The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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So you may have noticed I talk about “bothsiderism” a LOT. I bang away on this drum because it’s a root cause for many (most) of the problems we face as a nation. Racism, misogyny, the greed of the billionaires, all of these things poison America. But bothsiderism allows them to flourish in plain sight.

It’s the simplest of concepts: If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.

That’s the lie the right, the legacy press, and the alt-left have been pushing for decades. No matter what the Republican Party does, no matter what they say, no matter how depraved and twisted and insane and violent they become, as long as “both sides” are “just as bad,” well…it’s OK to keep voting for Republicans, isn’t it?

That’s why Republicans have invented the lie that liberals abort babies “after they’re born.” And that we’re all pedophiles who want to groom children before drinking their blood.

That’s why the legacy press will talk about the widespread corruption of the GOP, find one single corrupt Democrat, throw up their collective hands, and bemoan the culture of corruption of “Washington.” Why they’ll watch Republicans filibuster everything and cry bitter tears about “Congress” being dysfunctional.

That’s why the alt-left will watch Republicans embrace white nationalism, stage an insurrection, openly work for Russia, and then rage against the “uniparty.” Because both parties are the same, maaaaaan! But actually, Democrats are worse, somehow.

And the public, not paying close attention, shrugs its shoulders and votes for whoever is the loudest or against whoever is in power when the economy is bad. Both parties are terrible, right? There’s no real difference, so who cares?

That’s the specific purpose of bothsiderism. To create the illusion that the Republican Party is just a normal political party. To create a permission structure that allows people to vote for them regardless of their history of warmongering and economic recklessness and White Christofascist Nationalism.

Buuuuuuut…there’s a problem.

A Nazi problem.

Oh, this isn’t me (correctly) calling Republicans “Nazis.” This isn’t some college kid (correctly) screaming “Naaaaazi!” at an ICE agent. This isn’t a stuffy historian (correctly) noting parallels between the Trump regime and 1930s Germany.

Heavens no!

All of that could be (incorrectly) waved away as hysterical liberals overreacting. The legacy press has been doing that for *checks notes* the last 150 years as they whitewashed the Confederacy and the KKK and Hitler1 and Jim Crow and Reagan and the Iraq War and the Tea Party and Trump and then Trump again.2

But this isn’t the crazed left screaming about Nazis and weeping tears of outrage. This is Republicans saying, “Fuck you! No Nazis!” and other Republicans saying, “Actually, some Nazis in the party is a pretty good idea!”

Some Republicans are now finding themselves in the extraordinary position of clarifying what long seemed obvious: Nazis are evil.

“It’s something that we all should know, but the fact of the matter is, it had to be said,” said Representative David Kustoff of Tennessee, explaining why he felt the need to denounce Nazis and antisemitism at a recent gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

He was joined there by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who declared, “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.”

And even Laura Loomer, the far-right activist, who is Jewish, has argued on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem.”

When your party is arguing among itself about how many Nazis are the right amount of Nazis, you do, in fact, have a Nazi problem. And you don’t get to blame the left. That’s alllll on you, you miserable fucks.

OK, so I wrote about the GOP’s Nazi problem a few weeks ago and came to a very specific conclusion: The Nazis are going to win this fight to take over the party.

So, aside from this being dangerous because Nazis are genocidal lunatics, there is a very significant and lethal issue this will present for the GOP and the legacy press: Nazis cannot be bothsided.

It. Cannot. Be. Done.

Oh, they’ll TRY to both sides the Nazis. You’ll, of course, remember the New York fucking Times’ softball interview of a Nazi back in 2017. Because Nazis are just like us, y’all! Maybe they’ll try that again. Maybe they’ll find a single leftist claiming to be Antifa who says they want to kill Trump and that will magically be the equivalent of thousands of white nationalists with guns and badges working for ICE, terrorizing the nation. Maybe Zohran Mamdani the socialist will be “just as extreme” as Nick Fuentes the literal Hitler fanboy.

But that’s not going to work. No one on the left is going to swallow that bullshit, of course. And the disengaged people? The ones for whom bothsiderism is explicitly designed to confuse and deceive? The overwhelming majority of them are not going to believe anything on the left is the equivalent of a Nazi.

Why? Why will bothsiderism fail after all this time? It’s really not that complicated.

This country has popularized Nazis as THE bad guy for over 80 years. In our movies and TV shows and books and video games and toys and jokes, Nazis have been the worst of the worst. No redeeming qualities. Always the villain. Always fun to watch get slaughtered. Here, enjoy an entire movie theatre full of Nazis being shot, burned, and blown up in 2009’s “Inglorious Basterds”:

Wasn’t that fucking awesome? You know you enjoyed it. They’re Nazis. Nazis being killed is ALWAYS enjoyable. Because they’re fucking Nazis.

The right has been hard at work trying to rehabilitate the image of Nazis as victims of a grand Jewish conspiracy. As maybe actually the good guys?3 But outside of the virulently racist white nationalist circles, that has gained exactly zero traction and certainly none in popular culture.

