By Sara Karlovitch

The news hasn’t exactly been uplifting lately. Newspapers tell the story of a divided America plagued by scandal, racial conflict and radical politics. I know I feel a tiny twinge of panic every time my phone buzzes with a Washington Post news alert.

Reading about the worsening state of our world makes me want to curl up in a ball under my bed, and I know I’m not alone.

After a long news day, sometimes you just need a break. You need a place where you can read things that aren’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes the cute baby sloth videos just don’t cut it; you need true escapism.

You need hillarybeattrump.org.

On hillarybeattrump.org, “The Majority Rules,” and i’s true liberal news crack. It’s Breitbart for the left. It’s the America millions of college students wished they lived in.

The site sports fantastic headlines like, “Historic First: Male senators listen to female colleague in polite silence,” “Trump vehemently denies mental illness, explaining: ‘I’m on tons of cocaine’” and “Law enforcement declares March ‘racial introspection month.’”

The site also has made up liberal celebrity news like, “Clinton signs executive order: Amy Poehler and Tina Fey to host ‘everything.’”

Need a little foreign policy pick-me-up? Check out the article, “Clinton slams Theresa May over UK’S immigration policy: ‘Bitch, please.’”

Also featured on hillarybeattrump.org is Ted Cruz admitting to several high profile murders, for example, “Cruz: ‘I framed O.J.’”

In the world of hillarybeattrump.org, J.K. Rowling has a Pulitzer prize, Clinton’s approval ratings are at 79 percent, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a best selling hip-hop artist and Ivanka is searching for her “real dad.”

The site is the brainchild of a 30-year-old writer living on the East Coast. During a Washington Post interview, her identity was kept hidden out of fear of becoming a target for alt-right abuse.    

She made it perfectly clear that no one was trying to convince anyone her “news” was real. Her site, by the name alone, lets the reader know that hillarybeattrump.org is purely for fun, a break from the constant flow of bad news we’ve been receiving every day.The true genius in hillarybeattrump.org, though, comes from the response it elicited from right wing sites such as Breitbart, which called it “The Ultimate Safe Space.” It has been accused at coddling liberals, playing into their “fantasies.” The founder of the site has managed to make Trump supporters angry in the best possible way, by turning fake news and political fantasies against them. 

And is hillarybeattrump.org escapism? Of course. It’s a site where you can go and click around for a while to take a break from the craziness of the real world. It’s a picture of a better world, a world where we get along with one another and work toward equality.

The site serves as a reminder of what could have been, what America missed out on. It’s escapism, sure. But it’s also a reminder of the world we dreamed we would create leading up to Nov. 8. Though it serves as a reminder of what we lost, it’s also a reminder to keep working, to persist in this crazy, turbulent world.

Though Hillary did not beat Trump, the world we want is still within reach, we just need to keep working.

Featured Photo Credit: Courtesy of WikiCommons.

Sara Karlovitch is a freshman journalism and government and politics major and can be reached at skarlovi@terpmail.umd.edu.