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The Demopolis (Ala.) Times announced Wednesday that its latest edition is its last edition. Newspaper closures are so common today that it’s barely worth noticing — but the Times was the very last newspaper where I ever worked. So I noticed.

When I resigned as editor and publisher of The Demopolis Times — many years ago — I assumed I’d be back in another newsroom pretty quickly. Instead, I made an accidental career change and spent the next 20 years as a political consultant.

With the closure of The Demopolis Times, most of the newspapers where I worked are now gone. That’s no surprise, because the newspaper industry has been slowly dying for something like 30 years. But it’s sad to watch the demise of something I once loved and thought I’d spend my entire life doing.

I detested the time I spent running the Times, so I have no special love for the town or for the newspaper. But it feels a bit like watching the deaths of people I used to work with. And that’s gut-wrenching.

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What does it mean to be attractive? Why is one woman considered beautiful by almost everybody and another to be plain or even downright ugly? Why is one man seen as an attractive physical specimen and another seen as woefully lacking?

I’ve pondered this all my life, partly because I considered myself unattractive and wondered why. I couldn’t figure out why one arrangement of sizes and proportions and colors was considered an example of great beauty and others weren’t noteworthy.

I finally came to understand that some of it is biological and some of it is cultural. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I see that some standards persist over the centuries and others change with the fashions. And since a great part of it turns out to be subjective, I’ve been concerned about what various forms of media were teaching people to feel about themselves — based on arbitrary and fleeting beauty standards.

And just this week, I’ve realized that we have something new to worry about. With the rise of so-called “artificial intelligence” software, we are hard-coding current cultural preferences into software. And as AI software becomes more widespread and more influential, these subjective cultural standards are being injected into that software.

And more and more people are going to accept whatever this software says as objective truth — when it’s nothing but the collective biases of the people who trained the software. To test how this worked, I asked ChatGPT to tell me how attractive I am. And I was surprised by how it left me feeling.

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Donald Trump is the most effective agent of Marxist economics the United States has ever seen.

Let that sink in.

The president who is beloved by many who scream about the dangers of socialism and wave flags that say “Don’t Tread on Me” is dragging this country further into the economic worldview of Karl Marx than the Soviets ever dreamed possible. And what’s worse? His followers cheer him for it.

I know better than to think Trump is reading Das Kapital in the middle of the night. He probably couldn’t distinguish Karl Marx from Groucho Marx. But his policies — his economic instincts — align with the collectivist, central-planning ideals that defined Marx’s vision of how to run a society. The irony is grotesque. The former host of The Apprentice is becoming the accidental apprentice of Marx himself.

Let’s look at the facts.

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