Christian Nation (35 page)

So while those of us at TW and in the governor’s inner circle understood the reason for our peaceful winter, the prevailing view within the Sec Bloc population was that the declaration of Holy War was a final desperate gambit to pressure the Sec Bloc states to back down and rejoin the Union. Those holding this view believed that Jordan needed to declare war to call the bluff of secession, but that real civil war was a line the theocrats would not cross.

Sanjay worked relentlessly to ensure that the Sec leadership did not embrace this fallacy. On the weekly conference call of the Sec Bloc State governors, the governor of Delaware said she had received assurances from those close to Jordan that actual war, violent war—tanks-in-the-street kind of war—just would not happen. Sanjay was always patient and methodical in his replies:

“Governor, I very much doubt this. Interposition gave Jordan the perfect opportunity to slow down in a face-saving way. He had the chance to preserve—for that part of the country that could tolerate it—The Blessing and everything else the Christian Nation project has achieved over the past ten years. This would have allowed him to keep the Union together and thus consolidate his control of all the instruments of federal power. Martial law would have stayed in effect. He would have been in the best possible position to contest the 2018 and 2020 elections. It was the best possible choice for him. But he walked away from this opportunity. So we need to ask ourselves why.”

“Is he reasonable, even sane?” Bloomberg asked.

“My opinion,” replied Sanjay, “is that he is entirely sane, quite brilliant, and extremely strategic. But you must understand that when these people say they believe, they believe. People who do not have religious beliefs too often fall into the trap of failing to accept the professed beliefs of others at face value. Don’t think of faith as belief; think of faith as a type of
knowledge
. They
know
that God exists, they
know
that the Bible is the revealed word of God, they
know
that their highest calling in life is to obey God’s will, and they
know
that if they do not, they will suffer unbearable torment for all eternity. How does this compare with the things that motivate you, Governor?”

Those in the room shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

“The closest analogy,” Sanjay continued, “might be your knowledge that you love your children, and always will, no matter what happens. Any other condition is unimaginable. Is that unreasonable? Is that insane? The key here is never to indulge in the hope or assumption that they do not really believe what they say they believe.”

Bloomberg looked grim, and the Delaware governor on the phone was silent.

I interrupted Sanjay. “I agree with that, but you must understand that their faith does
not
mean that they are unable to think reasonably, only that there are real limits to the way reason and strategy will determine their behavior. If your child is threatened, you’ll use all your stores of reason and strategy to help her. But when none of that works, you don’t give up. You keep trying; you do something manifestly unreasonable, bold, or rash. A mother runs suicidally into a burning building to save her child. This sort of unreasonable behavior happens every day all around us. So the Holies will calmly and rationally continue to plot to achieve their objectives. But when they meet a hopeless roadblock, they’ll abandon reason and do whatever they can.”

“Greg is right,” Sanjay said, “because on the other side of the roadblock stands the most important thing in the universe ever to happen—the most important thing that
can
ever happen, which is the second coming of Christ. And they know that America must be a godly kingdom in order for that to occur. And they know that we are now in the end times and that the rapture and Armageddon are near. So no, they are not bluffing about war. For two decades they have been educating their children and preparing their parents to use violence. Gen Josh, Joshua’s Army, Warrior Christ, making Christians the victims and secularism the aggressor, inuring popular culture to violence—these are the things they have done to prepare. Violence is what is now required. So, I am sorry, violence is what we will see.”

“OK,” Bloomberg replied. “I get it. But still, let’s remember we never pretended that we could win a war. Secession was an
economic
strategy. Cut off their money; show them that the United States is not a viable country without half the GDP, without Wall Street and the banking system, without Hollywood, without the ports of Long Beach and New York. We cut the heart out of the country, and if that doesn’t bring them to the table, then God help us.”

“I understand,” Sanjay replied. “It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do. And it might work. But it might not. And if it does not, you need to decide whether or not to fight. If you decide to fight, then now is the time to prepare.”

I interrupted. “But, San, I know they will fight. The question is will
our
people really fight? The Guard perhaps, some of the troops loyal to the Sec states, maybe law enforcement. But ordinary people taking to the streets for a full-blown civil war? Fighting professional soldiers? I don’t know. We don’t have guns. It would be suicide for a bunch of ordinary New Yorkers to stand up in front of charging marines. Isn’t it over if they can get the regular military to come in?”

“Let’s not worry about that now,” the governor said, interrupting. “Everything we do, every single little thing, should raise the stakes, raise the cost of a real war. If it puts them off for a month, a week, even a day, we should do it. If they send in the US Air Force and Marines as if this were Grenada, well, we know how that story ends. Nothing I can do about that. But I can do lots of things so history says we tried our best to ensure that that day never comes.”

And so, during the winter and early spring of 2018, what people were calling the “phony war” simmered on with a gradual escalation of violence. In places like rural central California, upstate New York, and western Pennsylvania, the Christian militias engaged in periodic harassment of institutions such as universities, public schools, and local television stations that were disrespectful of The Blessing. Two liberal federal judges were assassinated near Harrisburg, and the president of Cornell University was briefly kidnapped and then released after the trustees agreed to shut down the college radio station, which had acquired a national following for its spirited sophomoric mockery of The Blessing. Outside Albany, arsonists burned the houses of the Democratic leadership of the assembly and senate, who were not home at the time but thereafter prudently left to stay with relatives in Brooklyn.

