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Excerpt from Anarchist, Republican… Assassin

Posted on February 8, 2021

Written by Jeff Rasley

I retired two years before the lockdown, when I hit sixty-eight. Sherry – that’s my wife – and I had a lot of plans for traveling and things we wanted to do in retirement, but then she died in 2019, less than a year into it. The cancer came fast and furious. Sherry was dead less than two months after the diagnosis.

I was finally getting back on my feet, trying to resume some semblance of a social life a year after Sherry’s death. Then, the pandemic struck. My life came to a screeching halt again, just after I was starting to get out and see old friends and make new ones at the coffee shop and bar where I used to hang out.

Sitting home alone during the lockdown, I started feeling irrationally irritable and had terrible mood swings. One day, I threw the toaster down on the kitchen floor and then stomped on it. I was furious, because two pieces of toast burned. I probably set the timer on for too long, but I didn’t care whether it was my fault or the toaster’s. I just wanted to smash the damn thing. A couple days later, I went outside through the front door and then went around back to survey the condition of the backyard lawn. I thought the backdoor into the screened-in porch was unlocked, but it wasn’t. Ordinarily, that would have been mildly irritating. I would have grunted and then walked back around the house to the front door. But I was so upset I started pulling on the handle of the screen door as hard as I could. When I couldn’t break the lock, I drove my fist through the screen and unlocked the door. I didn’t fix the screen.

I sat in front of the TV hour after hour watching the news about how Trump was fucking up the government’s response to the spreading coronavirus infection. Why didn’t he invoke the federal government’s power under the Defense Production Act as soon as the virus hit Washington State in January? All the experts knew how fast-spreading and dangerous this virus could be. But he ignored the CDC’s advice and downplayed the risk to the nation’s health. Not until mid-April, when it was way too late, did Trump finally use some of the government’s power under the DPA, and even then it’s a half-assed measure. There wasn’t enough testing. There weren’t enough ventilators, not enough PPE, not enough swabs. What the hell was he thinking?

The number of infections kept rising. By the end of March the US led the world in infections and deaths caused by the virus. What does Trump do? He refuses to wear a mask. He’s not going to look like a weakling. Testing? Overrated. It increases the number of infections. Why doesn’t the country have enough PPE and ventilators? Obama’s fault. The President is in charge, but if there’s any failure, it’s the fault of governors and mayors.

He kept repeating his mantra, “The situation is under control.” Pence’s team will whip the virus. If they don’t, well, Jared’s team will. This virus isn’t as bad as the flu. America always wins. Those people wearing masks are doing it to spite me, Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history. “The situation is under control.”

But the deaths kept mounting. It surpassed annual deaths from auto accidents, 34,000. It surpassed US deaths in the Vietnam War, 58,000. It surpassed the total deaths of US soldiers in World War I, 116,500, and it kept going up. World War II deaths, here we come! Spanish Flu deaths, hah! We’ll beat you too. America will be Number One with Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history, leading us!

What the fuck!? This is the United States of America! We’re supposed to have the best healthcare in the world, the best of everything. Yeah, Trump made America great again. We’re Number One in coronavirus infections and deaths.

I was getting angrier and angrier about how badly Trump was handling the pandemic. And lonelier and lonelier locked down at home with no one to talk to.

After spending all day switching back and forth among the cable news networks on TV, I’d turn off the television and get on my laptop and rant on Twitter about what an idiot the President is. That was my lockdown life. That’s all there was to it.

When Trump started puffing hydroxychloroquine as a cure, I was sure he, or Jared and Ivanka, owned stock in a company that makes the drug. Why not? He’s tried to sell every product under the sun with his Trump brand. And then, he mused on national TV about sticking a UV light down your gullet and drinking Clorox as a cure. Presidents aren’t supposed to muse about hair-brain schemes that will get some numbskull killed when he burns his throat with a tanning lamp or poisons himself with laundry bleach.

But there was Trump on the tube again claiming victory over the virus. The jobs report was better than expected, so that proves the Trump-Pence team is winning. Hooray! The economy is already recovering. The CARES Act is working. He says America is coming back greater than ever. And by the way, Donald J. Trump has done more for African-Americans than any US president. Lincoln? All he did was free the slaves. Donald J. Trump gave ‘em all jobs.

I turned off the TV and opened Twitter. What did I find? All these Trumpers are praising the President. “The situation is under control.” He’s saving us from the virus! He’s saving our jobs and the economy! Don’t believe those traitors in the media and that Dr. Fauci, who says things are getting worse. God chose Donald J. Trump for this moment. He has it under control.

