The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Cyber dollars represent a major innovation within blockchain technology. In particular, they enable real-time transfers, operate without banking holidays, and provide access outside the traditional SWIFT system for anyone with an internet connection.
Users essentially need nothing more than a smartphone and an installed wallet app — no traditional bank account required. Another advantage lies in potentially lower fees and, in some cases, higher yields, since providers avoid the bloated administrative structures of traditional banks. Stablecoins undoubtedly represent a major increase in individual sovereignty — at least until issuers, possibly under government pressure, decide to freeze access to users’ holdings.
The fact that the eurozone has so far neither agreed on a digital CBDC control standard nor trapped citizens inside such a digital financial prison stems from several factors. One is technological. The threat posed by quantum computing dramatically intensifies the risks involved. A centralized digital financial system such as the euro-CBDC would face massive hacking attempts and manipulation from the moment of its launch. This is the classic weakness of centralized systems: they provide attackers with one clearly defined point of attack. Moreover, the European Union and the Eurosystem together form an overbureaucratized and fully centralized power structure that inevitably lags behind current technological standards.
For precisely this reason, decentralized financial ecosystems such as the Bitcoin network are technologically superior. Bitcoin is secured by a decentralized network of independent miners and node operators. Every participant defends the structure out of direct self-interest. With well over 100 million Bitcoin holders worldwide and tens of thousands of miners, an almost impenetrable protective wall emerges. Contrary to Nagel’s remarks in the interview, the commercial banking sector is obviously also resisting the centralization of the financial system in the hands of the ECB. The reason is simple: a full rollout of the digital euro would make the traditional banking business model — accounts, savings products, and transfer services — largely obsolete.
But the real reason there has so far been relative calm on the CBDC front inside the Eurosystem becomes obvious once one observes the speed at which global capital flees crisis zones. The introduction of a CBDC would signal that the ECB intends to build in a mechanism for capital controls, possibly in anticipation of a full-scale financial or sovereign debt crisis in the euro area. A dramatic surge in interest rates triggered by a selloff in European bonds would once again force the ECB to intervene as lender of last resort, on a scale potentially far greater than anything seen during the financial and sovereign debt crises of the past decade and a half. Such intervention would inevitably raise fundamental questions about the long-term stability of the euro itself.
That the eurozone will eventually face another debt crisis is hardly in doubt. The only uncertainty is timing — namely, when bond markets, confronted with Europe’s relentless debt binge, in which even Germany is now enthusiastically participating, will finally give the thumbs down.
HISTORY LESSON ON YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CARD: Just in case some of you young whippersnappers (& some older ones) didn’t know this. It’s easy to check out, if you don’t believe it. Be sure and show it to your family and friends. They need a little history lesson on what’s what and it doesn’t matter whether you are Democrat or Republican. Facts are FACTS.
Up until the 1980’s, Social Security cards expressly stated the number and card were not to be used for identification purposes. Since nearly everyone in the United States now has a number, it became convenient to use it anyway and the “NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION” message was removed.
Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. His promises are in black, with updates in brackets.
1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary [No longer voluntary],
2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program [Now 7.65% on the first $90,000, and 15% on the first $90,000 if you’re self-employed],
3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year [No longer tax deductible]
4.) That the money the participants put into the independent ‘Trust Fund’ rather than into the general operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program [Under Johnson the money was moved to the General Fund and spent]
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income [Under Clinton & Gore up to 85% of your Social Security can be taxed].
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month — and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to ‘put away’ — you may be interested in the following.
Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent ‘Trust Fund’ and put it into the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the democratically controlled House and Senate.
Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party.
Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?
A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the ‘tie-breaking’ deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US
AND MY FAVORITE:
Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?
A: That’s right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments!
The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!
Now, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!
And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it!
If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe changes will evolve. Maybe not, though.
Some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn’t so but it’s worth a try.
The party that spent a decade casting itself as democracy’s last line of defense has a candidate problem in Maine, and its solution is to make sure the candidate its own voters chose never reaches the November ballot.
When the chips are down, these civilized people… they’ll eat each other.
Graham Platner, the oyster farmer and Marine veteran who buried the establishment’s preferred choice by nearly thirty points, is suddenly the target of a coordinated effort to shame him out of a race he is about to win. The mechanism is narrow, the timing is suspicious, and the goal is unmistakable.
Maine Democrats want to do to Platner exactly what national Democrats did to Joe Biden in 2024, swap out the inconvenient nominee for one the people in charge prefer, and call the result a rescue.
The backdrop is genuinely ugly, and no honest account pretends otherwise. Platner’s record of online posts, the death’s head tattoo that resembles an SS insignia, and now reporting from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times that his wife flagged sexually explicit messages he exchanged with a string of women on an anonymous app notorious enough to earn the nickname “Predator’s Paradise.”
His wife, Amy Gertner, discovered the texts in the spring of 2025, less than a year into their marriage, and raised them with a campaign aide that summer. A current campaign official, rather than denying the conduct, quibbled that the number of women was closer to six than a dozen. Platner has admitted the account was his and offered the explanation that he simply forgot to close it.
That is the man Maine Democrats elevated over Gov. Janet Mills, a two-term governor with statewide name recognition and a record of winning. They were warned, repeatedly, and they shrugged each time. The voters wanted a fighter, and a fighter is what they got. The question now is not whether Platner is a flawed candidate. He plainly is. The question is who gets to decide what happens next, the voters of Maine or the party machinery that has already lost to them once.
