If it’s not already obvious, Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is not just to put money in his own pocket. It’s to fund domestic terrorists to do his bidding. You might think that with a cult of millions of brainwashed MAGA morons, Trump wouldn’t need money to summon his fanatic Brownshirts. But you would be wrong.

Remember, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were facing decades in prison for their attack on the Capitol. The only reason they got out was because Trump “won” the 2024 election. He had the opportunity to pardon them before he left office, and he didn’t. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that he’ll have their back the next time they launch an attack on Washington, D.C.

Also, recall that during the four years Trump was out of office, he tried to summon his mob more than once, and no one came. It was so humiliating, Trump stopped putting out the call. It made him look weak.

They didn’t come because we had started throwing rioters and insurrectionists in prison. For the first time in American history, there were real consequences for mediocre racist white men lashing out in violence. It scared the shit out of the far-right. It made them really angry, but it also terrified them. They should remember that fear and hold onto it. We are coming for them.

In the meantime, Trump knows he’s going to lose the midterms, and the 2028 election will be another bloodbath for Republicans. A Democratic president with a Democratic Congress will come after him, and everything with his name illegally slapped on it. Trump and his bootlickers know the only way to stop that from happening is another coup. But his militias are not going to show up again without a hefty financial incentive. $1.8 billion ought to do it…

It’s a lot of money, and America’s far right is nothing if not greedy little shitbags.

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!)

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

Prefer a PayPal tip? We got you!

With big rewards come even bigger risks, though. After January 6th, America said, “Hmmmm…maybe we should start holding violent, racist white Republicans accountable for their actions for the first time in all of American history.” The right lost its fucking mind because, as I discussed several times, we just don’t DO that here in the United States! But we did, and we as a country really have a taste for it now. Worse (for Trump), the regime has erased the taboo of charging political enemies with crimes.1 This surely will not backfire in any way whatsoever…

Staging a second violent coup? One backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from a regime of desperate fascists? If/when (emphasis on “when”) that fails, that won’t just leave a bad taste in the collective mouth of the country. It’s going to leave a burning desire to crush everyone involved and make sure that shit never fucking happens again.

It’s important to remember that Democrats, and the left in general, are already talking about Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo. You don’t have to look very far to find Democrats, a lot of Democrats, openly talking nonstop about tribunals and prison and severe consequences.

I want you to think really hard: Were they doing this after Trump’s first time in office and the hundreds of crimes he committed?2 Did they do it after eight years of George W. Bush being a war criminal? Eight years of Ronald Reagan committing more crimes than Nixon? Have Democrats talked like this ever in your entire life? No. No, they have not.

There are plenty of Democrats, I’m looking at you, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who won’t have the stomach to pull the trigger on Nuremberg II, but an awful lot of elected officials are agitating for it, and huge swathes of the base are salivating over the prospect, something else that is unusual. This is really mainstream stuff here. There’s a real appetite for it.

When the far right inevitably takes up arms again and tries to overthrow the government a second time, there will be more than enough public support for burning the far right to the ground. It’s not clear that the fascists really understand this.

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!

They live in a propaganda bubble that tells them they are the “real” America. The majority. The “will of the people.” But they are a very distinct minority, and the violent extremists are small enough to be snuffed out through concerted effort. We’ve done it before, and it took them decades to recover. And let’s be honest, the only reason the far right recovered is because we didn’t follow the money back to the wannabe oligarchs funding them.

Do you honestly think we’re going to stop with just the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers and the other militias this time?

Trump and his regime have been screaming about a “global leftist conspiracy” for several months now and, say it with me, every Republican accusation is a confession. Always. They’re telling us what they’ve been doing. We’ve all seen it. We’ve seen how America’s far right is funded by foreign governments and works directly with extremist groups overseas. We know that fascist American billionaires pour money into a massive network to fund extremism at home and abroad.

Once the second coup fails, and it will, we will have a mandate to burn the entire network to ashes and arrest everyone involved, no matter how rich they are. Follow the money, cut the heads off the hydra, and destroy it all. Musk, Koch, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation (what’s left of it), Turning Point, the entire right-wing media system fueling the violence, all of it is part of the machine built for the express purpose of toppling American democracy and instigating domestic terrorism. All of it has to go.

This newsletter needs your shares and likes and comments to grow. Please let Substack know we’re worth your time and attention!

