Ogre Note: I will be slowly bringing over the most important articles (aka the personal ones) from The Banter over the next several months. I’d like to get all of my stuff in one place. :)

Trigger Warning: This article contains instances of child abuse both physical and emotional.

At the beginning of October 2020, I was potentially diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called “Muir-Torre Syndrome.” MTS is a subcategory of Lynch Syndrome, a broader set of genetic disorders that greatly increase my chances of developing a variety of cancers. Since then, I have been scrambling to get all of the tests I need to find any lurking tumors.

Part of this scrambling was going through family medical history to see who else had cancer, what kind they had, and if anyone else had been diagnosed with Muir-Torre or Lynch syndrome.

Naturally, I talked to my father first (my mother died in 1999) since he’s one of the oldest members of that side of the family (the Puerto Rican side). He confirmed what I had suspected, that cancer was not really a thing among our relatives. There are a lot of us on that side, and since MT/Lynch is inherited, one would expect a significant number of relatives to have developed cancer over time. They had not.

The confusion came when I contacted Janis, one of the last living relatives on my mother’s much smaller side, and she also confirmed that cancer was not really a thing on that side, either. Muir-Torre is rare, and spontaneous cases are even rarer. It happens, but it’s ”winning the lotto twice” levels of unlikely. So why would I possibly have it?

That confusion was hypothetically cleared up the next day when my father called to let me know he was most likely not my biological father. I am 48 years old.

“Uhhhhh...OK?”

It was not a long conversation, but I was informed that my mother had (allegedly) slept with someone I had known growing up as “Fat Larry,” and I was almost certainly the result of this. Looking back, it is clear I was not immediately processing the full magnitude of what I was being told. I understood what was being said, but my reaction was far too calm and coherent. It was not until maybe thirty minutes later that the ramifications of what I had learned started to come into focus, and I got angry. But not entirely for the reasons you are probably thinking.

Interlude: When I was maybe 6, I got a teddy bear. It wasn’t fluffy and soft. In fact, it was kind of rough with almost denim-like material. But that didn’t matter. I loved it. I do not recall if I gave this teddy bear a name, but I do know I slept with it. A few years later, my father decided I was too old for teddy bears, and instead of quietly making it disappear, which would have been bad enough, he stood with a few friends around a barbecue grill and burned it while I watched, screaming and crying.

The first thing that came to me was the level of sheer disrespect required to keep this a secret. And that was before I found out that almost everyone knew about it except me. My mother died several years after I went to live with her, and I have no doubt that she was afraid to tell me. But after her death two decades ago, there was really no reason for my father to keep it a secret other than to protect himself from the embarrassment. Except he told my brother Matthew. But not me.

It has been suggested that this was kept quiet because I had placed my mother on a pedestal. The idea is risible. I am well aware of who my mother was. She was having an affair with my father while he was still married to his first wife, Marie. She had another affair with another married man when I was maybe six years old and left to marry him. I love my mother, but anyone who believes I placed her on a pedestal does not know me at all.

A little later, after I was done seething at the lack of respect, I started to think about the abuse.

Interlude: One day, both Matthew and I did...something. I do not even slightly recall what it was. I don’t even know if it was the same thing or if we had both done something different to incur our father’s wrath. Whatever it was, a spanking (of which there had been many) wasn’t going to cut it, so he took us down to the basement and used a horsewhip. He chased us around the basement, whipping our backs, arms, and legs for what seemed like forever. We were bleeding when he was done.

This was the most extreme case, but of the two of us, I got the lion’s share of the beatings. I was always the problem child. The one who got in trouble in school and acted out at home. The divorce exacerbated the situation significantly. My father regularly resorted to spankings, first by hand, then by paddle, and a level of emotional abuse that is hard to describe. As an adult, I wondered if he had even been aware he was doing it, but now? Now I wonder how much of it was from being a bad parent and how much was because he resented me for being the (possible) bastard son of an affair.

Would he have kicked me out of the house if there had been no question that I was his? Would the abuse have been as severe? He was abusive to Matthew as well, but I will never know how much of his cruelty towards me was out of spite, conscious or otherwise.

Interlude: When I was in fifth grade, my father decided that he’d had enough of me. One weekend when I was visiting my mother, he left a message on the answering machine that I would not be coming home. I was no longer welcome there and would be living with my mother from now on. At the ripe old age of 9, my father had kicked me out of the house. A few weeks would pass before family and friends pressured him to undo this.

On my way home from school, he picked me up without a word to my mother and took me back to Brooklyn. She must have been frantic when I disappeared, but I was too young and stupid to think about that. I was just happy to be going home. A home where I was not wanted.

The opposite of love

I saw a therapist for a while, and Joanne really helped with my self-control. I had hospitalized a kid who had punched me in the face (he’s fine), and clearly, my home life was causing me no small amount of stress. Fortunately for me, this was long before school resource officers, or I would have certainly been arrested. Joanne and the kid at school were a turning point for me. I stepped back from physical confrontations, acutely aware of how easily I could break people.

Once my rowdier behavior eased up, one would think things at home would go more smoothly. That’s not how it worked out. Arguably, the next phase of the abuse was even worse. They say the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. I can tell you with certainty that this is true.

