PODCAST SUMMARY: OPERATION GARDEN PLOT
Operation Garden Plot was the Pentagon's 1968 blueprint for deploying military forces against American citizens, born from the ashes of Detroit's uprising when the 82nd Airborne occupied an American city for the first time since the Civil War. This meticulously documented plan created the bureaucratic infrastructure for domestic military control—standardized procedures for everything from intelligence gathering on citizens to mass detention protocols—that transformed constitutional crisis management into routine administrative procedure.
What makes Garden Plot essential to understand today is that its infrastructure never disappeared: the fusion centers, military equipment transfers to police, and normalized deployment patterns we see with Marines in LA subways and National Guard in Florida all follow the playbook written 57 years ago. The declassified documents reveal how the government didn't just plan for martial law—they created administrative procedures that made military occupation of American cities feel normal, necessary, even mundane, turning what should be unthinkable into standard operating procedure filed properly in triplicate.
Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?
-Daniel P. Douglas
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