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Today is Tuesday, October 21, 2025 and the Republican Party continues to be completely fucked. Smiles, everyone! Smiles!

Because they had no plan other than, “Fuck you, Democrats!”, Republicans walked into a funding fight with no real exit strategy. For some insane reason, they believed they had the stronger message. They really did not. “We love firing government employees, fucking over blue states, and refusing to give tens of millions of people back their healthcare!” is the Cybertruck of political messaging minus the exploding battery.

Oh wait, we’ve reached the exploding battery part:

Three weeks into shutdown gridlock, some Senate Republicans are expressing openness to a controversial solution: nuking the filibuster.

“I know that’s being discussed,” Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “I am a strong supporter of the filibuster, but obviously I’ll look at any plan that anyone puts out in order to reopen the government.”

Senate Republican leadership is not into this idea, but an increasingly vocal and growing number of Republicans are pushing for it.

What’s happening here? A few things. The massive No Kings rally on Saturday has the GOP rattled. They were assured it was going to flop or be violent or no one would notice. Instead, over 7 million people showed up and the entire world saw a peaceful protest…against Trump and his entire party.

That’s 2 million more than showed up in June and getting awfully close to that critical 3.5%. That would be the historic threshold where 3.5% of the population engages in protest/civil disobedience and governments fall.

At the same time, Republicans are running out of track for the Trump Train. This week and next, millions of Americans are going to get letters from their insurance companies. These letters will explain how much more expensive their premiums are going to be without the ACA subsidies that are expiring. Social media will be flooded with enraged Americans who will demand those subsidies back, and even more Americans pointing the finger at the party refusing to renew them.

Hint: It’s Republicans. Republicans are refusing to renew them.

The easy way out would be just to restore the ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding. Republicans will still get 90% of their cruel budget passed and take the big W for fucking the country. But they can’t DO that because compromise is weakness and fascism will never compromise blablabla.

Remember, the regime’s illusion of total power has to be maintained at all times because without it, everything falls apart.

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But why won’t Republicans flex their muscle and do away with the filibuster? They’re all about power and abusing it, right? Well, as I keep pointing out, Republicans are not convinced that Donald Trump can seal the deal on his authoritarian takeover:

Removing the filibuster has long made Republican senators queasy. While all senators acknowledge it would be easier to pass bills with a 51-vote threshold versus needing 60 votes to move legislation, Republicans are well aware Democrats would use a simple-majority for bills if they retake the majority.

“Bad idea,” Thune told reporters of getting rid of the filibuster as he walked into his office Monday evening.

…

Speaker Mike Johnson has been more careful, arguing in a press conference earlier this month that he would be “deeply concerned” if Democrats used a diminished 51-vote threshold to turn the U.S. “into a communist country.”

I cannot stress this enough: This is not what a fascist regime convinced it is winning acts like. Vladimir Putin does not give a flying fuck about what the opposition party will do “if they win” the next election. Viktor Orban doesn’t give a shit if the rules would give the opposition party the chance to remake the country. Xi Jinping doesn’t lose a moment of sleep wondering if he’s making a mistake by setting up a system that will allow his successor to move China in a way he wouldn’t like.

But Republicans are extremely concerned about this.

Again, the filibuster is the only thing keeping their party from extinction. A new Voting Rights Act alone would be a death sentence. The day the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court announce they’re taking the new law under review, Democrats would announce that they’re expanding the Court by 5 seats and, gee, are you SURE you want to review that law, Chief Justice John Roberts?

So, yes, Republicans are acutely aware the filibuster is all that stands between them and oblivion in a single election cycle. If they really thought they would never have to face another real election, they wouldn’t give a shit. They would just nuke it and pass whatever budget they want. They would outlaw abortion nationwide. They would make contraception illegal. They would criminalize homosexuality and transgender people. They would make it illegal to speak any language except English. It wouldn’t matter that the public would despise them because who cares? Elections don’t matter anymore!

But they clearly do matter and Republicans are very much convinced they will not be in power much longer. As badly as they want to load that gun and pull the trigger, they know THEY KNOW, deep in their shriveled little hearts, that soon it will not be THEIR finger on the trigger. And while they’re a long way from being able to pass laws to fully cement their power, Democrats can easily pass just two or three to cement theirs.

