John at the Wilder Wealthy and Wise blog has posted a new "Civil War 2.0 Weather Report" which is his monthly assessment of how close we are to civil war in the United States. The major factors he looks at are: violence, political instability, the economy, and flow of illegal aliens. Because violence, political instability and the economy haven't seen much change, John has elected to not advance us on his civil war scale (currently at 8 "Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology").
I would argue that one of the reasons that violence and the economy appear to be relatively unchanged is government is cooking the numbers--many large cities do not even report crime statistics anymore; and it seems that almost every monthly economic report touted by the Administration is revised in subsequent months and show that things are worse than first reported. But by that point, it is old news.
John was also taken to task by Aesop of the Raconteur Report for overstating the situation. Aesop believes we are, at most, at a 5 ("Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil") or 6 ("People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology").
I won't get into John's response and argument for why he believes we are at an 8--you can read that in his post--but I want to approach where we stand vis-Ã -vis a possible civil war from a slightly different perspective.
Peter Turchin, in his books Ages of Discord and End Times, found that periods of significant civil unrest and civil war (and not all civil unrest led to civil war) shared some common characteristics. Among these--and which he considered to be the most significant factors--were elite overproduction (basically too many elites competing for too few elite positions in government, finance, etc.) and popular immiseration (basically how well off were the populace as a whole relative to the elites).
Elite overproduction leads to conflict among elites and prospective elites; and since you need elites to prosecute a civil war, this is probably the most telling factor of whether you are facing war versus less organized social unrest in the form of protests, strikes, riots, and the like. In the past, elite overproduction was mostly the result of too many children among the elites. A king having one or even two princes was not a problem. A king having several princes, and the dukes and other nobles siring lots of male heirs is quite another issue as they jockey for position and power.
In the modern world, it is not just elites producing children that create new elites, but the university system which anoints new elites. While you and I might scoff at someone getting a degree in political science, gender studies, community organizing, etc., they all expect jobs, preferably in government. The protests that we are seeing in relation to the Israel/Palestine war are only about Israel and Palestine on a cursory level. I believe they are more accurately viewed as a battle within the Democrat party for control of the party pitting a generation of nouveau elites and putative elites against an older generation of elites that just cannot let go of power no matter how old and decrepit they have become.
This seems to be the position taken by Park MacDougald in his recent article at Tablet Magazine entitled "The People Setting America on Fire." His article is primarily a deep dive into the various radical groups behind the protests. These groups--a mixture of Marxists, Anarchists, Islamic, and, yes, even Jewish groups--may cooperate and coordinate, but they have no central leadership.
But the funding is a different matter. Backers include: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Ford Foundation; "various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire", the Open Society Foundations; the Kaphan Foundation; the Quitiplas Foundation; and other wealthy donors that run their contributions "through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA".
Another key funder is WESPAC, which is run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz According the article, WESPAC has received significant funding from the Elias Foundation (a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife), Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), the Bafrayung Fund (run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman), and the Eutopia Foundation (founded by Albert Wenger, a German American computer scientist and managing partner at the New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, and his wife, Susan Danziger).
But a key player that shows up again and again is the Tides Foundation. MacDougald elucidates:
The Tides Nexus, of which the Tides Foundation is a part, is one of largest progressive dark-money networks in the country, controlling upward of a billion in assets; its list of major donors is an all-star cast of left-wing billionaires and foundations, including Soros, Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the New Venture Fund, controlled by another Democratic dark-money powerhouse, Eric Kessler’s Arabella Advisors. A pioneer of what critics have called “charitable money-laundering” through the use of fiscal sponsorships to obscure money trails through multiple layers of bureaucracy, Tides, through its donations and fiscal sponsorships, has emerged as a major backer of the anti-Israel protest movement across the country.
Indeed, scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of the Port of Tacoma in November and an anti-Israel walkout of high school students in San Francisco—where AROC contracts with the unified public school district—is a fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center. So is Palestine Legal, which has coordinated with the National Lawyers Guild to provide legal support for students at the encampments and filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Justice alleging “hostile anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic” environments on American campuses. Another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Adalah Justice Project, whose executive director, Sandra Tamari, was arrested on April 30 at the encampment at Washington University in St. Louis, and who is also the co-founder of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, which participated in the April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza” by blockading the local Boeing manufacturing plant. Still another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Community Justice Exchange, which ran the legal defense and bail fund for the A15 Action/Strike 4 Gaza “blockade,” raising money through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. Since 2020, Tides has also donated just under $3 million to the Alliance for Global Justice, a far-left nonprofit that fiscally sponsors Samidoun, a PFLP front led by Charlotte Kates, the wife of PFLP Central Committee member Khaled Barakat. Barakat, in turn, addressed Columbia students at a seminar in March organized by WOL and SJP.
