In many countries, politics happens 365 days a year. Citizens hold their governments’ feet to the fire when they’re unhappy. Not so in the United States. We outsource politics to the politicians and check in every two to four years to see how they’ve been doing.

The post The Outsourcing of Politics first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post The Outsourcing of Politics appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           As Democrats continue to deconstruct the root causes of their recent defeat and attempt to regroup for next year’s midterm elections, they might want to consider a new factor in American politics: the seductive power of a movement compared to a boring old party.

            On the surface, the 60th American presidential election was the usual two-way contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But, as Democrats tried their best to run as normal and competent as they could despite Biden’s ill-timed withdrawal, Trump had re-branded and re-organized the Republican Party as a vessel of his MAGA movement.

            A movement is dynamic. Its number-one goal is building excitement and a sense of belonging.

            A party strives for constancy. It represents a set of principles through thick and thin.

All things being equal, a movement beats a party.

            “The difference between parties and movements is simple,” the progressive pundit David Sirota wrote back in 2009. “Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda. Movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it.” Democrats who were skeptical of military interventionism under Bush embraced it under Biden yet remained Democrats; the abortion-rights movement would vote Republican if the GOP were to come out as firmly pro-choice.

            Donald Trump has scrambled Sirota’s formulation.

Trump has built a highly-personalized movement detached from any discrete policy prescription. Rather than remain independent of party politics, his MAGA movement seized control of the Republican Party. Despite having achieved a sweeping victory, MAGA continues to act like an outsider insurgent movement.

Personality is everything. The dauphin J.D. Vance notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the MAGA movement without Trump. While I don’t give much credence to arguments that the president is a Nazi-in-waiting, there is an echo of the Führer Principle that gave the force of law to anything Adolf Hitler said. MAGA Trumpism is anything that Trump says at any given time.

At first glance at the man on the golden escalator in 2015, this highly individuated politics seems ill-fated. Trumpism is riddled with internal contradictions and existential hypocrisies. Trump’s habit of reversing himself, as he did recently by threatening Russia only to turn around and embrace it after a call to Putin seems destined, by traditional political standards, to turn off supporters who care about those issues. So does the conflict between his personal and political lives; surely evangelicals will turn against a crude serial adulterer who screws porn stars and doesn’t appear to have ever darkened the door of a church in session.

People who evaluate Trump by traditional metrics fail to understand that everything has changed. For a party, Trump’s inconsistences and flipflopping changing his mind 180° would be weaknesses to overcome or explain away. Not so for a movement. First and foremost, a movement moves. Where and how it moves is beside the point.
            A movement is entertaining. Think about Trump and his wild and crazy rants, not as appalling or racist but as unpredictable—and thus interesting. Think about Trump supporters and their giant flags, their sense of community.

Trump kept holding rallies throughout his first term—a party doesn’t do that. A movement does. A party doesn’t stick with an individual politician through thick and thin, as Trump supporters did through his legal troubles. A movement does. It has to, because it’s all about one man.

            If there is a 20th century authoritarian parallel to Trump, I have argued before, it is not the totalitarianism of Hitler but the culturally-centered rule of Mussolini. As the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who grew up under Italian fascism, noted, “Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” Mussolini, who started out as a socialist journalist, came to believe that people were drawn to action—any action—for its own sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection,” Eco wrote in an influential essay about fascism in 1995. “Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

            Writing at Salon, Chauncey DeVega complains: “President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president’s first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law.” DeVega blames the media for normalizing Trump and Democrats for not taking him seriously enough to convince voters.

            What such mainstream analyses dismiss is is how soul-deadening the technocrats who run the West have been. Not only have they been unresponsive to people’s complaints about internationalism and declining living standards, they have been boring.

            Democrats (and many Republicans) have repeatedly run on not promising anything. The only surprise is that they got away with it for so long.

