There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we are. It’s a narrative we’ve spent a lifetime compiling.

In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the comforting fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her (as are immigrant populations in the US). They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America's and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

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This sucks.

There’s no way around it.

Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena.

But from a human perspective, this is where we should be today as a movement and a people. This is where we have to be if we’re going to prevail as a civilized society, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the ever-deepening moral cesspool across the aisle that has grieved and infuriated us.

We cannot allow power to become the end by which all means are defensible, and Platner’s campaign, had it proceeded, was in danger of beginning our collective slide into the abyss. We could easily have started down the steep and greased path toward becoming a people who choose the immediate intoxication of a political victory over the far more difficult and costly long game of staying human.

As a growing list of troubling revelations about Platner surfaced in recent months, a concerning number of people on the Left began to do exactly what we’ve spent a decade lamenting about the Right: minimize the severity, engage in whataboutism, move the goalposts, and talk about the importance of “the win” over everything else.

We know where that all leads, the way that cancer moves through the bloodstream, how ambition devours people from the inside, how it paves the road to a deeper excavation into the depths of inhumanity. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched in disbelief as tens of millions of our family members, friends, and neighbors have abandoned every alleged conviction and denied every professed value in order to engineer the ascension of a useful monster. They’ve shelved their morals, denied their religion, and imprisoned their better angels to secure a presidency. They’ve gained a world of SCOTUS seats and legislative carte blanche and lost their collective souls, and we’ve rightly condemned it.

On the Left, there’s a sickening deva vu, as we’ve seen this movie before: a promising political candidate or sitting lawmaker voluntarily withdrawing or succumbing to public pressure to do so—all while the other side makes concessions, holds their noses, and banks more political victories.

That cannot be who we become, no matter how we want to justify it, no matter how much good we aspire to do with the political capital we’re chasing, regardless of the story we tell ourselves of our lofty aspirations.

We can’t say that we believe women up until the point at which believing women becomes politically costly.

We can’t loudly crusade against a voting bloc for covering for a serial predator and then bear with the sexual sins of candidates who can lead us to the promised land of Congressional control.

We can’t claim or hold moral high ground over the Right if we find ourselves ignoring the red flags, dismissing lawlessness, or turning a blind eye to brutality as they have become so comfortable doing.

And while we don’t want to fall into a purity politics that sets an impossible standard for the people we choose to represent us, we can and should have dealbreakers, red lines that we simply refuse to cross because if we don’t, we will become exactly like the people we’re trying to dislodge from power right now.

Given his past, Graham Platner should never have chosen to run in the first place, and there were disgraceful failures in the vetting process that should have disqualified him before his campaign ever began. Those are matters for another time

But today is a good day to remind ourselves that these moments always feel like losses, but in the most important ways, they aren’t.

As the Democrats scramble to choose his replacement and try to salvage a victory in Maine, progressives, liberals, and moderates who are crestfallen today need to remember that in the loftier spaces that transcend politics, this is still a win.

Choosing not to align with indecency always is.

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Hatred is a slow poison.

Once it finds its way into the bloodstream, it gradually begins destroying a human being from the inside out. It does its work almost imperceptibly, driving out critical thinking, eradicating empathy, and hardening the heart.

Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that has rendered them shells of the people they were before. We all have the stories of the people we’ve lost and the moments we realized they’d been polluted.

A couple of years ago, my family and I walked into an older relative’s house unannounced. They’d been expecting us that day from out of town, but we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than we’d planned, so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing Fox News.

When one of them came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us, our relative walked hurriedly over to the sink, grabbed the remote, and turned off the TV, looking like a teenager caught watching porn by their parents.

Suddenly, everything made sense.

All the dots connected.

Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed this couple changing. They’d become more and more outspoken on things like immigration and women’s reproductive rights and police shootings, surprising us with the intolerance and cruelty of off-the-cuff comments that seemed out of character for them. We questioned whether we were just being overly sensitive or projecting our fears onto them.

But after the surprise peek into their viewing habits, it was clear: they were merely following the script. They’d been pulled into the false story. The indoctrination had begun. The poison had taken hold.

Now, we could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist talking points in their words at family gatherings and on social media: open borders letting in floods of dark-skinned rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims bringing our demise, Transgender perverts lurking in public restrooms, and violent black men threatening police at traffic stops.