Whether Tides itself is selecting these organizations for donations, or whether it is merely acting as a pass-through for large donors who would prefer to avoid the spotlight, is difficult to know—which, one might say, is the entire purpose of Tides’ byzantine corporate structure. But we are left with the fact that wealthy donors have been subsidizing months of rolling disruptive street protests by a grab bag of revolutionary and anti-Israel radicals. That leads naturally to a question: To what end?
In that regard, MacDougald notes that, although the Tide Foundation and other billionaire groups have funded other radical protests and riots, this is the first time they have targeted a Democratic president. He believes this is key:
... [Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism] speculates that whatever the ultimate goal of funding the anti-Israel protests, it is to be found closer to home than Gaza. “It has more to do with domestic politics, and we can see this by the language targeting Joe Biden explicitly, even though he and his administration have already handled the conflict in an exceedingly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian way.” One reason to target Biden is that it provides his administration cover to ignore a weakened but still influential block of pro-Israel Democrats—allowing the president to claim, in essence, that his hands are tied. But it may also reflect a power struggle within the party, between what was formerly an insurgent progressive fringe—now backed by a murderer’s row of billionaire donors and energized by young cadres rising through the professional-managerial cursus honorum—and what remains of the teetering old Clintonian establishment. Or, rather, it is a display of force by the faction that has already won, complete with a message for the losers: This is who we are now. Get in line or be destroyed.
He continues:
It is here that the outsize role of Tides in funding the protests may be especially significant. More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party. Tides board member Cheryl Alston, for instance, was appointed by Obama to serve two terms on the advisory committee of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Board member Dylan Orr worked in Obama’s Department of Labor, becoming the first “openly transgender person appointed to a U.S. presidential administration.” Board member Tim Wang is a managing partner at the Westley Group, a clean-energy venture capital firm founded by Steve Westley, the former California co-chair of Obama for America whom Obama nearly appointed as Secretary of Energy. Board member Lori Chatman serves as president of the capital division of Enterprise Community Partners, a housing and “racial equity” nonprofit helmed by Shaun Donavon, who served as Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development and director of the Office of Management and Budget. And the former secretary of the Tides board, Suzanne Nossel, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration (Nossel resigned from the board in 2021).
Maybe it is a coincidence that a dark-money philanthropy empire tied to Obama would be bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel’s war on Hamas—which just happened to be the White House nickname of one Ben Rhodes, the man responsible for building the media-NGO echo chamber that would initially sell the Iran deal and later be repurposed for domestic political warfare during the Trump years. Perhaps it is a coincidence that an Israeli victory in this war, which started with a grisly terrorist attack planned and sponsored by Iran, would deal a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden project of realignment with Iran, which remains the current administration’s real but unacknowledged policy in the Middle East. That realignment has in turn required seeding the generally pro-Israel and anti-terror American public with the idea that Israel isn’t actually a friend but rather a sectarian ethnostate with a pushy domestic lobby bent on dragging American boys into another pointless Mideast war, all so the Jews can continue kicking around the poor Palestinians—just like those bitter whites in flyover country who vote Trump because they want to kick around the Blacks and Mexicans. Which seems, in what is no doubt another coincidence, to be precisely the message of the protesters, who explicitly liken Zionism to domestic white supremacy.
Thus do we find ourselves in a regular lattice of coincidence.
We cannot know whether this will lead to open conflict. Perhaps this is a victory dance of the Obama wing of the Democratic party, but to me it feels more like a fight between the old guard, AIPAC funded wing and the younger Obama faction.
The next civil war will be one that, at least initially, will be widespread mob action; but through their influence over these radical street protestors and connections in minority communities, it appears that the Obama faction is ready to begin this war if they start to lose the ongoing behind the scenes fight. Consequently, on John Wilder's scale, I believe we are at 9: "Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case." It's just that the opposing sides are both nominally "Democrats".
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