Extremism

Responding to the Murder of Charlie Kirk: How to find calm in an insane nation

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

September 11, 2025

It was a call from a reporter. That’s how I found out that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk had been shot. I didn’t know enough to make a comment to the media. My brain started making a list who could have been responsible:

  1. Far right groups who think that Kirk’s Turning Point USA is not extreme enough.
  2. Right-wing groups who think Turning Point USA is too extreme.
  3. Someone having a mental health crisis.
  4. Someone personally connected to Kirk, like a spurned lover or someone he financially ripped off.
  5. Someone from the Trump camp, hoping to knock the Epstein files out of the news cycle and/or angry with Kirk’s demand that Trump release the files.
  6. A Russian plot to create political instability in the U.S.
  7. An incel frustrated over Kirk’s success as a family man.
  8. A nihilist who worships death and chaos.
  9. A suicidal individual seeking fame on their way out.
  10. An accelerationist who wants to hasten societal collapse.
  11. A right-wing “patriot” hoping to spark a civil war.
  12. A student hoping to harm the school where it happened.
  13. Someone from the left who opposed Kirk’s right-wing positions.

The immediate response to the shooting said everything about America. Some on the right (assuming they knew who the shooter was) called for violence on the left. Some on the left responded with the quip, “the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.” Most expressed regret that we’ve gotten to this point. My social media feed was filled with hysterical MAGAs screaming about the “violent left,” while the left filled the feed with quotes from Kirk himself about the cost of gun violence in the protection of the second amendment. What a shit show.

This needs to be said. Charlie Kirk was a racist, homophobic, transphobic misogynist. He profited from spreading his brand of “free speech” hate. But he also encouraged public debate on these issues, not violent conflict. And he didn’t deserve to be slaughtered in front of his wife and children. He deserved to be ridiculed for his toxic beliefs. One day, he could have seen the light and become an advocate for tolerance. Now he’s just dead.

So on this 9/11, where does are nation go from here?

The United States is on the proverbial ledge.  Hours after he announced the death, from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the “radical left” without even a suspect in custody. Activists in Portland are on high alert for retribution. In 2020, we saw right-wing actors outside Portland create “Pro-America” caravans to attack local Black Lives Matter protestors. The rhetoric in extremist forums, like 4chan, state the Kirk killing has green lit an open season on leftists. Could our Fort Sumpter be Utah Valley University? Has the civil war begun? Do I need to arm up to protect my family from gangs of Proud Boys attacking Portland? America is a powder keg, with troops on the street and endless chatter about right and left.

The good news is, America is not divided as Fox News would have you believe. Watching MSNBC whitewash Kirk’s hate mongering might be evidence. While the media (including MSNBC) leans right, the vast majority of Americans are happily in the middle. Surveys find a general consensus on “divisive” issues like gun control, abortion, gay rights, vaccines and even tariffs. That’s because, while we might debate an issue (Transgender swimmers, go!), our core values across the political spectrum are relatively stable. Conservatives and liberals, MAGA and Bernie Sanders fans, we generally value education, public safety, privacy, equality, fairness, and justice. Research shows when people from different political positions first share common values, political civility returns to the discussion. We can heal this divide.

Every 9/11, I like to focus, instead, on 9/12 – that incredible feeling of national unity we felt following the attacks. We have a choice this 9/11. We can push our peers farther to the extremes and tip the nation into an unwinnable civil war that will plunge our beautiful nation into years of traumatic violence. Or we can find that common ground and create a rebirth of our vibrant multicultural democracy. We can put down our doom scrolls and meet out neighbors, rebuilding community. Charlie Kirk’s life was dedicated to dividing us. Perhaps his horrible death can motivate us to reject violence and incivility and find what binds us. The attacks of 9/11 still tear at my heart, but the resilience of 9/12 gives me great hope.

Trump’s Shock & Awe Plan to Collapse the American Economy

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

February 4, 2025

These first two weeks have been dizzying. Trump and his billionaire bros have attacked multiple aspects of our democracy. They have ripped the guardrails off while Democrats have stood there, dazed and confused. The flurry of bias-motivated executive actions, appointments of merit-less droogs hell-bent on dismantling the imagined “deep state,” inflation driving tariffs, saber-rattling at our allies, and the pardoning of violent criminals who, in 2021, tried stop democracy in its tracks. It’s all too much.

The chaos of Trump, ripped from the pages of Project 2025, is the intent. In a normal world, each action would occupy a few weeks in the news cycle, but there’s a dozen actions a day. The chaos is the point. The opposition is playing Wack-a-Mole to each insane impulse from the orange madmen who is declaring war on our allies with one hand and canceling Black History Month celebrations with other. He’s throwing countless federal employees into economic crisis (as well as those, like me, who are employed by federal grants), while blaming the airline crashes on Obama and dwarves. It’s like being punched in the face over and over again with no chance to land a counterpunch.

Trump didn’t invent this strategy. Bush used it to destroy Iraq in 2003. Twenty-two years ago, they called it “Shock and Awe.” Use the military might of the United States to overwhelm Iraq and out of the chaos, create a machine that would profit post-war contractors. Just Google: Halliburton, Iraq, and Profit. This “shock doctrine” (as Naomi Klein called in her 2007 book) has a history of effectiveness. The disaster capitalism employed in nations like Chile was utilized to generate billions in profits for war contractors in Iraq. This week, as witnessed by the plunging of markets after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, Trump has brought disaster capitalism to the homeland and he and his billionaire bros stand to take home all the money.

The shock doctrine relies on chaos to shake up markets and political organization. Not only is the opposition stuck on the back foot trying to respond to each affront, economic destabilization paralyzes the working class who is more worried about inflation and holding on to their jobs than developing a strategy to fight back. Meanwhile, oligarchs are positioned to swoop in and calmly reassemble the pieces in a way that permanently protects their power and profit. This happened in Russia in the 1990s and it’s happening here now. It’s like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when there’s a run on the banks and George Bailey tries to calm the panic, saying, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not.”

