Ogre Note: Until I get a grip on the sadness and anxiety crushing my soul, I am going to try to write a series of journals so you can walk with me as I walk this road. One hopes it’s a journey towards healing, but it will be a journey I’ll be taking whether I want to or not. Depression and anxiety rarely arrive with an invitation, and they always overstay their welcome.

These journals will be for me. To see where it all started, where I’ve been, and how far I have, or have not, come. They will also be therapeutic for me since writing is how I process trauma. Writing down what is causing me pain allows me to understand it better and work my way through it. Until now, that’s all I’ve needed, but this pain has been too great for even this balm to soothe. Fortunately, I have been able to lean on my family, and I started therapy for the first time since I was a child. It helps to be unashamed of my pain. In some ways, I welcome it, but I’ll get to that later.

These journals will also be for you, my readers who are travelling on their own journey through sadness and anxiety and feelings of helplessness. What works for me may not work for you. What doesn’t work for me may save your life. Everyone’s road is different. But just like with all of the articles I’ve written about the challenges of being an autism parent over the years, just knowing they are not alone has helped so many people push through another day. If I can help just one of you get through a single day, then these journals are worth it.

Finally, these journals are for the men and women who live in a world where we are told men cannot show emotion. Where being vulnerable is weakness. These journals will show you another way, and that men do not have to be broken in silence and shame. We can tell the world we are scared or sad, and that does not make us weak. It means we are reaching out for help. In turn, we should be able to be that shoulder to lean on when someone else reaches out. Empathy is the foundation of humanity, and without it, we are nothing. Even if that empathy causes us tremendous pain, as it has me, I wouldn’t sacrifice it for anything. It makes me the father and husband and best friend I am.

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If you’ve been reading these journals, you know that since Jordan and Lila’s back-to-back prom nights in late April, the struggle with anxiety and depression has not been as severe. If I had to characterize it, I would say way less depression, still some anxiety. I have these moments where paralyzing fear hits me. They pass in minutes but, fuck, they’re intense and unpleasant. It’s usually along the same lines, “Lila will be gone soon, and how do I cope with that?”

It’s good that the depression doesn’t follow. Sadness, but not depression. It’s OK to be sad. I have every reason to be sad. I’m going to miss this smart and funny and (usually) sweet little girl I helped raise for a decade. I’m allowed to be sad, and I’m allowed to say that out loud without embarrassment. This is not something men have been traditionally taught how to do. God knows I wasn’t. But I consciously chose to ignore that upbringing because I needed to be better, and it’s incredibly toxic to keep it all buried. Not just for me, but for everyone around me.

It’s scary to be vulnerable in front of my family, but I taught them to trust me with everything. How can I not trust them in return?

Tuesday, May 12th: Today was not a super productive therapy session. I wasn’t really sure what to talk about. It had been almost two weeks since we last spoke (she had a patient emergency last week), but the last two weeks have been really good. We talked about my prom night meltdown and the really nice talk I had with Lila, just to catch her up to where I am. But that was kind of old news.

Beyond that, there wasn’t a whole lot to discuss. Like I wrote in the previous journal entry, everything has been…normal. No real depression and only little spots of anxiety here and there. Not exactly a lot to dig into with a therapist. We agreed to talk again in two weeks. I felt silly. Obviously, I’m not “fine.” I’m not magically healed, body and soul, but if nothing overt is happening, what do I talk about?

Friday: May 15th: Slept like shit last night. I think I’m stressing a bit about not needing to talk to my therapist. Which is stupid. If I’m not drowning in anxiety and depression, this should not be triggering anxiety. Jesus fucking Christ, this is the stupidest shit in the world. I will never not hate this.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. But it’s different now (and I’m hoping it stays that way). I’ve been thinking a lot about what it will be like when Lila is gone. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s not the same kind of doom loop. I’m not terrified I’ll never hear from her again or that she’ll need me and I won’t be there for her. This is simply imagining life without Lila next door, and it’s just…sadness.

It’s not even really abandonment issues. I’m not sinking into a deep depression over it, it’s just…sadness that she won’t be here all the time anymore. I will absolutely feel this same sadness (actually, that will be a lot worse for a lot of reasons) when we find Jordan an assisted living facility to move to. This is the same sadness I will feel when Anastasia goes to college herself in two years. But it’s normal, healthy sadness which, perversely, makes me feel better. Have I mentioned how stupid anxiety and depression are?

The thing I’ve been thinking about is that I’m a father whose children are growing up, which means in a few short years, the lion’s share of my life’s work is more or less done, and then I have to find a new role.

This is something I talked about, more than once, with my therapist. I have spent the last two decades doing everything in my power to raise my children in a way I was not. Anastasia is everything I could have dreamed of in a child. Smart. Hard-working. Kind. Generous. A wise-ass. Independent. Lila had so many challenges weighing on her, and I went above and beyond to give her the childhood she deserved. Or as close to it as I could get. Now she’s ready to take those first steps, and I know she’ll be OK. And if she stumbles, that’s not the end of the world. We’ll be here to help her get back up and try again. As long as I’m breathing, she’ll never be alone and on her own. None of my children will. Knowing that, I hope, will give her the courage to try anything and everything until she finds the path that’s right for her.

I didn’t have that. If I blew it, there was no one to catch me, so I couldn’t take any real risks.1 Anastasia and Lila will always have us as backup, and they’ll always know it. So even when I’m done being a father, I’ll never really be done. It will just take a different form, and what that looks like for me is what I have to figure out. And that’s pretty fucking scary. It’s like re-entering the workforce after an extended hiatus. Yeesh.

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Monday, May 18th: Despite having spent the better part of four years connected at the hip before Covid, early teen angst, and some other issues pushed them apart, Anastasia thinks Lila doesn't want her around. Anastasia desperately misses hanging out with her sister. She complains about this somewhat regularly.

Lila, on the other hand, thinks Anastasia doesn’t actually want to hang out with her. This is almost certainly an artifact of her anxiety. Lila struggles to believe anyone can really love her2, so why would Anastasia want to be around her? Lila also misses Anastasia. She’s mentioned this to her mother.

Now, Lila is 18, and Anastasia is 16, so they’re not going to hang out in a social setting with friends. They have their own friend circles, and they do not overlap. But they used to spend an afternoon together every now and then doing arts and crafts or just talking or just watching YouTube before teenagerness got in the way. They miss each other, and they’re not happy about it, but being as they are both teenagers with zero emotional vocabulary, they are incapable of talking to each other. I want to strangle them both, but today was a really good day.

I’ve been wanting to take the girls to a bookstore that reopened after a year of renovations. We used to go all the time to buy manga and YA novels. We were going to go today, but June was going to be over, so Lila offered to have June drive her and Anastasia to the store. Anastasia wasn’t sure about that. She was worried Lila and June wouldn’t pay attention to her, and she would be alone and sad. I said it would be worth the risk because she’s been wanting to spend time with June. Anastasia really REALLY wants to get to know Lila’s girlfriend just like any little sister would. So she went for it.

Before they got home from school, though, Anastasia found out she had not gotten a part in a musical she had auditioned for, and she was crushed. A lot of tears and a lot of sadness. She almost didn’t go, but she felt bad because she was the one who had been asking Lila to pick a day and she didn’t want to disappoint Lila. I texted Lila to let her know that Anastasia was really bummed out and to be patient with her, maybe try to cheer her up.

This is where the daughter I know and love came shining through. Lila always wants to make the people she cares about feel better when they’re hurting, and today was no different. She and June made sure Anastasia had a wonderful trip to the bookstore with her big sister and her girlfriend. By the time she came home, Anastasia was practically glowing, all of her misery washed away.

That’s what sisters can do, and that’s why it was so important to me that they keep that bond between them. Friends come and go, but family will stay with you.3

This has been a source of constant stress for me for years. Lila has cousins, but they’re not super close. We’re not close with either side of our family, so when Mrs. Ogre and I are gone, Anastasia will be alone. The girls need family they can turn to when things get difficult, and friends are not always dependable. No one should be alone. Maybe they’ll both have significant others in their lives. But maybe they won’t. As long as they have each other, though, they’ll always have someone they can rely on. Today told me that they will almost certainly still love each other as adults, and that is the greatest gift I could have ever given to them: Each other.4

Thursday, May 21st: I didn’t think I had anything else to add to this journal, but today, Lila needed to talk. She’s been having some issues and asked me to walk her down to the mailroom because she wasn’t feeling good and she was stressed.

We talked for a while, and she really needed to vent about some personal stuff. Afterwards, when she was done, and not quite in tears but close, I gave her a tight hug, told her I love her, and let her go back to her apartment. It occurred to me as she left that here I am, shoving down panic and depression over Lila disappearing from my life, and here she is, still trusting me enough as her father to talk about fairly private stuff. Does that sound like a daughter who is going to just drop off the face of the earth in less than three months? Nah. This is a daughter who loves and trusts her father enough to reach out to him when she needs to. Will it be every week? No. Will she need to reach out less over time? Yes. And that’s OK. That means I (and her mother and Mrs. Ogre) successfully raised a functional adult.

But anxiety is mindless and stupid and doesn’t care about reality. I just have to keep reminding myself of this in the coming days as we get closer to dropping off Lila at school.

Postscript: Three things I have found have been extremely useful in alleviating the worst of my anxiety and depression. In this order:

1. Talking to a therapist - It helps to talk to a professional who can help put things into perspective. Or perhaps help you frame the problem in a way you hadn’t considered. My therapist spends an awful lot of time poking around what fatherhood means to me and what it means to be a father, not just to Lila, but to Anastasia and Jordan, as well. It helps to clarify what I’m trying to achieve and why.

2. Talking to Lila - It helped to let Lila know how scared I was that I would lose her without dumping all of the responsibility in her lap. It helped her to know that I see these last few months as precious time together, and she has been more than happy to let me be her father as much as possible. After all, this is a scary time for her as well. Adulthood is right in front of her, and we never really outgrow the need for someone important to us to make us a snack and tell us that we are loved after a rough day. Someday, it will be a partner. For now, it’s still a parent. And even as adults, sometimes we need to hear mom or dad tell us they’re proud of us.

3. Talking, a lot (soooo much), to my family - I can’t talk to Lila about this as much as everyone else because she’s, technically, the root of my anxiety and depression. My abandonment issues and fears around parenting are obviously not really about Lila; she just happens to be the trigger, and I cannot, will not, allow her to internalize that responsibility. It’s not hers to shoulder. She has enough anxiety of her own without gobbling up any of mine. But I know for a fact that if I were struggling with this level of anxiety and depression because of something/someone else, Lila would absolutely be there for me when I needed her. As long as it didn’t interfere with her social life, of course. 😜
   
   It’s been rough for everyone to see me this broken and uncertain. I have always been the steady rock for everyone else. When things were bad, I was there to walk them through it. There have only been a few times I was overwhelmed and needed to lean on Mrs. Ogre and Claudia and the girls. That generally lasted for an hour or two before I pulled myself together. This? This has been going on since March. It has not been fun for anyone, and I hate that for them, but it is what it is. I think I’ll make everyone a rather lavish dinner as a thank you. We’re not going to have too many opportunities for a family meal left, and it’s nice when we all get together.

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The Ogre’s Anxiety Journals:

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The absolute top priority of the Democratic Party when they topple the Trump regime is to purge the courts of corrupt judges. The Federalist Society has tipped its hand, and its operatives have shown that they are an existential threat to the rule of law. Nothing will get done until these traitors are removed and the Constitution restored.

We have a lot to get to this week, so come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Ogre Nations News Update!

1:45 - 9:31 We talk about the San Diego neo-Nazi shooting because the legacy press won’t. Why? Because when it’s neo-Nazis, it’s an “ISOLATED INCIDENT” and the story vanishes. (Nathan, aka “Little Mr. ” is hanging out in the room as a special guest host. 😆)

9:32 - 17:49 Virginia Democrats discover what we’ve all known all along: The most corrupt Supreme Court in American history is a stickler for the rules…but only when it hurts Democrats.

17:50 - 26:28 Trump and the GOP’s poll numbers are so bad, all their gerrymandering and election rigging will not save them.

26:29 - 36:36 Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for domestic terrorists and his insider trading are new high-water marks in corruption, and the legacy press is too busy to notice.

36:37 - 41:10 I Scream You Scream We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE

41:11 - 59:50 Headlines for Short Attention Spans

59:51 - 1:08:55 Self-care of the Week (Nathan has left the room at this point)

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream!

A new chapter is my weight loss journey has begun and, ooooof!, is it off to a rocky start. It’s been several months since I’ve written about taking Ozempic. Specifically, I haven’t written about it since last August. The reason for this is that nothing had changed. At all. Since I started splitting my medication with Mrs. Ogre, everything has been pretty much status quo.

I wasn’t losing weight, but I wasn’t putting it on, either. So, really nothing to write about.

Now, I DID drop from 251 to 241 over the course of a month starting in the middle of March. That…was not for the best of reasons. If you’ve been following my newsletter, you know I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety over my daughter Lila leaving for college. It got really bad for several weeks, and I was hardly eating. When I’M not eating, there’s something seriously wrong.