Winter has passed and it’s spring, but I am cycling farther and farther down and I can’t stop it. Trump’s lies and crazy talk haven’t stopped. When the demonstrations started in Minneapolis after George Floyd was killed by that cop, something snapped in me and I really lost control.

I was losing track of what time it is. I mean, like, what year is it? Is Lyndon Johnson the President? I can hear my dad yelling to turn off the boob tube. But I can’t turn it off.

The talking heads on CNN are talking about the Kerner Commission Report. They keep saying the findings of the Kerner Report are still true today. It must be 1967? They say there are two Americas, one black and the other white. Black America is ripped off every which way, income, housing, job opportunity, education; the system is rigged against you, if you’re black. You can’t trust the police. They aren’t there to protect and serve, if you’re black. All these images of police beating or killing unarmed black people scroll across my TV set; there’s Rodney King, Malice Wayne Green, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor …

Sitting alone every day staring at my TV watching the street clashes between protesters and cops, and then shops going up in flames, stores and cop cars vandalized, looters busting out windows and jumping out of stores with stolen goods. I’m losing my grounding in the present. This must be 1968. I was an anarchist revolutionary then, but I’m an establishment Republican, if this is 2020. But what year is it? Who am I?

There he is on TV again! That big orange clown figure with that bloated face and ridiculous hair. He’s babbling about MAGA loves black people.

That’s it. I know what I have to do. I’m no longer a retired businessman and country-club Republican. I am nineteen years old, a militant, an anarchist.

I pack the car. I put my twelve-gauge bolt-action shotgun in the trunk. I don’t know how long it takes. I don’t know how many times I stop. I arrive in Washington D.C. What’s the date? June first, 2020? No, it’s 1968.

I smell tear gas in the air. It draws me toward the White House. I walk in that direction. I’m dressed in black with a black bandana covering my face. There are lots of demonstrators around the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Some are yelling at cops in Lafayette Square across from the White House. People are shouting, chanting, screaming. Cops with shields and batons are lined up confronting the protesters.

Then it happens. It’s around six thirty. Secret Service agents, military police, Park Police, National Guardsmen, and Arlington County Police all in riot gear advance on the demonstrators in Lafayette Square. A Black Hawk helicopter swoops out of the sky and hovers fifteen feet above ground blasting gusts of wind that snap tree limbs and send volleys of dust and broken glass-like shrapnel tearing through the crowd of protesters. People are screaming and running for cover in panic and confusion.

There wasn’t any violent activity going on, just chanting and singing, people waving signs. But the forces of The Man are advancing. They shoot smoke canisters. They’re pushing the crowd of people with their shields. Protesters trip over each other trying to back away. People on the ground are beaten with batons. Heads, elbows, and knees are bleeding in the street. Cops shoot pepper balls. Horses charge defenseless demonstrators and trample them underfoot. Everyone is forced out of the park into H Street. A few protesters throw water bottles, but no one fights back. The pigs keep advancing and beating helpless protesters holding up their arms to shield their heads from baton blows.

I jog around past the melee on H Street, south past the White House grounds skirting the fence along the west and south lawns, and then toward the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback. Lafayette Square is deserted now. I run through the little park. I sneak across H Street. I’m at the opposite end of the street from where the security forces are still attacking, pushing, and pummeling the protesters. I hide behind a large oak tree on the southeast corner of St. John’s Church’s grounds.

I have a clear view of The Man as he walks up to the parish house of St. John’s Church. There’s a group of men with the Evil One. I know I should recognize them from TV. Is that little Billy Barr? No matter. My mind is buzzing too much to get a clear signal. Two blond women are in the group. One is The Daughter. Then, He steps away from the group. He’s carrying a book. Yes! It’s The Bible. He’s standing there holding The Book upside down. The final signal!

I aim and pull the trigger. What? Nothing happened. Could it be? I shoot the bolt. There’s no shell in the chamber. Some demon must have stolen my ammunition. The gun isn’t loaded. I scrounge through my pockets. No cartridges there. Oh yeah, now I remember. We only fight with handheld weapons. So that’s what this is. It’s not a gun. It’s a club.

I let out a war cry and run toward The Man holding The Book. Before he can turn to see death approaching, something happens to me. I’m flying. No, I’m falling. Did something hit me? I didn’t see it.

