A Love Letter to America - The End Game

Will we survive?

Washington DC 01 SEP 2024

Blind-spots

I spent all of my adult life assessing national security threats for two governments - first Australia, and then the United States. As a short-term locally employed member of staff in the Australian embassy on Scott Circle, I wrote reports on political developments in the US and their implications for Australia. Many years later, as an Australian defense official, I provided the government strategic assessments of the US, its place in the world, and its current and likely future foreign and defense policy settings, in order to anticipate US policy responses to global events and their implications for Australia. I had studied the history of US foreign policy at Sydney University (under Prof Neville Meaney). This prompted me to become an exchange student to the US (where I was unexpectedly invited to do the embassy gig over the summer). At Berkeley, I doubled-down on my new DC-bug by selecting Prof Ray Wolfinger’s excellent course on the US Congress. I saw an ad on a campus noticeboard and next thing I knew, I was getting my ‘DC-hit’ by interning with a local Member of Congress. So two days a week, I complimented my studies with poli-sci “lab work” in the Federal Building in San Fran.

America in those days was a very happy, future-focused, can-do, super-friendly, exciting place to be. We had just won the Cold War. My embassy office had poster-sized pictures of George HW Bush and Prime Minister Bob Hawke laughing and back slapping on the White House lawn. I had one of the best bosses anyone could hope to have. He always got more invitations than he could possibly accept, so he sent me off in his limo to a series of events. You try being a 22 yr old rolling around DC in the #3 embassy car to official parties with congressional heavyweights when America was on top of the world and tell me you wouldn’t want to find a way to stay or come back at some point! [In those days both sides partied together - there was mutual respect for public/private boundaries].

Following an improbable life journey, I realized the dream, emigrating to the US and joining the national security community. I came to find that my ‘outside-looking-in’ perspective on the US came in handy. In particular, I could explain to my colleagues the “paradoxical” ways others perceived the US and why they sometimes reacted to our policies in ways we did not expect. Equally, I could explain to them that America’s exceptional governance structures and the mindset that was needed to service them, were not always obvious to others. This way, I could help both sides see and understand each other a little bit better. I learned strategic empathy by using it to make sense of my own personal experience spent between Australia and the US. Sometimes similar cultures are much harder to really understand and navigate than those that are obviously different.

Whether working for the Australian or American national security establishments, US stability was a bedrock assumption. American institutions were unquestionably robust. The people who worked within them were united not just by an oath but by a deep commitment to realizing the ideals upon which America was founded. America was exceptional, but no one would argue it was free of contradictions, let alone perfect. There was always work to be done, to keep moving forward, inching ever closer to the ideal.

Like any country, America had domestic issues. Where these strayed from civil discourse, they remained a policing matter where they rightfully belonged. Domestic groups opposed to America were a handful of ultra-fringe nutters more committed to inflammatory attention-seeking rhetoric than revolution. No domestic groups had a serious capability to threaten, let alone overthrow, the US government (USG). The KKK and militia groups were a nuisance that on a few occasions did cross the national security threshold - for example in the Oklahoma City Bombing. The only people who believed such acts were capable of accelerating the realization of an actual revolution were their deranged members numbering a couple of hundred losers.

Invulnerability

Internationally, America was strategically invulnerable. No country would dare attack the United States. Terrorists cleverly used that assumption as a cloak for a sucker punch. In the intervening 23 years they have not yet successfully landed a second. Nor should they, given we have spent $3 trillion+ on countering them at home and abroad. Usama bin Laden had two very limited and interconnected objectives. Punishment and deception. He successfully accomplished them both. He wanted Americans to suffer the humiliation and anguish he blamed America for inflicting on the people in his part of the world. He also wanted to trigger an over-reaction, causing America to waste blood and treasure chasing ghosts all over the world. This we did until we made a ghost out of him.

America has since learned how to defend against, and if necessary, withstand the occasional terrorist attack. Even an attack using a chemical, radiological or biological device, or the targeting of a nuclear power plant by conventional means, would not cause as much damage as you might imagine.¹ It would have psychological impact, but that is the outer limit of the effect terrorists can achieve. America was as likely to surrender to UBL as it was to Timothy McVeigh or David Koresh.

Tipping Point

Then something fundamentally changed. The American people started showing signs of radicalization and extremism. Somehow we managed to import the mentality we were fighting overseas.² The same conspiracy-theory driven political dynamic impelling AQ and the Taliban (and their supporters), started showing up in Main St, USA.³ The bedrock American idea that all citizens have an equal right to think as they pleased and express themselves as they saw fit - evaporated. Freedom, reason, and tolerance for difference were replaced with absolutism, orthodoxy, and conformity. Discussion and debate were abandoned as signs of weakness. Any attempt to engage in them had suddenly become treason. Now one group was in charge and everyone else had to get used to it. Or else. Peaceful resolution of disputes through negotiation, bargaining and compromise were replaced with ultimatums and threats of violence. Elections were replaced with coup d’etat’s complete with scaffolds ready to execute heretics. The primary purpose of politics had become to humiliate, degrade, and punish anyone who thought differently. “Cruelty was the point” as Adam Serwer observed of the new order.

