For nearly twenty-five years I have been writing in this space about war: that is, the wars we have waged against other countries. I’ve heard every possible rationalization for these conflicts, from “weapons of mass destruction” to “he’s killing his own people” to babies being bayoneted in their incubators and on down the line.
Now that I’ve reached a milestone in my career as a chronicler of this kind of folly, and thought I’d seen it all, I’ve come upon something entirely new and that totally outdid my experience and expectations: civil war in America.
Oh, and you should hear the rationales! They make George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle come off like paragons of honesty and rectitude.
According to a coalition of forces including the Democratic party, the FBI, the CIA, and most of the “news” media, the country has been taken over by Vladimir Putin and the Russian State: President Donald J. Trump is an instrument in their hands, and the independence of the United States has been fatally compromised: the President and his top aides are taking their orders from the Kremlin.
This wouldn’t even pass an elementary course in formulaic script-writing, not to mention that gigantic plagiarism problem such a project would pose: it’s been done to death. But a lack of originality isn’t something that would stop our spooks, as dogged as they are.
Our intelligence agencies are at war with the executive branch of government, and they have been ever since Trump triumphed in the Electoral College and decisively defeated Hillary Clinton. The FBI/CIA/Deep State have been trying mightily to reverse the election results since that moment, to no avail.
Not that they haven’t had an effect on how the government functions – or fails to do so: the essential defensive role played by the intelligence community in identifying and isolating potential terrorist cells is undoubtedly compromised. Their attention is elsewhere. And let’s get real here: why would the CIA identify an imminent terror threat if their main goal is to discredit a sitting president? Wouldn’t they just let it slide and then heap the blame on Trump? Of course they would. Forget the “war on terrorism” – our spooks are fighting a war on Trump and they mean to win it by hook or by crook.
This didn’t just happen overnight. The two antagonists in the Second American Civil War have been evolving into rival armies with antithetical interests since the 1990s.
Where are the richest counties in these here United States? The answer is those counties around the capital city of Washington, D.C., where practically all the nation’s wealth is squirreled away. The huge McMansions, the private schools, the expensive autos, the overeducated children, the impressive properties, the elite professionals in every field – it’s all inside a very few Northeastern counties centered around the Imperial City. While the rest of the nation suffers from the worst drug scourge in many years, crime invades areas (Califonia, Illinois) that had showed some signs of improvement, and peoples’ incomes cannot keep up with the cost of living.
You can tell the American empire is on its last legs because its ruling classes have already declared open warfare on their less fortunate subjects. The puffed-up arrogance and exhibitionistic wealth and behavior of these worthies is something that even a Bourbon would know enough to refrain from flaunting. But our elites are on a suicide mission.
For decades, the corporate and ideological tribes that have ruled this country have looted it within an inch of its life. The tremendous wealth created by what used to be the freest economy in the world has been monopolized by a tiny minority of crony capitalists at the top of the pyramid. Hi-tech oligarchs who look like tenth graders and have the mentality of high school hall monitors have seized control of the commanding heights of the culture and turned it into a nightmarish mix of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Nineteen Eight-Four. Instead of adapting themselves to the views of the American people, our two political parties have adopted ideologies that have very little to do with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Instead, we are subjected to tirades from the Democrats about how the Russian government is in de facto everyday control of the White House and that the best thing we can hope for is a coup d’etat.
How do you conduct a foreign policy in the midst of a civil war? That’s just one of the fascinating questions we’ll be facing if not answering over the next three years. The coup plotters mean to paralyze the country: Trump’s idea that he could institute a foreign policy that puts America first is running into roadbloacks from the bureaucracy, and his own appointees, who are all too often in league with his worst enemies.
The ultimate goal of the NeverTrumpers is to get DJT out of office, somehow, anyhow, by legal means or extralegal shenanigans. If you think they’re ruled out assassination you’re being naïve.
But why? Why the extreme reaction?
Trump threatened to dismantle their precious “international order,” which had protected so many tyrants and subsidized so many oligarchs. The world according to the Davos crowd – a world of unearned privilege, ruthless arrogance, endless wars, and self-consciously extravagant wealth – was about to give way to the world of Donald Trump: a world of nations, not of “interests,” of sovereign peoples not migratory predators, of wealth earned honestly rather than extorted from hapless passive “consumers.”
In short, the globalist gig was up. And the war goes on to this day. It is the same old eternal conflict, the war of Liberty against Power, the Little Guy against the Oligarchs, the peace party versus the war party – and, yes, God against the Devil Himself.
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Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
