I am the proud product of excellent K-12 public education. I am a liberal who wants to pay teachers more, who supporters teachers’ unions, who will always vote to raise my own taxes to give more money to public schools, who opposes efforts to redirect public funds to private religious academies, who thinks education has to be broader than just multiplication tables and spelling tests.

And I’m stunned at just how badly people who share my politics have screwed up public education for American kids — and how urgent it is to reckon with the bad outcomes of our good intentions, and quickly change course.

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In New York magazine, Andrew Rice has a must-read piece looking at his own town of Montclair, NJ, which has one of the best-funded public school systems in the nation and yet has seen steep downturns in student outcomes, especially for Black students. In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about the stunning decline in math abilities among college students, many of whom — even at competitive colleges — cannot complete problems suited for eighth graders. In The New York Times, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes about plummeting standardized test scores and identifies the ubiquitous in-class laptop as a culprit. On Twitter, organizational psychologist Adam Grant shared a new study finding that, per Grant’s summary, “students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It’s not just because they’re less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.”

There is no single cause of the educational backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade. And Covid school closures certainly accelerated existing negative trends. But Covid also contributed to polarization in even agreeing that there’s a problem to be solved. It is clear, in hindsight, that closing schools was disastrous for students; but it was not clear, in the moment, that the potential learning losses for students were more of a risk than the potential loss of life and health for the masses, including sick and elderly family members living with young children. The Covid divides, though, have poisoned the education conversation. At this point, there is nothing we can do about the fact that many schools closed and many students suffered from it — and some people’s lives were also probably saved. It would be far more useful to look at the whole picture of what went wrong — what was going wrong before Covid, and which terrible ideas Covid made widespread — so that we can learn from our mistakes and improve the situation for American kids.

Liberals really have been America’s strongest advocates for public education, and America’s public education system really is an incredible achievement. But if we want to keep it strong — if we want to make it stronger — then we need to see where we’ve gone wrong, and work quickly to right it.

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Step one: Get screens, including laptops, out of the classroom.

This doesn’t mean “no computers ever.” But as Grant points out, when students take notes on laptops instead of with pen and paper, they don’t retain nearly as much information. It’s also the case that we don’t retain nearly as much information when we read it on a screen versus on paper (sorry to all of you, I wish I could mail you a printed version of this newsletter). If we want young people to retain what they’re being taught, one of the best things we can do is get them back on paper for most of their day.

Getting students off of screens is also necessary if we want them to even hear what’s being taught. I am currently sitting in a cafe writing this newsletter, which is both my job and something I enjoy and have chosen to do, and I have clicked away to scroll through Twitter, check my email, WhatsApp a friend, read the front page of various websites, and otherwise distract myself approximately 5,693 times. And I am an adult with a fully-developed frontal cortex. Ask yourself: When was the last time you sat with a computer in front of you and only focused on your single task at hand? Is that your normal way of working? If adults can’t do this, how in the world do we expect kids to do it — and why are we plunking distraction machines in front of them all day long? With a laptop in front of their faces in the classroom, students scroll through social media and watch YouTube; in one study, a quarter of teens said they’d used their class laptops to watch porn. College students may be more mature, but they aren’t much better: Twenge cites a study finding that they spend roughly 40% of their in-class time screwing around on the internet instead of focusing on the material at hand. The obvious ensues: “The more time college students spent doing something else on their laptops during class, the lower their exam scores, even after accounting for academic ability,” Twenge writes.

This is a Covid holdover. The pandemic pushed students to learn at home, online, and through screens. That was disastrous. And yet for some reason, while we’ve grasped that we have to get kids back in the classroom, we’ve kept the screens in front of their faces.

Laptops are also now substituting for school-issued textbooks, which means that kids are bringing these distraction devices home and can, under the guise of doing homework, enjoy virtually unlimited screen time. Papers written on them are increasingly penned by ChatGPT.

The school-issued Chromebook may have seemed like a good idea, a way to equalize internet and computer access for public school kids, including those whose parents don’t have the resources to buy them a computer. But a funny thing has happened: Educated, affluent parents are increasingly forcing their kids off of screens, delaying screen access as long as possible, enrolling young kids in screen-free schools, organizing to delay giving kids their first smartphones, and limiting screen time for older children. Poorer families are more screen-dependent. Poorer kids spend more time on screens.

This is not to say that children should never see a computer. There are reasonable ways to teach crucial modern-world skills — typing, online research — without moving the whole of education online. Giving students time to type out papers, for example, on school computers disconnected from the internet supports learning and skill-building rather than diminishing it. Screens are a part of life. But in school, they should be a part of it — not dominating it.

Who wins here? Not kids or parents or teachers, but the tech companies who supply not only the laptops, but the millions upon millions of dollars of software that public schools now depend on. Laptops in the classroom have not increased “equity.” They’ve contributed to widening racial achievement gaps.

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Step two: Raise expectations.

I am a woman of childbearing age, and so I see tons of social media content about raising children. As far as I can tell, American parents are very concerned about raising kids who are (1) resilient and (2) not entitled. But our educational system has increasingly treated kids with, well, kid gloves, and demanded that educators cater to their desires. It’s good that schools are considering students’ feelings and wellbeing. But in trying to keep kids from being discouraged in school and in trying to decrease racial and socioeconomic inequalities among students, we may have instead sent the message that we don’t expect students to work hard — that we don’t trust that they can do well. We don’t teach them to experience setbacks and persevere through them.

