
A letter from the future
Our researchers have unearthed this letter, apparently written in 2023, in the midst of the second American civil war.
My fellow American, I have no idea who you are or what year you will be reading this but I guess you will be curious as to how the country you live in ended up in this state of violence and perpetual crisis. It is no exaggeration to say we are the middle of a civil war.
As the purge of intellectuals and “cleansing” of the archives continues across our nation, there is no guarantee that this history will be faithfully recorded, so I feel it is my duty to attempt to report how this came to pass.
It is important that I share with you this cautionary tale, so your generation has at least some chance to avoid repeating the apocalyptic scenario we live in today.
I write this letter under considerable duress; outside, I can hear the regular noise of gunfire and for days the air has been filled with the acrid smell of smoke from burning buildings. I can feel them closing in, and fear I may not have much time.
As I write to you, our nation is embroiled in a violent civil war from which I can see no ending, except one awash in bloodshed and terror that will leave our society in ruins for many decades to come. I hope that this does not come to pass.
In hindsight, the conditions that led to the present situation were all too plain to see.
It is simplistic and wrong to simply say that the turning point was the election of the tyrant, who I will not name, in 2016. But there is no doubt that his arrival accelerated the decline of our once great nation.
Even before he came to office, we were a nation awash in deadly, high-powered weaponry, easily accessible to all, thanks to endless resistance by the NRA to any tightening of gun laws and to ensure vigilance to the Second Amendment. This enabled an environment where semi-automatic rifles, sub-machine guns and high-powered pistols could be openly carried into potentially volatile situations without any interference from law enforcement agencies.
The nation’s industrial heartland had been hit by several decades of decline, facilitated by a free market economic ideology, leading to widening economic inequality and envy which in turn had fuelled anger and resentment towards modern urban liberalism.
Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, we had been able to paper over centuries of vast and bitter racial divides. The eight years of the Obama presidency lulled us into a false sense that progress was being made, although it was marred by a spate of white on black police shootings.
But these wounds were re-opened in a short period of time after the tyrant was elected, accompanied by renewed tolerance for discrimination and oppression towards racial and religious minorities.
We suffered environmental degradation that accelerated far earlier than predicted due to deliberate policies that favoured heavy pollutants over renewables and turned their back on action to reduce climate change.
Ideological extremes were fed and nurtured by an ongoing culture war over identity, multiculturalism, abortion, and rights for women and minorities.
This tinderbox had existed for years but had been held in check by the unifying forces of strong political leadership and respect for the institutions of government and judiciary.
Then, in 2017, we saw the arrival of a President who sought not to unify, but to divide; not to heal wounds, but to inflame them; who pandered to bigots and white supremacists; and who recklessly and deliberately provoked and encouraged an uprising by a white underclass against those they hated and resented.
Whether it was the President’s intention to trigger a civil war or not, the results were the same.
Emboldened by a leader who showed no interest in healing historical racial scars, who ridiculed gun control activists, and who preached an ideology of self-interested ultra-nationalism to a disenfranchised and easily manipulated section of the community, armed militias began forming in early-2018, patrolling the streets of dozens of cities in vigilante packs and rounding up Muslims, Arabs, Mexicans and other migrant and minority groups.
Sensing immunity from any form of punishment under this President who spoke to and encouraged their own prejudices, these new militias slaughtered entire families in the name of white American purity. As their numbers grew, and with only the most tepid of reprimands from the nation’s ruler, they became increasingly confident in asserting their place in society and violently doing away with anyone who stood in their way.
But it was not long before a counter force of African-American and Hispanic militias, also heavily armed and often having their origins in urban gang culture, began to coalesce and exact retaliation against the white militias. Seemingly uninterested in the outcome of the early skirmishes between these two groups, the President benignly sat back and watched events unfold into open conflict.
Within a short amount of time, parts of America’s largest cities had become warzones as rival race-based militias fought for control with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammunition.
Eventually, the President relented, sending troops onto the streets to impose martial law where they could, but it was too late. By the summer of 2020 — an election year, no less — America was engaged in a full civil war from one end of the country to the other.
And still the President sat back and watched, occasionally tweeting a few words of encouragement to those who regarded themselves as his supporters. When military chiefs approached him with warnings that the situation was in danger of spiralling out of control, the President waved them away, exercising his powers as commander-in-chief.
He scorned any criticism, whether from Congress, the media or the courts, instead basking in the accolades and applause at mass rallies of hand-picked supporters, which were beamed into every house by Fox News.