Jeff Rasley is a retired lawyer and long-time social activist. He is a director of 6 nonprofit organizations and has taught classes on community development at Butler and Marian Universities. Anarchist, Republican… Assassin is his 11th book.

2020 Pandemic Phillip Morris Prose

The Autopsy of Donald J. Trump

Posted on November 25, 2020

Written by Phillip Morris

After years of the media rarely mentioning his name, the 45th President of the United States was once again in global headlines, “Donald Trump Dead!”

Trump was found dead in his cell while awaiting trial in New York. No official cause of death was given in the early articles, but reports of a bluish hue to his body suggested asphyxiation. Video surveillance of the hall outside his cell only showed guard patrols in the time between when his dinner tray was retrieved and when his body was found at breakfast.

The Trump Re-election Campaign Committee called for an investigation into the prison kitchen staff.

“Everyone knows kitchens are filled with Mexicans and radical-left Democrats,” Donald Trump Jr. said from the campaign’s headquarters in Costa Rica. He went on to spread suspicion among everyone with access to the former President, including the medical staff that attended to him during his bout of stomach flu and weeks earlier, and several Democratic members of Congress that never interacted with the President.

“Did they poison him?” Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked from his own cell in the prison’s psychiatric ward. “Did they hide needles in his diapers? I don’t know. You don’t know. There are a lot of questions about emails.”

Prison and DOJ officials were quick to rebuke claims of foul play and urged the nation to remain calm. They promised a quick and thorough investigation into the cause of death expressing confidence that if it wasn’t natural: “Then he did it to himself.”

Photos of Trump’s corpse spread like California wildfire online. His supporters scrutinized every pixel so even the most mundane details were woven into keystones of grand conspiracies. One theory that rose to prominence early was that he had been poisoned during a court appearance weeks earlier, but that his body was so strong that his only symptom was a lack of bladder control. Despite video footage from outside of the cell showing otherwise, the theory concluded with the assertion that a Soros backed assassin was hired to finish the job by strangling him..

Trump’s opponents amused themselves by parodying the memes his supporters produced as evidence for their theories. A comparison of Trump’s trademark orange tan juxtaposed with his post-mortem blue was re-imagined as an action movie poster that was shared over one million times.

The Trump autopsy was completed in less than a week. In a muted press conference it was announced that Trump’s official cause of death was a fungal infection that had gone unnoticed in earlier exams. The medical team that performed the autopsy quickly left the stage without taking any questions after stating the body would be cremated as a precaution.

The mundane explanation did little to stifle the public’s curiosity. Just a few hours after the press conference an anonymous post appeared online claiming to be from someone who worked with the county coroner.

“It was aliens that killed him,” the poster claimed. “I saw the body. They were crawling out of him. He was on his stomach so his butt was in the air and these yellow tendrils were coming out of his anus and moving in the air like vines looking for a hold. I didn’t see what they did to the body but they kept calling in more and more experts to examine it.”

What should have been dismissed as the ravings of an internet troll got picked up by the mainstream media and amplified. Leading another anonymous individual to publish an article in the New York Times that offered further details on Trump’s bodily invader. The Times verified the author was an investigator involved with the Mueller Report.

As the author saw it, if Mueller’s focus was less narrow and his approach less conservative Trump’s infection could have been discovered years earlier. Misconduct by Trump from before the start of the campaign was all but ignored unless it was directly relevant to later criminal actions, which caused a lot of now pertinent details to be overlooked.

An extensive investigation into Trump’s trips to Russia was whittled down to bare bones in the final report because failed business deals and evenings with sex workers were not considered relevant without explicit evidence that Russia was using them to blackmail him.

“We couldn’t verify the existence of The Pee-Pee Tape, so we had to proceed as if it didn’t exist. However, we all believed its existence was likely, and we were certain the acts rumored to have happened, actually happened.”

According to the article’s author, that certainty came from the story of a housekeeper who worked at the hotel Trump stayed at in Moscow. She was not a witness to the events of Trump’s romp with the sex workers but she did clean up the aftermath.

Initially the suite seemed to be in the standard state of disarray for travelling businessmen. The bedding needed to be laundered, there were roomservice hamburgers to be tossed, and left over drugs to be resold. What stood out as unique was that the chaise lounge was “absolutely drenched in piss.”

The housekeeper recommended the chair be sent for a professional cleaning, but her manager ordered that she clean it the best she could and mask the scent with perfume.

