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 mean, isn’t this kind of keeping with the theme of US civil wars so far?
If I was creating a civil war bingo card based on history of civil wars in the US, “starts over how people with darker skin can be abused or not” would certainly have been on it.
This has to be purposefully not getting media coverage so as to not incite panic/public support, right? When I saw the first ruling posted by Gov Abbott it seemed almost like a secessionist rant, but it’s NO WHERE to be seen in MSM
Them defying the supreme court is a step they haven’t taken before. It forces Biden to respond or look incredibly weak. Either he allows a red state to actively break federal law and make treasonous statements or he arrests Abbott. It’s not just drama anymore.
No one in the National Guard is going to stop the CBP from cutting the fence down because their pension is on the line. The government of Texas doesn’t control that.
They were ordered to stop putting the fence up, ignored it, and continued to put the fence up. Yes, if the Texas National Guard is federalized they probably won’t refuse orders but that has to be an active choice by Biden to do. Until then, they are under the Governor’s orders which have been to ignore the supreme court ruling and federal law.
It is the definition of treason as the Governor is expected or trusted to obey federal laws.
Point of order: Nobody in Texas has been ordered to do anything. They’re completely allowed to put up razor wire under whatever rule Abbot cited. The court order was to allow the federal border guys to cut the wire if they needed to.
Legally, Texas is allowed to put up wire, and also legally the feds are allowed to cut it. That’s it. It’s a literal Looney Tunes situation. The nonsense from Abbot and the rest of the Rs is just chest-puffing.
They’ve been ordered to allow the federal agents to carry out their duties but adding new wire has “effectively barred” the agents from doing what the supreme court has ruled they have the legal right to do. Yes, they’re allowed to cut holes in existing wire but by constantly adding new wire and barriers, it’s actively defying that ruling.
I know the ruling doesn’t explicitly say “Texas can no longer put up razor wire” but this is like being told by your mom “your brother is allowed to play on the xbox” and you giving them an unplugged controller. They’re allowed to play on the xbox, you’re allowed to give them an unplugged controller, but you actively went against her ruling and earned a whooping.
Because the CBP barely tried to access it? I feel like the CBP was just told to wait them out, like a child. Let Texas have a temper tantrum and wait.
They probably had to wait for the fence cutting equipment anyway. This isn’t the DMZ border with North Korea. If there was a pressing reason to do it, it would have already happened.
Like I’ve said before, if Biden really wants to access it he could just sign the federalization order at 8 AM EST. All the Guard troops would wake up to a direct order to sit their asses down or lose their pensions. By 10 AM Texas time, the fence would be on the ground or the Guard CO would be unlocking the gate.
But that’s what Abbott wants to happen so he can escape this dumb situation he created. Biden is trapping him by not taking the bait. Now Texas looks dumb paying money to lose in court. Abbott wants Biden to do something so he can shout “Federal overreach!” and get donations.
I’d say its not getting coverage because Texas talks about seceding almost every year and states have been using their national guard as political tools for years now.
When the national guard was sent to DC after the insurrection, Texas pulled their national guard back because of “poor treatment”. I was there, there was no poor treatment. Texas (and several more states afterwards) used their national guard as a political tool to make the other side seem bad.
Very good point. I’d like to also think it’s not getting attention as to avoid prompting more idiots from joining in on the idiocy, but that’s likely me giving MSM too much credit.
I read how most experts agree that there will be some kind of “constitutional crisis” within the next decade. The impeachment 1, impeachment 2, and January 6 attacks already show the rumblings of what is to come.
Personally I find it doubtful that a full civil war would be the means though bc of the disparity b/t military resources at the federal vs. lower levels. Thus, probably something else, perhaps extremely mundane e.g. Trump runs for President, and bc of the Israeli conflict in Gaza and whatever else Russia manufactures between now and then Biden loses, then Trump simply declares himself Emperor.
Or maybe even that much paperwork will not happen and the government will simply never pass another federal budget again, thus ending the federal level by default of obstruction.
So probably not Civil War, at this time and over this event (no matter how much the clickbait media tries to get its clicks), but even so… something is coming indeed, down the road in some form.
Honestly, it’ll probably wind up becoming an American version of The Troubles. Republicans are cowards, and I doubt there are very many who are truly willing to fight and die for their cause. However, there are plenty of people willing to commit terrorist bombings and acts of sabotage if they think they can get away with it, and the US is huge. There are still plenty of places to hide if that’s the case.
And if Trump wins reelection, I can’t imagine many blue states putting up with it, and the same thing will happen from the opposite direction.
I don’t know how liberals will react tbh. Usually they try to work within the system, but if that should ever prove to become impossible… I haven’t studied enough history to get any kind of accurate impression, but it’s worth noting that nothing like it has been needed (within the USA) in the last hundred years or so, so whatever might come seems hard to predict.