The Tell Is in the Timing
Consider the sequence. Gertner raised the texts internally in the summer of 2025. The story did not break until the final days of May 2026, with the primary on June 9. The reporting was sourced heavily to Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, who left the campaign back in October when the tattoo and the Reddit posts first surfaced. The information has been sitting in Democratic hands for the better part of a year. It emerged at the precise moment when Platner can no longer be stopped in the primary, yet can still be removed afterward under a quirk of Maine law.
That is not the cadence of journalism stumbling onto a scoop. It is the cadence of a controlled release. Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi read it plainly, calling it a Democratic operation to push Platner out before more damaging material lands in the general election. Conservative analysts watching the statute have reached the same conclusion, noting that the influential voices demanding accountability arrived conspicuously late, only once the calendar made a clean swap possible. Nothing is hidden that shall not be revealed, and the people releasing this material know exactly which day they chose to reveal it.
Platner’s conduct was always going to surface. But so is the motive of those who sat on it for nine months and then deployed it like a scheduled munition. Both the deed and the maneuver are now coming abroad, and the maneuver is the more revealing of the two.
A Window Measured in Days
Maine law gives the party a path, but a tight one. A candidate nominated at a primary may withdraw by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July, which this year falls on July 13. The state party committee then has until 5 p.m. on the fourth Monday in July to name a replacement on the general election ballot.
The entire scheme depends on a single fact that no statute can supply. Platner has to quit on his own. There is no provision to strike a healthy nominee against his will. The party cannot fire him. It can only persuade, pressure, and shame him into walking away after he has already won.
This is why the strategy is not force but humiliation. Win the primary, the establishment hopes, then absorb enough public battering that stepping aside looks like the honorable exit. The model is not subtle, and Democrats are naming it themselves.
Neera Tanden invoked the 2020 North Carolina race, where Cal Cunningham’s sexting scandal handed Thom Tillis a seat and, with it, arguably the Senate majority. Others reached straight for the 2002 New Jersey playbook, when Robert Torricelli, sinking under an ethics cloud, dropped out and the party slotted in Frank Lautenberg despite a state deadline that had already passed. New Jersey’s Supreme Court waved the substitution through anyway, reasoning that the public interest required giving voters a competitive Democrat. Lautenberg won by ten.
The Torricelli precedent carries a detail the strategists would rather forget. On his way out, Torricelli asked, “When did we become such an unforgiving people?” It was a remarkable thing for a man admonished by the Senate ethics committee to say, and it captured the essence of the move. The party was not asking voters to forgive Torricelli. It was telling them their judgment did not matter, because a friendlier name would be substituted regardless. That is the same message now being prepared for Maine.
The Replacement Problem They Cannot Solve
Here the plan runs into a wall of its own making. If the point of removing Platner is to field someone stronger, who exactly is that someone? The name floated most often is Mills, and the irony writes itself. Mills did not lose narrowly. She was crushed, trailing Platner by close to thirty points before she suspended her campaign in April, citing a lack of money and momentum. She is 77 and would be the oldest freshman senator in American history, the very generational liability that sank her the first time. She has already moved on, endorsing a candidate in the governor’s race. Reinstalling her would mean handing the nomination, by committee vote, to the woman Maine voters had just sent home.
That is not a rescue. It is a restoration of the establishment’s first choice over the heads of the people who rejected it. The Lautenberg swap at least produced a fresh face with no baggage in that cycle. The Maine version, if it lands on Mills, produces the opposite, a recycled candidate whose defeat was the entire reason Platner exists. The thin Democratic bench in Maine offers no obvious upgrade, which means the window is narrow in a second sense. Even if the party shames Platner into leaving, it has nobody clearly better to put in his place.
The Most Likely Outcome Is the Most Humiliating One
For the plan to work, three things must happen in sequence. Platner must win on June 9, which he will. Platner must then voluntarily quit by July 13. And the party must coronate a replacement who improves their odds against Collins. The first is certain. The second and third are fantasies, because Platner has already told a town hall crowd that his party is “trying to destroy my life,” and that he has “no right to quit.” A man who frames his persecution as a reason to fight is not a man preparing a graceful exit.
So the most probable result is the one the establishment least wants. Platner wins the nomination, refuses to leave, and Democrats spend the fall yoked to a candidate they spent the spring trying to knife, while Collins watches her opponents wage war on each other. They will have proven, again, that the modern Democratic Party would rather control its own ranks than win a general election, and that its devotion to “democracy” lasts exactly until the voters choose someone the donors and the leadership dislike.
The people of Maine made their pick. The only real question left is whether the party that lectures the country about respecting elections can bring itself to respect this one.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sent a letter to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s office submitting his resignation, London-based anti-regime outlet Iran International reported on Sunday.
An anonymous official told Iran International that the letter had called out the fact that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had effectively taken over large portions of the government, and that the president and other high-ranking officials had been cut out of vital decision-making.
Pezeshkian, the letter emphasized, was unable to run the government or fulfill his responsibilities under the circumstances, and as such, requested to resign.
Anonymous sources told Iran International that the primary source of the differences between Pezeshkian and the head of the IRGC, who is believed to currently hold the lion’s share of power in the regime, was “the way the war was managed and its destructive consequences on the people’s livelihoods and the country’s economy.”
Khamenei hidden in secret location
Last week, US officials revealed to CBS that Khamenei is hidden in a secret location with little access to the outside world, only reachable through a “labyrinth” of couriers.
Even the highest officials in the Iranian government are unaware of his location and are not able to directly contact him, the officials said.
