United Airlines flight 93 was the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01, instead of being flown into the US Capitol. The reason it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania was that a group of passengers, ordinary peace-loving Americans, put aside their fears of immediate harm from the edged weapons held by the hijackers and united with one goal: to storm the cockpit, kill the hijackers, and regain control of the plane. Although they didn’t succeed in regaining control of the plane, they did at least induce the hijackers to crash it prematurely.

These passengers had the advantage of knowing, from communications with people on the ground, what was up that morning—and thus, what their hijackers probably intended to do with the plane. So really they knew they had nothing to lose. Among the many sounds the cockpit voice-recorder picked up in the final minutes of the flight, was that of a food cart being rammed against the cockpit door, and a cry from one of the passengers, “In the cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die!”

According to Wikipedia, “Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center deep under the White House, authorized Flight 93 to be shot down, but upon learning of the crash, is reported to have said, ‘I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane.’”

He was right. But the heroism of the flight 93 passengers was a different kind of heroism than the lone-actor heroism we’re more used to reading about. It was a heroism involving a coming-together, a coalescence, of people who could accomplish a heroic task only when in a “united state.”

The rarity of that kind of coalescence nowadays points to a basic conundrum of human affairs, especially governance. In other words, even when a large mass of people has ample justification for rebelling against the relatively small group of individuals who control their lives, and ample means to do so—if united—they almost never unite effectively.

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Consider the recent unprecedented popular protests across China, which ultimately involved more than a dozen cities. The background was a general unhappiness concerning national and local “COVID zero” policies, plus an even more general dissatisfaction with one-party rule. The triggers for protests were World Cup broadcasts from Qatar showing fans not wearing masks, and a deadly fire in a residential building in Urumqi that took firefighters hours to extinguish due to extreme local anti-COVID measures—Urumqi had been locked down for months. As for the leadership of the protest movement . . . the movement seems to have been relatively leaderless and spontaneous, driven chiefly by the circulation of Internet messages and images. That leaderlessness is unsurprising in China, where any dissident leader visible and vocal enough to shape and direct protests is likely to be swiftly bundled away by police. It also may have been the decisive factor, for these relatively leaderless protests were limited to public gatherings, and did not have clear goals other than the mass voicing of complaints. Ultimately, the Chinese government was able to climb down from their COVID policies without their tight control of the country being threatened significantly.

A popular uprising against the government of Sri Lanka earlier this year was arguably more successful. The government, headed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and including some of his family members, was widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, as Sri Lankans faced out-of-control inflation, power shortages, and other problems. When these stresses worsened and protests began, the government responded with repressive measures such as arrests and social media blackouts, exacerbating the situation. The protest movement eventually developed a leadership structure, including some firebrand student leaders. In July, a very large crowd of protesters stormed the Presidential palace in Colombo and Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country. However, the new government soon cracked down on the protest movement leaders, who apparently didn’t have much support among the country’s elites.

There are also ongoing protest movements in Iran and Russia. The one in Iran is very prominent and broad-based, and has forced the Tehran regime to backpedal somewhat, but so far has failed to result in an overthrow of the theocratic regime—which recently has started publicly executing protesters. The protest movement in Russia, against the Putin government and its Ukraine invasion, is hardly visible and seems to have achieved little if anything—clearly many dissidents have opted to leave the country rather than stay and protest, while some higher-profile dissidents have been disposed of via the now-classic Russian method of defenestration.

Just looking at these examples, one can postulate that a popular political uprising, to have a decent chance of success, requires:

• • Sufficient popularity, i.e., support from a large, preferably dominant proportion of the population, among whom there is a strong commonality of interest;
  • Strong stressors/triggers that convince ordinary people that regime change is needed and compel them to take action (starting with protest marches and other gatherings);
  • A vision of how things should be different, e.g., more liberal, less corrupt, more aligned with some alternative ideology, etc.
  • Effective leaders who can inspire and direct the movement in ways that achieve regime change;
  • Elite support, boosting the movement’s power by enabling it to control or influence key institutions (e.g., media, academia, police, military).

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Ticking most or all these boxes is going to be challenging anywhere, particularly so in Western countries. I would say it’s virtually impossible in the United States at present.

Popularity: Considering how the current US regime favors nonwhites, and considering how many contemporary white women are content with this anti-in-group discrimination, it seems likely that American dissidents are mostly white males—the principal heirs, as it were, of the country’s founders and builders. I would guess that this putative dissident group, all in all, comprises less than a third of the US population. That is still a very large number of individuals, somewhere between 50 and 100 million. Certainly they would be unbeatable if united as one against disunited foes. But even white American males remain highly disunited. Moreover, the fact that dissident Americans, as I have defined them, are very much a minority puts them in a weak position culturally. It also would be used (and to some extent is already being used) to justify harsh regime measures against them, since they do not “represent the average American.”

