside of the cartels, if this is happening, it’s not happening publically.
14. White people begin to wonder if the establishment is working for them. The white vote appears to be polarizing, although I personally doubt we’ll ever see the 90/10 split seen in many minority voting blocs.
15. An armored car will be destroyed. A child is shown in the media foraging for food in a dump.  Neither of these have come true, to my knowledge, but photos of the homeless camps in California are common.

Phase II is where we are now – but it keeps getting worse, seemingly on a monthly basis.

The next phase Chittum outlines is Phase III:  Guerrilla Warfare.  By inspection, we’re not there.  The skirmishes that Antifa© provokes aren’t it – imagine if Antifa™ has weapons and secures an area, killing people in the process – that’s the level of violence expected.  This is actual warfare, but limited in time and location.  Areas will be lost to the guerrillas.  Chittum expects this to be shorter than the current phase, and this lower-scale warfare will last ten to twenty years.

The final phase is Phase IV:  All-Out, Continuous Warfare.  It’s just as on the label – actual armies moving in the field.  This is civil war – and the outcome cannot be predicted, especially if it takes place ten or twenty years from today.  Massive forces will be unleased, like never before in the country, and (this is me, not Chittum) we won’t have the structure that provided cohesion after the first Civil War.

Chittum spends some time analyzing the United States and safer places to be, but this is tied back to 1997 demographics and I don’t live in the places he talks about, so, those are interesting primarily due to his analytical methods and I’d suggest you give that a read to see how your mileage may vary.  I’d suggest spending time doing your own research on what you feel is a “safe” location.  Although finding a safe location might be hard, it’s probably easy to find places that won’t be safe, so you could probably start just by avoiding places that you know will turn into a post-apocalyptic hell-hole in five minutes if the microwave at the 7-11® breaks.

It’s easy to predict places where you’re not safe – you know, the places with bars over the windows and the local priest carries an AR.  Think those neighborhoods will be better after the world caves in?  Well, I’m pretty sure real estate prices will be down, but that’s primarily due to the wailing coming from the direct pit to hell that will open up after things get bad.

Birthday at Casa Wilder is always exciting!

But how do they go from normal to “pit to hell”, anyway?  One particular line from Chittum in a later chapter breaking down stability by using Europe as a model had this sentence in it:  “With each and every passing day, more and more Americans of all ethnic groups are perceiving their tribal affiliation as more self-definitive and more important that their common American nationality.”

This is the key to the unravelling we’re seeing in the country right now.  The United States transformed from a nation that had little diversity (in 1960, the country was 85% non-Hispanic white) to today, where the country is 60% non-Hispanic white.  In 1960, by and large the identity of all the citizens in the country was:  American.  Americans were of all ethnicities.  Were there groups that were excluded?  Certainly – Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement gained popularity by pointing out unfairness in treatment of blacks in America.  And America responded – we wanted to believe that being an American could transcend racial differences that seem to rip apart countries across the world.  We did our best.

Problem fixed, right?

No.  Not as long as each ethnic group defines itself through identity.

Also, the Egyptians should have seen that pyramid scheme from the start.

Chittum hints at the possibility that complete Imperial Conversion might be one way to avoid Civil War, and lists several requirements to complete the transformation of the United States from it’s former form to an Empire.  In the end, Chittum feels that Civil War at least provides hope, whereas Empire doesn’t.  Chittum even provides (23 years ago) a direct time and place where the Civil War will start – 5/5/2020, in a city park in Los Angeles.  For reasons that I’ll get into below, I think this is a little soon.

Chittum’s advice on preparation is pretty common in the prepper world, at least in 2019.  Locations near borders along ethnic faultlines are out.  Locations that have logistical dependencies (think water) on other locations . . . out.  Military bases?  Out.  Large cities?  Out.  Near the border of the “new nations”?  Out.

Also, have some food and don’t tell other people that you have food.  At least enough for your family for a year.  Also, a gun and at least 5,000 rounds of ammo.  Chittum speaks about gun caliber in general, but I’ve seen the fights that gun caliber selection sets off in the comments section, so I’ll leave that for later when I want to make sure you’re reading.  He suggests caching your food and ammo and gun away from the house, and, although I understand his reasons, it’s not something I do, at least currently.  As I get older, it’s even less likely.  If I make it to a retirement home, I’ll probably hide bullets in my walker.

