The American Insurgency, Part 1: Prelude to Civil War

tacticalgadsden1The American Insurgency officially broke out in 2026, as a direct result of Steward vs. The State of California which effectively nullified the 2nd amendment. However, the conflict was rooted in the politics of the previous decade, and the economic realities of the Great Collapse.

Following the election of 2016, the Republican Party split into various regional factions and ceased to be a force in American politics. None of the third parties then extant were able to pick up enough Republican dissenters to challenge the Democrats on the national stage. As a result, the 2018 elections handed the Democrats control of the House and Senate, as well as the White House.

The Great Collapse began in late 2016 / early 2017, when Germany and France fell into recession. The migrant crisis in Europe had reached the high water mark, which along with the ongoing Eurozone crisis propelled several right-wing, Euroskeptic parties into power. Referendums in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, and the Czech Republic all resulted in decisions to exit the EU, leading effectively to the dissolution of the union.

Following Vladimir Putin’s mysterious disappearance in April 2018, the Russian Federation collapsed and Russia ceased to exist as a single contiguous country. NATO attempted to safeguard Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal and oversee a transitional government, but failed as the Russian oblasts either refused to recognize the authority of the Kremlin or were annexed by neighboring states. Poland and the V4 countries formed a competing alliance system for eastern Europe, and the various western European countries gradually withdrew support from NATO as they rebuilt their own national militaries.

As a result of these events, the entire Eurasian continent fell into economic collapse. Insurrections in the Chinese mainland forced the PRC to withdraw from global affairs as the country gradually imploded. Foreign investors lost a tremendous amount of capital. Stock markets across the globe plummeted, the Euro was disbanded, and regional wars broke out in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, and the South China Sea.

The immediate effect of all this was to drive foreign capital to the United States, which was not nearly as leveraged as the Eurasian countries and therefore in a much better economic position. However, the debt to GDP ratio of the United States was already over 100%, and US dollar’s days as the reserve currency of the world were numbered.

But in the short-term, the United States experienced a brief period of economic relief as the rest of the world collapsed. This boosted President Clinton’s popularity and enabled the Democrats to sweep the 2018 elections.

As soon as the Democrats had control of congress and the white house, they pushed a deeply partisan agenda. Abortion laws across the states were nullified by federal law. The federal minimum wage was raised first to $15, then to $20 as the dollar began to plummet. The welfare rolls expanded massively. Hate speech laws were passed that banned any discussion of abstinence in public schools, and mandatory consent classes began as early as grade 5. Christian churches were forced to perform gay marriages, and the movement to decriminalize pedophilia gained significant legal traction.

President Clinton was impeached and thrown out of office in 2021, but the damage had already been done. The Supreme Court was stacked with left-leaning activist judges, who overturned previous limits on federal powers and reinterpreted the US Constitution in ways that effectively nullified it. The rule of law had already broken down with the FBI’s failure to prosecute Clinton in 2016, but new court decisions effectively paved the way for the President to exercise dictatorial powers.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2026 that the 2nd amendment was not to be construed as an individual right to bear arms, Washington immediately instituted a national mandatory gun buy-back program. Conservatives and libertarians decided they had had enough.

The American Insurgency had begun.

The American Insurgency (Index)

Tactical Gadsden Flag taken from The Art of Not Being Governed and published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

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