Overnight, America had developed a massive totalitarian problem. It was not geographically limited. Half the population everywhere was suddenly in favor of killing their fellow Americans for not worshipping a game show host. Because this was so profoundly dissonant to the prior 248 years of our history, to everything we stood and fought for, few could see it and still less dared say its name. The speed of its arrival also masked its malignancy. Reasonable people would examine the evidence and dismiss it as an exaggeration. Some kind of mind trick. “It cant happen here”. Even national security analysts who should know better, maintained things were no where near as bad as they seemed. This was a phase, a quirky reaction to some acute stressors on the system - lost forever wars, economic crises, mainstream political parties that both abandoned the little guy by offshoring his job and pandering to Wall St. Then all of that turbulence was capped-off by a full-blown pandemic and all its attendant psychological turmoil of genuine isolation, fear, and political manipulation through social media.⁴

Transgression

Never in a million years did it occur to me that I would live through a close facsimile of 1930s Germany. And NEVER in America. America, the ‘leader of the free world’, ‘champion of democracy’, and victor over fascism in WWII and communism in the Cold War (really part III of a war that started in 1914). In the past decade, I have had many questions answered. Now I know why the German people did not realize what was happening. They could not believe the depths of the depravity unfolding among their leaders and filtering down to their fellow citizens. Such things were not possible in a civilized society (Beethoven, Goethe, Einstein). They had an excuse. There was no historical precedent for Nazism. What was our excuse?

I had studied extremism, written a PhD about how the west countered it in the past, and had worked with the world’s best practitioners in US Special Operations in combatting the most modern manifestations of it. The radicalization process evident in Iraq, Syria, Libya, was now evident in Phoenix, AZ, Howell, MI, and Johnstown, PA. Having said all that, it still felt incredibly transgressive to step out of the shadows to declare the President of the United States the leader of a enemy terror network driven by a fascist ideology hell bent on destroying the US Constitution.

January 6 was the watershed. This newsletter, CWII, was started on Jan 15. It represented a book I had already written (but not yet published) on the rise of American totalitarianism.

It was important to me that the pubic understand what was happening. Trump was an old school fascist. Maga was an extremist political movement with a paramilitary wing - just like the nazi’s and the brown shirts. Trump had a hold over his followers that went way beyond the political into a very rare psychologically-bonded relationship, that once established is usually only broken in death. Virtually no one else was saying this at the time. This newsletter is filled with examples and explanations .

Trump was a charismatic leader cut from the same cloth as Hitler, UBL, and David Koresh. There was no practical difference between them as far as methods were concerned. He attempted a sloppy disorganized last minute desperate coup d’etat to stay in power and only failed by the narrowest of margins. It is still hard to accept a game show host could be the undoing of the genius of Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Washington. Therein lies the danger. After all, this has been a story of underestimation built on disbelief on one side, and overestimation built on too much faith on the other. Historically, in strategic affairs, a combination of over and underestimation has always resulted in disaster.

Bunker Phase

Trump and his supporters already know they are going to lose the 2024 election. However, this time he is prepared. He has surrounded himself with criminals with nothing left to lose and pardons to gain if they retake power. There will be no restraint this time.

They have issued the blueprint - project 2025 - something I highlighted years ago. I am glad to see the media finally woke up.

There is something else very important to notice about Trump’s 2024 “campaign”. It started at Waco Tx and is touring “sun down” towns wherever possible. Thats not an accident. That is a call to arms.

Trump will burn it all to the ground and blame his own followers for weakness if his planned coup 2.0 and violence does not work. Hitler issued his famous “Nero order”. Thankfully, the last Nazis could see the end was inevitable and decided their necks would be safer if they did not destroy Paris and their own country. Maga now face a similar dilemma.

When Trump inevitably loses, he will be counting on the local apparatchiks maga have been flooding into in election offices in swing states to fabricate new “stolen election” stories. It’s the same play book. Remember Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss? It’s going to be the same lies but better organized and perhaps assisted with AI video this time. When that does not work, they will activate the paramilitaries to attack key facilities in an attempt to try and kick something off. I wrote this assessment for the midterms that did not happen then but might in January. Still the good news about the midterms was the rejection of maga Secretary of State candidates that would have done so much to advance the cause of election denial in 2025.

Joy to the Rescue?

