“Technical State of Civil War” by Robert Hawks Aug 4, 2025.
Let’s dispense with the pleasantries.
But something worse in its own quiet, choking way—a technical state of civil war. The kind of war that makes cowards of rules and turns procedure into shrapnel.
And in Texas, Greg Abbott is lighting the fuse.
On August 4th, Governor Abbott announced—proudly, defiantly—that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session of the Texas state legislature by August 5th will see their seat declared vacant.
This, in a bald attempt to force a quorum for an unscheduled redistricting effort that would gerrymander at least five new Republican congressional seats into existence.
Bought not with votes, but with ink and knives.
Five seats to hold the U.S. House hostage after a 2026 election that, by all current indicators, will be a biblical catastrophe for the Republican Party.
This is not about state politics.
This is about permanently tipping the balance of national representation using the architecture of a dying republic to rig the new one being born behind its back.
It is a dagger aimed at the heart of the Constitution itself—and it is being sheathed in plain sight.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has responded in kind.
So have the governors of Illinois, Washington, New York.
They’ve declared their own intent to redraw maps, to counterbalance Abbott’s theft with a theft of their own.
And just like that, the pretense is gone.
The guardrails are being sawed off by both sides.
The game is rigged, the referees have joined the teams, and the field is splitting down the middle.
We are not drifting toward civil war.
We are being carried there—on gurneys, on motorcades, in armored trucks painted red, white, and blue and driven by men with no conscience and nothing left to lose.
Donald Trump—the increasingly frail, increasingly unhinged re-occupant of the Oval Office—has shattered the last illusions of presidential restraint.
His executive orders openly violate the Constitution.
He appoints judges who have lied under oath and dares the courts to stop him.
Senate Republicans, now functionally extinct as an institution of deliberation, confirm them without even pretending to vet.
Trump has begun personally selecting general officers in the U.S. military.
He is choosing his own warlords.
This is no longer political theatre.
This is war prep. This is banana republic shit.
Half the country still thinks the Democrats are overreacting.
That we’re all just melting down because we lost a few court cases or that we’re mad we can’t get pronouns printed on our napkins.
We’re reacting because we’re watching the United States be turned inside out by men who believe they should rule forever—or not at all.
This is not just about maps.
This is about a Republican Party that has now publicly declared—yes, publicly, and repeatedly—that if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they will refuse to certify the election.
That’s not politics. That’s war-by-other-means.
The plan is as clear as it is insane: gerrymander the House, win the majority through rigged maps, then throw the 2028 election to the chamber when no consensus can be reached.
Install a Republican president—possibly Trump, God help us—by congressional fiat, regardless of the Electoral College or the popular vote.
In other words: end elections.
Burn the scaffolding of democracy and salt the earth where the ballots used to grow.
And here’s where we land.
If one side openly declares they will never accept a Democrat in power again—and backs that declaration with action—then the only rational, ethical, and self-defensive response is to make the same declaration in return.
That’s how we arrive at a technical state of civil war.
Not with a shot at Fort Sumter.
But with deadlines and district lines, and governors signing paperwork like generals drawing battle maps.
And yes, it leads—eventually, inevitably—to the real thing.
Because what happens when blue states stop sending taxes to a red federal government?
What happens when governors of California, New York, and Illinois say, flat out, “We no longer recognize the authority of a president elected by gerrymandered fiat”?
What happens when National Guard units are federalized and told to act against their own citizens?
Federal troops in Portland.
Federal agents in unmarked vans in Minneapolis.
And now, a sitting U.S. president selecting military leadership based not on strategy, but on loyalty.
This is what a soft coup looks like.
This is how republics become dictatorships—one signed order, one packed court, one nullified election at a time.
We are standing on the edge.
And I want to be clear: I’m not even opposed to the collapse in principle.
Because unlike the Abbott crowd, I’ve thought this through.
If the United States breaks apart—and God knows, we are dangling over that edge like Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of TNT—here is what happens next:
California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada—the spine of the West—will form a new nation.
