Let’s take a step back into the distant past of…March 2025. Trump had just been sworn in several weeks earlier, and his regime immediately set the Constitution on fire. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, was rampaging through the federal government, stealing trillions of dollars’ worth of personal data and illegally firing tens of thousands of federal employees.

Masked ICE agents began to grab people off the street with no warrant and make them disappear. The first human trafficking flight to a concentration camp in Central America was on March 15, in direct violation of a court order. The country was terrified. The press was working 24/7 to sanewash a rabid president and normalize open lawlessness by a fascist regime. The Republican Party was gloating about Trump’s (nonexistent) massive mandate and a new dawn in ‘Murika. Elections didn’t matter because by the time they came? This would be The White Christian States of Trump.

March was a really long time ago, wasn’t it? All that Republican swagger vanished. Where is it? In a supermax prison in El Salvador?

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Let’s fast forward from March to the far-flung future of June 30, 2025. In the three and a half months since the regime peaked, how are things going for them?

• Trump has lost about 93% of the cases brought against his regime.

• Elon Musk has been exiled from his government job and is now attacking Trump and his signature bill, the MAGA Murder Budget.

• Trump’s triumphant, masturbatory military parade was a disaster, complete with laughably low attendance and the troops making it very clear they were not on board with the fascism.

• At the exact same time no one showed up to cheer for Trump, several million people took to the streets to cheer for democracy in one of the largest, and definitely most widespread, protests in American history.

• Trump’s public support has vanished.

• Voters fucking HATE the “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans are trying to pass. Even Republicans hate it if they’re aware of what’s in it, something Democrats have been screaming at the top of their lungs and the legacy press has been kind of mumbling under their breath.

This last part is where we pick up the story of now. Remember, Republicans were strutting with their collective dick swinging around. They had a mandate, baby! Fucking ‘Murika! MAGA all the way! Those pussy libs couldn’t do anything. Trump was inevitable and who cares about elections?

A party convinced they don’t have to worry about elections doesn’t give a shit about what the voters think. And when the House Republicans put this bill together, they surely did not care. They were loud and proud about how they were going to gut Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps and Meals on Wheels and just steal literally hundreds of billions from the poor and middle class to feed the endless greed of the fascist billionaires that own the GOP.

By the time they passed the bill, though? They were fighting tooth and nail to secure the votes. Whole lot of threats and compromises and even more threats to get it over the finish line. That was five weeks ago.

Since then, things have gotten even worse. Senate Republicans are tearing each other to pieces over the bill. Trump is threatening primaries. “Moderate” Lisa Murkowski needed a massive bribe. Thom Tillis said, “Fuck you” and then announced he wouldn’t run for reelection next year.

The bill is so bloated and mangled, the Senate Parliamentarian is shooting down crucial pieces of it and Republicans are responding by lying and cheating as they always do. Trump is demanding they simply ignore her and pass whatever they want. But the Senate GOP is not doing that (yet). Why not? Elections don’t matter anymore, right? This is the Thousand-Year Reich, so who cares if they ignore the rules?

Three months ago, Republicans might have done that. They might have done away with the filibuster, too. Something else they haven’t done but should have if they really believed there isn’t going to be another election. Why keep it if they’ll be in power forever? When democracy is dead forever, consequences are only for the losing side.

But the Trump of three months ago isn’t the Trump of now. He’s weak and flailing and still a bumbling incompetent.

Meanwhile, the public of three months ago absolutely isn’t the public of now. We’re angry. So SO very fucking angry and getting more organized by the day. More organized and more militant in our organization.

Trump may have convinced himself that there will not be another election but the Republican Party VERY much believes the midterms are coming and they are very afraid of them.

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

The Ogre Wave is coming!!!

Here are a few things to consider and I will continue to point them out:

• The Trumpcession has not hit yet. It’s coming and it’s going to be bad - When millions of people lose their jobs and the federal government does nothing at all to help, because Project 2025’s solution to a recession is “Fuck you, Poors!”, no one is going to blame Joe Biden or trans kids. They’re going to blame Trump and the GOP.

• The tariffs haven’t fully impacted the economy yet and Trump is still a fucking moron engaging the country in a global trading war we cannot win - On top of the inflation that’s coming down the pike as the tariffs jack up prices on huge swathes of the economy, Trump’s stupidity is crashing the value of the Dollar and it’s going to get worse.

