p until about a year ago, carrying mail for the United States Postal Service was among the most predictable ways to earn a living. My father did it for 20 years, and I worked alongside him for two of them. You show up, throw magazines and loose letters into the labeled slots at your designated mail case, and deliver the route. You come back when the truck is empty, and the next morning, you get to work filling it up again. A Sisyphean means of community service. “Every day!” echoing in a sing-songy voice on the floor by carriers with a strong sense of gallows humor: The mail never stops, and it’ll keep going long after they’re gone.

Until last year, that is, when the pandemic began to crush this American institution under the weight of its sworn duty. As frontline workers, carriers began getting sick: By September last year, roughly 8 percent of postal workers had taken time off as a result of illness or exposure, a percentage that surely increased along with cases. Considering the increase in overall mail volume thanks to the pandemic’s e-commerce boom, this resulted in overworked carriers covering unprecedented levels of empty routes. On-time delivery of presorted first class mail fell from 94 percent at the end of 2019 to 91 percent after the start of the pandemic in 2020.

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Americans “have got to know” if our last president conspired to commit treason and murder to end American democracy.

Did Donald Trump and some of the people around him conspire to have others murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House in order to hold power and conceal his crimes for another four years?

Time and evidence will eventually prove or disapprove that question, but the evidence before us right now is pretty grim.

About a week after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he fired his Secretary of Defense and replaced him with a reliable toady, Christopher Miller. He also replaced several other senior civilian officials at the Pentagon around the same time, including one who was a “protégé” of Mike Flynn.

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I’ve told you about mantras I teach undergraduates. Here’s another one: “You can’t get anything done when fascists are sitting at the table of democratic politics.” A democratic community can tolerate a vast array of opinions. However, it cannot, and should not, tolerate opinions in which democratic politics is the problem. If it does, then nothing needing to get done gets done—and everyone suffers. Kaitlin Byrd put it another way: “Democrats are the entire spectrum of rational politics in this country. We don’t have a government, and we won’t, until we break the Republican Party.”

I think Byrd’s “spectrum of rational politics” is ideal for viewing the debate over “cancel culture.” This term is gaining traction thanks to Donald Trump’s lawyers accusing the House Democrats of “canceling” the former president’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech during his second impeachment trial. And like most people aligned with Trump, or most people seeing opportunities in that alignment, they pervert reality. Truth is, the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, which Trump incited, was an attempt to cancel a free and fair democratic election. These fascists did not fight for principles. They fought against democratic politics itself. (Indeed, many of them longed for a United States purified by blood and violence.)

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