Cold Civil War, 1954-2024

The South, in the form of Trump implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, has won, at least for the time being, and is now trying make the US appear as it would have appeared, had the Confederacy won the 1860-65 Civil War—partly by removing non-whites from jobs and online government historical records, not to mention deporting tens of millions of non-whites. Trump has also announced plans to incorporate all of North America and Greenland into the United States, fulfilling the dreams of many unreconstructed Southerners, and Elon Musk et al, dreams that climate chaos and resource scarcity have surely made into imperatives to some government strategists.

In 1854, George Bickley of Indiana founded the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), whose objective was to create a new country known as the Golden Circle, 3900 km in diameter (consisting of the Southern US, Mexico, Central America, northern parts of South America, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic and most other Caribbean islands, as shown in the map on the left), where slavery would be legal. Initially, the KGC advocated that the US should annex the new territories to increase the number of slavery states vastly and thus the power of slaveholders…In response to the increased anti-slavery agitation that followed the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Knights changed their position: the Southern United States should secede, forming their own confederation and then invade and annex the other areas of the Golden Circle.

1860-77: During the US Civil War of 1860-65, the 1864 Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed by the Union, abolishing slavery. When the Union defeated the Confederacy, it launched the Reconstruction era of 1865-77, during which Blacks were enfranchised, and the KKK, White League, and Red Shirts formed to terrorize Blacks and white Republicans in the South. The Compromise of 1877, aka the Corrupt Bargain, was an unwritten political deal to settle the intense dispute over the results of the 1876 presidential election, ending the filibuster of the certified results and the threat of political violence in exchange for an end to federal Reconstruction. The federal government then adopted a policy of leniency towards the South to ensure federal authority and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s election as president. As part of the bargain, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South, where white Democrats controlled every state, and voter turnout—especially by Blacks—dropped dramatically.

Thus began the Jim Crow era, during which state and local laws were passed in the Southern United States that enforced racial segregation, and disenfranchised and removed political & economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era.

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment (of 1868, passed in response to issues related to formerly enslaved Americans, guaranteeing citizenship rights and equal protection under the law), and was therefore unconstitutional… Many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as massive resistance…"In many ways the South moved faster, with more 'deliberate speed' in displacing Black educators than it did in desegregating schools." In September, 1957, to ensure the safety of Black students registering for and attending Little Rock Central High School, President Eisenhower asserted federal control over the Arkansas National Guard and deployed troops from the 101st Airborne Division to guard them.

The last of the Jim Crow laws were generally overturned in 1965, after 88 years of festering Jim Crow culture.

Meanwhile, in the 1930s, the Technocracy Movement began in the US & Canada, advocating technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics. The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians & business people with scientists & engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy. A 1938 Technocracy Inc. publication reads, “The Technate will encompass the entire American Continent from Panama to the North Pole because the natural resources and the natural boundary of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit” (map on right). Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression.

On October 7, 1940, the Canadian police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organization. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk. The Technocracy, Inc. website announced a "Transition Plan 2016" and an online meeting in April 2021 before, one presumes, going underground for four years.