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.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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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.

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 was not going to write a regular article today. Thursdays are for doing the post-edit clean-up of the podcast, putting together the summary and links, and then doing other stuff. But then I saw this headline from Chris Cillizza’s execrable substack, “So What”:1

The second I saw it, I knew deep down on a molecular level what he was going to say. I was SO FUCKING SURE that I almost didn’t even bother clicking the link because why do that to myself? I could see the entire thing in my head, which was already straining at the seams in anger. But I did anyway, and now you have to read my head explosion.

Hey, if I have to suffer, so do you.

In case you somehow missed it, all of this has to do with the Young Republican group chats that got “leaked” by another Young Republican, happily setting his fellow pieces of shit on fire for personal gain.

In those group chats, a whole bunch of up-and-coming fascists spewed the ugliest kind of hate. Here are some of them and some of what they said:

Racism. Homophobia. Misogyny. Antisemitism. Literal Nazi shit.

This is about as ugly as it gets, short of them screaming “DEATH TO ALL THE FUCKING JEWS/GAYS/BLACKS/etc.!!!” It’s a damning look into the mind of the Republican Party. It validates every single thing we’ve been saying about them for decades. They are the monsters we’ve always known them to be.

And that’s a problem because if that becomes the accepted view of the GOP, it becomes impossible for the legacy press to shield them. Which is where lying filthpigs like Chris Cillizza come in:

The immediate reaction I saw from the left on social media (and Substack) went something like this: See! This is how ALL Republicans are! This is what they really think! Racists! Anti-Semites!

I think that is a HUGE generalization. And overly facile.

Got that? We got a good look under the pointy white hood of the leaders of the next generation of Republicans and found…actual real-life Nazis. But, hey, don’t rush to judge! They’re young and stupid!

That said, I think extrapolating the online messaging of a group of 20-something (mostly) men as reflective of the broader views of an entire political party is a major mistake.

Having been a 20-something male, I can attest that they are idiots — especially in groups. And especially when they are trying to one-up one another in outrageous statements. (To be clear: I never talked like this in my 20s.)

Stop. Stop talking. No, you mewling shitgibbon. We are NOT fucking doing this. Two points:

1. They are NOT a group of “20-somethings.”

27 is closer to 30 than it is to 20. You don’t get to be “20-something” anymore when you’re pushing three decades. At least two of them are in their 30s, so get the fuck out of here with your “20-something” bullshit.” That leads us to…

2. Even people in their fucking 20s are not “kids” and we shouldn’t treat them like it. It’s condescending, but it’s also a neat little sleight of hand the legacy press loves to pull when white people, ESPECIALLY white men, are involved.

   
   A 16-year-old Black kid can be gunned down by the cops because he was pretty much the same thing as an adult. 15? 20? Is there really a difference when the police are afraid for their life?
   
   White men, though, get to live this extended Peter Pan childhood, where they’re not really responsible for their actions because they just haven’t grown up yet. 25? 26? 29? They’re still just a kid! Give’em a break! You don’t want to ruin their whole lives over one little misstep, do you?🥺🥺🥺

Cillizza goes on because of course he fucking does:

Because over the last decade there has been a rise in what I would refer to as “toxic masculinity” — the veneration of men who are tough and speak their minds and take no bullshit (or whatever). Think of Andrew Tate as the Platonic ideal of this sort of culture.

Donald Trump didn’t create that re-defining of what it means to be a male in modern American society. But he did super-charge it.

His repeated assertions that law enforcement needs to be tougher on protesters. His embrace of the UFC culture. (I mean, there is going to be an MMA fight this summer on the White House grounds!) Donald Trump Jr’s. aggressive online masculinity. You get the idea.

Got that? This isn’t Republicans being racist pieces of shit! This is just toxic masculinity! Which it sounds like a term Cillizza just invented! Isn’t he sooooo cool?! And, really, all of this nonsense is because of Donald Trump. Things didn’t used to be this bad.

Really?

How do I phrase this politely? Oh, wait, I’m a toxic male Ogre. I don’t have to be polite:

Chris Cillizza is a lying sack of shit. That, or he is the single dumbest fuck in the media today. Honestly, the two are not at all mutually exclusive because this is such a stupid fucking lie, I don’t know who the hell he thinks he’s trying to fool with this bullshit.

That was Lee Atwater in 1981, explaining how Richard Nixon used the Southern Strategy to appeal to racist white people.

That was the Reagan administration, which sat back and let HIV spread until it became a global scourge. They could have stopped it easily. But it was killing the gays and drug users, so who cared?

That was the, for the time, jaw-droppingly racist Willie Horton ad George H.W. Bush ran in 1988.

The George W. Bush White House led a literal “Holy Crusade” in the Middle East that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians and ran a campaign of terror against Muslims at home.

When Obama won in 2008, the racism was so undeniable, people like Chris Cillizza had to redefine what racism was so they could pretend it didn’t exist. Telling the first Black president to go back to Africa wasn’t racist! He was Kenyan, wasn’t he?! Questioning if he was really an American citizen wasn’t racist, either! Those questions about his birth certificate were 100% legitimate and not at all motivated by race!

The first Trump regime put immigrant children in cages and laughed about it. Trump cheered on neo-Nazis marching and called them “good people.” Trump’s second time in office has been so explicitly marked by white nationalism; literally no one was surprised to discover that the next wave of Republican leaders spewed that kind of hate. Except, apparently, Chris fucking Cillizza.

