How to be heroic in the time of Trump

“Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: “the power of facing unpleasant facts”). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..” (Christopher Hitchens)

the back story, which Orwell tells in his "Homage of Catalonia," is that he, a confirmed socialist, went to Spain to fight Franco and the fascists. But, unlike many deluded socialists in the West, he was willing to see that the Soviets present in Spain were actually fascistic in their own way, even as they sought to eliminate socialists there. This experience was to be the basis of Orwell's book Animal Farm. But his publisher in London refused to publish it because he still thought the Soviet Union was utopia. When it finally came out after WW II, two years after it could have been published, it sold 800k copies in England and went on to be an international bestseller.

I think down deep, most of us would like the truth instead of being lied to all the time by the media and political parties. We cannot allow ideology or party affiliation, of whatever stripe, to get in the way of searching out and finding the truth, no matter who it implicates.