Trump spoke out against white supremacy today. He gave a speech calling them “repugnant” and referred to them by name – the KKK, the neo-nazis, white supremacists. Good news, but when I break it down I’m not inclined to believe it was heartfelt. Why?

Well, how much time do you have?

Let me tell you a little secret about “transgender people.” It’s a two-part term. An adjective and a noun, and I’d like to talk about both of them.

The adjective – “transgender” – can be scary and foreign to a lot of people who have never had occasion to use it in their own lives. I’m a male who was born with the traditional boy parts, I’ve never felt like I was supposed to be something else, so the idea that someone COULD feel that way is quite alien to me. Does it weird me out? Sure, sometimes. It may weird you out sometimes, too, and that’s okay.

There is also a noun. The noun is “people.” This part of the term is just as important, if not more important, than the adjective. “People,” as in human beings. Sentient entities, with consciousnesses and consciences. Emotions. Real people. Actual people. Flesh and blood. People you’ve met. People you live with. People who deserve the same basic common decency, courtesy, consideration and benefits of the doubt that you give to all other people.

Here’s the secret: the adjective in front of the noun doesn’t change any of that. Even with the adjective there, they’re still people. If I get weirded out by that adjective, that is not an excuse to treat them differently. That’s my problem to handle.

I expect people to be able to choose their own bathroom. That doesn’t change if the people are transgender.

I expect people to be able to choose their own sexual and life partners. That doesn’t change if the people are transgender.

I expect people to have the privacy of doing whatever they want in their own bedrooms, and for that privacy to be reciprocated to me. That doesn’t change if the people are transgender.

And, most germane today, I expect people who are interested in serving their country through the military to be allowed to do so. “Transgender” is an adjective, not a physical or mental barrier to military service. If it weirds someone out, then a) it is incumbent upon that person to deal with that, and b) how can we ever expect that to change if transgender people are refused access to certain institutions?

Today’s announcement from the Commander-in-Chief is yet another giant step backward for this country. It is sad, embarrassing, cruel, and frankly primitive. It is founded on a belief that the adjective matters more than the noun; that being “transgender” takes precedence over being “people.” It is an appalling decision, particularly when you consider that many transgender soldiers stopped hiding their adjectives after they were told it would be safe to do so. Now, I assume, all those people will be summarily dismissed from military service – because the Commander-in-Chief is weirded out, and too much of a thin-skinned, bigoted whiner to handle it like a man.

All right, look. I know there’s been a lot of noise about the “Russia Thing.” I know if it seemed quite obvious to you months ago that Trump was guilty, that it’s been easy to tune out new developments. “If no one’s acted up until now, why would anyone act now?” I get it. The new revelations, the steady drip-drip-drip just serve to reinforce the fear that no one will ever do anything, that we’re stuck with this, that this is the new normal.

If you’ve made the mistake of letting the emails Trump Jr. released today fade into the background noise, like I did, I strongly encourage you to rethink that decision.

This is the son of the President, at the time the son of the Republican candidate for President, actively requesting information from a foreign power for the express purpose of sabotaging the Democratic candidate. This is illegal. It doesn’t even matter whether the information was received. It doesn’t matter if Trump Jr. tries to claim he was “joking.” The solicitation itself is illegal.

This is as deep inside as you can get, short of an admission from the President himself. This is the biggest crack in the wall we’ve seen yet. And if you have a Republican representative—in either the House or Senate—I really hope you’ll call them today and tell them you’ve had enough. It is time to light a fire.

Is religion to blame for the violent acts of its practitioners? Does Islam deserve to be held to account when terrorists act on its most violent teachings, claiming a “fundamentalist” belief in them?

As an atheist who left his “angry atheist” phase awhile ago, I’ve been grappling with this question anew in the wake of the events in Manchester. I don’t want to unfairly malign any religion or its practitioners; at the same time, I refuse to just close my eyes and pretend calls to violence don’t exist. If a given practitioner of ANY religion chooses to disregard parts of a religious text because they feel those parts are too violent or don’t fit into their worldview, good for that person — but I wish more of those people would take that opportunity to then go the next step and question the underlying text itself. What good is a religious text that requires a “conscience filter” from its readers? Remember, these books, whether we’re talking about the Bible or the Quran, claim to be infallible. One mistake should call into question that claim of infallibility, and ultimately, the entire text.