That’s what happens when you turn your party into a minority party cesspit of white nationalism and fascism that can only win by rigging elections and gerrymandering. If elections become free and fair, really free and fair, you lose everything. That is what Mike Johnson and John Thune fear above all else and why they’ll resist nuking the filibuster. The end of the filibuster is the end of the Republican Party.

The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump doesn’t give the tiniest of shits about the GOP. He wants what HE wants and who cares what the consequences are later? That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

Or, Senate Republicans could finally negotiate and end the shutdown like adults, which would preserve their party and let them take the brunt of the blame instead of their beloved master in the White House. They may even come out with a bump in popularity for working to preserve healthcare for millions of their own voters. Weird to think Republicans actually doing something to help their base…

But all of this is in the future. Hopefully, the not-too-distant future as the shutdown is set to begin its fourth week on Wednesday. A lot of people are hurting, the fallout from the shutdown is spreading and impacting the economy in increasingly damaging ways, and with the economy already collapsing, this can easily push it into a freefall.

Republicans keep talking about how this is going to go on until Thanksgiving or after, but that’s a bluff and/or a desperate bid to keep the House from reopening so they can’t vote to release the Epstein Files. But in reality, time is almost up for the GOP. The question now is what will they do to avoid the doom of their own design speeding towards them at high speed? Watch this space.

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Fascism hates organized protests. Over 7 million of us showed up, and the fascists are afraid. They fear US. Keep the fascists afraid by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun. There are 13 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

That’s how much it’s taking to power the composition of this column. The LLM – Large Language Model – being used is in my own head. I think I’m safe in saying that no amount of Artificial Intelligence – AI – could write what I’m going to write sitting here at this very instant.

Let’s take the above paragraph for example. I used the word “composition” in the first sentence. I could have said construction or the writing of, or I could have gone way out there and used the word creation. I could have said writing this column rather than sitting here writing at this very instant.

But then I would have lost the little scene-setting that’s in what I wrote, describing myself as sitting and putting you in the action with at this very instant.

Those were choices I made that comprise what you’d call my style, I guess. I don’t think of myself as having a “style” of writing, but people have told me that I write conversationally, so I guess I’ll take that, because when I sit down to write, I think of it as talking to another person. That the other person happens to be a reader is what makes writing what it is: the transmission of ideas by arranging letters into words and sentences and putting them down on paper or, these days, on the screen of a cellphone or computer. It’s the same thing, in the end. Writing uses language to convey information, description, emotions, anger, delight, confusion – you name it, writing does it.

See that word “language” in there? I was curious about why artificial intelligence was described as coming from, or amounting to, or even being a “large language model” until I realized that it is really just a system that has gathered information in the form of language and organized it in such a way that it can be regurgitated as the second word in AI, intelligence.

It’s not intelligence, however. It’s other people’s words repositioned from the documents and information channels they were derived from into a new form that derives from an algorithm that uses previously gathered information produced by a person or a set of persons to get to a desired output or outcome. Looked at another way, it’s a fancy search engine that doesn’t just take you to source documents where information resides, but “scrapes,” an AI word that perfectly describes the process, information from those sources and puts it together for you. In other words, it’s a second step in search, in that it arranges information as well as presents it.

I’ll give you a good example: One of the big AI systems, ChatGTP or OpenAI, could have probably produced some version of what I have written in this column so far, but it couldn’t have come up with the idea for this column.

I spend most of the hours of every day doing that part of the job – coming up with the subject of the column I’m going to write. I don’t even really think about what goes into that process, but I do know what doesn’t. I don’t write what I think people will want to read, because I don’t know the answer to that question.

Which raises a possibility: If I asked an AI system in the middle of the afternoon, about the time I usually come up with the idea for my column, to write a column for me, what would it do? From what I know of AI, it would scrape my previous columns for patterns of subjects, probably coming up with “politics” or something similar. Then it would scrape my Substack data to see what went over best in previous columns by measuring numbers of views, and comments, and replies to comments. To the extent that AI could, I think it would put a number value on comments to measure what was popular and what wasn’t. Then AI might have enough data to produce a subject for a column and write it.

But I can guarantee this: No AI system would have put a headline on a column on the subject of artificial intelligence using the words “grilled cheese sandwich.”