On the one hand, I knew I was struggling and immediately sought help. On the other hand, I figured I might as well get something useful out of the pain and allowed the weight loss to continue without much pushback. At 251 pounds, I still have a lot of weight I can lose without experiencing any kind of negative effects. Losing 2-3 pounds a week was not going to harm me, so fuck it.

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I’ve been seeing a therpaist and I’m through the really brutal part for now (probably?). My weight loss has stopped. But during that time, I also switched from the Ozempic injection to the Wegovy pill. It has been a pain in the ass of a transition.

Here’s the reason I did this.

I take Ozempic to keep my blood sugar under control. It’s worked. My A1C (the medical term for your long-term blood sugar)has been under 6 for over a year now, meaning I am no longer pre-diabetic. Success! But as I’ve mentioned in previous Ozempic articles, without the shot, the food noise comes roaring back, and it’s really hard to regulate my eating.

If you’re not familiar with food noise, it’s a constant screaming in the back of your head to eat something, even when you’re not hungry. I once wrote that I wasn’t even aware it was present until it was gone. When I realized the screaming had stopped, I literally almost cried in relief.

But there’s a catch, it’s always there. It never goes away, apparently. Which is fucking bullshit. I spent well over a year eating normal portions for meals, barely snacking, rarely overeating. I was very used to eating this way. The idea of eating more was quite literally unthinkable, and I didn’t WANT to eat more. I was quite happy eating smaller meals and not snacking. And yet, just a few days of reducing my Ozempic intake, the food noise came back. It was merciless. It was like I had never stopped stuffing my face. It was actually offensive, and that’s when I knew it was not about learning new habits or about willpower. There was a literal chemical trigger in my brain malfunctioning. Fuck you, brain.

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But here I was, with my blood sugar under control for over a year with government-issued medical insurance. Who is in charge of said insurance? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A man whose singular goal is to hurt as many Americans as possible by denying them access to modern medicine. I knew I KNEW that motherfucker was going to start pulling people off of their diabetes and weight loss drugs, no matter what their doctors and every scrap of medical evidence tells him.

So I started to look at getting the drug directly from Novo Nordisk, the Danish company that created it in the first place. They started selling it through their own online pharmacy. It’s not cheap buuuuut, if Mrs. Ogre and I were splitting it anyway, it would be worth it.

It turns out that the Wegovy pill is cheaper than the injection, so I figured I would try that. Also, the pill is one a day, and if it worked really well, we could each take one every other day, and there’s the split.

I wanted to start at the highest dose, which is 25 mg. I had been taking the highest dose of Ozempic, so I figured I could tolerate the highest dose of Wegovy. Even though I had been taking a half dose for the last year, I didn’t anticipate any issues. Despite specifically requesting the 25 mg dose, our doctor prescribed the next lower dose, which was 9 mg. Why did she do this? We don’t know. She never bothered to explain.

OK, the pill and injection do not stack up next to each other one for one, exactly. The Ozempic injection comes in .25, .5, 1mg, and 2 mg. Wegovy does the same but goes up to 2.4 originally.1

I was taking a 1 mg injection. Maybe a little more. Turns out the 9 mg pill is less than the 1 mg injection. Significantly less. For the last month, I have been struggling A LOT with food noise. It’s been a fucking nightmare. And since it’s a lower dose and daily, I wake up hungry most days. Like, really hungry. I haven’t had to deal with that in three years. I fucking hate it.

I have been putting on weight and then fighting like crazy to lose it again. Up five pounds, then back down to 241. Up again, down again. It’s been incredibly frustrating.

The good news is that in a few days, I will finally have the proper prescription of 25 mg. Then we’ll see how that goes. I’m really hoping a dose three times stronger is, in fact, much more effective, even in pill form. If not, there’s always the injection, but it costs more.

When I started this whole thing several years ago, I was 330 pounds. I managed to get down to 300 using a drug called Trulicity and then got stuck. Ozempic has gotten me way further than I could have imagined. 250 was my pie-in-the-sky goal back in 2023. I hoped to someday to maybe see it just over the horizon and wave at it. But here I am, at the low 240s. I was at 239 for a few days before I started the Wegovy pills.

Now I’m about to start a higher dose than I’ve ever been on after a full year of being on a much lower dose than I was on when I first reached 250. I’m wondering if I can get to 230. Maybe 220. There’s a muuuuch higher dose for the injection, but I’m not sure I’m interested in doing that to myself. There’s healthy weight loss, and then there’s self-harm.2

Allegedly, I’m supposed to weigh 170-180. I don’t see that happening. But 220 would be really nice after all of the crap I’ve gone through. I wouldn’t mind sticking around for another 25 years and seeing if I end up with grandkids old enough to remember me.

Regardless, after a few weeks on the 25 mg pill, I’ll know how effective a real dose is, and I will let you know. Fingers crossed because the 9mg dose truly sucked. I’m sure it’s fine for someone who is working their way up, but it’s a step back if you’re used to at least 1 mg of the injection. The more you know…

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The average price of gas across the nation is $4.50. The price of groceries just rose faster than at any point in the last four years. Millions are losing their healthcare. Rent and housing are getting more expensive. Inflation is rising faster than wages. The economy is coming apart at the seams, and everyone knows Donald Trump and his party are to blame.

Naturally, they’re going to barnstorm the country and campaign on all of the amazing ways they’ve fucked helped the American people:

Trump and his top officials are fanning out across the U.S. this week for events aimed at touting his domestic achievements — a notable pivot after major foreign policy matters in Iran, China, Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere have dominated headlines for months.

Back in 2017, Republicans pushed through the largest tax cut in American history, and it went overwhelmingly to billionaires and corporations. They tried to campaign on this magnificent accomplishment for the midterms because Republicans live in a hermetically sealed propaganda bubble. They were absolutely shocked to discover the public, including their own voters, was intensely hostile towards tax cuts for the rich when the economy was sluggish.1

The economy right now is not sluggish; it is being actively murdered by a regime whose goal is to turn America into a piggy bank for the Epstein Class and their enablers.

These motherfuckers just stole almost $2 billion of OUR money to use as bribes, and they’re going to steal soooo much more before we drag them into the streets and hang them for crimes against humanity.2 This is what EVERY dictator has done throughout history: They loot the country and leave behind a smoking husk when they’re done. Fuck that and fuck these cheap little criminals. They haven’t done a goddman thing for the American people.

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Here’s the thing…the regime is going to run around the country and lie through its fucking teeth. That’s the strategy.

“This is the strongest economy in American history!” - Reality: We’ve been flirting with stagflation for the first time in half a century.

“We have a manufacturing revolution!” Reality: We’re shedding manufacturing jobs.

“We’ll have affordable healthcare in two weeks!” Reality: Prices have risen sharply as millions dropped their coverage. Which is exactly what Republicans wanted when they passed their “Big Beautiful Bill” last year.

“I will make groceries cheaper!” Reality: Between the oil shock and fertilizer shock, groceries are only going to get more expensive throughout the rest of the year.

Trump and his bootlicking toadies are going to promise everyone puppies and ice cream and unicorns and it’s all going to happen right after the midterms! Just you wait and see! It’s going to be amazing. An economy like you wouldn’t believe!

Now, the MAGA cult will believe because Trump could feed them a pile of his used diapers, tell them it’s premium Trump Steaks™, and they would brag to their friends about how they ate some of the finest steaks ever made. Is that poop dribbling down your chin? And why does your breath smell like shit, Cletus? Shaddup, Elroy! Fake news!

But the rest of the country? Ain’t no one going to believe a goddamn word coming out of the regime’s mouth. Even with the legacy press carrying water all day long, the lies will just be too ridiculous to work.

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By the summer, we will be in the middle of Trump’s oil shock, and the economy will spiral out of control. As I’ve said too many times to count, a competent and well-intentioned administration would struggle to keep things from falling apart. The regime is maliciously incompetent and will not only be incapable of preventing an economic meltdown, they will welcome it.

It’s important to remember, autocrats see economic distress as an excuse to grant themselves “emergency powers.” EVERY emergency is another excuse to grab more power. The economy is in jeopardy, we’re at war, there’s civil unrest, why, how can we trust the results of the midterm elections, y’all?!

That’s not going to work, but they’re definitely thinking they can try it.

Regardless, the regime, at the moment, thinks it can boost its chances in the midterms by bragging about all of its “accomplishments.” Which tells us they are either completely detached from reality or supremely confident in their ability to bullshit the public. Or both.

A third option is that they really do not understand just how bad the economy is about to get and just how intense the public’s anger will be. Or that it will be entirely directed at the people in charge, aka, Republicans. I would bet a shiny nickel on Option #3. These are the same people who thought they could topple Iran in a few weeks and still can’t figure out why the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Long-term thinking and understanding more complex ideas than “Does it look good on TV?” is really hard for them.3

So here’s what I think is going to happen: Trump and his flying monkeys will race around the country for a few weeks, maybe a month, making shit up the entire time. They’ll handpick their audiences so they can pretend they’re speaking to crowds of “average Americans” who just so happen to all love Trump. The press will pretend these are real events and try really hard to push a narrative that everything is awesome.

But then the oil shock will hit, and everything will not be awesome. The regime will hold its breath and stamp its feet, but the economy will contract hard and fast. Trump’s popularity, already at historic lows, will erode even further.

The Republican Party will then pivot to the same closing message it always pivots to when it is losing: Naked racism and bigotry. We will see a massive surge in Islamophobic rhetoric in late Summer, early Fall. Trump will suddenly rediscover how much he vocally hates immigrants from predominantly Black countries. The regime will almost certainly avoid antagonizing the Latino community any further, but any other kind of immigrant? It will be open season on them. Expect the regime to cancel as many TPS orders as it can to pander to its base of white nationalist trash.

The attacks on the Trans community will intensify, and don’t be surprised if the regime begins its war on the rest of the LGB_Q community. They’re going to be desperate to distract from their failures on both the domestic and international stage.

If (when) this happens, we have to be ready to stand in front of the vulnerable and say, “Not today, you fascist Nazi fucks!” and then kick them in the teeth so hard in November, even the most weak-kneed Democrats know that it’s time to go for the throat of the regime. We have to stand for more than just protecting our money. We have to stand for protecting each other, and the time is coming to prove we are who we say we are: The party of all the people, not just the ones we’re comfortable with. Otherwise, we’re no better than the fascist fucks trying to destroy our country.

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There are 167 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.

It’s a sad day in America when a tiny, petty little copycat of a tyrant can start a war of choice in the Middle East and the country doesn’t rush to praise him as a conquering hero. Whatever happened to good ol’ fucking American pride?!?! Has the United States of ‘Murika become too goddamn woke and filled with weak-kneed liberal pussies to celebrate our massive indisputable AWESOME military victory in Iran that has resulted in exactly zero of our stated objectives and has made the price of gas (and everything else) shoot through the fucking roof?

Ummmm…looks like the answer might be…yes?

Most voters think President Trump made the wrong decision to go to war with Iran, a New York Times/Siena poll found, leaving the Republican Party on rocky political footing heading into the midterm elections as his approval rating sinks and economic concerns rise.

Majorities of voters said that the war was not worth the costs and held deeply pessimistic views about the economy.

73% of Independents rejecting your stupid war and the inflation it’s causing is not an electoral kiss of death going into the midterms. It’s the throat fucking of doom.

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How much trouble is Trump in? Soooo much fucking trouble. This is not a blip. This is a trend and it’s been going on for too long to ignore:

A four-point decline isn’t necessarily huge, but it puts Mr. Trump’s ratings in new political territory. While recent presidencies have often been unpopular and polarizing, no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average. If there has been a floor during this partisan era of politics, Mr. Trump’s ratings today have fallen to it.

But let’s be more specific. Let’s look at what’s coming and what happens next. There are two things to consider here.

1. 37% is what the Professional Left Podcast calls “The Sarah Palin Floor.” This is the lowest Trump can go. Maybe. This is the 37% of Americans who will lick Trump’s unwashed balls while he is raping their 14-year-old daughter and thank him for the privilege. He can shoot their family dog, and they will beg him to stay for a dinner of unseasoned mashed potatoes and boiled chicken. He can burn their house down in the middle of winter, and they will marvel at how their favorite president DONALD J. TRUMP!!! made a campfire for them.
   
   But worshipping Trump does not translate into worship for the Republican Party. No matter how tightly the party clings to Trump’s leg and humps it for all they’re worth, his cult will inevitably vent their frustrations on them, mostly by not voting. They may understand, intellectually1, that their godking needs them to vote, but they’ll be sooooo fucking mad at the GOP, they’ll just stay home.
   
   The end result will be a blue wave that the legacy press won’t even bother trying to downplay like they did in 2018.2 Gerrymandering will not save them if their voters do not turn out.