If the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz is a game of chicken, it sounds as though the Iranians will either swerve first – or accelerate. One way or the other, though, the blockade appears to have succeeded in bringing the regime to its crisis point. As discussions around a potential deal (really a pre-deal) continue, the IRGC has begun to demand an end to the US Navy’s complete siege on Iranian ports.
That message has come from the top of the food chain today, including the Nepo Babytollah’s supposed attaché: [X links at source article]
The “direct action” threat comes with a promise of “utter ruin” as a result:
Iranian officials have used the negotiations to project confidence that they retain significant military options should diplomacy fail. The Revolutionary Guards said any renewed conflict would spread “far beyond the region,” threatening “crushing blows” and “utter ruin” in places opponents “cannot even imagine.”
The warnings come after a war that saw Iran target US bases, Israeli cities and critical infrastructure in Gulf Arab states, while effectively shutting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and triggering a global energy shock.
Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that any future retaliation would “feature many more surprises,” while Iran’s military threatened to open “new fronts” using “new tools.” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator, said the armed forces had used the ceasefire period to rebuild their capabilities “at the highest level.”
Experts say much of the rhetoric is intended to deter further attacks. But they also warn that Tehran retains significant escalation options should diplomacy collapse.
“Experts say” a lot of things, but this is probably correct. The Iranian regime has not exhibited any restraint in its missile and drone attacks in this conflict or in others. They have aimed at practically every Gulf state, including relatively friendly countries such as Qatar and Oman, targeting their energy production infrastructure. The IRGC has sent volleys of ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv and other places in Israel. At the same time, however, the US and Israel destroyed their military-industrial infrastructure on multiple levels. If the Iranians had more gas in the tank for deterrent strategies and tactics, the IRGC would have used them already.
That’s not to say that the Iranian regime can’t inflict damage. They still have drones and missiles in their inventories, but they lack the industrial capacity to replace them now. Their blue-water navy is gone, and the US is taking out their littoral navy when the IRGC sends those boats into the Strait of Hormuz to harass shipping. This threat isn’t exacty empty, but it’s entirely insufficient to deter hostilities if the IRGC won’t make a deal. To extend the “chicken” analogy,” they’re pitting a Peugeot against a Peterbilt. In that kind of matchup, it doesn’t matter whether Iran accelerates or not – they’re going to lose if they push it to a collision.
Vahidi wants to use these threats to force the US into more concessions. It’s the Tehran Two-Step, related closely to the Hamas Hokey Pokey, both of which are based on the concept of the hudna. The dance goes like this: Take one step toward your negotiating partner, and when he takes a step toward you, take two steps back and wait for him to come to you. It only works, though, when your partner wants to dance with you and thinks the dance is good enough. That has been the case with the West when it comes to the Iranian regime for the past 47 years.
Is it good enough for Donald Trump, though? That has been the question since the ceasefire, and both his critics and supporters wonder about it. Trump warned in a Truth Social statement this morning that he won’t sign a deal without verifiable compliance by Iran on both the Strait and ending nuclear weapons development. His decision will come soon, Trump declared, but he’s not going to let Iran off the hook:
Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb. The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions. All water mines (bombs), if any, will be terminated (we have removed, through detonation, numerous such mines with our great underwater mine sweepers. Iran will complete the immediate removal and/or detonation of any mines that are left, which will not be many!). Ships caught in the Strait due to our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade, which will now be lifted, may start the process of “heading home!” Say HELLO to your wives, husbands, parents, and families from me, your favorite President! The enriched material, sometimes referred to as “Nuclear Dust,” which is buried deep underground with virtually collapsed mountains, caused by our powerful B2 Bomber attack 11 months ago, sitting on top of it, will be unearthed by the United States (which, it is agreed, is the only Country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so!), in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED. No money will be exchanged, until further notice. Other items, of far less importance, have been agreed to. I will be meeting now, in the Situation Room, to make a final determination. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
The part about no money being exchanged is significant, Axios’ Barak Ravid notes:
The MOU states that Iran will agree to negotiate on its nuclear program, but does not include specific concessions. …
– U.S. officials say they have verbal commitments from the Iranians on the nuclear material, but that what matters is what is agreed when the sides get in the room for the formal negotiations.
– Trump claimed “no money will be exchanged, until further notice,” referring to Iran’s frozen funds in accounts around the world.
Even if Trump accepts this MOU, it may not end the game of chicken. The IRGC violated the current ceasefire within 48 hours by threatening traffic through the Strait, which prompted the full blockade by the US Navy that remains in place today. The Iranians are still demanding control of the Strait, which both the ceasefire and the MOU rejected. The Iranians will do what Hamas and Hezbollah have done for decades – sign the agreement, claim it meant something else, then refuse to comply when it comes time to disarm or withdraw. That’s exactly what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon at this very moment.
Maybe Trump will sign the MOU and let Iran violate the terms first as a justification for what comes next. Or perhaps he might just stick with the blockade and let the economic collapse take place over the next several weeks, either forcing the IRGC to surrender on Trump’s terms or restart the war and give him the political opening at home and in the Gulf for full-scale strikes on what remains of Iran’s energy and transportation infrastructure. The blockade is clearly working to force the arrival of a decision point, and maybe Trump will be inclined to let it ride.
Six million dead. Ten million enslaved. Twenty-five million displaced. The raging genocide hiding in plain sight — and why you’ve never heard of it.
They say the winners write the history books.
What if the Nazis had won?
