Fourth Generation Warfare Has Come To America

 Information Cutoff Date: June 17, 2023

Introduction

This is the third article I have written since 2017 warning of the threat of Fourth Generation Warfare in America.

In “Battle Without Bullets” published by Political Research Associates in 2017, I warned: “The bonds of societal trust are disintegrating. Constitutional norms of governance are being undermined. Institutions meant to hold the executive branch in check are under assault from within and without. None of this was accidental. But if we are to hold onto any semblance of democratic society, knowledge of how Fourth Generation Warfare works, and that a religious and political insurrection is well advanced in the United States, is essential to formulation of appropriate strategies going forward.”

In “Battle With Bullets” published by Political Research Associates in 2020, I warned: “But the most dangerous proponent of the Boogaloo “civil war” isn’t any of its Hawaiian shirt-clad affiliates, but rather Donald Trump, whose tweets and statements have reinforced right-wing calls for such a conflict…. But the threat of U.S. civil war, influenced by Raspail’s narrative and driven by racial grievance, is Trumpism, the authoritarian GOP, and armed right-wing paramilitaries.” I called Raspail's narrative the "Camp of the Saints Worldview" that encompassed the Christian Right's demographic winter, the neo-Nazi's white genocide, and the Alt Right's "Great Replacement."

In this third strategic warning, given with high confidence, I suggest four hypothetical scenarios for a future America. To students of history at least two of those scenarios are shockingly familiar for they end with camps, ovens, and genocide.

That is not to say that a second American civil war is inevitable. But it can no longer be dismissed.

Former CIA analyst Barbara F. Walter’s analysis of the three stages of civil war suggested that “We are a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. The siege on the Capitol has made it impossible for the government to dismiss the threat that far-right groups pose to the United States and its democracy” [How Civil Wars Start, 2022, p. 159].

Counter-terrorism expert Malcolm Nance in his 2022 book, They Want to Kill Americans [p. 256] warned of a future genocide in America: “The long legacy of racism, domination by superior weapons, and the inherent distrust of government has given a part of the nation the feeling that domination, murder, and genocide in the name of American progress are acceptable.”

This intelligence assessment reviews how we got to this point by once again focusing on the Christian Right’s employment of the principles of Fourth Generation Warfare to severely fray the moral bonds that hold the United States together. We did not get here by accident.

Previous Strategic Warnings Regarding The Christian Right

Many believed that the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial would have been the beginning of the end of fundamentalist Christianity challenging science and a secular Constitution. But in the 1930s fundamentalist Christianity found a new alliance with the economic elites and corporations waging a political war against FDR and the New Deal. That war continues today as does the constellation of forces arrayed against our liberal, secular Constitution and social order.

The current early phase of this war began in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Social scientists such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Seymour Martin Lipset sounded the alarms that were politely listened to by the Democratic Party and then quickly ignored. Liberalism seemed invulnerable and impervious to challenge.

Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (pages 134-5) noted: “One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world…. The fundamentalist mind…is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities…. The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual Armageddon, an ultimate reality…and not of the empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions.”

In 1982, communications professors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, studied thousands of communications generated by Christian Right leaders. They concluded in Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics, and Our Private Lives (page 276): “In our view, the assault on secular society by the fundamentalist right…is the first instance of total propaganda brought home to the United States. And it is propaganda in its cruelest form to date: politics masquerading as religion…. Its expressed objectives…to Christianize the nation, to gain ascendancy over the national media, to have fundamentalist beliefs taught as science in public schools, to dictate the meaning of life, and, ultimately, to convert every person on earth.”

Fifteen years later, long-time observer of the Christian Right, Frederick Clarkson, warned in his invaluable book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (pages 125-6): “Contending with a political movement that sees demons where others see citizens…is profoundly different than confronting mere political differences of opinion. If opponents are demons, then shooting people…is not a matter of killing people, but ridding the world of evil…. Waging spiritual warfare against Satan’s agents, while preparing for a larger physical showdown, is the actual backdrop to much of the culture war.”

Australian journalist Elle Hardy observed the New Apostolic Reformation in twelve countries and six U.S. states. In her 2022 book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World she summarized their objectives, modus operandi, and Seven Mountains Mandate (page 162): “The rhetoric is aggressive, focusing on battle, violence, war, satanic forces, urgency and victory. Heresy is no longer a religious idea—it’s a political one. True believers in the Seven Mountains Mandate…threat lies equally in what they can destroy…. Christian leaders preaching a God-given ‘mandate’ help to suppress doubt, and to inspire violence and fanaticism…. The Dominionist movement is seeking to turn whole groups into disciples—or soldiers—and to transform society through them.”

