On the brink? Or over the abyss?

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump’s. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of di­Genova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

Of course, that last statement is ridiculous. If anyone is responsible for the racial divide we are saddled with, it is former president Obama, not Trump. The tone of the rest of the article seems more like a journey of discovery, rather than commentary on a train racing down a hill with no brakes. But you can feel the panic beneath the words:

Then there’s the persistent worry by some about the 2020 election. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday.

If anyone is obsessed with following the rules of law, it is our current president. But naturally, when observing the same phenomena the Left says one thing, and the Right says the opposite. But it is not the Right that is breaking the rules. Cadwaladr continues:

 Many leftists would certainly decide to pursue their ends “by any means necessary.”  Some of them have done so already.  Just ask Steve Scalise.  We have our breaking point, and they have theirs.  Our two nations hang suspended over war’s abyss, kept in mid-air temporarily by a tug-of-war of pundits, politicians, and overpaid attorneys.  Our “leaders” are not quite ready to repudiate the only instruments of power they know how to wield, but in their cynical maneuvering, they have broken the very foundations of the rule of law itself.  We have seen the two-tiered legal system and found it unworthy of respect.  We have watched in quiet horror as a federal judge in Hawaii stuck his dainty legal foot in front of Trump’s immigration order — but that’s exactly how the game is played.  You and I hold our breath, waiting for the shambling Frankenstein’s monster of formalities to eventually keel over and drop dead.  We wait for our side to finally draw a line and say, “Enough!” — or for their side to dig in and openly proclaim, “We won’t be bound by a constitution written by old dead white men anymore!”

The back and forth, tit for tat squabbling has gone beyond playground taunts from the Twitterverse, and cups of soda thrown on people wearing red clothing items. Even the most educated and engaged among us are starting to speak of actual war. From the Washington Post article:

Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson said the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, S.C.

Cadwaladr concurs:

…the people who believe that a civil war is now a real possibility are neither fools nor wild-eyed alarmists.  Moreover, the people who believe that, grim though the prospect may be, war might be the lesser of two evils have a daily strengthening case.  The Left has shown itself to be dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization itself.  We have not been faced with such an existential threat since European armies threw the Turks back from Vienna in 1529.  The fascists of the mid–2oth century, for all their loathsome policies, were not the kind of threat to the fabric of our society that we face now.  Bad as they were, they did not seek the destruction of Europeans as a people, or of European culture as a living, breathing thing.  Progressivism does.

Are we truly on the edge of open war, the kind with bullets flying, neighbors burning out neighbors, kids lying in barns dying of horrendous wounds, propaganda and confusion filling the air, no direction to go to feel safe for long enough to get a night’s sleep?

Cadwaladr believes the portents are not good, and we will soon have some serious choices to make:

The truth is that we, as individuals, have rather few decisions left to make.  The titanic nations of the Left and right are rising en masse — flexing their muscles and snorting menacingly at one another.  We cannot get out of their way.  There is no safe part of the country, nor any genuinely safe haven left in any other country.  This is a global conflict.  We have run out of frontiers.  There is only so much “prepping” one can do for an upheaval of this magnitude.  We Americans have not seen such a calamity on our soil for six generations.  What our ancestors knew, we have forgotten.  The Civil War of our history has become a dim and comfortable myth.  A new war leers at us like the devil, but we talk about it like a football game.  We may learn as human beings have always learned — the hard way.

William L. Gensert, in an article on March 1st, put it this way:

The third most populated nation with 330,000,000 people, America has an estimated 350 million guns in circulation; any effort to seize them will call for the total mobilization of our armed forces, city and state police, and the National Guard. 

People are not going to turn in their guns and politicians who think they will do so are being naïve.  Fighting will surely ensue as the forces of the regime go door to door to try to take them.  

Many of those empowered to confiscate weapons won’t obey orders.  Defections will be common and there will be fighting in the streets, limited at first, but it will soon break out into open rebellion.  The regime will become increasingly strident and many states will refuse to comply.  Using Democratic-run “sanctuary cities” as an example of state nullification of federal law, talk of secession will become rife. 

The ruling leftists will, of course, be surprised, and orders will be given to the remaining loyalist forces to put down the rebellion.  In the end, the death toll will far exceed the 620,000 people who died in our first civil war. 

To people who say it can’t happen here, I say history is replete with examples of places that no longer exist where people believed “it can’t happen here.” 

It can’t happen here?  Open your eyes, it has already begun.

Be safe. And godspeed.