Their growing tolerance for cruelty suddenly made sense.

Their social media feeds became increasingly littered with fictional horror stories about vaccine dangers, LGBTQ people converting their children, space lasers, and immigrants eating pets: the kind of garbage they’d have easily spotted and rejected before.

The moral alteration in an unthinkable expanse of people who call this place home has been stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths, and the worst part is that we can’t reach them in the ways reasonable human beings can be reached. Before Fox News, Franklin Graham, and MAGA propaganda, we could meet the people around us on the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus, our respect for the Constitution, the clarity of objective truth, or shared compassion for vulnerable people. Now, they no longer have use or tolerance for such things.

The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ counter-cultural, counterintuitive manifesto of humility, gentleness, and love, has been replaced by venomous, incendiary Sean Hannity supremacist propaganda and Laura Ingraham white fear porn.

The barrier-breaking, table-expanding hospitality of Christ has morphed into sneering Trump rally rant rhetoric about violent illegals and foreign predators, and callous “build that wall” refrains.

These people used to know better. They were good-hearted, generous human beings who aspired to love their neighbors. They flatly rejected bigotry and defended vulnerable communities. They were people I could count on for rational, level-headed decency. They once instantly recognized men like Donald Trump as the antithesis of Jesus.

But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally deluded, equally terrified people, until one day they are the hateful extremists that they always used to warn you about.

Those of us who’ve lost people we love to this curated pestilence should file a class-action suit against Fox News and Rupert Murdoch for thirty years of malpractice and murder: for the relationships they’ve destroyed, the deaths they’ve been complicit in, the betrayal of the public trust, and for purposefully killing the goodness in human beings who will never be who they might have been otherwise.

We’ll never know exactly how our nation or the people around us would be different had this venom never been allowed into our systems, but it would have been a hell of a lot more compassionate, loving, and equitable. It would be a whole lot closer to anything resembling greatness—or better yet, goodness.

It’s infuriating to know that right now, in nursing home common rooms, in car repair waiting rooms, on kitchen countertop TVs, and in the palms of their hands, they are being unrelentingly eaten alive, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it and rescue them.

I still love my relatives, my former church members, my high school friends, and my neighbors, but I grieve what has happened to them. I lament the poisoning of their once-soft hearts, the way Jesus has been all but squeezed out of their religion. I fear that they’ll never fully recover from the corrosive narrative that has been continually injected into their brains about the world and about disparate people and about the expansive, lavish, audacious love Jesus calls us to extend.

I only hope these moms and ministers and nurses and schoolteachers and football coaches and favorite relatives get a truer story or meet someone who wakes them up, or that they rediscover Jesus enough that they change the channel, turn off the TV, escape this hateful cult, and find the truth that truly sets them free:

Donald Trump is filth.

Hatred is a waste.

Empathy is the antidote.The world is bigger than America.We are our brother’s keeper.Kindness is the better path.If they’re going to join a cult, I wish it were that kind.

In the comments, share your stories of the ways Fox News poisoned someone you love, fractured your relationships, or polluted our Republic.

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The steady stream of vitriol I receive from professed Christians who identify as MAGA is understandable.

As they fire off threatening texts, furiously tap out expletive-laden emails, and break into violent, performative histrionics on social media, I genuinely feel for them. They’re often getting some really bad news that blows up the story they’ve spent a long time telling themselves and depend on to validate and justify the way they treat other people and the planet.

They’re coming face to face with the sobering reality that they are antithetical to Jesus. Worse than that, they aren’t hearing that news from me; they’re hearing it from Jesus.

Few things confound and infuriate Conservative Christians quite like the simple, clear, unadorned words of Jesus as documented in the Bible they so loudly and frequently claim to love, believe in, and live by, but seemingly never read. It’s almost miraculous.

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Matthew 5:9

When you’re part of an antagonistic movement built almost exclusively on a self-righteous battle posture: on a theology and politics that require an enemy, an adversary, an encroaching danger, a culture war foe to be defeated—the idea of being a peacemaker really pisses you off. MAGAs don’t like peace. They refuse to coexist with it. They cannot abide it. It’s not a compatible idea.