Interlude: By the time I was in middle school, my father had almost completely checked out on raising me. There was no one going over my homework or asking if I even did it. No one cared about my grades or if I was studying for tests. I was left to my own devices in one of the worst middle schools in the city. Later, when I somehow passed the test to get into Brooklyn Technical High School, one of several specialized schools in NYC, I was completely unprepared for the level of academics required. “Smart” does not equate to “good student” if no one bothers to teach you how to be one.

I occasionally wonder why I went to Brooklyn Tech while Matthew went to South Shore, our local high school. I was always smarter, but Matthew is by no means stupid. I’m not even sure he took the test. Maybe I was sent to the advanced school because it would give my father bragging rights? I find it unlikely he was concerned about my future because he did not pay the tiniest bit of attention to what I was doing there. He did not really pay much attention to Matthew, either, and was surprised by how that turned out.

Interlude: By high school, my brother Matthew had discovered marijuana and sex were more fun than attending class. His once-excellent grades tanked, and the only way my father could think to deal with this since we were too old to spank was to take him to the backyard and start a fistfight. Matthew spent most of this with his face buried against a tree, crying. Later, he threw Matthew out of the house to go live with our mother. I guess it gets easier with practice.

After Matthew left, I moved down to the basement. At the age of 15, I had a studio apartment to myself, with my own bathroom, kitchen, and entrance to the house. No one cared to know what I was doing. I had no curfew, no one checked on me. I could come and go as I pleased.

I didn’t abuse this wild freedom, though. I had no interest in partying until all hours of the night, and I wasn’t much of a Lothario. Nobody was getting drunk, stoned, or pregnant at my place. When I was a teen, and even into my twenties, I used to think I had this level of “trust” because I had earned it. Maybe not with my grades, but undeniably with my staid behavior. Compared to the rest of my family, I was actually kind of a wet blanket.

It occurred to me when I was older that I had been stashed as far away from my father and Kim, wife #3, who despised me (the feeling was mutual), as possible. Out of sight, out of mind. Indifference is a hell of a thing.

Interlude: After I had started 10th grade, my father and Kim announced that we were leaving New York and moving to Florida. The idea of leaving everything I had ever known to be trapped, alone, with a woman who hated me and a man who didn’t care was too much. I left to live with my mother. My father made no attempt to stop me, even though he had legal custody.

Moving in the middle of the school year might have been one of the most selfish things I have ever seen. It wasn’t like I was thriving at Brooklyn Tech, but I could have been the Valedictorian, and they still would have moved. This was about them starting their perfect life in Florida, and I was, at most, an afterthought. Curiously, my father still thought he had the right to dictate Matthew’s life, although he still had no interest in mine.

Interlude: When Matthew inevitably got Dawn pregnant. She had an abortion. When they continued to have unsafe sex, even after we were both living in Long Island with our mother, Dawn kept getting abortions until she was no longer able to do so without risking permanent damage. 18 years old, Matthew was going to be a dad. Our father, who had his first child at 17 or so, was enraged by this despite never having bothered to have The Talk with us. He called Dawn a “crack whore” and ordered Matthew to stay away from her.

Abuse is generational

After escaping my father, and it did feel like escape, I was badly scarred. When I was maybe eleven years old, I saw the movie Mr. Mom and thought being a stay-at-home father would be pretty cool. I liked the idea of raising kids in a loving home. By the time I was in college, though, the idea of having children horrified me.

Abuse is often generational. It’s a cliche that we become our fathers/mothers, but cliches exist for a reason. I was worried, for very good reason, that I would be exactly the same kind of father, and why would I ever inflict that on another soul?

Interlude: When Dawn gave birth to Cassie and made it clear she expected Matthew to stick around and be a father, Matthew spent a few years not really doing that, and then moved to first Florida and then Arizona to escape his responsibilities. Was this Matthew fulfilling his father’s wishes to stay away, a deep character flaw of his own, or a combination of both?

Matthew ended up being worse than our father in some ways. There’s a lot to say about my father, but leaving for another woman a decade and three kids later as my father did is not the same as never being there in the first place. Marriages end. Staying together in a deeply unhappy marriage “for the kids” can be far more toxic than even a bitter divorce. And as far as I know, Marie (again, his first wife) always got child support. Matthew never manned up, and his child support was...inconsistent to be charitable. His parenting skills, the random times he showed up, were just as inconsistent.

Many people become their fathers and fail to break the cycle. Matthew was a case study in why I did not want kids. As Cassie got older, he got worse.

Interlude: When Cassie turned 16, Matthew apparently decided the hard part of raising Cassie was over, so he moved into her neighborhood to be a real “Dad” for the first time in his life. But as a teen, Cassie had a fully developed life of her own that did not revolve around her father. Matthew took offense to this and started to deliver increasing amounts of psychological abuse, exactly like his father had inadvertently taught him. When I tried to tell Matthew that he was driving Cassie away in precisely the same way our father had driven me away, Matthew exploded in rage and stopped speaking to me. His current relationship with Cassie is incredibly strained. Matthew has “disowned” his daughter about three times. I’ve only been disowned by our father once. For the crime of telling him something he didn’t want to hear, and the even greater crime of being right, Matthew has not spoken to me in 11 years.

Jordan was already a year old, and Debbie was pregnant with Anastasia when this happened, and thank god for that. If I had realized earlier that Matthew had become the spitting image of our father, I might have gotten cold feet and never agreed to have kids. As it was, I almost didn’t. If my friend Maria had not asked me to be a donor and if Debbie hadn’t agreed under the condition that she get a baby as well, I would have missed out on the most important and fulfilling role in my life. I would have missed everything because of the scars left behind by an abusive father.

