 Hi, I'm Jerry Mikulski. It is just a couple days before election 2016, which will very likely be burned in our memories I just posted a one-hour version of this talk as you can see. It's pretty complicated What I'd like to do is give you the three-minute short version if you like this go find the talk So first why do people support Trump? There are a bunch of deplorables in the country. Sorry And if you're conservative, please hang in there with me I'm going to say some things that I think you'll agree with or at least you'll be able to see Most of your opinions in here, but there are some people who are in fact deep racists, xenophobes, neo-nazis, the KKK People who now have found what they're saying in the mainstream. That is not particularly good for us There's also apparently a large number of gullible people who believe that Hillary actually wants to Deactivate the Second Amendment and take away all our guns who believes that Hillary and Obama are Satan a bunch of things like that or who have bought the story that Trump is the best business man Man, the genius of spending many years doing the apprentice and celebrity apprentice that has really paid off Or that the economy is a mess. It's not a mess crime is low, etc. etc So there's a bunch of gullibles There are also a series of conservatives who are just holding their noses and voting for Donald because the Supreme Court is going to swing reproductive rights party loyalty Maybe they just can't admit any democratic progress or or wins because then they're afraid they'll be out of a job Some of these people are holding job security over national security because Trump is in fact a really dangerous critter There are some reasonable reasons to be angry and to be trying a protest vote here One is up by early Russell Hock child has been talking about this I'm on the hill trying to get up to success and people are cutting in line. That's not right Some of it is about loss of white privilege Some of it is actually about hearing someone Trump speak things out loud in the public sphere that Nobody else dares say and I will say I agree with a couple of those things. It's just that it's about one percent of the things He says um Some people think the system is broken and actually needs to be shattered on the rocks and maybe this guy who's reckless Will just be the only one who does that So there's a bunch of different reasons the the last one here is this is about my community and my identity I can't go against them So we dive into why did this happen now and partly conservatives are reaping what they sowed After the civil rights act was signed and the solid south of Dixie crats turned into republicans And everything just went haywire after gold water lost his election to lbj The republicans rethought everything and created over the years well funded this echo chamber that has fox news conservative blogs talk radio some official sounding think tanks that are actually in some cases populated with some smart humans The religious right joined in and then just recently the alt right really populated by these deplorables Uh came into the conversation as well Uh conservatives then set up a scorched earth strategy They did not want uh democrats and liberals having any victories Or in fact didn't want their people mingling with them at all and I go into the details of that All of which really want us trump as the bad the standard bearer for the conservative party which Must have made a lot of them pee in their pants Trump really understood how to hack the media. He is in fact very smart at getting attention knows how to push Just far enough that what he said was crazy And everybody will have their cameras on him for the next news cycle And not so far that the crazy gets him thrown off the campaign Which is what I was pretty sure was going to happen somewhere along the way If howard dean just had to yell once to get thrown off his campaign How could trump survive an entire thing and in fact be You know a couple days from winning the presidency So he has these incredible skills, but and he's flourished in our terribly broken media industry The thing is we're there's a force we can't really see which is that we consumerized All sectors of human activity education the food system our bodies medicine But we don't notice it and we also consumerized politics It's you know, we're choosing trump versus hillary the way you would choose cheetos Cheerios or cocoa puffs And the problem is that we've kind of shredded our old set of relationships in society And turned it all into consumer mass marketing capitalism We are now healing that and moving into a relationship economy But those effects are long lasting. They have deep hooks and they're going to take a while to fix Meanwhile, the version of capitalism we have is a carnivore And businesses are under tremendous pressure to produce exorbitant profits Which causes them to do a whole bunch of things that aren't really actually very good for communities and humans And then there's this shadow that's always looming over us, which is we really haven't dealt with the ghosts of our past Misogyny is alive and well First nations whom we pushed aside and pushed into the worst pieces of territory in the country And no wonder there's protests at Standing Rock and then slavery no wonder that black lives matter and the shooting Of of black men in particular is still up the slavery. She really hasn't been dealt with in our country The good news is we've had it worse before just in the run up to the civil war, which of course tore the country in half One two congressmen one congressman almost beat another to death on the floor of the senate But it's also, uh, it could possibly be get much worse So what do we do now? Both in the next couple days before election day and also if trump wins and if hillary wins Right now it's really really late and a lot of people are coping with unbearable pressure Their communities their colleagues their party Their everybody or else around them is is is basically saying either you're in you're in you're an idiot for voting for trump Or you're an idiot for being untrue to the party or name your reasoning um I just got to say vote for hillary listen a lot, but go vote for hillary. This is a mess if you don't um, and After the election the media really needs to figure out how they got hacked. Uh, how to survive Uh, we also need to figure out how to return to civil discourse Uh conservatives are going to see a lot of interesting repercussions. There might be a split in the party I'm not sure the gop survives as it is I'm not sure fox news survives as it is And there could be some fascism in our future. Um Or if trump wins he could defy all of our I hear my expectations and suddenly be a good guy I put that at 1% It's really likely to be bleak The supreme court would go conservative for several decades. There would might might be some big wars Uh, a whole lot of sorts of things never mind environmental catastrophe If hillary wins she will probably be governing in gridlock Obstructionism could get worse. How do we fix democracy? How do we actually make some real change? We need to rebuild trust reconnect with each other because we're facing large enough problems that we need to do them together That's the short summary. Thank you very very much. I am not a historian or a political theorist You can find the prezi at this link. This is all under creative commons. So riff Tweet and send me, uh corrections edits suggestions, even criticisms. Thanks very much