Analyzing the January 6, 2021, insurrection in the context of the NAR’s doctrines of spiritual warfare and Seven Mountains Mandate, Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné, professor of religion, warned: “The disturbing claims that God is calling his people to organized vigilante violence is happening in the context of the evolving theology of the New Apostolic Reformation…. Briefly, increasing numbers of Pentecostals and charismatics since World War II believe that a global End Times army is gathering and building strength. In fact, it’s this feature of the Dominionism of the NAR that animates much of the politics of the Christian Right…. [T]here is a relationship between what’s termed ‘spiritual warfare’ and physical warfare.”

Finally, in June 2023 Frederick Clarkson published a report in Salon detailing 50 national-state calls NAR leaders held with state leaders as they plot strategy and campaign operations. He concluded, “NAR leaders understand perfectly well that their views are revolutionary. In addition to wanting to take over government at all levels, they are engaged in a long-term erosion of institutional Christianity, including the destruction of doctrines and denominations that they see as obstacles to advancing the Kingdom of God…. Some apostles are patient revolutionaries. Others are accelerationists.”

Douglas Pratt, a scholar of philosophy and religion in New Zealand, distinguished three phases of fundamentalist movements—passive, assertive, and impositional. The impositional fundamentalist movement has four features that end up in religious terrorism: the negation of other communities or ideologies as “satanic;” “sanctioned imposition” which asserts that the fundamentalist “views and polity” are “sanctioned by a higher authority;” “legitimated violence” in which a “platform of justification is established.” The last feature is the “terrorist event.”

Without going into any greater empirical detail regarding mass shootings driven by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, William Lind’s “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, and the religious justifications given to Trump, MAGA, QAnon, and the January 6 insurrection, I would argue that the Christian Right is certainly within the trajectory of the Impositional phase of a fundamentalist movement.

And yet here we are.

A Very Brief History of the Christian Right

Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, rightwing economic elites and mainstream corporations once again allied with the New Right and then the Christian Right to create a dense network of libertarian think tanks, parachurch organizations, and social movements to challenge the liberal status quo. Decade after decade, millionaires and billionaires funneled billions of dollars into building a rightwing information warfare infrastructure to challenge the Democratic Party, elite university academicians, and the mainstream media.

The secretive Council for National Policy brought together religious and political activists with funding and media sources to launch culture war campaign after campaign after campaign in the states to move state governments to the right. The Christian Right, now a powerful force within the GOP, created movements such as the Tea Party to purge the party of centrists and moderates. Orthodoxy reigns. And the only path to a successful political career is to move further and further to the right and promote or acquiesce to unbelievable conspiracy theories.

Slowly but surely the key Christian Right strategists such as Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and Richard Viguerie—all students of Marx and Lenin—began turning the GOP into a combat party and created multiple culture war campaigns in the states to keep the GOP in line.

The Christian Right was aided enormously by the expansion of fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal Christianity from the 1970s onwards. A new religious movement, the New Apostolic Reformation allied itself with the strategic thinking of the Christian Reconstructionists to forge a new religious alliance dedicated to reconstructing America’s governments and society into a Christian Nation, where only certain Christians would be entitled or anointed to rule the Seven Mountains or institutions of society [the Church, family, education, government and law, media and communication, arts and entertainment, and business and finance], where there would be the “Great Wealth Transfer” from the middle class to the anointed elites, and there would be a physical purging (genocide) of the demonic Left.

The Christian Right may plan their campaigns in secret through the Council for National Policy or in enclaves hosted by billionaires (pdf) or through private communication channels on the internet, but the Christian Right has not hidden its strategic goals. Nor have they hidden their strategies. Nor have they hidden their tactics.

The problem has been that social scientists are not interested in strategy, operations, and tactics. Social scientists do not study the application of military principles to political operations.

And defense intellectuals, well aware that Fourth Generation Warfare’s (4GW) principles and concepts had merit, ignored a multitude of red flags about William Lind, the seminal thinker on 4GW, such as his work at the Free Congress Foundation, his support for the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, if not racially questionable views, and his antisemitic “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.

They ignored his Washington Post article favoring a genocidal civil war in America—published two weeks after the rightwing terrorist attack in Oklahoma City. They ignored his second article on 4GW in which he all but openly declared war on what he called “cultural Marxists,” that is, the Democratic Party, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the university and culture elites. They ignored Lind’s inclusion of John Boyd’s strategic thinking, particularly his influential thought on moral conflict. They could have raised a warning, but they chose not to look at the red flags.

We have dithered for decades. We have ignored the warning signs. We have ignored those few scholars and activists who tried to alert us to the coming dangers.

And what is the danger? Christian Nationalism and its goal to completely reconstruct America as a Christian Nation. Yes, Donald Trump is very dangerous. Yes, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Movement is dangerous. Both are blunt instruments legitimized and influenced by the Christian Nationalists. The Christian Nationalists and their political-religious ideology of Christian Nationalism, Seven Mountains Mandate, Occult and Strategic Spiritual Warfare, and various conspiracy theories are what bounds all this together. When you see the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers bend their knees to the Christian Right, and some Alt-Right figures come to see merit in Christian Zionism’s view of Israel, you know who holds the power in the larger rightwing movement. And we still have no estimate of how many uncounted church-based militias exist in America under the guidance of "patriot pastors" who support Trump.