Trump, unregistered foreign agent Elon Musk, and their army of gangster capitalists are crashing the economy on purpose. Shipping migrant labor across the border, ludicrous tariffs, rampant deregulation, and appointing insanely unqualified loyalists are all meant to tank financial stability. Trump no longer needs his MAGA troops who were told he would lower the price of groceries on “Day 1.” They served their purpose of installing him back in the White House. They will suffer at the checkout line along with the rest of us. But at least they got to “own the libs.” Musk, now with the keys to the U.S. Treasury, can let the air out of America’s tires and jack up his global banking portfolio and Trump’s voters will have no idea what happened.

Like Mr. Potter, Trump’s billionaire bros will come in to “manage” the economic crisis. The German National Socialist Party did this when the Great Depression hit Germany. They consolidated power with the promise of affordable eggs. And now, when we look for the storied institutions of democracy to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a non-partisan Department of Justice, we will find they have been hollowed out during MAGA’s war of the “deep state.” Trump’s vow to purge the FBI of agents and analysts who investigated January 6th should be all the warning Americans need.

It’s easy to draw on the rise of Hitler as a historical parallel. And even though Melania has claimed that Trump kept Mein Kampf on his nightstand, Donald probably isn’t going back 90 years for a playbook. The rise of Putin and the rule of Russian oligarchs provide the formula. Just read Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter is Coming. Putin used economic calamity and the fear of Chechen terrorists to dismantle Russian democracy, making him President for Life. Dissidents get poisoned or sent to a Siberian gulag. Trump using the federal government to go after his political enemies is a page out of his comrade’s manifesto.

So what do we do?

We’ve have three weeks of the worst assault on American democracy in our lifetime. We’re all in shock that it’s really this bad. And it’s going to get worse. We can’t depend on Chuck Schumer and the corporate toadies of the Democratic Party save us. Many of them are in line to profit from the consolidation of power by the billionaire class. The Democrats who stand against them need to make themselves known now (or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said). But this is about us first. Us who are battered and defeated by the task at hand. Do we retreat into Netflix binges, or is there a path forward?

This is great opportunity to remember the practices of mindfulness. We’re all in reaction mode right now. Personally, I’ve had to resist the desire to punch someone, especially fellow working class people who think DEI is their enemy while their egg prices skyrocket. This is time to stop. Take a pause and breathe. Then we can start planning. There’s a great device popular in AA circles called “HALT.” Does this situation make me “Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired”? If so, just stop and take stock. So slowing the freakout roll is key.

Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter offers a simple strategy to re-enage with solutions. First, focus on a few key issues you care about instead of being overwhelmed by the tsunami of fires that need to be put out (to mix metaphors). Second, find trusted sources of information who can do the work of providing needed facts and analysis. Third, if their goal is to overwhelm you, take mental health breaks. Meditation is a favorite “self gift” of mine. Next, Walter suggests taking 48 hours to respond to a news story to let your emotions subside and sort out what’s important. And lastly, build community to share the load. My faculty union president sent out an email last week, entitled, “What to Do in a Burning House,” asking faculty not disengage but step forward. I immediately joined a union committee.

Progressives, real patriots, and those who just care about the price of heat this winter, have been knocked to their knees by the Trump/Musk war on the buttresses of American democracy. But it’s time to stand back up. A lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by lawyers who still have access to the courts to stop Trump’s actions, many of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The rest of us who are not the uber rich have a role, whether it’s monkey-wrenching the shock doctrine or building a viable alternative to Trump’s fear-fueled vision of America. Take a breath. We will do this.

With the J6 Pardons, President Trump Just Set Up His Coup

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

January 22, 2025

He said he was going to do it, so we shouldn’t be shocked. We hoped there would be some rhyme or reason, some forethought, some restraint. But there was none of that. President Trump blanket pardoned approximately 1500 of the terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow our democratically elected government. This includes the most violent attackers who beat Capitol police, causing injury, trauma, and death. Today the leaders of violent extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys walk free and our nation is much less safe. Trump did this in his first 24-hours as president.

Almost 30 years ago, I had just completed my PhD when Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder Truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer up to the federal building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and ran. The explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s daycare center. On that spring day in 1995, my research went from focusing on racist skinheads to the even darker corners of the far right. This included interviews with militia members in western Montana in 1998, who told me in very clear terms that the only salvation America would be born from a violent civil war.

The patriot militia movement that birthed McVeigh and his fellow anti-government extremists would die, not with a bang, but with a whimper at the turn of the century. Janet Reno’s Department of Justice broke up numerous plots, aided by many community members reporting bomb-making neighbors. The 2000 election of George W. Bush took the wind out of their sails as many of their core issues, like guns and land rights, had gone mainstream. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed and exactly three months later, the nation would launch a new war on terror.

But the racist reaction to the 2008 election of Barrack Obama, the Tea Party, and the advent of social media, brought the militia movement back. The election of Donald Trump and the COVID pandemic took it from survivalist bunkers to the laptops of soccer moms. And the end result was the violent assault on our Capitol sparked by conspiracy theories that used to be the domain of tinfoil hat kooks, now spread by the President of the United States.

Many of those that attacked the Capitol were members of violent extremist groups, like the Oath Keepers, the 3 Percenters, and the Proud Boys. Over 75 of those arrested for entering the building were carrying weapons, including guns. They had been told by Trump to “fight like hell,” and they did. When the dust cleared the besieged members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, called for the rioters to be arrested and charged to the fullest extent of the law. After encouraging them on January 6th, on January 7th, Trump said, “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Thanks to vigilant work of community members, dubbed “sedition hunters,” and the diligence of the Department of Justice, over 1,500 rioters were arrested and charged with federal crimes and over a thousand plead guilty (with 64% receiving jail sentences). This included leaders of well-known extremists groups who were charged with sedition.  Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, received a 22-year prison sentence. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes received 18 years.  The January 6th attack was the most violent assault on our Capital since the War of 1812.

