What if 1968 ended not with healing, but with hardening?

In this recovered timeline, George Wallace doesn’t just run—he wins. Riding a wave of backlash against civil rights protests, campus uprisings, and political assassinations, Wallace shocks the world by capturing the presidency in a fractured electoral college vote. What follows is a United States steered by segregationist populism, entrenched police power, and televised trials of dissenters.

We follow a Black college student in Birmingham, a white factory foreman in Youngstown, and a political prisoner in solitary confinement—all caught in the machine Wallace built. Through their stories, we see what changes when fear becomes law, and what survives when freedom does not.

This is Not This Time. What follows is the Archivist’s account of Wallace Wins.