2. As I have been reminding people since last year: We still have not reached the really nasty part of Trump’s economic disaster. We’re about to, though. We crossed the event horizon weeks ago, and it’s too late to stop Trump’s oil shock from impacting the country now. Even if Iran surrendered today and reopened the Strait of Hormuz, it wouldn’t matter. Even if Trump capitulated and gave Iran everything they wanted right now, it wouldn’t matter. If they shook hands and reached a deal neither side really likes but restores peace and gets the oil and fertilizer shipping again, it wouldn’t matter. The damage is already done, and we’re going to start feeling the real effects in the next couple of weeks, long before any oil from the Gulf could possibly reach us. You still have some time to prepare, but that time is running out:
   

   But let’s be honest…Trump is too stupid and arrogant to end his war of choice. He started it to look good on TV, and now that it’s a disaster, he has no idea how to get out of it without looking like the fucking loser he’s been his entire life. He went to China on his knees, begging to be bailed out because when Trump has fucked up, like he has so many MANY times in his life, someone always bails him out. His father, the American mob, the Russian mob, Elon Musk, some bigger piece of shit has always swooped in to pick up the pieces because Trump was a useful idiot who served their agenda. But now, Trump failing serves China’s agenda, and they’re the only bigger piece of shit in a position to help. Womp-womp for us.

   
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   The American economy (and the global economy with it) is going to contract, hard. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs, their benefits, access to health insurance, food banks are going to be overwhelmed because the regime has crippled them, and on and on and on. Unlike what Fox News would have us believe, most of those people aren’t going to be minorities in cities. They’re going to be rural whites, aka, Trump voters, aka “real Americans.”
   
   They will be furious, but even in their psychotic fugue state of racism, misogyny, and bigotry, it’s really hard to tell yourself that immigrants and Trans kids made the price of gas and inflation go up. Even Fox News has been talking about how closing the Strait of Hormuz is a problem for consumers. The dimmest of MAGA will be able to connect those dots.

   
   Trump may be the Second Coming of Christ Himself, but when a few million more of his disciples lose their homes and their retirements because of him, they’re going to discover what we’ve known all along:

So what happens when Trump destroys EVERYTHING? We can look to the last Republican cult and how they responded when their infallible divine messenger shit the bed. When George W. Bush annihilated the economy and left two disastrous wars in his wake, his cult magically discovered that they never supported him from the beginning. Praise JAY-zus! They were never Republicans! Heavens no! They were the Tea Party! Or Constitutional Conservatives! Or “Independents!” We saw this with Bush, and we will see it with Trump because Republican voters hate one thing in this world more than they hate us,3 and that is being demonstrably wrong.

They erased Bush because he was so terrible that they couldn’t avoid the reality that he had destroyed the economy and their lives. Trump is heading down the same road, but worse. What choice will they have? Blame Joe Biden for attacking Iran? I mean, they can try, but I’m not sure even the most cult-brained inbred MAGA will be able to tolerate sounding that fucking stupid for long.

Trump’s cult will kill for him. They will die for him when they believe diseases and vaccines are a hoax. They will not, however, tolerate ongoing inconvenience and poverty for him. When it costs $100 or more to fill the manly pickup every week, and the grocery bill tops $250, while Trump won’t stop talking about his fucking ballroom? Well, that’s a man who doesn’t care about me and my red-blooded, God-lovin’ American family. That’s an out-of-touch billionaire and maybe he was one of them all along. That’s why I’m an Independent and never voted for that lying piece of shit, and any Trump bumper stickers you see on my F-150 were probably put there by some commie-pinko leftist!

The Trump cult will lie, cheat, steal, and murder for their Dear Leader and they will vote away their future time and again. But when the bill comes due, there’s only so much they’ll put up with before abandoning their cult and pretending they were the victim all along.

George W. Bush found that out the hard way, and I think Trump is now going to learn the same hard lesson in the very near future. Just breaks my little Ogre heart…

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There are 168 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.

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Time is almost up, and the last of the mitigation efforts will run out in the next couple of weeks. A month or two at most (and that’s a huge stretch). After that, all of the really bad things start. There will be no one to blame except Joe Biden Trans kids Immigrants Hillary Clinton Your Mother Donald Fucking Trump.

You still have time to get ready. Get to it. Then pull up a seat and enjoy the show as the regime panics.

Monday: Don’t listen to the people telling you society is going to collapse. But you do want to get ready for rough waters ahead.

Tuesday: You cannot be friends or allies with people who want you dead.

Wednesday: Recording and Writing D&D for the girls.

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: Be careful what you wish for.

Friday: The kids had a wonderful prom night. Me? Not so much.

5 Things I found Interesting This Week

1. On Superpower Suicide - And the recovery of justice by Timothy Snyder at Thinking about…

2. Trump Has Officially Lost The War In Iran And The Great Energy Collapse Of 2026 Is Coming. - Bob Kagan just declared “checkmate” on America in Iran while the US prepares to fall off an energy cliff in the next two weeks. You should probably buy an EV soon. by Dean Blundell

3. Nobody Tells You The Last Time They’ll Reach For Your Hand - On Grief, Granola, and the Country Our Children Deserve by JOJOFROMJERZ at Are you f’ng kidding me?

4. The Sex Economy: The Enclosure of Connection - Your Loneliness Is Not a Personal Failure. It’s a Business Model. by Farida Khalaf at Lights On

5. Is Russia Finally Losing Its War of Choice in Ukraine? - The raw numbers don’t lie, and they carry a stern lesson for the U.S. by Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo

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

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Ogre Note: Until I get a grip on the sadness and anxiety crushing my soul, I am going to try to write a series of journals so you can walk with me as I walk this road. One hopes it’s a journey towards healing, but it will be a journey I’ll be taking whether I want to or not. Depression and anxiety rarely arrive with an invitation, and they always overstay their welcome.

These journals will be for me. To see where it all started, where I’ve been, and how far I have, or have not, come. They will also be therapeutic for me since writing is how I process trauma. Writing down what is causing me pain allows me to understand it better and work my way through it. Until now, that’s all I’ve needed, but this pain has been too great for even this balm to soothe. Fortunately, I have been able to lean on my family, and I started therapy for the first time since I was a child. It helps to be unashamed of my pain. In some ways, I welcome it, but I’ll get to that later.

These journals will also be for you, my readers who are travelling on their own journey through sadness and anxiety and feelings of helplessness. What works for me may not work for you. What doesn’t work for me may save your life. Everyone’s road is different. But just like with all of the articles I’ve written about the challenges of being an autism parent over the years, just knowing they are not alone has helped so many people push through another day. If I can help just one of you get through a single day, then these journals are worth it.

Finally, these journals are for the men and women who live in a world where we are told men cannot show emotion. Where being vulnerable is weakness. These journals will show you another way, and that men do not have to be broken in silence and shame. We can tell the world we are scared or sad, and that does not make us weak. It means we are reaching out for help. In turn, we should be able to be that shoulder to lean on when someone else reaches out. Empathy is the foundation of humanity, and without it, we are nothing. Even if that empathy causes us tremendous pain, as it has me, I wouldn’t sacrifice it for anything. It makes me the father and husband and best friend I am.

It was not fun to learn that anxiety and depression do not stay confined to the thing causing me anxiety and depression, i.e., Lila leaving for college. I suppose if I had stopped to think about it for a second, I would have known that literally anything that made me sad would be amplified.

But this is all very new to me, and I have had precious little real-life experience with this kind of thing. Lila has been fighting anxiety and depression for several years, but she never talked about what it was like for her.1 I was just there to help pick up the pieces as best I could. Now it’s my turn, and I don’t really know what to expect. We as a society place so much stigma on mental illness of any kind that those who have not dealt with it know precious little about the contours of the pain so many experience. I hope I can help shed the tiniest little bit of light on my small corner of this world as I make this frustrating journey.

Friday, April 24th: For the first time in the 16 years since Jordan was diagnosed with autism at age 2, I broke down crying. I’ve teared up before, especially when writing about Jordan, but not like this. This was uncontrolled, broken sobbing filled with grief and loss and anger.

I had just dropped Jordan off at his senior prom.

I knew I was struggling with this and had been all week. A perfect storm came together, and I was unable to regulate my emotions in any way whatsoever. It was cathartic, eventually, but in the moment, it was fucking awful and bleak and hopeless.

Back in February, Mrs. Ogre and I filed for legal guardianship of our son ahead of his 18th birthday. It was a soul-crushing thing to do, but necessary. I wrote about it at the time.

This has been gnawing at me ever since. A silent guilt weighing down on me despite the absolute necessity of it. I’ve been in a heightened emotional state since I had my (not so) mini-breakdown over Lila leaving, so this hurt a lot more than it would have normally.

On top of this, Lila was going to her prom on Saturday,2 and even though we were all excited to see her dress and excited she would be going to her first dance with June, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Jordan wouldn’t get to do any of that. He would never get to go on a date. He would never get to go hang out with a group of friends. He would be alone at his prom even if his classmates were there because Jordan doesn’t play/talk/hang out with other people. He’s always alone, even in a crowd. He’s not lonely because that’s how his autism is. But he’s alone, and even if he doesn’t know it, I know. I always know.

I thought I had come to terms with that a long time ago, but dropping him off and seeing all the neurotypical kids in their dresses and suits as couples and groups just brought it all home in a visceral way: Jordan doesn’t get to do this. He never gets to do it. The simmering anger and despair I had been drowning in all week swept me away, and all I could do as I drove away was cry and scream at the steering wheel. I honestly do not know how I managed not to crash.

I got home, sat down next to Mrs. Ogre, and fell apart. She knew exactly what I was feeling, and she fell apart, too. We spent the next half hour crying on the couch and cursing the unfairness of it. Fuck you, autism. Fuck you, depression.

Anastasia has been really good about my unusually fragile state these past two months. I didn’t try to hide it from her because she’s old enough to know I’m struggling and why, and also that’s bad parenting to hide important shit from your kids. Our parents did that a lot, and it bred not a small amount of resentment.

Still, seeing both of us crying and me really falling apart was too much for her. She didn’t know what to do, so she stayed at her desk and finished her homework. Afterwards, she felt really guilty about it and came over to comfort us. She curled up on the bed, and we watched TV while she asked a bunch of questions about stuff she knew would get me rambling. My daughter is very clever, and she knows me very well.

Both Mrs. Ogre and I went to pick up Jordan later that evening because I couldn’t bear to do it alone. But his teacher told us that he had spent the entire two and a half hours on the floor dancing his ass off. I was worried he would sit at a table and be bored, but he wasn’t at all. He didn’t dance with anyone, but he still had a lot of fun, and that was good enough for us. It was a painful night, but knowing Jordan had a lot of fun in his own way made it bearable.

Saturday, April 25th: Today, Lila has her prom. Sort of. She’s going to the prom in Alexandria, where we used to live, because most of her friends are still there, including her girlfriend, June. We had been hoping to see Lila in her prom dress, take pictures, and make a fuss. It’s one of the things you look forward to as a parent, and right now, these last few months of being Lila’s dad before she leaves for college, I needed to do all of the things.

But Claudia told us that Lila was going to a friend’s house in Alexandria to get ready, so we wouldn’t be seeing her dressed up. That bummed me out, but not as much as I thought it would. I absolutely understood why she would be doing that. Getting ready with friends is part of the excitement of prom. Even my annoying fucking anxiety and depression couldn’t spin that into a personal rejection. I was sad I wouldn’t see Lila in her dress in person, but she had sent me a picture from the other day when she had tried it on because she wanted to show off how pretty it was (it was exceptionally pretty). And, of course, she would send pictures from the prom itself. It was all good.

Buuuuuut…it turns out that Lila and June were actually going to get ready at Lila’s place, and we would get to see her all prepped and dressed! I was elated, and so was Anastasia, who was really sad she hadn’t seen Lila’s dress at all (I sent her the picture after she mentioned it, though).

We went over to ohhhh and ahhhh, and Lila looked absolutely amazing. June was still in her civvies, and she and Mrs. Ogre were making jokes about this being the new style of promwear. Mrs. Ogre got June to laugh, and she (my wife) was practically glowing. She hadn’t said anything, but she also really wanted June to like us.

We didn’t want to pressure June, but we told her we would really like to see her in her dress if she was OK with that. She thought that would be just fine, and she went to change. When she came out, we made a huge fuss over how pretty she looked, and she was all smiles. We took a bunch of pictures of her and Lila together, talked for a bit, and then let them get on with their evening.

Later, Lila sent pictures, and between Jordan having a good night on Friday and Lila and June having a good night on Saturday, I felt a lot calmer. When my children are happy, I’m happy.

It was a good sign that I didn’t shut down when I thought I wouldn’t be able to see Lila in her dress. It’s also good that I was able to strengthen that connection with June, however little. Although, honestly, I don’t know if it was that small a thing to her. Validation is meaningful, and I do not think June has enough of it in her life. It was nice to be able to do that for her (and be sincere).3

Starting on Sunday, April 26th, I have been in a suspiciously good mood. Engaged, active, motivated. Dying to write everything and not stop. I was wondering if I was having some kind of manic episode but even though my knowledge is pretty much all based on television, this really doesn’t seem to fit the bill. I’m not hyper, just…not depressed and anxious.

In other words, I feel normal. Normal normal. I write to process trauma, but I also write because I love to write. Like, love it. Taking a week off from writing is really hard. Not because I don’t want to disengage from politics. Jesus, would I love nothing more than to disengage from this perpetual shitshow. But not sitting at a keyboard and crafting an article for a week or more is like not eating or drinking for a month.4 It’s pausing an activity that is vital to my well-being. When I don’t want to write, I know something is desperately wrong. Even at my lowest points concerning Lila, I was still able to write, although I felt no particular joy in it.

