Henry Flores ● And So It Begins ● Our Voices/Nuestras Voces

And So It Begins

Henry Flores, PhD

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They built detention camps and then extended them into a nationwide network;

They created a national, masked police force with unlimited powers to detain, arrest and disappear individuals;

They took away the right to vote;

They took citizenship away from individuals who earned it legally;

They took the right to dissent and assemble;

They took the right of a fair hearing in the courts;

They took the right for a representation in legislative assemblies;

They took the right to compete for work, purchase housing, and access to public facilities from everyone;

They are planning to take over the election process; and,

They will eliminate term limits for the presidency.

This happened in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s and now it is happening in the United States.  The implementation of Project 2025, that President Trump denied of ever hearing, is and has created each of the pronouncements above.

The authors and many of its purveyors also believe in an assortment of anti-democratic ideas such as the sterilization of women who may give birth to certain types of children, the subjugation of women generally in all venues, and denying women control over their own bodies.

They also believe in the integration of church and state where only “theologically correct,” we now have a new acronym “TC,” white males should hold public positions of power and responsibilities.  These same TC men are to make biblically-based public policy decisions.  I wonder if this includes “stoning” as a form of capital punishment?

So, how did we get here?  This story began in the 19th Century as an artifact of Reconstruction, its aim being to suppress the Black vote so whites could regain control of their state legislatures.  However, what came to be known in the late 20th Century as the “Southern Strategy” was developed as a more sophisticated way of suppressing the Black vote by concentrating on increasing white voter turnout and ignoring black voters.  White turnout was encouraged through the use of racial tropes in a strategy developed by a Republican Party activist, Lee Atwater, who advised politicians to replace “the n-word” with terms such as “forced busing” and “states’ rights.”  Eventually, this strategy included racial gerrymandering, intimidation, purging of voter registration rolls, and imposition of stringent voter identification laws.

The “Religious Right,” which is a coalition of fundamentalist, evangelical Protestant Christians and Conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews, began agitating for the need to close the separation and church distance that is one of the founding principles of liberal democracy.  By the 2015s the Christian Right, now known as the White Christian Nationalism movement, which is a coalition of extremist evangelicals, right-wing Catholics, and some Orthodox Jews.  The fundamental idea is that there cannot be a separation of church and state, that public and private sector institutions should be led by Christian White Males, that all policies be based in Christian or biblical values, and that only a very select should have the right to vote.  The more extremists feel that the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, should be repealed.

The first step in the strategy was to take over the judiciary, which has already been accomplished as evidenced by the recent destruction of the Voting Rights Act, overturning Roe v Wade, and allowing unlimited election campaign donations by private corporations or individuals.  The next step was to establish a “strong executive,” which is still under construction but will be complete just prior to the 2026 midterm elections when the president declares a national security emergency and takes control of the election process.

Fundamentally, the United States is being transformed from that 17th and 18th experiment designed to create a government answerable to the people into an authoritarian or dictatorial government governed by a theologically and ideologically driven White, Male “TC” elite.  It appears that the “light upon the hill,” that Jonathon Winthrop spoke of has been extinguished.