The truly extraordinary difference between ChatGTP and yours truly is in the fact that the AI companies I’ve already mentioned, along with Meta and Amazon, are currently in the process of building facilities around the country so they can do some version of what I have just described. Have a look at what it is taking OpenAI to build just one portion of what they are calling its flagship Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas. They have leveled 1,200 acres of land on which the complex will sit when it’s finished. There will be eight buildings, each holding 72 racks of servers containing a total of 60,000 Nvidia GB 200 chips. The eight buildings, when they’re finished, will consume about a gigawatt of electricity. That is more electricity than is consumed by the city of El Paso, with a population of about 680,000 people. The Abilene AI data center will be powered by five – that’s right, five – new gas-fired power plants that will be built all around Abilene and will use natural gas that comes from fracking wells in the Texas Permian oil basin.

That’s just one of the OpenAI Stargate projects. They will be building two more similar facilities in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and another in a Midwest location that hasn’t been announced. OpenAI President Sam Altman announced last month that the entire Stargate project will cost $500 billion and will consume 10 gigawatts of power. That’s enough to power New York City – the entire city of 8 million people that sprawls over 475 square miles. The thinktank RAND estimates that AI data center demand will be around 70 gigawatts of electricity by 2027, and 327 gigawatts by 2030.

As you can imagine, new demands on the electrical grid by AI data centers are sending electricity costs ever upward. Nationally, electric utility prices are up six percent. Prices near AI data centers have increased 15 percent. A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as a city of 100,000 residents. Even Donald Trump’s Department of Energy estimates that by 2028, AI data centers will consume 12 percent of the electrical power generated in this country. This at a time when Trump is closing every renewable energy project that has been touched by federal funding, including wind, solar, and geothermal.

There are things artificial intelligence can do way, way better than human beings. AI systems can crunch through zillions of numbers to solve problems even computers can’t solve, like looking for variations in genes that cause cancer, tracking them down to single genes in single types of cells. All of it can be done much faster than such problems have ever been solved.

But while we’re marveling at the genius of AI, we should remember that NASA built the rockets and landers and everything that got us to the moon using slide rules that were held in human hands, and measuring tapes were used in constructing it all. The calculations necessary to build the St. Louis Arch from both bases at once and have the arch meet in the middle within a tiny fraction of a millimeter in the air hundreds of feet above the ground were done with slide rules. Thomas Pynchon wrote “Gravity’s Rainbow” on a typewriter. James Joyce wrote “Ulysses” in longhand on large sheets of paper because of his failing eyesight. Neither wrote their masterpieces in buildings that covered a thousand acres of ground and used enough electricity to power an entire city.

Tracy just brought me my nightly cup of coffee made with an electric coffee maker, and I boil the water for my iced tea with an electric kettle, and we use a gas stove to cook our grilled cheese sandwiches, and a refrigerator kept the cheese cold, and I’m writing this on a computer that is plugged into an electrical outlet in the wall. So, power from the electrical grid was used in the production of this column.

Google just told me that there are 100 trillion synapses in a human brain. That’s a piece of information that I didn’t find using my trillion, because it wasn’t there. But now it is in my brain…at least temporarily…and it’s written down in this column. Later tonight, you’ll be able to Google my byline and Substack, and you’ll find a link to this column, so the information about the human synapses is up there in a data cloud somewhere, and from the descriptions I read about the way AI works, it will be “scraped” and added to the banks of Nvidia chips in Abilene or in Meta’s new data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana – only 92 acres were necessary for Meta’s air conditioned and water-cooled banks of server synapses.

It looks from the expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars and the consumption of dozens of gigawatts of electrical power that artificial intelligence will be with us for a while. I find myself asking Google’s AI function questions that yield answers that lead me in turn to sources of information that I use to write my column. Tracy reminded me this afternoon that the capability of the computer that I write on every day, similar to ones I’ve used to write for several decades, now exists in the palm of my hand. It is possible today to access the product of all those AI data centers using a cellphone. It could be that during the same amount of time I have walked the earth, all those acres of data centers will be torn down, and artificial intelligence will come directly from a hand-held device that will make our phones as obsolete as a slide rule.

