American Insurgent

by Phil Rabalais

  “My wife stood by my side, my daughter hid in our panic room, and—I will not mince my words—I shot and killed four agents. They did not come to my door with clipboards and smiles, wanting to inspect my home. They did not ask to check my serial numbers or see if my guns were in compliance. They used a battering ram to knock my door off its hinges and entered my home without warning, each holding a full-auto M4 carbine that NONE OF US could legally own any longer even if we paid our extortion money to the ATF. I considered this breach of my home an act of war against a citizen of this country, and I reacted accordingly and unapologetically. I killed them and placed my family in a very precarious situation in the process. Mark and his group aided my escape, and we are preparing to release ALL of the information, drone footage, and radio recordings of the attack and post attack on every social media platform, every AM/FM radio frequency, every avenue we have available to us. The resources of a nation-state are limitless, and if we alone undertake this, we will be stopped, our message will stop, and we will be hunted down. That is inevitable.

  “If you join with us, release the information we have provided simultaneously, the agency will be so overwhelmed they will not be able to stop our message. The time has come to decide if you are in this fight or out. If you stand on the sidelines, know that you are abandoning not only us, but tens of thousands of people to the same fate that awaited me. Maybe hundreds of thousands. You can ease your guilt with phone calls and warnings, but you know, as I do, many of these people do not have the preparations and training to mount an appropriate defense of themselves. If we do not act, they will be rounded up and carted off just as many have already. I do not mince my words, based on my attack this morning, the agency may opt for an even more aggressive stance. The next house they hit, they may not use a battering ram, they may just shoot on sight. Save money on prison housing costs, 5.56 is cheaper than feeding and clothing prisoners. And if that happens, we have stood by and watched people who have never committed a crime be executed because their government decided only it should be able to use force to protect its interests.

  “In 1775, the original Minutemen faced a similar choice as you do today. They could have issued their warning, moved the powder stores as they did, and not confronted the British troops. They could have stayed home and not stood in front of the world’s greatest army and refused to be disarmed. But those men stood there and said NO, no more. They told the British they would not be disarmed, they would not scatter, they would not yield. They took casualties, and the further casualties of the American Revolution cut a bloody swath through the people of this fledgling country. But no price was too great to pay for their freedom; no matter how many sons or brothers they sent to the lines never to be heard from again, the price was worth paying. The price is worth paying today. Stand with us, and if this turns into a shooting match, then let’s fight it out knowing the cost is worth paying.” John released his microphone button, and the transmission ceased. He leaned back in his chair and released the tension he felt. He had done his best to energize them; he only hoped it worked. What he did not expect was a response.

  “I don’t think engaging the agents in a shooting match is a productive solution, and neither do many of us. We survive by hiding our presence, not by goading them into a fight we cannot win. Are you going to be the one to defend our families when the agents come to find us?” This self-appointed leader of the opposition made no attempt to hide the contempt he felt, both for John’s foolish decision to fight and for this foolish attempt to enrage the agency.

  “And what will you do when these agents DO come to your doorstep? Will you fight? Will you surrender? Will you hand over your arms and bend to this tyrant? Or will you do exactly what I did when backed into a corner, sir?” John lashed out, careful to control his anger. He could not believe all these years later, he was still hearing the same pleadings. Obey the law, don’t fight, don’t resist, compromise. Compromise had brought them to this point, and this man and his kind would go on compromising all the way to the damned gas chamber so they could trade a dangerous life of freedom for a few more moments of life in captivity. John would rather face his mortality than live with a boot on his neck, and he was realizing just how alone he had felt all those years ago when he came to understand most people would rather the boot.

  “We aren’t engaging in a shooting match with these people just to satisfy you,” the voice said with finality.

  “I have argued with people just like you for years. People who told me to compromise, obey the law, tolerate a little more infringement, stop upsetting people. And those people will continue to compromise all the way to their demise. If these agents come to your doorstep like they did mine this morning, they will not politely knock. They will come in and haul every one of you off to prison. No trial, no jury, no list of charges, no legal representation. No, sir, they will just come and take you and your families and your friends, and you can all share the same cell. The question is not DO we fight, it is when? Do you want to fight this fight now, while we have enough like-minded people still to push them back, or wait and let them pick us off one at a time? These people don’t even realize the danger they are in, and we have an obligation to warn them. And if the consequence of issuing that warning is we have to defend ourselves, so be it.”

  “What you preach is madness.”

  “And what you preach is surrender. I refuse to surrender! Why the hell have all of you joined this movement if not to fight? Why did you hold onto your arms; why didn’t you give them up? Why are you here if you aren’t ready to lay it on the line for your beliefs? Either we fight this fight now, or we will lose it later. I’m signing off now so that I don’t have to hear any more of this man’s cowardice. In another three hours, we will have our answer. Who are the patriots who will stand with us at Lexington and Concord, and who are the Tories who will trade their brethren and their ideals for the false promise of life without freedom? People, you’re either in, or you’re out. Make your choice.” John disconnected the transmission. He then stood abruptly and stomped out to the yard.

