I know what you mean. I feel like I've been fighting this same fight (or at least been aware that it was raging all around me) since I was in high school. It is religious fundamentalism, racial bigotry, McCarthyism, the constant favoring of the "rights" and "freedoms" of the businessman over those of the modern-day serfs who toil for him, or purchase his produce, or are forced to live in his polluted and turbulent wastelands. And joining this constellation of dis-asters are the orbiting comets of nationalism, nativism, xenophobia and homophobia, and that same crushing, ever-present fog of orthodoxy, banality and conformity. They may appear to be disconnected, but I can see now they are all part of the same phenomenon; a vast Venn diagram of disfunctions that overlap in one place, with one agenda, under one banner.

Its the final flowering of a half-century of fascism, with roots that go back all the way to the founding of the Republic, and perhaps even further. It is an evil tree now finally bearing fruit. And it is watered, not with the blood of patriots, but with fear, anger, ignorance, envy, greed and hatred. There are those, like the Russians, who feed and tend this tree, who exploit it for their own commercial, political or ideological purposes. But they did not plant it. We have no one to blame but ourselves.