How will history remember this wild year? Which events were significant and which were distractions? POLITICO Magazine asked the smartest historians we know to put all that happened over the past 12 months in its proper historical context—by literally writing the paragraph that history books of the future will include about 2018. Here’s what they had to say:

The year of distraction
The end of American exceptionalism
When we saw the fault lines after the earthquake
The decline of America’s dominance
A Manichean year of rage and violence
The fight between authoritarianism and democracy
The year of cruelty
Liberal democracy vs. Trumpism

Speaking to host John McArdle, a man identifying himself as “Scott” said that he couldn’t suggest a solution to the shutdown because he’s in support of it.

“I don’t really have a solution,” Scott said. “But I am in support of it because I’m waiting for the second coming. We just celebrated the first coming of Jesus. But Jesus is coming back.”

“And as crazy as the government is, it’s getting us closer,” Scott continued. “Now the solution to having a bill pay for the wall, Trump can do this by going after every business in America that got a tax break if they have any ties to any sister/baby companies off of them that have hired any illegal aliens in the past.”

“I want it shutdown because I can’t wait for when Jesus comes back and gets the righteous real people and takes them to heaven. And then we have a real big mess on this Earth.”

President Donald Trump threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border if Democrats did not cave to his demands in the government shutdown.

The president tweeted out the threat, which he’s made before, Friday morning as federal employees remained unpaid and off-duty in a government funding dispute related to Trump’s proposed border wall.

But let’s turn away from politics. The essay goes on to pan “On the Basis of Sex”—a movie about gender discrimination—by complaining it didn’t give enough screen time to her husband Martin, played by Armie Hammer. Canellos uses the word “extraordinary” once in the piece, and I’ll let you guess for yourself whether it modifies a man who “enjoyed cooking and parenting,” or a woman born in the 1930s who rose to the Supreme Court.

And he can’t exactly let Ruth have that, either! “Marty shrewdly campaigned for her Supreme Court nomination at a time when others felt that, at 60, she was too old for the appointment,” he writes. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s own personal history as a barrier-breaking civil rights lawyer and 13 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, on the other hand, apparently had very little to do with her nomination.

There is also the incredible complaint that the film should have focused more on the all-male panel of 10th Circuit judges who were even open to Ginsburg’s persuasion that gender discrimination is bad. Canellos writes:

There’s a further irony to the emergence of RBG as a political icon: She would never have succeeded in rooting out some of the double standards in American law had she not argued before some fair-minded, apolitical judges. In “On the Basis of Sex,” the male professors, law-firm partners and Justice Department attorneys are all irredeemably sexist and connive to preserve their privileges; the male federal judges, however, are not and do not. Though they’re lower-court judges, they’re portrayed by character actors resembling Earl Warren and William Brennan and other Republican appointees who turned out to be attuned to social change. When, at an appeals-court hearing, Ginsburg launches into a speech about the evils of sexism, the camera pans over their thoughtfully creased faces, absorbing her words like kindly grandfathers, while oboe music reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” plays on the soundtrack. The judges are so clearly moved by Ginsburg’s arguments that her team is tearful with joy even before they issue their ruling.

“Through the investigation, it was learned Trace walked into the Dillons store and kicked a 1-year-old victim in the back, causing the child to fall on the floor,” police told the local news. They described it as a “racially motivated bias crime.”

Riff was “being held on (the) ground by citizens” when police arrived.

“We were barely in the store and [Trace] kicked him in his back,” Whitaker said about her baby. “All I heard was a loud thud and my daughter screaming.”

The man attempted to run away but another customer tackled him, she told KWCH.

Politico reports:

The President of the United States is the “worst” perpetrator of misinformation on the internet, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion David Kaye said in an interview published today.

“Governments are real offenders when it comes to disinformation,” said Kaye. “In my own country, the United States, the worst perpetrator of false information is the President of the United States.”