[Stormlight]

Donald Trump: a man so obnoxious that karma may see him reincarnated as himself | Frankie Boyle | Opinion | The Guardian

So what do we do? I think, first of all, it’s worth noting that, under an authoritarian government, all protest will be vilified anyway. Even before Trump, people got very upset that quarterback Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand during the national anthem. You’d think that would fall under the list of White People Approved Forms of Protest, along with leaving a voicemail for your senator kindly asking them to stop shooting black people in the street. Personally, I think there’s limited value in moralising with, or fact-checking, regimes that don’t care about morals or facts. In Britain we also have an increasingly authoritarian government. We send them petitions telling them that we don’t want them reading our emails, which they presumably already know from reading our emails. We face a brief political period that, unchecked, will bring at least irreversible climate change and, at worst, nuclear war.

Morally, I think you have to look at what you can do to change your own country first, as that’s the bit you have most influence on. This is complicated in Britain as we have a government that has undergone what is known in the business world as “regulatory capture” by corporate and financial interests, and is, broadly speaking, a vassal state of the US. What can we do practically to influence our own government that would truly affect the Trump administration? Well, in a country supposedly filled with restored national pride, we could not renew Trident and refuse to be his missile base. That kind of strategic loss would damage him deeply. No amount of likes or memes or petitions can achieve this. Really, if we want to survive as a species, it’s time for organised civil disobedience. It’s time to stop writing to your MP.