The jury of the silent majority probably figured Donny was as guilty as his clients, if not more so. At least in the beginning. The need for labor to work the new farms gave perfect cover to the “resettlement” programs that were really just euphemisms for camps to lock whole populations up before they could start a revolution. The farms, if you believed the propaganda documentaries they streamed across the networks, were the secret to bringing back a healthy and well-fed future. New food that would feed the people, sustain the livestock, fuel the cars, and help clean up the mess, maybe even rehabilitate the exhausted fields to where they could once again grow the heritage crops that had failed. And people never really wanted to know where their food came from.

So as much as Donny and his colleagues in the dissident bar liked to credit their work for helping bring the system down, in the end it was the overreaching by the people in charge of the system that led to the uprising. The pie kept shrinking, and the government controlled who got their piece, through official channels and unofficial ones, all of them equally corrupt. The president, who had been elected as a reformer who would heal the nation’s scars, became a self-dealing autocrat, and the accumulation of power brought out the mad king. When he began to piss off the wealthy donors who had given him that power, they turned on him. They made pacts with the underground networks who had been resisting him all along, and the exiles who had been seasoning the population with an alternate narrative, waiting for such a moment. And when the spark of revolution finally ignited, the uprising coalesced so fast, after so many years of repressed yearning for real change, that you couldn’t help but wonder what had taken it so long.

They got more than they bargained for.

The president who provided the regime’s public face and insane personality was gone, removed from office by a mob, tried for his crimes, and then assassinated before he could serve his sentence. International peacekeepers moved into the vacuum and brokered a cease-fire, immunizing the combatants from criminal prosecution. The resettlement farms survived, under new management. Now it was up to the people to renegotiate the social contract and come up with a new Constitution. In the meantime, the federal government was officially broken. The president had no replacement, and if the radical factions got their way, never would. Congress was short on members, with the former majority party having been outlawed, and met only infrequently. The courts still worked, except that most of the federal judges had been appointed by the deposed regime, and the only way they had to enforce their judgments was through the Marshals Service.