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THOM GOOD RUSSIA SUMMARY

AN 10 26

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

THOM

Clandestine Kremlin meetings just sent tremors through CIA headquarters

Thom Hartmann October 13, 2026

Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that angry truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

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10 26 an

Sneaky ballot measure could give one industry a 'Constitutional Right' to pollute

(REUTERS)

Thom Hartmann October 18, 2026

Over the next three weeks, Colorado voters will get to vote on an amendment to their constitution giving one single industry the ability to largely prevent any regulation of itself or its pollution. Amendment 82 says that the state would establish a “right” for the natural gas industry to sell its products.

It’ll be the only industry in any state to have a state constitutional right assigned to it.

Things like pollution controls to protect air and water that might reduce consumption would violate that right. So would local communities trying to limit or ban gas wells or pipelines. Even during a dry fire time, an effort to ban gas-fueled camp stoves and outdoor grills or lights would be a violation.

The amendment is being pushed by a dark money group called Advance Colorado; the original donors behind it are hidden, but it’s not hard to guess. And if it passes in Colorado, expect similar amendments and laws to pop up in every state in the union.

This is, frankly, nuts. Instead of increasing the power of the fossil fuel industry and encouraging more consumption of their planet-destroying products, we should be helping Americans tap into nuclear fusion power that’s free, compliments of that giant reactor 93 million miles away that we call our Sun.

What reminded me of this is that here in cloudy, rainy Oregon we just started, for the first time since April, to buy electricity from our local grid because 3 years ago we installed solar panels and batteries on our home. The summers are free (which includes charging our Ioniq5 electric car) and in the winter I use a tiny fraction of what we used to buy.

So why, Louise wondered out loud when I told her that we’d just bought $6 worth of electricity this week for the first time in months, hasn’t every home in every city in America — particularly those south of the Mason-Dixon line — done the same?

The answer, of course, is that most people can’t afford the up-front cost of the solar installations. But what if there was a way to solarize most of the houses in a community or even a state that didn’t cost the homeowners a penny and left them with free solar electricity from panels with a 20-40 year lifespan?

It’s actually something that’s ridiculously easy to do, if we can just find politicians willing to defy the fossil fuel and for-profit utility industries.

I first understood how this could work for an entire country back in September of 2009, when I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Hermann Scheer as a keynote speaker at a conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his “100,000 Rooftops” program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and how it could work in Spain. As he laid out the concept to me over lunch, it was simple and elegant.

You can read the details here and here but this is something that American cities, counties, and states could implement an American variation on right now.

First, you pass a law saying that the local or state government will 100% guarantee/backstop 10-year bank or credit union loans up to $40,000 to install solar power and batteries on any home.

If the homeowner defaults, the government will pick up the loan. Because the risk to the bank becomes zero this way, the law can also mandate that the loans are made in the neighborhood of a 1.5% rate, enough to cover processing costs and give the banks a small but reliable profit.

Second, you require the utility to buy surplus electricity from those panels at a multiple of the current going retail rate for the first ten years while those loans are being paid off.

The goal is for each home to generate enough cash every month, or at least averaged over a year, to cover 100% (or something close to it) of the cost of the loan payments. Depending on local power costs, the abundance of local solar, etc., that could run from 1.5 times retail all the way up to a few times retail.

This way, the utility is paying off the loans so the homeowners incur no costs, and the banks are making a small profit. So far, everybody is happy except, apparently, the utility.

You’d think that the power companies would object to this since they’re the ones paying the premium for electricity for the first ten years, but think of it from their point of view.

Every home that comes online is part of one less power plant, transformer distribution station, or high-tension setup they have to pay to build and/or maintain. (Germany did this to generate enough power to decommission several nuclear power plants.) At the end of a decade they’ll have a reliable source of power that’ll last for many more decades that they can sell to businesses, data centers, apartment buildings, or whomever else wants electricity but isn’t eligible for this program.

For non-profit and community-owned utilities this would be a huge boon. They’d be able to better serve their customers during times the sun isn’t shining, upgrade their existing equipment to a smart grid, and be available to set up other revenue sources like EV charging stations or even data centers.

The picture is a bit dimmer for the for-profit utilities, although even there if the program were rolled out more slowly it could help them by ending the need to build new power plants and deal with the rising costs of fuel. My local power company, Portland General Electric, is for-profit, but they still happily buy electricity from me because that’s less they have to worry about producing.

For-profit utilities, by the way, are only 5 percent of the companies selling electricity in America, although because they’re concentrated in high population areas they serve about two-thirds of Americans.

If this were done nationally, you could even require all electric utilities to be owned and run by nonprofit co-ops or local governments like the other 95% are in America today. It would take some serious political commitment to resist their lobbying pressures, but could be done; Nebraska, for example, hasn’t had a for-profit utility company anywhere in the state for over 80 years.

And under FDR, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 did this on a regional basis that ended up producing the TVA and the Bonneville dam (now investor owned), which provides much of my region’s electricity.

If we were to revive the 30% federal tax credit (that Trump and the GOP killed with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill) for installing home solar and batteries that Louise and I used, and states were to add in their tax credits as many (including Oregon) did recently, it would also go a long way toward making such a program more easily possible.

And it would trigger an economic boom for the whole country. We could build solar panel factories, companies that construct the batteries and control systems, and launch a massive construction/installation revival that would hire millions and could last decades.

There are a few bugs and tweaks that would need to be worked out, not the least being the rate utilities pay during that ten-year “pay off the mortgage on the solar installation” period.

But imagine if the entire cities of Phoenix, Atlanta, Mobile, or Los Angeles — and hundreds of others — could run without having to burn an ounce of fossil fuels.

Electrification is exploding around the world. The majority of cars being sold in China and Europe are electric; both have massive, industrial scale wind and solar installations, as well as hundreds of millions of rooftop solar systems right now.

America is the laggard, largely because the fossil fuel industry owns the GOP, thanks in part to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing the bribery and purchase of judges and politicians.

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REALLY GOOD SUM AYN RAND AN 9 26

Ka$h Patel’s (his preferred spelling) pathetic performance before Congress last week has left many Americans wondering what’s going on with our federal government. We now have, as a result of Trump’s choices and the endorsement of every or virtually every Republican in the US Senate:

— An alcoholic B-list weekend TV star in charge of our military,

— A formerly heroin- and sex-addicted brainworm-infected lawyer in charge of our public health,

— A wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department,

— The president’s personal criminal defense lawyer in charge of the Justice Department,

— A C-list reality TV star in charge of our air traffic control system,

— A plumber in charge of Homeland Security,

— A “miracle weight-loss pill” TV hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid,

— A social media hustler and children’s book author in charge of the FBI,

— A predatory hedge fund guy in charge of the Treasury,

— A fracking CEO who denies the climate crisis in charge of the Energy Department,

— Jeffrey Epstein’s former next-door neighbor and Epstein Island visitor in charge of the Commerce Department,

— A politician who built his career on a phony story about his parents fleeing Castro in charge of telling America's story to the world,

— The mentee of an anti-democracy billionaire as our VP,

— A Project 2025 architect who was excited to put federal workers “in trauma” in charge of America’s federal budget,

— A racist whose own uncle publicly denounced him as an immigration hypocrite, and whose leaked emails pushed white nationalist material to Breitbart, in charge of immigration policy,

— A former NFL player in charge of public housing,

— A real estate developer and golf buddy with no diplomatic experience whatsoever negotiating with and sucking up to Vladimir Putin,

— The world’s richest man firing people investigating him and his companies while gutting the federal government and killing millions by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,”

— And a self-described “proud Islamophobe” with no government job vetting the National Security Council staff.

The model here is straightforward: government is something to be exploited for personal gain not public service, because government is essentially an evil thing. So, load it up with incompetents, suck up as much money as you can, and leave the mess to the Democrats:

— Three Republican presidents borrowed over $35 trillion, put it all on the national credit card, just to hand all that money to the billionaires who fund their campaigns and sustain their lavish lifestyles.

— Republicans in Congress have thrown millions off of food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid and refuse to fix Social Security or Medicare.

— Trump just discarded many of our pollution rules, a move that will lead to more cancers and asthma among our children.

— Bob Kennedy saluted putting cancer-causing chemicals on our food supply.

— Anything Putin wants from Trump he gets.

— They’re selling off public lands and destroying our park system like there’s no tomorrow, while rewriting America’s history into a white supremacist fantasy.

— Miller’s ICE goons are murdering Americans and getting away with it while imprisoning brown-skinned people without due process.

— Trump has made billions since becoming president through crypto scams and bets on his own war proclamations.

And that’s just the beginning. Which is causing millions of Americans, scratching their heads in wonder, to ask:

“Where did this anti-American-government insanity come from, and how did it come to seize control of the entire Republican Party?”

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army, a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous psychopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told *USA Today*’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like tearing down the East Wing of the White House and threatening to level the Kennedy Center.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:

“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote words that Trump must have loved, saying that he:

“[H]as learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.

Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished.

“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were:

“[T]he best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:

“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, she wrote,

“[A] brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s former chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where 25 so far have died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, Patel, Musk, Vance, Kennedy, and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly psychopathic president.

The result so far is over a half-million Americans unnecessarily dead from Covid, an economy laid waste, another unending war, the destruction of America’s standing around the world, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.

While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.

In the 1930s through the 1960s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK/LBJ put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 45 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharaohs in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of predators, hustlers, and grifters into the GOP.

And then there’s Trump’s war against Iran, his theft of Venezuela’s oil and gold, his attacks on NATO and threats against Greenland, his cutting off weapons to Ukraine, his cashing in on the presidency in ways that clearly violate the Constitution, and his and the GOP’s multiple efforts to rig our elections.

There’s a popular meme going around the internet these days that says:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to find out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, stop Trump and his lickspittles, and rebuild our civil institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 45 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country and giving Congress to Democrats who’ll actually investigate and prosecute these crimes against both democracy and our nation itself.

And that starts with checking your voter registration at vote.org and making a plan today to be sure your vote is both cast and counted.

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PPL LOSE 6TH? 14TH? STATE OF EXEMPTION?

AN 9 26

Trump just activated a secret 1990s court

Thom Hartmann September 16, 2026

Last Friday, for the first time in American history, a brand new court in America deported to Afghanistan Nazira Haji Zada, a 47-year-old lawful permanent resident living in Fort Worth. She was never charged with a crime, and wasn’t allowed to see the evidence against her (and neither were her lawyers). Attorney General Todd Blanche called the whole thing “a win for national security and the rule of law.”

This was possible because, in a moment of national hysteria following the Tim McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s, Congress authorized the creation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, something so counter to normal American concepts of the rule of law and fair play that no president before now had been willing to use it.

Until, of course, Trump.

When I was around twelve, my dad gave me his tattered copy of a paperback of Franz Kafka’s short novel The Trial and told me he wanted to discuss it after I’d read it. The book gave me nightmares for weeks, which was clearly his goal.

He was a tool-and-die maker in Lansing, a WWII vet, and a man who’d volunteered in 1945 to go fight and even die to defeat fascism and defend the rule of law. He saw The Trial as the essence of why he’d joined the Army straight out of high school.

The Trial opens with a bank clerk named Josef K. being dragged out of his bed one morning by two officers who won’t tell him what he’s being charged with. They made clear that even they didn’t know what his crime was.

Over the following year he’s pulled deeper and deeper into a dark court that’s never held in public or official buildings, whose judges he never sees, and whose files are “secret” and thus not available to him or his lawyer. Nobody ever sees or says what Joseph K. was accused of, and his attorneys advise him it’s best to stop asking because the fact that he was arrested in the first place will be considered by the court as all the proof they’ll need of his guilt.

The story ends when two men in frock coats drag him out to a quarry at night and carry out his execution as mandated by the secret court:

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread all his fingers.

“But the hands of one of the men closed around K.’s throat, while the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two men close in front of his face, cheek pressed to cheek, watching the outcome. ‘Like a dog!’ he said…”

When Kafka wrote that in 1914, he was a Jew living in Prague inside a dying empire. He never lived to see Hitler or the Gestapo or Putin build the very thing he’d imagined, but my dad did which is why he’d given me that book so I could understand what a police state would feel like from the inside. He told me repeatedly throughout my life that “only the rule of law” and the Constitution protected us from the tyranny he’d volunteered to fight as a teenager.

I got a glimpse into that world myself twenty-some years later, in the winter of 1986, when my teenage daughter and I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and were picked up in East Berlin by a young gypsy cab driver named Torsten. Before we’d traveled even a full block he had us rehearsing a cover story, that we were his cousins from the West, in case the Volkspolizei or the Stasi pulled us over.

That’s because in East Germany — where the secret police were then largely run by a guy named Vladimir Putin — Torsten knew that anybody could be hauled into jail at any time for any reason and nobody would ever have to explain why.

What happened Friday here in America is the Trump administration’s version of the same thing:

— Under this bizarre law in these secret courts, 8 U.S.C. § 1534, the judge reviews the government’s classified evidence alone, in chambers, and neither the accused nor the public may learn what it is or where it came from beyond an unclassified summary.

— The Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply.

— The government may use the fruits of FISA wiretaps and warrantless physical searches, and the accused is specifically denied the right to suppress evidence she claims was gathered illegally.

— You get a court-appointed “special attorney” with a security clearance who can look at the secret file on your behalf, but that lawyer is forbidden by law from telling you or other lawyers what’s in it, and if he does he faces ten to twenty-five years in federal prison.

Kafka gave Josef K. a lawyer who couldn’t see the file with the charges against him. Now Trump mandates a lawyer who can see the file, but goes to prison if he talks about it to any other living being.

Zada’s public defenders put it plainly before she was chained and thrown onto the plane to Afghanistan:

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said in a statement, adding that her consent to removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.”

This secret court is only the most recent brick in the fascist wall Trump, his tech bro billionaire supporters, and his fascist lickspittles are building around what used to be American law. Last year he sent 238 men to life sentences in to a torture prison in El Salvador — most with no criminal record whatsoever — without even bothering with a hearing for them.

One of them — a gay makeup artist named Andry Hernández Romero who was snatched by masked, armed men at the asylum appointment the government had set up for him — was shipped off to his life sentence in a foreign hellhole on the strength of crowns tattooed above the words “mom” and “dad”; he spent 125 days incommunicado before a prisoner swap got him out.

Shades of Joseph K. 109 years later.

ICE today is holding roughly 65,000 people in detention, most of them never convicted of even any minor crime (being in the country without papers is a civil infraction, not a crime) and never having seen a real judge or courtroom. Most will wait months for a hearing that may never come, a clear violation of their Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

In their frantic efforts to purge America of nonwhite people, Trump’s racist toadies have frozen our refugee program since he was sworn in a year ago January, with more than 100,000 fully vetted people stranded abroad. We’ve only admitted 6,069 refugees, and all but three were lily-white South Africans.

These misogynist white supracist fascists are also purging our government’s own institutions of women and people of color. Whiskey Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out at least twenty generals, admirals, and senior civilian leaders; when he removed the Army’s chief of staff in April, in the middle of a war, the Pentagon announced it in true Kafkaesque fashion without even bothering to give a reason.

White South African immigrant Elon Musk’s DOGE and the OPM drove out more than 300,000 federal workers in a single year, with Black women losing roughly a third of those jobs. (I can no longer link to this because the administration deleted their workforce demographic data in March, 2025.) Many were fired with Joseph K.-style form letters that cited nonspecific “performance” issues, often sent to people who’d gotten glowing reviews just weeks previously.

One NIH analyst’s supervisor told her that management had been ordered to pick either misconduct or performance as the reason and so had simply randomly picked one. A federal judge correctly called the entire process a “sham” and when ProPublica dug into what ICE has been up to they found more than 170 US citizens who’d been dragged off and imprisoned, often for days with no access to either a phone or a lawyer, all in clear violation of the law and our Constitution.

Each of these examples of overreach and lawbreaking by Trump, ICE, and the DOJ are grounded in the same basic logic Kafka described: you are powerless before the all-knowing all-seeing state. Instead of being judged, you’re processed through an impersonal, uncaring, brutal machine.

If you’re arrested it must be because you’re guilty, even if nobody knows for sure of what. And when you ask why this is happening to you, the answer is a variation on, “You don’t need to know and, besides, we won’t tell you in any case.”

My father’s generation understood something we’ve lost track of in the years of rightwing hysteria since McVeigh and 9/11.

Our Sixth Amendment guarantees that every accused person — citizen or not — must be told the nature and cause of the accusation they’re charged with, have a public trial, and be confronted with the witnesses against them. The Fourteenth Amendment requires and guarantees due process for everybody confronted by the government, citizen or not.

When a government stops honoring the rule of law, due process, and fundamental human rights it cease to be a legitimate republic and has demonstrably slid into the early stages of being reinvented as a full-blown fascist state.

Zada may well have been involved in potential terrorist activity, although none of us will ever know because of the secretive nature of this case. If she was guilty, it should have been established in public; we have plenty of ways to protect sources and methods, when necessary, that are consistent with our Constitution.

Torsten knew what a country that doesn’t respect the rule of law and civil rights felt like. So did my dad, which is why he asked me to read The Trial when I was twelve. We’re not East Germany yet, but Trump’s clearly learned from his mentor/owner who used to run that country’s secret police, and this new terrorist court is now established as a legal precedent. Which means this is just beginning.

Call your senators and representative at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them the Alien Terrorist Removal Court should be repealed and that not one more person, citizen or not, should be deported, detained, or fired by this government without being told why.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and support my daily work here, because the only real answer to a government that won’t explain itself is a public that never stops demanding it does.

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an 9 26

The dark electoral secret the media has hidden for 50 years

For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice.

Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?

In the 2008 election, for example, CNN anchor Kirin Chetry noted that in Ohio:

“It was, after all, 120,000 votes that made the difference in that state in 2004 and gave the win to now President Bush.”

Republicans controlled the voting in Ohio, so they rigged polling places so people in mostly-Black, Hispanic, and student areas would have to wait hours and hours in line to vote, knowing that these were also the people most likely to be paid hourly and so would be unwilling to stand in line for hours to vote.

Here’s how it played on CNN from their November 4, 2008 transcript:

“MARY SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kiran, certainly, around Ohio, board of election officials are bracing for long lines. And this is because the state is expecting record turnout, 80 percent of Ohio’s voters are expected to turn out and about a quarter of the voters vote early.

“And, of course, we’ve been seeing those long lines over the last several days in Columbus where voters had to wait several hours to cast a ballot, but for the most part, people were in good spirits. And the enthusiasm outweighs the frustrations.”

No mention that this is the #1 voter suppression technique that Republicans have been using in the states they control ever since the 1960s.

In that election, lines in Black neighborhoods in Republican-run Georgia ran eight to ten hours, four hours in Blue parts of Republican-run Florida, and the same in Democratic strongholds in Republican-run Virginia. As CNN’s Campbell Brown reported:

“Take a look at this. Early voting lines around Atlanta today were two, four and at times even 10 hours long, pretty maddening. And, unfortunately, for the impatient among us, it’s been the same in some of the other early voting states as well. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm.”

Nobody bothered to mention that the long lines are almost entirely in heavily-Democratic precincts. I’ve been voting since I was 18 — including a decade in Georgia — but have always lived in mostly-white mostly-upper-middle class neighborhoods so I’ve never waited more than 15 minutes to vote.

But the media seems to consistently miss that disparity or the reason Republicans always set it up, instead telling the stories of “brave” voters so “dedicated” to democracy that they’ll stand in line for hours.

Here’s the Washington Post on election day, 2012 from 40% nonwhite Arlington, Virginia, whose elections were controlled by a State Board of Elections appointed by Republican Governor Bob McDonnell:

“At 8 a.m., in Arlington, Va., 644 people were lined up outside an apartment building polling station, almost all of them late for work. ‘I’m glad to see everyone out, it doesn’t matter who they’re voting for,’ said Emma Durazzo, 84, who works at the Pentagon and, in 28 years in the neighborhood, has never seen lines like this on Election Day.”

In previous elections going back to 2002, Democrats (Governors Mark Warner and Tim McCain) had run the elections in Virginia.

Pew and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did an in-depth analysis after the 2012 election and found that nationally 20% of Black voters and 17% of Hispanic voters reported waits exceeding 30 minutes, versus 11% of white voters.

The Brennan center found that Black voters typically waited 45% longer in line than white voters, and Latino voters waited 46% longer.

As Beto O'Rourke notes about what happened when John Roberts and his corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act:

“Within minutes of the decision, Texas imposed the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, disenfranchising more than 600,000 citizens who, all of a sudden, couldn’t meet the state’s standard for proving who they were. Over the decade that followed Texas also closed more than 700 polling places, twice the number of the next most restrictive state, and almost all of them in African American and Latino neighborhoods. Congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, voting by mail was restricted and voting locations were moved miles away from colleges and universities.

“Without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, politicians were free to not only pick their voters, but they could now choose who could vote in the first place.”

While this may be a secret to the media and most white voters, Republicans are very, very clear about their favorite voter suppression strategy. Just look at what they did last week in Texas’ Tarrant County, where the 1.2 million voters are 60% nonwhite.

With 316 voting locations, the county experienced long lines in the 2020 presidential election, as CBS Dallas/Fort Worth reported. They noted:

“Bill and Dee Horn waited two hours, but said it was well worth it. Now in their 60s, they say they’ve voted in every presidential election since they were 18.”

But the lines in this increasingly blue area weren’t long enough for the Republicans who control the Commissioner’s Court that determines how many voting locations there will be and where. They cut out 92 of those polling places, virtually all of them in minority or student areas.

When people have to stand in line for six hours to vote in Tarrant County this November, will the media cover it the way ABC/Channel 11 in Republican-controlled North Carolina did?

“At University City library in Charlotte, lines were two hours long Thursday morning and growing. Some standing in line said they were ready for the election to end.

“‘Voting is the equivalent of the shower we all needed after the three (presidential) debates,’ said Gregory Weeks, chairman of the UNC Charlotte political science department, who waited two hours to cast his ballot.

“Back in Raleigh, Mitchell said she didn’t mind waiting in line.

“‘It’s important,’ she said, ‘and I’m happy to get the chance to do it.’”

During the Jim Crow era, conservatives used a wide array of strategies to prevent Blacks and other minorities (and often women) from voting, including guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, so-called literacy tests, requiring the recitation of part of the Constitution from memory, poll taxes, etc.

When these were all outlawed with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republicans shifted their strategy to creating long lines, purging people from voting rolls, and challenging signatures on mail-in ballots.

In the first national election after the Act’s passage, for example, the only precinct in Tallulah, Louisiana that was majority Black ended up with one single polling place for roughly 1,400 voters. When it opened at 6 a.m., approximately 600 people, virtually all Black, were already standing in line.

The newly-created US Commission on Civil Rights concluded, as Black aldermanic candidate Zelma Wyche said:

“[B]ecause of the long wait, many Negro voters…tired of waiting and went home without casting ballots.”

When reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast went through official government numbers from the 2024 election, he found that Republican voter suppression won the day for Trump and the GOP, just as it had for George W. Bush in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

And that doesn’t even begin to count all the people who simply gave up and went back to work after standing in line for an hour or two.

You can bet that if Democratically-controlled Blue states had been shorting voting machines and polling places in upscale white Republican areas, the GOP’s squeals could be heard halfway around the world. It would be an epic scandal, and the media would cover it as such.

This fall, how will they cover the long lines and outraged voters who show up only to discover they’ve been purged from the rolls by Republican secretaries of state? Stay tuned…

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7 26 new bk

chapters: https://hartmannreport.com/s/sunday-excerpt

https://hartmannreport.com/p/prologue-a-crime-in-plain-sight

https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-1-the-scene-of-the-crime

ch 2 sanderson delmas https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-2-the-courtroom-showdown

3 https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-3-the-triggerman-jc-bancroft

sjf: https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-4-the-mastermind-supreme

ch 5 conkling, hist lochner post: https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-5-the-seventy-year-legal

Chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off - by Thom Hartmann

The Lie That Changed America - YouTube

followup vid:

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The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, Thom Hartmann

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The Mark Thompson Show

20,853 views Jan 16, 2025

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AN 9 26

Trump's crazy new cheap scheme destined to backfire in spectacular fashion

Thom Hartmann September 04, 2026

Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”

You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.

Back in February of 1989 I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic.

What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.

Four years earlier, Reagan and his Treasury Secretary James Baker had begun leaning hard on Venezuela to cut back on their social programs and reduce their taxes on rich people, just like they’d done here with trickle-down, only this one under the banner of “austerity” and IMF-supervised “restructuring.”

Venezuela’s President when I arrived was Carlos Andrés Pérez, a guy who’d successfully campaigned in 1988 against the Reagan/Bush austerity plan, calling the entire thing “a neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing.” He’d also been the president five years earlier, and in that time had nationalized Venezuela’s oil, making him a bit of a folk hero.

But when he took office on February 2, 1989, three weeks before I arrived, the previous president (Jaime Lusinchi) had run the country $33 billion into debt, giving Bush and the IMF an excuse to force their neoliberal austerity program onto new President Pérez, who — disastrously — went along with it. His first step was to raise bus fares, which he thought would be benign. It wasn’t.

In the country with the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, Russia’s, or America’s — Bush’s price for debt relief was that the country’s poor had to pay more to get to work. Just 25 days later, the day I arrived, millions of angry people flooded the streets in response to that increase in bus fares and Pérez declared a state of national emergency.

By the end of the next afternoon, the 28th, Pérez had suspended the constitution and his army had killed at least 276 civilians and wounded another 1,500. Human rights groups said thousands died as bodies were dumped into unmarked pits in a corner of the Cementerio General del Sur that Caraqueños call La Peste, “the plague.” The brutal state of emergency, endorsed by US President GHW Bush, lasted another month.

Now, we’re not only risking a repeat of that, but we’ve also run this movie before in other countries. In an incredible irony, the most well-known of those was Iran in 1953 when our CIA overthrew democratically-elected Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh because he’d nationalized that country’s oil.

We replaced Mossadegh with the brutal, repressive rule of the Shah, and we’re still paying for that one, this time with American blood and treasure thanks to Trump’s and Hegseth’s criminal attack and bumbling incompetence.

Calling his latest imperialist scam in Venezuela “the biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump is now filling in some of the details of his corrupt attempt to make off with some 65 billion barrels of oil sitting across 17 fields that represent about a fifth of Venezuela’s estimated 303 billion barrels total.

And it’s a grim repeat of our worst experiments in colonialism from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Gregory Brew, senior energy analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Fortune magazine yesterday:

“If the U.S. scheme in Venezuela sounds colonial, that’s because it is.”

Trump tried to put a happy face on his scheme to steal Venezuela’s oil by saying that he’ll be using it to refill our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he’s drained down to 286 million barrels in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices, its lowest level since 1982 in the wake of the Arab Oil Embargoes.

But, like with so much else Trump says, that’s an easily disproven lie; our salt caves can’t hold Venezuela’s thick, heavy sour crude because they and their pumping equipment are designed and built for light, sweet crude like we pump here. Putting Venezuelan oil into them would gum them up and destroy their usefulness forever.

