In 2019 I wrote on this site:

All indications are that the GOP and the American people are prepared to collude in the transformation to an authoritarian regime

Well, they tried. And they're still trying. It almost worked in 2020. We were not saved by "our institutions" - we were only saved by a few individuals here and there and some good luck. There were a few election officials, many republican, that refused to go along with the coup. Some staffer in Congress grabbed the boxes containing the electoral college votes on January 6 at the last minute. A few Capitol police held ground long enough for members of Congress to find shelter and avoid being killed or kidnapped.

By Tyler Merbler from USA - DSC09265-2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98724490

Had any one of those accidents not happened, we could be living in a much different world right now.

With everything we're learning from the January 6th committee, along of course with everything we already knew, what we saw with our own eyes, we know there was a coup attempt. If they succeeded, they would have kept the former president in place, ignoring the will of the people, ignoring the vote, ignoring the Constitution, ignoring that the election wasn't even close, as Mitch McConnell himself stated on January 6. Now we know this coup plot was put to paper. They had a blueprint to use to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and ignore the devastating loss that Trump suffered and keep him in office anyway.

How quickly we forget.

After losing the election in 2020, the then-president went entirely AWOL. He was never particularly presidential or particularly attentive to his presidential duties, but after his 2020 election defeat, he was totally missing, focused only on the "big lie" and wanting nothing to do with affairs of state. This is who he is. This is what we would get if he runs and wins back the presidency. We will not get the "muted" version we had for four years. We're going to get the full off-the-rails version we saw for the two months up to when he boarded Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2021, the version of Trump that (finally) got him kicked off Twitter and Facebook.

Here's some of the crazy stuff that happened after he lost the election:

• After vote counts showed a Biden victory, Trump engaged in what has been called a "post-election purge", firing or forcing out at least a dozen officials and replacing them with loyalists.
• He and his associates filed a number of lawsuits contesting election processes, vote-counting, and the vote-certification process in multiple states. Courts dismissed more than 50 lawsuits of alleged electoral fraud and irregularities presented by Trump and allies. Trump's own U.S. election security officials have said the election was “the most secure in American history”.
• He pressured Michigan officials not to certify the legal and valid election results.
• He famously pressured  Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to disqualify ballots and "find" him enough votes to win.
• The Trump campaign requested a recount in Wisconsin counties known to be Democratic strongholds. The recounts ended up increasing Biden's lead by 87 votes.
• Trump placed a call to Georgia governor Brian Kemp in which he urged the governor to call a special session of the state legislature to override the election results and appoint electors who would support Trump.
• After legal efforts by Trump and his proxies had failed in numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, some right-wing activists and Trump allies – including Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and L. Lin Wood – suggested that Trump could suspend the Constitution, declare martial law and "rerun" the election.
• Trump enlisted Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other aides to pressure deputy attorney Jeffrey Rosen, who would replace Barr on December 23, and other Justice Department officials to challenge the election results. Jeffrey Clark, acting assistant attorney general for the civil division, approached Rosen with a draft letter addressed to officials in the state of Georgia and requested he sign it. 
• Michael Flynn called senior Trump intelligence official Ezra Cohen and told him to take extreme actions, including seizing ballots, to prevent the election results from favoring the winner, Joe Biden.
• On New Year's Eve, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent a memo drafted by Trump attorney Jenna Ellis to a top Pence aide containing a detailed plan to overturn the election results.
• On New Year's Day, White House director of personnel John McEntee sent a series of bullet points via text message to Pence's chief of staff to incorrectly assert that Thomas Jefferson "Used His Position as VP to Win" the 1801 election.
• Justice Department officials pressured Atlanta's top federal prosecutor, B. J. Pak, to say there had been widespread voter fraud in Georgia, warning him that he would be fired if he did not. The White House forced Pak to resign on January 4, 2021.

Nothing has changed.

We were not saved by the "rule of law." Pundits keep telling us, even in the long list of dirty deeds listed above, there were no laws broken, or not enough evidence to bring a case anyway. If this holds true, we are no longer a country ruled by laws. Meanwhile, the republicans have been systematically removing everyone that pushed back against the coup and replacing them with Trump loyalists who will be more open to overturning future elections.

