All Along the Watchtower: A Dystopian TLIAW
- Thread starter Vidal
- Start date
Of course, the two horsemen could always team up again for some other thematic alternating TLIAW project 👀The ending goes to the present day, so I’d say there’s no real room for a sequel. Plus, this was wholly intended to be a self-contained bit of fun and not much more than just us having fun with the alternating format
also there is a small part of me that would love to take this outline and flesh out a full world from it. But that would almost certainly be confined to the villa
AllThePresidentsMen
Banned
make it a utopia this time
"The Shining City On A Hill: A Utopian TLIAW By Vidal and Enigma-Conundrum"
wwbgdiaslt
Gone Fishin'
Maybe a side-quel focused on the United Kingdom or Canada or some such, running alongside this one?
I’d love to see you two do the same format but make it a realistic utopia instead.The ending goes to the present day, so I’d say there’s no real room for a sequel. Plus, this was wholly intended to be a self-contained bit of fun and not much more than just us having fun with the alternating format
See, now this I could get behind - the Watchtower ‘verse ends soon, but who says another thing won’t come of the collab
AeroTheZealousOne
Monthly Donor
Found this timeline the other day, been lurking, reading, and thoroughly enjoying it ever since.
My main reason for the enjoyment, aside from my favorite alternate history trope to use as an overarching premise of the theme: deconstruction of what seems to be a really good thing, and leaving the world overall worse for wear by the time the long international adventure is over, akin to a previous unfinished work of mine which I'm not exactly proud of where the Nazis never happened but the 20th century somehow gets worse, or better yet, akin to the broad effect of changing history and screwing everything over in Stephen King's 11/22/63.
Shit. This is kinda like 11/22/63 but without the universe itself unraveling or time travel, and it's Bobby Kennedy who is saved by circumstance and not his brother Jack.
That out of the way, this may have inspired me to try my hand at a timeline in a period of time (TLIAPOT) format, and as such I'm looking forward to the thrilling conclusion!
My main reason for the enjoyment, aside from my favorite alternate history trope to use as an overarching premise of the theme: deconstruction of what seems to be a really good thing, and leaving the world overall worse for wear by the time the long international adventure is over, akin to a previous unfinished work of mine which I'm not exactly proud of where the Nazis never happened but the 20th century somehow gets worse, or better yet, akin to the broad effect of changing history and screwing everything over in Stephen King's 11/22/63.
Shit. This is kinda like 11/22/63 but without the universe itself unraveling or time travel, and it's Bobby Kennedy who is saved by circumstance and not his brother Jack.
That out of the way, this may have inspired me to try my hand at a timeline in a period of time (TLIAPOT) format, and as such I'm looking forward to the thrilling conclusion!
Speaking of worldbuilding, I’d be very interested in seeing a 2022 world map of this nightmare
Just like you're post where JFK Jr. became a far-right Republican and tried to overturn the 2024 presidential election and founded the Libarators Party with VP Michael Flynn.
This.\/
Which is partly inspired by this.
Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State
The lack of Orb Mother here alarms me You have no idea how badly I wanted to include her, but I couldn't figure out a way to make her politically prominent in the mainstream by 2032. She also didn't have many notable endorsers. Weed Lord Ryan ends up picking a left-liberal Senator Wiley as his...
forum.sealionpress.co.uk
Is their any chance of a utopian tliaw? after this, I loved it but id like something slightly more hopeful in these trying times
Not sure if we’ll do a Utopian one but there’s some talk of another collar project
46. Ralph Reed (NR-GA)
46. Ralph Reed (NR-GA)
January 20, 2017 – present
“I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values. What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.”
January 20, 2017 – present
“I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values. What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.”
America was facing a crisis. Just as things seemed to be improving – reunification, the return of free and fair elections – Ken Lay’s arrest threw the nation into turmoil once more. The Election of 2016 was, perhaps, America’s last chance to right the course, but voters that year ignored a Biblical warning: Beware False Prophets.
Since Robert F. Kennedy’s near-impeachment over government corruption, the American presidency had played host to a series of problematic individuals. Two former presidents (Butz and Lay) had been arrested, one of them had gone to prison. Two presidents (Butz and Cheney) resigned their office; three did not stand for reelection when political headwinds turned against them (Bork, Vidal, and Lay). Two had died in office, one of them had been assassinated in an attack that collapsed the federal government.