They will be joined by Illinois, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and most of the northeastern corridor.
The population, economy, and military of this new Union will be vastly superior to anything the southern rump states can cobble together.
And yes, you can wave your little Wyoming flags, but the brutal math is this: once the U.S. Constitution is abandoned, so too is the notion that two Dakotas matter more than one California.
In the new post-America, power will come from population, productivity, and force projection.
Which means: the south is screwed.
The GOP’s strongholds—Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas—are welfare states, net takers, dependent on federal subsidies from blue states they now propose to dominate.
They are a red velvet cake of hypocrisy baked in a kitchen paid for by liberal taxpayers.
And when those subsidies stop?
When Social Security checks don’t arrive?
When food assistance vanishes?
These states will burn—not from outside invasion, but from within.
Poor white voters, duped into culture war hysteria, will finally realize that racism doesn’t pay the rent.
And when the AC breaks, when the grocery shelves are bare, when the insulin is gone—they will riot.
The next Fort Sumter won’t be fired upon by blue coats—it’ll be torched from the inside by red ones who realize too late they were cannon fodder for a billionaire death cult.
Meanwhile, the new blue nation—call it Pacifica, call it the North American Republic, call it literally anything else—will control the nukes.
Because those bases are in California.
Those silos are in Montana and the Dakotas.
Those subs are docked in blue harbors, crewed by people with graduate degrees and no patience for neo-Confederate cosplay.
There may be some holdouts—some nukes in Texas, maybe a stray missile in Florida—but the command structure will fracture.
And the moment loyalty is divided in a nuclear state, you no longer have a country.
You have a disaster waiting for a launch code.
And you can bet NATO and the EU are watching.
So is China. So is Russia.
The new blue state will ally with Europe overnight.
Morally bankrupt. Internationally shunned.
Try running a nation with no money, no allies, and a citizenry trained only in rage. Let’s see how that goes.
And yet—and yet—this is where we are headed.
Because for too long, one side has played by the rules while the other sharpens the knives.
We have tried to compromise with arsonists.
We have let the Constitution become a suicide pact.
Because now, if we do not fight, we die.
If we play fair, we lose.
If we tell ourselves it can’t happen here, we will wake up in the ash of what once was.
Greg Abbott is trying to fire on Fort Sumter with a fountain pen and a smirk.
If we don’t match him force for force—not violence for violence, but action for action, map for map, court for court, and yes, goddamnit, declaration for declaration—then the next fight won’t be about democracy.
It will be about which side gets the tanks.
Because I promise you: the right has not thought this through.
They think blue states are weak.
But I’ve seen New Yorkers when the train’s late.
I’ve seen Californians during wildfires.
I’ve seen drag queens in Texas standing alone against armed mobs and not blinking.
You want to go to war with those people?
Just don’t be surprised when they’re still standing and you’re neck-deep in the mud, wondering why the federal aid convoy never came.
Let me say it again: this is a technical civil war.
The only question left is whether it becomes a real one.
Whether maps give way to bullets.
Whether executive orders become execution orders.
And if that day comes, the outcome is not assured.
It will rest on the heads of men like Trump, like Abbott, like the perjured judges and the cowardly Senators and the hollow-eyed billionaires who looked at democracy and said, “That’s too risky—let’s buy it instead.”
But history has long arms.
And the schoolchildren they’re so terrified of?
The ones they think will be traumatized by learning about slavery?
Those kids will write the textbooks.
And they will tell the truth.
They will say that the Republican Party, faced with the loss of cultural hegemony, chose to burn the country down rather than share it.
That the right feared democracy more than death.
That in the end, they didn’t win.
Because power isn’t loyalty.
Power is legitimacy. Power is cooperation. Power is earned.
And no matter how many judges they install, how many maps they redraw, how many parades they throw for the flag—they cannot force a country to love them.
The United States is not one nation.
Hasn’t been for a very long time.
