America is Already ‘Going Back’

Extremists Waste No Time Exploiting Trump’s Lie-Based Victory

As America careens towards an era of instability and constitutional crises, we can look to Hong Kong as a tragic tale of freedom-loving people who lost their democracy to authoritarian dictatorship.  This week, 45 pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong were sentenced for up to 10 years on bogus charges of “conspiracy to commit subversion” under Beijing’s Orwellian national security law.  

“The courts now are rarely departing from the government’s narrative,” Eric Lai, a research fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law told The Washington Post.  “Judges have been working to further the government’s line, using their definition of pro-democracy protests, on the strategies of the [opposition] democrats, rather than putting weight on safeguarding rights and freedoms.”

Could this be our (near) future too? Surely, these Hong Kong activists thought they would forever remain citizens instead of subjects of an oppressive regime.

Emboldened by Trump’s victory, the forces of darkness are quickly coalescing at home to bring about radical change that few people voted for. Indeed, Trump’s victory is proving to be a triumph of propaganda and lies.

A new Blueprint survey highlights how the Trump campaign won by grossly misrepresenting Kamala Harris’ positions on key issues. Blueprint discovered that undecided voters, who made up their minds in the final weeks before Election Day, chose Donald Trump by a 52-38 margin. LGBTQ Nation’s Alex Bollinger outlined how voters were bamboozled:

·      77% of swing voters who sided with Trump thought that Harris favored “allowing children under 18 to transition genders without informing their parents.” This position is one that Harris never said she supported.

·      82% of swing voters believed that Harris wanted to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035. This is false.  

·      76% believed that Harris wanted to allow abortion up until the day of birth. This is an outrageous lie.

·       67% believe that Harris wanted to give Black people reparations for slavery.  This is race-baiting propaganda with no basis.

·       74% said they believed Harris would ban fracking. The Vice President explicitly said she would support fracking.

·      73% said that she would force everyone into a single-payer health care system. Not true.

It is maddening that Harris lost an election based on things she never said and positions that she did not hold. Trump’s dark money distortion field, fueled by Elon Musk’s billions, successfully sabotaged the democratic process and now his crackpots and cronies are racing to finish the job.

The increased mendacity is largely a result of social media platforms failing our society. New York Times columnist Julia Angwin explained how lack of moderation on social media sites aid conservatives and has led to an avalanche of bogus information flooding our feeds:

A comprehensive study published last month in Nature found that conservatives shared more false information online in 2020, and therefore even neutral enforcement of platform policies against misinformation would disproportionately target conservatives.

The wave of fake news was so bad that in the days leading up to this month’s election, the F.B.I. issued five press releases warning the public about lies circulating online — including fake claims about F.B.I. electionmonitoring activities and two rare joint statements with other intelligence agencies warning of Russian online efforts to influence elections.

Democrats are understandably depressed and tuning out politics as they try to heal. Since Trump’s victory, MSNBC’s viewership in prime time has declined 53 percent, according to Nielsen data. CNN’s prime time viewership declined 43 percent. Meanwhile, Fox’s audience in prime time has grown 21 percent and its total day audience has jumped 38 percent.

Unfortunately, while Democrats sulk, MAGA fanatics, emboldened by Trump’s victory, are slithering out of the woodwork to do their movement’s dirty work. NBC News reports:

Latino teenagers in Georgia getting texts saying they are "set to be deported" by immigration authorities. A lesbian business owner receiving messages telling her she's been assigned to an “LGB re-education camp” in Las Vegas.

Soon after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, the FBI and the Department of Justice started receiving numerous reports of racist text messages being sent to Black Americans, telling them they had been selected to pick cotton "at the nearest plantation."

We may soon look back fondly, remembering when the terror was mostly relegated to texts. In Columbus, Ohio a dozen masked Nazis boldly marched through town this week. 

“Neo-Nazis — their faces hidden behind red masks — roamed streets in Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing vile and racist speech against people of color and Jews,” Gov. Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement posted on social media. “There is no place in this state for hate, bigotry, antisemitism or violence, and we must denounce it wherever we see it.”

The Anti-Defamation League reports that hundreds of white supremacist incidents have taken place across the country over the past 18 months. Earlier this week, a group of masked demonstrators were seen waving Nazi flags outside a production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" in Howell, Michigan. 

After running a bigoted campaign claiming Haitians in Ohio were eating pets and Harris was a DEI candidate, Americans should not be surprised by increased white supremacist sightings during Trump’s second term. Floridians were treated to a similar uptick in fascist activity after Gov. Ron DeSantis trafficked in hate and refused to condemn Nazis who marched outside of Disney World and projected antisemitic slurs onto the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville.

A Netflix documentary on Hitler tried to warn Americans about reelecting Trump, subtly comparing him to The Fuhrer. The president-elect’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said Trump would rule like a dictator and told him that “Hitler did some good things.” In May, Trump briefly posted a video on Truth Social showing an image referring to “the creation of a unified Reich” before nixing the post after people protested.