There had been secession, near-constant rioting and protests and military occupation of American cities. Nuclear missiles had been lobbed around the globe – and the American continent – as if they were like any other weapon. America’s dramatic retreat from the world stage had emboldened the USSR and extremists in the Middle East. Few considered the nation a superpower in any meaningful way.
Democracy as the founders envisioned was essentially over. The winner of the Election of 1984 had been decided on a legal technicality and within two decades, democratic elections had been replaced with sham elections that produced convenient outcomes for those in power. Routinely, dissidents found themselves imprisoned – lost in a maze of mysterious prisons and camps strewn about the middle of the nation, often never seen or heard again by their loved ones.
Twice, presidents had inspired hope in their people. Both died in office under tragic circumstances.
By 2016, Americans were feeling dejected, lost, and confused, and in that darkness many of them turned to religion for answers. Throughout the Southern states, where partisan elections were still permitted, a new political party, the National Renewal Party, began to win more and more elections. Its leader was Ralph Reed, a charismatic born-again Christian, who preached America’s restoration through a closer relationship with God. Returning America to its Christian roots, Reed argued, was the way back to American excellence.
And the country had been primed to believe him. For ten years, Cheney’s federalization of schools had heavily emphasized the wisdom of the Founders, the promise that America was a shining city upon a hill. That scholarship had provoked a number of books in the last ten years that talked about the “Golden Age” of the Fifties – before the Kennedys came to power and demolished America as we knew it then. There was no fighting about race in the Fifties, these books argued. Instead, everyone knew their place in society. There were stable family units. People went to Church. The national conversation had begun to change in Reed’s favor.
So it was no surprise in 2014 when Reed was elected Governor of Georgia. He mandated school prayer in the morning, banned abortions and Sunday shopping, and he led the state challenges to Cheney’s federal law permitting same-sex marriage. Eventually, Cheney’s own Supreme Court had ruled that marriage should remain, fundamentally, a state issue. Reed had won. So too, he argued, had God.
In the Election of 2016, Reed refused to identify as “Pro” or “Anti” administration. He said he was truly independent – that the nation’s politics should not be defined by your support or opposition to Kenneth Lay or Lynne Cheney but instead should be about finding a greater common purpose. That was what his National Renewal Party was all about.
Funded by a cadre of wealthy donors, Reed ran an aggressive national campaign, promising to unify the country and heal old wounds, including racial tensions. He went into Black churches and Synagogues and compared the struggle of the American people to the book of Exodus – the story of the Jews that many Black Americans had long identified with. Though the federal elections were technically non-partisan, he ran a slate of “Renewal Candidates” in all 50 states, who followed him into office after he soundly defeated two anti-Administration candidates and one pro-Administration candidate.
U.S. Presidential Election, 2016
Ralph Reed/J.C. Watts (Unaffiliated) … 50.4%
Rocky Anderson/Richard Painter (Anti-administration) … 27.6%
Michael Bloomberg/Evan Bayh (Anti-administration) … 15.3%
Dick DeVos/John Yoo (Pro-administration) … 4.6%
Various other candidates … 2.1%
His inauguration in Philadelphia was the most widely attended presidential inauguration in the modern era, and he promised to restore the United States to greatness. At the outset of his presidency, public opinion polling showed that he had the support of 76% of the American people. It was a hopeful time for the nation.
After the arrest and death of Ken Lay in February of 2017 came the “March of Miracles.” The first announced “miracle” was the state of the US economy. Lay’s economic initiatives and Reed’s recent economic stimulus bill, which included tax cuts for most Americans and a significant military build-up that created hundreds of thousands of jobs, meant that unemployment had fallen to just 3.4% and that GDP growth was at its highest point in decades.
The second “miracle” came when a far-left extremist tried to assassinate Reed after a tour of a factory in Ohio. A bullet just barely missed Reed’s head. Another lodged in his chest. Reed was taken to the hospital where he made a full recovery.
But the final and most mysterious “miracle” came at the end of the month when an employee at George Washington’s Mount Vernon home discovered a time capsule in a collection of Washington’s things that had been in storage for years. The capsule was dated for March of 2017 – 220 years after Washington left office. In it was a letter from Washington that prophesied that one day the United States would face a difficult period of decline, but a new leader would emerge and have the bravery and foresight to know a new Constitution was needed – one that built the nation in the image of his vision and of the electorate.
Some historians professed doubts about the document’s authenticity, but a number of scholars were brought in by the President’s administration to verify the documents, and they unanimously confirmed the artifact was a genuine letter from Washington. Reed, overwhelmed by the prophecy, announced that he was retreating to Camp David for a period of “reflection.”