The Christian Nationalist movement is funded to the tune of around one billion dollars per year. The NAR has spiritual warfare networks in all 50 states. It has redundancies in communication networks. The billionaire class and the Christian Right have built formidable Get Out the Vote organizations and infrastructure. Prayer breakfasts are in every major city. Prayer groups are in every government institution.

And here we are, fighting for the preservation of a secular, liberal democracy.

The Basics of Fourth Generation Warfare                                     

In 1989, the Christian Right’s most prominent military strategist, William Lind, employed at the Christian Right’s premier strategic think tank, the Free Congress Foundation headed by Paul Weyrich, published a seminal conceptual article on Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW).

Lind proposed that the fundamental strategic objective was to achieve the moral and mental collapse of a target population.  A 4GW attacker’s objective would be to “collapse the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him.”

According to Lind, 4GW would blur the distinctions between tactical and strategic levels of combat, between military and civilian targets, between front and rear, and between war and peace.

A 4GW attacker’s primary targets would be “the enemy’s culture” and “political infrastructure.” The mental and moral collapse of a population would make “Psychological operations…the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention…. A major target will be the enemy population’s support of its government and the war.  Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions” [emphasis added].

This mental and moral collapse was an idea derived from America’s best military strategist, John Boyd, who had earlier concluded that moral conflict was the highest form of combat.

According to Boyd, the essence of moral conflict is to “create, exploit, and magnify menace, uncertainty, and mistrust” in order to create “fear, anxiety, and alienation in order to generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as subvert those that adversary depends upon, thereby magnifying internal friction.”  The aim is to “destroy [the] moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.”

The Christian Patriot Militias—the Armed Wing of the Christian Right

Within three years of Lind’s first 4GW article, the Christian Right in collaboration with the racist, antisemitic Christian Identity religious movement, and ideologically assisted by the Gun Owners of America, the National Rifle Association, and the anti-environmental Wise Use movement created the Christian “Patriot” militia movement. The movement was opposed to abortion, opposed to any form of gun regulations, opposed the federal government’s ownership of public land in the West, and opposed “federal tyranny” which came in the form of Social Security, Medicare, labor law, environmental law, and federal taxes.

At the collaborative meeting between representatives of the Christian Right and Christian Identity movements at Estes Park in October 1992 that led to the creation of the Christian “Patriot” militias, Greg Dixon, formerly of the Moral Majority, briefed them on “The Theology of Christian Resistance,” the title of Gary North’s edited 1983 book. The book provided a comprehensive theological grounding for a Christian militia modeled on the ancient militia in Israel and Revolutionary War militia in New Jersey, and resistance to federal tyranny led by lesser magistrates at the county level—following both John Calvin’s and Rousas Rushdoony’s writings. In an analysis of John Calvin’s writing on the legitimacy of resistance to tyranny by lesser magistrates, magistrates who are “acting as His viceregents,” Michael Gilstrap noted that “If the time ever comes, and there is the need for armed, active resistance against a tyrannical federal government, then that resistance must come about as the result of the leadership of lesser magistrates.”

In January 2008, Gary North, the libertarian economist and Christian Reconstructionist strategist and adviser to Ron Paul, published a semi-secret operational plan. The strategic objective was “to roll back the state to its Constitutional limits—its 1791 limits, meaning the Bill of Rights. All ten of them. This movement must be based on a systematic, well-thought-out campaign to roll back the civil government in every area of life in which it is operating unconstitutionally” [emphasis added].

In that same January 2008 article, North incorporated the key objective of Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare: ““Precinct by precinct, town by town, county by county, a decentralized political movement could begin to undermine the legitimacy [of (sic)] the existing political structure. It can do so politely, helpfully, and sympathetically.  The central issue is legitimacy. The supreme goal is to undermine the legitimacy enjoyed by the prevailing central state. This task is doable.  We have the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System working for us: a debt disaster to be funded by fiat money.  When the dollar dies, political legitimacy dies with it. This is the central premise of my recommended strategy” [emphasis added].

Edwin Vieira, a constitutional lawyer and informal adviser to Ron Paul, has written extensively on the “Power of the Sword.” The sword refers to the proper reconstitution of the “militias of the several states.” The purpose of the militias is to contest the sovereignty of the United States Government at the local level—the county level where the lesser magistrates are supposed to lead the resistance to federal tyranny, according to Gary North. Vieira’s ideas were incorporated into the Jekyll Island “continental congress’s” “Articles of Freedom” and then heavily promoted by the national level of Oath Keepers. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “this remarkable gathering appears to have played a key role in launching the current resurgence of militias and the larger anti-government ‘Patriot’ movement.”