Your Ancestry DNA results are in!

Knowing that the abuse was worse because of something I had nothing to do with makes everything infinitely more horrible, and the rage that has been boiling through my mind since early October is something I have not felt in a very long time. The only way it could possibly be worse is if it turned out that I was, in fact, his biological son. I needed to know, without a doubt.

A regular paternity test was no good because I would have to trust my father, who lives in Florida. You might be shocked to learn that after all of this, trust is in short supply. A DNA kit like Ancestry.com, on the other hand, would tell me things I needed to know regardless of what my father did or did not do with his kit.

If my results came back that I was 100% not Puerto Rican, well, then that’s that. Presumably, I would show up as 100% European Jew since Larry was also Jewish. If they came back that I was 50% Puerto Rican, well, then unless my mother had an affair with another Puerto Rican (not entirely impossible, I suppose), chances are my biological father is a man who did not think I was his for almost the entirety of my life and exacted a cruel price for it. The worst-case scenario. His kit would confirm it.

Think about it this way. If I’m not his son, then nothing really changes other than the fact that now I know the why of it all. A question that has always been at the back of my mind gets answered, and the status quo remains. He was abusive, I got the brunt of it, now that is explained.

If I am his son, it was all for nothing. I would have been abused anyway, because that is just who he is. But the additional cruelty? That would not have been there.

Interlude: I don’t have a very clear memory of my childhood. Repressed trauma? Maybe. Regardless, I remember my father telling me on multiple occasions when I was young that I was an accidental pregnancy. He told me that enough times that I remember it continuing across a number of years. I don’t remember anything that clearly over a period of time, but I remember that because it did wonders for my self-esteem. I didn’t even understand the concept of self-esteem at the time, that’s how young I was, but I know it made me feel bad. Just a little extra icing: Not only was I an accident, I was also the reason he had gotten a vasectomy. To make sure I was the last accident.

You might say that once as a joke. You don’t say that to a child you don’t think is yours over and over again for years unless you’re being cruel.

I got my results the day before Thanksgiving:

That’s one half. Here’s the rest:

If you’re having a little trouble interpreting that, don’t feel bad, it took me a minute, too. I had forgotten that “Puerto Rican”, as we understand it, is a mish-mosh of Spanish (colonizers), Native Caribbean (colonized), and African (enslaved). My father literally had an afro in the 70s. Like, several inches thick, and he used a pick. I was probably the only White kid in my school who got this joke in Spaceballs:

According to various sources, Puerto Ricans are, on average, about 65% European, 20% African, and 12% Native. Since I would be half, my percentages would also be half. So, 32-33% European, 10% African, 6% Native.

Let’s take a quick peek at my results again: Spain 18% + Portugal 12% + Scotland 4% = 34%. Senegal 4% + Nigeria 3% + Ivory Coast & Ghana 1% = 8%. Indigenous/Native 6%.

Well, I guess I’m a Puerto Rican, after all, and almost certainly the son of the man who raised me. Don’t you feel like a fucking idiot after all these years? I know paternity tests weren’t a thing until the 90s, but did you even do a non-DNA blood test during the divorce? Did it even occur to you to try and find out? It clearly didn’t. Years of abuse for something that wasn’t even true. Well done. Enjoy having that on your conscience.

Greater than the sum of his failures

It’s true that my father made me the man that I am. But in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons, whatever they were. I did not have a guide to manhood. I had an albatross dragging me towards a lifetime of being emotionally distant, unable to make meaningful long-term connections. With great difficulty, I overcame the mental and emotional landmines left behind. This is why I’ve been with Mrs. Ogre since 1997, but Matthew has wrecked almost every relationship he’s ever been in (the jury is out on his most recent), and my father has been divorced more times than Donald Trump (4, if you’re curious).

I had the strength of character and perseverance to rise above such poisoned beginnings. Who could I have been had I been raised in the kind of nurturing home I am providing for my children? I’ll never know and, I suppose, I don’t really care outside of the most abstract thought experiment.

Because I am a massive nerd, I often think about stuff like time travel. I think about it enough that I have a code phrase a time traveller would have to use to convince me they are from my future. I also have a rule that I would never go back before the last major event I would never risk changing. First, it was meeting Mrs. Ogre, then it was Jordan’s birth, then Anastasia’s. After that was Kyle’s birth. A few years later, it was meeting Claudia and Lila and folding them into our family. These are the people who give my life meaning. This is my family. I am where I am supposed to be, and I am surrounded by the love denied to me growing up. I am a father unbound by the failures of my own upbringing.

Matthew was never able to overcome those failures, and his limitations as a father to Cassie are manifest. He knocked up another woman several years ago and is now, ironically, also a stay-at-home parent. Only time will tell whether he will be able to break the cycle on his second try. I have my doubts.

Breaking the cycle really wasn’t that hard, though. For the first five years of Jordan’s life/three of Anastasia’s, my ruling principle was “What would my father do?” and then do the opposite. It was oddly effective. This is a man who could not tolerate his sons not being cast in precisely the same mold as him. This is why three of the five of us stopped speaking to him. Louie stopped speaking to him until he died from heart failure, Marky has not spoken to him for years, and I only started speaking to our father again when I decided, after months of serious deliberation, to allow my kids to know their grandfather. My issues with him were not their issues, and I chose to be the bigger man.

