As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
In this dystopian world of Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo, there are scenarios that can send a shiver down a reader's spine.
- Everything about the Lesser Mao, implied to Mao Yuanxin:
- Even before he became leader, he was a sadist who watched people being tortured to death and reportedly was fascinated by the sounds of breaking bones. There was also a rumor that he once personally tortured a man to death by breaking all the bones in his body.
- The man was violently more oppressive than Mao Zedong ever was, purging millions in an attempt to root out political opponents. He takes savagery to a whole new level by beheading Hua Guofeng in front of the Great Hall. He also unleashes massive purges on the countryside just to keep sedentary populations in line.
- To maintain his political authority, he holds the increasingly senile and feeble Mao, his own uncle, captive and pumps him with drugs to make him more easily manipulated.
- Like Pol Pot, he murders people for any connection to the outside world, including knowing a foreign language or just for getting the chicken pox. He even makes literacy a crime punishable by death.
- Attempting to worm your way to power through kissing the Lesser Mao's ass could easily backfire, since once you reach the height of power, you could easily be denounced and purged. It gets to a point where mid-level officials make every effort to avoid being promoted, allowing idiots to be promoted in their place.
- The refugees produced by the Lesser Mao are empty shells without even a fear of death. Countless march toward the borders with the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, despite being gunned down by border guards.
- The dropping of an atomic bomb on Kwangsi to put down a rebellion, which horrifies the entire world, and then parading captive US soldiers in front of TVs as scapegoats. And when George Wallace responds with a nuke on Lop Nur, he goes even crazier, massacring countless soldiers, feeding radioactive sand to imagined opponents, and leaving the poisoned people to rot in public.
- His final months in power, where his drug abuse reduces him to little more than "a screaming monkey", where by this point, being a minister could get you a death sentence.
- America under Rumsfeldia and later, under the Christian States of America.
- Rumsfeld not hesitate to lock up his political opponents in insane asylums where they are then sedated with addictive drugs. Almost half a million people end up there.
- Partly thanks to the Lesser Mao, the war on drugs becomes much more brutal. Governor John Rarick even makes heroin addiction a crime worthy of life imprisonment.
- The implication that Rumsfeld assassinated James Gavin, a former president.
- The Liberty Battalions that adopt the role of cruel paramilitaries, with book-burning, political repression, and murder as major policies. These fanatics even kill wounded soldiers as a means of cutting costs.
- David Pryor being dragged off in the middle of a speech in the Senate against Rumsfeld's economic policies, with only a couple of Senators trying to stop it.
- Not even stalwart conservative Republicans are safe, as George H. W. Bush and Barry Goldwater find out.
- Rumsfeld not only repeals every single environmental regulation, but actively encourages coal pollution, since he believes it will allow for new jobs to be created and that global warming will open up the arctic for colonization. All while people everywhere are dying of heart and lung disease.
- Just the idea that Rumsfeld actually tries to weaponize AIDS.
- The Christian States of America, probably the most oppressive regime in modern American history. They unleash nuclear and chemical weapons, obliterating areas of resistance, including Philadelphia. As of 1990, a second civil war has begun.
- Obliterating a resisting Congress with several missiles, and replacing American monuments with Christian symbols.
- Coe and the CV essentially re-enact all the worst parts of the Spanish Inquisition when persecuting so-called "enemies" of the state, which includes crucifixion.
- Under the rule of people like Magnus Malan and Eugene Terre'Blanche, South Africa has taken its racism to new heights. The Apartheid system now not only discriminates against blacks but anyone who isn't Afrikaner, including other white people. African natives endure massacres almost on the scale of genocide, refugees from the Rhodesian Bush war are placed into concentration camps, and, worst of all, the country frequently and unashamedly uses dirty bombs and chemical weapons against their neighboring enemies, turning huge areas of Southern Africa into irradiated wastelands. And they're protected by President Rumsfeld as "a bastion of freedom."
- It's also been stated in updates written from the perspective of future that this fascist state will eventually collapse, but not before Malan unleashes their entire nuclear arsenal to turn the rest of Africa into glass.
- The Middle East is already a bigger mess than it ever was in our timeline, but the prime example has to go to Israel. As their neighbors destabilize all around them, they begin expanding from their territorial holdings and instate a policy of ethnic cleansing by deporting non-citizens to camps. By 1988, the population of Arabs within Israel's borders has dropped by 75%. Soviet leader Ryzhkov flat out calls it an "Arab Holocaust." And there are heavy implications that this policy will eventually extend to all non-Jews. And they're also protected by Rumsfeld, who calls their fascistic actions "a move to spread democracy and order in an area of the world so often torn by chaos, strife and repression."