• Stephen Miller’s Nazi war against immigrants is going to do massive damage - On top of destroying millions of lives, Miller’s blind racist rage will devastate several industries including hotels, farming, restaurants, and construction. With the economy already stumbling, this will be a killing blow and food prices will skyrocket as crops rot in the field.

• Musk is not on Trump’s side anymore - Will Musk fund primaries against Trump allies? Possibly. But even withholding his money and support is a massive blow to Trump who would not have “won” the 2024 election with the billionaire and his propaganda machine.

• The ongoing cuts to the government will be felt soon enough in red states - Even before the MAGA Murder Budget, Republicans have gutted thousands of programs that overwhelmingly served rural America and red states. They’re already noticing all of that support disappearing and they’re going to want to know why. (Hint: Not trans kids)

• RFK Jr’s vaccine bullshit will kill tens of thousands of people and we’ll all know whose fault it is - By limiting access to the flu and covid vaccines this Fall, the death toll will be unlike anything we’ve seen since 2020. Who’s going to get the blame for that? Not migrants.

• Iran and Israel will keep fighting and we will get more involved - Netanyahu cannot allow peace to break out or his criminal trial will proceed. Therefore, Israel will be back at war before the summer is over and Trump, his little mushroom dick hard over the idea of being a “wartime president,” will throw us headlong into the fight. No planning. No exit strategy. Just “cool” footage for the news and demands of absolute loyalty. But a new endless Middle East war will infuriate at least some of the GOP base as well as the rest of the non-MAGA country.

• ICE will continue to spiral out of control - Stephen Miller’s Gestapo grows bolder by the day, convinced that they will never be held accountable for their actions. They are so very very wrong about this. But while they’re high on their own supply, their violence will increasingly sicken the public. Eventually, they will beat someone to death on camera because white nationalists are animals and they’ve been waiting their whole lives for this. They won’t even care if they’re undocumented or not because they’ll have brown skin and that’s all that matters. The public backlash will make the George Floyd protests look like a gathering of elderly British librarians having Sunday tea.

When all of this comes to pass, Trump will be weaker than any president in history and the public will be raging at him more than anyone thought possible. This November’s off-year elections are going to be a bloodbath presaging a midterm slaughter that will put the House and Senate firmly in the hands of the democrats and yank a number of even gerrymandered state legislatures to the left. Republicans will long for the days of the 2018 blue wave.

Now, it’s important to understand that Trump desperately wants to use the military to seize control of the country. To declare an “emergency” and cancel the elections. That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.

It’s a very bad plan.

There is no mechanism to cancel or even delay the midterms. The federal government cannot dictate when and where states hold their elections. Trump can write an executive order demanding they be canceled and…what? What Democratic-controlled state would honor it? Would the Supreme Court uphold it on the grounds that Trump is king? There is not one single letter in the Constitution to support Trump’s plan and inventing new powers would simply trigger riots.

Now, Trump may want that but the United Military is clearly not onboard and even if they were, they simply are not large enough to seize control of more than one or two big cities. So how does that work? Fingers crossed and hope for the best? Dissolve the Senate and House and hope no one says anything? Hunker down in the White House and rule by fiat? Hope enough of the police or militias join you to put down the riots?

If Trump had the kind of support he needed to do this, millions of Proud Boys would have been in the streets, beating up protesters on No Kings Day. But they weren’t. Isn’t that strange?

Republicans may cram through this bill because they’re afraid of Trump and his cult of murderous monsters. But this should have been easy for them. Deficits don’t matter when elections don’t exist. The debt doesn’t matter when elections aren’t happening. Public rage at the contents of a bill you were gloating about just a month ago doesn’t matter because the public doesn’t get to vote anymore.

But that’s not how Republicans are acting at all. Most of them are very much convinced that passing this bill is electoral suicide and they’ve been trying to do it in the middle of the night behind closed doors. They’ve been lying about what’s in the bill, whereas before they didn’t bother lying at all. They know.

Trump is weak and getting weaker. They’re afraid because they know we’re coming for them, and they no longer believe Trump can stop us.

Fascism relies on the illusion of infallibility, and that illusion has been well and truly shattered. By this time next year, the rats will be fleeing the flaming wreckage of Trump’s regime, trying to save themselves without incurring the wrath of the mad king. Look for an enormous number of “retirements” from the right as dozens of Republicans decide to “spend more time with their families.”

Those are the filthy rats fleeing the coming blue wave.

