Civil War Approaches

“Civil war is coming,” David Betz told a Budapest audience on Thursday night. And later: “Sorry, but I don’t think there is a peaceful solution at this time.”

Betz should know. The professor is head of the war studies department at King’s College London and is an academic expert in civil war. For years he has been writing that all the conditions for civil war to break out have been met in most Western countries; all that is needed is a spark. 

Betz’s message has gained far more attention this year, thanks to podcast interviews like this one with Harrison Pitt of europeanconservative.com. What makes his warnings especially chilling is that he delivers them calmly, driven by data and logical analysis. He is the furthest thing from a wild-eyed apocalypticist shouting on a street corner.  

By “civil war,” Betz does not mean two uniformed armies clashing. He’s talking instead about violent chaos, like Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Italy’s ‘Years of Lead,’ or the cataclysm that engulfed Yugoslavia as it broke up. He warned Budapesters that anyone who relishes the coming of civil war to get things sorted has no idea what they’re talking about. He predicted that millions will die in Europe, and millions more will be forcibly displaced, including through deportation.

Betz has been speaking mostly about civil war prospects in Great Britain and continental Europe, but his analysis also covers the United States. Civil war in America came a lot closer this week with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

Kirk, 31, was not a politician. He was an astonishingly effective advocate of mainstream conservative values, which he advanced chiefly by going onto college campuses and debating people who disagreed with him. Kirk was a cheerful man, unbending in his conservatism but respectful to his opponents, and beloved by countless men and women of his young generation. 

And someone shot him to death in front of his wife and two young children for the crime of doing what every citizen in a democracy is supposed to do: peacefully debate issues in the public square. When a liberal once asked him why he visited college campuses to debate leftists, Kirk responded, “When we stop talking to each other and arguing our differences, that’s when people turn to violence, and I’m trying to prevent that.”

The Kirk assassination will likely be a turning point for America. Why? Because it is now undeniably clear that there are many, many people in the U.S. who are prepared to kill others for believing the kind of normal, conservative things that Charlie Kirk did. Left-wing social media was filled with comments and videos from people celebrating Kirk’s death. Some of these people were teachers, nurses, even American soldiers. 

We Americans, we are two nations. The rest of us are not like them, those ghouls. Preliminary findings by federal law enforcement say that a rifle and ammunition found discarded near the site of Kirk’s murder had pro-trans and pro-Antifa markings. If this is confirmed, nobody can be surprised.

This is what America has become: a frantic friend messaged me on Thursday, saying she has been thinking of sending her little girl to a Christian school, but now she’s terrified that doing so will make the child a target for trans terrorists. Charlie Kirk was an evangelical Christian. My friend’s child once attended Covenant School in Nashville, which in 2023 was the site of a massacre of children and teachers by a transgender former student. A couple of weeks ago, a trans-identified young man opened fire on a Catholic church where schoolchildren were at mass, killing some.

My friend is afraid that militant transgenders have declared open season on Christians. You might say she is overreacting—America is a big country, after all—but her daughter, who is eight years old, lost two of her best friends at Covenant. This is not an abstract threat to that family.

Again: when you realize that you share a country with millions of ideological maniacs who would be happy to see you murdered because you are a Christian or a conservative, it changes you. It hardens you. It makes you realize that David Betz is right: we cannot resolve our differences through politics. Charlie Kirk tried that, and they killed him, and cheered for his murder.

Fortunately, America is governed by a strong president, a personal friend of Kirk’s, who is not likely to do what our politicians usually do: issue a public statement saying how sad it all is, then move on. Donald Trump, with the backing of the Republican Congress, is probably going to go to war with Antifa and transgenderism in all its forms. 

It is now clear that trans is a mental illness. Obviously the vast majority of trans people are not murderers, or would-be murderers. They are mentally ill people who deserve compassion and psychiatric treatment. But the trans phenomenon has taken in untold numbers of mentally ill people who have found in it an identity that allows them to valorize their psychopathy and to weaponize it against normal people. 

The entire American establishment—medical, media, corporate, and political—has given itself over to embracing the trans narrative, including the insane collection of ideas we call ‘gender ideology,’ and forcing it on unwilling Americans. It must end, and it must end now. Not next week, not next year: Now.

