RAGE AND WAR: Goldberg imagines a new civil war!

MONDAY, AUGUST 31, 2026

Rage of Laura Loomer: Has the United States (E pluribus unum) somehow become two different nations, one Red and the other one Blue?

Does an incipient state of war obtain? One week ago, in Sunday Opinion, Michelle Goldberg, who's very sharp, was observed floating that thought.

We've posted this excerpt from her column before. We'll be working from this excerpt all week:

Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?

[...]

For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.

Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.  

She refers in that passage to Blue America, and by implication to Red. In her headline, she reports a type of puzzling dream:

We keep imagining a new civil war, she says.

"A florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics," Goldberg accurately says in the text of her column. She says she's describing the politics of "at least the last decade," leaving open the possibility that this state of contempt—Red for Blue and Blue for Red—dates even farther back.

Instantly. she tracks the phenomenon to President Trump's outlandish, never-ending, endless stream of insults. She says it seems obvious to her that "blue America is more abused than abuser" at the present time. 

We agree with that at the present time. If we take our chronology farther back—to Thoreau's dismissive remarks about "the mass of men;" to Pete Seeger's astoundingly insulting comments about the people who lived in the "Little Boxes" of Daly City, including our own Aunt Connie and our younger cousin Diane:

If we take our chronology back that far, we aren't entirely sure that we Blues are more sinned against. More on that question to come.  

Today, the front page of the print edition New York Times may suggest, to Blue America, that we truly ae living in two different nations. 

Over the weekend, the president continued his florid, aggressive wars against lakes and nations and those in the press. But the values of his MAGA America may seem to fully prevail in this front-page report, headline included:  

Deportees Recount Harrowing Journeys to Africa: Shackles, a ‘Freezer’ and Blows

Leonardo Sánchez wailed in pain for hours on the deportation flight from Louisiana to West Africa, he and six other detainees said.

He’d been cuffed around his wrists and ankles. A chain around his waist dug into his grossly protruding abdomen—the result of years-old wounds and surgeries that doctors said left his intestines barely inside his body.

Mr. Sánchez, a 49-year-old Cuban, begged for medical attention from several of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the aircraft.

“I was in pain, crying like a little kid,” he said. But the agents wouldn’t remove his chains or let him use the toilet, he and other detainees said. He wet himself.    

That's the way the news report starts. Most of the deportees were being sent to Liberia, a nation to which they had no connection. Others were taken on to Equatorial Guinea.

According to the Times report, the paper "interviewed 10 of the deportees on the flight to Liberia, all of whom described...a panicked 14-hour expulsion to Africa, in which agents wrestled and shackled frightened detainees."

 As for Leonardo Sánchez, the report goes on to say this, among other things, about his arrival in Liberia:   

When the flight arrived in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, Mr. Sánchez, the Cuban national, and three others said they refused to disembark, afraid of being abandoned in an unfamiliar country. They said they were forced onto the tarmac by ICE officers who yanked and twisted their handcuffs, pinned them to the ground and pressed their knees directly onto their necks.

Mr. Sánchez said the federal agents knocked him onto the ground and knelt on his bulging abdomen, leaving him in agony, his pants still damp with urine. Other deportees began shouting, “‘You abuser! If he dies, it’s on you!’” Mr. Sánchez and three other deportees said.

The Department of Homeland Security said that no detainees were refused access to the bathroom, that Mr. Sánchez was reviewed and declared fit to fly by medical staff, that his medical needs were addressed on the flight, and that agents did not kneel or press on his abdomen.  

And so on from there.  As it turns out, Sanchez was placed back on the plane, becoming one of the deportees who went to Equatorial Africa, where he apparently remains today.

In Blue America, many citizens will read that report as proof of the claim that "the cruelty is the point" with many of Red America's current policy approaches. In Red America, this story will seem different, to the extent that the reporting is believed: 

In Red America, the focus will turn to the bizarre (and still unexplained) border policies of the Biden administration. Attention may be drawn—as Caroline Sunshine did last week on CNN—to the rape and murder of young American women by unauthorized immigrants who crossed the unattended southern border during the Biden years.   

To see Sunshine's presentation, just click here. (For the CNN transcript, click this.) You'll see Bakari Sellers, a good decent person, interrupt her as he offers one of the irrelevant dodges which are a standard part of our own Blue American array of deceptive talking points.   

The president is a constant source of insult and rage. So are other Red American figures, including TV's Greg Gutfeld, with his endless insulting behavior directed at liberal women, with respect to which no one within our Blue American elites has been willing to complain.

The rage of Achilles (and the countervailing rage of Agamemnon) begins the story which sits at the dawn of European literature. Today, the rage of Trump, and astonishing the rage of Steven Cheung, virtually define the shape of our rapidly disintegrating post-American culture.   

The rage of the Reds is quite astounding, and it's quite widespread. Just last Friday, the astoundingly furious Laura Loomer referred to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as one of a group of women who "are all ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black B*TCHES who are completely unfit for the power they hold.” 

(For the record, Loomer spelled the B-word out—in all caps, of course.) 

That's right! Loomer referred to Justice Brown Jackson (along with the others) as "a ghetto, race-obsessed black B*TCH." (To see Loomer's tweet, click here.) This red rage is so ubiquitous at this point that this astonishing remark has produced virtually zero comment.   

Where has this red rage come from? What explains the extent of the fury? 

In her presentation on CNN, Sunshine displayed the ability to voice a punishing complaint while staying within the bounds of traditional public civility. The Trumps and the Cheungs and the Gutfelds oh my have long since stopped pretending that they want to behave like that.

Goldberg's headline floats the possibility of some sort of new civil war. We think of Wallace Stevens' female protagonist who, on a famous Sunday morning—in a completely different context—"dreams a little, and feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe."  

Stevens' protagonist feels the onset of a disaster. Goldberg, who is very sharp, is wondering why we seem to be imagining another civil war.   

Tomorrow: Rage of Cheung