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 (a 17% discount!).

🌟BECOME A CONTRIBUTING SUBSCRIBER!🌟

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

Ben Cohen over at The Banter wrote a piece about “The F-Word” aka “fascism,” and why it is 100% appropriate to call Trump and his wider movement fascists. The reason he dived into this “controversial” topic is that, for some reason, it’s actually still controversial to apply the proper label to a movement that is openly fascist and quite happy about it.

Here’s what Ben pointed out:

Robert O. Paxton is widely regarded as the pre-eminent historian of fascism in the English-speaking world. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004, he defined the ideology in the following terms:

Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

This was written over twenty years ago, long before the Trump era in American politics. But Paxton is describing Trumpism to a tee.

You can quibble about whether or not these people are Nazis, but, as I’ve pointed out recently, that won’t be the case much longer. The Nazis are going to take over the party. Soon.

But for now, quibble away. What you cannot quibble about is whether or not they are, in fact, fascists. The Trump regime fits the definition so closely, it’s practically a textbook example.

So why ARE we fighting over this?

Well, to be clear, “we” aren’t. We on the left have been very clear for quite some time that the American right has been moving in this direction for over half a century. Now that they’re exactly where we said they were going, two things are happening:

1. The centuries-long project of protecting racist white men from consequences is working overtime.

2. The decades-long project of the legacy press shitting on the left is having a temper tantrum.

I’ve talked about the centuries-long project a number of times. This is America’s refusal to hold racist white men accountable for the evil they do.

We should have hanged the treasonous “government” of the Confederacy. Instead, we let them go home.

We should have hunted down and killed the entire KKK for the murderous terrorists they were. Instead, we left the South and allowed them to enact a reign of terror for generations.

We should have shot every American found to be working for the Nazi Party. We were willing to put over 100,000 innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, but racist white men working to destroy America? Well…that’s a different story.

The steps of the Capitol should have been red with the blood of violent terrorists on January 6th. Instead, they were allowed to go home, too.

America does not like to hold racist white men accountable for what they do. It’s unseemly. It’s unfair. It’s “un-American.” Accountability is for Those People and the left.

Of course, and I’ve written about this a whole lot as well, those days are over. The right has gone too far to play the “We have to look forward, not back, for the good of the country” card this time. 2029 is going to be a very bad year for the fascists and their collaborators.

Now, the second thing we’re seeing here is the legacy press protecting itself from having to admit something: We on the left were right all along. The Professional Left Podcast talks about this allllll the time. The legacy press has spent decades telling us that we were fucking idiots. Alarmists. Absolutely hysterical. You stupid libs and your “sky is falling” nonsense!

I’ve only been writing about politics for 15 years, and I saw the White Christian Nationalism coming a mile away. Did I have some special insight? Am I smarter than the extremely well-paid Jake Tapper and Chuck fucking Todd and insufferable Chris Cillizza? No.1 I am, however, not deeply invested in saving face by denying what has been right in front of me for my entire career writing about politics like they are.

For the legacy press to admit that, well, yes, the left was right all along, they would have to admit that they, the legacy press, were wrong.

These are the smarmy shits that helped the Bush regime lie us into the Iraq War. Have they apologized for that yet? No.

These are the miserable assholes that savaged Hillary and pushed Trump into the White House. Have they even admitted they were “overzealous,” much less lying through their fucking teeth? No.

These are the same fucksticks who hated Biden because he was booooring and attacked him over the dumbest stuff imaginable while pretending his age was the Greatest Scandal In American History and then immediately forgot that the age and health of the president were important when Trump limped into office and instantly started to die in front of us. Have they apologized for ushering in the age of American Fascism? No.

Of course, they haven’t. The legacy press does not apologize. They rankle at the idea of being held accountable. They speak truth to power, you see. How the fuck DARE you speak truth to them! You’re nothing but a fucking peasant and they’re the mighty legacy press!

So, yeah, that’s why they’re fighting tooth and nail against naming and shaming the American right. Partly because they would rather eat glass than admit we were right all along. But also, once they do admit we were right, they would have to start discussing the source of America’s deep divide and severe dysfunction: The Modern Republican Party and its base of brain-rotted bigots.

More than anything else, this is verboten. We can savage women. We can savage the LGBTQ+ community. We can savage Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the mentally ill, the handicapped, literally any and all groups are open for criticism. But not racist white men indulging their inner fascist, the way teen girls go through an emo phase. They are swaddled in the protective cloth of eternal innocence and victimhood.

But someday soon, that protection will disappear, and the enablers will disappear with it. That’s when real change will come to America, and we will all be the better for it. Even the racist white fascists who will finally be forced to grow the fuck up.

The Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!)! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

🌊Join The Blue Wave!🌊

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

Please support this work by becoming a paying subscriber. This newsletter is free and will always remain free, but it still takes time and effort to produce. Your support means everything to me. For just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), you can keep the Opinionated Ogre going. Thank you!

🌊Join The Blue Wave!🌊

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

Sit right down and let your Ol’ Uncle Ogre tell you a story. A story about hubris and shooting yourself in your own dick because you just couldn’t shut the fuck up long enough to get what you wanted.

Once upon a time, the most corrupt and arrogant president in all of American history saw that after just a few months into his second illegitimate term in office, his party was going to be crushed in the midterms. They were going to be crushed SO badly, they would lose control of the House and quite probably the Senate. The House was the bigger problem, though, because Democrats would impeach his flabby ass for a third time.1

That could not be allowed. The first two impeachments were a huge embarrassment. A third one would be intolerable. No one may hold the Emperor president accountable!!

So the corrupt president, who runs his party like a cheap mob boss, ordered the states controlled by his equally corrupt party to redraw their congressional maps to lock in his power and ensure he wouldn’t be impeached, errrrr…lose the midterms.

Several states rushed to obey their mob boss. Texas. North Carolina. Ohio. Missouri.

But then there was Indiana.

Indiana Republicans didn’t really like the idea of mid-cycle redistricting. They already held a gerrymandered majority. Why mess with what was already working?

The mob boss president demanded it anyway and started to threaten Indiana Republicans.

Now, six months ago, that might have worked. The mob boss president seemed unstoppable. His march to total dictatorial power all but assured.

Six months is a looooong time, though. That was then. This is now. The mob boss president doesn’t seem so all-powerful anymore and Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So the mob boss president ratcheted up the threats, calling out Indiana Republicans by name. And then the death threats from the mob boss president’s death cult started to pour in.

Most Republicans buckle under that kind of pressure. See Joni Ernst’s craven decision to vote for drunken rapist Pete Hegseth. But for some reason, Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So…more pressure, more threats. But the mob boss president couldn’t stop being an asshole and deeply offended a critical vote he needed:

This wasn’t going well. So more threats. It kind of worked? The Indiana House voted to appease the mob boss president. But what about the Senate? Lots of pressure was dumped on them.

The result of all the threats of violence and political retribution and primaries?

On Thursday, the Indiana Senate told the mob boss president to go fuck himself. Loudly.

21 out of 40 Republicans told the mob boss president to take a fucking walk.

Hilariously, the threats have been explicitly cited as the reason WHY Indiana Republicans told the mob boss president to fuck off.

Is Indiana uniquely resistant to mob boss tactics? Maybe. Maybe not. They were pushing back on Trump’s plan months ago, long before his precipitous tumble into lame duck territory.

Still, getting slapped down this hard by a completely Republican-dominated state is embarrassing. Remember, it is absolutely critical for a dictator to maintain the illusion of absolute power. Does this look like absolute power to you? Nah.

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

Join The Ogre Nation Conversation!

The problem for Trump going forward is that this creates a permission structure for other Republicans to refuse the mob boss president’s demands. When he demands red states give the federal government full control over their elections, they are 100% going to refuse. They’ll have to. Ceding control of elections to the federal government is a one-way road. You can’t turn over all of your election infrastructure and then ask for it back because a Democrat is president.

Because that’s the risk they’ll be running. It’d be great if the regime could rig the elections as they do in Russia and Hungary. But what happens if a Democrat has control of that machinery? The risk isn’t that they’ll rig an election. It’s that they WON’T rig it. Free and fair elections are toxic to Republicans, after all.

But it won’t just be elections. There will be other things Trump orders Republicans to do that will benefit Trump and ONLY Trump. Why should state parties go along with that now? It’s clear the mob boss president is losing his power, and, hey, these Republicans will still have jobs to protect after Trump is long gone.

This is how a regime falls. Not always in big mighty strokes, but in little cracks that undermine the entire foundation until there’s nothing left but a sick and tired and dying old man screaming on the front lawn of the White House that all of this belongs to him and no one can take it away!

Maybe they’ll bury him under the wreckage of his stupid ballroom. But who would risk the rotten smell of his bloated corpse?

Anyway, don’t get too rah-rah for Indiana Republicans. They’re still awful people doing awful things, but for today, they stood up to Trump and hurt him in ways that really count. I’ll take it.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

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 325 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.

The photo is one of a number from the “personal collection of Jeffrey Epstein” released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today.

Other photographs show sex toys and bondage equipment — including something with a “choking hazard” warning on it — and a murderers’ row of men hanging out with their good buddy, Jeffrey. These men should be shunned, banished from what we used to call polite society and disinvited from any and all honors which might be bestowed upon them such as speaking at a college, attending a wedding, or even being invited to a dinner party.

