Looking at the USA through open eyes, with Malcolm Nance and Barbara Walter
I’ve been thinking a lot about just how bad things could get in the USA, as far as political violence and systems breakdown could get. This weekend we even sat down and talked about it as a family, which was depressing and sobering. I absolutely hate the fact that we are handing our younger generations a country with so much division and conflict. Let’s be good parents and really keep trying to turn this situation around.
After our family discussion, I heard two interviews that made me think that I am definitely not over-reacting with my concerns. These interviews are worth your time. Please listen and evaluate critically. I know that I had to break through my own resistance at times, to really hear what these experts were saying.
The Mary Trump Show with guest Malcolm Nance
Counter-terrorism expert and intelligence community member Malcolm Nance has been sounding the alarm about Trump for more than 5 years now. He even published a book about the 2016 election BEFORE election day. In this interview with Mary Trump, he says that we should absolutely be worried about continued political violence and insurgency in the US. And, he talks about the phenomenon of “Black evidence” that says that Black experts are not listened to until white experts back them up by writing their own articles or books. And by the way, Nance says, this applies to experts who are women or from other marginalized voices as well. It has taken the mainstream media a long time to catch up to the warnings that experts including Nance, Sarah Kenzior, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others have been sounding for years.
God bless Mary Trump, raising her voice as a brilliant, reasonable person. I don’t know if I could have put myself out there the way she does, coming from the family she comes from. She is a thoughtful, talented psychologist, writer and interviewer. Her podcast is off to a good start, 6 episodes in.
The Truth Report hosted by Chauncey DeVega, with guest Professor Barbara Walter
What unnerved me about Chauncey DeVega’s interview with global civil war expert Barbara Walter is that she seemed so reasonable and logical. A big part of me wanted to think that someone predicting a civil war in the USA would sound radical and unrealistic. But she confronted my defenses to minimize cognitive dissonance head on in a way I cannot ignore. Professor Walter studies world history and the factors that predict civil war and domestic unrest—and the USA has them. Civil violence would not be like an 1800s Civil War, but could resemble ongoing unrest akin to what happened for years in Northern Ireland.
According to the predictive model Walter refers to, two risk factors predict civil war:
Anocracy: a type of government that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. It is something in between. And guess what—that is where the USA is now, as we have seen Trump and his allies’ efforts to push the USA toward autocracy. The USA was downgraded to an anocracy on January 7, 2021.
Ethnic factionalism: when a society begins to divide itself along ethnic, religious or racial lines, and political parties begin to organize themselves around racial and ethnic identity, rather than ideology, with the mission of gaining power and excluding everybody else. The Republican party is now running on no new party platform, no legislative agenda for the 2022 midterms, other than loyalty to Trump and Trumpism.
Keep an eye on what is happening in Ottawa, Canada’s capital
What form would violence take? Of course, we already have the January 6 attack on the Capitol as model, but what else could happen? When I saw the story emerging this weekend about downtown Ottawa being heavily disrupted by so-called anti-vax “Trucker Convoys,” I thought, “oh no, civil unrest in the USA could look like that.”
The “Trucker Convoys” are a developing story, and please be a very critical reader—it looks like this state of emergency may be caused by an “astroturf” operation that has very little or nothing to do with actual Canadian truckers. Facebook groups are being formed by fake accounts, supposedly in support of the convoys. It is early days, but don’t just read one story and take it at face value, including the story I am about to link to. As reported in Politico: at the very least, it is apparent that right-wing influencers and white supremacist groups are fanning the flames and promoting the standoff to a global audience.
These are hard times. Keep your eyes open, be good to each other, and stay safe.