For their part, Trump and his regime will be lashing out in a wild panic, desperately trying to subdue us. So this is going to get worse before it gets better. Document all of it. Make a record for the tribunals and use the anger to fuel you because when this is over, and it WILL be over, the Nazis will either spend the rest of their lives in a small cell or swing from the rope for what they’ve done. Count on it.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 126 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Is it professionally worthwhile–not just as a form of light intellectual entertainment–for a modern economist to read articles and books written long ago? Do old article contain within them the possibility of live insights for modern economists? Matthew McCaffrey, Joseph T. Salerno, and Carmen-Elena Dorobat make the case for an affirmative answer in “The History of Economic Thought as a Living Laboratory” Cambridge Journal of Economics, March 2025, pp. 235-253). They write:

We argue that the history of thought can be conceived as a living laboratory of economic theorising. It is living in that it is a vital and valuable part of economics rather than a dead branch of it. It is a laboratory in that it functions as a proving ground in which theories from many different times and contexts can be examined, compared, critiqued, combined and developed. In other words, history of thought can be conceived as a method of doing economics rather than an isolated or niche field within it. …

For example, Axel Leijonhufvud similarly conceived of economics as a vast decision tree with many branches, each of which can be traced back to earlier choices by economists in a sequence potentially centuries long (Leijonhufvud, 2006). This is consistent with our own approach in that it views modern economics (the topmost branches of the tree) as embodying and reflecting a rich, living history of past choices and paths not taken (the lower branches or bits of tree trunk). Our approach expands some elements of the tree metaphor. In particular, our view is that HET [history of economic thought] is the tree itself rather than one of its dead branches or forgotten roots: there is no arbitrary point at which a branch becomes historical and therefore separate from the rest. Even the most recent branches exist synchronously with older ones. The decision tree of economics is dynamic, and old or seemingly withered branches can grow healthily again even after years of neglect.

The authors trace the “laboratory” metaphor back to Frank A. Fetter (1863-1949), who wrote:

Something of worth to present thought is, therefore, often to be gained by a restudy of past opinions, even though the first result may seem to be merely to expose their error. Showing that a thing cannot be done in a way that looks promising is often a service of laboratory research second only in value to showing how it can be done. The history of economic thought is the experimental laboratory of economics, or as near to that enviable agency of the physical sciences as social students are able to come.

They quote from Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) magisterial History of Economic Analyis, published posthumously in 1954:

[O]ur minds are apt to derive new inspiration from the study of the history of science. Some do so more than others, but there are probably few that do not derive from it any benefit at all. A man’s mind must be indeed sluggish if, standing back from the work of his time and beholding the wide mountain ranges of past thought, he does not experience a widening of his own horizon… But, besides inspiration every one of us may glean lessons from the history of his science that are useful, even though sometimes discouraging. We learn about both the futility and the fertility of controversies; about detours, wasted efforts, and blind alleys; about spells of arrested growth, about our dependence on chance, about how not to do things, about leeways to make up for. We learn to understand why we are as far as we actually are and also why we are not further. And we learn what succeeds and how and why.

Mark Blaug (1927-1911) took the laboratory metaphor a step further in the final pages of his Economic Theory in Retrospect, using it to emphasise the need for humility in economics, and for acknowledging the inescapable influence of the history of ideas:

One justification for the study of the history of economics, but of course only one, is that it provides a more extensive ‘laboratory’ in which to acquire methodological humility about the actual accomplishments of economics. Furthermore, it is a laboratory that every economist carries with him, whether he is aware of it or not. When someone claims to explain the determination of wages without bringing in marginal productivity, or to measure capital in its own physical units, or to demonstrate the benefits of the Invisible Hand by purely objective [i.e., without resorting to subjective value judgments] criteria, the average economist reacts almost instinctively but it is an instinct acquired by the lingering echoes of the history of the subject.

As McCaffrey, Salerno, and Dorobat argue: “In this version, the laboratory functions as a way of keeping economists grounded and avoiding mistaken claims of originality or inflated assertions of significance. It is also noteworthy that Blaug describes the history of thought as a ‘more extensive’ laboratory, implying the existence of a less extensive version. That version most likely refers to contemporary theorising without the benefit of history. In other words, Blaug too is suggesting that the history of ideas provides a richer and more expansive range of knowledge and ‘tools’ for economists to use. It is a crucial part of the economic record that gives us far more material to work with when determining the successes and failures of economic theory.”

I’ve read more history of economic thought than a number of modern economists; indeed, back in graduate school I even ploughed through Schumpeter’s thoroughly intimidating 1000-plus pages of the History of Economic Analysis. My own revealed choices suggest that I find it worthwhile to read the work of dead economists. But of course, my own preferences are not dispositive.

On one side, it seems to me that in questions of economics, inspiration can come from many sources. For some, inspiration arrives in the act of writing down and spelling out a mathematical model. For others, it arrives in the form of observations about the world that don’t seem well-explained by standard theory. For others, it arrives a part of the effort to answer a real-world policy question. Among the many potential sources of inspiration, it’s not hard to imagine that for some people, reading the efforts of earlier economists trying to come to grips with an issue might touch off a spark of insight.

But time is the consummate scarce resource. If an economist is looking for inspiration and insight, is it more likely to be discovered by spending the marginal hour reading articles by dead economists or by live ones? The answer probably depends on an idiosyncratic mix of reader and topic. But there is an intermediate choice, which is to be willing, now and again, to dip into the writings by those who specialize in history of economic thought. Their work offers a pre-chewed and partially digested version of past writings, which in more than a few cases has pushed me to dig deeper.

One of my friends used to say that “I’ll think about history of economic thought when I’m doomed to repeat it.” In that spirit, I’ll point out that many modern policy nostrums have actually been the subject of considerable debate. The arguments and evidence on how price controls work, or don’t, goes back centuries, as do the arguments about the effects of tariffs. Arguments about specific applications of price controls, like rent control, or about specific applications of tariffs, like favoring cerain domestic industries for purposes of national economic development, go back decades. If, say, rent control was a useful and obvious method of providing affordable housing across a large metro area or a country, one might expect to find lots of examples in the history of economic thought explaining how well it worked, and why. For me, history of economic thought often is useful in teaching humility, because it’s often true that very smart people have thought deeply about similar questions in the past. There’s a centuries-old saying to the effect: “If I see further, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” A neglect of the history of thought is an apparent belief that it saves time not to stand on the shoulders of giants.

As an editor, I’ll offer one other thought: If you haven’t actually read the article or book by a dead economist, be very cautious about repeating a quotation that you saw or heard someplace. A random quotation might seem like just a bit of color to enliven dreary prose, but if the quotation does not actually capture the original argument, then for those who have read the original, it marks you as unreliable.

The post A Case for Reading Dead Economists first appeared on Conversable Economist.

It’s the 56^th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. I was there on the streets for all three nights in June of 1969. I wrote the Village Voice cover story, “Gay power comes to Sheridan Square.” I have written stories commemorating that historic moment in American history many times over the years.

There. I got that out of the way.

What I want to write about this year is the need to keep writing about Stonewall, about LGBTQ rights, about the fact that Pride month and Pride marches are still an issue. This year, chiefly because Trump is once again in the White House, the stories are about corporations pulling their sponsorship of Pride month. “Big brands are pulling back on Pride merchandise and events this year,” was the June 4 headline on CNN Business, with other major media covering the same story, the same way.

Why? Instead of covering Pride month itself, or Pride day, or the Stonewall anniversary, major media outlets found it necessary to cover the pull-back by major companies of their support for Pride events, limit or cancel sales of merchandise, as well as messages of support for Pride in television ads or social media.

It’s the same old story: Fear. Corporations are afraid they’re going to get on the wrong side of Donald Trump in the way that Trump has targeted major law firms for their support of the Democratic Party, liberal causes, or lawsuits involving issues that Trump and Republicans don’t like.

Trump is doing everything he can to attack LGBTQ people and their rights. He’s got too many Supreme Court decisions that affirm gay rights to go at it in a full-on frontal way, so he signed an executive order declaring that there are only two genders, male and female, and ordered the banning of transgender people from service in the military. He’s counting on “his” Supreme Court to affirm that the Pentagon is the final arbiter of what constitutes fitness for service and military readiness, and so far, he’s succeeding, with the court lifting a stay of Trump’s transgender ban while a lawsuit challenging it makes its way through the courts. That allowed the military to begin discharging transgender service members who refused to resign.

It's outrageous, of course, which is the point. Some transgender people who are currently serving have combat records and awards such as the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Do you think that makes any difference? Not a chance. Trump is going to do whatever he can to pander to his base supporters. He can’t resegregate the military. He can’t ban gay people from serving. So, he does the next best thing by banning transgender people using the same arguments that were used against Black people before Truman integrated the service and against gay people before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was overturned.

I’d like to address that particularly disgusting time in our nation’s history, when gay people were banned from service in our military. There were thousands of gay Americans who served in all the uniformed services, of course. Some were drafted during World War II and afterwards in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the draft was used to fill the ranks. The commanding general at Fort Leavenworth when my father served on the Staff and Faculty in the early 1960’s was gay and lived with a male Captain. He didn’t have to hide who he was, because he had a sterling record of heroism in World War II, and everybody knew it.

Before he took office in 1992, Bill Clinton said he would issue an executive order similar to Truman’s, integrating gay people into the uniformed services. There was immediate conservative opposition. Colin Powell, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 when Clinton was inaugurated, led the military chiefs of staff who headed up the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines into the Oval Office, where they basically told Clinton that if he issued his executive order allowing gays to serve openly in the military, they would resign en masse.

I was in Washington D.C. that day. The Human Rights Campaign had recruited a few straight military veterans to lobby the Congress in favor of gays in the military. That’s what it was called: “Gays in the military.” My father flew to Washington to support the Human Rights Campaign. He had written an article in favor of “gays in the military” for the Washington Post that appeared the day we all gathered at the Washington Hilton to plan our lobbying visit to Congress. The actor Troy Evans, who had appeared in “China Beach” and “Twin Peaks,” among other television series, and was a veteran of the 25^th Infantry Division in Vietnam, was with us, along with several others.

We went to the Capitol where House and Senate members, some of them newly elected, had just moved into their offices. Representatives of the Human Rights Campaign had made appointments for us to visit Congressmen and Senators, including the forgettable Speaker of the House, Tom Foley, and Majority Leader of the Senate George Mitchell.

I remember the feeling of going into the offices of these members of Congress as a nearly out of body experience. I remember Troy Evans, who would go on to fame playing the character “Barrel” on the hit TV series “Bosch,” beginning his pitch to Senator Mitchell, who had served as an officer in the Army in the 1950’s, by saying, “I shouldn’t have to tell you this, because you are a veteran, Senator, but this discrimination is just wrong.”

Troy summed it up perfectly. Why was it necessary for us to be there? We had all known gay men who served alongside us in the Army and Air Force and Navy and Marines. The members of Congress who hadn’t served, well, we were there to tell them exactly that, and to tell them that the gay people we had served with had served honorably. My father was able to tell them that one of the gay soldiers in his company in the Korean War had given his life as a machine gunner to save the lives of the rest of the men in the company – all of them – as they retreated during the Battle of The Gauntlet, a particularly savage engagement during which the Chinese army had attacked using “human waves,” directly into, in my father’s company’s case, the fire of his gay machine gunner.

Why did we even have to explain this stuff? Discriminating against gay men and women was wrong on its face. We shouldn’t have had to “prove” with our stories that gay people could serve alongside straight people. It had happened! It was a fact! It was part of our history!

But Colin Powell told Bill Clinton the same thing that General Omar Bradley had told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1949, when conservatives in the Congress were attempting to overturn Truman’s order integrating the services racially. Powell said integrating gay people would be “harmful to good order and discipline, unit cohesion, morale, and esprit de corps.” When it was pointed out that the same thing had been said about integrating Blacks in the services, it had no effect whatsoever on Powell or anyone else. They were going to force discrimination any way they could. The result was the criminally stupid “compromise” of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which wasn’t a compromise at all, but rather a system of discrimination under another name that was used to run gay people out of the military until its repeal in 2011.

And here we are again. Another top leader at the Pentagon, this time in the person of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, telling the outright lie that transgender soldiers cannot serve honorably because they are “living a lie” or some bullshit like that, and of course, their service is inimical to “good order and discipline” and all the rest of it.

Trump’s 6-3 rubber stamp majority on the Supreme Court will shoot down the case against the transgender ban whenever it finally reaches the court. And last week it came out that Kim Davis – remember the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in 2015 after the right to marry was affirmed for gay people in the Obergefell decision – is filing a lawsuit to overturn that decision because of her religion, or some bullshit reason. That case will wend its way to the Supreme Court because it’s got big-time right-wing money behind it in the form of the right-wing Liberty Counsel.

Because of course it has.

They never stop, they never let up, they’ve got God on their side, they’ve got Trump in the White House, they’ve got hand puppets on the Supreme Court…pick your reason...this will go on and on. More Stonewall anniversaries will come and go, more Pride Months, more Pride Marches…

None of this repetition of all that came before should be necessary. Whoever named the Human Rights Campaign got it exactly right: The right to marry whomever you want, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to be proud of who you are – these are not special rights, they are human rights. We will keep going. We won’t shut up. Straight or gay or transgender or bi or whomever, we are tangled up in pride of who we are, and we will prevail because we are strong and we are united and we are right.