Stressors/triggers: The level of stress and urgency that would normally compel dissidents to go out onto the streets and protest is so far not very evident among dissident Americans. To be sure, the regime (an entity that is cultural as well as political and extends far beyond formal government) has done great damage to the country, via the wokeification/corruption of education, media, academia, immigration policy, the judiciary, and most other policies and institutions. Their misrule seems much more deserving of a punitive popular reaction than the misrule that prompted the American Revolution. Yet the US, for now, retains relatively high living standards, certainly for white males—and those living standards are supported by a huge structure of financialization/debt. In short, American dissidents still have much to lose by revolting openly. And so, like the proverbial slow-boiled frog, they still mostly prefer waiting (and complaining ineffectually, often indirectly via conspiracy theories) to real, in-the-streets action. I doubt that they will prefer action until there is much more radical and extensive regime provocation and/or a prolonged economic depression that leaves them with “nothing to lose.”

Envisioned change: American dissidents are remarkably fragmented in their views of what has gone wrong and what is to be done about it. Many of them, as I just noted, believe in bizarre conspiracies involving things like elite pedophile rings, or “chemtrails.” It’s often hard to tell where the conspiracy-theory fringe ends and the mainstream begins.

The only halfway-cogent explanations for USA’s predicament that I’ve ever heard/read are from right wing intellectuals with small followings. The average “angry white male” appears to have little or no understanding of, say, the recent cultural and political impact of women, or the history of blacks in the USA and their manipulation by the major political parties. The most popular view now among right-wing American dissidents seems to be that “wokeism is the problem,” and that things would get better if it could just be toned down a bit. In other words, they have neither a solid grasp of the problems facing the country, nor a positive alternative vision—let alone one that captures the energy and idealism of young people in the way that progressivism/wokeism does.

Inadequate leadership. The American woke regime seems almost as effective at suppressing the leaders of dissident groups (e.g., Proud Boys, Oath Keepers) as the Chinese Communist party’s secret police are at suppressing pro-democracy leaders. In the wake of the regime’s 1/6/21 prosecutions and hearings, I can’t think of a single person, inside or outside of American politics, who currently has the visibility, stature, energy, intellect, and vision to reverse the adverse trends and put the country on secure footings. A big part of the problem, of course, is that at this late stage of the national disease, saving the country almost certainly would require a revolution-like abandonment, at least temporarily, of its current political framework—and the regime, understanding this, has begun to treat any opposition as sedition. Given these stakes, many of the right’s most prominent “leaders” have switched to less risky goals, such as enriching themselves—which to me is a clear indicator of organizational defeat/degeneracy, seen also among Democratic Party-controlled African American leaders.

Lack of elite support. Perhaps the most obvious of all its defects is that the American conservative/dissident movement lacks elite and institutional support. This is not a trend that seems likely to be reversed any time soon. The takeovers/makeovers of elites and institutions by anticonservative activists and their ideas (often these begin as conquests by women, who are inherently more left-wing and susceptible to wokeism) reflect a process that has been at work for decades, and is now accelerating through its final stages to a state of more or less complete control.

Thus, while the Flight 93 story presents a striking case of group heroism in the face of disaster, it’s more an example of what US isn’t (yet) than what it is. The legacy population of the United States, though well advanced in their cultural and political emasculation, and in the related, sad handover of their inheritance to foreigners, are still surprisingly comfortable, still quite far from an “if we don’t, we’ll die” moment.

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Why are Americans on the political Right so drawn to conspiracy theories, from the chemtrails lore and QAnon to the conviction that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful?

It’s hard to say anything with certainty about the causes of social trends, societies not being very amenable to the types of experiments that can settle such issues in other realms of science. But to me a plausible hypothesis is that all this conspiracy-theorizing is a conversion of complex, partly unconscious, and above all inadmissible knowledge concerning existential threats, into a form that the average person can openly express.

In other words, even if this conspiracy stuff seems ridiculous to most educated people, it is stuff that ordinary folks can understand and discuss, and even if the threats are in fact imaginary, they are in principle as salient and alarming as the real threats that are suppressed: Dire threats from the culture and media are converted into dire threats from the water and the air, even from medicines. Similarly, the implicit knowledge that America’s elite-driven culture corrupts young people is transformed, in the QAnon belief system, into a simpler narrative about a ring of elite pedophiles.

To put it yet another way: on the Right the collective unconscious knows that something has gone terribly wrong and is causing great harm, but it tends not to acknowledge this directly—it tends to acknowledge only imaginary wounds. Psychiatrists call such phenomena, when they occur in individuals, hysterical or somatoform or conversion disorders: For example, a woman’s husband has been cheating on her, but instead of acknowledging this, she develops an ailment with nonspecific and unverifiable symptoms.

