[lordroel]

Originally Posted by mpipes

Assume this is set in the 2030 time frame?

Middle 2020s to 2030s.

2 – Years of Lead

There had been acts of political violence in the Teens, the Noughties and back throughout the history of the United States. However, the multitude and severity of the politically-motivated acts of domestic terror undertaken during the Twenties would lead to a columnist in the Washington Post deeming the decade ‘the Years of Lead’. The term came from aboard – Italy in the late 20th Century – were there was relentless violence. The term took a-hold whereas the similar ‘Troubles’ (echoing Ulster) positioned by various internet-only media outlets lost out.

In July 2022, the husband and twin sons of Fay Fry were murdered in a home invasion. The Illinois Senator was in Washington while her family were slain in their Springfield residence. The murders were livestreamed over the internet. There had been high-profile live-streams before on the Facebook and YouTube platforms… but this was something else. The two companies were accused of acting far too late and their defences as to why they didn’t stop the broadcast rang hallow. Those three deaths shook the country. Fry’s family were helpless and brutally murdered while begging for their lives. The masked pair of killers, who took absolute joy in what they did, made assertions during the killings that they did this due to Fry’s politics. She was a well-known Democrat who’d faced death threats before. However, no one expected this. Federal and state forces sought the fleeing killers. They were identified as members of a right-wing militia from Kansas. One was arrested by the FBI in Illinois but the other managed to make it back to his home state. Kansas had passed a state law months earlier giving itself extensive domestic policing powers which contrasted sharply with those of the federal government’s ability to enforce national law within the state. Whether the domestic terrorist knew this wasn’t known but was in Kansas when the FBI sought to arrest him. Kansas had no intention of shielding him – the slaying of the Fry family united all Americans, at least for a while anyway – but the ‘federal invasion’, as one of the state’s Republican senators called it, led to a stand-off between Kansas’ state police and armed FBI agents… with that killer in the middle. It was live on television where armed officers pointed guns at each other and exchanged insults. Kansas took their captive into custody and would later extradite him to Illinois – from a Red state to a Blue state – but refused federal involvement. Public attention through August and September ’22 shifted from the Fry family murders to this stand-off between a state and the federal government. That division was the ultimate outcome of the killings in Springfield.

Race riots in the inner cities and the armed establishment of so-called ‘autonomous zones’ by left-wing militia groups took place during 2022, ’23 & ’24. These were events played out in the media which gripped the nation. The partisan divide was apparent when it came to the opinions of how people saw these events. Supposed inaction by the 47th President was criticised by the Republicans who demanded that she act to intervene against protesters. At the same time, when federal action was taken, there came the criticism that the state’s rights were being violated when there were measures within them: the unrest gripped areas within Red and Blue states leading to much mental gymnastics. On the Democratic side, the 47th President came under fire from people within her own party for acting and not acting: it depended upon where this was/wasn’t done based on what part of the country which the violence which came with the protesters was seen. Looting, arson and killings occurred. Police shootings and arrests by federal officers took place. Right-wing militia elements, always well-armed made appearances in front of the media with assertions made that should more violence grip certain Red states, they would intervene against that and also make a stand against federal forces too. In Miami, during October ’23, this came to a head in front of a federal building in that Florida city. A left-wing mob – Marxist protesters, not Progressives – surrounded the building and were threatening to storm it to set it ablaze. A group of armed militia from a well-known right-wing force turned up. Shooting started with Miami police officers caught in the middle. Eight deaths were incurred. In the aftermath, while criticising Washington and blaming the 47th President for it all, Florida, a redder state than it had been a few years past, gave itself extensive civil law-and-order powers. The state’s governor soon signed this into law in the face of (weak) internal and (strong) national vocal opposition to what Florida had done. Miami, a Blue area of the state surrounded by a sea of Red, was under near martial law for the rest of ’23. Journalists from Blue states and unfriendly media organisations were banned from entering first Miami and then the state as a whole.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) had been for many long years focused on firearms than the other two elements of its name. It was a federal agency with wide-ranging powers. Republican efforts in the Senate had blocked the 47th President’s choice of director and then impeached the man they first approved when the AFT did what they were supposed to: enforce national gun laws. In May ’23, the agency had an acting director put there using an Executive Order when the senate refused to confirm the president’s nominee. Within months, at the behest of the White House, the AFT seemed to gain a new lease of life under new leadership. Agents moved to enforce the law more extensively than they had previously done so due to the appearance of so many armed militia groups nationwide. Not all of them were so perfect with their legal paperwork and select groups had access to illegal weaponry too. Far left groups were targeted alongside right-wing ones but when the latter were subject to AFT raids, in Red states, the Republicans were up in arms. Federal officers were said to have violated state’s rights during seizure operations – to confiscate guns as well as explosives – across the country. When the White House stuck with the ATF, the battle with the 47th President went nuclear. Congress defunded the ATF ahead of the stated goal of state’s setting up their own agencies. The consequences were soon going to be apparent as no one was enforcing the law.