We also see education as a consumer product, and parents are among the worst offenders there, routinely complaining to deans if their adult children — college students — don’t get the As to which their parents believe they are entitled. And that of course starts well before university, with parents “advocating” for their kids to get higher grades as early as elementary school. Teachers, of course, don’t want to feel like they’re depriving students of future opportunities. They also aren’t paid enough to fend off invective from angry and entitled parents.

As a result, students are learning less but getting pushed forward anyway. As actual student abilities have gone down, graduation rates have gone up. So have grades. Some 60 percent of grades awarded at Harvard are now As, according to a grade inflation report from the university; twenty years ago, it was 25 percent.

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” one Harvard student told the student newspaper. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

One key to managing anxiety is not avoiding it; it’s learning, through practice and failure and eventual success, that you actually can do hard things and that disappointment is a normal part of life. The answer to pervasive mental health issues among young people is not to confirm their fears that they can’t do what’s being asked of them or that perfection is the only acceptable outcome; it’s to show them that they can face their fears head-on, and that they’re resourceful enough to succeed — if they put in the effort and have the necessary support systems. Learning, frankly, is not always enjoyable. It shouldn’t be miserable either, but wiring your brain in new and better ways can be painful and difficult. That’s part of what makes it so good.

Raising expectations also means offering more-academically-inclined students opportunities to be challenged in the classroom. I know this makes me a big outlier among progressives, but gifted and talented programs are actually good, as are AP and other advanced classes. It is really hard for teachers to effectively teach to students who are several grade levels apart in skill, and the obvious outcome is that the lowest-performing students are left behind while the highest-performing ones are bored. We should probably re-name them (“gifted and talented” is… a lot). We should absolutely take steps to change the status quo in which a child from an affluent family is twice as likely to be funneled into a gifted and talented program as an identically-performing child from a poorer one. But if in pursuing “equity” we’re actually simply imposing universal mediocrity, that’s bad.

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Step three: Evaluate well and fill in resources where most needed.

A lot of the current politically moderate critics of America’s educational demise point to the end of No Child Left Behind and its testing requirements as the moment things started to turn bad. I think it’s definitely more complicated than that, and No Child Left Behind had more than its fair share of problems. But we do need a more comprehensive way to assess student learning, and a thoughtful system to dedicate additional resources where they are most needed. That doesn’t need to look like over-testing, teaching to the tests, and punishing schools that do badly. It does mean giving ourselves the tools to identify problems, and the resources to help solve them.

It also means resisting the urge to forgo data collection because you might not like what you find. In the heady period in 2020 when so many Americans and American institutions were grappling yet again with our country’s racism and pervasive inequality, several elite colleges and universities decided to drop SAT scores from their application requirements. The idea was that SAT scores are pretty unequal, with affluent white students typically doing the best, and they don’t necessarily measure any individual student’s potential (they do, in fact, tend to be pretty good at predicting how well a student will do in college and if they’ll graduate). But with pervasive grade inflation, it’s awfully hard for colleges to really compare apples to apples when looking at SAT-free student applications. And the SAT can perhaps perversely be a real benefit for students from challenging backgrounds. They may not be able to afford the fancy test prep that richer kids get, but buying an SAT practice book is a lot more accessible. By contrast, the ability of a17-year-old to write an essay that intrigues and persuades a panel of university administrators that you deserve admission is a more sophisticated endeavor, one that cannot be studied for — it often involves pretty sophisticated parents, school counselors who are practiced at getting students into elite institutions, often private essay tutors and editors. A policy meant to help even the playing field seems to have only skewed it further.

We shouldn’t make a similar mistake with kids in the public K-12 education by sidestepping testing. Nor should we assume testing is the end-all be-all to education. It should be one diagnostic, not the whole plan.

To be clear, the conservative assault on public education is also a big part of this story. They have undermined public trust in the education system and undermined public education itself by fighting to push Christianity in schools and opposing teaching students things like widely agreed-upon scientific consensus. They have successfully taken public funds for secular education and channeled them into religious schools which have to meet virtually no standards at all. They have created a homeschooling scheme that broadly enables child abuse and neglect. As I write this, the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Vogt is and other extremists in the Trump administration are dismantling the Department of Education. American conservatives today are, in many ways, an anti-Enlightenment bunch. They have been the driving factor in America’s education problems.

But conservatives generally aren’t the ones reading this newsletter; liberals are. So if you’ve gotten this far, I want to hear from you. What here sounds right? What have I missed? What do American schools need, and what can turn things around for our kids?

xx Jill

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Soooo…things are going great. If by “great” I mean very badly and getting worse.

Look, I’m not an economist. I don’t even play one of TV. But after the 2008-2009 crash, it turns out there were several warning signs that were right out in the open that most people ignored. People like you and me ignored them because we didn’t know what they meant and/or didn’t know they were happening. The greedy rich fucks ignored them because they were making billions, and they knew they would get a nice, fat, juicy bailout from the government. The legacy press ignored them because this stuff is soooo wonky and booooring!

