6 states siding against a supreme court decision to deny access to federal authorities seems big, if thats happened in my lifetime I’ve not heard of it before
It’s republicans grandstanding to impress their racist base.
It’s technically sedition and if democrats wanted to they could arrest or kill them all, but they are cowards.
So instead it will just blow over. It’s nothing. It will lead to nothing. It’s just stupid pandering for racist scum.
It’s technically sedition and if democrats wanted to they could arrest or kill them all, but they are cowards.
The echos of the Buchanan administration are palpable.
The echos of JDAMs hitting Texas National Guard positions should be audible. : (
Wouldn’t even be necessary: the best parallel is Alabama using its National Guard to block school integration, then Eisenhower federalizing the Guard and eventually arresting the governor when he physically stood in the way.
Even such an obvious precedent that would involve zero violence is apparently too much for Biden to handle.
Yeah, i agree with this. Its technically a huge thing, a real constitutional crisis if this was a functioning government. But even in something like this, its not even meant to be real politics, just pandering. Like these libs and chuds will literally take their pandering to what should be the brink, but its ultimately empty and meaningless
You want to maintain empire, you better be willing to enforce it’s primacy. A truly “American” president would have meal team 6 merc Abbot within the hour. No trial, no deliberation, straight up kill the challengers of the union.
Every dem voter is going to get an email citing it as more evidence that Democracy Is On The Ballot and demanding more donations.
“The South is rising in revolt and I am doing everything I can to encourage them. Here’s why I need you to open your wallet and pour out the last few pathetic copper fennigs stuck to a piece of gum in the bottom to aid my path to the white house where I will make your life measurably worse”
Better than any Biden pitch I’ve heard so far
We need to let the voters decide whether to enforce sedition laws. Make sure to
Biden to force him to do something.“Also there is literally nothing Biden could do about the situation so don’t ask”
Yeah. It’s sedition. The feds should have everyone involved, at minimum, gitmo’d, if not hung. It’s a big deal. This is balkanization/civil war stuff. The feds have total, unambiguous authority over the border and the states have zero, zip, nada.
It’s wild they haven’t moved to shooting yet. BLM faced more persecution blocking a road to ask for police reform. These hogs are doing such a fundamentally illegal thing that a whole civil war was fought to decide the very issue of state authority and Biden doesn’t know whether to kiss them on the lips or give them all of their demands. The democrats could have had a huge groundswell of support for any action they take like they did with January 6th, but they’ve spent the last three years trying to prove to republicans that their border policy is just as fascistic. All of the orgs dedicated to that issue are now vote machines for the democrats or are opposed to them.
If the feds do something like Waco or Ruby Ridge they don’t have my support. If they do that level of violence here, that’s the clearest case for its justified use to the broadest number of people. I’d clap like I did on January 6th whenever anyone on either side got what they both deserve.
It goes back at least as far as O’Bummer, too. His border policy was “I am going to do everything the fascists demand because then they will like me and invite me to their tea parties.” Sucks. the democrats never had a solution to the GOP. idk. Bunch of wack ass fucking model UN losers. You can’t fight fascism with a more borng, pedantic, multicultural fascism, it turns out.
BLM faced more persecution blocking a road to ask for police reform.
That’s because it was leftist. The Texan hogs just want to do a particular fascist thing slightly differently than the way the federal government wants it done.
I agree, except i think it will probably blow over without any direct consequences for now (they’ll come down the line). The reason i think this is because while it is sedition - the states/governors are only engaged for the spectacle of it as a grandstand to the hogs. They aren’t politically engaged in pushing for actual secession or balkanize, because that isn’t their goal. And i don’t think the Biden Admin is going to do much but fundraise off this and call it a win/win for politicians in both parties.
Right now it’s political theater, but it’s planting the seeds for something in the future to be more than just theater
exactly and unfortunately it does set the table for some nasty shit. not like 1860’s civil war as so many envision it though. the fort sumter in this case is much more likely to be something like a wave of pickup truck pogroms in minority areas and the local/state pigs basically refuse to investigate themselves.
Bleeding Kansas 2.0.
Yeah, call me when there’s blue on blue fire.
Enjoy your daily calls from the IOF.
