TRIGGER WARNING: The Topics of this work of fiction include war, genocide, terrorism, and cruelty against marginalized communities. This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Reader discretion is advised.

We’ve just finished a dinner at the Reclamation Center’s commissary. Thomas Stanley, like most of the parolees here, is free to travel in and out of the little town originally built for Conservation Corps workers. As we return to his cottage, he continues his story.

Chaos. That’s the only word for what South Florida had become. The government, our government, had relocated to West Palm Beach just as the Democrats were marching into DC. The President and his Family landed right before they’d captured the city. They had all of us from the campaign there to help get things set up for what they were already calling the “Wartime Capital.”

Those first few days everyone was just trying to figure out what was going on, and nobody had the whole story. We’d heard about how the Libs burned down the White House, how they tried to kill the President and his family, how our side outsmarted them with a daring escape by air. We knew that we still had allies in the old military, those patriots that were helping to arm the new National Defense Force. You’d try to learn more, but every day was packed to the gills with work.

For me, that was working to stand up the Executive Office of the President. There was already a small Communications Office of sorts in the First Family’s private residence, I’d been there once or twice before the evacuation from DC. Now it was undergoing almost a total remodel. While new office space was being added to the grounds, I had to run most of the Communications Office from the executive offices normally reserved for a handful of guests. It was this gorgeous Spanish-colonial room, and we filled it full of cubicals. We almost turned the wine cellar into a server farm, but the First Lady put a stop to that.

I’d been promoted to Assistant Communications Director, and between trying to stand up a whole new office, I had to meet regularly with the staff of all the Congressmen and Senators flocking to West Palm. I didn’t really know what to say to these people other than the same mantra, a prayer at this point, that I’d been saying since the election. Then came the Victory at Bellville.

How did your people react?

Whatever doubts they had were immediately put to rest. The inauguration gala became two-day party. You’d think we’d won the war. I went from reassuring our people with a bunch of stale talking points, to telling them the good news as succinctly as I could, and eventually I just started ushering new arrivals into the ballroom to drink, snort, and fuck whatever they could find. As the night dragged on, I took part in a bit of that myself.

[He stops, and looks out at the sea.]

I ended up dancing with this staffer for the new Senator from Utah, tall, funny, gorgeous. I’d tried drugs before, really just out of peer pressure, but with him I found myself eagerly partaking. We wound up in the laundry room. I might have told him I loved him.

The next morning, I woke up before he did and puked my guts out into a hamper. I’d never felt more disgusted with myself and frantically tried to get dressed. He must have heard me, because when he came too he shot up like a bullet.

“We just got too messed up last night, it happens, but we can’t tell anyone!”

I agreed. After we got cleaned up we prayed together, hoping to absolve ourselves of what we were. We actively avoided each other after that.

The rest of Palm Beach didn’t have as “patriotic” of a reaction. The Airport was getting people out of the city faster than it was getting people in, protestors clashed with the newly formed Capital Army of the NDF, really just the Florida State Police at that time. The demonstrations were as much about Bellville as the Inauguration. After I took a shower, threw up again, and prayed some more, I got cleaned up and made sure I got over to the Inauguration ceremony as fast as I could.

Junior was sworn in by one of the Associate Supreme Court Justice, he’d left DC well before J3. The President was surrounded by his wife, members of his father’s administration, the governor, the Supreme Commander, along with key members of the House and Senate. His father had been moved into a glorified hospice care facility in the residence shortly after they arrived. One of my jobs in the run up to the inauguration was making sure he could be digitally reconstructed for the broadcast. We actually enlisted the help of some graphic designers and videographers that previously worked for the NFL.

The President’s address was, thankfully, pretty lucid. He promised to remove what we’d labeled as the "Fake President" and the "Illegitimate Government” from our nation’s Capital, and to restore law and order. More than that, he promised to return America to its heritage, restore values to American life, and as always to Make America Great Again. He closed with, " It is time for a new generation of Loyal Patriots to take back their nation from the communists and pedophiles in Washington!"

