Some words by Oliver Kornetzke

Click here for an article on Blogspot by Oliver Kornetzke. 

It begins: 

I come from a small, rural town in Wisconsin—the kind of place where the high school mascot is sacred, the churches outnumber the stoplights, and the local diner still offers political commentary with your scrambled eggs, all filtered through a Reagan-era lens of rugged individualism and bootstrap theology. It’s a town that raised me, yes—but also one I outgrew, not out of arrogance, but out of an insatiable curiosity that was simply not compatible with fences and familiar last names.

My childhood was an oddity in that place. While most of my peers stayed anchored in the gravitational pull of local norms and traditions, my parents handed me a passport and pointed outward. Road trips across the US turned into train rides through Eastern Europe. I was the kid who collected fossils and insects instead of baseball cards, who could name capitals but not quarterbacks. Later, I moved abroad. I pursued higher education. I immersed myself in history, science, philosophy, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, trying to understand not just the world, but why people move through it the way they do.

And then, like some tragic protagonist in a novel about the perils of nostalgia, I came back.

If distance grants perspective, then returning to the town of my youth was less like coming home and more like stepping into a diorama. The streets hadn’t changed, but I had. What once seemed wholesome now felt performative. The patriotism wasn’t pride—it was ritual. The friendliness wasn’t openness—it was surveillance. And beneath it all ran a silent, suffocating current of fear: fear of change, fear of the other, fear of being left behind.

On August 18, Oliver wrote this, accompanied by a headshot of Trump's bloated face:

Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul -- all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been -- arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul -- it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader. 

You've got to admit: The man has a way with words.