The Sixth Sense and Civil War
How a violent insurrection, massive COVID deaths, and years of the Trump reality TV show has numbed America’s psyche and blinded her to the reality of her on-going civil war.
“I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see.” Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense
Experts agree there are a few basic stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. The first is dealing with the initial shock of the event — survival. Often, the next stage is denial, the human psyche’s default coping mechanism. Violent trauma can even result in some memory loss.
For only the second time in our nation’s history, we’ve experienced a violent insurrection. The first — the Civil War — lasted five years, destroyed the economy of the South, and cost us over 600,000 Americans. Both started with a skirmish — 6 January and the battle of Fort Sumter; both began after a contested election. More died on 6 January than in the battle for Fort Sumter.
After the 1860 elections, the Confederate inciters at least had the integrity to acknowledge the real winner of America’s election, a Republican named Lincoln and one to whom they would never subordinate themselves. They owned their insurrection. They wrote declarations of succession. There would be blood.
The inciters of 6 January, on the other hand, barely acknowledge something bad happened, but why would they? Inciters who were on Capitol Hill on 6 January like Senator Ron Johnson weren’t concerned all because “those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned. I never really felt threatened.”
Ron, pressuring Senators to vote against a constitutionally-certified election is what insurrectionists do. Love of country is not demonstrated by violent attempts to overthrow an election. Respect for law enforcement is not expressed by beating and maiming cops. It’s also against the law — it’s also treasonous.
Senator Johnson went on to crackersplain: “Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
Yep Ron, saying racist shit usually will get you in trouble, but you need not be concerned about Black Lives Matter. They’re protesters, not violent, racist, assault rifle-carrying, anarchists who keep taking about the coming civil war. Those are your folk.
The inciters are so emboldened now that Roger Stone, Mr. Stop the Steal himself, can flaunt his Stop-the-Steal security team literally composed of insurrectionists, while deflecting blame for the Capitol attack on ghosts, left-wing groups Trump’s own FBI said weren’t at the Capitol on 6 January.
Rather than be embarrassed, the inciters have now shamelessly embarked to undo the very same election laws that produced almost unprecedented voter turnout, during a pandemic no less, and an election assessed as the most secure ever. Oh the horror!
In the Supreme Court this year, the Republican National Committee lawyer could not have been more blunt about their goal; current law “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.”
But, what about voter fraud? Republican State Legislators have drafted and passed hundreds of bills in more than half of our state legislatures specially designed to advantage them by limiting voting, particularly in key battleground-states. Most mind-boggling, partisan Legislators are planning to literally seize control of elections. All justified by lies about voter fraud for which evidence is never produced. Not by Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (2018), not by his own Attorney General Barr (2020), not by any of Trump lawyers who lost 59 out of 60 cases, and not by our conservative Supreme Court.
Most cynically, the inciters cry crocodile tears about barbed wire around their sacred Capitol while knowing they’re safe from those they incite.
Only Seeing What We Want to See
Is it possible that a nation could be in the midst of a civil war and not know it? Is it possible Americans are regular people walking around not seeing each other and only seeing what they want to see?
Consider as evidence our recent experience with psychologically processing 600,000 Americans dying in a pandemic. Have we even begun to comprehend that the scale of our pandemic deaths match those of our first our Civil War? Have we yet grasped that we literally watched live on TV and twitter our President endlessly contridict his own medical experts and commit gross negligence costing hundreds of thousands of American lives just to save his ratings? Has the scale of the pandemic sunk in yet for the tens of millions of insurrectionist-supporting hoaxers who still refuse to get vaccinated?
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” — Joseph Stalin
My daily and dichotomous diet of MSNBC, Newsmax, OAN, CNN, and FOX, strongly suggests Cole Sear’s vision well explains the state of our union — two cultures that only see what they want to see.
