Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.

Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American Right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, "wild-eyed". This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

Ever since Steve Bannon was demoted, and drama started playing out between Bannon and Jared Kushner and the firing of Comey and "Is he going to get impeached?" we have been trapped in a classic Survivor reality TV show, like, "Who's going to get voted off the island?" And this has every single news show enjoying ratings never seen before. And it physically pains them to talk about the stakes of this administration, whether it's health care or climate change or the deregulation of the financial sector or social security. None of it can compete with this reality show.