Atheists Beware: Trump Will Come For You, Too

While women and immigrants will initially be the main target of the Talibangelists in the upcoming Trump theocracy, they will not be the only victims of Trumpist repression. Among the many targets of his vindictive agenda of vengeance and punishment will be both believers of other faiths and non-believers. Perhaps the main difference in treatment will be that women will be repressed, their rights and careers taken away, and expected to be baby factories, while others will be arrested, put into camps, jailed, and in many cases deported.

The extremist pseudo-Christians Trump appoints to positions of power and authority will mount an increasingly virulent and aggressive attack on anyone who does not openly and loudly support their Christofascist ideology. Just like the Nazis did in Germany, a full and public display of loyalty to the leader, the party, and the pseudo-Christian nationalist ideology will be required. Anyone showing less-than-absolute fervour will be suspect, questioned, and likely punished. Citizens will be encouraged to spy on their neighbours and report to the authorities overheard conversations that express dissent and criticism.

Just like the Nazis did for the Jews, the Trump state will establish detention and concentration camps for immigrants and opponents. I expect to see camps also used for atheists, skeptics, scientists, and followers of faiths and beliefs not sanctioned by the state (we’ve all heard the Islamaphobic rhetoric from Trump’s campaign and his supporters as well as their contempt for scientists and experts). That will require a massive bureaucracy to build and manage the camps, create and maintain growing lists of enemies and offenders, secret police to spy on, arrest and question them, jails to house them before they get shipped to the camps, transportation networks to get them to and from the camps, transportation (including trains and ships) to deport immigrants and other undesirables and political opponents (like special prosecutor and American citizen Jack Smith, talk show hosts who mocked him, unsupportive “fake” media, political commentator Lawrence O’Donnell, the women who host The View on MSNBC, etc.). And, of course, there will be executioners.*

Perhaps as he frequently threatened, Trump won’t create his own Gestapo, but will use the National Guard and the military to suppress and detain — and perhaps eliminate permanently — those he calls the “enemies within” (i.e. anyone who opposed him, criticized him, didn’t donate to his campaign, mocked him on late night TV shows, voted for another…). The fact these are American citizens is entirely irrelevant to his intended vengeance. Their rights and freedoms will mean less than nothing when he takes office. All that will matter is the leader. The scale of Trump’s repression will be staggeringly huge.

For an indication of what could happen, I recommend Richard Evan’s book, The Third Reich in Power, which documents the steps the Nazis took to control the country, its education, courts, police, military, churches, associations, unions, businesses, etc. It took only three months in 1934 for Germany to go from a democracy to a one-party totalitarian state. Opposition parties were outlawed, their leaders jailed, tortured, and many were killed. Their members were harassed, fired, beaten, and exiled. And the Nazis did it without the backing of the spineless, self-centred oligarchs who supported Trump, his powerful Talibangelist block, the surveillance state mechanics of modern social media, and a fawning, sycophantic rightwing media in Fox Newz and the even more extreme Newsmax (both active in helping Putin achieve his goal of destabilizing US democracy) and others.

It won’t take much, if any, longer, for the USA to become a one-party state like Germany and emulate those dictatorships Trump admires so much: North Korea and Russia. As noted in a review of Evans’ book on The Cresset (emphasis added):

The Third Reich was a police state. Quickly upon Hitler’s ascension in 1933, the National Socialists began to clamp down on German associational, professional, and political life and stamp out all possible agents of resistance (within both society at large and the party itself). Evans’s Third Reich is brutal and relentless. “In 1933 a huge apparatus of surveillance and control was rapidly brought into being to track down, arrest and punish anyone who opposed the Nazi regime, including a good third of the electorate who had voted for the parties of the left in the last free German elections”. The window of opportunity for any organized resistance to the regime quickly closed. “By the end of 1935,” Evans argues,“organized opposition had been completely crushed”. After shutting down the traditional oppositional parties and purging potential rival forces within its movement (on the “Night of the Long Knives” of 29–30 June 1934) the regime could then turn the screw on isolated groups: “[F]rom 1936 onwards, overt terror was directed increasingly against relatively small minorities such as persistent or committed Communists and Social Democrats, the asocial and work-shy, petty criminals and… Jews and homosexuals.”

Targeting Atheists

Atheists have never been popular in the USA, despite having so many of them as the nation’s Founding Fathers. The myth that the USA is a “Christian nation” has persevered despite being easily debunked through the writings of those men themselves. But their actual views have been effectively suppressed (look them up).

