America: Riots, Instability, and Colour Revolutions

Why the Democrats are forced to escalate their street violence, and whether Trump can contain it before it gets out of control.

After the 2020 election, Time Magazine published a lengthy report on how the Democrats, led by Jewish colour revolution specialist Norm Eisen, had planned to counter the possibility of the vote count favouring Donald Trump. Time explained that Eisen and his Democratic associates had prepared a full scale protest movement, intended to delegitimise Trump and force the Republicans not to certify the election, including by pushing business leaders to oppose him. They had planned a colour revolution.

What is a colour revolution?

Colour revolutions are complex affairs. They include several components, including:

1. A full blast media attack to discredit the targeted government, delegitimise it, and constrain its ability to act by removing public and international support.

2. Lawfare, including domestic and international courts, intended to limit the authorities’ legal options, paralyse their ability to counter the revolutionaries, and occupy their attention fully.

3. Winning over business leaders, by threatening them with sanctions, reputational attacks, and thereby pushing them to withdraw their financial support to the target’s political apparatuses.

4. Coordinated protest movements, protected by the lawfare, supported by business leaders, and publicised by the media. The protest movements typically target state institutions that oppose the organisers of the colour revolutions, with the aim of forcing them into a corner where they can only respond with violence.

The protest movement itself is a small part of the colour revolution. Its role is not the most critical one - the media, the legal system, and the business leaders are far more important. The role of the colour revolutionaries - including but not limited to the protesters - is to discredit the target in the eyes of the public and constrain the target’s freedom of action, to the point that the its only recourse is violence, and to the point where that violence further discredits the target. A colour revolution is successful when the target’s security apparatus is unable to muster the will to use enough violence to maintain order. The target is meant to find itself without allies and without recourse, forcing him to leave his position.

Why the Democrats must escalate

As analyst Mike Shelby has been arguing, the American left is preparing another colour revolution against Trump. They are driven by Trump’s three-pronged attack on their ability to gain control of the House of Representatives and indeed the presidency. This attack includes:

1. Attempts to remove race as a consideration in designing electoral districts. The case is currently before the Supreme Court.

2. Attempts at redistricting in various Republican states to reduce the number of Democrats. This itself is retaliation to the way in which electoral districts are set in Democratic states, where up to 40% of the population who vote Republican do not get a single House seat.

3. Attempts to exclude illegal aliens from the census. The census determines both the number of House seats and votes on the electoral college based on population size. Ignoring illegal aliens would reduce the number of House seats and electoral votes that are allocated to Democratic states, especially New York and California, while increasing the share of Republican states.

Taken together, these changes would remove up to 40 house seats from Democrats and shift them to Republicans. The current Republican majority is six seats. The House would be in permanent Republican control. The Senate favours the Republicans anyway because there are more Red states than Blue states. This would be a game changer. Therefore, the Democrats must use all the means at their disposal to fight this.

The Democrats’ tool kit

The Democrats are fighting Trump, and the possibility of another American First president, using several tactics that all fit in with the colour revolution playbook:

1. Street protests: These include Antifa, BLM (which has been dormant, but will be reactivated if the Supreme Court rules against the inclusion of race as a criterion in drawing electoral districts, as this would reduce black representation), and Latino groups supportive of illegal migrants (one group is known as La Raza, The Race). These protests are targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the judiciary, the police, and sometimes even the courts. The violent factions - BLM and Antifa - are just one piece in a broader organisation, coordinated by an outfit called Indivisible, which tries to build up cells of protest organisers in most American cities. The violent rioters use bigger protests as cover, but sometimes act on their own. On the more extreme side, they will attack ICE using firearms, as has occurred on multiple occasions.

2. Voter registration and radicalisation: Major protests such as No Kings are used to register voters and recruit additional potential radicals. Protesters are profiled to identify those who can be given further training in tactics intended to disrupt and paralyse police forces, or in actual use of violence, in order to strengthen the movement’s ability to paralyse the police.

3. Legal backing: the cost of street unrest is low - there are some professional protesters, but they seem to be mostly self funded. The actually expensive bit is bailing out arrested protesters and providing them with legal protection. This is done via bail funds, financed by major donors, and by funding lawyers to defend the protesters and prevent them from facing consequences. That in turn is also aided by Democrat Attorney Generals who have worked hard to help protesters plead down or even get off without any legal consequences.

4. Lawfare: separate from the legal backing to protesters, Democratic operatives are engaging in a massive campaign to challenge every Executive Order and every legislation to prevent the Trump administration from acting, in line with the lawfare described above. The aim is to make everything the administration does seem illegitimate and/or unconstitutional.

