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!)

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

🌟BECOME A CONTRIBUTING SUBSCRIBER!🌟

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Senate Republicans toying with the idea of ending the filibuster so they could get out of the disaster they’ve trapped themselves in.

Senate GOP leadership has been rejecting the idea for extremely good reasons I explained in the article and will get into again later. But here’s me writing the most obvious prediction ever:

That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

And here we are, with Trump doing exactly that - ordering the Senate GOP to end the filibuster (sorry for subjecting you to Trump screeching):

What’s happening here? I thought Republicans were loving the shutdown and wallowing in the misery they were causing? I thought this was their big chance to destroy the federal government and really stick it to the Demtards?

Well…yes and no.

Republicans are arsonists. They set fires with the explicit understanding that Democrats will put them out. This is why they set fire to anything and everything, including their own base and things they, the GOP, actually care about. They know that Democrats will step in and keep the fire from burning out of control. And then Republicans can point to the damage and blame…Democrats.

Very stupid people see this as kabuki theater. The uniparty! Both sides are working together! It’s all a scam to fool the public.

These people do not understand the core concepts of who and what the Republican and Democratic Parties are. At their essence, Republicans are people who do not care if Americans live or die. And in the last 15-20 years, they’ve become a straight-up death cult, strongly leaning in the “preferably dead” direction.

Democrats, on the other hand, whatever you say about them, you cannot argue that they have spent decades trying to keep Americans alive. Medicare. Medicaid. Social Security. SNAP. The ACA. Funding for cancer treatment and vaccines. Pretty much every piece of the social safety net comes from us and is despised by the right.

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

So…Republicans shut the government down, refusing to restore healthcare to tens of millions of Americans. They set another fire and assumed Democrats would put it out because that’s what Democrats do.

Playbook: ”White House officials had been running an informal pool at the start of the shutdown over how long the whole thing would last. The longest anyone predicted was 10 days.”

But Democrats are refusing to put out the GOP’s fire and Republicans don’t really know what to do about it. The only thing they can think of is doubling down again and again to make things worse.

They illegally cut SNAP to 42 million households, which include over 20 million children. A judge ordered the federal government to not deliberately starve its own citizens, but even with the order, there will be a break in services that will last weeks.

Understand that: Republicans, the party of “pro-life” and “pRoTeCt ThE cHiLdReN!!!” took active steps to impose hunger on children in an attempt to gain a political advantage.

But it’s worse than that. They illegally ordered grocery stores not to help out SNAP recipients on their own:

Several grocery chains and food delivery apps have announced in recent days that they would provide substantial discounts to those whose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits have been delayed. More than 1 in 8 Americans rely on the program, and 39% of them are children.

But on Sunday, Catherine Rampell, a reporter at the Washington Post published an email from the USDA that was sent to grocery stores around the country, telling them they were prohibited from offering special discounts to those at greater risk of food insecurity due to the cuts.

Republicans truly are the worst fucking people to ever exist in America.

The goal here is to ramp up the cruelty and suffering to force the Democrats to break, but it’s not working. Democrats are still refusing to smother the Republicans’ out-of-control fire. The public is increasingly mad at the GOP after originally blaming both sides, with slightly more blame landing on the right.

Accordingly, Trump and his regime are getting “frustrated” with the shutdown. It was supposed to be quick and easy. Democrats were supposed to cave and put out the fire. Another fast win for the “unstoppable” dictator, not a long, protracted fight. Trump doesn’t like long, protracted fights. They’re boring and confusing, and he’d rather play with his toys.

So now the Mad King is demanding Senate Republicans scrap the filibuster so they can end the shutdown.

If you read my previous articles about why Republicans have not and will not risk eliminating the filibuster, you know why this is freezing the marrow in their bones. If not, allow me to considerably brighten your day.

The thing you need to understand here, and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo agrees with me, is that the filibuster is the only thing keeping the Republican Party from oblivion. It MUST exist for Republicans to obstruct progress or Democrats can erase them from the face of the earth in a single election cycle.

Sounds crazy, right? But it’s not. I keep saying this, but all Democrats have to do is pass a Voting Rights Act that eliminates gerrymandering and voter suppression, and that is the end of the GOP. Like that. Poof.

The 6 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court can attempt to strike it down, but without the filibuster, Democrats can add 5 seats, and that’s the end of that. What are Republicans going to do? Accuse Democrats of being fascists? For…expanding voting rights? That might land harder if they hadn’t just spent the last decade being openly fascist and loudly praising Hitler.

This means Republicans are in an impossible position.

• Get rid of the filibuster and watch their future evaporate.

