Part 1: The Blue November

It’s amazing how few people realized what was going to happen.

There was a sense, of course, that the old US empire was on the verge of something catastrophic, but even as all the telltale signs were lit in neon, basically everyone refused to engage in detailed speculation. Many commented that civil war, internal waves of genocide, infrastructural collapse, and mass death seemed on the way. But such concepts denote endings, not beginnings or transformations. Aside from the fascists chaotically moving to seize the 2026 election, various political camps girded themselves defensively, but almost no one prepared in a proactive sense.

And no one, absolutely no one—including themselves—expected the Leninists to win.

You are no doubt familiar with the triumphalist Leninist historiography that dominated US propaganda over the following century, and perhaps counter-narratives that dismiss the old US empire as a weak regime too soft on vast hordes of Leninist workers. But the truth is right up to the revolution the Leninists were of vanishingly small number and relevance.

After their financiers withdrew with the end of the Cold War, the remaining Leninists in the US languished for decades as a marginal fringe of even the radical left. Most leftists laughed at them for perpetually trying to apply the same outdated model from a century prior. Yet Lenin himself had been something of a stubborn historical cosplayer, obsessing over the French Revolution, unimaginatively trying to reproduce its structures and operating within the conceptual vernacular it spawned. And—while it certainly wasn’t the result of some inevitable historical materialist march—it just so happened that conditions in the 250-year-old US empire were surprisingly close to those classic revolutions. By the fall of 2026, mass unemployment and ratcheting food scarcity were really getting going. This was partially a result of the 2020s AI race and the mad fascist president’s tariffs, but, just like had happened in Lenin’s time with the Russian empire, the US empire had launched a war against a country it assumed was obviously inferior and lost to devastating consequences.

Similarly, while public support for the ruling regime had been strong, and there were still massive fascist forces mobilizing in defense of it, by November 2026 its public image was in a tailspin. The recent seizure of Cuba had gone a lot better than perpetually dragging war in Iran, and the regime struggled to trumpet this new success as a sign of strength. But the “victory” came off as desperate, venal, and cringe. The delegation that arrived with US Marines to oversee the remaining government in divvying up land and writing new laws for the starving island were no Chicago School boys but tacky and unprepared grifters. Soon even conservatives were joining jokes about the new Cuban regime, indeed the term we still use for it, “Meyerfest,” derived from a conspiracy popular among fascists about one of the Trump delegates and in reference to an earlier Caribbean boondoggle called “Fyrefest.” If the 90s privatization in the USSR that killed millions was tragedy, the privatization of Cuba was total farce.

Further, as coverage of expats in Miami leaving to pillage the motherland circulated, a consequence emerged that the regime was not prepared for: a mass push in the ranks of their fascist base to celebrate this as their “remigration” model of ethnic cleansing. “If we can do this to the browns in Florida, why can’t we do this to every other brown?” Fascist media personalities latched on and started filming from Miami, stirring up conflict with cuban-americans for views. The vice president steadfastly tried to hold together online right-wing factions, but this came at the cost of a post sending shockwaves through the Cuban community and led to catastrophic polling results. Aggressive AI intervention into what was shown in most social media feeds proved too slow to stop the backlash.

There were so many surprises and blowups around the 2026 elections that historians continue to research and debate their relative impacts, but unquestionably the biggest was President Trump threatening to nuke Japan after they backed out of a trade deal. Now there was no way the dying ruler could have imagined that among all his rabid provocations would actually bring consequences, and of course he tried to spin it as the overly sensitive liberals getting offended for no reason to a bit of macho ribbing, but the international consequences kept compounding in ways that stole the headlines. And the takeaway to a hundred million apolitical Americans was simple: as bad as the economy is right now, it’s gonna get worse, because of the mad king.

Yet, as we all know, when the dust settled on November 4th, the intervention of the Supreme Court and the “Independent Polling Irregularities Commission” mobilizations meant that the centrist liberal party—the Democrats—were left with FEWER seats in the lower chamber of the empire’s legislature. And yes, infamously, two people died trying to cast their votes, although the dead white girl overshadowed the other.

I think it’s important to correct a common misunderstanding about the 2026 elections, because now it’s broadly assumed these were elections for the presidency, but they were actually a more minor election in the old system always scheduled between the presidential elections called “midterms” that only determined the apportionment of minor representatives in their legislative body. It’s amusing looking over these old records because of how breathlessly they refer to these “midterms” when, as we know there was very little further “term” ahead, nor would there be any other national elections in the US, ever again.

But the most important result in the 2026 elections wasn’t the further step in Trump’s power consolidation before he planned to suspend the constitution in 2028. It was the victory of “the DSA candidates.” The nomenclature is notoriously inaccurate, as many of said candidates were not members of the “Democratic Socialists of America,” just slightly more progressive than the norm, but the nomenclature became widespread and we continue to use it to this day.

The success of these candidates might have been eclipsed by the wider theft of the election, but the liberal outrage machine had been ramping up for months in advance and editorials had already been written, so as the shootings and the Supreme Court rulings held the top media attention, just below them was the entire establishment losing their minds over the scourge of “socialists,” who simultaneously were going viral in everyone’s feeds with charisma and authentic smiles. The liberal media found themselves incapable of influencing public narratives against both right and left, and so only ended up highlighting both and marginalizing any possible liberal figures of gravitas, elevating “the DSA candidates”—including previously elected politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—into icons of progressive victory amid defeat. This virtually shut out liberal pundits struggling to regain narrative control in the following weeks.

A handful of liberal orgs had spent months preparing to lead people in mass protests should the election be stolen, but they had no plan for anything beyond that. Ideologically there was a widespread myth in the late American empire—one that had been widely cultivated by the establishment after MLK Jr.’s assassination to suppress insurgent social movements—wherein getting large numbers of people to walk in a political parade was somehow in-and-of-itself a success and a way to enact change. Since liberals had drunk their own koolaid, they simply didn’t have any further strategic analysis. “Protests” were treated as something like elections where victory was magically achieved by turnout, not tools of mass mobilization or threats to leverage in further steps. And organizationally, every incentive within the liberal orgs was to build their own organizational standing, accumulating contact lists, donors, and volunteers, not actually bring down the Trump regime.

By every right this is how things should have ended, some mass rallies for a week or two and then a return to chattering on social media where liberals prepared to vote “even harder” in a supposedly upcoming “next election.” Another two years of backbiting and performative howling as this or that thing was demolished.

But, as we know, the “organizers” of these protests very quickly lost control of them, and instead of liberals going home after the marches, they surged into local government buildings—even some federal ones—and started occupying them.

These occupations are now often presented by both liberal and communist historians as inevitable and natural developments, but it’s worth noting that not just the liberal organizers but the Leninist cadres with some control or entryist presence were all opposed to this turn to occupation, and indeed in many situations fought against it. It was almost always anarchists who took the initiative and showed enraged liberal protesters that there was more possible than marching in circles.

The result was fiercely popular occupations in a ton of cities with sometimes literally tens of thousands of people inside and around government buildings of various relevance. The liberal organizers rapidly worked to regain control and standing in these occupations, printing and distributing mass placards that narrowed down on two isolated demands around electoral recounts. But this barely contained the simmering anger in the occupation camps, where folks were increasingly talking about wild things like new constitutional conventions. At this point, if they were going to get out ahead and fulfill their role as counter-insurgents containing the streets, the liberal Democrats really needed to take a much more aggressive posture.

