Raphael ThysThe Theocrats and Fascists Want a Totalitarian Society — And They’re About to Get One
Image Credit: Evelyn Hockstein
Shockwaves reverberated around the world. At my little cafe in an old, old European city, full of friends, people: “They really did it?” “Are they crazy?” “What’s going to happen now?” “My God!” At the park, just around the corner, where the dogs spin in happy summer circles: “I can’t believe it!” “Is there anything Americans can do?” “What happens now?”
What happens now? That’s the question on everyone’s mind.
Here’s the answer.
If you’re scared for America’s future — you’re not scared enough yet.
Overnight, the landscape for women in America has changed. Women woke up to having their abortions cancelled and surgeries closing across 26 states. Missouri’s trigger law came into effect, banning abortions without exception, including for rape and incest. In Wisconsin, gynecologists are being told that pregnant women can’t be treated for cancer anymore.
Americans have at every juncture — every juncture — consistently and catastrophically underestimated, dismissed, denied, and ignored the very real process of collapse their country was undergoing. Not you and me. But those of us who warned weren’t just marginalized — we were demonized. We became the enemy — instead of the actual bad guys. And here we are.
I don’t say that to score points. I say it so that Americans listen. Even now, in this incredibly bleak moment, they are still underestimating social collapse.
What happens next? Everything you fear, and then some.
Now a new chapter in American history is beginning. It’s the opposite of the last one, but turbo-charged and on steroids. The last era was, broadly speaking, the Age of Civil Rights. Over about half a century, rights advanced in giant leaps. For women. For ethnic and racial minorities. For gay people. For all kinds of people. These advances in rights brought American forward in history, and began to modernize it.
The next chapter, this chapter? It is to be about undoing all those advances. Call it what you like. What it is going to be about is as clear as day. Welcome to the Age of Totalitarianism.
We have lots of names for them. “Christofascists,” “wingnuts,” “trumpets,” “lunatics.” What do they really want? What’s really happened here? Something truly horrific. America’s lunatics have joined hands. They’ve made relationships of convenience with each other — theocrats, fascists, authoritarians, oligarchs backing them, neo Nazis as muscle, religious fundamentalists of different stripes. All these parties have put aside their obvious differences for one purpose.
To make America a totalitarian society. Oriented around theocratic-fascist goals. The theocrats and fascists share one common belief: persecution. The fascists believe there’s a great replacement of their “pure” blood, the theocrats believe there’s a great replacement of the purity of faith. Both have made common cause to now control society in a total way.
Totalitarianism. Of a fascist-theocratic kind. What does it mean? It means total control. Over what? Bodies. Minds. Relationships. Speech. Expression. Association. Interaction. Let me say it again, because I don’t think Americans really get it yet. Totalitarianism means total control of what people can do, say, think, be, become, want, express. It means that everything from friendships to marriages to education to simple where people go and what they buy, say, and who they meet and where they meet them is monitored and policed. For what? For infractions from the totalitarian project.
In the Soviet Union, or in East Germany, the totalitarian project policed people from deviation from the communist cause. Were you criticizing the Party? Were you a good comrade? Did you raise too many questions? Could you please tell us — why did you meet that person in that cafe? Didn’t you know that they were an enemy of the state? Can you tell us why we found these books in your home? These personal effects? We have our doubts about you.
Totalitarian America is going to do the same thing — but for the theocratic fascist project. What the lunatics want — and especially the ones on the Supreme Court — is a society that is totalized towards theocracy and fascism. That means: any form of divergence from the goals of that project are criminalized, punished severely, and constantly watched for. What are the goals of that project? Purity, faith, babies, and the separation of society into subhumans and superhumans.
This is a new phase in American collapse. It’s not just fascism, and it’s not just theocracy. It’s what happens after they crystallize, coalesce, join hands, and gain real power. It’s totalitarianism now. There is a big, big difference, and Americans had better begin to grasp it. Because their lives are about to change in drastic, shocking, and terrible ways.