And Donald Trump freed all of these terrorists. Every single one. They were not hostages, as he called them. Hostages are bound in the tunnels of Gaza. They were convicted criminals. But criminals who committed their crimes for Trump, so he let them loose, back into society.

Much of my work over the past four years has been in response to January 6. This includes my academic work as well as my ongoing work on a project, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, to reduce political violence. One of the things I can say for certain is the prosecution and sentencing of the J6 rioters has served to greatly suppress anti-government violence. Proud Boy-wannabes and militia members who missed the bus to DC saw the long sentences of Tarrio and Rhodes and hundreds of others and cooled their jets about the “boogaloo” and dreams of civil war.

Trump just erased that powerful deterrent with the stroke of a pen.

Where Timothy McVeigh’s story ended with a lethal ejection, the January 6 terrorists have been made into folk heroes by Trump and the far right. He has routinely sung their praises as lovers of the country. “These people have been destroyed,” Trump, said shortly after returning to the Oval Office. ”What they’ve done to these people is outrageous.” They are now living martyrs, rock stars of the anti-government movement, and will use their celebrity to bring more into the rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy theories of the “deep state” and into the rhetoric of violent retribution for the agents of justice who dared imprison them. Tarrio has already promised revenge on those that jailed him. His Proud Boys marched in Washington DC, while Trump was being sworn in Monday. Rhodes and other militia members are free to reinvigorate the violent anti-government patriot movement that sees bloody revolution and a “Day of Ropes’ as required to wrestle America from the “deep state.”

Donald Trump, with the support of stiff armed ally Elon Musk, has opened Pandora’s Box. The core of the J6 terrorists see the Oklahoma City Bombing as the model for accelerating mass chaos to collapse society. Their anti-DEI policy ends with bodies hanging from lampposts. And don’t expect a Defense Department headed by fellow nationalist Pete Hegseth to get in their way. Where Reno shut plots down, Hegseth will enable a reign of terror.

We have seen versions of this in other countries. January 6, 2021 was the rehearsal for the coup. Trump and his corporate-fascist “patriots” have played the long game. In other countries, it has been the military that has quashed the coup. (It won’t be Hegseth’s military here, perhaps the rank and file.) We are heading towards that showdown and I wish I wasn’t so certain of that fact. What we do know is that with these pardons, Donald Trump has normalized political violence and ensured the loyalty of militia groups who will violently fight to keep him power. Welcome to the new Civil War.

Laissez les mauvaise temps rouler?: The Terror of 2025 and How to Stop It

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

January 3, 2025

Well, 2025 is off with a bang. My New’s Eve hangover didn’t have time to kick in before the news from New Orleans rolled in. And then Las Vegas. Welcome to the worst year of our lives.

Forty years ago, my study of fascism was the focus of my second undergrad major of political science. That then moved headlong into the field of criminology. As a graduate student, my research on teenage skinheads evolved into a study of right-wing extremists groups. Once I had my PhD in my pocket, that work became a scholarship on domestic terrorism. When I was asked to contribute to the 2003 edition of the Encyclopedia of Terrorism, I knew had achieved the title of “terrorism expert.” And that meant I would spend a chunk of New Year’s Day talking to reporters.

The study terrorism is not exactly an exact science. And those coming from academia and those coming from law enforcement are going to have different focuses (root causes vs. threat assessments, for example). But where we come together is in vague intention to create terrorist profiles (which I jokingly refer to as terrorist stereotypes). The good news is that we have a massive amount of data from previous bombings, mass shootings, car rammings, and the like to have a pretty good picture of who commits these crimes, with a handful of relevant variables. The bad news is that we have all this data because of the success of these people in carrying out their deadly plots.

So with minimal facts available, I had a pretty clear picture of who Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker who killed 15, was and wasn’t. For example, despite the unhelpful grandstanding at Wednesday’s press conference, I was pretty certain Jabbar worked alone. The blather that Jabbar was a part of an “ISIS cell” fit conservative fear-mongering (since the “immigrant” narrative crashed), but did’t fit the typical profile. This was not the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was the Big Easy’s version of the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France. While Donald Trump decried “open borders,” I talked to local media about how we have seen this movie before.

You’ve got a guy with a military background who served in Afghanistan who probably saw the heavy hand of Uncle Sam in a Muslim land. That was enough for Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 and injuring dozens. Jabbar also had a host of economic crises, including massive debt, and a dramatic divorce involving conflict over children. Most men who go on workplace mass shootings are in the same situation. Exactly. The insanity of ISIS gave him a place to put his anger. Their binary world of believers vs. non-believers is like a warm blanket to someone whose life in a complete spiral. Like the workplace shooter, Jabbar was ready to check-out (AKA die) but he was going to go out in a blaze of glory, spreading his pain to others as he barreled down Bourbon Street.

The case of Matthew Alan Livelsberger is a little less obvious. Livelsberger was the Army Special Forces operations master sergeant who drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck up to the front door of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel, shot himself in the head and set off a bomb in the truck. Again, the nattering nabobs of disinformation over at Fox News claimed this was an attack on the incoming president and his boss, Elon Musk. But, there were facts that didn’t add up to that claim, including the fact that Livelsberger was a green beret (not known for their liberal anything) and that the bomb was so poorly constructed it didn’t injure anybody. (He could have driven straight into the hotel lobby if he was after casualties.) There are clues to motive that have nothing to do with Trump or Musk.

We’ve seen a steady increase in the suicide rate of active military (523 cases in 2023, up 9% from 2022). We still know so little about the PTSD-suicide link, but we know it exists. Livelsberger was a new father, so that should have been a mediating factor. (When Cozy was born, I didn’t want to miss a single second, staring at her while she slept.) But we don’t know much about the sergeant’s internal and external life yet. We do know that soldiers who suffer trauma from combat who also experienced trauma as young children are significantly more likely to spin off the rails. Musk and Trump have been a constant presence in the news. It’s likely that he chose the car and hotel as part of a strategy to make his suicide more newsworthy. After all, how many of the over 500 military suicides last year hit the news cycle? (And the suicide rate for veterans is almost twice the non-veteran rate, so maybe both Livelsbergerm and Jabbar were demanding attention on the matter.)

