On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR lays out what he sees are the three most likely short-term futures for the United States after the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
I’m a student of history. Here are three possible futures following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They’re based on historical examples of what happens when a Communist subversion campaign or insurgency overplays its hand and triggers broad popular resistance.
1. Popular revulsion against aboveground leftists celebrating the murder gives the Trump administration political cover to go after Antifa and its shadow funding network hard. Both are smashed.
Communist agents of influence in the mainstream media and academia continue to self-discredit.
Relatively few Communists are arrested, but their millions of aboveground tools become isolated and demoralized.
Propelled by a huge swing in voter registrations that we are already seeing happen, the Democrats get crushed in the 2026 midterms.
The long period of fever, madness, and Left ascendancy that began with the assassination of JFK by a Soviet agent in 1963 ends not with a bang but with a whimper.
This is the best case scenario for everybody, including the Communists who don’t get thrown out of helicopters or shot down in the streets.
If things don’t go this way it will likely be because Democratic lawfare prevents the counter-subversion push from being fully effective. An obvious index of this failure would be another high-profile political assassination or attempt against a conservative target after about 4 months out.
What happens in the event of that failure, especially if the third public attempt to kill Trump succeeds:
2. A period of Caudillismo. A charismatic strongman rides popular anger into power. If this happens, the Left better pray that the strongman is an infuriated JD Vance, because any alternative to him is likely to be worse for them.
The crackdown against the Communist network becomes brutal and routinely uses extra-Constitutional means, possibly thinly covered by a declared state of emergency.
At the harder end of this range of possibilities, right-wing death squads not exactly formed by government but winked at by it go after Communist public figures that are out of reach of the law because they’ve carefully preserved deniability. Many journalists are at the top of this target list.
It is not likely that the Communist network can survive this future. The only way it happens is if they have enough popular support to develop a semi-militarized resistance — in effect making certain parts of the country no go regions for Federal agents.
Going by historical precedents, the index of this failure would be a resurgence of banditry by armed groups, initially with overtly political goals but decaying into general predation.
This would land us at:
3. Low-grade civil war, a la Bosnia or the Irish troubles. Anybody wishing for this has no idea how bloody, ugly, and brutal it would probably be. Especially if the Left succeeds at what it will with absolute certainty try to do, which is racialize the conflict.
I don’t think there is any realistic scenario in which the Communists win any of these confrontations. Not in the U.S., not in the 21st century. The question is how much blood and agony the rest of us will go through before they are finally defeated.
Update, 20 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] CONSIDER THESE ARE THREE OF THE MILDEST. THE IMAGINATION DOESN’T HAVE TO GO FAR TO SEE WORSE: After the Charlie Kirk assassination, here are three possible futures. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » CONSIDER THESE ARE THREE OF THE MILDEST. THE IMAGINATION DOESN’T HAVE TO GO FAR TO SEE WORSE: Af — September 20, 2025 @ 01:32
We are seeing THE GREAT UNMASKING where previously camouflaged great gobs of DARKNESS festering inside otherwise normal folks in all levels of society blew out their pie holes… demonic – undoubtedly
Comment by Jim Raclawski — September 20, 2025 @ 05:07
Thank you for republishing ESR’s post. I saw it and thought this should go wider than the twitterverse.
Comment by PubliusII — September 20, 2025 @ 09:45
My pleasure. That’s exactly what I thought when I read it.
Comment by Nicholas — September 20, 2025 @ 11:04
The Democrats repudiated the critical principle of peaceful transition of power in 2016. That inevitably has to lead to civil war. They imposed every aspect of Orwellian Big Brother tyranny in 2021.
The opponents of the left have to make sure that ignorant, almost normal Democrat voters appreciate the depths of depravity to which their party sank.
Comment by stan — September 20, 2025 @ 12:58
The Liberals in Canada didn’t formally renounce the idea of peaceful transition of power … they just successfully rigged the situation so that they would be far less likely to face such a terrible situation. Pouring money into legacy media (TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers) has more than repaid them — especially as it wasn’t their money being spent in the first place.
Comment by Nicholas — September 20, 2025 @ 14:41
I appreciate Eric’s listing of the possibilities. Personally, I suspect #1 is the most likely, with #3 in second place. I have written about the civil war possibility on my own Substack–https://autisticredneckphilhawkins.substack.com/p/another-civil-war–and in comments on others, mainly Glenn Reynolds’ and Don Surber’s. I don’t think a civil war like 1861 is viable at all: the Democrats are mostly scattered around the cities all over the country, rather than a group of contiguous states like the Confederacy. In the post I linked, I included a map from the Brilliant Maps website that shows the 2020 election by counties across the US, with five shades of red and blue to show the strength of the vote. There are only 3 states that are completely blue–MA, RI, and HI. At the time I wrote that, I was living in Indianapolis, IN. If you look at Indiana on that map, there are five blue dots in a sea of red. Two of those dots are urban areas–Indianapolis and Gary/Hammond (up by Chicago). The other three blue counties are dominated by college towns–IU, Purdue, and Notre Dame. (In the 2024 election, Purdue’s county went red!) The large populations in big cities are an asset for the Democrats in elections; they will be a liability in a civil war. Those people will want their food, water, electricity, fuel for cars and heat, and more–and whoever controls the countryside can cut much of that off. The urban liberals have been living in bubbles for many years–one up Pauline Kael’s quote about only knowing one person who voted for Nixon! It’s gotten worse since then.
Comment by Phil Hawkins — September 20, 2025 @ 13:56
Each electoral system has key ways to exploit the voting mechanism … in the US and Canada, it’s electoral district boundaries and media dominance (fading, but still powerful for persuading the voters who aren’t terminally online). In France and Germany, it’s blunt use of the legal system to suppress populist and right wing parties and politicians.
Comment by Nicholas — September 20, 2025 @ 14:45
[…] from the Quote Of The Day above comes this observation about the political scenarios following Charlie Kirk’s murder, in order of […]
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