After all, there was a Republican president and we sure don’t like to deliver bad economic news when there’s a Republican president. Funny how that works.

So here are the three red flags the press has noted but not really made a fuss over:

• Housing prices are falling

• Defaults on home mortgages are skyrocketing

• Defaults on car loans are skyrocketing

If these loans are going sour, it’s a safe bet a lot of other kinds of loans are going sour, too, and the banks have a LOT of money invested in those loans. I wrote about this back in March. Wall Street is following the same greedy playbook that led to the Great Recession, but a thousand times dumber and more dangerous.

The fact that the press isn’t making a huge deal out of this tells us that they are protecting a Republican president. Again. These are the exact same kinds of warning signs that preceded the 2008-2009 crash, except they’re larger and more unstable. Somehow, these red flags are not being connected to a larger picture in anything but a general, “Gee, I hope something bad doesn’t happen” way.

Here’s where I remind you that for four years straight under Biden, the legacy press was Deeply Concerned the country was About To Enter A Recession. Not a month went by without multiple headlines “just asking questions” like “Are we in a recession?” or “Is America heading towards a recession?”

Now? Not that many headlines, and we are barreling towards an economic collapse our grandparents and great-grandparents would find both familiar and horrifying.

But just because they won’t talk about it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Look, I’m not jumping up and down about this for funsies. Most of the country/the planet was blindsided by the Great Recession. Knowing it was coming wouldn’t have saved people’s homes or jobs, but it would have let them prepare for the fallout. The press had a duty to warn the public, and they didn’t, a duty they are failing to perform yet again.

Panicking and freezing won’t do you any good. You need to prepare for rough waters, and you still have time, although I honestly have no idea how much. It would be great if we had six months or a year. It would be awesome if the breakdown were gradual and not a sudden collapse. I feel like we’re not going to be that lucky. I’ve written about how to prepare for economic disaster before and I will again (after Thanksgiving). But for now, do not ignore those red flags just because the press is mostly overlooking them. They fucked us all once, don’t let them do it again.

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🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

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Donald Trump and his party of fascist shitweasels have a problem. Everyone hates them. Well, not EVERYONE. There’s always going to be enough inbred morons who will support Republicans no matter what to keep some of them in office. But it’s not looking good for next November:

Here’s where I remind you, yet again, that this deeply lopsided result is BEFORE we see pictures of Donald Trump raping a little girl.

• Before the AI bubble collapses and the Great Depression takes second place in the “What’s the worst economic disaster America has ever faced?” category on trivia night.

• Before inflation and unemployment spin out of control, bringing back stagflation for the first time in half a century.

• Before Stephen Miller’s Gestapo is fully staffed up with literal Nazis and they start roaming the streets, an army of white nationalists with badges looking for victims to kidnap, rape, and murder.

• Before millions lose access to healthcare from the trillion dollars stolen from Medicaid to pay for billionaire tax cuts.

• Before millions lose SNAP because Republicans want hungry children.

All of this and more is coming in the next twelve months. Some of it may take longer to hit if we’re unbelievably lucky. Every day a disaster is delayed is lives saved, so it would be the best thing ever for me to be wrong. The more wrong, the better. This is not something you should bet on, though.

The slim silver lining is that all of this will fall on Republicans. And they know it. They know they are facing a historic wipeout next November, and they have a plan. The only plan with a chance of working:

Fresh off their staggering electoral losses this month, Republicans are urging President Donald Trump to start hitting the campaign trail for them next year with control of Congress on the line.

And in a sign of their rising anxiety over Democrats’ renewed enthusiasm, the requests for rallies have started rolling in.

It’s important to remember that in 2024, Republicans did not win the election. Trump did. The Republican Party did terrible everywhere. In an election where their presidential candidate won (allegedly), Republicans lost several Senate seats that should have been theirs for the taking. They retook the House, sure, but with a margin so small, one bad order of shrimp for lunch could knock enough House Republicans out to put Democrats in charge.

Voters do not like Republicans. If we’ve learned anything, they will not show up to vote unless Trump is on the ticket. Or, at least out in the field holding rallies to summon the faithful, something he did not do leading up to the off-year elections.

But why not? Trump LOVES to do rallies. He loves the adoration and attention and cheering, screaming masses of cult members. He hates actually being president and doing work (because he’s stupid and lazy). Why hasn’t he been running around the country, soaking in the worship of the masses?

Answer: Because rallies are physically and mentally draining, and Trump is very sick. Whatever is wrong with him is progressing quickly, and he can only sustain short bursts of energy when he’s speaking. And even that is frequently disjointed and confused gibberish.

That leaves Trump in an impossible position. Moo Hoo Ha Ha.

Here are his two options. Both leave him fucked and help us immensely.

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Trump Must Campaign

If Trump does not go out, they lose everything. The next twelve months are going to be unrelenting bad news, and all of it will be laid at the feet of the GOP. They will own all of it.

Democrats can be disorganized or they can be unified. It ultimately will not matter. The public will turn out to punish Republicans. The difference between Dems in Disarray and Dems Unified will be the scale of the slaughter. Will Republicans lose 30 seats in the House and 3 state legislatures? Or will they lose 40 seats and 6 states? Will Democrats retake the Senate with one seat or two? How many governors’ mansions will they pick up? Will there be a single Republican dog catcher left if they’re unified or will a few Republican mayors slip through Democratic disarray?

