See Part 1 and Part 2

It would seem that — like a lot of Republicans — they’re just not that into you, dude.

- Even Ted Cruz's own family can't deal with him (image above)

[W]hen I hear Bernie speak, I feel like I’m the problem with America. I’m one of those millionaires he mentions who should pay more taxes. I’m the bad guy. I’m the white male who is only successful because everything was handed to me. I don’t deserve the money I made. All the things I sacrificed don’t matter. The additional stress I was under doesn’t matter. The risks I took don’t matter. According to Bernie, the world needs fewer people like me, and more people like the smart Yale student who majors in something useless, travels the world, and then graduates with $100,000 in debt that people like me should pay off via higher taxes.

- "Dear Bernie Sanders, Sorry I'm The Problem With America"

As the Trump campaign has accrued power, its treatment of the media has grown even more worrisome … If you want a picture of a future Trump presidency, imagine a reporter shouting questions into an empty void.

- What it's like to be a reporter on the Trump Trail. Spoiler alert: it sounds horrible. (h/t DM)

According to a new Deseret News/KSL poll, if Donald Trump becomes the GOP nominee, the voters of Utah would opt for a Democratic candidate for the first time in over 50 years. Poll respondents said they would support either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders over Trump, though Clinton was only two points ahead of Trump in the poll, falling within the margin of error. As many as 16 percent of respondents said they would skip the election altogether if Trump was the nominee.

- Utah: A Blue State?

An episode of the beloved American sitcom that aired almost exactly 16 years ago – on March 19, 2000 – features Donald Trump as President of the United States, presiding over a broken economy. “It was a warning to America,” one of the writers, Dan Greaney, told the Hollywood Reporter. The idea of a Trump presidency, he added, came about when the writers needed to invent a world in which “everything went as bad as it possibly could.”

- The Simpsons: our modern day Magic 8 Ball

I believe Clinton has the experience and knowledge to deliver on her promises. And her mission has always been to care for the American people. I have disagreed with Clinton's positions from time to time but, like any good leader, she listens, processes information and adjusts based on knowledge. We have a tendency in our political discourse to claim that this type of change is "flip-flopping" or "waffling," but this is simply not a fair assessment of Clinton's record. We need a president with a core set of values, but we cannot afford to have an entrenched individual who refuses to see both sides of an argument. Now, more than ever, we need a diplomat in the White House.

- Unlike the majority of Utahans, SLC Mayor Jackie Biskupski supports Hillary

Ted Cruz really isn’t the guy to make the case that Obama is not acting presidential, given that his own response to the Brussels attack has been hysteria, demagoguery, and a foul sop to anti-Muslim sentiment. As my colleague Elias Isquith writes, Cruz is talking an abhorrent abuse of government power that takes existing anti-Muslim sentiment in the country and enshrining it as official policy. He’s proposed denying American citizens their civil liberties and using the heavy hand of the state to treat them as potential criminals for no other reason than their faith. And this guy is going to give a lecture on how to act presidential? He sees a terrorist attack unfold overseas and his immediate instinct is to bomb things, violate religious freedom, and curtail civil liberties at home.

- Ted Cruz needs to calm down.

"One of the great strengths of the United States and part of the reason we have not seen more attacks on the United States: We have an extraordinary successful, patriotic, integrates Muslim-American community … any approach that would single them out or target them for discrimination is not only wrong and un-America, but it would also be counter-productive. As far as the notion of having surveillance of neighborhoods where Muslims are present, I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance. Which, by the way, the father of Senator Cruz escaped for America, the land of the free."

- Obama wonderfully shoots down Ted Cruz's horrifying plan to "secure" Muslim neighborhoods

There is an inauthenticity in appeals to anger rather than to reason, for simplified solutions rather than ones that stand a chance of working. This is true about Donald Trump, and lamentably also true about Sanders. On the question of experience, the ability to enact progressive change, and the issue of who can win the general election and the presidency, the clear and urgent choice is Hillary Clinton.