As it stands, the question of whether to blame the religion feels largely academic. What does it mean to “blame the religion”? Does that mean blaming the book, or blaming the institutions that spring up around the book? The first makes sense — if a book says “kill the people who disagree with you,” that book absolutely needs to be brought to account and should not be forgiven its claims. The second, though, is where the question gets thorny. On face, certain institutions (the fundamentalist ones) are obviously to blame for the violence. But how can peace-loving institutions be held blameless, when they claim to rely on the exact same book for their beliefs?

Ultimately, my issue with “blaming a religion” is that it is too broad a blanket. Like many other labels, it hits every individual person that falls under that label, when in actuality those individuals run the gamut from the murderers of ISIS to pacifists who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It always comes back to people and their individual choices, of course — but denying that those choices can be influenced by the violent passages in a book claiming to be the infallible word of God seems, to me, naive.

Let’s take stock.

My country now has an Executive branch which lost the popular vote and is likely compromised by a foreign government – a government which is historically hostile to the United States and has a vested interest in curbing the U.S.’s global power as it attempts countless power grabs for itself. Wars which were unthinkable four months ago now loom all around us.

It has a crippled Judicial branch missing 13% of its federal judges and a dysfunctional, 8-member Supreme Court, due to a concerted effort on the part of that Executive’s political party to cripple it and keep it crippled.

And it has a gerrymandered Legislative branch under the control of the same political party, which refuses to investigate the Executive because they share a party, regardless of the unprecedented and terrifying news that is exposed day by day or the desperate efforts of the nation’s intelligence and free press communities.

In ten years, we will look back at these days in one of two ways.

We will lament the fall of modern day Rome.

Or we will celebrate the moment when we rose up as one and took power back.

We can still seize the rudder, though time is quickly running out. We can still push back, and push and push and push until the rotten tumor at the heart of our government tumbles over a cliff. We still have a hope of a future where we can say, “That was the year we woke up. That was the year we said, ‘No more.’ That was the moment – on the cusp of their victory over compassion and reason – that we stood, and we fought, and we won.” We can still realize a future where we set the childish notions of pollution and hatred behind us. Where we require our technology to be subservient to our wisdom, not the other way around. Where we begin to transform this planet into something thriving, holistic, and beautiful, a realization of humankind’s greatest and deepest potential.

But it is a mutually exclusive proposition. We are on the knife’s edge, and gravity is pulling us the other way – away from that magnificent future, and toward failure.

That failure means surrendering not only a hundred years of social policy advancement, decades of climate work, and a social expectation of safety and respect. Those things were largely products of the past that some of us had foolishly taken for granted, but losing this fight also means losing the future. It means falling into a modern dark age, where science is ridiculed, the truth is determined solely by our malevolent leadership, and “social justice” becomes a term of mockery. It means watching the world literally suffocate under the weight of its own pollution, and witnessing an apocalypse that unfolds in slow motion over the span of our lifetimes: storms that annihilate our homes and extinctions that devastate our food supply. It means starving and warring and dying, all while the men in charge shriek that it’s not real and wage war against those who dare to trust evidence, condemning, imprisoning, or killing them.

Some say our children will ask us, “Where were you? What did you do?” I say we will ask ourselves.

The dangers in play in the U.S. are replicated worldwide. This all comes back to who we are as a species. We are explorers, investigators, and creators. We have discovered unprecedented wonders of technology, but if we don’t define them, they will define us. This is the moment when we decide whether the energy we’ve discovered destroys us, or propels us forward; whether our powers of communication create a brilliant focus on truth, or suffocate us in lies.

This is not just the most vital moment of your life. It is not just the most vital moment of my nation’s existence.

It is the most critical moment for our species in modern history.

We must stand up.

We must fight.

We must win.