            Whether Trump is influenced by Mussolinian tactics or his acute political instincts rediscovered the potency of a “cult of action,” the United States was primed for the politician Trump became by the time he ran a third time in 2024—energetic, focused, retributive, imaginative—and stormed out of his inaugural ceremony with a blizzard of pardons, sweeping executive orders and bold diplomatic initiatives.

            Asked if she would have done anything differently than Joe Biden during his presidency, Kamala Harris said: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

            And, four years earlier, Biden told a group of wealthy campaign donors that, were he to be elected, “Nothing would fundamentally change.” Turns out, he was truthful. Nearly a third of those who voted for him in 2020 didn’t turn out for Harris in 2024.

            Liberal Democrats I talk to are depressed and disengaged in this, the first month of the second term of Trump. They’re also jealous. Why, they ask, won’t the Democrats run a candidate who campaigns and governs as aggressively as Trump is doing now?

            As for those Democrats, the party faces a choice as it prepares to challenge MAGAism. It can reconstitute itself into something that looks and feels more like a movement, far less careful and far more energetic. Or it can keep going as a party that promises that nothing will ever fundamentally change.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post A Movement Beats a Party Every Time first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post A Movement Beats a Party Every Time appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered Pentagon officials to draw up plans to cut 8% from the military over each of the next five years, the most radical attempt to rein in such spending ever.
There would be 17 exceptions to the proposed cuts, including military operations at the southern border. Cuts to defense will face opposition in Congress, where lawmakers focus on budget cuts that could affect their districts.
On “The TMI Show” Ted Rall and guest cohost Robby West discuss this shocking attempt to co-opt anti-militarism as an issue away from the Democrats.

The post TMI Show Ep 82: Trump Wants To Slash Defense first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 82: Trump Wants To Slash Defense appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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The United States and Russia have moved toward a total reset in Riyadh, agreeing to work together on ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, financial investment, eliminating sanctions and re-establishing normal relations. The meeting was striking after three years of American efforts to isolate Moscow. After more than four hours of talks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both sides had agreed to work on a peace settlement for Ukraine as well as to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians,” both geopolitically and economically.

“We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other,” Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said.

The meeting signaled Trump’s intention to reverse the Biden administration’s approach, which focused on sanctions, isolation and sending weapons to Ukraine.

What’s the next step? What will peace look like? What role will Ukraine itself have in the negotiations? What will it take Europe to sign off? Do they have to?

On “The TMI Show” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan talk to Ukrainian whistleblower Andrei Telizhenko about what comes next.

The post TMI Show Ep 81: Ukraine: The Jig Is Up first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 81: Ukraine: The Jig Is Up appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Israelis are taught to “never forget” the Holocaust. In the case of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and his right wing followers, however, they seem to have taken genocide as something to emulate rather than to avoid.

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The post Never Forget appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Five years ago this week, the United States entered an unprecedented national lockdown. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the government, businesses and educational institutions to shut down. The streets of major cities turned into ghost towns. Confused, traumatized and terrified of a fatal respiratory virus whose means of transmission was not clearly understood until later, Americans hid in their homes while over a million of their fellow citizens died, many of them alone in terrible agony.

The novel coronavirus struck as the United States was experiencing three major societal trends: a growing divide between Left and Right, decreasing trust in institutions and a splintering of the information environment.

Three-quarters of Americans say the pandemic took a toll on their own lives. 27% say they were traumatized. On “The TMI Show,” Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask: What are the longstanding implications? Have we learned anything? What would we do different?

The post TMI Show Ep 80: Covid: Five Years Later first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 80: Covid: Five Years Later appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Even if you didn’t vote for Donald Trump and you hate his guts, you have to be jealous of how much he’s doing so quickly. Liberal Democrats can’t even imagine one of their presidents leaping into action like this.

The post A Democrat Would Never Do This first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post A Democrat Would Never Do This appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The politics of the former American colony of the Philippines is devolving into a Hatfields versus McCoys style blood feud. Sara Duterte, daughter of the last president Rodrigo, was the vice president until she just got impeached. Now she’s being charged with sedition too.

