It’s a concerted effort spanning almost 70 years and I agree, they’re not going away at all.
It’s a long listen but worth checking out How Conservatism Won by Robert Evans. He lays out in a clear concise way “how a consortium of rich failsons got together to fund a network of right wing think tanks and shift American culture in a fun new direction. (note: it was not actually fun at all).”
The rich hated FDRs New Deal and immediately set about to undo all the trade, tax, and housing policies, labor and consumer rights, everything, he’d done. They very much want a return to the gilded age with themselves as the robber barons and gentry. They’ve been very successful and those think tanks are now pipelines used to funnel ideological purists into powerful positions like our current Supreme Court.
I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities. The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety. We only have soap, ballot, bullet, and jury boxes and obviously the soapbox has limited impact.
Iran was a secular, liberal state until almost 1980 when they (mostly legitimately) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
edit: tl;dr the shadowy cabals the rightwing says are behind everything is classic projection again because they’re controlled by shadowy cabals of rich people and they’re winning