Jesus said: Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Matthew 25:45

The poor, the outcast, the hurting, the hungry, the homeless, the lonely. Jesus said he literally inhabits the most vulnerable among us, and that the way we treat them is the way we treat Jesus himself. That’s gotta be a really disturbing reality when you spend so much of your time denying people healthcare and cutting social programs and assaulting voting rights and legislatively attacking people for their sexuality or their nation of origin or their pigmentation. The news that, according to Jesus, you devote a great deal of your life treating him like garbage tends not to be received too well.

Jesus said: For God so loved the world... John 3:16

The world. God loves the world. That includes the planet, the climate around it, the resources within it, the disparate humanity, and the expansive life upon it. No America First. No “Go back where you came from” nationalistic bluster. No, “Don’t Tread on Me” middle-finger defiance. If you love the world as God does, you fight for diversity, you welcome immigrants and foreigners, you demand environmental responsibility, you want more people to have a voice, not fewer. When America becomes your world, you’re opposing Jesus.

Jesus said: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Matthew 26:52

That’s the part of the oft-quoted story that gun-loving Christians never want to read: the part where Jesus reprimands his disciple who uses a weapon to defend him, reminding him and those listening that his people will not be a people of retributive violence, that they will be those who shun force and turn the other cheek and resist harming others and de-escalate conflict. That is a really hard truth for the NRA, God and Guns, Come and Take It crowd, who really want Jesus to be cool with their instigating, posturing bloodlust—and who have to hear straight from Jesus that he isn’t.

‘Jesus said: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:37-39

Loving your neighbor. Jesus says unequivocally that this is the priority and the point, and the way we show our love for God: the way we treat other human beings. When Conservative Christians realize that this includes their Muslim neighbor, their transgender neighbor, their Jewish neighbor, their Liberal neighbor, their uninsured neighbor, their undocumented neighbor, their black neighbor—they usually don’t react very well. When you aren’t able or willing to practically or tangibly extend love to such a vast portion of your neighbors in any meaningful way, that is a difficult theological pill to swallow.

Honestly, I feel sorry for people who want to be both Christian and MAGA, who think they can be devoted to Jesus and to Donald Trump simultaneously, who labor under the false assumption that their bastardized, territorial, self-centered white nationalist GOP version of Christianity is remotely of God.

And I know that the actual words of Jesus are the most triggering of any they could be faced with, and so the venom these generate isn’t surprising, and neither is their scalding rage toward those of us who regularly share those words with them.

I’m not saying this Republican theocracy built on power, exclusion, and subjugation that white Evangelicals are tethered to is anti-Jesus; Jesus is saying that.

MAGA Christians really don’t take that well. It makes them want to shoot the messenger.

That’s been going on for two thousand years.

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Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why.

I think it’s having to sit through the pretending.

You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity.

It’s rightly heartbreaking to see those we love so seduced by power, addled by racism, and deluded by tribalism that they’ve declared war on immigrants and vaccines and gay kids and the electoral process.

And yes, it’s infuriating witnessing tens of millions of Americans having their minds slowly poisoned by Fox News to the point they defend a domestic act of terror at the Capitol or take the side of a murderous regime’s genocide or celebrate their neighbors being thrown into concentration camps.

As wearying as all that is, it’s so much worse having them invoke love of God and country in the process.

That’s what makes these days so difficult for so many of us: not merely coming to terms with the beliefs and prejudices and phobias of those we are daily surrounded by here, but having to contend with their constant projection about us and their refusal to simply own who they are. It’s the nonstop, hypocritical, farcical performance art.

Good people are so tired of traitors masquerading as patriots, of the treasonous continually waving the flag, of hateful people peddling a God of love.They’re tired of human beings with no empathy pretending they care about the sanctity of life, of the loudest prophets of America First having the least regard for so many Americans, of the self-righteous sermonizers defending a serial predator.

Where are the selflessness, generosity, and hospitality that were supposed to mark the lovers of God and country?Where are the lives that replicate the embrace of the poor, huddled masses affixed to the foundation of Liberty?Where are those who emulate the love of disparate neighbors at the heart of the Gospels?

Patriot. Christian. American.

These words have all lost their meaning: words that used to cost something to claim, labels that once came with even a modicum of transformation, and self-identifiers that had previously required a measure of evidence displayed in one’s life.

The flag and the cross that used to hold such meaning to so many of us are now just stolen iconography wielded by the immigrant-hating wall-builders and the violent anti-abortion zealots.

Using these words and wearing these symbols has become more and more difficult for us, as they now align us with the very antithesis of our moral convictions and guiding principles.

