People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image).
I honestly don’t think the active duty and national guard units would be willing to fight each other. A lot of guard guys are former AD and AD gets supplemented by guard all the time. Some missions they even work side by side with active guard positions.
The states leveraging their guard units like this strikes me as highly presumptuous.
I was in the Army NG for 6 years. The president is still Ultimately the top of the chain of command and we swear the same oath to the constitution.
I just want to throw out there that it’s just not really like that. There is no chance of civil war from inside the army in this manner. The big green weenie gets everybody in the end.
Edit: like for example, we all wear the same unfiroms, they both do US Army on the front. They have the same MOS (military occupational specialty) We receive the same training, at the same places, and both go to overseas for deployments as well.
Usually, you get deployed twice during a 6 year contract for the National Guard. When they aren’t deployed the NG trains at home bases in their states and sometimes in large Active Military Bases for Various reasons. So it’s all very much intertwined.
I don’t know if anybody answered your question, lemmy is weird about replies deleted or not showing. AD is Active Duty, which is anyone in the federal component of the military i.e. not guardsmen. “Active” means full-time, and most guardsmen are one-weekend a month, so they are not active. It’s a little fuzzy, because if a guardsman is on full time orders, depending on where the money is coming from, it could be called AGR, or Active Guard Reserve, but they are not technically Active Duty (AD).
All you really need to know is that AD is just the Big Army or Big Air Force, paid for and run by the federal government, and the national guard is distinct from AD because of split loyalty to state and federal govt, and they are usually paid by the state. Otherwise, same regulations, same uniforms, same bad leadership.
Guard units are also only under state control until they’re not. By the book anyway the DoD(?) can say “okay you’re activated under federal orders now, so you are now active duty, do this instead”.
I’d love to think this is true but when I was active back in the day there were a LOT of right wing militant nuts. I can only assume that’s skyrocketed in the years since.
i keep seeing comments like this. i want to point out texas has a LOT of poor and uninsured people, but the state economy is pretty decently sized with a lot of business investment.
that’s not really a bad thing for preventing secession. you think those with energy and tech money want their shit fucked up by Abbott and MAGA?
I’m an american and an idiot. I thought the National Guard was a Federal organization?
Regardless Governor Abbott is a hateful idiot, along with all of the other leaders in Texas. I just left Texas because I can’t handle paying their salaries anymore, though I went to Louisiana where they are somehow more corrupt but also bigger idiots.
It is. It got federalized during World War 1 and later the supreme Court basically ruled that the federal government wasn’t allowed to do that but they weren’t going to make the federal government give control back to the individual states anyway.
These days some states have state guards, but not all do. Of those that do, a significant amount are absolute jokes. It’s fairly logical, of course. What state has needed an army in the last hundred years?
I don’t think the conservatives are sufficiently unified to form a single opposition army. The problem with basing your appeals on hating “outsiders” is that you end up with a lot of internal hatred too. There’s also a strong undercurrent of “no one can tell me what to do” that makes central control unlikely.
What seems more likely are terrorist incidents, carried out be individuals and small groups, without any overall communication or strategy. We’re already seeing some of that. The lack of coordination won’t prevent it from happeing, but will prevent it from achieving anything.
I don’t think there are very many people within the MAGA movement who honestly want to resort to violence, whatever they tell themselves. The ones who are actually willing are the ones who wanted to hurt someone anyway. Politics provides them with an excuse, not a motivation.
I think we’re going to have a nasty time for a while, but I don’t think a right-wing takeover by violence has any chance of happening. I’m much more worried about a political takeover that then turns into an authoritarian coup. The left-wing has a much better chance of organizing as a whole, but I don’t think there are that many people ready to fight from that side either, but that could change as conditions get worse.
The right has been used, and steadily intensifying stochastic terrorism for a while now. You’re right, it’s not a strategy for a military takeover of the US. It’s just one step in the political takeover.
There is many more people in the states that would be a Union Army, the fools that would wage war on the United States would be defeated and most Americans wouldn’t even need to do anything but watch
The real problem is that they cut us up along crazy lines and lump the second and third groups together, so that the nice bluish-purple i see out my window looks bright red from space.
Oh, this’ll be fun in the future when people try to whitewash it. We’ll have another chance to follow up by asking, “a state’s right to what, specifically?”
No, the civil war 2 looks like mass shootings and terrorists attacks. It started with the Oklahoma City Bombing. Liberals just refuse to acknowledge it’s existence.
There’s an argument to be made, though, tha the US has always been in a state of civil war. The Spartans would symbolically declare war on their slaves every year. That’s kind of what slavery is: a constant war on a portion of the population. That’s aside from the whole genocide of native folks. Since the 13th amendment didn’t actually ban slavery, it never ended and if you look at standing rock, you know that whole native genocide thing never ended either.
Then when you contextualize all this with stuff like the Red Summer, you realize the recent violence is just the normal terrorism that white supremacists do every now and then to get control back. There probably won’t be a war with two side, more just escalation violence from one side leading to the systematic murder a huge chunk of the population. The question is if it will be officially sanctioned like the Holocaust, or continue with the ad-hoc stochastic terrorism like the Rwandan genocide and the Serbian ethnic cleansing.
