The U.S. and Israel have decapitated Iran and probably are working on the neck and shoulders of the religious leadership. The apparent thinking is that Iran will soon run out of people volunteering to be leaders or change their evil ways.
That makes sense. At least at first thought it does. Let’s run through a little thought experiment I have had a few times with some close friends a decade or two ago.
Imagine an alternate timeline where SCOTUS came up with different result in the Heller decision and things went downhill from there. Today, in this alternate timeline, U.S. gun owners realize all they have left is the 100 million guns and a few billion rounds of ammo they had hidden before everything else was confiscated. They still have the firepower and now the motivation to remove the tyrants and restore liberty and the true meaning of the U.S. constitution.
In a coordinated attack, with the help of insiders during the state of the Union address, they take out POTUS, all his cabinet, the VP, and the Speaker of the House. They then make it known that everyone who voted for the unconstitutional (in the eyes of the gun owners) laws must be removed from office and replaced with constitutionally friendly politicians. If not, minds will continue to see the light in the most literal sense.
What would the response be? Would the remaining anti-gun politicians go into hiding or give up power? Or would they double (and/or triple) down?
I believe that the smart money, in the best-case scenario, says, “That’s an interesting question.” The more likely result is a police state and mass killings of innocent people.
What are your thoughts on what to expect in this alternate U.S. timeline and what that might tell us about what the Iran response will be?
Pretty much the scenario you outlined. Uprisings don’t need guns but they do need organization. Gandhi and Walesa led completely unarmed uprisings. Collins and Begin were perennially short of weapons. Of course, we did have weapons but the key was organization.
“Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
We lost at Lexington but won at Concord when the reinforcements arrived from every village and farm.
If the tribunals for violating USC 242 were immediately held on the House floor, you’d end up with about 450 out of 525 Representatives and Senators looking like overripe fruit (i.e., hanging from a tree).
There would be no point in telling them that they would be removed from office, since any oath they swore to stay out of politics at any level would be null and void. Besides which, none of the gun-banners have even a shred of courage, so they would lie like a cheap rug.
Putting their heads on pikes outside the House and Senate chamber might “encourage the others”, the newly-elected ones, to not grotesquely violate the Constitution, but the effect wouldn’t last more than a few election cycles.
The bunch of things we really need would be to amend the Constitution (or re-write it) to eliminate the 16th Amendment (get the government back to its original sources of taxation), the 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators) which killed the notion of actual federalism in which state legislatures elected the Senators.
We would need to add some simple little things like term limits (2 for President and VP, 2 for Senators, and 4 for House Reps) to keep the politicians and their aides amateurs. We neither want nor need a professional political class. And once you’ve run your terms in the federal government you are not allowed to ever run for any political office again, not even dog-catcher.
We also need financial transparency on anyone running for ANY government office, from dog-catcher to mayor to state legislature on up. Your finances can be audited at any time and by anyone, for no reason at all, if you’re sucking from the government teat. And if even the vaguest suspicion arises based on an audit you are automatically removed from office until either convicted of acquitted. Conviction of misfeasance or malfeasance in office is a life term at hard labor, since you stole from the taxpayers who entrusted you with that position, which you violated.
Naw, this is all a nice little fantasy. It would most probably end with a return to some form of feudalism, either on the state or more local level. Western civilization would fall without the economic and military force of the United States to keep that fragile web of international (and inter-state) trade together.
“And once you’ve run your terms in the federal government you are not allowed to ever r̶u̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶e̶ receive remuneration from any government in the United States or serve voluntarily on a government-affiliated commission again, not even dog-catcher.”
Come from the private “real job” sector, serve for a limited period, return to the private “real job” sector.
What’s this bullshit about only limiting elected government officials? Part of the current problem with the federal government is that so much of the law making has been offloaded to executive agencies, shifting power to the permanent bureaucrats, something that will be exacerbated with term limits in the legislature.
Or you could just return to the spoils system; at least then the elected officials would be responsible for what the bureaucrats do. And the legislature wouldn’t be able to hide behind ‘nonpolitical’ bureaucratic expertise.
“Or you could just return to the spoils system”
I have advocated for that for some time. What he have now is simply a “spoils for only one party” system.
“They then make it known that everyone who voted …….”
I imagine “They” would be rounded up or killed ASAP by whoever was left in some power position in the government. I doubt the military would allow a coup that decapitated an elected government.
