Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The GOP Is Turning 20th Century Dystopian Literature Into the 21st Century's Bold-Faced Reality
July 26, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
Dystopian writers beware: The Republican Party and its Christian nationalist allies may be putting you out of business!
The dystopian story lines of such classic novels as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, are being eclipsed by a dark reality fashioned by today’s Republican Party, its Christian nationalist, white supremacist and QAnon allies.
Such dystopian views that Big Brother is always watching; censorship is threatening; women’s rights are eroding; and violent white gangs are roaming the political landscape, once viewed as idiosyncratic, seem prescient by today’s reality.
These days, the political landscape is rife with new laws -- and alarming proposals in states across the country -- that are more horrifying than plots cooked up by the best of our speculative fiction writers. And while dystopian legislation is being crafted, right-wing domestic terrorist groups are metastasizing.
While the election of Donald Trump set much of these events into motion, the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning a woman’s right to abortion has opened the floodgates to proposals that were once thought of as pure fiction.
Item: Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio is pushing a bill that would mandate “anyone whose sperm is used to fertilize an egg to begin paying child support from the moment of conception, upon the mother’s request,” David Badash recently reported for the New Civil Rights Movement (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/07/rubio-pushes-bill-mandating-men-pay-child-support-from-moment-of-conception/).
Item: Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz recently declared the Obergefell ruling, which found equal marriage rights in the Constitution, “overreaching,” and “clearly wrong.” “Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history. Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states,” Cruz claimed. “We saw states before Obergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting.”
Item: Andrew Torba, the anti-Semitic Christian nationalist founder of the popular far-right social media platform Gab, recently declared “We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates at the state, local, and federal levels, and we’re gonna take this country back for the glory of God.”
“This isn’t a big tent,” Torba continued. “This is a Christian movement, full stop. The only way that we’re going to gain any ground in the culture, in the government, in taking our towns, our cities, our states, our counties in our country back is by putting Jesus Christ first. It’s just that simple. There’s no other way. There’s no other path.”
Item: Ninety-nine percent of congressional Republicans voted against the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, a bill that would protect the right to travel for abortion care, a bill that came in the wake of a story about a ten-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for an abortion.
Item: The FBI’s domestic terrorism caseload has increased dramatically since the spring of 2020. Social media, including Facebook, has become a breeding ground for right-wing anti-government groups.
Item: John Guandolo, a former FBI agent forced to leave the agency in 2009 in disgrace, “has founded an organization called Understanding The Threat, through which he trains law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist,” Right Wing Watch recently reported. The training promises to “organize communities into operational forces to identify roots of corruption & dismantle the hostile networks behind it, and re-establish a Republican form of government at the local level.”
Coda I: Republican win back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. “MSNBC national security analyst Malcolm Nance told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah that if Republicans win in November, a parade of horrors — including but not limited to the jailing of the January 6 committee and the end of elections — will follow,” Mediaite reported. Nance added: “They will vote through every piece of legislation, and defund every component of the United States government. They’re not joking about impeaching Joe Biden every week.”
Coda II: It is mid-2025. The Republican Party has won the 2024 presidential election, and controls both the House and Senate. The president has just signed legislation -- passed by the Congress -- outlawing all abortion, regardless of circumstances. Sexually active women are required to register with their state’s public health authorities. Public school teachers have been forbidden to talk about racial issues in the classroom. Via national legislation, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law has spread to all fifty states. Newspapers are banned from using the term “climate change.”
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