We’re living in an alternate reality. There’s no way that the United States is what it’s become in a matter of weeks, is there? President Cheeto Mussolini, an #alternativename for our dearly beloved Donald Trump, has been bringing the hammer down with an abnormally high amount of executive orders that have brought America to our highest level of civil hostility since perhaps the Civil War.

The truth of the matter is that this alternate reality is becoming true reality. Quickly. And, if our fearful leader gets his way, the Environmental Protection Agency gag order is just the first government agency domino to fall in a potential long line of closed mouths throughout the country. Forget Fox News—the WWE of the news realm, Breitbart, the alt-right media group that has been described as White Nationalist, is becoming the most dangerous far-far-right “news” source to flow into the stream of American consciousness.

As future members of the media, or what is to be left of it in Trump’s America, the staff has been examining the recent acts of our president under a worrisome lens of censorship and misinformation.

Plenty has already been said about the multitude of what some call surprisingly fulfilled promises so early on (insert joke about a politician actually following through with his promises here). There is no need to stoop to the Trumpian level of referring to matters and happenings of the world as good or bad. We realize that we are in a horrifying state of worry and dystopia, and bad is hardly the proper adjective to describe affairs.

This is not the time for political debates. It is a basic understanding of right and wrong to realize that we cannot let evil win. While we are a small college newspaper nestled in the middle of the Great Plains, we do have the responsibility to speak for what’s right. And what’s happening now is not.

What exactly can we do to help make things right? There is no quantifiable way to measure how much right you do in the world—it can be something more significant, like standing for hours in protests for something you stand strongly for. For others, donating to causes that are fighting for basic rights is an option. It can be as simple as speaking with peers, creating dialogue about concerns we have and what can be done to resist the unfathomable reality being forced upon us.

However we can, we must stand now more than ever. Nobody on the earth has witnessed a world as chaotic as it has become. But we still have hope. We still can resist.

Mason Schweizer for The Wayne Stater