Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?

“We might find the abandoned furnace room, or the old Civil War amputorium!” – Malcom in the Middle

No problems in this map.  None at all.  Everything is as right as rain . . .

The following is (more or less) a discussion that occurred over several days as we sat in the hot tub.  I’ll note that our speculation reflects things that we as observers and students of history and current events think are might happen, not what we want to happen.  It’s edited for clarity and readability – it’s not a transcript, it’s a blog post.  In some cases a half an hour of conversation is only a sentence or two.

Honestly, this speculation is chilling enough to use as an air conditioner on a hot day . . . .  Previous posts similar to this can be found here at The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths, The Coming Civil War Part II, and a (Possible) American Caesar,and Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps.

The other day when we were in the hot tub, I rudely interrupted The Mrs.

John Wilder:  “That’s enough of what you want to talk about.  I have something to discuss.”

The Mrs.:  “Well that was rude!”

John Wilder:  “And that’s exactly how I’ll describe it in my post.”

And yes, Internet, this was pretty close to the real conversation, but The Mrs. is used to it after being married to me for what she calls “an eternity.”  I guess time flies when you’re having fun, right?  Wait a minute . . . that eternity comment might not be a complement?

Anyway, as we luxuriated in the warm swirling waters of the tub, I threw out my discussion topic.

John Wilder:  “As we look at parallels from today’s developments to the last Civil War, I know that events, places and people won’t be exact matches, but they seem to rhyme.  If you look at the contentiousness of, say, the presidential elections, that’s a pretty big parallel.  Lincoln got only 40% of the popular vote, and that was against the first female candidate for president, John C. Breckenridge.”

I think this map was influenced by the Russians since they wanted to sell us Alaska and knew only Lincoln was stupid enough to buy it.  Thankfully the Russians seem to want it back.

“If you look back in the past, Abraham Lincoln was elected president by a party that was only six years old after an election that was so divided that one side actually refused to acknowledge the results.  If that’s not a hallmark of a society unravelling, I’m not sure what is.”

“But,” I continued, “the people didn’t just drop everything one morning and yell at their neighbor and say ‘THAT’S IT!’  There were a series of escalations that society went through that made it seem like it would be a good idea to blow up Virginia.  And one of those events was Bleeding Kansas.”

Bleeding Kansas was that period when violent groups (on both sides) ended up fighting each other over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free state where slavery would be illegal or not.  Things got heated.  On the floor of the United States Senate:

“Sumner ridiculed the honor of elderly South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, portraying Butler’s pro-slavery agenda towards Kansas with the raping of a virgin and characterizing his affection for it in sexual and revolting terms.” (Wikipedia)

The next day, Butler’s cousin (A congressman named Preston Brooks) showed up and nearly killed Sumner by beating him with a cane.

So, if you’ve never been “beating a guy nearly to death with a cane mad,” maybe Congress wasn’t the place for you in the 1850’s.

This was originally published by CNN – the Cane News Network – all canes, all the time.

Eventually Bleeding Kansas ended up as a big mess, with multiple battles (death toll total of 56, per Wikipedia), with there being multiple elections, crazy vote manipulation, and at least four territorial constitutions sent to the United States Senate for approval.  And it gave us the album cover for the debut album of the prog-rock band Kansas®, which might make up for the death toll?

Tragic Prelude, by John Stewart Curry – John Brown is the crazy looking dude with the ZZ Top beard and Eraserhead hair in the middle.  True fact:  John Brown was really 12 feet tall, and the reason that basketball was invented in Kansas was so he could have a sport to play.

So, back to the hot tub.

John Wilder:  “I’m thinking that Ferguson® and Black Lives Matter™ is the Bleeding Kansas of today?”

The Mrs.:  “I don’t know.”

John Wilder:  “Maybe Antifa©?

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  Antifa©.  The level of violence that they initiate is amazing, and they think that their violence is justified.  Their violence isn’t real violence because they think they have a good reason to be violent.  Just as Antifa’s® racism isn’t real racism because they have a good reason to be racist.”

I nodded.

The Mrs. continued, “But I wonder if a civil war is possible at all.  There isn’t the same geographic concentration that there was during the 1850’s.  You don’t have a group of industrialists in the north competing against the agricultural south.”

John Wilder:  “But you do have the rural-urban divide.  Heck, our county here went 80% for Trump.”

The Mrs.:  “And our county has all of the guns.”

John Wilder:  “We do now.  But groups like Anitfa™ have shown that they’re not afraid to use violence.  In our county we don’t even lock our doors because either we’re too nice to steal much or the thieves know that behind every door is a 12 gauge shotgun or an AR-15.”

The Mrs.:  “True.”

John Wilder:  “Guns aren’t that hard to get, or hard to learn how to use.  Oh, sure, you have to really work at being able to do a 500 yard shot with a 20 mph crosswind (15 kilometers with a 20 liter crosswind for the metric-impaired) but half of Africa was conquered by revolutionaries who couldn’t even read with AK-47s that were built in factories in Bulgaria whose idea of a precision tool was a sledgehammer.”

The Mrs.:  “I can see that.  But we’re not as concentrated as we were back then.”