People who truly love this country, those who earnestly seek a faith expressed in love, human beings who are burdened to make America worthy of the speeches and anthems—we find ourselves branded heretics and traitors and apostates, forcefully displaced from religion and country by these angry squatters who have taken up residence in them.

True patriots should want all Americans to vote, they should oppose would-be dictators, they should yield to the Constitution, and they should demand a nation that is offered to everyone equally.

Actual followers of Jesus should defend the vulnerable, they should give comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, welcome to the immigrant, and love to the least among us.

And while the masqueraders and pretenders parade around in grand performative acts of love of God and country while willfully betraying both—the rest of us are going to have to fight to hold on to our nation and our religion, and to care for a world that needs desperately authentic people of faith, morality, and conscience who simply live a love that doesn’t need to declare itself loving.

As far as patriotism and faith go, this nation needs the real thing again.How are you experiencing, wrestling with, and expressing patriotism or faith right now?

Are you feeling the exhaustion I talk about here?Let me know in the comments.

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I am a lifelong aspiring straight LGBTQ ally.

For the past few decades, I’ve worked to be a good listener, to be willing to have my blind spots revealed, to be open to changing a deeply held assumption, to be willing to reckon with my profound privilege. My journey over this time has placed me in the path of millions of beautiful human beings who’ve shaped my understanding of sexuality up close and from a distance: scholars, pastors, physicians, activists, artists, family members, friends, and strangers.

What these disparate teachers have collectively helped open my eyes to is the vast expanse of sexual identity and expression; of the limitless ways in which human beings find their sense of self and their place in the world; how they experience safety, companionship, love, and pleasure.

Yet, as much as I work to be a responsible ally to the LGBTQ+ community, I am fully aware that I will never be a member of that community. By virtue of my identity and orientation, I am forever operating with limited information. As well-intentioned as my words might be on matters of equality and justice for my LGBTQ+ friends, I will never be speaking for anyone other than myself, which is where I begin today.On the last day of Pride Month, author Matthew Vines published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he declares his identity as a gay man, as opposed to a queer man. Further, he alleges that the “queer” label and those who embrace it have contributed to decreasing support for the gay community, especially among Conservatives.

Vines states in his piece that he believes the word queer “carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not,” as it has come to embody a broader, more politically engaged progressive activism; that it displays a confrontational posture that is essentially putting straight people off and rewinding the progress of the gay community. This feels somewhat shortsighted.

Vines is a former Evangelical and author of the incredibly important book God and the Gay Christian, which eloquently made the Biblical case for same-sex relationships. It was a game-changer that helped foster vitally important conversations within the Church. As an LGBTQ-affirming pastor, when it arrived, it was invaluable in giving me a place to meet people in my churches for substantive conversations about sexuality. This all makes Matthew’s words in the Times concerning. He knows the Bible, and he knows the Christians who wield it like a hammer, and for some reason, he seems to be overestimating them.

Over the last two days, I’ve been poring over comment sections, watching videos, and reading nuanced essays that reflect the diversity of the LGBTQ+ experience regarding the word queer. Some were raised in a time when it was a dehumanizing slur, and as a result, will always carry negative connotations and always be triggering. Others claim both gay and queer, depending on the context, choosing to speak to their individual experience and their members as part of a collective. Still others have come to embrace queer as a massive umbrella, embodying the sweeping scope of sexual identity and expression. Many others use queer to embody not just identity and orientation, but the vast intersectionality of all vulnerable, oppressed, historically marginalized communities. None of these perspectives is more right than any other, but each comes with costs.

In the comment section of my friend, Pastor Brandan Robertson, a gay man wrote: Gay men don’t identify as queer. You need to respect that. We have nothing in common with nonbinary or trans people. It is insulting to have decades of fighting for gay rights coopted by communities that have nothing to do with being gay. Gay rights are not fringe rights.

This is precisely the worrisome sentiment I find in Vine’s opinion piece: the idea that liberation ever happens in a vacuum.