When I’m in a good mood and feeling stable and on the ball, though? I want to write multiple articles a day. I have to consciously stop myself from doing that because I have other responsibilities (like the kids and cooking dinner, for example). There have been times when I let myself get so swept away by my love of writing, I started to neglect other parts of my life. That’s a big No-No. Still, it’s nice to feel that kind of eagerness again. It’s been a minute.

Tuesday, April 28th, I was motivated to really cook for the first time in a while, not just make something quick and easy. I ended up making way too much food, and since Claudia was not feeling well, I told her to take some rather than order out. She thought that would be an excellent idea.

Lila came over to grab something for her mom, and she brought June with her. I was surprised and then a little overwhelmed, although I kept that shit on lockdown. I don’t know if June is aware of what I’ve been going through, and I wasn’t going to make a scene.

There are two parts to this. First, Lila casually bringing June over may not seem like a big deal, but literally one month ago, Lila was wary of having me spend more than 10 seconds around her. A month before that, she had said I would have to wait until August to officially “meet” her girlfriend. Now? She just brings her over to grab some food because we’re just an extension of her home. That’s how it is for Lila, of course. It always has been. But, and this is the second part, she never EVER brings her friends over. I mentioned in a previous journal that Lila is kind of embarrassed of us, so she never lets us socialize with her friends. Like, ever.5 Except now she did. June was in our apartment. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s important, at least it is to me.

They both smelled the very tasty chicken cutlets I had made and were eyeballing them. Lila’s father was supposed to be bringing over dinner later so, not wanting to step on his toes (we do not like each other at all, but I try not to be a dick about it), I hadn’t offered to feed Lila and June. But Lila was giving that “Can I?” look, and I told her to go ahead if she was ok with eating before her father shows up. They’re 18. They can eat a second meal and be perfectly fine. They took some chicken and stuffing, and I was very happy to feed my girl and her girlfriend.

It’s been really important to me the entire time I’ve been a father to make meals and snacks for my kids. That included Lila when she came into my life and still holds true today. I wrote an entire article about why it’s so central to my understanding of myself as a parent a few years ago. I’m going to miss doing this for Lila when she’s gone. A lot. Maybe I’ll bring cookies when I come to visit…

The Banter

The Simple Joy Of Making Lunch For My Kids

by Justin Rosario…

Read more

4 years ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · The Opinionated Ogre

Tuesday, May 5th, Lila snapped at me as I was driving her to school. I knew she was stressing over an AP exam she was getting ready to take, so I was trying to distract her for a little bit with idle chitchat. She was not in the mood for any kind of chitchat, idle or otherwise. Three weeks ago, I probably would have taken that as a personal rejection and dropped into a pit of depression for a few hours (or longer). But it was obvious why she was so tense, and I ignored that part of me that wanted to cringe and flee, pushing into the background. I was more worried that Lila was worried, but she’s been studying and staying on top of her schoolwork lately, so she should be fine. I’ll know how it went when I pick her up after school.6

We’re supposed to go to a death metal concert tonight. I had brought the tickets several months ago, loooong before we knew the AP exam was the same day. If she’s comfortable with how she did, tonight will be a fun night of screaming, barely comprehensible lyrics. If she feels like she bombed, she will either bail or spend the entire night sulking. Either way, I won’t take it as a personal rejection. I know Lila beats herself up over stuff like this, and I’m in a far better headspace than I was just last month.

Wednesday, April 6th: Had a long and important talk with Lila. She came home from school early, and I brought over some food. We chatted about last night’s concert and how she actually would not have enjoyed it that much.7 She was exhausted after the AP test, and even though she felt like she did well, I wasn’t going to push her to come out to a show with me.

While we were talking about the show, I asked Lila if she would send June an article I was planning to write when it was finished. She gave me some serious side eye, and I knew she thought I was writing an article about June herself that I wanted her to read. I assured her I was not; it’s a list of all the horrible people (mostly Republicans) whom I look forward to outliving and celebrating when they shuffle off this mortal coil before me. We had talked about that at Jordan’s birthday dinner, and I thought it would make a funny piece for the newsletter.

I told her that June does pop up in some of my writing, and Lila got miffed with me. She is not a huge fan of me writing about her and her life, even though Lila is aware I’ve been doing this for the last decade. That’s when I told her about these anxiety journals and why I was writing them.

Now, Lila knew I was struggling. What she didn’t know was how MUCH I was struggling. As someone who also struggles with anxiety and depression, she was the last person I wanted to tell. I’ve been leaning on Mrs. Ogre, Claudia, and even Anastasia (lightly, but a little) for support because you turn to family when you need help (if you’re smart). But I couldn’t risk Lila internalizing any guilt about it. That would have been unconscionable on my part. And even with my feeble understanding of anxiety and depression, I knew that was a risk.

However, I’ve been in a really good place, and we’ve, Lila and I, have been in such a good place communication-wise that I knew I could explain what I’ve been going through and why properly. And not in writing. ;) So I did. I needed her to understand that writing is how I process my pain and how much I need to write these journals. That they weren’t filled with personal and invasive details about her and June, but were very personal and invasive for me. These journals are not comfortable to write, but it’s part of what I need to do to be whole.

I also told her how deeply I appreciated her effort to be present for me these past two months. How much it has helped ease my panic and depression. I’ve been very careful to stress that Lila does not owe me her time or her communication. I said that a few times to make sure she understood that while I love her for reaching out to me, she was not obligated to do so, even for the sake of my mental health. The entire point of our parent-daughter bond is that it is 100% voluntary and out of love, not because either of us feels we owe the other something. I mean, as her father, I owe her my best effort to be the father she deserves, but that’s different.

A little later, I sent her the link to the first journal so she could decide for herself if I was oversharing. I was a little nervous she would be mad, but she ended up reading both journals and thought they were very sweet. She also read some of the comments and saw that a bunch of people were finding solace in me laying it all out there for everyone to see (which is part of what I’d hoped for and that is healing for me, in turn. A virtuous cycle, if you will). Now she wants to record a podcast and talk to everyone again. One last show before she leaves for college. I think we can talk about anxiety and depression now that we’ve both seen what it looks like from the inside. I’ll see if I can arrange “Lila Explains One Last Time” sometime after school ends.

Postscript: I’m a little curious. I’ve identified three main concerns causing me anxiety and depression. The main one is losing touch with Lila, of course. The second is failing as a parent because I can’t/won’t be there for Lila if she needs me. The third is June, the person Lila loves, disliking me.

These anxieties are in order of decreasing severity. I’m most worried about losing touch with Lila, less worried about not being there for her, and June was not as anxiety-producing as the first two, but still a source of consternation.

Now, the June anxiety has resolved itself. I would have to put some effort into pushing her away. We’re never going to be best buds, but that’s not what I was looking for. I needed June to accept me as Lila’s family and be comfortable around me. She did, and she is; so that’s the end of that anxiety. Lila and I talked about this, and I acknowledged it was the stupidest fear imaginable, but she understood - Anxiety doesn’t care how irrational and stupid the fear is. It grabs hold, and nothing you can say will change your mind. I knew she would get it even while knowing how ridiculous it was.

Meanwhile, if Lila goes away and does not disappear from my life, that would be the end of my main anxiety. Even if/when she slowly reduces contact with me over time as she builds her adult life, that’s normal and not a rejection. I’m pretty sure I’ll be OK with that if/when it happens organically. My fear is that it would happen all at once, and that terrified me.

So that leaves not being there if she needs me. As a newly-minted college student learning to adult, Lila will make all kinds of mistakes and (presumably) learn from them. Sooner or later, she won’t need her parents to hold her hand. And that, too, is normal. But even before that, she’ll be away and have to cope with things on her own. I won’t be able to hyperfocus on her well-being constantly if she’s not here, and I don’t know what she’s doing. It’s just not possible. I can’t imagine the anxiety will be sustainable under those circumstances. No bad news means nothing to panic over.

So…what happens then? If the three things I’m experiencing anxiety and depression over go away, do the anxiety and depression go away with them? Or will the anxiety and depression linger, looking for new things to latch on to, like a parasite searching for new food to sustain itself? How does that work, exactly? Does that mean I get to be free of this at some point, or am I a ticking time bomb, waiting for the next thing to trigger my newfound (but hidden in plain sight) abandonment issues? There’s a pleasant thought…

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A long time ago, I used to take a dim view of people railing against America as the “policeman of the world.” I understood the resentment, and I got that we regularly abused our power. But the thing that always got under my skin was: Have you thought, for even a second, about the alternatives?

Well, all of those people are on the brink of getting their fondest wish. Trump and his party of pedophiles and rapists have crippled the American empire, leaving China as an emerging superpower.

I know the plan was to carve the world up into “spheres of influence.” Where Russia, China, and the United States, under a theocratic fascist dictatorship, would control their parts of the world and stay out of each other’s backyards. But Russia is a dying country. Their imperial pretensions died the week they parachuted their elite troops into the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv back in 2022. Russia’s Spetsnaz, some of the most feared military units in the world, were swallowed whole, never to be heard from again. Thus ended the Russian empire.

But China, China is ascendant. For a while there, back in 2021-2022, it looked like they were also pretty fucked. Their economy was in shambles. Years of pseudo-communist control had led to a housing bubble that made the 2008-2009 bubble here in the US look like a drop in the bucket. If the US economy held the course and continued to grow, China was on the path to severe economic strain, if not outright collapse.

But that’s all over now, isn’t it?

This week, the President of the United fucking States went to China to grovel for help ending a war he started. I’m old enough to remember when Obama went on a world tour to rebuild the shattered goodwill George W. Bush had squandered over eight long years of arrogance and ignorance. The right screeched about how humiliating it was. They called it an “apology tour” and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it for years.

Now? Trump has to beg and plead with Xi Jinping, a man Trump has spent the better part of a decade openly mocking and antagonizing. Just six months ago, Trump was waging economic war against China. Now we are begging for their help.

Will they? Maybe. A global recession is not really in China’s best interest. But they appear to be better suited to survive it than we are, and a broken America is very much in the interests of Beijing.

It’s important to understand that Trump is not just pushing the global economy into the red zone. He has destabilized the Dollar so much that we are at risk of the world moving away from our currency as the default global currency. There are countries that are starting to sell their Treasury bonds because they do not feel their money is safe here anymore. That sounds academic and the kind of thing that only really affects rich people, but it really does not.

American debt is financed by other countries and companies buying it. Trillions of dollars of it. They do this because for over a century, the American Dollar was understood to be THE single safest investment in the world. No matter what was happening to the global economy, your money was safe here. The United States economy could implode, and it has, more than once, just in the last 20 years, and your money was safe because the United States did not fuck around with its monetary obligations.

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That is no longer the case. Trump and his regime of kleptocrats are looting the Treasury and stealing everything not nailed to the floor. They are implementing monetary policies that children would understand as stupid and destructive. Trump has openly “joked” about not paying back debts we owe and then attacked allies who hold hundreds of billions of our debt, knowing that they could call those debts in at any time and bankrupt us.

In a true financial emergency, like the one rapidly approaching, no serious person believes the Trump regime will be able to handle it. They’ll be able to make it exponentially worse, but under no circumstances will this collection of imbeciles and blind ideologues be able to right the ship.

China, for all its economic faultlines, is poised to reap the benefits of a collapsed American state.

Europe will be too busy dealing with the dying Russian dictator on its doorstep. The rest of Asia is simply no match for China, either economically or militarily. Africa and Latin America have to be figuring, “How much worse can the Chinese be after centuries of exploitation by the fucking Europeans and their bastard offspring, the US?”

I’m going to go ahead and make a wild guess: A lot fucking worse. Oh, to be sure, European and American colonialism is a history of nightmares and horror. The old version was bad. The new version is not much better.

China is not going to be an improvement, though. This is a country that is committing a genocide within its own borders. We don't talk much about the Uyghurs, but in a generation or two, they won’t exist anymore. China is doing to them what we (and Canada) did to the Native American tribes. Stripping them of their language, culture, religion, and essentially breeding them out of existence. Why? Because they’re different and that is not acceptable in China.

This is a country that does not allow democracy or dissent. They have instituted a police state that would make George Orwell vomit. The state watches everything you do and assigns you a “social credit score.” If your score drops too low, you can be blocked from buying tickets at airports and train stations. As the system evolves and becomes more ingrained into people’s lives and bolstered by AI to keep better track of “unacceptable” speech or online activity, people will lose access to more and more: Good schools for their kids, eating out, going to the movies, and shopping in popular stores.

This method of social control is a totalitarian dream, and if you think China will not eventually spread it to countries it dominates economically, you are insane.

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Now that Trump has wrecked our military and exposed its weakness, China will be quite eager to flex its own military power. How do you think that will go? Do you think China, a country whose government does not answer to its people, will show restraint overseas? If they decide to invade a Middle Eastern country for its oil, do you think they will hesitate to kill anyone and everyone who gets in their way? I would direct your attention to how Russia conducts itself when invading other countries. Even its “small” wars have been marked by astonishing violence and countless war crimes. There is no one to hold them accountable. Why would China behave any differently?

Yes, the United States has done terrible things while at war. Now, think really hard about this: The US military and US government still answer to the American people, and we are not overly fond of mass civilian casualties. Think about the protests over Gaza, and we aren’t even directly involved with the violence there.

