Authoritarianism / Fascism

Trump is not a political anomaly. He's not a disruptive force that came out of nowhere. And contrary to the column inches of pearl-clutching pundits, he didn't hijack the Republican Party - he unmasked it. His presidency is the product of decades of strategy, ideology, and deliberately nurtured, festering decay.

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Republican voters bear direct responsibility. They are active participants in America’s political apocalypse, not passive victims manipulated against their interests. After witnessing years of his break-it-without-buying-it governance and hearing his promises of harm, the Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 weren't deceived. They were convinced. They didn't hold their noses while voting for mass deportations and stripping transgender people of their civil rights. They huffed the scent and loved it.

Blaming Trump alone offers psychological comfort, by localizing a systemic problem in a single figurehead. It legitimizes the false promise that removing one man solves the underlying condition. It absolves millions of their responsibility while leaving intact the machinery that produced Trump - and will create future authoritarian leaders.

Political scientist Cas Mudde has suggested a classification I find particularly helpful, especially when it comes to determining what, exactly, we are confronted with in case of the AfD. Mudde has been at the forefront of the research on far-right parties and movement across Europe – few people can offer the kind of broad, comparative perspective he can provide. In his 2019 book The Far Right Today, Mudde concisely outlines what I believe is an extremely useful typology.

The first key distinction to draw is between the mainstream right and the far right. On the mainstream right, we find established conservative parties that are largely on board with the foundations of liberal democracy: the rule of law, universal suffrage, free and fair elections, minority rights, protection of baseline civil liberties. What defines them as parties of the right is that they are skeptical towards the idea of egalitarianism; they accept “natural” hierarchies which they contend should either be preserved or, at least, not leveled via state intervention. But they tolerate some measure of pluralism, respect democratic deliberation, and ultimately support and stabilize the democratic system.

Far-right movements and parties, by contrast, reject the system – they are fundamentally not on board with liberal democracy. Crucially, the far right is itself not a monolithic bloc but covers a range of ideologies as well as attitudes and dispositions. Cas Mudde helpfully distinguishes two main camps on the far right: the radical right and the extreme right. The distinction really comes down to a reactionary (on the radical right) vs revolutionary (on the extreme right) attitude and political project. The radical-right reactionaries disdain liberal democracy, but prefer to work mostly within the existing political and constitutional system to turn the clock back; they begrudgingly accept some level of restraint in their anti-democratic pursuit. If they got their way, they would probably erect something that is best described as an illiberal democracy: It still looks democratic on the surface, with elections and opposition parties, but the system is set up to entrench certain hierarchies, discriminate against historically marginalized groups, and consolidate power in the hands of the right. To me, Chief Justice John Roberts belongs in that bucket (and has a case to be one of their standard-bearers in the United States).

The extreme-right revolutionaries, on the other hand, will never be satisfied with just reformist reactionary measures. They desire to tear the system down. They accept no opposition, no restraint. They are not content to bend the law, they believe they stand above it. They don’t just want to make it harder for certain groups to participate in the political process, they want to purge them from the nation.

Thomas is the single best commentator on the theology that drives these people.

Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: “This was the right person sent to the right place.” Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of “real America,” he does not – and must never – belong to the Volk, the “real” people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a “Higher Truth” that overrides all else: The “homeland” is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.

The MAGA rage won’t be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.” In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The “enemy within” – those Un-American forces of radical leftism and “globalist” elites – are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.

This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the “globalist” enemy within, they function as power centers for the “woke” elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation.

Another source warned that law enforcement and intelligence sources living in witness protection could be exposed by the data, as well as everyday Americans who could be viewed by Musk and the Trump administration as political enemies.

Some of those perceived enemies could include transgender Americans, according to Zinnia Jones, a transgender activist and researcher. Jones warned that the SSA data could be used to “identify nearly all likely transgender people in the US with 99 percent confidence.” Jones cited a 2015 U.S. Census Bureau study that utilized the same SSA data accessed by DOGE to estimate the number of trans Americans.

“For all we know, they may already know about the possibility of doing this and it’s part of why they insisted so forcefully on full access” to the data, Jones tells Rolling Stone. In her deposition, Flick noted that Bobba requested and was eventually given access to the SSA’s full dataset, “including source code.”