That’s a photo of Bill Gates at the lower left on the wall of a room in one of Epstein’s homes. His association with Epstein is known to have been a factor in his divorce:

This is a photo of Bill Clinton being way too happy about being in the presence of his friend Jeffrey Epstein and his mistress-pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell. There are countless photos of Donald Trump in exactly this sort of situation, grinning ear to ear, having the time of his life with Epstein. Democrats cannot shrink from this. Anyone who was close enough to Epstein and his circle to have their picture taken with a big smile on his face should not be allowed anywhere near a Democrat running for any office in the land.

Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, who taught law at Harvard for many years. Epstein donated millions to Harvard and is reported to have visited the campus 40 times or more. Harvard donated the money Epstein gave to groups that support sex trafficking victims. They never should have taken his money in the first place.

Epstein and Woody Allen and a woman whose face is, thankfully for her, redacted. Every restaurant in New York should refuse to seat Allen. Every studio in Hollywood should refuse to distribute his films. Every person who sees him on the street should give him the finger and yell “Epstein” at him.

This is Richard Branson having way too much fun with Epstein and another unidentified man somewhere in the Caribbean. Branson is another person who should be denied honors and banished by right-thinking people.

There is no evidence that any of these men engaged in illegal behavior with Epstein, but that is not the question here, and it is certainly not the standard by which they should be judged. Any association with Epstein, privately or socially and especially in public, in front of the world, puts a stain on them that cannot be washed off.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Sometimes, you don’t need a study to confirm the obvious, but it can certainly help. And a new one published in the journal Pediatrics confirms what should, by now, be astoundingly obvious: That giving children smartphones is bad for them. The study found that children who are given smartphones before the age of 12 wound up with higher rates of insufficient sleep, obesity, and depression than children whose parents waited until they were teenagers to give them phones.

Subscribe now

What struck me about this study, though, wasn’t just the conclusion, which should be clear to anyone who has picked their head up and looked around in the past decade; it was the ways in which it pokes at various strains of growing inequality among the rich and the poor (and relatedly, between those who have lots of education and those who have much less): Not just in educational outcomes, but in basics like getting enough sleep so your brain functions, and getting the kind of physical movement we all need to live in healthy bodies.

As recently as a decade ago, lawmakers and do-gooders and casual observers were worried that a “digital divide” could fuel inequality because poor kids would have less access to tech: Their parents wouldn’t be able to afford a laptop or consistent wifi, and that might set poor kids back and give wealthier ones a bigger leg up. Instead, with the broad proliferation of smartphones in pockets and school-issued laptops in classrooms, something very different has happened: Poorer kids spend more time on screens than wealthier ones, and see worse outcomes as a result.

This starts really, really young. This is purely anecdotal, but I know very few college-educated city-dwelling white-collar-job-working parents who let their babies see screens (with exceptions for, say, FaceTiming Grandma). This shifts as their children turn two or three and might get an airplane iPad or a half-hour of Miss Rachel so the parents can cook dinner, but among the kind of highly-educated parents who read the New Yorker (and their global equivalents), I’ve observed almost none who will, say, hand a one-year-old their iPhone so they can enjoy a distraction-free dinner. These parents are giving their babies wooden blocks and child-development-expert-designed Lovery play kits, enrolling them in music and tutu school and sensory play classes, and shelling out for plastic-free Montessori-inspired preschools and nannies who agree to keep their phones put away in their purses. Outside of these rarified communities, though, it’s a totally different story: Babies holding smartphones in their strollers; toddlers playing interactive iPad games in the middle of restaurants; children who are barely walking but are highly adept at scrolling through YouTube Kids.

Subscribe now

I don’t say this to judge every single parent who hands their kid a screen (just some of them). Sometimes you’ve gotta get dinner on the table or get through a flight; when kids are older and their peers start getting phones, having one becomes not just a luxury but a means of staying socially connected. The “screens are bad for young kids” conversation is still a pretty new one, and the advice has been muddled; for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics long said no screens before 2, but then changed that rule in 2016, basically saying that FaceTiming family members or even playing some educational games alongside parents is ok after 18 months of age. Conversations about kids and screens are also cultural; parents who don’t spend their workdays behind a computer where they can click over to nytimes.com are (ironically) probably less likely to have the water-cooler conversation be about Jonathan Haidt’s latest book or the study that just came out showing that watching a lot of short-form video is correlated with a series of cognitive deficits, including decreased attention span and inhibition. People who get most of their information from TikTok are not hearing the message that they should get themselves and their kids off of TikTok.

Read more

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!)

🌊Join The Blue Wave!🌊

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

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.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

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.