Our government and military, even under Republican presidents, have generally been restrained. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but think about what it would be like if we just said, “Fuck it, kill everything.” What we would do overseas would look very different than what we actually do.

There is no reason to believe China will show any restraint if and when (and let’s be honest, it’s just a matter of “when”) they decide to start using their military to achieve their goals.

This isn’t a “Communism Bad!” article. China isn’t really any more communist than Russia is. It is on paper, but there’s so much capitalism combined with naked corruption (more so in Russia’s case), that calling either country “communist” kind of misses the point. China is, however, a repressive police state with zero respect for human rights. Roll your eyes all you want because Trump and the GOP are rapidly turning America into a shithole country. But we still have a chance to course correct. I challenge you to find anyone who says China is one or two elections away from reform. That there is even a possibility of reversing their current trajectory without anything short of massive societal upheaval and bloodshed on a scale that would make our Civil War look tame. Not for nothing, China has a population of 1.35 Billion, with a “B.” If even one-half of one percent of them died during civil unrest, that would be over 6 million people.

The Pax Americana was not great. We abused our power all over the globe and left death and ruin in our wake. A lot of people abroad and here at home are gleeful to see us brought to our knees. In a decade or two, when China is running rampant with no checks on its power, I think those same people are going to look back and wonder how they could have been so fucking stupid. And it will be far too late for the millions of victims of China’s ambitions.

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Prices are on food, and everyday essentials are going up fast. But Trump’s oil shock hasn’t really hit yet, and when it does, prices are going to explode. and I give you a practical guide on how to prepare before that happens.

Oh, and we cover some other important news, too.

Come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Ogre Nation News Update!

4:10 - 4:50 Trumpflation explodes, and it’s just going to get worse

4:51 - 27:45 Trump’s Oil Shock is here, and we’re going to feel it soon. There are a lot of simple, common-sense steps you can take to protect yourself. We give you some.

27:46 - 39:07 Trump’s Epstein scandal refuses to go away, no matter how many countries he invades…

39:08 - 1:02:30 Headlines for Short Attention Spans!

1:02:31 - 1:10:00 Self-care of the Week

Here’s the chart of how much traffic right-wing sites are losing. Ha-Ha!

The Unedited Hot Mess Livestream!

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If the left is mad at you, go join the far right instead of mending fences! Genius! I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the far-right government of Israel had gone all in on murderous violence in order to steal land under the guise of “self-defense.” The left was no longer buying that particular line of bullshit because, let’s be honest, Netanyahu’s government wasn’t even trying to hide what they were doing anymore. Why bother when America has a Christian Nationalist government willing to support Israel under any circumstances because they think Jesus Christ is returning at any moment? If you were a cycncial power-hungry piece of shit like Benjamin Netanyahu, wouldn’t you go for the brass ring as long as these theocratic fucksticks were running the show?

The right, of course, fully supported any violence that resulted in dead Muslims, so why not cross the aisle? Oh, everyone knew that the right harbored an immense amount of antipathy for Jews, but Israel was just sooooo fucking important to the Evangelicals! They would definitely be good long-term allies!

Looked like it was paying off, too! The Trump regime was abusing using the full power of the federal government to silence critics of Israel! Happy days!

The second Trump administration carried this partnership to its logical conclusion. Official actions now focus on Jews — at least those who support Israel in traditional ways — alongside Christians, white people and men as groups that need government protection, in the form of executive orders, investigations and federal lawsuits.

What could possibly go wrong? The regime was on the side of Israel, the left was on the run, and Israel was safe! Hooray!

Oh, but there was that pesky little Nazi problem, wasn’t there? You may have noticed I’ve written about it a few times.

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I’ve been banging this drum for a while now because it’s been super obvious that the American right was infested with literal Nazis (and pedophiles, but I repeat myself) and they were ascendant. As I point out with some regularity, I am not an Ivy League-educated political wizkid.1 I possess no special power to see the future. I am, however, unencumbered by the need to pretend the Republican Party is a normal political party instead of a collection of rapists, perverts, pedophiles, and fucking degenerate grifters. It comes in very handy for accurately understanding reality.

Like, for instance, pointing out to my fellow Jews over a year ago that they were committing suicide by allying themselves with literal goddamn Nazis:

I was not subtle about it:

Don’t you fucking say it can’t happen. You’re watching Republicans do it right fucking now to the trans community and immigrants and you’re not saying a fucking word because “Something something Trump is pro-Israel.”

It can happen and you fucking damn well know it will. The ultimate goal of the Christian Nationalists is to send all the Jews to Israel so we can fulfill their grand end-times prophecy. That’s all their support for Israel was ever about in the first place. They expect us to all die in a grand war against Muslims and kick off the Apocalypse. If you’re not acutely aware of this, you are so painfully ignorant, you’ll be inside the gas chamber expecting a steak dinner before you realize you’re choking to death on the Zyklon B.

Was that too harsh? Too fucking bad. You’re siding with the Nazis because you think you’ll be safe, said the sheep hiding in the wolf’s shadow.

That brings us to today. Would you be shocked to discover that, oh my fucking god!, it turns out that the Republican Party might not be such good friends to the Jewish community after all?!

…the Republican Party seems to be in the midst of an antisemitism rug pull: Just as major Jewish leaders decided to start working in earnest with the conservative movement and burn bridges with liberals, the MAGA vanguard has decided that Jews may not belong in their coalition after all.

Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who rose to prominence first as a columnist and later as a campus speaker and podcaster before starting The Daily Wire in 2015, has found himself on the losing end of a battle with Tucker Carlson for the future of the conservative movement.

Of course Ben Shapiro is losing to Tucker Carlson. Shapiro offers a veneer of respectability to hide the right’s racism. Carlson offers naked hate with a huge dollop of antisemitism on top. Gee fucking whiz, I can’t imagine why the white nationalists that comprise the GOP’s base are flocking to Carlson. They’ve only become more extreme and violent over the last 50 years. It was impossible to predict they would openly embrace fascism and Hitler!

Except, you know, for all the times they openly talked about how much they loved fascism and Hitler. But other than THAT, how the fuck were right-leaning Jews to know!?!?!? They were totally blindsided by the giant swastika!

It didn’t have to be this way, of course:

Jewish leaders had a choice to make as they faced growing animosity toward Zionism among their longtime partners on the left. They could have engaged in the excruciating work of reconciling their otherwise liberal values with their support for an increasingly illiberal Israel, while simultaneously trying to get their progressive allies to develop a more nuanced understanding of antisemitism and do a better job of including Jews in their coalition.

But that would have been too fucking hard, right? Soooo much easier to scream “antisemitism!” and use it as a cudgel to end any discussion about what Israel was doing. And how did that fucking work out?

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Literally every accusation of Israeli war crimes and imperialism turned out to be correct. Netanyahu’s murderous government is slaughtering civilians with zero regard for either international law or even Israeli law. They are attacking neighboring countries with the explicit intent of snatching and occupying land they have no legal right to.

One can defend Israel’s right to exist and still condemn what it is doing. I do it all the fucking time. One can denounce Israel’s war crimes and still hold the left accountable when it crosses the line into real antisemitism. I do it all the fucking time. It’s not that hard.

Here are some really easy examples:

• “Israel’s government should be tried for war crimes!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth!” = Antisemitism

• “Fuck Israel!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Jews are genocidal monsters!” = Antisemitism

See how easy it is? It’s sooooo fucking easy. If you’re not sure if something is antisemitic, just replace “Israel” or “Jew” with literally any other country or ethnic group/religion and think, “Would it be OK to say this?” If the answer is “I would never be OK with that!”, then it’s OK to push back. If you could swap in “America” or “Americans” and the statement is fine, then you should probably nod your head and agree. Both countries are currently being run by violent fascists intent on murder for fun and profit and ethnonationalism.

Israel should exist. It’s a country with millions of people who were born there over the last 75 years. In no universe can erasing it be separated from antisemitism because, whatever your reasoning, you will not apply it to a single other country, which means your reasoning is based on “Israel is filled with Jews.” Feel free to lie to yourself, but don’t think for a second you’re going to lie to me successfully.2

But that does not mean Israel is above criticism. No one is. Israel is drenched in blood. Russia is drenched in blood. America is drenched in blood. China is drenched in blood. And I’m only talking about this century. Never mind the horrors of the 20th.

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American Jews, specifically pro-Israel American Jews, had a choice. They could have demanded Israel do better. BE better. They could have demanded accountability from both Israel for its violence and the left for engaging in widespread antisemitism. Don’t you fucking tell me the left is innocent. I’ve been watching its rapid descent into hate for the last three years. The right paved the way, and far too much of the left gleefully followed.

But instead of demanding better for both Israel and our side, pro-Israel Jews threw their lot in with the Republican Party. They bet that they would be safe with the Evangelicals even as the GOP was being swallowed, in plain fucking sight, by Nazis. It was already a bargain with the Devil because Evangelicals hate us to begin with. Everyone knows the religious right expects us all to die when their Messiah returns. But until that happens, which is never, the theocrats will be more than happy to pour unlimited money to protect Israel until Armageddon. Or until they get impatient and start WWIII to skip to the end.

Who could have possibly foreseen that a party moving further and further to the extreme right would somehow rediscover its love for Nazism, the end boss of right-wing extremism? It beggars the imagination that a party whose only move after losing elections is to lurch to the right would keep doing that until it reached full-throated fascism and genocide. There’s no fucking way that could happen here!

This is what happens when people take the easy way out. When they opt for power over principle. Burning bridges instead of mending fences. When they place devotion to Israel over the safety of all Jews everywhere. These reckless morons have set us back decades. They have made antisemitism acceptable, and hate is fungible. I promise you, the right is already using it to recruit people on the left to their cause. Because if the Jews are behind everything, what other lies have the liberals been telling you?

All of the coming hate and fear and, yes, murder because I promise you, the pogroms are coming again, and for what? Nothing. The Republican Party will be fully Nazi within a decade, and Jews will have no home there. By then, the left will be so done with the conflation of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel (of which there are so very many) that we will not be welcome there, either. We will be at the mercy of whoever feels like picking up a rock and smashing the window of any shop owned by a Jew. Or the skull of any person visibly identifiable as one. Well-played. A masterful gambit that will surely work out in the long run for us all.

You stupid fucking idiots.

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As we enter the third month of Trump’s “two-week war,” we have passed the point where we can avoid the oil shock. We are seeing increasingly hysterical articles on Substack warning of societal collapse and famine. These are clickbait, and I find them offensive. My personal favorite are the ones who are pretending we’re going to run out of oil, as if the Strait of Hormuz is where we get all of our oil instead of 10-20% of it. We’re heading for Mad Max territory, baby!

But, no. We are not heading towards full societal collapse, even under this regime of dumbfuck fascist pedophiles.

On the other hand, we are just about out of mitigation efforts. We’re just pretending we aren’t, and everything is fine. Sure, gas prices are kind of high, and prices have been creeping up. But have things really changed for the average American? Why, the economy is still limping along, and the stock market is doing awesome! It’s almost back to its all-time high!

We’re creating jobs and the rich are doing just fine, and isn’t that what really matters? The legacy press is a little nervous, but hey, things don’t look that bad right now. Why, the big banks aren’t even sure if there’s going to be a recession!

Just to be clear: If you have money with Goldman Sachs, you should move it. They are very bad at economic forecasts if they think we are only facing a 25% chance of a recession.

Trump’s oil shock is going to hit sometime in June or July. If we’re very very lucky, it will be delayed until August, but I wouldn’t want to bet on that. It’s going to hit hard, and it’s going to hit fast because, for some insane reason, the legacy press is pretending it’s not coming at all, so the general public really doesn’t know about it.

Too many of the people who do it see it coming are, just as inexplicably, couching it in terms of Armageddon. They’re predicting so much chaos and destruction that people, understandably, are tuning them out. Fearmongering clickbait may get clicks on your article, but it will not encourage readers to act.

I am not pretending that nothing is coming, and I am definitely not predicting the Apocalypse. I am, however, telling you that things are going to suck in the near future. A few months before Covid, I told people to start stocking up on food and to pull money out of the bank. It didn’t occur to me to buy toilet paper because who knew people were going to panic buy that into oblivion for three or four months?1

So, here we are again, with me warning you that you need to prepare for some rough waters ahead. Buy shelf-stable foods. Rice, beans, canned meats. Flour and yeast and salt and sugar. Peanut butter, crackers, pasta, jars of sauce, etc. Here’s a helpful list and why these foods are good.

There are two things happening at the same time:

1. Diesel is going to get much more expensive, which means shipping everything will get much more expensive. Thus, prices will go up on everything, everywhere. There will be fuel shortages, which means some trucks will not go out. A smart and competent government would prioritize getting food to grocery stores over golf clubs to sporting goods stores. But we do not have a smart and competent government. It’s going to be a shitshow run by drunken clowns on meth. What could go wrong?

2. The fertilizer problem - at least one-third of the world’s fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Growing season is already underway, and the window for fertilizing crops has passed. Fertilizing them later will not make up for the lost time at the beginning. That’s just how plants work. So there will be fewer crops later this summer and in the Fall. Parts of the world are going to experience famine. We won’t, but there will be less, and what there is will be much more expensive. Buy whatever food you can store now, before prices start to skyrocket and shelves start to thin out.