I watched the whole thing from the temporary Communications Office, constantly looking between Video Village and the window to make sure what we were broadcasting held up. There had been plans, requests, and eventually demands to have the now-former President give a live address endorsing his son’s administration. We couldn’t make that happen. Instead we released another deep fake from the new Oval Office, even had our actor shake hands with the President so it looked like his dad was literally pulling out the chair for him. The base ate it up.

After the inauguration, another party, more drugs, another rendezvous with a male staffer, more vomiting, more prayer, more self loathing, and then more work. I made the rounds on cable news, podcasters, and made sure our message was being repeated by the new Congress. The goal was to fan the flames after Bellville, to undermine the Fake President at every turn. A popular talking point was that the Democrats were going to take away people's guns, property, even their children, and that the legitimate government would root out all "Domestic Enemies of the United States.”

After the inauguration, our effort shifted to sifting though a deluge of footage of the Victory at Bellville, and dozens of other battles around the country. We assembled highlight reels and some choice images and sent them to media outlets, our people, or just posted them directly to our socials. The message was all the same: give up, we’ve already won.

How much of the regime’s propaganda did you believe?

I believed it the same way I believed I wasn’t gay, despite repeated evidence to the contrary. Belief isn’t about accepting facts as truth, its about accepting what you’ve been told as truth. When you’re on the other side of it, especially in that environment, and you don’t think of yourself as a liar or question the different story you’re being told from everyone else as a lie. You’re now on the inside, this is real, and what you’re telling everyone else is what they need to hear. To keep them safe, to keep yourself safe.

That’s how I saw my job. I was keeping our people safe by telling a version of the truth that would be the most helpful for the President, the Party, and the War Effort, in that order. That meant demoralizing the other side while boosting our own morale.

The press were our greatest allies, especially after Bellville. Anytime partisans or just a random patriot attacked government buildings, abortion clinics, mosques, or a Democratic party office, no matter how small, they’d report on it like the world was coming to an end. When your President was finally sworn in and invoked the Insurrection Act, oh!

[Mr. Stanley makes a masturbatory gesture]

We didn’t even need to call our people, CNN did a segment all on their own: “Is the President Going Too Far?” To this day, I can’t believe they actually did that. Two hours of those idiots debating the merits of fighting back, and Democrats actually suggesting that they should seek a ceasefire and negotiate. This one lady, rail thin hippie bitch from California, actually said California should negotiate separately, and that your side should dissolve the Union. I actually checked to see if she was on our payroll. Nope, lifelong Dem with a brief stint in the Green Party in the 80s.

And then there was all the misinformation we and the press pumped out. We had armies of bot accounts, all running on server farms that were originally built for AI companies that went belly up in the Crash. That program was run by one of the other Assistant Communications Directors, Igor Sil…something. He’d been part of that wave of refugees from Russia, after Vlad turned out to be too much of a pussy to beat a Jew Comedian… sorry old talking points.

Anyway, Igor was one of their cyber-propagandists, and got his citizenship expedited so they could put him to work in the White House. He set up the entire domestic cyber program, had a blank check and a staff like an army. We used AI generated images and videos plenty, but mostly, they just had to boost people own panicked videos and posts. The Press would often pick it up without anyone having to call any media directors.

But you still had working relationships with… certain media outlets?

With all of them.

All of them?

Well, not me personally, the Communications Director, his Deputy, and the Press Secretary did, yeah. I know a lot of people still think it was only the right-wing press that listened to us, but in the early days of the war there wasn’t a media outlet that wouldn’t take our calls. And why not? We were winning weren’t we? If we made a press release, it went out as a wire. We didn’t have to wait for one outlet to re-report on what we sent to just our people.

No, the right wing press was where we sent direct talking points, and people too low on the totem pole for the lamestream media. But if you had a fancy title, they’d often come to you. Usually they just wanted to setup interviews, or get a comment about something. Their main interest though was propaganda.

The press wanted you to send them propaganda?

Well, they didn’t phrase it like that. They wanted B-roll of NDF units in battle or doing drills, Supreme Command, the President. Ya know, Hollywood stuff. For the Press back then, especially on your side, the war wasn’t real it was a blockbuster. They didn’t care who won, they just wanted drama. And we were happy to give it to them.