She did as she was told and thought nothing of it until the next week when she was again cleaning the suite. She noticed the chaise lounge had developed a yellowish tint and immediately panicked thinking the cleaners she used had damaged the expensive piece of furniture.

She began scrubbing it again using only water and found that the cushions had also changed to be uncomfortably stiff instead of luxuriously soft.

The housekeeper told the interviewer that she felt movement in the cushions, but she ignored it thinking it was only her imagination. Then a thin yellow tendril emerged from the fabric wiggling in the air like it was looking for her hand.

She ran out of the room screaming that the chaise had to be burned. Her request was ignored until the entire cleaning staff one by one refused to clean the suite. When finally the hotel’s management inspected the suite with their own eyes the lounge was removed from the hotel less than an hour later.

The anonymous author ended his article by speculating that the fungus was purely terrestrial in origin. Nothing the investigators uncovered could be related to alien visitors. To support his reasoning he cited numerous examples of strange fungi, including several fast moving varieties and even some that could control the behavior of small animals as part of their reproductive cycles.

Unfortunately for the curious, Trump’s remains can no longer be studied directly because the day the New York Times article was published his body was hastily cremated.

Phillip Morris is a Californian living in Amsterdam. When he’s not writing dry instructions booklets, he’s likely writing colorful short fiction. When he tweets it’s @lephillipmorris.

Jonas Guigonnat THE BODY AS A PRISON - November 2018

Don’t Judge a Woman by Her Body

Posted on November 1, 2018

Written by Jonas Guigonnat

Individually, we tend to think of our body as a kind of private property, a part of our chosen identity. We constantly try to control and shape it on what seems to be our own terms, but ultimately the relationship between human beings and their bodies is not only based on individual preference. What others think of our bodies, and how they relate it to “cultural clichés”, is what motivates us to shape our appearances to fit in.

Yet, it is also what dictates our social and cultural identities as part of social groups. The interaction of those groups with each other defines what one’s body means. On a global scale, and throughout time, there are numerous cultural clichés that have been so deeply rooted in humanity that we still hang on to them today. Firstly, because they are easy to understand. Also, because they represent a hierarchy, an order, that seems to be “natural”. As diverse as cultures can be in different parts of the world, some cultural structures often seem to be recurrent, especially when it comes to the place of women in society.

The fact that the word the words “women” and “men” not only define physical characteristics but also a network of social and cultural symbols hits the nail right on the head.

The body as a social and cultural prison

Stereotypes about women are legions and, even can jokes tell us a lot about general assumptions. Jokes about women behind the wheel, or about blondes, are based on generalities that make sense only in our social environment. This environment seems to us natural and based on truths. As the transsexual woman, sociologist, and feminist Raewyn Connell explains in her book Gender in World Perspective, a social order is nothing more than an intellectual construction. This construction is implemented into the structure of society to such an extent, that it seems absurd to doubt it.

Nonetheless, it is anything but a natural state.

What it means to be a woman – or a man for that matter – is defined by criteria of reproductive functioning, what Connell calls the “reproduction arena”. But it doesn’t mean that those criteria are all there is to one’s identity. Newborns are conditioned into their gender role and young children learn what it means to be a girl or a boy through their social experiences. As the godmother of modern feminism, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir put it: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Nicolas Poussin, “L’enlèvement des Sabines,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1634-1635). Painting of one of the Romans founding myth, The Rape of the Sabine Women, where violence against women is mostly a justified expression of power

Imprisoned by history

Recounting the entire historical process through which the present position of women was formed is beyond the scope of this article, but some contextualization is still necessary. As far as historical records show us, for the last 5000 years, there was almost no society in which women weren’t considered “inferior” or at least “dangerous”. There are some exceptional women from otherwise repressive societies, such as queens Cleopatra and Sabha, or some legend like the Amazons, but none of those examples really defied the established order. Their bodies still made them weak and corrupt in the eyes of the men around them.

One of the Roman founding myths, the story of the Sabines, is quite symbolic of such mentalities in antiquity. It tells how the Romans, who were desperately looking for women, raped and kidnapped all the wives and daughters of neighboring cities.

Historians point out that this event probably never happened. The first written account about what should have happened around the sixth century BCE comes from the Roman writer Pliny who lived in the first century BCE. “The Rape of the Sabine Women” was part of a propaganda that legitimated the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire under the first emperor Augustus.

There was thus, to say the least, some pride in disrespecting a woman’s body.