He re-emerged three days later at Mount Vernon for a major address to the nation. Reed said that after thoughtful reflection and prayer, he had decided to convene a Second Constitutional Convention. Each state would send a number of representatives to debate and draft a new Constitution. “We will leave this Convention stronger and more unified than at any point since 1776,” Reed insisted.
At the convention, delegates again debated a revised Constitution. They did away with the Bill of Rights as a series of amendments and instead codified many of them into the original text, including the previous Second Amendment. Delegates voted against an updated version of the Establishment Clause, angering liberals who worried about a state-run religion. In a narrow vote, a form of the Electoral College was restored and the 17th Amendment, which provided for the election of US Senators by popular vote, was stripped out. There was a decided march towards the original copy of the Constitution “as the Founders intended.”
Those who warned about the dramatic departures from the original text were ignored. Some disappeared. For example, the Retention elections would no longer be put to a popular vote. Instead, Congress would vote on retaining the president after four years in office. Congressional elections would still be overseen by the Federal Elections Commission.
One proposal by Reed’s National Renewal Party fell short. They were some 20 votes shy of changing the name of the USA to the “People’s Christian Republic of America.”
The FEC also managed the vote on adopting the new Constitution. By this point, Reed had appointed a new crop of administrators, and the Commission more closely resembled the FEC under Cheney’s leadership than under Lay’s. It seemed that Lay’s collapse and Reed’s landslide election had given the new executive the leverage needed to backslide the country’s democratic standing. There were dissenters, but most of the public was still drunk on the March of Miracles, and those who were loudest in their opposition seemed to vanish without a trace.
The new Constitution was adopted with the support of 75% of voting Americans.
In rural Virginia, they erected a new national capital, Bethlehem, complete with a new Presidential Palace and a new Congressional building.
One of the most important roles was that of Secretary of Education. School curriculum had been an important mechanism for the surge in young Americans who identified with the concept of “American exceptionalism.” To lead the Department, Reed tapped Professor Newt Gingrich of Emory University, who had written many papers on the need to teach patriotism in school. Gingrich’s first edict as Secretary was to mandate that every school day begin with a Christian prayer.
In 2018, tragedy struck the State of Michigan, when arsenic in the water of residents of Dearborn, Michigan had wiped out nearly the whole city. Reed declared that it was an act of terrorism and trained his ire at the Soviet Union. Reed believed that American unity was strongest when the country shared a common enemy instead of turning on each other, and so he decided to call up a common one from the Fifties: Communism.
Schools, news commentators, and columnists preached the values of America’s democratic republic. Meanwhile, they broadcast horror stories from the Soviet regime.
Reed authorized an extensive build-up of the country’s nuclear arsenal in addition to the more traditional military build-up already underway, and his rhetoric made clear who it was he intended to fight.
For the first time in decades, Reed’s four-year presidency marked a time of tranquility and prosperity. Americans were exuberant and a real national identity had come into form. All around America, murals of Reed with a halo around him appeared. Shop owners hung his portrait in their stores. Some cities attempted to lead a resistance, namely Portland, Oregon, but the protesters were painted as radical extremists, and few voiced their disagreement when American troops moved in quickly to quell the rebellion. There was finally stability in America, why was the radical left trying to disrupt it?
In 2020, Congress voted unanimously to retain Reed. Even those of the new opposition party, the Peace and Liberty Party, were supportive. “Now is not the time for disagreement,” said the Senate Minority Leader, Evan Bayh. “It’s time to be Americans.”
Americans didn’t seem to notice when, by 2021, nearly all of their radio and television programming was produced by the state. When Dennis Kucinich, a longtime agitator of the Cheney administration, held a rally to protest the “Reed Regime,” only a few hundred showed up. Kucinich was never seen or heard from again. Noticing the disappearances, many liberals (branded by their opponents as “Godless”), slipped across the border into Canada, which had quietly begun accepting refugees. Some more liberal states simply adopted a quiet means to carry out life differently.
In 2021, when Reed amended the Constitution to include a Human Life Amendment, Peace and Liberty Governors on the West Coast established a secret network to provide individuals with access to abortion. The risks of publicly defying the government had become too great. There were reports that in some schools, when teachers refused to begin class with a prayer, they were fired – never heard from again.
Reed also announced that every American male would go to military training at age 17 for one year. They would serve three years in the military, until turning 21. During that time, they’d also receive a free college education. But it was clear that he was preparing for war.