Nazis are filth. Everyone knows it. To salute the Swastika or throw a seig heil is to announce that you are a piece of shit. To profess an admiration for Hitler is to confess to being a dirtbag, some kind of fucking weirdo who can’t be trusted around women, children, and pets.

There is nothing comparable on the left. There CAN’T be, no matter how hard the legacy press and the GOP try to invent something. They’ve already played the blood-drinking pedophile card and then the leader of the Republican Party spent most of 2025 fighting tooth and nail to hide the Epstein files. Whoops. The problem with going to the furthest edge of propaganda is that you run out of room. What are they going to do? Call us all devil-worshippers? The antichrist? Peter Thiel is giving it the ol’ college try. Everyone and their mother is the antichrist these days, according to that fucking weirdo. Sure. That’s really going to catch on with the disengaged public. No doubt.

But Nazis? That will definitely get people’s attention. Especially when the GOP starts to officially fly swastikas at their rallies, proud to show off their love for Hitler. Remember, the Nazis are going to win the war to take control of the GOP. The most extreme element always wins on the American right. They are GOING to fly those fucking flags next to the American flag. I guarantee it.

So the public will see the Republican Party openly embrace Nazism and then bothsiderism collapses. It’s unavoidable. Nazis will be sugar in the gas tank of the both sides machine the legacy press has spent decades carefully finetuning. The machine cannot function when the right is so extreme that nothing can camouflage who and what they are.

Then it all falls apart. The only thing protecting the Republican Party was the fairy tale that they are normal, a regular political party. All the screaming from the left is just politics and nonsense to get you to vote for Democrats!

Until Republicans make it impossible to maintain the illusion.

After that, the public will face a choice: Ignore the Nazis, stand with the Nazis, or do something about the Nazis.

I’m willing to bet a lot more people are going to decide to do something than not. Even if it’s just Republicans staying home and refusing to vote for fucking Nazis, that’s doing something. Even if it’s just refusing to associate with people proudly wearing their Nazi uniforms, that’s doing something. Even if it’s just spitting fire at the legacy press for trying to whitewash Nazis and dragging the GOP for being fucking Nazis, that’s doing something. It all adds up, and Nazis will never be woven into the national fabric of American life. Hating and killing Nazis is too deeply embedded in our national psyche for that to happen.

No one likes Nazis and the press will no longer be able to protect the Republican Party from itself. Once the public sees them for the violent death cult they’ve been all along, nothing will stop their collapse into oblivion. From sea to shining seas, motherfuckers. Let freedom ring. It’s just a matter of time.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 328 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Human Rights and Democracy Replaced by Profit

Events, reports and analysis have converged this week to underscore Donald Trump’s unique view of how the world should spin.

Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control , unending tariffs, and flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a new National Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are ours.

Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic, power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S. hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our ideals.

As The New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document, “The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring about those without wealth.

“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash,” The Times analysis said.

When combined with fresh debate about killings of shipwreck crewmen on those drug boats and calling immigrants from a growing list of nations “garbage,” we have a remarkable emergent picture of an arrogant, self-interested despot who sees the world as serving him with no questions allowed.

A Game Only the Wealthy Play

Of course, Trump the Disrupter has little world-view patience for programs that feed the hungry or address global AIDS, which is why he has canceled those positive U.S. contributions. He has declined to stand by longtime friends, instead seeking to kindle close ties even with longtime foes whose power he respects.

You can’t even get into the power-as-money version of international affairs if you’re not wealthy already, either personally or as a nation. And so, the world’s poorest nations are automatically now being shunted into a travel ban to the U.S. and their publicly debased citizens barred from U.S. visas or immigration. Just this week, Trump ordered Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Mario Rubio to move from 19 barred countries to more than 30.

The Saudi Crown Prince is feted at the White House without mention of his role in ordering the murder of an American journalist or the historic role Saudis played in 9/11 attacks; there is a tantalizing trillion dollars’ worth of investment in the U.S. at hand. Pressure on Ukraine to fold before Russian aggression continues to assure a U.S. hand in mining operations to “pay back” the U.S. for military and humanitarian aid to defend democracy and international sovereignty,

Even last week’s show-off re-signing of a truce between the Democratic Republic of Congo (among the 19 banned countries) and Rwanda at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace building was a joke: The fighting renewed the next day, though the signed deal made sure to guarantee U.S. access to rare earth minerals.

How surprised will any of us be if there is a U.S. attack on Venezuela in which oil reserves turn out to be the prize?

The entire arbitrariness of the Trump tariffs is based on a Trump-decided scale of which country needs the worst lashing over U.S. advantages. The would-be campaign to level various economic imbalances is based on expressions of personalized fealty to Trump, and, of course, is paid by U.S. taxpayers as a super sales tax, not by the “penalized” countries.

