this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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You can doom all you want, but ultimately there's nothing stopping a president from causing a civil war. There's no point really worrying about it, other than being vigilant. They can declare what they want, but they have no authority here. If they choose to just ignore the Supreme Court, well if they really want a civil war, they will have one.
I guess the term "civil war" has lost all meaning entirely. I won't even try.
No, you just don't understand how serious this is. If the federal government starts outright cancelling or invalidating elections, we are officially in civil war territory. That is the time for states to start seceding from the union. Democracy is worth fighting for. Democracy is worth dying for. Again, if the federal government really wants to force a civil war, it can do so. But that's always something the federal government can do.
Civil war means internal, opposing armies between clearly defined groups.
What you're describing would be widespread social unrest and the like, but without an army on our side we don't have opposition, and without leadership and organization we won't even be able to make an underground army. We don't even have boundaries and targets and clear agendas, so we're years and years from "civil war" if not decades.
You may think this is pedantic but in these matters it's very important we stop using inaccurate or hyperbolic terms because it gives people the wrong idea of what is going to happen and what we need to actually do. There is a hollywood-like infatuation with "civil wars" that is not doing this conversation any good. It makes reasonable people who know these facts tune out and take the whole thing less seriously. We can turn it around electorally but the reigning powers really, really want us to create false narratives around what's happening so that average people roll their eyes and tune out.
You ignored what I wrote and wandered off on a tangent. No, I'm talking about the actual formal dissolution of the Untied States. States literally seceding from the union. When the federal government starts invalidating elections, that's when you need to be contacting your state representatives formally demanding that your state secede from the union. I am literally talking about second civil war, with the US military breaking apart into opposing sides, just like it did in the first civil war.
Yah I know what you're talking about and I think you're lost in the sauce also, this isn't happening anytime soon. It may happen, but a lot more has to happen beforehand.
You may be confused, I am not saying "everything is going to be okay", in fact what I'm saying is far, far worse which is that, right now if we lost election integrity entirely and the electoral process was supplanted or compromised, we would have a lot of protests, but then nothing would happen. We don't have any organization, we never even got anything from BLM, No Kings or the recent wave of national protests about ICE. Nothing changes until the majority of comfortable Americans start getting uncomfortable enough that they are willing to sacrifice everything, that is when armies start forming, state militias, and rhetoric of secession.
That would be an inevitable consequence of destabilizing democracy, but the big force here is still the biggest force, that the US is a slow turning boat and companies, the corporations who run the country, are not going to accept anything that rapidly hurts their bottom line, so none of this happens over a timespan less than decades.