At the rate they are also arresting citizens, I think there is no one truly safe.

Unfortunately even if you naturalize, they're now floating the concept of denaturalization for people opposed to the regime. It is wise if you are or were a legal immigrant (or have family members who are), to keep your head down.

Oh they're thinking long-term about someone. It's just not you or I.

It has roots going all the way back to the founding of the country. The core of American culture and of many of its issues has always been the tension between the conflicting desires for a Puritan theocracy with a strict racial hierarchy and a secular progressive Republic.

Slavery was justified by Christian principles, and manifest destiny. Hitler was inspired by America's genocide of native Americans, racial segregation and eugenics (all of which were justified by Christianity.) And after the war, the US carried the torch of Nazism's racist ideas after the rest of the world tried to move beyond it.

Many conservative ideals are backed by Christian belief. They hate feminism because it undermines the tradition Christian ideal of gender hierarchy. They hate homosexuality because they believe the Bible says it's a sin. They hate communists because communism is atheist. And most of all they believe the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and should be governed only by Christian principles.

9/11 happens and Bush declares a new "Crusade" against the evildoers. That language wasn't accidental. The connections between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity run deep.

And now we have Trump, whom a significant number of Americans believe to have literally been sent by God to wage spiritual warfare against demonic forces within the government, citing Christianity explicitly as justification for his militarism.

And it's absolutely not a coincidence that we reached this inflection point and acceleration after electing a Black president. That broke America in ways that I don't think that it can ever recover from. It certainly isn't a flavor of the month. If anything it's the only truly unifying ideology America has ever had.

I think you're correct that religion can be used as a tool by the powerful, but the typical cynical assumption that no one in power actually believes any of it is I think a mistake. Maybe not Trump, I suspect he's too much of a narcissist to believe in anything but himself and is an example of what you're referring to, but I think the people around him whispering in his ear and many of his supporters are true believers.

You should think for yourself instead of using outdated 4chan meme words.

Trump is just a miserable narcissistic racist (and rapist) consumed with a bitter desire for vengeance against the left, and thus an easily manipulated tool for the people actually setting this up. Anyone with half a brain has been watching the normalization of white nationalism and right-wing extremism escalate and accelerate since 2016 and can see that it isn't entirely about Trump.