The rapid expansion of the Christian militias in the 1990s was correlated with violent attacks against the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the FBI, various other federal installations and personnel, public infrastructure, plots to assassinate President Clinton and Attorney General Reno, and violent attacks against gay bars, abortion clinics and medical personnel, as well as violent and fatal attacks on state and local law enforcement officers.

In 1995, the Christian “Patriot” militia movement would be held responsible for the worst domestic terrorist attack in our history with the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in retribution for the tragedy at Waco in 1993.

Currently, the Christian militia movement has apparently incorporated 4GW into its operational planning with its pronounced goal of “No More Free Wacos,” targeted assassinations of political leaders, mid-level federal officials, and tactics such as bombing Fusion Centers and kidnapping governors.

During the Trump administration, the Christian militias in various disguises (“Boogaloo Boys”) undertook armed protests against proposed state-level gun regulations, mask mandates and shutting down the economy in order to save lives during the Covid pandemic. A Michigan militia group planned to kidnap the state’s governor—a tactic consistent with Lind’s 4GW novel Victoria which has a chapter (Chapter 14) on kidnapping a governor.

The scale of this insurrectionist movement is shocking and striking.

Professor Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, used “gold standard” NORC survey data to measure the dimensions and characteristics of the “insurrectionist movement.”

The insurrectionist movement [report via this link] was defined by five variables: belief that the 2020 election was stolen, agreed that the “use of force was justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” owned at least one weapon, was a member or supporter of a violent group, and had prior military experience.

About 8% of the U.S. public or 21 million Americans agreed with both beliefs. Of the 21 million, 75% believed in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, that is, “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate…with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” [This “Camp of the Saints Worldview” was central to my article on “Battle With Bullets”]. And 49% agreed with the central belief of the QAnon conspiracy theory, namely, that “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government.”

Pape’s second report released in January 2022 found that “the greater the decrease in non-Hispanic white [county population], the higher the rate of sending insurrectionists. For every 1 standard deviation decline in the white population (~1%), the number of expected insurrectionists increases by 25%. This would happen by chance less than 1 in a thousand times.”

Pape’s third report released in June 2023 found that “almost 14% --a minority of Americans, but still a significant number—believe the use of force is justified to ‘achieve political goals that I support,’’ including 6% who think it’s justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6% believe it’s "justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump.” That is around 12 million Americans. Some of them heavily armed.

The Chicago Project’s first report, released in April 2021, estimated that the armed “insurrectionist movement” ranged from 360,000 at the low end to more than 3.6 million at the high end—more than the combined forces of the U.S. Army and U.S. Army Reserve (2.4 million). That is a lot of potential combat power spread over the continental United States probably capable of contesting the legitimacy and sovereignty of the United States government when led by Republican governors, Republican county sheriffs, and other Republican political elites.

In terms of predicting partisan violence, scholars Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason in their 2022 book Radical American Partisanship found that partisan social identity, trait aggression, racial resentment, hostile sexism, and watching Fox News were correlated in a regression model with partisan violence, with an intervening variable of moral disengagement. Overall, they found (page 56) that “Large numbers of partisans—even majorities in some cases—hold morally disengaged views of their opponents, and roughly 10 to 15 percent endorse threats and violence against their partisan opponents.” They also found that much of the preferred violence “seem to have nonlethal acts in mind.”

Arie Perliger’s 2020 study, American Zealots: Inside Domestic Right-Wing Terrorism examined domestic terrorist incidents between 1990 and 2017. Consistent with the findings of the Kalmoe and Mason study, Perliger (page 111) found that changes in the political environment towards greater Republican control of the presidency and Congress, as well as conservative Supreme Court decisions tend to “intensify rather than reduce the tendency to engage in illegal and violent political activism. These perceived opportunities empower potential ideological perpetrators, whether because they feel the environment is more permissible for such acts or because they believe they have more public legitimacy to express their radical far-right views.”

Perliger (pages 111-2) also found support for Pape’s finding on the centrality of the “Great Replacement” as a driver of political violence. Perliger noted that “states that experience population growth, mainly via immigration to the United States or the arrival of minority groups, are becoming the centers of far-right violence. Members of communities that are experiencing changes in their social, cultural, and political characteristics as a result of the population’s diversification tend to use militant activism to express dissatisfaction with the breaking of the traditional social and communal fabric.”

The Operationalization of Fourth Generation Warfare

In 2001, the Free Congress Foundation published a strategy document, “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement.”

This strategy document leaves no room for doubt that it is the Christian Right who revealed their effort to unleash an unrelenting, vicious Fourth Generation Warfare attack within the United States of America. According to the strategy document:

“Our strategy will be to bleed this corrupt culture dry…. Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive.  We will not try to reform the existing institutions.  We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them…. We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left.  We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left…. We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”

In 1994, Lind published a second article on Fourth Generation Warfare in the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette, a private publication, that predicted or prophesized that the “next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.”

