Preface: The Seawall

Before the peninsula was irrevocably torn in half, my father’s family lived in Hwanghae-do. My grandfather was a man of specific, dangerous substance. He was a first-generation Christian and a landowner who utilized profit-sharing models with his farmers. He held the keys to independent survival: a rice and flour mill, apple orchards, and timber forests used for ship masts.

But in the family memory, his economic power is secondary to his passion. My father remembers the saxophone and the piano; he remembers a house filled with music.

Music was his sanctuary, but his existence was his crime. To the encroaching regime, he wasn’t just a man; he was a rival infrastructure. He controlled resources and operated under a moral framework that competed with the state. That made him a target.

When the war came in 1950, the illusion of safety evaporated. The North Korean forces didn’t just want territory; they wanted the liquidation of alternative power centers. They kidnapped him first. Then they came for my grandmother.

She was released weeks later, physically free but psychologically shattered. She died within a year. My grandfather never returned. He was detained, interrogated, and eventually executed. He left behind three children. My father was seven years old when he became an orphan, forced to flee south to Seoul with his younger brother and sister, running from a regime that had classified their existence as an error to be corrected.

I carry this history not as folklore, but as a foundational dataset. It taught me that civilization is not a permanent state of nature. It is a fragile architectural construct. And when that construct fails, it does not decay slowly. It collapses with the terrifying speed of an underwater implosion.

For over two decades, I have worked as a systems architect in the American financial and technology sectors. I did not inherit my grandfather’s music; I inherited the refugee’s obsession with structure. My professional life is dedicated to building redundancies, identifying points of failure, and ensuring that complex networks survive stress. I viewed the American constitutional order through this lens—as a system designed with enough checks and balances to withstand any load.

I was wrong. The “democratic backsliding” scholars warned about was a euphemism. We were witnessing a controlled demolition.

The summer of 2025 shattered the final assumption that American institutions were redundancy-proof. The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June was a shock to the system, a violation of the unspoken truce that keeps politics from becoming warfare.¹ The “No Kings” protests in Washington dissolved into terrified silence, met not with reassurance but with a $50 million military parade—a message that the state possessed a monopoly on force and intended to flaunt it.²

But violence is often chaotic. It was the events of September that revealed the design.

When Charlie Kirk was shot by a sniper in Utah, the chaos was brief.³ Within hours, before a suspect was identified, the machinery of the state engaged with terrifying precision. The White House did not mourn; it mobilized. The tragedy was immediately repurposed as a warrant for total war against political opposition.

The President and Vice President announced a legislative and executive offensive. They invoked RICO statutes against liberal nonprofits. They encouraged the private sector to purge employees for “sympathizing with domestic terror.” They unleashed the Department of Justice to dismantle the “intellectual infrastructure” of the Left.⁴

This was not a reaction. It was an activation.

The policies deployed in the wake of the Kirk assassination were drawn directly from the text of Project 2025. The plans to weaponize the DOJ, to criminalize dissent—these were already written, reviewed, and staged. They were simply waiting for the right trigger.

Project 2025 did not invent American rage, polarization, or the anger that pulled the trigger in Utah. But it provided the permission structure that allowed the state to capitalize on it. It offered a blueprint for converting tragedy into tyranny.

This book is a dissection of that blueprint.

We are past the point of wondering if the republic is in danger. We are watching the seizure take place. The analysis in these pages is clinical because the situation demands it. We must look at the specific mechanisms used to break our republic: the executive orders, the court filings, the personnel changes. We must understand how the law is being inverted—turned from a shield for the citizen into a sword for the state.

There is a temptation to retreat into silence. To hope that if we keep our heads down, like my grandfather tried to do, the storm will pass. But the surveillance state built by this administration, powered by technologies my own industry helped create, leaves no room for shadows.

I spent months writing under the pseudonym “Hemlock Collective,” believing I could fight this battle from the dark. That was a mistake. My grandfather operated in the underground, and it did not save him. In an era where the state criminalizes the truth, speaking openly is the only strategy left. We must stake our claim to reality before they rewrite it entirely.

He gave his life for his principles. I can, at the very least, give my name to mine.

~ Jason I. Oh