No it hasn’t happened in our lifetimes. This should be massive. It is a constitutional crisis, technically. But none of the parties are engaging in this for those reasons. It is 100 percent pandering and grandstanding, and is only about bullshit electoral agendas. So it probably won’t actually be anything, even though it is technically massive lol
Edit: the only important impact could be later on down the line. Like every escalation of cynical Republican pandering to their genuine fascist base. Eventually the hogs won’t be happy until they order tge national guard to open fire on feds. Which will be mostly hilarious when it first happens. Itll be another Jan 6 kind of thing where its technically treason, but no one involved understands what they are actually doing or than it is treason or what comes next. They’re just in it for the spectacle with no actual politics or understanding of the implications of the thing they’re howling for
BalkanizationBaudrillardization
perfect. That’s a good way to express the near future of these kinds of political stunts that really should matter but 
It is wild to see two completely different realities playing out in the political rhetoric and what passes for our shared objective experiences these days.
I do wonder when someone who truly has ambitions of being a real warlord or autocrat will appear.
When peoole like that are able to do anything it’ll be the result of a more material Balkanization and it’ll exist in regions where no other law is being enforced.
Politicians today are only in it for their own egos at this point, because none of them have meaningful power to be an autocrat or warlord, because they just don’t have that kind of real power. That’s why libs Teump derangement is so unserious. Even if everything libs claimed were true about what Trump wants - that he wants to be a dictator and end democracy - it wouldn’t matter because even a president doesn’t have that kind of real power. They just get to rubber stamp bullshit and have their ego stroked
I think you’re right overall but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of one of the sides painting themselves into a corner and then chosing to escalate rather than the alternative. The problem inherent in brinkmanship is that it’s very easy for things to spiral out of control.
I can guarantee you that no balkanization is going to happen in the US.
Why? Because this is no longer the time period where individual states can build up their gold reserves as a store of their wealth. No, the US dollar is unparalleled in history in the sense that it allows the US to get “free lunches” from all over the world with junk papers.
I love quoting from this article from 2022 because the Californian finance department accidentally revealed a very crucial fact:
If you look at all of the personal income tax returns that were filed in California in the year 2020, just 1% of the total number of income tax returns that were filed were responsible for more than 49% of all of the personal income tax that was paid in that year. And unlike most of us who get our income from wages and salaries, that very narrow band of taxpayers derives a lot of their income from things like capital gains, stock markets [and] bonuses that are tied to corporate or stock performance. So when the markets are doing very well, those individuals are doing very well and state revenues are doing very well. Conversely, when the markets go south, their fortunes don’t do very well and the state’s revenues decline as a result.
Let’s parse this paragraph: California, the richest state in the US, derives much of its tax revenues from capital gains such as stocks and bonds. Yeah, good luck losing access to the dollar, if any US state even dares to contemplate about seceding for real. Their wealth and living standards are going to plunge overnight. Good luck with that.
Just because it’d be irrational for it to happen, doesn’t mean it won’t happen
This is just the equivalent of rich kids who live off their parents’ wealth throwing tantrum. At the end of the day, nobody dares to cut ties from the family wealth. Sure, some might be crazy enough to do it, but most of the time it doesn’t end well for them.
No country is ever going to give up the dollar just to trade with Texas. Literally nobody. This is how the US impose its sanctions and embargo against Cuba and all the Bad Countries.
What if Texas joins BRICS?
BRICS Bank Aims to Increase Local-Currency Borrowing to 30%
- Dollar funding will continue to dominate, CFO Maasdorp says
But the majority of the bank’s funding — about 70% — will continue to be denominated in dollars, he said.
“The bank’s capital is in US dollars. Our reporting currency is US dollars. So the dollar is hot-coded in the DNA of the bank,” he said.
No shot. Everyone’s dragging their feet about de-dollarization at BRICS. My biggest disappointment of 2023, after all the encouraging talks about doing it during the 2022 summit.
I gotta be honest, nothing has made me despise dollar hegemony like your posting. Truly removed the blinders I had that had me coping re: BRICS
As you should. I try to raise awareness about how dangerous the dollar can be because too many people think that the US empire is on the brink of collapse just because it is losing a few wars currently, forgetting that the US has lost near every war since 1945 except maybe for the 1991 Gulf War and still managed to dominate the world like nothing has happened.
Accurate materialist analysis is anathema and antithetical to Western mindsets, even those with slightly wider lenses
Messin with Texas
I see what you mean
fwiw I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon, but crises such as these repeating (growing larger each time) plus the US’ power globally declining = after a few decades, probably balkanisation, sure
If the dollar loses its hegemony status, then likely. But it’s going to be a while away, probably decades like you said.
Good take. Material analysis gives us an insight into the most likely scenario.