The Holocaust would be a vague conspiracy theory — denied, spun, suppressed, purged from the media. Anyone who raised it would be marginalized, branded a fringe lunatic. Israel wouldn’t exist. The Middle East would be under total Islamic domination. And eventually, America would be fighting Nazis on the homefront.
We don’t have to guess what that world looks like. There’s a real example today — chillingly parallel, hiding in plain sight.
Nigeria. An ongoing genocide possibly more bloody than the Holocaust.
Before I go further — the point of that comparison is not to rank the dead. Six million souls is six million souls. The difference is that in Europe, the right side won and wrote the history books — so the world was forced to reckon with what happened. In Nigeria, the wrong side won. And the world is being told there’s nothing to reckon with.
Unlike the Holocaust, Nigerian Christians could in theory spare their lives by converting to Islam and joining the jihad. Hitler gave the Jews no such exit. But no human being should be forcibly converted under torture and death threats. What is happening in Nigeria has its own name, its own horror, and its own demand for the world’s attention. It is jihad. We must respond.
To understand what’s happening today, you first need to know about a place called Biafra. There’s a reason you’ve probably never heard of it. But you should.
Today’s Nigerian genocide did not emerge from chaos. It has a genesis — and from it a consistent ideology, tactics, bloodline, and throne that have never changed. Only adapted.
In 1804, a scholar named Usman dan Fodio led the Fulani — a nomadic Muslim tribe perhaps originally from the Sahara — in a declaration of holy war across West Africa. He built Africa’s largest pre-colonial empire on conquest, mass displacement, and enslavement. He called it the Sokoto Caliphate. Its spiritual authority over Nigeria’s Muslim north has never been broken — not by colonialism, not by independence, not by a constitution. The 20th Sultan sits on that throne today. Same institution. Same ideology. Same bloodline. Same ambitions, tactics, and tribe. Two hundred and twenty-two years and counting.
In 1914, Britain stitched together two incompatible worlds — the Christian south and the Caliphate north — into one colonial territory and named it Nigeria. Administrative convenience. When they granted independence in 1960, they handed the keys to the north and left.
What followed in the southeast — Biafra — was electric. Its people, the Igbo, are among the most remarkable on earth. Renowned for their entrepreneurism, hustle, and integrity. They carry an ancient tradition of descent from the lost tribes of Israel — working synagogues still serve their communities today. They are overwhelmingly Christian.
And they happened to be sitting on one of the world’s largest untapped oil reserves.
In the summer and fall of 1966, organized Islamic mobs killed thirty thousand Igbo across northern Nigeria in coordinated pogroms. On September 29th, the killing erupted simultaneously in at least a dozen cities — a coordination that required planning, not passion. Nearly half the dead were children.
The Igbo drew the only logical conclusion: this forced marriage to a bloodthirsty Caliphate simply wasn’t going to work. On May 30, 1967, after futilely trying to negotiate a structure for peaceful co-existence, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra.
The Caliphate came with full jihad fury. When military assault couldn’t break them, it imposed a total blockade. They shot down Red Cross planes bringing food for starving children. A federal spokesman stated policy on the record: “Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war and we have every intention of using it.”
By 1969, more than a thousand children were dying every day. Time, Der Spiegel, the New York Times all ran the photographs. But the West was consumed — Vietnam, Woodstock — and a genocide of Black Africans simply didn’t break through. Britain kept arming the side doing the starving. Why? Igbo oil. Washington called it an internal affair. The UN stood down.
As many as three million dead. Mostly children. Mostly Christian. The world built museums for Hiroshima. It forgot Biafra existed.
On May 29, 1969, a 20-year-old Jewish American student named Bruce Mayrock — a graduate of Flatbush Yeshivah — set himself on fire on the lawn of the United Nations. His sign read: “You must stop the genocide — please save 9 million Biafrans.” He died the next day. No one listened.
Biafra surrendered in January 1970. Every Igbo bank account seized. Each survivor handed twenty pounds. Start over.
Now you know about Biafra. That chapter ended in 1970. The conquest didn’t.
For a brief moment beginning in 2010 — the year of my first of sixteen trips to Nigeria — an accidental Christian president named Goodluck Jonathan started pushing back. For the first time in living memory, the Caliphate’s machine was losing ground. The Obama administration, David Axelrod’s political firm, and the full machinery of Western diplomatic pressure colluded to remove him and install Muhammadu Buhari — former military dictator, open Sharia advocate, the man Boko Haram chose as their preferred government mediator.
Since 2009: 125,000 documented Christian deaths. 60,000 peaceful Muslims killed. Nearly 19,000 churches destroyed. Ten to twelve million displaced. I stood in Bokkos months after the 2023 Christmas Massacre and saw mountains of fresh dirt where illegal strip-mining operations had moved in behind the killing. The people erased. The machinery arrived.
The International Crisis Group calls it farmer-herder conflict. This narrative was crafted by a career Sharia propagandist funded by George Soros, promoted by Washington lobbyists, and adopted by every major Western outlet until it became the official story. Meanwhile, Salisu Shehu — the world’s leading boko haram scholar (literally, Western education is forbidden) — runs the federal agency controlling what fifty million Nigerian children are taught. The winners are literally writing the history books. Right now.
Jewish human rights scholar Charles Jacobs puts it simply: “What is happening to the Nigerian Christians is exactly what happened to the Jews living near Gaza — jihadists storming the innocent, murder, torture, people burned alive, kidnapped as slaves and sex slaves, all to the screams of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Jihad is jihad, worldwide.”