If there’s any good news in all this carnage it’s that we know these profiles inside and out. Which means we know the antecedents to the terror, the proverbial red flags. And the red flags provide intervention points to head off calamity. As we dissect these two New Year’s Day attacks, we’ll find points where “somebody could have done something.” The Cure-PNW project I work on, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has been finding angles to de-escalate political violence by strengthening communities and empowering people to intervene when they see a Livelsberger or Jabbar moving toward criminal action. (We refer to these interveners as “credible messengers.”) This is the work that needs to be upscaled on a national level as 2025 promises many more January firsts. (Unfortunately, our grant runs out with the new administration.)

After Election Day there was a lot of “the sky is falling” hysterics on my side of the aisle. Yeah, decency and democratic guardrails took a major hit. But the 2026 midterm election is only 96 weeks away and there is already dissent in the Trump-Musk-GOP ranks. Maybe the sky won’t fall, but what we can count on remaining constant are the factors that drive (almost exclusively) men into choices to commit acts of terror. Better understanding how to utilize that knowledge gives that “something” that we can do.

I Remember America: It Was a Good 248 Years

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

July 4, 2024

There have been red flags along the way; the Civil War, Watergate, Rosanne Barr singing the national anthem at a Padres game. America has always been an idea more than a reality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” referred to a small group of white men in 1776, some of whom owned slaves and none of whom (except for Thomas Paine) thought women should have a vote. America was a work in a progress. It wasn’t until the arrival of an orange-hued huxter that this grand experiment went completely off the rails.

When Trump and his mail order bride came down the golden escalator in 2015, no sane thinking person thought this malignant narcissistic game show host could become the leader to the free world. Trump was a buffoon with a string of bankruptcies. (You have to be a special kind of moron to bankrupt a casino.) But his rough justice brand of racism (“Mexicans are murderers and rapists”) spoke to the victims of globalization and, while he lost the popular vote, he managed to sneak in to the high office. Thus began the campaign to hijack the no-longer Grand Ol Party and dismantle the guard rails of democracy.

If the 2022 Dobbs decision, that ended women’s bodily sovereignty, was a sign that this was democracy’s sunset, the July first Supreme Court decision in Trump vs. United States, that gave presidents absolute immunity, was our lights-out moment. Goodnight, John Boy. The President is now officially above the law. Trump will claim that he is now immune from all indictments, past and future. If re-elected, he becomes Caesar.

The once revered Supreme Court has gone down this road before. In 2000, the court literally stopped the counting of ballots in Florida and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. But the Federalist Trump Court, stacked with his three nominees and insurrection supporters Alito and Thomas, represent the complete obliteration of the checks and balances system our Founding Fathers designed. The federal judiciary is now merely an extension of MAGA. MAGA controls the House of Representatives as well. So if Trump’s minions take the Senate and he takes back the White House, which controls the entire Executive Branch, America is completely under the control of this madman who has already proclaimed he will be a dictator on Day 1.

Since 1984, when I became a political science major at Emory University (on top of my sociology major), I have dedicated my life to understanding how fascism happens. My work has included going undercover in fascist movements to see how they recruit young people, to entering war zones in Eastern Europe to help children escape the invasion of fascists. For forty years, I have been consumed with this work in hopes that I could prevent it from happening here. That forty years of work, of expertise in this field, tells me one thing. It is happening here.

Let me put this into the most simple words I can, Donald Trump does not give a fuck about America or Americans. He would never let any of his knuckle-dragging MAGA base into his haughty Mar-a-Lago affairs where he flaunts his stolen wealth. Trump cares about power and ego and ratings. And he cares about retribution. He has made it exceedingly clear that his second term would be about revenge, including firing any and all federal workers that are not absolutely loyal to him. His (currently imprisoned) top advisor, Steve Bannon, has said Trump 2.0 will arrest, try, and imprison Biden officials and anyone viewed as not supporting Trump, including former FBI acting Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Attorney General William Barr and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Trump 2.0, would be modeled on the authoritarian regimes Trump has only shown admiration for. A national abortion ban, the releasing of the January 6 terrorists, and detention camps for immigrants would be the first impact. The hollowing out of voting access for minority populations and the protection of corporations from regulations comes next. Then, as Trump has publicly supported, the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, replacing every federal worker not loyal to Trump, from the highest executive office staff to the lowest park ranger, with Christian nationalists. Department of Education? Gone. Environmental regulations? Gone. Civil rights enforcements? Gone. And finally, because of the July 1 ruling, Trump can legally “take out” any perceived opponents, from Nancy Pelosi to the teenage anarchist down the street. America becomes a hellscape where the Confederacy has won the long civil war. There will be blood.

Why Americans are not out in the streets, I’ll never know. Maybe we’re the frog in the slowly boiling pot. Maybe it’s, as John Lennon sang in 1970, they “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you’re so clever and classless and free.” Or maybe we have prematurely achieved Idiocracy. Whatever reason, fascism is at our doorstep and turning the knob.

Even if you think my words alarmist, you know another four years of Trump appointments to the federal judiciary will fundamentally transform the nation for generations in a way that will make America the nineteenth century again. An immunized presidency will provide no disincentive to the wanton criminal behavior of a sociopath. A sociopath who only cares about his own power.

Yeah, Joe Biden’s performance at the recent debate was a train wreck, but I would vote for Biden in a coma if it meant keeping this very real threat to the nation from access to the levers of our democracy. Trump and his GOP cult of personality will burn it to the ground.

June is the Cruelest Month

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

June 21, 2014

School’s out, longer days, warm summer nights. What’s not to love about June? As a kid, I knew I could balance out the onslaught of pine pollen allergies with hours of playing Sharks & Minnows at the pool. (Now I leverage endless coffee against the Benadryl.) As an adult, June was all about commencement, a few weeks of sleeping in, and celebrating Pride with my LGBT friends. The lack of social media let us think it was all wine and roses.

