Once upon a time in America, I wrote a cautionary tale warning what would happen if chickens enthusiastically voted for Colonel Sanders.
Illustration by Christopher Cruz
The chickens thought they’d be spared because of their privilege, wealth, and proximity to KFC restaurants, so they foolishly joined Colonel Sanders’s campaign against veal and goats. A year later, they ended up as fried chicken.
The fast food analogy is for the many deluded Americans who suffer from amnesia and thought a fascist regime would stop its march of hate after destroying LGBTQ+ people. As such, they chose to re-elect Donald Trump, a convicted criminal who incited a violent insurrection and lied to the world about COVID-19 as President, resulting in needless deaths and anti-vaccine disinformation.
To win over some religious, male, and suburban voters, Trump and his MAGA crusaders decided to reboot a successful strategy of manufacturing a fake boogeyman to distract from their numerous lies, grifts, and failures. They landed on transgender panic, focusing on one of the world’s marginalized communities that represents less than 1 percent of the total population.
The 2021 Virginia governor’s race between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe served as the original test case for what became a national campaign. Youngkin championed “parental choice” when it came to opting out of a diverse school curriculum that promoted inclusion, particularly focusing on LGBTQ+ characters and themes in books. Ahead of the 2024 national elections, Republicans spent more than $200 million scapegoating transgender people, even running television ads during the NFL season with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
Unfortunately, it worked like gangbusters.
True to form, Democratic leadership was caught flat-footed, refused to respond with a successful counter-message, and decided to move to the right instead of promising to defend some of the most bullied and tortured children in the United States.
After Trump’s victory, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the great white knight of the Democratic Party, invited rightwing demagogues on his podcast for friendly chats. To allegedly win over Trump voters, he said Democrats must be “more culturally normal” on transgender issues. Newsom’s “normal” includes inviting the world’s worst billionaires into his “big tent” and refusing to denounce Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, but pronouns are a step too far for the liberal governor who hopes to become President.
With Trump’s re-election and the MAGA takeover of the government, the new normal also meant erasing transgender people from both the military and U.S. history. The rightwing hacks bought and groomed by conservative billionaires followed suit.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a Tennessee law and banned gender-affirming care for minors. So much for parental rights! In Chiles v. Salazar, two liberal Supreme Court Justices joined the majority to rule against a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for minors, even though the practice has been debunked by the medical community and compared to torture by the United Nations. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the MAGA crowd used a Muslim American plaintiff to successfully argue that Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland must allow parents to opt out of LGBTQ+ themes in the curriculum.
Everything was supposed to become great again—except it all became worse.
Emboldened by attacks on transgender people, the Trump Administration set its sights on pro-Palestine activists, depriving them of their rights and liberties. The administration continued its white nationalist march by kidnapping and deporting more than 230 innocent brown men, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a foreign prison in El Salvador.
Since the majority kept silent, Trump and his budget Goebbels, Stephen Miller, then unleashed masked and armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on liberal American cities. Eventually, these agents murdered two innocent white protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Members of the Trump Administration referred to them as “domestic terrorists,” while praising and pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, including people who were convicted of seditious conspiracy charges.
The MAGA movement used and abused people’s ignorance and fear about transgender people as a Trojan horse to implement its fascist agenda. ICE and CBP agents began terrorizing white and suburban communities with impunity. Trump didn’t end any wars, but instead became more imperialistic, embroiling the United States in an unwinnable conflict in Iran, leading to rising gas prices, alleged war crimes, market volatility, and food shortages. Instead of releasing the Epstein files, Trump backtracked on his promise, engaged in a massive cover-up, and forced the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies.
Facing sinking approval ratings, the Trump Administration replaced transgender people with a new villain: Somali Americans. Trump referred to them as “garbage,” “low-IQ people,” and fraudsters who allegedly stole from Minnesota and “contribute nothing” to the United States. The accusations were rich, coming from a failed businessman and fraudster who was held liable for rape and defamation and caused multiple bankruptcies.
After a year of lies, violence, and betrayal, some chickens remained loyal to Colonel Sanders, such as Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender Fox News contributor and former Olympic athlete. Due to a Trump Executive Order, Jenner was unable to change the gender classification on her passport from the one assigned at her birth to “female.” She apparently appealed directly to Trump for help, but he ignored her request. Despite that bigotry and disrespect, Jenner said, “I love the guy, and I love what he’s doing.”
Sadly, despite our best efforts, not every chicken can be saved.
Hopefully, many who were once conned by this anti-transgender campaign will wake up, learn from their mistakes, walk out of the slaughterhouse, organize, link arms with other marginalized communities, and realize Colonel Sanders, like fascism, never discriminates when it comes to cooking fried chicken.