I should add that Democrats are also cowards too, as are most individuals - neither side holds a monopoly on that. That’s what makes this all so dangerous: if something could be accomplished behind the scenes, then 99.9999% of Americans will simply go along with the flow. Exactly like within Russia, even the thinnest vernier of respectability would be enough to forestall a large-scale conflict. So the “constitutional crisis” might take the form of a fairly bloodless (in the wider sense) coup.
Or Republicans could just keep turning the ratchet, making steady gains wherever they can, then locking in those gains and turtling, obstructing as best they can whenever they do not hold a majority, as they have been doing for decades now. In one sense that’s even entirely fair - a democracy should reflect the majority will of the people - except Republicans are aware that white people are becoming in the minority now and so have been changing more and more over time who gets to be counted as “people”. e.g. gerrymandering, with the stacked Supreme Court members not opposing it so now it’s “legal”. Though even that is becoming not enough lately thus they are having to adjust the stakes higher, possibly doing away with voting altogether (yes they are literally talking about that, hence all this discussion about Civil War). They have already been allowed to push that far, which leaves fewer options for them to move forward with short of something drastic.
The trick is that to the uninitiated, much of it sounds reasonable at first - e.g. “states rights” means that we all get to choose our own paths, and what is wrong with that, isn’t that “freedom” in the truest sense of the word? The trouble is how the lie is delivered along with the truth: for one, the means by which those gains were achieved has enormous implications, which feeds into two, it was actually always a lie bc they never stop there and always push forward after people accept the first push. i.e., if only appeasement would ever actually work! However, like that famous saying “first they came for…”, where even if you don’t care about those first few that were come for, eventually they will come for YOU too, and if you had been paying attention then there would be no need to be shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked! Leopards eat faces off, and just bc one hasn’t eaten YOUR face off, yet, doesn’t mean that it never will. They tend not to change their spots, only their current targets. Like Brexit, many people in the USA won’t know what’s happening anytime before, during, or somehow even after it has happened.:-(
And some are even joining in with the leopards, neither realizing nor seemingly caring that they are just being saved as future meals for those who are true predators. These “facilitators”, together along with the much more numerous “collaborators”, collectively are bringing literal (neo-)Nazis back into power.
If it does go down, it’ll be rural people driving into cities to shoot them up, plant bombs, or drive people over with their trucks. That’s what it’ll look like.
“Will”? Check the news… it’s been happening for awhile, just not terribly successfully. I think we get something like at least one such event every other month.
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.
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 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.
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.
The US is the next empire to fall. I am a US citizen and i am taking steps to GTFO if needed. I have an e-residency and ID card from another nation and am working up to the investment for full citizenship.
I mean, the issue is that most of the rest of the so called free World (and in my opinion correctly so), especially Europe, depends on the US for defence, specially weapon production. Despite France constantly whining about it, insisting on strategic autonomy, as far as I am aware, when it comes to ammo production and air power, we very much depend on the US for production and designs (the design when it comes to aircraft)
The United States military should scale way back, but the European military would have to increase because of what you mentioned with designs for specialty weapons.
We have reasonable designs for almost all weapon categories, except maybe for airplanes, with the latest being the Eurofighter which is by now a bit dated. Regarding Tanks, the German Leopard is as far as I am aware a fine piece of engineering as well as the belgian FN-SCAR. However we lack the ammo capabilities (especially when it comes to artillery shells) to ever have hope of winning a protracted war (or simply keeping Ukraine alive). (also, quick side note, France also spends a great deal of money maintaining their own nuclear arsenal and weapons delivery system, which kinda makes the UK seem a bit puny with their dependence of the US for weapon delivery)
If the American empire falls, it’s not going to reduce weapons production or arms sales. Decline into fascism requires more guns and bullets, as they get turned against domestic targets, while guns and oil are among the US’s best sources of external currency.
This reminds me of Auroville, a village in India that’s supposed to be an Utopia of socialism and new humanist living. But when you look beyond the marketing and the veneer of spirituality, it’s just a bunch of people living in poverty and giving their money to a group of leeches.
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.
Ain’t no way this is actually going to happen, any attempt at succession will be put down by the much larger national military. There will be no civil war.
If they vote on it Brexit style it will be one thing. If 51% of the population shows up and votes 51% to leave we can consider it. Wait until that happens.
Eh there won’t be an organized civil war of large standing armies, but I can definitely see the Redneck militias doing some damage. If it dragged on long enough they could theoretically get organized somehow.
I really doubt that the politicians in the GOP states want a Civil war though, it is gonna be hard to extract wealth from the poor if the whole system explodes.
i also notice nobody mentions the possibility that cartels could try to take advantage of any significant unrest in some states. i doubt states or feds want that mess.
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