We do have, however, massive refineries along the Gulf coast that were built by the Koch brothers and others specifically for that heavy Venezuelan crude back in the days when it was easily flowing to America. They’re probably salivating at the opportunity to dump the expensive Canadian tar sands oil they’re now refining and get back to the cheaper and easier stuff from down south. Perhaps this was all even their idea.

Trump says he’s “negotiated” a 100-year lease with Delcy Rodríguez, the illegitimate “acting president” of Venezuela who was Maduro’s VP when the two of them lost the election but stayed in power anyway. Today, the only things keeping her in power — after a majority of voters said “No” — are their army and our Navy and Air Force.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before.

To make things even more classically Trumpian, he’s giving the contract to handle this oil we’re snatching to an allegedly corrupt billionaire who’s wanted for arrest in Switzerland, a fellow named Alejandro Betancourt López.

López made his fortune from insider no-bid power plant contracts with Chávez; Transparency International’s Venezuelan chapter estimated he’d overcharged the Venezuelan government by $2.9 billion. American prosecutors identified him as an “unnamed co-conspirator” in a scheme they say embezzled more than a billion dollars from those deals, leading Swiss authorities to freeze his assets and issue an international arrest warrant for him.

When British police arrested Betancourt López in London in November of 2025, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s senior officials intervened, pushed the Swiss to close the case without charges, refused to act on the arrest warrant, and gave him a visa to enter the United States.

The corrupt lawyer who argued in American courts that López shouldn’t be charged with embezzlement was then staying at one of López’s mansions in Madrid and has a familiar name: Rudy Giuliani.

So, not only did Trump and Hegseth illegally and without congressional authorization invade a sovereign country, kill more than a hundred people, and abduct its head of state, but we then handed a massive chunk of that country’s oil — for the next century — to a man whose arrest warrant we’re sitting on and refusing to execute.

Meanwhile, nobody can find the money from the tanker-carried oil we first seized right after our invasion of Venezuela.

According to The Financial Times, Trump collected roughly $13 billion selling seized Venezuelan crude, routed at first through a bank account he controlled in Qatar, and six months later it appears to have vanished into thin air. It’s definitely not back in Venezuela.

Elizabeth Warren says the entire oil seizure and sale is a crime, and Democratic Representative Juaquin Castro and Republican Representative María Elvira Salazar are echoing her sentiment. The money didn’t even show up when the country was begging for it this June when two earthquakes killed 2,595 people and they desperately needed the cash for rescue and reconstruction.

Given all this, it should be obvious that this sleazy deal is going to fail, and that failure will be both spectacular, bloody, and expensive.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still owed billions from Chavez’ nationalization and aren’t going anywhere near this one. Trump sneered at Concoco’s CEO when he asked for reparations for what was taken from them back in the day.

And oil industry experts say it’ll take years, perhaps a decade, to get Venezuelan production meaningfully increased, a timeline that will run well past the political lifetimes of both Trump and Rodríguez.

Get ready: somewhere in the barrios I once worked in above Caracas, a young officer and his friends are running the political arithmetic I saw people doing during those hours I was there in February of 1989. He’ll be the next Hugo Chavez, the guy who overthrew López and re-nationalized the oil.

Seriously, do we really think the citizens of that country — after all they’ve been through over the past four generations — are just going to sit back and take it as our military props up a government nobody elected, hand their oil money to an accused money launderer Trump crony, and let us ship the proceeds through a Trump-owned bank account in Qatar?

Is anybody in America that naïve other than Republican voters who live on a diet of Fox “News”? As Senator Jack Reed — the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee — said:

“President Trump’s effort to turn the U.S. military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”

Which raises the question: Where are Republicans who control Congress on this harebrained doomed-to-fail scheme? Every one of them knows just how crazy it is, but it seems most of them are figuring that their silence will buy them a million-dollar-a-year lobbying job if they can just keep their heads down and not challenge Trump and his oil billionaire buddies.

Call your senators and your representative at 202-224-3121 and ask them what happened to Venezuela’s $13 billion and to support a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s insane war against Iran and further military actions in Venezuela.

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The forgotten tape proving the GOP never stopped rigging democracy

Thom HartmannAugust 13, 2026

Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.

On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:

“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …

“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”

Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”

Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.

When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.

In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.

The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.

The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.

None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.

As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.

While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.

— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.

— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and ten months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.

— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.

— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.

So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.

We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.

Therefore, Democrats must:

— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.

— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event — Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.

— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.

— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.

— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.

— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.

— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.

— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.

— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.

People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.

While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.

For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.

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The dark truth behind the secret war inside the Democratic party

Thom Hartmann July 30, 2026

Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps.

Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

The most recent example is how Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — whose father was CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan back in the day — has endorsed Congresswoman Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the upcoming primary in that state. El-Sayed, a public health official, has worked for Medicare for All his entire career; he even wrote a book about it, Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide. Stevens, a recipient of corporate money, opposes the program.

El-Sayed summarized the situation with a remarkably clear and straightforward statement that highlights the conundrum facing Democratic Party leadership trying to advance elections for both factions:

“I think in this race, at the end of the day, it tends to be that candidates who generally have been funded the same way will tend to go together. Those of us who don’t take corporate money tend to stick together. Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together.”

The media isn’t helping Democrats work through this. CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday about what the Party’s policy positions would be if they regained control of the House or Senate this fall:

“Your party is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, [have] open borders…”

Sweet Jesus. When a real, educated, credentialed reporter can’t distinguish between a teenager with a TikTok account or a looney tunes narcissist from the DSA and the positions held by actual progressive Democratic politicians, things are really grim. (Or maybe Dana is just pre-sucking-up to the Ellisons?)

Yes, the co-chair of the DSA recently went on Fox “News” this week and called for a bunch of stupid policies like abolishing the Senate, ending national borders, and shutting down all our prisons. And, yes, Republicans will be pounding on this, trying to suggest that she was speaking for the Democratic Party.

But she was not. The DSA is not the Democratic Party, and even Democratic Party candidates who endorse “democratic socialism” are not endorsing the DSA or its positions.

There’s literally not a single actual elected Democrat who’s ever called for “open borders” (that’s actually the position of the far-right Libertarian Party) and other than the occasional call for police reform following the murder of George Floyd, none are calling for “defunding the police.” Lefty icon Bernie Sanders, for goodness sake, said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”

Even Republicans (Senators John Thune and Roger Wiker) are making a case for ending military aid to Israel, and a recent YouGov poll found that more than half of all Americans want to abolish ICE and replace it with a more professional and transparent agency to enforce our immigration laws.

So, let’s set the record straight. There’s not a single “far left” progressive position held by actual elected progressive Democratic politicians that has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, most have well over 80% support, and virtually all are supported above 50% by the majority of Americans of all political stripes.

This isn’t “far left”: it’s the radical middle! We’ve been “radicalized” by 45 years of neoliberal policies by both parties that have gutted the American middle class and the American Dream, and want actual fighters who’ll make our country safe for working people again.

We want politicians who’ll return us to the ideal of a single full-time paycheck, regardless of educational attainment, paying enough to buy a house, a car every few years, take an annual vacation, put our kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement.

Two-thirds of us had that when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981 and launched the Republican War on Working People™. Hell, that’s the “Square Deal” that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on over 100 years ago, and the vast majority of Americans still want it!

While corporate-money-dependent Democrats may oppose Medicare for All or ending student debt or taxing the rich in a meaningful way, progressive Democrats — the ones being vilified right now by Trump, the GOP, the media, and their own on-the-take peers — are clear about most all of their positions. They are that:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan and, no, Trump did not fix that), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like the Supreme Court has ruled it now works if a state wants to take away your gun.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like every other developed country in the world has.

— It’s crazy that one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of America (165 million of us) and he and his peers typically pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90% on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our 20th century scientific and business prowess. And it’s morally and politically wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Healthcare should be a right, like in every other developed country in the world, instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you make.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion (or, like Thomas Paine, no religion) and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the doctor’s office to the voting booth.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment.

— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system, not a brutal regime that’s literally killing people while it tears our nation apart.

— And it’s completely insane that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would say that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, which is why most Democrats think Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Sadly, many of the corporate-dependent Democrats oppose many of these positions because they’d conflict with the interests of their donors. This is something the Party needs to work out, particularly as voters increasingly make their desires known in primary elections. But few of these positions would have been alien to FDR or LBJ; most are simply a call for a return to the middle.

It’s frankly astounding that Jeffries didn’t explode when Bash threw out all those disingenuous GOP talking points (I sure would have!), but he politely steered the conversation back to affordability and generally spoke well of his progressive peers and candidates. That’s his job, of course.

And it’s also our job. With the billions that’ll be spent this year to convince Americans that progressives are communists who want to abolish the police and have open borders, not to mention the billionaire-owned-media dialing the echo machine up to 11, it falls on us to educate our friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

America needs to break from the past 45 years of bipartisan neoliberalism and once again embrace the values that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson succeeded in putting into law and Republicans and corporate Democrats have been systematically dismantling since 1981 as they brag about “ending welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government is over.”

Average American voters have largely succeeded in waking up to these scams; now it’s our job to infiltrate and wake up the Democratic Party itself. Tag, we’re it!

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Trump's AG pick is letting a a 111-year-old corpse dictate your rights

Thom HartmannAugust 06, 2026

Todd Blanche is campaigning to become our real, confirmed Attorney General, presumably so he can better help Donald Trump, his corrupt family, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make off with as much of our money as they can.

Most recently, his campaign took him to the rightwing “religious” group Intercessors for America. When he was asked about progress in totally ending legal abortion in America, or at least Red State America, he told them:

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and and it will be permanent.”

He added, later in the call:

“If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that. They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.”

So, how’s he going to pull this off? His sworn testimony before Congress may offer us a glimpse into the plan.

Ted Cruz asked him:

“18 USC 24 Section 1461, the Comstock Act, provides that every article or thing designed or adapted or intended for producing abortion is declared to be non-mailable. I have to admit that statutory text to me looks quite straightforward. It is not subtle. It is not difficult. It is straightforward. …

“[W]ill you commit that the Department will carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act and other Federal pro-life acts?”

Blanche answered: “Yes.”

How does he plan to “protect every life from the moment of conception”? Apparently, with the Comstock Act. And he may well have the backing of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court as their next step after their Dobbs decision.

Back during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March of 2024, the Comstock Act was invoked repeatedly by Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Erin Hawley, the wife of Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who was the lawyer arguing before the Court that the abortion drug, Mifepristone, should be banned nationwide.

Justice Sam Alito said:

“This [Comstock Act] is a prominent provision. It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law. Everybody in this field knew about it.”

Erin Hawley was emphatic:

“We don’t think that there’s any case of this court that empowers FDA to ignore other federal law. The Comstock Act says that drugs should not be mailed … either through the mail or through common carriers.”

And Clarence Thomas laid out the possibility of future litigation when he essentially threatened the lawyer for Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of Mifepristone:

“How do you respond to an argument that mailing your product and advertising it would violate the Comstock Act?” He went on to note that the law “is fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours.”

In other words, they want the Act enforced today.

So, what the heck is the Comstock Act and why are Republicans trying to revive it before the Supreme Court and in threatening letters to pharmacy chains?

You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.

Comstock spent decades scouring the country collecting hard-core pornography, which he enthusiastically shared with men in Congress, and harassing “loose women.” For example, when he visited a belly-dancing show (then a new craze) in Chicago at the Cairo Theatre during the World’s Fair of 1893, he demanded the show be shut down.

As Amy Sohn, who wrote a brilliant Comstock biography titled The Man Who Hated Women, noted:

“Despite national controversy and Comstock’s intervention, ultimately the only alteration made to the fair’s belly dancing was costuming: the dancers swapped their gauze blouses for thin woolen undershirts. The vice hunter had lost in Chicago. But he would not forget the dancers, and would have four of them arrested and fined when they came to New York that winter. New York, after all, was Comstockland.”

Comstock lobbied for and shepherded through Congress a law passed on March 3, 1873 titled “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” Today we refer to it as the Comstock Act.

It’s language with regard to abortion is not at all ambiguous:

“Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance … designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and

“Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and

“Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing—

“Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.” (emphasis mine)

The penalty is also not ambiguous. Persons mailing information about abortion, or drugs or devices to produce an abortion:

“[S]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, for the first such offense, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, for each such offense thereafter.” (emphasis mine)

The Biden administration argued that the Comstock Act of 1873 was set aside almost a century ago.

And, indeed, in 1930, the Appeals Court for the Second Circuit ruled in Youngs Rubber Corp. v. C.I. Lee & Co that the law couldn’t apply to things sent through the mail that are legal, even if they were illegal at the time of the passage of the Comstock Act. (The case involved condoms manufactured by Youngs Rubber Company.)

“Such a construction,” the Court wrote, “would prevent mailing to or by a physician of any drug or mechanical device ‘adapted’ for contraceptive or abortifacient uses, although the physician desired to use or to prescribe it for proper medical purposes.”

The law has been amended by Congress four times (in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994), but the language above about abortion was never struck because legislators figured the 1930 appeals court’s ruling rendered it nugatory.

But don’t tell that to Trump’s appointee, Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, who ruled in 2023 that Mifepristone was to be banned nationwide: he based a large part of his decision on the plain language of the Comstock Act.

Republican members of Congress agree, and want the Comstock Act enforced nationwide now. They think they don’t even need a ruling from the Supreme Court: they just need Todd Blanche to “enforce the law already on the books.”

In a letter sent to CVS (among other pharmacy chains), Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and eight other Republican senators (Lankford, Daines, Braun, Rubio, Marshall, Risch, Crapo and Blackburn) wrote that the Biden interpretation (and that of Congress in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994) is wrong.

They explicitly asserted that the Comstock Act is still in effect and they want it enforced:

“We write to express our support and agreement with 21 [Republican] State Attorneys General,” they wrote “who have reminded you that Federal law in 18 U.S.C. 1461-1462 [the Comstock Act] criminalizes nationwide using the mail, or interstate shipment by any express company or common carrier, to send or receive any drug that is ‘designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’”

The 1930 court ruling that lawmakers and judges had, for over 90 years, believed only applied the Comstock Act to items that were illegal (like child porn), Senator Hide-Smith wrote:

“[D]oes not protect CVS or any other individual or entity from being prosecuted within the five-year statute of limitations for the illegal mailing or interstate shipment of abortion drugs … even for conduct that occurs today.”

Keep in mind, under the plain language of the Comstock Act this could also apply to birth control pills, IUDs, and other things used to prevent pregnancy. And, of course, pornography and “masturbation devices” like vibrators.

The lawyer for Republicans defending Kacsmaryk’s ruling, Erin Hawley, went so far as to assert before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that even physicians and pharmacies shouldn’t be able to receive Mifepristone or other drugs that could produce an abortion via the mail, FedEx, or UPS:

“What the Comstock law says is that it is improper to mail things that induce or cause abortions, which is precisely the action the FDA took in 2021 when it permitted the mailing of abortion drugs.”

If Hawley’s interpretation is enforced by Todd Blanche once he’s securely settled into his office with a vote by Republicans in the Senate, all abortions in the United States could be ended when drugs and suction and surgical devices designed specifically for the procedure can no longer be shipped to hospitals, clinics, or physicians’ offices.

This is no idle threat.

As Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond wrote for his Substack newsletter, anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, who’s helped several cities around the country put into law local versions of the Comstock Act, told him:

“If a future president were to enforce these federal statutes, then they could shut down every abortion facility in America.”

This is the specific goal of these mostly “Christian” religious fanatics: to completely outlaw all abortion and radically restrict access to birth control. And having Blanche start enforcing the law that’s already on the books, provoking a battle heading for the Supreme Court, is all it would take.

Such a case would, based on Blanche’s sworn testimony to the Senate, have Republicans, Clarence Thomas, and Sam Alito gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation.

So, if you’re concerned about the future of abortion rights in America, it might be a good time to call your Senators — particularly if either is a Republican — and let them know your thoughts on Blanche’s nomination that’ll probably get a vote in the next two days.

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AN 7 26

The real reason Republicans are trying to tear America apart

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with the press at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 24, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Thom HartmannJuly 15, 2026

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?

— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?

— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?

— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?

— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?

— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?

— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?

— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?

— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?

— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?

— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?

— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?

— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?

— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?

— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?

— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?

— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?

— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?

— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?

— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?

— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?

— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?

— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?

— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?

— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?

— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?

— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?

— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?

— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?

— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?

— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?

— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?

— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?

— Weaken whistleblower protections?

— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?

— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?

— Create a network of concentration camps across America?

— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?

— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?

— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?

— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?

— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?

— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?

— Ban books and censor libraries?

— Criminalize trans and queer people?

— Roll back gun safety measures?

— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?

— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?

— Nakedly politicize the military?

— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?

— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?

— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?

— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?

— Sabotage the US Postal Service?

— Undermine the census?

— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?

— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?

— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?

— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?

— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?

— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?

— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?

— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?

— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there.

Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?

---

THOM 7 26 AN PENDLETON ACT SLAUGHTER andrew jackson?

AN

Study confirms what many suspected: the 2024 election was rigged

U.S. President Donald Trump places a hand over his heart during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., November 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

:{Thom HartmannJuly 10, 2026

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.

---

AN 7 26

Trump claims he can suspend the Constitution wherever he wants — and he's already started

Thom Hartmann July 09, 2026 |

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past 20, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation, the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany, my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road, they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

So don’t let this one slide past as somebody else’s problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called “hundred-mile zone.”

There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.

Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in

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7 8 26 anti-commie

...t. Get this. This is an these are act this is an actual quote from a speech that Trump gave a couple of days

0:16

16 seconds

ago at the faith and freedom conference or what you know this this Christian nationalist conference that he was speaking at. He says the Democrats they

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24 seconds

are horrible. They want to resume the transgender mutilation of our children.

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28 seconds

They want to restart the war on Christmas and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, and they're communists.

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35 seconds

They're not social democrats. They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. You'll live in squalor. There will be no food. There

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44 seconds

will be no housing. There will be no military. There will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You'll be a third

0:52

52 seconds

world inhabitant in every way. And everyone will suffer or die. You'll suffer or die. That's what happens for thousands of years cuz it's been happening by different names. The

1:00

1 minute

problem is a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses. Always does, always has. But I'm sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them

1:08

1 minute, 8 seconds

is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They're animals. They're animals. They hate our country and they

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1 minute, 16 seconds

hate our people. And then he goes on to say, "These are not social democrats. These are hardcore godless communists.

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1 minute, 24 seconds

They're godless communists. All communists are godless. They don't believe in God. That's the most serious threat to our country since its existence in my opinion 250 years ago.

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1 minute, 34 seconds

This is a major threat to our country.

...

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VID CALLOUT OUT MTA 9K VIEWS 9 MIN

Delaware Just Made The WORST Decision...

May 29, 2026 #BreakingNews #Politics #MoreFromThom

Delaware just voted to let corporations vote in some elections, giving money, greed, and billionaires that much more power in democracy. This will help any corporations that want tax decreases on themselves and payouts from the government possible if they fund the right candidate.

no lnx

Follow the money: How one crooked lie became a 140-year assault on America

paywall for pm Follow the money: How one crooked lie became a 140-year assault on America - Alternet.org

Thom HartmannJune 01, 2026

Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.

In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.

The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.

The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.

But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.

The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.

Their efforts worked; just 10 years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:

“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)

The railroad corporations claimed that because they were taxed at different rates on property they owned in Santa Clara and Santa Ana counties in California, they were “persons” being denied the “equal protection of the law.” The Court determined that the California constitution already dealt with tax issues like that, giving the railroad the relief they wanted, but there was no federal action at all.

However, the lie about corporate personhood buried in the headnote took root and lives on to this day. For example, yesterday afternoon I asked DuckDuckGo’s AI the question:

“Who won the 1886 Santa Clara Supreme Court decision?”

And the answer I got back was:

“The Southern Pacific Railroad Company won the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the railroad, affirming that corporations are considered ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

None of that is true, but it was nonetheless the basis of the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision written by Lewis Powell himself (of “Powell Memo” fame), claiming that because corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment right to free speech — they could spend big bucks to swing elections. In that decision, the Court majority footnoted:

“It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U. S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U. S. 578 (1896).”

Because corporations don’t have mouths to speak with, Powell reasoned, their money served the same purpose. So they could “speak” freely with millions thrown into elections, corrupting our democracy to their benefit and our detriment.

Two years earlier, in Buckley v Valejo, the Court had struck down the 1970s campaign contribution limits Congress put into law after the Nixon bribery scandals. They ruled that wealthy Senator James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) could use his own money to finance his election campaign because his money was functionally the same thing as his First Amendment-protected free speech.

Which led straight to Clarence Thomas — the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, then on the take from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting rightwing billionaire — to cast the deciding vote in Citizens United.

That bizarre decision blew up hundreds of campaign finance and other good-government laws, claiming that there should be virtually no limits on the money morbidly rich individuals, corporations, and even foreign entities could pour into US elections.

Clarence Thomas even cited the Bellotti case and, thus, its reference to Santa Clara to justify handing our democratic processes over to the richest people and biggest companies in the nation.

And now we’ve arrived at terminal insanity. As Reuters reported on Tuesday:

“A judge in Delaware, where many big U.S. companies are incorporated, ruled on Tuesday that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections was not violating the state’s constitution.

“Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.”

More corporations are incorporated in Delaware than any other state in the nation because of that state’s lax corporate laws and low corporate taxes: there are more corporations in the state than people.

And now they can vote.

I wrote Who Stole the American Dream? to wake people up to the corruption of our democracy by the rich and powerful, particularly the corporate “artificial beings” that keep buying off judges and politicians because of corrupt Supreme Court cases citing that corrupt headnote, starting with Santa Clara and then going to Covington and then straight-lined to Bellotti and Citizens United.

The entire thing is a fraud, a 140-year-long scam, as knowledgeable legislators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Elizabeth Warren will tell you in a New York minute.

And it needs to be overturned.

There are a few ways to do that, the most effective being a constitutional amendment, but reorganizing the Supreme Court and even strong legislation can take a bite out of it. I detail them all in the book, and good government groups like Move to Amend and Public Citizen have been on this case for years.

The situation, after all, has become so bad that I suggested in my book Rebooting the American Dream (which Bernie read from on the floor of the Senate in his famous filibuster) that members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR-style patches to let folks know which corporations are “sponsoring” them.

If we don’t get active and take back our democracy for humans, corporations may one day vote one of themselves into office and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court will probably simply nod along.

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AN 7 26

Trump is now spying on his own supporters — and the irony is stunning

:{Thom HartmannJuly 03, 2026

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows ten entire states and cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

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TRANSCRIPT

America [music] just expanded voting rights to corporations. Yes. Really? I mean, this is just wild. I mentioned

0:077 secondsthis briefly during our conversation with Congressman Smith, but um it deserves a little more of an explanation. Back in 1819 in the

0:1616 secondsDartmouth case, the our America's first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, said that corporations are artificial

0:2424 secondsbeings, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.

0:3030 secondsBut in 1886, the clerk of the court put a footnote into the Santa Clara County decision and

0:3939 secondsthe or a headnote rather, and the headnote said that corporations are persons. Now the court didn't rule that but it became law 10 years later when

0:4747 secondsthe court cited that headnote and so corporations became persons. Then in 1978

0:5656 secondsuh you had uh Lewis Powell who wrote the Powell memo famously and in 71 Nixon put him on the court in ' 72. In 78 he

1:041 minute, 4 secondsauthored the first national bank versus Botti decision in which the Supreme Court said because in 1886 the headnote

1:141 minute, 14 secondswhich had no legal authority said corporations are persons. Because of that we're going to let corporations participate in elections. So that was

1:221 minute, 22 secondsthe the really full-on birth of corporate personhood in 1978. And we've had corporations messing in elections ever since in a in a big way and an

1:301 minute, 30 secondsincreasing way. But it really exploded in 2010 when Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote in Citizens United and

1:381 minute, 38 secondsCitizens United cited the Botti decision which cited this the Santa Clara decision.

1:451 minute, 45 secondsSo here we have this continuous chain from 1886 to 1978 to 2010

1:521 minute, 52 secondsof a lie that corporations are persons and entitled to rights under the Bill of Rights and under the 14th amendment

2:002 minuteswhich offers equal or guarantees equal protection to all persons in America which by the way would include quote

2:072 minutes, 7 secondsillegal immigrants which is one of the reasons why Trump locking up people for simply being here without authorization.

2:162 minutes, 16 secondsuh for anything longer than you know the the time necessary to deport them is a crime in and of itself. But that but I but I digress.

2:272 minutes, 27 secondsSo here's where it gets weird. I mean really weird is there's a a a court in Delaware

2:362 minutes, 36 secondsthat well let me let me back up. Under the Delaware Constitution, Delaware has more corporations than people. There's two million people. There's more than 2

2:452 minutes, 45 secondsmillion corporations in Delaware, small state. And the reason for that is that back in the 1890s when when Ohio

2:542 minutes, 54 secondscame after uh John Rockefeller for creating a monopoly there, the Standard Oil of Ohio, and he was going beyond Ohio. Um

3:033 minutes, 3 secondsRockefeller said, "Which state will change its corporate laws to make it, you know, basically let me do anything I want?" And Delaware, actually New

3:103 minutes, 10 secondsJersey, was the first, you know, the first one to do that. and Rockefeller moved his operation to New Jersey. But a couple of years later, Delaware made

3:173 minutes, 17 secondstheir corporate laws even weaker. And so the Delaware Constitution recognizes corporations as persons.

3:253 minutes, 25 secondsSo So this is this is wild. This this judge

3:333 minutes, 33 secondssays this this is this is a report from Reuters. Okay, I'll just cite Reuters. A judge in Delaware, where many big US

3:413 minutes, 41 secondscompanies are incorporated, ruled on Tuesday, as of this week, that a small town that allows corporations to vote in municipal elections, was not violating

3:493 minutes, 49 secondsthe state's constitution. Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Carson said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing

3:573 minutes, 57 secondscompanies and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.

4:044 minutes, 4 secondsNow, I have a new book coming out about this very topic. It's it comes out on July 7th. Uh you can pre-order it now at

4:144 minutes, 14 secondsPowell's or Amazon or or Barnes & Noble or wherever you like to buy your books online. [snorts] Um and [clears throat]

4:214 minutes, 21 secondsit's called Who Stole the American Dream? The the greatest political crime ever told.

4:294 minutes, 29 secondsAnd you know, it points out how this happened. How a corrupt Supreme Court justice and a corrupt clerk of the court

4:364 minutes, 36 secondsin 1886 basically stole human rights and gave them to corporations or conspired to do so. It was 10 years later when the

4:444 minutes, 44 secondsfirst actual case was decided that that cited that that that you know went along with that. That was the Coington and

4:524 minutes, 52 secondsLexington v. Sanford decision. That was in 1896, same year we got Py versus Ferguson.

