god Has A Plan (alternate Battlestar Galactica (RDM))

Don’t tell her that.

V. THE EASTWOOD CONSPIRACY

Actor Clint Eastwood had the support from delegates for Fred Thompson, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Richard Petty and others to gain the majority needed for the GOP nomination. However, on the eve of the Convention he stepped down, citing 'health issues' and throwing his full endorsement behind Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, citing her political experience and, more importantly, the historical need for a woman to hold the highest office in the land.

Conspiracy theorists on such banned internet sites as 4Chan, GodsNet, RealPolitik and CounterHistory have theorized for years that The Fellowship persuaded Eastwood to step down, by reason or blackmail...

--Marcus J. Spears, Turning Point: The American Presidential Election of 2008, pp. 205, Mercury Press, Boskirk, Virgon, U.C.K.

Number One: Well, Dirty Harry is gone.
Bombmaker: I could've handled it.
Number One: You'd have fraked it up.
Bombmaker: How much money did you pay him, anyway?
Number One: I didn't.
Bombmaker: Frak me...you bastard.
Number One: A little porn here, a little anti-social thing there...these humans are so easy to manipulate.
Bombmaker: Would've been better if you let me do my work.
Number One: You'd have frakked it up. 
Bombmaker: How?
Number One: You'd have brought in the spooks, and they're good enough to possibly uncover what we're doing...which we don't need. Your talents are better suited elsewhere, anyway. How's holiday going?
Bombmaker: Having the ol' luck of the Irish. Got anybody you want me to take care of?
Number One: Never without my permission. 

--transcript from a dark web chat room, 2008, as released by the Report of the United Nations Commission on the Cybernetic Threat to Humanity,  20__

V. THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE

From Wikipedia:

The Government Representing the Diaspora of the United States of America is a governmental body that officially represents the estimated 42 million refugees and their dependents from the United States who live outside of the United States and its territories and were exiled from the nation for political or other reasons from 1981 on through the present day. Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the Diaspora Government is organized the same way as the U.S. government, into three branches: executive (a President voted in by an electoral college, who selects a Vice-President), legislative (a Congress split into a House of Representatives and a Senate); and judicial (a Supreme Court, with lower courts, split along continential and national lines), whose powers are vested by the U.S. Constitution as of April 13, 1981. It has almost no actual authority over the diaspora, and is funded mainly through donations by individuals, groups, corporations and as of 2019, yearly grants from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United Colonies of Kobol and the Dominion of Canada. 

As of 2018, the Diaspora Government considers itself to be the legal government of the United States, representing all American citizens in exile and within the country itself. The Powers Act, passed by the Provisional Congress and signed into law by Provisional President Jon Huntsman, cites what the Diaspora Government considers to be "credible evidence" of a coup d'etat by 'plotters' that 'killed the legitimate government' of the country in 1981 and illegally installed a figurehead (former Secretary of the Interior James Watt) who single-handedly ran the government with support from the military and 'sympathizers within federal intelligence agencies and other departments'. Watt, in their eyes, used illegal dictatorial powers to sanction the exile and/or murder of citizens who were political or other enemies of the 'plotters'; or were non-Christian/non-Jewish and non-Caucasian/Asian and unwilling to conduct their personal lives and affairs as 'whitish, Judeo-Christian, compliant citizens'.

The Diaspora Government considers the diaspora as legitimate American citizens who had gone unrepresented and discarded by the Washington federal government, and Americans living under federal rule as citizens 'living under the...tyranny of an illegal government'.

HISTORY

In July of 1981, 46 men representing American overseas business interests met in a London hotel to discuss the Coup and what Watt was doing as de facto dictator of the country. Most within the group agreed the legitimate government had been removed in some kind of coup, and therefore the nation was under the rule of an illegal, un-Constitutional government. Several of the men argued that Watt -- having legally assumed the Presidency via the Line of Succession -- was in fact the bona fide chief executive, and removing him would be another illegal coup. Those men affirmed their disagreements with the rest of the group on other issues, and were asked to leave; those who remained decided to call upon the United Nations to condemn the Watt 'dictatorship' and ask NATO members and other U.S. allies to impose harsh economic sanctions on the U.S., and to lend military and economic support to 'those within and without' the country who 'wished to remove the illegal dicatorship from power'.

Although many of the men died under mysterious circumstances, their ideas got out of the hotel meeting and spread, first among Americans overseas, and later among the growing diaspora who relocated to Canada, Mexico, Europe, Kobol, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia. Groups who advocated economic sanctions often clashed with the few groups who advocated violence; the pro-violence groups died out (thanks in large part to organizations like the King Foundation, the Association of African-Americans in Exile and the Mormon Church-in-Exile) and the remaining groups began to coalesce.

