Why I Don't Worry about Militias

And More Reasons Why I Don't Think We're Going to Have Another Civil War

“Got Your Six” by Day of the Dead-style artist David Lozeau

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to give you Part Three of why we’re not going to have another Civil War.

Last week I gave you my dog-poop theory of why we’re not going to have another civil war. This week I offer you an asshole-centric theory of the same. 

• Below are some of my own rules of thumb for American political and religious violence that I use for forecasting purposes. This isn’t an exhaustive study of anything; it’s just a set of truisms I’ve drawn up by reading a lot of news. And they appear to be mostly true most places most of the time rather than exactly and completely true everywhere every single time. (Next week I’ll offer another major rule of thumb.)

In the modern American context: 

1. If you advocate for political violence in this country you are probably an asshole. I take this as an article of faith. Just… go with me on this for a minute.

• Also, Very Important: Most politically- and/or religiously-violent assholes are utopian and altruistic and don’t understand why they scare people or could be perceived as cruel, barely-contained monsters. They see themselves as heroes, think they’re calm, civil, and well-reasoned, and will take great pains to persuade you that they are. (More on this in my e-books here and here.) They usually do not know that they are deluded assholes.

• The central emotional shock many of the Capitol Rioters suffered — later — was that the world didn’t see them as noble heroes for attacking the Capitol and that they were seen as epic asshole criminals instead. It shocked many of them down to their core. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government,” one clueless 56-year-old Michigan woman told a reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

2. Asshole groups in America are almost always defensive in orientation and will only be violent conditionally.

• Right wing militias almost never argue for offensive violence to achieve revolutionary change. They largely argue that they exist to heroically counter The Great Offensive they’re certain is coming someday from a Tyrannical-Federal-Nazi-Satanic-Liberal-Army (That-Doesn’t-Exist-and-Ain’t-Never-Gonna-Come) and/or by The Antifa-Snowflake-Horde (That-Doesn’t-Exist). (Recall that the only two notable firefights between militia-like people and federal law enforcement — at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993 — was when those raid teams went out to the house and the people there saw themselves as acting defensively because federal agents’ actions fulfilled the residents’ narrative and/or prophecy. I walked the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound a couple of years after the fact. It was an unholy — and an unholy — mess.) Once that Great Offensive begins — and they counter it — they fantasize about taking that fight all the way to the White House and heroically taking over the United States Government to end the oppression.

• The Boogaloo Boys are an exception to this. They argue that if societal collapse can be achieved through, you know, shooting up enough unspecified stuff, that a better (or white-ruled) America can rise from its ashes. They’re still, you know, kinda working on a strategy that would strategically-strat that into happening, you know, strategically. They’re still working on it — they’ll get back to us.

• Sure, there are exceptions to this like the Hutaree’s plot to murder a Michigan police officer, attack his funeral, and fall back into hardened positions — all to try to spark a Second American Revolution to ‘restore the country to its conservative Christian nationalist principles.’ And the Wolverine Watchmen’s plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And of course the Capitol Riot. Those are large and rare and often get thwarted ahead of time by assholes who rat them out (see below).

• And left wing “militia” groups only come out when there are Nazis in the streets to shout down and punch those Nazis to defend American democracy from fascist encroachment, you know, heroically.

3. Asshole groups may be part of the same broad ideological movement and they may radicalize, recruit, and even sometimes train together because they hold to the same broad narrative but they almost never operationally collude to conduct violence. Assholes do not get along with other assholes because they are assholes. This is why you do not see some Great Alliance of Violent Asshole Groups engaged in team, cooperative, coordinated, campaign-level operational assholery.

• Unless, say, they have an enormous opportunity, a clear path down a specific road, too few police between them and their objective, a crowd, and a clear invitation and call to immediate action from a hero figure. And even then they can’t keep it together for more than a few hours. Which they are not apt to have in the future.

4. Most assholes – even heavily armed ones – are not unstoppable, un-persuade-able, or intractable in their assholery. 

• You can talk to most of them and they’ll talk to you (without shooting you) if only because they want you to understand that (they think) they are doing something heroic or noble.

• Some can be out-argued and/or paralyzed through the sheer power of cognitive dissonance. A militia-adjacent guy I know was gloating online during the federal crackdown on unarmed protesters in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020 until I went full CAPS LOCK on him and said STOP MASTURBATING TO THE TYRANNY, CLEETUS — GET OUT THERE AND FIGHT IT LIKE YOU SAID YOU WOULD. Cleetus is still trying to untangle his brain on that and I won’t help him because confusion is one of our greatest assets because one cannot kill righteously in the name of ambiguity.

• Even most religiously violent assholes can be theologically thwarted and theologically disarmed. Here’s how. 

5. Frequently, the least asshole-ish in an asshole group often rats out the rest of an asshole group to law enforcement if/when the asshole group switches from defensive mode to offensive mode and preps to go Full Asshole. That’s how and why the Hutaree, the Wolverine Watchmen, and more were stopped before they could execute on each’s OPERATION FULL ASSHOLE.

6. And the Inverse: When an asshole in an asshole group starts looking like he’s gonna go Full Asshole – and the asshole group realizes that – they generally kick the Full Asshole out and sometimes rat out Mr. Full-hole to the FBI or to a reporter.

• A recent example of this was last month when the Virginia Kekoas militia kicked out member Russell Vane after Vane epicly weirded them out and made them conclude Vane was about to go Full Asshole. So they outed Vane to Ford Fischer, an independent journalist who covers assholes. (Nope. Unfortunate pun. Sorry.) Fischer published the story and the FBI raided Vane and arrested him for — among other illegal bizarro things — manufacturing ricin and keeping it in a glass jar on a high shelf in his laundry room where it would be, you know, safe from his kids.  

7. Every asshole who actually successfully conducted a mass attack was one who first joined an asshole group or asshole community and then left once he concluded that the asshole group wasn’t asshole-ish enough and out of frustration he’d have to go Full Asshole on his own, often in efforts to generate new literal “Shots Heard ‘Round the World” designed to inspire a transformative revolution.

• This is why almost every single political/religious mass murder by violent assholes in the United States since 9/11 was committed by only one — or very occasionally two or three — people who were radicalized by an extreme narrative but acted apart from or after they left an asshole group or community. (New America Foundation keeps a pretty comprehensive running list/chart of murders organized by ideology. Almost none of these were team-murders. Very helpful resource for when I need to check in to re-verify my Theory of Violent Assholery.)

• This also means Don’t worry when an asshole joins an asshole group; worry when he leaves. 

And this brings us to what I’ll talk about next week.

Just because we are not going to have another civil war does not mean we won’t maybe have some limited reciprocal violent assholery between solo Full Assholes. The character of that violence-of-tomorrow — who will attack who (or what) and why — is what I’ll talk about next week. Hopefully with less cussing than the past few weeks but the Lord was guiding.

But we are not going to have another civil war. 

See you next week.