A genocide is raging in Nigeria right now. Today. While you read this. And the world is being told it’s a weather problem.
Now you know better.
Tell someone.
The history books got it wrong. Let’s make it right.
Drawing on historical patterns of civilizational stress, elite overproduction, cultural fragmentation, demographic pressures, and fading social trust, Lynch argues that the United States faces a high risk of internal conflict or civil war.
His theory resonates because the data is hard to dismiss: record-low trust in institutions, deepening regional and cultural divides, sporadic political violence, and a populace increasingly viewing opponents as existential enemies rather than fellow citizens.
Lynch is not alone. Peter Turchin, a scientist-turned-historian, using “cliodynamics” (quantitative historical modeling) predicted heightened instability and political violence in the U.S. starting around 2020.
Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist and author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. argues the U.S. meets several key risk factors for civil war, e.g., anocracy, factionalism, and loss of trust. She emphasizes preventative bottom-up efforts.
Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, has publicly estimated a 35% – 50% chance of civil war-like conditions, framing it as an “existential battle” between hard right and hard left, potentially involving state fracturing and defiance of federal authority.
Yet the most compelling evidence is easily observed: we are already living through a form of civil conflict. It is not the symmetric clash of armies at Gettysburg. It is modern, technological, and like modern warfare asymmetric: subtle, persistent, and waged primarily through institutions, information, lawfare, economics, and culture. Recognizing this reality is the first step toward de-escalating it before it turns hot.
So let’s look at the nature of this assymetric warfare.
Asymmetric conflict leverages control of legacy media, academia, federal and state bureaucracies, and financial systems to marginalize, censor, and economically pressure opponents. The response has included parallel institutions, alternative media ecosystems, legal countermeasures, and electoral pushback. This isn’t traditional warfare with identifiable front lines. It includes lawfare against political opponents, selective prosecution, regulatory warfare against disfavored industries, educational indoctrination, and demographic engineering through policy.
This low-intensity struggle has been underway for years, perhaps decades. It explains why many Americans sense a “cold civil war” without scenes of open battlefield combat. The weapons are subpoenas, algorithmic suppression, corporate boycotts, and narrative control rather than muskets. Casualties appear in eroded trust, declining social cohesion, falling birthrates among the productive classes, a disillusioned and depressed youth, and rising despair.
One unmistakable front in this asymmetric struggle is the battle over border security and immigration enforcement. While polls have long shown strong majorities of Americans supporting secure borders and the deportation of those here illegally — priorities rooted in fairness, resource limits, and public safety — activist factions have responded with escalating lawlessness and disruption. Recent protests against ICE operations included masked demonstrators chanting “Grab your guns and kill yourself” at federal agents attempting to enforce the law.
Multiple reports described “escalating violence” outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, NJ, where protesters (some masked) linked arms to block entrances/gates, threw objects at officers, and sprayed officers with unknown liquids.
🚨 BREAKING: MAJOR BRAWLS ONGOING OUT HERE AT ICE NEWARK WITH NJ STATE POLICE
No rational person would credibly call this peaceful dissent. The lawless and deliberate effort to intimidate those upholding the republic’s sovereignty, turning routine law enforcement into a high-risk ordeal is not civil disobedience. Making ordinary citizens targets, forced to bear the downstream costs in strained communities, higher crime in some areas, and overwhelmed services is not symbolic speech.
These intentional and orchestrated threats against legitimate law enforcement agents, performing legitimate law enforcement duties, included Democrat elected officials as participants. These tactics exploit institutional restraint and media sympathy to wage cultural and political warfare without symmetric accountability.
Rudyard Lynch’s historical analogies rightly highlight the dangers. Societies under similar stresses have fractured before. Truth seeking demands that citizens consider and face the risk honestly.
So collapse is possible, but not inevitable.
America has emerged on the other side of deeper divisions by rediscovering its core strengths: innovation, federalism, and the stubborn individualism that resists centralized tyranny.
In our technological age, these asymmetric tactics face powerful built-in defenses that previous generations lacked. Smartphones, decentralized media platforms, and citizen journalism enable near-instant documentation and dissemination of events, exposing lawfare, selective enforcement, and orchestrated disruptions before they can consolidate.
Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics rapidly detect patterns of propaganda, coordinated narrative campaigns, and institutional abuses, leveling the information battlefield.
Encrypted communications, parallel economic systems, and open-source intelligence tools allow ordinary citizens and institutions to build resilience and respond with speed and precision. What once took weeks or months to expose now unfolds in hours, making sustained deception far more difficult and empowering rapid countermeasures rooted in transparency rather than centralized control.
President Trump’s approach of “maximum pressure realism,” targeting corruption, criminal networks, and institutional rot through sustained, lawful leverage, offers a practical model for resolving tensions without widespread violence. Intensifying accountability after key electoral milestones, paired with strategic de-escalation toward ordinary citizens, can disarm corrupt and hostile bureaucracy while preserving the peace.
In any society, the most sustainable path lies in resolving disputes through constitutional mechanisms, reform, and shared reality rather than mirroring destructive tactics. Peace does not require surrender or unilateral disarmament in the culture war. It demands only that ordinary citizens reject reciprocal barbarism and insist on equal application of the law, restoration of merit and free speech, secure borders, and a renewal of shared national ideals grounded in truth rather than ideology.
The republic will survive this asymmetric era because of the enduring commitment of millions to the founding idea: a constitutional republic where individual rights remain inalienable. Patriots can prove doomers wrong.