Then came the Tweets and Trump. It seemed like all at once all the hate that been hiding under a rock came roaring into the daylight. On a June evening in 2016, that hate took 49 lives at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. I was in Washington DC when it happened and watched as President Obama lowered the flags on federal buildings to half-mast. And the Trump trolls wasted no seconds in complaining about the need to grieve the death of “homosexuals.” I heard them with my own ears. “They were pedophiles, not veterans,” I heard one man in a MAGA hat say, in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Over the next four years, after Trump’s election, it only got worse. Hate crimes spiked as bigots were given license to take off their hoods and go mainstream. The deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was a foreshadowing of things to come. The racist and homophobic bile that used to be the stock and trade of the “deep web” flooded your mom’s social media feed. Who needs to wade though 4chan anymore when you can freely and openly spew hate on Facebook? There’s no need to be anonymous anymore. If you’ve had it with gay pride and black lives mattering, the floor is yours.

On June 17, 2021 President Biden signed the Juneteenth holiday into law and, again, the Trumpies were triggered. The day the marks when the last group of Texas slaves were informed that slavery was abolished has been an informal black holiday for years and I had attended many a Juneteenth celebration. Thanks to the hard work of teacher and activist Opal Lee, it was now a federal holiday. When Lee was twelve, a mob of 500 white supremacists burned down her family home in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2021, Lee stood next to President Biden at the signing as white supremacists burned down her holiday on line.

Social media has been the place where bigots come out of the closet. Soon as posts celebrating Pride Month appeared the comments section became a soup of homophobia, decrying the holiday as “woke,” “sinful,” “sick,” and a celebration of child abuse. One woman posted, “Why is there a month celebrating putting a penis into an ass?” Trumpies posted that “their” pride flag was the American flag. I tried to respond to each and every one with a meme that read, “Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they’re better off dead than being gay.” The response was met with laughing face emojis and I just realized my efforts were pointless.

The Juneteen celebration posts brought out white supremacists by the score. A meme circulated that Juneteeth was for black people since they couldn’t celebrate Father’s Day. Posts that equated Juneteeth with black crime and the destruction of “America” came fast furious. I tried to engage with one commenter who told me that black people need to be more grateful to white people for freeing them. How do you unpack that in a Facebook comment? The fact that so many people think celebrating the idea that the day the America got better is a bad thing shows what the “again” is in their “Make America Great Again” battlecry. Juneteenth is Freedom Day, but, for them, freedom is not for others. It’s their freedom to unlimited guns and their freedom to shove the 10 Commandments in our faces.

Each of these anti-Pride and anti-Juneteenth posts illustrates EXACTLY WHY we need Pride and Juneteenth celebrations. Social media has magnified the forces of marginalization. Every day, queer and black people are reminded of hatred towards them. Celebrating allows the cumulative trauma to heal just a little bit. (And can we get an intersectional day in June when queer black folk get a little extra love?)

Maybe it’s because I’m a sociology professor and my job is to help people unlearn ideologies of oppression that I’ve come to see June as a gut punch. This massive, very public, Klan rally seems to be growing. We lack serious national leadership on this issue. Trump and his troll army seem like they have momentum and Biden and Democrats fear looking too “woke” to come out swinging against this fascist fad.

Maybe I should stay off social media and find my people out in the streets. But, lordy, it’s hot our there. And about to get hotter.

We Defeated Fascism 80 Years Ago, We Must Defeat Trump Now. It’s Go Time!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

May 27, 2024

I had a voir dire day dream about a month ago. I was being interviewed as a prospective juror for Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York. When I was asked about my excessive media bashing of the former president, I offered this reply, “I know two things. The first thing is that this is America and that Mr. Trump is presumed to be innocent and should only be judged on the facts pertaining to the indictment. If those facts support his acquittal, I will vote so. The second thing I know is the Donald Trump is a buffoon who leads a sub-moronic cult of personality and he has no business leading this great nation.” My proclamation wouldn’t have gotten me seated on the jury but it would have probably gotten me seated next to Rachel Maddow the next Monday evening.

It’s so easy to see Donald Jessica Trump as a clown, an obese orange orangoutang, falling asleep and farting in the courtroom, dreaming of dates with Ivanka. His bizarre word salads about Gettysburg and contraception can be written off as dementia, syphilis brain, or just never being told he’s wrong by the army of red tie bootlickers he surrounds himself with. It makes for great fodder for Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and a phalanx of liberal commentators on YouTube. “Look at El Cheeto try to dance to the Village People at his rally! What a train wreck!” “Look at Orange Hitler drink water with two hands like a drunk toddler!” “Look at Dumpie saying Nikki Haley is Nancy Pelosi. Is he an idiot or what?” “Did you see the libertarians booing his confused ass? LMAO!” Trump is the gift that keeps on giving to joke writers.

But is he a joke?

I know a certain Mexican green card-holder that does a good job of frequently popping my bubble of white privilege. We had a pretty heavy conversation about what the potential re-election of Trump really means for people like her. I was curious at why she was not more interested in the Trump soap opera in New York. As someone who works in the law field, I would have thought this fascinating trial would have grabbed her attention. Her response slapped me upside the head. She was so disgusted that we (white people) had let this man rise to the position he’s in that she just checked out of the whole circus. Why aren’t white people rioting in the streets to stop him? “The only time I’ve seen white people rioting was on January 6th,” she said.

Boy, did she have a point.

Her perspective was that white male liberals enjoy the Trump spectacle. He’s fun to lampoon with his spray tan and buckets of KFC. We eat up his gaffes and stories of sexual harassment, knowing that, if he wins, we’ll still be comfortable, sitting in front of MSNBC for the next four years. But if Trump wins in November, he’s floated the idea of building detention camps for undocumented immigrants, including DACA residents. While “illegal aliens” from Norway don’t need to worry too much, a large percentage of my students would be “disappeared” if he was elected. As he did during his first term, Trump would cancel all the federal DEI programs that work to make America a more equitable place. His war on women’s reproductive rights would continue, and the safe space we seek to provide for LGBTQ people would be thrown under the bus to appease his Christian Nationalist base. Make America Gilead Again.