100-150 years ago it would be a real event but now it’s some bullshit we’re all going to forget about in a month
We’re having these false “existential threats to our democracy” crises with such frequency and regularity now that everyone will be too desensitized to the warnings when the actual threat does arise.
the actual fascist takover threat is already here lol
The libs will probably use it as fuel in their woke scolding about voting blue no matter who. Gotta preserve democracy 🙏 Hillary 2024
And we can all say “yea it’s an example of how Biden is literally not going to do a single goddamn thing even if multiple states explicitly say they’re ignoring the federal government to be cruel to vulnerable minorities”
I’m not if libs appreciate how bad this is going to hurt him, not great to be the guy who supports genocide abroad and is doing literally nothing to stop the fascists at home.
Libs screeching daily about democracy under attack since 2015, spends the next two election cycles paving the way for Republicans to materially harm the bare bones scrap of American democracy that remains, say I told you so in 2028
This has the potential to be the tankie Biden moment, but he’s only militant about doing violence to foreigners.
My money is on this being the thing that directly causes the US to balkanize, and only because it seems to be against the hexbear main consensus. This site was wrong about the invasion of Ukraine, I think this is going to be Hexbear tradition.
Wrong about the beginning of events, but correct about their trajectory once they have begun
But often only because we go “No, that won’t happen, that would be stupid and counterproductive for the West” but then they just do the thing anyway and so we just go “…okay, well, they’re gonna lose then”
I think the skepticism toward the invasion of Ukraine was completely correct and valid, we just forgot we live in hell world.
It was a Thatcher bombing situation. The libs crying wolf about Russia only have to get lucky once, we have to get lucky every single time. They like to forget that they were howling about an imminent Russian invasion for months and even US analysts no longer considered it plausible. And then it happened.
Ever since Ukraine, my partner scoffs whenever I say “nothing major is going to happen.” I can’t say they’re wrong
I had a large discussion with some colleagues about there not “being anything going on in Ukraine” because they had finally, after weeks/months of scaremongering, picked up on the news that “something was going to happen in Ukraine”.
This argument took place on february the 24th. I had not heard the news because I had finally tuned out, because nothing was going to happen lol. I literally said “I’ll call it a war when there’s tanks rolling into Ukraine!” Not knowing that at that moment, tanks were rolling into Ukraine.I don’t blame you. That was a lot of us. US dem-party-leaning media screeched about Russiagate for 6 years, wearing everyone’s patience thin on anti-Russian scaremongering and creating a “boy who cried wolf” effect. All the libs I know were very smug that day.
How they doin these days?
Bidening their time
i remember the night before i had a drunken discussion with friends at uni and said i thought nothing was going to happen and the next day tanks went in
Happens to the best of us, literally. Lenin said revolution wasn’t going to happen in his lifetime.
lmao Lenin as a nothing-ever-happens guy is really funny to me
Nothing to Be Done by V. I. Lenin
me when weeks take decades
me when decades take weeks
that might be rough if time were real
Thank god right
What an idiot! Hate to be that guy
Ukraine is like the only thing this site has been wrong about, and that’s only because we forgot the number one rule – the stupidest thing that can happen is the one most likely to happen
And that rule is the exact same reason the site will be wrong this time. Most users are assuming rational action, forgetting they live in dumbworld
Yeah I’m a Marxist-Contrarianist too
So a Marxist
Naw my vibe based interpretation says not shit happens
Disclaimer: I was wrong about covid
I just assume it’s all gong to happen now. Once years started to happen, all bets were off.
I actually anticipated a war in Ukraine (because I had been listening to Alex Mercouris and for months throughout 2021 he was very pessimistic about the various diplomatic negotiations leading up to February 2022), I simply did not expect it to happen this soon. I thought it would be another year or so, but those who had been following closely the US-Russia summit in 2021 knew that the US was dead set on provoking a war in Ukraine.
I think anyone who thinks this is going to cause the US to balkanize needs to step outside for at least 3 hours. Screenshot this comment and feel free to @ me in 2-6 months when the current state of affairs has led nowhere.
