how to start a war
Step 1: Pick an enemy
This enemy should be a group of people who threaten your position of power. No matter how theoretical or tenuous that threat is, it’s best to stay ahead of the game and start the conflict before your enemy has a chance to pick up momentum.
Step 2: Anger the enemy
It is wise to let your enemy make the first move. This allows you to later justify your actions as self-defense, as defensible. So just do things that will significantly worsen the material conditions of your enemy’s life until they can’t take it anymore.
Slash funding to critical health infrastructure so that 17 million people lose their insurance coverage in the next decade, and everyone else deals with a health care system that is substantially more expensive and precarious. Cut funding to nutrition programs, including SNAP, and introduce obstructive work requirements that make it harder for millions of people to get food. Yank energy funding and dismantle recent initiatives so that it’s more expensive for everyone to keep the lights on.
Do all of this while giving tax breaks to the rich, making an already canyonesque wealth gap even wider. Show your enemy every day, through a ceaseless procession of small indignities, that there was enough to go around, just not for them.
Step 3: Make war the only option
In normal circumstances, your enemy might try to resolve their grievances by voting you out of office or going on strike or making your life sufficiently inconvenient through repeated protest actions. But it’s war you want. So make sure you’ve already laid a solid groundwork of gerrymandering and stacking the courts with friendly judges so that, no matter how numerous your enemy is, they still never have quite enough political power to stop you.
Take this a step further by elevating the president to more of a pampered dictator, one you treat with fawning deference and adoration. Worship your daddy-emperor by protecting him from prosecution and helping him oppress with impunity. Make him someone your enemy cannot touch. Then stay on his good side so you are likewise untouchable.
Step 4: Muster your troops
You may find that your actions thus far have caused some people whom you previously counted as allies to cross over to the enemy’s side, since they also need health care and food and electricity. Not to worry. Just spend $170 billion to bolster a domestic military force that you already have in place to terrorize the enemy. Do this in the name of “immigration enforcement,” in the smug knowledge that, in practice, ICE inflicts illegal, indiscriminate violence on people across the country regardless of their immigration status. Intimidate your enemy by hiring more soldiers and building new prisons that, thanks to your careful preparation, you can now throw pretty much anybody into, indefinitely, whenever you want, no questions asked.
Step 5: Try to win
Uh oh, you started a war! Sure, this is what you’ve been working toward, but you hadn’t fully considered that war means war, you know? You’ve operated for so long outside of the intended workings of democracy, ruling by a tyrannical minority, that you’ve forgotten that the enemy you’ve pissed off is the greater portion of the country. Their numbers are in the hundreds of millions.
Now there are a bunch of angry people absolutely everywhere, and the ICE commandos you’ve enlisted are outnumbered. All the prison beds are full despite the new ones you just built, and there aren’t enough people left on your side to build more. People are striking and boycotting left and right, absolutely crushing your investment portfolio. What was that? There’s still an election coming up this year? That can’t be right; we’re at war. But you of all people should know how much normalcy can sneak in on the heels of unprecedented events.
If and when your efforts fail, at least you can blame the whole affair on your opponents or your predecessors. What are they gonna do, post a Bluesky thread about you?
Recommended reading:
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