In Lind’s second 4GW article, he claimed that America’s political elites, but especially the Democratic Party and its intellectual and cultural supporters, were “cultural Marxists” spreading “cultural Marxism.” These Democratic elites were heirs to the 1930s Frankfurt School intellectuals ["all Jewish" Lind told a Holocaust-denying conference] of intellectuals who had allegedly declared war on Christianity with the intent to destroy the intellectual and moral basis of Western Civilization. In other words, the Democratic Party and the broad leftwing were anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-male, anti-white, and, in certain rightwing circles, agents of Satan.

Lind’s ideas on “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxists” would form the ideological infrastructure allowing the Republican Party, the Christian Right, the “Patriot” militias, white nationalists, white supremacists, the Alt-Right, and neo-Nazis to communicate via a set of common concepts, enemies, and narrative structure.

By establishing the narrative structure of a secret cabal of Jewish and non-Jewish elites endeavoring to destroy America and Western Civilization, Lind created the capacity for the entire right-wing to formulate an increasingly brazen and bizarre series of conspiracy theories all designed to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic Party, elite universities, leading culture creators and disseminators, labor unions, women’s rights groups, and gay rights groups.

Even the most cursory and simplistic history of American politics would demonstrate that the Republican Party and the Christian Right have pursued a strategy not only consistent with the key concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare, but they have used menace, uncertainty, and mistrust to create fear, anxiety, and alienation. Boyd wrote that the goal of moral conflict was to “destroy [the] moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.”

Today, social scientists and political commentators are increasingly worried about the loss of a common reality, common facts, the descent into political tribalism, and polarization—the product of the GOP drifting further and further to the right. They warn that the Republican Party has not only rejected the legitimacy of the Democratic Party as an opposition party, but the GOP has rejected the written and unwritten norms for democracy, rejected accountability and transparency of the government, rejected the legitimacy of elections won by Democrats, have gerrymandered districts to make it even harder for Democrats to win elections, have passed voter suppression laws to deprive the Democratic base the right to representation and voting, and have corrupted the U.S. Supreme Court.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade—a reversal of a constitutional right to abortion that had existed since 1973—the Republican Party, the Christian Right, and the larger MAGA movement have coalesced at the state level to further limit and outlaw abortion, restrict gay rights, ban books, whitewash American history, and undermine academic freedom in leading state universities.

Christian and White Nationalisms and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Right-wing conspiracy theories have one common strategic objective: to delegitimize the federal government and/or the Democratic Party and to induce the believers to transfer their loyalty from a secular, liberal Constitution to a new political-social order based either on a specific biblical worldview or one based on the white race.

This transfer of loyalty and allegiance is the essence of Fourth Generation Warfare.

Thomas Main captured this transfer of loyalty for the Alt Right in his book The Rise of the Alt-Right.  He noted that the white supremacist VDare website had pioneered the idea of bifurcating the United States into a real, white America that existed in the past and that will exist again in the future with the current America which is run by or for unworthy non-whites.

Main (page 208) also warned that “despite the Alt-Right’s protestations of good intent, their disunionist schemes [secession and homelands for non-white minorities] leave the door wide open to war and genocide.”

Main concluded [pp. 197 and 202], “Then allegiance to the supposedly more real America is professed while the present United States is declared to be an alien entity or even the enemy…. Thus, according to the Alt-Right, there is the historic American nation, the ‘Real America,’ which is white, and then there is the Anti-America or Black Run Amerika, which is the actually existing United States.  According to the Alt-Right, only the real, white America is worthy of allegiance; the present-day United States deserves none.  In short, the Alt Right expresses revulsion for the actually existing United States of America of today.”

The Christian Nationalists like the white nationalists, the Alt Right, and the neo-Nazis all believe they have been dispossessed and disassociated from their country, hence their common refrain to “take the country back.” For the white nationalists, their loyalty is to the white race and a mythical white nation. For the Christian Nationalists, their loyalty is to a mythical Christian nation.

Historian Thomas Zimmer recently suggested that “Rightwingers have decided that they are the country, everyone else is an enemy….[T]hey have been painting the Democratic Party as not just a political opponent, but an ‘Un-American’ enemy—a fundamentally illegitimate political faction captured by the radical forces of leftism, liberalism, wokeism, and multiculturalism…. The Right [sees] the struggle between Republicans and Democrats…as an existential conflict over whether or not the only version of the country they are willing to accept as ‘America’ will survive and endure…. We are in deeply dangerous territory…”

Or in the vocabulary of the Christian Nationalists, the Democratic Party has become the party captured by “cultural Marxists” and promoting “cultural Marxism.”

The Christian Nationalists have done the most to provoke a crisis of legitimacy as a political-religious movement.