Yet we just keep pretending it's politics as usual, just another election cycle. See: A message from the future.

At first glance, the QAnon movement would appear to be pro-Trump and very right-wing. However, that aspect is just a vector into the mind-control aspect. The same people behind QAnon have also infiltrated left-wing movements like Occupy and NODAPL (The anti Dakota Access Pipeline movement).

These schemes have all had the same goal: inflicting mind-control on a population, subjecting them to a PSYOPs Alternative Reality Game (ARG) for the pure enjoyment of the malignant narcissist puppet masters. They use a narrative as the basis for the game, but really those at the top of the power pyramid have no sincere interest in the purported cause. It turns out, for whatever reasons, the QAnon narrative has had the most success in spreading the ARG virus, so they use that narrative as the basis for the game.

An ethical ARG, such as the Microsoft Halo ilovebees.com ARG, sets guard rails to keep the players safe and keep the game fun. QAnon has no such guard rails. An unethical ARG with no guard rails is how you end up with someone storming into a pizza parlor, loaded for bear, terrifying patrons, looking for a non-existent basement, expecting to find trafficked children there, who were on the menu, then finding nothing and getting arrested.

We know a lot more about QAnon today as a result of some fantastic work by investigative journalists and a variety of experts across several disciplines becoming alarmed and getting involved.

Unmasking Q

a consensus of leading researchers and critics who study and debunk QAnon disinformation told ABC News that a key to identifying "Q" has been hiding in plain sight for years -- on a pig farm south of Manila in the Philippines -- at least until recently.

... The two Americans most clearly associated with the author of thousands of "Q drops" dating back to October 2017 are James Arthur Watkins, 56, who gained control in 2015 of the controversial anonymous message board 8chan, and his son, Ronald Watkins, former 8chan administrator and current administrator of its successor, the Watkins-owned 8kun.

While the Watkins' are certainly major players, they may still not be the top of the pyramid. Likewise, Jason Gelinas, who was fired by Citibank, after being identified as the person behind the site QMap.pub.

Normal people are baffled that despite everything, Trump holds an unwavering 40% approval rating, and 90% approval among Republicans, essentially unchanged. Despite impeachment and a failed Coronavirus response, leaving the country ravaged with180,000 deaths and millions unemployed, while the virus rages on in America when other countries have brought it under control, it has almost no effect on his approval ratings.

Trump hasn't delivered anything substantive, none of his promises, no infrastructure, no healthcare; he didn't get rid of the deficit; Mexico didn't pay for a wall; he didn't bring back manufacturing; none of it. But none of that ever mattered, really. What he did promise is "We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning." And this he has delivered, from their perspective. He understands that "winning" for them is having license to hate democrats, hate liberals, and be racist, out in the open, spewing right-wing talk radio vitriol as official positions.

When that lady in red told John McCain at a town hall that Obama was a Muslim who wasn't born in this country, they didn't want him to be the fact checker, and tell her she was wrong, to tell them that Obama is a good family man who they simply disagree with about policies. Oh no. That won't do. What they wanted is how Trump would have responded to that lady, how he has responded to all sorts of abhorrent behavior from right-wing media, from far-right groups, white-supremacists, and worse, from birtherism to "they're bringing rapists" to "very fine people on both sides" to "shithole countries" to the new Biden/Harris birtherism, to embracing a 17-year-old murderer as a hero -- this is what "winning" means, as far as his deplorables are concerned.

They don't really care about the rest of it. They pretend to, but they don't really. Until COVID-19 hit, when you talked to a Trumper about morality or lies, they'd say "sure, he says some stuff, but look at the economy!" (the economy he inherited from Obama, by the way). But now that unemployment is sky high, they offer something else; it doesn't matter what. Because it was never about policy, or jobs. When they speak of being "left behind" it's not really about jobs or manufacturing. It's about white-supremacy, or at the very least, white-privilege, even if many would never admit it, not even to themselves. The world is leaving behind these attitudes and "values" (can we call hatred a "value"?). That's what they're pissed off about. They want to be racist, dammit. They want to shit down the throat of liberals because liberals don't share these values. They literally wear "liberal tears" t-shirts, because that's what they really care about. Every time Trump repeats a Fox News or Twitter right-wing crazy lie, they love that stuff. That's "winning" -- and they're getting a belly full of it from Trump, so they love him. Biden, can't fill that need.