At the same time he was shocked, SHOCKED to hear about this, and insisting we shouldn’t hold the entire Republican Party responsible, this happened:

What’s this all about? Well, one of Super MAGA Rep. Dave Taylor’s (R-Sieg Heil) aides was on a video call and someone noticed the flag behind him had been altered:

Call me crazy, but in no universe would I NOT notice that the flag on my cubicle wall had a fucking swastika on it all of a sudden. What’s the story they’re going to go with? Antifa snuck in and did it with no one noticing? Get the fuck out of here. That little shit did it himself, and everyone in the fucking office knew about it because it’s impossible to miss. This aide was just so goddamn stupid, he forgot it would also be visible on a video call.

Fascists are a lot of things: Lazy, angry, boring, weak, etc. No one ever said they were smart.2

“Not all Republicans?” Bish, please. Cillizza is a propagandist delivering the lies the GOP needs to keep being literal Nazis. He’ll say I’m still overreacting. Cool. He can eat shit and let me explain why I know he’s a liar from personal experience.

I JUST told this story on this week’s podcast, but let me get into it again.

In 1992,3 before I knew anything at all about politics, I took a road trip with the Young Republicans of Nassau Community College. I, myself, was not a Young Republican. I wasn’t anything at the time. But a friend of mine, little 5’1” Jen Gorman, asked me to go and “keep her out of trouble.” I interpreted that to mean she didn’t want to get drunk and hook up with anyone. Everyone else on the trip was male, and 3-4 of them were testosterone-laden ROTC.

Jen had previously hooked up with my brother, which made her a leper to me, and she knew it. No matter how drunk we got, nothing would ever happen between us in a million years. Ew. Gross. So we slept in the same bed, her against the wall and me on the outside.

It wasn’t until many MANY years later that I realized I was not there to keep Jen from doing something, I was there to keep her from getting raped. Since I was significantly bigger than all of the other people on the trip, including the ROTC muscleheads, I was a literal wall between Jen and sexual assault.

So that’s how I ended up on a political trip when I was apolitical at the time.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre is 100% NOT apolitical today.

On this trip, the Young Republicans (and me) met with older Republicans, and this is when I learned who and what Republicans were. I frequently mention that I am a Puerto Rican Jew, but my genetics kind of canceled out, so I just look generically white. And most people who only know me causally either don’t know I’m a Puerto Rican Jew or forget about it because literally nothing about me suggests either.

That meant I was “one of the guys” when we met with these Republicans, and no one thought twice about taking off their masks. We were all buddies, right? All white people working to save America from the n***** and immigrants and whatnot. Fortunately, no one got around to complaining about “The Jews,” or I would have waited until we got back to the hotel before smashing a bottle of Jack Daniels over their head.

Well, maybe. 19-year-old Ogre was not the “I don’t give a fuck what you think about me” Ogre of today.

Still, I did will myself to be invisible, and so, to her credit, did Jen. We never talked about it but I don’t remember her joining in.

It was the 90s, though, right? It was a different time!

Well, yes and no. I had grown up in a working-class Italian neighborhood, and the racism was thick as fuck. None of us were saints, certainly not 10-year-old me discovering the fun of cursing. But it was never cruel or mean. It was habitual. It was still real, though. When the first couple of Black families moved onto our block, I got to witness White Flight long before I knew the phrase existed. Racism is racism, no matter how routine.

But this? What I saw with the Young Republicans? That was something else. Something uglier and darker and deeper. There was a mean edge to it I was not used to, and I was used to a LOT.

It looked and sounded an awful lot like the group chat Chris Cillizza is trying to play off as a recent development.

But he knows it’s not. Cillizza has been in political writing (he’s not a journalist any more than I am) since the mid-90s. That’s a full decade before I started paying close attention and started writing about politics. And yet, somehow, in all that time, Cillizza never quite seemed to notice the rampant racism in the Republican Party.

Which is weird, because you would have to be blind not to see it. From space. Cillizza’s got some thick-ass glasses, but I’m fairly certain he can still see a fucking Nazi seig heiling right in front of him.

When I started writing 15 years ago, I spent an awful lot of time trawling through the filth of the far right to understand who these people were. I frantically jumped up and down that white Christian nationalism was the fringe and the fringe wouldn’t stay that way for long. Once they mainstreamed that, I looked at the right’s fringe again and saw the Manosphere and a horde of pedophiles. I said years ago that this was coming.

And here we are. Chris Cillizza is telling us that it’s just so sad that toxic masculinity is driving dumb “20-somethings” to say outrageous stuff, but, hey, what are ya gonna do? And the entire Republican Party is protecting an international pedophile ring while starting to talk about how 15-year-old children are old enough for grown men to fuck.

How could I, some stay-at-home schmuck without Cillizza’s expensive education and fat rolodex of connections, have noticed such fundamental aspects of the GOP when Cillizza couldn’t?

Then again…

Cillizza has made a very lucrative career lying to protect the Republican Party, shielding the public from noticing who and what they are. He gives others in the legacy press a fig leaf to hide the truth behind so none need speak the obvious truth: The Republican Party is the home of American Nazis, traitors, and monsters.

Must be nice to get paid so well to run interference for the worst people this country has ever produced. I wonder if Cillizza thinks his money and connections will be enough to protect him in the fascist hellscape he’s deliberately helping to build. A lot of rich people think they’ll be immune when everything falls apart. History tells us otherwise. But keep selling those lies, you fucking shill. I’m sure the money helps you sleep at night.

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