Fear, lies, and distrust

The rise to power of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions in the early Middle Ages didn’t help the case for women, as the three great monotheistic cults put women in a separate corner from men. They were to be controlled, otherwise, hell would break loose.

Just take the example of Pope Gregory I, who in the sixth century decided that Mary Magdalene was the sinful woman that is referred to in the gospels. This was not the case before he made her officially a woman of little virtue, a prostitute. This ancient “fake news” had been considered the truth until just a few years ago.

Fear seems to play a great role here. Considering that most of those religious men tended to truly believe in the “Kingdom of God”, it is easy to deduce that they were plagued by their own desire for the woman’s body. It imbued them with fear, thus they imprisoned it in every way possible, taking total control over women’s lives by deciding for them what it meant to be a woman.

The women’s march to Versailles in October 1789. As a result, the king and his family came back to Paris, which was a turning point in the French Revolution

Slowly but surely

Things have changed, but it took a while. There were some signs of emancipation in the 17th century Netherlands. In Dutch cities every “citizen” had city rights, and this was also true for women, even though there were some nuances. But it didn’t last long and nowhere else in Europe did any society take this model as an example.

Then there was the French Revolution of the late 18th century, and the Revolutionary Wars in Europe that followed. Women are known to have played an important role there. A few months after what is now considered to be the start of the revolution – the Storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July 1789 – in a time of economic depression and famine, the women of Paris decided to go see their king on their own. They formed a cortège that marched the twenty kilometers separating Paris from Versailles and, though they initially set out to merely ensure bread got to their tables, they accomplished what revolutionaries in Paris couldn’t achieve: getting the king and his family to move to Paris so he could take responsibility in front of the parliament.

From that point on, women became some of the most fervent supporters of the revolution. They even hoped to improve their social position, but once again, their claims were ignored when new power structures were put into place.

A few years after the event at Versailles they were back to square one. It would take a century to see real changes occur, at least in Europe. Women everywhere on the continent used socialist ideologies to plea for their causes. The only way to change the course of action was to take things into their own hands and be the authors of their own story.

Finally existing, but how?

It was possible for women to influence the way they were seen and the way society expected them to behave. But first, they had to be recognized as an acting part of society. The right to vote for women everywhere in Europe in the 1920’s was a sign that things could not stay the way they were. After World War II and the rise of the “society of prosperity”, it took just 20 years for the emancipation of women to really become significant, even for men.

But the body was still in the way, and quite rapidly new kinds of behaviors became “normal”. Women who were not respectable “housewives” didn’t deserve respect, so men knew full well that they were free to give in to their animal instincts. Sexual objectification, or seeing the woman as a sexual object, was a new prison for women, for men were still “dominant”.

Good Housekeeping (an American magazine), 1908. To be perfect, a woman had to be a virtuous housewife.

Paradoxical changes

Finally, this brings us to the present day and its challenges. The sexualization of women has continued as the norm. But for a few years, there has been a direct answer to this neoliberal gender arrangement. Regardless of the impact, the #MeToo movement has had since its commencement, it shows that things still need to change and that women are ready to express themselves in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago. The scale of sexual harassment is quite striking, but not surprising. Someone as high-ranking as the President of the USA, Donald J. Trump, even talks about being able to “grab them by the pussy” and the reaction of the establishment is almost nonexistent.

That says enough, women seem to really be fed up. In France, women are even more defiant than in other western countries. This is easy to understand if we look at recent affairs with politicians such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Nicolas Sarkozy, or François Hollande. One day in Paris is also enough to understand what it really means to be a woman in the capitale de l’amour.

Is it then possible to conclude that women did emancipate from the prison of their body? At least the recent history proves that the possibility exists, but the cost in terms of the social struggle and the manual effort it takes is quite huge.

Freeing the body from the mind is already a challenge when it comes to individuals, but it is far more complex when a whole group is concerned. All of society, our co-citizens, are seeing us by what our appearances mean. However, human beings are potentially capable of emancipating from the present and acting towards an unknown future. The body is surely often a prison, but jailbreaking, with all its consequences, is always an option.

Phillip Morris POLITICAL UTOPIAS - March 2018

Thankful for Trump

Posted on March 31, 2018

Written by Phillip Morris

I am thankful for the election of the 45th President of the United States (Trump’s name is also his brand, so it’s better to not use it if you don’t want to inadvertently support him). He is forcing everyone to evaluate what they stand for, and this has led to some honest conversations with people who no longer feel comfortable with their political party. It would be great if everyone across the board took the time to re-examine their core beliefs.