Yet there was almost no institutional or cultural memory much less appetite within the liberal Democrats for escalation, and instead of joining the protests and contesting the election, a large swathe of the Democratic establishment desperately bolted to talk down, discredit, and sign whatever they could licensing force to stop the protests.

At the most pivotal week of street mobilizations they focused on public collaborations with the GOP in getting one of the DSA candidates banned from office over something they had said.

Meanwhile Trump screamed nonstop promises to murder all the establishment Democrats, and the more establishment rightwing media ecosystem focused everything on equating the Democratic establishment with the protesters to justify liquidating the leading Dems. Right after he succeeded in overseeing the expulsion of one of the DSA candidates, the liberal “House Minority Leader” was himself arrested for Treason.

Consistently, the more Trump promised to murder congressional Democrats, the more desperately they struggled to differentiate themselves from their base and help suppress the protests.

It’s important to understand that this was highly rational in a sense, given their evaluation of material conditions. One Elissa Slotkin of Michigan—who would somehow survive the following years and escape to exile in Sweden—told interviewers towards the end of her life that there was a widespread sense among Democrats in congress that street pressure outside the state had zero chance of winning because “we’re not hicks with guns” and thus the only conceivable means to personal survival was to fall over themselves proving their loyalty to Trump, hoping to wheedle out some concessions or friction on the margins while being allowed to stay in office and out of prison. And that evaluation seems somewhat reasonable, in the sense that Slotkin was not one of the “Congressional 21” ziptied and frogmarched out of Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.

Certainly many of the occupations were quickly broken up and forced—or persuaded by local politicians—to retreat from government buildings. And the legacy media remained largely lockstep with the establishment democrats, openly panicking that any substantive resistance meant assured destruction, that it would only “legitimize” the escalation of the liquidations by fascists. Of course, we can see that this conceptualization of “legitimacy” was completely disconnected from the sort of material consequences that the streets represented. To worry about Trump’s consolidation of power being seen as legitimate implies that there would have been some victory if it was seen as illegitimate, but the potential violent force being mobilized by the streets were the only mechanism that could have made such “illegitimacy” have any consequences.

Again, it’s important to note that the liberals could have consolidated their own power during this period, but repeatedly chose not to, both through a lack of imagination and in fear of a Left that did not really have its footing yet. At one point, the stenographers of what had been a long-standing regime outlet, “The New York Times,” printed a headline warning about “imminent communist insurgency”—which you’re no doubt familiar with, since it has been reproduced in memes for generations as a Cassandra-like prediction—but there was almost no appreciable “communist” presence in the protests when the headline was written.

And to be clear, while the streets presented potential force, at this point there was far more force being brought to bear by the regime. Even before the election, Trump had been deploying military units, leveraging an old edict called “the Insurrection Act” and getting accidentally bogged down into legal battles around a poorly thought out attempt to formally take control over local police. Local and federal police collaborated in brutalizing and occasionally gunning down the protesters, in one case setting fire to a government building while barricading the protesters inside while they burned to death, but this didn’t break the back of the occupations. And there was a very predictable spiral whereby the regime would repeatedly decide that it had been too weak, squeamish and restrained in slaughter before, and only needed to increase the death toll to break the protests… only to be surprised when the protests were strengthened by their latest escalation.

Despite the failures in the courts of their initial strategy to consolidate direct control, escalating conflict saw local police stop engaging in any pretense of following the local liberal politicians supposedly above them in the command hierarchy of the US empire. Two mayors were arrested by their own police (without charges besides “treason”) to wide applause. There was a small spate of relatively negative coverage when the child of an insufficiently compliant city councilor was abducted by local police as a hostage, but, like countless other examples of the cops threatening their politician “superiors” before, the story never went very wide.

Throughout his first and second reign, Trump had been deeply constrained by his own media consumption habits and the incentives of those media producers, so he consistently failed to recognize opportunities to assert direct control, even when local police were basically promising to follow his orders and dissolve the last pretenses of the old constitutional order. Only at the end of November did it finally start to leak into Trump’s media diet that there were cops standing up to their “traitorous” local orders and he finally realized he could bypass the courts and bureaucracy via social media posts commanding the police. This is when the remit of the infamous Joint Terrorism Taskforces started dramatically expanding and presidential staffers began flying out to set up camp in local police departments. Forensic historians believe this is when the very first secret mass graves started, typically supplied via packed buses that ran directly from snatch squads at the protests, bypassing documentation.

In parallel, rightwing media were engaged in increasingly frantic discussion of how there was clearly a conspiracy behind the failure of the police to have already executed every protester. So while the JTTF kill squads were still working in secrecy, they started publicly assembling crews of “Republicans With Democrats for Security” to do the police’s job for them. These were pitched as ostensibly “bipartisan” citizen volunteer committees in defense of law and order, but the RWDS initials were intended to be obvious to many contemporaries, while still allowing credulous conservatives to join up, sincerely believing it to be an unhinged leftwing conspiracy that “RWDS” ever stood for “Right Wing Death Squads.” This was a thin veneer, but it’s one they nonetheless worked at: creating a barrage of media content from people pretending to be liberals or democrats who thanked them profusely for helping them retake and restore the Democratic Party from the communists/cartels who had seized it.

Largely ignoring both the JTTFs and RWDSs, the liberal media remained steadfast in condemning protesters who responded to force with force, but there was some back-and-forth dancing, with, for example, a video of police grenades blowing out the windows of a house of bystanders obliging talking heads to recognize and trail public outrage. But, despite their best efforts to tamp down energies in the streets, the ever-present background of protesters being murdered by JTTFs and the RWDSs started getting more attention, and then video of a couple protesters firing back on cops blew up to the point where pollsters revealed that 57% of the nation supported the protesters firing back.

You will not be surprised to hear that, in a retread of what we talked about in our episode on the earlier 2020 uprising, well-funded nonprofits quickly paid small-time actors and influencers to pretend to be protest leaders, and their photogenic pandering was initially very effective at corralling first-time-protesters. They used this influence to coordinate the formation of a nationwide brand of peace police, doing trainings in dozens of cities and handing out impressively expensive kit. Well-meaning liberals were rapidly drawn into their influence network because they seemed serious, provided good resources, firm organization, and a way to plug in that didn’t feel as off-putting as the existing leftist orgs, defined by esoteric language and backbiting.

These peace police and the “Blue Wave Electoral Integrity Guards” (or “Blue Guard”) legions they formed into over November were a hail mary to suppress the protests, funded by a few billionaires in collaboration with liberal centrists, but they rapidly came to play a much bigger role in the coming revolutionary struggles, if only because of all the kit that they bought and managed, from food to radios to trauma kits.

Although at this point, in late November, the Blue Guards were not yet armed with guns. Just as Democrat governors studiously refused to call state units even as police and paramilitary forces increasingly moved to depose them because as one governor scoffingly put it, a day before he was executed with his family, “violence is the tool of the other side.”

So, by the end of November, armed pickup convoys of RWDSs from the suburbs were regularly raiding into cities to shoot up the Blue Guard controlled occupations, with the very explicit collaboration of local cops, and the Blue Guards refused to allow people to get armed in response, instead escalating internal purges to try and find “Proud Boy infiltrators” which inevitably meant any leftist militants. By this point almost none of the activists who helped lead the initial seizure of government buildings were still around in the camps.

The nonprofit funding of the Blue Guards and their presence in the protests were of course noticed, not just by leftists, but also by the right, who happily promoted conspiracies that the protesters were “a plot by billionaire communists to seize the government.” But this right-wing narrative only reinforced the Blue Guards legitimacy among the protesters and marginalized leftists with the same criticisms of their funding.

