New America

[castlebravo92]

Explaining New America

New America

GDW positioned New America, under the leadership of Carl Hughes, as being in a good position to take over the crumbling United States as of Jan 2001. The question one might have is how does an organization generate hundreds of thousands of members, stockpile metric tons of weapons, ammunition, and resources over several years, and manage to escape the attention of US intelligence agencies like the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA? The short answer is they did not.

In fact, New America was the brain child of a faction within the CIA. By the 70s, the US intelligence community had become adept at infiltrating and subverting radical domestic groups on the left and the right, from the Weather Underground to the KKK. In some cases, the US government was doing this for appropriate reasons, whether criminal justice or national security related. In other cases, however, factions would sometimes manipulate these groups for more nefarious purposes (the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X being rumored instances of cutout groups being used and manipulated this way).

The original intent for New America was for it to be a Pied Piper for right wing extremists. Coalescing around an “independently wealthy”, charismatic leader with proper anti-government bonafides, New America would crowd out competing, uncontrolled right-wing anti-government groups, and from there the movement could be steered into oblivion if desired (much like the left-wing movements of the 60s and early 70s), or leveraged for political advantage, black ops, or any number of other plots along the way. The government would help clear the field for New America by using Federal law enforcement to go after seemingly ideologically similar (but competing) organizations like Posse Commitatus and Convenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord.

With that aim in mind, Carl Hughes was approached after his failed Presidential bid in 1976 with a proposal: Hughes would be “sheep dipped” as a convicted felon, and while “serving” his sentence (it’s never been established that Hughes actually ever saw the inside of a prison cell), he would develop his political ideology, and on his release form the organization of New America. Hughes agreed wholeheartedly, stating that his life’s only ambition was to serve his great nation. Initially, the CIA had planned on using propaganda teams to assist, but to their surprise, Hughes threw himself into the work, writing newsletters and manifestos that only rarely had to be tweaked, as it were. In the early days, the CIA funneled considerable amounts of “off-books” money to New America. Some of this money came from CIA owned or controlled private firms, other CIA assets, some was funneled from the cocaine and heroin drug smuggling pipelines set up with Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.

While the CIA faction that had dreamed up New America always envisioned it as being a useful domestic pawn, Hughes was playing the long game. With CIA money (and some of his own), he built deep political connections into the Republican establishment and conservative Christian circles. Mostly at local and state levels, but his PAC was a difference maker in quite a few elections in the late 80s and 90s. With CIA protection, he was able to form militant militia groups – some of these were set up from beginning to be sacrificial lambs for law enforcement (with no direct or indirect ties to New America), but others were used to funnel “stolen” weapons from US armories and build up trained cadres. Additionally, and most critically, over time he converted his CIA handlers over to his side. As things began to heat up in Europe and China, The Powers That Be mostly lost interest in right-wing extremism and external CIA funding was shut off. But by this time New America had become self-sustaining with licit and illicit sources of funding (many of the CIA contractors who were smuggling drugs and weapons for the CIA were also working in parallel with a number of organizations, including New America).

Shortly after the nukes fell in late 1997, most of the CIA staff who knew about the origins of New America were either dead…or working for Hughes.

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A second question that might come up is "but yeah, New America is still a virulently racist organization, how did they mobilize support in these broader communities after the bombs fell when they are running literal slave camps with elsies and the like?"

By being less oppressive than the other guy.

The long answer is that MilGov is an incredibly oppressive government, however noble the intentions of the soldiers might be. The powers granted/assumed by the military via the Presidential proclamation of Federal Emergency Plan D and the implementation of martial law are draconian. Effectively, according to Milgov, private property has been abolished and escheated back to the state: vehicles, land, food, fuel, weapons, clothing, tools, medicine, everything. Anything deemed to be vital or necessary for the running of the war or the state is to surrendered on demand. All able bodied individuals are conscriptable, and outside of growing food (and remember, carrying a surplus is dangerous - and it's no longer your land that you are farming), labor is the only reliable way of getting fed. Anyone accused and convicted of hoarding (or any number of other crimes like possessing contraband or damaging morale) are sentenced to hard labor battalions where the rations are starvation rations, the work is brutal and dangerous, and the life expectancy is intentionally short (there isn't enough food to simply imprison people anyway). And since "trials" are done by military tribunal with military appointees representing the government and the defense - most accused are convicted. It's not unusual to be accused in the morning, convicted before noon, and clearing rubble by hand by afternoon. And this is in Milgov controlled areas that are considered "organized". Outside of those areas, Milgov units are seen as no better than marauders because - just like marauders - they'll come in, loot everything to haul back to Colorado or elsewhere, leaving communities with nothing - no fuel, no food, no weapons, and they use violence indiscriminately when communities object. And a lot of citizens got a sour taste of the government in 1998 when, in order to "restore control" with "extreme measures", the military responded by killing hundreds of thousands of hungry and starving Americans in urban and suburban communities - not all of the killed were rioters hell bent on looting and violence, but the military did not always make a distinction between a hungry, peaceful crowd and a riot.

And this is the life in the organized Milgov enclaves. Out in the wilds, life is absolutely Malthusian. Nasty, brutish, and short.

So, when comparing the vision of New America to the America of 1995, it might not seem that great. But when comparing it to what most Americans are enduring in 2001, it's often a step up. Even for the elsies.