Perhaps even more frightening is if Trump loses. He’s already front-loading the election denial for the results in November for his knuckle-dragging cult that fervently believes the 2020 election was stolen by Biden, the doddering old fool who is also a brilliant criminal mastermind. (Pick a lane, Karen.) The work I’ve been doing on this federally funded grant has collected troves of information on how the far-right is arming up to launch their civil war as soon as their dear leader, again, says, “This election was stolen.” I don’t doubt the FBI has their hands full getting in front of the MAGA militias who are under every rock in the nation.

How did the hell did we get to this point, America? It’s not like Trump has been some secretive Manchurian candidate. He’s been completely open about his “Dictator on Day 1” fantasies. From his idolization of authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Kim Jong Un, to his utilization of Hitlerian language, like “unify the Reich” and “vermin poisoning the blood of the nation,” the Orange Führer hasn’t actually hid his intentions. And his base is completely fine with Trump as dictator, and turning the White House into a weapon of retribution. (I hope Liz Cheney has a very deep bunker.)

So while late night comedians make fun of Trump for not being able to form a coherent sentence, or tease his sycophants outside the courtroom for dressing as mini-Trumps, the United States is on the precipice of oblivion. What this country might look like during the next election cycle could be unrecognizable, as voting districts are gerrymandered to guarantee Trumpists majorities, women are required to register their pregnancies, abortion only exists in back alleys, new media regulations limit the free (“enemy of the people”) press, and anyone left of Mitt Romney is now the target of heavily militarized police departments. This isn’t hyperbole. Trump has suggest support for such policies and so much more.

How do we save America from Trump?

Personally, I say a nightly prayer that Donald Trump has a heart attack on the toilet. If Nikki Haley is his running mate (if he’s smart, which he’s not), she’ll look like Bernie Sanders compared to a Trump second term. I’m not holding out on the power of collective prayer to remove this human turd from the mortal coil. So we have to heed the words of my favorite Mexican, we need to riot. I’m not talking about kicking in a Starbucks window with our Doc Marten boots. I’m talking about getting vocal every chance we get, like those libertarians who screamed into Trump’s face this weekend. I can’t legally advise throwing rotten vegetables at the presumptive Republican nominee, but this is a fucking 4 alarm fire. In the words of J Lo, let’s get loud.

Here’s my message to straight white men – If Trump is elected, we’ll survive, but a lot of the people we care about won’t. We’re too polite and worried about offending anyone. If you’ve got Trump supporters in your circle, either do your best to wake them up or cut them loose. We need all hands on deck. We need record turnout this fall. Yeah, Biden is old and will probably die soon (putting a woman of color in the Oval Office). But after him, there are multiple generations – X, Millennials, Z, Alpha, that are energized and ready to create a vibrant, healthy nation, that includes everyone, even that crazy uncle who likes “Mexican food, just not Mexican people.” He can be reached. As Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And as every annoying reality show contestant says, “Ride or die.”

If you love the idea of America, get off your ass. Whether you are an overwhelmed soccer mom or a teenage anarchist, this is go time. There is no “freedom” under authoritarian rule. Just ask Russia. We must do everything. We must do everything to stop Trump to save America. This Memorial Day for all those brave soldiers who fought fascism 80 years ago, let’s do this.

Supporting the Right of Palestinians Not to Be Murdered is Not Anti-Semitic, And We Must Confront the Rise in Anti-Semitism

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

April 27, 2024

Free the Israeli hostages. Hamas is a terrorists organization. Israel has a right to exist. Also, no Jewish college student should be made to feel unsafe because they are Jewish, including at my alma mater, Emory University. I wanted to get that out of the way before someone on Fox News accuses me of anti-Semitism. As someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to studying and combatting neo-Nazism, I think I have a pretty good feel for what anti-Semitism is and there is an alarming lot of it, but the de facto defending of the right of Palestinians to live is not anti-Semitism. But I’m not Jewish, so I might be missing things that don’t look anti-Semitic but feel anti-Semitic.

I’m writing this on the fifth anniversary of the Poway synagogue shooting. On April 27, 2019, a 19-year-old white supremacist walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego and opened fire, with an AR-15 rifle, on the last day of Passover. He killed one woman and injured three others, including the rabbi. Before the shooting, he posted a manifesto on 8chan that claimed Jews “meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” Because he was inspired by the Christchurch mosque shootings that had resulted in 51 deaths in New Zealand a month earlier, the killer had attempted to burn down a mosque in Escondido before his deadly shooting spree in Poway.

Last week, I sat in on an ADL webinar that shared that anti-Semitic incidents in 2023 increased 140 percent over those reported in 2022, spiking after the Hamas attack in Israel. If I’ve learned one thing in the 30+ years I’ve done this work, it’s that racists and neo-Nazis are opportunists. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 767 civilians (including 36 children), they saw a massive opportunity. So how do I speak about the over 38,000 Palestinian civilians (including nearly 16,000 children) killed by Israel in their war on Hamas without being pulled into the black hole of anti-Semitism?

It’s sickeningly clear that the far right is coming at this issue from both sides. On one side, it has injected anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories into a part of the pro-Palestinian movement. (We can debate how big or small that part is.) They’ve also utilized the claim of “anti-Semitism” to shut down sincere protests to defend the human rights of Palestinians, that can include the accusation that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza (which was alleged by the United Nations last month).

I feel the need to point out four basic assertions:

Thing 1: A firm critique of the policies of the government of Israel is not anti-Semitism. Being critical of the misogynistic policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan does not make one Islamophobic. There are countless Jews, both inside and outside of Israel, who oppose the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and reject the actions of Bibi Netanyahu. Are those Jews anti-Semitic?

Thing 2: The core tenant of anti-Semitism is that Jewish people, as a group, have some secret control of the world (banks, the media, government, hip hop, etc.) that shapes global events. It is completely possible to see Israel’s military campaign as an action of a sovereign nation and not an operation of a “global cabal” of “evil Jews.”