For maybe a second or two, I contemplated not writing this article. I mean, I was always going to write it, but I was going to wait until after he died. I felt there was no sense in dredging it up now. But that was before. Now, I have years of pointless abuse to address. This is my retort. I hope you’ll be gracious enough, father, to allow it without comment. It is neither necessary nor welcome. We will not be discussing this. Any of it. Ever. That is the price for continuing to exist in my life. If that is not good enough, that is your choice to make but I cannot imagine many people would give you a better offer.

You may find that some, or much, of this does not match your recollection. You may feel you have been treated unfairly. You may feel hurt. You may feel betrayed.

Trying living it for five decades. That is what you did to me. That is your legacy.

By the way, all of my tests came back negative. I do not have cancer. Enjoy your holidays and I’ll give you a call on Christmas Day. Answer the phone. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

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 over 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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ICE has never been an agency filled with nice people hoping to uphold the law for the sake of decency. Almost by definition, an agency created to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country is going to attract nativists and bigots. That never ends well without intense and constant oversight which, well, never happened. That made it extremely easy for a fascist regime to turn ICE into a modern-day Nazi secret police.

But alongside the secret police, there have frequently been Brownshirts in many authoritarian regimes. Paramilitaries roughing up the public to pave the way for the real violence. But where have the militias been here? It’s not like we have a dearth of violent far-right groups to pick from. Why haven’t the Proud Boys been rampaging through the streets? Where are the Three Percenters? Where are the Oathkeepers? You know, the people who swore to defend America against a tyrannical government but turned out to be the footsoldiers of fascism all along?

Amanda Marcotte of Salon has an answer: Who needs Nazi Brownshirts running around doing the dirty work for the fascist regime when the United States government has BECOME the Nazi Brownshirts?

I’m far from the first observer to notice how much ICE, under the leadership of Homeland Security Secretary — and proud dog-killer — Kristi Noem, has come to resemble the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group founded by Gavin McInnes in 2016. As Wired’s David Gilbert wrote in response to ICE’s recent invasion of Minneapolis, the reason we haven’t seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys in Trump’s second term is that the president’s “militarization” of ICE and “embrace of white nationalist rhetoric” leaves the group “without a role to play.”

In other words, it would be redundant for the Proud Boys to come out and beat up protesters under the banner of white nationalist slogans. The federal government is quite literally doing that:

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security used a song beloved by white supremacists in a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The self-pitying “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which equates living in a diverse community with being oppressed, has long been an anthem for racist terrorists, neo-Nazi groups and, crucially, the Proud Boys — one of the paramilitary organizations that led the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. As a local journalist in California reported at the time, the Proud Boys covered their faces and sang the song at a November 2020 Sacramento event, vowing to “put ourselves on the line” to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 election.

This explains a lot about what we’re seeing in ICE and a lot about what we can expect. and I have discussed this more than once on the podcast. ICE has lowered its hiring standards and truncated its training schedule. We’ve recently learned just how bad it is:

Many of ICE’s critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs—Jan. 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc.—for a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier: ICE’s recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who’s joining the agency’s ranks. We’re all, collectively, in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America’s streets.

And we are all, collectively, discovering just how deadly of an arrangement that really is.

If you haven’t read Laura Jedeed’s article in Slate, you really should just so you understand how insanely dangerous and out of control ICE is:

To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position. I made no effort to hide my public loathing of the agency, what it stands for, and the administration that runs it. And they offered me the job anyway.

It’s possible that I’m an aberration—perhaps I experienced some kind of computer glitch that affected my application and no one else’s. But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment.

With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents’ identities, it’ll be extremely difficult for us to know.

The regime says Jedeed is lying, which might as well have been a sealed and signed confession that her article is the gospel truth.

Part of this will be that they’re overwhelmed trying to obey Stephen Miller’s command to fill their ranks as quickly as possible. America’s Himmler is speedrunning the Holocaust, and he needs an army to do it.

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But I believe the real reason for the “confusion” is intentional. The regime needs to fill the ranks of ICE with unstable, violent criminals, people who would never in a million years qualify to wear the badge and uniform of law enforcement. People with domestic abuse charges. Drug charges. Assault and battery. Links to domestic terrorist groups. Links to foreign terrorist groups. All of this is catnip to the regime but they would never be able to justify it to a court of law. So the process has been broken intentionally.

And now the dregs of society are flocking to ICE. The incels and losers. The small and petty. The angry and resentful. All of the men who look around them and see persecution because a Black man was president. Because a Latino is speaking Spanish on their cell phone. Because two men are holding hands in public. Because the girls in high school and college (if they even made it that far) laughed at them.

They see a world of injustice because they have been denied their rightful place as masters of the world. They’re not rich. They’re not powerful. They’re not respected. They earned all of that, dammit!

By “earned,” of course, I mean they were born with a penis and white skin. Asking America’s white men to do anything else beyond that is oppression. Grooming? Oppression. Emotional labor? Oppression. Stand up for the rights of others so the rich don’t loot your future? Fuck you! That’s oppression!