Without Trump, the difference will be Republican beaten with a baseball bat or with a spiked baseball bat.

Here’s where I remind you that the regime and the GOP MUST control Congress after the midterms. A hostile Congress, aka “One that upholds the rule of law,” will grind Project 2025 to a standstill. The courts have not been kind to the regime’s increasingly erratic, dishonest, and illegal behavior. Once a Democratic-controlled Congress sues to stop literally everything the regime is doing, the fascist plan to reshape America goes off the rails, and the clock starts to run out very VERY quickly.

Trump needs a compliant Congress or there will be no way to plausibly steal the 2028 election, and that’s the end of that.

Also, and this remains critical to the Republican agenda, if Clarence Thomas (77) and Samuel Alito (75) refuse to retire before Democrats take over, they risk dying or retiring with a Democratic president in office. A liberal Supreme Court ends the fascist plot with just a handful of rulings.

Trump must campaign next year. But can he? Not really.

Campaigning Will Kill Trump

Literally or figuratively, it won’t matter. Trump is 79. He will be 80 by the time campaign season really kicks in next summer. He can barely stay awake now. All the shitty makeup in the world can’t hide the weird sagging face and slouching limp.

The strain of even a moderate campaigning schedule will push Trump into real physical danger. To be clear, the people around him don’t give the tiniest of fucks about him as a person. Miller and Vance and Hegseth and the rest? They’re psychopaths, just like Trump, with a complete disregard for human life. Trump is entirely disposable, although his death before the midterms and so far from the 2028 election might be inconvenient for them. He really would be much more useful as a martyr struck down by an assassin,1 say, in the Spring or early Summer of 2028.

But let’s say Trump goes for it anyway. How’s that going to go? His mind is collapsing at an accelerating rate. Even before the pressure of the Epstein files sent him spiraling into wild, uncontrolled rages, Trump was barely coherent. After a week or two of stress and exhaustion, he won’t be campaigning; he’ll be a walking dementia commercial for assisted living facilities.

The press has spent a decade sanewashing Trump, but there’s a limit, and the more video there is of him rambling and babbling and spewing gibberish, the more damage he does to himself and his party. They’ll still lose the midterms, and Trump will have committed electoral suicide for the rest of his time in office.

He’s already being called a lame duck. After a year of incoherent fuckery on stage, they’ll be calling him a “dead duck.”

His own party is already starting to throw him under the bus and here’s an important bit of data we just learned - The base is leaving Trump as well:

“Trump recently called Greene a ‘traitor,’ withdrew his endorsement of her reelection and encouraged a primary challenge in 2026. But many Republican leaders and voters in Greene’s deep-red district say they are sticking with her, boosting her bid to carve out a populist MAGA brand independent of the president.”

I was super curious about that when the split developed. If Greene attracted a Trump-backed challenger and was pushed out, then Trump can still threaten and bully the rest of the party. But if the base stuck with Greene? Well, then, Trump isn’t the all-powerful overlord of the Republican Party, is he? And if Greene can tell him to fuck off, why does the rest of the House GOP have to debase themselves for a decrepit, dying pedophile?

My guess is that more Republicans will break with Trump now because they see a path away from his radioactive wreckage. A GOP civil war before an election is not exactly a recipe for victory.

So even if Trump survives physically, he won’t survive politically.

He HAS to campaign or he loses everything. But campaigning guarantees Trump loses everything. Gosh darn! What’s a fascist piece of shit to do?!

I know what you and I are going to do, of course. We’re going to keep all the pressure on all the time. The Nazi fucksticks are cracking, and when your enemy buckles, you punch them even harder. Desperate animals make stupid mistakes, and we want them panicked and stupid. It won’t be easy, and it will not be fun. A lot of people are going to be hurt before this is over, but it WILL be over, and it’s up to us to make sure that happens.

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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!

The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 347 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.

James B. Comey is going to sleep well tonight. His lawyer, Michael R. Dreeben, spent the morning in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, appearing at a hearing ordered by U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff on the subject of the validity of the indictment Comey faces for lying to the Senate and obstructing Congress.

Oh, boy, now comes that classic phrase, “not to put too fine a point on it.” The day did not go well for either the Department of Justice, which following the orders of Donald Trump, arranged to have Comey indicted, or for Lindsay Halligan, allegedly the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who appears to have fucked up the Comey indictment in every possible way that an inexperienced lawyer could.

The hearing was on Comey’s motion to dismiss the indictment on the basis that it was brought on Trump’s orders to retaliate against him for critical interviews he has given and what he has written about Trump since 2017, when he was fired by Trump. Halligan sat at the table for the government, alongside two Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) from the state of North Carolina, to whom she was forced to turn when none of the experienced AUSAs in her own office would consent to become involved in the indictment of Comey, which had already been rejected by the U.S. Attorney whom Halligan had replaced, Erik S. Siebert.

