Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”
Capitulation by weak figures like Newsom is far and away the most likely.
There is a scenario where people demand action, and escalations keep coming to the point of widespread resistance and replacement of leadership for people who will disrupt the federal government. Work stoppages, tax strikes, and outright sabotage escalate into assassination and ambushes, while a debt crisis cripples the central government’s ability to respond.
There is no capacity for the states to resist the federal government in the current dynamic, but a debt crisis could degrade the capacity of the feds to the point that the balance of power shifts and the costs benefit ratio shifts with it. Nobody can predict when such a shift can happen.
Again, I don’t think it’s likely, even in the darkest timeline, but it’s possible.
The best course of action for us, I think, is to organize. Into innumerable groups that cooperate on a general forum on what we agree on, where we can cooperate publicly and privately as we see fit. Pledge to do something if a condition is met or not, organize into private groups, etc. The federation would be key so the government could not take down the entire whole with a pretext the first time there is a crime alleged. Or their own agent sends child porn to another agent and then they discover it and use it as cause to take down the whole.
So any protests we go to, do not just go march, sign people up into these groups, onto the general forum to join the groups. Obviously we need the actual development of that, but it could be done by the same people doing this fediverse it’s the same concept. This way the government and big business could not get their hooks into a limitless number of new instances that could be made when they corrupt existing ones.
But we actually agree with most of the right wing on a great many issues, it is only because we live in different realities, and listen to different influencers, that we are at odds on some of the most important issues. Like the Base Issue, that working people shouldn’t get screwed by the Rich without their consent. On such a site we could cooperate on such issues, and importantly could find and groom political candidates to take the candidacy from doomed to fail aristocratic sell outs dooming us to fascism, themselves supporting the oligarchy, seeing their reason for being as preventing popular reform and thereby allowing the fascists to run as reform.