• Refuse Trump and suffer his considerable wrath as the shutdown grinds on and Republicans pay a steep price in the midterms.

I know conventional wisdom is that the public will not remember the shutdown by next November. Possibly. But people will remember their children going without enough food. That happened to me for one week when I was five, and I still remember it vividly. That was almost half a century ago, and I still carry those scars. I feel as if the parents of the 20 million children Republicans are hurting are going to remember a year from now.

And that’s aside from the other millions of people who are going to lose their healthcare even if Republicans relent and restore some or most of the money they stole from the ACA and Medicaid.

These are people’s lives Republicans are directly harming in very tangible and lasting ways. They’re going to remember.

The longer this goes on, the worse it will be for the people of the country AND the Republican Party AND the regime. That means Trump will increase the pressure on the Senate Republicans to end the filibuster.

Then it just becomes a question of ending the short-term pain or enduring it to avoid the long-term death of the party.

Personally, I very much want Senate Republicans to cave to Trump’s stupidity. Yes, millions will lose their healthcare. Yes, Republicans will do terrible things for the next three years. But they will not hold onto power, and without the filibuster to hold the vast majority of the electorate back, their entire corrupt project dies.

We should only be so lucky that Republicans are so spineless1 and Trump continues to be so unbelievably dumb.2

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

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

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

The Blue Wave has begun, and the fascist fucks are scared. There is 1 day until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Enough is never enough. You can never come up with enough new ways to praise Trump. You can’t think of anyone he isn’t greater than, even, it seems among some so-called Christians, The Almighty. There are not enough Trump policies and projects for you to favor, from terrorizing children of undocumented immigrants, to terrorizing the immigrants themselves, to denying food to children and babies with the refusal to fund SNAP and WIC that is going on right now, to praising his demolition of the East Wing of the White House, to his continual desecration of the White House itself with gold leaf and marble – most recently, the photos he just posted of the bathroom off the Lincoln Bedroom he “renovated” in a style reminiscent of Saddam Hussein.

I’m sure you can come up with a list of your own. A good place to start is with Trump’s slavish adherence to Project 2025, which he denied knowing anything about last year during the campaign, and then proceeded to work his way through, policy by policy – including “ending” birthright citizenship by executive order.

Nothing is extreme enough for the MAGA faithful. They express love and devotion for sub-human sacks of bone and flesh like Victor Orban of Hungary. In the face of Putin’s three-plus years of crimes against the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian cities and land, they speak highly of his manliness and strength and – God help us – his character.

They made excuses for Trump when he excused Nazi-sympathizers, antisemites, and white supremacists by telling the world there “are fine people on both sides” of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2018 that featured a torchlight parade of pasty-faced Hitler fan-boys shouting “Jews will not replace us.” They made excuses for him again when he had Nick Fuentes, the avowed Jew-hater and Nazi, over for dinner at Mar a Lago in 2022.

And now they are rallying behind Tucker Carlson after he had the same unapologetic Nazi, Fuentes, on the online show he films at his family compound in Maine. Let’s understand who this piece of shit is. He’s a Holocaust denier, with every last scintilla of that horrific belief system. He is antisemitic in every way possible, calling for a “holy war” against Jews, saying Jews were responsible for Roe v. Wade, compared the killing of six million Jews to Cookie Monster baking cookies in an oven…

I can’t go on with any more of this.

Carlson spoke with Fuentes for two hours and 12 minutes. I’m gob smacked just typing that. I can’t stand to look at or listen to either of them, so I haven’t sat through that horror show, but reports I’ve read about it say that Carlson did his usual “you don’t say” and “go on” as Fuentes spewed hate and of course denied it was hate and tried to make all his bullshit sound rational, which Carlson was exceedingly keen to hear.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what Fuentes said, because we’ve heard it all before. What matters is that it happened at all. It shows us how MAGA extremism finds its own level, and it has now sunk to previously unthinkable lows. Praising Hitler. That’s where they’re at.

What we might think of as mainstream MAGA has been either silent or has treated both Carlson and Fuentes with kid gloves. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, let it be known in a video he posted on X that “cancelling Fuentes is not the answer,” despite avowing that “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says.”

Let’s stop for a moment and consider not what Fuentes says, but what Roberts said. In defending the MAGA house-Nazi, Roberts tells us, “The Heritage Foundation did not become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by cancelling our own people, or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now.

“Now,” being after “our own people” Fuentes appeared on the show of another of “our own people,” Tucker Carlson.

He accused those who are attacking Carlson for having Fuentes on his show as a “venomous coalition” that is “sowing division.” Roberts bragged that when the Heritage Foundation disagrees with someone, they “challenge those ideas in debate.”

Where was the “debate” with “things that Nick Fuentes says” in Roberts’ taped statement on X? Nowhere to be found. Instead, he bragged that “we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left.”

Roberts isn’t merely intellectually dishonest; his statement is a way of signaling your agreement with the truly hateful crap that Fuentes believes and Carlson’s spreading of it. You figure out a way to blame it on the “left” because they are “venomous” and all they seek to do is “sow division.”

I am at a loss to find the words to describe how utterly corrupt all this is, but it’s been going on with Republicans and “conservatives” for decades. They’ve pushed their own coalition so far to the right that they’re passing laws that allow bounty-hunters to target people seeking to travel out of state for an abortion or who receive abortion pills in the mail.

The question I’ve had is, what’s next? We have an answer. The right now considers that it’s okay to believe insane conspiracy theories about how Jews control the economy and the media. They consider that it’s okay to openly say they hate Jews and admire Hitler as a forward-thinking genius. They now consider it acceptable to think slavery had its good sides – the enslaved got three squares and a roof over their heads, after all.

The far right is now the mainstream right, and they are actually coming right out and saying this shit. I would call it rank insanity, but it’s not that easy. It’s always been what these people say to each other when they think nobody is listening – see also: the right-wing text chats that were recently revealed. And they even show it to us – see also: Carlson giving Fuentes a platform to spread his bile.

I never thought that I would live to see a day when declaring yourself a Nazi would be mainstream, but we’re there. With Fuentes spewing hate on Carlson’s online show, it’s only a matter of time before Fox News will pick up on it. That’s the way it happens on the right. It starts small, with a blathering incel like Fuentes and his minor online presence. Before you know it, the Republicans nominate a guy who admits to “Nazi tendencies,” and we have what amounts to masked and armed brownshirts on our streets teargassing school children and “detaining” citizens until they can determine their citizenship, as they did in Chicago a couple of weeks ago.

When it comes to these right-wing hate spreaders, our memory of the past is failing us. There were hastily-dug trenches filled with the bodies of dead Jews inside the fences of concentration camps when American troops liberated them only 80 years ago. That is the blink of an eye. We have 80 year old rock and roll stars touring and playing on a stage somewhere every night, that’s how short 80 years ago is.

And yet, even as close as the Holocaust is – we have living survivors among us – a little shithead like Nick Fuentes and his lies and hate have not only an audience, but a home among a significant percentage of one of our two political parties.

So long as there are Confederate flags and Nazi flags and Nazi salutes and Jew haters and white supremacists walk proudly among us, we are a fallen country. We need to save ourselves from this horror before it’s too late. It sounds like a cliché, but it is absolutely the truth that we stand proudly for peace, love, and understanding. That’s what we must spread with our lives and our votes.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

Trump’s rocket strikes on alleged drug boats in the Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are his dream of what law enforcement should be. You make an allegation – look over there! A drug boat! You order up a Reaper drone armed with a Hellfire missile. You get your Secretary of Hair Gel to post a video on his X account showing the boat loaded down with packages – see what we said? Drugs! You shoot it out of the water. Boom! Lots of fire! It’s gone.

It’s not even shoot first, ask questions later, because there are no questions. It’s fait accompli. It’s gone.

I’ve watched every video they’ve posted of their attacks on so-called drug boats, and I’ve got to tell you, they’re not fishing boats. Nearly every one is the same design – a long speedboat style craft with three outboard engines attached to the transom. There are four or five thwarts, pieces of wood attached to the gunwales, running across the boat for stiffness, meaning that it is impossible to move around the boat without climbing over the thwarts. That’s not a fishing boat. It’s a boat designed to carry heavy loads in choppy seas without damaging the hull.

The boats are loaded with square or rectangular packages that appear to be wrapped in heavy plastic. Here is where it gets interesting. The boats are hit amidship by missiles fired from drones. Some of the packages explode away from the boats into the water. They can be seen floating next to the burning boat, because Hegseth’s videos dwell on the burning boats pridefully, like look what we did!

Do you want to know what those packages are? They’re evidence. But without defendants – the people in the boat, whose bodies exploded when hit by the missile – there is no need for the evidence.

There is also no need for the rest of the usual accoutrements of regular law enforcement, like some sort of an authority to make an arrest – say, the Coast Guard. There is no need for a prosecutor, because there is nobody to prosecute. There is no need for a courtroom or a judge, because there is no indictment, no case, no defendant. And there is no need for a defense attorney, because there is no one to defend.

Fifteen alleged drug boats have been sunk since the attacks began in September, killing 61 individuals whom Hegseth, speaking on X for the Trump administration, says were “narco-terrorists bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans.”