Finally, Mr. Chittum has a checklist (in no particular order) of things that will be there before Civil War II hits.  I’ve put the ones I think have already occurred in bold:

Always remember item 6 – “Wear Pants”

1. Ethnic classifications become more prominent.
2. Illegal aliens allowed to vote, even locally.
3. Attack on the Second Amendment.
4. Juries that split on racial lines – shows that justice isn’t justice anymore.
5. Military taking police duties.
6. Internal (for use in the United States) elite military force.
7. Mobs in Washington D.C.
8. Blacks demanding facilities without whites (dorms, etc.).
9. Replacement of individual rights with group rights – health care, for instance.
10. Non-governmental organizations acquiring military power.
11. Real political power shifting to the courts.
12. Political power shifting to international bodies.
13. Leftists and minority control spreads of basic institutions.
14. Secessionist movements and groups seeking autonomy.
15. Race-based political parties.
16. No-go areas left to gangs.
17. Reparations.
18. Court voting manipulation (against gerrymandering).
19. Unrest in other multiethnic empires in the world at the time.
20. “Gated” communities for the wealthy.
21. Increased media hoaxes.
22. Increased minorities in the military.
23. Out of court settlements in cases of racial discrimination (method to transfer money to radical groups).
24. More restrictions on freedom of speech, including getting speakers fired or SWATed.
25. Police abandon traditional uniforms for military-style uniforms.
26. Groups of cops that form to oppose unconstitutional actions. Chittum thought they would be clandestine and ethnic, but the Oath Keepers are neither.
27. An affirmative action agency (EEOC for instance) to have armed agents.
28. Dollar collapse.
29. Geographic segregation and mention of it in the press.
30. Signs American military dominance challenged in a serious way.
31. Breakup of Canada.
32. More Americans moving to Canada than vice versa.
33. Parallel ethnic political and legal organizations have more power than base organizations.
34. More help wanted ads requiring bilingual applicants.
35. Greater role for UN in the world.
36. Photo of burned out American tank on US soil.

So, of this list, by my count about 18 (your mileage may vary) of Chittum’s 36 item checklist have happened.  Some of the above are more important than others.

As noted, I recommend the book.  It’s good, and not everything is covered in the 4,000-odd words that are in this review.  It’s also a pretty quick read with decent flow.

How has the prediction held out?  Certainly, better than any prediction that I did in 1997.  I think the biggest missing piece is Leftist ideology.  The Leftists have done a really good job of keeping together a rickety coalition of communists, Islamists, racial agitators, and ideologists without ideas.  This has led to increased stability that would have been hard for Mr. Chittum to foresee from 1997.

Additionally, the work on prepping has moved on in twenty years.  The basics remain the same, but the general philosophy has had 20 years of thought, refinement, and improvement.  But we haven’t had 20 years of thought on what will cause a civil war and how likely that is.

But, oddly, the Leftist coalition is keeping the country from splitting into dozens of pieces – right now it’s just two pieces.  I think this increased stability has extended the time until Civil War II breaks out.  What brings stability down?  Economic hardship.  The 2020 election.

And there is a price to be paid.  Can the Left control the forces of discontent and hate that it has unleased?  Can the Right control the forces that are a reaction to the demographic change in society?

Tough questions.  (Shakes Magic 8 Ball®)

MAGIC 8 BALL

“I’ll give you a winter prediction:  it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

There was a dwarf fortune teller that was wanted by police.  The news headline was “Small medium at large.”

One of the comments on the very first issue of the Civil War Two Weather Report (You can find all three Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming, Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links, Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) was a link to Thomas W. Chittum’s 1997 book Civil War Two:  The Coming Breakup of America.  It is available as a .pdf here.  Ordinarily I’d point you towards Amazon® so you could buy the book and put money in the author’s pocket, but it looks like the book has been out of print for some time.

Update:  it’s here, Mr. Chittum pointed me in this direction.  Please give this one a purchase – it’s good for Mr. Chittum, and I promise I don’t make a dime off of it.

Chittum had an interesting past before writing this book – he fought in Vietnam for the United States.  Apparently that wasn’t enough and the United States was all peaceful for the next twenty years, so he fought in Rhodesia and Croatia as a mercenary rifleman.  Oh, and he was a computer programmer for most of his life.

