Shanghaied - 2ACW

[gillan1220]

Jan 23, 2021 18:40:38 GMT James G said:

Jan 23, 2021 18:39:02 GMT gillan1220 said:

Alright, what now?

Part Two will be starting tomorrow.
Things will go even crazier than they already are. We'll see a split.

Jesus, things will get bad real quick.

[James G]

Jan 23, 2021 18:57:30 GMT gillan1220 said:

Jan 23, 2021 18:40:38 GMT James G said:

Part Two will be starting tomorrow.
Things will go even crazier than they already are. We'll see a split.

Jesus, things will get bad real quick.

That they will!

[James G]

Part Two – Lame Duck


19 – In the streets

Once that Supreme Court decision was made public, President Walsh contacted Senator Roberts and invited him to the White House. There were still two months to go before the 2028 Presidential Election winner would be inaugurated yet there was a lot to do. Walsh wanted to speed up the transition following the conclusion of any debate about who would succeed him. There was certification from states to come and the Electoral College hadn’t met, but it was a done deal as far as the 48th President was concerned. Then Vice President Padley made that speech out in California alongside the woman whom Roberts had defeated. Roberts was put off until the morning, angering his campaign team, while Walsh contacted Padley. He expressed his displeasure – to put it mildly – at what she said. Her remarks, he told her, were incendiary and likely to plunge the country into a fresh wave of violence. Padley told him that what she had said had to be said. The election had been stolen from Maria Arreola Rodriquez and all of those tens of millions of Americans had voted for her. Walsh instructed her to make another statement, one to calm things down. If she wouldn’t do that, he wanted her to come back to Washington and explain to him why not. Padley refused to do either: she wouldn’t walk back on what she had said nor would she return to the nation’s capital. Asked what she intended to do while staying out West, she told him to ‘just wait and see’. Padley then terminated the call.

If anyone else in the Walsh Administration had behaved in the same manner as his vice president, they’d be gone. The President could fire them directly or demand their resignation. That wasn’t the case with Padley though: the US Constitution gave her the ability to refuse his demands and she was un-sackable. First she’d lied to him about the administration-wide decree to respect the decision made by the Supreme Court and then gone to California and done what she had. Now she was refusing to retract her comments and return to Washington. This was completely unacceptable. He was impotent to do anything meaningful in response though. Journalists had the phones of his chief-of-staff and press secretary ringing off the hook. Walsh knew that the White House had to make a statement. He brought those two top-level officials in to see him and, through his rage, went through what he wanted said to the press in an official statement as well as getting Roberts over to the building. The White House Press Secretary addressed the media soon afterwards. The nation was let know that Walsh didn’t agree with what Padley had said, including her unwarranted attacked on the Constitution & its framers, and firmly believed that his successor should be, and would be, Senator Roberts. That Texan Republican arrived some time later. The media were invited to take pictures and ask a few questions of him and the president when they sat side-by-side in the Oval Office: Roberts was called ‘Mr President-elect’ by Walsh. There were assurances given by the sitting president about the smoothness of the transition to his successor and how the Walsh Administration would do all that it could in that.

Despite the actions of his vice president, Walsh was letting her, and everyone else, know how he saw things standing. Roberts would be his successor. That message was one that was understood elsewhere too. Through that night and into the next morning, there were official messages of congratulations on his victory coming in from overseas for Roberts. A few governments had already done so yet most, allies especially, had held off doing so due to the possibly that that case before the Supreme Court could have gone the other way. Once that ruling was made, they were all eager to show how pleased that they were that America was soon to have a new leader. They gave their recognition in a flurry of diplomacy. Rivals and even enemies – some of them anyway – of America did the same. Almost the whole of the outside world was accepting the notion that Senator Edward Roberts would be the 49th President. However, domestically, that wasn’t the case with everyone.

In the aftermath of the actions of the vice president, there came comments from a handful of elected and formerly elected officials going even further than she did. Of note were those made by the trio from the West called ‘nobodies’ by the Vice President-elect Lee Mitchell. These three stated that they believed that there should be official recognition from their home states, solid Blue ones, of MAR and not Roberts as the next president. Former congressman Greg Antonetti from New Mexico and recently-retired Colorado Senator Elliot Carville (the subject of that 2024 sex scandal which put Padley on Walsh’s winning presidential ticket) made statements to such an effect while joining them in off-the-record yet leaked remarks was the Speaker of the Nevada State Assembly. Judy Ashby’s comments were called ‘sedition’ by political opponents there in Nevada in the immediate afterwards. Once they went national, there was even more uproar but from Democrats as well as Republicans. She, wisely, said nothing more while aware that the US Attorney for the District of Nevada, a fierce enemy of hers in the form of Christine Babcock, was circling ready to pounce on anything like that said openly by an elected official. Remarks like these form such politicians were considered in the minds of others across the nation but those out West felt comfortable to say them if not to the media then in a semi-private setting. Members of the public who thought the same generally had no issue in expressing their views. They did so when interviewed by the media, online and also in the streets.


Out into the streets came protesters against the election outcome once more. There were marches and demonstrations in cities and towns across the United States. These had been seen in immediate aftermath of the election when the Republicans began their ‘theft’ but only intensified once that had been completed by what those unelected justices on the Supreme Court decided. Using law-and-order powers which the same legal body had in the past ruled legal despite furious opposition from opponents, in several Red states there were efforts to forestall such gatherings organised online. Georgia, Missouri and South Carolina went out of their way to do this more than others. Big Tech out in Silicon Valley – backers of MAR but also worried over their bottom line – were aiding various protest groups in trying to get around that with some success yet failures elsewhere: not everyone with internet smarts worked there in California for one of those huge corporations. Figures at the top of various groups, including Revolución, had gone ‘old school’. They called people up at work & home using their landlines to send robo-calls. They handed out fliers and used mega-phones. Door-knocking was done in densely-populated urban areas. Yet, it was mostly the work of the news media which brought out attendance for the protests. When they occurred, these were reported on… leading to more people hearing about them. None of those restrictions applied in Blue states nor the Purple ones either. Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania fell into that latter category with California, New York, Illinois and many others in the former. However, Red state Florida was hit the hardest by the violence too, where those restrictions on gatherings were gotten around in the face of all that Governor Cook – a fascist as far as many on the left were concerned – attempted in reply.

Miami and the urban sprawl northwards up the coast to Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach saw huge numbers of protesters turn out like they did in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Orlando and Jacksonville. There was serious violence which came with these protesters with the organisers and the police blaming each other for what happened. Rioting, looting, arson and deaths occurred. Above Miami, a police drone was shot down by a shoulder-mounted projectile: such a thing had been seen over California’s Oakland the year before. A police station was invaded and burned down; another one was the scene of gunfire where invaders were turned back in a fusillade of bullets. ‘Blue flu’, recently seen up in New York City, took hold of several police departments across the Sunshine State. Other officers fought back against those out in the streets but many didn’t want to and therefore stayed away from work. Starting on that first night after the ruling on Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida, into the following day and then the next night too, urban areas of Florida were gripped by violence. Cook sent state troopers to the state lines to try and keep out ‘outsiders’. That was a futile gesture because they were many ways into Florida, including through them, but, more-importantly, it was Florida residents themselves doing this.

Similar scenes were being witnessed in Michigan. Detroit, Grand Rapids (once again), Flint and Lansing were all seeing violence on a scale comparable with cities in Florida. National guardsmen had already been called out up in that state. Cook’s lieutenant-governor, as well as the state’s two senators – one of them, Vargas, in his last few weeks of office after that defeat on November 7th –, called on her to bring out Florida’s National Guard and to also declare martial law. The number of the dead increased and the economic disruption was really going to bite. She resisted though, in part because she believed that that would be an embarrassment upon her governorship of Florida. There was too a certainty in her that things could be turned around. As put by Senator Vargas, no longer on good terms with her, ‘while Cook fiddled, Florida burned’.

[jedicommisar]

Well things are defiantly going to End in Fire now, now the question remains as to what type of fire it will be, Napalm, Thermite, White Phosphorus or Chlorine Trifluorite?

[James G]

Jan 24, 2021 21:35:26 GMT jedicommisar said:

Well things are defiantly going to End in Fire now, now the question remains as to what type of fire it will be, Napalm, Thermite, White Phosphorus or Chlorine Trifluorite?

All of the above!
I had never heard the name 'Chlorine Trifluoride' before. Looked it up and knew the name 'N-stoff' though.

[James G]

20 – Plan Red

How much truth was there in ‘Plan Red’?

Asked this question, Senator Roberts’ pick for White House chief-of-staff when he took office in January 2029, Sara Keating, denied that name. That was stupid, not just wrong. Keating, who had a good relationship with many journalists, even ones from the other side of the partisan divide, assured those attending an impromptu press conference that Plan Red was being blown out of all proportion. She did confirm that it was a working document from the Roberts campaign but asserted that those who’d leaked it had ‘sexed it up’. A CNN reporter asked whether (retired) Admiral Richard Miller was the president-elect’s choice for the position of Homeland Security Secretary come January. Keating would neither confirm nor deny that, which had also come out of the Plan Red leak, and said that in time, Roberts would make announcements on Cabinet & other administration selections. Coming from Fox News was a question about where the leak came from: was it someone inside the campaign team? Unable to give a firm answer there, Keating explained that that was still something being looked at. All in all, Keating, and the watching Roberts, agreed that the press conference had gone better than expected. There hadn’t been as much hostility as expected. Lee Mitchell, the vice president-elect, called Roberts afterwards and told him that the media had gone easy on Keating because the whole thing had yet to be consumed by them. Keating getting out there early was a good start but the document dump was huge and the media, plus the Democrats, weren’t going to let this all go once they got reading.


Plan Red concerned the Department for Homeland Security (DHS). Starting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that defining event of the Noughties, the matter of ‘homeland security’ had become a bigger and bigger deal. The 43rd President first had a Homeland Security Adviser and then later established the Cabinet-level department. International terrorism was the primary concern of the DHS at the beginning though it did subsume the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. During the political violence seen during the years of the 46th & 47th Presidents, there were further expansions in the scope of DHS operations as domestic terrorism became more of a problem. Walsh had successfully negotiated – or been browbeaten in accepting a diktat; it depended upon your point of view – Congressional will when it came to his further expansions of the DHS. Protection for politicians and public figures was granted extensively though due to the slow bureaucracy of the hiring process, many Private Military Companies (PMCs) won no-bid contracts to provide security for so many threatened by extremists. Armed civilian contractors got themselves a lot of work under the 2027 growth of the DHS… and the profits reaped by those PMCs made eyes water. Moreover, the Republican Party as a whole, and individual politicians themselves, had PMCs under contract for security work. Congress had continually demanded that the DHS never get involved in ‘political crimes’. The Republicans feared that the Democrats would use the DHS against the right while there was a similar fear among the Democrats of the opposite happening should the Republicans end up controlling the DHS themselves.