Trump’s flourishes of fascism are concerning, with the incoming president saying that he will use the military to enforce his draconian immigration plan. Such misuse of the armed forces could desensitize the public to troops in the streets. If these forces are eventually turned on American citizens, the public may already be primed to accept state-sponsored violence to quell public demonstrations.

There is also concern over a bill in Congress, (H.R. 9495), known as “the non-profit killer.” The original intent of the bill was to punish pro-Palestinian organizations tied to designated terrorist groups. However, under a paranoid Trump regime focused on punishing “enemies”, the law could be manipulated to empower the secretary of the Treasury to designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status.  

Despite damning evidence and the growing potential for Trump to undermine civil society and our institutions, a majority of voters, upset with inflated egg prices, decided to crack democracy’s shell and experiment with an autocratic omelet. In Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about Nazi, Germany, “First they Came”, it begins and ends: “First they came for the communists…then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

It seems the transgender population is destined to be cast in the role of “the communists,” the first group MAGA seeks to punish. After the Trump campaign spent at least $215 million in ads on network television attacking trans Americans, this infinitesimally small group of people now have a gigantic target on their backs.

In their anti-trans campaigns, MAGA activists pretended they were interested in “protecting” children. Now the masks have come off and it’s becoming apparent that their real goal is erasing transgender people from society, notably including adults.

To punish Sarah McBride (D-DE), who just became the first transgender person elected to Congress, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced an ugly bill to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol.  Perhaps, McBride should behave like the MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and leave a special gift on Mace’s desk.

Meanwhile, the Texas GOP prefiled 32 anti-trans bills on the first day of the 2025 legislative session’s prefiling period. Erin Reed reports:

The bills filed by Texas Republicans target transgender people in nearly every aspect of their lives. One such measure, HB1123, would impose stricter laws on sports by requiring every athlete in the state to undergo a chromosome test—an invasive and costly procedure that could wreak havoc on high school and college athletics.

The unrelenting attack on transgender Americans is taking a toll on public health:

A study conducted by Dr. Lisa Diamond, University of Utah, and the National LGBTQI+ Cancer Network shows that anxiety increased 45%, depression by 19%, and feelings of dread by 30% among trans Americans from the month before the election until the week afterward. Over 30% say their overall health status has declined since last year, 60% report disruptions in their sleep over half the time, and 80% report that these health problems interfere with their daily functioning.

M. Gessen, who escaped Russia’s autocracy, wrote in The New York Times what we are witnessing in real time: “What they delivered [in authoritarian societies] was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and to heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Balint Magyar [a scholar of autocracy] calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”

In another realm of MAGA mischief, there is no sugarcoating how devastating Trump’s victory was for religious pluralism and how much power he plans to give the Religious Right. “This is a make-or-break election for church-state separation,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “The overreach is threatening our core freedoms, our equality and our democracy like never before. The stakes are truly so high.”

Wasting no time, Texas education officials are poised to vote this week on whether to approve a new elementary-school curriculum that imbues Bible lessons into reading and language arts.

“They’re using Texas as a testing ground for these extreme ideas,” said State Representative James Talarico, a Christian and a Democrat, told The New York Times.

David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar who reviewed the curriculum said:  

In a fifth-grade unit on racial justice, students would be taught that Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists relied in part “on a deep Christian faith” to “guide their certainty of the injustice of slavery.” But they would not be taught that other Christians leaned on the same religion to defend slavery and segregation.

It was one example, Mr. Brockman said, of what he called a “whitewashing of the negative details of Christian history” that “helps to promote Christianity as an inherently ‘good' religion.”

The Times’ Linda Greenhouse reported this week on a creepy and invasive new legal scheme from the right-wing attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri. These extremists are arguing that abortion pills must be outlawed for “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.” Expect this movement to expand, due to the fervent support of Elon Musk:

Over the last two years, he has become increasingly fixated on what he sees as another threat: declining birthrates, The New York Times reported. He believes a global population collapse is coming that will wipe out humanity. His apocalyptic vision is unlikely, according to demographers, but on X, the social media company he owns, he has been encouraging followers to have as many children as possible.

“It should be considered a national emergency to have kids,” Mr. Musk posted in June.

Matthew G. Whitaker, who previously led Trump’s Justice Department for 4 months, was nominated today to serve U.S. ambassador to NATO. He previously opined that judges should have a “biblical view” and said he could not support “secular” judicial nominees. A former U.S. attorney, he also said that the courts “are supposed to be the inferior branch” of the three branches of government.

Didn’t conservatives always tell us that they stood for institutions, constitutional originalism and limited government? Apparently, those days are over and they demand the long arm, of their bizarre version of the law, reach into bathrooms, operating rooms, courtrooms and classrooms.

Kamala Harris’ campaign pitch was “we are not going back.” Bamboozled voters lifted Trump to victory on his litany of lies, now the only question remaining is whether we are going back years, decades or centuries?