5:015 minutes, 1 secondBut this is just wild stuff. I mean, you've got corporations now in Delaware having the vote. This is the logical

5:095 minutes, 9 secondsextension, right? I mean, corporations have already claimed the first amendment right of free speech. This, you know, to engage themselves in politics. And

5:175 minutes, 17 secondsbecause they don't have mouths, the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court in the Botti decision and in Citizens United, which were both 100% Republican

5:245 minutes, 24 secondsdecisions, because they don't have a mouth, the Republicans in those in those cases said, "Well, money is the same thing as their mouth." So, number one, they've

5:345 minutes, 34 secondsclaimed the right to free speech. Number two, now they've claimed the right to privacy. Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene through the ceiling of

5:425 minutes, 42 secondsone of their large factories. And the EPA, this was back during the first Bush administration and the George Herbert

5:485 minutes, 48 secondsWalker Bush. And the EPA hired a small pl hired a small plane to fly over the top of that uh facility to with a

5:575 minutes, 57 secondsdetector that would spot the benzene coming out. And they did. And they nailed Dao for it. And Dao sued and took that all the way to the Supreme Court

6:046 minutes, 4 secondssaying that their fourth amendment right to privacy, the fourth amendment that says that all persons shall be secure in

6:126 minutes, 12 secondstheir papers, houses and effects, right from in you know from intrusive uh search and seizure.

6:216 minutes, 21 secondsDowo Chemical claimed that their as a corporation their fourth amendment right to privacy had been violated and the Supreme Court agreed with them.

6:296 minutes, 29 secondsuh companies have now re they you know the the government comes in and says we're going to do a surprise inspection.

6:346 minutes, 34 secondsYou can't do surprise inspections anymore because it's a violation of your fifth amendment right to not have to testify against yourself

6:426 minutes, 42 secondsand your fourth amendment right. I mean this and there are other cases as you know obviously the the you know the legal rights fifth, sixth, seventh and

6:506 minutes, 50 secondseth amendments of the constitution having to do with you know speedy trials and all that have been grabbed by corporations.

6:576 minutes, 57 secondsBut now we have corporations actually voting.

7:037 minutes, 3 secondsI mean, what's next? When when when Delphan Delmas, who was the lawyer who argued this case in 1886 for Santa Clara

7:117 minutes, 11 secondsCounty, um he pointed out the ridiculousness of the argument that the railroads were making that they were persons. And he

7:187 minutes, 18 secondssaid, "What? You expect them to be able to engage themselves in holy matrimony?" Actually, they do. It's called a corporate merger.

7:267 minutes, 26 secondsUm, but you know, he he he was pointing out it's like, you know, corporations, you know, they fall to love. I mean, they're not persons for God's sake. And yet we're letting them vote.

7:387 minutes, 38 secondsAnd, you know, this starts in Delaware. Where does it go?

7:427 minutes, 42 secondsI mean, this is just absolutely crazy stuff and and extraordinarily destructive to democracy. We have to

7:507 minutes, 50 secondsoverturn Citizens United. Now, I lay this out in my book. um you know, who killed the American dream, this new

7:577 minutes, 57 secondsbook, this brand new book. Um I lay out what we can do about it. The the the strongest response, of course, is a constitutional amendment, but that

8:058 minutes, 5 secondsrequires twothirds of the House and Senate and threequarters of the states. It's going to be real difficult to do.

8:108 minutes, 10 secondsMove to amend.org has been working on this for years, as has public citizen.org.

8:158 minutes, 15 secondsOther alternatives? Well, let's let's fix the Supreme Court. Let's expand the Supreme Court and get some people on the

8:228 minutes, 22 secondscourt who aren't just corporate shills and revisit Citizens United. It was a five to four decision. If Clarence

8:318 minutes, 31 secondsThomas had voted against it instead of in favor of it, it never would have happened and we wouldn't see billions of dollars being spent on our elections by

8:398 minutes, 39 secondsbillionaires and right-wing corporations or corporations, you know, wanting their legislation.

8:458 minutes, 45 secondsIt's also possible that Congress can do some things to at least slow down the damage from [music] Citizens United. So, you know, there are a few steps we can

8:538 minutes, 53 secondstake, but this is absolutely [music] astonishing. Corporations are actually voting in elections in elections to

9:019 minutes, 1 second[music] determine what kind of tax corporations will pay or what the rules are under which [music] corporations operate in these towns in Delaware. It's

9:099 minutes, 9 secondsnuts. [music]

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THOM 6 22 26

15 PL MINNE IMPEDE CONSPIR

DANIEL ROSEN GIVES AS REASON FOR ARREST

DAVID BEARD CATO ONLY 1 CASE KNOCKED NOTEBK OUT OF HAND OF ICE

RELIG STUD MCCALLISTER COLLEGE DAVD KING MIS ATTR BY TRUMP

WE NEED TO BECOME UNGOVERNABLE

SUBST EMOT DISTRESS OF ICE AGENT

LIVES OF OTHERS PUTIN SILENCE

The Knock on the Door Has Arrived... - YouTube

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Behind Trump's DOJ humiliation strategy — and their use of fake cases

Thom Hartmann June 16, 2026

A Cable TV host did an extended rant a few days ago about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting last week that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of s----” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin, the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to 10 years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then, the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes, like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Get Thom Hartmann's daily columns on his Substack, Hartmann Report. Click here to join for free.

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NO LNX

New study reveals the massive con on white voters

Thom HartmannMay 28, 2026

America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.

We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.

And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.

If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.

Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice you picking his pocket. H---, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.

Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.

One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.

The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.

The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.

That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.

There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.

Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo.

Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.

These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.

From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at it’s core.

Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.

The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the 10 states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured.

Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.

And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind.

The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.

Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky.

The Princeton economist Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on poverty, has observed for years that life expectancy in much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta is now lower than in Bangladesh or Nepal. White working-class men in the Mississippi Delta and the West Virginia coal country can now expect to live fewer years than men in countries we call “impoverished.”

And the political response from the Republicans? They keep electing racist white politicians to refuse Medicaid expansion, slash food stamps, hand tax cuts to their morbidly rich white men, and triple down on the very cultural grievances that the Delaware study just demonstrated, in laboratory conditions, are the precise mechanism by which they’re being conned.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where in 1956 my father finally got a job at a tool-and-die shop with a union contract and health insurance that covered the whole family without a copay. None of us got rich, but none of us went bankrupt when somebody got sick, either.

The country my dad worked in had marginal income tax rates above 90 percent on the very wealthy, no billionaires to speak of, and a healthcare system that, for everyone covered by a union job or a public employer, looked something like what Canada or Germany has today.

In Michigan, like in most states of that era, hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be non-profits, run for the public good and heavily regulated.

Then Reagan came in, busted the unions, slashed the top rates, deregulated the insurance industry, and let the banksters loose on what had been a largely nonprofit hospital and insurance sector. The fifty-one healthcare billionaires we have today are the direct, foreseeable result of those choices.

I wrote a book about all of it, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and the math hasn’t changed: every dollar in the bank account of a Frist or a Stryker or a UnitedHealth executive is a dollar that didn’t go to a nurse, a clinic, or a sick kid in Tupelo.

The Delaware study explains why we can’t seem to vote our way out of it. The morbidly rich Republicans who actually benefit from the system know exactly what they’re doing when they fund Fox “News,” Heritage, Turning Point USA, and the entire infrastructure of right-wing media that pumps racial grievance into white American living rooms twenty-four hours a day.

They’re running LBJ’s con at industrial scale. Convince a guy in Tupelo that Medicaid expansion is a handout to Black people in Jackson, and he’ll vote to keep his own daughter uninsured.

Convince a retiree in The Villages that single-payer means giving healthcare to dark-skinned immigrants, and she’ll defend, with every breath she has left, the very system that’s overcharging her for the drugs keeping her alive.

It works because “conservatives” have found it’s a very useful con to make themselves rich and maintain political power, and the fifty-one billionaires it produced are the ones writing the checks to make sure it keeps working.

Every other developed country has figured out that healthcare works better, costs less, and produces longer lives when it’s run as a public good rather than a profit center.

Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, and Debbie Dingell have a Medicare for All bill sitting in Congress right now, with hundreds of co-sponsors and the active support of National Nurses United and most of the rest of organized labor.

Californians are about to vote on a billionaire wealth tax that would partly fund healthcare and education by clawing back a five-percent slice of accumulated wealth from people who’ll never feel its absence.

The arguments are made, the policies are drafted, the funding mechanisms are costed out. The only thing missing is enough Americans willing to recognize the con LBJ named sixty-six years ago and refuse, just once, to fall for it.

LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026.

The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.

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When the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted

Thom Hartmann May 24, 2026

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.

After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy — and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cower before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win?

What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or, simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator,” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela, and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.

Labor is powerless.

The press is controlled.

Religion is weaponized.

Elections are managed.

Fear keeps people obedient.

And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”

Not patriotism.

Not Christianity.

Not freedom.

Power.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again.

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.

Now it’s our turn.

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How Republicans plan to rig the vote — and make it stick

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).}:

Thom Hartmann May 17, 2026

The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow its playbook virtually to the letter has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most.

Scott Yenor wants:

— To make gay sex illegal in America again,

— Divorce to be “difficult to get or proscribed,”

— Adultery and sex between unmarried consenting adults criminalized, and

— The Civil Rights Act to be “scaled back” so that businesses, schools, and “every other institution in the country” can once again discriminate against women, queer people, and minorities the way they used to.

And just a few months ago, the Heritage Foundation, the same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, hired Yenor to chair its American Citizenship Initiative.

When pressed about Yenor’s record, reported in detail by The Guardian and LGBTQ Nation, Heritage didn’t quietly walk anything back. They instead invoked their “One Voice” doctrine, which means that what one Heritage staffer says is what the institution stands for, and they loudly stood by him.

Even some of the foundation’s allies winced publicly to The Atlantic, but Heritage reportedly didn’t budge. This is what billionaire-funded Christian nationalism looks like in 2026, and it’s been the project, almost without interruption, ever since the Reagan Revolution

Most Americans don’t know how the Heritage Foundation came to exist; I’ve been telling this story on the radio for more than two decades because it matters. In 1971, a tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American “free enterprise system” was under attack from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

His prescription was that corporate America needed to fund its own intellectual infrastructure, think tanks and university programs, legal centers, and media outlets that would shift the country’s political center hard to the right and protect billionaire wealth from democratic accountability.

Two months after writing that memo, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court.

In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors read the Powell Memo, decided American business was “ignoring a crisis,” and wrote a $250,000 check to launch the Heritage Foundation alongside Paul Weyrich, the man who later coined the phrase “Moral Majority” and famously told a room of 1980 evangelical leaders that conservatives don’t actually want everyone to vote because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Heritage was, from day one, a vehicle for translating Powell’s memo into operational policy, and that founding circle of donors, Coors plus Bradley plus Olin plus Scaife plus Koch, never really left.

According to a DeSmog analysis of Project 2025’s funders, six billionaire family foundations bankrolled Heritage’s blueprint for the second Trump administration: Bradley, Coors, Koch, Mellon, Seid, and Uihlein.

Same families, same project, more than half a century of the same handful of fortunes funding the same grinding assault on democracy, women’s rights, civil rights, and any policy that would tax great wealth or restrain corporate power.

What’s new is how openly they’re saying the quiet parts now.

Heritage’s 90-page tract “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the subject of a thorough investigation by Billie Jean Sweeney for Important Context, lays out a vision that overturns marriage equality, denies the existence of trans people, eliminates no-fault divorce, and uses federal Medicaid dollars as a weapon against any state that disagrees.

The document opens with the sentence “The Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers,” which gives you a pretty clear sense of where they’re going. They’ve invented a problem they call a “birth dearth” and identified the culprits: women being educated, women working outside the home, women using contraception, women existing as autonomous people.

As Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, said recently, “One in three Americans is under-babied.” White Americans, of course.

Anybody who’s read 1930s European history will recognize what’s going on here.

The Nazi regime’s Mutterkreuz, the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother,” handed out medals to Aryan women who produced four or more children while sterilizing those it considered unfit, and the Lebensborn program ran maternity homes designed to manufacture “racially valuable” babies for the Reich.

Heritage isn’t there yet, but the ideological architecture is the same: women as reproductive vessels for a state-defined ideal, with the full weight of federal policy bent toward forcing them into that role.

Civil rights attorney Michelle Uzeta, who runs the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, told reporters the through-line is “government-sponsored devaluation of entire communities, informed by eugenic thinking,” and that’s not hyperbole, that’s what the documents say when you read them carefully.

The operational arm at HHS is staffed accordingly. Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB director and a self-described Christian nationalist who co-authored Project 2025, has spoken with revulsion of “the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”

Calley Means, a former Heritage research analyst, is now senior White House advisor at HHS. His sister Casey Means, whose surgeon general nomination Trump just withdrew on April 30 after Senator Bill Cassidy refused to support her, told Tucker Carlson that birth control “shuts down” a woman’s “life-giving nature,” and Trump immediately replaced her with another vaccine-skeptical Fox News contributor, radiologist Nicole Saphier.

Natalie Dodson, a named Project 2025 contributor, runs the Office of Population Affairs that decides Title X family planning rules, and the first Trump-era domestic gag rule, in effect from 2019 to 2021, forced 981 clinics out of the program and cut the network’s patient capacity in half, leaving six states with no Title X provider at all. The current administration has signaled it will repropose the gag rule, and Trump’s 2026 budget proposes eliminating Title X entirely.

The most useful place to watch how the playbook actually operates on the ground is Missouri.

Voters there passed a constitutional amendment in November 2024 protecting abortion rights with 52 percent of the vote, and the Republican-controlled legislature simply ignored them and referred a counter-amendment to this November’s ballot that would repeal the protections voters just enshrined.

To boost their odds, they bundled in a permanent ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors, even though Missouri law already bans that care. It’s pure ballot candy, bolted onto an abortion ban specifically because polling shows the trans-care provision boosts support for the abortion ban among voters who otherwise wouldn’t go along.

Divide and conquer, in other words, weaponized at the ballot box to overturn the explicit will of the voters.

This is what I wrote about in The Last American President: the slow, methodical, billionaire-funded conversion of American constitutional democracy into something that more closely resembles a “Christian” white supremacist oligarchy with a theocratic veneer.

The people running this project are not hiding it anymore. Yenor isn’t hiding it, Vought isn’t hiding it, and Heritage’s “Saving the Family” tract isn’t hiding it either.

They’re telling us, in their own words, that they want to recriminalize gay sex, eliminate no-fault divorce, force women back into the home, gut the Civil Rights Act, and use federal funding as a chokehold on any state that resists.

And while Heritage and its think-tank allies map out the cultural policy, their allies in Congress are working to rig the franchise itself so that the populations most opposed to all of this can’t actually vote any of it down.

The SAVE Act, which Republicans in the House passed in expanded form on February 11 as the SAVE America Act, would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office in order to register or re-register to vote.

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack ready access to those documents, and the League of Women Voters puts the number of American women whose paperwork doesn’t match their current married name at 69 million, all of whom would suddenly need to dig up a birth certificate, a marriage license, proof of a legal name change, and matching photo ID just to vote.

Trans Americans, naturalized citizens, older Black Americans born in the pre-civil-rights South who were never issued birth certificates in the first place, college students, military families stationed overseas, rural voters who’d have to drive hours to a county office, and the millions of working-class citizens who simply can’t afford a passport would face the same wall.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the bill’s chief Senate champions, has publicly tied its passage to Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms, which is about as close as a politician gets to admitting on the record that the entire point of the bill is to keep women, trans people, young voters, and Americans of color away from the polls so the Heritage agenda doesn’t get voted down by the majorities that consistently oppose it.

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Science just proved what we all suspected: the 2024 election was rigged

Thom Hartmann May 09, 2026

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.

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MAGA insider blows lid off a $120 million right-wing racket

Former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a "Save America" rally at Country Thunder Arizona in Florence, Arizona. Image via Gage Skidmore.

Thom Hartmann May 11, 2026

For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for right--wing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.

Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.

So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:

— Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,

— Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,

— Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,

— Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,

— Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,

— Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that

— Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.

Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.

So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll right-wing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.

They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.

This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.

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AN 5 26 PRETY GOOD LIST OF DAMAGE BY CABINET

Nikita Khrushchev famously said, “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours. Fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block U.S. weapons delivery to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, HHS Secretary brainworm-infected heroin addict Bob Kennedy has hollowed out America’s core public health infrastructure and elevated anti-vaccine messaging, undermining trust in immunization and disease prevention. The result is a sicker and more vulnerable America as measles and whooping cough outbreaks spread across the nation and U.S. science leadership in the world has been kneecapped.

Over at the Pentagon, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, whose mother says he abuses women, has purged senior career leadership of women and Blacks and weakened the independence of the JAG corps, eroding professional military norms and devastating morale. He’s stupidly burned through so much ordnance with his illegal, unconstitutional Middle East war crimes that our military readiness and deterrence capacity are at an all-time low in the modern era.

Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Nazi-saluting, multiple-baby-producing billionaire Elon Musk has impaired basic federal functions and hollowed out institutional expertise. When he destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), killing millions in the Third World, both China and Russia swept in to fill the vacuum and secure key natural resources and strategic military outposts.

Over at the Voice Of America, conspiracy nut Kari Lake has turned the network from independent journalism into a right-wing propaganda operation that delights Putin and damages U.S. credibility abroad, weakening a cornerstone of America’s advocacy for democracy and soft power.

With ICE and an ever-expanding network of concentration camps, brutal racist Stephen Miller has driven hardline immigration policies that gut asylum processes and expand detention (even for children), straining courts, destroying our reputation around the world, and devastating tourism.

Over at the Office of Management and Budget, billionaire-lapdog and neofascist ideologue Russell Vought has weaponized budget authority to illegally defund agencies and programs Congress authorized, concentrating power in the hands of the president, undermining constitutional checks, and destabilizing federal operations.

The FBI has been weaponized by the unqualified drunk Ka$h Patel (as he brands himself), politicizing investigations and purging career officials, weakening the bureau’s independence and ability to fight actual crime, while complicating intelligence cooperation with allies.

After showboat Kristi Noem destroyed the credibility of DHS with mass detention policies and multiple unaccountable murders of American citizens, former plumber Markwayne Mullen continues to gut civil liberties safeguards and execute Miller’s vision of a nearly-all-white America.

Wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon is actively vandalizing the Department of Education, cutting support for public schools and student protections in ways that widen inequality and weaken long-term workforce competitiveness.

Climate change denier and fracking company CEO Chris Wright now runs the Department of Energy, which has been redirected toward aggressive fossil fuel expansion while obliterating clean-energy initiatives, making America weaker and more vulnerable to both climate disasters and oil supply disruptions.

Under fossil fuel shill Doug Burgum’s leadership at Interior, the National Park Service is being dismantled by political interference, workforce depletion, corruption, and the systematic erasure of American history. He’s prioritized drilling and mining over conservation, producing long-term environmental damage, while corruptly moving $100 million in our tax dollars over to a group run by Trump loyalists.

At the Department of Justice Pam Bondi (who dropped an investigation into Trump University when he gave her campaign $25,000), and now Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and Ghislaine Maxwell buddy Todd Blanche continue to hide the Trump-Epstein files and have gutted enforcement against polluters, fraudsters, and other white-collar criminals while pushing hard to torment and bankrupt with malicious prosecution those individuals who’ve called out Trump’s corruption.

Failed reality-TV star Sean Duffy now runs the Transportation Department, where oversight has been loosened in key safety and infrastructure areas. The result is increased risk for the traveling public in aviation, rail, and roadway systems while much-needed modernization has been delayed or killed off altogether.

Billionaire Scott Bessent controls America’s Treasury as he pushes deregulation and financial concentration, helping his fellow billionaires while increasing the systemic risk that inevitably hits homeowners, small investors, and ordinary working people like it did in 2008.

Billionaire and former Epstein Island buddy Howard Lutnick now runs the Commerce Department, pushing Trump’s tariffs and politicized trade decisions, disrupting supply chains and straining longstanding relationships with trading partners while exploding inflation here at home.

Real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, has screwed up our negotiations with Iran to the point that gas is now pushing five bucks a gallon here and the world is horrified. His sons hooked up with the Trump kids to make millions off their dads’ government jobs, as Witkoff himself regularly travels to Moscow to consult with Putin.

Rightwing crank Brooke Rollins runs USDA programs that have been reshaped to favor large agribusiness over small and mid-size farms while stripping millions of American children from food stamps and school meals, hitting rural America particularly hard.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon hustler Lee Zeldin has rolled back pollution and climate regulations while reducing enforcement capacity, delighting Putin and increasing profits for fossil fuel billionaires.

Scott Turner is turning HUD from a pro-housing agency into one that pushes rightwing talking points and is shedding programs designed to give housing access to low-income and homeless families.

Putin-friendly Tulsi Gabbard now oversees the nation’s Intelligence agencies, politicizing their assessments while sidelining career analysts and distorting threat reporting. As a result, our allies have become less willing to share sensitive intelligence and Russia’s power is increased.

And at the State Department, Marco Rubio has hollowed out diplomatic staff and reduced emphasis on alliances and multilateral engagement, weakening U.S. influence and opening space for Russia and China to set the agenda.

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot:

— Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work,

— Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars,

— Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned,

— Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America,

— Defund the agencies Congress created,

— Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously,

— Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks,

— And turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps.

Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a Cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend.

When Louise and I lived in Germany back in the 1980s, we could feel what the American military presence meant to the Germans we shared meals and beers with. The GIs at Ramstein and Grafenwöhr weren’t an abstraction or a budget line; they were the visible, daily reassurance that the United States had learned the lessons of 1914 and 1939 and that we would never again let Europe sleepwalk into catastrophe.

Older Germans I met would talk about the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift the way Americans of that generation talked about Pearl Harbor or the moon landing, with a kind of stunned gratitude that another country had voluntarily done such a thing for them.

That moral capital, accumulated over eight decades and across both Republican and Democratic administrations, is precisely what Trump’s people set on fire this week, with the Pentagon’s announced 5,000-troop withdrawal coming on the heels of that nearly two-hour Putin call and Trump’s weekend promise that we’re cutting “a lot further” still.

In Europe, Boris Pistorius, Donald Tusk, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer are now openly discussing how to defend the continent without us, which is exactly the world Vladimir Putin has been trying to engineer ever since the day he first took over the Kremlin.

The grim irony of Khrushchev’s famous threat is that he never literally meant we’d be “buried” by a tank or warhead (although rightwingers loved to claim it did).

The Russian phrase “My vas pokhoronim” was a Marxist taunt lifted from Marx’s line about the proletariat being capitalism’s gravedigger, and what Khrushchev was actually saying — as he later explained at length in Yugoslavia — was that history itself would do the work because socialism would outlast and replace what he called the rotting capitalist order.

He was wrong on the substance, of course, since the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, buried by its own corruption and by the open society it had spent half a century trying to subvert. But he may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

That’s the project Trump’s Cabinet is executing in plain sight right now, and the only force on earth capable of stopping it is the same force that both beat back fascism in 1945 and, after the Republican Great Depression, built the very institutions we’re watching get demolished: ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.

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NO LNX

Economic collapse is coming — and the rich are already prepared to profit from it

Thom Hartmann May 04, 2026

The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …

“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.

Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.

Get Thom Hartmann's daily columns on his Substack, Hartmann Report. Click here to join for free.

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5 25

Hawaii is poised to become the first state to use its long-dormant legal authority to drain corporate money from its elections.

14 states looking to CAP

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unions --> M class

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thom yt headsup 4 22 26 = full on fascism

hist ctx john abigail palmer

Common Dreams

'Hateful, Bigoted' Chip Roy Introduces MAMDANI Act in Congress

US Rep. Chip Roy sparks outrage with "blatant Islamophobia" bill targeting NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Critics slam anti-Muslim bias in...

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MICH CLERK BUSTED VOTER PURGE

NO LNX

This proposal sounds like a great way to end corruption — but it's a trap

Thom Hartmann April 20, 2026

I recently came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.

In just the past 48 hours, I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.

This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.

For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.

But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.

Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them), but in reality, they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:

First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.

Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.

With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.

Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.

Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.

Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.

This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.

Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.

As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:

“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…

“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”

While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.

Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.

This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court, like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.

Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992. Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.

In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.

In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.

What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?

Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.

Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.

Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.

Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.

The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.

And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.

Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.

States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:

“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.

“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”

A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:

“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…

“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.”

The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:

— “Take away power from voters,”

— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”

— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”

— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and

— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”

As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.

For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).

So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.

Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.

Get Thom Hartmann's daily columns on his Substack, Hartmann Report. Click here to join for free.

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an 4 26

no lnx

Trump's son-in-law has a $5 billion problem

:{:{Jared Kushner applauds during U.S. President Donald Trump's State of the Union address in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 24, 2026.}:

Thom Hartmann March 20, 2026

There are several clear winners from Trump’s attack on Iran:

— Russia, who can again fund its violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims its unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine;

— Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country;

— the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010;

— the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions;

— Don Jr. and Eric, who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train;

— Donald Trump himself, who’s succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page;

— and Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.

The losers include:

— The credibility of the United States and the rule of international law;

— the families of 13 dead and 140 injured American soldiers and airmen,

— the families of at least 160 dead Iranian little girls and thousands of other dead civilians in a dozen countries,

— American taxpayers who’re paying for the bombs;

— and future prospects for world peace.

But the biggest winner may be Jared Kushner, who apparently pushed Trump to initiate the war while he’s trying to solicit $5 billion from the same Arab states that have been begging American administrations for decades to attack Iran.

Back on March 5th, I speculated here on Hartmann Report that Kushner and Witkoff had been negotiating with Iran in bad faith, possibly to get the Iranian leadership to meet together in one place so Netanyahu (who used to sleep in Kushner’s bedroom) could kill them all with a missile strike.

Three years earlier, I laid out the backstory of how Kushner allegedly helped MBS take over the Saudi kingdom and was richly rewarded with $2 billion to fund his new investment venture.

Now, The New York Times is reporting that Kushner is back at the Arab trough, trying to pick up an additional $5 billion for his company from the same states that have been begging America to attack Iran for decades.

This represents a massive and apparently corrupt conflict of interest, as Congressman Jamie Raskin and Senator Ron Wyden pointed out when they called for an investigation into Kushner acting as an unregistered foreign agent in violation of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. They wrote:

“This revelation is deeply disturbing, as Mr. Kushner appears to be influencing U.S. foreign policy by acting as a political consultant to the Saudi government while also accepting their money. … Mr. Kushner’s proximity to President Trump and the potential for political interference warrants the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, in a brilliant imitation of Vladimir Putin, is threatening news organizations for their reporting on the War. He seems upset about news stories that Trump may have ignored warnings from his top generals that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if we attacked them; those reports appear to be well-sourced.

And it appears it was Kushner who was one of the main cheerleaders for this war, risks to world oil supplies and the possibility of the conflict igniting WWIII be damned.

Trump himself said that Kushner had advised him that Iran was preparing to strike America, something that’s patently impossible; they don’t have any missiles capable of reaching the United States and had just offered to sign a new deal promising never to develop any. Nonetheless, Trump — in an eerie echo of Bush’s lies about Iranian WMD — told America:

“Within a week, [Iran was] going to attack us, 100 percent. They were ready. They had all these missiles, far more than anyone thought, and they were going to attack us.”

