Stumbling Towards A New Civil War

A Reckless Driver In Minneapolis, A Reckless Sheriff In Philly, & A Caesarist Prez

Renee Good had less than one minute to live

Good evening from Budapest. I very rarely write twice in one day, but I just saw to very, very disturbing videos, with potentially tectonic implications for America.

First, here’s the footage from the point of view of the ICE agent filming Renee Good’s obstruction of ICE agents in Minneapolis. This is a screen grab; click here for the film: (Sorry, link is fixed now)

This clip shows Renee Good was coming straight for the ICE agent. Good, a member of a local anti-ICE protest group, does not appear frightened in the opening of the clip (see image at top). The woman filming, and taunting the officer — was her partner and legal spouse. I don’t know how one watches that video, hears an officer ordering her to get out of the car, then, as she accelerates, hears the sound of her Honda colliding with the ICE agent, and conclude that the cop had any other choice but to shoot (but many people on the Left are doing just that). We know from close analysis of another clip that she gunned the engine; you can see her tires spinning on the wet street.

I’m not a legal analyst, but I find it hard to imagine how a jury would convict that ICE agent after seeing the video above. I’m sorry that Good is dead, but if the attitude of her spouse is the same as her own, then they were asking for trouble. From the Daily Mail:

According to a video that circulated rapidly online after the shooting, a distraught woman claiming to be Ms Good’s wife dissolved in tears near the wrecked car as she admitted she had urged her to join the protest.

The same woman was seen in various clips as, before the shooting, she followed the ICE agents and filmed them. Later, she was seen trying to help Ms Good as she sat bleeding in the driver’s seat.

‘I made her come down here, it’s my fault,’ she can be heard sobbing. ‘They just shot my wife.’

Now, here’s the second frightening clip, from a press conference given by the Philadelphia sheriff, Rochelle Bilal, in which she praises the woke, George Soros-funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner:

Sheriff Bilal says any federal agent who tries to round up immigrants in her city and county will be arrested and charged.

According to Grok, the federal Insurrection Act of 1807 can be invoked under the following conditions:

• At a state’s request — When a state’s governor or legislature (if the legislature can’t convene) asks for help to suppress an insurrection against the state government (§ 251).

• To enforce federal law — When “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce U.S. laws through normal judicial means (§ 252).

• To protect constitutional rights / suppress domestic violence — When insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies:

  • Deprive people of constitutional rights, and the state fails or refuses to protect them, or

  • Obstruct federal laws or justice (§ 253).

This sheriff is taunting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. President Eisenhower did it to integrate public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the objections of state and local law enforcement during the Civil Rights Era.

Do not be shocked if Donald Trump does it again.

How will local law enforcement respond? Will all the sheriff’s deputies of Philadelphia County be loyal to Sheriff Bilal, or will they obey federal law?

I often cite here interviews with David Betz, a professor of war studies at King’s College, London, and an international expert of civil war. He has been saying for some time now that the countries of the West are headed for civil war, defined not as armies versus armies, but factional violence (targeted assassinations, bombings, riots, etc). In this clip from an interview he gave two weeks ago, he discusses his view that we are beginning to experience “polar factionalism,” which is the concept of people no longer disagreeing but feeling that they are part of the same whole, but rather beginning to side with their own faction, despite what they think of a given issue, because they only feel safe with their own side:

So, if you are a sheriff’s deputy in Philadelphia County, and Sheriff Bilal orders you to arrest a federal ICE agent, do you do it? You might refuse because you judge it is an illegal order. But you might also refuse because you believe that you are safer siding with law enforcement, including ICE, over the progressives who are mobilizing against law enforcement.

You can also imagine a situation in which one opposes ICE raids, but who thinks Rachel Good was shot amid a protest stunt that went wrong, but for which she bears blame — yet you may feel deep internal psychological pressure to suppress your doubts about the Official Progressive Narrative on the Good shooting, to side with your faction, because you somehow judge it to be safer.

That’s where this is quickly leading to. In the interview above, taped two weeks ago, Betz explains carefully and academically why we are where we are. He said all the signs of civil war are “flashing red.” Betz has focused his comments mainly on the UK and Europe — in particular, Britain and France, which are at the tip of the spear, in his view — but he includes the United States in his general analysis. If you follow Betz’s work, he has said that mass migration and failed multiculturalism is at the core of the issue.

Betz’s interviewer, Prof. Glenn Diesen, cites a 2004 National Interest essay by the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, titled “Dead Souls,” as explanatory. Excerpts from the essay:

Debates over national identity are a pervasive characteristic of our time. In part, they raise rhetorical questions, but they also have profound implications for American society and American policy at home and abroad. Different perceptions–especially between the citizenry and the more cosmopolitan elites–of what constitutes national identity generate different national interests and policy priorities.