Many of these worries came from where the DHS moved further into domestic surveillance over the internet. That was where so much extremism was born and organised. Since the 45th President, the DHS had been involved in ‘cyber security of national infrastructure’ but, under Walsh, with the Republicans in Congress watching with eagle eyes, domestic terrorism was fought online. There were plentiful states already doing so themselves though what they did had less oversight than federal efforts and was certainly more political. Red states and Blue states alike acted against what they regarded as extremism by trying to silence it. They could only do so much. The DHS, should there be the political will to take the step, could do a lot more. No one had wanted that. It was agreed that that would send the country down a slippery slope yet the Democrats and Republicans each feared that the other side would make the first move. Plan Red revealed the incoming Roberts Administration was likely to do just that. Such a thing could be done too with someone like Admiral Miller at the helm of the DHS.

Admiral Miller was a career intelligence administrator. He’d been in the US Navy yet rarely been at sea, and only then back in his early years in uniform. Climbing the ladder of promotion like he had, Admiral Miller had served for many years in the Office of Naval Intelligence before moving to the Defence Intelligence Agency. He’d never been a spy nor done any real intelligence work. Instead, he was an ultimate insider involved in overseeing innovation in intelligence-gathering means. Out of the public eye, he’d excelled there. Admiral Miller did take the credit for the work of others but he was the one in-charge and got the political support plus funding. To the DHS’ Office of Intelligence & Analysis (OI&A) Admiral Miller had moved in mid-2020 – during the mad last months of the 45th President – but he was only until there was a new resident in the White House. OI&A had a cyber division and Miller stood out when there. He had come to the attention of select journalists, those who concerned themselves with homeland security. After talking with their sources, they reported on what they heard about Admiral Miller’s ideas for how to expand cyber defence into cyber offensive warfare in the domestic arena. The new administration in 2021 had no place for Admiral Miller and to the private sector he went once he retired from uniformed service. Admiral Miller spent several years in think tanks and on the lecture circuit. Fighting domestic extremism, whether it be online or in the streets, Admiral Miller told those who paid to hear his views, needed to be done with the gloves taken off. Because he had never really done anything when at the OI&A (his time there being so short) and there was so much else going on, Admiral Miller never gained a public profile. He’d been in the private sector since. A few journalists knew who he was but the public didn’t. Republicans in 2028 watching their country seemingly going up in flames didn’t take long to realise he was the man they were looking for.

The leaked Plan Red said that Admiral Miller had already been selected by the Roberts transition team. That wasn’t true. His name had been put forward to the president-elect by Senate Majority Leader Green and other top-level national Republican figures but Roberts barely knew of the man. Keating herself had to do a Google search when the first journalist called her: that was how unknown Admiral Miller was. Could such an obscure career insider end up in charge of one of the biggest US Government departments in a few month’s time? It didn’t sound possible.


As the vice president-elect predicted, while that first contact with the media over Plan Red went well enough, things got messy fast. The details of Plan Red were read over by journalists and political figures. The measures envisioned for how an expanded DHS would operate to combat extremism set off alarm bells as well as howls of anger. There were claims made that this was a blueprint for the creation of a fascist state and that thought crimes would be punished. A lot of hot air was expelled by those eager for everyone to hear them. However, the basis of the proposal for the DHS under the Roberts Administration, which was near certain to get Congressional approval since the Republicans had a vice-like grip on both chambers, did call for greatly increased investigative powers as well as curtails on political organising if the promoted cause was deemed extremist. Plan Red made direct mention of the Supreme Court in the hands of conservative-minded judges who would overall almost any First Amendment objections to what the transformed DHS would be able to do. As to what was extremist, critics who made their way to the air waves pointed to a ‘top 5 list’ in the leak of targets for DHS activity against.

At the top was the American Insurgent Army: that was expected due to the outrageous terror attacks they had recently conducted and their capability & shown willingness to do more. Behind the AIA was Black Liberation Army in the #2 spot. The BLA was no coherent, truly organised terror group. Many acts of criminality, not terrorism per se, had been attributed to or claimed by them away from what terror had been done; there were various competing groups using the same name as a cover. Many of the left didn’t regard all members of the BLA as terrorists either due to their ‘defence of local communities’ against outside attacks. Antifa took #3 on that list. Even more diverse than the BLA, and likewise the name often being used by violent outsiders away from those who proclaimed to be fighting fascism, to call Antifa a terrorist group and put it alongside such others was either folly or malice. Worse was who were in the #4 spot: Revolución. That was a campaign group of left-leaning Hispanics who supported the presidential candidacy of Maria Arreola Rodriquez. No terror attacks had been attributed to them by the FBI nor any non-partisan body. None. Zero. They had been organising protests against the Republican theft of the election, critics of Plan Red told the media: did that make them domestic terrorists in the eyes of the Roberts campaign? Coming in last, at #5, was the White Star Militia. It was said that they should be second behind the AIA. An umbrella organisation for various right-wing militia groups, including at first those in the states out West but still expanding, they were murderers and terrorists: that congressman-elect in Idaho being their latest victim. Its membership was generally Caucasian racists and they were had long had the tacit support of state authorities in many Red states. It was actually a surprise, those attacking Plan Red said, to see them there on such a list.

For the Roberts campaign to not deny that Plan Red was anything to do with them, gave the detractors of this all the ammunition they needed. They called this transformed DHS which the new president would have under his incoming administration the beginnings of a fascist state. Denials and claims of hyperbole came in reply. A lot of people, including those with real influence on the political left, did believe that they really had something to fear from what would come once Roberts got to the White House and began implementing a domestic security agenda like this. There were worries expressed of what else was on the cards, what remained yet to be revealed. They spoke of how this was only possible because MAR had been cheated out of the presidency.

[James G]

21 – Martial law

When President Walsh heard what Governor Cook was going to do, he put in a call to his Attorney General and there was a subsequent call made from the Justice Department to the governor’s mansion down in Tallahassee. Florida’s governor was told that declaring martial law in certain areas of her state was not acceptable. It would be opposed in the strongest terms by the federal government. Cook told the Attorney General that Walsh was a lame duck president, Florida was only doing what California had done the year beforehand and if the Justice Department sought legal action against Florida, her state would be back in the Supreme Court once more and winning again. Florida had no choice but to do what only a few days beforehand Cook had believed was unconscionable.

Starting at six o’clock on the evening of November 23rd 2028, three counties in Southern Florida were placed under martial law. Cook send in both Florida’s National Guard and members of the State Guard (a state defence force re-established two years past yet primarily for disaster relief) in Broward, Miami-Dade & Palm Beach Counties: the situation elsewhere in Hillsborough & Orange Counties, around Tampa & Orlando respectively, wasn’t as severe in the end to warrant that. People were ordered to stay in their homes and law-and-order was enforced. As expected, there was physical opposition on the streets to such a move.


Starting on the night of the 20th following that Supreme Court decision concerning the recent presidential election, Florida had been hit by a wave of violence. Other states nationwide had seen protests against the ruling made in the Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida case erupt within their cities yet Florida was especially hard hit. The marches and sit-ins escalated rapidly to arson and looting as well as attacks made against the police. Deaths occurred with many of those involving outright murder. Elsewhere across the United States, after two nights – and the intervening day – the violence petered out somewhat. In the Red state which was Florida, where all those votes cast for the Democratic candidate were being thrown out and the state was going to declare for her Republican opponent, things went the other way. The night before Cook took what was such a drastic step, which she had no desire to do, the violence had only increased. Fort Lauderdale, Hialeah, Miami and West Palm Beach those urban areas looked like warzones. The violence spread outwards into large towns in Southern Florida too. Businesses shut, public transport ground to a halt and general criminality occurred where advantage was taken of the wider situation. Police officers were targeted for shootings and even firefighters and state employees came under attack. It was madness and went on into the morning of the 23rd. Elsewhere in the country, protesters eventually expelled all their open rage and had jobs to go back to. The widespread unemployment/underemployment in Southern Florida, brought about due to the severe financial predicament that country was in following the aftermath of the Taiwan Conflict, meant that that wasn’t the case in that region.

Those out on the streets weren’t all still protesting against the Supreme Court’s ruling too. For so many of them, their fight was against more than just that. Ousting Senator Vargas on November 7th as well as voting for Maria Arreola Rodriquez, voters in Southern Florida had cast their ballots for change. They wanted jobs, decent healthcare and a better standard of living. The election of Laura Garfield, the Democrat who would become their new senator come January, the only Democrat Senator in a Red state, stood and wasn’t being challenged by Governor Cook. Garfield had motivated people in great number to vote for her and been helped in her cause by that October Surprise coming from the murder of the renowned & wildly-popular singer Teyo. She was in Miami on the first two nights of the protests but found herself not able to influence the crowds of people in the same manner she had addressed rallies before the election. An African-American congresswoman, a local activist made good, they were meant to be ‘her people’. She was verbally abused, spat at and had glass bottles thrown in her direction. Garfield had come face-to-face with the beast she had helped create and rejection, violent distaste for her, had come in return. The people out on the streets of Southern Florida – and for some time elsewhere in the state – weren’t Democrats, progressives nor part of a movement for a democracy which she recognised. There were anarchists, accelerationists and just plain bad people in the surging crowds. Not all of them really gave a damn whether MAR had been robbed of the White House as Garfield and her party believed. They were fighting for something else, a very different society where a reckoning would be given to enemies.

There were the beginnings of the carving out of sections of urban areas of self-declared ‘autonomous zones’. City blocks were taken over by angry mobs armed with automatic weapons and prepared to burn out anyone who stood in their way. Such areas had been created elsewhere in America during the Years of Lead, notably in Detroit and Oakland (all now gone), but Florida had never seen before a serious attempt to set them up in that state. Governor Cook had a big national profile, one built by her statements over the year in criticism of the inability of other states to act against such creations. They began to form in her state. She tried to put a halt on them using the police but, met with violence, then those waves of ‘Blue flu’, crushing the attempts in their infancy failed. Knowing what it had taken to rid California and Michigan of them in years past, Cook wasn’t prepared to accept them: a lot of her response was stubborn pride. She mobilised the National Guard and State Guard ahead of making the announcement. A plan of action to strike hard and fast, with no quarter given, was presented to Cook and she took the final step.