Now, when Trump’s oil shock hits, the economy, already wobbling, will go into a free-fall. I’m sure Silicon Valley will continue to pump hundreds of billions into their data centers in their insane pursuit of a godlike supreme artificial intelligence that will make them immortal, but that will not be enough to keep the economy afloat.

And, no, I am not kidding about the immortal thing. I really wish I were:

Part of this bizarre complacency we are watching unfold is that companies have built more robust supply chains because of how Covid blindsided the world. Before, everything was purchased and moved on an “as-needed” basis, and that proved to be disastrous. Now, companies keep stock on hand in case of a disruption so they can run on that for a while. No need to worry, everything is fine! As long as the emergency doesn’t last too long. Like, say, less than three months.

And to be fair, no one could have anticipated some fucking imbecile starting a war that would cut off 20% of the global oil supply, one-third of the global fertilizer, and an enormous amount of the global plastic supply. A war that appears to have no end date and was started with no warning or plans to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though any moron with 30 minutes of regional history under their belt could have told you Iran would close the Strait immediately.

So, here we are, just weeks away from an economic time bomb the press is studiously pretending isn’t there. When it detonates, how, exactly, do they intend to protect Trump from the consequences? That is, after all, what they appear to be doing right now. From the beginning of the war, the press has barely talked about what would happen if the war lasted more than a few weeks. They absolutely did not talk about what would happen if it lasted more than a month. We’re entering month three, and they are still barely acknowledging what the long-term impact will be, much less what is about to happen and can no longer be avoided, even if Iran agreed to open the Strait right this very second (which they absolutely will not fucking do).

I can only conclude the fix is in and the order has gone out to shield the regime from the consequences of its own stupidity. Something the legacy press has become quite adept at over the years. We have a resurgence of deadly childhood diseases that were effectively eradicated, and it barely makes the headlines for more than a few hours. We literally do not know how many women have died from being denied reproductive healthcare because the legacy press can’t seem to find the time or resources to compile a list. Literally hundreds of Republicans have been outed as pedophiles in the last several years, giving the Catholic Church a real run for its money in the category of “Institutions That Should Be Burned To The Ground To Protect Children.” For some reason, the legacy press hasn’t been able to connect the myriad dots into a cohesive picture.

The unifying problem with these stories is that they cannot be blamed on Democrats. At all. Without a feasible path to accusing “both sides” of causing the pain and suffering, the press would prefer not to talk about them. And so it will be when Trump’s oil shock hits the economy like a sledgehammer.

Will there be gas lines? Maybe. There are a lot more EVs on the road these days, so it might not be as brutal as it was in the 1970s. We also produce a lot more oil domestically than we used to. Still, it’s going to be harsh. Watch for lots of stories about California struggling. Less about Florida nd Texas, though.

Watch for stories about stores in New York City having empty shelves. Less stories about rural hospitals running short on supplies. Any way the press can make it look like Democrats are failing to meet the challenges of Trump’s disaster will be pushed to the front, while the regime’s failures will be downplayed. But you can only paper over reality for so long. Everyone will know what is happening and why. No matter what Fox News says, Joe Biden did not close the Strait of Hormuz.

In the coming weeks, you will be confronted with some people telling you everything is fine and others that this is literally the end of civilization. Both are lying to you. Asia was hit with their oil shock weeks ago, and it hasn’t collapsed into fire and brimstone. Please note the press has barely mentioned what they’re going through. Europe will have its oil shock in the coming weeks and, again, they will not collapse and, again, the press will somehow manage to barely notice it.

And then it will be our turn. Ignore the fearmongers and ignore the liars telling you everything is normal. You still have time to prepare, and knowing what is coming strips it of its power to terrorize and paralyze. My job is to spook you enough to get your ass into gear, not to freeze you into inaction, and absolutely not to lull you into ignoring what’s coming. Trump has fucked us all, but that doesn’t mean you have no options. There’s a lot you can do, and you still have the time to do it. So get moving!

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There are only 175 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

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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The nonstop whining of racist, mediocre white Christian Nationalists and the idiots who swallow their garbage is deafening. I know I’m not the only person tired of listening to the laziest people cry about how they can’t get ahead in the world because of women and gays and immigrants and blablabla when the real problem is them and the pedophiles they keep voting into power.

Maybe if they looked in a mirror once in a while and stopped blaming everyone else for their shitty lives, we could move this country forward. Just a thought.

Anyway, lots to catch up on, so let’s see what you missed!

Monday: Let’s make this the last time these dumbfucks ruin everything.

Tuesday: The death cult is never satisfied.

Wednesday: Writing and recording a death metal concert!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: This changes absolutely nothing. The fight is still the fight, and the reason hasn’t changed at all.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. No One Told Men the Floor Was Made of Women - On decentering men, loneliness, men’s desire for recognition, and why persistently misdiagnosing men’s crises is making everything worse for everyone by Soraya Chemaly at Unmanned

2. Republicans’ ecosystem is rotting - Trump’s leadership is causing the Republican Party to decay from the inside out, as Trump doesn’t care by The Fascism Heckler at A mocking a day, keeps the Fascism away

3. The media’s double standard for Trump needs to stop - Call it normalizing, sane-washing, or giving him the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t serve the public. by Margaret Sullivan at American Crisis

4. 36 Doctors Just Staged the Quietest Coup in American History - The press looked away for a reason. by Carlyn Beccia at The Grim Historian

5. Jews bet on conservatives. It’s backfiring. - Just as major Jewish leaders started working with the conservative movement — and burning bridges with liberals — MAGA decided that Jews may not belong in their coalition after all by Arno Rosenfeld at Antisemitism Decoded

This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s, and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

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I’ve written several articles about the regime’s assault on the Trans community. I’ve written an awful lot of notes telling the weird, creepy perverts obsessed with Trans kids to leave them the fuck alone. I usually preface these by pointing out that I, personally, do not care about the Trans community. I don’t know any Trans people in real life, so I’m not defending them because they’re important to me, again, personally. I’m doing it because it needs to be done by all of us, regardless of how we may or may not feel about the community.

But I can’t do that anymore. My daughter Lila is dating a Trans girl, June. You may know June from my anxiety and depression posts. I like June. A lot. She cosplays with Lila at conventions. She’s a comic book nerd. Most importantly, Lila loves her, and she loves Lila. For that alone, it would be a very bad day for anyone who laid a hand on her. June is not aware of this. She would probably find it odd, but the umbrella of “People I Will Violently Defend” extends to the significant others of my immediate family.

Regardless, even if they weren’t dating and were just friends, I now know June in real life. If they broke up tomorrow (not bloody likely) and never spoke to each other again, I would still like June (she would have had to do something particularly heinous to change that). That means I know a Trans person in the real world.1 Not just met in passing, but know them, and that means I can’t say I don’t have a personal stake in the fight anymore.

And that changes…absolutely nothing. I’m still going to argue that you should defend the Trans community. I’m still going to argue that creepy fucking perverts need to leave Trans kids alone. That I have a Trans person tangentially in my life doesn’t change anything at all because the core argument still stands: It doesn’t matter what you think about Trans people. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with how they live their lives.2 You have to defend them because it doesn’t stop with them.

That was always the point. That was always the point. That I would beat a fascist to death to protect June doesn’t alter that reality. If they succeed in erasing her, they will not stop. June and all of the people like her are just the first domino. That’s how genocide works. That’s how the conditioning they’re subjecting us to works.

First, they come for June. Then they come for Lila because she likes women. Then they move on to Jordan because he’s autistic. Then Anastasia because she’s Jewish. It never ends, and every single one of my children, including Kyle, my donor son, will be sent to a concentration camp. Kyle is three-quarters Latino in a country run by white nationalists. I would be dead already because they would have to kill me to get to them, but they would keep coming because fascism must always have an enemy. There must always be another threat to “national security” or “the purity of the American people.”

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This is the core operating system of fascism. The war can never end because once there are no more enemies to fear, the public will look around and ask why everything is broken. Why is the economy in shambles? Why does nothing work? Why are our roads and bridges crumbling? Why are the rich wallowing in gold and our children going hungry? Fascism distracts with fear and hate, so those questions are never asked.

It is irrelevant if the Trans community makes you uncomfortable. Just like it was irrelevant if watching two men kiss made you feel icky. Just like it was irrelevant if hearing people speak in another language in the grocery store irritated you. Just like it was irrelevant if you thought it was weird watching Muslims kneeling on prayer rugs in the middle of the day. None of that matters because it wasn’t about you. It was never about you.

There is plenty of stuff you do that other people find weird and creepy, but they don’t say anything because it’s none of their fucking business, either. Ew, you eat pork? How vile, thinks the Jew and the Muslim. Ew, you beef? How disgusting, thinks the Hindu. You wear your shoes indoors? How disrespectful, thinks the Asian. And so it goes.

The people who would erase us all to create a bland world of white Christian conformity will not stop with Trans kids and Trans adults. They’ll come for the next group and the next and the next until they show up on your door. It won’t matter how “normal” you think you are. Just reading an article like this makes you an enemy. When the fascists run out of easily identifiable enemies, thought crimes will be next. Dissent of any kind will be criminalized. They’re already laying the groundwork for it. Trump has designated “extremist transgender ideology” as a “threat” to the United States. That means, sooner or later, just saying “leave Trans kids alone, you fucking pervert!” will be a terrorist threat in the eyes of the regime.

Once that happens, you think you’ll be safe? That nothing you’ve ever said or done can be weaponized against you? That you’re so anondyne that your MAGA neighbor cannot report you to Stephen Miller’s Gestapo and have to be sent off to the concentration camps?

Are you willing to take that risk just so you won’t have to feel icky about Trans people?

We cannot save our democracy and our civil rights by offering up a sacrifice. Throwing June under the bus will not mollify the Republican Party. There can be no compromise with a death cult. We cannot offer up half of the Jews in America to appease the Nazis taking over the GOP. We’ve already learned this lesson. I will not allow our side to relearn it by discarding the lives of the innocent to garner the goodwill of soulless monsters who have no goodwill to bestow.

Fascists do not get an olive branch and accommodation. They get the back of my hand across their face and the toe of my steel-tipped boot in their groin. America destroys genocidal animals. It’s a proud tradition I look forward to celebrating 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!

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There are 178 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 Ogre Trans Archives:

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returns and she is sooooo pissed off at the corrupt Republican Justices on our infinitely corrupt SCOTUS! Plus, the oil shock from Trump’s idiotic war in Iran is almost here and the consequences will be absolutely brutal for the American economy.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you…

Ogre Nation News Update!

1:13 - 26:15 The Iran War Stalemate Drags On

26:16 - 34:08 The Most Corrupt Supreme Court in American History gets involved in abortion politics again

34:09 - 1:24:55 Headlines for Short Attention Spans

1:24:56 - 1:35:40 Self-Care of the Week

The Hot Mess Livestream!

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Once upon a time, the pro-life movement liked to pretend that they cared about “states’ rights.” That they only wanted to end Roe v Wade so they could get the federal government out of the way of good god-fearing Christian red states. Then the good people of America could decide for themselves if they wanted to allow women to brutally murder babies make their own choices concerning their sinful whorish ways bodily autonomy.

But we all knew that was a fucking lie. We knew that “pro-life” zealots didn’t care about the unborn. They cared about murdering women. As many as possible. They’re a death cult. They’ve always been a death cult. They cheered when their handpicked murderers struck down Roe, but that was then; this is now.

Now, they want more death, and Trump isn’t delivering it fast enough to sate their psychotic bloodlust:

“Trump is the problem. The president is the problem,” Dannenfelser told the Wall Street Journal in a striking intervention from a woman who once led Trump’s pro-life ground game.

In an address to donors at her group’s gala in D.C. on Wednesday, the Journal reported, Dannenfelser warned that if Republicans keep allowing individual states to decide abortion policy, “then the movement as we know it is finished.”

The problem is twofold. The first is that women can still access Mifepristone, the abortion pill. Because Republicans have made it all but impossible to get an abortion in a hospital or a clinic, more women than ever are turning to abortions using the pill. That’s caused an overall increase in abortions because fewer women are trying to jump through the GOP’s hoops and going straight to abortion through the mail.

Ah…unintended consequences. Fucking idiots.

The second problem is exactly what Dannenfelser “warned” her fellow death cultists about. Individual states, i.e., blue states where Democrats still respect civil rights, continue to allow women to decide their own destiny. The fucking nerve of them!

But, again, we always knew this was coming. When the right talks about “freedom” and “choice,” what they mean is the freedom and choice to dictate how you live your life. This is a foundational part of America’s right wing. They cry about oppression when others are given the rights they’ve enjoyed all along. Equality is anathema to a Republican. They only feel free when they have their boot on the neck of the people they hate.

I promise you, if Dannenfelser or her daughters were faced with a fatal ectopic pregnancy, she would not pray to JAY-zus for salvation and a miracle. She would get that abortion in a fucking fetal heartbeat. Because why should she or her loved ones die? That’s crazy! But you and your daughters? Well, that’s too fucking bad. You should have thought of the consequences before spreading your legs, you whores. Oh, you’re married with four kids, and you want to have more? Well, it’s God’s will for you to die, sweetie. Too bad. Now, excuse me while my children and I continue to receive proper healthcare.