We’d send over helmet cam footage from NDF units in the Midwest or the Capital Army Group’s parade troops in West Palm, anything we had of the President or Supreme Command that looked intimidating. We even sent them footage from partisans in the Midwest or war streamers in the Central Valley, stuff they could have gotten on their own.

At one point, they didn’t even need footage, all they needed were rumors from “sources close to the NDF.” They were basically asking for disinformation. Igor and me organized this whole pipeline of where he’d figure out where refugees were starting to evacuate, my staff would tell the press that an assembly area had fallen, and he’d boost any posts that remotely supported that, or just make some up with AI. We used to joke that we took more territory than the NDF at the beginning of the war.

They were that irresponsible?

What, are you surprised? Before the war print journalism was all but dead, and cable news was founded on being a money-making enterprise first. So even outside of social media, the press was structurally geared to public whatever kept people reading and watching. Anything to drive engagement.

You know, that’s how our guys got into office in the first place: an establishment politician droning on about a bunch of boring half-measures that nobody ever notices is just bad TV. Our people were all characters, some more literally than others, and when they did stuff, people felt it.

What about the progressives? They had some engaging personalities didn’t they?

Yeah, but they were lefties. And there was no way the press was ever gonna boost someone who wanted to take money out of their pockets. That’s probably why they featured statements from our government more than theirs. We ran the numbers once. It was something like a 3 to 1 ratio in favor of our side. Online it was a bit more of a mixed bag, but you can see why so many people thought we’d already won by the time we had Chicago surrounded.

[Thomas stops, and suddenly looks rather embarrassed.]

It was so stupid. The NDF really only existed on paper. Yeah, the Supreme Command was in West Palm, but every NDF “field army” was really just a state militia. Yeah, we told them that there were six army groups, that we had all these generals working for us, but the Capital Army Group was the only unit that really existed as we described it to the media. The rest of the NDF was an unorganized mess. NDF West-Command existed only in theory, and the Texas State Guard was an almost completely independent force loyal to the governor.

A lot of our “generals” acted more like regional warlords who treated orders from Supreme Command more as suggestions. The reason we got so much good footage from the Capital Army Group was because it had to be deployed well outside of South Florida at multiple points just to keep things organized. I found out later, that’s what happened during the attack on Scott AFB. I remember seeing the Supreme Commander’s brother arguing with him about having to “fly all over the damn country to run your war.”

A few times NDF officers were superseded by local politicians or even Homeland Security officers carrying out mass arrests.

[Thomas Stanley stops talking. He stares at his feet for several minutes before resuming.]

I didn’t know, ok. I testified, I gave evidence. I’m guilty of a lot of things ok, but not THAT!

[Seeing that my host is clearly uncomfortable, I rise and offer my hand.]

Thank you for your time, but maybe I should go.

No, no, its ok…

If you’re not feeling up for it today…

No, if I don’t get this out now I don’t know if I ever will.

[Takes a breath.]

point was seen by white nationalists as confirmation of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory,

So, right after we got the capital set up, the new Congress, our Congress, started legislating. It was mostly wartime funding bills, authorizing the creation of the NDF, the new draft, stuff like that. You understand, I coordinated with members of Congress over how to present to the public what the President and the Cabinet had already told them to do. I didn’t make policy, and I didn’t have a clearance level high enough to…

[He takes another deep breath.]

Our side had wanted to abolish the 14th Amendment for a while now. The President wanted it, his father had wanted it, our voters wanted it. The guarantee of birthright citizenship was seen as a pathway for millions of anchor babies to gain rights and privileges that hey didn’t deserve, jobs that should have gone to real Americans, and for Democrats to eventually replace white voters with Spanish speakers. That was the party line anyway.

The government had tried mass deportations under the old laws, but they were always held up by the courts. Now that we didn’t have to worry about Democrats anymore, the Party could do things the way they wanted. The Amendment was ratified just after your side started pulling back to I-80 in the Midwest. The whole of West Palm was riding high, it felt like there was nothing we couldn’t do.

