antifa berkley protest
The group of more than 100 hooded protesters, with shields emblazoned with the words “no hate” and waving a flag identifying themselves as anarchist, busted through police lines, avoiding security checks by officers to take away possible weapons.
It has become clear to me that we are headed for Civil War. An article by Charles Blow at the New York Times makes so many assertions of Trump weaponizing everything I had to stop and double-check the URL to make sure I hadn't wound up at a parody site.

From a throw-away line at a press conference in Finland from Trump about 'ratings' Blow proceeds to go on a 1535-word screed that starts with Hurricane Harvey and ends with the dire warning that Trump may attempt a military take-over of the White House if he's impeached.

"How do you raise an army?" Blow asks.
You do that by dividing America into tribes and, as "president," aligning yourself with the most extreme tribe, all the while promoting militarization among people who support you.
Is it Trump who consistently engages in identity politics to sub-divide people into groups and label them with the worst monikers the English language is capable of suitable for polite company? Racist? Misogynist? White-Supremacist? Anti-Semite?
You do it by worshiping military figures and talking in militaristic terms.
Ok, he's right about that. In fact, I expected from the beginning Trump to align himself with the military in order to stave off the attack coming from the 'spontaneous civilian outrage' over his policies.
You reverse Barack Obama's executive order on gun control. As PolitiFact put it: "Obama's order made it mandatory for the Social Security Administration to release information about mentally ill recipients of Social Security benefits. This information would then be included in background checks, essentially prohibiting people with mental illnesses to buy guns."
As Breitbart pointed out, Blow is overlooking the removal of a person's 2nd amendment rights via the Social Security Administration which was an end-around by Obama to restrict gun ownership that abrogated due process.
You cozy up to police unions and encourage police brutality.
And he was rebuked by police for those comments, in the New York Times article Blow linked to. Simply lazy stuff. Trump is a boor, a thug and a bully, but we know that.
You do this by rescinding Obama-era limits on the militarization of police departments; a move that, according to The New York Times, allows these departments "access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets."

You do this by defending armed white nationalists and Nazis in Charlottesville.
Equivocating violent Antifa thugs and those herded into them by the Virginia State Police is not 'defending armed white nationalists.' It's speaking the truth. Truth that is uncomfortable for the race-baiting and intellectually-lazy.
You do this by defending monuments of Confederates who fought to preserve the noxious institution of slavery, and you do it by tweeting the coded language of white supremacists: "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments."
Our history is our history. We can learn from it or we can expunge it. Those who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it.
You do this by pardoning Arpaio, a man who joked about an Arizona jail being a "concentration camp," signaling to people that racist brutality is permissible.
Arpaio is an odious man. I have always found him to be a rank Authoritarian. But, that does not mean he should be denied a trial by jury because a judge decided this. That was a miscarriage of justice that no one in America should have to suffer. Our legal system protects EVERYONE as innocent until proven guilty.
You also do this by attempting to reduce or marginalize populations of people opposed to you: Build a wall, return to failed drug policies that helped fuel mass incarceration, ban Muslims, curb even legal immigration, increase immigration arrests.
Blow is saying that Trump, by enforcing immigration laws and doing his job to protect the flow of people into and out of this country, is lowering resistance to his rule.

The Trump Army Ruse

And his end game is to raise an angry army of disaffected white guys to run rampant in the streets brandishing weapons and chanting mindless slogans to foment a Civil War?

But I thought we weren't talking about Antifa.

Blow's entire polemic is projection. The Left has been doing all of this from the moment Trump took to the stage to declare victory in in November.

By tying it to climate change and the Paris Accord he's implying the planet is smiting us for our policy choices. Having a conversation is now 'weaponizing hate.' Saying things that you take the wrong way is some casus belli that we need to watch out for.

But, it is Antifa is a real threat to social order, not Trump's calculated pardon of Arpaio. What men like Blow want is for Trump to just give up and go away. His outrage over Trump's comments were exactly the kind of insane over-reaction Trump was looking for.

Blow seems to think if the Left hectors us enough the white guys will surrender their lives and ill-gotten property to their bankrupt morality and be grist for their new Soviet mill.

His tying this into some fantasy about a Trump Army is your clue that their plan is exactly this.

A war.

But, we're bad people for even thinking about resisting this war, don't you know. We deserve to roll over and thank them for our spiritual salvation at the hands of Antifa's broken bottles and flag poles.

It makes so little sense but, then again, so does the Marxist virus that infects the minds of most of the people writing on the NYT op-ed page.

It is also a harbinger of where we are headed. Advancing any social agenda not approved by them is a step on this path to civil war. Antifa is listening.

The Left wants out of the compact of states. They are rightfully scared of the backlash to come.