At the heart of the clash is a power struggle between two families, the pretty much pro-China Dutertes, against the pro-American Marcoses, whose Bongbong is the current president.

Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, president of the Philippines Association for Chinese Studies and research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, joins “The TMI Show” with Ted Rall and Manila Chan to analyze the future of this linchpin to the Western Pacific and the Pacific Rim.

The post TMI Show Ep 79: Feuding Filipino First Families! first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 79: Feuding Filipino First Families! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

            When I was young, I knew a lot about old people. Especially about old people I knew personally: members of my family, my mother’s contemporaneous older friends, teachers, clients on my paper route.

            It wasn’t a choice. When I was young, no one asked whether I was interested about events that significantly preceded my birth. They just talked. My mom told me countless detailed stories about her childhood growing up during the Nazi occupation of France; many if not most of these tales of woe were repeated despite my reminders that I was already familiar with them. I was expected to listen as the schoolteacher got shot, the cat was abandoned and the Allied tanks rolled in.

            Children, teenagers and young adults were expected less to be seen and not heard than to listen politely nodding their heads as their elders described watching the Beatles arrive at Idlewild (on black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, natch), where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been shot and, in the case of my seventh-grade homeroom teacher, what it was like to be in the convention hall when FDR accepted the Democratic nomination.

            Pop culture, politics and personal histories from decades prior persisted in a way that doesn’t seem possible today, when youth culture and the Internet have delivered a clear message to older generations like mine (I’m an old Gen Xer) that our stories are neither wanted nor sought out.

            And sought out they would have to be. Unlike my Baby Boomer babysitter who taught my nine-year-old self hippie slang, how to curse and how much fun she’d had at a free-love commune, and also unlike my Silent Generation father who schooled me on Jack Benny and Benny Goodman, we members of Generation X survived our histories of childhood neglect and adulthood underappreciation only to graduate into our later years assuming that no one cares about us and no one ever will. So yeah, there was that time I stood three feet away from Johnny Thunders when he gave his last concert and the hilarious lunch I had with Johnny Ramone and the time Ed Koch gave me the finger after I bounced a bottle off the roof of his limousine, but I’m pretty sure nobody under age 45 cares.

            As the author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says: “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”

Or maybe younger people would care. But they’d have to ask. And I’d have to be convinced that they weren’t just being polite. Probably not going to happen.

Whatever the cause is, and what I’ve written so far is no doubt only part of the reason, there is probably less familial, cultural and popular history being transferred from older generations to younger ones than ever before. Changes in technology and education are contributing to our failure to pass on knowledge and wisdom.

If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.

Generation Z, for example, never learned to write in cursive. Which means they can’t read it. In the same way that Ataturk’s decision to abolish Arabic script in favor of a Latinate alphabet suddenly made hundreds of years of incredible literature inaccessible to Turks after 1928 and Mao’s simplified Chinese characters meant that only scholars can read older texts, newer generations of Americans won’t be able to read an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or a letter from their grandmother.

Similarly, the dark ages of photography are well upon us. Though it has never been cheaper or easier to take or store or transmit a high-resolution photo, the number that are likely to pass from one generation to the next has never been smaller. When mom dies, her smartphone password usually dies with her. Even when obtaining a court order is not required, how likely is a grieving child to sort through an overwhelming volume of photos, few of them worth preserving, and have the presence of mind to carefully store the keepers somewhere where their own children will be easily be able to access them someday? And let’s not mention the digital disasters that can instantly wipe out entire photo archives.

For all their shortcomings—fading, development costs—film-based photos survived precisely because they were more expensive, which made them precious, which prompted people to store them in albums. We’ve all read stories about how victims of a flood or fire sometimes only escaped with one possession, the family photo album.

I’m grateful for all the old stuff old people told me whether or not I wanted to hear it. Some stuff was pretty enlightening, like the couple on my paper route where the husband had fought in World War I and still had his gas mask on which he had written the names of each little French village through which he and his squadron had passed. They invited me in for tea when I came to collect my money. It’s one thing to read about the horrors of mustard gas. Holding that contraption in my hands made it feel real.

Other things I picked up probably didn’t teach me much of anything at all. Still, it was pretty interesting to learn how to use an old-fashioned adding machine, Victrola record player and self-playing piano one of my neighbors had in her garage. My mom taught me how to use carbon paper; recalling the fact that businesses and government agencies routinely made numerous copies to be distributed to different files proved useful when I researched my senior thesis at the National Archives.

When I complain about a problem, I like to offer a solution. But I’m not entirely sure that the fact that billions of yottabytes worth of human knowledge is getting memory-holed, mostly because Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t particularly interested is necessarily a problem. Maybe they don’t need that stuff to try to save themselves from climate change or killer asteroids.

What I do know, if indeed it is a problem, is that it is one without a possible solution. In the same way that streets would be clean if nobody littered but people always do so they never are, there is no way to convince today’s 30-year-olds that they should take an interest in what today’s 60-year-olds have to say.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote. But he’s so old, he’s dead.

Nowadays, even the present is past.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post Resistance to Memory first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Resistance to Memory appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As the DNC met to elect a new chairman, attendees admitted that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a message. If they had a message, they don’t know what it would say or to whom it would be delivered. Nor do they have a charismatic leader in the wings who might be able to articulate that message.

The post Democrats’ Work Is Done first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Democrats’ Work Is Done appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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The deep freeze in U.S.-Russian relations is about to thaw out bigly.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump talked for about an hour and a half yesterday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The call was “lengthy and highly productive,” Trump said on Truth Social. “We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects.” They agreed that they “want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump added, announcing an “immediate” start of negotiations to resolve the Ukraine conflict.

The two men discussed the Middle East and Iran’s nuclear program and agreed to visit one another in person.

What’s next for Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine? Political and international relations expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and Manila Chan on “The TMI Show” to figure that out.

The post TMI Show Ep 78: Putin and Trump’s Perfect Phone Call first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 78: Putin and Trump’s Perfect Phone Call appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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House Leader Jeffries sounds like a Vichy Democrat who has given up. “What leverage do we have?” he asked reporters at his weekly news conference on Friday. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”

Yet Republicans had a very different attitude when they found themselves in the same position Democrats are in now. They threatened to shut down the federal government and sometimes did so. They extracted concessions in order to raise the debt ceiling. They blocked judicial and other nominations.

What parliamentary and other tools could Democrats deploy to block or slow down Trump and his initiatives? Do they want to use them? If not, why not?

That’s what editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are talking about on today’s DMZ America Podcast.

 

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 193: Democrats Say Resistance Is Futile first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 193: Democrats Say Resistance Is Futile appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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“I’m not a cheap date,” Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said yesterday. “[Republicans] want to run and tell everybody that they have this huge mandate — that they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Well, if that’s the case then they should put their mandate-pants on and do whatever the hell they want to do. But if you want us to be helpful, then you have to engage us. And we’re not going to just be there to bail you out.”

Democratic votes will be needed to get a federal spending bill through Congress. That might mean holding the line to save Medicaid, US-AID and education. They might try to fire Musk and DOGE. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warns that Democrats won’t support efforts to reduce the mortgage interest deduction or slash food subsidies for low-income children.

Does the Democratic #Resistance (finally) start here? Or will they cave like a cheap date? “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan preview the budget fight.

The post TMI Show Ep 77: Dems Threaten a Shutdown first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 77: Dems Threaten a Shutdown appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Democrats say they’re overwhelmed by all the outrageous policy changes and executive orders Trump is cranking out. But there’s no evidence that they’re actively resisting anything at all.

The post We Have Found the Anti-Trump Democratic Resistance and They Are first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post We Have Found the Anti-Trump Democratic Resistance and They Are appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Should we like our children like we like our livestock: free-range?

Older Americans, who grew up before electronic trackers/devices and helicopter parenting, remember childhoods with much more independence than many kids get today. In the 1970s and 1980s, when “The TMI Show”’s Manila Chan and Ted Rall came of age, it wasn’t uncommon for the under-18 set to take mass transit by themselves and disappear for hours between meals with little accountability. It was riskier. But it also made for bigger lives and bigger imaginations.

Joining us is a leading pioneer of today’s “free-range parenting” movement. Writer Lenore Skenazy is a writer and blogger famous for her 2008 article “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.” In 2017, Skenazy co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow to make it “easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident and happy adults.” In 2018, Utah became the first state to pass the Free-Range Parenting bill, assuring parents that they can give their children some independence without it being mistaken for neglect, for which the Washington Post credited Skenazy’s 2008 column as a contributing influence. Similar laws have since been enacted in Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and several other states have relaxed laws regarding some aspects of childhood independence.

The post TMI Show Ep 76: Make Our Kids Free Again? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 76: Make Our Kids Free Again? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

DOGE leader Elon Musk is gutting government agencies, including US-AID. Why do so many liberals and Democrats seem to get more agitated about Trump’s war on DC bureaucrats than capitalism’s longstanding war against ordinary Americans?

The post Elon Musk on the Rampage first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Elon Musk on the Rampage appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Is this the end of the American experiment? Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his administration are flouting the Constitution and making a mockery of the checks and balances that have kept U.S. democracy going over nearly a quarter millennium. Congress has signaled that it does not plan to rein in the president so it’s mostly up to the Supreme Court. With governing norms demolished, will we still be able to say this is a nation of laws?

Editorial cartoonists and best friends Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) draw on history to forecast what appears to be a rapidly growing constitutional crisis.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 192: Trump Trashes Checks and Balances first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 192: Trump Trashes Checks and Balances appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           I’ve been unpersoned. Here, in the United States of America.

            The censor? OpenAI, the huge tech company run by Sam Altman, famous for creating ChatGPT.

            Open ChatGPT and ask it: “Who is Ted Rall?”

ChatGPT will answer: “I’m unable to produce a response.”

Unable? Unwilling is more like it.

ChatGPT had all sorts of things to say about me a few years ago.

Asked to describe my supposed trip to Uganda, ChatGPT falsely offered: “Ted Rall, an American political cartoonist and writer, visited Uganda in 2006 as a journalist. He went to the country to report on the conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the use of child soldiers.” I’ve never been to Uganda.

I also asked ChatGPT: “What is Scott Stantis’ relationship to Ted Rall?” Scott, the conservative editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, is my best friend.

ChatGPT, however, had another tall tale to tell.

Declaring that Scott and I “have had a contentious relationship in the past,” it went on:

“In 2002, Stantis accused Rall of plagiarism [not true] after Rall used a similar idea and composition in one of his cartoons as Stantis had used in a previous cartoon [never happened]. Rall denied the accusation [nope, didn’t happen] and claimed that the similarity was coincidental [uh-uh]. The controversy led to a public feud between the two cartoonists, with each accusing the other of unprofessional conduct [not actually].

“In 2015, Stantis and Rall were both named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning [we wish!], but Rall’s nomination was later withdrawn [were not named so could never be withdrawn] due to discrepancies in his account of a 2001 incident with the Los Angeles Police Department [nope].”

Amused, I wrote about the fact that ChatGPT makes stuff up—a lot—in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal. “ChatGPT Libeled Me. Should I Sue?” asked the headline (which I didn’t write).

After my essay appeared in the Journal, I vanished from ChatGPT.

Poof!

Gone was my intrepid investigative reporting from war-torn Africa. No more feud with Scott Stantis. As far as ChatGPT is concerned, I don’t exist. Try it yourself. You’ll see.

