Opinion

If you're headed home for Thanksgiving or en route to a family dinner, chances are the 2016 election is going to come up. The story was too big and the shock too great for it not to be a topic of conversation. Odds are great that you also might have one or more of those relatives who wants to shove it in your face that Donald Trump is the new president-elect.

California is now the capital of liberal America. Along with its neighbors Oregon and Washington, it will be a nation within the nation starting in January when the federal government goes dark.

Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the presidency has put racism at the heart of American politics. From the very start of his campaign, Trump called Mexicans “criminals” and “rapists” while pledging to build a wall between the US and its southern neighbour. He shocked the world by promising to ban Muslim visitors from the US, and is now reportedly considering a “Muslim registration system”. He dismissed the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement and refused to disavow the support he received from white supremacists.

As a vindictive sociopath prepares to move into the White House, it's perhaps important to consider ways to protect your private communications and information about your whereabouts, especially around demonstrations and direct action protests. As a citizen of a country with the largest and most invasive surveillance apparatus in the world, you should think about how you use your mobile device, as it is capable of being used to monitor your most intimate communications and browsing habits.

After one of the most divisive presidential elections in American history, many of us may be anxious about dinner-table dialogue with family and friends this Thanksgiving. There is no denying that the way we communicate about politics has fundamentally changed with the proliferation of technology and social media. Twitter bots, fake news and echo chambers are just a few of the highlights from this election season. Much of how we’re conversing online can’t – and shouldn’t – be replicated around the family table. We are getting out of practice at conducting meaningful, respectful conversation.

President-elect Donald Trump is right: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a damaging deal and deserves to be killed off.

We are a divided nation; that is an understatement. What’s more, we increasingly hear we are living in our own “bubble” or echo chamber that differing views cannot penetrate. To correct the problem, many are calling for people to reach out, to talk and above all, to listen. That is all well and good, but what are we supposed to talk about? We can’t hope to listen without a topic for finding common ground.

In February of 1801, President John Adams faced much the same dilemma that Barack Obama faces now. Under the Federalist regimes of Adams and his predecessor, George Washington, the United States had made a great deal of progress in certain areas. The young nation had established the supremacy of the Federal courts over those of the states, reformed a defunct financial system, rebuilt the US military, and, perhaps most impressively, managed to remain neutral in the wars of the French Revolution that, under the ascendant tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte, were quickly spreading across Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Yet despite these accomplishments, the election of 1800 saw Adams and his party swept out of office by massive margins in favor of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who promised an end to Federal control over finance, strengthening of states’ rights, and a pro-France foreign policy that threatened to engulf the still-fragile young Republic in an emergent world war.

Mike Pence went to see "Hamilton" on Friday night, and because he is a horrible monster who has relentlessly dehumanized and opposed the rights of LGBTQ people and women, and will be the vice president in an administration that ran on a campaign of racial bigotry and misogyny, an administration that is now filling out with anti-Semites, racists, homophobes and Islamophobes, people booed him. The audience chose a completely reasonable and incredibly mild way to show displeasure with someone who has dedicated his political career to systematically disenfranchising millions of people.

It has been one of the longest weeks in human history and the Trump presidency has not even begun yet. Any notion that reasonable, well-intentioned people should give him a chance—hey, maybe he was just kidding about all that hateful, bigoted stuff he spewed on the campaign trail—was immediately dispelled. One of his first official acts was to name Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic mastermind of the racist, “alt-right,” fake-news website Breitbart, to chief propagandist and horse’s ass whisperer. The president-elect dodged the media, regained control of his Twitter account and proceeded to confirm all of our worst fears about him.

Here’s the First 100 Days resistance agenda [with thanks to Alan Webber]:

In the winter of 1987, Pat Nixon was watching real estate developer Donald Trump on the Phil Donahue program. Trump had been invited on the daytime interview show not only to promote his book The Art of the Deal, but to discuss his thoughts on how to solve the problems that were ailing America. The former first lady was so impressed with Trump’s performance that her husband, former President Richard Nixon dashed off a quick missive to the multi-millionaire. In his comments, Nixon said that based on the enthusiastic observations of his wife, the 38th President of the United States believed Trump had a great career in front of him not only in business, but in politics as well. “Whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Nixon wrote.