On Thursday, July 31, 2025 the U.S. Senate appointed a “far right extremist” (White Christian Nationalist) to lead the United States Government’s National Counterterrorism Center, even though the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2019 clearly stated that “White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.”
What do you do when terrorists have taken over your government?
A little over 6 years ago, in May 2019, well before the November 2020 election or the insurrection of January 6, 2021, I wrote a piece of speculative fiction titled “Epic Fail: An Oral History of the 2nd American Civil War”. Set in 2076 on the occasion of what would have been the American Tricentennial, it was a fictional oral history of the dissolution of the USA, researched and written by a fictional PhD student for their doctoral thesis.
When I shared the draft document with friends they thought it was more than a little bit over the top. People told me they found the story far-fetched. I started to feel like a crazy person for harboring these thoughts. Well, guess what? Many of the things I speculated have come to pass.
I got the dates wrong - my story was predicated on DJT remaining in office after the 2020 election - but a lot of other things I flagged have actually been happening: the open embrace of White Nationalism, the dismantling of the civil sector and federal government, ICE Raids, detention camps, compiling databases, alignment of American allegiances away from Western Democracies and towards Authoritarian regimes, DJT accusing the Democrats of treason in order to arrest and imprison them, etc.
Every time we think we’ve reached the breaking point, DJT smashes through it. All previous evidence suggests that DJT will do what he says.
As recently as a few months ago, when people asked me what I thought was going to happen, I told them to brace themselves for at least a decade of this, if not more, that it was going to get much worse before it would get better. People were still skeptical but now, just 6 months into DJT’s second presidency, I think they are starting to come around to my way of thinking. MAGA is following a well-known and well-worn fascist takeover playbook:
The Nazis partnered with IBM, MAGA has Palantir (that also just got a $10B contract with the US military)
The Nazis had the SA, MAGA has ICE, which is basically a federal jobs program for Proud Boys, J6ers, Active Club members and other White Christian Nationalist thugs.
The Nazis had Goebbels, MAGA has Steve Bannon and, increasingly, an entire Far Right media-verse.
The Nazis had concentration camps, MAGA has Alligator Alcatraz, with more to come.
DJT is threatening to arrest his political adversaries and he will if he can. He is already going after Obama, James Comey, and Jack Smith, they’re trying to go after AOC. He may well succeed. What happens when Obama is handcuffed and jailed? What will we do?
DJT is going after his perceived enemies in the media, Stephen Colbert is just the beginning. Media, law firms and educational institutions will continue to capitulate. Maybe, on some level, they are even sympathetic to the MAGA agenda.
Once-trustworthy media will continue to drift rightward, mainstreaming fringe opinions as the MAGA media landscape expands. It is only a matter of time before there is no meaningful structural or narrative resistance to the MAGA world view.
DJT has been pushing to “prevent ‘woke’ AI in Federal Government” – essentially aiming to ensure that the AI-powered digital information space pushes far-right propaganda and misinformation. The ability to warp reality at this speed and scale is unprecedented in human history, more than anything Joseph Goebbels ever imagined.
A recently leaked memo reveals DJT/MAGA administration’s intent to expand the use of the military in domestic immigration raids. It appears that this has already started with the National Guard being deployed to states with compliant Republican governors, thus continuing the expansion of ICE, placing all U.S. citizens in jeopardy.
FEMA has redirected “$608 million to states to construct immigrant detention centers as part of the Trump administration's push to expand capacity to hold migrants.” Consider that The Nazis started with concentration camps, opening Dachau in 1933, shortly after coming to power. The Nazis built killing centers in 1941–1942 for the sole purpose of murdering Jews (and other undesirables) on a mass scale.
MAGA will rig the elections in 2026 and 2028. See what’s happening in Texas. The FBI has been deployed to Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas in an effort to thwart MAGA’s radical right gerrymandering. And, for what it’s worth, you don’t plan a $200 million dollar expansion of the White House if you’re planning to leave in four years.
While some voices in the media offer different versions of “Everybody Hates Trump Now” as evidence that MAGA will soon crash and burn, it is more likely that MAGA double down on their position as people increasingly think that DJT is a buffoon and get more vocal about hating his policies. For the MAGA faithful, abandoning the core beliefs around which they’ve formed their identity poses an existential threat, auguring a painful psychic break that no-one willingly accepts.
Thus, nothing DJT does will unnerve the MAGA faithful. Even if he is proven beyond a doubt to be a child-raping sadist, his followers will not abandon him. The MAGA movement will press forward on its violent, cruel, shambolic mission to dismantle the existing democratic(ish) government and replace it with a White Christian Nationalist autocracy.
This is not hyperbole. This is real.
They have said it out loud, repeatedly.
Take them at their word.
It is already happening at an astonishing rate.