The truth is, gay men do have something in common with nonbinary and trans people and queer people (and every non-conforming human being): the Republican Evangelical Right despises them and wants to take away their fundamental freedoms simply because of their identity and orientation, just as much as it wants to take them from the noisier, messier queer people.This violent Christian Nationalist movement in America will not allow any non-cisgender-heterosexual expression, and Matthew seems to be in denial about that. Right now, this christo-fascist GOP regime is loudly targeting the transgender community because that is the easiest way to rally their phobic base. Articles like Matthew's seem to be throwing nonbinary and trans people under the bus, believing they are somehow preventing the acceptance of him in the minds of people that will never come.As someone who aspires to be a responsible ally, I respect every human being's personal perspective on these words and how they impact their own experience, Matthew Vines’ included. I completely respect his position regarding his own life and the way he wishes to exist in the world. I would never question that for him or anyone. We are all the authorities over our own humanity. I would never ask him to embrace queerness as a label any more than I would ask him to embrace heterosexuality.

Yet, I do feel that his words about the queer community seem to be born out of the misplaced feeling that he can somehow evade the Right's disdain and their punitive violence by distancing himself from supposedly "less palatable" expressions of sexuality, but that seems myopic to me. As a white gay man, Vines may feel he is distinct from a black trans woman (and of course he is), but to the hateful Evangelicals steering us into theocracy, there is no difference whatsoever.To these phobic zealots, trans people are nonbinary people, are gay people, are nonconforming people, are lesbian people, are bisexual people. Further, they are immigrant people and black people and poor people and women. It seems as though Matthew is choosing to lean away from the collective liberation of all marginalized people in the hopes of finding safety in the sexual and political expression of least resistance.

To all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, your voices here truly matter. How do you feel about Matthew’s Op-Ed, my reaction to it, or the label of queer? I would greatly appreciate your perspective. Thank you!

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(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault)

Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.

This is not speculation.

It is not conjecture.

It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.

This is documented, established fact.

It was unequivocally declared by a judge.

It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.

He is a rapist.

And to any decent human being, that would have been a deal-breaker.

It wasn’t for them.

Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.

For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.

For them, it proved not to be.

Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.

For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil.

For them, it hasn’t been.

For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.

Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.

Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.

For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.

Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.

They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.

They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.

And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.

When time and justice catch up to him, when his cancerous regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.

One day soon, they will deny their affiliations, try to gaslight us into thinking we didn’t see what we saw, and plead ignorance of what has always been clear. We must never let them forget.

He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.

Donald Trump is a rapist.

He will always be a rapist.

His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.

They cannot be excused for that.

They cannot be forgiven for that.

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Supergirl opened this weekend to disastrous box office numbers, but its fate was sealed long before that, and it has very little to do with the quality of the film or the performance of its cast.

The second offering in the James Gunn-curated DCU didn’t burn up on its entry into theaters. It was killed by a thousand Kryptonite darts in the weeks and months preceding, by an increasingly crowded YouTube/TikTok/IG landscape of monetized fandom that, as in every other facet of media, now runs on vitriol and negativity. Supergirl became its latest and perhaps most predictable target.

The film’s lead, House of Dragons alum Milly Alcock, was dogged from the moment her casting was announced, with a disturbing amount of venom hurled at her physical appearance (something that has reached a disgraceful zenith since the film’s release). Add to that a female screenwriter in Ana Nogueira (along with the rabid disdain for Gunn’s supposed “woke agenda” from aspiring alpha male online gatekeepers), and from the beginning, the Manosphere was simply not going to allow it to succeed.

A fierce torrent of dudebro think pieces, panel conversations, and supposed scoops flooded social media, each one working to one-up the others with sky-is-falling histrionics, Yellow-Sun-hot takes, and click-garnering thumbnails. More than any superhero movie since the first Captain Marvel film, have performative fragile males worked so hard to poison public sentiment before a second of footage was released.

Alcock especially has been hounded by criticism over her physicality and her perceived lack of enthusiasm on the press circuit (Serious, “Maybe you should smile more” vibes). YouTube accounts such as Nerdrotic Daily and Geeks + Gamers, whose stable of mortally insecure, insufferable incels have been among those most ruthlessly attacking the actress in an effort to grow their already massive viewership among other easily-lured young men weaned on Conservative sexism and toxic masculinity.

And, then, of course, there are the legions of perpetually lathered-up, zealous Zach Snyder fanboys who have been sitting vigil for the last couple of decades, and who want so desperately for the DCU to fail so that they can once again work themselves into a public frenzy to restore their beloved auteur to the lofty place they believe he alone deserves.