The Christian Nationalist movement believes that their fellow Americans are not really Americans but are agents of Satan, heading up institutions in government, media and entertainment, and academia to destroy God and Western civilization. They are “cultural Marxists.” Christian Nationalists believe themselves to be engaged in a cosmic war of God versus Satan or Good versus Evil. They cannot conceive of compromising with their satanic enemy. They distrust science, academics, and mainstream news sources. Trump’s characterization of the mainstream media as “fake news” is intended as a 4GW attack to delegitimize the media. His characterizations of his various indictments as “hoaxes” is intended as a 4GW attack to delegitimize the FBI, the DOJ, and the federal, state, and local court systems.

[For a fuller discussion of the relationship between Boyd’s concept of moral conflict and the literatures on cosmic warfare and the crisis of legitimacy see my paper “Moral Conflict in Theory.” I discussed the 4GW attacks of the Christian Right and the Christian Identity movements in “Moral Conflict and Christian Identity and the Christian Right.”]

That the GOP base largely agrees with Trump indicates how strongly they view the dominant institutions of society as illegitimate and not worthy of loyalty and respect.

Proto-Fascism and a Second Civil War

Sadly, many of America’s leading intellectuals fear that the Republican Party is not only morphing towards, if not into, a fascist party, but that the broad rightwing is preparing to fight a second civil war which would inevitably lead to a racist genocide. Indeed, since the 1980s, the Christian Right and the neo-Nazis have been training their children and young adults to prepare for a genocidal (race) war, be it via the Left Behind novels and video games, or the bible of the neo-Nazis, The Turner Diaries and similar video games. The second half of William Lind's own 4GW novel Victoria ends in bloodthirsty, brutal, genocidal racial civil war.

Moreover, the Christian Nationalists since the 1960s have pursued an ideological assault on American history and values by claiming that America was/is/should be a Christian nation; that only Christians of a certain pedigree are entitled to rule the seven major institutions [mountains] of society; and, that under a reconstructed Christian Nation, there will be a great wealth transfer from the middle class and poor to the anointed elites.

The Christian Right has known for decades that its actual agenda, reconstructing America as a Christian Nation, is rejected by a majority of Americans, and that most Americans prefer a social democratic society.

But since the 1980s, the Christian Right, and increasingly other segments of the rightwing—including the neo-Nazis—have foreseen their path to power through a catastrophic financial collapse. For decades, the Republican Party has “played chicken” with the U.S. economy over raising the debt ceiling or some other issue of the day. While the Republican Party leadership may believe that makes for good political theater and electoral support, it is the essential basis of the Christian Right’s strategy for coming to power.

Lind, Gary North, the Christian Reconstructionist’s political strategist, Ron Paul, and many others on the rightwing, believe that the Federal Reserve System’s inability to handle a catastrophic financial crisis will be their pathway to power and reconstructing America. That is one of the major reasons why they have stressed their followers being “preppers,” getting off the grid as much as possible, and amassing weapons and ammunition. Christian Right elites tell their followers to buy gold and buy crypto currencies in preparation for a financial collapse and ensuing social chaos.

All the elements of Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare, to include Boyd’s ideas on moral conflict, are now present in America. The GOP has become an anti-system political party drifting dangerously close to being an outright fascist party. The GOP and the Christian Right view their political opponents as “evil” and as “agents of Satan.” They view the federal government and the Democratic Party as illegitimate, tyrannical, anti-white, and anti-Christian. The GOP and the Christian Right view the Democratic Party’s electoral base, largely Black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim, and immigrant as fundamentally illegitimate--cheaters who cost them elections by voting illegally or just plain voting. The Christian Right views itself as engaged in a “cosmic war” of God vs. Satan, Good vs Evil, with no room for compromising with the forces of the anti-Christ.

The GOP has a movement of street fighters and the Christian Right has an armed wing of Christian militias preparing to contest the federal government’s sovereignty and legitimacy during a catastrophic economic crisis or collapse. We do not know how wide a gap there is between the strategic intentions of Lind, North, and Vieira—according to their strategic writings—and the tactical capabilities of the current Christian “Patriot” militias. However, one cannot conclude that dozens of militias operating in dozens of states would not be capable of creating havoc during a severe, if not catastrophic, financial crisis. One only has to remember the havoc two terrorists wrought in April 2013 as the city of Boston was shutdown and flooded with federal, state, and local police for days

The January 6, 2021 Insurrection Was Driven By Christian Nationalism

Professor Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network, reported that the Council for National Policy was heavily involved in the preparations for January 6^th. According to Nelson, “So as early as February 2020, the CNP and its advisers were already anticipating various strategies to overturn the results of the election in the event of the loss of either the popular vote or the Electoral College, or both.” She later reported that “CNP archives illustrate the extensive planning its members undertook to discredit the 2020 election results, undermine local election officials, and incite the protest on January 6, 2021.”

