Like almost every other American, I can’t wait to hit this year in the back of the head with a shovel, wrap it in plastic, and bury it in the back yard. Between Ferguson, #GamerGate, and this week’s argument about whether America is or is not awesome because we become torturers the minute our safety is called into question, 2014 has been the most demoralizing year to be an American that I can recall. So many uncomfortable American truths—sexism, racism, torture—have finally been spoken aloud.

My first instinct is to be hopeful about this. Now that we’re talking about these issues and taking to the streets over them, maybe people will finally listen? Then I watch clips like the one at the top of this post, or read stories about Geraldo Rivera mocking LeBron James’s “I Can’t Breathe” shirt. Rivera wondered aloud, “what if LeBron James instead had a shirt [reading] ‘Be a better father to your son.’ ‘Raise your children.'” And this isn’t a conversation. It’s just people yelling about race in an inflammatory way.

But I could write thousands of words a day about dumb things said on Fox News. Hell, some bloggers do that for a living. The most troubling sign I’ve seen that 2015 won’t be any better than 2014 is this New York Times story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael Barbaro about the fact that no prospective 2016 presidential candidate is willing to talk about the torture report. No, not even Hillary Clinton. No, not even that most ardent defender of the Constitution, Rand Paul. Nobody has any comment. Nobody wants to talk about it, presumably because they don’t want to alienate prospective donors or get pinned to a position that might wind up on the wrong side of public opinion. When the one politician who’s willing to take a stand against torture is Marco fucking Rubio, you know you’re living in a toxic environment.

Another sign that 2015 could be a political nightmare? Russell Berman at The Atlantic reports that the new spending bill has a tiny little rider hidden in it that would “dramatically increas[e] the amount that individual donors can contribute to the various Republican and Democratic committees,” further making a mockery of campaign finance reform laws and opening the floodgates between money and political influence. Who cares if a presidential candidate doesn’t say anything of value if that presidential candidate is standing in the middle of a lavish multimedia spectacle paid for by captains of industry?

The political machine is heating up. Texas Governor Rick Perry said his first really stupid thing of the 2016 presidential cycle, announcing on MSNBC that he’s a valid presidential candidate because “running for the presidency’s not an IQ test.” Joshua Green published a blockbuster Bloomberg report this morning revealing Jeb Bush’s Romney-like investments in offshore private equity. We’re three weeks away from a new year, and things are only going to get dumber from here.