Cook sent what critics called her ‘stormtroopers’ into Southern Florida. That name wasn’t directed so much at the men and women of the National Guard (ground and air units sent personnel) but instead the State Guard. There were four thousand in service of this organisation and they were sent into the trio of counties placed under martial law to clear the streets and shut down those autonomous zones. Gunfire was met and returned with support called in by several State Guard elements from the National Guard. However, in other incidents, when met by serious resistance, detachments of the State Guard gave as good as they got. Cook had been sternly criticised in the past for some of the individuals serving in the State Guard due to examples of their personal history being exposed by the media or their actions in other (far smaller) deployments. Garfield was one of those who had campaigned against the formation of the State Guard and then called for its abolition when there were allegations of misconduct following Hurricane Emily in 2026. The so-called stormtroopers put an end to the autonomous zones just as Cook wanted. The night-time curfew, a component of Cook’s martial law enforcement, was rigorously enforced.


Michigan followed the lead set by Florida.

Things were almost as bad in certain parts of the Purple state, one which had voted for MAR in the presidential race earlier in the month and whose votes had not been thrown out, as they were in Florida with urban areas across a belt through the southern portion of Michigan hit by severe violence. Starting out the protests had been about the claims of Republican theft of the keys to the White House. Yet the trouble which came with the mass demonstrations of people on the streets in Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids & Lansing was soon more about a wider range of matters such as poverty and racial injustice. The Michigan National Guard had been out on the streets for a fortnight; there was a state guard, the Michigan Volunteer Defence Force, but it was only a couple of hundred personnel strong and in no position to enforce law-and-order. Michigan had seen the pre-election murder of former Energy Secretary Ehringhaus – ‘Mayor Phil’ to most Americans – and the post-election ‘Grand Rapids Massacre’ where national guardsmen had fired on rioters. Seeing what Florida was doing, and aware that the White House was impotent to stop it, the state’s Republican governor did the same and declared martial law in various parts of Michigan. He did so because there was more than ‘just’ the rioting continuing in his state when it was ending mostly elsewhere across the country.

There were efforts underway by far left anarchists to re-establish the abandoned autonomous zones and they had been exchanging gunfire with a right-wing militia group called the Red Wolverines (affiliated to the White Star Militia) as well as the over-stretched police. Gunmen claiming to belong to the Black Liberation Army had set up roadblocks inside Flint where they were harassing both Caucasian and African-American citizens as they demanded a ‘tax’ for travel. A lot of that BLA issue was criminality rather than racial politics but it was entirely an unacceptable state of affairs. In Lansing, Michigan’s capital, a huge march came close to overrunning the National Guard positions around the state house and there was intent in the crowd to get inside to burn it to the ground. Then there were the attacks made against foreign journalists. Domestic media in Michigan, like in most American states, faced danger on a regular basis but those from aboard were generally not assailed… unless threats and being spitted upon counted. In Detroit, a media van belonging to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which had just come over from Ontario, was hit with a petrol bomb and those inside barely escaped with their lives. Meanwhile, a trio of British journalists from the UK-based Guardian newspaper/internet outlet were shot at when in Grand Rapids: two of them were killed leading to that being a major international story.

Michigan’s governor saw himself as having no choice but to enforce martial law in his state with all this going on. The number of dead in election-related violence passed the two dozen mark and the violence had showed no sign of decreasing. Michigan, like the rest of the states in the union, were soon to begin certifying the results of the presidential election and further trouble was expected with that. Putting an end to the anarchy ahead of them was all that he could do. Howls of outrage at the curtailing of freedom of protest were coming from Washington, with screams from elsewhere that this was the beginning of something far worse, yet it was done. Like Florida, Michigan acted where needed regardless of the protestations of outsiders not on the ground in the middle of all the madness going on.

[James G]

22 – Two in a day

Amil Parkar owned and operated the online weekly magazine Slade. His website was full of political commentary from a left-leaning point of view though wasn’t beyond criticising the American Left too at times. Cartoonists, good ones at that, were paid for contributions to Slade and their works were generally full of pop culture references while maintaining the fierce cutting bite which Parkar wanted. He was a sworn enemy of many Republicans including defeated presidential primary candidate Senator Stokes who had said Parkar should ‘go back to India’; he, and his parents too, were in fact American-born. In addition, he had been engaged in various legal disputes with them and Red state governments since his magazine’s inception. Back in 2027, in a case taken all the way to the Supreme Court, that body had upheld the ability of half a dozen Red states to block credit card and other monetary donations from residents of their particular states to Slade: the financial companies were forced to comply and a big chunk of Parkar’s revenue stream was cut off. Governor Cook from Florida was a frequent target of satire among contributors to Slade including the various cartoonists. In the immediate aftermath of her declaring martial law in a trio of Florida counties, two published cartoons were directed against her but also her relationship with the president-elect. Roberts was portrayed as wandering like a helpless baby into Shelob’s Lair in one; another had him a victim of what was depicted as vagina dentata undertaken by Cook. Republicans and conservative commentators cried sexism… along with a healthy dose of bad taste. Parkar defended the cartoons on Twitter as he claimed that together the two images represented his own belief on how Cook had Roberts trapped where she wanted him and also was out to emasculate him. The cartoons were cheered among many on the left and Parkar had no concerns about retribution from either of those politicians. He had his First Amendment rights to use.

They were published followed questions asked of Roberts by the media about what Cook had done down in Florida. He and top figures in his transition team believed that Florida’s governor had put the journalist in question up to making the enquires made about where the president-elect stood on the matter of martial law in Southern Florida: there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that that was the case. Why would that have been done? To get his public support of the action taken. Roberts was in no position to make criticism – which he personally felt – because without her, he would be a failed presidential candidate. He gave his backing to what was done. It was felt by the Texan Senator that it was more than just Cook boxing him in on that matter. Senate Majority Leader Green was believed to be involved as well. They put him in an impossible position for their own ends. Talking with his soon-to-be White House chief-of-staff afterwards, Roberts expressed concern over what 2029 would bring when he was in the White House. Red states like Florida had spent many years now defying the past three Democratic presidents. Would they suddenly stop that when there was a Republican holding the presidency? The immediate answer seemed to be a ‘yes’… but Roberts feared that they wouldn’t. Like Walsh, and those before him, the president-elect was concerned that he was going to be a prisoner of the power wielded by those in Congress and holding the reins of power in many of the reddest of Red states who thought of themselves and acted in many ways as modern day princely rulers.

While Roberts was defending what Cook done, Senator-elect Garfield down in Florida told lies over the situation there. She lied and lied again about what she had seen, heard and been subject to personally from the protesters and criminals who had effectively taken over Miami for a good few days before Cook sent in the National Guard & State Guard to break them. Rather than tell the truth, which would have done her no harm, she chose the opposite course of action to score political points. An effort by the Democrats to dominate the news with that was forestalled though by events in North Carolina. The New Ku Klux Klan made a big appearance in an organised rally in the rural western reaches of the state. They had a long-established presence through the Appalachians (into Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia & West Virginia too) and came out in protest at the recent election of an African-American congressman there in North Carolina. She was a Republican and vice president-elect Mitchell, the state’s popular former governor, led the charge against them. A big show was made of the Republican Party, not left-wing protesters or militia, facing them down and taking action in support of Black North Carolinians.

Up in Washington, another side of the Republican Party was being shown though. There were chants of ‘deport her back to Mexico’ and ‘deport the f*cking b*tch’ on the matter of Maria Arreola Rodriquez. None of these came from elected Republicans in the US House & Senate – House Speaker Fraser and Green ran tight ships – but rather from activists who’d gathered in the nation’s capital when MAR came to the city in late November. An infamous Conservative cable news host had first aired such views on television though such things had already been extensively said online. What had been said by Republican lawmakers was that MAR should be barred from being a Member of Congress. Their argument was that the Supreme Court had declared her an ‘illegal alien’ and the US Constitution stated that Members must be American citizens. It was one of the firm requirements and something she legally wasn’t. Still contesting that ruling, MAR declared in response that she was a United States citizen born in the country whose presidency of she had just been robbed of. She didn’t have to ‘go home’ because home was America and she had been elected by voters in her California district to serve in Congress. If she or anyone else believed that the matter was just going to go away with her counter remarks, they were very much wrong. However, once again, a major important news story such as this was then knocked right off the media agenda due to the events of November 25th 2028 when President Walsh lost two Cabinet members in a day.


Treasury Secretary Philip Moore resigned that morning from the Walsh Administration. He was out of a job in less than two months – along with several thousand other politically-appointed officials – but opted to go early. He sent a letter of resignation to Walsh and also posted a YouTube video explaining why he could no longer serve in the role he’d held since Walsh had entered the White House almost four years beforehand. Moore explained that his conscience drove his decision to stand down. In his opinion, MAR, his fellow Democrat, had won the presidential election earlier in the month. He disagreed strongly with many of her policies, on the economy especially, but she had been elected by the American people. In reply, the Republicans had stolen the election using their influence over the wholly undemocratic Supreme Court. No longer could he be a silent part of the support for that illegal, immoral act. The Walsh Administration had committed itself to ‘upholding the law’ – following that ruling in Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida – and thus standing by as the greatest of all injustices was done. He refused to any longer play along. Moore told his president, and then the viewers of that widely-shared video message, that he agreed with Vice President Padley on this. He called for others in the Cabinet, and the wider government, to follow his lead and no longer be silently complicit. History would judge them for their actions, he warned. Not just that, but as part of the lies told, her citizenship was being denied too: such a travesty where her whole identity was under legal attack was a travesty which he said made him physically sick.

Having a Wall Street banker serving at the Treasury was almost a habit for recent Democratic presidents. It’s what they did, much to the ire of so many of their party. Appointing Moore had been one of the earliest signs of Walsh’s intention to rule as a moderate, a neo-liberal despite winning his 2024 election when campaigning as a progressive. The left had been continuously angry with the economic policies of Walsh’s presidency with Moore at the Treasury. In this year’s election campaign, Moore had called the policy proposals of MAR ‘Marxist gobbledygook’ and asked who was going to pay for all of that when the country was in the midst of the Second Great Recession following the economic fallout of the Taiwan Conflict with China. He was a moderate Democrat himself, something many party activists regarded as part of the corporate elite who had a vice-like grip over their party. Moore didn’t apologise for his economic views in his YouTube statement and affirmed once more his opposition to those which the MAR campaign had set out. However, he said that, in his heart, she was the nation’s next president: he wouldn’t personally recognise Edward Roberts as the 49th President. Warning came from him at the end of his statement that the nation was ‘sleepwalking into a fascist dictatorship’ now that the Republicans had control over all three branches of national government. He said that they had to be stopped.

