Terry O’Gara

The most fascinating part to me isn't the falsehood, but diagnosing its origin. Is it a lie, a delusion, or performative politics? Or is it simply part of an intentional narrative strategy to justify ratcheting up control and preemptively sanctioning violence?

Name someone who read the CliffNotes but still failed the test.

The unspoken equation: My commercial gain = The correct outcome.

Imagine being a news organization and editing out the most newsworthy part of an article or video. 🙄

Debating whether we’re in a crisis yet is like deciding between a hike or the beach when a storm is fast approaching the shore. The adult move is: evidence → forecast → plan. If the wind is already shifting in your direction, what’s the next move?

It's not new. In Elizabethan England, a courtier would wait all alone in the royal chambers, and upon seeing the face of a noble figure, identify them by name, and then say, "How may I assist you today, my liege?" 😁

The "both sides" rhetoric mistakes a moral conflict for a partisan one. There's no middle ground between democracy & autocracy, or between justice and injustice. The call to abandon an "us vs. them" frame is an oligarchical demand that we stop identifying the "them" who are actively breaking things.

The most successful coup is one that convinces its targets that self-defense is an act of violence. Failing to prosecute those who attempt to dismantle the republic isn't avoiding retaliation; it's granting them immunity for crimes against the state.

Beware the little gnat that can lift up a 300lb man and carry him all the way from the National Mall to Guantanamo Bay.

To confuse having the power to do a thing with having the authority to do a thing is exactly the kind of comic relief that military courts will appreciate in years to come.

He knows exactly what it is and who he's talking about. And he's not landing on a question; he's planting a seed of cognitive dissonance in barren soil. And the seed is made of dynamite. The real test of faith is whether it will grow or detonate. Nation states have pivoted on less.

A system that betrays the social contract and engineers economic despair will always find people desperate enough to abandon their moral compass and do its brutality for a price. Such a system first betrays its people, then it pays them to betray each other.

Ours is an era of skibidi empire.

To be alive at a time that future generations will use as a cautionary tale and morality play. How fear warped our neighbors. How cruelty was normalized. How the game was broken.

Politics has shifted from governance to performance. In this equation, attention is power and spectacle is the leadership.

If only it were as simple as swapping out bad guys for good guys. Red team out; blue team in. But new solutions won't fix the old architecture. We need a new framework. How do we get reformers to rise out of the crumbling structure that landed us here and now seems only exists to reproduce itself?

Rules of Engagement separate soldiers from marauders. The Secretary of War isn’t championing a ‘warrior ethos’ so much as a war-crime ethos.

Thank you for pulling me back from the edge before I pulled the trigger on a 4lb bag of Anthony's Vital Wheat Gluten from Amazon. 😄

Well, then, I guess I am in the right thread. But the gluten instead of whey. Hm. I'm going to have to experiment.

Aha! I found the product! Thank you! I will investigate (read: binge on greek yogurt😆)

Branched-Chain Amino Acids 'for flavor'? Help me understand.

Churchill drank deeply and governed steadily. The problem today isn’t the substance in the glass, but the substance of the man.

Indeed, the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend on its own. And it never bends without casualties. At times it takes generations. And many are crushed beneath its weight, while others are crushed just waiting. So, if anyone can speed us along without burning the whole thing down, let's hear it.

You can wait till you see flames, but if you smell smoke, the house is already on fire.

Honoring soldiers for Wounded Knee doesn't feel like constitutional patriotism. It feels like a crusader order preserving the memory of one massacre to justify the next.

An autoimmune disorder occurs when a body attacks its own healthy tissue. When a state mistakes dissent for disease and targets its own citizens, the result is a self-inflicted and all too often fatal wound. The end is not cure, but collapse.

Maybe we should retire the word 'leader' for those who destroy institutions, whatever their power or market influence. Most are merely office-holders. True leadership is the courage shown by citizens defending democracy, as you indicate. That's the gold standard.

The American eagle is a perfect system evolved for flight. So to believe you can sever the left wing mid-air and still return with a bigger nest egg is catastrophic lunacy. We are all likely to learn a brutal, spiraling lesson in gravity.

I feel the same frustration. But shame only works when people share the same value system. In autocratic societies, people speak at each from across different moral worlds. Klein is unpersuasive for a similar reason: without a shared narrative, each of us simply lives out our own story.

I often think The Apprentice was a real-life Truman Show. In this version, the contestants were trained professionals, hired to teach a flailing businessman how to perform the role of a tycoon.The person we think of as the host was the actual, unwitting apprentice. And it’s the fans who were fired.