Similarly, the tolerance for Antifa and its violence must stop. Trump should bring down the entire weight of the federal government on Antifa, in the same way a previous generation of leaders used the FBI to crush the Ku Klux Klan. 

That would be a start. But will it be enough? I doubt it. 

When convicted black felon George Floyd died at the hands of police in 2020, leftist rioting burned down cities. Establishment institutions rioted in their own civil way, instituting ideological re-education programs and strategies to demonize whites, for the sake of ‘racial justice.’ 

Those who loved Charlie Kirk did not riot. They came out in public and prayed. We are not like them.

It would be a great thing if the same institutional leaders who lost their minds over George Floyd would now use Kirk’s murder as an opportunity to reaffirm basic American liberal values like free speech, open debate, tolerance of political and religious difference, and all the things that within living memory were taught as fundamental American values.

I don’t think they will. I hope I’m wrong, but I think these elites are too far gone into the cultish thinking of the Left. And this, note well, is one of the key conditions that Betz says leads to civil war: an elite radically disconnected from the masses. 

If, God forbid, civil war comes to America, it will not be from the followers of Charlie Kirk. It will be in part from young white men who are already on the extreme right—white nationalists and antisemites, whose number is growing—who have concluded that the only way to deal with this crisis is through violence. I personally know American fathers—conservative Christians—who are trying to de-radicalize their sons. It’s not working. 

At least the United States has a political leadership—the Trump administration—that is committed to fighting back against left-wing extremism. Not so Europe: nearly every country (Hungary is a welcome exception) is governed by a transnational globalist class that sees its own fed-up people as the problem. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, when fully implemented, will no doubt be used to suppress ordinary Europeans who simply want to speak out against the destruction of their own nations.

In his Budapest lecture, Betz warned that it takes only a tiny spark to ignite civil war. Just prior to the Yugoslav catastrophe, he said, overwhelming majorities of Yugoslavs polled said that they got along well with their fellow citizens of different ethnicities and religions. In the blink of an eye, they were at each other’s throats.

On X that same day, a Croat named Martin Erlic made a similar point. It is worth quoting in full:

I was talking to a friend who grew up in Yugoslavia. He’s about ten years older than me and recently moved back to Serbia. What struck me about his recounting of the years just before the war began was the sense of banality, a kind of timelessness. Despite all the vitriol, it didn’t really feel like anything was going to happen right away. But what set off the Homeland War—the conflict between the new Croatian state and Yugoslavia—was a single bus attack. A group of Serb paramilitaries opened fire on Croatian police officers near Pakrac, killing several and wounding others. That moment lit the fuse. From there, everything erupted. 

The war turned brutal very quickly, with civilians swept into atrocities. Imagine being raped in your own bedroom, beheaded in front of your family in the garden. Grenades thrown through your window, your bones later collected and dropped into a village well. 

And when I see a young woman today mocking the death of someone she disagrees with, or speaking with ambivalence about an assassination, I can’t help but think she has no idea how fast things can change. She doesn’t know that violence, once unleashed, doesn’t stay contained.

I feel sorry for her, and for people like her, because they don’t realize what may be coming. The truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine. The shift happens too fast, the violence too unforgiving and traumatizing. The pain lasts generations.

I see it even in my own family. My grandparents still pinch pennies, mistrust everyone, swear that people are out to rob them. That fear has been passed down, and it lingers. If Americans speak with such disdain for people they disagree with, they should be prepared to endure these traumas too, for themselves, and for their families, for decades to come.

This is what we all may face, and sooner than we realize. These days feel like one imagines it felt in Europe in the summer of 1914, on the brink of the suicidal war that all but toppled our civilization. Betz, the civil war expert, has been blackpilled. He dreads it but thinks there is no way out at this point. We have to hope and pray that he is wrong. But hopes and prayers are not a strategy. Nothing is inevitable. What are we—Europeans and Americans alike—doing to fight the coming of our own destruction?

How many more Charlie Kirks—or Samuel Patys, Father Jacques Hamels, English victims of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, patrons of the Bataclan, riders of London public transport, and Manchester concertgoers—will have to die before it’s open war?