Share

Trump’s next coup is the last bite at the apple. The far right is taking its shot, and it’s going to miss. I would be more worried if I thought they were any good at this. Have you looked at these fucking idiots, though? Trump has filled his government with some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Rapists, junkies, drunks, imbeciles, losers, and those are the highlights! There are a handful of smart people, but they’re not going to be leading the coup. Trump will entrust it to dimwits like Pete Hegseth, who can’t lead a Girl Scout troop on a field trip.

After decades of quietly corrupting our democracy and stealing power and rigging elections, the far right bet it all on an 80-year-old pedophile with severe dementia who only cares about his own aggrandizement. Probably not the savviest move they could have made. Can’t say I feel an ounce of pity for them, though.

When the history books are written about this time in American history, they will write about Trump pretty much the same way they write about Hitler: A charismatic fascist leader who rose to power on a wave of racial animosity and fake populism and then led a resurgent far right to absolute destruction through his own erratic behavior and inability to think beyond his own personal obsessions and grievances.

It would be hilarious if the miserable piece of shit wasn’t hurting so many people in the process. The least we can do is make sure all of his enablers and violent followers pay for all of it and send the clearest message possible to right-wing extremists: The days of America giving far-right terrorism and crime a pass are over. Their violence will be met with a bullet, a noose, or a small prison cell for life. No more coddling for domestic terrorists when they’re angry, racist white men. They get treated like the danger to the public they’ve always been.

And they can all thank Donald Trump for Making America Safe Again.

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!

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

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

There are 161 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.

In Chicago yesterday, a federal case for interfering with law enforcement officers fell apart in spectacular, embarrassing, even career-ending fashion for prosecutors who work for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Way back last year, when Stephen Miller and that little Nazi in the Gestapo leather trench coat Greg Bovino were running around Minneapolis and Chicago with squads of jack-booted and masked ICE agents arresting anyone with brown skin who spoke English with an accent, the Department of Justice was desperate to arrest someone, anyone, for getting in the way of their anti-immigrant terror tactics.

Trump’s jackbooted thugs arrested six people outside the Broadview ICE detention facility in Chicago for standing in the way of a police car during a protest against the squads of ICE agents rampaging through immigrant neighborhoods. The charge was conspiracy to impede a federal officer, a felony punishable by seven years in prison. The intent of the case was to intimidate other protesters who were indeed trying to prevent ICE from running roughshod over the rights of people’s neighbors whose only crime – and it wasn’t really even a federal crime – was being suspected of not having proper immigration documents.

The problem was, prosecutors had to get a grand jury to agree with them and indict the protesters. The grand jurors, citizens who lived in Chicago and probably saw the news about the ICE and Border Patrol agents who rappelled out of a helicopter onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building and went through busting down doors and terrorizing residents without presenting warrants, turned out to be not so eager to charge their fellow citizens for protesting against this kind of government-sponsored terrorism.

One grand juror resigned from duty on the jury to protest the way federal prosecutors were trying to shove indictments down their throats, and other grand jurors complained to prosecutors about the case and said they had already made up their minds not to indict. So the chief U.S. Attorney handling the case dismissed the problematical grand jurors, and in the process, communicated with at least one grand juror outside of the grand jury room, meanwhile telling the grand jurors who remained, listen, we know the case seems weak, but it’s stronger than it looks, you just have to trust me. This is known as “vouching,” another big no-no for prosecutors.

When they finally got the felony charges they wanted, defense attorneys smelled a rat and told the judge overseeing the case that they wanted to see the grand jury transcripts. Judge April Perry ordered the government to bring the grand jury transcripts to court and was in the process of reviewing the transcripts when she discovered the transcripts contained redactions. She ordered the office of the Chicago U.S. attorney to bring the unredacted transcripts to court. Instead, the U.S. attorney dropped the felony indictments, making the judge’s transcript order moot.

The government can bring a misdemeanor case to court without a grand jury indictment, so that is what they did. A misdemeanor charge of interfering with law enforcement is still a major federal crime punishable by a year in prison. Defense lawyers renewed their request to see the grand jury transcripts. Judge Perry got the full, unredacted grand jury transcripts earlier this week and ordered all the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in the case to show up at a hearing in her courtroom yesterday.

She reviewed the grand jury transcripts in a closed-door hearing, taking testimony from two of the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in bringing the case to the grand jury. In the afternoon, she held a hearing in open court and required U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to answer questions about the improper manner the grand jury indictments were handled.

“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Judge Perry said.

Boutros responded by dropping the misdemeanor charges, telling the judge he had been unaware of the prosecutorial misconduct, including dismissing grand jurors after the first grand jury presented a “no bill,” refusing to bring a felony indictment. “No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Boutros whined. “I will tell your honor that as upset as you are, and have been — I, too, had not seen conduct like that, and it upset me — which is why we did dismiss that indictment.”

Boutros continued to criticize the defendants, calling their behavior at the protest “unacceptable in a civilized society.”

But Judge Perry would have none of that from Boutros. “You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants,” Perry said.

After the case was dismissed, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Christopher Parente, told reporters that not only had prosecutors redacted 30 lines of the grand jury transcripts in an attempt to conceal their misconduct, they had withheld entire pages from the transcripts and had not informed the judge of their omissions.

“We have a Department of Justice that hides behind the grand jury in selling these indictments against Mr. Comey, against Don Lemon, against Brian Straw and the rest of the Broadview Six, saying, ‘Hey, it’s not us, we have a grand jury, a fair and impartial grand jury,’” Parente said. “Shame.”

Parente told reporters if Trump’s “weaponization” fund is eventually approved by Congress, his clients in the Broadview Six case would consider applying for restitution due to prosecutors’ misconduct that cost them eight months of their lives and thousands in legal fees.

There’s one for the ages. At exactly the same time Todd Blanche was asking Congress to provide $1.8 billion in funds to recompense people who have been targeted by a corrupt DOJ, lawyers he controls were standing in a federal court in Chicago apologizing for lying to grand jurors, bringing fake indictments, and misleading the judge overseeing the case.

What was it the hippies used to say? What goes around, comes around? Todd Blanche should read the history of the Chicago Seven case: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and five of their friends were indicted for leading protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when police rioted and ran roughshod over the rights of people whose only crime was trying to stop a war. The jury found all seven not guilty of conspiracy.

Yay, Chicago!

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

Every crime boss has the same problem: what do you do with your ill-gotten gains? You can’t take money that you’ve made from cocaine deals or prostitution or protection rackets or loan sharking or book making and just spend it. A lot of money from crimes is in cash, so it’s got to be laundered before it can be spent. There’s an entirely separate area of crime that developed over the years: money laundering. The more money criminals took in, the more of it needed to be cleaned up so it could be spent.

This has traditionally involved coming up with corrupt ways to use money gained from crimes to create or invest in legitimate businesses. But that’s hard. A big-time criminal can’t take cash that came from drug deals and walk into a real estate office and say, hey, I want to buy that store on the next block, and hand over cash. State laws and registries are involved when you want to buy real estate. The state wants to see where money came from, and where it’s going. Banks have to report cash transactions over $10,000. That’s why it’s difficult to use cash to buy expensive jewelry. The store, or the jeweler, has to deposit the cash spent to buy the necklace or bracelet. Banks have to report cash deposits. The IRS wants to know who spent that amount of cash on a million-dollar ring or necklace.

Donald Trump has had IRS problems for most of his adult life. This has not been because the money he reported as income was suspect – at least we don’t think that was the nature of his problems. Trump’s IRS trouble had to do with being audited for the deductions he claimed in order to reduce his taxable income to a level where he paid, during the years 2016 and 2017, a grand total of $750 each year in federal income taxes. Remember each time he ran for president, he said that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited?

Well, that’s not going to happen anymore. Yesterday there was an announcement of an utterly corrupt agreement reached by the Department of Justice to settle Trump’s lawsuit that sought $10 billion in damages because his tax returns had been leaked. Trump dropped his lawsuit in return for the establishment of a $1.8 billion slush fund that will be used to pay off people who claim that they were targets of the Biden administration “weaponization” of the DOJ. Individuals convicted of committing crimes on January 6, 2021 in the attack on the Capital will be eligible to make claims on money from the fund, apparently including those who committed crimes of violence against police officers.

I love that word, “weaponization.” In another context – that would be the context in the general vicinity of sanity – weaponization could be used to accurately describe the purpose of the DOJ, which in past years used the law as a weapon to go after criminals. “Weaponization” as used by Trump and his MAGA allies supposedly describes being illegitimately targeted for prosecution. They’re saying that they didn’t do anything wrong, so they shouldn’t have been prosecuted, tried, found guilty, and in some instances, sentenced to terms in prison. Trump has claimed repeatedly – and I mean repeatedly – that he was targeted by the Biden DOJ. He was a victim of “weaponization” when he was indicted for stealing secret documents and storing them insecurely at Mar a Lago and elsewhere, and he was victimized when he was indicted for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In fact, the law says it is illegal to do what he was accused of doing, so the indictments brought by the DOJ and the Special Counsel did use the law as a weapon by claiming that he had broken said laws.

Around and around and around we go with these words that would be familiar to any gangster accused of a crime. The infamous New York crime boss John Gotti, nicknamed for years the “Teflon Don” because juries kept finding him not guilty, was a “victim” of the FBI which wiretapped his social clubs. The DOJ “weaponized” its procedures and the courts to “get” him. It’s what you say when you’re guilty as hell.

Today in an addendum to the corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, the director of which he appointed and who reports to him, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, announced that the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing or investigating Trump and his family and “related or affiliated individuals” for anything they did before the date of the settlement, which is today.

So, there it is, everything Trump and his family and anyone associated with the Trump Organization, and presumably anyone who did business with Trump and his companies which provided him with income, is off the hook for any crimes they committed.

This is the dream of crime bosses everywhere. You spend a lifetime skirting the edges of the law, breaking the law, achieving wealth from the crimes you have committed, and you don’t have to pay another lawyer another dime to keep you free from the long arm of the law. You can take your money and spend it any way you want, because it’s now legitimate, every cent of it.

Trump has now been able to “weaponize” the federal government by turning its law enforcement arm, the Department of Justice, into his own personal law firm that has served as his defense attorney, currently headed up by his former defense attorney. Today, it was reported that Trump has endorsed Ken Paxton, the hugely corrupt Attorney General of Texas, in his primary campaign against incumbent Senator John Cornyn. This represents yet another instance of Donald Trump weaponizing the Republican Party and using it against his political opponents. He used the Republican Party against Representative Tom Massie today in his primary race in Kentucky. He used the Republican Party to punish Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana for voting to convict him in his impeachment trial in 2021. He has used his Republican Party to drive Marjorie Taylor Greene from office for betraying the MAGA movement. And on and on.

Donald Trump is a crime boss the likes of which this country has never seen. Insulated from prosecution by the Supreme Court, Trump engaged in more than 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of this year in companies that have benefited from decisions he has made in defense contracts and other government business. The total of the profits he has made is unknown, but documents he is required to file with the Office of Government Ethics reveal that the profits are between $220 million and $750 million. These profits pale in comparison to what he has gleaned from the billions he has taken out of his crypto businesses such as Liberty Financial run by his sons, and payoffs from Gulf states.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Donald Trump has pretty much ceased functioning as the president of the United States and begun acting as the boss of the Trump crime family. Even his order to attack the country of Iran has returned profits from his investments in tech stocks that produce parts for weapons systems deployed against Iran. He made some of the stock trades just before his order to attack became public knowledge.

The only difference between crime boss Donald Trump and crime boss John Gotti is that Gotti didn’t put his name on the social clubs he frequented, the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy and the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens.

Trump, on the other hand, is putting his name on everything he can in Washington D.C., from the Kennedy Center to the Institute for Peace. How long before he renames the big obelisk on the Mall as the “Donald Trump Washington Monument?”

When he starts making tourists pay him money to visit it, I’d bet.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

That wasn’t a supersonic jet crashing through the sound barrier you just heard. It was Trump’s billion dollar “ask” for his ballroom blowing up. It’s gone, done, finito. Ain’t gonna happen. Over the weekend, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the money for Trump’s ballroom didn’t fit within the Senate’s rules for the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill appropriation for immigration. What the hell the ballroom was doing in the immigration bill in the first place wasn’t addressed in the ruling. The ruling prompted a not insignificant explosion from Trump, who demanded that Majority Leader John Thune fire the parliamentarian, which hasn’t happened. Republicans are said to be looking for another way to fund the ballroom, but as the days tick by and the midterm elections approach and the cost of living keeps going up for everything from beef to gas to potato chips, fewer Republicans are expressing much enthusiasm for Trump’s gold plated dream that not a single ordinary citizen will ever see the inside of.

