Desperate people were forced to take desperate measures, and the crime rate was soaring, aided in some cases by Uber’s new gun-rental division, which rented weapons by the hour.

To combat this crime wave while keeping unemployed workers from rebelling, volunteer militias had been transformed into paid neighborhood watch organizations under the direction of Vice President Hunter. Local merchants contracted with them for protection from predators. To encourage pride and professionalism, these militias designed their own outfits. While these uniforms were generally similar to those of state troopers, featuring gray or brown pants and shirts, high-gloss black boots, and “cowboy” hats, set off by de rigueur fake Oakley sunglasses, several militias selected clothing of a deep burgundy, supposedly paying homage to the blood spilt by American patriots in defense of our liberties. Each militia took a local name, from Olympia, Washington’s Apple Corps to Texas’s Ted Cruzers, but in general they became known as Wrightman’s Watchers. According to Breitbart, these neighborhood watch teams consisted of “patriotic Americans on the watch for those who would put our freedom in jeopardy.”

What was most stunning to me was the lack of outrage. Jackbooted bastards were patrolling American streets and nobody was screaming about it. The general attitude seemed to be that Wrightman hadn’t fooled anyone; after all, he had run promising to “Restore Order,” and that was exactly what he was doing. What did people expect him to do? As Eunice Kaufman said, dismissing the protests, “Americans should be proud to have a president who doesn’t lie to them.”

There were some objections. But when a local newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania, referred to the Pennsylvania Brakemen as “a pseudo-military organization reminiscent of the worst days of fascism,” that militia broke into their office and destroyed their computers and workstations. Other media outlets critical of the administration, including the Pro, received anonymous warnings that the same thing might happen to them. Watching this happen, I was reminded of a story I’d read years earlier: The respected community activist Saul Alinsky had completely rejected the use of violence to achieve his political objective; when asked why, he explained logically, “Because they have all the guns.”

The fears and frustrations plaguing Americans more and more were being transformed into anger, which too often exploded into rage. Trivial encounters escalated into fights. In the recently incorporated town of Trump, Mississippi, for example, a long-simmering feud between neighbors over ownership of a two-foot-wide strip of land between their houses erupted into a furious gun battle. Family members shooting across the contested strip from windows, like defenders of a besieged fort, fired into their neighbor’s house. Three people were killed and four more were wounded, but the survivors came together and copyrighted the concept. The resulting cable program, Neighbor Wars, roughly an action version of Family Feud, which taped episodes in suburbs throughout the country substituting paintballs for bullets, became a major hit show.

There were at least a few people brave enough to stand up to Wrightman. Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, the former Army helicopter pilot who had lost both legs when her UH-60 Black Hawk was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, led a futile effort to force the administration to reinstate all constitutional guarantees. New York Times columnist Carole Cooper created a furor when she claimed to have evidence that monthly job creation and unemployment numbers had been falsified under direct orders from the White House, although her reputation was severely damaged when she was indicted for tax fraud and subsequently fired before the release of those documents was blocked under the Secrets Act.