But I’m getting a little ahead of the story. Anecdotes, while powerful, are not proof. Is America in the middle of a civil war? I looked to experts in social science, history, data analytics, and modern warfare for some answers.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” — Bob Dylan
Recipe for a Coup
Fun fact about coup attempts and insurrections, social scientists know a lot about the conditions that make them more likely. Having done work in the past with these folks designing analytic models, I expectantly set out to search the Web for all their enlightening comparative analyses about the origins and causes of our recent insurrection.
Turns out a lot of the social-scientists would rather quibble about uprising semantics; was 6 January a coup attempt, an insurrection, or an act of sedition? Sigh.
Undeterred, I went straight to an unbiased source for answers — Encyclopedia Britannica. Surely its experts reviewed studies of coups and insurrections and identified common conditions or circumstances indicative of violent uprisings. My bet was the good old Encyclopedia Britannica synthesized all this into a concise and easily understood list of conditional indicators.
Who needs social scientists to do basic social science? Using the encyclopedia alone, I was able to isolate demonstrable conditions underlying insurrections, code them into a simple analytic model, and run simulations to answer the question, is America in a civil war?
Coup Ingredients
Britannica identifies political deprivation as a key insurrection ingredient. You need an aggrieved group or groups who believe they’ve been “systematically excluded from political power or discriminated against by the state.” For our model, I’ve named the aggrieved group white nationalists. I’m confident most sociologists would agree the insurrection was not an exercise in diversity.
Britannica also stresses certain dynamic events can fuel insurrections by “making it easier for groups to mobilize” like say a constitutional crisis. Most sociologists and psychologists would agree a stolen Presidential election is a powerful rallying cry.
Britannica further indicated a trend towards insurrection can worsen when there are demonstrations of state weakness. Would any political scientist not assess a state as weak when that state’s leader loves the insurrectionists, won’t call in the guard, and many of the inciters who serve in Congress acquitted him of doing what everyone watched him do on TV?
Additionally, the encyclopedia emphasizes a couple more really important conditions — let’s call them insurrection Viagra. “Economic crises and natural disasters can also increase the risk of conflict.” Emergencies create more rallying cries — grievances with government. Pretty certain most sociologists and economists would agree mass deaths, a pandemic lock-down, wide-scale unemployment and thousands of lost businesses are powerful insurrection foreplay.
Finally, I added a category not defined in Britannica — amplification of pre-existing grievances. Initially, I coded for four pre-existing grievances — big government, big brother, the new-comer big tech, and the golden-oldy socialism. For model simplicity, however, I combined all these amplified grievances into to a single condition — fear of the Deep State. I dubbed this “The Q-effect.”
So let’s review our simple analytic simulation model (HAL 2021):
Political Deprivation? Aggrieved white people who want their stolen country back, check.
Perceived Weakness of the State? Our President loves insurrectionists, inciters continue to serve in Congress, and the Supreme Court majority believes in fantom voter fraud, but not in freshly polished Jim Crow laws. Weak state, check.
Organizing Principle? A stolen presidential election, check.
Economic Crisis and Natural Disasters? Pandemic deaths, lock downs and wide-scale unemployment, check.
Amplification of Pre-existing Grievances? Intense anger amongst millions over the loss of the entire country to the abortion-loving, socialist, atheist, latte-drinking, deep-state pedophiles. Q-effect, check.
Having run various simulations both minimizing and amplifying variables in my insurrection model, the results were consistent and chilling. Incidentally, big mistake naming my model dashboard HAL; it keeps calling me Dave. More eerily and to the point, rather than identify probabilities of a civil war, HAL just keeps repeating the same four words over and over:
“Take our country back!”
Historical Parallels to 6 January— The Election of 1860
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Abraham Lincoln, 1860 election
“We did not send him (Senator Pat Toomey) there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, or whatever he said he was doing.” Dave Ball, Chairman of the Washington County PA Republican Party, 2021
While this famous Lincoln quote from the 1860 election stands in stark contrast to eloquence of modern Republican rhetoric, it is but one way history can help us compare and contrast similar events. Although history does not describe it thus, arguably the 1860 election was and still is the most contested election in our nation’s history. Within weeks after this election and without a shot being fired, seven states had already seceded from the Union. It would be months before the first engagement of the Civil War occurred at Fort Sumter. If you are an American history professor at Columbia like Barbara Fields, you might argue the contest of 1860 election has never been resolved.