Within hours, Walsh had another Cabinet vacancy. That didn’t come about via a resignation as called for by the departed Treasury secretary but instead by yet another act of domestic terrorism. Back in 2024, the then Commerce Secretary, Traci Bennett, had been assassinated when out in Arizona. No senior member of the Walsh Administration had been successfully targeted since then yet there had been plentiful attempts. One of those finally succeeded. Targeted by the American Insurgent Army, that murderous death-cult who’d recently killed MAR’s running mate DaJuan Anderson in the presidential race (along with more than a hundred others in the Omaha Bombing), was Marcia Arguello. The Homeland Security Secretary was shot dead in Michigan later that day.

She was on an unannounced trip to the second state in the union where martial law had been declared in certain parts of it. The Governor of Michigan had done so following the devastating violence seen earlier in the week across multiple urban areas. Arguello had been in Lansing and visited the state capital after national guardsmen finally put an end to all of the rioting, looting, arson and murder. Via helicopter she had flown to the smaller locality of Battle Creek where the DHS had an extensive facility. The Federal Protective Service operated a huge data centre there for its nationwide security effort – most of that done by contractors despite the recently-increased large size of the FPS – of federal buildings and staff. After coming into land, that helicopter touched down in a supposedly secure area. Once Arguello came out of the door to the passenger cabin, a shot was fired from an almost unbelievable distance away: close to twenty-five hundred yards was the later recorded distance of the shot. Her bullet-proof vest did her no good as a hole was punched in it with the fired bullet tearing through her chest and out of her back too. Almost instantly, without she nor anyone else knowing what had happened, she was dead. A futile hunt for her killer would be mounted with no success forthcoming.

Boatswain’s Mate Noel Reed took that shot. He was a US Navy SEAL who had gone AWOL earlier in the year following his joining of the AIA. Firstly there had been NCIS investigators looking for him and later the FBI, the Federal Marshal Service & the Secret Service had joined in too. His links to that terror group had become clear and another kill he made, that of the State Assembly Speaker in Kentucky, gained all of that federal attention upon him. After assassinating Arguello, he moved to the #1 position on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Every lead, no matter how trivial, would afterwards be followed up. Hundreds of investigators were assigned to the Arguello case as well as trying to locate Reed. It was believed that he wasn’t working alone and so the already ongoing hunt for other AIA active members intensified; information as also sought on how details of the DHS Secretary’s trip were leaked and ended up in their hands. Walsh was later briefed on the situation with Reed. It was made clear to the president that there were others like him out there – serving military personnel gone AWOL or those who were retired, all with the very best training – who had dedicated themselves to the AIA and its twisted world view of ‘fighting big government tyranny’. Oh, and in addition, there was still no progress into that other AIA-related investigation about their theft of those biological weapons samples. That was something Walsh had hardly forgotten about.

[James G]

23 – Sedition

In Nevada, the District Attorney announced a federal investigation into the State Assembly Speaker. The charges being considered were that of sedition.

Christine Babcock (the US Attorney for the District of Nevada) and Judy Ashby (the leader of the lower house of the Nevada Legislature) had a bitter personal history full of acrimony. Each saw the other as the enemy, one whom the fight with wouldn’t be finished until the other was finished for good. They were both Democrats with Babcock having previously tried to run for an Assembly seat but blaming her primary failure on Ashby. The latter hadn’t believed that the former was willing to work in the hyper-partisan atmosphere that Nevada politics had become during the Twenties; Babcock deplored the state of things when it came to the behaviour of many of her fellow Democrats in the Blue state towards the minority Republicans. They had also clashed over the District Attorney’s Office attitude to combatting illegal ranchers who had cattle on federal land without permission & payment and how those ranchers were supported by right-wing militia groups from out of state: that issue went all the way back to the mid-Teens. An ethics complaint against her within Babcock’s office in Carson City, where the state capital was too in the northwest of Nevada, was blamed by the federal prosecutor upon Ashby: she was convinced that the Assembly Speaker was trying to get her fired. Nothing was ever going to cause the two of them to kiss and make-up.

The previous (alleged) comments by Ashby concerning how she believed that Nevada should ignore the Supreme Court and declare that Maria Arreola Rodriquez was the president-elect were followed up upon by Babcock. Her office used an informant – someone they had something on – to get Ashby talking once more on the matter, this time while the Assembly Speaker’s colleague was wearing a wire. Tricked into fully explaining what she had said beforehand, this time Ashby said it all on tape… and more. The United States, Ashby said, she be dissolved because it wasn’t a democracy. That dissolution should come about by peaceful means if possible yet, if that couldn’t happened, then force would have to be used. The informant did very well indeed. Ashby said far more than was hoped for and it was all recorded legally. Such remarks, ones borne of frustration, were coming from an elected official and were that of sedition. Babcock had had her staff bring her fully up to date on the specifics of the law beforehand and believed that that was enough. Maybe such words wouldn’t put Ashby in jail but there was enough for the empanelling of a grand jury and for charges to be brought soon enough. The public announcement came first though: this was all about the personal animosity between the two of them.

The Smith Act of 1940 was a controversial piece of federal legislation. It had been used against suspected communists, Vietnam War protesters, Puerto Rican nationalists and white supremacists. Difficult to gain a conviction with, especially in the modern era, it was a law which had many opponents and they were on all sides of the partisan divide. What defined sedition was open to interpretation in the minds of many. For Babcock to use it against Ashby would mean that her office believed that the Assembly Speaker didn’t just hold beliefs which desired the overthrow of the United States Government, that alone wasn’t a crime, but was engaged in a ‘seditious conspiracy’ with the aim to see that done. Babcock declared that she had enough of a case for her investigation to be launched with her office having evidence that Ashby was seeking to engage others in making such an attempt. One of her Assistant US Attorneys tried to convince her that using the charge of ‘criminal anarchy’ might be more winnable. Under that, calling for the overthrow of the government, if that was what Ashby was doing, was not just a federal crime but one under state law in Nevada: the Assembly Speaker would come under dual legal assault. Babcock didn’t want to go down that route though. She saw sedition was a far sexier term for her press conference.

The story went national straight away. While this started out being about a dispute between two women at war over politics in Nevada, it was very quickly something being debated from coast-to-coast. Nevada leaving the union, other states too, Blue ones especially, was talked about and argued over. Ashby had no power to take her state out of the union and there seemed to be no one else of serious note involved. When allies of the Assembly Speaker made public the disputes with Babcock, telling a one-sided story at that, the water was very much muddled. Still, the topic of conversation remained on whether in light of that Supreme Court decision in Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida, there could actually be a split like that. Fanciful, most people agreed. Possible, a few hoped for.


If that District Attorney, or her ultimate boss in the form of the Attorney General, knew what else was going on out West, they would have dropped the Ashby investigation and gone after a bigger seditious conspiracy… well, Babcock might have taken some convincing because she had a personal stake in going after Ashby. Regardless, there really was something illegal going on in the West where there was serious talk among elected officials of importance that concerned the same general issue. This was being kept very quiet though, among a select group who were doing all that they could to avoid leaks. Unless there came a reason to suspect what was happening, other US Attorney’s and the Attorney General weren’t looking into meetings which Vice President Padley and California’s Governor Pierce were having with others within a tight circle of contacts.

Because of the Republican’s theft of the White House, using the Supreme Court as the keys to the doors, the two of them were leading the effort to see if there was a way which democracy could be respected. That was how they made their case to those they were seeking to covert to their so far secret cause: what they were doing was about democracy. To do that, they were advocating the leaving the United States of America by several states. They intended to hold referendums on that (which they believed the people would give a ‘yes’ vote in) and make it as legal as possible though fully expected that it would be one opposed. Succession was illegal and the federal government, as well as many people within those states which were envisioned to be the ones to leave, would do all that they could to stop it. Padley and Pierce – allies in this for less than a week – made the case to those they spoke to that there was no other way though. The road which the country was being taken down now was one which led to the end of democracy. There was nothing else that each of them could see being done to stop that apart from succeeding and, with a heavy heart, fighting to ensure victory in that endeavour.

The explanations given for this proposal were that the country was now falling in fascism. President-elect Roberts was no fascist – each had to concede that – but he represented a political party which had that at its core. The nationwide political violence and the domestic terrorism were blamed on the Republicans and how they had subverted democracy so thoroughly as they had spent the Twenties doing. That was now culminating in their overthrowing of the democratic will of the voters in the presidential election giving them control of the three branches of government. Leaks coming out of the incoming Roberts Administration, such as that Plan Red, showed what was coming. They had full power now and weren’t ever going to give it up no matter what the voters wanted. Padley and Pierce spoke of the lame duck Walsh. He was going along with it all, defending illegitimate institutions which the Republicans had seized control of, just like so much of the Democratic Party establishment in the East. All of that talk about respecting the law – what the Supreme Court said was their interpretation of that – was just the inability, or even wilful naivety, to see what was happening before their own eyes. Citizens in the West had voted for change, real change. They opposed the undemocratic institutions that the Republicans had a complete grip upon. The West needed a new start. That could come not by symbolism as some were calling for in making meaningless statements declaring that in their hearts MAR, not Roberts, was the next president (resigning Treasury Secretary Moore being a prime example of that) but by doing something real. Now was the time to do it too, their argument ran, when Walsh would be unable to stop them and Roberts was yet to be in the White House. If it was left too late, democracy would falter in the West and it had elsewhere in the nation. They wrote off everyone else and said it could only be done by the West.