- Rolling Stone endorses Hillary for President

I didn't care about Senator Cruz one way or the other until I watched the first Republican debate. I noticed that his countenance doesn’t move the way I typically expect faces to move. Human faces can’t help but broadcast what we feel, what we may be thinking, and even what we may intend. I have rarely, if ever, seen a conventional smile from Senator Cruz. The eyes give away one’s game and help us tell forged from genuine smiles. No matter what the emotional coloring of Senator Cruz’s outward rhetoric is, his mouth typically tightens into the same straight line. If it deviates from this, then the corners of his mouth bend down, not upwards. The outside of his eyebrows bend down, too, when he emotes, something so atypical that it disturbs me. For the record I am not a Democrat. I’m at a loss to verbalize what unsettles me so when I watch the freshman senator. But it leaves me cold.

- Another reason to be creeped out by Ted Cruz: his face

Nate Silver points out that while polling from May 2015 shows a plurality of voters under 30 supporting socialism, that figure drops to a mere 15 percent among those over 65. The reason for this is not difficult to see. It reflects a difference in personal experience. Millennials either missed the Cold War entirely or were young children in its final years, with little or no conception of the triumph of liberty achieved with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They do not understand the menace that socialism – combined with power – posed to the people it enslaved and to the free nations that it threatened. The violence and brutality of the communist regimes of the past are irrelevant, just lines in the history book somewhere between the Spanish-American War and 9/11. It’s more personal for older Americans. Perhaps some of their friends or neighbors – or they themselves – arrived in this country just ahead of Soviet tanks that were rolling into their homeland. Perhaps they remember the stories of citizens of these supposed utopian socialist prison states arrested, “disappeared,” tortured, or shot simply for trying to cross a border. Perhaps they remembered cowering under their school desks during drills in case of a nuclear attack, planned in communist Russia and launched from communist Cuba. This is the context young American voters should know as they prepare to cast their vote this year – many of them for the first time. We should all be mindful of the power of words and ideologies, and how discredited ideas can flourish again as memories of their failure fade. We cannot forget the lessons of history. All of us, but especially the youngest among us who will have to live in that world for the longest, should make this election about the future by rejecting the ugly, violent legacy of socialism’s past.

- Do we even know what "socialism" means anymore?

Marxist governments trample on individual rights because Marxist theory does not care about individual rights. Marxism is a theory of class justice. The only political rights it respects are those exercised by members of the oppressed class, with different left-wing ideological strands defining those classes in economic, racial, or gender terms, or sometimes all at once. Unlike liberalism, which sees rights as a positive-sum good that can expand or contract for society as a whole, Marxists (and other left-wing critics of liberalism) think of political rights as a zero-sum conflict. Either they are exercised on behalf of oppression or against it. Any Marxist government immediately sets about snuffing out the political rights of parties or ideas deemed reactionary (a category that also inevitably expands to describe any challenge to the powers that be). Repression is woven into Marxism’s ideological fabric. The case for democratic, pluralistic, incremental, market-friendly governance rooted in empiricism – i.e., liberalism – has never been stronger than now. What an odd time to abandon a successful program for an ideology that has failed everywhere it has been tried.

- Liberalism: Yay; Marxism: Nay

In an interview with Slate, the historian of fascism Robert Paxton warns against describing Donald Trump as fascist because “it’s almost the most powerful epithet you can use.” But in this case, the shoe fits. And here is why. Like Mussolini, Trump rails against intruders (Mexicans) and enemies (Muslims), mocks those perceived as weak, encourages a violent reckoning with those his followers perceive as the enemy within (the roughing up of protesters at his rallies), flouts the rules of civil political discourse (the Megyn Kelly menstruation spat), and promises to restore the nation to its greatness not by a series of policies, but by the force of his own personality (“I will be great for” fill in the blank). To quote Paxton again, this time from his seminal “The Anatomy of Fascism”: “Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program.” This explains why Trump supporters are not bothered by his ideological malleability and policy contradictions: He was pro-choice before he was pro-life; donated to politicians while now he rails against that practice; married three times and now embraces evangelical Christianity; is the embodiment of capitalism and yet promises to crack down on free trade. In the words of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, fascism was “a beehive of contradictions.” Like Mussolini, Trump is dismissive of democratic institutions. He selfishly guards his image of a self-made outsider who will “dismantle the establishment” in the words of one of his supporters. That this includes cracking down on a free press by toughening libel laws, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 11 million people (“illegals”), stripping away citizenship of those seen as illegitimate members of the nation (children of the “illegals”), and committing war crimes in the protection of the nation (killing the families of suspected terrorists) only enhances his stature among his supporters. The discrepancy between their love of America and these brutal and undemocratic methods does not bother them one iota. To borrow from Paxton again: “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.” For Trump and his supporters, the struggle against “political correctness” in all its forms is more important than the fine print of the Constitution... [F]or a historical analogy to be useful to us, it has to advance our understanding of the present. And the Trumpism-Fascism axis (pun intended) does this in three ways: it explains the origins of Trump the demagogue; it enables us to read the Trump rally as a phenomenon in its own right; and it allows those of us who are unequivocally opposed to hate, bigotry, and intolerance, to rally around an alternative, equally historical, program: anti-fascism.