Salvation for me, not for thee. It’s the Christofascist way.

Trump has not put a lot of effort into pandering to the pro-life movement since “winning” the 2024 election. Not because he doesn’t want the Evangelical death cult on his side, but because he doesn’t give a shit about abortion. He never did. Trump literally does not give a second thought to women’s reproductive rights. It’s a meaningless topic for him. If his base was pro-abortion, he would be pro-abortion. If his base was pro-abortion until the second trimester, that’s what he would back. He doesn’t care at all. Trump is a misogynist to the bone, but not in this particular way. He’ll happily watch women die because of his policies, but he won’t put in the time and energy to restrict their rights further because what a woman does or doesn’t do with her body doesn’t affect him, personally.

And that is what it’s always about with Trump: How do I benefit from this, or how does it hurt me? If it doesn’t, then why bother?

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Trump got the Evangelical vote. It got him back into power. They still overwhelmingly support him because abortion is illegal in wide swathes of the country. It will be a very long time before the rank and file death cult tires of women bleeding to death in hospital parking lots. The leaders want more, but Trump isn’t going to pay much attention to them until they persuade enough of the base to stop supporting him. And so Dannenfelser has learned the lesson so many have learned before: She was not using Trump. Trump was using her, and now he doesn’t need her anymore.

That doesn’t mean abortion access is safe. The Republican-controlled Supreme Court is infinitely corrupt and will, without a doubt, eventually “discover” a new legal justification for banning abortion nationwide, rejecting their own reasoning about letting states decide for themselves.

Trump will certainly take credit for that, unless he sees it hurting him in the polls. Then he’ll throw his own Justices under the bus, denouncing them as “too extreme.” Trump has no ideology beyond “Me.” We all know this.

It is, however, very helpful of Dannenfelser and her fellow soulless monsters to so openly clarify who and what they are. No more pretending they care about states’ rights and freedom and choice. They have dropped all pretense that they care about anything other than a nationwide abortion ban and spreading as much death and misery as possible. We can dispense with the veneer of respectability the legacy press has allowed these murderers to hide behind for decades and hold them up as the death cult we’ve known to be all along.

It really does make the choice much clearer for the public going forward. Isn’t it nice when the Christofascists stop pretending to be anything other than sadistic animals?

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There are only 181 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

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We need to have a conversation about racist mediocre white men. They’re a plague on this country, and they’re killing everything good in the world. They’ve become so dangerously toxic, there is a very real possibility they’ve doomed us to half a century (minimum!) of misery and death because they cannot bear the idea of being the mediocre nobodies they actually are. They HAVE to be special and powerful and in control, and if they’re not? Well, then everything has to burn to the ground. That’s what you get for not acknowledging how superior they are in their mediocrity.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about a so-called “extinction burst.” This is the idea in psychology that when a toxic behavior is no longer rewarded, it intensifies in a desperate bid to restart the reward cycle. If that fails, the behavior dies out, aka, goes “extinct.”

This is supposed to be what we are seeing right now with racist, mediocre white men. Men who have nothing to offer but their rage and weaponized incompetence. They’re lashing out and destroying everything around them because they need to show the world they are actually mommy’s special little snowflake. They need to prove that they’re superior to all the mean dark-skinned people and cruel women and scary gays and even scarier trans people. To do that, racist, mediocre white men have gone all in on fascism and white nationalism. That’ll show those meanies who’s in charge!

Is it an extinction burst, though? Only if we make it one. Are we prepared to do that? Are we finally sick and tired enough of racist, mediocre white men to shut them down for good?

I was told the Tea Party was the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. Then they elected the most racist, most mediocre white man on Earth. Their temper tantrum was rewarded.

I was told Trump’s first time in office was the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. Then he stayed in the headlines for four years and “won” the 2024 election after building an even larger and more racist cult of mediocre white men.1 Rewarded yet again.

Now this fascist shithole regime is the last gasp of racist, mediocre white men. There’s always another “last gasp.” Always another “extinction burst.” The racist, mediocre white men always get another bite at the apple they’ve covered in shit and filth.

Until we say they don’t. Until we say, “Fuck you. No more of your bullshit. Sit your bitch ass down and shut the fuck up, spoiled little white man.”

We have to do this. We have to stop coddling racist, mediocre white men.

There are encouraging signs we are reaching/have reached a tipping point. A lot of women are being really blunt about who these men are:

Women have been speaking out about this for a very long time, but it’s reaching a crescendo. Women, especially younger women, are so absolutely fucking fed up with racist, mediocre white (and non-white) men that they’re just checking out. And since bisexuality is not nearly as frowned upon among women, they’re looking elsewhere for romantic and sexual fulfillment. Or they’re just going solo, and they’re fine with that because the alternative is garbage.

Men are left to fend for themselves or listen to fucking morons like this:

@lucasanswerNever Help With Chores!

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Look at this fucking loser. Listen to his advice for racist, mediocre white men. Don’t be a partner. Don’t cook or clean or participate in any way in being in a relationship. She’s either your domestic servant or you are hers. Listen to that advice and then ask yourself what women would ever put up with that shit? None I know.

Then men have the fucking gall to cry and whine and rage about a loneliness epidemic? Why won’t women date me? Why won’t they have sex with me? Why do women prefer to be alone? Are you shitting me? Have you MET a woman in the real world? Women are horny as fuck. They WANT to get laid as much as men do. What they don’t want is a penis attached to a loser who thinks women exist for his pleasure and nothing else.

No one is forcing men to follow the path of the incel. No one is forcing them to be lazy slobs who think the only emotions worth showing are anger and lust. Is it easier? Sure. Is it working? Obviously not. Men are falling behind, and they’re not getting laid, and they’re not getting married. Even when men put the effort in to look good and be successful, too many of them do it for the wrong reasons, imagining that toxic masculinity and dominating women will make them attractive partners. Imagine their surprise when all they attract are women who don’t give a shit about them personally, but rather view them the same way they view women: A means to an end. How emotionally fulfilling. 🙄🙄🙄

Sure, they’re having sex, but it’s JUST sex. Sooner or later, the emptiness of that life will eat away at their souls and leave behind the bitter resentment etched into the faces of hollow men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I’ve been with Mrs. Ogre since 1997, and I promise you, I’m a thousand times happier and more fulfilled than the “manly men” who have slept with 500 women and wake up every morning to an empty bed.

But back to the main point: With each “last gasp,” the racist, mediocre white men of America become more and more extreme and unfuckable. They become louder and stupider and more obnoxious. They’re not even bothering to pretend to be decent human beings anymore.

They decided that the best way to show America they deserved to be in charge was to go full Nazi.

You never go full Nazi. Ain’t no American woman ever got turned on by a goose-stepping fascist screaming about how Jews need to die, women need to submit to his authority, and 14-year-old girls should have his white babies.

But here we are, anyway. The final extinction burst. Because after this, we either make the racist, mediocre white men pay such a steep price for their arrogance that they grow the fuck up, or we are lost as a nation for a generation or two (or three).

And that really is what we’re talking about: Making racist, mediocre white men grow the fuck up. I’ve written about this more than once over the years, and it really does seem to be penetrating.2 We have coddled these manbabies for literally centuries, and the only way forward is to stop. Stop the coddling. Stop them. Stop all of it.

When the regime falls, and it will, the chorus of enablers will be deafening. They will insist we have to “look forward” and “join hands to heal the nation.” What they’re actually telling us is to reward the temper tantrum yet again by not holding racist, mediocre white men accountable for their actions, just like we’ve been doing for over two hundred years.

But spoiled children never learn unless there are consequences for their actions, and it has to be more than a slap on the wrist. These screaming toddlers have to learn to fear the cost of trying to destroy America. They have to look around at their fellow fascists and see them spending decades in prison or swinging from the gallows for the crimes they’ve committed. The racist, mediocre white men who fancy themselves the masters of all have to learn they are masters of nothing because they were only ever mediocre nobodies. Their only power was being white, angry, and stupid in a country that refused to hold them responsible for anything, ever. Take that away, and they are left with the choice to do better or slink off into the background, never to be heard from again.

I’m ready to kick this plague of losers to the curb and reclaim our future from the dumbest, angriest fucksticks America has ever produced. My kids and hypothetical grandkids deserve better.

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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There are 182 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.

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

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Even as the most corrupt Supreme Court in history tries to put its thumb on the scale for the GOP, his has been a phenomenally bad week for the party of fascism and stupidity. They had their shot and missed. Now Republicans are just trying to stop their inevitable destruction which is all they’ve been doing for the last 40 years. Too bad their greed keeps getting in the way…womp womp.

Come on, let’s see everything you missed this week!

Monday: They’re sooooo fucking predictable.

Tuesday: I’m sure this won’t backfire on them at all…

Wednesday: Great job, dumbass!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Anxiety and depression are suuuuch a pain in the ass.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

1. The Trump Freak Show Just Jumped the Shark - Trump forged a coronation of victimhood out of Butler, PA. Last night at the Hilton, the encore flopped. by W.A. Lawrence at Glass Empires

2. The Fertilizer Crisis Just Got Worse. Food Prices Will Catch Up by Fall. - Four fertilizer shocks are stacking on top of each other. Your grocery bill catches up at the fall harvest. by Preparedness & Politics

3. An oligarch’s dystopian scheme to discredit journalism with AI by Caleb Ecarma at Popular Information

4. We Should Start Paying Attention to the Manosphere Again. We’re Already Inside It. - How the Manosphere moved from the margins into mainstream conversations. by Letters from a Feminist

5. Why Trump Can’t Deal - Putin and Obama are driving our current president to a breakdown. And you cannot understand what’s happening in Iran without understanding why by LOLGOP at The Cause

Ogre Note: Until I get a grip on the sadness and anxiety crushing my soul, I am going to try to write a series of journals so you can walk with me as I walk this road. One hopes it’s a journey towards healing, but it will be a journey I’ll be taking whether I want to or not. Depression and anxiety rarely arrive with an invitation, and they always overstay their welcome.

These journals will be for me. To see where it all started, where I’ve been, and how far I have, or have not, come. They will also be therapeutic for me since writing is how I process trauma. Writing down what is causing me pain allows me to understand it better and work my way through it. Until now, that’s all I’ve needed, but this pain has been too great for even this balm to soothe. Fortunately, I have been able to lean on my family, and I started therapy for the first time since I was a child. It helps to be unashamed of my pain. In some ways, I welcome it, but I’ll get to that later.

These journals will also be for you, my readers who are travelling on their own journey through sadness and anxiety and feelings of helplessness. What works for me may not work for you. What doesn’t work for me may save your life. Everyone’s road is different. But just like with all of the articles I’ve written about the challenges of being an autism parent over the years, just knowing they are not alone has helped so many people push through another day. If I can help just one of you get through a single day, then these journals are worth it.

Finally, these journals are for the men and women who live in a world where we are told men cannot show emotion. Where being vulnerable is weakness. These journals will show you another way, and that men do not have to be broken in silence and shame. We can tell the world we are scared or sad, and that does not make us weak. It means we are reaching out for help. In turn, we should be able to be that shoulder to lean on when someone else reaches out. Empathy is the foundation of humanity, and without it, we are nothing. Even if that empathy causes us tremendous pain, as it has me, I wouldn’t sacrifice it for anything. It makes me the father and husband and best friend I am.

April has been a bit of a rollercoaster. Not nearly as bad as March, but still a slog. Fortunately, only a few lows, only one of which was really bad. The highs, on the other hand? Well, they’ve been very helpful in my ongoing struggle with anxiety and depression.

We spent most of the first week in Canada on a family vacation to Niagara Falls. It was awesome, and we had a great, if very chilly, time. I had been to Niagara when I was maybe 12? 13? I don’t quite remember, but Mrs. Ogre and the kids had not been up there at all.

I was fine for most of the trip and immensely enjoyed spending time with Mrs. Ogre and the kids away from everything. There was a nagging voice in the back of my head that kept pestering me about Lila not being there. But that’s not a new thing, and I’ve mostly learned to ignore it. We took her up to NYC a few years ago, and it was her first time in Manhattan. We showed her around, did some tourist stuff, and it was a nice trip. Lila hasn’t come with us on a family trip since then, though. Once she was 15-16 years old, getting up early and spending the day walking around and seeing the sights stopped being something she was even remotely interested in. We could have pushed her to come, of course, but she would have hated it, and what would be the point of making her miserable? Her mother, Claudia, does not particularly enjoy these kinds of trips anymore, either. I miss having them with us, but what are you gonna do?

Still, that nagging voice was one I’ve grown accustomed to, so it only triggered small moments of unaccustomed sadness here and there. I kept those to myself so as not to cast a pall on everyone else’s vacation. I’ve been leaning on my family when I need it, but these were very mild spells, and I pushed through on my own.

It probably (definitely) helped that the couple of days before we left were so good. Spending an evening with the girls effectively depression-proofed me for the rest of the week. I can’t depend on that kind of thing, though. I’m going to have to learn to cope without a crutch, as it were.