Here’s hoping that we won’t lose wisdom at the same time machines gain processing power, because the whole thing, from earth movers leveling ground to steel beams and aluminum siding to steel racks and servers and computer chips and the electricity to power it all comes from one place: our human brains, backed up by whatever of our souls is left after we have delivered ourselves upon this earth.

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Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my feet and the sole, painfully reminding me I also had no arch support. There were spiky bindis the size of small tarantulas that I knew from experience to step around. They would pierce those stupid shoes – and my feet.

My destination, Creedon Street, was a site for public housing. There, families were crowded into an environment that one woman told me had been ‘set up to fail’ in the 1990s when authorities sought to move Aboriginal people out of the Sydney suburb of Redfern in time for the 2000 Olympics. As well as uncomfortable on my feet, the walk there was also boring. Broken Hill has fascinating architecture, extraordinary cultural heritage, a buzzing art scene and plentiful pubs (though fewer than the 70 it once boasted). Whether it was the day or the route I am not sure, but none of this seemed evident as I trudged. My allegorical ambitions dissipated with every boring block. I’d imagined myself like philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘walking in the city’ helped understand the relationship between our agency in everyday life, set against big structures like capitalism, which I was in Broken Hill to think about.[i]  But as the dry, hot sun seemed to suck the life from me, walking in the desert seemed more like a parody of de Certeau’s agency. I soon feared it might also be making a mockery of my own intellectual pretensions.

Like others in this age of polycrisis, I wanted to think about the historical entanglements of race, labour and environment. Historically these have often seemed at odds. We see it where workers oppose the end of coal or logging, and when environmentalists fail to acknowledge that such people have a legitimate need for a job – and when the ‘true’ working class is imagined to be white and male. By walking I hoped to think about, perhaps even to feel with my body, how race, class and environment might be brought together in everyday life, via a shared history and politics.

Broken Hill seemed a good place to do it. The town, like many outback cliches, is like one big allegory for Australia, especially for our history with capitalism. I started my walk at the Trades Hall, the pride of Broken Hill and a historical touchstone for Australia’s union movement. Like sentries guarding against the labour rabble, however, directly across the road stand seven carved white busts depicting the ‘syndicate of seven’ who founded Broken Hill Proprietary, BHP. They were visible from the front door of the Trades Hall. On this street, the main symbol of labour literally opposes seven key founders of Australian capital.

Other representations of working-class politics in Broken Hill are nearly as ubiquitous as the dust, which is perhaps not quite as red as the town’s political history. Capital too looms, as present as the massive heap of slag (the by-product of mining and smelting) towering over town. These great black piles of the debris of industrial mining are known as the ‘line of lode’. It is spectacular in a Tolkienesque kind of way, though where we might expect the Eye of Sauron there is instead a memorial to miners killed extracting lead, zinc and silver from the hill. Next to the miners’ memorial there is the empty shell of what was once a world class restaurant.

Not everyone survives capitalism.

When I finally arrived at Creedon Street, hot and irritable, there was nothing to see. It was just another street, not noticeably different to the thousands that I felt I had stumbled through.

I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn’, taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.

Face-palming, I took stock. I noticed that the street was right on the edge of town. Behind that row of public houses was nothing. Stony desert littered (charmingly, in fact) with rusting junk.

This seemed important. I’d been talking to teachers’ aids, employment centres and the local high school careers advisor, himself an Aboriginal man, who all told me that young Aboriginal people often experienced racism, particularly when they seek employment. The geography of town seemed to bear this out: the town centre celebrates labour on every corner, but when a place was built purposely for Aboriginal people to live, it was far from the town’s working-class centre.

I took this to be a symptom of what settler-colonial studies historian Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’.[ii] Of course, some Aboriginal people did and do work for big capital and small capital, and some were and are members of Broken Hill’s famous union movement. But any sense of the centrality of First Nations claims to land and sovereignty posed – at least in recent decades – a threat to the Broken Hill establishment, and by extension to the rest of us.

First Nations sovereignty is by definition hard for a settler colonial society to acknowledge. But it is the truth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were here first. Sovereignty was never ceded. This is First Nations land. Acknowledging this beyond the words we use at meetings, extending it to our hearts and practice demands something like turning the still-colonial world upside down. And from the centre of the battle between labour and capital, it seems easier to push the question, and the people connected to it, to the margins.

Creedon Street, by this logic, was certainly not aligned with those founders of BHP, whose profit relied on supplanting First Nations economies and claims to land. But why was Aboriginal sovereignty not, on the whole, protected by the Trades Hall?

Feeling stupid, I turned right and walked along the street, soon arriving somewhere familiar. The closest famous landmark to Creedon Street was the cemetery.

Broken Hill cemetery might be one of the most important in Australia. The burial site of revered members of the Australian union movement, the cemetery is an important monument to colonial and working-class history. Black crosses of the religious orders who sent teenagers from Ireland to serve in the outback offer a poignant memorial to what must have been an utterly dislocating experience. Artist Pro Hart’s grave is there, a massive, crazy expensive, marble thing engraved with his signature golden dragonfly – recently defaced by vandals. But the cemetery is mainly a memorial to labour. A pamphlet guides visitors to graves of historical significance to Australian unionism. Headstones list labour leaders’ CVs, while others honour the Red Flag Forever.

It is an outback cemetery, so small cages cover many graves, protecting burials from animals. Protecting the dead this way seems some sort of perversion of what sociologist Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.[iii] Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust or the work that maimed, killed and riddled many with diseases, often deadly. But now, iron cages protect the dead.

The cemetery reminds us that capitalism kills.

Up on the line of lode, the miner’s memorial documents the tragedy. In 1887, capitalism killed 21-year-old Samuel Spears, who tumbled down a ladderway in the pursuit of ore that would profit BHP shareholders. Spears was already not the youngest to die since the discovery of ore on the broken hill in 1883. Just a year earlier, John Vaugh, aged 14, fell down BHP’s ore heap, to his death. The following year, 25-year-old Charles Apple died in a rock fall, 36-year-old Alfred Neiring died in an explosion of shot and Alfred Polgreen, 21, was killed by a rock drill.

Mine safety improved, largely by union agitation, supported by local medical practitioners who helped alert the public beyond Broken Hill, to the dangers of industrial mining. The resulting public pressure drove engineering innovation and safety procedures. Many safety measures were hard won by strike action, like the number of minutes workers were to wait between blasting and heading back into mine shafts newly polluted with lead-laden dust.

Such improvements were far too slow for 16-year-old Charles Shannon, who was electrocuted in the BHP mine in 1910. It did not help Ronald James who at 18 years old was also electrocuted in 1979, as was 22-year-old John Collison in 1988. Mining in the 2000s slowed to such an extent that homes in Broken Hill could be purchased on a fairly modest credit card – and meant there were no deaths to record. When mining resumed, so did death. Capitalism killed again in 2007, when 30-year-old James Symonds was crushed by machinery. So was Andrew Bray, aged 47, as recently as 2019.

Capitalism kills, and the working class unites against it.

The graves of union leaders at the cemetery not only remind us of this, but they also act as a kind of mirror image to the mock graves that union members made of ‘scabs’, who refused to join strike action, in 1909. A photograph of one of those graves reads “Here Lies Peter Corney 1909 Scab”. Imagine Peter Corney’s trepidation, seeing his own name on the tomb. His death, however, was fictional. It was a tough strategy, but one that highlighted the value of solidarity as the only path to improved working conditions, and perhaps more broadly to liberation itself. For those listed in the miners’ memorial, death was not a ploy, but a central logic of the operation. Human lives – their lungs, their broken bones, their hopes, even just their time, so precious and short as it is for us all – was exchanged for profit.

This profit was not only the foundation of big mining in Australia, but it also underpinned the fledgling stock exchanges, and large finance enterprises like Collins House in Melbourne. Added up, exploitation pays – but only for a few.

Since colonisation, a significant portion of the middle class has considered education to be the answer. In the 1990s it became economic doctrine, systematically shifting the population to ‘better’ jobs. And yet for those of us in white collar work it is little different. Capitalism colonises every moment of our lives in the name of a rewarding, and often well-meaning, career. While industrial accidents are less common for professionals, ever-increasing productivity demands and decreasing autonomy under a managerial class is also killing us slowly – if perhaps mainly spiritually – as it converts our very selfhood into profit-making stuff. Even when the surface seems cleaner, the logic on display at Broken Hill applies to us all.

[i] De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkely: University of California Press.

[ii] Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, No.4, pp.387-409.

[iii] Weber, Max (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Vintage Edition, 2002. The ‘iron cage’ was not what Talcott Parsons’ famous translation of weber’s ‘shell as hard as steel’. Like others I have used it here as it more evocative of what I mean, and possibly what Weber meant too.

Hopped on with my fellow Gen Xers, and this morning to rant about the host of shitty things the Trump regime has done in just the last week. From Nazis to mass murder to the dumbest kind of fascism, it’s been one fucked up week.

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You may not have heard about 6 7, and if not, your life is not the worse for it. Also, you probably don't have contact with young humans. 

6 7 is just the latest nonsense meatworld meme. You don't need to rush to figure it out because now that Wikipedia has a page about it, Miriam Webster has an entry, and the Wall Street Journal just ran an explainer (calling it "this fall's most obnoxious classmate"), all of which means it's nearly played out. 

But in the meantime, it is one more test of teachers' patience (particularly on the elementary level). 

These tests are always there (skibidi toilet, anyone?) because young humans love them some nonsense. And 6 7 is relatively harmless-- not violent or sexual or intended to offend. As nonsense goes, it's better than average. But this brand of nonsense represents a fundamental challenge for teachers.

Some teachers are not meeting the challenge well, with nonsense behavior being met with nonsense rules. But it's not great for a classroom to model principles like "I don't like that, and I have the power here, so I'm just going to forbid it." That includes silly ideas like "I'm going to fine you fifteen cents every time you say that stupid thing, because I'm fed up." It is tempting, as a teacher, to just get out your big stick; after all, this is just nonsense, and not important talk.

As we live through a time marked by the muscle flexing of a wanna-be authoritarian regime, teachers need to ask themselves what form of governance they want to model in their classroom, and I sure hope they arrive at "non-authoritarian" as the answer.

I am not (as any of my former students would tell you) a fan of classroom anarchy. You can be an authority without being an authoritarian. Teachers are hired to be the responsible adult in a room filled with non-adults. That can mean many different things, but what it should not mean that the classroom is governed by the teacher's personal preferences or whims rather than being governed by actual rules and principles. 

I've seen classrooms run by a teacher's personal edict. I still remember the shock of hearing teacher say, speaking of home room elections for 7th grade student council representatives, "They picked the wrong kid, so I made them elect the right one." What a lesson for students about how elections work. 

If we're going to grow adults who understand the Rule of Law rather than the Rule of Me, then classrooms and schools have to model it.

That means, for instance, the administrators need to follow the actual rulebook for the district rather than a modified version in which different people get different consequences depending on who they are.

And classroom teachers need to set and follow rules based on something other than their mood or the newest irritant of the day. Students need to soak in a subtext other than "People who have power get to make other people do what the powerful wants." 

This was always true, but it's especially true now. You want to push back against authoritarian tyranny? What would be better than helping to raise a generation of humans who understand in their bones that there are other, better ways to be.

So when 6 7 gets on your last nerve, or the next bit of nonsense reveals itself, reach for some reaction other than "I am so sick of this and I have the power to shut this noise down, so I'm going to use all the power at my disposal to stomp it out." Because we know right now what that looks like when applied in the grown up world on a national stage. More than ever, classrooms need to be built to look like the country in which we want to live. If you want No Kings in America, be careful about crowning yourself in your classroom. 

There are currently several pending lawsuits against Walters. Thompson said the department is reviewing them and will address them as quickly as possible. They’re also examining several policy statements made by Walters to require action in schools.

“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.

In other words, it appears that the department might actually get back to helping teachers do their jobs. It's Oklahoma, so I don't imagine the department is going to turn all squishy liberal any time soon. But it sure seems like the atmosphere has changed considerably.

Walters was on Twitter expressing his big sad that he "could not be more disappointed" in the decision. "The war on Christianity is real," he wrote in his trademark hyperbole disconnected from reality. He's speaking this weekend at the Moms For Liberty summit, on a panel with Aaron Withe (his boss from Freedom Foundation) and Corey DeAngelis about how the evil unions took over schools. That summit is in Florida, putting him far far away from Oklahoma, which seems like what is best for Oklahoma's schools.