Domestic crackdowns. Militarism abroad?

When Richard Spencer, a leading alt-right white power ideologue finished his speech at Saturday’s day-long “Become Who We Are” summit at Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building, someone yelled, “Heil the people!” and the room shouted back, “Heil victory!”

It wasn’t the evening’s first Nazi reference, nor most brazen. Soon after Spencer started slamming the mainstream media, overlooking how they gave the president-elect endless free coverage, he jeered, “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” The crowd shouted back, “Lügenpresse,” a Nazi-era word for “lying press.” Spencer said, to cheers, that white power was rising. “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity… It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

America under Donald Trump is entering an uncharted authoritarian era. Whether apt historical precedents are in the first months of Hitler’s rule in 1933 in Germany or closer to the 1950s anti-Communist witch hunts led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, remains to be seen. But there are myriad events everyone is seeing and unfolding behind closed doors that are forming a prologue to Trump’s authoritarian rule.

Looking backward, people always ask if the course of history could have been changed. Many people would like to dismiss some of the recent events as bad dreams that will vanish if ignored, like last weekend’s neo-Nazi rally in a federal office complex in the capitol; like Trump taking to Twitter to denounce the cast of the musical, Hamilton, for openly imploring Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, who was in attendance, to honor America’s diversity.

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