Thing 3: The heartbreaking spike in anti-Semitic incidents and crimes has been paralleled by an equally heartbreaking spike in anti-Muslim incidents and crimes, including the murder of Wadea al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois who was stabbed 26 times by his landlord who had been listening to conservative radio following the October 7 attack.

Thing 4: The vast majority of the deaths caused by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been civilians, including women and children, who are not members of Hamas, and have not resulted in the liberation of Israeli hostages. Additionally, the created famine and destruction of schools, hospitals, and infrastructure in Gaza has not resulted in the freeing of Israeli hostages.

Having said all that, we cannot deny anti-Semitism has been witnessed in pro-Palestine protests in two ways.

First is the idea that a free Palestine requires the elimination of the state of Israel. There are many, including myself and President Biden, who believe a “two state solution” is the most rational way out of this mess. But those who chant, “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free!” do not see Israel existing in that vision. (Although, I’m willing to bet a lot of the college students chanting that have no idea were the Jordan River is. Americans are pretty stupid when it comes to geography.) You know who also wants the destruction of Israel? Hamas and neo-Nazis.

The second issue is how Jews in general (including Jewish Americans) are scapegoated for policies of the government of Israel. While there are significant numbers of American Jews who are in the streets and college quads protesting for the human rights of Palestinians, that any Jewish person be made to feel unsafe or targeted for the policies of government over 6000 miles away is the definition of irrational. But Jews have long have been the target of irrational scapegoating, including by one well known anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler.

I remember what it feels like to be young and righteous. When I was an undergraduate at Emory, our issue was apartheid in South Africa. Like the students there now, we set up a shantytown on the quad and called for the university to divest from the country. Emory was built on Coca-Cola money and Coke had plenty of operations in South Africa. (In 1986, Coca-Cola pulled out of South Africa. You’re welcome.) Is the movement to divest from Israeli “apartheid” the same situation? As an undergrad in 2024, I might see the similarities. I also might get caught up in the chants and rallies the blur the lines between anti-Netanyahu-ism and anti-Zionism. But utilizing police to crush the protests doesn’t help protestors (including well-meaning college students) to better understand the complexities of this issue. I’ll tell you this, when the cops came for us in the 1980s, it further radicalized my position as I dug my heels in for the long fight. These protests seem the perfect opportunity to widen the conversation, centering both Jewish and Palestinian voices. (Note: Not all Gaza residents are Muslim. There is a small Christian population there. And probably a few Goths.) Police crackdowns silence the discussion.

This could be a lengthy tome about the need to find a “middle ground” in this crisis. That talk does not serve the children of Gaza, who face the same certainty of death from Israeli rockets that the children of Ukraine face from Russian rockets. Those kids don’t know about Hamas or Israel’s tortured history in a hostile landscape. That call for compromise would also not soothe the families of the 133 Israeli hostages still being held in some God-forsaken hellhole. That is not the intent.

The intent is highlight how the very powerful charge of anti-Semitism has been weaponized to shut down calls for a cease fire, calls to stop the slaughter, calls to choose policies that don’t result in human carnage. Some Americans are afraid to oppose the war out of fear of being labeled anti-Jewish. As I said when this thing started last fall, it is possible to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. The deep emotional nature of this conflict obscures what should be ethical clarity. I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to determine if Jewish trauma is now being levied on Palestine. I will leave it to the philosophers to determine if genocide is a defense against genocide. (And if “genocide” is even an accurate term.) I just want to hold space where we are allowed to express our outrage and sadness for what we continue to do to each other. Stop the killing.

Is “Civil War” a Preview of 2025?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

April 22, 2024

I just walked out of the new Alex Garland (Ex Machina) film Civil War and am wondering if I need to arm up. The dystopian film, starring Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura as war journalists, feels a little like a flash forward to America after the fallout of the upcoming election. The film is clear not identify who the bad guys are, but America is under the leadership of a “third term president” who sure sounds like a certain authoritarian-wannabe we all know, currently on trial in a criminal court in New York City. The “Western Forces” of Texas and California (I about choked on my popcorn at that thought) are trying to retake Washington DC. I don’t want spoil any of the fun, but firefight between the Western Forces and the Secret Service on Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty lit.

The movie is more of a meditation on the need for emotional detachment required to document wars than a treatise on the polarized nature of the our uncivil society. There’s a scene where Dunst’s character, reflecting on her coverage of brutal foreign wars, states that the subconscious message of her war photos was, “Don’t do this here at home.” Oh, the irony. But my work has me highly focused on the “the don’t think it can’t happen here” scenarios. So my heart is racing.

I’ve written plenty in this blog about the looming fantasies of a second civil war from the far right, who made their first attempt in 1995 in Oklahoma City. This project I’m working on, funded by Homeland Security, has me spending an inordinate amount of time in spaces where the far right fantasizes about launching a second American revolution if Trump wins or loses.  If he wins, they’ll see it as a green light to string up woke traitors from lampposts and if he loses, they’ll see it as proof that democracy has been hijacked by “communist libtards,” only to be restored by the blood of patriots. Either way, there will be blood.

Not long ago I was in the parking lot of Home Depot near the Portland airport. I was parked next to a pickup truck with a ton of anti-Biden stickers. The truck had a very small “III %” sticker in the window. The Three Percenters are a local militia group that were heavily present at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. I waited to talk to him (after moving my car). When he came out, I struck up a conversation with him. (He also had a University of Oregon sticker, so that was my in.) “Hey, I noticed your Three Percenter sticker and I have to ask your position about armed violence.” He seemed surprised and a little leery I knew that deeply underground imagery. “We’re locked in loaded,” he calmly said. “When we get the call from above, we’re ready to go. Locked and loaded.” Stand back and stand by, someone said.