In November, an explosion rocked the Washington suburb of Georgetown. A car bomb blew up one of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. Susan Meadow was one of the few liberal members in that conservative-dominated body and was killed alongside three others. FBI investigators were unable to discover who committed this infamous act. The following month saw a trio of acts of political terror elsewhere in the nation. A Democratic Congressman was shot and badly wounded by a sniper when in his California district. In what was regarded by federal investigators as a tit-for-tat attack, the next afternoon saw a gunman use an illegal automatic rifle to spray with bullets the office of a Republican Congresswoman in Mississippi. Elizabeth Evans and six others died with the attacker escaping detection. Days before Christmas, when the Minnesota Legislature was meeting in Saint Paul, a bomb went off in the senate chamber. Democrats and Republican lawmakers alike were targeted and slain in that (recently turned) Red state. Twenty-three deaths were the outcome with the perpetrators of the Saint Paul bombing unknown.

Things got worse the next year.

In early 2024, when on the campaign trail, the 47th President is suddenly pulled away from the crowd by the Secret Service with the shouts of ‘gun, gun, gun’. An armed man is pounced on before he can fire on her with all this caught on live television. A week later, at a presidential debate, there is a suspicious package found in a last minute sweep of the event in Las Vegas. Only this last check avoids what could have been a terrible blast targeting the president as well as candidates such as Walsh: all other security was bypassed by whomever planted that bomb. In Oklahoma the following month, a CNN reporter is shot to death. She is in the Red state the night before a law comes into effect banning her media organisation from Oklahoma. Arrested by local authorities, the shooter, a neo-Nazi from a militia group, is eager to explain why he did what he did as he seeks media attention and national notoriety. On the violence goes through the following months of ’24. In upstate New York, a Republican state legislator is badly wounded in a shooting by an unknown gunman. A major fundraiser for the Democrats is killed – and his eight month old grandson left in intensive care – when a letter bomb explodes at his Delaware home. Caught on camera is the shooting by two masked gunmen on the outskirts of Denver of a crowd of people registering as volunteers for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign for November: eight are left dead there and a shootout with police & the perpetrators later sees another three lives lost. In rural Pennsylvania, a senior staffer to a Democratic Congressman – who’ll be fighting hard for his re-districted seat in the upcoming election in this Red state – is kidnapped from his boyfriend’s apartment. A body is left there and then the staffer turns up the next day also killed, with a message of hate carved into his bare chest. A police officer’s funeral is targeted by a failed bomb attack in Michigan but the next morning, two policemen in Detroit are killed by gunfire in a deliberate attack. A bitter state sentate campaign race in North Carolina – one of the few Purple states left – is suspended when the brother of one candidate kills his opponent’s wife. This is no domestic dispute but an assassination due to politics. Walsh and Allen spend the presidential campaign surrounded by Secret Service agents. Events are cancelled or curtailed with regard to crowd numbers. Assassination fears run high. The Secret Service has an agent with the Commerce Secretary yet he fails to stop her being murdered when in Arizona. A noted Democrat who was campaigning on behalf of an old friend running for Congress in that Blue state, Traci Bennet is shot to death when the member of the Cabinet supposed to be protected against that.

In the last days leading up to the elections in November 2024, as Walsh and Allen battle it out while the 47th President is effectively a lame duck, there are more incidents. In Arkansas, California, New Jersey & Wisconsin, political terrorism occurs. A Democrat running a no-hope campaign for governor in the Red state of Arkansas has shots fired at him: they miss but an innocent bystander is killed. In Sacramento, the California state capital, a pipe bomb thrown into a political rally for a Democratic candidate for the US House wounds him: two others die. Police in New Jersey arrest a man outside the house of the state legislature speaker who was planning to kill that Democratic politician. Up in Wisconsin, a sitting Congressman, the Democrat Paul Gonzalez, is strangled to death in a public bathroom with his killer evading custody. There are false alarms nationwide with terror fears. Armed groups, militia of various political affiliations, are shown on the news boasting of their strengths and sharing messages of hate.

Against such a backdrop, Walsh wins that presidential election. He inherits the leadership of a country beset by political violence with no sign of the Years of Lead coming to an end.