In May of 2005, preliminary meetings among diaspora leaders from all 73 nations hosting American diaspora members met in Caprica City, Caprica, UCK to discuss the formation of a formal body representing the diaspora, within its host nations and to the rest of the world, including the Washington government. The government structure was drawn up, and a Diaspora Continential Congress was held in April 2006 on seven continents in Toronto; Boskirk; Paris; Lagos; Sydney; Seoul; and Rio de Janeiro, to select representatives for a Diaspora Congress. The First Diaspora Congress met August 7-14, 2006 in Boskirk, Virgon, UCK, installing Jesse Jackson as the first President of the Diaspora Congress and formally recognizing the Constitution as it existed April 13, 1981 to be the legally-binding document on the Diaspora Government. Its next act was to schedule Presidential elections, which it did when the Second Diaspora Congress met August 5-11, 2007 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

The Diaspora Congress recognized 11 different parties to present candidates for the 2008 Diaspora Presidential election. Nine were set by early 2008:

Bishop Thomas D. Jakes of the Christian Faith Party
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson of the Progressive Liberal Party
Byron Mallott of the Native American Party
Physician Jill Stein of the Green Party
Activist Dan Barker of the American Diaspora Freethought Party
Author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Restitution Party
Musician and activist Emily Salyers of the Rainbow Party
Former NFL and CFL player and political exile Jim Zorn of the True Christian Party
and, activist and political exile Gloria Steinem of the Equal Rights Party.

That left the candidates for the diaspora versions of the Democratic and Republican parties to be chosen, via conventions held in July 2008 (Manchester, U.K. for the Democrats, Kyoto, Japan for the Republicans).

The Democrats selected John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran and former district attorney who fled the U.S. for New Brunswick, later serving as an attorney for the American diaspora in Moncton and as a member of the Unicameral, then President, of the American Diaspora of the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

The Republicans selected Jon Huntsman, who was a student at the University of Utah when the coup occurred in 1981. Huntsman's father sent him to South Korea weeks afterwards, obsentibly as a Mormon missionary. He served his two years there, and reunited with his family in Alberta in 1983, where he enrolled at the University of Alberta, and graduated with a degree in international politics in 1988. Huntsman then went into business while helping form the foundation of a representative body for the diaspora within Alberta; he eventually became Speaker of the diaspora unicameral and, later, Representative of the American Diaspora in Canada to the United Colonies. He was one of the signers of the Diaspora Constitutional Convention, while heavily campaigning for the Republican nomination in the upcoming Diaspora Presidential election.

Still, Washington paid little attention to the goings on in Ottawa, especially with what it considered to be the real Presidential race going on.

VI. THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Introductory placeholder

The U.S.'s problems are of its own making. Killing your leadership, installing a fundamentalist regime, suspending habeas corpus and civil liberties while creating an emergency that allows you to kill off or kick out the 'undesirables', and refusing to change while citing God will create quite a few problems for yourself. 

Right now in the timeline, the Cylons are the robots overwhelming Washington (and other critical places in America). Cavil, the bombmaker, Shelley and the other nine....if you know the BSG reboot, or at least Googled '12 cylon models bsg', well, you know who their counterparts ITTL are modeled after. Who, and what, the 13 (yes, there are 13) models are ITTL is yet to be fully revealed...

The Bombmaker -- Leo, Lenny, Liam, Leoben -- has his fingers in a lot of filthy dirty places, some which lead to the IRA, some to the PLO, some to two-bit dictators and some which lead to the Agency, to Russia, and to China. And, even the Colonials. Everyone knows him, and he knows everybody. But only a handful of...types...truly know him. 

By the way, these types are not the Fellowship; neither is the Family (Google Jeff Sharlet or watch the Netflix series), which doesn't exist ITTL but whose absence has been filled ITTL by the Fellowship, which John Cavil has been involved with since Reagan first considered running for the Presidency.

stevep and to the readers:

You’ll see who the 13 are as the timeline rolls along, although if you’ve watched the BSG remake you know 12 of them already (that includes the Final Five). Model Number Seven was referenced but never seen in the reboot: he’s very much alive here, albeit in a form that probably is much different than what the BSG writers would have created for him on the show.

en.battlestarwikiclone.org/wiki/No_Exit

I want to save the full revelation of who the Cylon 13/12/Final Five are in this timeline for further down the road. How John Cavil came to America and began ‘stirring the pot’ to get to the coup and its aftermath will be revealed much sooner.

I don’t want to use The Family (see Jeff Sharlet’s book or see the Netflix series) in this timeline, but I do want to have an analogue. Hence, The Fellowship. They are very much behind the coup, albeit in a way as to save the United States from itself. Don’t assume they signed off on every single event that took place leading up to it, though, or afterwards. Cavil, on the other hand...

And, life has gotten in the way of my writing here and elsewhere so many times. I apologize for not keeping up. I will update asap, as I have time.