Did I mention that Kushner is asking the Saudis and Emiratis for another $5 billion? As Popular Information reported:

“Kushner’s largest investor is the Saudi Arabian government, which provided Kushner with $2 billion in funding in 2021. Each year, Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, $25 million, as a ‘management fee.’ Meaning he has received in excess of $100 million from the Saudi government over the last few years.

“Notably, ‘Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump’ in February, advocating a U.S. attack,’ according to reporting in the Washington Post. Trump’s comments reveal that Kushner used his role in Geneva to push Trump toward the outcome favored by his biggest client. Affinity Partners also received more than $200 million from the UAE. According to CNN, behind the scenes, the UAE was also lobbying Trump to strike Iran.”

Never before in American history have US negotiators had massive personal financial stakes in the outcome of their own negotiations. It’s a clear violation of the Constitution’s and US law’s ban on foreign emoluments, and possibly numerous anti-bribery laws.

With Congress paralyzed by terrified, spineless Republicans refusing to even look into the possibility that billionaire Trump, billionaire Kushner, billionaire Witkoff, and billionaires in the Middle East have thrown America into war just to enrich themselves, the burden has fallen on the American press.

Which has produced the predictable squeals from Carr and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” propaganda channel, and from Whiskey Pete Hegseth, giggling about how things are going to change when David Ellison takes over CNN.

Threats notwithstanding, our elected officials need to step up now to defend both the First Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, and the lives of our men and women in uniform.

Even lacking subpoena power, Democratic leadership should convene shadow hearings to investigate this possible double-dealing that’s already killed Americans and threatens to plunge the entire world into flames.

At the very least, they should spend a few weeks holding public, on‑the‑record hearings into whether this Iran war is being steered from Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Kushner’s investment firm instead of the Pentagon.

With their Benghazi spectacle that followed the death of four Americans, Republicans taught us that when our officers and enlisted people die abroad, Congress has a duty to drag every decision‑maker before the cameras; Democrats should apply that same standard now, and ask under oath whether Trump, Kushner, and their billionaire partners are profiting from a war they helped ignite.

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no lnx

A tangled maze of ties uncovers Trump's true masters — and his treachery

:{:{Thom Hartmann March 14, 2026}:

Eight of our American service members are dead and more than 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, airmen, and marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:

“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

When asked about the reports, Donald Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:

“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”

His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and who has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Vladimir Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC:

“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”

Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:

“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”

As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.

Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”

Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?

That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Jeffrey Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

In 2019 the Washington Post revealed that throughout his last presidency, Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As the New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. [Konstantin] Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” the Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Manafort, asking FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on Gen. Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Sen. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As the Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on Aug. 2, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, the New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

:{:{“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised.}:

Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”}:

And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, the Wall Street Journal reports, has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by the Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, D.C. for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe on Sept. 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As the Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off Gen. Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

The big question is, “Why?”

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no lnx

Trump's new hustles demand a day of reckoning

Thom Hartmann March 01, 2026

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.

Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.

For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.

That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.

Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:

“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”

But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.

Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.

So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:

“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”

Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!

Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.

Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.

Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.

Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.

They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.

And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.

And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.

Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws, agreed to massive financial penalties, but was thrown into prison nonetheless. Not long after, Trump granted him clemency as Binance worked out a $2 billion stablecoin deal anchored in a Trump entity.

Or take Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road operator serving a life sentence. Ulbricht ran what was allegedly the world’s largest hub for trading in illegal guns, narcotics, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, Trump gave him a pardon, stunning the legal world.

Other recipients have included well-connected political allies and donors, such as former Las Vegas council member Michele Fiore — convicted of wire fraud — whose sentence was vacated despite a jury verdict, and extremist figures like Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys pardoned after participating in the January 6 insurrection.

Even British billionaire Joe Lewis was pardoned for insider-trading convictions, again showing how Trump’s clemency has disproportionately flowed to the wealthy and well-connected.

None of this should surprise Americans; a jury of his peers found Trump’s little personal corporation guilty of felony tax fraud and fined it over a half-billion dollars (which apparently has yet to be paid). And he was personally convicted of 34 felonies involving falsification of business documents in a successful effort to rig the 2016 election by preventing the public from learning of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.

Since his inauguration just 14 months ago, Trump’s personal wealth has increased by an estimated $4 billion. Not bad for a guy who could have been headed to prison if he hadn’t gotten elected president. After all, both Brazil and South Korea just gave their former presidents long prison terms for trying to pull off what Trump tried to do on Jan. 6, 2021.

This is the most corrupt administration in the history of America, with Trump following Vladimir Putin’s formula for becoming wildly rich step-by-step. And somehow Fox “News” and the rightwing echo chamber never seem to report on any of it…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

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NO LNX

America reaches the line historians warned us about

Thom Hartmann February 19, 2026

This fight isn’t really about immigration. It’s about whether the Constitution still restrains government power at all.

When elected officials call it a “nonstarter” to require federal agents to get a judicial warrant before kicking in doors, to give people bail or a trial before they face long-term prison, and to allow protests, they’re not debating border policy, they’re testing whether the Bill of Rights is still binding or has become merely decorative.

The Bill of Rights was written to put friction between the state’s power to use force and the people it governs. To restrain government.

If that friction can be removed so government can attack any one disfavored group, then constitutional rights stop being universal guarantees and turn into conditional privileges. And once that shift happens, history — and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem — show us that the groups of people who’re unprotected never stays small for long.

This week’s news which highlights this crisis is that Republicans have shut down the Department of Homeland Security because they say Democrats’ call for ICE to follow the law and the Constitution is “a nonstarter.”

Seriously. Here’s the first sentence of the Democrats’ demand that Republicans say is so unreasonable:

“DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.”

Right now, ICE is kicking in doors and smashing windows of cars in order to attack and arrest both citizens and non-citizens alike. They do it because they say they can. And to arrest, detain, and imprison people they claim they can issue their own phony, made-up “administrative warrants” and don’t need a judge or court to see any evidence or say a word.

This is complete bull----, and it’s genuinely astonishing that Republicans are backing them up. The Fourth Amendment isn’t complicated. Here it is, in it’s entirety (notice it does NOT say “citizens” but says “people”):

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s it. Every word. And it applies to any “person” who happens to be in the United States. Nonetheless, ignoring 250 years of American law and history, DHS General Counsel James Percival said:

“[I]llegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”

His argument is that kicking in the front doors of the homes of people where undocumented immigrants may be staying, or smashing the windows of their cars, is not “unreasonable.”

This is a classic example of how law can get twisted into gibberish by a criminal regime like we are currently suffering under. And it doesn’t even include the right to a trial by jury, the right practice journalism, or the right to protest, all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Yesterday I told you about something the people who started this country learned from bitter experience and their deep reading of history: a wannabe fascist government (like Donald Trump is trying to turn ours into) doesn’t have to openly break the law to destroy liberty.

It just has to have enough sycophants in positions of power to ignore the law so it no longer restrains the government’s awesome power.

To modern Americans that may sound like an abstraction, but it’s critical. Government is the only institution that has widespread cultural approval to use violence, to imprison or even kill us, and to tear our lives apart in search of alleged criminal activity.

The whole point of a democracy is to restrain that power and prevent it from ever becoming so concentrated in a small number of hands that it can be abused for the benefit of one group over another.

Our movies and old newsreels of the Nazi era seem to tell us that we’ll recognize tyranny when there are tanks in the streets, newspapers are shut down, elections are canceled, and we see public executions of protestors.

But that’s not how tyranny usually works in its middle stages, like the one we’re in now.

At our founding, for example, the British Empire never announced, “Colonists have no rights” the way ICE’s lawyer is now proclaiming that immigrants aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Parliament repeatedly insisted the opposite. Americans were British subjects, protected by British law, and the king’s officials repeated that constantly.

And yet, nonetheless, British agents kicked in doors without meaningful warrants. People were faced with almost daily violence. British agents monitored, followed, and often beat or arrested people who protested. Newspapers were shut down and writers arrested. And the courts couldn’t meaningfully restrain officers acting in the name of the Crown because their authority was both granted and limited by a single man, the King.

Everything existed inside a legal framework, and the British repeatedly insisted that it was the colonists, not their own agents and troops, who were “breaking the law.”

That’s what finally snapped the colonist’s patience. It wasn’t a single outrage like the Tea Act or the Boston Massacre — although those highlighted the oppression they experienced — but their final realization that every complaint they filed was answered with a legalistic explanation of why the abuse was justified.

Read the Declaration of Independence — which I quoted yesterday — closely and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Jefferson doesn’t just list harms. He listed systemic, undemocratic structural and jurisdictional moves: judges who were dependent on the ruler, military power that was put above civil authority, the denial of power to local courts, tax laws that only benefited the rich, and people transported for trial elsewhere.

The issue wasn’t cruelty or British abuse of power, although both were terrible. It was that the very structure of authority, the system, had been arranged so law was constantly being rewritten on the fly, tweaked to confront defiance, and abused to enhance and justify government power over people’s lives instead of limiting it.

That distinction, after the Revolutionary War, shaped the Constitution that came next.

We tend to treat the Bill of Rights as a moral document, a statement of national values, but the people who wrote it were being much more practical than philosophical. They were building a machine they believed would make tyranny as a governing method impossible.

They assumed — again, based on their own experience and their reading of history —that every government would always want to expand its own power because every government throughout history always had.

That’s why they wrote our Constitution the way they did: to establish a structure, a system, that’s bigger than any politician (including the president).

If the government wants to arrest or imprison someone, it must first charge them with a specific crime.

If it charges them, it must present valid evidence to an independent judge or jury.

If it presents evidence, the accused can confront it and has a mandatory right of defense counsel.

Before force like arrest, home invasion, or imprisonment is used, the courts must review and can even prevent it.

Those protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the overall three-branch structure of our government weren’t there out of kindness or to enhance public morality. They were put into the highest law of our land to produce serious friction — a proverbial “throwing sand into the gears” of our system — that would slow down any politician’s or party’s rush to destroy democracy.

They understood that when politicians and bureaucrats have to explain themselves in public, when they must justify their actions, they’re less likely to abuse people the way the King of England had done during their era.

Perhaps even more important, the Founders and Framers of our Constitution also knew from history that when any group seizes enough power to rise above the law, the republic itself is on its last legs.

Once a segment of society (like the Epstein-billionaire-class or ICE) reached that point — whether because of government employment or vast riches — they knew that the system would be distorted and democracy could die, even if the black-letter text of the law remained intact.

When that happens — as we’re seeing today with Trump having ignored more than 4,400 court orders — court’s rulings become technically binding but the government feels free to ignore them.

The British abuse of the colonists in 1773 is an ancient echo of what we see in Minneapolis today where the FBI just this week officially refused to turn over evidence in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to the local authorities who, under the law, have jurisdiction over murder.

Under this Trump regime federal government officials now refuse to comply with the Constitution, the law, with court orders, and with even normal American expectations for human decency. They shop around for friendly judges, laugh at court orders, and daily ignore the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

This is exactly why early Americans were obsessed that the due process provisions in the Bill of Rights must apply to everyone, not just citizens, not just allies, not just the respectable. The moment any government starts to decide who receives full legal protection and who the law can either abuse or elevate, it has quietly shifted into that second operating mode the King of England was asserting in 1773. What our nation’s founders called “tyranny.”

History shows what happens once the law restrains some and elevates others above itself: the category of both the abused and the exempt expands. Both always expand, because power, once exercised, becomes precedent. What began as an exception becomes “normal.”

The Founders knew republics — when corrupted by rich, unscrupulous men — drift into this new mode. Like in modern-day Russia and Hungary, elections continue, laws remain on the books, courts keep ruling and yet the poor, the workers, the dissenters, the protesters get crushed while the rich and well-connected — the Epstein billionaire class — rise above any accountability whatsoever.

Which raises the harder question we, as Americans suffering under this regime, must confront right now:

If our government can commit violence, violate the Constitution, lie to the public on a daily basis, repeatedly lose in court, and yet continue acting however they want because the structure now allows it, is there some specific point or line where we’ve officially moved from democracy to tyranny?

It turns out, history tells us that such a line exists. Political philosophers have argued about it for centuries, but the people who wrote our Constitution were quite certain they knew roughly where it lay.

History also tells us there is a line, a point where a democracy stops being a democracy. The people who wrote our Constitution believed that line is crossed when those in power can ignore the law and face no consequences.

It’s passed when rights can be denied to some, when court orders can be brushed aside, and when the government can use force without meaningful oversight. And when that happens, our republic itself is in danger.

Tomorrow I’ll walk through that threshold and explain what it means for us today, because whether we’ve crossed it or not determines whether normal political remedies like elections and legal processes can still function — or ever again function — the way most Americans still assume they do.

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NO LNX

Trump admin now threatens anyone who won't clap loud enough

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a breakfast with Republican Senators at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. November 5, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque

Thom Hartmann February 12, 2026

Donald Trump’s presidency now has a human body count.

“We really feel like we’re being hunted, we’re being hunted like animals,” an undocumented farm worker in Ventura county, California, told a reporter for The Guardian.

I’ve seen this movie before. Or at least where it leads.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time in Colombia on behalf of the German-based international relief organization I’ve worked with for more than half my life. I shared the story in my book about those experiences, The Prophet’s Way, detailing one of the “hunt clubs” I ran across in Bogotá.

These were mostly middle-class European-ancestry (white) men, many of them off-duty cops, who go out at night in camo with high-powered rifles and night-vision gear to hunt dark-skinned “los gamines,” the million or so street children who commit much of the petty (and often serious) crime in the city.

Afterwards, they go drinking and partying, celebrating their kills. Some of the clubs even have names, like “the deer hunters” (cazadores de ciervos).

“Hunt clubs” is my term (and that of my host in Bogotá); during that era, what these men were doing was called “social cleansing” or “limpieza social” and in addition to killing kids, they also targeted for beatings or death homeless people, sex workers, LGBTQ people, drug users, and others they labeled “undesirable.”

As Amnesty International noted in a 1993 press release:

“There is concern for the safety of thousands of street children in Bogota following the appearance on 11 August 1993 of posters in the city centre inviting them to attend their own funerals.“These posters, which announce the extermination of ‘delinquent street children’ are signed in the name of industrialists, shopkeepers and civic groups. There have been an increasing number of reports of killings of so-called ‘social undesirables’ (desechables sociales) in what are routinely called ‘social clean-up operations,’ generally attributed to shadowy ‘death-squads.’”

But the hunt clubs of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s were pikers, compared to what Trump, Miller, Homan, Noem, et al are running today in America.

So far since Trump took over their operations, they’ve killed at least 40 people, both in their so-called “detention facilities” and on the streets of our cities, and imprisoned more than 70,000 men, women, and children in over 230 concentration camps. And Trump just cut off funding for medical services for those in the camps, so expect the death numbers to grow quickly.

Unlike the “volunteers” in Bogotá, Trump’s thugs are well-paid, making up to $200K when you include signing bonuses, bounties, and other benefits.

And they get to go hunting!

Supervisory Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, for example, reportedly bragged to his fellow ICE hunt club members that when he shot Miramar Martinez in Chicago suburb Brighton Park there were “5 shots, 7 holes.” The following day, he shared with his ICE buddies a text message saying, “Cool. I’m up for another round of ‘f--- around and find out.’”

After shooting Renee Good five times for daring to tell him to “have a nice day,” ICE hunt club member Jonathan Ross called her a “f------ b----.”

And when two ICE thugs murdered Alex Pretti, they rolled his body over to count the bullet holes as nearby agents laughed and applauded.

Like the hunt club members in Bogotá, today’s ICE hunt club members — under color of law and with the approval of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the applause of Trump’s senior officials — pick out people based on how dark their skin is and routinely kick in brown-skinned people’s doors or drag them out of their cars before assaulting and even killing them.

And, while the hunt club members in Bogotá only occasionally wear masks or balaclavas to conceal their identity, ICE hunt club members can do it all the time.

America has — at least for the past few generations — always considered itself better than this.

These ICE hunt clubs don’t operate in secret. They wear (concealed) badges. They draw salaries from your and my tax dollars. They joke about murder and violence in their text messages. They pose for photos with their victims.

And they know — absolutely know — that powerful people will protect them. After all, the vice president of the United States claimed they have “absolute immunity” from prosecution.

But that protection only works if the rest of us stay quiet.

Colombia’s hunt clubs didn’t (largely) vanish because they had a moral awakening. They ended when the public finally said no and forced accountability. And the country today shudders every time that story is told. History tells us, unambiguously, how this sort of disgrace ends.

Every modern society that normalizes “hunts” of the poor, the dark-skinned, the undocumented, or the politically inconvenient eventually discovers that the culturally-acceptable definition of “undesirable” keeps expanding.

Today it’s brown-skinned migrants. Tomorrow it’s white protesters (they’ve already started that, building a database of “domestic terrorists” who film them and even revoking their access to TSA PreCheck). Then journalists (they just raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson). Then judges (they arrested Judge Hannah Dugan).

Then anyone who won’t clap loudly enough.

Colombia learned this lesson the hard way. As did Germany, Chile, and Argentina. So did the American South after Reconstruction, when “posses” and “night riders” were praised as patriots until, in the 1950s and 1960s, we finally admitted to ourselves what they really were and did something about it.

But here we are again.

The people running today’s ICE hunt clubs may feel untouchable now. After all, people like them always do. But history keeps receipts and is utterly merciless with those who choose to hunt human beings.

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no lnx

Trump's cabinet unmasks everything about who they really are

:{:{Thom Hartmann February 10, 2026}:

I’ve been talking into microphones since I did the morning news on WITL in Lansing Michigan in the late 1960s, and I’ve seen a lot of ugly moments in American politics. But every so often something happens that still takes your breath away, not because it’s surprising, but because it’s so painfully revealing.

This latest racist stunt by Donald Trump — reposting a meme on his Nazi-infested social media site in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle set to the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens — is one of those moments.

That a popular pro-Trump account on X created this video and it has lived on that platform without consequence is disgusting in and of itself. But Trump — as our president, speaking in our voice — made it infinitely worse last night by promoting it to millions around the world.

Promoting a video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as non-human primates isn’t a joke. It isn’t satire or an accident. It’s the oldest racist smear in the book, dressed up in a cheap meme and now blasted out by a man who once swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the president of the United States does something like this, it doesn’t just insult two people. It tells a story about who, according to the most powerful man in the world, belongs in America and who doesn’t.

For centuries, racism in this country has relied on the lie that some people are less than human. That lie has been used to justify slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and mass incarceration.

It’s the lie that made it easier for people to look away while their neighbors were brutalized. It’s the lie that justifies ICE’s brutal, racist behavior. When Trump shares imagery that taps directly into that history, he’s not being edgy: he’s reopening wounds that never fully healed.

When the President of the United States signals that this kind of racism is acceptable, it gives permission to others. It tells the kid being harassed at school, the family being targeted by a hate group, and the voter being pushed out of the polling line that the cruelty they’re experiencing is justified. That it’s their own fault.

It tells the bullies and thugs of ICE as they do their “Kavanaugh Stops” — targeting people based on their race — that they’re on the right side of power.

This isn’t just about harm to minorities, although that harm is real and immediate. It’s about what happens to democracy itself when the presidency becomes a megaphone for dehumanization.

Democracy depends on the idea that we’re all political equals. Once you start suggesting that some Americans are animals, that idea collapses. It becomes easier to justify taking away voting rights, ignore court rulings, or shrug when violence follows hateful rhetoric.

I remember a time, during the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy, when the presidency stood as a kind of moral North Star. Even when presidents like Nixon and Clinton failed to live up to it, there was at least a shared understanding that the office itself mattered. That it should pull us together, not rip us apart.

Trump has spent years doing the opposite, from the 1970s when he was busted along with his father for refusing to rent to Black people to his recent use of words like “vermin” and “----holes” to describe Hispanic and Black people and majority-Black countries. Last night’s post is another brutally clear example of Trump’s deep, lifelong racism.

What’s even more chilling is the silence from Republican leaders and elected officials. If you can’t bring yourself to condemn something this overtly racist, where exactly is your line?

Silence in moments like this isn’t neutrality: it’s complicity. It tells people of color in America, already dealing with the burden of centuries of institutional racism, that their pain is irrelevant and their dignity a plaything in the hands of white people.

I know some people will say we should ignore it, that reacting “just feeds the outrage machine.” Trump’s propaganda princess, Karoline Leavitt, tried to downplay it by telling reporters:

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But pretending this doesn’t matter is how we normalize it and weaken our shared sense of humanity. And the end point of that is always disaster.

As California Governor Gavin Newsome posted:

“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”

“Denounce” is a bare minimum. This country can do better. We’ve done better before, often after terrible struggle and sacrifice.

But we won’t get there by minimizing moments like this or waving them off as “just another Trump post.” We get there by calling it what it is, by standing up for one another as equals in our humanity, and by insisting that the presidency must reflect our highest ideals, not our ugliest instincts.

If this doesn’t provoke the 13 white billionaires in Trump’s cabinet — who would all instantly fire anybody in any of their companies who posted such an image on their company’s servers — to start 25th Amendment proceedings or endorse impeachment, it’ll tell us everything about who they are, too.

America is stronger when we recognize each other as fully human. The moment we let that slip, we all lose something precious.

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no lnx

The way to put an end to a Republican hoax

:{:{U.S. President Donald Trump and lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025.}:

Thom Hartmann February 13, 2026

Get ready.

At Tuesday's hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) lied through his teeth, saying of Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act:

“They let millions of illegal aliens into the country. They set up sanctuary cities so you can’t enforce these federal laws that are on the books that Congress has passed.“Now they won’t vote to stop these illegals from voting in our elections. If the American people don’t understand what this is about, it’s about one word. It always has been. That is power.

“They want power and they need illegals to vote in our elections. That’s why they don’t care about fraud either. They need those votes as well.”

And it’s not just a lone crackpot congressman from Arizona. As Walter Olson wrote for the Cato Institute in 2024:

“If you believe Elon Musk, ‘Democrats’ are permitting large numbers of immigrants into the country on purpose in order to win elections. By ‘ushering in vast numbers of illegals,’ he wrote on X March 5, ‘they are importing voters.’ …“Musk’s co-thinker on this topic … Donald Trump, said in January in Iowa: ‘That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.’ And a television ad from [then] Ohio Republican Sen. J. D. Vance claims that current border policies mean ‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country.’

“‘Treason indeed!’ exclaims Musk.”

Trump has made good use of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie, famously claiming that the 2020 “election was stolen” from him. And now he’s preparing to use one of the GOP’s favorite perennial Big Lies to disrupt this November’s midterm elections.

If he can find an excuse (Tulsi Gabbard is working on it, from media reports) to seize ballots and voting machines in congressional districts that may flip from Republican to Democratic this fall, his lickspittle Squeaker Mike Johnson can refuse to seat the newly-elected Democrats in the House, keeping it in GOP hands.

After all, Johnson was in the middle of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election by organizing Republicans in the House to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes that year, and this year he held up the swearing in of Dem Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) for over a month just because he could.

All he’ll need is for Tulsi (or others) to find even one questionable ballot among the ones they took from Georgia — or insert one — to wave around like a bloody shirt and, if history is any guide, the corporate media will fall into line, saying, “Ah, ha! He’s found voter fraud!”

And then Johnson can claim “election irregularities,” just like Republicans did in the election of 1876, and refuse to seat Democratic winners in the House, giving their seats instead to the Republican losers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) mentioned this exact scenario on my radio/TV program on Tuesday, saying Democrats are seriously concerned House Republicans may be actually planning for it.

All to keep Democrats from taking over the House and having the power of the subpoena so they can investigate Trump’s massive corruption, self-dealing, bribe-taking, Putin-bootlicking, and possible exploitation of young girls with his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein.

The driving force behind all of this is a classic GOP Big Lie, the false allegation of widespread “voter fraud” in America.

Republicans have been using this lie to attack the heart of our democracy right out in the open ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the year they responded by rolling out Operation Eagle Eye, yelling about nonexistent “illegal alien voter fraud” and using it as an excuse to intimidate minority voters in the Goldwater-Johnson race.

It’s a phrase Republicans essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy when they used it to suppress the votes of poor whites who opposed that oligarchy. And the GOP has been using it for more than 60 years now with barely a peep from either Democrats or today’s media.

Back in the day, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of dozens of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As the New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

“Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent ‘vote fraud’ in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry ‘fraud.’“The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from ‘stealing’ the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.”

Keep in mind, this was novel back then. The GOP’s “voter fraud” Big Lie was brand new. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few southern states for a century; the phrase usually appeared in quotation marks as it was so unusual. The 1964 Times article continued:

“The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as ‘a program of voter intimidation.’ He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.“‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, ‘that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.’”

But that one NYT article was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican Big Lie.

In the 60 years since then, no major American news media has seriously and persistently challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades they have routinely used it for blocking minority and woman voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp and Ken Paxton did in Texas and Georgia.

Weirdly, the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute have both weighed in on the issue, and not in a way that makes Trump happy.

Over at Cato, Stephen Richer last week wrote an article titled, “Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It.” And, as Reuters reports, “The conservative Heritage Foundation found 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.”

That’s 24 instances total over a period of 20 years! And if you go all the way back to 1982 in the early years that Ronald Reagan was talking about “undocumented alien voter fraud,” you’ll discover, as Heritage did, a total of 99 cases in 44 years.

Not a single election in modern American history has ever been even slightly affected by a non-citizen voting. None.

And in the past few years, in response to Trump’s squealing about 2020, multiple Republican governors have audited their own voter rolls with a fine-toothed comb. Utah, it turns out, had one non-citizen on its rolls. Idaho found 36, Louisiana had 79, and Montana 23. Most were probably errors.

After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What immigrant wants to draw the attention of law-enforcement by voting? What possible payoff is there to that?

It defies common sense, although that’s never stopped Republicans from pushing a good conspiracy theory.

Among functioning democracies, this Republican Big Lie and its use to make it harder for people to vote is unique to America. No other functioning democracy in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s every bit as nonexistent in other modern democracies as it is here.

The only three major countries in the world that use “voter fraud” as an excuse to make it harder for minorities and women to vote are Hungary, Russia, and, now, the United States.

Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t need or want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote. Like with Social Security here, when you’re born you’re put on the list (which is also usually the list for their national healthcare system and their equivalent of Social Security), and when you turn 18 you can vote. In many democracies, particularly across Europe, they simply mail you a ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody who’s on the list gets one.

As I document in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, in all the years since the 1960s when Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack on American voting rights claiming that “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.

Most even behave as if the GOP’s phony claims of “voter fraud” are legitimate, so Republicans continue to aggressively use them to make voting hard, reject mail-in ballot signatures, and purge voting rolls of Black and brown people.

As reporter Greg Palast found, the only reason Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the House and Senate today is because Republicans succeeded in preventing more than 4 million US citizens from voting or having their votes counted in 2024’s election.

The simple reality is that there’s never been a non-citizen “voter fraud” problem in America — or any other advanced democracy — so there’s no need for a “solution.”

What Republicans know, however, is that the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti-voter-fraud registration requirements.

