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The Big Lebowski Civil War
Kunstler.com ^ | 29 Sep, 2025 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 09/30/2025 7:15:27 AM PDT by MtnClimber

When the newly-formed Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, April 1861, they ignited the Civil War. They, at least, had a clearcut goal: to maintain an economy (and society) based on slavery. It was patently evil, but it was firmly established and it was their engine for daily life, and they didn’t want it to end.

When Charlie Kirk was murdered in 2025, Civil War 2.0 kicked off. The enemy this time are not Confederates with a coherent command structure and a goal. They are an army of nihilists like the gang in The Big Lebowski, who, for one reason or another, have failed to launch lives of meaning and purpose, and so have adopted the purpose of destroying the country they cannot thrive in. Unlike The Big Lebowski, this is not a joke. But, it’s obviously a different sort of civil war than the first one.

It appears that many of these nihilists, especially the ones amalgamated as Antifa, are straight-up mentally ill — crazed young women too untamed to find a mate, many obese and self-mutilated like tattooed savages with steel bones in their noses. . . young men, hormones afire, likewise frustrated, escaping into sexual fetish and psychotic obsessions with demons, violence, blame, enmity. They are warriors for their own deformed ids.

There is, for sure, plenty to complain about in American life as currently organized. It abounds with swindles and ruses, and much of the ill effect falls on young people who were rooked into college loans, are drowning in unpayable debt, are unable to find meaningful work in an economy dominated by cruelly gigantic companies, are unable to afford a place of their own to eat and sleep in, and whose bodies and minds are ravaged by junk food and pharma products.

Do not overlook the deleterious effects of the everyday environment we have created: the world of American suburbia. Above all, it requires a reliable car to even begin to function in, and that is beyond the reach of many newly-minted adults with no job or a shit-job. The sheer ugliness of American suburbia is punishing to human neurology. It induces anxiety and despair to a degree we can’t begin to reckon. Try walking a mile down a six-laner between the Sam’s Club and the DMV sometime.

Suburbia atomizes social relations, making everyone an isolated unit and it defeats any attempt to form real communities. Its schools function like minimum security prisons, generators of anomie and ennui. On top of all that, suburbia has entered its arc of economic failure. Even the gainfully employed middle-aged can no longer pay for it. It was built out of crappy materials that are falling apart now. A sane person would opt to not live in it, but since escape is so difficult from sea to shining sea, the other option is to go insane — especially if you’re just setting out in life.

All of this discontent gets converted, abracadabra, into political ideology. The old, reliable package of Marxism works whenever people feel cheated out of meaning, purpose, and a livelihood. And so, this anguished cohort of the young, defeated in making a life, driven mentally ill by their surroundings, hounded by the endless prompts of their beloved smartphones, wrecked by the things they put in their bodies, and broken by their demoralizing failures, become the useful idiots of their political elders.

And the Democratic Party, having become little more than a grifting machine of hustles and hoaxes, uses the young to generate ever more ill-feeling across the land over issues that self-evidently are against the interests of the young — so that the party can survive its present existential crisis.

It was not in young America’s interest to receive “Joe Biden’s” flood of illegal migrants across the border. Apart from their criminal histories, or the hidden agenda to form subversive cells for foreign enemies, the illegal migrants compete with young people in many realms of employment like the building trades, while they drive down wages generally. So why are the Antifas out there in front of the ICE facility affecting to “rescue” the deportees?

Because the mind-scrambling language of Marxian revolt has persuaded the Antifas that the illegal migrants are their “marginalized intersectional allies.” It’s bullsh[**], of course, but the mentally ill swallow it because they are desperate for meaning and filled with animus for all-and-any authority responsible for constructing and managing a system they have failed in.

Mr. Trump, the primary demon in their fantasies, and certainly the enemy of the Democratic Party’s corrupt grifting machine, attempts to restore an economy based on producing things of value, rather than financial flimflams. The catch is, he may not be able to do that using the old armature of gigantic corporate organisms operating on rollover debt. That phase of history is probably over.