History shows that asymmetric conflicts often end in exhaustion or negotiated renewal rather than total victory. With clear eyes and the will to choose peace through strength, America can contain this cold conflict and emerge stronger through relentless pressure on corruption and a cultural recommitment to the Constitution.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong. Thank you.https://givebutter.com/embed/c/WhA2EO?goalBar=false&gba_gb.element.id=gkx27p
NEWARK, N.J. – As he navigated the crowds in an impromptu appearance at a protest outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility, Marxist political influencer Hasan Piker defended figures in the pro-China activist network funded by American Marxist tech millionaire Neville Roy Singham as “wonderful people,” while dismissing scrutiny surrounding his Cuba trip.
Asked about reporting on Singham’s network and its connections to far-left activism, Piker said there is “this environment of suspicion” surrounding Singham and his activities, taking a “sinister shape,” but they are “totally above board and totally legal.”
In recent months, many agitators from the Singham network have fueled, coordinated and organized fiery protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, New York City, Los Angeles, New Jersey and elsewhere.
The remarks by Piker are noteworthy because the online influencer isn’t just a livestreamer on the Twitch platform. With millions of mostly young followers across Twitch, YouTube and social media platforms, he has emerged as one of the most influential — and polarizing — figures on the American left, regularly mobilizing support for candidates and causes aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. Piker wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the group’s logo.
Piker has used his platforms to interview, promote and campaign alongside candidates backed by Democratic Socialists of America, helping introduce them to younger voters who consume political content online. His audience reach has made him a significant force in Democratic politics, giving him the ability to shape narratives and drive grassroots enthusiasm for candidates running on socialist and anti-establishment platforms.
As reported, Singham is an American Marxist tech tycoon who has pumped $285 million since 2017 into a network of nonprofits that have organized and coordinated divisive anti-American street protests, such as the one unfolding in New Jersey.
I don’t have any personal contact with Roy Singham or any of these other people,” Piker said, in response to questions from Fox News Digital. “I mean, I know some of these people. They’re wonderful people in general. They’re activists….None of it is actually hidden or illegal in any way, shape or form.
There are a lot of stories about Cuba floating around right now. Some are MSM outlets acting like they have a scoop on something that’s been happening or rumored to be happening for months. Some are simply absurd and probably not true. Most aren’t actually verified by the Donald Trump administration and come from anonymous sources. I’m not even going to bother with those today. I saw this happen in the final months before we captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Most of these reporters and media outlets didn’t even care about these countries until they became newsworthy, and once they do become hot topics, they’ll publish just about anything to get clicks. I can’t do that.
But what I can tell you is that what the regime is saying and what’s happening on the ground tell two different stories. Both the “president,” Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, have been doing interviews for a month or two now, warning of the United States’ impending military aggression, claiming the people of Cuba will fight the imperialists, etc.
In the last week or two, Díaz-Canel claimed publicly that the U.S. “will cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences.”
Most recently, Rodríguez has been going after Marco Rubio with his favorite talking point: Rubio has a personal vendetta against the regime — as if he’s not just one of the millions of Cubans who have seen their parents and grandparents flee the communist s**thole in which they were forced to live. He just happens to be the one with the power to do something about it.
But while these guys are going on all the TV networks yelling about U.S. aggression, on the ground, the regime is actually playing nice with the U.S. because it knows it holds no leverage.
On Friday, the most unusual thing happened. United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan was at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and he met with Army Corps General, Gen. Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, First Deputy Minister of the Chief of the General Staff, and other senior leaders from the Cuban military at the perimeter of the facility. They even posed for a picture:
Keep in mind that the regime considers our base at Guantanamo Bay an illegal occupation.
This extremely rare, high-level face-to-face meeting was described as “positive” by both sides. The Cuban Ministry of Defense said in a statement, “Both delegations considered the meeting to be positive, where issues related to security around the dividing perimeter of the military enclave were addressed and they agreed to maintain communication between both military commands.”
While some in the MSM are downplaying it, this isn’t something you see every day, but then again, a lot of what we’re witnessing lately is unusual. The regime is doing interviews with the U.S. press, including Fox News. The CIA director is holding talks in (and making threats) in Havana. Cubans standing on rooftops raising U.S. flags or writing “Long live Trump” on building walls without fear.
In the past, low-level “fence line” meetings took place each month between U.S. and Cuban military officials at the naval base, but Trump had them suspended when he took office in 2025. This is not a continuation of that. This is not routine.
Keep in mind that the regime considers our base at Guantanamo Bay an illegal occupation.
This extremely rare, high-level face-to-face meeting was described as “positive” by both sides. The Cuban Ministry of Defense said in a statement, “Both delegations considered the meeting to be positive, where issues related to security around the dividing perimeter of the military enclave were addressed and they agreed to maintain communication between both military commands.”
While some in the MSM are downplaying it, this isn’t something you see every day, but then again, a lot of what we’re witnessing lately is unusual. The regime is doing interviews with the U.S. press, including Fox News. The CIA director is holding talks in (and making threats) in Havana. Cubans standing on rooftops raising U.S. flags or writing “Long live Trump” on building walls without fear.
In the past, low-level “fence line” meetings took place each month between U.S. and Cuban military officials at the naval base, but Trump had them suspended when he took office in 2025. This is not a continuation of that. This is not routine.
Sarah Anderson is a Georgia-based freelance writer and journalist, specializing in foreign policy, with a passion for Latin America and the Caribbean.
When she’s not writing, you can find her chasing animals on her small hobby farm, swimming every chance she gets, traveling, gardening, reading, or yelling at a Georgia Bulldogs or Atlanta Falcons football game like any good Southerner.