This hostile exclusion of anarchists and explicit leftists had the cumulative effect of filtering out everyone with experience besides the assortment of fringe Leninist groupsicles and factions who specialized in secretive entryism and control over liberal mass organizations. These cadres had long prepared for precisely this sort of situation, and the more the liberal-centrist forces pushed to consolidate control over the protests and marginalize leftists, the more they functionally handed power to these Leninists. There are still recordings of early webconferences where right-liberal political operatives and funders excitedly embrace their supposedly loyal protest managers reporting on their efforts to shut out “the radicals,” unaware that these managers are themselves a roster of some of the most famous Leninist figures that would come to power and in multiple instances personally sign the execution papers of their “leadership” in those calls.

But of course none of these maneuverings were then visible to the rank and file of the Blue Guards or the much wider base of the protests.

We’re not going to drill too deeply into the names of the Leninist factions at play in the early days of the Blue Guards, because while there were existing Leninist groups with aspirational names like “Party for Socialism and Liberation” or “Freedom Road Socialist Organization Fight Back” whose national group chats and command hierarchies played significant roles in the Blue Guards, many of their individuals operated in a very opportunistic manner in these early heady days, leading to a network of personal alliances and betrayals that muddled existing organizational divisions, while creating new tensions that held back consolidation.

While the Guards’ own ranks supported “order” and liked the sense of legitimacy and hierarchy provided by a single nationwide organization, they were not in any sense ideologically in line with Blue Guard central, or even really aware of how divergent their interests were.

Similarly, the wider protests increasingly viewed themselves as in an existential battle against the Democratic establishment. This meant that the camps consistently provided massive support for the DSA candidates constantly traveling between camps, mostly managing to avoid interception and arrest. Nor did Blue Guards in any sense hold a uniform monopoly on protest security; many camps had multiple volunteer peace police groups operating simultaneously, as different networks and organizations jockeyed. Often a single individual who declared themselves protest “security” wore many organizational affiliations simultaneously, responding to competing loci of decisionmaking.

Further, these self-appointed security forces were also just one of many loci of power in the protests, with bitter and chaotic power struggles present in many other arenas like social media accounts and camp kitchens. On December 2nd, there was honestly no guarantee that the Blue Guards would have remained relevant, or indeed that anything would come of their Leninist middle managers.

Part 2: The Red December

And so we reach The Day Of Two Armies, December 3rd 2026, one month into the occupations and various conflicts across the urban spaces of the US, when President Trump gave the order to execute every protester in DC.

He had, of course, given variants of this order before, but this is the one that stuck.

As we’ve covered, the police had been murdering protesters since the beginning of November, but their efforts were scattershot and reactive. Trump’s new order was to—in the words of his deputy chief of staff—“systematically eliminate these criminal degenerates from the gene pool.” To avoid interference, it was broadcast loudly and directly along multiple channels. And, to the surprise of nearly everyone, local DC police balked. Suddenly bureaucratic protocols mattered, and even the rapid removal and imprisonment of Chief Jeffery Carroll didn’t impact the flow of overly formal foot-dragging messages.

While some, like Carroll, would try to later spin careers as the first police to stand up to Trump, historians are pretty universal in evaluating this surge of reticence as less a product of moral objection than trying to pass the buck. What was being asked was, in their minds, beyond their job description. Laziness, cowardice, and ass-covering were ubiquitous among the police forces of the old US empire and the audacious amount of work implied by the order was too much too soon for them.

Similarly, the various federal agencies that had been deputized into operating as beat cops harassing homeless encampments in the nation’s capital over the prior year largely evaporated in a cloud of sick days and transparent excuses.

The head of the US armed forces, Pete Hegseth—amid drunken public rants promising retribution on any local cops who disobeyed direct orders—responded by quickly moving several more military formations into DC, lining the streets with military vehicles as a show of force to the boss.

An armored division from the Pennsylvania National Guard allowed themselves to be photographed in formation but were slow in proceeding into the city proper. Tanks that had been shipped in from Fort Riley and gathered at Fort Myer forced their way down Pennsylvania Avenue and were ordered to point their guns at the John A. Wilson Building where the main locus of protesters was gathered.

While the exact command sequence is unknown, at 1:05pm eastern, a single M830A1 round was fired through the second story, blowing out critical masonry structure, tearing through the unoccupied building behind and causing a blast pressure that blew out the lungs of many not directly ripped apart or crushed under the collapsing structure. No further cannon fire came but there were bursts of small gun discharges recorded on the streams over the next two minutes.

The burst of bright red blood staining the side of a collapsing conference room immediately became an iconic historical image, and is typically used to signify the beginning of Red December.

Cellular networks in DC went almost entirely down at around 1:07pm. Almost everyone of any grouping on the ground believed this to be the result of government action, but we now know it was simply an infrastructural collapse from overactivity.

What did get out before the network went down was a short clip from Sergeant Samuel Smith in front of other men in the DC National Guard griping, “fuck this shit; we aint doing this.”

It is completely unclear what degree of seriousness this video recording to a friend held, but it was rapidly shared across social media, instantly generating the widespread impression that the DC National Guard, which had always been reticent about the occupation, was in revolt.

It’s broadly understood by historians that the incipient revolution would almost certainly have crumbled from the DC slaughter had the head of the armed forces simply given the orders to kill protesters and nothing more. After all, he had moved aggressively to purge the military leadership and they had complied. While the officer corps broadly disliked the Trump regime, they were hardly liberal and huge swathes of the rank-and-file subscribed to the populist side of the fascist movement. FOX News played 24/7 in all military facilities and the more educated officer corps were obsessively loyal to an honor code of neutrality that saw diligently obeying orders as a centrist defense of law and order.

And on the other side, Leftists had done pretty much zero outreach to the military. There was almost no consumable media packaged for them, no concerted effort at messaging, and certainly no mapping of the structures and tensions within the military. Not a single revolution in history has succeeded without the help of a revolt within the military, and the Left was in no remote sense sincerely preparing for a revolution. Up until the very last minute, every incentive was on building their own standing in contrast to liberals and other leftist currents, and this aligned all leftist discourse and propaganda towards shows of moral purity. There was nothing to be gained from being caught even remotely sympathetic to the baby-killing attack dogs of US imperialism, any more than there was to be gained doing outreach at nazi rallies. To be fair, in peacetime such sympathies and outreach can erode and undermine long-term radical movements, opening them up to corruption and entryism. And, after centuries of marginalization in the old US empire, the left quite reasonably believed it was engaged in such long-term movement building, not on the edge of an actual revolution. The Leninists were essentially no different from the rest of the left in this.

Similarly, all throughout the lead up to Red December, liberals had staunchly refused to consider or plan for the possibility of a contest of material force. They consistently decided that the maintenance of the state was of such importance that it did not matter what that state looked like, or how fascist it got. They were not going to even think about staging a coup or engaging in anything like revolt. And so, even though disenchanted members of the military and intelligence communities formed informal networks of grousing and shit talk—we’ll talk about the infamous Virginia Group Chat in a minute—these networks went largely without any contact or feelers from the liberal establishment.

All of this adds up in one direction: the military didn’t like being ordered to massacre the eleven thousand or so protesters in and around the DC building occupations, but there’s every indication they would have done so with only slight grumbling and foot-dragging.

But every revolution needs idiocy at the top to work. And so Hegseth’s response was to declare the DC National Guard to be engaged in treason and order a detachment of Marines from Quantico to liquidate them.