And the poorer a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

Republicans also know that millions of women are seriously p----- off about the Dobbs decision, particularly in the 20 Republican-controlled states with bans on abortion. This is on top of the long-term reality that women are 12 percent more likely to vote Democratic than men.

Thus, we now have Republicans pushing federal legislation that would mandate ID all across the nation, and would require that birth certificates carry the same name as driver’s licenses and passports.

This demand for proof of citizenship to prevent “voter fraud” is the main way the GOP is now expanding its suppression efforts to women. The National Organization for Women notes:

“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.

“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

Many women won’t have them, won’t be able to track them down, or can’t afford to replace them, so millions will just shrug and go back to their lives, figuring that “just one less vote” won’t make that much difference.

And women who adopted their husband’s last name at marriage but failed to go before a judge to make a formal, legal name-change will be locked out of the voting process, too. As many as 80 million of them.

Claiming widespread non-citizen “voter fraud” is the GOP’s primary go-to strategy to prevent people from voting or even registering to vote and every day it seems they come up with new ways to exploit it, as Crystal Hill pointed out at Democracy Docket:

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents, claiming the move will ‘facilitate [voter] fraud.’”

Additionally, the GOP has expanded their campaign against “voter fraud” by planning to dispute millions of mail-in votes, particularly in Blue cities, through so-called “exact signature match challenges.”

The GOP is recruiting as many as 100,000 people to examine millions of signatures on mail-in ballots, the majority in Blue cities, so they can reject ballots that, in the observers’ opinions, don’t exactly match signatures and thus could be “fraudulent.” Those ballots will not be counted unless the voters show up at the Secretary of State’s office within a few days of the election to prove that their signature is still theirs.

And it’s all based on the lie that there are non-citizens voting, which is total b-------.

Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie to burst onto the scene over the next few weeks with much sturm and drang — and pontificating Republicans on Sunday shows trying to act like Very Serious People as they wring their hands about non-citizens voting — as the media will almost certainly give Trump and the GOP another pass on this monstrous lie when they threaten to shut down our government this weekend over ICE funding.

There is a way to put an end to this Republican scam, though: a way to fight back.

Here’s FDR’s take on the GOP’s perennial willingness to make things up, as he shared in 1944 with a group of UAW auto workers, complete with his suggestion about how to confront Big Lies the first time Republicans rolled them out:

“The [Republican] opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

When Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipe-out 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media ignored FDR’s warning and treated Trump’s Big Lie claim like a joke for years.

As a result — just like Roosevelt predicted — it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans that Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him. That worked for them, so now they’re trying to do it with “voter fraud.”

This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican “voter fraud” scam for 60 years.

No democracy anywhere in the world can long survive if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately cast and counted. This lie about non-citizen voting — that the GOP first rolled out in 1964 — is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.

If it’s not debunked and destroyed by both the Democratic Party and our national media, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascist reign.

It’s beyond time for our corporate media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie of “voter fraud” before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.

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History shows what Trump is doing — and what comes next

Thom Hartmann February 06, 2026

As people testified before Congress on Tuesday about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:

“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:

“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:

“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.

They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.

The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”

The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).

The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.

When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.

“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.

The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)

By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.

By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.

In Tennessee, the Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.

Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.

In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.

In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.

Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.

Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.

Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.

History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.

History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.

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Newsmax host complains about Lupita Nyong'o playing Helen of Troy: “Forced diversity has made its way into the film”

02/03/26

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NO LNXAN

Thom Hartmann February 04, 2026

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?

Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?

Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?

Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?

Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?

Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?

Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?

Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?

Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?

Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?

Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

See you in the streets on March 28th!

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We're on the eve of what could be America's final reckoning

Thom Hartmann January 30, 202

There is something deeply unsettling about Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning 80 years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every 80 years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy.

What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Nobody’s sure exactly why this keeps happening every 80 years. It may be because when the people who lived through the last catastrophe have just died off, their lived memory of repression and violence is gone with them. The guardrails then weaken, the warnings are forgotten, and people take leaps without remembering the lessons from the past.

Or it may simply be the way generations cycle through cultural and political power, producing recurring moments every eighty years when fear, grievance, and concentrated wealth overwhelm democratic restraint.

But it certainly appears to be real. Consider the history starting in the late 17th century as America became an important economic and strategic British colony:

The government’s heavily armed men walked the streets as enforcers of religious conformity, making sure people showed up at the “right” church. Attendance was compulsory, dissenters or non-Puritans were fined or harassed, and the power of the state marched in lockstep with the power of the pulpit. Then came the Glorious Revolution and the end of King James II’s reign, as colonial charters were rewritten, Protestant dissenters gained new legal rights, and the idea of religious freedom in British America caught fire (eventually to be enshrined in the First Amendment). It was 1690.

Eighty years later, the government’s heavily armed agents were roaming the streets looking for people who’d spoken out against King George III or his East India Company. If you defied them, they could imprison or even shoot you. The people, enraged, rose up, threw their tea in Boston harbor, and demanded self-governance and a political system that respected the rights of citizens. It was 1773.

Eighty years after the American Revolution, armed enforcers again stalked the streets, this time in the Confederate South. They hunted abolitionists, journalists, and people of color who dared challenge the brutal system of racial hierarchy and human bondage they ran. If you resisted, you could be beaten, hanged, or shot with impunity. Speech was crushed. Violence enforced obedience. Elections were rigged. The nation was driven into civil war to stop an explicitly authoritarian system that had seized control of half the country. It was the late 1850s.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, the government’s agents, heavily armed, were going door-to-door in communities across western states looking for people of color. Americans and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were immediately seized and put into concentration camps scattered around the country. It was 1942, just months after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

Exactly eighty years after the end of World War II, Donald Trump sent his heavily armed agents into American communities on “Kavanaugh stop” missions to find people with dark skin or foreign accents, regardless of their refugee or legal status, and imprison them in privately-run for-profit concentration camps. In Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities people are rising up and fighting back when confronted with chemical weapons and armed thugs who believe they have what VP Vance called “absolute immunity” to kill American citizens.

Each of these moments forced Americans to make a choice.

In 1690, we chose religious freedom.

In 1770, we rejected having a king and embraced the creation of a government “by the consent of the governed.”

In 1860, we rejected the fascist system that had completely seized control of the Confederate states and we preserved democracy for the continent.

In 1943, we freed the 140,000+ Japanese immigrants and Japanese-ancestry Americans we’d imprisoned after Pearl Harbor and fought a war to reject Hitler and Tojo’s attempt at creating a worldwide fascist empire.

And here we are, eighty-one years after the end of WWII, once again facing an authoritarian crisis that’s forcing Americans to decide afresh who we are and what form of government we want.

Trump and his gang of lickspittles, toadies, and incompetent hangers-on are hell-bent on turning America into a Russia-like authoritarian state with single party rule. Almost without exception, they’ve cowed the entire Republican Party into a frightened silence as their Brownshirts spread across the country to terrorize any city whose citizens had the temerity to vote against them.

Outside of a few real stars including Walz, Pritzker, Frey, Ellison, and Newsom, Democrats — particularly national Democratic leadership — have failed to meet the moment.

Nine turncoat Democrats even voted last week to give ICE more money and power (Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York) and Hakeem Jeffries did nothing to punish them. None lost committee assignments or other perks. No one from Democratic leadership or from the DNC has meaningfully challenged the power or death-dealing of the Trump regime.

As a result, average Americans have picked up the slack, organizing ad hoc when ICE shows up, and showing up by the millions in the streets for No Kings and other protests.

Emperor Trump’s response has been brutal, murdering citizens in the streets and then defiantly lying about the circumstances while slandering the memories of those his goons killed. He’s questioned whether the election will even happen this fall and is now demanding voting rolls from every Blue state so, presumably, his people can figure out how to purge them of Democratic voters.

We are thus at a turning point, much as we were in the 1490 War of the Roses, the 1570 Armada Crisis, the 1690s Glorious Revolution, the 1770s American Revolution, the 1860s Civil War, the Republican Great Depression and World War II of 1929-1945, and today’s Trump Fascism Crisis.

Every one of these prior “great turnings” has produced an expansion of human rights, an improvement in quality of life and freedom, and, essentially, a rebooting of the country. We stand today on the verge of another turning point, every bit as important and consequential as the six that preceded it.

Will America choose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarian model, compiling lists of “domestic terrorists” who dare film ICE operations, and killing people who dare drive away from them or try to protect people from being beaten to the ground and pepper-sprayed in the face?

Or will we constrain the jackbooted thugs who are currently running wild in our cities, stop the naked corruption of the Trump family that’s made billions in their first year back in charge, and help the GOP reinvent itself along the lines of Dwight Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism?

Neither outcome is guaranteed.

Trump and his degenerate suckups have no intention of relinquishing power, and billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison appear committed to using their media and social media power to back him up. MAGA families are replacing their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with ones that say, “Comply or Die” as submissive conservative men worship at the golden “Big Daddy Trump” altar.

But the flame of freedom also burns bright in the hearts of most average Americans and has for over 250 years. The heirs of MLK’s marches, the SDS resistance to Vietnam, and my father’s generation who put down Hitler like a dog continue to spark and inspire us.

A time of choosing is again upon us.

Will we stand with our ancestors and re-embrace democracy and reinvent America as a new and better nation with equal justice for all and a commitment to peace and human rights? Or will we become a MAGA version of Putin’s empire bent on war, conquest, and terror, egged on by rightwing billionaires and their media?

At the moment — but only at this moment — our fate is in our own hands. Now, we must choose.

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Republicans have been selling us these lies for four decades

Thom Hartmann January 29, 2026

Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress on Thursday was a master class at demonstrating how elected Republicans have become what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck termed People of the Lie, in his 1986 bestseller. It was the perfect example for this week being the 16th anniversary of the corrupt Citizens United decision.

For most of American history, lying in politics carried a real and immediate cost. Get caught and you’d lose credibility, maybe get voted out of office, and sometimes — as with the roughly 40 people around Richard Nixon who went to prison — even face criminal consequences.

That informal but effective enforcement mechanism depended on a shared understanding that truth mattered and that the law applied equally to everyone. Five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, shattered that understanding when they handed down Citizens United.

By redefining political bribery as “free speech,” Justices Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Scalia turned money into power without accountability and, in the process, turned lying into a currency that could be minted, traded, and hoarded by unscrupulous Republican politicians.

Once political power could be bought openly, the incentive structure in American politics changed. The goal of today’s GOP’s is no longer persuasion grounded in reality; instead, it’s morphed into a sophisticated system of lies and half-truths.

With social media amplification and backed up by a billionaire-owned rightwing media machine larger than any the world’s ever seen, the bigger the lie, the more emotionally gripping it is, and the faster and farther it’d travel, the more useful it became to Republicans. Lying stopped being a moral failing and became the foundation of their business and political model.

When a Republican politician can raise money, mobilize voters, intimidate opponents, or justify cruelty with a falsehood, that lie pays for itself with huge political, power, and even economic dividends. Truth, by contrast, became a liability as we saw Republican after Republican try to discredit or shut up Jack Smith, in the service of the Party’s 2020 “election fraud” lie.

The GOP has become so addicted to lies that its members can’t even say out loud the actual name of the Democratic Party, instead falling back on Joe McCarthy’s advice that “‘democratic’ sounds too nice” and instead Republicans should always “call it the Democrat Party, with an emphasis on the ‘rat’!” If you don’t know what I mean, just listen to the Republicans who appear on the Sunday political shows. And, sadly, Democrats and news people don’t even bother to call them out any more.

That’s the context in which the testimony by Smith must be understood. What we watched wasn’t just a partisan disagreement; it was an embarrassingly public demonstration of how deeply-monetized lying has woven itself into the Republican Party’s operating system, even before a pathological liar became the party’s standard-bearer.

Smith calmly laid out the facts and legal standards, and Republican members responded by repeating b------- narratives that have already been disproven in scores of courtrooms, in sworn testimony, and on the public record.

They accused him of “weaponizing” the Justice Department despite the fact that his investigations relied heavily on Republican witnesses (he didn’t have a single Democratic witness on his lists for his proposed prosecutions of Trump) and followed long-established prosecutorial rules.

Republicans desperately tried to frame routine subpoenas and phone metadata requests as “spying,” knowing full well those tools are standard operations in any serious criminal investigation.

They minimized or redirected responsibility for January 6 while Smith stated plainly that Donald Trump caused it and then set out to exploit the violence to keep himself in power.

They substituted grievance, character assassination, and personal insult for engaging with the evidence, turning the hearing into material for their fundraising emails and “sharable” or “viral” cable news clips rather than a serious attempt to find the truth.

Those moments illustrate the multiple layers of the lies Republicans have been selling us for four decades, as well as the new ones Trump is trying to get away with. They’re lying to the public about what the law allows, lying about what the evidence shows, lying about how investigations work, lying to delegitimize any person or institution that threatens their power, and lying to base voters who’ve been trained to accept the lies as gospel.

Each of those lies has value; each can be cashed in for attention, money, or even political or legal protection.

This poisoning of the GOP and its base didn’t start with Trump or on January 6.

For four decades, Republicans have lied relentlessly about taxes, promising that tax cuts for billionaires would lift working families even as wages stagnated and wealth exploded at the top.

They lied about “free trade,” insisting it would empower workers while entire communities were hollowed out and then told their suffering was just some weird but inevitable force of economic nature.

They lied about unions, portraying them as corrupt or obsolete while quietly celebrating the theft of power from labor to capital.

They lied about monopolies, calling consolidation “efficiency” while prices rose, competition vanished, and the average American family is spending $5,000 a year more than necessary because of this “monopoly tax.”

They lied about deregulation, dismissing pollution and climate damage as imaginary or exaggerated while entire communities paid the health and environmental costs and thousands lose their homes every year.

They lied about immigrants, claiming they were more likely to be criminals than American citizens when the opposite is true.

They lied about fossil fuel subsidies, calling them “energy security” while gutting green projects that threatened entrenched Republican donors.

The White House even lied about a protestor, editing her picture with AI to make it look like she was crying when arrested when the opposite was the case.

Every one of those lies followed the same pattern: ignore the data, attack the messengers, repeat the talking point, and cash the check.

Citizens United — which came into being when Clarence Thomas, himself on the take from a rightwing Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with business before the Court, became the deciding vote — supercharged that cycle. As a result, billionaires can now pour unlimited money into politics, teaching Republican politicians which stories are rewarded and which are punished.

With corruption having become the underlying foundation of the GOP, lying became not just acceptable but necessary. Telling the truth about inequality, climate change, immigration, corporate power, Trump’s crimes, the state of our health care system, or even democracy itself threatens the party’s revenue stream.

What made yesterday’s hearing so particularly revealing is that it showed how normalized lying has become for GOP politicians.

The Republican inquisitors evinced no embarrassment, no hesitation, and didn’t even attempt to reconcile their own claims with any of the known facts. The lies were delivered as ritual, as tribal identity markers, as proof of belonging. As we saw in Germany in the 1930s and the USSR in the mid-20th century, this is what happens when a political party internalizes lying as a political strategy.

M. Scott Peck warned decades ago that social systems built on lies eventually lose the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, loyalty from morality, or raw power from truth. We’re watching his 1986 warning play out in real time.

From the Reagan Revolution and his massive tax cuts to George W. Bush sending our young men and women off to Iraq and Afghanistan to Donald Trump pushing his claim he won 2020, when lying is rewarded by billionaire donors, complicit media, and with gullible voters, it doesn’t stay confined to campaign ads. It metastasizes through institutions, corrodes accountability, and turns governance into mere theater.

Citizens United didn’t just corrupt elections: it corrupted truth itself. And until we reverse it, until we restore the idea that democracy isn’t for sale and reality isn’t optional, lying will remain the most profitable commodity in Republican politics.

And our country will be forced to continue paying the price.

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:{:{AN}:

NO LNX

Inside the deception that made Trump possible

Thom Hartmann January 22, 2026

For decades, Americans were told that “conservative values” stood for restraint, responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. The rise of Donald Trump forces an unavoidable question: were those values abandoned, or were they a generational lie that made his authoritarian takeover possible?

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP’s abandonment of the principles that animated John McCain and Mitt Romney in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy will keep them fat and happy.

They’re wrong.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said something on my radio program on Monday that would have been shocking just a few years ago but now is becoming increasingly self-evident to anybody with a conscience and an honest view of American politics and history.

He said the GOP as a party with an ideology, a set of principles, or even a governing philosophy is now almost entirely dead.

It’s been replaced by a violent, racist, lawless, unprincipled cult organized entirely around Trump. It’s a cult that demands total loyalty and punishes dissent with both political annihilation and, increasingly, with threats of real-world violence.

Remember when Romney said there were plenty of Republicans in the Senate who wanted to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, but they began flipping when senators started getting death threats against their families?

His biographer, McKay Coppins, wrote that Romney told him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment — vote to convict Trump — and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety.”

That terror is delivered from the hands of both prosecutors who can threaten imprisonment and MAGA lone-wolf assassins like the one who murdered Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota, and those who routinely terrorize federal judges who rule against Trump.

Republican elected officials, Walsh said, echoing Romney, now live in a state of deep fear. Not a metaphorical fear, but genuine terror.

It includes a fear of physical violence, the fear of being primaried and losing their jobs, and the very legitimate terror that Trump will turn the power of the state against them and thus break them financially with legal fees and the threat of prison, as he’s trying to do today with Letitia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff, etc.

Mark Twain noted that history rhymes, and this one is getting downright alarming.

The end of the modern-day GOP and its conversion into a fascist-tolerant party started with Ronald Reagan flipping classical economics on its head with his “supply side” scam and his scapegoating Black people to justify gutting social and educational programs, all to benefit his morbidly rich donors.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement, exploded the costs of health care, housing, and college education, and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

He did this because devastating the working class was actually part of the plan to return “stability” to the American social order, following the outline of Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, and Lewis Powell’s infamous memo.

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the middle class, Republicans believed they could rebuild our nation along the lines of a new form of feudalism, one of the most stable of the ancient governing systems. And when Trump came along, riding the wave of outrage at the economic devastation Reaganism had caused, they thought they could control him, too.

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he’d made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him massively richer but never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 54 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators, he learned — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Thyssen described how traditional German conservatives also convinced themselves they could ride a demagogue into power and then control him. They feared the left more than they feared authoritarianism, believed “order in society” mattered more than democracy, and were certain that once Hitler’s power was secured, moderation would follow.

What followed instead, however, was a demand for total submission or the threat of total personal and national destruction.

Thyssen’s story shows us how fear dissolves loyalty to principles and power silences the soft voice of conscience. Loyalty to a man replaces loyalty to the law and its traditions.

By the time conservatives realized what they’d enabled, escaping Germany was the only remaining option; Thyssen fled the country in 1939 (although the Vichy French captured him and turned him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him until the end of the war).

That brings us back to Russell Kirk and his landmark book The Conservative Mind that I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Although Kirk argued strongly for “classes and order,” claiming that inequality is both natural and good, he also tried to anchor American conservatism in moral restraint, historical humility, institutional continuity, and a deep suspicion of demagogues and mass movements.

He warned repeatedly that if conservatives were to abandon those restraints out of fear or resentment, they’d become something else entirely. He explicitly feared rightwing hate ideology, leader worship, and the belief that force could substitute for virtue.

There’s little doubt Kirk would have despised Trump. Trump embodies almost everything Kirk warned against: contempt for history and institutions, appetite over restraint, grievance over stewardship, and power over a moral order. Trump is not even remotely a conservative in any Burkean or Kirkian sense.

He was able to seize control of the GOP because, over the past four decades, much of American conservatism has simply hollowed itself out as it embraced racism (Southern Strategy); promoted lies about trickle down, voter fraud, and tax cuts; and conducted debt-financed foreign adventurism including Iraq and Afghanistan.

What survived was hierarchy, nationalism, hostility to the left, cultural grievance, and the protection of wealth. Tragically, the GOP has discarded the moral restraint, constitutional humility, reverence for truth, and respect for institutional limits that were once elevated by men like Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and Mitt Romney.

Starting in the 1980s, American conservatism became less a philosophy than a set of race- and gender-based resentments married to perpetual deregulation and tax cuts for the party’s morbidly rich donors. Once that happened, the GOP was defenseless against a charismatic authoritarian who promised dominance and control instead of democracy.

Trump didn’t hijack conservatism from the outside: he stepped into a vacuum created by the GOP’s abandonment of constitutional and traditional American principles. Like Thyssen’s peers, today’s Republican donors and leaders believed they could use the wannabe dictator, ride his popularity, placate his followers, and keep the machinery of government power under control.

They were wrong in the same way German conservatives were wrong, and for the same reasons. Once fear takes over as a governing principle, the most ruthless and outspoken leader will inevitably own the party. Everybody else gets destroyed, some sooner, some later.

Now the GOP exists as a sort of permanent loyalty test. Tell the truth and you’re exiled, uphold the Constitution and you’re primaried, defy the leader and you’re threatened with death or imprisonment.

As Walsh pointed out, most Republicans know exactly what’s happening. They know the lies are lies, the elections weren’t stolen, and under Trump and Kristi Noem violence is being normalized. Many know where this road leads, but fear of Trump’s wrath silences them more effectively than their conservative ideology ever unified them.

This is where the comparison between today’s Republicans and their donors to Thyssen becomes unavoidable. In Germany, conservatism didn’t just die the day Hitler seized power. It began to collapse a decade or more earlier, when conservatives decided that democracy, law, and moral restraint were simply political tools rather than binding commitments.

Once they crossed that line, they lost both the authority and the moral courage to resist Hitler and his Nazi Party. As a result, when the time of real terror directed at them arrived a few years later, that terror was all that was left of the system.

That is where the GOP now stands. It’s no longer a party arguing about tax rates or regulation or even federalism. It’s become, instead, an cult of personal loyalty dedicated to the deification and enrichment of one man and his family. That’s neither conservatism nor democracy.

Which brings us to the question Democrats — and the rest of us — today find ourselves confronting: what do we do about it?

First, Democrats must stop treating this as a normal partisan contest. This isn’t a disagreement over policy, it’s a struggle over whether the United States remains a constitutional republic governed by law or becomes a fascist regime organized around loyalty and fear. Democrats must say that plainly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. Not “threats to norms,” not “concerns about rhetoric,” but the clear truth: one of our two major parties has abandoned democracy and embraced fascism.

Second, Democrats should relentlessly frame Trumpism not as strength but as weakness. Authoritarian movements thrive on the myth of invincibility, and Thyssen tells us how that myth collapses when its confronted. Democrats should point out, over and over again, that a party that can’t tolerate dissent, won’t allow truth-tellers, and must rely on hate, fear, and intimidation is not strong, but is fundamentally brittle and weak.

Third, Democrats should invite disaffected conservatives like Joe Walsh and independents into a pro-democracy coalition without demanding ideological conformity. This is not the moment for purity tests: traditions — including our democratic traditions — survive by coalition and continuity. As fanatic a progressive as I am, I also know Democrats must welcome former Republicans, libertarians, faith conservatives, and business leaders who still believe in the Constitution, even if they disagree on taxes, healthcare, or regulation. The message should be simple: democracy first, arguments later.

Fourth, Democrats must model the courage of our Founders and the generations since who fought for democracy. That means unrelentingly defending courts, free speech, and the rule of law. The contrast matters: as we saw in South Korea when Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from power last year, authoritarian movements collapse when their opponents are willing to fight for democracy rather than flee or hide in panic.

And finally, this isn’t just about politicians. We average citizens have the biggest role to play, and Thyssen’s story makes clear what happens when we don’t.

Speak up loud and frequently. Support local journalism. Show up to school board meetings, city councils, and your local Democratic Party meetings. Defend your neighbors who’re being targeted by Trump and his ICE goons. Double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

Authoritarianism feeds on isolation; democracy survives on solidarity and participation.

The most chilling part of Thyssen’s book isn’t that he and his family had to flee Germany: it’s that by the time they did in 1939, it was the only option left.

For those of us who Trump identified in his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), it might be a matter of months or a year or two unless he and his regime are blocked from moving forward with their repression. America’s top three experts on fascism have already fled the country; if we don’t win this battle for the soul of America, the same may become necessary for many Americans sooner than we’d like to imagine.

Although the media covered it as a one-day story, NSPM-7 directs the FBI, ICE, other federal police agencies, and over 200 local police departments coordinating with them to begin putting together dossiers on any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

If that list includes you or people you love, now is the time to speak up and take positive political action to stop this missile aimed at the heart of our democracy and our Bill of Rights.

Russell Kirk warned that social and political order without moral restraint becomes despotism. Fritz Thyssen taught us that conservatives who empower authoritarians don’t survive the experience. Joe Walsh is describing the end state of that process in real time: a party that has ceased to exist as a governing institution and now operates only as an extension of one demented man’s will.

History doesn’t guarantee outcomes, but it does show us trajectories. Fear is never a stable foundation for politics and only delays the day of reckoning. And the longer the party exploiting it delays, the more catastrophic that reckoning becomes.

The lesson here isn’t that conservative values inevitably lead to authoritarianism: it’s that any political movement without courage, conscience, and adherence to constitutional principles and individual freedom eventually dies.

If “conservative values” can be so easily discarded in favor of fear, loyalty, and power, then they were never values at all, only a story they cynically told us to get elected.

Hopefully that’ll sink in for enough Republicans — and be loudly pointed out by enough Democrats — soon enough to rescue our republic from Germany’s fate.

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A Reagan-appointed judge just shot a warning flare up into the night

:{:{Thom Hartmann January 21, 2026}:

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet.

“The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, the mayor of Minneapolis, and any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles:

Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out.

“You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet.

Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet.

Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia state policeman, because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes:

“The activist … has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town:

“They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As theTimes reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.”

In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian:

“It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night.

But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Stephen Miller posted last night about Minneapolis:

“Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Elon Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly.

But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than 20 years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly-liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid 40 years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Trump and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes.

Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them.

And then, of course, it’s too late…

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AN 1 26

Earlier this week, I published an article about how Republicans have spent millions funding the Green Party since 2016 to bleed votes away from Democrats, and how useful idiots on the left have enthusiastically participated because they don’t understand the difference between a first-past-the-post versus a parliamentary electoral system.

The responses have been enlightening: there are still progressives who think the solution is to complain about the Democratic National Committee, trash people who point out these simple political realities, and promote Green and Working Families Party candidates even more aggressively to “scare” Democrats.

As if any of that would work.

The simple reality is that progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the hard right that’s captured the GOP: we should be learning from them. They had this come-to-Jesus moment back in 2008 when, to their shock and horror, America elected our first Black president.

Instead of just complaining, they got active and in just one short decade “conservative” activists completely took over the RNC, purged it of its “moderates,” and now are transforming America into something entirely new based on the models of Russia and Hungary.

I’m not suggesting that we should be learning from the GOP’s bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest men and women.

But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party in the wake of that 2008 election and forced the entire conservative establishment to lurch so far to the right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at transforming today’s Democratic Party, kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party successfully did a decade and a half ago to take power within the GOP and then nationally.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, in 2009, was in charge of the Tea Party taking over the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and hard right conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of:

“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?

“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with local Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power. (Typically they’re voluntary, but in some states or cities they even carry a small salary.)