A former federal employee speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution agreed with Jones’ assessment, telling Rolling Stone that the Trump administration could use the SSA data — as well as agency hiring paperwork and passport applications — to identify and purge transgender employees from the government.

In the early 1950s, a moral panic over gay people swept across America. LGBTQ+ individuals were cast as threats—vulnerable to blackmail, labeled “deviant sex perverts,” and accused of colluding with communist governments. Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for the Red Scare, pressured President Eisenhower into signing an executive order purging LGBTQ+ people from government service. With that signature, the campaign escalated rapidly—up to 10,000 federal employees were fired or forced to resign during what became known as the Lavender Scare, a far less taught but even more devastating purge than the Red Scare. The episode remains a lasting stain on U.S. history. And now, it appears we are witnessing its revival: 100 intelligence officials were just fired for participating in an LGBTQ+ support group chat—an internal network not unlike employee resource groups (ERGs) at most companies.

The firings stem from out-of-context chat logs leaked by far-right commentator Chris Rufo on Monday. Sources tell Erin in the Morning that the chat functioned as an ERG-adjacent LGBTQ+ safe space, where participants discussed topics like gender-affirming surgery, hormone therapy, workplace LGBTQ+ policies, and broader queer issues. Rufo, however, framed these conversations as evidence of misconduct, claiming that “NSA, CIA, and DIA employees discuss genital castration” and alleging discussions of “fetishes, kink, and sex.” To Rufo and his audience, merely talking about being transgender and the realities of transition is enough to be labeled “fetish” content.

Eisenhower and McCarthy would have killed for such an easily accessible list of LGBTQ+ federal employees—and the flimsy pretext to purge them.

Within a day of the chat logs’ release, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that all participants in the “obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit” chatroom would be terminated.

A useful explainer for bewildered relatives, etc.:

Clear definitions of categories matter in the law. The use of two sex categories to talk about a species is standard in biology. In many animal species, including people, however, there are individuals who are neither male nor female or who are sometimes both. In other species, there are two sexes, but they aren’t male and female (usually these are intersex and male). And a few species have only one sex (usually female). The biological reality is that “male” and “female” are not universal immutable biological classifications but rather descriptions of typical patterns in reproductive biology. These categories, male and female, are used by biologists who fully understand that they rarely represent all the relevant biological variation in any given species or identical sets of variation across different species.

Sex is not one single, simple, uniform biological reality. Thus, biology cannot be invoked as a basis for such in legal terms. That’s the bottom line.

Of course, men and women are not the same, and reproductive biology does structure important aspects of human bodies and lives. But none of the key biological systems associated with sex in humans (chromosomes, gonads, genetics, hormones, and so on) come exclusively in two “immutable” categories. Yes, most humans have either XX or XY chromosomes, but as Judge Reyes noted, some don’t. People with either testes or ovaries are most common, but some people have both, and a few have ovotestes. Usually those with testes can produce sperm, and those with ovaries produce ova—but not always. The chromosomes one has do not always predict one’s gonads or one’s genitals or even all the elements of one’s reproductive tract. It is true that most people have the “typical” combo of chromosomes, gonad and genitals, yet there are tens of millions of people alive right now who don’t. These people are not errors, aberrations or problems; they are a part of the range of variation in our species. They are all real people. In fact, many who have these variations don’t even know it. You might be one of them.

In making laws, then, we need to recognize what the actual range of variation in sex-related biology is and how it maps across everyone.

Shameless.

Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

The CDC’s move to comply with Trump’s executive order is not just an attack on transgender inclusion—it is a fundamental assault on evidence-based policymaking. Public health data drives funding allocations, legislative protections, and medical advancements. Without accurate data on transgender individuals, lawmakers and health officials will be unable to craft policies that address the unique challenges faced by the trans community.

For transgender individuals, this erasure from federal data is more than an administrative slight—it is a direct threat to their health, safety, and survival. Without demographic representation, there will be fewer initiatives tailored to trans healthcare needs, fewer resources allocated for trans youth mental health programs, and fewer protections against discrimination in medical settings.

“This is an attempt to legislate us out of existence,” said a transgender activist who wished to remain anonymous. “They are trying to make it so that we don’t ‘exist’ in public data, and if we don’t exist in the data, we don’t exist in policy. If we don’t exist in policy, we don’t get protections. And if we don’t get protections, they are making us more vulnerable.”

Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.

What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.

Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.

“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded.

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Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.

“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”

“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”