But it isn’t easily intimidated conservative men only, as plenty of female content creators gleefully joined in the incessant crepe-hanging over the last few months, proving that it isn’t just the guys who are capable of manufacturing misogyny or being driven to corrosivity by declining revenue streams and oversaturated online spaces. To curry the favor of their largely male audiences, many women in these spaces have face-shamed Alcock with juvenile AI-generated caricatures.

And let’s be clear: art’s interpretation is subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with criticisms grounded in substance, or admonishments about straying from the source material ( as happened here), but that’s not what this is, as evidenced by the giddy celebrations of the film’s financial failure among the men largely filling these spaces.

Supergirl is a flawed yet well-crafted comic book movie. Alcock, especially, does wonderful work embodying the titular character and deserves to get further chances to bring Kara Zor-El to audiences. While it by no means reaches the stratospheric heights of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, or the Russo Brothers’ Infinity War, it sure as heck isn’t Morbius, Black Adam, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, either.

The sad truth is that even in comic book spaces that should be more evolved than other media landscapes, women actors, writers, artists, and directors still have to do three times the work to get a fraction of the credit, and in an exponentially expanding virtual landscape where the lowest common denominator is courted and women are targeted, we’re going to continue to see these stories play out.

Supergirl is a perfect example of how toxic content creators have ruined the experience of anticipating and seeing a comic book movie, spewing out a steady stream of negativity, speculation, rumor-mongering, and doom forecasting.

By constantly needing to compete in the oversaturated market, they build their brands on grievance, creating ever-more incendiary content and engendering so much hatred toward a film before it’s even out that it doesn’t have a chance to be received on its merits.

Combine that with the reality that 90 percent of these creators are dudes or women trying to draw their gaze, and a female-led superhero movie faces impossible scrutiny.Supergirl didn’t fall, at least not completely.

She simply burned up in the Manosphere.

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When the law fails the people, where do they go?

When the highest court in a nation is compromised to the point that it disregards the law and becomes predatory toward its citizenry, what recourse does that citizenry have?

What happens when the most powerful minority in a country weaponizes the very systems designed to protect its most vulnerable?

America is about to find out.

Despite his and his party’s relentless efforts, Donald Trump could not quite successfully manage a bloodless or bloody coup in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election, but it turns out they didn’t need to. They’d already done mortal damage to the Republic from the inside.

Over the last two decades, through a perfect storm of Republican opposition, Democratic Party malpractice, a prolonged political imbalance in Congress, and the untimely death of a Justice, Trump and his party have commandeered the Supreme Court and are rapidly rewinding the clock of human and civil rights here to a place that would have been unthinkable to many, just a decade ago.

With only a few months before the most pivotal midterm elections in our lifetimes, the reproductive rights of women, the fates of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and naturalized citizens, environmental protections, the marriages and freedoms of LGBTQ people, and the viability of elections are all near or at the precipice. The velocity and scale of the losses are beyond what most people’s minds can fathom.

Every day people ask me what we can do to stop the coming flood of fascism, and far wiser human beings than myself struggle with answers, especially if November doesn’t manage to catalyze the majority into the voting booth in numbers that we haven’t seen before. If the theocracy being built right now is solidified in Congress later this year, we will be in uncharted territory that none of us can predict or imagine. It may require personal sacrifices, legal consequences, and relational schisms that our nation hasn’t had to face since the Civil War.

So what are we who are here and grieving all this, supposed to do with our grief and our outrage over what this nation is and what we fear it could become? The answer is: everything we can.

People of faith, morality, and conscience each need to take stock of what we value here, of the freedoms we still do have, of the people and causes we care about, of the kind of place we don’t want it to become—and live boldly, fully, and passionately in light of all of it.

We also need to make our presence felt by these treasonous, compromised Justices who have chosen to abandon the law, abdicate their responsibility, disregard the common good, and do the bidding of a traitorous, felonious wannabe dictator. Within the limits of what is lawful, we should never allow these people to have a moment’s peace in public. Short of anything illegal or violent, they should become pariahs in the places decent, patriotic Americans gather, and their shame should be preserved by all of us and by the history books.

November is not yet here, which means there is still time to write a better story if we are willing to spend ourselves on behalf of that story; to stay in the small and the close and to embody the America we believe is worth fighting for and the nation we dream of living in.

