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DMZ America Podcast Ep 192: Trump Trashes Checks and Balances

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Ted Rall

LIVE at 10 am Eastern Time/7 am Pacific time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

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.

Feel free to shoot us questions in the live chats on YouTube or Rumble.

I Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT

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Ted Rall

           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.)

TMI Show Ep 74: War Against Greenland

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Ted Rall

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

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.

TMI Show Ep 73: What’s Next for DOGE?

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Ted Rall

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Chief Trump consultant Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have hit the ground running, shocking Washington’s Inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic infrastructure by following the Silicon Valley approach of “move fast and break things.”

Musk is moving to shut down US-AID. He offered bullying buyout offers to 2.3 million federal employees. He and his team of very-young assistants has been granted access to confidential government data, including those of the Treasury Department payment systems, NOAA, Medicare and Medicaid, and more.

Musk says DOGE is thoughtful and deliberate. But the speed with which he is moving worries critics who think he’s endangering essential government services and might have nefarious designs on Americans’ personal data. What’s next for DOGE?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall speak with financial expert and political analyst Mitch Roschelle.

TMI Show Ep 72: Trump Endorses Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza + Did Trump Choke on Tariffs?

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Ted Rall

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

A shocking (but not surprising) turn of events prompts a special edition of the show today.

First: As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu smiled next to him like the cat who ate the canary, President Trump brazenly endorsed the forcible expulsion of at least 1.7 million Palestinians from Gaza so that the bombed and bulldozed site of Israeli genocide can be occupied either by U.S. real estate interests or by Israel. Manila Chan and Ted Rall break down the implications for the Middle East.

Second: Trump said that Canada and Mexico couldn’t do anything to stop his 25% tariffs on goods. “We’re not looking for a concession,” he said. Three days later, Trump paused the tariffs on both countries for 30 days, citing concessions they had made.

Trump’s tariffs threatened to increase inflation and spooked the stock market. Did Trump’s pullback have more to do with that looming economic pain than with the concessions? What happens in a month?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss the future of tariffs under Trump with wealth management and finance expert Aquiles Larrea.

TMI Show Ep 71: Democrats: Is There a Road Back?

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Ted Rall

Airing LIVE at 10 am Eastern time this morning, then Streaming 24-7 thereafter:

Dispirited and depressed, the Democratic Party doesn’t have a target audience, a message to send it, or a strategy to opposing Trumpism. Highlighting their dismal situation, new ideas were notably missing at a recent election for new DNC chair, where party insiders insisted that Biden and Harris ran great campaigns that failed to get their great message across to the voters and that nothing should fundamentally change. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA Republicans are manic and energized, running roughshod over institutional and constitutional norms, and capturing our national attention.

Can a major political party survive without a core constituency or firm ideological underpinning? Is waiting for Trump to overreach, provoke a backlash or die a feasible strategy? Will Democrats go the way of the Whigs?

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss the future of the Democratic Party. Does it have one? If so, what does it look like? Joining is guest Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune.

TMI Show Ep 70: Tariff Terror!

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Ted Rall

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Trump made good on his threat to slap tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada over the weekend. All imports from China now face a 10% duty. It’s 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada. Canadian oil, natural gas and electricity, will be taxed 10%. Trump’s order includes a mechanism to escalate the rates charged by the U.S. against retaliation by the other countries, raising the specter of an even more severe economic disruption. Trump demanded that the three nations to stop the manufacture and export of fentanyl and that Canada and Mexico reduce illegal immigration into the U.S.

The tariffs could cause inflation to worsen. They are likely to cause turmoil in supply chains and have an impact on financial markets, though not immediately.

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss Trump’s tariffs and their impacts on your life.

DMZ America Podcast Ep 191: Political Potpourri

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Ted Rall

LIVE at 12 noon Eastern today, Streaming 24-7 thereafter:

It’s Trump’s second week as president and he’s a busy boy. He’s expanding Guantánamo Concentration Camp to accommodate as many as 36,000 migrants in perpetuity, working on ways to get a third term, firing the inspectors general and running roughshod over the hapless Democrats who still seem to think they shouldn’t change a thing.

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) could talk about all that and more. And maybe they will. But this is a Political Potpourri episode in which they’re going to roll open mic style: whatever comes to mind is what will come up.

 


TMI Show Ep 69: Video Games Are Good For You

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Ted Rall

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Video games have long been considered a waste of time and even a pernicious influence by many educators and political leaders in the establishment. In 2019, Gaming Disorder was even listed in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Gaming Disorder is “characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.”

Not everyone was buying it. During the pandemic, new studies found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall ask gaming developer V.K. Samhith whether gaming ought to become part of psychological self-care.

 

TMI Show Ep 68: Trump To Send Migrants to Notorious Torture Camp

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Ted Rall

Airing LIVE at 10 am Eastern time this morning, then Streaming 24-7 thereafter:

Guantánamo Bay concentration camp, the American human-rights disaster made infamous by the Bush Administration when it sent Muslim detainees to be tortured there out of reach from the law, is about to radically expand. Donald Trump has ordered the camp to prepare for the arrival of 30,000 migrants, many of whom have never been charged with a crime.

On “The TMI Show,” co-hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss the morality, practicality and political implications of Trump’s latest move in his war against illegal immigrants.

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