We need a new armature, but one based on voluntary exchange, which is to say economic liberty, not top-town communist-type centralized planning. Everywhere that has been tried, it failed and blew up. Euro-style Socialism Lite is not a workable choice anymore, either, because we are leaving behind the cheap energy economy and the geopolitical deals that made six-week vacations, retirement at 60, and free medicine possible.

Neither the Democratic Party nor their Antifa foot-soldiers have a sane and coherent approach to this set of problems. The remaining option for them is to stay insane, to fight for crazy things like men in the women’s swim lane, and to act out their inchoate rage. If they keep escalating, the remaining sane sixty-percent or so of America will opt to put them down briskly and harshly, and it looks like that is about to happen.


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: antifa; armature; boogaloo; charliekirk; cw2; demagogicparty; ennui; flimflams; hoaxes; hustles; inchoate; jameshowardkunstler; jhk; kunstler; leftism; murderingleft; ruses; savages; secessionists; swindles; tattooed; thecivilwar
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To: Racketeer

The Confederates were EXACTLY like the left. Both hate the US.


41 posted on 09/30/2025 9:37:28 AM PDT by cowboyusa ( YESHUA IS KING OF AMEbRICA AND HE WILL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!)
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To: MtnClimber

It seems to be lost that on many occasions Lincoln stated that the war was not about the issue of slavery. No one seems to know that.


42 posted on 09/30/2025 9:38:59 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: PGR88

The leaders of the South thru a hissy fit because they lost an Election. Like the left, the Confederacy was stamped in evil.


43 posted on 09/30/2025 9:39:54 AM PDT by cowboyusa ( YESHUA IS KING OF AMEbRICA AND HE WILL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!)
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To: Wilderness Conservative

Both are traitors and seditionists.


44 posted on 09/30/2025 9:42:06 AM PDT by cowboyusa ( YESHUA IS KING OF AMEbRICA AND HE WILL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!)
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To: Wilderness Conservative

Both are traitors and seditionists.


45 posted on 09/30/2025 9:42:10 AM PDT by cowboyusa ( YESHUA IS KING OF AMEbRICA AND HE WILL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!)
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To: Codeflier

So you are one of the dumbasses that think prior to the civil war no Southern white men worked farms, laid bricks or sawed a board?


46 posted on 09/30/2025 9:43:50 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: cowboyusa

Yankees are exactly like today’s Communists.


47 posted on 09/30/2025 9:46:01 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: central_va

Not at all. The Confederacy o the Confeceracy Socalized whole industries, and confiscated land. The North’s, unfortunately Hamiltonian War Government failed in contrast to the Confederacy.


48 posted on 09/30/2025 9:53:56 AM PDT by cowboyusa ( YESHUA IS KING OF AMEbRICA AND HE WILL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!)
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To: marktwain

His hero treatment did not last long beyond the Civil War.

In wartime, when a government is trying to whip up support for the war, it would not make sense for the government to tell the citizeny that the war was started without its approval.

For the same reason, you will notice that democrats, except for Fetterman lately, never criticize fellow democrats, putting up an united front. Republicans aren’t quite that intelligent.


49 posted on 09/30/2025 10:03:35 AM PDT by odawg
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To: MtnClimber

The war starting s8de typically has to be in a state of crazy to start bloodshed.

No worry. FAFO.

The bloodshed rids the world of a lot of crazy, leaving just the ptsd.

War ends. Suffering continues. Sometimes some good comes of it, though much bad. Sometimes only bad comes of it.

Better to be vigilant and brave. Cowardice leads to war.

Cowards are in control, still.


50 posted on 09/30/2025 10:03:55 AM PDT by If You Want It Fixed - Fix It
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To: central_va

I don’t see how you would come to that conclusion! Are you one of those dumbasses that think the issue of slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict between the North and South?


51 posted on 09/30/2025 10:04:05 AM PDT by Codeflier (Don't worry....be happy)
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To: central_va
It also seems to be lost that almost all of the battles of The War Between The States were in the South.   The Southerners fought because they were invaded.
52 posted on 09/30/2025 10:44:21 AM PDT by higgmeister (In the Shadow of The Big Chicken! )
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To: higgmeister
You have to wonder what would have happened had Lincoln stood down at Fort Sumter and withdrew the Federal forces. Would the Upper South have seceded? Would the Confederacy have been viable without Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas? There were pro-secession elements in those states but it was Lincoln's response to the Fort Sumter crisis plus his calling for 75,000 troops from the state militias that pushed the four states into the Confederacy. Virginia and Tennessee had strong Unionist elements in the mountainous regions where the plantation economy was nonexistent. There was less pro-Union sentiment in North Carolina and Arkansas.
53 posted on 09/30/2025 10:55:36 AM PDT by Wallace T.
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To: Organic Panic
This is probably one of the worst Kunstler takes on a social ill I have read.