The hearing quickly devolved into another issue entirely: whether the indictment against Comey had been brought properly at all. Judge Nachmanoff was understandably curious about why former U.S. Attorney Siebert had found insufficient cause to indict Comey when that decision was up to him. The judge asked one of Halligan’s hired-from-out-of-state assistants, N. Tyler Lemons, for the declination memo that is typically written when a U.S. Attorney declines to indict a suspect who has been under investigation for committing a crime. Lemons was, shall we say, not forthcoming, telling the judge, incredibly, “I don’t know the world of documents that exist.”

The judge stiffly reminded Assistant U.S. Attorney Lemons, “You are counsel of record in this case,” and asked him if he had been inclined to “seek out a declination memo.” I wasn’t present for the hearing, and there were no cameras or recordings of what happened, but I would take a wild guess that Lemons did some hemming and hawing as he attempted to answer the judge’s question, finally admitting that on the orders of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, he had been told not to even talk about the existence of any purported declination memo, because the Department of Justice was “studying” whether they could make a case that they were legally justified in refusing to disclose it.

Oh, boy, that must have made Judge Nachmanoff happy, to have this deputy assistant U.S. attorney imported from another state standing there and telling him that the rather notorious Deputy Attorney General, who had been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and conducted the sham-at-all-costs interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, was interfering with the proper functioning of his courtroom from across the Potomac River. The Washington Post had already reported that two sources in the DOJ had told them that the declination memo indeed exists. It’s likely that Judge Nachmanoff, situated in Northern Virginia, reads the Washington Post, so he was probably already aware that the memo exists. And yet this pipsqueak purporting to be an assistant U.S. attorney was telling him that he couldn’t talk about it because Todd “I’m covering Trump’s ass as fast as I can” Blanche had told him not to talk about it.

Judge Nachmanoff was curious about the indictment of Comey because U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick had on Monday issued what the Post called a “blistering assessment” of the case against Comey and ordered that all grand jury material from the indictment of Comey be turned over to his defense lawyers because “government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings.” Among other things, Magistrate Fitzpatrick ruled that Halligan, who personally made the presentment to the grand jury, had made “fundamental misstatements of the law” that “potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”

Apparently because Halligan was the one who presented evidence to the grand jury, Judge Nachmanoff called her to the podium to personally answer his questions about how the grand jury proceedings were handled. He was so unimpressed by her command of the facts and law regarding the grand jury and the process of bringing an indictment that he “quickly dismissed” her and told her to “sit down,” according to the Post.

Comey’s attorney, Dreeben, put the issue on the table adroitly. It turns out that the indictment Comey is facing, on the two counts of lying to and obstructing Congress, is a replacement for an initial indictment that was for three counts. Halligan was apparently shocked and unhappy that the grand jury voted “no bill” on one of the counts in the first indictment, so she handwrote changes on the indictment, deleting the count that was no-billed, and took it back into the grand jury room to be signed again.

There was a problem, according to lawyer Dreeben. Magistrate Fitzpatrick’s Monday ruling had been made after he had read all the grand jury proceedings and included the interesting detail that when Halligan took the “new” indictment back into the grand jury room, 22 out of 23 members of the grand jury were not there. The only grand jury member present was the foreman, whom Halligan got to sign the indictment without the other members of the grand jury voting on the new indictment or even seeing it.

Because the grand jury had not voted, “there is no indictment Mr. Comey is facing,” Dreeben told the judge. “The new indictment wasn’t a new indictment.”

All this time, U.S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan was sitting there at the prosecution table, mute in the face of Dreeben’s indictment of her as an incompetent, ignorant fool.

The actual subject of the hearing – the Comey motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive and retaliatory, was discussed until Judge Nachmanoff, having listened to arguments on both sides, announced that the issues in question were “too weighty and complex” to deal with immediately and said he would rule on that question after further consideration.

Comey’s attorneys had argued that Trump’s animus to Comey was obvious from his years of criticisms of Comey, including calling him a “traitor” and “guilty as hell” in social media posts and public statements. The fact that Trump fired former U.S. Attorney Seibert when he refused to indict Comey and appointed another of his personal lawyers, Halligan, in his place with orders to indict him, was even more evidence that Trump had singled out Comey in a discriminatory manner.

In reply to these facts, the two out-of-state assistant U.S. attorneys brought in to clean up after Halligan had soiled the courthouse, argued that the decision to prosecute Comey had been made “independently” by the Department of Justice, and all the evidence of Trump’s years of animus to Comey and his calls to prosecute him amounted to “legitimate prosecutorial motive.”

That’s right. Halligan had her two go-fers argue in court that Trump’s obvious discrimination against Comey wasn’t evidence of “discrimination,” because there had to be an “admission of discriminatory purpose” by Trump. Instead, they argued, “the only direct admission from the President is that DOJ officials decided whether to prosecute, not him.”

That is the logic presented by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to a federal district judge who will rule on whether the indictment of James Comey is legitimate or illegitimate. If Halligan had stood at the podium under questioning from Judge Nachmanoff and just shouted like a kindergartener, “because,” she would have stood a better chance today.

Instead, court-watchers and legal experts were unanimous that the indictment of James Comey is likely to be thrown out “with prejudice,” which means that it cannot be appealed to a higher court or brought again before a new grand jury.

Here is the thing about an autocrat who achieves a form of absolute power: Donald Trump is fond of telling his audiences that “I can do anything I want!” Yes, he can. He can appoint an incompetent, arrogant, ignorant fool such as Lindsay Halligan to an important position, and she is all the evidence you need that autocracy is a bad way of achieving your goals. Because when what you want to accomplish meets rules and evidence and logic in a court of law, the Lindsay Halligans of the world will not prevail. Comey will walk free one day soon, and he will be able to sit back and watch Donald Trump try to lie his way out of a whole bunch of evidence that shows his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is the one corrupt thing he won’t get away with.

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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While the legacy press loves to run one hundred “DEMS IN DISARRAY!!!” stories at the first sign two Democrats don't agree on the precise shade of red of a stop sign, they’re much less interested in writing about the internal struggles of the Republican Party. It won’t do to have the public see the GOP as weak or ineffective or pulling itself apart at the seams. Why, that might give an advantage to Democrats and that would just be biased!

Anyway! There are, in fact, multiple civil wars tearing at the Republican Party, any of which should be front-page news but, you know, probably not that big a deal.

First, there’s the party fighting Donald Trump. It’s true Trump won that fight a long time ago. The vast majority of Republicans, cowards all, rolled over and let Trump do anything he wanted because it was easier than standing on what little principles they have. The few that refused to go full fash were run out of the party.

But that was then, and this is now.

Now, Trump is weak and failing. He’s physically and mentally compromised to a startling degree. The legacy press has gone to heroic lengths not to see Trump’s mental decay for a full decade, but it’s reaching the point where they’ll literally have to use an AI version of him to continue to fool the public.

For the first time, Republicans are looking to a post-Trump world, and they see a vicious backlash coming against the regime’s violence and corruption and incompetence. Best not to be too closely tied to Trump and hope to ride out the destruction.

A separate but related fight is over who defends pedophiles and who doesn’t. There are a lot of Republicans willing to fall on their sword to protect Trump and the other rich rapists in the files. But an awful lot of other Republicans are not willing to sacrifice themselves to protect pedophiles, rich or not.

Some of this has to do with protecting Trump and avoiding the fallout when Trump implodes. But there’s also the quieter war over the right’s move to embrace pedophilia. The legacy press ABSOLUTELY will not talk about that because it’s indefensible. For now.

The right has been working on moving the Overton Window on raping young teens for years, and the groundwork is not nearly in place. The Epstein files have forced the issue to the surface looong before the right was ready to have this discussion. That doesn’t mean they’ll give up, though. This is very important to them.

But here’s the fight currently raging that is more dangerous than anything else: The Nazis are trying to take over the Republican Party. And I’m sorry to say they’re going to win.

It’s not inevitable the Nazis are going to take over the Republican Party, but I would not bet against it even if I were using Donald Trump’s (stolen) money.

It’s important to understand that since the Civil War, yes, THAT one, the American right has not even TRIED to de-escalate. They moderated at the point of a gun during Reconstruction and immediately went on a decades-long murder spree the second the North withdrew its troops. Then the right fell in love with Nazism and when we went to war with Germany, they moved on to Jim Crow and then the Southern Strategy and then the War on Terror and then the Tea Party, always with the fucking Confederate flag waving in the background. Then they embraced Trumpism with screaming hate and open arms.

Now we’re back to the goddamn fucking Nazis.

Nick Fuentes has been increasing his power and influence in the Republican Party for years. He openly calls himself a Nazi. Please take note that the press, even now, refuses to call him one. After all, we don’t want to call Republicans Nazis, do we? That would be biased, even when they are literally calling themselves fucking Nazis.

One faction of Republicans is aghast to discover that their party is full of Nazis. To which one can only wonder where the fuck have they been for the last 10 years? Did they really think Charlottesville wasn’t Nazis? Did they think all the times Republicans waxed on and on about their love for Hitler or joked about “having a Nazi streak” were just little oopsies they didn’t mean?

Bullshit. They all knew exactly who and what their party was. They knew the GOP was the party of hate and rage and violence. But they thought THEY were in control. Not the Nazis.

It’s really important to understand that the American right is explicitly racist. White supremacy is their starting point and has been for over 160 years. They have devolved into white nationalism over that time, where just having white people as the apex was no longer enough. This had to be a nation of and for whites only. Those People were no longer welcome.

But it’s a very small step from “no longer welcome” to “Why not just kill them?” which is where the Nazis come in. To be a Nazi is to embrace an ideology of genocide. Homosexuals cannot just be erased from public life. They have to be killed. Deporting Latinos isn’t good enough. There can be no more Latinos. Blacks can live (some of them, at least) in chains and on plantations because those were the good ol’ days. But Jews? The Holocaust didn’t go far enough. The handicapped and mentally ill? A drain on society. Better to just eliminate them.

This is what it means to be a Nazi. This is where the American right has always been heading. This is the natural endpoint for a movement that can only escalate in hate and violence and cruelty.

Every time there is an off-ramp, they refuse to take it. Every time there’s a way back to the center and greater appeal to the wider public, they double down on hate and rigged elections and minority rule.

The right’s turn to fascism was not an accident. That was the plan all along.

That’s why the fight we are seeing is not one of morality; it’s one of timing.

