(Un)popular opinion: I do think there is a legitimate conspiracy by politicians to under-report, undermine, and begin erasing climate change data. I think they intend to openly lie about the state of the environment and discredit lifesaving scientific research. I think they intend to do so so that they may pass more policy initiatives favorable to the fossil fuel industry, which lobbies for/is an investment of/is a family business for many of them, and that this dependence on fossil fuel is the justification for foreign wars which allow us to promote American interests and post-Imperalism overseas.

I think that Trump's avowed position on withdrawing from the global stage is a good idea for American interests. I do not think a state of total war is helpful or a good idea, and I think our role with NATO is virtually that of world police, or military might, and I think that this is wasteful and totally irrelevant to American interests at home and abroad.

However, I think it would be a sorry mistake and a rookie move to abandon our allies. Global politics are not that simple. I also think that complete isolationism is impossible in the globalized world we live in. I think that going back on our promises to other nations and directing policy from within a vacuum is not only asinine but self-destructive. America's wealth and world power status is, I'm sorry, because we are the opposite of an isolationist country. Our wealth has been built on the profits of war, on the backs of third-world labor, and the late-ripened gains of exploiting post-colonial states Europe could no longer maintain as it settled into a constant state of fighting with itself- and, as Europe did so, we are now the babysitters of its former puppets by proxy (whose infrastructure Europe destroyed prior to our arrival). We are, in a sense, the garbage men of the world, cleaning up Europe's messes.

I don't think this serves American interests. I think doing this is the opposite of what America stands for. I don't think the United States needs NATO as much as NATO needs the United States. I don't think we need Europe nearly as much as we think we do. Europe is dead, fam.

However, the glorified memory of a "Great America" prosperous of its own accord never existed. Those boom times of the 40s and 50s, with industry thriving? Government subsidies. War is good for business. At one point in California, when the automobile industry and the fast food industry were kicking off, one third of all take-home industry money was from government. Also, the idyllic stability and traditional values of that Great Era of the 50s? We basically had a full-blown propaganda machine in place. "If you see something, say something," was on the posters, remember? People were literally tried in court over suspicions of "Communist sympathies," and you were encouraged to turn in your friends. Is that really so idyllic? Is that really such a beautiful era we would wish to see again?

End of the day, two sub-points about "Great America": Awkward, but thriving industry was because of the war machine and military-industrial contracts. So sorry, but the government paid for that. And the tight control on media and free speech was no extraneous effort- that was pivotal. "Great America" was great because, in a time of total war, you can't have controversy- you need to convince people that continuing to work for a semi-religious or ideological national identity was a fundamentally spiritually fulfilling and worthwhile cause. And it worked. People bought it. But do you see the point?

All of that "prosperity" was because of war. It was because of a Nanny State on Steroids compared to anything we know today. And it's not going to happen now.

I agree with isolationist stances- I think America has its own problems, and we need to fix them, and we're being held back by Europe- but I think that, were we to withdraw from the global stage, our "empire" which has made us would collapse. We could not and would not maintain our standing as world superpower, as we would be abandoning all the things on which our wealth was built. We can pretend that we don't rely on this world order, but we do. We can pretend that 90% of your clothes aren't made in sweatshops, but they are. We can pretend that we got this rich "all by ourselves and we don't need anyone" but we did this on the backs of exploited nations, and we did this through decades of complex diplomatic negotiating with European powers, and, we can pretend we don't need the influence and interests of NATO to stand on the world stage, but they are the hand inside our military puppet, and they indirectly benefit from all of our war and have made us this huge empire we now so proudly claim. We can pretend that we could stand on the world stage without them- but that is a web you can't unweave. We could pretend we don't need them for that, but we do.

Yet, we need them *to stand on the world stage.* If we were to really withdraw and become more isolationist? I think that's, honestly, essential, and morally mandated. We have outdated and decrepit infrastructure at home, and we need to focus on improving the lives of our citizens- not bombing other countries in never-ending wars.

But here's the catch-22: when we built up that infrastructure, we did it with government money. When we built the roads, invested in schools, bulked up universities, subsidized industry, *we did it with government money.* And we were able to do it because of war.

You see? You can't lower taxes and fix infrastructure. You can't promise an economic boom without a booming customer- the war machine- our customer was the rest of the world. If we were to build up American industry, it will most likely be sustainable, not hyper-profitable. I think sustainable is good. But that's not what you've been promised. You just can't get quite what you were promised without government investment, and I'm not sure if we can get surplus without war. We do not live in isolated times. And cutting off our existing and well-forged trade and diplomatic allies is probably the worst idea if we want to create any kind of new American-made economy.

Anyway, to the actual point of everything: incredibly alarming factor- none of this matters if we do not invest in sustainable energy initiatives, NOW. Like, YESTERDAY. Like, by midnight, at the latest, guys. We really need to do this. Because without sustainable energy initiatives- no economic plan or ideological fever dreams of American grandeur are going to be sustainable come thirty years down the line. And honestly, you know who's going to suffer the effects of that first and most severely? Not us. The third-world countries we've exploited. The other parts of the world. So no, I don't think we *get* to just withdraw into isolationism while the smog of our excesses kills them and we harp patriotism as the world burns. We didn't earn this. They didn't earn this. We all kind of made this big, huge mess together- speaking of both climate change and world politics. So I get that the pathos approach to climate change is so overdone it induces eye-rolls, but look at the economic and political ramifications if we don't. There is no sustainable prosperity without adaption. And adapting to climate change and, perhaps [idea: using our revolutionary new technologies like the internet to create new kinds of energy and infrastructure which perhaps can create a more self-reinforcing economy and one which does not *hint, hint: oil* rely on total war,] this should be our governing priority and principle for foreign policy on every level. That does involve a degree of working together, like, sounds crazy, but NOT backing out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to reduce global carbon emissions?! That's a thing we SHOULD be doing, and that's the opposite of worthless.