It’s unclear what he was thinking. In the initial aftermath practically everyone assumed the order came from Trump—after all the entire project of getting “loyal generals, like Hitler’s” had gotten its main impetus from Trump’s frustrations at not being able to slaughter protesters during the 2020 uprising. But recordings from inside his palace show Trump was surprised. This initiative was all Hegseth.

What records we have of the choices made by the generals are notoriously thin, thanks to the default operational security of the military, deliberate decisions to destroy records later, and the untrustworthiness of later testimony. It’s clear that many regiments did not understand what was happening and their information environment was often completely polluted with rumors to the polar opposite of facts on the ground.

What is conclusively known is this: by 5pm the Alabama National Guard had been separated and fired on a small detachment of the DC National Guard. The 273rd Military Police Company and the 3rd US Infantry Regiment had softly refused orders and then, upon hearing that the DC National Guard was being fired on by two helicopters, declared themselves in public noncompliance.

Uncertainty over what was happening and the danger they were in led the 3rd Infantry to then actually fire first on an arriving detachment of Marines.

Scenes of US troops firing on US troops flickered into wider social media and were breathlessly commented on, alongside some rushed AI footage created by conservatives to call for the liquidation of the 3rd Infantry that ended up ironically convincing other military units that widespread military revolt was in place against a rogue Trumpist general and they had to join their brethren to restore honor and stop the unlawful situation.

It’s also totally unclear if the Leftist crew that invaded FOX News and executed Laura Ingraham—infamously mid-shout about the need to “kill them all”—at the same time did so with the strategic intent of cutting off the main information source of servicemen, or whether it was purely a reactive effort of unthinking “adventurism,” as later Leninist historians would claim. We have evidence that two anarchists involved survived the kill squad that retook the building, but at least one of them would be later caught and liquidated by Leninists in the coming regime. What digital artifacts we have from Anarchists at the time indicate they were largely convinced the FOX action was perpetrated by wingnuts freshly radicalized from online content and without ties to the existing movement.

Either way, the end result was a completely unmoored information environment that ended up facilitating mass military revolt, even if most everyone involved didn’t see themselves as in revolt. By 10:38pm Hegseth was dead (whether by his own hand or not, we will probably never know) and power in the Pentagon was rapidly moving in a direction autonomous from Trump’s circle.

More broadly, 76 servicemen were dead and at least two thousand protesters had been gunned down or blown apart, countless more were injured.

In response to repeated declarations of neutrality from wings of the military, the liberal political class took them at their word and almost entirely failed to reach out beyond some scattered thanks. No plans were made to depose Trump and restore a centrist-liberal establishment government.

Instead, once again, the scattered remaining liberal leadership in Capitol Hill approached the President, in conjunction with some scared Republican congressmen, to collaborate on a “bipartisan plan for law and order.” The thinking seems to have been that they could use this opportunity to wrangle acceptance of the courts back into the functional chain of command and wheedle Trump into suspending the Insurrection Act in some respects.

Their first and most impactful product was “feed nationalization.” At the time a prominent plutocrat of the old empire, Elon Musk, had a third rate AI system he had financed as a vanity project to compete in the 20s’ AI race, and it was rapidly rolled out to judge each post and decide whether they would ever be visible to anyone. He had captured a social media platform originally built by anarchists, “Twitter,” and this was abruptly rebranded as the “US Free Speech and Civil Discussion App” in rushed legislation and “The Everything App” on its actual interface. All other social media sites were blacklisted by BGP routers at major transaction points. And within 36 hours the blacklisting morphed into much more restrictive whitelisting. The liberals were successful in making sure this was all done over the course of two days via formal legislation and court order, with a non-partisan oversight board supposedly enshrined. It never convened.

The liberals truly believed they had turned the tide and wrestled back the beginning of control, but even more than the carnage in DC, this was the moment that functionally made the revolution. The changes to the social media ecosystem were so transparently heavyhanded that users immediately realized the remaining major platforms were totally useless, and, rather than cede to liberals’ dream of a return to a pre-internet age, they mobilized.

While standard VPNs and at the time standard censorship circumvention tools had trouble accessing the external internet, enough ad hoc connectivity persisted over the first few days of implementation that alternative communication apps leaked through and were rapidly adopted. Many of these networks would spring into existence only to collapse within a day or two, unable to stand the infrastructural challenges at scale or taken out by firewall rules. Developers often worked in relative isolation, spitballing divergent responses to things they did not know were already solved problems. This rapid development of alternative communications network apps was sped up in part thanks to the simultaneous proliferation of local instances of early Chinese models.

For decades there was a widespread belief that the US revolution was provoked by the PRC in order to undermine frontier models in the AI development war that had been ratcheting across the 2020s, and the involvement of open source models like Deep Seek was often pointed to, but modern digital archeology paints a more complex picture. There was no PRC collusion of note with protesters in these early days, they just got lucky in the result of open-sourcing their models.

Indeed, the more dominant influences on the technical adoption patterns were paranoia storms, with several well-established, promising and/or quite valid technical options getting abruptly discarded.

But, for the purposes of understanding the revolution, there’s one central technical feature: the alternative communication systems folks gravitated to required line of sight or close physical proximity to make connections between devices. And this forced more and more people who might have otherwise passively scrolled out of their houses.

As the infamous saying of the revolution went, “the internet is in the streets.”

While the initial protests and occupations in November had been around the elections, the whitelist restrictions on the internet had the impact of turning almost everyone—including those who did not care about politics—out into street mobilizations.

In fact this massive mobilization was almost calamitous to the revolution. It was common for leftists and the first wave of liberal protesters to gripe during the second week of December that things had devolved into an almost completely apolitical street party.

Yet the success of these mass gatherings was dependent upon them being almost entirely made up of normal people, with explicitly political and high-information factions marginalized. Leftists complained bitterly about fascist co-option and populist narratives that threw out core progressive norms, values, and aspirations. But the numbers protected them from the kind of slaughters that had been escalating against the liberal and leftist protesters in November.

The demands at this point were basically “enough of this.” And they might’ve been satisfied with the resignation of Trump and some military statements about returning normal civilian oversight and ending the economic crisis…

But the regime made no such concessions. Indeed it seemed incapable of making such concessions. And the more people spread into the streets, the more Trump and the actual decisionmaking circles in the palace of the old US empire—”the white house”—became desperate and paranoid. This led to proclamations and threats that sharpened the resolve and politicization of those in the streets.

While the Leninist entryists at the heart of the Blue Guards found themselves marginalized in the following two weeks, trying to assert control of a suddenly vastly outnumbered core organizing framework as street meetings spread, the fringes of other leftist factions that had remained ended up playing a huge role in spreading infrastructural capacity and politicization.

Anarchists had not abandoned the streets but continued doing trainings and providing infrastructural support. Whole operations like food tents and charging / encryption-verification tents became rapidly standardized in how-to zines that were mass printed across every city and neighborhood.

And in part thanks to the temporary marginalization of the Blue Guard leadership, the “Socialist Rifle Association” (SRA) was able to start mass training camp defenders in firearms, causing the streets to suddenly be flooded with ad hoc neighborhood defense groups and councils.

The far-right kept a monopoly on viewable posts on old social media, and so they were still able to organize nationally and coordinate narrative crafting around the urgent need to put down “the communist insurgency”, but the sheer scale of folks in the streets dissuaded the RWDS. Reactionary movements certainly wanted to strike quickly, but they could only mobilize a background of occasional stochastic attacks that reinforced the legitimacy of the neighborhood defense groups.