The religious right needs Jews to fulfill their biblical prophecy in the Middle East to bring about the return of Jesus and the Rapture and blablabla. Nazis do not care about any of that and want all Jews everywhere dead. Accordingly, Nick Fuentes and his followers have zero desire to continue supporting Israel. That’s a dealbreaker for the Evangelicals. They all hate Jews, but one side wants to use them and the other wants them all dead right now.

But the greater hate always wins with the American right. Always. The more intense the rage, the quicker it absorbs the party and Nazis are nothing BUT hate. Hate and rage and spite.

Remember, Republicans just lost an election. Badly. They’re facing an electoral wipeout in the midterms, and Trump is so mentally compromised and consumed by his pedophile scandal, it’s no sure thing his regime will be able to stop the elections from happening. After that, it’s all downhill and the 2028 election will be a bloodbath for an already collapsing GOP.

Faced with loss after loss after loss, and the intense backlash of an enraged public demanding accountability for the crimes and corruption of the regime, the American right could take a step back and reorient itself as a movement dedicated to law and order (but for real). They could reject the criminal excesses and fascism of Trumpism. They could reject the politics of hate.

But they won’t because they haven’t done that since long before I was born, and I’m pretty fucking old.1 Instead, they will lurch to the right as they always do, insisting that if they could ONLY be more extreme, that would solve all of their problems. And who will be waiting to lead the way? Nick Fuentes and the neo-Nazis, because there is precious little room on the right left to lurch to.

Not for nothing, what’s beyond the total genocidal lunacy of Nazism? Double Nazis? Extra Crispy Nazism? Nazi Plus?

Nah. Faced with extinction in a country that rejected Trump and his fascism, the Republican Party will seek out the next Big Thing to energize their base of rage junkies, and that will be the swastika and calls for racial purity. Then Republicans will have no choice but to get on board and seig heil or exit politics because very few of them will find a home in the Democratic Party after spending a decade bending the knee to Trump.

I think a lot of people will be deeply dismayed at how many Republicans suddenly discover their deep and abiding love of Adolf Hitler.

I, however, will not be one of them. My opinion of Republicans cannot possibly get any lower. I have more respect for the Ebola virus and cockroaches. I fully expect the majority of the party to convert and for Nick Fuentes to rise to prominence before inevitably self-destructing as a pedophile or a rapist or some other creepy sexual perversion that seems to go hand in hand with white nationalism and Nazis. But the party will soldier on, goose-stepping and praising eugenics and the white race even as the legacy press struggles to find a way to equate genocide and demands for racial equality. Can’t both parties find a middle ground? Maybe some rights for Blacks and a little bit of genocide for Jews? It’s only fair!!!

I’d love to be wrong, but nothing these shitheels have done in the last century and a half gives me any reason to believe otherwise. They are what they are, and we had best come to terms with that reality and treat them like the cancer they’ve always been before they kill us all.

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!

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The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 349 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The House voted 427 to one to order the release of the files kept by the Department of Justice on convicted sex-trafficker, well-known pedophile, and friend of Donald Trump and other powerful men, Jeffrey Epstein. It turns my stomach to write a sentence containing that vote count. Just two days ago, the vote on the discharge petition to force today’s vote was 218 to 217, with only four Republicans voting for the petition. That the rest of them, save for the execrable Clay Higgins, changed their vote after Trump essentially gave them permission, turns my stomach.

And the shit keeps flowing downhill, as usual. I picked up the New York Times at Walgreens, and my eye caught this headline – a subhed, actually: “Bondi rushes to investigate Democrats.”

This is just wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First, in my mind, is the normalization of this outrage by the Times in the manner the subhed is presented: flat, matter of fact, as if an Attorney General of the United States is ordered by the President of the United States to investigate members of a political party – and only members of that party – every day. This is not the way the system of law enforcement is supposed to work in this country. To my recollection, and I’ve been covering politics and government for a long, long time, this has never happened before.

Trump and his minions will say that it happened to him – that President Biden ordered the DOJ to investigate and prosecute Trump -- but it’s a lie. Trump was investigated for his theft of classified documents because the National Archives had repeatedly demanded that Trump return documents that he had taken from the White House. When several boxes of documents were finally presented by Trump’s team in January of 2022, months after they had been requested, the Archives discovered that they contained classified information and notified the DOJ in February. The DOJ ordered the FBI to investigate to see if other classified information had been taken from the White House and thus began what turned into the “classified documents case” that ended up being charged and prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The White House had nothing to do with this referral. President Biden was not even aware that this had taken place.

The Times story is accurate, in that it depicts Trump’s order to Bondi to investigate Democrats for their connections to Epstein as a tactic to distract from the DOJ documents, which are expected to show a close connection between Trump and Epstein. Such a connection has already been shown in the emails produced by the Epstein estate last week. The latest count of the number of times Trump’s name appears in the emails to and from Epstein is 2,020. You can be certain that was noticed by Trump and his people, and so the wheels of The Great Lie Machine were put in operation with the order to Bondi to investigate Democrats. The Times even came up with the number of minutes that transpire between Trump’s order to Bondi and her announcement that she had appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to head the investigation: 217 minutes.

So, all that is to the good. The Times is on the story of how Trump is “weaponizing” the DOJ, to use another word had not been in use to describe our system of law enforcement until Trump came along. But there is a way to take note of how unusual this is. The Times could have used the word “unprecedented” to describe Bondi’s “rush” to investigate Democrats on the orders of President Trump.

