Five years ago last month, I self-published The Antifan Girlfriend (TAG), a novel about a librarian whose life changes when she hands a book to an illegal reader in 2089. Of course, it isn’t just Malia’s life that changes, but that of David, the Antifan Defense Forces commander whose squad invades the library to beat and arrest the reader. David is attracted to the librarian who he learns is secretly reading the dangerous books in the False Knowledge Depository. As a Deplorable serving the woke Diversity Justice Republic that has turned the rest of his family into serfs, he is looking for a partner to whom he can speak honestly without upturning his comfortable high Social Credit lifestyle. Before too long, David is telling Malia “I will find your daughter—” who was kidnapped by the government, “…I will bring her back to you, and we will escape into the United States.”
I wrote the draft quickly in 2020, when many of us were spending extra time at home and becoming newly aware of how quickly and easily our government had seized control of our lives. My commute improved tremendously. On the other hand, it was disturbing to see how many people were eager to hide at home, accept whatever narrative the government fed them, and join the mob to silence those who didn’t accept it. Fear, sometimes irrational, made us do ridiculous things: being admitted to an empty Social Security office by someone looking at you through a peephole so you could get what you needed to renew your already expired drivers’ license; hissing at fellow citizens who wouldn’t adopt the mask fetish; tolerating thieves who profited from lavish covid subsidies; following the petty tyranny of arrows on the floor of the store telling you which way you could walk, ignoring the hypocrisy of blue leaders who flaunted their own covid laws to get haircuts (Pelosi) and eat in fancy restaurants (Newsom), celebrating wildly health care workers and then supporting their firing next year when they refused to take poorly tested vaccines. Churches closed, liquor stores open. The enforced masking including of preschoolers. Elderly people dying of loneliness in their assisted livings and nursing homes, forbidden the touch of their loved ones. The chanting of “Science!” when science was being squashed and silenced. Do not forget what these people did when they were allowed free rein to frighten rather than represent the values of a free people and show leadership.
When The Antifan Girlfriend came out, readers said to me, “I think you set the civil war a bit late,” in other words, they saw this happening far sooner than 2050. The people who cheered on the covid totalitarians hated the book. Nor did it help when I described it as a reverse Handmaid’s Tale where the woke guys are the ones oppressing women.
How have the predictions of the book held up since 2020? Is it still a realistic alternative-history novel?
We are more divided than ever, and more people are calling for a divorce between the two sides, as in “a peaceable divorce.” But how do you secede when red states have large blue minorities, and blue states have large red minorities? This ain’t 1860. But it’s not that it can’t happen—we just don’t know yet how it might. In TAG, it’s war between the normies on one side and the wokists, foreign mobs, and Antifans on the left. Yeah, I can see it.
Our political predispositions guide our choices of businesses, friends, and hobbies, and geographic destinations. And vice versa. Recent surveys show that as of 1 June 2025, far more Democrats than Republicans or independents had stopped or reduced, or increased purchases from a company in the previous month because of its political stance. (Axios/Ipsos/CLYDE survey, 5 August 2025). One in five told pollsters they’ve cut off ties with a close relative because of politics (NY Post, 2 Aug 2025). Surveys show that it is far more likely to be liberals severing ties with people on the right than vice versa.
Groups have become more insular, whether because of the inherent positions they support or because of self-policing. My gun club friends are conservative. My undergraduate women’s college class is probably 95 percent Democratic, and the other four percent may be Communists. Except for an iconoclast or two, they generally dislike me these days. Even if you undertake a benign hobby such as gardening, someone, usually a liberal, will try to elicit your political inclinations early on with an otherwise stray remark—designed to ensure you are part of the crowd. If not, you will be shunned until you leave of your own accord. As some observers have pointed out, maintaining cohesion is a key goal of female-dominated organizations and groups. The idea of bantering, even argument, followed by decisionmaking and amity, more typical of men, induces fear, especially in those who speak the language of feelings rather than facts. An arch-MAGA friend of mine told me about her Spanish conversational group where the conversation was mostly about el Hombre Naranjo, the Orange Man. She kept silent and they all assumed she agreed with them.
Over time, these become what we know as “reinforcing cleavages,” where instead of cross-cutting (Democratic Asian male business owner), they only sharpen them (Republican gun owning Christian business owner). Over time, you associate more and more with those like you in every way, and polarization deepens.
Our schools have been taken over by the Left. Unless you sent your child to a private religious school, and maybe even then, he will be taught the catechism of the Left in their language and their worldview. Elite private schools are even worse. Social media, also left dominated, if not outright owned by China (TikTok; Silicon Valley) will reinforce those lessons with its algorithms. It is only a very energetic and watchful parent who can ensure his children learn another narrative, or even knows it exists. The “traditional” publishing industry favors books by “marginalized authors” that endlessly repeat stories of oppressive white males, and the sufferings of females, people-of-color and diverse sexualties. When Malia coaches Rex on how to pass her Diversity English and Diversity History exams, these lessons are emphasized. “Whatever makes America look bad is the right answer,” Malia tells her.
