Ask most Americans to name the darkest chapter in the nation’s history and you’ll usually get the same answer: the Civil War, when the question of whether the country would continue to exist as a single entity was settled only after four years of bloodshed. Steve McCann, writing in American Thinker, wants to retire that assumption. In his telling, the most dangerous stretch in the republic’s roughly 250 years was not 1861 to 1865 but 2020 to 2024.
McCann’s argument, published October 13, is less a work of history than an indictment — a sweeping, partisan account of the pandemic years and the Biden administration in which he assembles a list of grievances he says amounts to a coordinated attempt to convert a constitutional republic into what he calls a one-party socialist oligarchy. Whether or not readers accept the premise, the piece is a useful window into how one corner of the right is framing that period now that the 2024 election has been decided.
A pandemic, a panic, and a police state
McCann opens his case in 2020, arguing the year began with a deliberate effort to manufacture national panic in order to defeat Donald Trump and flip both chambers of Congress. He writes that the Democratic Party, working alongside allies in the medical bureaucracy and the legacy press, lied about and misrepresented COVID-19 — that they knew the virus had essentially the same mortality rate as seasonal flu and chose fear over candor.
From there he describes what he calls a de facto police state: lockdowns and school closures that he says trampled constitutionally protected rights, coupled with vaccine mandates and intimidation campaigns that coerced citizens into receiving what he describes as unproven and dangerous shots falsely marketed as safe and effective. In his account, millions of businesses and lives were sacrificed for political convenience.
That framing is contested terrain, and McCann does not engage with the counterarguments — the hospital surges, the death tolls, the emergency-room overflow that drove many of those decisions. He treats the official pandemic narrative as a politically motivated fabrication and moves on.
Unrest, an election, and censorship
The piece turns next to the unrest that followed George Floyd’s killing, which McCann calls a drug-induced death. He describes the militant wings of the American left — Antifa and Black Lives Matter — as having been unleashed in a bid to panic and intimidate voters in an election year. He cites a set of figures: more than $2 billion in property damage across 8,700 protests, 3,692 of which involved unlawful acts of disobedience, 2,385 incidents of looting, 624 arsons, and 574 involving violence directed at police, with more than 2,035 officers injured.
His sharpest complaint is about accountability. McCann argues that Democrats and their allies made certain virtually no one was prosecuted or imprisoned for fomenting or participating in the lawlessness — a contrast he returns to later when he discusses January 6.
On the 2020 election, McCann does not hedge. He calls the result blatantly and egregiously stolen in a process he likens to third-world dictatorships, pointing to late-night ballot dumps that broke overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, a flood of mail-in ballots, voting machines he says mysteriously altered tallies, missing ballots, and counting that was manipulated or deliberately delayed. His stated objective behind all of it is not merely that Biden win, but that this level of fraud and manipulation be permanently embedded so Democrats would never lose again.
Those claims of a stolen 2020 election have been litigated repeatedly and rejected by courts, audits, and Republican election officials across the country. McCann presents them as settled fact rather than allegation.
He then moves to speech. In what he calls an overt First Amendment violation, McCann describes government-sponsored censorship on an industrial scale, with the Biden administration leaning on social media platforms to monitor and suppress disfavored speech across the political opposition and the broader public. He singles out the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, which he says was created to police online speech and strong-arm Big Tech into suppressing conversations the administration disliked.
January 6, lawfare, and the courts
McCann describes January 6, 2021, as a convenient excuse — one he suggests was the product of premeditated incitement by Democrats and the so-called Deep State — for a crackdown he says violated virtually every right enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Patriotic citizens, groups, and churches were monitored and harassed, he writes, and thousands were falsely arrested, persecuted, or imprisoned on specious charges. His point of comparison is the George Floyd unrest, where he says prosecutions were essentially absent. For the first time in American history, he argues, the overwhelming police power of the state was directed at everyday citizens solely because of their political viewpoint.
From there he turns to what he calls clearly unconstitutional lawfare aimed at imprisoning a former president and future candidate. McCann writes that crimes were invented where none existed and notes that Trump was indicted 91 times — a figure he calls absurd — with no consideration given to Trump’s rights, the legality of the prosecutions, or the long-term damage to the rule of law. The purpose, in his reading, was to ensure Trump and a revitalized Republican Party could never regain power.
Immigration gets similar treatment. McCann calls the border policy the most Machiavellian scheme since the nation’s founding, saying an open invitation was extended to anyone on the planet who could reach America and that twenty-plus million came, regardless of whether they were convicted criminals, terrorists, or drug dealers. He frames the influx as an attempt to irreversibly change the country’s demographic makeup and create a dependent voting bloc that would keep Democratic Socialists in power in perpetuity.
McCann also focuses on the judiciary, noting that during 2021–2024 the majority of sitting district and appellate court judges — he puts the figure at 55 percent — were appointed by Barack Obama and the Biden administration. He describes those judges as sympathetic to the Democratic Party, to the promotion of socialism, and to what he calls the shredding of the Constitution, and he points to the current Trump administration’s clashes with the bench as evidence that the judiciary has been recast as a complicit accomplice.
The stakes as McCann sees them
McCann’s conclusion is stark. No five-year period in the country’s 250-year history, he writes, rivals 2020–2024 for determined destruction of the Constitution and for setting the stage to overthrow the government. He treats the period as both a preview of how the current Democratic Party governs and a confirmation of what he calls its treasonous motivations.
Had Trump and Republicans not won the presidency and Congress in 2024, McCann argues, the transformation would have accelerated exponentially and become nearly impossible to reverse without violent national upheaval. That leads him to a blunt political conclusion: the current Democratic Party cannot be allowed to win any upcoming midterm or presidential election if the United States is to survive as founded.
It is a maximalist argument, and it is worth being clear about what it is and isn’t. McCann is not offering a neutral historical comparison so much as a political case built from contested claims — a stolen election, a manufactured pandemic, an orchestrated censorship regime — presented without counterevidence. The value of reading it lies less in its factual reliability than in what it reveals about the intensity of the convictions animating a significant slice of the American right as it looks back on the Biden years and ahead to the next election cycle.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/the-most-perilous-period-in-american-history/