UPDATED: Is America Fracturing?

My Dutch friend sent me a link to a longish piece at Zerohedge that raises once again the issue of civil war in America. The piece begins with a lengthy and very interesting analysis of where Turkey stands vis a vis NATO, the EU, Russia, and China's Belt and Road project. But halfway through the author shifts gears. But the theme is similar--just as the old Cold War alliances are shifting and even fracturing, so too in America:

New Alliances Forming In The US...Civil War Is On The Table

The focus of the article is singleminded. The one issue raised is The Border, although state finances are drawn into that mix. Basically here's how the author sees a civil war developing.

We've seen that Texas and Arizona are very much concerned with the flood of illegals pouring across the border with Mexico, and are trying to address the situation with their own resources. More striking than this open conflict with the Zhou regime's policy of attacking American sovereignty, however, was the recent announcement by Florida governor DeSantis that Florida would send law enforcement resources to assist "fellow Americans"

“Helping our fellow Americans in their moment of need is always the right thing to do. The governors of other states have sent resources to Florida in the past to help respond to natural disasters. With the federal government unable or unwilling to enforce our laws and secure our border, Florida is ready to step up to the plate and do our part.”

“Florida is stepping up to the plate. Texas and Arizona, you’ve got a storm, and we’re coming to help you.” – Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey

Securing the borders and enforcing the laws of a country are the most fundamental responsibilities of any national government. In effect, what is being recognized here is that our federal government has in a major way abdicated those key responsibilities. For individual states to assert that they are taking over functions that have historically been exercised by the federal government is stunning in its implications. We probably haven't seen the end of this, although the hope is that perhaps Election 2022 may resolve this. Our author, however, sees this as possibly leading to an actual civil war if the federal government responds as expected by attempting to punish these states financially:

Here’s what happens next:

• The Biden admin scraps wall building and border enforcement (already taking place)
  
• Texas takes it upon themselves to step in and stop illegal immigratioin (already taking place)
  
• This causes Biden’s handlers to get angry, forcing them to wake him from a nap
  
• Now we have Florida helping Texas… oh, and Arizona as well. It is inevitable now that Biden will stumble out onto a podium somewhere with a blistering verbal attack “Krzwepilians bgterrr opswillvst” or something to that effect against the 3 musketeers, and then the Federal government will begin taking steps to reign in these recalcitrant upstarts. Wait for it!

I think we’re not far off the Federal government using their power to cut funding in these states.

This is obviously quite speculative, but the possibility does exist. If that should develop a response as the author envisions is also possible:

With their funding cut, the states will say, “Hold on, this is a two way street,” and subsequently refuse to send tax receipts to DC. And BOOM! We are into a civil war. It may take some time to develop, and there may be a bunch of things that get fought over and ruled upon, but when you boil it down to the rawness of it all, there is an ever increasing risk or, dare I say, inevitability to it that individual states say, “The hell with you lot,” and seek to go their separate ways. In theory this can happen without too much stress, but in reality Marxists never back down, so it won’t be pretty.

He goes on to point out the wildly differing financial conditions of Red states versus most Blue states. This type of fault line is one which could definitely aggravate divisions on other matters, such as The Border. Here is a summary similar to others I'm sure you've seen (I've edited out all detail except for the debt ratio):

States With the Most Debt

1. New York - a debt ratio of 273.8%.

2. New Jersey - debt ratio is 441.7%.

3. Illinois - a debt ratio of 468.7%.

4. Massachusetts - liabilities are at 305.5% of total assets.

5. California - a debt ratio of 120.5%. 

States With the Least Debt

1. Texas - debt ratio is 62.5%.

2. Florida - debt ratio is 40.9%.

3. Alaska - third-lowest debt and the third-highest net position.

4. North Carolina - a debt ratio of 30%.

5. Tennessee - a debt ratio of 17.3%.

The point as I see it with regard to these financial fitness numbers is twofold: there are issues beyond the border that divide the states, and nothing gets people's attention more quickly than pocketbook issues like, Who's gonna pay for all that debt? Further, the very real geographical divide is also apparent. Just as importantly, but what should be apparent after a moment's reflection, is that the five Blue states are dominated politically by a few large cities, but in almost every case contain large, productive Red tracts that are geographically contiguous.

