It's great to be on the winning side & able to breathe a little easy for a change, but we need to think about why the last 4 years happened (& are unfortunately still happening here in UK) & what we can do to protect our democracies against destruction by hate, lies & corruption.

It is hard to grasp how anyone with a shred of decency could vote for Trump, yet 70 million did, despite his manifest cruelty, hatefulness, incompetence & inadequacy. They can't all be hateful people - I refuse to believe that - so what is the explanation?

The tech that dominates our lives has moved faster than our ability to control it. It has distorted our perceptions of reality - "ours" as well as "theirs". Through our lens, "they" may seem despicable, but through "their" lens, we may seem to threaten all they hold dear.

Our distorted media landscape - specifically the malign and sinister Murdoch empire - exploit and magnify our divisions to manipulate us for their own ends.

Our failure to regulate the financing of political activities and campaigns distorts our political discourses and priorities. Without any effective scrutiny, shadowy figures like the Koch brothers and untraceable foreign disrupters are able to dictate the agenda.

So how do we fight back? CNN showed the way this week, with their aggressive assertion of the primacy of objective truth and their refusal to have any more truck with Trump's lies. Others should follow suit, especially our cowed and cowardly @BBCNews

We need to break up the Murdoch empire. We need to regulate our tech companies. We need to hold our journalists and news agencies to account for their ethical standards, lending our support to those committed to reporting the objective truth & sanctioning those spreading lies.

And we need to strengthen, and protect our education systems - our schools and universities, our teachers, educators and academics - & support them in teaching our citizens and the citizens of tomorrow to think critically, to seek objectivity & to value truth & decency always.