New America

[Raellus]

For anyone trying to explain/justify the existence of New America in the T2k timeline(s), I recommend the HBO documentary, An American Bombing: the Road to April 19th.

It traces the three phases of the right-wing anti-government militia movement, starting with the farm crisis in the 1980s.

An interesting tidbit was that, during the 1990s (maybe earlier), there was a pre-paid phone card issued by a right-wing militia group that was distributed to members, allies, and sympathizers in order to network whilst making gov't surveillance and tracking more difficult.

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[castlebravo92]

The "big" problem with New America is it's basically a seditious criminal conspiracy spanning at least a couple of decades involving several hundred thousand members (pre-war). And criminal conspiracies involving a handful of people fall apart all of the time due to things as mundane as infidelity (cheated on spouses or girlfriends are notorious for turning in their conspiracy involved husbands or boyfriends) or someone getting jealous because a rival made 32nd tier and they are stuck at 31st tier.

That's why I like the idea of NA being a CIA/FBI honeypot to trap seditions right-wing zealots, and once the nukes flew, the official government people involved in the op died or disappeared. The government knew about them, and was "managing New America"...until it wasn't. Thus, finally freed from his handlers, Carl Hughes starts to believe (or maybe he always believed) in his own messianic propaganda and releases the Eagle Papers plan on Jan 1, 2001.

[Vespers War]

Given New America's initials, I figured it was loosely based on the National Alliance, the band of neo-Nazis led by the author of The Turner Diaries. The group was openly seditious and ran its own publishing house, record label, and radio programming carried on 22 stations for decades with the most significant government interference being the IRS revoking their fake church's tax-free status after a year.