By the third week of December, SRA and Blue Guard associated militias had defeated a few counterrevolutionary convoy raids easily in a couple showy nights. This didn’t really cut down the material capacity of the fascist forces, which remained extensive, but the impact of these simultaneous victories on moral, narrative, and momentum was massive.

This is when breakaway chunks of the liberal political class finally grew some spine and started trying to broker a deal between the DSA candidates and the military regiments on revolt.

The main result of these negotiations was increasing regularization of militias under the Blue Guards, buoyed by their status in communications with military forces, and the return to relevancy of the Leninists controlling them. A couple fired generals that were lurking around looking to return to power saw their moment and attempted to make deals with the Blue Guard financier level to coordinate integration with the network of military units in “refusal”.

To say that the military and intelligence forces of the US were in disarray during this period would be an understatement, but the abrupt capitulation of the breakaway province of Taiwan to the PRC central government on December 17th sent clarifying shockwaves and unified everyone around a desperation to resolve domestic turmoil—however possible—before the US empire lost more of its vassals.

The Virginia Group Chat was later built up to such historical relevance by both the new Leninist regime and dissident liberal historians, but it alone was really not as important as far more complex informal conversations in diffuse circles within the intelligence and military officer communities.

The consensus that emerged depended in no small part upon the leading “DSA politicians”—the three names of relevance were Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Abdul El-Sayed—continuing to seem like the most competent and small-c conservative actors on stage.

While the liberals had studiously failed to get ahead of the radicalism of the streets and thus contain it, the same intelligence community that had trained and overseen counterinsurgency for generations grew to appreciate that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and El-Sayed did not represent a radical break, but retained both pragmatism and strong legitimacy in the streets. These were figures whose rise would give a strong sense of victory to the revolutionary masses, but who would retain the existing state apparatus, respect norms, and operate within the overton window of neoclassical economic theory. They were by then aware that Ocasio-Cortez was deeply uncomfortable with the political power being increasingly thrust on her and were reassured by her educational background and de facto support for the globalized free trade system.

The intelligence community was not directly taking orders from some unified capitalist class, but they certainly rubbed elbows with many in the private sector and a consensus emerged that some green technology industrial policies and expanded welfare programs would be nowhere near as economically ruinous as Trump’s personalist mercantilism had been.

It’s clear that they would have preferred a conventional Republican, and barring that a standard Democrat, but there was simply no competent option on the table, much less with factional capacity or momentum. As was so infamously said of the Democratic Party in the Virginia Group Chat after another mewling pronouncement was widely mocked, “these people have no juice.”

And so, over the last two weeks of December 2026, the most unlikely of things happened: a large portion of the CIA decided to back a regime change in the US empire that would put socialists into power.

Part 3: New Year, New Communism

By the time, around Christmas, that Trump started publicly floating “joking” threats to nuke American cities, it had started to sink in everywhere that what was going on was an actual capital-R Revolution.

The liberals and the majority of the population conceived of this revolution as something brief—as a necessary moment of drama in order to return to how things had been. Trump would be forced to resign, then all his executive orders would be reversed and this would lead to stability, Netflix shows resuming, and prices dropping to where they had been before the pandemic in 2020. Jobs would come back, supermarket shortages would end, 401ks would resurge in value, and everyone would have lower rent too, somehow.

But the imagination of the Left was starting to wake up from its long slumber. And while they had no real idea of the world they wanted—seriously, read the old Leftist theoretical tracts of the early 21st century and you will invariably find zero serious blueprinting beyond vague impressionistic poetry that conveys “not this”—there was an increasing sense that everything, or at least Very Big Things, might suddenly be possible.

This sense of the possible was only outmatched by that of the fascists who had spent the prior decade dramatically escalating, until mass ethnic cleansing and depopulation of at least a third of the US empire was taken as a baseline expectation. They felt so entitled to this future holocaust that the idea of going back and abandoning it was unthinkable. And there was an expanding understanding among everyone complicit in the Trump Regime that if even the milquetoast centrist liberals retook power and reestablished the normal function of the courts, every last one of them would go to prison. The more isolated the fascists became on the state-run media platform of The Everything App, the more convinced they became that they had the real strength and that there was no conceivable alternative but to put down “the communist insurgency.”

Meanwhile, with cops increasingly meekly standing down, the liberal establishment having totally lost traction on the information space, and the military frozen in place while taking coordination meetings with now widely armed Blue Guards, to everyone outside the fascist information bubble there was simply no avoiding the simultaneous facts that Trump had no real power and was never going to relinquish power.

For the first time in the 250 year history of the old US empire, a President was going to be replaced outside of anything resembling constitutional channels. The only question was how.

When it came to making the first move, almost everyone wanted to pass the buck. There was a GOP breakaway faction that had started to fear the potential of the streets more than they feared their own base assassinating them, but they were insistent on getting backing from centrist Democrats for a Republican-led administration under the Secretary of State, but their schemes were fruitless. The centrist liberals were convinced that an emergency election was the way to go, and got bogged down thinking they were making great headway in hashing out a legal framework for it. Many apolitical people in the streets believed that the vice president would solve everything if Trump’s cabinet used an untested constitutional procedure known as the 25th Amendment to replace him—and the vice president was certainly open to this—but scheming within the cabinet was bogged down by mutual distrust and paranoia. Everybody hoped the military would do something but they absolutely did not want to make the first move. They hoped the civilians would settle on something that they could then back.

The Left had few guns and absolutely no legal standing, but they had the confidence of sudden imagination.

Scholars quibble endlessly about how to periodize revolutions. But there’s no question that the “DSA Constitutional Convention” marked the pivotal transition point between the old US empire and the fraught interim socialist republic.

Of course it wasn’t officially called a “constitutional convention” in the lead up to its convening on January 1st 2027, but that’s what everyone almost immediately started calling it. And unlike everything else that was getting called “DSA” during this period, it actually was an explicit function of the Democratic Socialists of America.

In part because the convention’s initial remit was quite nebulous, every faction felt like it would be a good opportunity to push their agenda. And, as increasingly drastic aspirations or promises circulated, the sense of importance became deafening within the Left. What sort of revolution was going on? How much could be seized? No one wanted to be left out of the DoubleTree in Philly.

Initially the constitutional congress was relatively moderate in structure. While all sorts of leftist organizations that largely ignored the DSA had forced their way into representation at the last minute, and there had been all kinds of contested irregularities, the pool of 748 delegates who were seated was largely comprised of moderate leftists and even many on the more anti-authoritarian end.

The secretary of the convention appointed by overwhelming assent was a compromise candidate—one Chelsea Manning—in good enough standing with various progressive/DSA camps and considered of unimpeachable character. And while she was no “traitor” as the coming regime would eventually allege, she was certainly no Leninist. Manning is an interesting figure that historians of the revolution have recently come to reexamine as a pivotal character long ignored. Her story is beyond our focus, but it’s relevant to how marginalized the Leninists remained within the DSA up to this point that, throughout the convention, no camp would speak ill of her.

Among the prominent electeds that had been touring the camps, few participated in the convention, and only Ocasio-Cortez spoke. There’s every indication that her staff considered the convention no more or less relevant than any other gathering she had spoken at before, and she had spent the prior weeks focused in talks between the progressive electeds and figures in the Virginia Group Chat, negotiating the planned terms of Trump’s ouster and the establishment of an interim “broad-coalition” government that the DSA electeds would be centrally positioned within. This vision was focused on maintaining legal continuity and getting legitimacy from centrist and conservative factions. She was so focused on these pragmatics that it wasn’t until the third night of the convention that her staff realized what was going down next door to them.