Those whom the duo of the vice president and the governor spoke to were only a few in number. There were a couple of senators and several governors among the ranks of senior of elected officials. Others were given the same reasoning behind what Padley and Pierce were calling for too and they included a few US House members, retired politicians and public figures. Every person told was a potential security risk to their conspiracy. Padley still had her Secret Service people around her whom she kept having to ask to leave the room. Those spoken to were politicians, people who loved to talk and also share secrets with others. What came in reply to them from almost everyone of them was a ‘no, this is not what should be done’. They hadn’t chosen those who would scream ‘NO… and I’m telling Washington too’ but found themselves not with an audience willing to agree with them. The former governor of Oregon, Ben King, suggested that maybe they should act in a different manner and call for a new Continental Congress to rewrite the US Constitution. Padley and Pierce told him that if only that would work, they would do it in a heartbeat. Until November 20th, that was a sensible course of action but then those Conservative justices, plus the jellyfish supposed moderate whom Walsh had put on that body, had made that outrageous ruling against MAR to deny her the presidency as well as effectively taking away her citizenship. The conspiracy wasn’t dead – though still was dangerously close to being exposed – but wasn’t something that could be acted upon. Padley and Pierce agreed that what would change the minds of those they had spoken to would be for something more: not from them but from those they regarded as enemies of democracy. There had to be something worse done than what had already been seen. It would be something that would turn all of those who were too cautious to take the ultimate step to spring into action. What would it be though? When would it happen?


MAR had been one of those spoken to. Padley had paid her and Shauna McCleary a visit with the vice president leaving her protective detail outside the room and scheming for MAR to get hers (she still had Secret Service agents assigned to her by the DHS) out of earshot too. McCleary, whom MAR had wanted as her own vice president to serve where Padley was for Walsh – hopefully with more loyalty! –, had come down to California’s Bay Area after several nights spent on the streets of Portland talking down potential rioters from tearing that Oregon city apart once again. The three of them discussed what would later be called the Padley-Pierce Plan. McCleary was fully onboard… the only one of all those let in upon the conspiracy. She wanted it done as soon as possible and then told the vice president some of the ideas she came up with on the spot about what a new nation in the American West would look like. They weren’t all ones which Padley, nor Pierce when later told, would fully agree with. Regardless, she gave that positive reply when elsewhere there had bene only rejection.

As to MAR, Padley found her less interested than expected. The congresswoman had just returned from Washington where she had encountered those right-wing protesters and then travelled to her personal lawyer’s office in San Francisco. With the latter, she had had difficult discussions about what that Supreme Court decision on her citizenship status meant. The baying mob in the nation’s capital had been screaming ‘deport her’ and her lawyer told her that it was entirely possible that that could eventually happen. The country’s top court had ruled she was an illegal alien for the purposes of Florida’s Electoral College votes. But, because it was those justices who decreed that, that meant it was now of the highest legal standing. She was classed by them to be an undocumented migrant. Being brought into the country as a newborn baby by a mother who had crossed the US-Mexico border illegally, thus no fault of her own, meant that she was still eligible for deportation. Her whole life was in America. She lived with her wife and her children. Her adopted mother, widowed when some maniac had years ago killed MAR’s adopted father because of her politics, was in America too. To be forcibly sent to Mexico meant separation from all that she knew, from all whom she loved. Her lawyer had talked of a rushed Path to Citizenship yet she was aware of the very real possibility of Republicans scheming to get her out of the country ahead of that: they were already making moves to strip her of her seat in the House of Representatives with the claim she wasn’t an American. The fear of deportation, with all of its attendant horrors, and she knew all about them due to her campaigning against that treatment for others, was very real in her.

When she told Padley and McCleary this, the two of them told her that stopping that could only be done by supporting succession and building a New America in the West. Perhaps she could have perked up with great interest. It would be another fight and fighting was all that she had done throughout her political career. The women in her living room with her wanted her to be the one to lead that. They saw despondency though. The fight was draining from her. There was dread instead, that of what might soon await her.

[James G]

24 – Certification

Corey Donner was Florida’s new Secretary of State. Governor Cook had appointed him to fill the vacant post following the assassination of Antonio Linton: there was no need for an election and so he was in a permanent position. Little-known in Tallahassee before he burst onto the scene, almost no one in the rest of Florida nor the wider United States had ever heard of him before. He made a splash straight away. He was a good-looking thirty year-old – with ‘movie star looks’ the Miami Herald would say – and well-spoken. Bi-racial, he was part of the new generation of Republicans as the party greatly expanded its minority presence… to include the African-American president-elect. His picture would soon be everywhere. Reporters asked him questions and came away rather impressed. Within days, there were some sections of the media who said Donner was future president material. That was a bit much to be saying when he’d never run for elected office and little was known about him but he did make such an impression upon many that it was asserted. Cook knew exactly what she was doing in appointing him. He came from West Palm Beach, the ground zero of all the trouble her party had found itself in within Florida starting in the middle of October 2028, and she wanted everyone to pay attention to him. It was Donner who was responsible for certifying the presidential election results for Florida. Linton had been up in Washington representing the state in the Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida case when it went to the Supreme Court. If he hadn’t have been shot, he would have been front-and-centre as Donner found himself in late November being the face of Florida declaring that the winner of the presidential race in Florida was Edward Roberts, not Maria Arreola Rodriquez.

On November 27th, Florida became the fourteenth state in the union to certify their results. In a ‘normal’ presidential election year, such a thing would have been done earlier than almost three weeks after polling day in Florida and elsewhere. The delay occurred due to the suit brought before the Supreme Court by the Democrats which pushed the timetable back. Unofficial results came in the early hours of the following morning after polling day but nothing was official until certification was done. Completing such a process, a necessary legal step, Florida’s thirty-one electors would then cast their vote when the Electoral College met. Before then came Donner’s moment to shine. He declared that the votes cast back on November 7th for MAR were invalid due to her being an illegal alien and thus not eligible for the office for which she ran. Just short of five and a half million ballots were being rejected. The five point four million odd cast for Roberts, along with the one hundred and twenty-two thousand for other candidates, were the ones which were valid. With them all counted, Florida had been won by the Republican candidate and its electors would vote for Roberts. His speech, like those he had made since his appointment, was excellently delivered. He did what Cook wanted and made sure that he repeatedly mentioned that Florida was following the law. His criticism of those who had committed violent acts in opposition ahead of the certification was firm. She’d chosen well.

Attention on Donner and what he was presiding over up in the state capital, far from Southern Florida, kept many eyes off what was happening in the latter in the aftermath of martial law being declared in the middle of the week beforehand. There remained National Guard & State Guard personnel on the streets and there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew across three counties. Cook hadn’t lifted it despite repeated calls, from near and far, for the end of the measure she had been forced to enact. The rioting had come to a stop and no longer were people being killed. Martial law had worked just as she knew that it would. To pull out those who had stopped all of that anarchy as soon as they had been shown to be effective was believed by the governor to be too hasty though. She was going to wait just a little bit longer. The critics wouldn’t exactly shut up straight away if it was a day earlier than she foresaw. Cook held back on a pull-out, even from just Broward County where the situation hadn’t been as severe as in Miami-Dale & Palm Beach Counties, rather than have to possibly reverse herself in a few day’s time should there come another explosion of anger now that Florida had certified the election results. There were still some people being sought for arrest too, those who had been involved in bringing out the worst in the rioters. Those troublemakers came from the MAR-supporting Revolución organising group and Cook wanted as many of them as possible locked up. With order enforced as it was, more success in the search for them was thought likely.


Florida certification came on the same day as more than twenty other states across the country followed those who had already done so. The hold-up with the wait on the Supreme Court decision as well as the large-scale effort needed to be made to receive and count all the tens of millions of postal & absentee votes had dragged things out. Things began to move at a rapid rate come the beginning of the last week of November. The date for the meeting of the Electoral College was one set by Constitutional law – it would be in the middle of December – and there was a lot to do ahead of then with the making of everything official.

What Florida did in discarding votes cast for MAR was done in half a dozen more states who interpreted the Supreme Court decision as Cook & Donner did. Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma – all very Red states – rejected the ballots for the Democrats’ candidate. The ruling made by those justices in Washington was seen in another light in the majority of states though, even ones as deeply Red as them. The Red ones had no need to throw all of those votes in the trash as Roberts had won their states outright; the Blue states certified their results in favour of MAR because, while there was still the belief that the court was biased and had made a ruling based upon a lie, they read that ruling in a different manner. Things were going to be more complicated in the Purple states. Surrounded by security efforts during this legal process just as had been the case down in Florida, certification proceedings were met with threats of violence as well as more than just words. There were bomb-scares when it came to official declaration of the state-wide winner in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Gunshots were heard near to the scenes of the certification in the state capitals of Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and West Virginia were those on the other side of the partisan divide let their feelings be known in the strongest possible terms. In Saint Paul, Minnesota’s state capital where the state’s senate chamber had been bombed in late 2023 killing almost two dozen people, a drone penetrated restricted airspace over the smaller of the Twin Cities. It came out of an apartment complex in neighbouring Minneapolis, across the Mississippi River, and flew both low and fast towards State Capitol building. Purple Minnesota had weeks beforehand voted for Roberts – a lot of that due to the state’s Republicans so successfully supressing the Democratic vote – and there were those opposed to that and willing to kill to somehow change the official results. Minnesota Army National Guard operated tactical air defence systems and with the National Guard mobilised as it was, there were their weapons near to the State Capitol. C-RAM multiple-barrelled rapid-firing guns, operating autonomously in the absence of the inbound drone emitting a friendly IFF signal, shot it out of the sky. C-RAM could target artillery and mortar shells as well as rockets on the battlefield in a tactical manner: the drone was an easy kill. No explosion as foreseen by members of the People’s Front for Minnesota – a new, small but lethal left-wing militia – occurred to deny the certification.

Across in Michigan, Lansing was under martial law like other parts of the state when the governor had followed the lead set by Florida in doing that. DHS Secretary Arguello had in previous days been assassinated while in Michigan and in light of that, there was no lifting of the stern measures brought in to ‘ensure public safety’. Michigan with its fifteen Electoral College votes had been won by MAR where she took the Purple state from Roberts with a significant victory of almost a quarter of a million votes. What the Supreme Court had decided was deemed to be a matter between MAR and Florida in the eyes of the majority of Michigan lawmakers. The Democrats didn’t hold the governorship but they had (tight) majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Moreover, the Secretary of State was an elected Democrat. She was going to ensure that the will of Michigan’s voters was followed and electors to the Electoral College were sent as those for MAR. What would happen then was still up for debate, but before then, popular democracy was being followed in Michigan. Republican lawmakers were up in arms in protest yet impotent: the governor was trying to stay out of the matter where he pretended that on such a matter, he was impartial. What a mess it all was. If the Republicans couldn’t get what they wanted inside the State Capitol with their minority presence, then they tried to do so using people power. Lansing was supposed to be locked-down, but a crowd of thousands gathered near the site of the certification. The protest was peaceful on the surface though there was a foul mood in the air. National guardsmen looked at their fellow citizens and feared being given the order to take action to either disperse them, or worse, engage them should they try to storm the State Capitol. The media were watching and the whole nation, the world even, would be witness should that happen.