Making the world a better place is hard work. Making yourself a better person is really hard work (ask me how I know). Hate and violence, though? That’s easy. It takes no effort at all to blame everyone for your own failures. It takes less effort to blame those with less power than those with all the power, too. Then you don’t have to challenge the status quo, you simply have to reinforce it and, hey, maybe you can be rewarded! $50,000 is a lot of money to get a badge, a gun, and legal immunity to shoot women who laugh at you in the face.

At this point, does Kristi Noem even have to bother using Nazi imagery and propaganda to recruit small-dick energy losers? Why bother? She could put up ads on X stating “You can punch women in the face for money!” and the exact same pool of men would apply. Maybe sweeten the deal by promising them some quality time with the children they kidnap? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the Venn diagram of white nationalism, misogyny, and pedophilia is a goddman perfect circle.

This is why the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis are not smashing up stores with anti-Trump signs and attacking crowds of protesters. Why do it for free when you can be paid a shit ton of money by the regime to do it?

It doesn’t help that they would have to find very small protests to attack, as most of them, even in small towns, have been in the hundreds, and there just aren’t that many neo-Nazis and Proud Boys in any given area. Wouldn’t do to show up, start a fight, and then get beaten to a pulp. Very embarrassing for the limp-dick incels trying to reclaim their “lost” manhood. Best to wear a uniform and have the “right” to throw tear gas at children. Like a real brave manly man.

But all of the violence against women and children and immigrants in the world is never going to make that tiny dick any bigger, buddy. Once a loser incel, always a loser incel. Now you’re just a loser incel wearing a Nazi uniform.

One last point about all of this worth making. Another piece of the puzzle about the missing Brownshirts is more obvious and something I’ve mentioned before. Something all of these ICE agents will come to regret: Federalism. While JD Vance and Stephen Miller and Fox News keep saying federal agents have total immunity, they do not. When the regime falls, and it will, we all know Miller will use the autopen to give pardons to every ICE agent. Miller is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and there’s a very good chance he will fuck that up, leaving his Gestapo exposed to legal jeopardy, but we’ll have to wait and see.

That, however, is in the future. Right now, Brownshirts would not be protected. Pardoning the Proud Boys for rampaging in Chicago would be political suicide for the GOP and even Miller knows it. Putting pardons aside, even if the regime’s corrupt DoJ refused to investigate or prosecute, there’s nothing the federal government can do to stop state and local charges from being filed against private citizens. The feds are interfering with the state investigation of Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit who murdered Renee Good, but they’re only going to be able to play that card so many times before the courts step in and put a stop to it. They would not be able to protect militias at all.

As I’ve said numerous times, 20 years in state prison is not an improvement over 20 years in federal prison.

This is something we have to keep speaking into reality for when the regime falls. California, Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia (not that we’re a target of ICE violence), and every blue state Miller has sent ICE to invade must be prepared to arrest and prosecute every ICE agent that stepped foot in their cities and violated their laws. Their Attorneys General have to be prepared to issue an arrest warrant for the leadership of ICE and DHS. To go after everyone in the White House involved in orchestrating this campaign of terror. Miller, Homan, Noem, Bovino. All of them should be looking to flee the country or face decades in prison.

Build an army of violent dickless incels, there’s a price to pay. Count on it, you fascist fucks.

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

There are 287 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.

Have you seen Trump’s letter, or text message, or whatever it was that he wrote to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway yesterday?

“Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you! President DJT”

Others have debunked the thing line by line, but all you need to know is that wants to take over Greenland because he was denied the Nobel Peace Prize. But why is he addressing the Prime Minister of Norway, who has nothing to do with awarding Nobel Prizes, and certainly nothing to do with Greenland? Does he know that Greenland is a territory of Denmark, not Norway? That possibility is jaw-dropping all by itself, and so is the rest of his gibberish. Attempting to apply logic to his lies and nonsense becomes the same tiresome burden we face with everything else he says late at night on Truth Social, at Oval Office press gaggles, as he walks to his Marine helicopter on the way to Mar a Lago, or on Air Force One standing in a doorway that is conspicuously devoid of elaborate decoration or gold leaf, an absence soon to be remedied with the airborne crime scene the Qataris gifted him recently.

Trump’s utterances, no matter their form, have a unifying theme that he was good enough to put into words during his recent interview with four reporters from the New York Times. After telling them that ownership of Greenland was “psychologically needed,” he was asked if taking over Greenland was “psychologically important to you or the United States?”

“Psychologically important for me,” he replied without hesitation.

One day, we may discover how a smidgen of honesty accidentally found its way out of his mouth on that day, but we have for now, on the record, Donald Trump telling us how complete is his need for dominance over everything he sees, and how deeply rooted and enormous is his narcissism. The man wakes up in the morning and proceeds to go looking for things that will make him feel better about himself – a Diet Coke, a “win” in a game of golf he has to cheat to achieve, a quick dressing down of a cabinet member, an expletive or putdown flung at a female reporter, a demand that unmet, he can double down on, something to tear down, something on which to add gold leaf.