In addition to the CNP, the New Apostolic Reformation appears to have been heavily involved in the incitement phase of the insurrection.

Journalist Elle Hardy, who is researching the NAR, suggested that the NAR “has arguably become the center of gravity in modern American Christianity” and is using church networks to “to orchestrate the radical transformation of society.”

Rick Pidcock reported that “As the U.S. Capitol building was under siege January 6, four of the six protest permits issued that day were to independent charismatic Christian groups that had spent the previous two months waging a spiritual war focused on overturning the election.” Pidcock also reported that the group may have received a briefing on strategy for the insurrection during a White House visit on December 29, 2020.

Matthew Taylor and ley Onishi reported that on December 29, 2020, eight days before the insurrection, Dutch Sheets, a NAR apostle, and his team of 14 apostles and prophets huddled with Trump administration officials inside the White House.

While the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers played prominent roles in the insurrection, including looking for government officials to kidnap, if not murder, Christian Nationalist symbology was prevalent in the crowd—if you knew which symbols to look for.

Matthew Gabrielle, professor of medieval studies, observed and reported the importance of the “Deus Vult” symbol of the red cross on a white field. It means “God wills it” in Latin. Gabrielle noted that “The Deus Vult flag (and other apparel) that appeared on January 6, 2021… serve as convenient shorthand for a wider Manichean war, whose roots seem to reach back into the Middle Ages…[and is an] all-purpose symbol used by elements of the political right to define itself from what they see to be an unholy alliance of Jews, Muslims, and secularists. It’s a combination that signposts a particular type of apocalyptic, militant Christianity.” Gabrielle noted that historically “violence almost always follows that flag in its wake.”

Sarah Imhoff, associate professor of religious studies specializing in Judaism, noted that Christian Nationalists use “jumbo-size shofars” during their “Jericho marches.” The shofar is a “is a weapon of war in the biblical story as well as for the contemporary Christian warriors.”  She suggested that the “Size, domination, and audibility come together in the shofar to assert that God’s warriors are coming to help usher in God’s plan and to vanquish God’s foes.”

Rod Dreher, a conservative, Orthodox Christian, noted that the Jericho march with the blowing of the shofars is “designed to mimic the Biblical story of the Israelite army ritually marching around the walled city of Jericho, blowing the shofar, and watching as God demolished the city’s defenses, so the Israelites could conquer.”

Finally, Anthea Butler, professor of American social thought and chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, explained the importance of the gallows erected outside the Congress: “What hung on the gallows that day was democracy itself…. The gallows were built for the ultimate political retribution.  Threats of violence against politicians and media figures are no longer anathema, but a regular feature of the right-wing media complex.  In the case of the insurrection, a muscular, violent image of punishment, coupled with prayers and violence, turned the men and women of the Capitol insurrection into instruments of God’s punishment on those who opposed their (and their God’s) choice for the nation’s leader…. The gallows were a symbol of their moral righteousness, the need to shed blood to bring back righteousness to the land.”

The Christian Right, Christian Zionists, Christian Nationalists, and the New Apostolic Reformation see themselves as God’s warriors to seize power, destroy a liberal, secular democracy, and install the one politician in America who promises to be “their retribution.”

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarian strongmen and fascism, explained the significance of Trump’s promise: “If he returns to the White House, he will punish all who did not collaborate with his attempt to overthrow the government.”

Ben-Ghiat also accurately described our current strategic situation: “A great multi-front war is being waged against the American people. We face a legal and legislative war that aims to take away our democratic rights and intellectual freedoms and turn the bedrocks of civil society, like schools and places of worship, into targets of terror. We face a psychological war that seeks to convince Americans that Democrats pose an existential threat to them and promotes violence as a legitimate response to that situation.”

Fourth Generation Warfare has come to America. It can only become more violent.

Scenarios For the Future

Alan Elrod writing at Arc Digital offered an interesting “thought exercise” on “Eschatologies of Democracy: Visions of the End of the American Experiment.” He suggested there were three main antagonists to American democracy seeking power through different means and end-states, though his analysis does not really differentiate means-to-ends among the three groups: Christian Nationalists seeking restoration, post-liberal or illiberal conservatives seeking transfiguration, and neo-Nazi accelerationists seeking annihilation.

I would suggest we are facing at least four different scenarios in descending order of probability:

• ·       Weimar/Hungarian Model: an anti-liberal, illiberal, post-liberal, or Christian Nationalist movement comes to power through legal elections and then uses its congressional majorities in both houses of Congress to pass their “restorative” or “transfigurative” agenda into law. This model works with and without an ongoing economic crisis. This is the fear of a second Trump administration turned into a regime.
  

I see this as the main threat via MAGA as the umbrella movement for the entire right-wing, from Christian Nationalists to the neo-Nazis. This model assumes that Trump/MAGA win the election outright without any violence or chicanery.