Before ratification was even finalized, a package of bills were passed that stripped all immigrants of their citizenship, gave deportation orders to all who were not deemed essential workers to the war effort, created a mechanism for stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship, and created a new tribunal system for prosecuting non-citizens. This was in addition to the suspension of Habeus Corpus, which your side did too by the way.

Did you know the regime had already compiled a list of suspect persons?

No, and I’ve said as much a hundred times to more lawyers, judges, and shrinks than I care to count. All I knew was that word came down that the Director of Homeland Security was given command of all forces in the provisional capital. His statement was pretty basic: the NDF would be carrying out the arrest of rioters, terrorists, and other criminals threatening the day-to-day business of the government.

“Good,” I thought. South Florida was the provisional capital, and the heart of the MAGA movement, but also the site of some of our biggest detractors. Palm Beach's gay community had been staging nearly constant demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience since the election. We also had trouble with the city council, a handful of local media outlets, and of course the Hispanics.

In truth, terrorist attacks were few and far between ever since the Capital Army Group was established. They beat back the protestors that tried to stop the inauguration, and generally kept the dissidents under control. But, after the West Palm Laws were passed, the 1st Division of the NDF were sent out to arrest every person attending a drag show or even being in the general vicinity of a gay bar.

Prominent local politicians were arrested, those accused of being non-Christians, "sexual deviants and pedophiles.” That was our blanket term for queerfolk, transfolk, and even certain cis-het political prisoners. Then there were those charged with infanticide, women who received abortions and abortion doctors.

How did you feel, at the time?

What, you asking if I was scared for myself? Not in the slightest. Remember, I wasn’t gay, I just got messed up at parties.

[He rolls his eyes.]

No, I was glad those [expletive deleted] and parasites got what was coming to them. I couldn’t wait for enforcement to go national.

How did the regime expect to execute mass arrests when they were already fighting a war?

Well it wasn’t like we didn’t have a shortage of volunteers. Recruitment offices for the NDF had lines around the block, we were actually turning people away we couldn’t process recruits fast enough. Young men were eager to fight for their country, to be heroes, but I think a lot of guys just wanted to shoot some libs. Of course, this enthusiasm had some drawbacks.

Our economy, the economy of the territory we controlled anyway, faced a serious shortage of labor. Your President did what she ran on and opened our country to be infested by a bunch of dirty immigrants. Sorry, again. Our side had what seemed like a much simpler solution.

Within weeks of the first wave of arrests in West Palm the Congress passed another round of bills designed to fill the gap in our labor pool by expanding the scope of prison labor by using the broadest possible interpretation of the Punishment Clause of the 13th Amendment. These "work furlough" programs supplied our economy with penal workers and emptied our prisons. Our people loved it.

As most convict laborers were held by a privatized prison system a market for buying and selling prisoners quickly emerged among major corporations and wealthy private citizens. People who were arrested for nothing but "disorderly conduct," were made to work in offices, factories, in the fields, and the private homes of the wealthy.

These convict laborers… fuck it, these slaves had no rights under our version of the Constitution. They were luckier than all those people the West Palm Laws condemned.

Did you…

[He avoids the question.]

Then there were executions, or at least the ones they were willing to tell people about. Death Row inmates were executed across the country on what the Communications Director called "The Day of the Rope,” because we used hangings to speed up the process.

I’m sorry, but you didn’t know what the regime was doing to all those prisons?

No, I told you. I just knew we were arresting a bunch of pedophiles, murderers, and terrorists. That’s what they told me, that’s what I was supposed to tell the public.

You didn’t think it was odd that in his inaugural address the “President” called to, "mount a crusade against those who are poisoning the blood of America, and secure the existence of our people."

NO!

[Mr. Stanley is on his feet, and clearly upset.]

I didn’t know, ok! Barely anybody did! We were told the people that had been arrested would be punished, that’s it. I figured a few of the really bad ones would be put on death row, but most would be sent to conversion therapy or something. Hell, YOUR GOVERNMENT said they didn’t know the extent of the extermination program! They thought our resources were stretched too thin to organize… fuck this!

[Mr. Stanley walks into his cabin and slams the door.]