  Kevin and Mark glanced at each other.

  “Hell, after that speech, I’m ready to follow him into Hell itself,” Kevin remarked. “He’s right, the time to push is now, and if that leads to open hostilities, we are stronger now than we will be tomorrow. And that little prick from the city would sit there and do nothing until it was too late.”

  Mark nodded. “We always knew some of these people would not toe the line when the time came. He only echoed what many will think. But I think John just made the case for everyone, and I expect a lot of the other cells will join us. The ones on the fence will join in when they see everyone else. No one wants to be the cell that sat this out.”

  Mark turned to go talk to John when something caught his eye from the monitoring station they had set up to comb through news stories and press releases. They had it configured to hunt for keywords and phrases and to prioritize accordingly. What he was looking at was pictures of John and Rachel and the words armed and extremely dangerous in bold lettering above them. “Kevin, go grab John and his wife right the hell now.”

  John and Rachel came into the room, looking at their pictures on a large overhead screen. The news story being broadcast was damning. The Minutemen were named as a terrorist organization that had claimed to be responsible for the deaths of four “innocent” government agents, with the perpetrators identified but their whereabouts unknown.

  “The pictures make these guys look like altar boys. Of course they don’t want to show them all geared up for a raid, make them out to be some good guys just out doing their jobs when a couple of gun nuts shot them in the back. And of course they grab a picture from my service record. Two-for-one deal, cast a poor light on pro-gun people and military vets,” John snarled. He had expected a government misinformation campaign, he had not anticipated it being so soon.

  “John, this plays right into our hands. Once we bombard all the media and so
cial media platforms with the evidence—”

  “You’re assuming we manage to. If everyone else doesn’t follow suit, the message will go nowhere and we’ll be hunted like dogs. Hell, my own mother would turn me in if she thought I was some crazy running around shooting people for no reason.”

  Mark could not disagree with John, only hold firm to the faith he had in his compatriots. “John, Rachel, this will work. We have to believe that.”

  Silence greeted him as John stared forward. His wife placed her hand on her husband’s broad shoulder, and he visibly relaxed, if only a little. “Fine, we’ll wait it out. About two and a half hours till we find out if our faith is misplaced,” John said with finality.

  Rallying Cry

  That evening, what began as a trickle of posts on social media quickly turned into a deluge. Every platform was bombarded with a rapid-fire assault of posts and links to the information John and Mark had prepared. The information was damning to the agency, even damning to the government that had authorized it. Some saw this unauthorized press release as only further confirmation of the media’s earlier characterization of the Minutemen as a terrorist organization, while many others were shocked at what they saw. That any agent of the United States government would act so aggressively to people who had not committed a violent crime was appalling, upsetting, and even enraging. More importantly, those gun owners who refused to surrender saw what waited for them. They realized the danger they faced was not the one they had faced years prior, in which you pay some fines or lose some guns. The penalty for their refusal to comply was now the safety and lives of themselves and their families.

  Two things accompanied this press release. All across the country, gun owners pulled their rifles from the backs of their closets, from under mattresses, from out of attics; some even walked into their backyards with shovels. Guns were cleaned and oiled; magazines were loaded. For the first time in two hundred and fifty years, the spirit of revolution had awakened in Americans young and old. The fabled dragon had been awakened once again, the one that had prevented regimes from invading America for generations. There would once again be a rifle behind every blade of grass, only this time the threat was not levied upon Chinese or Russians or Mexicans or British. This time, the threat was for their government to respect the rights of its citizens. The people were ready to stand.

  Simultaneously, there was a shriek of frustration coming from a mid-level supervisor working in a nondescript office somewhere in America. He was a program analyst tasked with screening social media platforms for libelous statements, hate speech, and anti-government sentiment. Years prior, the tech companies had finally ceded to the government’s insistence that only they could be trusted with monitoring the internet, that last bastion of free speech. The ironic part was, the majority of people agreed only because of the tech companies’ policies of censoring conservative speech. The votes were in to take this function out of the hands of the private-sector employees and place it in the hands of the bureaucracy that knew only its own interests.

  “Can’t you shut that down?!” he bellowed. They were working to scrub these unauthorized releases of information as vigorously as they were able, yet for every one they managed to take down, for every post they broke the link to, two more popped up in their place. It was as if his forty employees were impotent in the face of this onslaught of free speech. He would have taken little comfort in knowing that three to four people each in more than two hundred Minutemen cells were bombarding social media. The end result was simple arithmetic. The government regulatory arm simply did not have the manpower to stop them.