I suggest, however, that there are other flashpoints that are also becoming ever more apparent as the Zhou regime relentlessly chooses to infuriate the normal parts of the country by pushing wildly unpopular policies—gun control, open borders, anti-white indoctrination in the schools, promotion of sexual curiosities, on and on. People are getting angry.

Again, however, beyond given policies, crime has become a major concern in ways that we haven't seen in nearly 30 years. A lot has changed in those 30 years, and one major change is that the legacy media no longer has a stranglehold on information. People are finding out about the policies they detest, and the violence of life in America's big--and very Blue--cities is on full and graphic display.

Interestingly, The Atlantic has a relatively perceptive article in the wake of Zhou's attempt to give crime the weather treatment--talking about it but not doing anything about it. As the article notes, that approach is unlikely to prove satisfactory to the country at large--nor to the voting public in particular. There's nothing particularly nuanced about the title:

Baiden Doesn’t Have an Answer to America’s Crime Spike

The president has few levers he can pull on to reduce the country’s murder rate.

Doesn't have an answer--full stop. Not only that, but the author in this very liberal magazine doesn't really attempt to conceal why Zhou "doesn't have an answer." It's not because of some outrageous or unprecedented complexity of the problem, it's about prog politics, pure and simple:

... the president has few levers to affect crime quickly, and faces political hazards in every direction. Biden has championed police reform, and many progressive Democrats have pushed for sharp reductions in police budgets.

The result was an unsatisfying announcement yesterday, delivered by a meandering Baiden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, about new federal efforts to fight gun violence.

The obvious thing to do is to hire more police, although the author carefully avoids mentioning that police are quitting their jobs in droves--in precisely the most affected cities. Commendably, he does note that this issue, too, is driven by politics--ignore the mystification of "what drives crime":

What drives crime—both up, as is the case now, and down, as occured from the ’90s until recently—is not well understood. Money can be used to, for example, hire more police officers, but training cops takes time, and besides, many departments are already struggling to fill open, funded positions, according to a survey from the Police Executive Research Forum.

Writing checks to hire cops might be politically untenable for Baiden. Although the president pointedly distanced himself from Democrats who have called for defunding the police, a huge increase in federal funding to departments would likely spark an insurrection on his left flank, ...

Yes, departments are struggling to hire--although the reasons are left unspoken, since they too implicate Dems. Note too that the author hints at his real concern: time. It takes time to hire and train police--even if you can find qualified hires--and November 2022 is rapidly approaching.

The problem is, the author says, that "six in 10 Americans view crime in the country as a major issue." That's a bit disingenuous, because the study he cites--which was co-sponsored by The Atlantic--doesn't just say that crime is one of many major issues. It's major issue number one. So much so that of the first five issues (out of ten) four could be said to be crime related. That strongly suggests that crime is far and away the biggest issue for ordinary Americans. Another interesting aspect is the contrast between #1 "Crime in the US" and #10 "Crime in your community." What that suggests to me is that most people feel safe in their own community, but they're very much aware of the crime problem in other communities--big Blue cities--and fear that that crime problem could come to them. There are nuances to the demographic breakdown of the study, but there's precious little good news for Dems. And so the author concludes:

Baiden has been careful not to overpromise, warning, “There is no one answer that fits everything.” That’s certainly the case, but it’s unlikely to absolve the Baiden administration in the public’s mind, during what may be a very violent summer ahead.

The other major issues--CRT, anti-white indoctrination, the war on normality and especially on women--are and have been for the last year or more on full display across the country. We're beginning to see major pushback at the grass roots level, especially with regard to government run schools. Most people send their kids off to these schools and avoid knowing too much about what goes on in them. But what goes on is being forced on parents' attention now, and they're very unhappy about it.