Today, Senators meeting for lunch to discuss the immigration bill faced another problem. Democrats are expected to propose an amendment that would make an issue of Trump’s $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund. Republicans will probably be able to shoot down the amendment, but the issue is not dead.

Also today, two police officers who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 1, 2021 insurrection filed suit in federal court to block the administration of Trump’s plan to commit legal theft from the taxpayers. Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn called the Trump plan to lavish money on Capital rioters “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century” and a “slush fund,” which it obviously is.

The money for the “weaponization” fund is supposed to come out of the Judgement Fund, money which is appropriated by the Congress to pay legal claims from lawsuits filed against the government. The problem the Trump “weaponization” fund faces is that it will be administered not by the DOJ but by a third party, a special commission with four members appointed by the Attorney General and one member appointed by Congress. The president would be empowered to remove any of the commissioners, even the one appointed by Congress, without cause.

In other words, “weaponization” money from the Judgement Fund will not need to be ordered by a court to be paid to people who have sued the government and won a judgement, which appears to violate the terms of the appropriations law written by Congress establishing the Judgement Fund.

As the cops who were injured by January 6 insurrectionists said, it’s a slush fund to pay off Trump’s pals, plain and simple, with no rules that need to be followed. Trump’s “commissioners,” whoever they are, will be able to pay any amount of money to any person who makes an application claiming the law had been “weaponized” against them, even if they voluntarily pleaded guilty to charges against them, as many of those convicted of January 6 offenses did. Plea agreements in such cases usually involved reduced charges and lesser sentences, often drawing no jail time. But all such plea agreements normally bar the signers from appealing the conviction or attempting to recover restitution from the government.

The case of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was convicted of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign, is instructive. Flynn pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly making false and fictitious statements to the FBI.” There then ensued a multi-year clusterfuck as Flynn sought leniency for cooperating with the FBI. His pleadings included a deal for his son not to be charged for crimes he had committed. Flynn also filed for delays in sentencing, his lawyer claiming that there was “information implicating the president” that made the sentencing a “national security issue.”

On and on the Flynn filings went. He fired his original attorneys and hired Sidney “Kraken” Powell, who lost her license to practice due to her outrageous behavior during the phony 2020 election lawsuits she filed. Powell convinced Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea. Flynn was pardoned by Trump in November of 2020 before he left office. He sued the Department of Justice in 2023 for $50 million and settled his case after Trump took office again in 2026 for $1.2 million.

That money came from the DOJ Judgement Fund. Flynn had sued for malicious prosecution, so the agreement he reached with the DOJ to drop the suit and take the $1.2 million payment had to be approved by the judge overseeing his lawsuit.

Exactly ZERO of the insurrectionists convicted of offenses committed on January 6 would come under anything even approximating Flynn’s situation. None have moved to change their pleas after pleading guilty as Flynn did. None have filed lawsuits claiming malicious prosecution, so the government has not lost any lawsuits in court with a judge ordering the government to pay the plaintiffs from the Judgement Fund.

None of this has even a hint of following the law as it has been applied in the past when money from the Judgement Fund has been paid out to plaintiffs who have sued the government, as was mandated when Congress appropriated money for the Judgement Fund.

What Trump wants to do with his “weaponization” fund is steal money from taxes paid by citizens to pay off his friends who attempted to overturn his election loss in 2020 and get them ready for anything he wants them to do in either 2026 or 2028…or in the coming years, for that matter.

There will be lawsuits against Trump’s “weaponization” fund, but Reuters is reporting that legal experts say that it will be difficult to find people with legal standing to file suit against the fund. Either or both houses of Congress could sue to stop payments, but that isn’t going to happen with Republicans running Congress.

That might change in 2027 if Democrats take over either the House or Senate or both. Until then, we have a gangster in the White House and he’s going to steal all the money he can to give it away to fellow criminals and build monuments to himself. That’s where we are, folks.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

 After first posting this list years ago, I have made it a tradition to get it out every year and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place (it is also a way to give myself the day off for my birthday). This list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence. 

In a break with tradition, I have fewer numbers this year (this is not the book I'm working on, but if you're a publisher who sees a book here, feel free contact me). And as the years roll by, it is interesting to note that some rules loom larger than others depending on the state of the world that year. 