So end of the day, a big part of me wants the isolationism you claim to hearken, Mr. Trump. Yet, because I'm a thinking citizen and because I also absolutely despise you as a human being, I fear that *gasp* you have only promised these things as half-baked solution plans of your own conspiracy theories, and I think they are nothing more. Conspiracy theory has been, arguably, your only consistent policy stance, and it's a damn good one, but it's like... an abstraction, you know? I love conspiracy theories too, and they are definitely real and running things and also lowkey responsible for most of history (as you will learn entirely above-board in any university-level history class [Yes, that war was funded by Haliburton. And yes, that is the Dole Pineapple Rebellion, as in the Dole fruit empire, no that is not a coincidence. And yes, this is your actual textbook about OPEC and the Rothschilds, not some weird Youtube video. And yes, the government admitted to assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr.]). So conspiracy theories are great, Mr. Trump, and I love them too.

But let me tell you something I learned the year I dropped out of college, Mr. Trump. I was deep into conspiracy-world that year. I was couchsurfing and doing some weird real-life imitation of a cross between an indie documentary and a Darren Aronofsky film, and I did Occupy Wall Street, and I hated the 1%, and I found out 9/11 was an inside job, and I read about the NSA on Tor nine months before it was published on mainstream news, and nobody believed me. But there's this thing with conspiracy theories- they're like rabbit holes. And once you fall in, everything around you looks upside down. And it's not that you're wrong- things are quite as disturbingly wrong as you believe they are, but you brain also starts to play tricks on you. You see conspiracy theories play on a, sort of, flaw in our programming in which we over-generalize globalized assumptions about specific events- and once it feels like a "conspiracy," it never stops-even when you're presented with contradictory proof.

The proof is just part of the conspiracy. And I've learned over time, and I truly believe, that the conspiracy-theory mindset is a recipe for error. It's true that most things are not as they appear- but that's not because of a "conspiracy," unless the conspiracy is a synchronicity of events you did not see before, and now do. That's not the meaning of the word conspiracy, and that's where we make our error. A conspiracy is, by definition, and most definitely in our minds, directed by a "They." There is always an Other conducting the conspiracies. Some unknown organization, sketchy government, or foreign source. And "They" are all. Out. To. Get. You.

That's where our brains trick us. The most boring and most useful piece of advice I got from an old history professor (and huge conspiracy theorist), was this: "Never account to conspiracy what can simply be accounted to human error." That's a much less Netflix-worthy take on world events- that we all, collectively, are only little beings seeing a small part of the big picture and doing what makes sense to us at the time, and that none of us, not even the CEO of BP Oil or Goldman Sachs or Mr. Rothschild or Lucifer himself, is the single embodiment of the forces of evil, as no known human network is capable of intentionally maliciously acting unilaterally on every level of society so as to further some kind of esoteric agenda. I get the appeal of the simplicity of that outlook, but if we want to be intelligent and realistic- humans are just not that organized. We suck, at everything, large-scale. We struggle very much at working together. Just look at history for proof after proof of our timeless ineptitude.

So I'm not saying conspiracies don't exist (I would never say that), but I am saying that the conspiracy mindset is a trap, and I learned that firsthand. You get paranoid. Every entity is soon the "They." And then, before you know it, you're living your whole life in fear of an Other- you dropped out of school, you try summoning aliens via astral projection, you create a website convinced the government's running secret internment camps, you maintain a Truther Twitter account and accidentally run for President- some of these were you, some of them were me, I think we both know who was who, sir. The point is, I soon learned you can't live that way. Because when you're constantly afraid of the conspiracy and of forces at work against you- you yourself become enslaved to that perpetual fear. You become militant and you alienate every new piece of information. You are so adamant against the conspiracy, that you begin to conspire. You use encrypted chatrooms to talk to your friends. You compulsively use VPN proxy servers just to check your email. You become so afraid of conspiracy, that you begin to act like a conspirator.

I know I'm gonna sound like a Shillary fraud when I say this, but I think that's what's happening to you, Mr. Trump, and, moreso, to the GOP in general. I think you, Mr, Trump, are, ironically, the most innocent of the bunch. I truly think you're just a rich old man who's fantastic at celebrity and disturbingly prejudiced at a level we don't want to admit our creepy uncles are since we'd never envision them in positions of power or transparency, but I do think, though you're embarrassingly selfish and somewhat disconnected from reality, you are more like the weapon being militarized than the commander itself. You are a clickbait-generating algorithm with Search Engine Optimization of all its content made manifest as a blinking light which both thrills and offends, a cringeworthy funhouse mirror into the distorted psyche, a caricature of the American mind. And I think that's genuinely all you are. And I think other people see how useful you can be to them and their *see my opening paragraph* conspiratorial cause, and I think they are using the leverage of your rhetoric to implement an open conspiracy amplified as "counter-conspiracy." I think erasing climate change data is a straight-up, broad-daylight conspiracy. I think it's very, very real. And the consequences will be, shall we say, "huge."