Why can’t Americans openly acknowledge what has harmed them? Most obviously because the principal causes of harm over the past half-century are the very things that American cultural and political elites have held up as holy and beyond criticism—indeed, anyone criticizing them is, in the lexicon of America’s new, feminized, despiritualized Puritanism, a hater.

Consider the general reaction if one were to make, on social media or in person in polite company, any of the following assertions (which I regard as essentially true):

• The permitting of mass immigration to the United States from 3^rd World countries over the past several decades has been—in effect, from the perspective of legacy Americans—a fraudulent and treasonous ploy by the Democratic Party to pack the electorate in their favor.
• To further this scheme, Democrats have depicted it as a compassionate, Christian policy that only “racists” would oppose—notwithstanding the fact that ethnically based nationhood is and always has been the norm worldwide.

• Democratic Party coalition-building over the last half-century has also relied heavily on the stoking of anti-white feelings among American blacks, anti-male feelings among American women (especially single women who are inherently more susceptible to this message), and anti-heterosexual feelings among homosexuals.
• To reward the members of its coalition and further divide them from legacy Americans, the Democratic Party has succeeded in establishing policies that significantly discriminate against legacy Americans and in favor of women and non-whites. Incredibly, these policies, including the euphemistically named “affirmative action,” favor even affluent non-white immigrants over legacy Americans. Again, to quash opposition or even debate, Democrats have depicted these discriminatory policies as compassionate and necessary measures that only evil people could oppose.

• Major news media organizations, the advertising and entertainment industries, academia, Big Business, large segments of the legal profession, and of course most of the pseudo-opposition Republican Party, have for their own selfish reasons enabled and abetted these schemes.

• While these schemes have as their inevitable result the destruction of traditional American society and its replacement with a grouping that necessarily will be degraded, unstable, partly atomized, and riven with ethnic conflict, the “new America” in principle will be much easier for these cultural and political elites to control.
• Although the Democrats’ latest power-seeking move—large-scale rigging of the presidential election, mostly through ballot-harvesting in key Democrat-controlled areas—has outraged many on the right, the Democrats’ much more harmful method of electorate-packing has been ongoing for decades.
• Effectively the USA’s cultural and political elites have ruined a great country in their pursuit of greater power over it. Many of these elites may actually believe that their motives have been pure. Yet the gravity of their crime far exceeds anything that any traitor or indeed any foreign adversary has ever done to the United States.

Obviously, for the average American, stating any of these things openly and identifiably, beyond one’s circle of family and close friends, would risk immediate practical consequences such as social ostracism and job loss.

Less obviously, such a declaration would also have an important psychological consequence: To acknowledge awareness of this real and colossal crime while doing nothing about it—continuing one’s normal routines—would be embarrassing; it would amount to a confession of pathetic weakness and cowardice.

For most Americans, such a declaration could invite as well the recognition that for years, even decades, they have effectively collaborated in this crime, by voting for Democrats and Republicans who have furthered it, and perhaps even by participating in ritual denunciations of fellow Americans who have opposed it.

For all these reasons, I suspect, many Americans avert their eyes from the harshest truths about their situation, preferring to embrace fantasies that signal their distress without inviting the labels “racist” or “white supremacist” or being otherwise unmentionable. They call these fantasies “red pills,” but they are really only blue pills.

And perhaps the remarkable mass rallies for a president who was always evidently an inept narcissist, the MAGA-themed protests and other gatherings, and even the recent, brief mob occupation of the U.S. Capitol, should be seen in a similar light: as make-believe manifestations of a rage that dare not speak its name—manifestations that in the end are ways of losing, not ways of winning.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, on the other side of the world from the USA, the elites and middle classes of the Philippines, with low-key but ample international support, overthrew their country’s elected president, Joseph Estrada, in what was later called a “constitutional coup.”

Estrada was in many ways like Donald Trump. He was an older guy with a womanizing past and rough-edged, frat-boy attitude who was widely known through past media exposure (he’d been an action star in Filipino movies, back in the day), and had plenty of mass appeal, but was somewhat repulsive to the more educated classes.

A big difference was that Estrada had been credibly accused of corruption. When, in January 2001, his Senate supporters effectively suppressed key evidence in his impeachment trial, the prosecutors walked out, liberals in the Philippines threw up a hue and cry, foreign diplomats and creditors became nervous, and the idea of simply ousting Estrada spread quickly.