The “nothing ever happens” crowd will be proven wrong soon
Less “nothing ever happens” and more “it is ridiculous to think Texas will balkanize over what is essentially a slap-fight over immigration when the state receives ~40% of its revenue from the federal government and, among other things, has critical infrastructure fail statewide during cold snaps and is reliant on federal aid anytime a moderately strong storm forms in the gulf of Mexico” - but be sure to tag me in case I miss Abbott’s announcement of Texas’ secession from his militarized wheelchair lmao.
it’s safer to say “eventually”
I think anyone who thinks this is going to cause Russia to invade Ukraine needs to step outside for at least 3 hours. Screenshot this comment and feel free to @ me in 2-6 months when the current state of affairs has led nowhere.
bro they were massing like 200k soldiers on the border for several months before that, it’s not comparable
I think anyone who thinks this assasination of Franz Ferdinand is going to cause a great war needs to step outside for at least 3 hours. Screenshot this comment and feel free to @ me in 2-6 months when the current state of affairs has led nowhere.
this comparison’s even more ridiculous than the Ukraine one - are you really trying to say that Texas refusing to the let federal agents access the border is equivalent to the leader of a country getting assassinated by a separatist and subsequently drawing its allies & enemies into an 5 year long international war across half a continent…Greg Abbott’s the new Wilhelm II and Florida is obviously the Ottoman Empire. Makes sense to me!!!
Nah, I’m just shitpostin’
thanks to you I’ve been sitting here for the past 30 minutes imagining a Ben Garrison style comic where the US/Mexico border is drawn sitting in a Gräf & Stift 28 with a bloody hole through it while Greg Abbott, drawn like Wilhelm II (labeled Texas) does the 
in one corner and in the other there’s this:
It might be obvious in hindsight, but everyone at the time thought it wasn’t going to happen… until it did.
There was already an actual war going on there pre the Russian invasion. It was a war that was started by a coup of the kiev gov. I think we will similarly need to see a coup happen before there’s war here
Well I have good news for you, no matter who wins the election in 2024, at least 30% of the country will believe its illegitimate. More if we get some electoral college shenanigans.
Do you remember the year 2000? Over half the country believed the result to be illegitimate, because it was
I never said anything like that in regard to Ukraine so frankly the comparison is pointless. Theory-crafting balkanization of the US & making cool maps is all well and good but let’s be serious about things.
The most recent example of something similar I can think of is Eisenhower ordering the national guard in to force Arkansas to allow Ruby Bridges into a previously all white school. Of course, that that had a much narrower physical scope than the border. I don’t think the number of states whining means that much as several of them aren’t Mexico land border states so as a practical matter they’re just complaining/engaging in political theater.
Actual enforcement of the Supreme Court order is a mixed bag. It’s easy enough to have the feds reclaim specific crossing sites, and as this is more about political theater I think Abbot will buckle before actually telling the Texas National Guard to fire upon federal agents (and for that matter, those guardsmen risking themselves like that in the name of an election year stunt). The larger border with the razor wire is a different story as it’s easy for Abbot to send people back in to replace the wire after the feds remove it, and the federal government might decide it’s not worth the cost to keep removing it.
Why remove the wire when you can just remove abbot
UwU I’m just a widdle pwesident of amewikkka what do you expect me to doooo
If they actually do secede, then every country in the world needs to immediately invade them on the side of the US and secure the nukes
no nukes for the new south. say no to nuclear proliferation!
A coalition of Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and several other south and Central American countries invading a newly independent Texas to resubsume into Mexico would be absolutely hilarious.
Eisenhower sent deputy US Marshals, to escort Ruby Bridges to school in New Orleans. He federalized the Arkansas National Guard, to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School.
Probably it’ll blow over in a couple of weeks. The feds next step for things like this is usually to find something they fund and pull funding…probably in this case they could just pull any border funding they give to Texas, and that would be enough for Texas to say “fuck it, we can’t buy more razor wire without the funds” and give it up. That’s almost always how these things end up.
If not, next step would be to use force, which at worst would result in a minor skirmish at one or two spots between the local forces and the feds. The local forces would lose that fight pretty much immediately. I would guess most of them are all talk and as soon as the feds roll up with tanks and start shooting, they’ll give up because they’d rather not die for some stupid border skirmish. The feds may not even have to shoot, what tools do the local forces have to stop an APC from just running over the razor wire? The die hards might stick around and they would die, hard. Perhaps there will be some token fall guy somewhere that spends a long time in jail afterwards, we don’t know about him yet because he’s not going to be anyone relevant. Nobody that matters will be punished for this in any capacity, just a few local goons will die and some middle manager soldier type will be made an example of.
Either way it ends with Texas and their allied states using this as yet another campaign talking point to show how the fed is doing le government overreach, push their agenda as usual, and the racists will eat it the fuck up forever. There’s no way in hell this is anything more than a political stunt, even if it gets a few folks at the border shot by the feds. A small price to pay for the GOP to push their agenda. Sure, their stunts are getting flashier and flashier because they need to, but the GOP doesn’t want to balkanize so there’s no way it’ll go that far.
