When does civil war become necessary?
But the parallels between the plot of the novel and what we have seen after the murder of Charlie Kirk are eerie.
I noticed the first parallel long before the Kirk assassination. And that is the sheer number of Americans, of all political stripes, who are just not paying attention. To the extent they vote, and many people who do not pay attention, do in fact vote, they simply vote for their party's candidate de rigueur.
I noticed the first parallel long before the Kirk assassination. And that is the sheer number of Americans, of all political stripes, who are just not paying attention. To the extent they vote, and many people who do not pay attention, do in fact vote, they simply vote for their party's candidate de rigueur.
Both in the novel and by long standing custom, everyone the left disapproves of is a fascist or a Nazi. And anyone with ideas that the left does not want to hear, and importantly, does not want others to hear, is an insurrectionist. Obviously.
In the novel, the left celebrated the assassinations of Trump and Vance. Just as many people of the left celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. As I said at the time, they were giddy.
If you do away with merit, replacing it with some form of non-merit based system, you can expect incompetence. And if you then have the incompetents focus their attention, and everyone else's attention, on non-mission focused objectives and psychopathic delusions, the mission will fail. We saw this in Schlichter's book as well as in the Biden government. God knows we will see it again when the left inevitably retakes power.
I note one other point the novel makes: When the war started, we really didn’t know it was a war. It was more like a mass riot, except bloodier. (Page 245) I think this is an interesting point. Will the shooting war begin as armed city rioters, who are really hoodlums, shooting at various forms of federal law enforcement? Say this breaks out in twenty cities...is that a war? And what if, like Chicago and Portland, you have the governors and the mayors egging them on? I don't know; maybe something to watch for.
Personally, I believe that it will be a civil war when the president tries to nationalize a state national guard, and the governor and his commanders refuse. I think that is a pretty good litmus test of the definition of civil war. Reasonable people might disagree with this as a definition, but what if it is more than one state? I am open to a more transparent definition, but this time it is not going to be a clean North/South secessionist divide. It is going to be murky.
Now, what about guns? Make no mistake, leftists love guns. All types and sizes of guns. Much more than any conservatives ever will. But with two caveats. One, that government has a monopoly on guns, and two, that they control government. This way, they control all the guns and they can disavow guns at the same time. Gun control is a moral-sounding, virtue-signaling, propagandistic method of insuring that people on the right do not have access to guns, but people on the left, including criminals, do.
Finally, I have to add that I am not the greatest fan of Schlichter's novels. They read like comic books. Or maybe more accurately, as young adult novels. But I continue to read Schlichter because his works are so on point. No one else, that I am aware of, is even close to his perception of the danger we are in as a perilously politically divided nation.
Plus I think he correctly captures the attitude and goals that American leftists truly hold. And I believe he is correct in his assessment of what they would do with unbridled power. We know this is true because they would have gleefully imprisoned Donald Trump. Of course, back in power, they will gleefully imprison you and me.
They do not care about people or policy. No matter what they say or how much they preach.
They only care about power.