Whether or not the Bubba Militia would be able to defeat the U.S. military is another discussion, but if the Commander in Chief was also their commander, it might not be that hard. Even if they couldn’t, as Timmothy McVeigh demonstrated in 1995, they’re willing to take out a lot of innocent civilians in their long game to make America that again. That America, where kids were safe to play “Smear the Queer” in the street and you know who better be off the street when the sun goes down.

Civil War is just a movie. I was pretty freaked out the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead and I’m not too concerned about a zombie apocalypse (although HBO’s The Last of Us has me thinking about it). But we know the Trump harbors fantasies of a regime of retribution if he is elected, democracy be damned. And we know the heavily armed MAGA minions are fueled by the politics of grievance and entitlement. There’s a reference in Civil War to “Portland Maoists” and the “antifa massacre” that reminded me of the summer of 2020 when caravans of armed Trump supporters drove into Portland from the exurbs to attack BLM protestors. It just feels close, and that I should have a plan to protect my family.

In the meantime, while either side stockpiles supplies, I’m going to continue to find ways to bridge the divide. It does’t have to be like this. We have so much the unites us. Red state and blue states share some deep connections that can bring us back from the edge. Our movie can have a different ending.

The End of Democracy and the New Dark Age

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 28, 2024

I lived long enough to see several nations cease to exist, including Rhodesia (1979), the USSR (1991), and Yugoslavia (1992). Even though many believe that “God likes us the best,” there is no guarantee that the United States will exist in perpetuity. We could exist for thousands of years, like Iran, or the U.S. could be kaput by this time next year. There are certainly warning signs that the great American experiment may have a rapidly approaching expiration date.

The idea of America was born in The Enlightenment, the European Age of Reason. Intellectuals, inspired by cracks in the medieval divine right of kings that propped up the authority of the Catholic Church, fashioned a new paradigm in which free thinkers were no longer burned at the stake as heretics. Those cracks were created by the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that encouraged the translation of the Bible and believers to seek the truth themselves instead of trusting the dogma of the Church. (Many of those reformers were killed by the Church, including William Tyndale, who dared to translate the Bible into English.) The new rebellion was embodied by Galileo Galilei who’s crime was to present evidence that the earth went around the sun, and not reverse (and who was put on trial by the Church in 1633).

Galileo laid out the framework for the new intellectual movements, taking root in oppressive monarchies in France and across Europe. Like Galileo, who did research based on a theory that made logical sense, the new thinking would be rooted in the values of rationality and empiricism, not blind trust and superstition. This “enlightenment” gave birth to an explosion of science that often contradicted the teachings of the Church. (“How do you reconcile the new fossil evidence with Genesis? Let’s do some research and find a truth rooted in the empirical!”) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) infused this philosophy with the binding rights and responsibilities of the autonomous individual, a radical new conceptualization of freedom.

The founders of the United States were not brutish patriots who merely wanted independence from their taxers. They were deep thinkers who studied and debated the Enlightenment tenets. Thomas Paine was involved in the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris deeply informed how the rational and empirical experiment of American democracy would be constructed. The United States of America is a child of the Enlightenment and exists because the core values of the Enlightenment have persisted for 248 years.

When I taught social theory at Portland State University, we’d often get get into a spirited discussion about the end of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment was born in coffeeshops in the 18th Century Europe, when did it end? Some students would argue for 2001, when religious extremists attacked America and a hostility to climate science was a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would counter-argue that as long as democracy and science are still widely valued, the Enlightenment is alive and well. I have since changed my mind. The Enlightenment, that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages, died on January 6th, 2021.

We knew that the Trump Administration was hostile to science. We saw it on a regular bases during Trump’s COVID briefings, with his ludicrous suggestions that the virus could be cured with sunlight or by injecting bleach. One of the world’s leading immunologists, Anthony Fauci, became a meme as he regularly face-palmed behind Trump’s “I know better than the scientists” buffoonery. And we knew that Trump was hostile to democracy. His administration was characterized by attempts to weaken voting access, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the courts, and a constant war on the free press (parallel to his Russian compatriot, Vladimir Putin). January 6th, was the culmination where he unleashed his anti-vax hordes on the Capital. Believing, despite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was “stolen,” the Trump mob tried to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and install their monarch.

In the following years, Trump has cozied up to the world’s dictators, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and made it clear that, if re-elected, he would weaponize the federal government to seek retribution against all his political enemies. I hope Mitt Romney has a safe room. Authoritarianism is six months away from America’s doorstep. Trump has joked that he would be a dictator on the first day of his presidency if he  wins. But if he loses, he’s already told his moronic anti-Enlightenment base that the election will have been stolen, and they are armed and ready to rectify the situation. Democracy’s only hope may be that Trump dies comically on the toilet this summer.

I routinely warn against the “sky is falling” prognostications. I remember thinking the Cold War tensions of 1983 would be the endpoint of the human race. (Remember Korean Air Flight 007?) We survived that and 1984. “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama,” as Taylor Swift sings. But things are different this time. My feelings may be shaped by this federally funded project I’ve been working on for the last two years. We are tasked with interrupting political violence and the chatter I’m seeing about a “second civil war” has been ramping up the closer we get to Election Day. The Trump droogs are locked and loaded and ready to wage holy war on anything they deem to be “woke” or that stands in the way of their dear leader taking control of the reins of power. They are clear that both science and democracy will be fired from Trump 2.0, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the Handmaid’s Tale agenda of the evangelicals at the Heritage Foundation who think Trump is God’s gift to embryos.

I try to talk about the Enlightenment whenever I can. It’s why America is here. It’s why we walked on the moon. It’s why we can save millions of lives with immunizations. And it’s why infertile couples can have children (except in Alabama). Trump and his minions embody the exact opposite of the values of the Age of Reason. They wanted to burn Anthony Fauci at the stake and hang Mike Pence from the gallows. If they succeed, three centuries of the triumph of rationality and empiricism will be succeeded by a new dark ages where the only value will be fealty to the sovereign, who is currently selling Bibles wrapped in an American flag. This is not dystopian fantasy. This a coming storm that could put out the light for a thousand years. But we stopped that storm 79 years ago. Can we do it again?