The book is now 22 years old, and it makes predictions.  How did it do?  I won’t spoil the plot too much, but Chittum has probably been better at predicting 2019 while writing about it in 1996 than a lot of people have done living in 2016 and predicting 2019.  It was pretty chilling to me to read how much Chittum had gotten right, so I thought I’d review the book.

As the notecards I use for blocking out posts went to three times the number I use for a typical post, I realized that the review would be take (at least) two posts, if not three.  So, here’s part one.  You’ll see part two next Monday.

Early on, Chittum notes that the United States has moved from the status of a nation to that of an empire.  Some might date the beginning of empire to the end of the first Civil War, but I’d say that the United States was, more or less, a single nation up until the 1970’s.  Sure there were regional differences, but the idea of kneeling when the national anthem was played wouldn’t have occurred to anyone but revolutionary Leftists.

Make the Empire Great Again™!

The United States had a homogeneous culture for 90% plus of citizens in the 1970’s.  The dreams of the civic nationalist were realized in that era that resulted from very low immigration:  all that matters was that people were committed to being the idea of integrating and assimilating into being an American, and it would work out fine.  As long as we were one group that could sit and watch Cheers® or M*A*S*H™ or baseball, and cheer for our favorite teams, we’d be fine.

In the civic nationalist world it didn’t matter that your great-grandparents were Italian immigrants in 1900.  Your grandpa might have been named Enzio, but he went by Ernie and married an Irish gal named Mary.  Your dad played baseball.  Your name is Robert and your sister’s name is Nancy and the only thing really Italian about you is you like pizza.

I’d guess I’d use the participation in youth soccer as a proxy for demographic change.  We all know that soccer was originally invented in Europe so the Germans would have something to do besides invade France and conquer it in an afternoon.  It’s not a traditional game that Americans play.  Oh, sure, the United States women won the World Cup®.  But to be fair, we needed something for our women to do so they didn’t invade France, either.

Let’s face it, our choice is either World Cup® soccer, or panzers streaking through Paris.  Is it just me, or do the panzers sound more interesting?

But Chittum points out that stability comes from a single group identity.  People being all on the same team makes us stronger, where as many groups make us weaker.  In this light, diversity isn’t Our Greatest Strength™, it’s really a weakness.

And his point is clear – ask a Leftist what it means to be an American, and you’ll likely get a vague statement about all you have to do to be an American is want to be one.  Asking them to learn English and assimilate and fit into American culture is for some reason now considered racist.  From the vantage point of 2019, it’s clear, diversity is our greatest weakness if we want a safe and stable nation.

This is observable in the real world.  Chittum fought in the breakup of the Balkans, and witnessed the breakdown of the Soviet Union.  When the Soviet Union fell, Chittum notes it was about 50% ethnic Russian.  The resulting nation that emerged was about 80% ethnic Russian and is much more stable.  It’s certainly more Russian.

The trends of a nation in peril are observable.  Our police departments don’t look like policemen, they’re now military.  Remember, to a cop, the citizens look like citizens.  To the military, everyone is a potential enemy.

• SWAT teams raided Amish farms because they were selling unpasteurized milk.
• Cops get armored personnel carriers like they’re patrolling Syria and not San Francisco.
• Even local cops in Modern Mayberry wear gloves with hard plastic knuckles during normal patrols.

When she pulled me over I rolled down the window and said, “What’s wrong?”  Her response?  “Nothing.”

Chittum spends a lot of time on the American Southwest – he figures it will be the trigger to the Civil War.

The original Reconquista took place in Spain as the Spanish expelled the Muslims who had conquered it over the course of six hundred years.  It was slow, but it finished up in 1492.  In the same way, Chittum notes that, although Mexico is a failed state, Mexicans are “retaking” the Southwest in a modern Reconquista that has taken place over decades since 1965, but with 1000% less Muslims.

Nothing says practical like that hat!

Likewise, Chittum writes that the only solution is to close the border.  Of course he was writing this in 1997 so 22 years have passed.  Right now, at least 40% of the population of Los Angeles is foreign born.  In no way could Los Angeles be considered to be an American city today.  It might even be considered Mexican, as rival Mexican gangs have recently infiltrated the LA County Sheriff’s office (LINK).