The feared violence didn’t occur. When the certification was made, and the majority of Michigan’s voters didn’t have their ballots cast aside, those outside the State Capitol shouted, blew horns and swore but there was no riot. They would disperse. Lansing had had a close call. That hadn’t been the case in recent weeks yet, for once there, there was no civil unrest. Part of that was the wide knowledge among the protesters that that wasn’t the end of things. MAR wasn’t going to be the next president, not with Florida doing what it was, and their country wasn’t about to fall under the dreaded socialism they feared would come with her in the White House. There were other battles to be fought in the coming months and years in Michigan where immediate danger was thought more possible. Little did any of them know that while they were correct on a coming fight, it wouldn’t be one they could at that time foresee.

[gillan1220]

Imagine having to disqualify the winning candidate all because she isn't a natural-born American. That's a shit ton of bad stuff to happen.

[James G]

Jan 29, 2021 19:18:27 GMT gillan1220 said:

Imagine having to disqualify the winning candidate all because she isn't a natural-born American. That's a shit ton of bad stuff to happen.

The disqualification is a complete clusterf*ck too with different states doing their own thing and all sorts of legal challenges ongoing.

Then there are the beliefs on each side. Most Democrats believe it to be a lie but some don't and are going to 'respect the law': case in point the sitting president.
Most Republicans believe it to be the truth; to others, it might be a lie but they don't care because they get victory.

EDIT: In addition, the VP candidate on the 'winning ticket' was gravely wounded right before the election and died after polling day so the Electoral College, even if the Supreme Court ruling is somehow defied, couldn't even give the White House to him.

[James G]

25 – New America

Before ‘winning’ the presidential election, the running mate for Maria Arreola Rodriquez had been gravely injured in that terrorist attack in Omaha. She’d chosen a new vice presidential candidate following the victory she attained, the Republican’s efforts to take the matter of her eligibility to the Supreme Court and the death of running mate DaJuan Anderson. Shauna McCleary was selected by MAR without any consultation from outside of her top campaign team. That announcement between the death of Anderson and the Supreme Court making its judgement in her case against Florida, came from MAR alongside a list released of her nominees to fill cabinet positions too. The whole thing was rather unorthodox. No presidential candidate, from either party, had ever done anything like that before. Defying conventions was what MAR’s whole political career had been about though. Jamie Murrow had gotten on the phone to her straight after MAR’s YouTube announcement of McCleary. A later leak of the recording of the conversation between the two gave an insight into just how the Democratic National Committee’s chairperson felt about such a decision.

He’d asked her if she was out of her mind! What was she thinking with those Cabinet nominees, none who stood a chance of being confirmed by Congress, let alone picking someone like McCleary? What hadn’t she conferred with the party’s hierarchy first when it came to such a woman? Didn’t MAR understand that even if the Supreme Court struck down Florida’s attempt to have the Republicans steal the election – at that point Murrow didn’t believe it was likely anyway –, the Senate would have to confirm her vice president? MAR’s answers to those questions were quite something. She told him exactly what she felt about his feelings and those of the majority of the Democratic Party… and also about the Republican-dominated Senate too. Murrow leaked that recording. He denied it though and his complicity in the media getting a-hold of their conversation was hidden. Doing so, the DNC chair wanted to absolve himself of any blame of what he, and an increasing number of other senior Democrats, were considering to be MAR acting completely irrationally. When the Supreme Court ruled against MAR in Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida, Murrow was somewhat glad. He couldn’t be in public and the DNC put out a statement which decried such a thing, yet it was for the best. There were those in the party which said that the Republicans taking the White House was the end of the world but Morrow didn’t agree. The Democrats would win it back in 2032 without MAR & McCleary on the ticket, he felt, and, in the meantime, the world would keep on turning.

McCleary caused such a strong reaction in Murrow, like it did so many other Democrats, because she was a such a radical. That label had been given to MAR before yet, in comparison between the two of them, MAR was almost a moderate! Elected unopposed (by the Republicans, not minor candidates) in Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District on November 7th 2028, McCleary was due to take up her seat in the US House come January ’29. Aged forty-four, though with the energy of someone half her age, McCleary had been a campaigner since her early teens. She was a native of neighbouring Washington state and raised in the eastern, rural half. Fighting for a wide range of progressive causes with a great deal of passion, she’d never gone for elected office in either Washington or Oregon before ’28. An opportunity opened up in Oregon, to where she’d moved in ’25, for her to make a run against the weak Democratic incumbent. Beating him in a primary contest which gained much attention, including a visit from MAR, McCleary then went onto a sure-thing of a general election run when the Republicans didn’t field a candidate. Back in ’16, then again in ’24 too, their party had done that before when they focused on contests elsewhere in congressional races that they at least stood a chance in: that happened across the country with both parties not fielding candidates in many unwinnable races. National attention upon McCleary came during that primary race and after she won it too. The right demonised her, those on the far left fell in love and the moderate left was extremely weary of her. Her fanaticism was of the in-your-face kind. She wasn’t just a partisan when it came to politics, but rather a zealot. The enemy was anyone whom she didn’t agree with. That included almost the entire Democratic Party establishment. The district which she ran in included most of the left-wing dominated city of Portland. She had a huge base of personal support there. Toeing the party line wasn’t in her, not in any fashion. Murrow and others in the party blamed her rhetoric for inciting so much of the far left violence seen across the nation. Every time they criticised the Republicans for defending the far right, McCleary’s comments were thrown right back at them.

McCleary was someone whom many Democrats would have been very pleased if she just disappeared.


After the Supreme Court decision, McCleary was out in the middle of Portland among the crowds of the angry masses who took to the streets nationwide. She stopped the city from being torn apart. Previously, she incited violence in that city but things were different after MAR selected her as her vice presidential candidate. Back to her native Washington she went instead and up to the state capital in Olympia. There she caused the trouble which she didn’t do when back over the Columbia River. Olympia was a small city south of Seattle and on the edge of the Puget Sound urban area. In the State Capitol there, certification of the presidential election results for Washington took place. McCleary was outside, at the head of a crowd of tens of thousands. Like her, they had come from across the Pacific North-West (Idaho and Oregon plus Washington) and also up from California as well to make their presence known outside where the process of certification was taking place. State troopers and national guardsmen manned a multi-layer barricade to protect the State Capitol from intrusion and also to make sure that Olympia wasn’t hit with a riot. If either happened, they were going to be far outnumbered as the crowd which McCleary drew was far bigger than anyone thought possible.

McCleary called for Washington’s secretary of state to not be influenced by the minority Republicans in the state who were trying to have the votes cast several weeks beforehand for MAR rejected. Sixty-one per cent of voters in the Blue state had cast their ballots for MAR. That was a big number though down on the figure from 2024. There hadn’t been a collapse in the Democratic vote but instead a high turnout and a strong Republican campaign outside of the Puget Sound region. The ’23 voter-approved state measure for presidential elections from ’24 onwards where Washington would do as Maine and Nebraska did in splitting their votes for the Electoral College drove that. McCleary had been vocal in opposition to that being done five years ago and a lot of Democrats, in the state and elsewhere, regarded that as a terrible decision too. Regardless, that was state law. On that matter of how many electors to send to the Electoral College, the Republican’s presidential candidate Roberts was due to gain four of the twelve: that was another fight which McCleary was going to lead when the Electoral College met the following month. Back with the certification, the secretary of state was certainly not going to reject those votes cast by the state’s residents. The Republicans tried all they could yet, secretly, knew their efforts in Olympia were doomed. McCleary herself knew that there was no danger. Still, she was at the head of a huge crowd of people. They cheered when the announcement was made that MAR had won the state back on election day. McCleary told them that it was they, turning out like they did, which ensured that that happened. Those in Olympia were defending democracy where that was under attack from all sides. Without the pressure of them outside, McCleary added, things could have gone another way inside. The lie was heard by the governor, the secretary of state and others inside the State Capitol who were left furious at such a thing: it was the law which defeated that attack on democracy in Washington state. The congresswoman-elect then gave what afterwards would be called ‘the New America speech’.


With a hyped-up crowd before her, national media attention focused too, McCleary spoke of a New America. From her came a vision of a different country from what the United States currently was. This New America was one where the democratic will of the people was its heart. The soul of the nation was its progressive values. At the head of the country which she wished to see was its president, Maria Arreola Rodriquez. Standing in the way of this New America was all those who were opposed to democracy. McCleary accused the Republicans of being an anti-democratic fascist entity. They were assisted by the lame duck president, Mark Walsh, who was willing to aid them in getting away with how they had fatally-wounded the country. The Republicans were those who were behind the American Insurgent Army – who killed Anderson – and also responsible for the actions of those right-wing militia groups: in addition, McCleary said that the Republicans also controlled the Black Liberation Army with that being a front for their ultimate goals. In a New America, there would be no ability for a party such as the Republicans to do what they were and no Walsh either. Her vision was one which she said that she knew Americans all across the nation wanted to see. But it was obstructed by the undefendable, illegitimate regime imposed upon the nation by the founders of the country a quarter of millennium beforehand. The framers of the US Constitution were opposed to the will of the people. They built a nation for the few, not the many. New America, the one she wished to see, wouldn’t be beholden to the will of those long-dead and immoral men. The society of New America was what she moved to afterwards. How that democracy would work and its progressive values were spoken of. All of the passion which she was known for came from McCleary in talking of this New America. The crowd loved it. Talking points from MAR’s presidential campaign, yet also ones even further to the left of the democratic socialist platform she had ran on, formed the ideas expressed for the how society would be in New America. She finished by asking, rhetorically, if there was any way for this New America to be achieved.

The whole country was quickly aware of what McCleary said. Her New America speech was carried live on multiple media outlets and then reported on across the nation by the rest. How that reporting was done to particular audiences depended upon the political slant of the individual media networks and platforms. To the right, this was heresy and sedition. She had gone further than Vice President Hadley recently had in attacking the Constitution and her New America was a Marxist dictatorship. On about half of the left-wing side of the media, there was rejection for McCleary too yet not as strong condemnation as came from the right. The other half (or so) of the left-leaning media, especially the ‘new media’ away from the big broadcasting corporations, was full of praise. McCleary was said to be saying what needed to be said. The New America which she envisioned was applauded: so was she for being the one to say it, and so well too.