But here is where it gets interesting. Three of these alleged “narco-terrorists” survived. Two were picked up by a U.S. naval vessel in the Caribbean Sea and “repatriated to their countries of origin for detention and prosecution,” according to the New York Times. One was rescued by Mexican authorities and taken ashore. We do not know his status.

Trump doesn’t want any survivors brought back to this country. Not one. They would get legal representation. Motions would be filed. The Trump administration would have to reveal the so-called “intelligence” Hegseth refers to in all his X posts, that the boat and the people on it are “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics.”

Just between you and me, if our navy is picking up survivors from a burning boat…or two burning boats…they could also be picking up the drug packages that Hegseth’s own videos show floating around said burning boats and have the proof that Democrats on Capitol Hill have been demanding.

Today, members of the House Armed Services Committee were given a classified briefing about the “Trump administration’s military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and the East Pacific,” according to a story this afternoon in The Hill. Rep. Jason Crow, Democrat from Colorado, sounded unconvinced and frustrated after the briefing, telling reporters, “Our job is to oversee the use of lethal force by our military outside of the United States, and I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of lethal force is adequate here. What I heard today was a tactical brief. I heard no strategy, no end game, no assessment of how they are going to end the flow of drugs into the United States, which needs to happen, by the way.”

Rep. Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts and a former Marine, told reporters that the members of the committee had questions about the legal justification for killing 61 individuals in international waters, but administration lawyers from the Department of Justice “cancelled at the last minute.” Committee Democrats asked Trump Defense Department officials about the legal aspects of the strikes on the alleged drug boats. “They just said that they can’t answer these questions because the lawyers aren’t here. They canceled having the lawyers here.”

There it is in a nutshell. They don’t have any legal justifications for these extra-judicial killings because there are none. Trump’s theory, or that of the people running the so-called drug boat shooting gallery show, is that they don’t need any legal justifications so long as there are no legal proceedings. With no defendants, there are no indictments, no trials, nothing. They just go out there in the Caribbean and the Pacific with their drones and shoot anything with three outboards on it.

Jason Crow put it well when he noted that stopping the flow of drugs into the United States “needs to happen, by the way.” But shooting random speedboats carrying packages wrapped in plastic is doing little to accomplish that goal, if in fact it is a goal of the Trump administration. Their failure to retrieve the plastic-wrapped packages and show that they contain dangerous drugs raises the question of exactly what the whole thing is about. Is it just a trigger-happy Trump and a trigger-happy Secretary of Hair Gel wanting to shoot stuff and watch it burn? Or is it part of another strategy that they’re not talking about?

What we might call the domestic equivalent of the drug-boat strikes would be police driving past a bank and observing masked men coming out of the bank carrying plastic bags that might, or might not, contain money. They get in a getaway car and drive. The police give chase, and without stopping the car and inspecting the bags to see if they contain stolen money, or arresting the suspects, they deliberately shoot at the getaway car. Its gas tank explodes, killing everyone inside.

The suspects are not questioned, because they are dead. There is no need for evidence, because there were no arrests. There is no trial because no one is indicted.

How likely do you think it is that such a thing would happen in this country, that police officers would kill everyone in a car fleeing from what appears to have been a crime scene, without stopping the car, arresting the suspects, and searching for evidence?

Well, how likely did you think it was that a Blackhawk helicopter would hover over an apartment building in Chicago, and armed, masked men would rappel down ropes to the roof of the building, and armed masked men would storm the building from every entrance, search every apartment in the building, without providing anyone with search warrants, detain all the residents in handcuffs, including toddler-age children, without reading them their rights, arrests dozens with outstanding warrants, and depart the scene with exactly one member of the alleged drug gang the masked federal agents were alleged to have been looking for?

We have a federal agency that is supposed to investigate drug smuggling and make arrests of drug smugglers. We have a federal waterborne force of defenders, the Coast Guard, that is charged with patrolling the coastal waters of the United States and stopping and inspecting boats in those waters and arresting people if drugs are found on board boats.

None of this is happening in the Eastern Caribbean or Western Pacific. Drones launched by the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Air Force are using military weapons such as Hellfire missiles to shoot at and sink boats alleged to be carrying drugs. Neither Secretary Dry Drunk nor the Attorney General nor the Secretary of Homeland Security has provided evidence that any law enforcement authorities at all have been involved in these extra-judicial killings.

This is what dictators do. They arrogate to themselves powers that are not specified in or authorized by laws. They use those powers to eliminate people whom they declare are “enemies” and justify it by alleging that they are “combatants” in a “war” on whatever they declare the war against.