When some drew the courage to openly criticise the direction the country was heading, the President became increasingly ruthless in dealing with opposition within his regime, ejecting anyone who was not willing to pledge total subservience to him and replacing them with loyalists and family members who would do his bidding without question. In what became known as the night of the long knives, he replaced the entire upper echelons of the military and national security establishment with loyalists after demanding but failing to achieve absolute allegiance.
By the time the President began to crack down on those left among us who he viewed as “opponents”, it was unfortunately far too late for us to resist.
The culprits for the terrorist attack on the Congress in the spring of 2020 have never been found. The official line has always been that the saboteurs were from a radical Islamist group, but suspicions remain that it was an act of deliberate provocation by supporters of the President.
Whatever the case, the President reacted forcefully and decisively, suspending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, closing the Senate and the House of Representatives, and abolishing the Supreme Court as he placed the levers of government into the hands of a small group of military advisers. Elections that were due to be held in November 2020 were postponed indefinitely. His Republican Party colleagues, afraid of alienating their base, timidly allowed this to happen.
The President justified these moves by arguing that when the nation was under attack from terrorist forces, normal democratic principles were a luxury that could not be afforded.
The suspension of democracy coincided with the creation of a new, heavily armed Presidential Guard, who were granted extraordinary powers to imprison or, if necessary, eliminate anyone deemed to be an enemy of the state. These powers were enshrined by the passage of an executive order labelled the Elimination of Un-American Activities Act.
The Presidential Guard were issued with pre-emptive lifelong pardons in anticipation of the lives that would be needed to be taken to restore order.
Detention centres were built to accommodate the millions of overseas-born residents who through another executive order were found to be potential foreign agents. More space was needed for the union members, political activists, intellectuals, artists and other dissidents rounded up in the great purge of 2021. The children of illegal immigrants were deported en masse. At the same time, all forms of public protest were banned and the ban was enforced with extreme prejudice.
With the suspension of all elections and the ongoing closure of other democratic and judicial institutions, at the beginning of 2022, and six years since he had been democratically elected, the President granted himself a new title as Supreme Leader and declared a final push to rid the nation of all opposition or dissidence once and for all.
Homosexual and transgender people, non-Christian migrants, unmarried woman and single African-American men were systematically arrested and then detained indefinitely as part of what was described as the 2022 Restoration of Freedom Act.
The construction of a two-metre wall on the border of Mexico, completed in 2025, effectively bankrupted the government, forcing the President to introduce a new poll tax with all proceeds being funnelled into national security. But even with the poll tax, there were no longer the funds to build intrastructure or fulfill many of the other basic roles of government, resulting in the cutting back and elimination of most forms of social welfare entitlements.
In past times, the media has provided an extra institutional layer of protection for our democracy, but that also became no longer the case.
The restrictions on press freedom began with the characterisation and ridiculing of independent journalism as “fake news” or “crooked media”, and when that didn’t work, troublesome journalists were arbitrarily arrested or even assassinated by the President’s supporters.
That had some impact, but did not totally stop media scrutiny of the President until 2022, when he enacted a little-known statute to shut down The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR and dozens of other outlets. The directors of these outlets were also arrested and charged with treason and tax fraud. Soon afterwards, Fox News was appointed the official government broadcaster.
You might ask where was I while all this was happening, and I am ashamed to admit that for far too long I stood by and allowed my nation to descend into a state of permanent crisis.
As a white, middle-class male living in a progressive urban enclave on the north-east coast, for a long period I was immune from most of the clampdown.
With my other liberal friends, I shared my concerns about the direction the country was heading and many was the night when we sat around the table at a restaurant or bar cursing and lamenting the tyrant in the White House. But perhaps because I was not personally directly affected I did not participate in any protests or other actions against the regime and I turned my face when my fellow citizens were victims of the regime’s actions.
By the time the President began to crack down on those left among us who he viewed as “opponents”, it was unfortunately far too late for us to resist. We had no choice but to bow obsequiously to his rule.
But now I am bearing the consequences for my inaction and deeply regret being among the silent millions who did not speak up when there was still a chance to prevent our nation going down this path.
My fellow American, I must stop now as the gunfire is getting closer and louder and I can hear shouting at my door. I pray that when you read this letter, the Civil War is a long distant memory and peace once again reigns in our nation.
Until then — God save America.