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees who then go on to hold elected office, and who draft a party's platform.

They’re also generally the first people elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say. As a result, they’re massively more influential than average citizens.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the Republican Party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.

Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.

This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:

“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”

Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that November’s elections.

In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.

But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: they’d filled up the Republican Party and there were no empty GOP precinct committee-person seats anywhere in the country.

And we saw the results of that Precinct Committee takeover first with big Republican victories in 2012 and most recently in the 2024 election: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by hard-core rightwing activists who’ve taken over the party and are also seizing control of school boards and other local offices.

In 2012, just three years after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the inner workings of the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and Tea Partiers picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and nine new seats in the Senate.

And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.

Progressives need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.

The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.

Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:

“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”

If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate/neoliberal “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to moving back to its FDR roots by adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.

And as we see right now in Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.

We’ve been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, No Kings marches, or even voting, although those are all important.

But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in three short years, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.

If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.

So, in response to the skeptics and cynics who responded to my article yesterday, I’d add the favorite line of my dear friend the late talkshow host Joe Madison. Whenever people would call into his SiriusXM show to complain about Democrats, he’d always say: “So, what are you going to do about it?”

We have 11 months before the next national elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.

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AN 1 26

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Inside the GOP plot to end America as we know it

Thom Hartmann January 05, 2026

It’s not just a brand new year; it’s a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election.

Just a week ago, for example, Trump’s Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it’ll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they’re received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get “processed,” which may happen days later.

In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state are enthusiastically purging voters from the rolls as they get ready for this fall. Remember, reporter and economist Greg Palast found, using official federal and state numbers, that in 2024:

Kamala Harris“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

You’d think we each have a right to vote, rather than voting being just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways.

Supreme Court Republicans on the ruled, for example, that we have a right to own a gun. As a result, before a state or local government can take away your gun, they must first go before a judge to prove the necessity of doing so.

But, Republicans on the Court tell us, Republican secretaries of state can eliminate your right to vote without even telling you; how does that make sense?

14th Amendment After all, the to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

The 19th Amendment references “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 26th Amendment is all about, “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote…”

ConstitutionAdditionally, the , in Article I, Section 4, says that Congress can make federal laws that overrule state laws restricting or regulating voting:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…”

And, sure enough, Congress did just that in 1993 when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Act because, among other things, it provided for the option of instant voter registration when a person gets a driver’s license in every state in the union.

Now known as 52 U.S. Code § 20501, this law of the land opens with:

The Congress finds that -(1) the right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right

(2) it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right and

(3) discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.

And it wasn’t a particularly contentious law when it was passed: every Democrat present in the Senate voted for it (Rockefeller missed the vote) as did all but two Republicans.

So how did we get from the Constitution repeatedly asserting a “right to vote” and Congress passing a law that unambiguously proclaims that right, to the current state of affairs where states regularly and methodically deprive citizens of their “right” to vote and instead claim that it’s merely a privilege?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, much of the blame rests with the most conservative and regressive of our federal institutions, the Supreme Court.

The first real test of the NVRA came in 2018, when Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, went on a voter-purge binge (that hit Black, student, and elderly neighborhoods particularly hard) and was sued by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for violating Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

In a bitter 5-4 decision, the Republican majority ruled in Husted v Randolph that purging voters because they failed to return a junk-mail-like postcard was entirely legal.

It’s a practice that was called “caging” back when Karl Rove’s guy was allegedly doing it and it was illegal then but has, since that Court ruling, spread to pretty much every Republican-controlled state in the nation.

They’ll identify a part of the state that they consider particularly “prone to fraud“ — in other words, filled with a lot of Black and brown people — and mail postcards that look like junk mail into those precincts. When people failed to return them, they are automatically removed from the voting rolls. In most cases they don’t even know they’ve been purged until they show up to vote and are turned away.

Justice Samuel Alito’s decision was particularly biting, claiming that the arguments made by the citizens who’d lost their right to vote were “worse than superfluous” and their argument that they shouldn’t have to regularly check in with the Secretary of State’s office to stay on the voter rolls represented logic “no sensible person” could agree with.

Sensible or not, in his dissent, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that around 4 percent of Americans move every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters — nearly 20 percent of its 8 million registered voters — as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll....”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent was even more scathing.

“Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by States to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters,” she wrote, “including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against.”

She then quoted the “right to vote” NVRA preamble noted above, and, essentially, accused the conservatives on the Court of helping Republicans in the states they controlled engage in massive racial and economic discrimination in the voting process.

“[This decision] entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate. … Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote.”

The “right to vote” took another hit when the State of Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a recount of the 2000 presidential election but five Republicans on the US Supreme Court ignored the 10th Amendment (“states’ rights”) and stopped the recount.

That was a good thing for George W. Bush because when the Florida vote was later recounted by a consortium of newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post, they found, as the Times noted on Nov. 12, 2001:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won...”

Nonetheless, Chief Justice William Rehnquist dismissed all the nation’s concerns about the Court flipping the 2000 presidential election in that totally partisan 5-4 decision, writing in his opinion:

“[T]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Which casts us in a pretty terrible light. As Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) points out:

“The constitutions of at least 135 nations — including our fellow North American countries, Canada and Mexico — explicitly guarantee citizens the right to vote…”

Instead, Raskin notes, because of five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court we’re in the company of countries like Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, and Pakistan.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda and they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to suppress the vote and thus rig the system.

That’s why they’ve already successfully passed previously-unthinkable major voter suppression laws in 18 states and have them pending in many more. They’ve changed the law in Georgia and several other states so that they can now throw out the votes from entire neighborhoods or cities where they don’t like the outcome; all they have to do is vaguely assert a “suspicion of fraud.”

Between the massive gerrymandering effort the GOP has launched nationwide and the Post Office’s changes that’ll hit Blue states with high levels of mail-in voting (some only have mail-in voting), the next few elections are going to be a real challenge for Democrats.

Additionally, as you’re reading these words, millions of voters are being purged from the rolls in Red states, particularly in Blue cities with significant minority populations.

As a result, this fall we’re going to have to show up in absolutely overwhelming numbers just to get squeaker victories in these now-heavily-rigged Republican-controlled states.

Unless enough of us stand up, speak up, and get active to regain control of Congress this fall and push legislation protecting American voters, Republicans will continue to eviscerate the voting right they’ve now turned into a privilege until it becomes completely meaningless.

And that will signal the end of America as we know it.

Report typos and corrections to: feedback@alternet.org.

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How the GOP has conned America for 40 years

:{:{Thom Hartmann December 29, 2025}:

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 28 percent, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:

They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;

They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100 percent of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);

They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;

And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ’80s and ’90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91 percent top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70 percent of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in the Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his eight years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218 percent increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86 percent to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for two years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

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AN 12 25

An alternative to the GOP is exploding among young people

:{:{Thom HartmannDecember 24, 2025}:

The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found:

“A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.“… 51 percent of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36 percent) don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17 percent are not sure…

“Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57 percent want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election…

“Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78 percent would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…” (emphasis added).

I was on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:

When, in 1957, my dad bought the house I grew up in, the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than ten times the average wage.

When my Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, we owned a bit over 22 percent of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control only about 4 percent of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).

From the 1930s right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.

When I ran my first seriously successful business in the early 1970s, it cost me around $35/month for comprehensive health insurance for each of my 18 employees; at that time hospitals and health insurance companies were required by Michigan law (where I lived; most other states were identical) to be run as non-profits. Today, health insurance can be as much as one-fifth of a company’s payroll expense.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65 percent of us were in the middle class (up from around 20 percent in the 1930s). Today, after 44 years of Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43 percent of us are middle class .

FDR’s great — and successful — Democratic Socialist experiment following the Republican Great Depression was to drive the economy from the bottom up, reversing the “Horse and Sparrow” trickle-down economics and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations that provoked the Great Crash.

He did that by:

Expanding the notion of the commons — the stuff we all collectively own and is administered or funded and regulated by government — to include free public education nationwide (and cheap college), old-age retirement (Social Security), and public power and transportation systems (Tennessee Valley Authority, federal support for local transit, roads and highways).

Legalizing unions, an effort that was so successful that when Reagan came into office fully a third of us had good union jobs and, because they set the local wage floors, two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union wage and benefit package.

Establishing a minimum wage on which a single worker could raise a family of three and still stay above the federal poverty level (today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25: adjusted with the Consumer Price Index, that $1.60 minimum wage in 1968 is equivalent to about $14.90 an hour in 2025 dollars).

In the years since, we’ve continued to expand the commons by establishing national single-payer healthcare systems for low-income people (Medicaid) and retired people (Medicare), both of which came out of LBJ’s Democratic Socialist program that he called The Great Society.

Meanwhile, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats have pushed back against these Democratic Socialist programs that made the American middle class the first in the history of the world to exceed more than half the population.

Reagan’s war on unions has cut our union membership down to well under 10 percent in the private sector.

His gutting federal funding for education has exploded college costs to the point where three generations are saddled with over $2 trillion in debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich (from 74 percent down to 27 percent) and corporations tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to $2.4 trillion) just in his eight years; since then the four GW Bush and Trump tax cuts have, when combined with Reagan’s, produced a $38 trillion national debt so big that we now spend more on servicing their debt than we do on our defense budget or would on administering a national healthcare system.

Back in the 1940s, after the incredible success of the New Deal, President Roosevelt wanted to further expand the commons by expanding the scope of his Democratic Socialist programs. Just before he died, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included:

“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the nation’s industries, shops, farms, or mines. (Unionization and an above-poverty-level minimum wage.)

“The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. (Ditto and government as the employer of last resort.)

“The right of every farmer to raise and sell products at a return that gives his family a decent living. (Don’t manipulate farm prices with stupid tariff wars, etc., and make the government the purchaser of last resort.)

“The right of every businessperson, large and small, to trade free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. (Break up the giant corporations and encourage average people to start small businesses, including with loan supports.)

“The right of every family to a decent home. (Today this would mean no more corporations, hedge funds, and foreign billionaires owning single-family homes to squeeze us dry by jacking up rents.)

“The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health. (FDR favored a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All.)

“The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment (i.e., robust Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance).

“The right to a good education.” (Free or inexpensive college, quality public schools in every community.)

Much to the chagrin of my Republican-activist father, my grandfather (a 1917 Norwegian immigrant) frequently and proudly described himself as a socialist. When I asked him what he meant, he always pointed me to FDR, the New Deal, and his proposed Second Bill of Rights.

And here we are again.

My grandfather’s generation saw up-close and firsthand the tax-cutting and deregulation binge of the Roaring 20s (which were only “roaring” for the morbidly rich), and then had the lived experience of watching FDR put the country back together and create the world’s first widespread middle class.

Millennials and Zoomers today are seeing the same thing, between the Bush Housing Crash of 2008, the botched Covid Crash of 2020, and the GOP’s relentless program to drive the wealth of the nation into the money bins of the billionaires who own that party.

They see the example of most European countries, where the commons includes college (many will actually pay you a stipend to attend), healthcare, and daycare/preschool, and union density is often well above 80%. Housing is subsidized or heavily regulated, leading several to have essentially ended homelessness. Giant corporate monopolies are prohibited and local small businesses are encouraged.

Europeans call these programs Democratic Socialism or social democracy, and young Americans clearly are enthusiastic about bringing the “European Dream” to this country.

My sense is that — much like in the 1930s — a significant majority of Americans are sick of the neoliberal “let the rich run things because they know best” b------- that Republicans, “Tech Bros,” and a shrinking minority of on-the-take Democratic politicians embrace.

Meanwhile, nobody’s sure why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is refusing to release the autopsy they did of the 2024 election, producing speculation it may have uncovered examples of Russian and Republican manipulation of both voters and the vote, but I’m guessing the real reason is that the neoliberals who largely run the DNC saw feedback that reflected the Rasmussen poll I opened this article with.

The exploding popularity of progressive politicians from Zohran Mamdani to Bernie Sanders, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t an anomaly; they’re a signpost to both electoral and governing success for the next generation of genuinely progressive Democratic politicians.

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AN 12 25

Science destroys Trump Cabinet's lie

:{:{Thom HartmannDecember 19, 2025}:

The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”

And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.

Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.

The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.

Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)

Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.

Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:

“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”

The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin

“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land

Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.

All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.

As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. And America’s Founders believed it.

Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”

And we get there through voting.

This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.

But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.

“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.

With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51 percent threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Dr. Tim Roper told me:

“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic:

“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“

Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.

When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).

It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.

This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.

As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.

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MTA GMAIL 12 25

NO LNX?

Dear Patrick,

Thom Hartmann here, progressive political commentator. Many of you know me from the #1 rated progressive nationally syndicated radio show, the Thom Hartmann Program. I’m also the author of several dozen books, including Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights and The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

I'm also a longtime supporter of Move to Amend!

Please support their work to end corporate personhood and the corrupting influence of billionaire money in political elections.

This effort is more important than ever before.

A major focus of my programming in 2025 has been analyzing the Trump regime’s rapid authoritarian takeover of our democratic institutions and its destructive assaults on individuals, communities, the environment, and democracy itself. Throughout this year, Move to Amend has worked to expose the connections between the rise of authoritarian rule and corporate power, along with the immense political influence of billionaires like Elon Musk. Corporations and billionaires spent billions to elect Trump, donated to his inauguration, and continue to bankroll projects like the new White House East Wing ballroom boondoggle.

In return, Trump has rewarded the crypto, fossil fuel, health insurance, private prison, military contractor, and other corporate interests – as well as billionaires – with massive permanent tax breaks, no-bid contracts, dropped criminal prosecutions, privatization/corporatization of public services and the rollback of health, safety, and environmental protections.

Resistance to these corporate assaults on people, communities, the environment, and democracy has been, and will continue to be, critically important. So too is responding to escalating attacks on marginalized groups and supporting the mass uprisings of people’s movements. Move to Amend supporters across the country have leafleted and spoken at this mass marches, rallies, and protests. But they also understand that resistance alone is not enough.

Defense must be coupled with offense. Resisting must be paired with envisioning a better future – realities those seeking authoritarian rule never want people to do.

Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment (HJR54) is going on the offense by envisioning a better world where corporations are no longer treated as constitutional persons (i.e. abolishing “corporate personhood”) and where political contributions are no longer equated with speech. These judge-made doctrines have handed power away from people and into the hands of corporations and billionaires. Ending them would put people in charge of decisions that shape their lives and their communities.

Opposition to corporate rule is growing. But street protests, boycotts, and even government fines are not enough. The only fundamental solution to the fundamental problem of corporate rule is abolishing corporate constitutional rights.

Despite its small staff and budget, Move to Amend’s 2025 Accomplishments have been impressive: 68 Congressional supporters of the We the People Amendment, 818 organizational endorsements, 725 local resolutions and ballot initiatives, over 528,000 supporters, several social media posts attracting over 1 million reactions, and growing support from law school professors across the country. This success is rooted in their political and economic independence from corporations, billionaires, big foundations, political parties, and governments.

That independence means their support must come from people like you and me.

No one else does the work that Move to Amend does – confronting corporate personhood directly and connecting it to everyday struggles. Working alongside a committed, visionary, and passionate group of people who truly understand what systemic change requires is rare, and I am proud to support them. Through community education, public speaking, movement education, lobbying, and coalition-building, Move to Amend is helping build a broad, deep, diverse, and democratic movement that increases people power over corporate power and the corrupting influence of money in politics.

For decades, I’ve used my platform as a broadcaster, speaker and author of Unequal Protection and scores of articles to help push for an end to “corporate personhood” and for the cause that Move to Amend leads across the country. I do so because I understand, as I hope you do, that corporate constitutional rights stand in the way of every justice movement – from environmental protection and climate action to ending for-profit prisons, predatory health care, and endless wars. We cannot win as long as corporations and special interests have more rights and resources than the people.

Move to Amend also recognizes that our deeply broken and dysfunctional political system and flawed constitution requires broader constitutional renewal. This year, they have joined coalitions exploring not only what additional amendments are needed, but how to create a truly democratic, participatory process to achieve them.

I’ve supported Move to Amend since the very beginning. Please join me in supporting this critical work to end corporate rule and political corruption.

Yours in the movement to amend,

Thom Hartmann

P.S. The history of social change in this country shows that progress depends on those willing to demand systemic alternatives—to make the impossible inevitable while others focus on immediate crises. Move to Amend seeks that fundamental structural change. That’s why, during the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, they will educate and organize for a Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule. Help out. Please donate to Move to Amend today.

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no lnx

Home | White House tries to smother the truth with what they pretend are jokes

Thom Hartmann December 05, 2025 | 06:49AM ET

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

The Trump White House just showed us something every American should find chilling, no matter what music they listen to or what party they vote for.

They took a video of aggressive ICE arrests, slapped Sabrina Carpenter’s song on top of it, and posted it like it was a victory lap. Then, when Carpenter objected and said the video was “evil and disgusting” and told them not to use her music to benefit an “inhumane agenda,” the White House hit back with a statement that sounded like it came from a playground bully, not the seat of American government.

They didn’t debate her point. They didn’t defend policy with facts. They went straight to dehumanization and insult, calling people “illegal murderers, rapists,” and saying anyone who defends them must be “stupid” or “slow.”

That’s not just ugly: it’s a warning.

Because the biggest story here is not a celebrity clapback; it’s that the White House is using the power of the state to turn human beings into a violence-normalizing punchline, and using America’s culture as a weapon to spread it.

This is what rising authoritarianism looks like in the age of social media.

A democracy survives on shared reality and shared humanity. It survives when the government understands that it works for the people and must be accountable to the Constitution, to due process, and to basic human decency.

But what happens when a government starts producing propaganda like it’s a teenage streamer chasing clicks and the president runs the White House like it’s a reality show operation, right down to the televised Cabinet meetings?

We get a machine that can normalize cruelty. We get a public trained to cheer at humiliation. We get outrage as entertainment. And we get the steady erosion of our ability to ask the most important questions in a free society.

Was this legal? Was it justified? Was it proportional? Was it humane? Were innocent people caught up? Were families separated? Was there due process? Is it even constitutional?

Those questions disappear when the government turns an ICE arrest into a meme.

There are, of course, serious crimes in every society and violent criminals should be held accountable under the law. But that isn’t what the White House statement was doing. It was, instead, engaged in something far more ancient, cynical, and dangerous.

It was trying to paint everyone in that video with the worst label imaginable so the public stops caring about what happens next.

That’s how they get permission — both explicit and implicit — for abuses.

If the audience for Trump’s sick reality show is told, “These are monsters,” then — as we’ve most recently seen both with ICE here domestically and with people in small boats off the coast of Venezuela — any cruelty becomes acceptable.

Any killing becomes a shrug. Overreach becomes a punchline. And following the rule of law becomes something we apply to our friends while we throw it away for people we have been taught to hate.

That is exactly why authoritarians always start by dehumanizing a target group.

And it always spreads.

Trump started by demonizing and then going after immigrants. Then he demanded fealty (and millions of dollars) from journalists, universities, and news organizations. He demonizes his political opponents to the point they suffer death threats, attacks, and assassinations. And if Trump keeps going down this same path — as Pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned the world — it’ll next be you and me.

Consider this regime’s cultural warfare program. The White House has reportedly used music from multiple artists without permission and now brags that they’ve used those creators’ work to bait outrage, to “own the libs.”

All to drive attention, create spectacle, and turn governance into a constant fight as they punish anyone in public life — today it’s Sabrina Carpenter — who dares to speak up.

This is intimidation pretending to be a joke. If you’re an artist, a teacher, an organizer, or just a person with a platform, the message is simple: “We can drag you into our propaganda machine whenever we want, and if you object we’ll mock you and send an online — and often physical — mob after you.”

That’s a chilling reality, and it matters in a democracy. People start to think twice before speaking. They start to retreat. They start to self censor.

And that’s the Trump regime’s first goal.

Then there’s the distraction, particularly from a cratering economy and Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell.

With this strategy, borrowed from the Nazis (as my guest on the radio show Monday, Lawrence Reese, noted in his book The Nazi Mind 12: Warnings From History), culture war isn’t a sideshow anymore, it’s part of a larger strategy.

When the government posts a meme like the one where ICE used Carpenter’s music, it isn’t trying to inform us: it’s trying to trigger us. It’s trying to bait us into amplifying the clip, fighting over the celebrity angle, and losing sight of the real issue.

And that real issue is Trump’s and the GOP’s insatiable lust for state power and the wealth that power can allow, bring, and protect.

Armed agents. Detention. Deportation. Families. Fear. Mistakes that can’t be undone. Human beings who can be disappeared from their communities with the tap of a button and a viral soundtrack. Or killed by “suicide” in a jail cell when they threaten to go public.

If we care about freedom, we can’t just stand by and say nothing while this regime turns ICE’s violence into content.

Because once a government learns it can win political points by broadcasting humiliation, it’ll do it again. And it’ll escalate. It’ll push the line farther and farther until we wake up one day and wonder how we got here.

So what do we do?

First, stop amplifying their propaganda on their terms. Don’t share their clips as entertainment, even to condemn them without context (no links in this article). When you must talk about it, talk about the power being abused, not the celebrity drama.

Second, demand oversight. Call your members of Congress (202-224-3121. Demand hearings on ICE media practices and the use of official government accounts and our tax dollars to promote dehumanizing propaganda. Demand transparency on how these videos are produced, approved, and distributed.

Third, support civil liberties groups and immigrant rights organizations that challenge abuses in court and document what’s happening on the ground. Democracy requires watchdogs like them when the people in power act like they’re above the law.

Fourth, get inside the Democratic Party and vote — and help others vote — like it matters, because it does. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, governors, attorneys general, and members of Congress all shape how far this culture of cruelty can spread. Authoritarians rely on fatigue and cynicism: Don’t give them either: participate.

And finally, speak up. Sabrina Carpenter did, and she was right to. Not because she’s a pop star, but because she named the moral truth that the White House is trying to smother with what they pretend are jokes.

When a government starts celebrating the humiliation of vulnerable people, it’s telling the world that it no longer sees itself as the servant of a democratic republic. Of all the people. Instead, it now sees itself as the applause-hungry enforcer of a bloodthirsty tribe.

If we let this become normal, we will — one day soon — no longer recognize our country.

This is the moment to draw a line.

Not just for immigrants. Not just for artists. For the Constitution. For due process. For human dignity. For the idea that in America, power is accountable.

Call. Organize. Vote. Let’s not let cruelty become America’s official language.

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no lnx

The GOP has become a party of addicts

(REUTERS)

Thom HartmannNovember 18, 2025

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the way, or the exception that proves the rule?

By the shocking light of today’s glaring headlines, it’s time to ask a larger question that no one in the media appears to be willing to say out loud: at what point does the accumulation of misconduct by Donald J. Trump become so brazen, so corrosive, so frankly immoral and even criminal, that Republican elected officials and voters finally say, “Enough is enough?”

So far:

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring are demanding Congress release all the files, and Trump was attacking Republicans for even considering going along with them (now he’s opened his own “investigation,” which will prevent their public release regardless of Congress as he pretends to call for them to be made public). A coalition of Epstein survivors has urged Congress to declassify every remaining record tied to his global network of child sexual abuse. They argue that decades of secrecy protected rich and powerful men while silencing victims. House Democrats dropped a political bombshell this week, releasing emails from Epstein’s estate that appear to show Trump wasn’t just aware of the abuse taking place in Epstein’s orbit but “spent hours at my house” with at least one of the presumably underage girls.

The January 6 insurrection, the Big Lie, and the GOP’s shrugging at treason. Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after insisting, against all evidence and over 60 court losses, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That wasn’t protest: it was a violent assault on American democracy itself that led to the death of three police officers and the hospitalization of over 140 others. Yet the GOP continues to use Trump’s lie as a political weapon.

He’s incited hate against those least able to defend themselves, promoting a culture of violence and intolerance. From people fleeing murder and rape in their own countries to those merely seeking a better life to American communities of queer people and religious and racial minorities, Trump has licensed the most base and disgusting elements in our society.

His trade wars gutted American credibility, paved the way for bribes to himself and his boys, all while punishing the very supporters he claimed to champion. Trump’s tariffs on China, Europe, and beyond slapped billions in hidden taxes on U.S. consumers and farmers. They crippled small manufacturers, triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad, and exposed how “America First” became America isolated. In response, corporate and foreign leaders showered Trump and his boys with gifts, investments, gold, crypto, a jet, and overseas Trump hotel projects. The GOP, once the party of free markets, turned away as this con man and his family accepted bribes, committed economic vandalism, and “earned” a reported $5+ billion during his first ten months in office.

His praise for Vladimir Putin and contempt for Ukraine revealed a chilling abandonment of America’s historic role in defending democracy. Even after Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, his kidnapping Ukrainian women and children, and his ongoing nightly missile and drone attacks horrified the world, Trump boasted of “good talks” with Putin and mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His words told the world that U.S. loyalty could be traded for personal favors and ego-fluffing — or blackmail. When strength is redefined as submission to autocrats, freedom everywhere grows weaker.

The most horrific symbolic act of corruption yet: demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a Trump-style billionaires’ ballroom. In October 2025, the East Wing, a historic cornerstone of American democracy (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the East Portico), was razed for a 90,000-square-foot “Presidential Ballroom,” financed by companies and billionaires buying Trump’s favors and conducted with virtually no oversight. Some preservationists called it the most reckless desecration of the People’s House in American history. This isn’t a renovation, it’s a Marie Antoinette-style attempt at monarchy.

He is now the first U.S. president convicted of 34 counts of felony election fraud, and whose company was nailed for falsifying business records to rip off insurance companies and the taxpayers of New York. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of orchestrating a criminal cover-up to hide hush-money payments from voters during the 2016 election. It’s the first time in history an American president has been convicted of a felony, and yet the GOP still kneels at his feet. When “law and order” applies to everyone except the powerful, justice collapses.

In a civil trial, a jury of average people found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, with evidence showing he’d committed what the judge in the case called the common-sense “definition of rape.” Writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store, and the jury believed her. Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the verdict meant what Trump had done to her met the ordinary understanding of rape. The GOP’s continued embrace of a man found legally liable for sexual violence — after bragging on tape that he had regularly sexually assaulted other women — shows moral bankruptcy in its purest form.

Twice impeached, and twice rescued by the party that pretends it swore an oath to the Constitution. Trump was impeached in 2019 for abusing power by trying to blackmail Ukraine into creating phony dirt on his political opponent, and again in 2021 for inciting the January 6th insurrection. Both times, Republicans in the Senate saved him. When loyalty to one man outweighs loyalty to country, impeachment stops being a safeguard and becomes a ritual of surrender.

:{:{He’s fired senior officials and watchdogs across government agencies, installed incompetent toadies in critical positions, and gutted the guardrails against presidential corruption. From food safety to pollution controls to safeguarding public lands to stopping climate change, Trump has elevated the interests of his donors and morbidly rich friends above those of average Americans and our nation itself. He’s cut taxes on billionaires while hitting working-class Americans with billions in tariff taxes to pay for those same tax cuts.}:

He prodded Texas to gerrymander/rig the 2026 election while demanding his Attorney General prosecute California for their attempt to rebalance the playing field. And now he’s going after his political enemies — many of them Republicans who could no longer stomach his criminality and corruption — with trumped-up charges designed to wipe out their retirement savings or even leave them homeless.}:

This is a crisis that’s tearing apart the soul of democracy itself.