Right now, it’s a war on drugs. The cartels are the enemy. The people on the alleged drug boats are the combatants. We already have soldiers from our army patrolling the streets of cities in this country. Democrats have been declared by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, to be “the enemy within.” He just accused a United States Senator, Chuck Schumer, who criticized his Asia trip as “a dud,” of using words that were “almost treasonous.”

They’re shooting boats out of the waters off the coast of South and Central America. How long before someone walking down an American street carrying a sign with an “almost treasonous” criticism of Donald Trump is shot without warning? Sixty-one people whom Trump declared are “enemies” of the United States are dead. This is not a drill.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

The Executive Education Academy Charter School of Allentown, PA, has just broken ground on plans for a $25 million stadium. The massive athletic complex will connect to the school and sit on top of a 300-stall parking garage and offer 4000 seats, a press box, and concessions. The field will be turf, be supported by concrete columns and sheer walls, and span 126,713 square feet. 

The complex will be near Coca-Cola Field, home of the minor league baseball team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, with whom the charter will apparently share parking, the result of some protracted negotiations. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission approved this thing. 

You are thinking, perhaps, that EEACS must be one hell of a school, and well, no, not really. According to Niche, the school rates a B-. Its test results are not great-- 36% proficiency for reading and 16% for math. Graduation rate is 95% (which tells us nothing about cohort attrition). There are 1,431 students K-12, and 100% of them are Free of Reduced Lunch students. According to School Digger, the student body is 5.4% White, 17.1 % Black, and 75.3% Hispanic. Allentown's population is 26% White, 8% Black and 60% Hispanic. 

Ironically, Niche says that girls and boys athletic participation is very low. Their football team plays AA ball and had a record of 6-5-1 this season. The Raptors also play AA basketball. 

In short, a pretty run of the mill charter school. Why do they need a $25 million stadium? That's not really clear. 

Some coverage notes that there are even more expensive and expansive stadiums out there at public schools, particularly in Texas and Georgia. Buford High School in Georgia just played its first games in the $62 million Phillip Beard Stadium.

But the Buford stadium came with controversy, with lots of observations about district priorities. But Buford's football team is ranked #9 nationally, and the stadium was actually paid for by the city. 

However, what we really want to notice about the Buford stadium is that the whole business involves decisions by locally-elected officials, both from the city and the school district. If people object to having their tax dollars spent this way, they can make their displeasure felt at the ballot box.

Not so for the EEACS stadium, because like any other charter school, EEACS is a privately owned and operated business-- it just happens to be funded by the local taxpayers, and if they don't like the idea of tax dollars funding a big beautiful stadium, well, too bad.

EEACS started operation in the fall of 2014, and lists four founders. Jennifer Mann, former Democratic state rep, now operating a consulting firm. She appears to have no current office with the school. Carol Trench, who appears to have worked with Philadelphia charter group ASPIRA and is now a Philly principal.

Steve Flavell is a co-founder and currently serves as Chief Operations Officer. Flavell has some actual background in education, but has worked mostly in behavioral health and as an administrator with Success Schools. He's paid around $150K. Robert Lysek is a co-founder who serves as CEO. Lysek appears to have started out with a career in law enforcement in mind (University of Florida), and was even a deputy sheriff in Pinellas County, FL. But he shifted to Camelot Education, founded Success Schools, and has been busy with PA charter schools for a while. 

Lysek was tagged for Pennsylvania's Superintendent's Academy in 2018, and he seems generally to be the public face of EEACS. He's paid just under $200K for his work.

How exactly is EEACS paying for this $25 million project? Currently they have an operating budget, according to their website, of $20 million. 

But this is not their first big athletic project. In March, 2023, they announced that they would be building a 28,000 square foot fieldhouse for around $7 million. For that project, they partnered with the Lehigh Valley Health Network. Announced Lysek:

Our partnership with LVHN is a game-changer for Executive. Besides collaborating, the partnership will bring internship opportunities to our students with a career pathway program, scholarship opportunities — along with in-house expertise that will provide us with athletic trainers, strength and conditioning professionals and medical and mental health programs that will benefit all our students.

No such partnership has been announced for the football stadium.

We can debate all day the wisdom of dropping huge piles of money on school athletic facilities. But at least with a real public school, that discussion can be held by representatives elected by the taxpayers. EEASC gets to throw all these taxpayer dollars around without having to answer to taxpayers at all. 

Hopped on Thursday afternoon with to dig into the Republican government shutdown, how it’s going to hurt millions of Americans, and how we can make our government more accountable to the people again.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from The Opinionated Ogre in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app