They will die on this hill too. Make no mistake. Trump has given them this new license to be "a good patriot" telling them their racism isn't racism, but just being a good American. And now killing liberals, BLM, antifa, is all embraced and admired by the president himself. You think they're going to give that up and go back to being seen as the ordinary folks, on the wrong side of history, they really are?

And it's sad because they're being manipulated to hate liberals, and vote against their own interests, instead of pointing that anger to those who are actually holding them down: Trump and his cronies, along with Democrats too, rake in billions of dollars, while giving out a measly one-time tax deferment here or some one-time payment there to the rest of us. Trump's people will vote for anything if it keeps Trump or others like Trump in charge. They will end social security, medicare, unions, better wages, healthcare, their own rights, as long as Trump sings the Fox News hysteria talking-points and keeps ramping up the cruelty upon their enemies. This is the new GOP. They can't go back from here.

The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries.

The transition has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. If they work for the government, or for a company susceptible to government pressure, they risk their jobs by speaking out. Nonetheless, they are free to emigrate anytime they like. Those with money can even take it with them. Day in and day out, the regime works more through inducements than through intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
- How to Build an Autocracy - The Atlantic 

Americans need not look far to see what this kind of boring authoritarianism looks like. As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey has argued, swaths of the US South were effectively under one-party rule during parts of the 20th century.
- Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable, Vox

It is happening here. Make peace with it. 

1. Assume all communications and activities are monitored.
2. Do not trust any information released by the government.
3. Support the production and dissemination of independent media.
4. Move banned activities and observances underground.
5. If necessary, change your identity.
6. If you are able, shield those more vulnerable than yourself.
7. Have a hiding place or escape plan ready.
8. Make room for culture, even in dark times.
9. Support labor unions and work stoppages.
10. Keep the spirit of resistance alive and never lose hope.

Now you say in the book that as long as this social divide is maintained, then we’re going to behave more like warring tribes than unified nations of people who have different values and different ideas about what policies should be enacted. Now, it’s just like the side has to win and the other side has to lose, no matter what. I feel like these are both the same question, which is, “What do we do? How do we fix it?” I’m just going to stop talking and let you talk as long as you want about that, because I think that is the thing that people want to hear most from you, once you have made them feel as bad as I currently feel.

The problem with this is that it requires motivation.

What I found is that people who are largely in the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is largely white and Christian and straight, they tend to be socially exposed to other partisans who are very similar to them. It’s relatively rare for a Republican to meet another Republican who is racially or religiously distinct from them. Democrats are the party of everybody else. Democrats were 56 percent white, 19 percent black, and 17 percent Hispanic in 2016. So, for Democrats, any given Democrat is likely going to be exposed to another partisan member or another party member who is racially or religiously distinct from them, because there are plenty of very religious Democrats who are people of color, and there are plenty of very secular, white Democrats. Within the larger party umbrella, Democrats tend to be exposed to people unlike them on a much more regular basis, or at the very least they think of the people in their party and their group as more diverse.

The people who need to try the most are the people who are the least inclined to try. 

Saying everyone needs to behave the same way to fix this problem is not exactly correct, because it’s the people who are the most socially isolated who really need to practice this the most. It’s unclear to me exactly how to motivate that, because that’s an extremely threatening thing to say to somebody who feels very comfortable in their homogeneous socially homogeneous group.

We need to find a way to step back and think, “OK, what’s the greater good?” Find a way to think about what is the best for the most people. Obviously, it’s not human instinct to do that. But we’ve done it before and we had crosscutting identities between the parties not that long ago. It is possible for us to have crosscutting identities again. That would link us to the other side in terms of thinking of them as human beings.

The last thing that I’ll say is that the one policy that I’ve thought of this since I wrote the book that could work would be service. One way to get people of varying backgrounds to work together is to put them work together doing some type of service. Working in a soup kitchen or building houses for Habitat or working in Peace Corps or doing something in the military. The military is a giant melting pot of all different kinds of political orientations. One thing that could be helpful is to work together. This is my like moonshot idea.