But come to think of it, so much has been unprecedented about Trump’s behavior since he took office in January of this year that the word has lost its meaning, and I guess you could make a case that the Times is justified, to some extent anyway, in dropping “unprecedented” from use in its headlines. There have been days, after all, that “unprecedented” would have appeared in every single headline in the New York Times in stories about Trump’s moves in office. His pardons of over 1,000 January 6 insurrectionists on the same day he ordered the closure of entire departments of the government by executive order come immediately to mind.

In yet another disgusting development, my colleague Nina Burleigh has done us the great favor of diving deeply enough into the Epstein emails that she has come up with a shit-spray of nuggets of exchanges between Epstein and Steve Bannon. The sickening details of the frat-boy back-and-forth between these two bottom-feeders are best read with one’s head close by the nearest toilet.

Burleigh reveals the, yes, stomach-turning fact that at the time Epstein was arrested in 2019, Bannon was in the process of making a documentary film about him.

Let us stop and consider that for a moment. Epstein had been convicted of the crime of “felony solicitation of a minor for prostitution” in Florida. At the time of his conviction, Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, wrote a series of articles that exposed the secret and extraordinarily corrupt plea deal Epstein had worked out with Trump’s DOJ to avoid federal prosecution. She identified 80 – eighty – of Epstein’s victims and proved beyond a shadow of doubt that in addition to his conviction for a sex crime, Epstein had for years been running an extensive sex ring, trafficking underage girls to wealthy and powerful men.

Bannon knew this, and still he was arranging to make a kiss-kiss-and-let’s-forget-the-details documentary about Epstein.

Bannon was all over Epstein with requests for money and jet-favors and business advice, but then, that’s in character for the man who was convicted of fleecing suckers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scam that involved promising to help Trump build his wall on the border with Mexico. The only thing that got built was additions to Bannon’s bank account. When he was arrested for the crime, he was on a billionaire’s mega-yacht off the coast of Connecticut.

Emails between the two reveal that Epstein provided his private jet for Bannon to fly all over the world for meetings with billionaire financiers including Qatari sheiks and a former Gulf prime minister. To describe the flavor of their emails as “locker room talk” insults both locker rooms and the act of talking. Here is just one nugget from Burleigh’s Substack, "American Freakshow."

“Short notice for jet charter,” Jeff texted Steve in November 2018. “But can for tomorrow morning to Paris lunch in Paris then fly you to wherever”. Bannon replied, “What a life.” and “u r a pretty good asst.” Epstein responded, “Massages. Not included”.

Epstein and Bannon took to referring to one another as “brother,” a rather dated form of hip-speak commonly used by stiff-backed squares thinking they are getting down with the dudes, if you catch my drift. The diminutive for “brother,” “bro,” isn’t found in the emails uncovered by Burleigh, but among the 20,000-some that were produced last week, I can guarantee you “bro” is in there somewhere.

Disgusting references to women pepper the emails throughout. Listen to this, from Burleigh’s Substack: “How was Paris fashion week,” Steve inquired in Spring 2018. “There’s nothing left in my testicles but a speck of dust .. and a puff of air,” Jeff replied. “Im putting up a poster of you in my apartment,” Steve wrote back.

You ask yourself how much lower could scum like Bannon go in his quest to become one of this country’s most repellent public characters, and then you discover that the last email message Epstein sent was from Teterboro Airport on July 6, 2019, as FBI agents closed in on his jet to arrest him for sex trafficking minors. They had been discussing the documentary film that Bannon had been working on, and the message Epstein sent was to, you guessed it, his “brother,” Steve Bannon. Here it is in its entirety:

“All cancelled.”

If only these assholes could be cancelled, every one of them, forever. But they are still here among us, living it up in spas for the super-rich like Palm Beach and on ranches in Montana and New Mexico, at the tops of Manhattan skyscrapers, flying hither and yon on their Gulfstream jets that cost in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was learned today that Larry Summers, about whose alleged contrition over his Epstein connections I wrote last night, will continue to teach five classes at Harvard on the subject of economics, because of course Summers was such an economic genius that he frequently went to Jeffrey Epstein for investment advice. We should have known that was coming. Summers is a member of the club. Harvard is the club. The way the club has always worked is to close ranks around even the worst of its members in their time of need, especially when they are men.

This is hard to say, but the problems we have in this country are deeper than the organized sexual abuse of minors. We know that some of these masters of the universe have indeed been involved with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and taken part in sexual abuse of minors. They have also taken their money and donated it to a political party that has the single aim of undermining our democratic system and denying ordinary citizens the right to vote because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity or even their gender. And far, far too many of them are bent in their determination to control the lives of women.

Epstein and Trump and the wriggling, oily likes of Steve Bannon are part of a deeper rot in the soul of this nation. Money is at the heart of it. The more money these monsters accumulate, the worse things get for the rest of us. It is no coincidence that when we speak of the “powerful men” who were befriended by Epstein and along with him took advantage of underage girls – we may learn that underage boys were abused as well – we are speaking of men who shared secrets not only about sex but about how to make themselves and each other even more wealthy.

It turns my stomach to say this, but we have not yet seen the bottom into which these wicked creatures have led us. Not even close.

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