The Stupid Apocalypse Fantasies Driving Us Toward Civil War

Everyone rooting for this is just embarrassing themselves

Hey, do you remember Tucker Max, the fun-loving early-2000s blogger and humorist? He wrote a bestseller called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell...

...which was turned into a movie in 2009 and made him millions of dollars. If you’re wondering what Tucker is doing these days, he’s gone off the grid to prepare for the apocalypse, training to kill his fellow Americans (in self-defense, of course):

It’s a reasonable reaction, if your observation of modern society is conducted entirely via a glowing screen. The nation is divided and the bad guys, we’re told, will settle for nothing less than literal genocide:

Those who don’t explicitly call for war will still insist “these people” can’t be negotiated with, that this can’t be fixed by voting, that the time for talk is over. The other side are, literally, monsters:

All this, in a nation that boasts the largest collection of destructive firepower ever assembled. And I’m not talking about AR-15s—a true war of extermination would render much of the country, if not the planet, uninhabitable. Our legacy would be generations of starving, sickly children who’ll lament the Old Ones who built a paradise and then went mad.

I don’t usually like to get political on here, but I personally am not in favor of that outcome. So let’s figure out what’s going on, after this plug for my new book:

My most recent novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is up at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop. Or any local bookstore!

1. First, The Bad News: You’re Already Collaborating With The Monsters 

Let’s say you agree that half of the USA is so far gone that you can’t ethically interact with them in any way. Maybe you’re a pro-life conservative who believes pro-choice types are literal genocidal baby killers, or whatever. So here’s an experiment: I’ll set a timer and we’ll see how long you can function without doing a transaction with at least one monster.

BZZT. 

Sorry, the answer was zero seconds. You’re already using electricity that required the work of dozens if not hundreds of monsters along the way, from the mining/transportation of the coal, to the running of the power plant and maintenance of the transmission lines, to the offices where the billing and customer support happens. That’s a whole bunch of humans that you believe want you dead, some of whom believe the same about you.

And yet, the power stays on. That is the magic of the modern world.

But this means our Civil War preenactor has a real dilemma. Any of us can make a big show of boycotting Disney because they have gay kissing in their movies, or avoiding Chick-fil-A for the opposite reason. But the modern economy is so complex, specialized and entangled that you actually can’t make it through breakfast without depending on and/or enriching some monsters. So realistically, what does, “We cannot share a country with these people!” even mean, when every one of you is living a life that’s only possible thanks to millions of invisible transactions with these very people? We work in the same offices, on the same projects. We live in the same neighborhoods, the same buildings. 

That’s what’s so strange about hearing this talk coming from wealthy capitalists; it’s physically impossible to sell a car that hasn’t been touched by communists or groomers or whoever the monsters are this week. Hell, you couldn’t even make a “Come and Take It” bumper sticker for that car without involving some of the very monsters that sticker is promising to gun down.

2. And No, You Can’t Split Up The Country

I mean, you can split up the country, and it may eventually happen, but no one seems to grasp what it would actually mean. Here’s a hypothetical map from USA Today:

Everything I said above demonstrates how absolutely ludicrous that is. Grab any item near you -- literally any one -- and I can guarantee the factory that produced it is in one state, while another has the mines/farms supplying the raw materials and yet another houses the corporate HQ, which relies on remote workers scattered across the map. The transactions crisscross those hostile borders dozens of times. This means that the moment of secession would instantly shut down everything. 

This isn’t 1861 and it’s definitely not 1776. You’re severing fuel pipelines, you’re choking off shipping, supply chains and financial transactions. All shelves will be empty, all hospitals will run out of supplies, all ATMs will stop working, all credit cards will become worthless plastic. The markets will collapse and, if markets in the USA fall, the world economy falls with them. “That’s why I’m putting my money in Bitcoin!” Motherfucker, what makes you think the internet will keep working? What makes you think you’ll have electricity?

Meanwhile, how many are willing to sacrifice the lives of themselves and their children for, say, Florida, when 64% of that state’s population was born elsewhere? How much of Austin or Houston wants to fight and die for fucking Texas?

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it feels like all of the “Compromise is no longer an option, we must eliminate the other side!” talk is from those who either A) have a child’s idea of how modern society works or B) are just talking shit. Because when I say, “We’re all in this together, including the people you think are ruining the world,” I’m not offering it as an inspirational slogan—I’m stating a fact. These people are trying to convince me that the feet can rebel from the legs and just keep on running.