You might also catch her watching State Department briefings to unwind.
The police’s vile treatment of young Henry exposes the cruelty and injustice of state ‘anti-racism’.
So this is where wokeness has dragged us. Into a moral abyss where a boy is handcuffed by cops as he bleeds to death. Into a wasteland of virtue where an 18-year-old lad, stabbed five times, is treated as a speechcriminal as he gasps his final breaths. Into a sorry, dystopic excuse for a society where the last words a youngster hears are the defamatory cries of the man who killed him. ‘He was racist’, his murderer said. ‘I can’t breathe’, the boy begged.
The case of Henry Nowak has shocked the nation. He was a Polish-Briton in his first year at university. During a night out in Southampton in England in December last year, he had a fatal encounter with a Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa. Some kind of altercation took place. Digwa then stabbed Nowak five times with his kirpan, the ceremonial curved sword that Sikhs carry. Nowak was gored in his chest, his face and his legs. He scrambled over a fence, leaving a blood trail in his wake. ‘I’m dying’, local residents heard him say. He was right.
As savage as the knifing was, it was what happened next that has shaken Britain’s soul. Digwa’s mother arrived and spirited away the murder weapon – it was later found hidden in the family home with 20 other Sikh swords and knives. Digwa then accused Nowak of having racially abused him. He said Nowak used a racist slur against him, punched him and knocked off his turban. These were ‘wicked lies’, the court heard during his murder trial. Yet there was a group of people on the scene of this atrocity who believed Digwa’s vile libels against the youth he had just fatally lacerated: the police.
The police’s behaviour that night defies all logic and humanity. They bowed to Digwa’s defamatory slurs and arrested and handcuffed young Henry. The Telegraph’s report captures the barbarism of the police’s credulous ineptitude that grim evening: ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ If anything will cause decent Britons to lose faith in the police, it’s this: the haunting vision of a boy being manhandled by the state as he drowned in his own blood.
This week Digwa was found guilty of murder. His mother was found guilty of assisting an offender. And the police have apologised for the fact that Nowak was ‘arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness’. But this isn’t the end of this story. It can’t be. This cruellest of deaths, this humiliation by the state of a boy who was dying, will surely force a reckoning with the social poison of political correctness. For it exposes the extent to which the cult of wokeness has chased truth and virtue from our societies.
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We all know why Digwa’s evil lie was believed and why wounded, gasping Henry’s pleas for help went unheeded – it’s because the word ‘racism’ acts like a magic spell on our ruling class. It’s like a rhetorical narcotic. The minute they hear it, they morph, like woke Manchurian candidates, into wide-eyed searchers for the merest hint of that greatest sin in our morally deracinated times: white privilege, and prejudicial speech. Their aim becomes not the discovery of truth but the demonstration of virtue. On that street in Southampton, once the word ‘racism’ had been uttered, the role of the state’s representatives suddenly and radically changed: it was no longer to investigate a potential crime but to obsequiously act out a moral script.
Having prostrated themselves so fully before the new regime religion that falsely calls itself ‘anti-racism’, the police were virtually programmed to believe the ‘brown man’ and be sceptical of the ‘white man’. No doubt the critical race theory that pumps like a toxin in the veins of the establishment kicked in, meaning that the Sikh who had so ruthlessly wielded his sword instantly became the victim, while the target of his red-mist knifing – the white boy – became the oppressor. The state’s intoxication with the hyper-racialised politics of victimhood has driven it ever further into a quagmire of dogma where cool moral judgment is all but impossible.
It’s important to say that this handcuffing of a dying boy was not ‘a failing’ by individual police officers. The police forces of the United Kingdom are expressly instructed to believe, without question, every accusation of hate crime. They are told that even things perceived to be racist are probably racist. They are trained to see ‘racism’ everywhere – in every slight, in every tussle between whites and non-whites. The police’s cruel subduing of a stabbed teen was not an aberration – it was the horrific logical conclusion of the new ruling-class ideology that sees us less as citizens with rights than as racial creatures in need of micro-management. The demeaning of young Henry was the woke state in action.
The state turned a blind eye to the rape of vulnerable girls by mostly Muslim gangs out of a fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. The very same wilful blindness born of cowardice led those officers to see a stabbed boy as a tyrant and his stabber as a victim. The questions pile up. For how much longer can we suffer under such a two-tier ideology that allows Sikhs to do what the rest of us are forbidden from doing: carry lethal weapons? Why did Keir Starmer take the knee for George Floyd when he died 4,000 miles away but not for young Henry murdered and failed down in Southampton? And most pressingly, what are we going to do about a state that arrests a boy as he chokes on his own blood and as his killer gloats and maligns him? We have to do something.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
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The police’s behaviour that night defies all logic and humanity. They bowed to Digwa’s defamatory slurs and arrested and handcuffed young Henry. The Telegraph’s report captures the barbarism of the police’s credulous ineptitude that grim evening: ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ If anything will cause decent Britons to lose faith in the police, it’s this: the haunting vision of a boy being manhandled by the state as he drowned in his own blood.
This week Digwa was found guilty of murder. His mother was found guilty of assisting an offender. And the police have apologised for the fact that Nowak was ‘arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness’. But this isn’t the end of this story. It can’t be. This cruellest of deaths, this humiliation by the state of a boy who was dying, will surely force a reckoning with the social poison of political correctness. For it exposes the extent to which the cult of wokeness has chased truth and virtue from our societies.