We’ve called it “united” because no one had the balls to call it anything else.
Not at the myth, not at the hymns or the fireworks or the golden parchment we put under museum glass and pretend still governs us.
Look at the actual nation.
The bones under the makeup. You’ll see it’s already split.
We are a cold war in a hot climate, a long, drunken marriage where both spouses sleep in separate bedrooms, hoarding money and muttering fantasies of murder.
Half of this country prays for rain.
The other half curses God for not sending fire.
You think this is a phase?
This is the logical end of manifest destiny and the Electoral College.
This is what you get when you marry thirteen slave states to thirteen merchant ones and pretend the vows were ever sincere.
You get a monstrosity: a country stitched together by compromise, half-built on genocide, half-built on commerce, full of contradictions so profound that the entire enterprise was always going to collapse in on itself like a house made of buried lies and termite wood.
And if you don’t believe me, ask the Cherokee.
Ask the Japanese Americans who had their homes stolen while they sat in desert cages.
Ask the Black soldiers who liberated Europe and came home to lynch mobs.
Ask the trans kids being hunted across state lines.
Ask the women whose bodies are now the property of governors.
Ask them if this was ever one country.
Ask a gay couple in Mississippi what flag they’re saluting when they’re denied medical rights.
Ask a Black teenager in Georgia if the Constitution applies when a cop pulls up behind him.
Ask a nurse in Arizona who makes $38,000 a year and can’t afford insulin because her governor thought tax cuts for landlords were a moral obligation.
Ask the dead. Ask the poor. Ask the workers.
This was never one country.
It was two—or more—pretending not to notice each other, because the lies were easier than the war.
But the lie is collapsing.
There is no social contract anymore—only contractual obligation.
There is no shared dream—only curated delusions, sold like corn dogs at a carnival no one wants to admit is actually a funeral.
The national anthem plays, and we’re supposed to rise, even though the flag’s draped over a coffin and the smell of decay is coming up through the floorboards.
What do you call a government where one party believes in nothing but power, and the other believes in rules the first party has openly set on fire?
You don’t call it a democracy. You don’t even call it a republic.
And hospice is where the United States now lives—quietly rotting, humming show tunes while the nurse tightens the morphine drip and checks her watch for the next coup attempt.
Because the old country—the one your parents pledged allegiance to, the one your grandfather swore oaths for, the one we were all taught to memorize and mythologize—that country is already gone.
The states don’t trust the federal government.
The Supreme Court is functionally a papal tribunal in robes, overturning majority will with smirks and footnotes.
Congress is a roach motel for lobbyists and performative lunatics, many of whom are openly preparing for a post-America America where the flag stays the same, but the Constitution is a ghost story told around campfires by billionaires.
And don’t give me the “but the military” argument.
As if the military isn’t just as fractured.
The military is not a monolith.
It’s a lattice of class tension and cultural divergence, a cross-section of a nation coming apart at every seam.
You think the Joint Chiefs will all salute the same president if both sides claim victory in 2028?
You think a captain from Oregon will obey the same orders as a major from Alabama if they both think they’re saving the republic?
We are one disputed election away from seeing Marine units on opposite sides of the Potomac drawing weapons on each other.
And don’t think they won’t.
We’ve trained them to kill.
But we didn’t train them who to follow once the flag splits in two and each side says it’s the real one.
That’s the thing no one’s ready for: there won’t be two Americas.
Twenty splintered visions of what the United States “really” is, each one armed and praying for the clarity of righteous bloodshed.
California won’t ask permission to secede.
Texas already pretends it’s its own country—hell, they teach their kids the Alamo was a birthright, not a graveyard.
Florida is the Bosnian wildcard in the whole damn deck.
Armed, enraged, half-drowning in its own hubris and sea level, it will burn and smile as it does.
Once the structure collapses—once the federal government becomes two rival groups of governors and officers and deep-state functionaries playing constitutional Calvinball, it’s over.