Russell Vought, Paul Dans and the other architects of Project 2025 are relying on the non-stop personality clashes and public drama fueling the reality TV spectacle of Trump World to dominate our collective brain space and distract us from their White Christian Nationalist takeover of the government. Tune in to this week’s episode of “Real Housewives of MAGA” and watch Kristy Noem, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard compete for Daddy’s approval! What kind of wacky antics will these crazy incompetent sycophants get up to next?!
And when I say “takeover” it is really more like the parasitic cordyceps fungus attacking a host body, consuming it from the inside, leaving only an infected, infectious husk. MAGA is a mind-virus that mutates as it replicates through the host body. By the end of this presidential term, if DJT makes it to the end of his term, the entire system will be cancerous with MAGA-infected loyalists; it will take years to root them all out.
What is happening is at once familiar, surreal and disorienting.
It is familiar because history repeats itself, because human beings tend to enact the same behaviors over and over again, because we’ve read about it in history books, seen it in movies. We know this story, we know how it ends.
It is surreal because this reality was once inconceivable except in dystopian science fiction or satire. It is surreal because we have never actually lived through it before. We thought it would feel differently than this. We never imagined a Nazi takeover of the United States would actually look like a mashup of the Real Housewives, WWE and Hogan’s Heroes, where cruelty and violence are spectacle and entertainment.
The MAGA coup is disorienting in part because it is simultaneously a shallow grift and deeply ideological.
DJT and Co. are all getting rich in a myriad of criminal strategies and enterprises, enabling those around them to get rich too. It is a con, a greedy raid on the public coffers. It is opportunistic. And at the same time, it is an ideological coup set on not only transforming society but the landscape of the public imagination.
For many of the movement’s followers, the MAGA ideology is not fixed but malleable, an ever-shifting cacophony of Evangelical Christianity, Racism, Xenophobia, Conspiracy Theory, anti-science fringe New Age MAHA “cull the herd” so-called “wellness”, Q-Anon, End Times theology, Prosperity Gospel and Curtis Yarvin-inspired far-right tech sector anti-liberal libertarian corporate monarchists pushing crypto and “charter cities” (aka “Freedom Cities”) with the specific goal of dismantling the government to eliminate the public realm entirely and replace it with the private sector.
But for true believers in White Christian Nationalism like Vought et al, every policy and action, everything we are seeing, is in service to their end goal of transforming the United States into a racist, Christian, authoritarian theocracy. They are guiding the nation (in their eyes) through a Manichean end-times struggle between Good (them) and Evil (not-them). It is ideological. It is religious. It is immovable.
Two years ago, I wrote that MAGA persists because of DJT’s “ability to simultaneously inhabit political and mythic spaces. Trump’s followers — and their affiliated acolytes inhabiting a kaleidoscopically interlocking multiverse of social, ideological and cultural micro-communities — feel themselves to be part of not just a movement, but a Crusade. […] Ideological purity — or even political consistency — [is] subservient to an overarching sense of the individual being a part of a struggle between Good and Evil. Trumpism — even without Trump — gives meaning to people’s lives, makes them feel that they are devoted to something greater than themselves, something historic, epic, mythical, important.”
I went on to say that “turning back the tide of rising authoritarian White Christian Nationalism — or at least shortening the period of darkness before civility is restored — will require, to some extent, acknowledging — if not accepting — the terms of the conflict as proposed by the aggressors […] The [Establishment] is understandably resistant to framing policy issues as a Manichean contest of Good vs. Evil. Unfortunately, that’s how the MAGA world sees it, and rationality, reason, policy and common sense don’t hold up well against zealotry […] Far right extremism — and its associated violence — isn’t going away. It is going to get worse. We are experiencing societal upheaval rooted in an existential mythos of national and cultural identity that extends far beyond politics.”
I speculated that “violent social unrest, ethnic hatred and civil war will look different in the United States than it has in other countries, but it will be no less real for being diffuse, disaggregated and disordered. The civil war may, in fact, have already begun, if you look at all of the power station attacks, mass shootings, kidnapping attempts, more mass shootings, and insurrections we’ve experienced over the past few years as discrete parts of an asymmetrical, decentralized but unified campaign.”
We need to see what is happening through their eyes. Read Kathleen Belew’s book on White Nationalism, Bring the War Home, or this recent essay by James Shapiro in The Atlantic about The Turner Diaries.
So, here we are.
And while certain events and outcomes are predictable, they’re not inevitable. Scenario planning based on a clear-eyed assessment of worst-case possibilities may be the only way to truncate this period of civil unrest.
What are we going to do?
I having been asking myself this question for a long time and I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know enough about the actual machinations of politics to even speculate on what a political strategy might look like. I’m not sure that there is a political solution to an authoritarian takeover that no longer acknowledges the rule of law or the legitimacy of democratic processes, that seeks dominion, not dialogue or compromise.
I know this: we are never going back to the Before Times, to what was once “normal”. We need to start planning for, and building, what comes after, what comes next. We need to start building that better world now.
