The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

That's unfortunately common - to blame immigrants, to blame the African-Americans who are being helped by federal programs, to blame anyone available, to direct attention away from the roots of the distress which you're suffering. This combines with xenophobia, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, and other quite unpleasant phenomena which are far from being eradicated. All of this makes for a pretty dangerous brew. But economic issues are right in the center of it. And you can see this in the fact that so many former Obama voters now voted for Trump, or just didn't bother voting.

There is a principle of human affairs that goes back millennia, which is that you don't look in the mirror. You can trace this principle back to the Bible. The designated intellectuals of that time are called prophets, which is a mistranslation of a Hebrew word, but they were basically intellectuals, giving geopolitical analysis, criticizing the moral practice of leadership, etc. Now, these people were not treated very nicely. There were other intellectuals who were treated nicely, namely those who centuries later came to be called false prophets. These were the flatterers of the court.

Anatomically modern humans are found up to 200,000 years ago; behaviourally modern humans appear very recently in evolutionary time, as far as evidence now exists, perhaps within a window of 50-100,000 years ago, a flick of an eye in evolutionary time.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.