Tuesday, April 7, was an interesting day. I had asked Lila previously about Anastasia and me making dinner for June, her girlfriend. Lila said she would ask, but then never told us yes or no. I gently prodded her, and she told me that June said yes to dinner. I was thrilled.

If you’ll recall, one of my three Big Fears was that June wouldn’t like us. June is not quick to open up around new people, especially adults. I was worried that she wouldn’t like us or would just be neutral. It was really gnawing at me, even though it was obviously not true. Unless Lila had told June we were the worst people in the world, how or why would she dislike us?

But we, Anastasia and I, also really wanted June to like us, not just be, at best, neutral. Both of us love Lila, so we really wanted to be on the good side of her girlfriend. Lila has been so happy and…whole, since she’s been with June. We really really wanted to know the person who brought so much joy to someone so important to us. We thought a nice dinner would be a good way to do that.

Anastasia got cold feet, though, and asked if maybe we could do dinner next month? Lila said sure. I still know this whole thing with June is all in my head, but as I keep saying: Knowing doesn’t make the feeling go away. Depression and anxiety continue to be stupid.

Saturday, April 11th: I could have fucking cried, but for a good reason this time. I finally finally broke the ice with June. Jesus fucking Christ, what a relief!

Lila asked me to send her pictures of my comic books. I have a lot of graphic novels lined up on my bookcases, along with a whole lot of regular books. I obliged and told her I assumed this was for June. If she wanted to borrow anything, she was more than welcome.

They had been watching “Invincible” on Amazon and talking about the comic it’s based on. Lila must have mentioned I have a shit ton of comics and suggested June might want to borrow some. June was, in fact, interested. Lila got really excited when I suggested James O’Barr’s “The Crow.” I had Lila read that when she was maybe 13 and going through her emo phase. She thought it was one of the greatest things she had ever seen in her life. Then we watched the movie, and her head exploded.1 She really wanted her girlfriend to read it.

June borrowed The Crow and the first two John Constantine collections. She knows the Constantine character from DC’s “Injustice” storyline. I warned her that the ones she was borrowing were far darker and more adult, but still really good, and we talked about comics for about 15 minutes.

I probably could have stayed and chatted longer, but I didn’t want to push my luck or keep intruding on Lila’s time with June. Still, connection made! Achievement unlocked! I’m no longer “that guy next door” that June is vaguely uncomfortable around. Thank fucking god.

Wednesday, April 15th: Almost a disaster! Again, this was almost entirely in my head, and I knew it was. That didn’t matter at all. I sat on the couch in the living room and could barely move for almost four hours. Jesus fucking Christ, anxiety and depression are the fucking worst!

OK, here’s the thing. I have been planning for weeks to talk to Lila and June about introducing June to Jordan. Since June is a trans woman who typically dresses in gender neutral clothing and has a very deep voice (as deep as mine, and I am twice her size), I was concerned about Jordan making an incorrect association. Jordan’s autism is such that abstract concepts are very much out of reach. It would be literally impossible to explain transgender to him. He simply would not understand it.

However, if Jordan understands June is a girl from the get-go, that’s it. June is a girl forever. Once Jordan makes an association in his head, it’s extremely difficult to change. For example, when he was just learning to speak at age 5, we accidentally taught him to say “You’re welcome” instead of “Thank you.”

You see, every time Jordan said “Thank you,” we responded with “You’re welcome,” as one does. BUT, he thought we were correcting him. Thus, Jordan started saying “You’re welcome” instead. It took years years to correct that, and he still does it sometimes.

I had wanted to explain this to Lila (who already knows about that) and June (who obviously would not), and let them know that when June met Jordan, I would have to carefully stress that June is Lila’s girlfriend. And that she is a girl. Once that was done, Jordan would make the association, and that would be that.

Buuuuuuuut, Lila and June were in the apartment getting food I had left for them out of the fridge when Jordan and I came up from Jordan getting off the bus. I wasn’t expecting them to be there, so Jordan walked into the kitchen and met this person he hadn’t seen before. I had to run over and do my little song and dance and THEN explain why I did it. It was extremely awkward, and I felt incredibly bad about it. I was seriously worried I had made June feel uncomfortable or singled out, which was never my intent.

They left, and I sank into the couch; my anxiety ran rampant for hours. I texted Lila and apologized and asked her to apologize to June for me. But when she’s with June, she rarely checks her phone. Shocking, I know.

But Lila did eventually check and told me that, actually, June was worried that she had upset Jordan. Doh! She hadn’t. Jordan just gets really shy around girls, including Lila, which annoys her to no end. They have, after all, known each other since they were both 8 years old. Lila said it was nice that I care, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Fuck you, anxiety.

But I felt a lot better after that. It's ridiculous that I can’t navigate minor social gaffes without losing my shit.

Tuesday, April 21st: Kind of nerve-wracking - It was Jordan’s birthday, and the kids were off. So was June (she lives in Alexandria, we live in Arlington), but she wasn’t allowed to stay over Monday night. She wanted to come over on Tuesday, but there was some family drama, so she couldn’t. I had previously told Lila that June was welcome to join us for dinner and cake, but Lila was hesitant. I don’t think she wanted June’s first time spending an evening with us to be at our apartment, and probably not a birthday party for someone June had met for 5 whole minutes, which I got. The only reason I extended the invitation is that Lila didn’t have a choice. She’s family, and she had to be there, and I wasn’t going to have June sit next door by herself for a few hours. Rude. But then the drama happened, and that appeared to be the end of that.

At least until it occurred to Lila that the party would be a good excuse to get June out of the house. I feel so used! 😜 Caveat: they couldn’t dine and dash. If June is coming over ostensibly to come to Jordan’s party, she kind of had to come to Jordan’s party. And stay for more than 15 minutes. For her part, Lila did not put up a fight.

I was nervous as fuck, but it was a lovely evening. We ate and talked and joked. June wasn’t uncomfortable at all, and we made her feel completely welcome, like she’d been over plenty of times before. She and Lila were very sweet together, cuddled up next to each other on the couch and it made me so very happy to see my little girl so content and in love. After two hours, I told them to take a hike and enjoy the rest of their evening together.

Thursday, April 24: A mini-breakthrough in therapy. Mostly through me talking it out, but that’s what therapy is for, right? I’ve been trying to figure out why the idea of losing Lila hurts so much. There’s the obvious, of course. She’s my daughter, and losing her would be devastating even without my recently discovered abandonment issues.

But there’s another layer to it, which I stumbled onto by accident. This is why therapy is good for you, boys and girls. Anyone who tells you it’s not is lying to you. As I was walking through what all of this means to me, I touched on a truth I hadn’t been confronting: Losing touch with Lila means I failed as a parent.

I wrote an article several years ago explaining that family traditions have to be organic, not enforced. We used to go apple picking every year until the girls outgrew it. I could have insisted we keep going, but then it would be a chore, not a family tradition. This is something Mrs. Ogre’s mother never understood, and why she has no family traditions to pass down, and her daughter does not enjoy speaking to her. We made new traditions for ourselves because she never let them grow organically, and Mrs. Ogre views talking to her mother as an unwanted chore.

To me, failing to establish a strong enough relationship that Lila WANTS to be in my life means I failed as a father as she transitions to adulthood. Success equals staying in touch. Not as a chore or something she feels obligated to do, but because it’s something she wants to do, something she needs, even as an adult. To touch base with her parents to tell them about her life and share her joy and sadness.

Success as a father means that someday, Lila will have children of her own and want to pass on the things we did together, even if she eventually outgrew them when she was younger. I may not be around to know if that happened, but if she stays in touch with me, there’s a good chance she’ll look back at our time together as father and daughter and want to recreate those memories.

Our job as parents is to prepare our children to be adults. It’s also to be an example of how to be a parent. If we do it right, they think of us when it’s their turn to raise their own children, and they, in turn, do a good job.

I understand that even if I’m lucky enough that she stays in regular contact during her first year away from home, that will change as she settles into her new life. She’ll become less homesick and less in need of an anchor. She will, hopefully, build an exciting and full life while away at school. She won’t have as much time or need to reach out to me. And that’s OK. Any contact at all, even if it’s just once a month, means she hasn’t forgotten about me and moved on.

And I plan to visit regularly, so there’s that. 😜

I’ve had three therapy sessions so far, and they really have been helpful. Partly through an outsider’s perspective, but also from walking through it all step by step.

I really do understand (mostly) where the pain is coming from. I’ve learned through hard experience to poke around in my own head and understand my reactions. I wasn’t aware of having abandonment issues because I had not yet been abandoned as an adult. Now I know, and knowing means I can learn to deal with it. You can’t cope with a problem until you know it exists and what the nature of the problem is.

It’s really important to be brutally honest with yourself (and your therapist). One of the things I have worked very VERY hard at over the years is allowing myself to be vulnerable and to not be ashamed of that or see it as weakness. All of the women in my life have seen me cry. It’s not easy to buck decades of being raised to be emotionally closed, but I knew, very early on, that it was important. My children, my wife, and my best friend needed to know that I trust them enough to let them see me at my most fragile and that while I am always there for them, I also needed them as well.

This is especially important for the girls, who needed to learn what real masculinity looks like in a world awash in toxic masculinity and men whose only emotional outlet is anger. Real men can cry and ask for help from their loved ones. And when I needed them, they were there for me. I didn’t have to carry this burden alone in silence, and thus, I will heal instead of breaking or twisting my grief into something dark and ugly. I don’t have time for that. I’m still a father, and my kids will still need me for a very long time.

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took the week off to deal with family stuff, so stepped in to fill her ranty shoes! There was MUCH ranting to be done. Just as we were getting ready to record, 6 unelected Republican extremists helped the GOP rig elections, Trump is setting the world on a path towards financial ruin, the legacy press tone polices the left AGAIN, and I let loose on Trump’s corrupt DoJ for paving the way for #Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo.

Come join the Ogre Nation Conversation, won’t you?

Ogre Nation News Update!

0:01 - 2:19 The six most corrupt Supreme Court Justices in American history put their thumb on the electoral scale by gutting the Voting Rights Act.

2:20 - 3:45 Intro

3:46 - 9:05 More discussion about the bullshit SCOTUS decision to kill the VRA.

9:06 - 26:49 The Iran War continues to devastate the global economy, and it’s about to get a lot worse as Trump’s ego is writing checks no one can cash.

26:50 - 52:45 Political violence is not the answer, especially if you think you’re going to use it to build a fucking ballroom.

52:46 - 58:46 I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE

58:47 - 1:24:27 Headlines for Short Attention Spans

1:24:28 - 1:40:34 Self-Care of the Week and a conversation about anxiety and depression

Norah O’Donnell savagely letting Trump hang himself:

The unedited hot mess livestream!

Donald Trump cannot afford to lose the midterms. He needs to keep at least the Senate, otherwise Democrats will have the power to make his life absolutely fucking miserable for the next two years. But Trump is a drooling imbecile who let his need to look “manly and powerful” take over, so he took us to war in Iran. Several Gulf states, including Israel, told him it would be quick and easy and boost his popularity (and make him rich). Giving in to greed and ego, Trump charged in with no plan. Now we’re stuck in a war we can’t win.

If Trump were smart (hahahahah!), he would make a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz, spin it as a victory, and do everything possible to get the price of gas and inflation under control before November. But Trump is the dumbest motherfucker on the planet so we’re not doing that:

This will drive gas prices through the roof, and inflation will explode. The economy, already falling apart, will crumble into a steep recession, dooming Republicans everywhere, even in deep red states. Why is Trump handing the midterm elections to Democrats? Why is he supercharging a blue wave that was already blotting out the sun?

Because Trump won’t leave without Iran giving up their nuclear program.

President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said, targeting the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.

It’s really important to understand that the only reason Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons is because, A. Donald Trump tore up the anti-nuclear treaty that Iran was adhering to just to say “Fuck you!” to Obama and, B. Trump keeps bombing their country. If Trump had just left everything the fuck alone, none of this would be happening. But nooooooo! Trump had to get one over on the Black guy and now he’s royally screwed himself.

Trump does have the option to end the war and negotiate on nuclear weapons later. It probably won’t save him in the midterms, but it certainly won’t make things worse. And yet, his fragile white man ego will not accept this. Even knowing that he cannot force the Strait open and strangling Iran will take months (and may not work), Trump will not take the off-ramp. He’s choosing the path that leads to the worst possible outcome for everyone, especially his own regime.

This is not the thinking of a strategic mind. This is pure ego. Trump cannot lose. Trump cannot be seen to lose. Losing means he is not the all-powerful strongman he claims to be. So instead of doing the smart thing to save his party and protect his power at home, Trump is throwing it all away like the dumbass he is.

On the one hand, I want to laugh and laugh and laugh and eat popcorn while Trump murders his own party. On the other hand, the economic pain coming our way is going to hurt a lot of people, and it’s hard to enjoy your enemy making a fatal mistake when it causes so much collateral damage. It’s tempting to write it off as the price of destroying fascism and freeing the country, but that way lies callous indifference, and then how am I any better than the MAGAts?

Still, we can be glad Donald Trump has the strategic forethought of a lobotomized pigeon. He’s handing us a priceless gift, and it’s up to us to make the most of it by getting the vote out in November and reminding the fascist fucks what democracy looks like. And then spending the next two years shoving it down their filthy throats.

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