After all that went into all the last decade’s best efforts by so many of us to expose Trump’s sociopathic, grifter lack of character and honesty, he still gets reelected to the most powerful job in the land. As the former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill and now TV analyst posted yesterday, “It’s official. He knew America better than we did. We thought we were better than fear and anger driven by lies. We weren’t.”

The failure to convince the American people about Trump means that something different has to happen. It couldn’t be more obvious, from my point of view, what Trump represents. He let it all hang out there on stage after stage in the closing days of the campaign, from his disconcerting 40-minute pauses to sanctioning brutally racist comments by co-speakers and effectively delivering death threats to Liz Cheney and the media. He’s become totally balmy.

But in a way that eclipsed the shameful promotion of the clearly mentally-compromised Hershell Walker in Georgia last year, the GOP establishment did not waver in its promotion of Trump despite the clear evidence of his diminished mental state, and, Mafia-style calls on the loyalty of major government-contract dependent moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

In Bezos’ case it was to intervene egregiously against his own newspaper’s editorial board to block an endorsement of Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris on behalf of his selfish-self interests.

On the subject of Harris, she could not have done better in her short campaign to lay the basis for what should have been a landslide victory. She was amazingly eloquent and personable. What more could she have done, other than to not be a woman?

Alas, male chauvinism is remarkably alive and well in America. Even as women are getting elected around the world to top leadership roles, in the U.S. the assaults on the autonomy of women have been extremely sharp in this period. The Project 2025 agenda that will be the cornerstone of a new Trump 2.0 mentions women 101 times and men fewer than 20, so it is evident who its authors deem is most important to control.

Extreme wealth inequality and worker wage suppression derive from this, fueled by a dumbing down for too many of education and our general culture.

Back from the onset of my adult political career in the anti-war and civil rights era of the late 1960s, it became clear to me and my best friends that insidious and brutal male chauvinism was the biggest political challenge of all. 

That was why, as a pioneer of the just-beginning modern gay liberation movement in that era, I launched a newspaper with my friend the late Jim Rankin called The Effeminist in 1972. It addressed “gay men in the feminist revolution,” and I have to say that as of 52 years later now, I have not changed my mind one iota about the core values and issues involved in overthrowing male chauvinism and supremacy, and on behalf of the kind of values that Harris articulated so well in her campaign.

An anti-feminist counterrevolution was launched in the 1970s around the theme of so-called “sexual freedom,” making rape and coersion an acceptable male behavior and reducing the role of women through the proliferation of pornography and demeaning roles on television sitcoms.

Accompanying that offensive was the proliferation of so-called postmodernism in all its forms attacking reason and scientific method. A major influence in that period was the French fascist Michel Foucault, who stripped any genuine affection and respect out of human relations in favor of power and pleasure as their only actual ingredients.

The nihilism and disdain that accompanied that outlook, advanced by all the media outlets controlled by the cultural elites, formed the cesspool out of which Trump got his start and the cynical anti-values arose.

To turn the tide on our nation’s current slide into fascism and tyranny, we must get serious at a fundamental cultural level to overcome the nihilism that is instilled in the general population to fuel it.

The social engineers behind this advance extremes on both sides of cultural issues, and we have to stop being played.