The Neo-Confederate Party
A Crisis Dispatch
I want to make an argument that will make some people uncomfortable. Not because it is radical. Because it is obvious, and the obvious thing has not been said plainly enough.
The Republican Party is the Confederate Party.
Not metaphorically. Not as a rhetorical flourish. As a structural description of what the party is doing, who it is serving, and what historical project it has aligned itself with. The evidence is not ambiguous. It is on the record, in the executive orders, in the base names, in the statues, in the pardons, in the theory of demographic replacement that now constitutes mainstream Republican ideology.
But before we get to the monuments, I need to tell you about New Mexico.
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Steven Garcia was 48 years old. On August 28, 2025, he walked out of his home in Albuquerque in a green camouflage shirt and shorts, carrying only a handgun. He left behind his phone, his keys, his wallet, his car. He has not been seen since.
Garcia was a government contractor at the Kansas City National Security Campus facility in Albuquerque. The KCNSC manufactures more than 80 percent of all non-nuclear components for America’s nuclear weapons arsenal. He held a top security clearance in what a source described as a “very high-level, overseeing position for all the assets — tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets, some of which are classified.” The source described him as “a very stable person” and said foreign espionage “makes the most sense.”
Garcia is the tenth person connected to American nuclear and space secrets to die or disappear since mid-2023.
The others: Anthony Chavez, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory worker, vanished May 2025. Melissa Casias, active administrative assistant at LANL with top security clearance, vanished June 2025. William Neil McCasland, retired Major General and former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory — who oversaw the Air Force’s $2.2 billion science and technology program — walked out of his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026 without his phone, wearable devices, or prescription glasses. Not seen since. Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and reportedly on the verge of a breakthrough in fusion energy, was assassinated at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15, 2025. Carl Grillmair, NASA JPL astrophysicist connected to missile tracking technology used by the Air Force, was shot and killed on his front porch at 6 AM on February 16, 2026.
Four of the ten vanished from the New Mexico nuclear corridor — Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos, the KCNSC — in identical fashion: on foot, personal effects behind, no body. All four linked through overlapping facilities. All four disappeared during the same window of time.
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said publicly: “Our scientists have been targeted for a long time, especially in the rocket propulsion area, by hostile foreign intelligence services. I think we’ve even seen instances where nuclear scientists have been taken out. They’ve been assassinated.”
The White House Press Secretary was asked about this pattern yesterday. She promised to look into it.
Here is what was happening at the FBI during the same period.
25% of all FBI agents — approximately 3,000 of 13,000 — were reassigned to immigration enforcement. In the 25 largest field offices, up to 45% of agents were diverted. The DOJ’s counterintelligence and export control section — the division specifically responsible for tracking foreign espionage on American soil — lost a third of its personnel. A total of 6,700 federal law enforcement officers were pulled from existing assignments across the DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, IRS, Diplomatic Security Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.
Supervisors were told to avoid leaving a paper trail documenting the shift away from national security priorities.
Iranian oil trafficking investigations were delayed for months because agents had been pulled to deportation duty — investigations directly relevant to the Iran war now being fought. Child exploitation investigators were reassigned. Coast Guard aircraft were diverted to move immigrants between detention facilities. An emergency partial reversal occurred in June 2025 — the FBI moved some agents back to counterterrorism because of Iran retaliation threats. The counterintelligence section remains depleted.
The KCNSC manufactures 80% of America’s nuclear weapons components. The FBI’s counterintelligence division was gutted. Ten people connected to nuclear and space secrets died or vanished. The White House will look into it.
This is the national security consequence of the immigration enforcement priority. Not abstract. Not theoretical. Measured in missing people, in assassinations on front porches, in generals walking into the desert without their glasses, in the most important nuclear facility in the country operating with a depleted intelligence apparatus while a hostile foreign power — we are currently fighting a war with Iran — operates freely in the gaps.
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The Republican Party leadership and the people around Trump do not view foreign authoritarians as adversaries. They view them as allies. This is the only explanation that makes the pattern coherent. The abandonment of NATO allies. The embrace of Orbán — until the Hungarian people voted him out in a landslide. The celebration of FBI agents being retasked from counterintelligence to immigration enforcement, cheered by the conservative movement as a victory while foreign agents operated freely in the New Mexico nuclear corridor. And now, ten nuclear scientists dead or disappeared, almost certainly by foreign actors who have been given a wide berth to operate inside a country whose counterintelligence apparatus was deliberately dismantled in service of the demographic project.
This is not incompetence. Incompetence does not produce this level of consistency. This is alignment.