Padley and California’s Governor Pierce received calls from those governors and senators out West with whom they had recently had secret meetings with. From Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon & Washington there was a lot of concern at the language used by McCleary. The message overall was that this was incendiary and incitement to insurrection. Padley told several of those callers that McCleary had spoken in hypotheticals; Pierce said to those expressing worry that McCleary hadn’t gone into the territory of sedition itself. Each asserted that McCleary was a bit off-message but they pointed to the reactions which it brought about from those who supported what she was saying. Their callers, members of a conspiracy even if they denied that they were, because they were still keeping the Padley-Pierce Plan a secret, were urged to take stock of the public mood in their states in the days following the New American speech. Once more, no one in the immediate aftermath went running to the media nor the nearest US Attorney.

McCleary wasn’t off-message, she hadn’t gone rogue. Instead, she had done exactly what Padley and Pierce wanted her to do. She was setting the mood music: she was preparing the way for succession of the West and the fruition of that New America. It also put her right in the firing line of all of those opposed to anything like that ever being allowed to happen.

[James G]

26 – Terror

On December 1st 2026, two female members of the Oath Keepers right-wing militia group had been shot dead in a shootout with federal agents outside Blackfoot in Idaho. Both of them died after drawing weapons against Fish & Wildlife Service armed agents in the company of a US Marshal: the Feds were quicker off the draw. Allegations, unfounded ones, came afterwards that the two women were wounded in the initial exchange of gunfire but then executed while on the ground. Such lies had infuriated others in the Oath Keepers leading to the murder months later of that US Marshal outside of his home elsewhere in the state. The Oath Keepers had maintained a periodical presence in the Blackfoot area following that incident. They continued to support a troublesome local rancher who ‘free-grazed’ his livestock without paying fees to do so on federal land. A year after that shootout, the Oath Keepers, merged into the umbrella organisation White Star Militia, had held a vigil at the site. That had caused problems in Blackfoot and gained national media attention. They returned on the first day of December 2028 for the second anniversary. The turnout the second time around for another vigil was far greater than anyone had fought. Militia members from across the nation, and even members of the unaffiliated New Ku Klux Klan, gathered en masse. They assembled not at the forested spot where those bullets had flown but in the middle of Blackfoot. State troopers acting on the orders of the governor blocked access to the State Fairground and there was also the presence of national guardsmen too: Governor Winkelman had mobilised them when Idaho’s newly-elected congressman had been assassinated soon after polling day. A lot of trouble was feared, especially with the New Ku Klux Klan in town. Blackfoot had few residents of an ethnic minority but they were threatened with verbal abuse and the intimidation from almost a thousand open racists, supported by all of those militia members carrying weapons, was quite something. The terror was felt in other residents, the Caucasian ones, as they worried that their little rural town was to be a battlefield.

The day passed off without the feared violence though. Eventually, after a march and speeches, the crowd dispersed. The big turnout was noticed all across Idaho. Winkelman and members of his legislature, Republicans like him, were in dispute over the everyday presence of the White Star Militia – the New Ku Klux Klan was an unwelcome surprise – and how they were tolerated. Bigger Boise had already seen them gather in numbers. No end in sight was on the horizon as far as the governor was concerned for how he could rid his beloved Idaho of such horrible people. They had a strong following and political cover. The White Star Militia were seeking to make Idaho theirs. The governor had no support from elsewhere in how to get rid of them.

Across on the other side of the nation, near the coast of Georgia, the same day saw a pair explosions take place at the Glynco federal training facility. Law enforcement training was undertaken at Glynco by all sorts of agencies federal, state & local. There were firing ranges, driving circuits, simulation suites and classrooms with the place always busy. A television series pilot – Glynco – had been broadcast last year but not picked up by networks presenting a different type of Glynco then what was it really was: that series would have had agents from the Georgia site going all over the country hunting bad guys and getting into adventures. Politics killed that with networks fearing viewer partisanship negatively affecting ratings due to the idea of ‘federal troops’ deploying like that. What Glynco was all about wasn’t really any sort of action anyway. Classroom teaching was done far more than anything else. It was a big place, once a US Navy airfield, and well-funded. There was security against intrusion and terrorist attack but that was easily overcome by members of an American Insurgent Army strike team who struck at Glynco the same day as the Blackfoot gathering. One bomb went off in an administrative building – a small one which killed three people – before Glynco went into site lockdown and there were evacuations from other buildings. The AIA knew the full details of the security arrangements in the case of a terrorist attack due to a sympathiser being in-place. A second bomb, far bigger than the first, went off ten minutes later. Around it were gathered a lot of people. Most of them were federal law enforcement officers from across the nation yet there were also Glynco staff. More than thirty were killed by the second bomb.

In the aftermath of the blast, the attack wasn’t blamed upon the AIA but rather a wholly innocent party. A false claim of responsibility made by a fantasist, a disturbed individual, pointed media attention towards Revolución. A leaked Republican Party document a week beforehand had called that political organising group terrorists but they certainly weren’t. Right-wing media networks knew that too. Still, when the claim was made, it was reported as legitimate because it was backed up at once by a congresswoman in Georgia who claimed – lied – that she had been briefed by the Department of Homeland Security that Revolución had attacked Glynco. The DHS had said no such thing. They were looking at the correct guilty party: the AIA. That sought terrorist, Boatswain’s Mate Reed, was afterwards identified as being in the area ahead of the blast and there was internet ‘chatter’ too linking the AIA to the Glynco attack. Allegations against Revolución were wholly false and made by those with a partisan agenda to tie that Hispanic group to this act of terror in the public mind.


President Walsh went to Europe at the beginning of December. There was an unscheduled, urgent NATO summit arranged in the French city of Auxerre. He was less than two months from seeing his successor inaugurated but went due to the ongoing situation in the Baltic States as Russian-backed terror actions drove NATO leaders to gather. His Secretary of Defence, General E. John Ferdinand, went with him. The French hosted the summit and there was a full attendance from across the alliance though with the exclusion of Turkish representatives due to their country’s suspension from NATO five years past. While NATO heads-of-state, ministers, generals and intelligence chiefs went to Auxerre, so did the President of the EU as well. She was a former German Chancellor who had been democratically-elected (though in a complicated ranked-choice, proportional ballot: EU fashion indeed) the year before. Facing down Russia’s power-hungry President Makarov was the subject of the summit. Extra forces forward deployed in the east were at the top of the agenda in addition to funding for military expansion within the Baltics themselves. Walsh assured his Canadian and European counterparts that the United States during the last months of his leadership would remain fully committed to the NATO mission. While he couldn’t speak for President-elect Roberts, he told the others at Auxerre that there was no way that his successor would back away either. Roberts had said he wouldn’t and his party wouldn’t let him should he out-of-character try to. There were rumblings from some leaders, Poland’s president especially, that another conflict with China could see America forced to withdraw some forces yet Walsh once more did his best to convince all those in attendance that the United States wouldn’t leave them to stand firm against the Russians alone.

Ferdinand had taken over from his disgraced predecessor in the aftermath of American defeat in the Taiwan Conflict. He was a former US Marine who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the 46th & 47th Presidents. The Republicans put him back in the Pentagon following the humiliation of January 2027, but right at the very top: Senate Majority Leader Green handpicked him like he did the new US Secretary of State too. NATO members had been impressed by Ferdinand before and were so again when he came to Auxerre. He gained a lot of the limelight which in usual circumstances would have gone to Walsh… had the president not been a lame duck who’d recently led his country to that defeat against China. Rumours coming out of Washington in the days ahead of the trip said that Roberts was considering keeping him on to serve as his Secretary of Defence too. That wasn’t unprecedented and Ferdinand was regarded as an apolitical figure despite his political post. Ferdinand wouldn’t comment on those rumours when asked. He did though give his opinion on what Roberts would do with the Baltic deployment: keep it, even increase it. Like his president, he told everyone in Auxerre that there would be no withdrawal. Now, if Maria Arreola Rodriquez had won the election, that would have been very different – she had made campaign promises for the United States to leave NATO – but that was something which no longer needed to be worried about.

In a couple of private meetings at the summit, Walsh found himself discussing something he hadn’t imagined doing on the way to Europe. First with the EU’s President and then Britain’s Prime Minister, those Europeans raised the issue of domestic upheaval in the United States and concerns that that would bring about real political disturbance in his country. The two of them were diplomatic but they had a lot of worry to express. They spoke not of the shootings and bombings – the Years of Lead had been going on for so long now that those were almost ‘normal’ – but instead fears they had of a growing rise of separatism in America. Walsh shook his head each time. He didn’t agree with the fears that each had that there would be a physical split in his country. Diplomats of theirs telling them that such a thing was even a remote possibility, Walsh assured each, was just plain crazy. Western states of the union looking to leave? No, that was not going to happen. Britain’s leader spoke of ‘dangerous far left populism’, something he had fought in his country, and some of those speeches being made in California, Nevada and Oregon by people as senior as Walsh’s own estranged vice president. The president told him that it was all hot air. They were mad that they didn’t get the president they wanted and talking of a dream that they wanted to come true yet never would. Reality was what ruled the land though. Succession was illegal, impossible even. There was no regional identity in the so-called ‘West’ of America and those people were Democrats in every sense of the word, meaning that were driven by public backing.

By the New Year, that would fade: he gave them his word on that, adding that with martial law in several Florida counties now over and the Electoral College soon to meet, everything was almost back to normal. The EU’s President was less convinced by Walsh’s equally firm assurances that there was nothing to fear. The bloc’s diplomatic core was sending her warning after warning about it all. Walsh would have none of it though. He almost seemed amused at such a notion and certainly not, as Ferdinand would be when an attendee raised the same matter with him, angry at such a suggestion. The whole idea of whatever some people said, whatever crowds they drew, no matter how many likes they got online, having any real affect leading to his country splitting apart was plain absurd!