5. Media campaign: Most online media is right wing. Most mainstream media is extremely left wing and unaware of how left wing it is. (Critically, however, the journalistic quality of mainstream media is often higher than the journalistic quality of online media, because the former is institutionalised, experienced, and disciplined. Its bias is reflected in the opinions and presentation of journalism, rather than in outright lies, though those, like the Russia collusion lie, are part of its toolkit). Mainstream media has been engaged in a huge campaign to discredit Trump, rally opposition to him, cast him as a dictator, a racist, or a Nazi, and thereby mobilise the left further.

6. Political opposition: The Democrats are famously disciplined in their voting. (Their judges are equally reliable in their willingness to ignore the constitution to push new legal theories). The Democrats want to prevent Trump from making any legislative gains, and to paralyse his administration as much as possible. The government shutdown should be seen in this lens, as an attempt to tank the economy and harm private businesses (especially large corporations that depend on the state), in order to boost opposition to Trump and create a narrative, real or imagined, of a failed economy and an economic crisis. This Congressional opposition is paired with obstructionism by Democrat governors to paralyse ICE, prevent the

These tools work together to create the following: a strong narrative of opposition, based on allegations that Trump is a dictator, backed by continuous legal action to paralyse the Trump administration, aimed at disrupting businesses and forcing them to support the Democrats, and then to unleash the protesters, both violent and non-violent, to topple Trump. The most likely timeline is the 2028 election or the run up to it, based on a narrative that Republican jerrymandering led to an illegitimate outcome. Our view is that if the Democrats were willing to support a colour revolution in 2020, they will try to do it again.

Trump assassination attempt

Trump’s response

Trump has a range of tools to counter this. The final arbiter of political conflict is violence, and that is Trump’s final tool. But there are others:

1. Defunding Democratic states: The federal government can and has cut funding for some states but can do considerably more.

2. Targeting Democratic donors: with Antifa now listed as an international terrorist organisation, Trump can go after its donors, including perhaps those providing its activists with funds for legal fees. Moreover, big donors are vulnerable to things like antitrust investigations, tax investigations, tailored tariffs, export restrictions, and the like. ActBlue, Indivisible, CHIRLA and others could be designated as international terrorist groups and broken up, and their funders prosecuted.

3. Sending in the National Guard in greater numbers: thus far, National Guard deployments have been minimal, with less than five hundred soldiers deployed per state. Trump can increase National Guard deployments significantly in order to crush unrest and speed up deportations.

   

   The 101st Airborne using bayonets to push back pro-segregation protesters in Arkansas. The protesters were opposed to sending black children into Central High School in Little Rock.

4. Arresting uncooperative governors or mayors: Trump could accuse some mayors and/or governor, such as Governor Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Newsom of California, Mayor Johnson of Chicago, of impeding or assaulting federal officers, conspiracy to impede officers, harbouring illegal aliens, or even seditious conspiracy. The DOJ would have to indict these individuals before the FBI proceeds to arrest them. This would be a major escalation and would undoubtedly trigger even bigger unrest. Trump would have to pair this with a policy to take control of the police in affected areas, and with large National Guard deployments.

Trump has not yet used all his escalatory cards, but we are not even one year into his administration. He in a way needs the left to escalate to justify, politically, his own escalations, and his enemies need him to escalate to justify theirs.

Little room for compromise

A critical escalatory factor is this: after Trump was ousted in 2020, he and his all associates were prosecuted on incredibly flimsy grounds (even the investigation into John Bolton was started under the Biden administration). Increasingly, American politics is existential for the players.

This is coming at a time when shared values among Americans have collapsed, and there is little by way of shared worldview. The American constitution is useless here: it is made for a religious and moral people. The greatest example of the uselessness of the constitution is in the manner that the American left celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, a mild-mannered moderate mainstream Republican.

The Second American Civil War

After Kirk's murder

There seem to be no pathway to de-escalation. By the light of the American constitution, Trump is morally right to remove race from consideration in drawing electoral districts. He is morally right to say that immigration laws should be applied, and those who violate it should not be permitted to remain - if some laws are optional, all laws will eventually become optional. His attempt to redraw districts halfway through the normal 10 year period is suspect, but no less so than the way that Democrat states normally draw districts to exclude Republicans. And, critically, if Trump succeeds, he would fully discredit the Democrats and their ideology, from transgenderism to net zero to open borders. Existential political fights normally end in one side gaining complete victory, typically through violence.

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