John Wilder:  “Have you seen this map?  We are divided geographically – and one side lives in a really small area, while the other side lives in the country.  Coincidentally, that’s where all the soldiers come from – rural places like where we live.  And we make all of the food and most of the energy.”

The Mrs.:  “Yeah.  Non-Trump counties make television shows and Teslas®.  Oh, and they lead the country in corruption, poverty, and crime.  So I guess it could happen, but it would be a lot more chaotic than the first Civil War.”

John Wilder:  “Sure, I think the chaos is pretty much a given.  No way to predict where will be safe.  So, what’s our Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that was instrumental in setting the stage for the Civil War was the most popular book in the United States (besides the Bible) in the 1800’s.  However, not long after it was published, it was strictly censored across the many Southern states.  One man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for owning a copy of the book, and that was before the Civil War started.  The book would be wholly censored across the Confederate States during the Civil War.

John Wilder:  “Is it Alex Jones?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes, that feels right.”

Alex Jones is a radio talk show host that specializes in fringe news stories – news stories the regular media doesn’t cover, and news stories that are at times thinly checked (at best) and at times far in advance of “mainstream” news.  And Jones has been an equal opportunity political poo-flinger.  He’s gone after Clinton, Bush, and Obama.  Republican or Democrat?  He doesn’t seem to care.  To be fair, Jones has been a fairly consistent proponent of Trump.

Free speech is important, it’s written in Silicon Valley’s DNA, right?  No.  On a single day, Jones was banned or punished in some fashion from Facebook®, YouTube©, Spotify®, Amazon™, and Pinterest©.  Soon enough LinkedIn™, YouPorn® (huh?) and MailChimp® (whatever that is) followed.

No one in the hot tub felt that Alex Jones represented the gold standard for journalism, but his silence was a sign that ideas outside of those of the gatekeepers could simply not be tolerated.  I spent some time looking for examples of “hate speech” that was supposedly the cause of his being banned.  I found nothing worse than the usual hyperbole of the left, and certainly nothing as personally threatening as many things celebrities and journalists said in the heat of the moment following Trump’s victory in November of 2016.

The concept that he was censored amazed me.  Bombastic?  Yes.  Over the top?  Sure.  The WWE™ of news?  Absolutely.

Something to be suppressed and censored?  Wow.  Speech an entire party (nearly) agrees should be banned?  Double wow.  But free speech seems to have few fans on the left now.

Now I know where my wallet went . . . George Soros has it!

But back to the hot tub.  By this time, The Boy had joined us.  I think Pugsley was inside napping, or maybe working on connecting his brain directly to the Internet through a device he was making based on a YouTube video.  Pugsley had been looking for a drill, some hydrogen peroxide, and an N-size battery, so he might by a cyborg by now.

John Wilder:  “What other events were there on the way to the Civil War?”  Since The Boy had taken US history most recently, perhaps some things were fresher in his mind, and since we were in the hot tub, it was easier to ask him than to Google® it.

The Boy:  “What about the Dredd Scott decision?  That was a biggy.”

John Wilder:  “Yes, even the courts were involved in the unravelling before the Civil War.  But with the people divided as they were – Dredd Scott could have been decided either way and would have inflamed one side or the other.  In this case, it drove the North nuts.  If they had decided the other way?  It would have driven the South nuts.  A no-win situation.  The sides weren’t even talking the same language at that point.”

The Boy:  “Well, I guess that leaves Fort Sumter.”

John Wilder:  “So what does our Fort Sumter take place?  Or has it already?”

Fort Sumter was the spot, on April 12, 1861, at 4:30AM, Confederate soldiers fired on the Union Fort.  (Spoiler, they won.)  Fort Sumter is notable because even after Southern secession, several months passed before the first shots were fired there.  It was as if there was a hope that things could be brought back together, that there was some alternative to war.

John Wilder:  “So what is it, what does it look like?  Does it occur after a Trump 2020 victory?”

The Mrs.:  “Well maybe sooner.  If the Republicans continue to hold the House after the 2018 election, I think that might make California secede.  From what I seen on Facebook®, they’re in a frenzy already.  They can’t even stand the idea of Trump finishing a single term.”

John Wilder:  “What if . . . what if Fort Sumter is going on right now?  Let’s look at it:  there was a part of the government, in that case the states, which denied the legitimacy of the sitting president.  Okay, they might have thought him legitimate but they decided that they didn’t want be a part of it.  Isn’t that’s what’s going on right now with the Deep State?  Insurance policies?  Investigations into people not because of a crime, but investigations of people to find a crime to prosecute them for because they don’t have the right political belief, that they’re not part of the right club that gets bacon-wrapped shrimp at the Friday get-togethers?”

The Boy:  “Not sure if that fits.  Maybe.  Maybe.”

John Wilder:  “An attack doesn’t require that the militia brings out cannons and shells Dallas.  No, if you look at that, plus the sanctuary cities, plus the judiciary routinely ruling against Trump on things that they would have rubber-stamped for Obama?  Is this open insurrection right now, just not with cannon?”

The Boy:  “I’m not sure.  But I do think I know the end point of all of this.  I’ve been thinking . . .”

And he had a pretty insightful observation.  More on that next Monday, I think.