To me, the most amazing thing about the DNC convention was 4 days of solid normalcy. That was shocking because it was so “new”. After years of exposure to non-stop mango-Mussolini, his criminal cabal, hateful followers, family of freaks, and all their perversions on saturation blast during hedonist parties at MAL (the modern day Führerbunker just hours before the end); seeing the well-adjusted happy Harris and Walz families, people I would be delighted to have as my neighbors, was a tonic - it was the release of a heavy burden. For the first time in years, I finally again saw the “happy, future-focused, can-do, super-friendly, exciting place” America used to be and I wanted it back so badly. I think millions of Americans, even maga-adjacent Americans, perhaps especially maga-adjacent Americans, were reminded of what normal looked like and wanted back in.

Democrats usually screw things up with infighting and lack of discipline. Not this time. It’s been pitch perfect. Because they know this is the last opportunity to stop this country from becoming a copy of nazi Germany. But far more dangerous because the power of surveillance, manipulation, and control is millions of times more potent now than it was then. With no ‘America to come and save America’ as we assisted Britain in saving Europe from the nazi jackboot, our last election would be just that. There will be no resistance movement. The power of the executive is far too strong. As goes America, so goes the world. Democracy would be quickly crushed everywhere as Trump allied with the axis of autocracy. The world would descend into a new feudalism from which there simply could be no escape.

The last burst of summer

The week of the DNC conference coincided with the arrival of “phony fall” - that change of season that always comes a few weeks too soon and is immediately snapped back to a harsh summer after a few glorious days of no humidity, 75 and sunny. I could open my widows for the first time since the spring to let fresh air into my American castle. At night it dipped to the mid 60s bringing that special delight of cool fresh air over the warm comforter. The kind of perfection that makes you want to linger just that bit longer.

The following week summer snapped back with gusto - 100+ and all the humidity the Washington swamp could muster. The windows slammed shut and the air was set back to “Arctic” just to get by. But it is no big deal, because you know it will only be for a few weeks until that tease of a turn in the seasons returns and settles down, making us long for the summer just past.

A few weeks ago we got a glimpse of normal America. It was refreshing and revitalizing. From now until possibly mid next year, but hopefully just the end of January, we are getting the last full blast of hate and vitriol. Thumbs up at an Arlington gravesite shows there never will be a bottom… rather the descent is accelerating.

Maga has pre-planned political antics, legal challenges, and paramilitary attacks to follow the election they know they will lose. They have no strategy to win votes. Their only strategy is disruption, chaos, confusion and violence. GA is the laboratory of the crooked political schemes they are cooking up. Don’t worry, they have them for all the battleground states. The only way this tried and tested playbook has a chance of gaining traction is if the election is close - to give the appearance of a contest that might have gone the other way. See the next posting that covers some wargames on how things might turn out.

So a blow-out election is needed. One whose outcome is so obvious and overwhelming that even maga know they have been soundly beaten. That should stop all but the dead-enders from trying their antics - knowing it will make them look stupid and land them in jail. If they have no hope of winning they wont risk further serious consequences. America needs to seriously revisit why these consequences still have not arrived 4 years after the last coup - thereby preparing the ground for this next one. In this sense, the constitution and the entire system has failed. Thats a major global security issue.

We have also got incredibly lucky with the turn of events: from the early debate, President Biden stepping down, and the Dems responding by getting everything right - the right ticket, a great message, and genuine unity. Without a landslide as a guarantee to stop most of the maga stupidity, I feel obliged to report to you that a serious threat remains. The good news is that pro-democracy forces have had time to think and prepare too. For what that looks like … wait for the next installment… “Wargame”…

1. Terrorist use of WMDs are hard to pull-off and a nuclear war-head almost impossible. Do they bring them in or try to find or make one here. Chemical weapons are really not WMDs. Their effects are very limited - not mass. Terrorists tend to kill themselves trying to make them. Radiological bombs relatively easy to make (low grade radiation materials widely available) but very minor physical damage. Again, terrorists likely to kill themselves making them. Attacking a US nuclear power plant - for reference - Chernobyl was an internal meltdown - but it only killed 31 people at the time and total deaths directly caused by radiation are hard to calculate but less than 4000. A nuclear warhead is not possible without state sponsorship and we would nuke the sponsor.

2. I believe we did in many respects. In the modern era, returning troops being promised, then denied, great things have formed the bedrock of radical movements, including famously communism and nazism. This is why the current era is so similar to the 1920s and 30s. Many of the same themes have returned.

3. I am not implying the causes/grievances/motivations - real or claimed - are the same. They are not. Each group - AQ, Taliban, Nazis (1930s), Maga, - has its own unique issues, interests, style, politics/religion (or claims to these things in the service of a political goal). However, the dynamic of radicalization is the same. Each group has similar psychological roots and follower-leader psychology.

4. A million times more potent - indeed VIRAL - than traditional media. So we had 2 viruses - both deadly and both without inoculation.