what america voted for

What America – mostly White America and Latino men – voted for last night in handing power to the American fundamentalist movement’s authoritarian leaders, scoping out from the most personal to the most global:

• a rapist
• making me and mine illegal again as people (via overturning Lawrence v. Texas (2003) via a now-assured long-term MAGA Supreme Court supermajority; see also Trump’s Agenda 47)
• making talking about me and mine illegal (via the fundamentalists’ revived plan of banning LGBT people by making us illegal to be seen or discussed in public; this is also how Russia made LGBT people illegal under Putin; see also Project 2025 under “pornography”)
• making my marriage illegal again (via overturning Obergfell v. Hodges (2015) via a now-assured long-term MAGA Supreme Court supermajority)
• making most forms of hormonal birth control unobtainable (via reviving the Comstock Act), and illegal (by banning travel for abortion); this will mostly be Vance’s hobbyhorse
• a mass ethnic purge in the form of Trump’s promised mass expulsion of “illegals,” which includes a whole fleet of kinds of very legal immigrants and refugees (via Trump and the Alien Enemies Act, last used to put people of Japanese descent into concentration camps, repeated constantly throughout his campaign)
• an economic dickpunch caused by Trump’s planned policies if implemented as promised (according to Elon Musk, who supports this implosion and sees it as a good thing, saying Americans will have to “embrace the pain”)
• throwing yet another ally – Ukraine – to its enemies, the fascist Russian Empire (via a fleet of Trump’s promises), and possibly the exit of the US from NATO (via many Trump statements)
• authoritarian misogyny and racism, arguably revised into a new kind of casteism not that it really matters (via basically everything he’s ever done or said)
• persecution of the press and political opponents (via repeated statements and promises; here’s a list of some of his top-level targets)
• “illiberal” democracy, in the form of a “republic” where there are still elections, but the ruling party always wins
• over time, the same kind of economic irrelevance as Britain (via swinging back to fossil fuels en masse, thus clinging to an obsolete economic driver in the same way that Britain clung to coal)
• over time, the return of several kinds of plague (via making vaccination difficult to impossible, via RFK, Jr.’s stated pre-election intent to go after vaccines and Trump’s promises to let him “go wild.”) [I must note that today, he’s claiming he won’t ban vaccines, just end vaccination requirements (though not using that exact word, that was the meaning). Even if true, though, you’re still talking plagues. He’s also going after fluoride, saying he’ll be “advising” water agencies and companies of their “liability.”]
• over time, 5.4°F/3°C of global warming or so (via Trump’s promises to “frack frack frack drill drill drill” on Day 1 and his many promises against zero-carbon/renewable energy.) We had ’til 2030 to cut carbon emissions by half; Trump’s second term ends in January 2029, assuming he lives that long. It’s literally an existential threat to civilisation, and how bad it’s going to get in the next 10 years will depend upon whether the Atlantic Current shuts down. Because it fucking well might.

If you voted for Trump, then you voted for all this, and I don’t know you, and clearly, I never really have, and you’ve never known me either, or, apparently, wanted to. If you think of me in the future, no, you didn’t. We’re strangers to each other. Let us never meet.

Everybody else… I’ve seen this year coming my entire adult life. Longer, really. I even had the years right. I gave half my life to trying to change this outcome, and I scored a lot of wins – some rather surprising – along the way, and yet, here we are, at the end of the Third American Republic…

…and I have no idea at all what to do now.

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