Only weeks later, the simmering violence was brought home to New Yorkers in a shocking way. On a Saturday afternoon in late April, Mayor Quinn and her wife attended a wedding in Queens. The groom was the most senior officer in the New York City Fire Department who was openly gay and one of the department’s most decorated heroes. The
Daily News
coverage of the wedding included a photomontage of all the children and others he had carried out of burning buildings under the headline “
Mazel tov
!” After a decade with his partner, they were getting married. Any mayor would have attended this wedding, but it had special meaning for Quinn, who was also gay. Only moments after the ceremony was completed, five gunmen in commando fatigues appeared from behind the altar. A brief staccato burst from military-issue automatic rifles followed, and the commandoes disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. A security camera captured two black SUVs in the rear parking lot, but these were never traced. Inside, the wedding party and a dozen guests in the front rows, including the mayor and her wife, were killed instantly. A score of others were injured. New York Police Department security officers never had the chance to draw their weapons. “Terror” is a word cheapened by two decades of abuse. Although a wedding is a joyous occasion and a funeral a sad one, both are moments where we feel fragile and exposed. The undercurrent of a wedding is that happiness is transitory, and this fact is affirmed by a funeral. So the Taliban knew what it was doing in targeting weddings and funerals. This was a day when New Yorkers felt real terror.

Due to the events that unfolded over the course of that year, the city was unable to hold an election to replace Mayor Quinn. Although a deputy mayor became the acting mayor under the city’s charter, from that point on Governor Bloomberg in effect performed both jobs.

During this period, our principal strategy was to do everything possible to starve the federal government of resources and prevent it from functioning in the normal way. The day the secession laws were passed, each Sec Bloc state required its corporate and individual taxpayers to pay all federal taxes to a special escrow account in New York. The fourteen Sec Bloc states that seceded—though only 28 percent in number of the states—provided the federal government with nearly 50 percent of its tax revenue, and a day after secession the US Treasury was cut off from that portion of its normal cash flow. Moreover, US Treasury borrowing operations were dependent on New York City: Manhattan-based primary dealers bought the bulk of the treasury bonds, notes, and bills at auction; those trades cleared through New York; and New York financial institutions handled custody, payment, and numerous other functions necessary to sustain the deficit funding to which the federal government was addicted. The entire board and staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York “defected” to the Sec Bloc and cooperated with the financial strategy being run out of the governor’s office, effectively disabling the usual operations of the Washington-based Fed.

Jordan and Congress had an interesting dilemma. Although the revenue sources of the government had been decimated, the federal budget was in some sense self-correcting. Forty-three percent of federal expenses were for entitlements, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The administration immediately cut off all payments and transfers to the Sec Bloc states, at once eliminating almost 25 percent of their customary expenses. They suspended servicing of interest owing on treasury securities to persons resident in the United States, but, afraid of the Chinese, they kept paying interest to foreigners. This move cut another 3 percent of expenditures. But this still left a severe gap in funds available to run the federal government and plan a civil war. Federal employees were paid only sporadically, and entitlement payments to citizens left in the Christian Nation Bloc were often late or reduced. The disruption to the nation’s financial, trading, and transportation systems had again thrown the economy back into recession, and as a result the tax revenues of the federal government further eroded over the balance of the year.

Although business outside the Sec Bloc was cut off from the normal means of raising capital domestically, China continued to fund—at shockingly high rates—both the federal government and American corporations. Although the disruption was as severe as any since the Civil War, businesses on both sides of the Holy War divide showed enormous adaptability and resilience. Somehow goods moved around, energy sources remained reliable, consumers consumed, employment stabilized, and the impact on ordinary families was far less than we had predicted.

In mid-March, with financial pressures on the federal government escalating, Jordan again showed his strategic prowess and his determination to keep building the new Christian Nation while simultaneously dealing with the coming war. The president called a press conference to say that the temporary loss of tax revenue from the Sec Bloc states was part of God’s plan and a great blessing, as it would at long last precipitate a reshaping of the federal government to a sustainable size. He tabled legislation, passed by Congress within a week, that eliminated hundreds of federal departments, agencies, boards, and commissions ranging from enormous organizations, such as the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to perennial right-wing targets such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Institutes for Health, and the National Science Foundation. The savings, he announced, would nearly close the federal budget gap, and it would free American business to grow and prosper. The hundreds of thousands of DC-based federal workers thus cut off from their jobs mostly fled north, further taxing the social services in New York and other big cities. But in an instant, Jordan had achieved the right-wing dream of disassembling much of the post–New Deal federal governmental apparatus.

Having unleashed the spirit of total revolution, the controlling “Teavangelical” bloc in Congress promptly seized the social agenda from the administration and—free of any meaningful parliamentary, judicial, or other restraint—proceeded to pass almost every bill introduced by any individual member, however ill conceived. These included an anti-blasphemy statute, under which “taking the name of the Lord in vain” became a federal felony. The text was modeled on a United Nations resolution promoted for years by the fundamentalist Muslim countries, but the scope of its protection was limited to “the true God and His son Jesus Christ,” and it provided expressly that no speech about “Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Satan, Hindu deities, yoga, false secular values, or any other purported deity” would be considered blasphemous. The United States thus joined Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few others as countries whose gods were so thin skinned that they demanded retribution for disrespectful speech. Soon thereafter, the statute of limitations for abortion crimes was abolished, and prosecutions began for abortions committed prior to the time that all abortion became illegal, in clear violation of the Constitution’s protection against ex post facto laws. This result was justified based on the long-standing rule that there is no statute of limitations for murder and the argument that abortion always was murder, regardless of the failure of corrupt and satanic federal judges to recognize that fact. Long-retired abortion doctors who had failed to flee to the Sec Bloc were executed in Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas within two months of President Jordan signing this law.