I expected more snipers, bombings, and attacks on infrastructure but if Trump wins it’s definitely gas chambers.
Democrats are too afraid of “real war” to actually do something about this. If they did they might have to deal with the mess for real and open themselves up to political challengers from the left.
A good portion of Democrat voters are boomers who created this reality by selling off everybody’s futures to corporations. It’s not that they’re afraid, this is precisely what they had in mind.
I can’t speculate as to what Abbot wants, but he’s definitely asking for an armed confrontation with the U.S. Military, and as a Texan, I think Biden should give only Abbot exactly that.
I’m not aware of anything outside of the civil war. There have been impeached governors sure, but the feds stepping in to stop one or more states from being egregiously bad happened only once that I know of.
They’re just trying to “get out the vote” by forcing Biden to do something that they can point to and say “See! You were right all along! The federal government is going to invade and put you all in FEMA camps and make your children go to public school where they will be turned gay!!!”
I realize that that sounds absolutely stupid and it is. If I hadn’t already watched exactly that happen with Jade Helm I would never have believed that people could be that incredibly stupid, but it did and they are. Sigh.
I really hope Biden doesn’t take the bait and just deals with it after the election.
Same shit, different election:
“ On April 28, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the operation, writing: “During the training operation, it is important that Texans know [that] their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed”, and requesting “regular updates on the progress and safety of the Operation”.”
Wow wiki even has a whole section on conspiracy theories. I feel stupider even reading that. Only makes sense under projection; the far right wants to do exactly what they project onto others.
Apparently our generals take those very seriously. I had fantasies Mattis was going to stab Trump with a steak knife to stop him from pulling a Stillson. IRL, Mattis said I’ll get on that right away, sir …and then just didn’t.
I’m pretty sure Mattis was the top ranking agent of the Deep State and that figured into why he got replaced with Esper. In the meantime, there’s a long chain of officers who are eager to interrupt an unnecessary nuclear exchange.
The states are beginning to openly disrespect the authority of the federal government. Texas Gov. Abbott directly said he believes Texas State law supercedes federal law. There is no basis for that position in law; the law dictates exactly the opposite. If Texas refuses to respect the authority of the United States of America and the rulings of the Supreme Court, the only way to resolve that is civil war.
What is curious to me is these are state departments disagreeing, though the previous civil war was fought between federal and state governments with raised armies.
This time I was expecting the police vs. militants. Uncontrolled civil unrest. Portland and Minneapolis but spread across the nation, cranked to eleven.
In Minneapolis at least one police station was burned down, as well as some commercial buildings. But what is interesting to me is the degree of lethality law enforcement tends to resort to during even peaceful protests.
What I thought was interesting in Portland were the DHS Stormtroopers / LGMs abducting protestors without identifying themselves or their purpose, which figured into to escalation of the protests around the ICE building.
So yes, I’m expecting either white power militant groups or law enforcement, masked up and without identifying marks to conduct raids on minority neighborhoods and community buildings associated with left-aligned organizations like BLM.
That or law enforcement accelerates its usual overpolicing of non-white neighborhoods and covers larger regions until the people can’t stand it anymore and start organizing resistance efforts. In Nazi-occupied Paris, it was the brutality of the German occupation that compelled Parisians to fight back. La Résistance evolved from independent mischief-makers to a formidable fighting force across three years.
But you’re right, if it’s just protests and OWS style campouts, and the police don’t misbehave too much, it’s not going to be much of a civil war. But so far, we can count on the police getting their murder on when they feel the civil unrest doesn’t respect their authority enough. And unlike Ferguson (or the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s) smartphones with cameras are ubiquitous, so they can’t deny when they pull a hit like Tamir Rice.
From what I’ve heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they’re all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.
Everybody’s correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don’t think that the radicalization that we’ve seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It’s very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly “populist” parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it’s a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it’s been successful, you know, which isn’t surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren’t, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That’s mostly what the “radicalization” that you’ve seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren’t really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.
Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. “defund the police” gets turned into an argument for “fund the police”. If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.
I think if we’re looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we’re seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I’m not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it’s maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it’s still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who’s deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.
I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There’s probably not going to be a civil war.
Apologies, but too verbose and meandering to gain insight/understanding from (and I tried). Also, its murder trying to read that on a phone (vs PC monitor) to boot.
Appreciate the attempt though, thank you for that.
I don’t even come to a conclusion in the thing itself, but the tl;dr is basically just that this is all political farce, political theater, and the nature of the opposition’s control is too like. granular, too atomized, to be able to co-ordinate a large scale war. What we see instead are discrete “events”, discrete attacks, civil unrest which is corralled and channeled towards political ends by political powers. That’s what we see, we don’t see like, large scale organized institutional conflict, because the institutions are (mostly) all on the same side.
If you read the popular opinions around 1860, we have the same “we are right and we’ll show them” attitude building up in the new poor-people-and-women slave states.
The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).
So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.
We can beat them! The US Army, Navy, Air Force, and that other one that no one cares about, they don’t stand a chance!
Like, we can all joke about civil war and splitting up the red and blue, but, like, when it comes down to deciding who gets the nukes in the divorce, it becomes pretty obvious that it’s just super dumb to think about realistically.
Add comment