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I woke up Wednesday morning anticipating a glorious day of meltdowns from the right and legacy press and Democrats who should fucking know better. And I did, indeed, get that. They’re all very VERY concerned that SOMEHOW, a disgraced sexual predator who ran a shitty Trump-style campaign didn’t win the race to be the next mayor of New York City.

But on top of that delicious pile of “go fuck yourself” was the most exquisite sauce imaginable: The sweet panicked tears of Wall Street. My God, do I even have a spoon big enough to shove it all in my mouth?

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year.

🍴EAT THE RICH! ALIVE!🍴

Please allow me to elaborate and bring joy to your day:

My immediate reaction was as follows:

My internal monologue STILL hasn’t stopped giggling, and I’m fairly sure I was chuckling in my sleep. My cat was looking at me oddly this morning…

Anyway, it gets better:

On Wednesday morning, the world’s epicenter of capitalism woke up to find it might soon have a socialist mayor.

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor shocked Wall Street. Some of the world’s most influential and powerful financiers were left grasping to understand what Mamdani’s victory would mean for their industry—and whether they would leave the city.

Grab your tiny violin and let us all play the world’s saddest song for rich assholes:🎻 Truly, their struggles are incomprehensible to us Poors.

Why, exactly, are they so terrified of this monster?

Mamdani’s platform includes increasing taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. He has said he would make the city more affordable by freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, investing $70 billion in publicly subsidized housing, providing free bus service and opening government-operated grocery stores.

Le gasp! But it gets worse!!!

My fucking god. It’s anarchy! Absolute anarchy!!!! Baby baskets? BABY BASKETS?! Those are a Finnish innovation from a century ago that decreases infant mortality and makes the lives of new mothers easier by providing them with most of what they need for a newborn in the first couple of weeks of life. And this commie hippie crunchy granola weirdo wants to give them out all willy-nilly?!

This is the United States of America, buddy! We’re pro-life! What part of that do you not understand?! We don’t give a shit what happens to the baby AFTER it’s born!

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

Ogres love babies!

It gets sooooo much worse! Mamdani wants free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and…more libraries!!!!

If you’re wondering what the grocery store thing is about, there are a lot of food deserts in NYC, areas where there simply are no grocery stores available to shop at for miles. Having to take a bus or train 20, 30, or more minutes to buy fresh food is insane if you don’t live in a rural community. City-owned stores would operate in areas deemed “not profitable” by big companies and provide the healthy food people need. It would reduce poor health outcomes, lower costs, and generally make areas more viable for the residents.

Truly, an insidious plan to…destroy the city? I don’t know the details of Mamdani’s nefarious plan, but I’m pretty sure it ends with all of us swearing allegiance to Stalin.

Here’s my favorite part of the rich asshole nervous breakdown:

There were renewed questions about whether Wall Street executives would stay in New York or if Mamdani’s plans for the city would send more financiers to states such as Florida and Texas. Some executives cited concerns about taxes and crime under a potential Mamdani administration as well as fears of rising antisemitism.

Sander Gerber, chief executive of investment firm Hudson Bay Capital, said he fielded texts from some of his 170 employees who said they were “thinking of leaving.”

Some developers and landlords said they are already making plans to exit New York and focus on more business-friendly markets like Miami, Dallas or Nashville.

Don’t threaten me with a good time, yeah?

It’s really important to understand that all of these people are rip-roaring mad because they’re going to be expected to pay more money. Not one of them believes, for a fucking second, that they will be driven out of business or reduced to poverty. They know, for a fact, that they will still be billionaires and millionaires four to eight years from now.

What they’re panicking about, really deep down in their bones, is that there will be a mayor in America’s largest, most populous, richest city who says loudly, and constantly, “Hey, the rich aren’t paying their fair share. We need to fix that and then this city will be affordable for the rest of us again.”

There’s a reason Occupy Wall Street made the rich and powerful spiral into violent overreaction. This is 1000 times worse. This is Occupy Wall Street in Gracie Mansion. This time, the rich and powerful can’t send the cops to beat the dirty hippies up. The dirty hippie is in charge of the city, and he’s going to be very popular with the public when he rolls out his policies.