Mine pushed me to register as a Democrat so I could vote for Bernie. If I had to be categorized I’d be in the Bernie or Bust camp.

A bust is definitely what the US is going through at the moment, but I think that’s better than going along with the status quo. I suspect that had Hillary gotten elected voters would have blindly trusted her and allowed voter turnout to return to being shamefully low. Hillary’s political career shows, for better or worse, that she has been willing to follow the will of the masses. She’s gone from describing black men as “super-predators” to working for the first “black” president. She has transitioned from ardently describing marriage as being between one man and one woman to being a favorite of the LGBT community.

My issue with her and most other politicians is that when the public isn’t up in arms about a particular topic they’ll support the policies that favor their donors, even to the detriment of their constituents and what’s right.

I am not a fan of democracy, but I accept that it’s the best method we have for balancing an efficiently functioning government with a relatively high level of freedom for the average person. That being said, the democratic system has consistently failed to protect significant portions of the population since its inception. Genocide, slavery, concentrations camps, racism, sexism, and pretty much everything else democratic politicians point to as issues in other countries have legally taken place in democratic systems. It’s a constant fight to keep anyone one of those injustices from coming back full force. Nothing 45 has done is really new, because nothing he does is his own idea. Hating immigrants, minorities, the LGBT, or anyone different is standard fare for conservatives. What is new, is having someone so dumb in charge that he doesn’t see the point of subtlety. A traditional politician, like Hillary, would know to hide their, true agenda behind policies that at least seem legitimate at first glance. But a traditional politician is not what we got, so everyone that would like to keep this from happening again should give up their ideological shields and start having honest conversations with each other on what they want for society and how best to achieve it.

My issue with the extreme ideologies I’ve seen develop is that most of the population will never be able to buy into their core beliefs, yet the true believers take their political vision as the absolute truth; making everything else not worth entertaining, even in a no-stakes debate. This is not an approach that can stand against the pressures of having to live in a pluralist society. If freedom of speech and freedom of thought are fundamental rights then you must be willing to at least hear out the opposition. This is not to say that every view is equally valid. Falsehoods, propaganda, and over exaggerations only cloud legitimate streams of information, but if working from the same vetted information someone comes to a different conclusion the proper response should be to figure out why that’s the case.

The reasons why 45 is in office include: racism, classism, sexism, frustration with politicians, Russia, and plain ignorance. Still, these are not really answers in themselves, no one is born hateful and bigoted, so again we should ask why. I’ve found that 45 made things simple in a world many found was getting too complicated, too fast. For every problem he was able to give an answer any primary schooler could follow, which usually involved pointing the finger. Simplicity and laying the blame at someone else’s feet are very attractive to people too tired for critical thinking, which is an inevitable state when they’re working 60-hour weeks, between two jobs, and still can’t get ahead. They know it can’t be their fault because they’re working as hard as they can. And it can’t be the system’s fault because that would mean all their efforts up to this point have been wasted. The easier answer to accept is that someone isn’t playing fair, be it Mexico, China, or everyone on welfare that isn’t them.

Despite the results of recent elections, I don’t think the world is going backward. I think people just needed a rude awakening to how things actually work. The biggest revelation being that straight up lying is a totally legal way to run a political campaign; that Cambridge Analytica will still exist after all is said and done will be a testament to this fact. We have gone through this relatively brief period where the truth didn’t matter and I hope we will be better for it. The world hasn’t ended yet, so every election still represents a chance to get things right. What is “right” will always be a subject of debate, but at the very least we should insist that every argument put forward by our potential politicians be based on reasonably objective facts. In such a world traditional conservatives would need to give so much they might as well stay out of the conversation, but the liberals will need to give up some points too.

Society is a construct that we can and should always debate on how to make better, but facts shouldn’t have to compete with pleasant-sounding lies. At the end of the day, I don’t care what someone believes as long as they’ve actually thought things through using facts. When faced with an undeniable truth the “isms” and phobias that drive extreme ideologies will fade away as long as the conversation takes place without patronization. A hero worth looking up to in this regard is the black preacher and activist Wade Watts, who was so steadfast in facing the KKK with humor and love, that the grand duke had to give up his hateful beliefs.

The equivalent of 45 is present in every society, shaming their potential voters won’t keep them from getting elected, honest conversations might.