How much corruption, how much deceit, how many assaults on truth can a republic endure before its citizens stop believing that justice still matters?

When the weight of wrongdoing piles high enough, it isn’t just the Republican Party that breaks and submits; it’s the faith of the people in the very idea of democratic self-government that dies.

And yet the GOP continues to worship him, to kiss his a--, to pretend he’s a great and brilliant man, a modern-day Wizard of Oz. They still rally behind the man. They still defend him, excuse him, and elevate him.

Why? Because corruption is addictive. Once a party decides that power is more important than truth, every lie becomes easier to rationalize, every abuse becomes normalized, every crime becomes “politics as usual.” Power is a drug that numbs the conscience, and the GOP has become a party of addicts.

Democracy can’t survive this level of violence against the rule of law. It must have accountability to survive. It requires honesty. It depends on the courage to face truth even when that truth is painful. The longer a party or a people look away from corruption and criminality, the deeper that corruption and criminality spread, until the whole system collapses from the rot within.

The only cure for that rot is trust, brought about by the evenhanded application of justice and the enforcement of laws and democratic norms. And the only path back to that trust is truth and accountability.

The GOP must decide whether it still believes in the words and examples of Republican presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower or whether it’ll continue to worship at a cheap, gold-painted altar atop which stands one man.

For the sake of democracy, for the sake of the next generation of Americans, these abuses can’t continue. There must be an accounting, and it must come before Trump’s damage is irreparable.

If the Republican Party continues to accept a leader who shatters every norm, effortlessly breaks laws, and ridicules every moral boundary, then the experiment called America will fail.

Because if Republicans continue let a man who once bragged he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” prove himself right, they haven’t saved our country: they’ve destroyed it.

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an

no lnx

The true risk behind Trump's purges

Thom Hartmann November 14, 2025

The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.

Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.

First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.

He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.

He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.

Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.

Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.

Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.

This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.

But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.

Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.

That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.

This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.

And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.

This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.

That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.

But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.

“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger.

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

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an

no lnx

The fight for our democracy won’t be won by appeasing bullies

Supporters of Donald Trump celebrate after the Fox Network called the election in his favor at the site of his rally, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

Thom HartmannNovember 13, 2025

What we witnessed this weekend in the United States Senate wasn’t “compromise.” It was surrender: the kind of gutless, morally bankrupt capitulation that betrays American families and feeds the billionaires devouring our democracy.

Eight senators who caucus with the Democrats joined Republicans to end the government shutdown, not in victory, not to secure healthcare for millions, but to hand Donald Trump and his morbidly rich cronies a gift-wrapped political win.

And standing at the center of this disgrace is Chuck Schumer, the so-called “leader” of the Senate Democrats, who orchestrated — or at least approved or failed to stop — the entire debacle from behind the curtain, then had the gall to vote “no” at the last minute to wash his hands of it.

Let’s be clear: this was Schumer’s deal. He built it, he pushed it, and he enabled it. His fingerprints are all over this betrayal.

And what did Democrats get in exchange for reopening the government? What did the American people get? Nothing.

Not a penny restored to Medicaid (or the hit Medicare will take in a year under Trump’s Big Ugly Bill). Not a rollback of Trump’s rescissions that gutted essential agencies. Not even a meaningful vote to protect Affordable Care Act subsidies or food stamps.

The so-called “promise” of a vote in the Senate within 40 days is a joke, a political placebo meant to sedate the public while the insurance industry counts its profits.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was right to call Sunday evening’s vote a “very bad night.” The deal explodes health-care premiums for over 20 million Americans and paves the way for 15 million to lose coverage altogether.

That lack of coverage, experts estimate, will cause 50,000 preventable deaths a year. These are real people and their children, their deaths sacrificed at the altar of Trump’s and the GOP’s lust for wealth and power.

And it wasn’t just cowardice: it was also cash.

The health-care industry owns far too many Democrats, and this vote appears to prove it. The same corporations that profit from denying you care are stuffing the pockets of the very lawmakers who just “compromised” your future.

When Democrats vote with Republicans to gut health care, it’s not bipartisanship. It’s corruption, legalized and laundered through Citizens United campaign finance loopholes created by five bought-and-paid-for Republicans on the Supreme Court. Bribery by another name.

Schumer has presided over this kind of rot for years, protecting incumbents who serve donors instead of voters, blowing up efforts to promote genuine progressives like Bernie in 2016, while building a machine that runs on Wall Street money and insurance and banking industry cash. He was so ineffective he couldn’t even stop Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema back in the day, even though he wields enormous power.

Schumer’s’ leadership — and, generally, the leadership of the Democrats since the 1990s Clinton years — have turned the Democratic Party from the party of FDR into a cautious club managed by well-paid consultants who tremble at their own shadows while they fill their bank accounts with blood money.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Trump is showing us exactly what real political power looks like, as well as what it fears.

The simple reality is that Trump was about to break. He was freaking out.

Before the eight senators caved to the GOP, Trump was so frantic that he was demanding Senate Republicans end the filibuster altogether, so he could “ram through legislation that will make sure no Democrat ever gets elected again.”

GOP leaders — including (and especially) Senate Majority Leader John Thune — are terrified at the possibility of ending the filibuster, not out of principle, but out of self-preservation. They know ending it could expose just how extreme and deranged the Republican agenda really is.

As I’ve argued before, the filibuster has been a scam for a half-century, a tool that since the Reagan era both Republicans and corporate Democrats use every year to fool their base and donors into thinking their hands are tied.

It obscures Republican radicalism, while similarly protecting the so-called “moderate” Democrats who spit-shine the boots of their corporate masters.

Trump believes killing the filibuster will increase his power. In reality, it would tear his party apart and lay bare its madness for the world to see because Republicans could no longer say, “We couldn’t pass that bill to [fill in the blank] because those damn Democrats filibustered it.”

But the filibuster should be ended, and if these eight Democrats hadn’t surrendered, Trump might have forced it. That would’ve been the best thing for America.

And make no mistake: Trump’s terrified or he wouldn’t have even considered killing the filibuster. As Steve Bannon bluntly said, if Democrats ever regain full control, “a lot of Republicans are going to prison.” Presumably including Trump himself.

Compounding Trump’s freak-out, alleged horrors are leaking out about how Trump appears in the Epstein files. Reporter David Schuster noted:

“A few GOP House members say they’ve heard from FBI/DOJ contacts that the Epstein files (with copies in different agencies) are worse than Michael Wolff’s description of Epstein photos showing Trump with half-naked teenage girls.”

Trump knows what’s in those files; he partied with Epstein for a decade and is now throwing bennies at Ghislaine Maxwell to try to keep her quiet. That’s why he’s trying to distract his supporters by hosting his Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago, making incoherent threats about cash check “rebates” to Americans and war in Venezuela, and hustling billions from foreign dictators to insulate himself and his boys before the walls close in.

If Democrats are going to really confront Trump’s authoritarianism and the corporate corruption that fuels it — which is absolutely necessary now to rescue and sustain American democracy — we need a Senate leader with a spine, not a strategist for surrender. Chuck Schumer’s brand of 90s politics, to triangulate, capitulate, and hope nobody notices, has failed us for decades.

He embodies the rot of the old guard: a generation of post-1992 Democrats who think fundraising prowess equals political courage.

It doesn’t. Times have changed, and we’re now standing in the midst of a progressive populist era. Just look at New York’s mayoral race.

Leadership means fighting for working families, not finessing deals for donors. It means standing up to Trumpism, not whispering in back rooms while pretending to resist.

We need new leadership. America — and Democrats — deserve statesmen and women willing to call out corruption in their own ranks, to reject the blood money of lobbyists, and to stand unflinchingly for universal healthcare, living wages, and democracy itself.

Americans are sick of being sold out. We’re done watching our supposed champions cave while billionaires pop champagne. The fight for our democracy won’t be won by appeasing bullies or bowing to donors.

It’ll be won when Democrats rediscover their courage, and when Chuck Schumer finally steps aside to be replaced by a true fighter.

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an 10 25

no lnx

Trump isn't the gravest threat to our democracy

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a Navy 250 Celebration in Norfolk, Virginia, U.S. October 5, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Thom HartmannNovember 01, 2025

Some data points for your consideration:

Last Saturday in Chicago’s affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Donald Trump’s secret, masked police violently pulled a 67‑year‑old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding.

Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime.

An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths.

While more than 75 percent of Americans trusted the news 50 years ago, today that number is a mere 28 percent, with only 8 percent of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets.

These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

It’s called the algorithm, and if we’re to survive as a republic it must be regulated the same way we regulate anything else that produces addictive, compulsive behavior that twists and distorts people’s lives.

Possibly the greatest threat to humanity at this moment is the algorithm.

It can twist and wreck people’s minds and lives — tear apart families and destroy countries — in a way that can be more rapid and more powerful than heroin, cocaine, or fentanyl. And yet it is completely unregulated.

An algorithm is a software program/system that inserts itself between humans as we attempt to communicate with each other. It decides which communications are important and which are not, which communications will be shared and which will not, what we will see or learn and what we will not.

As a result, in a nation where 48 percent of citizens get much or most of their news from social media, the algorithms driving social media sites ultimately decide which direction society will move as a result of the shared information they encourage or suppress across society.

When you log onto social media and read your “feed,” you’re not seeing (in most cases) what was most recently posted by the people you “follow.” While some of that’s there, the algorithm also feeds you other posts it thinks you’ll like based on your past behavior, so as to increase your “engagement,” aka the amount of time you spend on the site and thus the number of advertisements you will view.

As a result, your attention is continually tweaked, led, and fine-tuned to reflect the goal of the algorithm’s programmers. Click on a post about voting, for example, and the algorithm then leads you to election denial, from there to climate denial, from there to Qanon.

Next stop, radicalization or paralysis. But at least you stayed along for the ride and viewed a lot of ads in the process.

Algorithms used in social media are not tuned for what is best for society. They don’t follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions, and political systems.

They don’t ask themselves, “Is this true?” or “Will this information help or hurt this individual or humanity?”

Instead, the algorithms’ main purpose is to make more money for the billionaires who own the social media platforms.

If telling you that, as Trump recently said, climate change “may affect us in 300 years” makes for more engagement (and more profit for the social media site) than does telling the truth about fossil fuels, it will get pushed into more and more minds.

No matter that such lies literally threaten human society short-term and possibly the survival of the human race long-term.

As Jaron Lanier told the Guardian:

“People survive by passing information between themselves. We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”

Those of a certain age or students of the advertising business may remember when Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders set off a panic across America in the 1960s, claiming that movies and TV shows were inserting micro-bursts of advertisements that flew below the radar of consciousness but nevertheless changed behavior.

The classic example was popcorn flashing on movie screens with the words “Buy Now!” It provoked a panic in Congress and multiple attempts at legislation to outlaw it before the practice was debunked as ineffective.

But algorithms are far from ineffective. They’re arguably one of the most powerful forces on the planet today.

The premise of several books, most famously Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is that the collection of massive amounts of data about each of us — then massaged and used by “automated” algorithms to increase our engagement — is actually a high-tech form of old fashioned but extremely effective thought control.

She argues that these companies are “intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes. New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify human behavior at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behavior modification.” (Emphasis hers.)She notes that “only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order.” Today, however, “the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed” to meet the financial goals of those engaging in surveillance capitalism.

This is such a powerful system for modifying our perspectives and behaviors, she argues, that it intervenes in or interferes with our “elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future.” (Emphasis hers.)

Social media companies have claimed that their algorithms are intellectual properties, inventions, and trade secrets, all things that fall under the rubric of laws designed to advance and protect intellectual property and commerce.

In my book The Hidden History of Big Brother: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy, I argue that algorithms should be open-source and thus publicly available for examination.

The reason so many algorithms are so toxic is because they are fine-tuned or adjusted to maximize engagement to benefit advertisers, who then pay the social media company, with little or no consideration for their impact on individuals or society.

Even more insidious, a billionaire social media company owner with a political agenda can program his algorithm to promote a particular politician, point of view, or a story that might help or destroy a politician or political party. Or even destroy a nation’s citizens’ faith in their government, media, or in democracy itself.

One way to get this under control is to require social media companies to ditch the algorithm and its associated advertising revenue model, and work instead on a subscription model with a modest fee.

Nigel Peacock and I saw this at work for the nearly two decades that we ran over 20 forums on CompuServe back in the 1980s and ’90s. Everybody there paid a membership fee to CompuServe and there was no advertising, so we had no incentive to try to manipulate their experience beyond normal moderation. There was no algorithm driving the show.

Replacing secret algorithms with subscriptions — or requiring they be publicly available in plain English so everybody can see how they’re being manipulated — would reduce the amount of screen time and the level of “screen addiction” so many people experience.

There’s an absolute consensus among both social scientists, psychologists, and political scientists that reducing algorithm-driven screen addiction would be a good thing for both individual mental health and the cohesion and health of our society.

But lacking a change in business model, the unique power social media holds to change behavior for good or ill — from Twitter spreading the Arab Spring, to Facebook provoking a mass slaughter in Myanmar, to both helping Russia elect Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 — cries out for regulation, transparency, or, preferably, both.

Three years ago, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Yvette Clarke, (D-NY) introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, which would do just that.

“Too often, Big Tech’s algorithms put profits before people, from negatively impacting young people’s mental health, to discriminating against people based on race, ethnicity, or gender, and everything in between,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), a co-sponsor of the legislation.“It is long past time,” she added, “for the American public and policymakers to get a look under the hood and see how these algorithms are being used and what next steps need to be taken to protect consumers.”

And — let’s not forget — to protect our democracy, our nation, and our planet.

The morbidly rich people who own our social media, focused more on adding more billions to their money bins than the consequences of their algorithms, don’t seem particularly concerned about these issues. Instead, they appear to be intentionally tweaking their algorithms to promote content that agrees with their political views and economic interests (although we can’t be sure because they keep them secret).

But it’s a safe bet that without the “enraging effect” of algorithmic amplification of outrage and hate, Donald Trump would never have become president, most Americans wouldn’t support brutal ICE tactics out of fear of brown people, and we wouldn’t today live in a nation where one in five households have stopped speaking with each other because of politics.

Right now, the Trump administration and Republican politicians don’t want to touch this subject because they believe Zuckerberg, Musk, and others who control the algorithms are using them to the GOP’s advantage.

But that sword can cut both ways, when public outrage reaches the point where it’s more profitable for the tech billionaires to promote anger against those in power than those currently on the outside.

It’s way past time to end the algorithmic manipulation of the American mind.

Pass it along (because the algorithm probably won’t).

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no lnx

The corruption of Donald Trump and his children points to something deeply menacing

:{:{Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, Co-Founder and CEO of World Liberty Financial, react outside the Nasdaq building after ringing the opening bell to celebrate the closing of ALT5’s $1.5 billion offering and adoption of its $WLFI Treasury Strategy at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., August 13, 2025.}:

REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz}:

Thom HartmannOctober 29, 2025

When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. The Trump family’s grift is teaching America’s elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, and it’s already distorting our economy.

When I was working for an international relief agency in the early 1980s, I went to Uganda during the war and famine that began when Tanzanian troops invaded to throw out Idi Amin. To get there, I had to pay a $50 bribe to the Ugandan official at their embassy in Nairobi to get my visa.

When I was leaving through the half-destroyed Entebbe airport, three soldiers pointed their automatic weapons at my face and demanded “half” of whatever money I had left before letting me through to the boarding area.

In Haiti, a cabinet-level official tried to solicit a $15,000 bribe from me in exchange for our agency getting permission to operate there (I turned it down). In a remote part of Mexico on a business trip, a police officer drove me off the road to demand $100 or else I’d “spend the night in jail.”

They were all quick, unforgettable lessons in how corruption works: when it becomes the default operating system of a country, it drains not only cash and makes it tough for honest businesspeople to earn a living, but — far more importantly — destroys democracy itself.

That same poison is now spreading here.

The corruption of Donald Trump and his children — the open solicitation of bribes disguised as “investments,” the jet plane, the crypto windfalls, the foreign hotel projects and “licensing fees,” the “donations” and “gifts” that appear tied to pardons, tariffs or regulatory relief — have begun to teach America’s morbidly rich and business leaders that access to our government is now a purchasable commodity.

Remember:

When Apple’s Tim Cook brought a chunk of 24-karat gold to gift Trump, apparently hoping for tariff exceptions?

The long list of corporations that are paying for the Epstein Ballroom, presumably in expectation of better treatment from the Trump regime?

The billions the UAE gave Trump’s kids just before Trump gave them chips they weren’t supposed to have because of national security?

Border czar Tom Homan taking $50,000 in a paper bag from an FBI agent and Trump, Bondi, and Noem laughing it off?

Or headlines like “Close Friend of JD Vance Skirts Normal Channels to Take Over Key Health Research” and “$130M Pentagon Donor Has Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”

Once that expectation of corruption takes hold, it reshapes an entire economy. It tells corporations, billionaires, and foreign governments alike that the fastest way to win contracts or avoid tariffs and other regulations isn’t through innovation or competition but through flattery, payment, or tribute to Donald, his wife, or his children.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s role models of Russia and Hungary.

In Russia, researchers estimate roughly 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s entire GDP vanishes each year into the pockets of Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs, and loyal politicians; some analysts put it even higher, approaching a quarter of the economy when you include the broader shadow sector.

In Hungary, corruption is smaller in absolute size but just as corrosive: public contracts are routinely overpriced by 20 percent or more, and a fifth of companies operate not on market principles but on loyalty to Viktor Orbán. The result is predictable: stagnant productivity, collapsing services, and a hollowed-out middle class as the Orbán family becomes fabulously rich.

Corruption functions like a tax, but one that never funds schools or bridges. It rewards obedience and punishes competence. Once leaders and their families start selling favors, the smart business move isn’t to innovate but to curry favor; the fastest path to profit is proximity to power.

Small businesses get crushed because they can’t afford the “entry fee.” Big ones stagnate because every decision runs through political connections. Ordinary people watch their roads crumble, their wages flatten, and their faith in fairness evaporate. The economy quietly re-optimizes itself around bribery instead of merit, and everyone — except the oligarchs — pays.

That’s where America is today. Trump has already normalized the spectacle of CEOs and foreign leaders making pilgrimages to the White House or Mar-a-Lago with million-dollar checks or lavish gifts. His family’s private ventures, from crypto to foreign hotels to golf resorts, are magnets for anyone seeking goodwill from the man with the power to sign their contracts or reduce their tariffs.

And with five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized unlimited political bribery of themselves and politicians through Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, and Citizens United v. FEC, there’s barely a law left to stop it.

We’ve seen this movie before. In every kleptocracy, every dictatorship throughout history, the leader’s personal enrichment becomes national policy. Regulators are neutered, watchdogs are fired, and the press is bullied into silence through lawsuits, regulation, and oligarchic purchase.

Then come the strong-arm tactics: the intimidation of lawyers, journalists, and opponents under the guise of “law and order.” It’s what Putin did when Alexei Navalny exposed Gazprom’s graft and paid with his life; it’s what Orbán did when he had critics of his corruption prosecuted and bankrupted.

And now, here, attorneys defending protesters are being detained at airports while Trump suspends enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so he, his billionaire buddies, and his family members can profit from foreign deals.

Corruption doesn’t just rot morality; it wrecks economies. When a nation’s leadership is for sale, domestic and foreign corporations start bidding instead of building.

Economists call it “state capture”: private interests rewriting the rules for their own benefit. Studies from the IMF and World Bank show that captured states lose growth, investment, and trust, while inequality soars. In Russia’s case, that loss adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. In Hungary’s, GDP per capita has fallen far behind its once-equal neighbors.

The same dynamic is taking shape here as tax breaks, tariffs, and deregulation are auctioned off to the highest bidders.

For most Americans, this translates into worse schools, fewer jobs, and higher prices. Every time a corporation pays a bribe to secure a contract, it folds that “cost of doing business” into what you and I pay at the store or in taxes. Every time a billionaire buys a loophole or a pardon, the rest of us pick up the tab.

Meanwhile, the honest business owner who refuses to play along loses bids, the worker loses bargaining power, and democracy itself loses credibility. The economy becomes a closed club, guarded by money, loyalty, and fear.

Recovering from this kind of rot isn’t easy, but history shows it can be done.

Countries that have clawed their way back from systemic corruption did it by prosecuting openly corrupt leaders while making the sale of influence difficult and dangerous: forcing transparency in contracts, requiring officials to divest from private holdings, empowering independent prosecutors, protecting whistleblowers, and putting every government transaction online where citizens can see it.

The sunlight approach works because it raises the cost of corruption higher than its payoff.

That’s the crossroads we face now. We can follow Russia and Hungary down the path where 15 to 20 percent of national wealth disappears into private hands each year, or we can defend the idea that government exists to serve the public, not enrich the Trump dynasty.

If we fail, America will cease to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. We’ll become a market; one where laws, tariffs, and justice are just products to be bought and sold by those with the closest access to Trump or his family members.

I’ve seen what that world looks like up close, staring down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at Entebbe Airport. The stakes aren’t abstract. Corruption is the moment when fear replaces fairness, when power replaces principle, and when Americans become “customers” of their own government instead of citizens.

If we let Trump and his circle finish that transformation, America won’t just resemble Putin’s Russia, it will have become just another tinpot dictatorship with a fabulously rich “royal” entourage and a vast class of the struggling, working poor who can’t afford to spiff the First Family.

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AN 10 25

NO LNX

Trump has successfully mounted a coup thanks to one man

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hands President Donald Trump a gavel after Trump signed his signature bill of tax breaks and spending cuts, ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations, at the White House in Washington, Friday, July 4, 2025. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS

:{:{Thom HartmannOctober 27, 2025}:

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“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty: The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

—James Madison, Federalist 47

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (emphasis Jefferson’s)

— Thomas Jefferson, commentary on Federalist 48

Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint.

He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked.

If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

That historical reality notwithstanding, “King” Donald has decided, all by himself, to demolish a large chunk of The People’s White House and replace it with a replica of Vladimir Putin’s Winter Palace’s Grand Throne Room so he can entertain billionaires with large, high-dollar fundraisers at the taxpayers’ expense without having to travel all the way to Mar-a-Largo.

He didn’t bother to get permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, nor did he submit plans for what people are now calling the “Epstein Ballroom” to the National Capital Planning Commission as any other historic building in D.C. would do. Loopholes in the law apparently allowed him to do this, however, because previous generations of lawmakers never imagined a president would be so insane as to one day demolish parts of the White House without consulting Congress or the people, so they saw no need to forbid it.

Which leaves only Congress as the single agency that could have thwarted Trump’s imperial plans. As any Constitutional scholar will tell you — as would Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson or Father of the Constitution James Madison — that’s at the foundation of their job.

Congress is supposed to have oversight over the president, to constrain him with laws, budgets, and hearings, and keep his behavior within the law. Like they did when Richard Nixon was bugging the Democratic National Committee, or when Bill Clinton tried covering up his affair, or George W. Bush engaged in illegal torture after lying us into two wars.

They should be demanding answers about Trump’s lawless “murders” (quoting Colombia’s president) of people in the Caribbean, his imposing tariffs in violation of Article I of the Constitution, or his ICE agency’s brutality and illegal warantless arrests.

But to do that — even to have prevented his unilateral tearing down part of the White House — the House of Representatives would have to convene oversight hearings and create such a public uproar that Trump would back down, and there’s a real possibility that could have happened, particularly as Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Thomas Massey (R-KY) are starting to stand up to Trump.

The only problem is that Congress is on vacation. Apparently because Trump ordered it: we all know that if he wanted the House open, it would be open today.

Johnson has shut down the House by sending everybody home and then dragging out the recess. The growing concern is that he’s doing this at Trump’s demand in order to eliminate congressional oversight and thus enhance his now-near-dictatorial power.

Johnson has kept the chamber in indefinite recess during a government shutdown — the first Speaker in history to do so — while refusing to hold even pro forma sessions, seat a duly elected member (Adelita Grijalva, of Arizona), or allow continuing resolutions to reach the floor.

This is against the law — the supreme law — of the land. There is no joint resolution with the Senate allowing for a recess longer than three days, nor has the Senate passed such a standalone resolution. Article I, §5, cl.4 of the Constitution reads:

“Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”

Congress didn’t even suspend its functioning for weeks like this during the Civil War or WWII; it’s literally never happened before.

So why would Johnson take this unprecedented step? What’s the emergency that’s greater than the War of 1812, WWI, 9/11, or any other crisis?

One possible answer is that it’s all about increasing Trump’s power as potentate, so he can do whatever he wants — like demolishing part of the White House — with no criticism or examination, no hearings or testimony, no experts or historians, from the House of Representatives.

By halting committee work, freezing discharge petitions through this naked (and unconstitutional) calendar manipulation, and withholding any date for Congress to reconvene, Johnson — obviously fulfilling Trump’s demand — has placed the entire legislative branch into a political form of suspended animation.

Why does Trump want this? Why does he care about the House of Representatives enough to put Mike Johnson in this difficult, illegal situation? This threat to Johnson’s legacy as Speaker?

The House, which only “exists” as a functional body when formally in session (normal or pro forma), has been rendered incapable of introducing bills, issuing subpoenas, or performing any oversight whatsoever of the executive branch, from Trump to Stephen Miller to Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or anybody else.

And even if the Senate were to step in and “legalize” Johnson’s recess, his dragging it out this long or longer would still have the same impact on weakening what’s left of our democracy and handing more and more uncountable power to Trump.

What Johnson has pulled off is a “procedural” coup: he (with Trump) now controls whether Congress exists at all. His keeping the House in recess concentrates extraordinary power in the Speaker’s office and, by extension, in Trump, whose directives Johnson slavishly follows.

With the calendar erased and committees paralyzed, transparency and accountability over the executive and judicial branches has disappeared; the public can’t track missed votes, can’t demand action, and federal agencies like Vought’s CBO and Noem’s ICE can operate entirely unchecked.

Border Czar Tom Homan suddenly has no oversight. Whatsoever. Ditto for Bondi, Noem, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Patel, Miller, etc.

They can do whatever they damn well please, particularly since they appear to believe they’ll get pardoned if they get caught breaking the law.

Furthermore, the longer this paralysis continues, the more it normalizes an unbalanced government in which the president acts without legislative restraint.

If this continues, or Johnson falls into a pattern of repeatedly recessing Congress whenever Trump requires him to, Trump might as well declare himself king.

Without the House, even the Senate can’t act in a meaningful way; the Constitution requires that all legislation involving money — including any laws or resolutions that may tie Trump’s hands (since virtually all actions must be paid for) — must originate in the House. (Article 7, Clause 1: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…”)

Without ever proclaiming it out loud, Mike Johnson has accomplished what open insurrection never could: the methodical, bureaucratic nullification of Congress itself, eliminating its ability to perform oversight over Trump.