Who loves this?  Leftists who wish to topple the United States:  Leftists need the votes.  Ethnic groups like La Raza:  La Raza is the intellectual part of the movement that actively wishes to retake the Southwest.  Multinational corporations:  they like the lower wages.

Worst, though, are the hipster cops who will only arrest you ironically.

Let’s be clear:  Mexicans are patriots about Mexico.  They love their country – that’s why they proudly carry their flag during protests. Even in 1997, Chittum noted that crime was rampant in Mexico and the border was a mess and it’s even worse in Latin America south of Mexico.  Who can blame them for wanting to come to the United States, especially when some groups spin a fable of an ethnic empire, Aztlan, which is theirs for the taking?

The South and Northeast aren’t much better, and Chittum mentions that the Northeast will experience massive, open violence, which will be unorganized, and savage.  Some of the urban areas might survive as city-states.

California is his odds-on favorite to be ground zero.  Street gangs, as mentioned above, are numerous and founded on ethnicity.  They’ve infiltrated public organizations and the police and even allegedly corrupted members of the Marine Corps (LINK).  It’s this particular “enemy inside” that is troubling.  An external enemy is that can be fought, but when the enemy of the country becomes an internal enemy, it’s much worse – there’s a reason that treason is mentioned in the Constitution.

Ahh, California, the meth laboratory of democracy.

Chittum mentions militias.  They seemed to have their peak in the 1990’s, and quickly declined after Oklahoma City.  He also mentions “Committees of Correspondence” which were a mechanism for people to communicate with each other because they didn’t have the Internet in the 1760’s to begin to organize against the British, LOL.  The Internet serves this purpose now, with large groups getting information from unapproved sources, and even managing to “privately*” share information.

*Don’t bet your life or liberty on it.

Chittum writes that Civil War Two will be vicious, atrocity filled, and genocidal.  Civilian casualties are to be expected, and many will be on purpose.  Looting will be common.  This is not the usual scenario our military faces in any fashion, so the analyses performed by John Mark (see Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming) or Forward Observer (Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) aren’t valid.  Civil War Two has the potential to be far worse than any conflict seen in history, as it combines both ethnic division along with ideological division – it’s like the Russian Revolution times Rwanda to the power of Somalia.

I’ve been stuck in the same phase for . . . oh . . . twenty years now.  Maybe one day I’ll grow out of being a 12 year old.  I’m not telling you how long it took me to get to that phase!

There are four phases according to Chittum.  The first phase of the problem is what he refers to as Foundational.  He said in 1997 the Foundational phase was already complete.

1. Tribalization of society – have different rules for different ethnic groups, push people to identify as something other than “American.”
2. Power shift to unelected administrators, judges, board, commissions, and public servants.
3. Since 1972, wages been stagnant, or, when compared to medical care or education, dramatically falling.
4. The core of many large cities has been abandoned – think Baltimore or Detroit.
5. Massive and sustained immigration, falling of standards and conditions in some locations to those similar to undeveloped countries.
6. Racial organizations in police – militarization of police, which are both covered above.
7. Treaties are more important that state sovereignty.
8. A consistent and strong drive for gun control.
9. From Antifa© to MS-13 to the Crips, these are in place.
10. Mass media participation in the polarization. The mass media has already picked a side – Left.

We can see what Chittum says is behind us.  Next Monday we’ll look (from his vantage point in 1997 and ours in 2019) to see what else he’s predicted, and how far along we are.

Sweet dreams!

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.” – Anchorman

With apologies to Gary Larson, in my defense there are only so many John Brown jokes out there.

Way back in 1998, I ended up with one of the neatest jobs that I had – assessing risks to a major corporation.  The Internet was new at work, and I was being paid to research potential disasters.  It was so interesting and so much fun I felt guilty.  In researching disasters and risk, I came across Y2K.  For those that don’t remember, there was a concern that, as a result of programmers only using two digits to store year information in computers, that many computers and computer programs would cease to function when the calendar flipped over to 00.

There were multiple websites and personalities that were writing about Y2K, and one that I went to from time to time was Cory Hamasaki’s Y2K Weather Report.  Hamasaki was a programmer (he has since passed away) and he had an inside perspective of the ongoing work that was required to keep the systems working.  As a result of his insider knowledge he bought an AR, a lot of food, and spent New Year’s Eve at his remote cabin.