The treaties don’t matter.
What matters is who controls the ports, who keeps the power grid on, who can move food and fuel and bullets across state lines.
There will be checkpoints.
Supply chains redrawn by governors who no longer answer to the Pentagon, because the Pentagon will be two buildings by then—one in D.C., one in Omaha, or maybe Austin, and each one claiming legitimacy over the other.
The South will remember its mythologies and try to rise again.
The North will remember its debts and try to collect.
Cities will become fortresses.
Rural counties will become militias.
Suburbs will become no-man’s-land.
And as all this happens, the dollar will collapse.
Don’t kid yourself: the global economy does not give a fuck about “We the People.”
They care about stability.
Trade routes and energy flows and the enforcement of contracts.
The minute they sense real domestic instability—not the threat of it, but the confirmation of it—the dollar goes down like a narcoleptic in a blackout.
And when that happens, the war isn’t theoretical anymore.
Because we don’t make shit here.
We import. And when the imports stop, the riots start.
You think Americans know how to wait in line for food?
You think anyone in this country has the patience for “rolling blackouts” or “fuel rations” or “shared sacrifice”?
They will shoot the cashier.
They will torch the supermarket.
They will drag their neighbor into the street because someone has to bleed for the fact that their Amazon package didn’t arrive and their WiFi is down and the President is in hiding.
Look at January 6th. That was the rehearsal dinner.
Look at Kenosha. Look at Minneapolis. Look at Portland.
Now multiply it by fifty.
Add National Guard units defecting based on Facebook memes and AM talk radio.
Add sheriffs with God complexes and militia ties.
Add cyberattacks from Russia, China, and every 20-year-old in Estonia with a grudge and a laptop.
Add nuclear weapons whose command structure is suddenly ambiguous.
Add diseases, real and manufactured, released to sow chaos by regimes eager to carve up the carcass of the American empire before someone else claims it.
Add fear. Add drought. Add fire.
This isn’t a Tom Clancy novel.
This isn’t a prepper fantasy.
This is what happens when a government built on consensus loses its ability to consent.
We’ve been trained to think of civil war in terms of Gettysburg and Antietam.
But the next one won’t look like that.
Like Lebanon in 1975, where Christian militias and Muslim factions and foreign powers turned one of the most beautiful countries on Earth into a graveyard that smelled of smoke and gun oil and the end of things.
The next civil war will be digital and tribal and sudden.
It will be declared not by Lincoln but by TikTok and Fox News.
It will be fought not on battlefields, but on highways and Wi-Fi and gas lines and court dockets and supermarket aisles.
It will not be brother against brother.
It will be neighbor against neighbor, algorithm against algorithm, drone against protest, truth against power, and power against everyone.
And in the chaos, people will scream for order.
And some strongman will appear.
A Tom Cotton or a Josh Hawley or some asshole we haven’t even met yet, raised in the bowels of corporate-funded think tanks and groomed for the moment America breaks.
And he’ll take what remains of the Constitution and feed it into a shredder made of applause and fear.
He will come, and we will let him.
Because Americans are not special.
We are not immune to history.
We are Rome in the 5th century, decadent and divided, watching the aqueducts crumble while we chant slogans and sharpen knives.
We are the USSR in 1991, holding onto a flag while the ground splits beneath us.
We are whatever comes next, and we are not ready.
And when it comes—when the sirens replace the debates, when the tanks roll down Main Street not as a parade but as a warning—some of us will remember what we lost.
We’ll remember the dream. The idea.
We’ll remember that once, however flawed and hypocritical and blood-soaked it was, the idea of America meant something.
It meant the possibility of self-government. Of progress. Of dignity.
It meant something more than flags and guns and courts packed with perjurers.
And now we stand at the edge of that attempt.
The United States was beautiful.
In dreams. In songs. In potential.
But it was never unbreakable.
And the people trying to bend it are forcing it to break.
I never thought I’d live to see it.
But now I worry we all will.