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability–within acceptable conditions for evolution–of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

According to Huntington — remember, he wrote this 21 years ago — the elites:

[decry] patriotism and nationalism as evil forces and argues that international law, institutions, regimes and norms are morally superior to those of individual nations. Commitment to humanity must supersede commitment to nation. This view is found among intellectuals, academics and journalists. Economic transnationalism is rooted in the bourgeoisie, moralistic transnationalism in the intelligentsia. … They are sophisticated, urbane and universalistic in their perspective and ethical commitments.

More:

Contemporary intellectuals have reinforced these trends. They abandon their commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large. This proclivity florished in the academic world in the 1990s. The University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum denounced emphasis on “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous”, urged the ethical superiority of cosmopolitanism over patriotism, and argued that people should direct their “allegiance” to the “worldwide community of human beings.” Amy Gutmann of Princeton argues that it was “repugnant” for American students to learn that they are, “above all, citizens of the United States.” The “primary allegiance” of Americans, she wrote, “should not be to the United States or to some other politically soverign community”, but to “democratic humanism.” George Lipsitz of the University of California, San Diego, argued that “in recent years refuge in patriotism has been the first resort of scoundrels of all sorts.” Richard Sennett of NYU denounced “the evil of a shared national identity” and judged the erosion of national sovereignty “basically a positive phenomenon.” Peter Spiro of Hofstra University approvingly concluded that it is “increasingly difficult to use the word ‘we’ in the context of international affairs.” In the past people used the word “we” with reference to the nation-state, but now affiliation with the nation-state “no longer necessarily defines the interests or even allegiances of the individual at the international level.”

And:

The prevalence of anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals led some of them to warn their fellow liberals of the consequences of such attitudes for the future not of America but of American liberalism. Most Americans, as the American public philosopher Richard Rorty has written, take pride in their country, but “many of the exceptions to this rule are found in colleges and universities, in the academic departments that have become sanctuaries for left-wing political views.” These leftists have done “a great deal of good for . . . women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. . . . But there is a problem with this Left: it is unpatriotic.” It “repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of national pride.” If the Left is to retain influence, it must recognize that a “sense of shared national identity . . . is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.” Without patriotism, the Left will be unable to achieve its goals for America. Liberals, in short, must use patriotism as a means to achieve liberal goals.

But on the other side, says Huntington:

Overall, however, with only minor variations, Americans overwhelmingly and intensely identify with their country, particularly compared to other peoples. While American elites may be denationalizing, Americans, the conductors of one comparative survey fittingly concluded, remain “the world’s most patriotic people.”

In 2004, Huntington saw three distinct forces shaping the future of America and its role in the world: Cosmopolitans, Imperialists (e.g., neocons and others who wish to spread American values abroad), and the largest group, Americans who want America to be America, but don’t have any interest in America trying to force its values on the rest of the world:

The first, or cosmopolitan, alternative involves a renewal of the trends dominating pre-September 11 America. America welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods and, most importantly, its people. The ideal would be an open society with open borders, encouraging subnational ethnic, racial and cultural identities, dual citizenship, diasporas, and would be led by elites who increasingly identified with global institutions, norms and rules rather than national ones. America should be multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural. Diversity is a prime value, if not the prime value.

The more people who bring to America different languages, religions and customs, the more American America becomes. Middle-class Americans would identify increasingly with the global corporations for which they work rather than with the local communities in which they live. The activities of Americans would more and more be governed not by the federal and state governments, but by rules set by international authorities, such as the UN, the WTO, customary international law, and global treaties. National identity loses salience compared to other identities. In this cosmopolitan alternative, the world reshapes America.

By 2026, this attitude had become fairly common in America’s blue cities.

About the Imperialists, we know plenty. It was George W. Bush’s trying to Americanize the Middle East. But it was also Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s using the NGO-Industrial Complex to spread cosmopolitan American values around the world. DOGE revealed just how much the US Government, primarily through USAID, was involved with that. Here in Hungary, we well know how that worked, prior to Trump.

And then there was the third class:

Cosmopolitanism and imperialism attempt to reduce or to eliminate the social, political and cultural differences between America and other societies. A national approach would recognize and accept what distinguishes America from those societies. America cannot become the world and still be America. Other peoples cannot become American and still be themselves. America is different, and that difference is defined in large part by its religious commitment and Anglo-Protestant culture. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America from its inception.

These are the people who, by and large, voted for Donald Trump. Mass migration, which was a major issue that propelled him to power in both terms, is at the red-hot heart of the anti-ICE protests.

Finally, did you see the interview Trump just gave to The New York Times? It contains this disturbing, Caesarist quote:

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

This is going to be one hell of a year.