It only begins with women. What happens next? They come for…everyone. They’re transparent about it. Just yesterday as Roe was struck down, Clarence Thomas spoke of “correcting the errors.” Which “errors”? Contraception. Not just gay marriage, but being gay. You can imagine for yourself what comes next — segregation, quite obviously.
Am I being hysterical? An alarmist, again? No, man, some people are just idiots. Americans don’t listen to the warnings, and then they cry that nobody warned them. How could this happen? Because America keeps letting it. Because nobody is listening. Not just to me, but at this point, to the entire world. Americans need to wake up, and stop going numb when it’s too late.
This is how extreme America’s fanatics are. They are saying it right out loud. They want to make being gay criminal again. Think about that for a second. What does that mean, exactly? How are we to police things like…being gay? Using contraception?
All that requires a new institutional infrastructure. People will have to be policed. Their basic rights will no longer exist. How do we know if you’re gay? Well, I suppose it depends on where you go, what you say, who you meet, maybe even how you dress, act, and speak. Whoops, there go the rights of expression, association, privacy, and movement. Bang. Gone. How are we to stop the gay menace from reaching our kids? Well, maybe if a kid seems to be gay, they should be turned in. There are already tip lines to turn in teachers in places like Virginia. The infrastructure to criminalize divergence from the theocratic-fascist project is being put into place.
Let’s take a few more examples of that infrastructure. Governments will be able to subpoena apps that track women’s menstrual cycles, their purchase histories, and so forth — and use those to police them. How do we know if people are using contraceptives? That’s a pretty good starting point. As is monitoring and surveilling their interactions at large. Privacy, association, expression — all gone.
America is now entering something like a Jim Crow era all over again. It’s going to be really, really, really bad. The theocrats and fascists want to criminalize any forms of behavior that diverge from their project. They want to basically make it illegal not to be pure of faith and true of blood. Much of this is already happening — the Supreme Court is only setting it in stone. Think of the way that saying the word “gay” to kids is becoming a kind of crime.
Now let’s take all the forms of divergent behavior on their agenda which are to be criminalized. They amount to nothing less than a full blown attack on the fabric of a modern, free society. No form of association or relationship which isn’t blessed by the theocrats and fascists is to be allowed. Americans are about to live in a society where being gay, or being a woman, is a crime. Punishable by lengthy, severe prison sentences. Women are to be prosecuted for murder. Who knows what charges they’ll attach to being gay?
Americans are fatally misunderstanding this, even if they think they understand it. Today, American women woke up, and their rights were gone. Poof. Just like that.
Tomorrow, the very same thing is going to happen. Americans are going to wake up one day, very shortly, and being gay will be a crime. They’re going to turn the alarm off, blearily wake up, check the headlines, and using contraception will be a criminal act. Then comes “interracial marriage.” Then comes the reinstitution of segregation. And bang — just like that — the theocratic fascist project reaches its culmination.
Maybe it won’t get that far. But it will get a lot further than this. This is just the beginning. Americans are now facing the prospect of waking up, day after day, and another group, another form of relationship, expression, association, freedom, has been criminalized. Bang. It’s gone. Just like that.
What happens when this Supreme Court makes it a crime to be gay? Most Americans are concerned about gay marriage. But this Supreme Court is willing to go much, much further than that. They are openly saying that they hope to make being gay illegal. Stop and think. What happens then? Well, then in half of American states or more, fanatical legislators rush to put laws on the books. All kinds of insane laws. Anti-“sodomy” laws come back into force. All kinds of establishments are forced to close. People are investigated and persecuted. People are jailed. A kind of anti-gay fervor and a new McCarthyism sweeps state after state.
America becomes a place like Russia or Iran, where repression is the chief social value. And minorities are scapegoats, who serve the social function of expelling the hate, spite, and rage of the fanatical minority ruling the nation.
