Nearly thirty years ago, I interviewed members of the far-right Michigan Militia about their world view. They were all heavily armed, and all told me they were ready to use their weapons to protect America from what they saw as government overreach. They feared an Orwellian government spying on them and intercepting their personal messages. They feared a government telling them what to think and punishing them for speaking words that weren’t approved. They feared the imposition of a national identity card system. They feared authoritarian-creep in every area of life.
In the decades since, I have interviewed numerous people on the right of the political spectrum in states around the country, from GOP stalwarts through to extremist militia members, radicalized parents-rights groups and John Birchers. The specific nature of their angst and anger might shift depending on the year and depending on which group I was talking with, depending on where in the country they were and what issues of the moment were in the headlines, but a common thread was always suspicion of Big Government.
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Yet here we are, in 2025, with that prospect of a totalitarian government, demanding absolute fealty from every institution in the country, now indeed upon us, and to date these conservatives have stayed largely loyal to Trump and his chaotic, violent, frequently lawless vision. Indeed, while independents are rapidly shedding their support for Trump, latest polling shows that 86 percent of the GOP’s base is still supportive of the president.
Imagine the reverse: imagine, for example, Presidents Clinton or Obama or Biden siccing the IRS onto the nation’s greatest universities because of what they taught, who they employed, because of their resistance to let government oversee their admissions process or monitor their international students’ free speech. It’s impossible to conceive that the libertarian-leaning right would stay silent. Yet, that, and far worse, is what’s being done by Trump’s people, to Columbia University, to Harvard, to Yale, to the University of California system and to many, many other top-tier universities. Their tax-free status is under threat, their ability to bring in international students is being re-evaluated, their federal science grants—which fuel the discovery of everything from new medical treatments to how to tap cleaner sources of energy—are being terminated.
The attack is being coordinated against one major institution and organization after the other. Major law firms that have represented people Trump perceives as his enemies are being targeted with Executive Orders withdrawing their attorneys’ security clearances and preventing them setting foot in federal buildings—with a shakedown-like promise that if they come to terms and agree to do pro bono work for causes near and dear to the Great Leader, they will be spared the Federal onslaught. This is the stuff of Victor Orban’s Hungary, or earlier European totalitarian regimes; it is absolutely unprecedented terrain for the United States.
The Smithsonian museums are being ordered to recalibrate their exhibitions so as to comport better with Trump’s vision of how the American story should be portrayed. National Park Service websites are being edited to remove references to racialized slavery—references deemed somehow antithetical to Trump’s war on DEI (though in this case, a public outcry resulted in at least a partial reversal of these shameful editorial decisions). The Naval Academy’s library has removed nearly 400 books from its shelves that touch on everything from slavery to the holocaust, sexuality issues to climate change, while leaving on the shelves two copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And the Kennedy Center, one of the country’s pre-eminent cultural institutions, has been taken over personally by Trump—who, in a peculiarly Stalinist twist, now is chairman of the board—and its programming reoriented towards Trumpist values.
At every level, the propaganda effort is intensifying. Check out the new White House website on COVID-19, and instead of seeing information on how to treat the disease and access medicines, viewers are met with a splashy report titled “Lab Leak,” about the reputed origins of the virus, with a superhero image of Trump striding forcefully out from between the two words.
At the same time, efforts to purge the government workforce are accelerating, as are Elon Musk-led machinations to centralize government databases containing pretty much all of the personal information of pretty much everybody living in America.
In the near future, 50,000 civil servants will likely be redefined as political appointees, subjected to Trump loyalty tests—and, if they fail those tests, replaced by more reliable lickspittles. Already, the military’s top brass has been purged, as have many of the top-tier appointees at agencies ranging from Social Security to the IRS. Former Trump officials, including ex-cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, who crossed his path after the 2020 election by daring to suggest that Trump had lost, are now facing Department of Justice investigations. Essentially, they are being investigated not for crimes committed but for opinions expressed.
As for what DOGE is doing with your personal data: There is now afoot a vast effort, one with no parallels in US history, to centralize control over government data on everybody living in the US—citizens and non-citizens alike. It involves pooling all the information currently held in deliberately compartmentalized files by agencies such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, HUD, the Education Department, the IRS, and so on. That will, ultimately, give DOGE about the same level of power-through-information over US citizens that the centralized Chinese government has over its population.
Making this even worse, this information grab is being done not by democratically elected representatives but by Elon Musk’s crack-team of DOGE engineers; unelected young men, seemingly with zero knowledge of civics or the rule of law, who are completely unaccountable to Congress, to the voting public, to the regulatory agencies they are busily sabotaging and corrupting. This seizure of personal data will impact every man, woman and child in this country from here to eternity.
And then there’s the issue of immigrants being grabbed off the streets, bundled into unmarked vans, driven to undisclosed detention sites, put onto military planes, and deposited in a concentration camp in El Salvador, with no promise that they will ever again see the light of day. At least one of these men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador despite an explicit court ruling saying he couldn’t be deported. There’s the awful fact that notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s intervention in this case, Trump’s people have doubled down and said Garcia will never return stateside. And there’s the reality that at a recent White House meeting with El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele, Trump said he would love to deport “homegrowns” —in other words, US citizens— to El Salvador. That’s a truly totalitarian prospect that ought to run shivers down the spine of any self-respecting small-government aficionado.
So, here’s my question: if you run conservative, if you’re a fan of limited government, and if you’ve been concerned about a rising tide of authoritarianism in recent decades, isn’t now your moment? Unless everything you previously believed was thrown out the window after the last election, shouldn’t you be out in the streets protesting the rise of a genuinely Orwellian Big Government? Shouldn’t you be screaming from the rooftops about the snatching of people off the streets by often un-uniformed agents and their bundling into unmarked vans, and their transport to secretive detention sites? If you’re Joe Rogan, say, a self-professed libertarian, oughtn’t you to be using your vast platform to warn your audiences of a five-alarm fire that threatens free speech? Shouldn’t you be banging the drums about the risk that cruel and unusual punishments are being normalized, about the rise of unjustified search and seizure processes at the borders, about the shredding of due process and this government’s seemingly boundless contempt for constitutional norms and for the separation of powers?
Or was everything you once espoused simply window-dressing? Was it all, in the end, simply about accumulating absolute power and having the ability to inflict a beat-down on everyone who disagrees with you?
