Some Rob You with a Six-Gun/ Some With a Fountain Pen: On Civil War By Other Means

Imagine if we were at war with a foreign power that bombed most of the federal buildings in Washington, destroying the records and functions of those departments and killing millions of federal workers – bombs falling on Health and Human Services, on the Justice Department, the Department of Interior, Veterans Affairs, incendiary devices burning down the servers on which great reams of valuable information, created with expertise at great expense (paid for by you and me) to serve the public with records of what has happened, how money has moved around, vital information on health, climate, science, education.

Imagine that this enemy regime had appointed its own soldiers to run these departments as part of the invasion and destruction, and they were clearly intent on running them into the ground, violating laws, abusing or eliminating skilled and experienced staff, on crashing the system. Like the Nazis in Paris circa 1940. The latest email I got from the Democrats declares, "They want to weaken Social Security piece by piece until it’s broken beyond repair — and they think no one will notice." Disinformation expert Renee DiResta writes: "Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood in front of the press and declared victory. Not against any foreign adversary, but over the remnants of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a small office within the State Department tasked with tracking foreign propaganda. In reality, Rubio’s act is more accurately viewed as yet another step in a broader campaign to dismantle America’s capacity to detect and respond to foreign influence operations." And although the press has largely stopped covering DOGE, its rampage continues--

This is war.

Because major parts of the US government are being destroyed through economic and administrative means, as well as reckless hacking and deleting, the violence and destruction are being underestimated, downplayed and normalized, or described piece by piece but not as a whole. But it is tremendously destructive in both intent and consequences, and it is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.

The differences are that this is mostly being done through technical, financial, and administrative means and the enemy soldiers invading these departments are US citizens. But the will to destroy is just as genuine as if an enemy power had taken over. Federal workers have not been killed--they've just been fired, driven out, sidelined, frustrated in their ability to work in a corrupted and sabotaged system under hostile bosses. They make this country run, and they are no longer allowed to do that work.

And while federal workers are not being shot at dawn, they are undergoing severe anguish and moral distress: In March, NBC reporters "spoke with 20 federal employees across agencies. Spanning the country, these workers lost their jobs, watched co-workers lose them or endured what amounted to a Goliath joyously stomping on David. In interviews, federal workers — many of whom are veterans — told of overwhelming stress, personal crises, suicidal ideation, rapid weight loss, prolonged lack of sleep, panic attacks and visiting the emergency room after a mental breakdown."

If we were indeed under attack by a foreign power using familiar forms of violence, if there were bombs falling, and bayonetted bodies on camera, the news media and loyal politicians would treat it as war, and we would know how to respond. But this is a blurry invasion from within, an autoimmune disorder of the state, an army of Manchurian candidates, and a zombie horror movie. While civil society is doing a pretty decent job of showing up, and some Democratic politicians are speaking up pretty strongly (while too many others normalize and placate), it doesn't add up to the kind of response a war demands. Of course if it were conventional war in conventional times, the administrative branch of the government would be leading the war effort, but it is now the enemy.

This war has casualties, including people in other parts of the world who suddenly lost their food aid in regions afflicted with famine or those who were suddenly cut off from the HIV+ medications keeping them healthy and preventing the disease from spreading. The Atlantic reports, "After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me." The New York Times states: "A study in The Lancet recently calculated that cuts to American spending on PEPFAR, the program to deliver H.I.V. and AIDS relief abroad, could cost the lives of 500,000 children by 2030." An increasingly out-of-control measles epidemic is spreading from Texas, while the deranged and malevolent RFK spreads misinformation and sabotages research on vaccines, demands new tests on proven treatments, and demonizes people with autism.

Lives of babies and children are being destroyed. Another NBC report, this one on a mother deported to Cuba, "Heidy Sánchez was so distraught that she got on the rooftop of a house in Havana to get Wi-Fi connection and send her daughter a bedtime lullaby via WhatsApp. The Tampa-area mother was deported to Cuba last week without her 17-month-old U.S.-citizen daughter, who has a history of seizures and was still being breastfed, she and her lawyers told NBC News.  Sánchez’s deportation occurred around the time two other mothers were deported to Honduras with their U.S. citizen children, including one with stage 4 cancer." This abrupt end to the child's treatment seems likely to be lethal.

