Seven Grey Swans a Swimmin’ in 2025: #1 America’s Politics Continue Down the Path of Violence

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

–Abraham Lincoln

 

December 31, 2024— On January 20, the Biden will end. And good riddance.

Why? Many reasons, from the soaring national debt to failure to address structural government spending priorities and successive debt default debates in Congress, phony corrupt wars overseas and election engineering gimmicks like an unconstitutional endeavor to buy off student loan holders.

Good riddance to election year 2024.

What a fraud the Democratic party’s effort to pass themselves off as the party “defending freedom and democracy” turned out to be.

The DNC and their allies spent the first half of the year brazenly lying about how Joe Biden was fit for office. We built our initial Grey Swan Investment Fraternity research on why Biden wasn’t mentally fit to be the candidate, and why he’d ultimately get the axe. We were right.

It’s barely satisfying to watch the legacy media’s insouciant soul-searching while they fumble every attempt to explain why they swallowed the party line… hook, line and sinker. Their smug dismissiveness of independent thinkers looks a little barren and niggardly now.

Clearly, the programmers and producers of what passes as network and cable programs have no idea what is actually happening in the country in which they purport to explain the “news” on a 24-hour schedule. Or, worse, they know it’s a lie, but they peddle it as news anyway to further an agenda.

So capping our Seven Grey Swans a Swimmin’, here’s our #1 forecast for ringing in 2025: The progressives were emboldened in the dark times of the Biden era… and they will not go quietly into that good night.

We refer to the knuckleheads who rioted under BLM… the vocal supporters of defunding the police…, and the students who rallied in the irrational support of Hamas, a violent, anti-gay, hard-line religious terrorist group…  all of these privileged obsequies proved much more militant than the earlier Occupy Wall Street movements.

But, in fact, as we have detailed on occasion here in the daily missive, these groups share in their DNA the roots of protest that date back to the 1960s Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven strategy to rot American education, legal and democratic institutions in the country from the inside.

The professional dissidents are not likely to let a landslide election victory against the Clinton, Obama, and Biden political establishment stop them from conjuring up a new social justice campaign to rally around.

It appears they’ve beaded in on Project 2025 and are attempting to pin that on the second Trump administration’s agenda.

True or not, sparks will fly when the inevitable challenge of moving legislative gears in an opposite direction begins to take shape.

Regrettably, that means America’s political violence is not over.

We can blame the seething underbelly of the festering political process just below the surface in urban areas, which was the holdout of believers in the big government and the censorship state. We can blame an underclass exploited for their desire to achieve what is actually promised: The American Dream.

We can even blame the heart of a roiling democratic system in the United States, the world’s most peculiar experiment with the government of the people, for the people, by the people to date.

Ultimately, we only hope that freedom and liberty will prevail.

But it will get darker before the dawn.

There’s already infighting among the MAGA right and the Elon Musk right over immigration policy.

If, as a human collective effort, we want to build new communication networks, explore the genome and build new defenses against disease… if we want to explore space and build carbon-free energy systems… if we want to eat meat and plants and feed 8 billion people… we need tech. If the U.S. wants to lead tech, it’ll need to recruit the best and brightest globally.

That’s one vision.

The Luddites and American traditionalists have another. Not just America first, as Donald Trump proclaims, but Americans only. Never mind we’re a nation built on legal immigration, and getting the world’s best and brightest is one of the greatest imports we could ever have.

No political coalition lasts.

The MAGA coalition will be no different.

The progressive movement represented by old-school hard-left visionaries will not hesitate to exploit the inevitable divisions.

For now, what Javier Mieli has done in Argentina to right-size their government cannot happen here. There are too many vested interests in Ukraine, Israel, Medicare/caid, Wall Street, defense contractors, health care companies, and NGOs to simply cut off the spigot.

The Trump agenda has two years before the mid-terms revert to American democracy as usual.

God bless the experiment.

Grey Swan #1: American Political Violence Returns To A Street New You

America is already facing a crumbling economy, the threat of China, and the destruction of the middle class.

The country’s increasing widespread political violence could be the final straw to break our nation apart.

Things have gotten so bad that a full 23% of Americans support their state seceding from the U.S.

A recent survey found that 10% of American adults, including a third who own guns, believe that “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”

Equally concerning, 7% support using force to restore Trump to the presidency.

But this trend is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. Equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans have reported that threatening the other party’s political leaders is justified in some cases.

Both sides engage in inflammatory rhetoric and baseless conspiracy theories that experts believe could lead to more lone-wolf attacks or even organized violence, potentially pushing the country toward conflict unlike anything seen in American history since the Civil War.

A December 2021 survey by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that 1 in 3 Americans believe violent action against the government can be justified, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 in the 1990s.

More recent polls show this trend continuing, with an April 2024 PBS/Marist poll finding that 28% of Republicans and 12% of Democrats believe Americans may “have to resort to violence to get the country back on track.”

This is wild to me, especially since it’s not even about policy disagreements. It’s become deeply personal and identity-based.

As political scientist Lilliana Mason explains, “The parties are significantly more racially distinct than they were a few decades ago.”

This isn’t just about policy disagreements anymore. It’s about two fundamentally different visions of America, with each side viewing the other as an existential threat.

This mindset creates fertile ground for justifying violence.

And that means we could see more of it when Donald Trump retakes the White House and looks to make significant changes to the size and scope of government in 2025.

Regards,

Addison Wiggin,
Grey Swan

P.S.  Reader Jerry writes in with the perfect thought to end 2024:

Thanks, Addison, for the ever-insightful clarity from yourself and the great friends you publish, many of whom I read, like Bill Bonner and Porter Stansberry.

As I said in my subject line, like Argentina, we need the chainsaw to be wielded to eliminate cancers, not trim them into pretty shapes.

Our offices will be closed tomorrow. Happy New Year to you and yours!

Your thoughts on the top Grey Swan events of 2025 are always welcome here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com.