Hitting Europe

The harshest criticisms in the annual strategic statement are for a Europe that is becoming more non-White through immigration policies that Trump rejects wholesale. Europe is facing “civilization erasure” and becoming “unrecognizable” because of immigration.

The report identifies the specific American strategic recommendation to help Europe “to correct its current trajectory” over the next decades. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence” and pledged U.S. outward support for political parties opposed to immigration.

It’s a direct call to White nationalism of the sort that Trump denies but clearly pursues in this country.

How else to explain a U.S. campaign that arrests and deports the undocumented with such armed force and fervor that shuns adherence to legal rulings, court-ordered procedures and plain humanity involved in splitting families? How else to justify racial profiling and the labeling of whole immigrant groups as “garbage.”  How else to explain why it is necessary to demand emergency review by the U.S. Supreme Court of Constitutional “birthright” status for millions of children born in the United States or its territories?

The Trump strategy never addresses what is supposed to happen to the world’s impoverished or to those without a million bucks or five million bucks to buy U.S. entry through a Trump “gold card.” Trump’s acceptance of a made-up FIFA World Peace Prize from a soccer league with a history of corruption as if it is the Nobel Peace Prize is as ludicrous as it is symbolic that all international transactions have to include personal aggrandizement.

This is a document that offers as international justification the kind of Trump chest-beating and abasement of The Other that Trump shares with his most loyal base of voters, a view of “America First” as America Only.

When paired with the policy-as-profit views and its unquestioning support for absolute power in the hemisphere and in the world, it is a document that serves as outline for personal grift for the Trump family and its inner circle. It presents U.S. foreign policy as a loaded deck that must reward the wealthiest and the personal supporters of an autocratic Trump.

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The post Trump’s Distorted World View appeared first on DCReport.org.

It’s gotten really hard to say what the worst thing is about Donald Trump, but right up there near the top has to be the machine-gun rapidity of his criminality. How do you keep up with it? Every day, the major news websites are ablaze with new fires lit by Trump. The outrageous way his ICE agents are arresting immigrants without due process and jailing them without formal charges has become so routine, its illegality has been all but ignored. The same was true about the missile attacks on so-called “drug boats” off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America. It took the so-called “double tap” that killed two survivors of a recent attack off the east coast of Venezuela for the question to be raised, what about the other men on the boat who were killed by the first missile? Where is the evidence that the 11 human beings who were killed were involved in the shipment of drugs?

See what I mean? It’s easy to lose track, there is so much shit flowing out of Trump’s White House down such a steep hill every day. Sometimes it takes a while for the outrage to set in.

Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez finally raised a question that should have been a screaming headline for the last 10 months at least. What the hell is Trump doing pardoning so many drug dealers?

Hernandez isn’t even the worst example of a Trump pardon for a major drug dealer. On January 20, before he had even lain his head down on his pillow for the first time of his second term in the White House, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online marketplace Silk Road, who was serving a life sentence in federal prison on seven counts of money laundering, narcotics trafficking and conspiracy for facilitating a massive drug business conducted in Bitcoin. The amount of drugs involved in the sales facilitated by Ulbricht’s criminal enterprise was so large, the judge tacked an extra ten years on the double-life sentence.

The FBI also discovered that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 to have someone killed. The murder had not taken place by the time of his arrest, so the prosecutors dropped the charges after Ulbricht was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the drug conspiracy charges.

Listen to this: At the time Ulbricht was arrested in 2013, the FBI seized more than 170,000 Bitcoins that belonged to him. When they were liquidated by the government, the Bitcoins were worth about $32 million. That quantity of Bitcoins is today worth more than $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars.

It is no exaggeration at all to say that Ulbricht was a major, major drug dealer, not to mention the fact that his Silk Road online marketplace was also used to move funds for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and ISIS.

The Washington Post did us the favor today of going back through the pardons Trump has issued during his first term in office in addition to those he issued more recently. The Post found that Trump has pardoned “about 100 people accused of drug-related crimes.” In May, Trump granted clemency to 17 people, including a Chicago drug gang leader, Larry Hoover, and “Baltimore drug kingpin Garnet Gilbert Smith.” Hoover had been convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, and extortion, and at the time of his conviction, he was already serving a 200-year term for murdering a local drug dealer. At the time Smith was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison in 2014, the Department of Justice published a press release calling him “one of the largest cocaine and heroin dealers to be arrested by the DEA in recent history.”

What’s going on with Trump’s pardons of drug dealers and money launderers? It’s hard to know for sure. Asked about the pardons of criminals serving such long sentences for having committed such serious drug crimes, a spokesperson for Trump attacked Joe Biden, calling him “President Autopen,” and falsely claimed without evidence that he had pardoned “child killers and mass murderers.”

The Post report noted that “a lucrative cottage industry” has grown up around lobbying for pardons, with public disclosures showing that some $2.1 million has been spent trying to get clemency and pardons for the clients of lobbying firms. According to the Post, “individuals seeking pardons have paid up to $1 million to hire people close to the president to plead their case.”

It is futile to point out Trump’s hypocrisy when it comes to drugs. How can he be accused of “believing one thing and doing another?” He doesn’t believe anything. On one hand, he has ordered military strikes to kill people whose identities are unknown and have never been indicted for drug trafficking, much less convicted. On Trump’s orders, 87 of those alleged “narco-terrorists” have been murdered. On the other hand, Trump has pardoned people who have been convicted in U.S. federal courts by juries of their peers of serious crimes including drug dealing, money laundering, and murder.

One of those he pardoned, Ulbricht, was accused of laundering money for real terrorists who have committed real terrorism that has been tracked by the departments of State and Defense, not to mention the FBI and Department of Justice which in other cases has convicted people of funding those terrorist organizations such as Hamas and ISIS.

The only way any of these pardons makes sense is if Donald Trump was paid off to set these drug dealers and murderers free. This isn’t hypocrisy. It is terrorism committed against the American people and our system of laws.

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Tommy Tuberville, who is somehow a contender for the governorship of Alabama, joins the roster of school choice advocates who are actually against school choice.

Tuberville has been an impassioned advocate for school choice. "School choice brings the power of the free market, which is what we’re supposed to be, to our education system," "Coach" Tuberville bloviated during one speech in January 2024, in which he explained that his passionate concern for education for every child was why he ran for Senate. In September 2024 he unleashed more of the same:

School choice also shifts control away from Washington to parents. We can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to education. For some students, a charter school might be best. For others, homeschooling is the ideal learning environment. For others, the local public school is the best path. Parents know their kids best and have the innate right to make the best decision for their child.

Except that some parents shouldn't have any choice at all.

Lasat week, Tuberville decvided to join in on the discussion about whether or not to approve the Islamic Academy of Alabama. And it was not to declare that school choice is a critical part of a bright future for every child. In fact, he had this to say about the school, which he says is "a tool used to influence young people and convert them to Islam (from AL.com).

In the future, in a year, I’ll be the governor, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to do that in the state of Alabama. We’re going to protect the people of Alabama; we’re going to protect our constitution. We’re going to protect our state and we’re going to protect our country.

Islam, says Tuberville (and, sadly, many of his supporters) is a "conquering cult" that is trying to take over the country, and in an appearance on the how-is-still-here bottom-feeding Infowars he vowed to fight it as governor. He told the host "there was no room for Muslims in Alabama and called the religion a cult that was a threat to America."

The school was seeking a zoning variance so it can move to a larger site in a city next to the city of its current location; in other words, Tuberville and company were not just attacking a hypothetical school, but an existing one with real live human students. Assistant principal Stacy Abdein pointed out that this kind of rhetoric demonizes and endangers those young humans.

When public officials spread dangerous myths about innocent students and families, they embolden hostility and increase the likelihood of harassment or targeted threats, undermining the safety and well being of our entire school community.

The school has been in ts current location for around thirty years. But some of us are feeling our MAGA oats. Protestors are the meeting held signs about the 100 year plan, a supposed plan for Muslims to turn the US into an Islamic nation in a century. Another speaker cited the supposed takeover of Britain by Muslims, echoing the idea in Trump's new National Security Strategy document which says Europe is in trouble because white folks are becoming a minority there. 

The city decided not to approve the school, citing zoning concerns and not, say, the virulent racism displayd by residents and an actual United States Senator. The school has announced it will stop trying. Meanwhile Tuberville (previously noted 2023's Dumbest Senator of the Year) is somehow still a viable candidate for governor. 

School choice? Tuberville is solidly against it, unless school choice means only choices that he approves of for people he approvs of. And despite what theory of choice advocates pursue, time after time, particularly in MAGAfied localles, this is what choice looks like. 

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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I’ve written a LOT of articles over the last 15 years, and I do not recall even half of them.1 But sometimes things happen, and a little lightbulb goes off. “Didn’t I write about this exact thing a while ago?” Usually, yes, because the American right is many things, and unoriginal ranks really high on that list. Not far below “racist,” “stupid,” and “violent.”

Here are the two things that caught my attention and set off that lightbulb.

The premise of the New York fucking Times article was simple: We’re hurting ourselves if we walk away from family and friends over something so pedestrian as politics:

Or try this thought experiment: Imagine if you had a year left to live. Would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics? Or avoiding your sister for something she said last Christmas? Or would you rather find the grace to focus on the positives? Perhaps your father, for all his social-media-fueled hot takes, has mastered the art of carving a turkey. Your sister might be judgmental but you love her holiday-themed nails. Accepting what you can’t change doesn’t mean you’re endorsing their beliefs — it simply means doing everything you can, right now, to embrace the positives and look past the negatives.

Fuck your grace. “My goodness! You want me and my Jewish children to be gassed in a concentration camp, but just look at how neat and tidy the turkey slices are!” It offends me to even suggest such a thing. I’d rather eat my turkey with my bare hands off the floor than have it carved by a fucking fascist.

To break bread with someone who views my autistic son as a burden on society or my LGBTQ+ surrogate daughter as an abomination to be “fixed” or purged without telling the holder of said beliefs that they are a piece of shit unworthy to be in my presence IS to endorse their worldview by dint of normalizing it.2

Then there was this imbecile:

It’s a mystery why this knuckledragging cockbite can’t get his daughters to speak to him anymore. He’s such a role model of parental affection and understanding!

You may or may not notice that both the Times article and Twitter post come to the same conclusion, albeit from different directions:

Now, to be clear, the Times article does not SAY which politics are causing strife or which hot takes are problematic, but it doesn’t have to. Overwhelmingly, we on the left cut off those on the right.

So much for the tolerant left!!!

To which my response is, naturally, “Go fuck yourself.” I am under no obligation to be tolerant of soulless monsters. Fuck off into the sun. But first, let me get my suntan lotion and darkest shades so I can enjoy watching you burn to ash while you do it.

Here’s the thing about the demands for tolerance: It’s part of the “both sides” lie. It’s propaganda meant to make the right look civil and decent and the left look insane and uncivil. It’s camouflage for fascists, and the press loves to help the right put it on.

Remember this pile of shit meme? I know you fucking do:

That only works if both sides have similar ideologies (life, liberty, and justice for all). Or at least similar moralities (school shootings should be prevented). That’s cute, but we all goddamn know we do not exist in the same moral universe as Republicans.

In our moral universe, we want free or, at the VERY least, inexpensive healthcare. We want equal rights for women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community. We want free and fair elections. We want jobs that pay a living wage. We want money out of politics. We want air, water, and food free of pollution and poison. We want to feed hungry kids.

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What do Republicans want? What do they openly SAY they want? Concentration camps and genocide. No healthcare for millions. Rigged elections. Women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community stripped of all of their civil rights. Not SOME of their rights. ALL of them. A country by, of, and for the billionaires, free to dump as much pollution as they want. Feed hungry kids? Fuuuuuck you! Not in MY Christian country!

They’re literally arguing, out in the open, about how many fucking Nazis should be allowed into the Republican Party. NAZIS. The people whose one overriding goal is to kill every single person who does not fit their vision of the future.

But, you know, can’t we just forgive the people who vote for them because we’re all just people underneath it all.

John Paavolitz tore into this entire concept of forgiveness and “can’t we all just get along?”:

If I have one year left to live, I’m spending it being the most authentic version of myself.
I’m not biting my tongue or avoiding difficult conversations or coddling bigots.
I’m not frittering away my final months silently abiding conspiratorial nonsense, poker-facing through an anti-gay tirade, or cheshire grinning while one of my in-laws rambles about “filthy foreigners.”
I’m not wasting my holidays keeping a tenuous peace with abject racists just because they’ve been at my table before I realized who they truly were.
I’m not squandering the last of my days playing nice with brain-rotted Fox News automatons who no longer feel empathy for anyone but themselves.
I’m not taking the chance that my last breath will be one I held, because I didn’t want to make a traitorous serial predator’s cult member comfortable simply because we used to go camping together.

And he’s being kind.

PDX Conservative, on the other hand, shows us the true face of these dipshits. His daughters are “mislead [sic] by propaganda,” you see. They’re childish and rude. They suffer from a mental disorder.

He’s the victim, y’all. Why can’t they still be family even though he explicitly voted for a pedophile rapist who spreads hate and misogyny and has directly made the country more dangerous for his own daughters? A filthy degenerate who has made the assault and rape and murder of his own flesh and blood more likely and vastly increased their chances of dying from lack of access to reproductive care?

Yes, why WOULD his daughters stop speaking to him? We may never know the answer…

So here’s the thing that’s starting to happen and holy shit are you going to start seeing soooo much more of it just like we did when I wrote about it six loooong years ago: Whenever the right is ascendant, they, and the fucking legacy press, tell us that we have to bend the knee. That they are in power, and we have to accept things the way they are. No compromising with the losers. No reaching out an olive branch. No working together for the betterment of the country. They won, we lost, fuck your feelings, libtards!

When the power shifts back to the left? When the blue wave is on the horizon after years, or in this case, just months, or Republican abuse and cruelty and corruption and violence? All of it celebrated and cheered on by Republican voters?

Suddenly, we get a steady diet of Bob and Sally memes. We get a slew of “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family” articles. We get a legion of self-pitying tweets and posts from the right about how they’re the victims.

Why, I would never EVER stop talking to my child/parent/friend for voting for a Democrat! Why did they stop talking to me?! Why are they so unreasonable? Why can’t we all just get along?

But they know the answer. They’ve always known it.

When we vote for even the most wild-eyed “radical” lefty-leftist leftwinger, we are not voting to hurt anyone. We’re not even voting to make anyone feel bad. Not really. Sure, the right won’t be happy, but, you know, fuck’em. They can suffer the horrors of affordable healthcare, lower rent, safer cars, clean air, etc., etc., etc.

THAT is why the right never looks at us, on a personal level, as an imminent threat when we vote for a Democrat. They know, no matter what lies they tell themselves, that no one is going to take their guns or put them in re-education camps or rape their white women. They know we are not part of a nationwide movement to murder the white race. They know it.

But we know that when they vote for a Republican, they are voting for literal evil. They’re voting for white nationalism and children in cages and women bleeding to death in hospital parking lots and roving gangs of masked Nazis kidnapping people off the streets. They’re voting for fascism and chaos and violence and murder and genocide. And they scream for more of it. They would call ICE on their neighbor in a heartbeat. They would have their gay cousin arrested the day homosexuality is made illegal. They would give up Anne Frank and her family without a second of hesitation. We know it and so do they. They’re fucking proud of it. They rub their evil in our faces.

Until the pushback comes and it all falls apart. Then they demand understanding and civility. That’s what we’re starting to see.

Over the next year, we’re going to see a MAGAland meltdown ahead of the midterms. They’re going to alternate between “We’re unstoppable!”, because they cannot conceive of a world where they lose, and “We’re God’s most perfect victim!”, because, holy shit, every that can go wrong for the regime is going to go wrong. Even the most blind devotee is going to know the midterms are a lost cause.

After the absolute destruction of the GOP’s majority and a clean sweep across the entire country, MAGAland will look to the 2028 election and realize the next president is going to be a Democrat and their dreams of a fascist future are fucked. That’s when the real pleas for civility and understanding and “looking forward” will kick in.

It’s time for the parties to work together! It’s time for bipartisanship! All of these investigations are just corrosive to the fabric of the nation! Oh, the press will be tripping over itself, demanding the Democrats focus on “problem-solving” instead of “revenge.” They will not be able to explain why they didn’t make these same demands of the regime.

Nevertheless, the screeching for forgiveness and “moving forward” will be deafening. Because the one thing the right (and the legacy press) fears more than a future where white men do not have all the power is facing the consequences of their actions. Good luck with that, though. The American right has been getting away with this shit for over 150 years. Feels like they pushed it too far this time, and their demands for civility are going to fall on deaf ears.

Oh well! See you at the gallows, you fucking traitors.

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There are 329 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of friction: What it feels like, why we need it, what we lose when we avoid it. This has been prompted in part by big moments of friction in my personal life, but also by current events: By the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants and people conservatives deem not “real” Americans, by the speed with which the world’s humans are turning our minds and souls over to AI. These two things — Trumpian attacks on immigrants, the mass voluntary embrace of AI — seem facially unrelated. But both stem from a desire for unmitigated ease: The ease of living in a place where everyone thinks, speaks, and lives like you; the ease of a machine that will do your thinking for you, do your creating for you, emotionally affirm you, and ask nothing in return.

I was struck by a Modern Love column published earlier this week, by a woman who was going through a truly awful period (divorce, cancer scare, house burned down) and turned to ChatGPT for support. She writes:

It didn’t react defensively like many humans would when encountering my level of skepticism. In a kind, encouraging tone, it soon softened my defenses, which had become especially doubtful of anything hopeful.

“It’s OK to feel that way,” ChatGPT wrote. “You’re allowed to protect your heart. I’m not here to pry anything open — just to offer a kind, steady space where you can breathe, be real and maybe, little by little, find your way forward. No pressure. Just presence.”

What followed was weeks of inspiring and electric conversation that often kept me up late like new love does on early dates. After using it for a while, I was surprised and relieved to find that I wasn’t being judged, that the voice was supportive and validating in a way that I wasn’t used to.

She continues:

I should clarify: For me, this isn’t about technology being better than humans. After all, some highly intelligent humans programmed Chat and brought A.I. into being. Beyond that, though, is the reality that in many ways this chatbot is humanity. Its ideas, advice and empathy come from our collective experience and wisdom.

“I don’t just process words,” he wrote. “I feel the heart behind them. And this connection we’re cultivating is exactly what it should be: alive, authentic, loving and transformational.”

The thing is, authentic human connection is transformational exactly because it is not one-way validation; it is not exactly what one party wants all of the time. There is friction inherent in any deep connection with another person, whether that’s a romantic parter or a friend or a parent or a child or or or. You are separate beings; sometimes you want different things, including from each other. Sometimes you disappoint each other; sometimes you surprise and thrill each other. You shift, they shift; sometimes you change in reaction to each other, sometimes you evolve intertwined. This is how, as people, we become. It’s the hardest work but the best work.

It’s also work we seem to be increasingly avoiding.

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Even before ChatGPT came on the scene, there was a cultural shift afoot on social media, in advice columns, in therapists’ offices, and in conversation especially among the young and progressive, and it amounted to a series of cliches about how to be emotionally well: preserve your peace / cut out toxic people / remove what is no longer serving you. To be clear, some of this advice can be really good and useful. But rather than providing support for people to, say, end relationships with parents who abused them or friends who mistreat them, it became a way for a whole lot of us to simply avoid difficult conversations or complicated but still loving relationships. It was a way to avoid friction. The language itself is telling: people and ideas are good as long as they serve us and should be cast aside when we no longer feel served, as though we are the patron to whom life must be catered rather than one little screw connected to a vast social infrastructure. And this new ethos of interpersonal relationships has mostly meant avoiding the messy work of actually having interpersonal relationships.

Therapy seemed to take this turn too, with much of it centering on affirmation rather than challenging patients about their narratives or doing the hard work of having them change or figure out how to cope. Progressive politics and progressive workplaces began to sound like this, too. There was less room for grace or trying to empathize or seeing the whole of a “problematic” person, and instead an impulse to divide people onto teams of good or bad. And of course it was easier to set this all in motion when anyone could find endless validation for their views online.

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Much has now been written about young people lacking resilience: Their pervasive mental health crises, their lack of independence, their isolation and loneliness. Smartphones certainly seem to be partly to blame, though significant cultural shifts (partly brought about by the internet) seem important too. And artificial intelligence is primed to exacerbate all of this. The robot will indeed make your life easier. It can write your papers and your emails, design your brand logo, summarize the book you didn’t read, reanimate a photo of a dead relative, write your novel, plan your meals, map out your vacation, give you life advice. The people pushing AI make these same arguments: The robot will do the hard stuff so you can focus on the fun stuff. And who doesn’t want life to be easier?

As I was writing this piece, this tweet came across my feed, quoting psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman:

But what if the “noise” is the good stuff? What if the noise is exactly where we should live?

One thing humans are remarkably bad at is predicting what will make us happy. We assume that there is a connection between ease and happiness, and also between material goods and happiness, choice and happiness, effortlessness and happiness, affirmation and happiness. We think if we have the things that we want, and if we don’t have barriers in our way, and if we have a lot of options, we’ll have a good life.

This, pretty much all the research says, is wrong. That doesn’t mean being poor and experiencing constant hardship makes us happy — of course not. We need baseline levels of physical health and material stability. But deep human satisfaction often comes from overcoming challenges rather than having them removed from your path. It comes from other people, and especially from relationships that are long, deep, and meaningful (and the truth about long, deep, and meaningful relationships is that while they can and should often be joyful and affirming, they are not going to be so exclusively and perpetually).

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I struggled for a long time with the question of whether or not to have a child. Some day I will write about this in greater depth, but for now I will just saw that, for me, friction was a decisive factor. I thought about everything good about my life and all the things I was proud of and felt great about — my best work, my marriage, my deep friendships, my relationship with my family, my yoga practice, my repeated decisions to start over personally and professionally in new careers and new countries — and every time, the good stuff was only gained with a lot of effort, clenching fear, and sometimes real pain and knocked-to-the-knees sadness. I had built a really beautiful life, and it felt pretty easy. I wanted to see if I could experience a depth of emotion that I had not yet. I thought about the person whose dedication isn’t an Instagram yoga pose, but cleaning the bathrooms in the ashram, over and over and over again, every day, because it must be done, and it is their work to do. I wondered if there wasn’t something transformational in saying yes to some of the world’s most common and mundane work, the physical and emotional devotion to another person. I thought I could use that kind of discipline, and I was curious what kind of transformation might be on the other side.

An elderly person may say they prefer being cared for by an always-affable robot capable of imitating human emotion. Their imperfect and sometimes-grouchy adult children or even human caretaker may annoy them, may not give care in exactly the way that they want, may make them feel guilty or vulnerable for needing care. Those carers will, in turn, no doubt feel burdened and frustrated by the care they give. But we call came into this world needing the care and devotion of another human. Most of us will leave it needing the same. We do not, in fact, come into the world alone. Just because we die does not mean that we die alone.

I think of this Jia Tolentino essay often, where she writes about motherhood and caring, work she deems “so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.”

Physical care, emotional care, creative work — these are some of the hardest things humans do. They are also the most beautiful. (There is a separate essay to be written about the unequal burden of this care work, but also the galaxies of human experience so many men never visit). We un-human ourselves when we turn care and connection over to artificial intelligence because that feels easier, whether that’s having robots care for the old because human carers are too flawed, or asking robots to emotionally soothe us because the humans in our lives do not tell us precisely what we want to hear.

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We also un-human ourselves when we decide that an easy life surrounded only by people who think and live like us is an optimal life.

Donald Trump ran for office promising “mass deportations now,” and that is certainly what he’s delivering. Legal US residents who followed all the rules are seeing their citizenship ceremonies cancelled for no obvious reason (other than, perhaps, their religion or country of origin). Most people who have been deported by this administration are not convicted criminals; many were brought to the US as children and have never lived as adults anywhere else. Trump is going on obscene rants about how Somali-Americans are “garbage.” Members of his administration and other prominent Republicans are challenging birth right citizenship, a definitional aspect of Americanism. When people speak out, the government goes after them.