3. Civil War 2 Is A Meme To Boost Engagement (That Will Still Get People Killed)

As far as I can tell, the fires of Civil War 2 are being stoked by two forces:

A) Extremist politicians/influencers trying to lock in support by portraying all compromise as betrayal; 

and 

B) Media platforms boosting them because they profit from perpetual, fruitless conflict.

In both cases, their task is to perpetuate an obscene lie that, under any other circumstance, a child could see through: That evil is not a type of action, but a type of person. 

It’s subtle, but crucial. They’re not trying to purge society of socialism, but socialists. Not predatory behavior, but predators. Not racism, but racists. You can see the trick, the unspoken assumption that no minds can ever be changed. How can you talk a cockroach into becoming a butterfly? Once you’ve accepted that framing, all contact with the monsters is counterproductive. You’re not going to change their minds, so any non-confrontational encounter is just enabling and normalizing their monstrosity.

And above all else, the factions must never, ever contemplate or discuss their points of agreement or overlap. If you have identical views on taxes, property, law enforcement, marriage, gender, foreign policy and guns, but disagree on abortion, you’re a monster—none of that other shit matters. Your mask has slipped and you now must be purged from the tribe. Any hint of nuance or ambivalence is at best a sign of weakness, at worst an indication of monsterhood. 

And right about here is where I have to get a little personal, so buckle up.

4. If I’d Been Born A Little Later, I’d Probably Have Been A Right-Wing Influencer

Here’s a fun fact about me that most of you don’t know: In the fall of 2016 I had a chance at a TV career as a Trump Supporter Whisperer. I was invited to be on Anderson Cooper’s show—I think to debate Van Jones—because I had written a massively viral column about the divide between red and blue America. It was specifically about how the real divide was urban vs rural and all of the cultural connotations that come with it: College vs high school, secular vs religious, nonwhite vs white. 

I didn’t accept that media appearance or any of the others I was offered. I never tried to parlay it into a book deal. I didn’t want to spend my life as the go-to talking head every time a host needed some idiot to say, “Now I know what the Proud Boys did looks bad, but you have to understand economic anxiety and...” No, I’ve seen what happens to people in that “Trump-era centrist” role. Their brains get scrambled.

But I was able to write that article because I grew up in a small town in deep-red America. I attended a Pentecostal church every Sunday and my job in high school played conservative talk radio on the production floor for the entire shift (Limbaugh, Hannity, Boortz, in that order). It was a town in which Christianity was assumed and if you were Christian, why would you vote for the party of the godless?

By age 16, I wasn’t just a Republican, I was a full-on “trigger the libs” troll, trained by talk radio to fight a culture war in which every conversation was a battleground and victory was defined by how much emotional distress you caused the enemy. If you can’t comprehend how I could rationalize such a thing, please note carefully the following:

For the duration of my childhood and well into my teens, I fully believed that Christians (and thus, Republicans) would in the near-future be rounded up and exterminated. 

5. I’m Telling You: It’s All Driven By Fear. All Of It.

I don’t know how old I was when I heard my first sermon about how the armies of the Antichrist would soon round up and behead Christians, but I know it was before I was in elementary school. I remember being shown the Christian apocalypse film A Thief in the Night (I wrote about it here) and it includes a scene in which this child...

...is led to the guillotine for refusing to renounce his faith. His executioners are his former neighbors, who reveal themselves to be genocidal monsters who secretly hated Christians all along.

Through my formative years, the coming Christian Holocaust was the subject of hundreds of sermons and thousands of hours of talk radio. Though the latter only addressed it in dog whistles; they’d explain that Christians were always rounded up and eliminated under communist regimes, then point out that the Democrats are really just communists in disguise, so...

We believed in gun rights because we knew we would need the guns on the day that the godless socialists came for us, and that even meager attempts at gun control were secretly about disarming us for the gas chambers. We believed that feminists loved abortion because they knew it was an insult to God and that all of that stuff about bodily autonomy and women’s rights was just a ruse. At every stage I was told—and believed—that the Left simply hates good and loves evil, so every inch of ground you give up is another inch down a slippery slope toward extinction.

6. All Is Justified In The Face Of Survival

“No, hold on. Are you honestly saying, Jason, that there were no issues where, as they say, cruelty was the point? Where all of the other stuff was just pretense?” Only in the sense that we thought we were being cruel to people who deserved it, because they were planning to genocide us.