Either way it ends with Texas and their allied states using this as yet another campaign talking point to show how the fed is doing le government overreach
Exactly. That’s the whole point of doing this for them, and the entire reason its happening in an election year.
It is just a stunt. Its a stunt that has some really high stakes implications that should matter in a functioning society - but we don’t live in one if those. We live in one where you can throw a political stunt thats equivalent to sedition and its no big deal because no one wants to deal with that, just enjoy the spectacle
You still feel that way knowing that now it’s not 6 states supporting it it’s 25?
I do, yes. Republicans aren’t going to go to start a countrywide civil war over some razor wire on the border. That’s the only other way this ends, either the funding cuts and a few local force deaths stop this, or it’s literally civil war. I guess the secret 3rd option is that Biden just does nothing and Texas keeps doing what they’re doing. That’s also pretty likely. Either way 2 of those 3 options are basically systemically nothings, and a civil war is highly highly highly unlikely.
It’s option 3.
Biden will do nothing and lose another 15 points in the polls when he clearly demonstrates he’s not only full steam ahead on genocide abroad, he’s also not gonna do a goddamn thing about the rapidly expanding fascism at home either.
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Sure, but Yugoslavia was never the heart of the imperial core. There’s no way the US balkanizes over something like this, it would be completely devastating to global capitalist hegemony. They won’t destroy themselves over something like this.
If they really thought like this they would have made sure Bernie won so that they could buy themselves more time before worsening material conditions radicalize people.
Objectively that would be better for the survival of capital than leaning harder into neoliberal austerity
This is not a rational system making careful decisions
I mean, Brexit was the same kind of irrational, if lower stakes.
were the yugoslavians not invested in not detonating the country too? civil war is generally to the common ruin of the contending interests, but in spite of not being in people’s best interest it still happens
It’s going to be a huge load of nothing. Just like Jan 6th was nothing, just like the Bundy Ranch standoff was nothing, just like the Malheur Wildlife Center occupation was nothing. Biden doesn’t have the cojones to do anything decisive about it, doubly so because it’s an election year.
Biden doesn’t have the cojones to do anything decisive about it, doubly so because it’s an election year.
True. That’s the main reason this is even happening right now, because its an election year. Despite all the implications of this that should matter and are actually high stakes, the reality is that to these governors and the Biden Admin this is just a stunt thats a part of US electoral politics
I might vote for the guy if he started mowing down border patrol hogs and their paymasters lmao
please can something funny happen, my life is so boring, i’m not asking for much, i want to see abbott taken to a government black site and returned with an obvious flesh tone antenna sticking out of his head, something of that nature
The should take him out of his wheelchair and put him a solitary box covered in some sort of lubricated oil.
America is going to become undebatably fascist pretty soon. The libs didn’t prosecute J6 hard enough, now there’s a precedent that a revolt isn’t a life ruining thing for right wingers.
Prepare for American balkanization
Liberal analysis
The second coming
Lmao the libs didn’t prosecute January 6th hard enough? They put everyone who was there in jail for life basically. They prosecuted it in an unprecedented way, clamping down hard and freezing assets. I have no idea what you are talking about, FBI went on a hog hunt afterwards.
The issue with libs isn’t that they didn’t freak out enough over January 6th, that’s basically the exact opposite of reality. They couldn’t have possibly overreacted more than they did
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“Basically” should have clued you in on a hyperbolic statement. Their sentences are all very high for the actual crimes they committed (essentially just trespassing on government property for most of them, no different than sit-in protests). The feds cracked down as hard as they legally could
Look up what those people who didn’t serve any prison time were actually convicted of. It’s just minor misdemeanor shit like trespassing and vandalism because that’s all they could actually prove (because there was no conspiracy, no treason, and libs were overreaching by calling it such)
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Relevant username.
They stormed the capital. Yeah, it’s tresspassing, sure, but this is absolutely a “throw the book at them” sort of instance. There are places that would execute people for this.
But people have been charged with treason and conspiracy, there were pretty well known plans to hinder the election process, many people were charged with gun or other weapons violations, so I don’t know how much of an overreach it is to call it treason or part of an attempted coup? I honestly can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
Really? I feel like I remember some of the r/Capitol Consequences posts being much less then that, like a few years type of thing. Not life or multiple decades.
For example, the guy with flex cuffs got a little less then 5 years.
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