According to the news, Communism was on the march. Americans were worried. Secretary of War Doug Feith assured the American public that the country was ready to “make the world safe for democracy.”
###
In early 2022, scholars from around the world met to discuss and debate the evolution of democracy with a particular focus on the decline in America. More than half marked the 1984 election as a point of no return. The runner-up was the assassination of Joe Lieberman in 2001.
Some questioned if the United States had really declined at all. In fact, it appeared to be stronger than ever. One German professor remarked, “Nobody does propaganda like the Christians.”
Reed used the academic conference to rally American popular sentiment. America had not declined, he said. America was renewed. Stronger than ever. And after five decades of domestic unrest, scandal and assassination, war and poverty, the weary Americans chose to believe him. By this point, they did not know.
They did not know that CIA agents monitored their every move. That those who dissented from the government were quietly removed from civilization. Many were simply discarded.
They did not know that their election results were manufactured by an FEC that produced results to match the desires of Ralph Reed.
They did not know that the Soviet Union had long stopped paying attention to America – that it had no intentions of instigating a world-ending conflict.
They did not know that in February of 2017, a team of document forgers from the CIA had carefully manufactured a letter from the nation’s founding president that predicted Reed’s ascension. They did not know that Reed himself did not intend to leave the new Presidential Palace that had been built for him in Bethlehem, Virginia.
They did not know that an anxious world looked on, weary of a nation returning to its status as an economic and military superpower without any of the former checks and balances that had preserved global stability.
The Americans did not know because they could not hear.
Could not hear the wildcat’s growl.
Could not hear the hooves of the galloping horsemen over the howling wind.
Wow! That was awesome! Was expecting for this to end with the dissolution of the United States but this equally as satisfying for a dystopia.46. Ralph Reed (NR-GA)
January 20, 2017 – present
“I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians...and Christian values. What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.”
America was facing a crisis. Just as things seemed to be improving – reunification, the return of free and fair elections – Ken Lay’s arrest threw the nation into turmoil once more. The Election of 2016 was, perhaps, America’s last chance to right the course, but voters that year ignored a Biblical warning: Beware False Prophets.
Since Robert F. Kennedy’s near-impeachment over government corruption, the American presidency had played host to a series of problematic individuals. Two former presidents (Butz and Lay) had been arrested, one of them had gone to prison. Two presidents (Butz and Cheney) resigned their office; three did not stand for reelection when political headwinds turned against them (Bork, Vidal, and Lay). Two had died in office, one of them had been assassinated in an attack that collapsed the federal government.
There had been secession, near-constant rioting and protests and military occupation of American cities. Nuclear missiles had been lobbed around the globe – and the American continent – as if they were like any other weapon. America’s dramatic retreat from the world stage had emboldened the USSR and extremists in the Middle East. Few considered the nation a superpower in any meaningful way.
Democracy as the founders envisioned was essentially over. The winner of the Election of 1984 had been decided on a legal technicality and within two decades, democratic elections had been replaced with sham elections that produced convenient outcomes for those in power. Routinely, dissidents found themselves imprisoned – lost in a maze of mysterious prisons and camps strewn about the middle of the nation, often never seen or heard again by their loved ones.
Twice, presidents had inspired hope in their people. Both died in office under tragic circumstances.
By 2016, Americans were feeling dejected, lost, and confused, and in that darkness many of them turned to religion for answers. Throughout the Southern states, where partisan elections were still permitted, a new political party, the National Renewal Party, began to win more and more elections. Its leader was Ralph Reed, a charismatic born-again Christian, who preached America’s restoration through a closer relationship with God. Returning America to its Christian roots, Reed argued, was the way back to American excellence.
And the country had been primed to believe him. For ten years, Cheney’s federalization of schools had heavily emphasized the wisdom of the Founders, the promise that America was a shining city upon a hill. That scholarship had provoked a number of books in the last ten years that talked about the “Golden Age” of the Fifties – before the Kennedys came to power and demolished America as we knew it then. There was no fighting about race in the Fifties, these books argued. Instead, everyone knew their place in society. There were stable family units. People went to Church. The national conversation had begun to change in Reed’s favor.
So it was no surprise in 2014 when Reed was elected Governor of Georgia. He mandated school prayer in the morning, banned abortions and Sunday shopping, and he led the state challenges to Cheney’s federal law permitting same-sex marriage. Eventually, Cheney’s own Supreme Court had ruled that marriage should remain, fundamentally, a state issue. Reed had won. So too, he argued, had God.