Yeah. Not to pile on that particular generation, but this is what is known as a "Boomer take". I know there are plenty of Boomers out there who have their eyes wide open, but Kunstler is one of those guys who epitomizes the worst of the Boomer stereotype, in that he tries to apply 30-40 year old paradigms to present day problems.

Anyone who has had close contact with these Antifa types, which I have, comes to understand that it wouldn't matter if the economy were the best ever and a worthwhile college education were easy to get and houses were cheap. The culture has been poisoned and multiple generations brainwashed quite literally to HATE, with all their mind and soul, the traditional American culture, political ideology and worldview.

They are fully indoctrinated to see, among other things, homosexuality and transexualism as true freedom, and anyone who doesn't embrace that idea as literally Hitler. They are indoctrinated to hate Christianity ONLY, while embracing a war plan like Islam. They have been indoctrinated to hate white people, especially men. Their mental illnesses have been elevated to virtues, and their criminality justified as a rebellion against evil.

In simple terms, they have been brainwashed into an ideology that is in DIRECT opposition to the American history and way of life. What difference would a new car or a good job make if you believe that you are living among evil Nazis who must be destroyed? There is no reconciling with these people. There is either deprogramming, which for the older ones may be impossible, or destruction. Anything less means constant war and terrorism.
54 posted on 09/30/2025 11:21:20 AM PDT by fr_freak (So foul a sky clears not without a storm.)
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To: PGR88
Sort of what Ayn Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged.
55 posted on 09/30/2025 11:36:48 AM PDT by 7thson (I've got a seat at the big conference table! I'm gonna paint my logo on it!)
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To: fr_freak

“Anyone who has had close contact with these Antifa types”

Portland is the womb for Antifa. The 90s were not particularly traumatic and at that time Portland was a great prosperous city and Oregon was very cheap to live. The whole state was nice. It was “liberal” but more in a “stay out of my business” sort of way. Not the “I’m from the government and we know all” like it is now.

This is a pretty good take on the downfall. Like just about everything else, it was college educated liberals that killed it.

https://youtu.be/LC4WcRi70LI?si=SNE1CTtHhlIECVDA


56 posted on 09/30/2025 11:36:54 AM PDT by Organic Panic ('Was I molested. I think so' - Ashley Biden in response to her father joining her in the shower.)
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To: blackdog

I felt somewhat similar when the movies that promoted total chaos and crime for one a day, were released.


57 posted on 09/30/2025 11:37:48 AM PDT by 7thson (I've got a seat at the big conference table! I'm gonna paint my logo on it!)
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To: MtnClimber
I would more likely describe this current iteration of lawlessness as guerrilla warfare as opposed to "civil" war. The enemy is cowardly, using hit and run tactics all the while keeping their identities hidden.
58 posted on 09/30/2025 11:47:18 AM PDT by LouAvul (1 John 2:22: Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist.)
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To: Segovia

Read Dr. Mary’s Monkey and have your mind blown!!


59 posted on 09/30/2025 12:03:05 PM PDT by Racketeer
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To: MtnClimber; BroJoeK

First of all, the Civil War wasn’t about tariffs or state’s rights, but that’s another story for another day.

Second, the parallel to today would be more like “Bleeding Kansas” before the war, or banditry and nightriding afterwards, rather than to the Civil War itself — low-level, quasi-insurgency, rather than full-on war.

Third, Kunstler moved to far upstate New York because he didn’t like suburbia. Other people like it. He didn’t. There are also different kinds of suburbs and different kinds of suburbia and what applies to one doesn’t apply to another. That is also another story maybe for another time.


60 posted on 09/30/2025 12:11:42 PM PDT by x
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