With all the talk of socialism among Democrats on the campaign trail lately, there are actually quite a few people on the right looking at how resources and capital are currently distributed in this country of ours and thinking, you know, there`s got to be a better way.

Ted Cruz announcing he`s no longer never [Donald] Trump.

To me, the biggest lesson I`ve learned up till now with two weeks to go before the election, and the thing I have to keep, sort of, taking myself back to kind of parse, is just how powerful a personality can be when it is as not worried about norms or shame as a normal person.

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career.

We should note it is not illegal for the campaign to pay [Doanld] Trump owned businesses as long as they`re charging fair market rates. And while the optics are pretty stunning, we shouldn`t be surprised. Afterall, this is the guy that told Fortune magazine in 2000 it`s very possible I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life.