For years he was in the forefront of organizing to subvert and disrupt the stable, prosperous society that he had inherited. During the waning months of the Obama presidency, he helped blow up any incident where a cop was forced to shoot a criminal into a fresh cause. Facts, he found, were beside the point. Truth, he learned, was simply an abstract concept that served only to distract from the all-important narrative. Who cares if the victim was a thug, if he had pulled a gun? That was mere objective truth, the weakest and least important kind. Instead, Rios-Parkinson learned to offer a new truth – that the victim’s hands were up, that he was slaughtered by a laughing cop with KKK ties while he walked from the school where he was an honor roll student on his way to the local church to help feed the homeless. Narrative truth—that was the only truth that mattered.
And when radical racist leftists declared war on police officers and murdered them in deliberate ambushes, he smiled. It was action, striking a blow, and it was working. Between the threats to their lives and the threat to their livelihoods and even their freedom if they were caught on camera using force against some criminal, the police withdrew. Crime rose, but Rios-Parkinson and his cohort savored the instability. Unburdened by any affection or affinity to norms, traditions, or the rule of law, they would not merely survive but prosper in the coming chaos.
And when the Crisis erupted, Rios-Parkinson was ready. Certainly, the sickly Hillary Clinton had been nothing like the president he and his fellow travelers truly wanted – she gave a pittance to the progressives, just enough to keep them with her, while lavishing her largesse on her Wall Street and corporate cronies. But when about half the country simply refused to obey her executive orders regarding gun confiscation from law-abiding citizens, illegal alien legalization, and the destruction of their carbon energy industries, Rios-Parkinson and his allies saw their chance.
Rios-Parkinson instinctively knew what he needed to do – organize and turn out as many people as they could find into the streets demanding she act to suppress the rebellion. And so, the same man who a month before had burned the American flag, calling it the “Swastika of rape culture,” was now clutching it and holding it close, demanding that the President defend it against some enemies – not foreign (he tended to side with those), just domestic. Destroy the red traitors once and for all!
He saw another chance when the military sat on its collective hands, refusing to budge – not that it could do much budging, considering the massive desertions and the sheer number of sergeants who simply shrugged when reporting to the few remaining Clinton-loyal officers that their units’ vehicles just wouldn’t seem to run for some reason. Rios-Parkinson began to organize a People’s Militia – militias had suddenly become in vogue again – to take action in support of the President. The media, slavishly loyal to the ruling elite on the coasts, eagerly covered this “spontaneous” and “patriotic” movement.
In reality, the leftist militias that sprang up in blue cities around the country were gigantic clusterfucks composed of bored students, convicts, whiny social justice warriors, and the occasional radicalized veteran. Naturally, it was always the one guy who had served as a latrine orderly in Baghdad and was now a sophomore who got interviewed on the news while being identified as an “Army Combat Vet.” The 300-pound, tattooed, genderqueered feminist who cried and screamed about patriarchy after tripping and scrapping her bloated cankle while trying to learn to march never appeared on screen.
For most Americans, the Crisis was a terrifying time of uncertainty and fear. For Rios-Parkinson, it was liberating. He abandoned his teaching to assume command of the Patrice Lumumba Battalion based in Westwood. When his paycheck stopped coming, he sent 20 of his “troops” over to the provost’s office. The checks started arriving again.
He called himself a “colonel” – he looked at Wikipedia to learn the military ranks. Every day at noon, the ragged five hundred or so (the number varied as bored enlistees dropped out and others joined) marched down to Wilshire Boulevard and the federal building, carrying a wide selection of mismatched firearms and stopping traffic. Eventually, they “liberated” the Veterans’ Administration complex west across the 405, evicting the elderly residents and setting up their own little realm. No one challenged them, so they pushed harder.
The LAPD was well aware of the sympathy of the mayor and the governor for this movement – Governor Newsom actually appeared with them and, standing beside Rios-Parkinson, who had taken to wearing a black beret he had found in an Aardvark’s recycled clothing shop, called the mob “patriots and heroes.” Ordered to stand down, law enforcement did nothing
Not when the militia marched in the streets, with guns, in violation of the anti-open carry laws passed to harass decent citizens by the same politicians who were now applauding.
Not when the militia decided to “liberate” goods and merchandise from the local stores.
Not when the militia began threatening and then attacking their critics.
And Rios-Parkinson soon found himself taking calls from the power brokers in the city who would never have taken his call just months before.
Commanding the militia – actually, the militia theoretically ran on consensus, with frequent meetings where the participants wiggled their fingers to show approval because clapping traumatized some violence survivors – came naturally to him. But he soon found the more doctrinaire members growing tiresome. They preferred endless debate and ideological purity, while Rios-Parkinson was learning the cruel, relentless logic of action and force. Guns were bad yesterday because people he hated had them; today they were good because his people were the only ones who had them.
He found this new freedom from ideology liberating. He found he loved, and understood, force. Because only from force came real power.
But some of the practical matters he did not understand. He was given a .38 revolver and, in his condo, he accidentally shot off the tip of his little toe and had to hobble in pain for a month. A number of his “soldiers” ended up accidentally killing themselves with firearms. These tragedies, of course, never made the news. Rios-Parkinson early on made it a point to deploy a team of People’s Observers to each of the local television stations every morning to ensure that coverage was “fair” and “honest.” After several producers were beaten, and the police never came, the stations capitulated. Rios-Parkinson found himself in control of the local media. Much of each broadcast was devoted to the perfidy of the red state traitors, and soon it became clear that the negotiations that would lead to the Treaty of St. Louis were going to result in the country breaking in two, to the promises of a bright future free of the knuckle-dragging racists who infested the vast wasteland between the coasts.
And Rios-Parkinson learned about people. He learned that the students and the activists he had spent years with talking about revolution and action were prepared for neither. They were soft, sometimes even sentimental. He ushered them out of the Patrice Lumumba Battalion, preferring instead the homeless kids he found on the streets and gave food and shelter, and the petty (sometimes, not so petty) criminals who joined up. Of course, they were not really criminals – the true criminals were the people who had cast them into the dungeons of the prison-industrial complex. So they had stolen, so they had robbed, so they had done – allegedly – worse things? Rios-Parkinson found they had the edge the soft, suburban social justice warriors lacked. They could give and take a punch. And they were very, very useful.
Soon, Rios-Parkinson was commanding an army of 2,000 of them within the heart of Los Angeles. And the police were powerless to stop him. In fact, once the Treaty was signed and the borders were set, most of the cops simply stopped showing up for work. They were among the first to see where this was heading, and therefore they headed east from Los Angeles to the red states to start over.