The only people who legitimately need to worry are the landlords. And I don’t mean the ones who own one or two units. I mean the parasites that own hundreds of homes and make housing unaffordable because they gobbled it all up after every housing bubble collapse. I’ll bet a nickel that Mamdani is going to come for them and he’s not going to be very nice about it.

Cry me a fucking river.

For their part, establishment Democrats need to get over themselves. They’re trapped in the mentality of “We don’t do things that way. It’s just not proper.” Fuck proper. Do what works, and if that makes Republicans and the press cry? Who gives a shit? Is it working? Is it making life better for the average American? Then fucking do it and punch Nazis in the face to get them out of the way so you can keep doing it. Worry about norms and tradition after the Nazis are in prison or swinging from the gallows for treason.

Now, how much Mamdani will accomplish in the next four years is an open question. Fox News is already whipping the right into a blind rage over COMMUNISM!!!! The GOP intends to make Mamdani the new face of the Democratic Party, a wild-eyed commie Mulsim blablabla. Their whole “AOC is the devil” schtick has grown stale, so they need someone new with brown skin to terrorize the rubes.

The legacy press, it appears, is going to despise Mamdani for the same reason they despised Biden: He’s a threat to the status quo. It’s permissible for Republicans to rewrite the economy to the benefit of the rich. Strip trillions from the working and middle class to lard onto billionaire bank accounts? Go for it! That’s a day ending in “Y” in America.

But to rewrite the economy in America’s most powerful city to work for everyone? To lower the cost of living? To improve schools? To make things better for the average New Yorker? That ruins the narrative of “inevitable decline” the legacy press and GOP thrive on. That threatens to show the public that things can work just fine if the rich stop stealing everything and pay what they owe.

It’s what Joe Biden was doing and it’s why they destroyed him. It’s why they’re STILL destroying him.

And so the press coverage of Mamdani will be relentlessly negative no matter what he does. Mamdani is inexperienced, so maybe he’ll be terrible. But maybe he won’t. He cannot possibly be worse than Eric Adams, who was corrupt, a clown, and just very bad at his job. Mamdani’s best hope is to pick a staff aligned with his views who know how to get things done and push to get other like-minded people elected throughout the city. Good luck, buddy. A lot of billionaires are really mad you want them to pay more taxes.

Just as an aside, pay attention to all of the people who demand to know how Mamdani plans to pay for his policies. As someone on Substack pointed out, Cuomo planned to cut taxes to the rich and hire 5,000 more cops at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. No one ever once asked him how he planned to pay for that. Same as it ever was.

Until November’s election, I’m going to both enjoy the ongoing meltdown of the greedy rich assholes on Wall Street who have fucked us all so many times facing the horrific prospect of paying, what?, 10% more in taxes on the hundreds of millions they’ve stolen? Boo hoo, baby.

At the same time, I’m going to be livid at how the legacy press moves heaven and earth to cost Mamdani the election. They would rather have a racist MAGA moron like Curtis Silwa, the wannabe vigilante, be mayor than a filthy socialist. It’s not going to happen, but, oh boy, are they going to try.

I don’t live in NYC anymore, and I haven’t in over a decade, so I’m not particularly attached to the city. Nice to visit every now and then but no desire whatsoever to return. But I’m going to pay attention to Mamdani for the rest of this election and, if he wins, for the next four years. I feel like he’s a microcosm of the Democratic Party. Not that we’re suddenly going to swing to, GASP, socialism! all at once, but that younger, unapologetically progressive faces are going to start to win and all the worst people are going to cry big sobby tears about how oppressed they are. And then use every ounce of their considerable power to destroy the upstarts.

They’ll ultimately fail, but it’s going to be funny/infuriating to watch.

The legacy media has abandoned us in favor of sucking up to oligarchs and fascism. Find voices you trust (other than me) and subscribe where you can. Independent voices like the Opinionated Ogre will be needed in the coming days, and we require your support. This newsletter is free, but for $5 a month or just $50 a year, you can keep the lights on.

🖕FUCK THE LEGACY PRESS!🖕

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!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 130 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

What woke me up to the need to write this column were the reports, as Trump held his good-bye press conference in the Netherlands after the NATO summit this morning, that the other European leaders had agreed last week to shorten the summit from three days to one and cut the meeting of NATO leaders down to two and half hours, to accommodate our president’s “short attention span,” according to two reports out of Europe. NPR this morning noted that Trump had not growled at the other leaders about NATO being irrelevant and useless, or gone on and on about the others “not paying their fair share” as he did during his first term every time the four letters N and A and T and O were strung together in his presence.

