 Two days before the election of 2016, which I think will be burned in our memories forever, I published a video. You'll see it on the right. If you hit escape in the Prezi, you can actually play it. It's titled, Why Trump, Why Now, What Next? And I used this Prezi, which I've sort of copied here to do it. Since the election, I've done a little bit of thinking and I'd like to go through this Prezi in segments to try to explain what the hell happened and where we are. So I was in, I was as surprised as most liberals and in a great deal of shock about what happened, although a little voice had been whispering, Brexit, Brexit in the back of my head. Still, it was just pretty incredible to watch the whole thing unravel. And so on Wednesday, the day after the election, I did a whole bunch of post-election introspection and I dug, dug, dug. I started looking for people who had gotten this right, who had the best explanations for what had happened. Michael Moore in July had published a piece, five reasons why Trump is going to win, reason number one, he's going to take the rust belt and bing, things like that. So I'd like to offer a perspective and my apologies that this is a little complex because there's a lot of angles to it. And because it's complex and I'm going to touch a lot of things, I will commit more than my share of generalizations. But my goal is to open a window of possibility, a window of possibility for left-leaning or independent people for what to do right now, also a window of possibility for Donald Trump and those around him. I'm doing this out of deep concern for what's happening. In fact, some of my family are pretty conservative and I haven't been in touch with them because of these kinds of issues. And as you'll see, as I explain all this, it would be nice to be back in touch. There's a reason to do that. So as I go into this particular explanation, I'm going to try hard to navigate the shoals between overreacting to what's happening and preventing the possible disasters. I mean, there is an easy-to-see path to climate disaster as all the things that seem to be being done right now which probably aren't enough as they are, get reversed. There is a path here where we could see World War III, where the nuclear buttons are within reach of Donald Trump, whose behavior is completely erratic. Who knows what's going to happen. The danger here is also that by opening some sort of positive vision on this, that we normalize racism, misogyny, the lack of truth, all the different things that we've suddenly seen all over the place during this election cycle. But in the hope of doing some good and causing some positive change, I'm going to try to do this. And just to give you a taste of what's in the rest of these videos, here's a bit of a list of my ahas. And these are sort of them up blunt and naked, so you're not getting much nuance here. But clearly there was a lot of sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, etc. But those aren't the whole story. They aren't, for me, even the main story. If you think that, if you think that those are the main story and the only story that will blind you to fixing this problem, in fact that will make you sort of frozen in the road. I think you'll see what I mean. Trump's abusive strategy was intentional. He did this completely on purpose. In fact, he hijacked everybody. He hijacked not only the media, he hijacked the Republican Party, the GOP, he hijacked liberals. I'll explain how he did that. Hillary was the wrong candidate. Plenty of people were saying that, certainly all the Bernie followers, but there's a variety of reasons why Hillary was clearly the wrong candidate to run against Trump. That is linked quite tightly with the fact that Democrats forgot the white working class. And they're not commonly abbreviated WWC, but they are. And this notion is really important that the Rust Belt, in fact, was probably one of the levers. And there's plenty of reasons why this election didn't go for Hillary as she won the popular vote. There was pressure in the polls. The Voting Rights Act was repealed. And therefore, a lot of states took measures to reduce the number of polls. Plenty of things happened. But if you step back and look around and you look at some of the patterns of what happened, really the white working class was the swing here. And there's evidence of deep, deep anger in the U.S. as a result of this. You only have to think about how many constituencies Trump pissed off and how deeply he pissed them off down to their roots and then realized that he won the electoral college vote. So there's some deep anger. We've missed things in the U.S. And my perspective on this is that consumerism broke community and democracy. And I went into that in my previous video and I'll go into that more in this series. As a result, we have a very plastic moment. It is a dreadful frightening moment. But it's a plastic moment. It's a moment of actually remarkable change. And there is a small glimmer, in particular if he starts to consider his legacy 100 years down the road, that Trump might actually change. And even if he doesn't change, there is an opportunity for all of us to lead the change. So if you stick with me and go through the rest of these, you will see what's up. So I am not an historian or a political theorist. You can find the Prezi I used to record this video at this link. I'll also put it in the description of the video on YouTube and in Facebook. If you're in the Prezi, at any moment, you can hit escape and go explore and play the videos that I put in. Please suggest improvements. My Twitter handle is below. This is under Creative Commons Attribution License. And all the things I'm mentioning here are also in my online brain. I publish a concept map. Go look at jerrysbrain.com. Thanks very much.