I contacted OpenAI to ask for an explanation. They never replied. So much for accountability. But it isn’t hard to guess what happened. A nervous executive saw the words “should I sue?” in a major newspaper and ordered me to be unpersoned.

            Countless people were “disappeared” during Josef Stalin’s reign of terror, either executed by firing squad and dumped in anonymous graves or, if they were lucky, shipped east to a Siberian gulag. Unfortunately for the Soviet government, some of the vanished had once been so close to Uncle Joe that state media had published photos of the dictator standing next to them.

In a practice that helped inspire Orwell’s 1984, Stalin employed a group of retouchers to airbrush his former comrades out of photos in official history books. “In one photograph, the History TV channel noted, “Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained.”

Don’t get me started on the irony of the name “OpenAI.”

I didn’t focus on my digital vanishing prior to last fall, when OpenAI announced ChatGPT Search, an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance that caused shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent, to drop one percent. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly active users worldwide. When you’re trying to sell cartoons and opinion essays and books, it is not good for business to have one-fifth of a billion people come up empty when they search for your name.

I tried to log into my OpenAI account to see if there was some way to make nice. “Oops!, something went wrong,” it said. OpenAI blocked me at the email account level too.

Big tech is so determined to be thought of as benevolent that “we’re making the world a better place” was a recurring joke in Silicon Valley, a TV comedy show that satirized the industry. OpenAI fits this PR to a T: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” the About section of their website assures. “We research generative models and how to align them with human values.”

Well, Stalin was human.

Last summer, they announced a partnership with Apple, a company you may have heard of, “integrating ChatGPT into experiences within iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.” Does this mean I will disappear from my own iPhone?

And in December, OpenAI signed up the U.S. Treasury Department and the Air Force to use the enterprise version of ChatGPT. Bright side: If the IRS ever wants to audit me, ChatGPT might tell them there’s no such person as me.

Maybe, I thought desperately, there was an indirect way of getting ChatGPT to admit I exist.

“Are there any left-wing political cartoonists named Ted?” I asked it. “Yes, there are left-wing cartoonists,” it replied, followed immediately by an error message: “I’m unable to produce a response.”

I attempted to reverse-engineer evidence that I walk this earth. I asked: “Who won the 1995 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Cartoons?” And, according to ChatGPT, the prize went to…Jeff MacNelly of The Chicago Tribune. MacNelly never won an RFK Award. That was me. I also won in 2000; ChatGPT says that that my award went to Doug Marlette.

            I also asked: “Name the three finalists for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Cartooning.” Correct answers are: Jim Borgman, Ted Rall and Tom Toles. ChatGPT replied with three names: Jeff Danziger, Paul Conrad and Tom Toles.

            Finally, I asked it about my best-known book: “Who is the author of the 1996 book Revenge of the Latchkey Kids?” It repled: Janet Tashjian. Tashjian is an author, not a cartoonist. She writes children’s and young-adult fiction.

Existence was fun.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post I Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post I Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Professor Kristian Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark joins “The TMI Show” to discuss the possibility of a US invasion of Greenland. Setting up a confrontation with NATO, Donald Trump says the Danish territory—where the US has a Space Force base already—is essential to American national security. It also has rare earth minerals and an opening to new Northwest Passage that has been created by climate change and the melting of the Polar Ice Cap.

What are the possibilities of an American war against Greenland? What’s the status of the American nuclear facility there? Why has the polar north become strategically important? Ted Rall and Manila Chan give you Too Much Information about the great white north.

The post TMI Show Ep 74: War Against Greenland first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 74: War Against Greenland appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Donald Trump and the Republicans are unleashing a tsunami of extremist executive orders and policy changes. But the Democrats who one would normally expect to lead the resistance are not reacting, explaining that they are in “wait and see mode” because they are still despondent about the election results.

The post First Meeting of the Resistance first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post First Meeting of the Resistance appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.