- Trump and the modern fascist movement (h/t MH for this great article)

Speaking with a CNN reporter, Terry proudly pointed to his wife as an example of immigration done "correctly." "It's not fair to her to let the illegals stay here. She does everything right. She works, she pays taxes, she votes," he said. The couple said they both planned to vote for Trump.

Paul Weber of Appleton, Iowa, describing himself as "kind of a redneck" at an October Trump rally in Waterloo, said he was tired of the so-called "new Americans" flooding the country. "The people that are coming in here from China, Indonesia and all of them countries, they're getting pregnant and coming here and having babies," Weber said, telling an Asian reporter that he meant no offense. "They get everything and the people that were born here can't get everything."

"Islam is traced patrilineally. I am a Muslim if my father is Muslim. In that sense, it is undeniable that Barack Obama was born a Muslim," Michael Rooney said at a Trump event in Worcester, Massachusetts, in November. Rooney, a respiratory therapist in his late 40s, likened Obama's Christian faith to Caitlyn Jenner's recent gender transition: "It is true that he now identifies as a Christian in the same sense that Bruce Jenner identifies as a woman." At another rally in Manassas, Virginia, on December 2, Robin Reif, 54, yelled into the crowd that the President was from Kenya. He told CNN afterward that Obama was "too much of a Muslim" and an "Islamist sympathizer." "In our Constitution, it says that the president has to be an American citizen," Reif said. "I'm still wondering where is he really from. What is this man's background?"

Rhett Benhoff, a middle-aged white man at a December Trump campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, said discrimination against whites is "absolutely" real. "I mean, it seems like we really go overboard to make sure all these other nationalities nowadays and colors have their fair shake of it, but no one's looking out for the white guy anymore," he said. At the Trump rally in Myrtle Beach, where signs that read "silent majority" dotted the crowd, Patricia Saunders told CNN that Trump is speaking directly to a segment of the population that feels left behind and marginalized. "White Americans founded this country," said Saunders, 64. "We are being pushed aside because of the President's administration and the media."

Brothers Ernie Martin and Lee Walter from Cresco, Iowa, were among a group of zealous Trump fans at the front of the line outside a Trump rally in Des Moines on December 11. They had waited more than seven hours to see the candidate in person. "Hey, hey. Ho, ho. All the Muslims have to go!" Walter, a 64-year-old retired factory worker, began to chant. "I don't want [Muslims] here," Ed Campbell said. "Who knows what they're going to bring into this country?"

Bickie Mason, a contractor from Lyman, South Carolina, who attended Trump's Spartanburg rally in November, said he felt he didn't have a choice but to agree with Trump's idea of tracking Muslim-Americans through a national database. "I don't believe all Muslims are bad. But anybody can turn bad, and you've got to be able to locate them and know where they're at," said Mason, 64.

"Islam is not a religion. It's a violent blood cult. OK?" said Hoyt Wood, a 68-year-old military veteran waiting to hear Trump speak aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. "All they know is violence, that's all they know." At the same rally, 55-year-old Susan Kemmelin said, "We can't look at a Muslim and tell if they're a terrorist or friendly."

Robert Engelkes, a 45-year-old corn and soybean farmer from Dike, Iowa, pointed out that there is historical precedent for targeting one group. "What did we do in World War II? We put all the Japanese in internment camps," said Engelkes, who was standing outside a Trump event in Des Moines. "We had to do something with them."

At a campaign rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, this month, a Muslim woman wearing a hijab stood up in silent protest as Trump spoke about the hidden presence of ISIS among Syrian refugees. As Rose Hamid was escorted out of the building, one person shouted: "You have a bomb, you have a bomb."

- "Why I'm Voting For Trump" - The only thing scarier than Donald Trump (besides maybe Ted Cruz) are these people