In the Election of 2016, Reed refused to identify as “Pro” or “Anti” administration. He said he was truly independent – that the nation’s politics should not be defined by your support or opposition to Kenneth Lay or Lynne Cheney but instead should be about finding a greater common purpose. That was what his National Renewal Party was all about.
Funded by a cadre of wealthy donors, Reed ran an aggressive national campaign, promising to unify the country and heal old wounds, including racial tensions. He went into Black churches and Synagogues and compared the struggle of the American people to the book of Exodus – the story of the Jews that many Black Americans had long identified with. Though the federal elections were technically non-partisan, he ran a slate of “Renewal Candidates” in all 50 states, who followed him into office after he soundly defeated two anti-Administration candidates and one pro-Administration candidate.
U.S. Presidential Election, 2016
Ralph Reed/J.C. Watts (Unaffiliated) … 50.4%
Rocky Anderson/Richard Painter (Anti-administration) … 27.6%
Michael Bloomberg/Evan Bayh (Anti-administration) … 15.3%
Dick DeVos/John Yoo (Pro-administration) … 4.6%
Various other candidates … 2.1%
His inauguration in Philadelphia was the most widely attended presidential inauguration in the modern era, and he promised to restore the United States to greatness. At the outset of his presidency, public opinion polling showed that he had the support of 76% of the American people. It was a hopeful time for the nation.
After the arrest and death of Ken Lay in February of 2017 came the “March of Miracles.” The first announced “miracle” was the state of the US economy. Lay’s economic initiatives and Reed’s recent economic stimulus bill, which included tax cuts for most Americans and a significant military build-up that created hundreds of thousands of jobs, meant that unemployment had fallen to just 3.4% and that GDP growth was at its highest point in decades.
The second “miracle” came when a far-left extremist tried to assassinate Reed after a tour of a factory in Ohio. A bullet just barely missed Reed’s head. Another lodged in his chest. Reed was taken to the hospital where he made a full recovery.
But the final and most mysterious “miracle” came at the end of the month when an employee at George Washington’s Mount Vernon home discovered a time capsule in a collection of Washington’s things that had been in storage for years. The capsule was dated for March of 2017 – 220 years after Washington left office. In it was a letter from Washington that prophesied that one day the United States would face a difficult period of decline, but a new leader would emerge and have the bravery and foresight to know a new Constitution was needed – one that built the nation in the image of his vision and of the electorate.
Some historians professed doubts about the document’s authenticity, but a number of scholars were brought in by the President’s administration to verify the documents, and they unanimously confirmed the artifact was a genuine letter from Washington. Reed, overwhelmed by the prophecy, announced that he was retreating to Camp David for a period of “reflection.”
He re-emerged three days later at Mount Vernon for a major address to the nation. Reed said that after thoughtful reflection and prayer, he had decided to convene a Second Constitutional Convention. Each state would send a number of representatives to debate and draft a new Constitution. “We will leave this Convention stronger and more unified than at any point since 1776,” Reed insisted.
At the convention, delegates again debated a revised Constitution. They did away with the Bill of Rights as a series of amendments and instead codified many of them into the original text, including the previous Second Amendment. Delegates voted against an updated version of the Establishment Clause, angering liberals who worried about a state-run religion. In a narrow vote, a form of the Electoral College was restored and the 17th Amendment, which provided for the election of US Senators by popular vote, was stripped out. There was a decided march towards the original copy of the Constitution “as the Founders intended.”
Those who warned about the dramatic departures from the original text were ignored. Some disappeared. For example, the Retention elections would no longer be put to a popular vote. Instead, Congress would vote on retaining the president after four years in office. Congressional elections would still be overseen by the Federal Elections Commission.
One proposal by Reed’s National Renewal Party fell short. They were some 20 votes shy of changing the name of the USA to the “People’s Christian Republic of America.”
The FEC also managed the vote on adopting the new Constitution. By this point, Reed had appointed a new crop of administrators, and the Commission more closely resembled the FEC under Cheney’s leadership than under Lay’s. It seemed that Lay’s collapse and Reed’s landslide election had given the new executive the leverage needed to backslide the country’s democratic standing. There were dissenters, but most of the public was still drunk on the March of Miracles, and those who were loudest in their opposition seemed to vanish without a trace.
The new Constitution was adopted with the support of 75% of voting Americans.
