THE CONNSPIRASPHERE

Forget the Twitter hysteria about WWIII, says NOEL ROONEY, it’s another Amrican civil war we should be worrying about – at least according to rumblings from the Conspirasphere

CIVIL WAR CRIES

The rhetoric of the alt-right and the patriot movement regularly adopts a vague bellicosity that hints at the potential for civil war, or a militarised patriotic response to government (or Deep State) activity. This aggressive defensiveness has always been part of the American political scene, so it’s hardly a surprise that the language of war has infected parts of the Conspirasphere fairly frequently. The notion that some core set of principles is under attack and needs to be defended at all costs is implied in conspiracist thinking.

But recently, the war rhetoric has been ramped up a notch or six, and the vague timelines and targets have begun to coalesce into something much more specific and worryingly tangible. This is not unprecedented (have a look at the kind of vitriol bandied about in the 1930s; there was a clear sense of imminent upheaval, and a simmering certainty that civil war was about to break out) but it is as warlike, or more so, than at any time in the recent past. The collective trigger finger of the patriot community is itchy and twitchy.

The coming year seems to have taken on an alarming apocalyptic significance for some sections of the alt right, and the main focus of their concerns is the immediate future of Donald Trump. His impending impeachment hearing, and the prospects for his re-election campaign, have persuaded many conspiracists that 2020 will be the year when things come to a head. The signs are there for those with eyes to see them.

A leading voice in the rumours-of-war chorus is Mike Adams, aka the Health Ranger. Adams has made a career out of a pungent, and peculiarly American, mix of alternative medicine, wholefoods, survivalist paraphernalia, Big Pharma and Big Government conspiracies and, more recently, cheerleading for an imminent internecine war in a country so politically polarised that the prospect of civil conflict is all too plausible, and perhaps not just to those on the conspiracist right. And like any competent prophet of doom in an age of listicles, he has provided checklists of signs that the big day is here.

Trump winning re-election is of course one of those signs, but so is Trump losing the election (in which case the Democrats will emerge in full gun-grabbing revenge for four years of illusory patriot freedom). Trump being impeached (the Democrat coup finally accomplished) is a trigger, and so is Trump surviving the impeachment hearings (the Democrat coup will need to be tweaked to include assassination). A casual observer might conclude that Mr Adams is hedging his apocalyptic bets here; but he provides arguments for each possible outcome, and there is a kind of logic to what he says.

Perhaps the most outwardly plausible trigger for conflict is a major ‘grid-down’ event: power outages, breakdown in electronic payment systems, lack of food stamps leading to popular riots. An accidental grid-down situation would certainly be volatile and dangerous; but Adams is more concerned with planned events, such as the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, plotting to de-power the state’s major cities so that California can be “invaded and occupied by Communist Chinese troops”. Or traitors like Michael Bloomberg turning off the coal-fired power stations and plunging the country into the hell that is a green economy, where you will be forced to “wipe your ass with ferns while praying to Gaia”.

Adams is by no means alone in predicting big bad things for the coming year; the ominous rumble of war can be heard across the Conspirasphere. And now that Q is back (the dust having finally settled on 8-Chan’s recent troubles) and Trump-oriented conspiracism is centre stage again, ‘the storm is coming’ may feel less like an offthe-cuff Trumpism and more like a martial message from the top.