The number of Americans who publicly admit to being atheist is small in comparison to those who profess a faith: about 4% of the US population, according to a 2023 Pew Research survey (40% identify as Protestant, 20% as Catholic). Based on the recent election, there are about 160 million adult (of voting age) Americans, so 6.4 million atheists. Compare this to 12% of atheists in the UK and 23% in France. However, the 2023 Pew survey showed that a total 28% of Americans identified as “religiously unaffiliated” and 8% as “other” faith: that’s almost 40% of Americans who don’t identify as Christian. All of them will be targets of the Talibangelists, who require absolute obedience to their pseudo-Christian ideology and Sharia-like law. There are already precedents for them to apply in other nations.**

In several other nations — notably repressive fundamentalist Muslim states whose severe laws are much admired by the Talibangelists — atheists can be jailed and even executed for simply refusing to believe in their state mythologies. In case you think that can’t happen in the USA, seven states have unconstitutional laws that prohibit atheists from even holding office. Those laws are likely unenforceable now, but when Trump takes office, the Talibangelists behind Project 2025 will move to change the Constitution to suit their own pseudo-religious ideology.***

Project 2025 includes numerous threats to diversity, equality, and inclusion, as well as promises to reduce education so that the populace is kept uninformed and ignorant. The Interfaith Alliance says “Project 2025 seeks to impose intense restrictions on reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ people, and to further blur key boundaries and distinctions between religion and government.” The IFA website also notes (emphasis added):

Project 2025 is Informed by an overarching assumption that US law, government and policy should be informed by Christian nationalist teachings and morality. It states that it seeks for families to have the freedom to above all pursue “religious devotion and spirituality.” One of its core goals is to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely.” It is clear that the initiative defaults to a conservative Christian understanding of God – elsewhere it states that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”, referring exclusively to Sunday, as opposed to the days of rest held by other religions…
By seeking to erase diverse viewpoints from our curricula and libraries, and to divert public funding into private religious schools, Project 2025 is creating a culture of fear among parents and educators and aiming to strip necessary resources from public institutions that are meant to serve all.

This is not mere hyperbole: this what America voted for in 2024, knowing what Trump stood for, knowing about the racism and misogyny he and his followers represented, knowing about the blueprint for a theocratic totalitarian state in Project 2025, knowing about the promised deportations, the repression of women’s rights, the threats to the media, his critics and opponents, knowing about his use of violence to achieve his goals, knowing about his lies and his cognitive decline. Everyone knew exactly who Trump was, what he stood for, what his followers planned.

This is what Americans wanted and this is what they got.

Notes

* Trump has also threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of US media that were not sycophantic during the campaign, while he insulted and threatened the careers of TV hosts and commentators. The women who host The View are particularly vulnerable because the deeply misogynist Trump has shown over and over despises intelligent women, especially those critical of his many failings and crimes. As CNN reported, “Trump has long threatened the media. Press freedom groups fear he might make good on it:”

Press freedom groups sounded the alarm Wednesday on the potential dangers facing journalists under a second Trump administration, denouncing threats from the president-elect and his associates to undermine the news media.
“On the campaign trail and during his previous administration, President-elect Donald Trump has frequently deployed violent language and threats against the media. His election to a second term in office marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom,” Reporters Without Borders said.

** According to Wikipedia, “a poll by non-profit PRRI in 2023, 4% of Americans were atheist and 5% were agnostic.” I agree with Richard Dawkins, who wrote in The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006) who called religious agnosticism an impoverished belief and “a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting.” During a British TV interview, Dawkins said, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” The late author Douglas Adams said about agnosticism it was “such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it.”

*** Wikipedia noted that “on 16 December 2016, President Barack Obama signed H.R. 1150, an amendment to the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act. It includes protections for ‘non-theistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess or practice any religion at all.'” According to a story in The Atlantic, atheists living in 13 Muslim countries (including some staunch US allies) can be executed for their non-belief or for daring to even question the state mythology:

The countries that impose these penalties are Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. With the exception of Pakistan, those countries all allow for capital punishment against apostasy, i.e., the renunciation of a particular religion. Pakistan, meanwhile, imposes the death penalty for blasphemy, which can obviously include disbelief in God.

However, the report also showed that there are numerous other nations where thought crimes against the state religion like apostasy and blasphemy are “punished with prison time or legal restrictions on (non-)religious speech and thought.”

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