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While this was happening, the Trump administration reinstalled a monument to Albert Pike at Judiciary Square in Washington D.C. — steps from federal courthouses. Pike was a slave owner, a white supremacist, and a Confederate general. The statue had been torn down during the 2020 racial justice protests. The executive order mandating its restoration was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
In June 2025, the Army reversed the Biden-era renaming of military bases that had honored Eisenhower, African American soldiers, and women. Fort Bragg — named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg — was restored. Fort Liberty was eliminated. Fort Benning — named for Confederate General Henry Benning, an avowed white supremacist who explicitly argued that secession was necessary to preserve slavery — was restored. Trump at the ceremony: “We won many battles from those forts. Now is not the time for change.”
Defense Secretary Hegseth personally announced the restoration of a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery — the nation’s most sacred military ground, where the bodies of Americans who died fighting for the United States are buried.
These are not symbolic gestures. They are declarations. They tell you, in the clearest available language, whose memory this administration is organized to honor and whose it is organized to erase.
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Trump pardoned over 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists. This is the third mass pardon of insurrectionists in American history. The first two were Andrew Johnson’s pardons of Confederates between 1865 and 1868, and Ulysses Grant’s pardons of Klan members in 1873.
History records what followed. Johnson’s pardons allowed Confederate generals to be elected to Congress within months of the insurrection’s defeat. Grant’s pardons emboldened the Klan. A federal prosecutor wrote Grant that trying Klansmen and then pardoning them had empowered the “hide monster.” Years of violent racial terror followed both rounds of pardons.
Pardoning insurrectionists is a specific political technology. It signals to the people who committed political violence on your behalf that the violence was legitimate, that they will be protected, and that more of it is both permitted and welcome.
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The intellectual architecture of the modern Republican Party is built on replacement theory — the belief that the white majority is under coordinated attack by Democrats who are importing a new electorate to replace the existing one.
JD Vance, before becoming Vice President, accused Democrats of “trying to transform the electorate” by bringing “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Elise Stefanik, now United Nations Ambassador, ran Facebook ads claiming Democrats were planning a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting amnesty to immigrants who would “overthrow our current electorate.” Tucker Carlson spent five years and over 400 segments on the same theme.
An AP-NORC poll found that one in three Americans now believes there is a coordinated effort to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral purposes. Among Republicans, the number is 47%.
This is not a fringe position. It is the party’s organizing theory of politics. And it is the same theory that animated the Confederacy — the belief that the white majority must be protected from demographic and political change, at whatever cost to the constitutional order.
The immigration enforcement priority is not a border security policy. It is the operational expression of replacement theory — the mobilization of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus in service of the demographic project. Every FBI counterintelligence agent reassigned to deportation duty is replacement theory made operational. Every nuclear scientist who vanished while the counterintelligence division was depleted is the cost of that operation.
The Confederacy was a project to preserve a racial hierarchy by destroying the Union. The modern Republican Party is a project to preserve a racial hierarchy by capturing the Union. The destination is the same. The method is the adaptation.
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Peter Thiel has placed at least ten former employees, co-workers, and investing partners into the Trump administration, including the Vice President. David Sacks — co-author with Thiel of a book attacking affirmative action — is AI and crypto czar. Elon Musk led DOGE. The Thiel network is not adjacent to this administration. It is constitutive of it.
Thiel bought New Zealand citizenship through a special ministerial concession — apocalypse insurance. He has described Greta Thunberg as a “legionnaire of the Antichrist.” He funded the Seasteading Institute — autonomous floating societies beyond the jurisdiction of any nation-state. He has backed every political project aimed at dismantling the democratic institutions that might constrain the accumulation of capital.
The exit ideology and the Trump alignment are not contradictory. They are complementary. Silicon Valley funds the political projects that accelerate institutional collapse while simultaneously building the private infrastructure to survive that collapse. The network state is the bunker. The Trump administration is the accelerant.
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The thread that connects all of this is not complicated.
The Republican Party re-erects Confederate monuments and honors Confederate traitors in the name of history. The same party guts the counterintelligence apparatus that protects against foreign adversaries, reassigning agents to enforce the demographic project instead. During the exact months the counterintelligence division was most depleted, ten Americans with access to nuclear weapons secrets died or vanished. The party’s intellectual architecture is built on the same demographic anxiety that animated secession. Silicon Valley funds the project while planning its own exit.
The Confederate monuments are not about history. They are about the present. They are markers. They are claims about who is in charge, whose heroes are honored, and whose memory is protected.
They went back up in October 2025.
The counterintelligence agents went to immigration enforcement in the same months.
The scientists vanished from New Mexico.
The arrangement is on display. It has been on display. The only question that remains is whether enough people will look directly at it before the door closes.
not weighing in on the confed angle, but I think there are a couple more that can go into that ten list. will circle back on this later.
Actually, something I've been thinking about for a while. There's definitely a strong thread from the Confederates to current far-right ideology. I've read that Hitler admired the Confederacy. Did it just go underground?