[James G]

27 – Empty promises

When on the campaign trail, Senator Roberts had talked extensively of his national economic recovery plan. Seeking to win voters for his presidential bid, Roberts had outlined how the United States could come out of the Second Great Recession. There would be jobs and wealth. The nation was still suffering from the economic fallout of the short but lethal conflict with China yet he had a plan to put all that behind American voters. At one of the two presidential debates, the Pittsburgh event which he attended in person yet Maria Arreola Rodriquez chose to be ‘present’ only by a webcast, Roberts had said that answer to recovery wasn’t socialism. That helped him win the swing states of Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – though not Michigan – and, without the Black Swan events of October, should have secured what was thought of as a given by taking the ‘safe’ Florida. Those states, plus so much of the rest of the country too, was an economic mire. He said he would bring about an end to that. In early December 2028, his transition team was once more the source of leaks to the media about the details of the programme for government once Roberts was inaugurated late the following months. The Republicans had firm control of both houses in Congress and the input from the leadership was in that programme. Those behind these leaks were aiming to cause uproar: they selectively leaked details and sexed up other bits to gain strong reactions.

On the economic front, a portion of the plans for the incoming Roberts Administration which were leaked to left-wing media outlets concerned exploitation of domestic natural resources to help with growth. Fossil fuel extraction would be back on the agenda under the 49th President. The share prices of many of the big oil & gas corporations had been rising since the election but they jumped significantly with confirmation that Roberts intended to let them drill extensively. All of the restrictions brought in back in the 2021-23 period, which had been slowly being whittled away since then, were going to be thrown out of the window. The price of economic recovery would be environmental damage. Details of environmental protections built into the plan were kept out of the leak… but even then, they would have looked like empty promises. The projected job numbers and tax revenues were likewise omitted. The leak was designed to inflame passions, especially among the ‘green young’ nationwide. It was well-known how the big energy corporations had funded Roberts’ presidential campaign with cash donations and it looked like they were going to get what they paid for.

There was a second leak, that one not about drilling for oil & gas. That concerned what the president-elect and the Congressional leadership had agreed upon as societal programmes to push for in the new year. Voting rights, media guidelines, abortion access, religious freedom, gender recognition limits and immigration was all there: once more selectively presented. What came out was all seemingly designed to upset progressives and the far left. On the last matter, that of immigration, what Senator Stokes wanted when it came to whom the Republican in the Senate would confirm for the new director of United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS – a component of the Department of Homeland Security) was revealed to be conditional on whether that nominee was willing to deny citizenship and deport one particular individual. The Roberts transition team had not yet given an answer and this was only one senator talking, but that was buried upon the explosive comment of the individual in question: defeated presidential candidate MAR. Even more than the environmental issues, more than anything else, this grabbed all of the media attention.


Following his trip to emergency NATO summit in Auxerre, President Walsh flew first to Vilnius – the capital of Lithuania – and then onwards to the Middle East. Air Force One took him through what was expected to be his last series of overseas trips. In Israel Walsh was very welcome. His administration had been a good friend to the Jewish state, more than the last two Democrats to occupy the White House. While not an official state visit with all the expected pomp and ceremony, because he was still the American President, the Israelis pulled out all of the stops for him. He had meetings with the president (who held the head of state role) and also the prime minister: the real power in the country. At the latter get together, the defence & foreign ministers were also there with their prime minister talking with Walsh. The primary subject was that of ongoing developments across in Egypt. The most-populous Arab country, Israel’s neighbour, was still in much turmoil after the defeated Islamic revolution of 2026. American air strikes that year and then again in September ’28 were each time meant to have finished off the rebels. That wasn’t the case. In an ultimatum, Walsh was told by the Israeli leadership that if American jets didn’t return once more to Egyptian skies, then Israeli ones would. If you don’t bomb Egypt again, the defence minister told him, we will. Walsh was aghast at such an idea. He told his hosts that would send the entire Middle East, from Morocco to Iran, up in arms. There would be a general war if Israel did that! He was informed of Israel’s fears about the Iranians getting a foothold there, one which (experience showed as with Syria) they would never let go of. The United States couldn’t bomb Egypt once again, Walsh told them. He had a solution though: fellow Arabs could do it. The Coalition which America had led back in ’26, and which was still technically in-place, of Arab nations were the only ones who could do that without starting a regional war. Air Force One left Israel afterwards bound first for Riyadh and then Dubai on the follow-up.

Agreement came from the Coalition. Walsh made it happen. Like the Israelis, he had been a firm ally of the Saudis and the Gulf Arab Monarchies. They didn’t want Iran having a presence in Egypt – the same intelligence Israel had, they had – and were prepared to bomb Tehran-backed militias fighting the Cairo government. Jordan, Morocco and Sudan would later all come aboard too. For Walsh to do this right at the end of his presidency, avert a major conflict which had the potential to turn into World War Three – if things got out of hand due to Russian, Turkish and even Chinese influences in the region –, was quite the achievement for a lame duck. In some quarters, he would be lauded for his diplomacy. The cost though would be more dead Egyptians and the further hatred which came his way from domestic sources. Running for president back in 2024, Walsh had been backed by those on the far left politically in America. They were his loudest supporters when he ran as a progressive. They thought that he owed them and were furious when he ‘betrayed them’ by governing as a moderate like he did. He would have won the presidency without them though. It was swing voters, suburbanites, who decided that presidential election: not those shouting on the internet. To those he made angry, his Middle Eastern policies had been a big part of that. Israel and the regimes heading the regional powers were all so thoroughly despised by the far left back home. There was a bigger picture though, one of American geo-political interests. Being allied to the Israelis, the Saudis and the Gulf Arab Monarchies against the forces of the extremists in Iran and Turkey, protected the United States. That was what Walsh and his administration had tried to explain to those who refused to listen. They had convinced themselves that there was an unspoken agreement back in ’24 that Walsh would cut back ties which such regimes. He had never given them anything to believe on that yet it didn’t matter to those mad at him: they only saw the betrayal and considered him to have broken his word.

When flying between Riyadh and Dubai, Walsh had made a long-distance call from his aircraft to California. It was a secure line from him to MAR’s home in the Bay Area. MAR took his call that time. She had refused to in the aftermath of the election with Walsh and his staff wondering just what kind of person would say no to talking with the President of the United States of America!? This time around, when she agreed to speak to him, Walsh raised the subject of the status of her citizenship because the Stokes-USCIS issue had just broke. Telling her that he would do everything in his power to stop efforts to see her denied her gaining official citizenship – her lawyer was busy – and that she would never be deported on his watch, Walsh reminded her of their long-standing friendship. Friends they had once been, before he took office though. Their relationship had collapsed once he’d been in the White House with MAR openly telling the media she planned to run against him when primary season 2028 came around. That was all before the aftermath of the Taiwan Conflict forced him to not run again yet if he had, she would have challenged him for the Democratic Party’s nomination. She thanked him for what he said though reminded Walsh that he was out of office come January 20th: it was another empty promise in reality. The call moved to another matter. MAR was asked by Walsh to concede defeat in the presidential election. The Republicans had stolen the White House and the best thing to do was officially accept that. Her answer was that of ‘never’. MAR would do no such thing. It would betray everything she stood for, she told him, and she wouldn’t do it. Then the president moved onto trying to talk to the congresswoman (how long would she hold that position though?) about her allies in California and the Pacific states: McCleary, Padley and Pierce. He started to urge her to have them stop what they were doing in, what he called, ‘encouraging sedition, separatism & succession’. MAR terminated the call without replying.

Who on earth hangs up on the American President!?


While he was overseas, Walsh saw more resignations from his administration. When Treasury Secretary Moore had quit last week in protest at the administration’s position on supporting the Supreme Court’s decision on Arreola Rodriquez vs. Florida, he’d called for others to join him. Hours later had seen the assassination of the Homeland Security Secretary. There had thus been a rallying-around-the-flag effort… apart from Vice President Padley though. Several days had passed and more resignations finally came. These weren’t from the Cabinet yet were still senior people who quit their posts with public explanations as to why they were doing so. The Deputy Secretary of Interior, the Solicitor of Labor, one of the Undersecretaries of Agriculture, the Federal Elections Commission head and the director of the Office for Management & Budget were all ‘Westerners’: they came from Blue states in the West. Going further than Moore, they said they recognised MAR as legitimate next president not in just their hearts (as he had said) but legally. Such words carried no weight and were, arguably, seditious. Walsh’s press secretary was with him on his overseas travels and at the podium in her place was her deputy. He made a statement – approved by Walsh – pointing out that come January, there would be thousands of political appointees in Washington who would be leaving office when the new administration took over. The business of government would continue. As to their comments about presidential recognition, they were ‘unsettling to hear from public servants, unpatriotic even’.

McCleary made several more speeches after her ‘New America’ address in Olympia. Up and down the Pacific coast, then inland through more Blue states, she went. The same theme as in Washington state’s capital was repeated. Revolución organised the events with crowds while elsewhere, McCleary spoke to the news media in studios. Padley and Governor Pierce came out in public support of her ‘vision’ for what America could be, what it should be. Then there was Congressman Ignacio Gutierrez from New Mexico. He joined with Nevada State Assembly Speaker Ashby – who was still under investigation by Nevada’s district attorney – in adding more support too. They gave this New America a western feel to it. What McCleary had started, to be joined by others, was gaining plentiful attention. It was receiving warm responses in the West. That was far from the case elsewhere across the nation.

Democratic Senators Kirk (from New Jersey who’d run against MAR earlier in the year) and Laura Yorke from Massachusetts (already being mentioned as a possible contender for 2032) came out in firm opposition to all of this. They were joined in making public criticism by such figures as Governor Norris from Pennsylvania and Senator-elect Garfield too. These high-level Democrats slammed what they all called sedition coming from fellow Democrats out West. The narrative of a stolen election was one which they all agreed with but what was happening in early December was felt by them to have gone too far already. Yorke addressed McCleary on a MSNBC talk-show (each appearing by video link) where the former told the latter to ‘get over it, we’ll be back soon and cut the sh*t’. In a rather dramatic fashion for the viewing public, McCleary acted out great shock at such language coming from the senator. Yorke reminded viewers to listen to the potty-mouth on display coming from McCleary’s recent speeches. Then there was the Republicans reaction to all of this. It was a gift horse which they weren’t going to ignore. Seditious talk from the Democrats, and them arguing so passionately against each other, made them smile. Democrats might have been warning this was all dangerous but it was just a political attack line for the Republicans. They doubled down once the McCleary-Yorke blow-up happened.

Roberts addressed the matter when talking to the media. He said there was no ‘West America’ but instead ‘just America’. The use of that first term by him wasn’t its initial outing. However, the president-elect saying ‘West America’ reached a bigger audience than when others said it. Such a concept, of something that was wholly different in terms of how the nation was split, was further ingrained in the public consciousness following Roberts remarks made to a Fox News journalist.