“What about all the racism? You couldn’t have thought minorities were oppressing you.” Well, I was told Democrats were the real racists, that they destroyed Black families with welfare rules that discouraged marriage, and that their soft-on-crime approach allowed violence and drugs to destroy urban neighborhoods. Besides, said the pundits, we love Clarence Thomas and other Black conservatives -- the bias isn’t against skin color, but against antisocial behaviors that are the result of leftist meddling in cultural pillars like the church, family, and hard work. It’s kind of amazing how I can still reflexively summon the talking points in my brain. You can tell I’ve had practice.

“Oh, come on, you didn’t notice that Neo-Nazis and Klansmen all voted Republican?” I did, but I was told that all the violent criminals and rapists in prisons were lifelong Democrats -- you can’t control who supports you. Besides, the left seemed to have no problem turning a blind eye to Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitism.

“What about their denial of man-made climate change, despite all the science?” You mean the “science” that also denied the existence of God, quoted to us by the very people who hated us and wanted us rounded up and killed? How convenient that their “solution” to this “emergency” happened to involve having the government take over all aspects of commerce and everyday life, the very agenda they push in every other circumstance! Rush Limbaugh used to call them watermelons, because they’re green on the outside, red on the inside. 

Seriously, I can do this all day. I’m telling you all this because what lingers now is an inability to go along with the mirror image view I’m getting from my side today, that nobody on the right actually believes what they’re saying, that it’s all just a pretense for cruelty from literal monsters. I’m sorry, I can’t. I was there. That’s not how it was. And, the fact that I changed my mind means I’m bound to believe, not just that minds can be changed, but that we’re obligated to keep trying, over and over, for as long as it takes.

Otherwise, I’d just be slamming the door behind me. And seriously, what’s the alternative?

7. Even If There’s No War, This All Sucks Quite A Bit

“Now hold on,” you say, “none of your story makes sense. If tens of millions of Evangelical Christians genuinely thought the cities were full of murderous infidels, they’d have struck first and made the streets run red with blood. Instead, we mostly just got sneering white people buying Rush Limbaugh neckties.”

Well, yeah, it’s easier to talk about war than to actually do it. Sure, there’s always the fringe crazies who’ll actually get violent -- the ones who have nothing to lose, who don’t realize it’s all just talk. “But that contradicts everything you said above about literally believing you were about to be rounded up and put into camps!” I admit it’s weird; the preacher could do an hour on how our martyrdom was at hand, but if a single congregant had leapt to his feet and charged out the doors screaming, “Let’s get them before they can get us!” we’d all have just stared at him like, “What the fuck?”

Then again, I have a TikTok and I’ve browsed through dozens of comedians talking about how the country has been taken over by murderous Christian nationalists. And their response is to... make TikToks about it? Instead of gathering their valuables and fleeing the country? I mean, I made fun of Tucker Max up there but at least he’s actually prepping. That’s the irony of Civil War 2 memes and t-shirts: if you genuinely thought it was coming, none of your preparation would involve memes and shirts.

“What would you expect them to do? The situation seems so hopeless, all I feel like doing is trying to find some kind of pleasure in my everyday routine and maybe striking some minor blow for my side whenever I can. Sometimes boosting a great meme or article is all you can do!”

See? Now you’re getting it!

8. There Is Great Potential For This To Turn You Into An Asshole

Look, I’m not here to tell you everything will be fine. I’m saying you’re being programmed to think in a certain way that can screw you up for life, regardless of how history plays out.

My problem is that I want to be on the thoughtful, intellectual side, among those who reject superstition and brutality in favor of reason and nuance. But everyone seem haunted by the idea that in a war between zealots and thinkers, the zealots always win, that fundamentalism is a superpower. So, you start hearing that we can only win if we purify our side, and can only do that by preaching that any deviation is heresy, that all questions are blasphemy, that all association with the enemy is treason.

I’m telling you from experience: that kind of thinking comes at a cost. Not just to the overall goals and direction of society, but to how you, as an individual, live your life. Trust me, I tried it.

Once you buy this idea that evil is a type of person instead of a type of action, what happens is you become blind to whatever ugliness lurks inside you. When you’re constantly scouring the horizon for monsters, it can be years before you realize others saw you as one.

My most recent novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is up at Amazon (including audio), Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop. Or any local bookstore!