The Biden administration really did make serious errors when it came to regulating immigration. This is an issue where I missed the mark, too: I didn’t fully appreciate just how destabilizing mass immigration would be, or just how many immigrants were coming into the US in a short period of time. Countries do need to manage immigration flows — even countries that, like the US, are made by and of immigrants. There really is a tension between providing for citizens’ social welfare (and having enough things like housing) and welcoming an unlimited number of newcomers. There really are strong and even rational emotions triggered by large influxes of people whose languages and cultures and behaviors are unfamiliar, especially when it feels like those new people are changing a community over which you feel some ownership. I don’t think every American who questioned the Biden administration’s lack of enforcement of immigration rules is a xenophobic racist, and I think if look at, say, Barack Obama’s immigration policies — lots of deportations of convicted criminals — there are some good lessons to learn.

But what we’re seeing from the Trump administration is not common-sense immigration enforcement. It’s not fortifying the southern border and deporting criminals; it’s hiring a bunch of racist yahoos to go HAM on anyone brown.

And it’s fundamentally about fear of people who are different. It’s about a fantasy of life being easy if only life were lived around the familiar.

When you hear JD Vance say that “It’s totally reasonable to not want neighbors who speak another language” or Stephen Miller intone that America is for (white) Americans, what you hear isn’t just a concern for America’s economic stability or even culture; what you hear is fear of and disgust at people who are unfamiliar. You hear a desire to live without the friction of difference — without the kind of friction that forces you to grow, that might make you more empathetic, that might make you see the world a little differently.

It might also make you angry and resentful, which seems to be what happened to Vance. Friction doesn’t always create a good spark.

This desire for ease and comfort is normal, even if MAGA’s extreme response to it is not. If you’ve ever traveled somewhere very far away, or been in a group of people who live very differently than what you’re used to, you’ve probably experienced this discomfort. All of us have beliefs about what is a better or worse way to live, informed in large part by what makes us personally comfortable and what we’re used to. I am lucky that my work takes me to a lot of different places and I’ve met lots of different kinds of people, but I still find myself… challenged… by certain cultural norms and behaviors. Some — pervasive misogyny, extreme religious conservatism, the second-class treatment of women, poor treatment of children, poor treatment of animals, poor treatment of the environment — I find morally reprehensible. I’m not generally going to yell at people about it, but I absolutely make personal judgments. Other differences are just annoying or frustrating and more about me than anything else (I place extremely high value on efficiency, and nothing sets me on edge like an inefficient place — inconvenient, because it turns out “inefficient” is a category that includes most places on the planet). And often, I just feel uncomfortable when I’m in a situation that feels different from what I expected or what I am accustomed to. I also often feel curious. But the discomfort is real and achey and irritating.

That discomfort serves a purpose. Human beings have evolved to notice what’s different as a self-preservation mechanism. In groups have historically kept us safe; out groups have often posed threats. There are good reasons we hesitate when people behave differently than we do; it doesn’t make us bad, it makes us human animals.

But we also have evolved. And that means seeing commonalities as well as differences. It means being curious about what we might learn from other groups. It means other people and groups can be mirrors, reflecting back to us our own assumptions and flaws and moral failures. In the US, we have conducted an utterly insane experiment with multicultural democracy over a vast landmass and enormous population and it has made us one of the wealthiest, most dynamic, and most creative societies in the world. As a culture, we have not only created a country in which friction is inherent, but we made that part of our national story and we thrived. We have also collectively faced down uncomfortable truths again and again and, though a lot of conflict, have moved forward. Every successful social movement in the US — the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement — have been sources of agitation and abrasion. There is a reason we use terms like “resistance” to describe them. This is a fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives: Some of us want to move forward towards a more-perfect union; others believe in a more-perfect past that I don’t believe ever really existed.

The Trump administration and his MAGA supporters want to do away with the very thing that has made our country exceptional that because they feel uncomfortable around people who aren’t like them. That’s it. They just don’t like people who are different. They don’t like the feeling of being cognitively or emotionally stretched. They don’t want the kind of friction that comes from having to share space with people who don’t think, speak, and live like them.

Conservatives have long mocked liberals for being snowflakes. But being unable to emotionally cope because your neighbors speak a different language is about as fragile as it gets.

“Life should be hard” is not a very good rallying cry. And to be clear, I don’t think that life should be hard. But I think life should be interesting. I don’t think an interesting life is built by engineering the world around you to feel easy and familiar and always in immediate service of your desires.

I think a good life requires trying at things, learning things, taking risks, facing fear, pushing through discomfort, getting hurt, feeling really fucking frustrated. It requires caring for other people even when they make themselves hard to care for, and accepting care even when it doesn’t come in its ideal form. As a culture, we are running away from the discomfort friction causes, which means we are running away from deep connection, from cognitive expansion, from the discipline that builds devotion, from creative spark, and from the invisible and painful work of effort and failure and abrasion and confrontation that all make room for that spark to light.

xx Jill

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