Was 6 January our post-election Fort Sumter moment? Is a Bull Run moment coming this Summer? What happens next remains to be seen, but given 70% of Republicans still believe the election was rigged, we can likely agree the core grievance is not going away any time soon. Particularly when right-wing media, the inciters in Congress, and our former President continue to promote lies about voter fraud.
Another parallelism between 1860 and 2020 elections is the aggrieved share the same core underlying social grievance — they are trying to take our country away; they threaten our way of life. In 1860, the main grievance charged abolitionists with insurrection; riling up Confederate property, slaves who dared not to be. The threaten way of life was an economy based on slavery.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell
In 2021, the social grievance has hardly changed, albeit it the aggrieved has a more diverse approach to hate. Now they see Black Lives Matter as the insurrections, but only as part of a wider conspiracy of socialists, elitists, immigrants, anti-christians, Jews (expect those living in Israel protecting the Temple Mount Jesus portal), and LGBTQ Americans. Hyperbolic; maybe. I’m just reading their signs.
“Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you. It’s not pie.” Anonymous
Insurrection, Rhetoric and Syntax
While I’m confident my model simulations indicate America is already in a civil war, HAL is being coy. Not sure why AI developers thought programming that human characteristic made sense? Regardless, I know all the key indicators of an ongoing insurrection are blinking red and the social scientists are still debating the semantics of an uprising.
I needed to press on, to trust that HAL’s seemingly incoherent answer has coherency. Take our country back? I resolved to trust HAL — the model is pointing me to rhetoric and syntax. I needed to better understand the language of insurrection and I know a perfect tool for the job.
One modern data analytics tool is cluster analysis. In simple terms, software scans large relevant data sets and identifies the most frequently used words and phrases. With this tool, one can synthesize the core rhetoric underlining a market, demographic, community, or culture.
A quick analysis of insurrection rhetoric yields unambiguous results. Take our country back, rigged election, and make America great again. These are the most common rallying cries of the insurrection universe. Moreover, my computer model HAL thinks one is so important, he won’t shut up about it:
Take our country back? Who is going to do the taking; from whom; who owned it previously; back to when?
I decided the best use of my time would be to study the syntax of HAL’s message. I started old school and simply diagrammed the sentence.
First, there is no subject; who’s going to do the taking? My experience with syntax has taught me that reflexive verbs are quite handy when the subject doesn’t want to be directly associated with the action or object. A good example, “mistakes were made.” You know, the go-to phrase responsible leaders use when they don’t want to take responsibility.
Use of the imperative “take back” is also striking, almost militaristic, e.g., take back that hill! Also, it definitely doesn’t sound very democratic. Echoes of Joey Zasa in Godfather III; “… you won’t give, I’ll take!” (Look out Michael Corleone, incoming!)
Finally, the direct object — our country. Pretty sure our Constitution did not assign ownership of our country to anyone, but whoomp there it is.
So now we at least have some insight into the motivation and grandeur of the insurrection, but we’re still left with identity ambiguity — the missing subject. Who’s is going to take our country back and from whom or to when?
Make America Great… Again
While the four-letter phrase make America great again was certainly not Mr. Trump’s invention, he and his followers have unabashedly coopted it just like Ronald Reagan did from Barry Goldwater in 1980 and he from Alexander Wiley in 1964. Regardless, the question is does this mantra share anything in common with “take our country back,” and if yes, could it help us better interpret HAL 2021’s message?
Like our first sentence diagram, there is no subject, no actor. Also, the modifiers back and again infer previous ownership, time travel, or both. If someone is claiming ownership, it’s easy to understand why they would want it back. If we are going back, back to when? Who or what is the subject of these mantras? Who’s mantras are they?