Initially the factions sat split between four primary emergent coalitions: Red Star, Groundwork, Bread And Roses, and “the Libertarians.” And seating arrangements were heavily contested, everyone wanted to sit on the “left” side of the assembly, initially as viewed from the podium. Because the libertarians and “moderates” didn’t contest this, they ended up sitting on the right, but they simply flipped perspective: their photographs were taken from behind the assembly with their banners turned towards the viewer so that they could claim the “left.” This is why photographs of the assembly have so few front-on photos of those on stage—the coming regime permitted only photos pointed out from the stage to the assembly to circulate.

We won’t be getting into the content of the convention, most of you have already gone over this when you were younger, and there’s supplemental material you can access beyond these lectures that give a taste of how much more complicated it was than the coming regime would retell, but what matters historically is how these proposed reforms and societal restructurings were completely shocking at the time. Of course the various factions of the assembly were competing to out-do one another, but there was a real sense of wonder at the time that each new proposal could even be thought concretely, much less voiced aloud. Gone were the middling reforms the party had previously championed, like “carbon taxes” and “preschool for all.”

The new government would be entirely cybernetic, emphasizing regionalized “direct” democracy, removing the presidency and the executive branch, restructuring the entire court system, and liquidating entire industries. Hardline freedom of speech would be enshrined via the new communications networks being bootstrapped on the streets and enshrined by a weakened “Director” executive branch that would be entirely dedicated to communications infrastructure, but “antifascist committees” would simultaneously expand as a formalized fourth branch of government. (Such committees had almost no connection with the network of largely anarchist research and streetfighting crews that had up until this point long constituted “antifascism.” Indeed many of these committees’ initial leaders had been staunchly hostile to antifascism over the prior decades, and would turn their guns on antifascists at the first opportunity, viewing them as dangerously libertarian.) A bill of rights was drafted that included the right to food and medical care, and enshrined ecological entities as persons. An economic program of georgist land reform was conjoined with mass nationalizations and calls for military action to repatriate any escaping capital. A proposal for deep reparations to the “global south” stalled out in acrimonious divisions but was surprisingly close to passing.

At the time this was all insane throwing everything on the walls stuff, said more for show—to push the national overton window with bravado and shame the DSA electeds either into breaking with the “DSA” nomenclature or pressuring them to go further—than as serious policy commitment, and it would have left the convention a marginalized episode of revolutionary fanfic, had it not been for the Salup-Cid Affair.

And here we simply can’t avoid the alphabet soup of acronyms labeling various cadres, organizations, and factions.

The revelation that PRC operatives were directly involved in spearheading a vicious intra-DSA skirmish to back Constellation in a break against Red Star, to then position FRSO/FightBack members into positions of power, created a profound fear and urgency among attendees. And the just-revealed fact that PSL had facilitated the arrival of over a hundred plainclothes PRC military members onto US soil in California made the internal powerplays of this pile of long-marginal leftists suddenly matter quite a bit to the Virginia Group Chat.

When Ocasio-Cortez emphasized, in sleep-deprived conversations, her horror at the ratcheting situation in the DoubleTree, she clearly had no expectation that CIA “Group L” would take proactive measures. She was mostly encouraging her fellow “DSA” electeds to mobilize rhetorically to protect their left flank. But the hand of the informal intelligence community was swift and firm—they had already begun to place their bet on the DSA electeds as a temporary government and easier than backing out and making new plans was to do what they did best, form a strategy group, order pizza, and remove the problem.

And it is true that the Red Star representatives they targeted were deeply complicit in rape, grift, and horrific cult-like control methods.

The problem is, by backing individuals in the Bread And Roses camp, and indeed having their agents collaborate so intimately with the faction, a large chunk of the CIA had become officially committed in the cutthroat politics of leftist infighting. They were overextended and overexposed, in addition to being irreversibly invested, and this made them blackmailable by the very socialists they were trying to use as stooges.

The Virginia Group Chat was out on its own, it could not go back to the republican right, not without an awkward number of assassinations to cover up the degree to which it had become a backer of socialists, indeed leakage of their involvement seemed increasingly inevitable and would only confirm the absurd fascist narratives about a “communist deep state.” There was no way out but through. They had to commit to getting their communists to move in and replace the PSL and FRSO members who had taken up power in the Blue Guard hierarchy.

And so a bunch of old conservative white guys with vacation homes and investments in energy companies found themselves embroiled in operations to push esoteric distinctions in Marxist lines, to bug and create intel reports on minor activist maneuverings in the-meeting-before-the-meeting. They were not good at it, but smart enough to know their own limitations and the need to wrangle in activist collaborators who actually understood all this weird lingo and could intuitively read the landscape. They focused on surveillance and black operations, but became obliged to have long confusing (cloaked) conversations with the activists they were assisting about the politicking.

Their ideal candidate had been Sanders—a reactionary nativist old white man who had a history of collaboration with the police state and a disdain for identity politics. He was close enough to the populist base of the fascists to deescalate a potential civil war but old enough to die soon so the old order could be restored. But Ocasio-Cortez was simply sharper, more energetic, and seen as more reasonable and educated on economics—she was sincere about getting the stock market back up. And—like the might’ve-been-King of the first American revolution, George Washington—she had both immense popular standing and a sincere discomfort with the reins of power. Spending time in the streets had hardened her private resolve to abandon political office as soon as she could, a rare inclination in a revolutionary figure that her minders planned to exploit. But while Ocasio-Cortez was doing gangbusters in the wider progressive movement and the streets, the DSA constitutional convention had her on the verge of losing her standing with the organizational left.

So when the Virginia Group Chat’s power base in Bread And Roses took enough dominance in the convention, they were compelled to rush through their constitutional declaration and vote Ocasio-Cortez into position as acting Director of the “new government.” The plan was to use this briefly seizable momentum to solidify her standing, and then sort the organizational chart of the congealing party apparatus into alignment beneath her. And honestly the earlier the new constitution was declared the sooner the batshit things could stop. Ocasio-Cortez could then serve out a temporary term as “director” for 2 years, ostensibly under the DSA “constitution” cleaning up the mess of the revolution and the Trump regime, before shepherding in elections and the restoration of the actual constitution. The Virginia Group Chat would force the organized left into order beneath her—albeit still without her knowledge—but the most they would pay for backing a socialist would be some empty leftist proclamations and the beginnings of a “Green New Deal” regulatory and administrative reshuffling in sectors of the government that had already been savaged under Trump.

But they knew they had to move quickly to turn a corner and lock things down conclusively before the US dissolved into complex multi-faction civil war.

And so with a public swearing of Ocasio-Cortez to restore the constitution, the intelligence community leaned on the military to accept this declaration of the position of “Director”—ignoring all the other language of the DSA constitution—as an interim office that would get the country back on track.

On the 22nd of January a masked US Marshal with a Supreme Court order and a deputy director of the FBI (the old empire’s secret police), flanked by soldiers from five semi-autonomous patches of the military that had gone unresponsive to Trump, marched into his palace and tried to place him under arrest.

What they found was a ransacked and trashed building and a days-dead 80-year-old man slumped on the floor of his “Situation Room,” TV still tuned to the dead channel of FOX News.

Their entrance into the presidential palace came almost as an afterthought, a necessary final punctuation to a done deal that had shaken out over two and a half months. But while it played on the restored national news media and the reconnected internet, and Ocasio-Cortez gave her famous “peace with justice” speech in front of Capitol Hill, the mess that had been created would prove not so easily cleaned.