Children in this country as a whole are under attack, with current and threatened cuts to SNAP, WIC, and school lunch programs, as well as access to healthcare and public health (Mother Jones reports, "After years of progress in reducing the number of babies that succumb to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the National Institutes of Health has terminated its participation in the Safe to Sleep program," which is credited with halving SIDS deaths since inception in 1994). There will be a lot more casualties, including suicides by the financially ruined, as the impacts of sabotaging economic, medical, and public-health systems arrives. The US is essentially being stripped for parts (and both Musk and Trump are using their powers to increase their wealth and enhance their assets, Trump through sordid crypto schemes).

This is a war against American forests, with a push to step up logging in previously protected places. A war against national parks and public lands. A war against clean water and food safety. A war against the US economy, which had a market crash when the tariffs hit, and is going to be severely impacted by China's decision to stop shipping a lot of goods to this country, a flow of goods that provides jobs at ports, in trucking, in manufacturing domestically with imported parts, and in retail. A war against US farmers, many of whom depend on income from both direct exports and crops used for the food aid that's been cancelled. Even a war against air traffic safety.

A war against education and knowledge and the independence of universities. A war against the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. A war against due process and rights guaranteed bye the Constitution. A war against the separation of powers. A war against the climate and climate action, including wind power (there's a lawsuit about that filed by 18 governors and a thread here on the dismantling of climate research and information). A war not just against refugees and immigrants, but against anyone who might be perceived to be in those categories, aka anyone brown, regardless of legal status. A war against women – Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski said on social media on April 29, "I teamed up with Senator Gillibrand to express grave concern with recent DOD guidance that would significantly alter or terminate the Department’s sexual assault and prevention (SAPR) services."

The people of this country are rallying to the occasion. In San Francisco, on May Day, a crowd of hundreds of lawyers standing in the open air re-took their oath that includes these words: "I (licensee name) solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California." The New Yorker recently reported on the archivists and librarians scrambling to save data being deleted from federal websites: "More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a 'digital book burning,' and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice. Racing to comply with executive orders banning “D.E.I.” and “gender ideology extremism,” agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do with the Administration’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by A.I. tools that flag forbidden words without regard to context."

But the comparison to book burning is inadequate: in most cases no matter how many copies of a book you burn, more exist and yet more can be printed. The Nazis could not and did not burn all copies of books by Karl Marx or Bertolt Brecht. But if you delete digital data, unless there is the kind of backup these information heroes are trying to create, it is gone for good. Groups from Earthjustice to the ACLU are filing lawsuits and winning them; protests abound. But I think a lot of us are looking for traction--there are fairytales in which the protagonist is supposed to climb a glass mountain, and when the enemy has already taken over much of the federal government, resistance faces not only an enemy but the slipperiness of that enemy criming and ransacking while barricaded behind the power and access of the federal government.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker sounds increasingly like Winston Churchill during World War II, because he know this is war. He thundered, “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. “They must understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.” But first we must understand we are at war.

"Some will rob you with a six-gun/ And some with a fountain pen" Woody Guthrie sang in "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd." Violence takes many forms, not all of it as straightforward as bombs and bayonets. Stochastic terrorism comes about when powerful public figures incite hate and encourage attacks in ways that aren't direct orders and therefore legally actionable but nevertheless serve to menace and encourage violence against a targeted group. And while only some members of that group – be it trans women or Venezuelan refugees – may face violence by followers of that public figure, it serves to terrorize them all. That's certainly the case with the Gestapo-like ICE raids.

In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon coined the term slow violence to describe how environmental devastation — pollution, contamination, dispossession – unfolds slowly, indirectly, in ways that too often let the perpetrators escape culpability. He writes, "By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.... We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence." Nixon was talking about environmental violence, but economic, legal, and informational violence can equally be described in his terms, and they abound in this current war.

When it comes to illness, cure begins with accurate diagnosis. Justice begins with calling things by their true names, and so: we are under attack. We are at war.

p.s. Wrote a long piece about resistance and change at the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/03/protest-can-shape-the-world-rebecca-solnit-on-the-fight-back-against-trump

p.p.s. I have a new book!

And to my eternal delight, this yellow book completes the rainbow of books (with Hope in the Dark as night) I've published in this Haymarket series, and I'm hoping that booksellers and maybe people at home recreate on their shelves the classic six-colors rainbow Pride flag. Men Explain Things came out in blue in 2014, and a couple of covers later I realized we were heading toward a rainbow and we started choosing colors to fulfill that possibility and now it's here.