As Tim Pool and Rudyard Lynch continue to explore the possibilities of civil strife, conflict, and war in the coming months, I think it makes sense to weigh in on what seems likely, from having written about the inevitability of some sort of civil war back in 2018.

Lynch described the state of American politics — set within the context of patterns of history — as a sort of “equation” where some kind of conflict is the only answer that balances things out. This general sense of the direction of things is not capable of providing details, since there are too many moving parts for that kind of precision. You can safely bet against anyone who gives precise predictions in situations where precision is not possible… but in this case, the opposite of a precise prediction of civil war is not no war, but just a different kind of war.

At least, it could be. We can’t be too precise.

The reality is that there are always circumstances which might arise that prevent some serious war. In some alternative timeline, Russian might not have invaded Ukraine. If a few things were different, maybe October 7th wouldn’t have happened. But a circumspect observer and predictor cannot lean upon “what-ifs” and try to anticipate the unanticipatable. He must make general, probabilistic guesses based upon patterns, and upon the general direction of energy. There had been tension escalating between Ukraine and Russia since 2014, with creeping NATO presence and persistent American sanctions. One might have guessed that Russia would have to seize military access to Ukraine’s Black Sea ports as well as Ukraine’s fertile agricultural capital for economic survival in the face of sustained Western pressure… and Ukraine did seem to be a central hub of sorts for corruption of some kind. For a variety of strategic reasons, the invasion of Ukraine makes a kind of sense.

Likewise, the Arab population of Palestine has been slowly asphyxiated with creeping Israeli settlements for years. If things continued, then eventually, Israel would subsume all of Gaza like a python. If the Arab population struck hard, it might risk losing everything immediately, but they might also bait some kind of overreaction, and maybe even win something. The attack of October 7th was not the sort of thing one could predict with any specificity (in terms of means, degree of success, date, etc), but it falls into the category of escalations that one would expect, given the circumstances.

An eventual invasion of Taiwan by China is a similar likelihood: there is the means, motive, and opportunity. Taiwan is a little different because there is less of a cost to not invading, whereas with Russia — and especially with Palestine — there definitely was a cost to not invading. When the cost of not attacking an enemy outweighs the risk and cost of attacking them, war becomes a question of when, and not if.

It is within this framework that I predicted Civil War in the United States in the near future.

Again, by the nature of the context, such a prediction cannot be specific.

But we can think about likely scenarios.

In returning to the question of Civil War in 2025: what are the odds of such a conflict, worthy of being called a “war”, sparking off next year specifically?

I would say about 20%.

This is incredibly high. If you have a disease that has a 20% fatality rate, you don’t shrug that off as “only” 20%. You should be getting all the treatment and care you can. If worst comes to worst, you should at least try to sneak in a late life-insurance policy.

War is still less probable than probable over the next 12 months. But looking at odds like this, one would be foolish not to make some basic preparations.

Why 20%?

As I wrote back in 2018, war is likely because it is in the interests of those in power to wage war:

The Left’s investment in minorities united by their opposition to whites means that more immigration will lead to a permanent victory for the Left. If the Right manages to stem the flow of immigration, or reverse it, then it will win a permanent victory over the progressive Left. The permanence of victory and the high stakes of the game mean that no strategy will be off the table, so long as it works. And history is nothing if not an ongoing demonstration of the viability of warfare.

The political dynamic that has emerged between the Left and the Right is one of escalating declarations of evil. The right is comprised of neo-nazi fascists that hate minorities, gays, women, black people, and immigrants; the left is comprised of crypto-communists who not only hate white people, men, God, health, children (or, rather, love children in the wrong way…), and America, but in a spiritual sense hate reality.

For full disclosure, I believe there is good reason to think the latter sentiment is more true than false… but the truth of these sentiments is irrelevant. What matters is that this is the opinion that Americans hold about each other. Trapped in an obsolete, 20th-century political mindset, half of Americans think the other half are Nazis, and the alleged Nazis think the allegers are communists. The labels themselves invoke both the historical pattern of war, and simultaneously invoke the sense of an existential threat from an enemy (communist or Nazi) who not only seeks power, but who seeks your destruction personally.

The stakes that have been created by this escalating framework of enemy-identification are absolute and existential. It combines kill-or-be-killed with good-and-evil. Beyond the psychology, the progressive political strategy has weaponized immigration for political weight in a manner that threatens to permanently alter the demographic, cultural, and perhaps even linguistic constitution of the country. It has worked reasonably well, but this political vehicle happens to be a threat to the existing population, just as grey squirrels are a threat to an existing, native population of red squirrels (invoke the plight of Amerindians at your own risk).

Between this immigration and the absurd debt that Biden has accrued, many on the right feel that America cannot survive another term of Biden/Harris.