If we recognize our interdependence, disparate Americans need to move together despite our relatively small differences, to push back an existential threat to all of us. In the face of a Supreme Court that no longer operates in the interest of the law or the people, and of a political party whose collective soul has long been sold, the rest of us need to do our best to dissent. We need to embrace what is within our hands: our relationships, our work, our resources, our energy, our economic influence, our shared voice, our shared vote—and to leverage those things in the cause of life, liberty, and happiness as best we can and hope that these things are enough.

And if they prove not to be, we’ll need to wake up on that unimaginable day and keep fighting.

Humanity is worth it.

The planet is worth it.

And the America that still could be is worth it, too.

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F*ck the fireworks and flip the flags.

For actual patriotic Americans, this July 4th isn’t a party; it’s a funeral.

There is nothing to celebrate here.

We shouldn’t be singing right now; we should be grieving.We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see.We should be mourning over how little independence has trickled down to the people in the streets.We should be lamenting how commonplace hatred has become in this supposed “sweet land of Liberty.”

Most of all, we should be mortified that no matter how it happened, Democracy has all but died on our watch here.

For these reasons, we are the United States of Embarrassment.

As our nation nears the quarter millennium mark, we have collectively failed those who came before by allowing the ascension of the very fascism millions of our forebears courageously fought, bled, and died driving back into the sewers of history.

The moral cancer they defeated on the other side of the planet, we have allowed to make a home here.

Mass abductions by government-deputized goons are not relegated to some ancient, jittery black-and-white newsreels from half a world away; they unfold in live-streamed phone videos from the streets of this alleged land of the free, showing masked, traitorous cowards draped in the colors they aren’t worthy of wearing.

Death camps are not the crumbled carcasses of a foreign failure of humanity that serve as memorial sites, cautionary tales for decent people; they are the newly christened pride and joy of monstrous men and women who have the stratospheric gall to costume themselves in the flag that actual courageous lovers of this nation wore as they expired on our behalf.

The grim propaganda military parades of unrepentant sociopathic dictators aren’t trapped in the amber blocks of discolored textbook photos; they are real-time travesties disgracing our National Mall.

And all of it: the breathtaking brutality against our most vulnerable, the unthinkable Constitutional assaults, the collective moral collapse of an entire party, and the disregard for the laws of the land, is packaged in a facade of patriotism that would be laughable were it not a deadly, sinful, vomit-inducing farce.

This is the paradox that decent Americans find themselves in.

Our essential liberties have never been more at risk, our electoral process never more assailed, our national sovereignty never more tenuous, our elemental freedoms never more in doubt. And yet, the patriotic fervor by this felonious, soulless narcissist, his twisted cadre of cosplaying Christian ghouls, and their allegiance-pledging, flag-waving surrogates has never been greater.

This is by design.

Weaponized patriotism is an intoxicant for easily manipulated people whose identities are shaped by those they hate, the neighbors and strangers they’ve been convinced are threats to be eradicated and dangers to be sent away.

With enough star-spangled rhetoric, rockets’ red glare spectacle, and red, white, and blue dog-and-pony distractions, you can make such people believe that they are winning, even while they are being led down the parade route and straight into the slaughterhouse.

And so this year, the anthems will play, the flags will wave, the bottle rockets will ascend, the M-80s will go off, and Fascism will quietly enter through the side door while everyone is distracted by the spectacle. Everyone, except for those of us who still remember what the hell this beautiful experiment was reaching for to begin with.

This is why these songs of freedom will indeed ring hollow this July 4th, because those of us who love this country realize how far we are from incarnating the glory of the songs we will be unable to sing.

We will be grieving, not because this country deserves better than this party and the amoral monster gorging himself on our citizenry, but because right now it does deserve them; because we wish it to be something far greater than their ceremonial patriotism, ornamental religion, and phony pro-life zeal they wear when it benefits them.

We see what a farce this all is: watching a joyless, mindless death cult led by rapists, racists, and career criminals making a mockery of an America whose diversity, plurality, and liberty they despise and are actively eliminating.

So yes, we’ll be loving our country fiercely this July 4th and beyond by not letting it remain what it currently is and by opposing the fraudulence of their performative love of country.

We will be working and protesting and loving and building and caring and voting and pushing it to become a place deserving of the festivities and the fireworks.

When freedom rings for all of us, then we’ll sing, and then we’ll celebrate.

Until then, we will grieve the death of what might have been.

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