Again, over the last few decades the military has been considered a trusted institution. That's changing as more and more people become aware of the Left's attempts to take over and make over the military. Tucker Carlson did a brilliant take down of the despicable Mark Milley's attempt to defend CRT indoctrination of the military--especially the officer corps--in the name of education. Basically Milley claimed that, in order to understand our communist enemies, he has gone to the sources and read Marx and Lenin and Mao. Therefore, he disingenuously maintains, it only makes sense to read CRT authors in order to understand "white rage", which he says was behind the attempt of our grandparents to "assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America" on January 6. Tucker pounced. Why, he asks, doesn't the general go to the sources to understand "white rage", just as he did to understand communism? Why go to third party sources, the CRT ideologues? Why not read "white supremacist" authors? Check out Tucker's brutal takedown:

Mark Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t get the job because he’s brilliant, or brave, or because the people who know him respect him. He isn’t and they definitely don’t. Milley got the job because he’s obsequious. He knows who to suck up to, and he’s happy to do it. Feed him a script and he’ll read it. Yesterday, the man in charge of the nation’s weapons, explaining that he’s working to understand a concept called "White rage:"

MILLEY: I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read. And it is important that we train and we understand. I want to understand White rage, and I'm white, I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out, I want to maintain an open mind here and I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand that because our soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines come from the American people, so it is important that the leaders now and in the future do understand it.

CARLSON: It's hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He’s that unimpressive. Notice he never defined White rage, and we should know what it is. What is White rage? Well, like drapetomania, it’s one of those diseases that only affect people with certain melanin levels. It’s a race-specific illness. That’s what Mark Milley has learned from reading about it. That’s why he’s making his soldiers read about it too. They need to know.

MILLEY: I’ve read Mao Zedong. I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, our noncommissioned officers, of being "woke."

CARLSON: So Mark Milley reads Mao to understand Maoism, he reads communists to understand communism. But, interestingly, he doesn’t read white supremacists to understand white supremacy. Why not? Go to the source. He’d be fired for that instantly, and that’s the one thing he doesn’t want.

All of that feeds into most of the other issues that are roiling our communities. What is key, is that one by one the institutions that people trusted as a bulwark against chaos are being revealed as, at best, run by feckless time servers or, worse, co-opted by radically ignorant Leftists. They've taken over the courts, Congress, our schools, the churches, and finally the military. That's the danger point--where are normal people to turn? Are there no institutions to stand up for them? That is the kind of situation, the feelings of alienation, that can spark revolutionary movements.

Incredibly, at this point in our history the political establishment--all three branches of government--saw fit to insert the barely compos mentis Zhou into the White House. For examples of how truly he--but, more importantly, his highly educated handlers--are out of touch with the country they claim to rule, check out this article:

Baiden Goes Over the Slide With Incredibly Offensive Comment Plus More Confusion

Briefly, Zhou first confused the Tuskegee Airmen with the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study--or, more likely, never knew there was a distinction. Then he gave us to understand that Hispanics--to whom he applied the offensive Leftist term Latinx--were refusing the Big Pharma injections because they're all a bunch of illegals who are afraid of being deported:

Unironically using the word "latinx" is almost as embarrassing as implying that all Hispanic Americans are illegal lmao https://t.co/1noTFxBHhE

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 24, 2021

Unironically using the word "latinx" is almost as embarrassing as implying that all Hispanic Americans are illegal lmao https://t.co/1noTFxBHhE

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 24, 2021

I suppose there's good news in this display, embarrassing as it must be for those who remember what America once was.

Unfortunately, the suspicion that must occur to more and more people is that, just possibly,  nothing can be done. to fix things. The rot has penetrated too deeply and there are no fixes that our constitutional order is any longer up to implementing. "Anything that might work is politically impossible, and anything that is politically possible won’t work. Cosmetics, moral preening, lowering of standards, party politics—none of these will fix the country. ...  Instead, the elites will double down on what isn’t working and nothing will get better, except the monthly sales at gun shops."

UPDATE: Re the military. Just to show that the military is either unfamiliar with the Constitution of the United State or doesn't actually give a rip ...

Let this sink in. Tucker Carlson on live Fox TV called Gen Mark Milley the Chairman of the JCS “Stupid” and a “Pig”. Why hasn’t he been terminated? Who talks like this about a public official? Mark Milley …Princeton and Colombia. Years in combat.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) June 25, 2021

Where was Barry when the Left was calling Trump "literally Hitler" and a tool of Putin? He was right there with the Left. And to show that our generals aren't very smart--not smart enough to understand that their past Tweets are searchable--Barry McCaffrey on Donald Trump. "Who talks like this about a public official?" Yep, Barry does.