Lies and nastiness and exaggerations are just a means by which to assuage his doubts and inadequacy. He is a man who spent years as a boy being yelled at by his mother and father and told that no matter what he did, he couldn’t get anything right. So what did he do when he grew up and took all his daddy’s money? He bought things. He bought wives. He bought friends. He bought buildings. He bought an airline. He bought the loyalty of employees. He bought a beauty pageant so he could be guaranteed access to young women whom he could ogle and abuse. And he took. He took advantage of those weaker than himself, such as contractors he hired. He took from women he groped and abused and raped. He took top secret documents, some of them about nuclear weapons and proposed attacks on foreign nations, so he could show them off to golfing buddies. He tried to take an election away from voters who had elected the candidate running against him. He took away the dignity of everyone around him, even his supporters and cabinet members and aides, by belittling them and falling dead asleep in the middle of their trying to suck up to him with praise.

Donald Trump has been on a lifelong search to find something to fill the empty hole inside him. He puts his name on institutions built by and meant to honor others, thinking, or hoping really, that his name represents something other than his neediness. The Nobel Peace Prize was just another starchy, fatty Big Mac he thought would fill him up. Not having it as his own only deepened and widened the hole he is left trying to fill.

He is a man who craves the attention, and yes, the love, he never received as a child and has been unable to either buy or acquire by threats and violence and punishment of those who would deny him that love even now.

This has been said before, but it needs to be said again: Trump is a weak man who is always trying to appear strong. Somewhere inside him, he must be aware that his “psychologically important” need for love and approval is as visible to others as it is to him when he looks in the mirror every morning. Can you imagine how sad it is to be Donald Trump? It must be why he falls asleep all day sitting in his chair. If I were him for even a moment, I wouldn’t want to be awake either.

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I suspect when future generations read about this era of US history (to the extent that “reading,” “the US,” and “history” are still things that exist), they will peruse as one of their primary documents the letter that President Donald Trump sent to the Prime Minister of Norway, laying out his justification for his desired invasion of Greenland. They will wonder: How was it possible that American citizens could read this letter and not become very concerned for the psychological fitness of their leader? How was it possible that such an obviously unwell man still enjoyed the backing of his party and a significant minority of the public? How did members of Congress, empowered as they are to force the removal of a president who descends into lunacy, not intervene?

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Here is what the letter says:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Trump has long struggled with the basics of writing: grammar, capitalization, syntax. A saner nation would have seen this as indicative of something disqualifying for a president: cognitive deficits, perhaps, or simple laziness. He has also consistently failed to tell the truth, and it has long been unclear when he is intentionally lying — as sometimes he surely is — or when he actually seems to believe his own bullshit, or fails to grasp fact and reality. These are, again, deficits that should have disqualified him from the highest office in the land. But Americans are a credulous people famously vulnerable to grifters and scammers and fraudsters. We give ourselves lead poisoning because TikTok meatheads say it’s healthy and natural to drink chemical-laden protein shakes (they taste like chocolate!); we applaud “entrepreneurship” in pyramid schemers, MLM founders, and the stay-at-home girlbosses they profit off of; and we tithe to mansion-dwelling preachers and prosperity gospel televangelists. And so of course we elected to our highest office a reality TV star whose scumminess is apparent to anyone with even one of five senses functioning but who read, to millions of Americans, as just their kind of guy. Of course here we are.

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Trump has been unhealthily fixated on the Nobel Peace Prize for years now, belying a deep insecurity and a total lack of inhibition when it comes to revealing it. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” is simply not a line that a functional person writes down, let alone sends out.

He seems convinced that the Norwegian PM, or perhaps the nation of Denmark, has power over the prize — patently false, but also revealing of a strongman’s worldview, and his own belief that if a person is “in charge,” then that person has or should have total power over everything in his jurisdiction without checks or balances.

He also seems wholly unacquainted with concepts like sovereignty and territory. It’s no surprise that this president does not recognize international law. But he really does seem to think that might makes right — that if the US has the power to take something, then that thing is rightfully ours. This is the kind of antisocial, base world view that preschool teachers work diligently to counter: It’s nice to share with others and they should share back with us; no, William’s toy truck is not yours to take home simply because you are bigger.

The president of the United States is saying that we should be able to take over Greenland because “a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” But we had boats landing there, also. This is not an absurdist comedy; this is the man with the nuclear codes.

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NATO is the most important security alliance that the United States is a part of. It is far from perfect, but it ranks toward the top of the most successful postwar agreements, and it has been an incredibly powerful force for peace, security, stability, and prosperity in America and around the world. Trump’s Greenland ambitions would destroy it. And for what? Revenge for not getting a gold medal he desperately wants? Because we had boats landing there, also?

This is not the behavior of a person who remains tethered to reality.

Donald Trump was an America First isolationist, until he wasn’t. He enjoys spectacle and attention and above all power, and seems to have really enjoyed the spectacle and attention and power that his Venezuela invasion gave him. Threatening to invade Greenland is getting him attention, and is no doubt making him feel powerful by stoking fear among America’s allies and loyal citizens. These threats are upsetting liberals and Europeans, which pleases the many members of Trump’s inner circle whose entire politics boil down to “trigger the libs and Europeans.”

But there does not seem to be any plan or larger strategy at hand. He is threatening to mire US troops in a foreign conflict, blow up America’s most important alliances, and jeopardize the American economy because he never learned how to manage his emotions and now, at nearly 80, his already-low capacity for inhibition has been smoothed down to virtual nonexistence.

This is honestly a difficult thing to understand, because most adults simply do not think or behave like this. We think before we speak. We feel shame and embarrassment when we behave poorly . We understand that sometimes we want things we cannot have. We grasp that generally-applicable rules might sometimes be annoying, but they protect us, too. We realize that reality may not always comport with our beliefs and biases, and we understand that our beliefs and biases mean that sometimes we get stuff wrong — and correcting course is the only upstanding and decent thing to do.