In rural Virginia, they erected a new national capital, Bethlehem, complete with a new Presidential Palace and a new Congressional building.
One of the most important roles was that of Secretary of Education. School curriculum had been an important mechanism for the surge in young Americans who identified with the concept of “American exceptionalism.” To lead the Department, Reed tapped Professor Newt Gingrich of Emory University, who had written many papers on the need to teach patriotism in school. Gingrich’s first edict as Secretary was to mandate that every school day begin with a Christian prayer.
In 2018, tragedy struck the State of Michigan, when arsenic in the water of residents of Dearborn, Michigan had wiped out nearly the whole city. Reed declared that it was an act of terrorism and trained his ire at the Soviet Union. Reed believed that American unity was strongest when the country shared a common enemy instead of turning on each other, and so he decided to call up a common one from the Fifties: Communism.
Schools, news commentators, and columnists preached the values of America’s democratic republic. Meanwhile, they broadcast horror stories from the Soviet regime.
Reed authorized an extensive build-up of the country’s nuclear arsenal in addition to the more traditional military build-up already underway, and his rhetoric made clear who it was he intended to fight.
For the first time in decades, Reed’s four-year presidency marked a time of tranquility and prosperity. Americans were exuberant and a real national identity had come into form. All around America, murals of Reed with a halo around him appeared. Shop owners hung his portrait in their stores. Some cities attempted to lead a resistance, namely Portland, Oregon, but the protesters were painted as radical extremists, and few voiced their disagreement when American troops moved in quickly to quell the rebellion. There was finally stability in America, why was the radical left trying to disrupt it?
In 2020, Congress voted unanimously to retain Reed. Even those of the new opposition party, the Peace and Liberty Party, were supportive. “Now is not the time for disagreement,” said the Senate Minority Leader, Evan Bayh. “It’s time to be Americans.”
Americans didn’t seem to notice when, by 2021, nearly all of their radio and television programming was produced by the state. When Dennis Kucinich, a longtime agitator of the Cheney administration, held a rally to protest the “Reed Regime,” only a few hundred showed up. Kucinich was never seen or heard from again. Noticing the disappearances, many liberals (branded by their opponents as “Godless”), slipped across the border into Canada, which had quietly begun accepting refugees. Some more liberal states simply adopted a quiet means to carry out life differently.
In 2021, when Reed amended the Constitution to include a Human Life Amendment, Peace and Liberty Governors on the West Coast established a secret network to provide individuals with access to abortion. The risks of publicly defying the government had become too great. There were reports that in some schools, when teachers refused to begin class with a prayer, they were fired – never heard from again.
Reed also announced that every American male would go to military training at age 17 for one year. They would serve three years in the military, until turning 21. During that time, they’d also receive a free college education. But it was clear that he was preparing for war.
According to the news, Communism was on the march. Americans were worried. Secretary of War Doug Feith assured the American public that the country was ready to “make the world safe for democracy.”
###
In early 2022, scholars from around the world met to discuss and debate the evolution of democracy with a particular focus on the decline in America. More than half marked the 1984 election as a point of no return. The runner-up was the assassination of Joe Lieberman in 2001.
Some questioned if the United States had really declined at all. In fact, it appeared to be stronger than ever. One German professor remarked, “Nobody does propaganda like the Christians.”
Reed used the academic conference to rally American popular sentiment. America had not declined, he said. America was renewed. Stronger than ever. And after five decades of domestic unrest, scandal and assassination, war and poverty, the weary Americans chose to believe him. By this point, they did not know.
They did not know that CIA agents monitored their every move. That those who dissented from the government were quietly removed from civilization. Many were simply discarded.
They did not know that their election results were manufactured by an FEC that produced results to match the desires of Ralph Reed.
They did not know that the Soviet Union had long stopped paying attention to America – that it had no intentions of instigating a world-ending conflict.
They did not know that in February of 2017, a team of document forgers from the CIA had carefully manufactured a letter from the nation’s founding president that predicted Reed’s ascension. They did not know that Reed himself did not intend to leave the new Presidential Palace that had been built for him in Bethlehem, Virginia.
They did not know that an anxious world looked on, weary of a nation returning to its status as an economic and military superpower without any of the former checks and balances that had preserved global stability.
The Americans did not know because they could not hear.
Could not hear the wildcat’s growl.
Could not hear the hooves of the galloping horsemen over the howling wind.
Well, his crazy-fundie-POTUS character in The Dead Zone, yes. Well spotted.