Enjoying spiked?
Why not make an instant, one-off donation?
We are funded by you. Thank you!£5£10£20£50Choose an amount
We all know why Digwa’s evil lie was believed and why wounded, gasping Henry’s pleas for help went unheeded – it’s because the word ‘racism’ acts like a magic spell on our ruling class. It’s like a rhetorical narcotic. The minute they hear it, they morph, like woke Manchurian candidates, into wide-eyed searchers for the merest hint of that greatest sin in our morally deracinated times: white privilege, and prejudicial speech. Their aim becomes not the discovery of truth but the demonstration of virtue. On that street in Southampton, once the word ‘racism’ had been uttered, the role of the state’s representatives suddenly and radically changed: it was no longer to investigate a potential crime but to obsequiously act out a moral script.
Having prostrated themselves so fully before the new regime religion that falsely calls itself ‘anti-racism’, the police were virtually programmed to believe the ‘brown man’ and be sceptical of the ‘white man’. No doubt the critical race theory that pumps like a toxin in the veins of the establishment kicked in, meaning that the Sikh who had so ruthlessly wielded his sword instantly became the victim, while the target of his red-mist knifing – the white boy – became the oppressor. The state’s intoxication with the hyper-racialised politics of victimhood has driven it ever further into a quagmire of dogma where cool moral judgment is all but impossible.
It’s important to say that this handcuffing of a dying boy was not ‘a failing’ by individual police officers. The police forces of the United Kingdom are expressly instructed to believe, without question, every accusation of hate crime. They are told that even things perceived to be racist are probably racist. They are trained to see ‘racism’ everywhere – in every slight, in every tussle between whites and non-whites. The police’s cruel subduing of a stabbed teen was not an aberration – it was the horrific logical conclusion of the new ruling-class ideology that sees us less as citizens with rights than as racial creatures in need of micro-management. The demeaning of young Henry was the woke state in action.
The state turned a blind eye to the rape of vulnerable girls by mostly Muslim gangs out of a fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. The very same wilful blindness born of cowardice led those officers to see a stabbed boy as a tyrant and his stabber as a victim. The questions pile up. For how much longer can we suffer under such a two-tier ideology that allows Sikhs to do what the rest of us are forbidden from doing: carry lethal weapons? Why did Keir Starmer take the knee for George Floyd when he died 4,000 miles away but not for young Henry murdered and failed down in Southampton? And most pressingly, what are we going to do about a state that arrests a boy as he chokes on his own blood and as his killer gloats and maligns him? We have to do something.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
spiked summit 2026
One-Day Conference
10am-5pm, Saturday 27 June Emmanuel Centre, London, SW1P 3DW
With Lionel Shriver, Brendan O’Neill, Katharine Birbalsingh, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Paul Embery, Tom Slater, Andrew Doyle, Fiyaz Mughal and more
spiked is funded by readers like you. Only 0.1% of regular readers currently support us. If just 1% did, we could grow our team and step up the fight for free speech and democracy.
Become a spiked supporter and enjoy unlimited, ad-free access, bonus content and exclusive events – while helping to keep independent journalism alive.
Monthly support makes the biggest difference. Thank you.
We all know why Digwa’s evil lie was believed and why wounded, gasping Henry’s pleas for help went unheeded – it’s because the word ‘racism’ acts like a magic spell on our ruling class. It’s like a rhetorical narcotic. The minute they hear it, they morph, like woke Manchurian candidates, into wide-eyed searchers for the merest hint of that greatest sin in our morally deracinated times: white privilege, and prejudicial speech. Their aim becomes not the discovery of truth but the demonstration of virtue. On that street in Southampton, once the word ‘racism’ had been uttered, the role of the state’s representatives suddenly and radically changed: it was no longer to investigate a potential crime but to obsequiously act out a moral script.
Having prostrated themselves so fully before the new regime religion that falsely calls itself ‘anti-racism’, the police were virtually programmed to believe the ‘brown man’ and be sceptical of the ‘white man’. No doubt the critical race theory that pumps like a toxin in the veins of the establishment kicked in, meaning that the Sikh who had so ruthlessly wielded his sword instantly became the victim, while the target of his red-mist knifing – the white boy – became the oppressor. The state’s intoxication with the hyper-racialised politics of victimhood has driven it ever further into a quagmire of dogma where cool moral judgment is all but impossible.
It’s important to say that this handcuffing of a dying boy was not ‘a failing’ by individual police officers. The police forces of the United Kingdom are expressly instructed to believe, without question, every accusation of hate crime. They are told that even things perceived to be racist are probably racist. They are trained to see ‘racism’ everywhere – in every slight, in every tussle between whites and non-whites. The police’s cruel subduing of a stabbed teen was not an aberration – it was the horrific logical conclusion of the new ruling-class ideology that sees us less as citizens with rights than as racial creatures in need of micro-management. The demeaning of young Henry was the woke state in action.
The state turned a blind eye to the rape of vulnerable girls by mostly Muslim gangs out of a fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. The very same wilful blindness born of cowardice led those officers to see a stabbed boy as a tyrant and his stabber as a victim. The questions pile up. For how much longer can we suffer under such a two-tier ideology that allows Sikhs to do what the rest of us are forbidden from doing: carry lethal weapons? Why did Keir Starmer take the knee for George Floyd when he died 4,000 miles away but not for young Henry murdered and failed down in Southampton? And most pressingly, what are we going to do about a state that arrests a boy as he chokes on his own blood and as his killer gloats and maligns him? We have to do something.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 