  “Uh, sir, it isn’t just on social media. I just got reports from the FCC they’re hearing pirated AM/FM frequencies broadcasting this same information, including our own radio chatter from that day,” a clerk warned his supervisor.

  “What the…how in the hell are they doing that?!”

  “I don’t know, sir. The FCC said all of the registered stations are calling in on landlines, and it’s locking up their switchboard. They all want to know where these transmissions are coming from too. It isn’t localized either. California, New York, Washington State, Florida, flyover states, you name it—this is coast to coast.”

  The supervisor felt a bead of sweat roll down his back. “Well, how the hell do we stop it?”

  “That’s just the thing, sir, normally we would just call our men at the local stations and tell them to pull the plug. These stations aren’t ours. We can’t stop them. And they’re on all frequencies. AM, FM, ham, CB, hell, even military frequencies. They are blasting every radio frequency but cell phones.”

  The supervisor could have opted to engage the internet kill switch, that oft rumored but never employed fail-safe. It had quietly been built into the system, its legislation buried in a thousand-page appropriations bill never read by the voters, to be employed in the event a cyberattack ever threatened to cripple or topple the government, and this seemed the perfect time to employ it. But the supervisor did not use his authority; as bureaucrats are apt to do, he reached out to his supervisor. And to his. And it would be hours before the unauthorized traffic was brought to heel by shutting off every internet service provider simultaneously. The internet, the last true method of free speech in America, was silenced.

  Likewise, the decision was made hours too late to broadcast radio static on all available frequencies. They could not stop the pirate transmissions, but they could drown them out. The peer-to-peer sharing of pirate torrent files was a massive success, and once this spread outside the United States onto hard drives of military service members and families overseas, even the internet kill switch shutting down the US could not stop it.

  All around the globe, people were seeing firsthand what a modern tyranny looked like, and they were shocked. The world media had all been led to believe the repeal of the Second Amendment was near unanimous, and the turnover of arms a peaceful one. What they were seeing was quite the opposite, something many nations would recognize from history books. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, communist China; many other nations would recognize a government’s heavy-handed attempt to subdue its citizenry through the use of military or paramilitary assets. The global political fallout for the current presidential administration would be catastrophic and embarrassing. Not embarrassment at what had come, but at being caught doing it.

  “Holy shit,” John breathed. He had not dared believe this would be this successful. Only a handful of the Minutemen cells had refused to engage in their information war, and they would be severely marginalized by their fellows when this was all said and done. Their press release was nearly simultaneously released, across social media, P2P sharing, and radio broadcasts from coast to coast. The only variance in their starting times seemed to be the time their watches were set to.

  Mark smiled proudly, but not smugly. “Told ya.” In truth, he had held his breath for nearly two minutes after he had indicated to Kevin to start transmitting, waiting to see if his faith had been misplaced. Kevin’s four-man team had prepared the radio broadcast equipment with a looped playback so it required no supervision, one man had stirred up the P2P sharing to get the torrent file into private hands as quickly as possible, and it spread like wildfire. Bulletin boards, forums, social media, everything but local church bulletins were trading the links to those torrent files, and with every download, the number of peers and seeds was growing exponentially. The attempts to track IP addresses were largely unsuccessful, as many people use VPNs (virtual private networks) to shield this activity from prying eyes, but some of the IPs traced overseas, which surprised Kevin. Once they get on that side of the pond, things will just continue spreading like a virus, he thought.

  “What now?” John asked.

  “Well, I’m going to keep out of Kevin’s way and let him do what he does best. He’s the IT guy here, used to work for one of the big tech companies in California before it got too liberal for him and he moved back to a freer state. I suspect we’ll keep this
up for a few more hours if our luck holds that long.”

  “What do you mean?” John asked.

  Kevin answered, “Well, the way I see it is we have them on the back foot now. Sooner or later someone will get the balls to engage the internet kill switch and shut down all the ISPs. They might even figure out a good way to knock out our radio broadcasts. Once that happens, we’re done, but by then it won’t matter. We won the war, and they’re still trying to fight the battle. If people react like we hope, the next time these agents put bootheel to front door, they’re going to come face-to-face with one unhappy homeowner, not some pushover waiting for his turn at the detainment camp.”

  “And after that?” John pressed.

  “Well,” Mark replied, “after that we see what we can do to make more trouble for this agency. Sour the public perception of them enough, sooner or later the government will have to bring them to heel. That will at least stop the confiscations and detainments. That’ll be some victory all by itself. Beyond that, we need to strategize in our own sphere what we can do to reverse the damage that has been done.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” John said. “I bet there’s a lot of people stuck in that camp who would really like to see daylight again, and a lot of family and friends who would like to see them free. Remember I said the Minutemen were like Robin Hood? I think it’s time to go bust everyone out of the sheriff’s jail.”

  Every eye in the room swiveled to look at John, only to find the same stoic face they were becoming accustomed to.