Do you hear that noise? 

I hear it too.  It grows louder by the day.  It’s not the Russian milblogger community demanding Putin nuke anything and everything in his way, although you could be forgiven for thinking it was. 

That sound we’re hearing, annoying at first, but now disconcerting, is the cacophonic clamor of politically conservative armchair warriors, posting gleefully from their keyboards, barely able to contain themselves at the prospect of a Second American Civil War. 

To their credit, they at least comprehend that such a war wouldn’t involve divisions of troops duking it out in the open fields of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. 

So, to all our digital Rambos, I ask:  How do you envision such a war playing out, and what precisely would your role in it be?  Do you picture yourself coolly and calmly patrolling the abandoned streets of a dystopic America, decked out in your zombie apocalypse gear, your Punisher t-shirt and your Navy Seals imitation sunglasses, pumping a single 5.56mm round into each green-haired, lispy-voiced leftist who cartoonishly pops straight up from behind bushes and garbage cans? 

Maybe.  Maybe it would be that easy.  But who among the enemy is fair game?  Armed leftists?  Unarmed civilians who support the other side?  Their property?  Their families?  Child soldiers?  Your lifelong neighbors with the “We Believe” yard signs?  Are we fighting simply to neutralize the threat and restore the ideals of our Founders, or do we, as victors, get to loot the wealth, or worse, of our adversaries?    Will we force them to perform public penances and take ideological purity tests like the Left does now? 

Have you seen what a bullet does to flesh?  Have you ever heard the sounds of a human being in their death throes?  Maybe you fantasize standing over them while they bleed out, giving them your best Sam Elliott glare, so they’ll realize in their last moments who they made the mistake of messing with.  Do you think it’ll be as sensational and fist pumping as Hollywood makes it out to be?  Or do you concede the possibility that it might severely traumatize you in ways you never imagined?  If you mistakenly kill an innocent person, is that something you’re prepared to live with?

Maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to kill somebody, at a distance, by pulling a trigger.  But what about up close and personal, with a knife?  Or a blunt object?  Or with your bare hands?  It takes approximately five minutes to strangle a human being to death.  Are you willing to actively kill a person for five minutes straight?  

These hypotheticals are based on the assumption that our side would win, and easily so.  Yes, I know, our side has all the guns, all the police, most blue collar workers, and all those true patriots just waiting for one more push and this time I mean it to entice them to revolutionary action.  But don’t mistake the enemy for a gaggle of pajama boys and under/overweight androgynes, and don’t underestimate the motivating power of their hate.  Have you turned on the TV in the last few years?  Who controls our city streets, the civil authorities or highly organized Antifa insurrectionists?  Whose symbols and bastions are being torn or burned down, ours or theirs?  Is it the Left or the Right who has ready-made armed mobs available anytime and anywhere with a simple click on social media?

Ahh, but that’s the inner city, you think, they can have it.  But if you think this can be confined to city limits, talk to the shell-shocked residents of the leafy suburbs of Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Diego, Chicago, and elsewhere, where daily Leftist reenactments of The Purge still somehow fail to sufficiently ruffle the feathers of our side’s loudest civil war agitators.  

As the hordes roam through your neighborhood, you might picture yourself picking them off one by one from the safety of your rooftop or camouflaged canopy.  But have you ever found yourself unexpectedly in the middle of a violent mob?  Kyle Rittenhouse (whom I support) did, and his courtroom recollection of the event wasn’t one of chest thumping braggadocio, but rather of the sheer horror of being engulfed alone, in the dark, into complete chaos with a thousand moving parts.  What would the McCloskeys (whom I support) have done, despite being visibly armed, if the mob decided to charge them anyway?  How many shots could they realistically have gotten off, much less neutralize dozens of running targets, before they were overrun and literally torn apart?

And seeing as the Left already censors any dissident on social media, what happens in civil war when they use their BigTech quislings to block not only social media but also cell phone use from identified enemies of the state?  Unless the local militias are planning to distribute CB radios by the millions, how could we communicate, much less mobilize?  Morse code?  Carrier pigeons?  Smoke signals?  What happens when the newly woke banking giants freeze our accounts?

We conservatives look into carnival mirrors and see rugged individualists and grizzled frontiersmen staring assuredly back at us, in sharp contrast to the helpless, amorphous caricatures we imagine every Leftist to be and who we somehow just know we could easily outlast.  But is that a realistic assessment?  Remember when we ran out of toilet paper for two weeks, and this country damn near fell apart?  Are we still lying to ourselves that was entirely the other side, and that we didn’t contribute in any way to that panic?  What will we by-our-bootstraps conservatives do when the food and gasoline shipments stop?  When the water and electricity shut off?  Have any of us, myself included, ever truly known hunger?  How much could we endure before brute instinct replaced rationality in our decision making, when we realize just how truly little control we have over our faculties in such desperate situations?  Will today’s compatriot become tomorrow’s enemy in that Darwinian struggle? 

We conservatives always assumed the military was the ace up our sleeve, that all-volunteer bastion of authentic, walk-the-walk patriotism, against whose unleashed might the degenerates of Seattle CHAZ mien would never dare raise their laser pointers.  And our military will always remain steadfastly conservative, right?

Right?

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay license