General Terrance J. O’Shaughnessy nearly became our Supreme Leader.

Do you remember that time when, in early the early months of that trying year of 2020, there was open talk of an impending military takeover of the United States?

If you have no such recollection of such an event taking place back then— even while you retain memories of all of the other ghastly and tumultuous happenings of that cursed year, which survives in our collective memory mostly as a nightmare or a cautionary tale— you can surely be forgiven, since incredibly enough, the impending military takeover, when announced, neither received much press, nor did it generate any sort of reaction or response whatsoever, much less the sort of mass outrage one would have expected.

I am almost tempted to suspect that I had simply imagined this event, or that it had merely been an episode of a television program which one are misremembering as real, or yet another in the growing list of “Mandela Effect” incidents, but for the fact that the source material was covered by Newsweek, an establishment-friendly outlet, and the article which discussed it remains posted to this day.

Here is the headline of the article, posted on March 18, 2020:

Exclusive: Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government

A reminder: this piece was not published at Infowars or National Enquirer, or any other outlet that is (rightly or wrongly) often viewed as unreliable. Instead, it was posted— and again, remains posted— at the Newsweek site.

Though Newsweek is admittedly now a mere shell of its former self, it was, until relatively recently, a glossy print journal which, like Time, dutifully put forth the accepted consensus of the day in the most dumbed-down manner possible. Like Time, it could be found on any newsstand anywhere across the country.

Though it now only exists online, Newsweek’s legit bone fides as the epitome of that grisly species of faux-journalism, known collectively as the mainstream media, remain impeccable. Thus, none of the censorship-happy, “fact-check” obsessed, federally-funded misinformation scout bots currently in circulation can claim that this story, however luridly paranoid as it might seem, can blithely be dismissed as some highly improbable “conspiracy theory,” since an outlet like Newsweek could hardly be called unreliable, indefatigable purveyor of 100% fully approved “news” that it is.

Yet the fact remains that in March of 2020, Newsweek reported something that should have struck readers as patently outrageous:

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of “continuity of government” plans that include evacuating Washington and “devolving” leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations.

But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated — including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages — are forcing planners to look at what are called “extraordinary circumstances”.

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

Granted, the article ran during a period of time in which we were being pummeled with egregious fear porn concerning an ostensible “deadly global pandemic” that was going to ravage the human population unless we all “sheltered in place” and wore paper masks over our faces and remained six feet apart and allowed our rulers to shut down the world economy for an indefinite period of time and only visited our friends on Zoom, and so forth. (You remember the drill, and rest assured, it was a drill…)

Still, anyone possessed of reason and functioning powers of observation should have looked askance at the tone and message of this article, and found the entire scenario being proposed highly dubious. Was it really probable that Covid-19, with its 99% survival rate, on pace with or even lower than the mortality rate for most flus, would “incapacitate” all successors in the presidential chain of command, necessitating a military takeover of governmental functions?

But it gets stranger, and even more sinister:

According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans – codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac – are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, “devolution” could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America.

“We’re in new territory,” says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy is.

He is the “combatant commander” for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed.

For some reason, “extraordinary plans” would have to be put into place, effectively “circumventing” the Constitution, and leading finally to the installation of someone named General Terrance J. O’Shaughnessy as “combatant commander” (which seems to carry much the same meaning as “Supreme Leader”) for an indeterminate length of time.

O’Shaughnessy at the time held the top spot at The United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). He has since retired, and now apparently consults for Elon Musk at SpaceX. All mention of this four-star general having been for a time poised to assume command of the country under the most dubious of pretexts seems to have been utterly forgotten, dumped down the memory hole.

In fact, I can’t find the information from this Newsweek article repeated many other places, and I find scant evidence of the extraordinary scenarios it unveiled even being discussed, much less hotly debated, much less roundly condemned, nearly anywhere (the one exception being YouTuber Dark Journalist, who covered the Newsweek piece extensively on his March 22 show).

Why were these wild and wooly machinations to wrest control away from elected officials and give it to US military general ever contemplated in the first place? Why did those making these plans spill their schemes to Newsweek magazine, of all places? What ultimately foiled their designs on power? These are questions that no one appears even to have asked.

So much for “never forget.” Then again, how can we forget what we don’t even remember?

https://andynowicki.substack.com/p/five-years-ago-there-was-almost-a