The economy would take a nosedive. State and local officials would try and maintain some order but would be targets for the opposition. Some would crack down hard on the rebels, others might embrace the cause. No side would want chaos or anarchy.
I hope never to see that.
“I imagine “They” would be rounded up or killed ASAP by whoever was left in some power position in the government.”
The only realistic way to make a scenario like this one (or some lesser ones that might to do some real good, actually) would be if those who did it stayed and surrendered afterward, which then resulted in their death.
That those who did it *died for it*, knowingly and explicitly, would show the level of commitment.
It’s the thing with the highest chance to avoid our whole society falling apart afterward.
“I hope never to see that.”
Same… but there are things I would like to see much less.
It might start that way, but the members of the police state like cops and the military have families too – that’s why CW2.0 is going to be ugly as hell.
CW2 will not have the same sectional split as CW1. It will resemble the Spanish Civil War more than anything America has experienced so far. CW1 was described as “brother against brother”, but only in terms of the border states and some parts of the southern states where slavery was unpopular. The Spanish Civil War was so destructive and divisive that its economy was still in ruins ten years after the fighting stopped, and so divisive that I was told by a Spanish engineer that as of our conversation in 1985, his grandmother still harbored hatreds and resentments.
We are unaware of atrocities committed during CW1? That will change quickly for CW2.
At this point, it’s not so much the mullahs that run Iran as the IRGC, and they have a great deal of depth for passing chain-of-command decision-making as they lose people, because they know we have precision weapons and brag about our “decapitation strike” capability. They planned for this.
But, granting your premise- the main problem is that the US population has been gaslit and subjected to a massive demoralization psyop for generations. We are not unified, we are not a coherent people with anything to fight for. In these parts any call for solidarity among heritage Americans to fight for our rights would be instantly denounced as racist and sabotaged from within. There would not likely be anything like an organized uprising, only individualized and sporadic violence, each one just one-and-done.
There is far too much surveillance for anyone to get away with much for very long. It would be a long, very ugly struggle, likely with a similar magnitude as the Reconquista… though with a greatly accelerated timeline (compared to 7 centuries) given the nature of food and energy production and distribution, and the fact that so many people are single or transing there will hardly even be many more generations of heritage-Americans who care about anything as quaint as ‘rights.” The number of white women who actively want a career as a replaceable economic production unit over kids means we are nearing the end-game in any case.
You don’t start from the top with a flash and bang and work your way down.
You start at the bottom and work your way UP, as quietly as possible. Hard to run a Police State when you don’t have police boots on the ground because they’ve all quit.
Preferably decentralized, without organization as that’s what make it easier for “them” to catch you.
The novel “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross, while in dire need of a good editor and perhaps a re-write, outlines in general how that might be done.
I am not familiar with that novel, but I said for some years that the lowest body count option to get out of the predicament we were in was probably 8 – four utterly unrelated instances of some low-level functionary or judge being killed in broad daylight, for explicit reasons of having violated their oaths of office and violated the Constitution and our social compact, with the killer not trying to “get away with it” in any way.
At that point, the low-level functionaries and such would realize that THEY were not safe when they did those bad things. They would have reason to stand up to their superiors on this stuff (or quit).
We did not do that (obviously), and the body count has already been much higher than 8, but at this point, I’m not sure it would work, anymore – it might make the whole thing fall apart if the right started actually, physically fighting back against the left’s aggression.
Well, unless the response was massive and happened all at once, but even if that succeeded, the body count (almost all on the left, but still) would be horrible. I am greatly in the market for some solution that does NOT involve that kind of thing, you know?
Rather than try to answer, I’ll just point to Matthew Bracken who answered far better than I can. His “Enemies trilogy” and also his short story “What I saw at the coup”.
History shows that people in power NEVER give up that power willingly or peacefully. They ONLY relinquish power at the point of a gun…or when they are dead. And our “politicians” are NOT the ones wielding the power. They are figureheads…who get changed and rotated out from time to time.
Also, FWIW, it’s looking more and more like “decapitation strikes” go both ways.
If we have enough power to do that, at a SOTU speech, we should not be stopping there. We should be going after the money that makes the hoplophobe world turn. The two big ones are the Joyce Foundation, which funded VPC for many years, and Michael Bloomberg. Also, as many state and local officials for same as can be reached before they all have security details that make vengeance extremely high risk.
The gun grabbers won’t have any boots to execute search warrants if they are all pre-occupied with security details.