“It seems they’ve learned how to flatter him,” one analyst said on NPR. That made the summit a grand success, she observed.

I could make snarky jokes about Trump falling asleep at the summit meeting, two and a half hours apparently being too long for him, but I’ll settle for This Is Not Normal.

Nor is it normal for the President of the United States to call for a CNN correspondent, Natasha Bertrand, to be “fired” and “thrown out like a dog.” Trump continued his attack on Truth Social, apparently posted from Air Force One on his way back from Europe: “She lied on the Laptop from Hell Story, and now she lied on the Nuclear Sites Story, attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit 'pay dirt' — TOTAL OBLITERATION!"

Laptop from Hell Story? Destroy our Patriot Pilots?

“CNN is scum, MSDNC is scum, the New York Times is scum. They’re bad people, they’re sick,” Trump went on. “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY.”

Trump is trying to say that any questioning of the efficacy of the bombing of Fordo is an attack, not on his judgement in ordering the bombing, but on the Air Force pilots who flew the B-2 bombers. The intelligence report on the effectiveness of the bombing being quoted by CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, was produced by his own Defense Intelligence Agency.

This is not normal.

Back in the good old U.S.A., Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against all 15 federal judges in the federal court district of Maryland over an order issued in Maryland that requires all deportations to be paused 48 hours so that immigrants picked up by ICE agents can file a petition for habeas corpus challenging their detention by ICE.

Previous to this lawsuit, which legal experts have called unprecedented, federal judges have enjoyed immunity from lawsuits challenging the execution of their duties as part of the judiciary. The Supreme Court has already ruled that immigrant detainees are entitled to protection of their right to due process under law.

This kind of lawsuit has never been filed against federal judges by the government. It’s not normal.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled U.S. funding of GAVI, the international vaccine agency, accusing the agency of “ignoring the science” regarding child vaccinations around the world. Kennedy told the agency that the U.S. would not make good the Biden administration’s $1.2 billion pledge to assist in vaccinating children in poor foreign countries. The decision was made unilaterally by Kennedy and delivered to the international agency in a video sent to the meeting of international members of GAVI who had gathered to support the goals of vaccinating children against infectious diseases. Vaccinations have succeeded in nearly totally wiping out certain childhood diseases such as polio, measles and rubella that were once the cause of widespread illness and death among children.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s new vaccine advisory panel held its first meeting in Chicago today. Kennedy had fired the previous vaccine panel and appointed eight new members. One of his new appointees withdrew from the panel, leaving only seven to meet in Chicago today. The chairman of the new panel, a vaccine skeptic who was critical of the COVID vaccine, announced that the panel will review the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella shot that has been used safely to vaccinate children for many years. During tomorrow’s meeting, the panel will be addressed by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense Fund, an anti-vaccine group, on the use of the preservative, thimerosal, which has been phased out of U.S. vaccines. In a slide presentation that has been prepared to be delivered to the vaccine panel tomorrow, Redwood quoted a study that does not exist. Redwood was forced to remove the reference to the non-existent study when the person she quoted as its author said he had not done the study.

The seven members of the vaccine panel have not undergone any form of vetting of their credentials or been cleared for conflicts of interest as required by law for service on the panel.

This is not normal. Kennedy himself is not normal.

In his press conference earlier today in the Netherlands, Trump compared his bombing attack on Iran to the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. “Actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war too. This ended a war in a different way. But it was so devastating," Trump bragged.

This is the man who has the codes to order the use of our nuclear arsenal. None of this is normal. He is not normal. And yet, a majority of our fellow Americans elected him President.

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As Donald Trump wages a war of choice in the Middle East over alleged weapons of mass destruction, it feels like deja vu all over again. Except this time, the weapons are in fact at least close to existence — because Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear deal and was unable to broker a better one. Again, conservatives are cheering on this dangerous escalation. Again, sane people everywhere are holding their breath.

And Democrats, per usual, don’t really seem to know what to do.

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In New York City, Democratic primary voters just elected Zohran Mamdani to run for mayor, and in New York, the Democratic primary winner is effectively the future mayor of the city. Mamdani is a charismatic and clearly bright 33-year-old Democratic Socialist with a policy platform that includes a lot of splashy promises, including a rent freeze and free buses. He’s been a member of the New York State Assembly for five years, and has no experience running so much as a large organization — let alone anything close to America’s largest city. But he is, in this moment, what voters seem to want: Someone who promises to shake things up. Who might break some stuff to rebuild better.

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