The governors of Texas and Oklahoma made a mutual statement declaring themselves in limited secession from the Federal government, and Utah quietly moved to restructure its national guard and send them out into majority-Mormon surrounding counties under the auspices of disaster relief. Federal troops were almost immediately dispatched to Mississippi to put down the anti-black pogroms, albeit too late to save three thousand lives. And while national guard deployments were canceled and the streets emptied—except for a few last hanger-on encampments where anarchists would be isolated and rounded up—it became clear to everyone the repercussions were only beginning.

The Blue Guards remained mobilized to provide self-defense for urban areas against the various murderous raiding convoys of fascists and—in multiple cities—oversee the dismantling of police departments that had too openly abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered local activists and the politicians that had been ostensibly their superiors. This deep necessity of the Blue Guards led to them becoming legally normalized to varying degrees by city governments.

But while their base was often quite idealistic, if naive, their internal hierarchies remained deeply riven with Leninist entryists who now saw the revolution very much in terms of the First Russian Revolution, with Ocasio-Cortez taking the role of Kerensky, a compromised reformist leader seeking to restore the old order but doomed to be inevitably replaced by the fully revolutionary dictatorship they longed for.

The problem was that while these Leninists had survived the cancellings, splittings, arrests and secret liquidations that had shattered old groupsicles like the PSL and FRSO, they were all deeply suspicious of one another and too engaged in a thousand vicious interpersonal power plays each week to coordinate effectively. They had “power” over the Blue Guards, but were totally unable to coordinate that power.

What they needed was a replacement groupsicle of dedicated cultists, skilled in entryism, but with longstanding lines of interpersonal abuse holding them together who could take over and integrate the disparate Leninists ensconced in Blue Guard leadership.

Many of you have asked me to cover Calla Walsh’s activities in our prior sections but despite the later regime propaganda she simply wasn’t central to anything so far, and her power base in Unity of Fields wouldn’t become remotely relevant for another two years. In truth her cadre only rose to anything approaching relevance less than a year before she was able to seize power during The Funeral Stream.

No, as historians now periodize it, the New Year of Communism was not so much initiated by the DSA Constitutional Convention, but by something taking place at the same time Ocasio-Cortez stood in front of Capitol Hill and electrified the nation.

In Charles de Gaulle Airport, a Virgin Atlantic flight departed for Montreal carrying an 83-year-old revolutionary with plans to be driven across the border into Vermont.

Bob Avakian, head of the Revolutionary Communist Party and man of destiny, was finally on his way to power.

Part 4: “Boomer Communism” and “MAGA Communism”

Unlike a lot of standard literature, I wanted to avoid talking about the main figures of the second American revolution until this point to emphasize how uninvolved they were in the initial months of it. But now it’s time. We simply can’t put this off any longer.

Robert Bruce Avakian was born on March 7, 1943, in the city, “DC,” that was the capital of the old US empire. The child of a progressive Armenian-American lawyer, the young Avakian started his twenties as a pretty conventional 1960s “new leftist,” following waves of fellow students into projects like the Peace and Freedom Party and the Black Panther Party. But by the time he followed the flow of leftists into Students for a Democratic Society, he had wrapped himself in the stylings of hard-line Marxist-Leninist-Maoism.

In the fractious political squabbles of fringe Leninists in the 1970s, Avakian found his footing and personalist powerbase by remaining absolutely loyal to the idea of Mao. While other maoist deadenders like the aforementioned Freedom Road Socialist Organization, contorted themselves in loyalty to the PRC—with basically all the leading organizers on a Chinese payroll—for Avakian, the idea that Mao’s death terminated the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party opened the seductive possibility that someone new could join the profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. And who better than a cunning boy of destiny in the heart of the US empire. Someone who would do what no other communist had been able to: bring down capitalism from within.

Avakian quickly consolidated tight personal control over the disparate constellation of true-believer Maoists who could not stomach the dishonorable deviationism of the post-Mao PRC, and ran a tight ship of subcultural infiltration operations within the Bay Area. Avakian’s RCP wrapped themselves in the militant legitimacy of the baby-boiling Shining Path guerillas in Peru. Any insurgents still in the mountains were inevitably more sexy than established governments, and Avakian’s cadres cared a lot about looking cool. They infiltrated the prominent punk magazine Maximumrockandroll and co-opted the prominent band Rage Against The Machine. These were heady days of early success.

But in 1979, while protesting Deng Xiaoping, Avakian punched a US police officer. Ostensibly to avoid charges, he fled to Paris. Biographers connected to the Bay Area scene have speculated a lot about his sexual practices and conflict with other activists, implying that this self-aggrandizing departure may have been more opportunistic than necessary. But regardless, Avakian soon found he quite liked the Parisian life as a well-funded “exile.” This was something like the trajectory of figures like Lenin, and while some of his charms and manipulations worked less well over the phone to Berkeley, such limits were more than made up for by the mythic stature his position began to afford him. His followers could devour new recruits for themselves, while legitimizing themselves in an appropriately nebulous and distant authority.

Like the soup of other Leninist groups we’ve so far discussed, Avakian’s RCP controlled any number of “popular” front groups, with names like “World Can’t Wait,” “Stop Patriarchy,” “Refuse Fascism,” and “RiseUp4AbortionRights”—but overall they consistently remained dwarfed and eclipsed by the other Leninist groupsicles we’ve covered. This led to them being initially mostly marginalized within the Blue Guards, which, as we will see, paved the way to their victory.

The Virginia Group Chat may not have understood or cared about the doctrinal differences of Leninist factions, but the landing of over a hundred plainclothes PRC military operatives in Santa Barbara under a drone blackout was not something they could ignore. While several impromptu deployments collaborated with the Californian governor to hunt down and execute these foreign agents, the intelligence community was united in a need to likewise immediately eliminate the foreign assets who they knew damn well had taken root in the middle management of the Blue Guards. The problem was, even if it could be pulled off without a hitch, a mass operation of targeted executions would have devastating effects on political stability, right when they were beginning to believe an Ocasio-Cortez administration could be smoothly used to clean everything up.

But CIA agents were old hands at this kind of thing. If you need a faction eliminated, get another faction to do it, or to take credit while you do it.

So intelligence analysts took a look at the back-biting and positioning within the Blue Guard middle management and came away with a simple evaluation: while those Leninists notably tied to foreign funding were in a complex web of alliances and conflicts, impossible to tease apart, there was a smaller set who had largely avoided such ties. Relatively marginalized but still strong enough, and attempting to differentiate and legitimize themselves as the voice of black people.

Avakian’s RCP entryists were joined by a small constellation of other figures in the Blue Guards who either sincerely took umbrage with the clear dynamics of white control within the middle management ranks of the Guards, or merely diagnosed it as a weak point that could be leveraged for political advantage. Among these, the Leninists of the RCP were almost exclusively non-black, and their pretenses to black representation had long been laughable if not racist in-and-of-themselves. But their decades forged as a high-control group kept them disciplined and separate while Leninists who had started with rival groupsicles like the FRSO and PSL, quickly meshed in complex maneuvers for personal advantage.

This meant that when intelligence groups aligned with the Virginia Group Chat built urgent momentum to calls for racial reform within the Blue Guard hierarchy—all lined up against the Leninists seen as foreign assets—the RCP was well positioned.

The only significant Leninist organization that could have posed a threat to them, indeed could have completely drowned them out, had they worked towards it, was Omali Yeshitela’s Uhuru Movement, but they—not versed in entryism in white dominated projects like the street occupations—had refused to partake in the Blue Guards. Further, they were notorious Russian assets and Omali himself had been compromised via the sudden reveal of an affair with the wife of one of his lieutenants.