I Alone Can Fix This
“The system is rigged by Democrats… I alone can fix it… I will restore law and order.” Donald Trump, 2016 Republican Convention
Could the mystery subject of all these mantras, the fixer, the maker of American greatness and taker-backer of our country be that obvious — aren’t all these mantras Trump mantras? Have I solved the mystery of the subject of our insurrection-model simulations? Is HAL trying to tell us Trump is instigating a civil war?
I’m leaning heavily toward the affirmative, but no time to time to extrapolate further. One mystery left; back to where; when? My model and syntax analysis seems to have identified the chief inciter. All I need now is confirm Trump’s historical perspective of American greatness — when WAS America great Donald?
Robber Barons and Jim Crow
“If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship, etc., etc. And then I would say, yeah, prior to, I would say during the 1940s and the late ’40s and ’50s we started getting, we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.” Donald Trump, New York Times Interview, March 2016
In 2016, Trump identified two periods of American greatness. The first was the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. Trump emphasized the greatness of this period was its entrepreneurship. While an interesting euphonism for robber-baroning — not exactly a workers paradise for the average Joe, unless you were a well-paid Pinkerton-Agency goon hired to attack union organizers. Also, not a great time to be female, a child laboror, any worker, Black, Brown, Asian, Eastern European, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Catholic, etc.
The other period was post-WWII 40s and 50s, which for Trump was a time when “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody.” Sounds like Al Capone reminiscing about his glory days. Also Donald, you left out that whole Roy Cohn led witch hunt thing. Imagine someone in modern America trying to scare the county into believing a deep state of socialists that secretly run and undermine America.
There is one obvious shared characteristic of these great American Eras. Both are periods in our history that no sane woman, person of color, non-Christian, or member of the LGBTQ community would ever want to revisit.
What War Looks Like in the 21st Century
Academic discussions about social-science, data science, and language syntax are all well as good, but what about direct and demonstrable evidence of an actual war? Only four people died as a result of January 6. Yes, there are threats of more skirmishes — domestic terrorist threats — but not war.
So how can America be in a civil war when there is no shooting going on? Welcome to world of hybrid warfare, an information war to influence Americas that their country is being stolen by Democrats and the deep state through voter fraud.
In warfare, preparation of the battle space is usually the first salvo fired, not mortars or missiles. Some preparations are done years in advance. In modern warfare, preparation of the battle space is accomplished largely through information operations, specifically influence campaigns.
Pundits can make these sound exotic and sexy with terms like bots and deep fakes, but these operations are as simple as advertising. Campaigners simply manipulate truth in various media to influence people to believe something that motivates said people to purchase toothpaste, vote Republican, or even to take up arms against our constitutionally elected government.
“Non-linear warfare is comprised of various elements from conventional warfare, unconventional warfare, political, and even economic means but its success hinges on an initial information operation campaigned that is subsequently exploited by special operations forces once it has reached a specific point.” Bret Perry — Small Wars Journal, August 2015
Trump’s non-linear war stated with his candidacy. The initial information operation began early in the 2016 campaign when Roger Stone’s political action committee launched a Stop the Steal website to fundraise ahead of that election and to set the play of the rigged-election card. Trump talked about it repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. Even having fairly won the election, Trump’s influence campaign of lies about rigged elections and voter fraud never stopped — he talked about it for his entire presidency. Today its all he talks about.
Stop the Steal was simply an information bomb, one that could be detonated when the time was right. That was after Trump fairly lost the 2020 election. The initial information operation campaign was exploited on 6 January by a special force of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the later providing Stone security for the Stop the Steal rallies. Non-linear warfare.
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Garry Kasparov
The Big Lie
The primary problem with this kind of manipulative propaganda — voter fraud and rigged elections — is that it’s easy to spot because it so obviously false. The problem for modern media consumers is the ability for such propaganda to hide in plain sight, even when proof of the voter-fraud big lie is literally documented in one of Trump own lawyer’s legal defense.