For many of us, it is going to be about acting locally, getting involved in our neighborhoods, community organizing, citizen patrols, and building grassroots networks of resistance. I think many people are going to find themselves in novel and unexpected situations, engaged in work that they never anticipated doing. And that kind of organized resistance sure won’t be happening on social media.
But the question I ask myself most frequently, is, in addition to practical, on-the-ground resistance, how do we defend and recapture the space of public imagination? What is the most unlikely, most unexpected, most unanticipated action we can take? What would go completely against the MAGA playbook, what would emerge so seemingly-out-of-nowhere that it takes them by surprise? What is a totally different reality than the one being offered by MAGA?
And the best I can come up with is:
Radiant Love
Radical Imagination
Leaderless Resistance
Leaderless Resistance is a “social resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells), or individuals (a solo cell is called a "lone wolf"), challenge an established institution such as a law, economic system, social order, or government.”
The Leaderless Resistance model has mostly been associated with the Far Right of late, but it is a values-neutral strategy. Read Ruth Ben-Ghiat on decentralized resistance. Also, this video of a lecture on decentralized resistance by James Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology, Yale University.
New leaders will arise and new movements emerge. As information flows and interventions are planned and implemented, interdependent networks of resistance will form. At the same time, each of us, individually, can engage in acts of leaderless resistance, not only against the physical encroachments of authoritarianism, but the occupation of our minds and spirits.
Authoritarianism wants us to accept hatred, indifference, cruelty and exclusion as the natural, and only, order of the world. To maintain control, authoritarianism seeks to occupy every possible space of thought and imagination. Authoritarianism seeks to constrain our sense of what is possible, of what the world can be, and what it can look like, who and how we can be in it. And in 2025 this is supercharged by a ubiquitous, all-pervasive media-verse, soon to be amplified throughout the system by AI. In the face of that, I think the essential work of the artist under authoritarianism is Radical Imagination.
It is not enough to be merely topical, or political, or to call out that which is known. It is not enough to merely portray, identify, or protest the political situation. That is important, it has its place. But it is not enough.
The 20th Century Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky put forth the idea of “defamiliarization”, that one of the things that art does, or can do, is to make the familiar unfamiliar, so we see things in a new way, see new possibilities, new realities. The artist under authoritarianism must defamiliarize the familiar, find new ways into seeing what is and pointing to what could be.
We need artists to co-create spaces of possibility, to help keep our imagination alive, to defend the autonomy of our inner lives as we resist the totalizing logic of authoritarianism. Spontaneous public dance parties. Dissident literary salons. Whatever it takes to stay free.
Artists under authoritarianism need to de-professionalize, pioneer the edges, navigate the unknown, explore the impossible, explode the rote, familiar and quotidian. Art under authoritarianism must wake us up, break us out of the trance, the mass hallucination of totalitarian thought. As that great visionary of liberationist funk theology George Clinton enjoins us, “Free your mind … and Your Ass Will Follow!”
And finally, this.
MAGA, at its core, is about giving people permission to be the worst possible version of themselves and feel righteous about it. It’s about being incurious, ungenerous and judgmental. It’s about giving into every selfish, greedy, unkind, hateful impulse you have and treating others cruelly, with complete confidence that you are right, and good, and just.
The polar opposite of MAGA is Love. Radiant Love.
I know it sounds like hippie-dippy bullsh*t but I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t.
In the early 1990s I was putting on an experimental play inspired by the Gnostic Gospels at the Pilgrim Center for the Arts in Seattle, WA where I met Michael Harris, one of PCA’s founders. He told me about his brother, George, who was the boy putting a flower in the barrel of an M-14 rifle in the iconic 1967 photograph, Flower Power by photographer Bernie Boston.
Suddenly the image wasn’t just iconic, it was real. That boy was somebody’s brother. Years later I learned that George was also known as Hibiscus, a founding member of the legendary countercultural drag theater troupe The Cockettes, who died of complications from AIDS in 1982.
Putting a flower in a gun is naïve but it is also true: war is a racket, a scam, a hustle, a con run by hateful people for profit, sending young men and women to their deaths, killing countless civilians, to line the pockets of corporations and billionaires.
It just seems as if the most hateful, cruel people are probably in the most pain, and there’s not a lot we can do about that. But maybe love radiates outward and the only way to really, truly, change anyone is to change the world around us, change the sea we swim in by modeling that world in our own actions and the systems we create.
Even as MAGA tries to impose a culture of hatred and violence, of mistrust, deceit and betrayal, we can resist by creating a culture of trust, transparency and compassion; love, care, joy and humor; creativity, celebration and imagination.
That seems like what George Harris was trying to do through the entirety of his life, a life cut short by a disease that was allowed to ravage a generation due to the hatred, indifference and inaction of the people who are now MAGA.
These are dark times and there’s no way out but through. But we’ll get through it together somehow. And when we reach the other side of this, we’ll make something better than what we’re leaving behind.