Just a decade and a half before, in 1986, a mass movement that had come to be known as the EDSA Revolution (after an avenue in Manila where the main gathering took place) had resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The anti-Estrada opposition followed this obvious model, and when the impeachment trial collapsed, EDSA II took place immediately. The media were for it, the US, a key ally, gave the nod (G.W. Bush, fresh from his own Bush v. Gore court victory, was about to take office), important Philippine cabinet officials including the heads of the police and military abandoned Estrada, and even the Philippine Supreme Court blessed the coup with the airy declaration that “the welfare of the people is the supreme law” (i.e., salus populi suprema lex). Estrada saw that he had lost virtually all support, and resigned, allowing his successor, vice president Gloria Arroyo, to take office.

(Arroyo, who later pardoned Estrada after his corruption trial and conviction, eventually faced corruption allegations herself, concerning a bribe allegedly demanded by her government from a Chinese government-linked telecom company that wanted a contract to install a “national broadband network” linking Philippine government offices. But she was viewed much more favorably by the elites than Estrada had been, and ended up serving out her terms of office.)

Why is any of this of interest now? Well, for one thing, it’s a reminder that presidential transitions in “democracies” are not necessarily constitutional or legal just because the media proclaim them to be. EDSA II also illustrates how Trump’s presidency, if it were restored by court action, could come to an untimely end.

Perhaps more importantly, this two-decade-old “people power” story highlights some of the things that Trump and his supporters, or a post-Trump Red State America, would not have if they were ever to try to achieve political power through a revolt or rebellion:

• They would not have significant foreign support.
• They would not have the support of their country’s elites.
• They probably would not have the support of any major media organization, domestic or foreign.
• They almost certainly would lack support from the USA’s top military brass.

Could they still prevail? Sure. But they would have to overcome all these disadvantages. And since they would not have MSM support they could not simply gather dramatically in one place and hope for a media-induced buildup of pressure on the federal government.

Red States Army

Essentially, Red State America would need to form an army, à la 1776. Although the needed size and firepower of that army would depend on the movement’s ultimate goals, I think that force would have to be at least several hundred thousand strong to contend with Blue States National Guard units and possibly regular army and USAF units. Much of the “Red States Army” total could come from Red State National Guard units, defecting regular military troops, and retired/reserve veterans, though it would probably be able to pad out that core with a larger group of hunters and others who own and know how to use guns.

This rebel movement, to the extent it could control its own territory, would have a grip on most of the former-USA’s food production, so food shouldn’t be a problem. But the movement would need to set up its own banking system, central bank, and currency, much as the Confederate States did in Civil War I. It would need to establish control over the parts of the internet and telecom networks, rail and road networks, and other infrastructure elements within its domain. It would need its own social security system. And so on, and so on.

Moreover, prior to rebellion at state level, this movement would need a network of benefactors who would fund the cause covertly, for example by adding soldiers and support workers to existing businesses’ payrolls, or simply in a low-visibility, cash-based system outside the federally regulated banking system. As many on the right have learned already, US banks ultimately will not (knowingly) do business with those whom the left elites designate as “enemies of the people.”

The goals of a Red State confederacy could be, for example simply to break away and form a sovereign country, taking existing Red States along with any adjacent Blue State rural counties whose inhabitants vote to join. At county level the USA is mostly Republican, so in principle such a Red America would include most of the land area of the lower-48 states and of course all of Alaska. This would leave Blue America with most of the GDP-producing industry of the former USA, but also with most of the long-term social and demographic problems—“vibrancy” I think they call it.

All that vibrancy would be reflected in whatever army the Blue States could muster following the tens or hundreds of thousands of defections by Red State-loyal troops and officers, plus the loss of the many military bases within Red States. And if the Red States’ goal were purely defensive, the Blue States would have the added burden of having to subdue Red State cities, presumably through high-cost urban warfare.

What of the Antifa and BLM brigades we saw in action last summer? Well, their antics don’t strike me as particularly relevant to actual combat—although I can imagine many of them being unwilling to learn that lesson except in the hardest possible way.

In short, when it comes to actual fighting, a Red State army could have substantial advantages. (I’m assuming that neither side would go nuclear in this conflict.)

My guess is that the hardest task for an independence-seeking Red America would be the political task of convincing Red State governors and legislators to secede in the first place, so that the rebellion could begin to organize at scale. They don’t make US politicians like they used to—certainly not like they did in 1861.

In fact, neither Trump nor any prominent Red State politician, as far as I know, has had the mental clarity and courage even to raise the issue of resolving the USA’s current schism through political separation. That’s despite the Woke Left’s increasingly obvious willingness to tyrannize its domestic enemies, i.e., half of the country, by demonizing, canceling, and disemploying them, silencing their political speech, and, if necessary, imprisoning them in re-education camps.

The USA was founded on the principle of self-determination as the ultimate escape from tyranny, and the tyranny of the contemporary, woke Left already threatens to be worse in some ways than what Colonial Americans faced in the run-up to their declaration of independence. So it does seem appropriate at least to start thinking about how contemporary Americans might successfully act on that hallowed principle.

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