“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” wrote Sidney Powell’s attorneys in a recent court filing in a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Her lawyers argued “Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims,’ which supports the defendant’s position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”
The implications of this legal defense are astounding. First, it is a tacit acknowledgment that the defendant filed frivolous lawsuits based on information no reasonable person would conclude were truly findings of fact. It also means the 70% of Republicans who still believe the election was rigged are unreasonable people — they’ve concluded these were statements of fact.
When contextualized, the shear absurdity of this conspiracy theory is self-evidence. To be true, it would mean the U.S. Supreme Court, including three Trump-appointed judges, were complicit in a stolen election. That Federal and State Court judges, including Trump-appointed judges, and Republican governors and states attorney were part of this conspiracy. That investigators in Trump’s own Justice Department were in on the steal. That Bill Barr, Trump’s Roy Cohen, was in on it. A conspiracy of people Trump hand-picked? Even Q can’t even make that dog hunt.
“Propaganda doesn’t work because it’s believable, it works because it speaks to peoples’ beliefs.” R. Scott McCall
Who’s Been Talking About Civil War?
If the idea of an on-going civil war hasn’t penetrated your infosphere yet, i.e., what the hell is this author talking about, it’s important at this juncture to identify those that have been talking about civil war — they’ve been doing it for a long time.
For example, in an eerily prescient tweet in 2019, Congressman Steve King of Iowa posted this meme to his tweeter account. Commenting on “folks keep talking about another civil war,” King sardonically pondered “wonder who would win?”
Wonder who’d win? The more important question is who are these folks that keep talking about another civil war; treason? Democrats? Liberals? Socialists? AOC? BLM? Antifa? Nope. It is the 6 January inciters, Tea-Party holdovers who traded their American-Revolution garb for MAGA hats. It is the believers of the great replacement theory like Congressman King, the white genocide theory that Charlottesville protestors chanted about. The shadowy group of elites like George Soros and Hillary Clinton conspiring to subjugate white people to minority rule. Hillary’s conspiracy to lock herself up?
More terrifying is the meme’s bragging about the open secret that large numbers of Americans, overwhelmingly right-wing extremists, have a massive stockpile ammunition and the tools needed to handload. If you don’t know what handload means and you are planning on buying a gun when the shooting starts, don’t waste your money. Guns only work with bullets and by the time you to get to Walmart they’ll all be long gone.
Epilogue
The bulk of this article was penned early April, but publishing felt like saying Beetlejuice three times — I didn’t want it to be real. But it is real. We are in a hybrid civil war and we need to acknowledge this reality if we want to hasten escalation. While the future is unknowable, it has a trajectory and we are heading straight towards a Bull Run moment in this country — Ruby Ridge on steroids.
We also have to shine a light on the insurrection’s underlying and discernable cause. It the shadow of our national psyche still trying to reconcile our history of racism and bigotry. Why else is critical race theory so terrifying? Only the shadow knows for sure. White nationalism is the insurrection. We need to call it what it is.
But what to do? On 7 January 2021, I published an article about the insurrection titled “In Plain Sight.” In it, I argued for a solution. Not THE solution, but a solution:
“A post-truth world is not inevitable and blaming technology — social media — is not the answer. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent propaganda and it doesn’t work because it’s believable, it works because it speaks to peoples’ beliefs.
The First Amendment is the foundation of our Democracy and limiting speech will only suffocate much-needed dialog. What we need to do is stop debating obvious lies and start litigating truth. That’s what a country of laws does. Libel and slander are crimes. There is no difference between yelling fire in a crowded theater and telling Americans to storm the Capitol because of false claims about a rigged election. The theater we watched last night was our house lit on fire by our President. He did it in plain sight.”
Litigate truth? Yep! It’s not a silver bullet and its not easy to do, but we need to attempt to reclaim a shared reality. One thing is for sure, we can’t litigate beliefs!