Obviously, the systems kept working.

Not my original.  And I’m sorry.

We live, however, in spicy times, with the potential for them becoming even spicier (I got the Spicy Time meme from Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), which really should be on your daily reading list).  I’ve written several articles about the potential for Civil War, and studied and thought quite a bit about it.  As such, this is the inaugural edition of John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report.  I anticipate putting it out monthly.  This first issue will probably be a bit longer than later issues, since I’m putting the framework together and explaining the background.

I’m attempting to put together a framework that measures where we are on the continuum between peace and war.  I’ll even try to develop some sort of measures that show if the level of danger is increasing or decreasing.  Civil wars don’t happen all at once, and like a strong storm, they require the atmosphere to be right.  A weather report is probably a good metaphor.

If you haven’t seen it, the guy with the trident was the weatherman in Anchorman.  And when he has a trident?  People die.

So, to review the future, let’s start by looking at Civil War I so we understand what happened, and what the potential differences are.

Civil War I was:

• Based on philosophical differences – the views of the people, North and South were pretty similar, except that the Northerners were descended from Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and the Southerners were descended from the Norman conquerors that took England in 1066 but got booted out after having lost a war in England. Although the North and South were the same people, more or less, with the same heritage, there were enough differences to lead to a war.  And it was a doozy.

Civil War II is different because:

• Certainly we are not the same people today compared to when we generally unified ethnically. Civil War II will likely be fought on the basis of conflicting culture, identity and ideology.

Civil War I was:

• Fought by armies, mostly, with identified geographical centers.

Civil War II is different because:

• At the early stages, at least, Civil War II won’t be fought by armies, and there won’t be defined geographical concentrations. Armies are better at killing people and breaking stuff, but irregulars are way better at atrocity.  Expect the initial stages of hot war to be filled with some pretty rough stuff.

Civil War I was:

• Characterized by a general adherence to the rules of war, though there were some war crimes on either side.

Civil War II is different because:

• There has been a tendency of civil wars in this century to have increasing levels of atrocity during the war. This will continue.

Civil War I was:

• Fought with the intent of reunification (by the North), and separation (by the South). The basic desire of the North was to reunify the country, admittedly under more comprehensive Federal control.  Reconstruction sucked, but the goal was a single country.  That’s why all the Confederate statues were tolerated, and even encouraged.

Civil War II is different because:

• I expect whoever wins to pursue a policy of revenge at the end, especially if it’s the Communists. This is founded based on every single communist revolution ever.  The end of Civil War I occurred in a growing young country with the opportunity to move West.  Now?  Whoever wins will cleanse whatever areas they take.

Civil War I was:

• Fought by organized, elected governments.

Civil War II is different because:

• I’m thinking that one side might be a Caesar-type leading a partial military coalition versus Leftist irregulars, but I might be wrong on this one.

I decided to see what other studies had been done about more recent civil wars, and found that James Fearon and David Laitin (from Stanford) did a study in 2003 on civil wars during the 20^th Century (LINK).  Here’s what they found:

• Civil Wars had a median duration of six years
• Sub-Saharan Africa: 34 wars
• Asia: 33 wars
• North Africa and the Middle East: 17 wars
• Latin America: 15 wars
• Eastern Europe/Former Soviet Union: 13 wars
• The West: 2 wars

Why do civil wars develop?  It’s my bet that political scientists are like economists – six political scientists will generate 15 incorrect theories over coffee each morning, although I, for one, have no idea why we would think we would have a more stable country if we import people who keep having civil wars all of the time.  Fearon and Laitin came up with three different types of civil wars:

• Ethnic: “You other people suck.”
• Nationalist: “We want our own country, because you other people suck.”
• Insurgent: “We want to be the boss, because you suck.”

Okay, I don’t know who the originator was of this meme, but it still cracks me up.

Civil wars were non-existent in ethnically homogeneous and rich countries during the time period of Fearon and Laitin’s study.  As the United States was essentially ethnically homogeneous and rich during Civil War I, you can see that, just like the Revolution, something unique was going on here.  We decided to fight over principles.

Fearon and Laitin had several graphs that pointed out that increased wealth makes up for a portion of ethnic diversity – wealthier, non-homogeneous societies were less likely to go to war than poorer non-homogeneous ones.  Oddly, the very poorest ($48 to $800 a year) societies were less likely to go to war than societies that made just a little more money.  I guess just living was tough enough and going to war against other people who also had nothing was pointless.