Donald Trump seems to comprehend none of this. And this latest letter demonstrates a divorce from reality — from basic cognition — that should put us squarely in 25th Amendment territory. The evidence at hand points to the conclusion that this man is not well. Republicans may like some of Trump’s policies and politics, and they certainly like his ability to annoy his political opponents, and they love the support of his followers, but there are obligations bigger than winning an election. Everyone around Trump — everyone watching Trump from any corner of the planet — can see that he is descending deeper and deeper into lunacy. Those who are close to him all seem to be angling for a position of more advantageous exploitation — how they can get the thing they want, how they can manipulate him into elevating their importance — because they see a mentally ailing man in a manic fit and they know that someone else’s time is coming. They are the equivalent of the home health aide who gets the dementia patient to sign over her assets and power of attorney, except there are dozens of them handing the patient papers and a pen, the stakes aren’t a life savings but America’s future and the Western world order.

We do not need every Republican to do the right thing here (that’s not going to happen). But we need a few. I have no doubt that many congressional Republicans understand the seriousness of this moment, and can see the extent of the president’s decline. We desperately need them to act on it.

xx Jill

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They’re getting closer, or at least it feels that way.

A woman in Nebraska, Jamie Bonkiewicz, posted on social media Friday that she had been visited by a Secret Service agent and a local police officer and was questioned about a post she had put on X the day before. Her comment on X was, “When Karoline Leavitt gets what she deserves, I hope it’s televised.” The Secret Service agent, shrugging as if he’s just asking an innocent question, says “You don’t want to perceive any ill-will towards these people.” When Bonkiewicz answers, “Yeah, I want to see her trial,” the Secret Service agent nods, and says, “Okay, all right, no problem.”

Then he asks her, “Do you go to a lot of the - any demonstrations or things like that?” Bonkiewicz asks him, “Why do you want to know that?” He answers, “I’m just curious.”

The agent goes on to ask her whether she has any weapons in the house or has traveled to “any functions—Democrats, Republicans...any kind of rallies or anything like that?” Bonkiewicz says, “I just answered that question,” the agent says, “Okay, you don’t want to tell me.” Bonkiewicz’s husband, who has been filming the encounter, interjects by asking what the agent “considers crossing the line on social media.” Looking pleased with himself, the agent answers, “I mean, so technically, obviously, you have freedom of speech, everybody has that,” and goes on to explain that if someone makes a threat like, “I will go and kill the president,” or statements like that, he would “use the U.S. Attorney’s office.” “But something like this, a veiled threat, is it threatening in nature? Now that I know you didn’t mean anything by it, it’s basically a non-issue, right?”

Well, no, it’s not a non-issue, not for Bonkiewicz or us. An American citizen, exercising her First Amendment right to be critical of the government, in this case critical of Karoline Leavitt, gets a threatening visit from the Secret Service and local police and is questioned about any other political activity she has engaged in, including attending demonstrations – another exercise of her rights under the First Amendment.

In Northern Virginia, another woman, Barbara Wien, a retired professor of peace studies, was visited by FBI and Secret Service Agents and officers from the Virginia State Police who handed her a search warrant and confiscated her phone, alleging that it might contain evidence of her having committed a crime. She studied the search warrant, signed by a judge, and found that she was being investigated for engaging in a “coordinated plan to intimidate and harass Stephen Miller.” Three weeks before, she had shown up outside Miller’s home in Arlington and distributed fliers depicting Miller’s face with a red line drawn through it. When Miller’s wife Katie came out on the porch, Wien pointed two fingers at her own eyes and then at Mrs. Miller, in the classic “I’m watching you” signal. Days before she handed out fliers on Miller’s street, Wien had been critical of Miller on Instagram, posting, “I will devote my life to stopping him and other fascists like him!”

Katie Miller took the gesture as a threat, and apparently her husband didn’t like being criticized, so they called in the FBI and the Secret Service.

Wein lives in a Northern Virginia neighborhood where dozens of people who worked for the federal government lost their jobs in the first months of Trump’s term when Elon Musk and his DOGE idiots were running through the government, closing offices and getting people fired. Later, her television screen and social media started filling with images of heavily armed and masked ICE agents handcuffing and beating immigrants and even arresting citizens. The Trump administration was shooting boats out of the water in the oceans off both coasts without any evidence that the boats were carrying drugs or other contraband. More than a hundred people had been killed in the boat shootings.

Wien is politically active and opposed to practically everything the Trump administration is doing, especially the roundups of immigrants by ICE that are overseen by Stephen Miller. Now Wien is the subject of a criminal investigation, and her cell phone is in government hands, not hers.

Last week, FBI agents searched the home of Hannah Natanson, a reporter for the Washington Post who has specialized in covering the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on the federal workforce of Civil Service employees, firing thousands and investigating many for leaking information to the press. Natanson’s laptop, smartphone, and Garmin watch were seized in the search. Natanson’s laptop probably contained notes of her interviews with the subjects of her Post stories. Her phone contained the numbers of people she had talked to, and her Garmin watch was a complete record of where she had traveled by car, subway, and foot, containing every date and time she had spent at every address she had visited. The government was clearly after her confidential sources.

In Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice had subpoenaed journalists at the New York Times, the Post, and CNN, seeking telephone data and emails during leak investigations, a constant obsession of Trump and his minions. The Biden DOJ barred searching journalists’ records unless they were the targets of a criminal investigation. Trump returned to office, and Pam Bondi cancelled the Biden order on journalists and allowed searches of journalist’s papers, phones, and computers even if they are not the targets of investigations.

These are just the most recent examples of the Trump administration’s intimidation tactics against ordinary citizens exercising their rights to protest and speak out in criticism of the administration in general, and especially against individual Trump advisers such as Miller and Leavitt. The move against the Washington Post reporter, while not unprecedented, is another example of the escalation of Trump’s campaign to investigate and prosecute anyone he doesn’t like.

In Minnesota, where an ICE agent clearly and intentionally murdered a woman who was protesting ICE agents’ tactics in their ongoing roundup of immigrants, the Trump administration has opened criminal investigations of the dead woman, Renee Good and her wife, Becca Good, the Mayor of Minneapolis, and the Governor of Minnesota. The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good is the only one not under investigation.

People across this country are depressed and fearful of what might happen next. Who will be the next target? Who will answer their door and find FBI and Secret Service agents asking them questions about their social media posts and political activities? Which reporters and writers will they be coming for next?

Who will be the next to die at the hands of these masked bandits bent on stealing constitutional rights and people’s sanity?

Over the last year, I have gotten hundreds of messages from my subscribers expressing how anxious and fearful they are because of what is going on around them in this country. Everywhere they look, someone they value or some institution they revere is under attack. It’s impossible to go to bed at night and wake up in the morning without facing some new horror that has been perpetrated while people sleep.

Some of us have been through this before during the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. I have an FBI and Military Intelligence file that is two inches thick. I know for a fact that some of my subscribers have been under investigation for their political activities in the past. In a way, for some of us at least, what Trump and his thugs are doing is nothing new. But repression in the past was focused on the most visible and public people who were leading protests and publishing criticism in newspapers and books. People like Norman Mailer and Michael Harrington were targeted. Sam Brown and David Mixner, leaders of the Moratorium movement, were investigated. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were investigated, indicted, and prosecuted. Leaders of the Feminist movement such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Susan Brownmiller and Ellen Willis were harassed and investigated.

But agents were not arriving without warrants or subpoenas on ordinary citizens’ doorsteps to question them about a demonstration they attended or a social media post of a few words they had written.

Leaders are not the only targets now. Everyone posts on social media. Everyone attends No Kings marches and demonstrations. Everyone feels vulnerable, and that is why so many of us are depressed about what is going on around us, what is happening to people we read about practically every day. The feeling is growing that we could be next.

I remember a time in the early 1970’s when one of my West Point classmates and I were under investigation by the FBI and Military Intelligence for anti-war activity both in and out of the Army. The details are too long to go into here, but suffice to say, we became aware by deduction and induction that our phones were tapped and letters that we sent to each other had been opened and read by government agents.

This is what we did. Every time we wrote a letter or made a phone call, we began by stating that we were not advocating the violent overthrow of the government, and we had no intention to commit crimes in furtherance of our political objectives.

And then we went on and spoke and wrote just as we had before, making political statements, sharing plans for what we intended to do and who we intended to see and when, because we knew that they knew. There was no sense in keeping anything secret or concealing our activities because we were not breaking the law.

Things were bad then. People died at Kent State and elsewhere. Repressive parts of the government such as the FBI and Military Intelligence and elements of the Department of Justice were running rampant.

We had no way of knowing that the future we thought we were working towards would turn out the way it has. But we kept going then, and we must keep going now. We have rights to free speech and assembly. We should continue to use them. We had a sense back then that if there were too many of us for the government to keep track of, we would prevail.

We did then, and we will again. What we feel as we face the repression of Trump and his authoritarian regime is not the sum total of who we are. We are better than they are. There are more of us. We have the power of our numbers and our votes. We are Americans, and we will act like it with every cell of our beings.

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Trump wants to declare martial law as his regime directs its Gestapo to become increasingly violent. Where does America go from here when its government declares war on its people? I don’t know, but I do know that we have to resist and make sure that when the regime falls, all of its footsoldiers pay the steepest price imaginable for “just following orders.”

A lot to get to this week. Let’s take a deep breath and catch up on what you missed.

Monday: No moving on “for the good of the country” this time.

Tuesday: Oh, this is going to work out just great for everyone. For sure…

Wednesday: Recording and working on the D&D campaign for a group of insane teenage girls.

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Every dead Nazi is a warning to the rest - Never Again.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. Addressing misconceptions about the Insurrection Act by Robert B. Hubbell

2. Trump Backlash Is Fueling A Leftward Culture Shift - Trump’s disastrous immigration crackdown will go down as a self-own for the ages by The Big Picture and Todd Beeton at The Big Picture

3. These companies advertised on X as Grok produced sexualized images of kids - At least 37 major companies were advertising on the platform this week, a Popular Information investigation reveals. by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims at Popular Information

4. Right Wing Hate Ideology Is a Giant Inferiority Complex - They can’t recognize any achievement because it makes them feel bad about their complete lack of merit by Walter Rhein at I’d Rather Be Writing

5. ICE Now Has Sections for U.S. Citizens at Detention Sites by Dissent In Bloom