In the meantime, today I exercise a blogger's privilege to be self-indulgent. My rules for life, in no particular order.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. You will hurt people in life, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. Sometimes conflict and struggle appear, and there is no way out but through. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more.

This is doubly true these days, even though some folks have decided that being a dick is a worthy goal, that inflicting hurt on Those People Who Deserve It Because They Are Wrong is some sort of virtue, that treating people poorly, on purpose, is not only okay, but necessary. It isn't. Be kind.


Step 1 of the writing process

2. Do better.

Worse, we now have folks who believe that not only should they have and express an opinion about how others live, but they should be able to put their opinion into law. Nobody has ever made the world (or anyone's life) better by imposing their own moral code on others. 

9. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is the wrong question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones). Nobody is in a better position than you are to take care of the people right in front of your face.

These opportunities may come at inconvenient times in inconvenient forms. That's tough--we don't get to pick our times or circumstances, but we can either rise to meet them or bail. Bailing does not make the world better. Take care of people, even when the leadership of the country is leaning hard on the message that you don't need to care about Those People.


You are never too young for your first tin hat.


10. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment gets up and gets the job done on the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly. Make choices. Live intentionally.

11. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Sometimes we spend too much time talking about the work instead of just doing the work. Self-reflection is valuable, but at some point you just have to get on with the work.

Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could do the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," ask yourself why not.

One of the side effects of social media is that not only do we curate and craft our lives, but we want lots of other people to participate in and confirm the narrative that we're creating. "You're canceling me," often means "You are refusing to corroborate my preferred narrative." We don't just want an audience; we want pliable co-stars. Worry less about both. Don't curate your narrative; do the work. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story--that will have to take care of itself.

12. Assume good intent, complexity, and the possibility of growth.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world.

Also, this: when you paint all your opponents as monsters, you provide excellent cover for the actual monsters out there, and you excuse monstrous behavior in yourself.

This week the internet lost its damn mind when Alex Cooper, the host of the hugely popular podcast Call Her Daddy, announced that she’s pregnant. Cooper is 31. She’s married (to a man). She is doing a thing that some 85% of American women will do before they reach the end of their childbearing years. And she’s doing it on nearly the exact timeline of the average American female college graduate.

But to hear too-online pro-family conservatives tell it, Cooper had spent her 20s convincing young women to live lives of libertine feminism, and now was, hypocritically, settling down.

Subscribe now

If this sounds bonkers it’s because it very much objectively is. But women in Cooper’s demographic — college-educated working women — have become something of a trigger for the broader right. The overt misogynists hate them because these women are (allegedly) stealing men’s jobs and then (justifiably) refusing to marry and procreate with men who despise them. But the pro-family conservatives seem to resent them, too, even though these women are, by pro-family measures, doing a lot right.

Women who go to college remain far more likely than their non-college peers to have children within a marriage, and to marry in the first place: A college-educated Millennial born in 1980 is just as likely to be married as a woman born in 1940; the steep decline in marriage has been almost entirely among people without college degrees. College-educated women are vastly unlikely to live in poverty. Even women who graduate from college and have children without being married are far less likely to be raising children in poverty than single moms who didn’t go to college (13 percent vs. 41 percent). College-educated married women are less likely to divorce than their non-college married counterparts. College-educated women have, in other words, generally followed the life script that pro-family conservatives want us to follow: We finished school, worked, chose partners wisely, had children when we were stable and ready, and largely stayed married.

And instead of seeing this as a great achievement, we’ve heard: “No, not like that!”

Subscribe now

The idea seems to be that affluent women like Alex Cooper are selling some Sex & the City fantasy to poorer women who are then duped into bad relationships, or maybe into forgoing relationships entirely. None of that seems to be borne out in anything resembling research, but to some significant chunk of the conservative commentariat, it feels true. Or perhaps the argument is that college-educated liberals hold “luxury beliefs” like it’s fine to opt out of college or be single parents but then don’t actually do those things ourselves — so we’re either too prescriptive (telling women to stay single and have fun until it’s too late) or we’re too broadminded (saying any life choice is ok), but either way, whatever is going wrong with marriage and childbearing is our fault, and certainly not that of the same conservative ideologies that are far more prominent in America’s working-class low-marriage enclaves than they are in, say, brownstone Brooklyn. And this is all getting tied up in what seems to be a never-ending Birthrate Discourse, in which there is a collective freakout over declining rates of baby-having.

Read more