The American Insurgency, Part 2: The Constitution Hangs by a Thread

tacticalgadsden1The sequence of events that made the American Insurgency inevitable had its roots in a political shift that had occured more than a century earlier. It began with the Progressive Era, barely a generation after the first civil war, dovetailed into the New Deal, and culminated with the near complete subversion of the United States.

It is worth taking a moment to review the founding documents and constitutional principles of the United States, to show how far the country had strayed from them in the decades leading up to the American Insurgency.

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence established the philosophical foundation of the US Constitution; namely, the principle of natural rights and the social contract:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This established the principle that rights are not bestowed by the State, but are held in reserve by the people. The purpose of the State is not to bestow favors or priviledges, but to preserve those rights and liberties which the people naturally possess.

The most important of these were enumerated in 1789 by the Bill of Rights, which were:

  1. The right to free speech and freedom of religion.
  2. The right to bear arms.
  3. The right from quartering soldiers.
  4. The right from unreasonable search and seizure.
  5. The right to due process.
  6. The right to a speedy and public trial.
  7. The right to a trial by jury.
  8. The right from cruel and unusual punishment.
  9. The right to retain all other rights not explictly enumerated.
  10. The right to retain all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government.

Together with the Constitution of 1788, these documents established a limited government, charged not with providing for the “common good” but protecting the individual rights and liberties of the people.

A century later, during the Progressive Era, this began to shift dramatically. Unlike the Founding Fathers, the 19th century Progressives saw government as a vehicle for achieving social reform. The concept of social engineering, so anathema to the constitutional principles of limited government, was gradually introduced until it became commonplace. Congress passed numerous laws that overreached their Constitutional mandate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Progressives upheld them. This incremental gutting of the Constitution laid the groundwork for the massive expansion of federal power under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Today, FDR is largely regarded as one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States. In the years leading up to the American Insurgency, however, he was regarded as one of the best. The entitlement programs of FDR and his immediate successors had not yet failed, though the writing was on the wall, and the national debt, while skyrocketing to dangerous heights, had not yet driven the nation to bankruptcy.

It is difficult for us, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, to conceive how the people living at this time could not see the writing on the wall. While some of the more forward looking ones certainly did, the vast majority simply assumed that the broken system would continue to plod along as it always had.

However, it was not only a broken system that brought the country to its knees, but the secret combinations of power that sought to exploit it.

It is impossible to accurately document all of the players who were actively working to subvert the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We may never know whether it was a monolithic effort by a single global organization, or a loose ideological confederation of various political factions. However, we do know that there was a subversion effort of some kind, because the effects of it are measurable and well documented.

The subversion process, as described by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, has four stages:

Demoralization > Destabilization > Crisis > Normalization

During the Cold War, the KGB actively funded or provided support to several left-leaning political groups in order to push the United States through these processes. The Soviet Union collapsed before the subversion was complete, but the process continued well into the 21st century until the crisis which caused the American Insurgency.

The purpose of demoralization is to effect a generational shift in basic moral values, laying the foundation for the disintegration of society. This was achieved through the social upheaval known at the time as the “culture wars.”

In the 1950s, divorce was rare, abortion was unheard of, most children were raised by their biological mother and a father, and religious practice was a major aspect of public life. By the 2010s, none of these were true. A lot of this was due to changes in government, which made divorce and abortion common and easy, incentivized single mothers on welfare to have more children, incentivized young couples to cohabit instead of getting married, and forced religious institutions to either adopt practices that ran contrary to their moral teachings or to retreat from the public sphere. In other areas, such as education, employment, law enforcement, and the media, similar trends can be documented that underscore a massive shift in social values.

The demoralization of the United States was more or less complete by the early 2000s. The destabilization process was already underway, but it accelerated dramatically under President Obama during the 2010s. During this stage, the society being subverted is pushed into violent confrontation with itself in order to foment a crisis. The race riots in Ferguson, Missouri marked a dramatic shift in race relations, ultimately leading to violence against the police. As law and order broke down, crime increased dramatically, especially in minority communities. Violence also became normal at political rallies and university events.

Historians disagree as to whether Hillary Clinton was supposed to merely further the destabilization of the country or bring it though crisis to the final stage of normalization. However, they almost universally agree that she was a major player in the subversion of the United States. Donald Trump, her Republican opponent in the 2016 election (the last year in which the Repulican Party would be a force in national politics), was probably also propelled to power by the secret combinations working to subvert the country, though most historians believe he was merely exploited by them, and not an active conspirator.

It is a testament to the resilience of the American system of government that the country did not collapse under Hillary Clinton’s presidency. However, her far-left policies pushed the United States past the point of no return. Before she was impeached and thrown from office in 2021, the Constitution was largely a figurehead document, exerting little force on the underlying political philosophy of the federal government.

The first and fifth amendments were largely dismantled in the aftermath of the college protest movement in the mid 2010s. The fourth amendment was rendered toothless by mass surveillance by the NSA, upheld by Clinton’s Supreme Court. The ninth and tenth amendments had been ignored for decades, and were effectively buried by Clinton’s sweeping economic policies following the Great Collapse in 2017.

The second amendment was the last thread by which the Constitution hung, and when President Ward attempted to annul it in 2026, the result was war.

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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