A New York Times essay last Thursday titled “We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country,” called to intensify “war games” for scenarios concerning the 2024 presidential elections such as “insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war,” in order to avert “America’s abject political decay.”

The essay was penned by Jonathan Stevenson, former National Security Council staffer under Obama, and Steven Simon, a former State Department staffer in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

It begins by claiming that the U.S. is “even more alarmingly fractious and divided” one year after the January 6 Capitol breach, which the Left has falsely deemed an “insurrection” that represented such a serious threat to democracy that they want to commemorate it every year as a reminder that supporters of former President Trump are domestic terrorists.

“Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms,” the authors ranted. They argue — correctly — that the next presidential election “will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested,” but they neglect to mention that it is the Democrats who violently contest election results that don’t go their way. Instead, the authors claim that “a right-wing minority — including many elected politicians — is now practicing a form of brinkmanship by threatening to unilaterally destroy American democracy.”

Stevenson and Simon posit hysterically that “War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity.”

This is fear-mongering demagoguery and incitement to violence. The left’s chief propaganda outlet — the New York Times — is outright pushing for civil war against its political opponents. They are the ones threatening to destroy American democracy.