So as January came to a close and news channels breathlessly covered Ocasio-Cortez’ ascension, a minor kerfuffle within the Blue Guards went largely unnoticed. Just another round of leftist infighting, inevitable as any movement moves from expansion to collapse. Almost no one at the time had any awareness of this as anything deeper than online callouts, but it’s estimated about 20% of the Blue Guard “coordinators” were disappeared during this week by CIA hit squads.

Compromising details on Leninists originating in the PSL and FRSO would suddenly appear, the “anti-callout” RCP originating Leninists would press the attack in public callouts, long think pieces would be published on combatting internal white supremacy, often confused-and-sincere black activists loosely associated with the RCP and their coalition partners would be steamrolled into replacing targeted individuals… and then the removed Leninists would simply not show up again, no doubt chastened. Few had active family connections who noticed their disappearance, and those that did notice didn’t take it as a sign of anything untoward, given the chaos and secretive monofocus of the disappeared Leninists. Only one set of bone fragments has been recovered, in a dried up former aquifer in Colorado.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Avakian knew his acolytes were being assisted by the CIA.

Just as there’s very little evidence that the CIA really grasped that they were assisting Avakian.

The best summary of the situation still comes from one of journalist Ezra Klein’s retrospective books:

“While today we think of Chairman Bob as the butcher of over thirty million Americans, an inevitable engine of dictatorial power that directly led to Walsh and her drone wars, at the time no one, and I mean no one, saw him as a risk. I’ve talked to nearly a dozen figures in the operation groups who all say—off the record—the same thing: ‘We skimmed past his name. We didn’t even get briefings on him. They, the leftists, treated him as a joke, and so we did. If the leftist who most benefited from what we did was a grandpa on dialysis, that was almost definitionally benefiting no one.’ “
Ezra Klein, Virginia’s Kill Squads: Voices from the CIA At The Dawn of American Communism, 2nd Ed., (Shenzhen Free Zone:新民主主义 2047), 37.

I keep emphasizing this in part because if there’s one man that modern conservative history holds up as a Cassandra who was right about everything, it’s Caleb Maupin, the nationalistic communist warlord of the Redoubt who is frequently presented as the main oppositional figure to Avakian during the civil war. And yes, Maupin repeatedly accused both Ocasio-Cortez and Avakian of being CIA agents or assets.

But Maupin accused everyone of being CIA.

The man made some correct predictions during the revolution and civil war, sure, but that’s easy to do when you predict everything at one point or another. Not that it matters to those who still fly Redoubt battle flags and dream of the proper American communism snatched away, but his hit rate was dismal. He claimed Ocasio-Cortez was still alive for years. He claimed Claude-Parable had escaped and was directing the Autonomous Puget Sound forces, when we know it was actually a hybrid network of open source models.

There’s absolutely no evidence that Maupin had any unique insight or access into the developments in the Virginia Group Chat. Nor is Maupin’s status as the “only uncompromised American” even remotely true. There are mounds of evidence he was wholly on the payroll of the Russian government for decades, taking orders and compliantly adjusting his claims. This wasn’t made up by the Walsh directorate, it’s literally on display in cryptographic signature on the old FSB databases. Moreover Maupin repeatedly sent entreaties and offers of collaboration to both the old FBI when he was younger and to pretty much every existing force—including the remains of the old military and the intelligence factions—during his campaign in Alberta.

Sure, at a pivotal moment he was involved during the multi-front attack on OpenAI and Anthropic’s compute, but Caleb Maupin was not the hero or the genius that so many want him to be.

But let’s rewind back to our point in the story of the second American revolution and properly introduce the warlord of the Redoubt.

Maupin was born in 1988, when Avakian was already middle aged and a decade into his “exile.” He grew up in a small town in Ohio, as a largely unremarkable kid without friends. We should be skeptical of all the accounts about him torturing animals as these do actually seem to have been fabricated by the Walsh directorate. But it’s certainly true that Maupin was always conservative with fascist impulses. In the absence of explicitly fascist groups openly organizing around him while he was a teenager, Maupin was instead recruited into a Leninist faction. The names and the acronyms of this one don’t matter at all to the story of the revolution so I won’t bore you with them, but they were essentially defined less by economic issues than by lionizing any dictatorship that wasn’t the US.

From the start of his involvement in Leninist orgs, Maupin was hugely ambitious but completely incapable of sharing a spotlight. Additionally, he simply could not comprehend the turn of most Leninist organizations during this period away from queermisia (or, as they would have termed it back then, “homophobia”). Leninists in the US and the wider world had long been largely gendersexual reactionaries on quite violent terms. Maupin saw concessions away from this as weak-willed deviations and desperate opportunism.

Maupin finally found the enunciation of his ideological orientation via the Russian fascist Alexander Dugin, and spent the decade prior to the second american revolution as a talking head for a fascist Russian state media project. But Maupin never gave up on his habituated Leninist organizing model, and while his projects like the “Center for Political Innovation” incessantly railed against leftists, he avoided starting from scratch in openly fascist spaces. Better to be an adept fish in a tiny Leninist pond, than a clumsy and disrespected fish in a big fascist pond.

But while Maupin was relatively unique among American Leninists in how early on he fixated on AI, at the end of 2026 he had meager few insights and almost no base, gathering scattered attendees to small conferences basically entirely on the dime of his patrons in Russian intelligence.

There’s no question he wanted to obtain power at the New York and Chicago street occupations he visited, but no one would give him the time of day, and he was constitutionally incapable of swallowing his pride and engaging in the networking within the Blue Guard hierarchies.

So while Maupin spent the early revolution railing against anyone and everyone in videos online, he was certainly not a part of the DSA constitutional convention. Instead he continued to stump for “MAGA communism”—conjoining the reactionary social politics of Trump’s former base with some residual Leninist trappings. There were aspects of his pitch that resonated, that were designed to resonate, with the conservative and fascist population of the US empire, but even as much of that base wanted to renounce Trump and cling onto welfare prospects, there was no reason for them to accept a lower-fidelity version of their politics with communist branding that had long been alien to them.

While Avakian’s consolidation of power within the Blue Guards was almost a runaway phenomenon, cutting a critical infrastructure of force out from underneath the bogged down Ocasio-Cortez, there were many potential rallying points for the fascist and conservative forces.

In February of 2027, there were literal secession crises around Texas, Utah, and a continued crossborder crisis in Alberta (which had been a province in the combined and independent northern polities then known as Canada). State militias were being openly mobilized. Two Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines were refusing orders and declaring themselves loyal to Trump’s vice president, wherever he may be. The US Department of State was acting autonomously of the Ocasio-Cortez administration, under a conservative who both the military and the intelligence community refused to arrest. A national network of police was holding a delayed rival constitutional convention in collaboration with a fascistic militia movement called the “Three Percenters.” And an attempted dry run of racial genocide outside of Baltimore had ended up creating a massive festival of white supremacists constantly getting into gun battles with locals. A fragile alliance led by two then-very-popular fascists, a Nick Fuentes and a Tucker Carlson, was reportedly on the verge of mobilizing a ragtag citizens’ army of several hundred thousand to invade the capital.

Any one of these could have consolidated the fascist opposition to Ocasio-Cortez’s directorate and dodged—or won over—chunks of the military and intelligence communities.

But then March 3rd, outside a theater in Hamtramck, Michigan, one of Maupin’s adherents succeeded in gunning down the “DSA politician,” El-Sayed.