What happens when this Supreme Court takes on contraception? Don’t tell me they won’t do it. Are you kidding? What’s the point of installing fanatics to it otherwise? Why are they openly saying so now? But what happens when it begins to attack contraception? Nobody knows — because there’s not a single modern society in the world where contraception is illegal. In fact, there are barely any societies in the world like that. But we can make some guesses. Women will bear the brunt, and they’ll be the ones facing prison sentences, when their medical records or correspondence or consumer data is checked for the crime of contraception. The fascists and theocrats will be very, very happy to have the opportunity to use contraception as the spear’s tip to invade everyone’s privacy, and make sure they’re living in a fundamentalist way.
This is as serious as it gets when it comes to social collapse.
This Supreme Court isn’t going to stop here. This is just the beginning. But Americans do something painfully obtuse. They get angry for exactly 48 hours, and then they go back to whatever dumb nonsense it is they do, Marvel Movies or Instagram, and they forget, so the next time around comes as a sudden, heart-stopping shock. This cycle needs to be broken. Americans need to understand that this is for real. It’s not an ending, it’s just a beginning, and it’s going to get so, so much worse than they are ready to admit or imagine.
Societies collapse through a fatal bargain. The fanatics offer the presence of malice. The in the silent majority, there is the absence of responsibility, care, concern, truth, decency. Once in a while, sure, there is a tepid effort at a protest here and there, but by and large, collapse is an issue that’s met with a kind of furious, desperate, deliberate denial. It’s not something to be discussed, fought, challenged. It’s not central, primary, fundamental. Escapism and pleasure matter more.
America’s silent majority is killing it. We know what the fanatics and lunatics want. This is. We know what they want next, too. They’re telling us openly. When authoritarians tell you this openly that they are coming for everyone next — from gays to kids to everyday marriages — that is a message. They’re rubbing it in your nose, flaunting it, humiliating you, because they’re not afraid of you.
It’s deeply, deeply chilling. It’s not just that America’s lunatics have taken control to the point that they control the Supreme Court. Not even that they’re using it as a cudgel to beat the nation with. It’s that that Supreme Court is explicit and open about who it’s coming for next. When they’re that open, it’s perhaps the most catastrophic sign of social collapse there can be. It means that they feel invulnerable, unstoppable. It means that they’re drunk on power. Intoxicated with hate and spite, because the majority is silent, and has been for too long, so long that the lunatics feel they can get away with anything.
That’s why America’s authoritarians are out of control. They are revelling in their power so much they’re flaunting it. They’re openly, gleefully saying that, next, they’re going to come for gays, kids, minorities of every kind, everyday marriages, families. When authoritarians are that open, my friends, you had better understand: it’s a message. They’re trying to humiliate you, because they are no longer afraid. They are only this open when they are unleashed to the maximum degree, and unafraid of any form of consequences whatsoever.
When I say “silent majority,” Americans don’t understand the term. They think that tepid protests once a year make them not a silent majority. Wrong. That’s exactly what a silent majority is. You raise your voice just loud enough to the point of a barely audible, feeble moan. It takes more than that — much, much more — to save a democracy. It takes shutting down a society, with general strikes, going full Lysistrata, stopping entire cities dead in their tracks, making the lunatics persona non grata everywhere, using every mechanism of nonviolent power there is, from marches to protests to lawsuits to ostracization to impeachment to contesting office, until the back of the fascist movement is broken.
What America has now is a silent majority, and like all silent majorities, it doesn’t really understand that it is one.
This is the endgame. A new chapter in American history is dawning. The Age of Totalitarianism. The lunatics are coming for everyone, at last, just as they were always going to, beginning way back when with all those Mexican kids they put in cages. Now they’re coming for white people, too, “real” Americans, who happen to be gay, they’re coming for everyday marriages, for regular kids, for women. They’re coming for everyone.
And only one thing can stop it. If the silent majority wakes up, and says, as one: this will not happen here. We will not let this happen here. We are all against you. This is our society. Instead of: it can’t happen here! Hey, did you see Aquaman Part 4763761?!! LOL, Bro, chill! This is America!
Umair June 2022