One conclusion that Laitin and Fearon found was that civil war onset was no less frequent in a democracy.  Discrimination is not linked to civil war.  Income inequality is not linked to civil war.  Grievances aren’t the cause of civil war – they’re caused by civil wars.  What are risk the factors?

• New nations. I guess they haven’t developed the “don’t kill the president” tradition yet.
• People can hide in mountains.  I guess.
• Higher (absolute) population numbers. I told you big cities were bad.
• Oil exporting.
• High proportion of young males.
• Exporting commodities – risk seemed to peak at about 30% of GDP coming from commodity export.

Okay, not directly on point, but my primary export is memes.

So where does the United States stand as a country today?  I guess I’d throw out the thought that the first prerequisite for Civil War II is economic stress.  Why?  Average Joe won’t pick up an AR to go kill people in the next county if Joe has beer in the cooler and another episode of Naked and Afraid® next week.  If Joe has a job and a wife and a mortgage, well, there just won’t be action.  I meant war, silly.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Our risk now is relatively low based on economics.

The United States is developing a higher absolute population.  That puts us at risk.

With immigration, the United States is forming a higher proportion of young males.  That puts us at risk.

State weakness is generally correlated with civil wars.  I’m torn on this one.  On one hand, we have the largest number of laws ever, along with a very large enforcement mechanism.  On the other?  Laws, both state and Federal are increasingly just ignored.  Victor Davis Hanson describes this paradox in California (LINK).

Nearby civil wars are associated with having a civil war.  Latin America is a civil war factory . . . so we’re at risk.

From the above five predictors of civil war, we have four of them.  Obviously this doesn’t tell the whole story.  The United States has a peaceful history, and, unlike a less established nation, the general populace is going to assume that today was good, so tomorrow will be pretty good, too.  And, generally that’s a good way to predict the future:  tomorrow will look like today.  Building the conditions for civil wars generally take years and what was abnormal becomes normal and tolerated as time goes by.

I’m going to attempt to try to make a metric showing the rise in various societal factors that I think might lead to civil war.  Some of the obvious are:

• Economic metrics – economic growth, unemployment, average wealth.
• Organized violence metrics – news of riots, other organized violence and protests.
• Political instability metrics – use of the term “impeach”, “civil war”, “electoral college.”
• Sites banned – numbers of political speakers silenced.
• Number of illegal immigrants per month. This shows greater economic stress or greater problems at their actual home.

Yeah, you just can’t add the North and the South together and end up with a Civil War.  Unless you do it in binary, then you could have a Bipolar War?

I’ll then combine them into an index.  If you have other items that you think can be tracked and should be tracked, let me know, and I may incorporate them, especially if they’re easy find and to incorporate, because I’m lazy.

Finally, Civil War won’t show up all at once, it may take years to get people to the idea that war is better than dealing with your weird neighbor by going into your house and watching a marathon of YouTube® videos where people turn $40 of propane and a bunch of aluminum cans into $10 worth of aluminum ingots.  It’s easier than fighting, right?

Following is my take on the steps that will lead to actual civil war.  I humbly call it the Wilder Countdown to Civil War II™.

1. Things are going well.
2. People begin to create groups.
3. People begin to look for preferential treatment.
4. Opposing ideology to the prevailing civic ideology is introduced and spread.
5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
10. Open War.

I bolded number six.  That’s where I think we are right now.  Violence is occurring, but it’s not monthly, so I don’t think we’re at step seven.  Yet.  And I think we can live at step nine for a long time as long as we don’t have the bottom drop out of the economy.  Might there be some trigger that takes us to nine in a hurry?  Sure.  But I’m willing to bet that we see it take a few years, rather than a few months.  My bet is no sooner than 2024, but I’ve been wrong before, way back in 1989.

This is a project where I’m not only very open to contributions of information (even anonymous contributions) I’m actively soliciting them.  Let me know if you’ve got commentary, criticism, news stories, or suggestions to make issue two (probably in early July) better, either down below or at my email, movingnorth@gmail.com

While we can’t predict catastrophic storms with 100% accuracy, it’s probably about time that someone started looking at the horizon to see what they could see.  Because I see what might be a storm coming.