Because of the unconscionability of their strategy, the left is facing risk of retaliation. This risk was serious enough that rather than conceding the election, the Democrats war-gamed out a scenario of having the West Coast secede from the United States, in the event of a 2020 election victory for Trump.

This is to say, the Democrats already had civil war planned as a contingency in the event of a lost election, four years ago. Or, maybe put more bluntly: we are already in a civil war. If things never “go hot,” history books written in the 22nd century will record this era as a “cold civil war,” not unlike the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century.

It isn’t as if this tension has ratcheted back down since 2020. Things have cooled a little, but we have not “come together.” If anything, people have become more confident in where they stand, and there is simply less to talk about. At least across the aisle.

As everyone knows, elections are big, pivotal moments in the calendars of those with power. If war is a contingency, then elections are likely to be decision-points in whether or not to go to war, making the year after an election the most likely year — in any given four-year period — for a war to take place.

As a sort of reference point, Abraham Lincoln was elected in November of 1860, entered office in January of 1861, and the battle of Fort Sumter took place in April, just three months later.

So if war is highly likely (I think we can put a probability as high as 90%, over the course of the next decade), why only 20% in 2025?

The Democratic party has lost a lot of its support over the last 2 years, due to a combination of disillusionments with Black Lives Matter, with COVID restrictions, and with the media in general. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are so anti-charismatic that they will be hard-pressed to win active support. The party has ideologically opposed men and masculinity, yet men are still necessary for any serious war-fighting effort. Indeed, in the event of some war, the Left will likely have to depend upon immigrant men, and perhaps upon hard-left-wing activists who not-so-secretly wish to overthrow the Democrats only slightly less than they want to get rid of Republicans. The hemorrhaging of law enforcement in many cities has likely been a strategic own-goal (in the context of a war) since law enforcement agencies were the major military muscles that the left had political control over.

In short, 2025 would be a logistically, culturally, and strategically bad moment for the left to decide to cross the Rubicon.

But despite it being a bad time, it might also be their only time. They might feel that military-strategic considerations aside, it might be the last political opportunity to re-gain some sort of control. Without some sort of seizure, a Trump (populist) presidential administration will:

• maintain control of the Supreme Court
• likely gut much of the FDR-legacy state department (including the FBI and CIA)
• gut much of the media (since the media receives much of its funding from the government, based upon a now-disproved presumption that they are a “public good”)
• close the border, and even return many migrants and illegal immigrants (who are necessary for Democratic representative dominance in the House and in voting delegations)
• maybe retaliate with DOJ inquiries into corruption and collusion among Democrat activists
• ban or restrict the educational mechanisms that promote ideological leftism in schools and institutions

In short, a Trump presidency isn’t just a defeat, but threatens a total defeat of the Left in its current iteration.

The nature of American politics requires two parties, and if the Democratic party dies, then some new, slightly less populist left-wing party will rise to challenge Trump. It has to.

But the current iteration of the Left (which, interestingly, includes nominally “right-wing” conservatives like George Bush and Lynne Cheney) won’t be a part of whatever new alternative emerges.

The odds are still better that the Democrats will wait, try to rally, and win big in the 2026 mid-term and strike back for the presidency in 2028. But there is still a chance that the Democrats will say “it has to be now” when Trump wins, and institute what they had been loosely planning back in 2020.

…or, if Trump loses, that Texas and a collection of other, supporting states challenge the validity of the election and deny its validity, confirming Trump as president independent of the national numbers, and decide “we can’t have another term of this.”

Preparation

A reasonable person seeking an “insurance-policy” level of protection from Civil War ought to have some number of preparatory measures in place before January of 2025. I wrote a little bit about preparation in 2019, maybe the most important tip there being “move to where your team lives” (it isn’t a coincidence that I got my family out of the greater Seattle area in the summer of 2018). Other obvious tips would include:

• Have a good rainy-day savings account (4-6 months of income, ideally)
• Have multiple sources of income — bonus points for something online
• Have a good local social network, with whom you can exchange food, repair services, childcare, protection, etc
• Have good, reliable transportation that can move your whole family
• Have a decent weapon — something defensive, or maybe even something offensive. Have ammunition, learn basic handling, and practice a little bit of marksmanship.

These kinds of preparatory moves — which do not guarantee anything, but do provide a degree of resilience and flexibility — may not prove necessary in 2025. Indeed, there is an 80% chance that no war will kick off (and a 90% chance that if a hot war did take place, with secessions and overt, state forces engaging in gunfights, it wouldn’t affect your area anyway). But the likelihood of a war soon, sometime in the next decade, are historically VERY high. They say “prevention is better than a cure”; we don’t necessarily have the power to prevent whatever might come, but we do have the power to individually pre-empt likely possibilities, and carry on living good lives with a bit more insurance for the possibility of a historically common event.