Class differences are sharpening. During 2020, we saw how politicians evaded their own COVID isolation rules. Wealthy families navigated lengthy school shutdowns because the parents worked from home, or were educated enough to make up for absent teachers, but others could not. The current mantra of “affordability” is another effort to stoke class resentment. If a 30-year-old can’t afford a house, it must be that the system is against him, although two incomes and saving money would make a difference, as would dropping Blue area regulations that make housing scarcer and less affordable. I can see how a Leftist administration might start according economic favors to their supporters in “friendly” sectors that could begin to resemble social credit scores, in an effort to ameliorate the burden of high prices often caused by the policies it follows, e.g., rent-controlled apartments.
A trend has emerged in which affluent Americans prefer to pay more to insulate themselves from a perceived disorderly or even violent rabble at cheaper or free venues. Once upon a time, we all interacted comfortably at Disneyland or a local park. And in TAG, the elite Belinda Barbaradaughter, speaking about the Outer Banks, says, “Anyone could come here (before the war), and it showed. Fortunately, we’ve become much more environmentally aware (by making it a High Credit zone).”
Our civic elites are not speaking up for civility and common values, let alone for America. When a synagogue was burned in Mississippi in January, local pastors and politicians condemned the crime, but it was not a national outrage unlike when that same synagogue was firebombed in 1967 by the Ku Klux Klan. When agitators invade a church service in Minneapolis, also this month, the Left bark “Free speech!” but no one thinks to defend “the free exercise of religion.” When a prominent and promising leader such as Charlie Kirk is brutally murdered, the Left decrees him a monster deserving of his fate. We are unable to even agree that political assassination is wrong, since one’s politics now determine one’s morality, a classic Communist feint. Widely accepted violence such as car ramming, arson, and beatings have become the “peaceful protest” of the day. The phrase “mostly peaceful” will never be taken seriously again, at least not in TAG. This isn’t Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights movement.
The Overton window about what is acceptable—overt anti-Semitism, openly socialist mayors, and assassinations met with a shrug or hatred—has widened since 2020.
Technological spycraft continues unabated, feeding on our indifference and desire for convenience. As David thinks, “the greatest political advances of coronavirus had in fact been technical ones. The heat-seeking technology intended to find infected people, once married to information available from people’s phones and filtered through AI algorithms, allowed authorities to identify the location of persons of interest.” And “The ability to integrate surveillance into almost all household appliances—the Internet of Things—had vastly simplified the ADF’s ability to monitor the population.” Alexa is already listening to you. Anyone in power who wants to learn about you has vast resources at his disposal, which you have provided willingly.
Are there any positive trends? One encouraging note is that it will be hard for the left to silence the counternarratives again. The little boy has cried out that the Emperor has no clothes. We now say openly that Black Lives Matter activists were charlatans who bought multiple mansions with proceeds, and that George Floyd’s system was suffused with fentanyl and other drugs that likely killed him under what would otherwise have been a routine arrest in 2020. We say freely that DEI is a fraud that fuels riots and undercuts merit. We know and say that massive illegal alien inflows impoverish and kill us, not enrich us. How will that be put back into the box, except by force? So even the one positive trend may accelerate conflict, in the end.
I thought 2020 was awful, and after the 2024 election, I happily assumed we would righten the ship. But 2025 and now 2026 are showing that the Left is determined to fight any effort by the Trump Administration to return us to normalcy and national strength, by any means necessary, whether through a convenient federal judge or paid agitators in the streets. The hysteria of the left suggests that if they achieve national power in 2028, they will reverse everything they can, and never let go of power again, because they will not risk being surprised again as they were in 2016 and 2025. They have no shame, so expect anything from blatant gerrymandering to lawfare prosecutions. The Republicans are not (yet) backing down. In Virginia, a test case for the nation, you will see what happens when the Left has a supermajority in the House of Delegates, an Islamic radical for a Lt. Governor, and a would-be homicidal maniac as Attorney General. Virginian voters listened to Jay Jones, a father himself, say he wanted to kill his then-GOP opponent’s children in their mother’s arms, shrugged, and voted him into office.
Compromise has become a strange-sounding word rather than a cornerstone of civilized politics. Unfortunately, the only alternative to compromise is a hostile stalemate, or worse, war. My third novel, a prequel in which David’s parents battle growing wokist hegemony in Ohio in the runup to the second Civil War, will be coming out later this year. I have already committed (in fiction) to a second civil war, but hope this book will illustrate ways in which such a conflict is still avoidable. “A republic if you can keep it,” in Benjamin Franklin’s words, is still achievable.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend (2020) and The Deplorable Underground (2023). The Cage Above will be published later this year.