“Too provocative,” the Clinton people said. We were landing on the Iranians’ beaches! It doesn’t get any more provocative!
Then, when things started going south, they panicked back in the White House.
We didn’t. We fought until we ran out of ammo, which was soon because we couldn’t get resupplied. Those of us who weren’t dead got taken prisoner, paraded on TV—you saw it. The world laughed at us. Clinton made Jimmy Carter look like George Patton—her groveling apology from the Oval Office begging the mullahs to let us go was the last thing we wanted to hear, as much as we wanted to get home.
Then the Iranians told her that wasn’t enough, and she looked like an even bigger clown. When President Marlowe got inaugurated and gave her “you have 24 hours” speech—holy shit, the Iranians did a 180. They knew she was deadly serious. We got nice new clothes, some real food, and we were out of that shithole of a country in under 24 hours.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
The first thing we did was deal with Iranian prisoner crisis that had paralyzed the Clinton administration. It was just like what Reagan did in 1981. We did it in a distinctly conservative fashion.
The president walked to the podium and announced, “This a message to Iran’s leaders. You have 24 hours to have all American prisoners out of Iranian airspace or the United States will commence unrestricted warfare upon your nation with the intention of destroying your military and secret police, annihilating your infrastructure, and killing you specifically. This is not threat—it is a promise. I will not be taking any questions. Iran now has 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds.” Then she walked off.
The press was stunned. The people, though, went nuts supporting her. Here’s the thing—she would have done it. The military, as screwed over as it was from 16 years of liberal administrations, was set to act.
I can’t say much about the war plan because it’s still classified, but have you ever seen a parking lot? Now think of one that’s made of glass and glows in the dark.
Rudy Zamora (Major, Texas Rangers)
He looks like the picture of a rough-and-tumble Western lawman even when he is dressed for golf. We are at a course outside Fort Stockton, a west Texas town that used to be known as a pit stop on Interstate 10 and today is a growing city feeding off the oil boom that never seems to end thanks to environmental deregulation.
Rudy Zamora is soft-spoken, but don’t let that fool you. He was the lead Texas Ranger at the “Battle of Austin” in 2021. Zamora retired in 2028, moved to Fort Stockton, and was soon elected mayor. If you look carefully, you can see the outline of his pistol in his waistband under his shirt.
I am a Texan. Yeah, I’m also an American—I fought in Iraq—but this is a republic. It’s built on principles. The Constitution sets those out, and I figure the Bill of Rights ought to mean what it says. So when the Clinton administration went after our governor for refusing to enforce the new federal gun laws, I had no problem when I got ordered to stop it.
Hillary slipped through in 2020—she didn’t win Texas, that’s for sure—but I think she figured her crew was going to lose the next time. She and her pals were bound and determined to beat us into line before she had to go. She did a lot of bad things. The worst was when her handpicked Supreme Court came out and said that the Second Amendment that says we Americans can keep and bear arms really doesn’t say that. They found a lot of things the Constitution didn’t say in there, but they couldn’t see the things it did say.
Well, that stirred us up pretty good, but Texas law still protected our rights. Hillary hated that—she hated the entire South, especially Texas. So she jammed through a bill requiring citizens to turn in their “assault weapons”—which weren’t assault weapons—and register all the rest.
And she expected us to play along. She expected us to just roll over. After all, it seemed like people had been rolling over to DC liberals for decades.
She didn’t know Texans. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Our governor announced that we wouldn’t cooperate. Not only won’t we do it, he says, but we won’t let the feds enforce the law in Texas.
Well, now everyone is looking at us because we’ve drawn a line. The liberal media is getting spun up about “the new insurrectionists” and all, but the people of Texas were behind the governor—even a lot of Texas Democrats.
Sometimes you gotta call out a bully. Hillary was a bully, and we called her out. So she had a problem. And I don’t think she really thought through what she did next.
She had her attorney general go into a federal court back in DC and get one of the judges Obama packed it with to issue an injunction holding our governor in contempt. Then the attorney general announced that the governor was going to be arrested by federal law enforcement.
By this time, we’re watching all the federal agencies in the state. Many of the feds were sympathetic, so we knew right away that an order had come from Washington into the US marshal’s office in Dallas. It ordered the lead deputy US marshal to go arrest the governor and put him in the federal lockup in Dallas. I know how the deputy responded to Washington: “Do you want a massacre? The hell I will.” And he and his people sat tight in their offices.
I know the FBI refused to arrest him as well. I got a call from a friend at the Houston field office, and I told him this was a bad idea. He passed it back to headquarters. The FBI director personally told the attorney general it was not within their jurisdiction, but the truth was that the FBI just wasn’t going to kick that hornet’s nest.
So, the attorney general was furious because none of her people in Texas would go and arrest the governor. She wouldn’t listen to them when they told her this was some serious shit, that the Texans weren’t just going to sit back and take it. That’s why you don’t put a law professor who has never lived outside of Boston in a position like AG—you need to have some understanding of the country you live in if you want to be its chief federal law-enforcement officer.
Obama and Clinton and their crew had been so used to just doing what they wanted they forgot that at the heart of things, America works only because everyone agrees the system is legitimate and cooperates. They tossed away legitimacy but expected us to act like they hadn’t. That was a recipe for disaster.
We got word that the Marshals Service had chartered a 737 jet and that a big team was flying into Austin at 11:22 p.m. on May 1, 2021. I talked to the governor beforehand and told him my plan. He said he didn’t want any of us to risk ourselves because of him.
“It isn’t about you,” I said. It was about principles. I told him I’d try to avoid trouble, but I was a Ranger and I wasn’t going to run from it.
We went up into the control tower and tried to warn them off. They told us they were landing anyway. The AG had made sure they picked guys who would do whatever they were ordered to do—a dozen deputies back in DC actually got fired for refusing to go.
We knew they were heavily armed; they thought they were going to intimidate us. They didn’t understand Texans, I guess. By dawn, they did.
We made sure the controllers knew where to direct the jet on the airfield once it landed. I deployed my sniper teams to cover the tarmac and brought up a few dozen vehicles to pen in the plane. We figured there were about 20 feds on the plane—turned out to be 33—so I brought over 100 personnel. Yeah, I know, “One riot, one Ranger,” but I figured they were less likely to try to play horsey if we outnumbered them.
Only a few of us were Rangers. Most of us were actually Department of Public Safety officers or other local law enforcement. I was a major in the Rangers, and I had operational control of the operation.