• ·       Lenin Model A: Trump/MAGA comes to power by physically and “legally” challenging and contesting the legitimacy of the 2024 election, assuming that the election results in swing states are close and Trump has lost in the Electoral College. Trump and the Christian Right mobilize their militias and county sheriff posses to confront the election voting officials and demand that, in any manner possible, that Trump is declared the winner of that contested state. This could be aided by a Republican legislature having passed laws before or after the election. This is essentially overthrowing the government. Now, this could almost certainly lead to a civil war. But it is not out of the question that Trump and the Christian Right, along with the GOP that has gone along at the state level, are prepared and are preparing for this scenario.

The 2020 election was a sneak preview of the “legal” means. January 6th was a sneak preview of the violent means. The post-2020 GOP has certainly indicated that they are preparing the “legal” grounds to challenge the 2024 results. And you have the militias and all the right-wing accelerationists who would be prepared to assist. Trump has already indicated that he plans to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. He would probably do the same for the 2024 insurrectionists, should he be installed as president-for-life.

Pape's Chicago Project warned in their study published in January 2022 [via this link], that this insurrectionist movement has a “large mobilization potential for replay of ‘stolen election’ violence in 2022 primaries and mid-terms.” While that did not come to pass, it is almost certainly a scenario that could develop regarding the outcome of the 2024 presidential election—provided that the Republican contender, Trump or someone like Trump, decides to mobilize the insurrectionist base of the party and overthrow the election with the aid of state and local GOP officials.

• ·       Lenin Model B: an anti-liberal, illiberal, or Christian Nationalist movement comes to power via secession, revolution, or civil war, contesting the legitimacy of the federal government through an ongoing, severe economic crisis or catastrophe that stretches the Federal Reserve's capacity to stabilize the economy to the limit. A sort of “black swan” event on the order of a catastrophe as Simon Johnson and others have written. This is also how the Christian Right has conceived their path to power, though Lenin Model A is more likely.

•  ·      The Base/Atomwaffen Model: a neo-fascist movement attempts to come to power through sustained political terrorism directed against public infrastructure, governmental infrastructure, and targeted assassinations of political leaders, civil rights leaders, non-white minorities, and others.

Conclusion

There are many days when it does feel like the “end times” are coming. But this “end times” will not bring a messiah, but the destruction of a secular, liberal America dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” and that all persons have the inalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been the foundation for liberty and prosperity in Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions—the two major theaters for the war.

The Christian Nationalists are on the verge of achieving what Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Castro, Guevarra, Putin, and Xi Jinping could never do—destroy America.

 

Biography of the Author:

James Scaminaci III received his PhD in Sociology at Stanford University in 1987. He is a retired naval intelligence officer and a former senior civilian analyst working for the Department of the Army at the U.S. European Command specializing in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. He spent nearly four years heading up Special Projects on the Stabilization Force (SFOR) intelligence staff in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

 

Published Works in this Assessment:

Clarkson, Frederick, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1997.

Conway, Flo and Jim Siegelman, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives, New York: Doubleday, 1982.

Gilstrap, Michael R., “John Calvin’s Theology of Resistance,” pp. 180-217 in Gary North (editor), The Theology of Christian Resistance, Tyler, Texas: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983.

Hardy, Elle, Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World, London: Hurst & Company, 2021.

Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Kalmoe, Nathan P. and Lilliana Mason, Radical American Partisanship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Main, Thomas J., The Rise of the Alt-Right, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2018.

Nance, Malcolm, They Want to Kill Americans, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

Nelson, Anne, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Osinga, Frans P.B., Science, Strategy and War: The strategic theory of John Boyd, London: Routledge, 2007, see pages 166-188 for the relevance of Boyd’s ideas of moral conflict to the Christian Right’s 4GW insurgency.

Osinga, Frans, “On Boyd, Bin Laden, and Fourth Generation Warfare as String Theory,” From John Olson (editor), On New Wars, (Oslo, then forthcoming,) The Air University, U.S. Air Force, June 26, 2007, at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/boyd/osinga_4gw_boyd_copyright2007.pdf.

Osinga, Frans, “‘Discourse on Winning and Losing’: Core Ideas & Themes of Boyd’s ‘Theory of Intellectual Growth & Evolution,’” briefing presented to the Air War College (USAF), September 25, 2007, Air University, at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/boyd/osinga_boyd_ooda_copyright2007.pdf.

Osinga, Frans, “John Boyd and strategic theory in the postmodern era,” Air University, Air War College, USAF, originally published at Defense & Securite Internationale, Number 27, 2007, at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/boyd/osinga_boyd_postmod_copyright2007.pdf.

Perliger, Arie, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Pratt, Douglas, “Religion and Terrorism: Christian Fundamentalism and Extremism,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 2010, 22:3: 438-456, especially p. 448.

Walter, Barbara F., How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, New York: Crown, 2022.