All without even a peep or notice from the mainstream press, who are instead fixated on the government shutdown, seemingly thinking it’s the same thing as, or part of, the House recess.

If Johnson doesn’t back down, or if he does temporarily but this becomes a regular thing, our republic will have been really and truly turned into a kingdom — complete with a massive new throne room — before our very eyes.

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AN 10 25

On Tuesday, here in Chicago, America caught a glimpse of its possible future, and it was terrifying. Federal agents, dressed like soldiers and armed with the weapons of war, rammed a civilian vehicle on 105th Street, using a maneuver outlawed by Chicago police, and then fired tear gas into a crowd of bystanders and local officers.

The air filled with smoke and screams as parents fled with babies in their arms, teenagers were slammed to the pavement, and a young girl was struck in the head by a gas canister. One boy was detained for hours, denied his rights, his family left in the dark.

This was not a foreign regime or some distant “law-and-order” fantasy. It was an American city, in broad daylight, and it looked more like a militarized crackdown in a third-world dictatorship than traditional American law enforcement.

The question we have to ask is simple and chilling: *Is this America that we are becoming, one where democracy dies behind clouds of tear gas?

Trump’s secret police are trying to provoke riots in the streets to justify a harsh crackdown on dissent and the Democratic Party. They’re kicking in doors and dragging screaming American citizen children into the cold night. They’re shooting priests in the head with pepperballs.

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And they say it’s all to “make America great again.” Again?!? Like in 1861?

Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy, dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media. Strip away the slogans and the tweets and you can see the same architecture: oligarchy instead of democracy, hierarchy instead of pluralism, the rule of the white wealthy few over the many.

This isn’t nostalgia for Dixie so much as a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead.

That same racist, fascist goal appears to animate today’s GOP, which fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of white people, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden. Government subsidies flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that cross political leaders are punished with the withdrawal of federal support and attacks by ICE.

Racism, too, is baked into the GOP’s contemporary model. The Confederacy was built on human enslavement and white supremacy. Today’s Republican project echoes that same spirit by targeting immigrants, demonizing Black people (even in the military, per “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth), restricting voting rights in communities of color, and maintaining a system of informal but organized apartheid. Housing segregation, school funding disparities, and the over-policing of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods today accomplish the same results as the old Jim Crow laws, just through different mechanisms.

Male supremacy is also apparently central to the new GOP Confederate order. Back in the day, women were property under the law, and patriarchy was woven into both religion and politics. The modern right’s war on reproductive freedom and equal rights for women is an almost perfect parallel. A woman’s autonomy and economic power, in their worldview, must always be subordinate to the demands of men and to a rigid religious orthodoxy.

The old Confederacy depended on cheap labor, and when it couldn’t enslave outright it invented systems like debt peonage and sharecropping. Today’s Republicans defend the use of prison slave labor, which is still constitutionally permitted under the 13th Amendment and most heavily deployed in Red states. They attack unions, push gig work without benefits, and refuse to raise minimum wages, ensuring that working people remain trapped in low-wage jobs without bargaining power.

The plantation economy itself was a form of monopoly: vast estates swallowed up smaller farms and drove independent competitors under to the point where a few hundred families controlled most of the region’s economy by the 1860s. Today the GOP defends monopolistic corporate power in much the same way, blocking antitrust efforts and encouraging consolidation across agriculture, media, energy, retail, insurance, medicine, and technology. Small business is starved out by giants, just as yeoman farmers in the South were once pushed off their land by the spread of the slave plantations.

The Confederacy was also defined by its propaganda. By the mid-1850s, virtually every anti-slavery or pro-democracy newspaper in the South had been shut down. Writers and publishers were imprisoned, hanged, or fled north to survive. What passed for “news” was propaganda controlled by morbidly rich elites.

Today, billionaire-owned Fox “News” and a constellation of billionaire-funded right-wing outlets play the same role, drowning out dissent and feeding a steady diet of disinformation to keep people angry and loyal. The very idea of objective truth has disintegrated in Republican-adjacent spaces as propaganda replaces journalism.

Another parallel is the fascist ideal of a mythic past. The Confederacy glorified a “golden age” of white rule and slave labor. When defeat came, the Lost Cause mythology grew up to claim victimhood and sanctify the old order. Trumpism and today’s GOP use the same trick. They conjure visions of an imagined past when “real Americans” controlled everything, erasing the ugly realities while promising “a return to greatness” if only people will give them absolute power.

The Confederacy’s legal system was never neutral. It protected the rich and powerful, treating enslaved people and poor whites as expendable, and punishing any who resisted. Today’s Republican project is similarly defined by a two-tier justice system. Elites like Tom Homan who back the movement are shielded, while dissenters and critics like James Comey are punished.

Judges and even military lawyers are now carefully chosen for loyalty, not fairness, ensuring the law remains a weapon for the GOP to use rather than an instrument of justice. Authoritarian capture of the military and judiciary today mirrors the way slave states stacked courts to defend slavery and property rights over liberty.

The Confederacy was also sustained by religious fundamentalism. Pastors preached that slavery was God’s will, and dissenters were driven out of the churches. In our time, white Christian nationalism functions the same way, sanctifying hierarchy and obedience while insisting — based on lies about the Founders — that religion must dictate law. The goal is not faith but control, and theology is being twisted into a tool for political power.

The Confederacy used culture war censorship to keep people ignorant. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed, abolitionist literature was banned, and abolitionist or pro-democracy speakers risked their lives if they crossed into the South. Today’s book bans and restrictions on curriculum are the modern equivalent. History is rewritten, ideas are suppressed, and young people are denied a full education to make sure they grow up docile and misinformed.

Violence has always been the enforcer of these systems. The Confederacy depended on slave patrols, irregular militias, and paramilitary terror to keep people in line. Reconstruction was undone by Klan terror and mob violence. Today’s GOP movement relies on heavily armed militias including ICE, groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and vigilante intimidation at polls and protests. The parallels are unmistakable: raw political power backed by the threat of force.

There is also the matter of dynastic families. The old South’s leadership was concentrated among interrelated planter aristocrats who controlled politics for generations. In modern America, political dynasties and billionaire networks serve the same role. Power is concentrated within circles of interlocking families and interests who use money, media, and influence to entrench their rule.

Regional economic hostage-taking was another weapon of the Confederacy. By controlling cotton exports and key resources, Southern elites tried to force concessions from the North and from Britain. Today, Republican leaders use their grip on energy, agriculture, and shipping industries in much the same way, holding national policy hostage to their own demands. Blue parts of the nation are told to bend or else face disruption in fuel, food, or logistics, and other nations’ leaders must publicly kiss Trump’s ass and give his children billions to avoid punishing tariffs.

The Confederacy also merged state power with its ruling economic class. Planters not only owned the land and the labor but controlled local courts, militias, and legislatures. Today, corporate monopolies and billionaire oligarchs have similarly captured our federal government and legislatures in the former Confederate states. The state becomes an extension of private wealth, fusing corporate and political power into a single apparatus of control.

Even in foreign policy, the parallels hold. The Confederacy was isolationist abroad, seeking recognition only to preserve its oligarchic order, but inwardly it was aggressive, unleashing violence on its own people. Trumpism follows the same pattern. International alliances are abandoned, democratic norms abroad are derided, while at home the state turns its power inward against dissenters and marginalized groups.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better and freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked.

The danger is not simply that Trump may win an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws. The danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and refined by generations of oligarchs, is becoming normalized across the Red states and increasingly in the federal government.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be. America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

The question today is whether we still have the clarity and courage to defeat it again, not with cannons and bayonets, but with ballots, organizing, and a renewed commitment to the democratic ideals that Confederates then and now have always hated and feared the most.

See you on No Kings Day!

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an 10 25

no lnx

Trump's cronies are gaslighting America with a new bald-faced lie

Thom Hartmann

October 16, 2025

Airport managers need to wake up fast. With only a handful of exceptions, people running airports across America are risking serious fines and being barred from government work for up to five years by broadcasting political messaging on behalf of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

Federal law — the Hatch Act — makes it a crime, punishable by fines and loss of current and future employment, to use government facilities or taxpayer money for partisan political purposes. Yet Noem, who has earned her national reputation as a puppy-killer and by cosplaying “tough cop” with her alleged boyfriend (they’re both married to other people), has pushed out a video to airports across the country blaming Democrats for the current shutdown.

This isn’t just a violation of federal law; it’s also a bald-faced lie.

Republicans today control the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted to end the shutdown, he could do so this afternoon.

All it would take is the same maneuver Republicans have used repeatedly: a Senate rules change allowing passage of their Continuing Resolution to keep the government open, using only 50 votes plus the Vice President.

We’ve seen it before. Betsy DeVos only became Secretary of Education because Mike Pence broke a 50–50 tie in the Senate. Jeff Sessions squeaked through 52–47 as Attorney General. Rex Tillerson and Tom Price were confirmed with slim margins. And when it came to the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell killed the filibuster to ram through Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Democrats, by contrast, failed when they tried to change the rules to pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights acts. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin sided with Republicans to preserve the filibuster, betraying the public interest.

So let’s be clear: this shutdown is not a matter of Senate procedure. Republicans have the power to end it today. They’re choosing not to because they want to strip health care from millions while protecting their $4 trillion tax cut for billionaires.

The 1939 Hatch Act, upheld by the Supreme Court in CSC v. Letter Carriers, outlaws the practice of federal officials converting government facilities into campaign machines. Its penalties are real: removal from service, debarment, suspensions, reprimands, and fines.

Some airport managers understand this, which is why several are refusing to air Noem’s message.

As of today, at least seven airports have declined to run the video at TSA checkpoints, citing policies and laws that prohibit political messaging in publicly funded facilities. Portland International Airport management informed the local ABC News affiliate:

“We believe the Hatch Act clearly prohibits using public assets for political purposes and messaging.”}:

The Washington Post reports that Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Portland have all also said no, with at least two explicitly pointing to the Hatch Act as the reason.

By distributing this video, Noem has implicated not just herself but also airport managers nationwide, most of whom are now breaking federal law by broadcasting it. They face personal liability, including fines and disbarment from government work.

That they’ve gone along with Noem reflects how normalized lawbreaking has become in today’s Republican politics led by a 34-times-convicted felon and alleged rapist.

The lie about the shutdown itself compounds the crime. Citizens in a democracy must be able to trust their government to tell the truth about who is responsible for policy decisions and why they’re done. When those in power use public money to gaslight the public, accountability collapses. That is exactly why the Hatch Act exists.

There is precedent for enforcement of the Act even at the highest levels. The Office of Special Counsel recommended Kellyanne Conway be fired for repeated Hatch Act violations. Trump ignored it. He also ignored the law when his administration used the White House for the Republican National Convention and when he and Elon Musk went out front of it to hustle Teslas.

Republicans have apparently learned that if they break the law and face no consequences, the law effectively ceases to exist.

If Democrats are serious about defending both the rule of law and what’s left of America’s democracy, they must insist on prosecutions. That means removal from office for Noem, claims against the propagandists who produced and distributed the video, and charges against airport managers who continue broadcasting it. Anything less signals that the Hatch Act — and the rest of American law that could restrain Trump and his lickspittles — is a dead letter.

This is not a partisan point. Imagine if a Democratic administration produced a video blaming Republicans for a shutdown, then forced airports to broadcast it. Republicans would be demanding prosecutions, and rightly so. The law must apply equally or it means nothing at all.

Noem needs to stop lying. She needs to stop breaking the law. And Democrats need to stop pretending this is “politics as usual.” It is not. These are crimes designed to shift blame for a shutdown that is entirely the responsibility of the Republican Party, which could end it tomorrow with 51 votes in the Senate.

If there is no accountability now, America will slide further toward a future where propaganda is pumped through every government-owned screen and speaker. That is what has happened in Russia and Hungary, where public spaces are saturated with partisan messaging and independent voices silenced.

The Hatch Act was written to prevent that fate here. It must be enforced — with indictments, prosecutions, and disbarment — before it’s too late.

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AN NO LNX

The insidious truth behind Trump's campaign of brutality

U.S. President Donald Trump attends an event to sign an executive order authorizing the construction of an access road to the Ambler mining district in Alaska, at the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 6, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura

Thom Hartmann

October 14, 2025

For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.

Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit/visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.

Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.

Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.

I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.

This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Homan, Noem, Trump, et al, engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?

There are now so many videos of ICE thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protestors, and journalists — even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes — that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.

From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (Feb. 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (Jul. 21, 2025), and even pepper-balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (Sept. 2025), the videos keep piling up.

Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (Oct. 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (Jul. 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.

This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.

When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state — with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield — against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.

Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.

German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.

Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled more than 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.

It was the first major Nazi book-burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.

Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.

But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.

When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”

But it never ends with “them.”

Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.

ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get non-citizens to leave the country.

Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step — arrest and forced deportation — takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.

But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.

For a reason.

Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:

“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)

Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration — by their own declaration — is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.

To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.

This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.

Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.

“Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say ‘Democrat Party,’ with an emphasis on the ‘rat’.”

It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Governor Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US Senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.

If you think Democrats — including registered Democratic voters — aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”

The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.

And if we ever get used to it, God help America.

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'Irresponsible': MAGA enraged by new Leonardo DiCaprio film

Cast member Leonardo DiCaprio attends the London premiere for the movie "One Battle After Another" in London, Britain, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Katie Collins

Thom Hartmann

October 10, 2025

This week has felt like one battle after another. We all watched video after video of ICE agents dropping from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment block, kicking in doors and terrorizing Black and Hispanic American and immigrant families, then trashing and stealing their possessions without ever presenting a warrant signed by a judge.

The GOP pushed the country to the brink again with another government shutdown threat while right-wing legislatures redrew districts to erase the votes of millions. We heard more talk of arresting journalists for doing their jobs, and watched as the military rolled through American cities as if people here are the enemy.

Each day has felt like a slow-motion assault on democracy itself.

Louise and I went to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, One Battle After Another, last weekend, and I was stunned. It’s a film of rare courage and artistry. From the first scene to the last, Paul Thomas Anderson reminds us that cinema can still tell the truth about power and conscience. It’s a film that demands attention, not permission.

The movie runs about two-and-a-half hours, but it’s so action- and drama-packed that it felt like it flew by in less than an hour. I knew people similar to those characterized in this movie when I was in East Lansing SDS back in 1968-69: seeing them portrayed like this was a hoot! This is truly brilliant film-making.

Predictably, conservatives rushed to condemn it. Some labeled it “irresponsible” or claimed it “glorifies violence.” What they really mean is that it unsettles them. They prefer art that flatters authority and soothes the comfortable. This film refuses to do either.

The world Anderson portrays is not a fantasy. When federal agents execute suspects, when protests are manipulated to justify repression, when truth is distorted by propaganda, that is not simply fiction. It reflects the deep anxiety of a society that’s watched Trump’s executive power become far too concentrated and way too cruel. Anyone paying attention to the news knows how real that danger feels.

The rightwing National Review published a piece titled “There Will Be Bloodlust in ‘One Battle After Another’” that accused Anderson of romanticizing 1960s radicalism. Yet DiCaprio, who stars in the film, called it a “timely satire.” Speaking to Reuters, he said, “It’s not a film where people are imposing any political beliefs on anyone else. It’s satire on both ends.”

That contrast says everything. Conservatives want to see chaos; Anderson and his cast are inviting reflection. The violence in the film is not triumphant; it’s painful, personal, and tragic. It shows what happens when injustice festers until ordinary people begin to break, as I saw in the people I knew in the Weather Underground back in the day.

History reminds us that art has always frightened the powerful. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South because it forced them to confront slavery. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was smeared by industrialists for revealing the cruelty of unregulated capitalism. Protest music of the 1960s and artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger were condemned as “unpatriotic” by the same crowd that called Dr. King a radical.

When art tells the truth, power always howls.

Today the same pattern repeats. The same rightwing billionaires funding “outrage” over this film are working to silence teachers, censor libraries, and rewrite history to protect privilege. They fear a nation that can still feel empathy; they fear what happens when people start asking why power serves so few.

One Battle After Another is not a call to arms. It is, instead, a warning about what happens when corruption becomes normal and compassion becomes rare. It asks us to look at the machinery of cruelty and decide whether we’ll stand by or resist. That choice is the same one that generations before us have faced.

If this film makes people uncomfortable, that’s its purpose. Democracy doesn’t survive by comforting the powerful. It survives when ordinary people demand justice and truth, even when it stings.

One Battle After Another will be called divisive by those who profit from division. They’re wrong. The real division in this country is between those who believe art should serve power and those who believe art should challenge it.

I stand with the challengers, because when we fall silent, we serve power; when we speak, we hold it to account.

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no lnx

The next target on Trump's list should trouble all of us

Thom Hartmann

October 08, 2025

Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge.

No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.

People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?”

Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Jimmy Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.

And by “all” I mean you, too. None of us are safe if all of us aren’t safe. We have to stand up and speak out now.

Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people.

Soldiers rapelled from Black Hawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours.

They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking and scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “F--- the children.”

This is the exact same sort of thing that British forces did against the colonists in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”}:

MAGA is delighted; puppy-killer Noem claims people were “clapping in the streets,” although there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of that. MAGA folks seem to think that because they’re white they’re safe from attack by this regime.

But when they’re done with the brown folks, they’ll be coming for the white people next. They’ll start with Democrats — Trump called them “Satan” last week — but history shows they won’t stop there.

It’s already started, with Trump’s most recent National Security Directive that instructs the 200-plus local police/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces all across the country to begin investigating anybody or any group that exhibits or has ever given a donation to any group showing “indicia of terrorism” including being anti-Christian; anti-capitalism; extremism on migration, race, or gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional views on family, religion, or morality.

Do you have a queer kid? A Black or Hispanic friend? Are you a union member? Have you failed to attend church over the past few years? Are you Jewish or Muslim? Unitarian? Ever donated to a civil rights group? Voted Democratic? Or voted for a Republican who Trump despises, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?

You’re next.

They may have already started surveilling you, tapping your phone, reading your emails, collecting your browser and location history.

This isn’t the first time masked, armed agents of the government have terrorized American citizens. In the late 1870s and the 1920s, in Portland, Oregon (among other cities) armed, hooded members of the Klu Klux Klan were deputized and unleashed against racial minorities, Catholics, Jews, union members, and other “criminals and undesirables.”

Oregon had been so taken over by the Klan that in the election of 1876 their electoral college votes were challenged by both parties in Congress, leading, in part, to the election being handed to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Eventually, Oregon and the rest of America rejected masked secret police and vigilantes in our streets. Now, in this generation, it’s our turn.

Christopher Armitage, on his Existentialist Republic Substack newsletter, argues forcefully that masked federal agents committing crimes should be arrested by state and local police:

“Here’s what you need to know: Federal agents are committing state felonies every day. Breaking and entering. Kidnapping. Assault. When they kick down doors without judicial warrants, when they detain citizens without probable cause, when they point guns at children, these are crimes under state law. And Democratic governors have the power to prosecute those crimes …“When ICE agents face potential state prosecution for breaking down doors, they’ll start getting real warrants signed by real judges. When pointing guns at families could mean assault charges, they’ll think twice. When detaining U.S. citizens could mean kidnapping prosecutions, they’ll check IDs more carefully.” (emphasis added)}:

And Trump can’t pardon state crimes; those convicted end up in state prisons. It’s probably why, like the Klan of old, they conceal their identities.

ICE isn’t bothering to get the kinds of warrants required by the Fourth Amendment, instead they’re using “administrative warrants” signed by ICE officials; these are just window-dressing paperwork and are not legal warrants.

Armitage points out:

“So when ICE breaks down a door with only administrative paperwork, that’s burglary under California Penal Code 459. When they haul away citizens without probable cause, that’s kidnapping under Penal Code 207. When they point weapons at unarmed families, that’s assault under Penal Code 245.”}:

He correctly tells us all to contact our state and local elected officials and demand that they enforce the laws of our states.

You can duckduckgo.com search for your town’s mayor’s office, your state representative and senator, and you can call your House and Senate members at 202-224-3121.

This brutal, illegal attack on American citizens last week was the Trump regime’s most visible “crossing the Rubicon” moment. If it stands, it will become normal and none of us are safe.

When the government becomes the criminal, silence is complicity. The Fourth Amendment is not a relic or a privilege; it’s the firewall between freedom and tyranny. If we allow it to burn, we’re setting fire to the idea of America itself.

Every citizen, every journalist, every elected official who still believes in the rule of law must speak out, organize, and demand accountability before this becomes irreversible. History does not forgive those who stayed quiet while justice was destroyed in plain sight.

The time to speak out and demand action is now.

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NO LNX

Thom Hartmann

October 06, 2025

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” —Abraham Lincoln

“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot.”—Thomas Jefferson

People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion to the morbidly rich?

Historian Kevin M. Kruse captured the zeitgeist brilliantly, reflecting widespread public bewilderment when he posted over on BlueSky:

“We’ve had ----ups in the White House before, but never a president who seemed so deliberately intent on being a ---up. It’s been said before, but if these people were actual agents of an enemy power seeking to divide, dismantle and destroy the USA they wouldn’t be doing anything different.”

So, let’s engage in a simple thought experiment. If you or I were hired by Vladimir Putin, an angry group of billionaires who want to end democracy, or a wealthy serial killer, and our orders were to tear our country apart and make us vulnerable to foreign takeover, what would we do? What steps would we take?

As I mentioned a few days ago, if we follow the Dictator’s Playbook there actually is a simple, 12-step formula to make that happen.

The first step would be to turn Americans from E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) into hate-filled warring factions. Turn us against each other. Divide us by race, religion, gender, region, education, income, and whether we live in cities or rural areas.

In Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), he described the first three strategies that “despotic moralists” use to rip apart the fabric of a society. They were Fac et excusa (“Act now, and make excuses later”), Si fecisti, nega (“If you commit a crime, deny it”), and Divide et impera (“Divide and conquer”). Jefferson perhaps inspired Kant when, in 1787, he wrote, “Divide et impera [is] the reprobated axiom of tyranny…”

When Hitler claimed that Jews, Gypsies, and queer people weren’t “real Germans,” he was invoking that principle. Joe McCarthy tried to divide us by political ideology. David Duke said we should be separated by skin color.

Its most recent invocation was just this week when Trump and Pete Hegseth told our nation’s generals that most Black, Hispanic, and female officers were only in their positions because of their gender or skin color. “Whiskey Pete” was blunt, claiming that Ronald Reagan’s invocation of America’s traditional belief that “our diversity is our strength” was an “insane fallacy.”

Next, we’d want to immiserate as many Americans as possible, creating a huge pool of mostly white men who are pissed off because they’d been left behind economically and feel locked out of the American Dream.

That strategy would include several steps:

Destroy unions that bind workers together with their employers and raise standards of living.

Gut programs that lift people out of poverty and into the middle class, including high-quality universal public education, low-cost college, and inexpensive access to healthcare.}:

Ship manufacturing overseas to low-wage nations while using incoherent, ever-changing whim-based tariffs to batter the domestic economy.}:

Build media operations that demonize “the other,” telling them Blacks, Hispanics, queer people and women are the cause of their troubles.}:

Ban books that embrace diversity and teachers who use them.}:

Spread hate and conspiracy theories via powerful social media and search engine algorithms that make them seem normal, coarsening the entire culture.}:

Throw people off programs offering healthcare, student debt repayment, and housing subsidies.}:

Third, we’d want to destroy people’s faith in straightforward news. Loudly proclaim that it all has a “leftwing bias” and can’t be trusted, that reporters are elite “enemies of the people,” and attack the media relentlessly.

Fourth, shatter people’s faith in reality itself. Challenge science and expertise. Flood the zone with conspiracy theories. Convince citizens to stop taking commonsense steps to protect themselves and their children including vaccinations, precautions against airborne diseases, or measures to slow climate change. Sow confusion until they no longer know who to believe, and then offer yourself as the only source of truth.

Fifth, deconstruct international alliances that go back centuries by alienating traditional friends and embracing openly hostile foes while tearing up norms of defense, trade, and commerce.

Sixth, fracture citizens’ faith in their elected officials and the government itself. Legalize the practice of morbidly rich people and giant corporations buying legislation and the loyalty of politicians with cash by claiming that “money is speech” and “corporations are persons.” Define opposition political parties as “radical,” “dangerous,” and “outside the mainstream.”

Seventh, turn the military and police forces of the nation against its own people, making them terrified of challenging armed, masked men in the streets, kicking in their doors at midnight. Start with vilified minorities like immigrants and, when they’re “under control,” turn those forces against anybody who dissents from the new single-party rule.

Eighth, demolish faith in the nation’s currency by seizing political control of the central bank while villainizing its leadership.

Ninth, run scams to accumulate as much wealth as possible in the hands of Dear Leader and his close cronies while refusing to raise the minimum wage so as to keep people in poverty.

Tenth, use the power of government to force institutions — corporations, universities, law firms — into complete submission and even explicit collaboration in the enshitification of the nation.

Eleventh, seize control of the legislative and judicial branches so your law-breaking, election-rigging, and bribe-taking is never held to account. Openly and brazenly break laws like the Hatch Act that forbids the use of any government agency or property for political or commercial purposes.

Force agencies to make illegal, partisan statements denigrating the opposition party and defy anybody who calls out that naked criminality. Sneer and laugh at those who demand that people committing crimes in office should be held accountable.

Twelfth, turn the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies into tools for punishing political enemies while ignoring the crimes of friends of the regime, thus destroying faith in equality under the rule of law and terrorizing anybody who speaks out.

All of these 12 simple steps have been used by every despot in history, from the ancient Roman Empire through the kings of the Dark Ages to the fascists of early 20th century Europe to today’s strongmen including Orbán, Putin, Erdoğan, El-Sisi, Maduro, Netanyahu, and Modi.

Whether Trump has put America on this road at the insistence (or by the payment from) Putin, rightwing American billionaires, or just his own authoritarian impulses and with strategies he’s learned from Orbán and Putin, it doesn’t have to end with America resembling today’s Russia or Hungary.

The good news is that multiple countries have elected men to leadership who tried to run through this list and were stopped before they could finish the job. Instead of letting their leaders turn their nations into permanent autocracies, the people rose up and took the power back for themselves and their democracies.

They include Ukraine, the Philippines, Brazil, Poland, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Peru, South Korea, Romania, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Gambia, Malawi, Moldova, and South Africa.

History shows that any democracy can fall into tyranny if its citizens grow cynical, give up, or look away. The question — the only question that matters now — is whether enough of us will choose to stand up, to act, and to reclaim what generations before us fought and bled to pass along, like the citizens of those countries listed above have done in the recent past.

If they can do it, so can we.

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Dictators have a playbook — but the media seems oblivious to it

Thom Hartmann

October 03, 2025

Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.

Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.

It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ferdinand Marcos, Agustin Pinochet, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo (among others).

And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech on Tuesday before our assembled generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.

“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”}:

And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:

“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats ... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”}:

What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” THEN ThREateded their careers? — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.

First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”

Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.}:

Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.}:

Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.

Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.}:

Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:

Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.}:

Declare political opponents enemies of the state.}:

Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.}:

Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with ----") that reality itself becomes negotiable.}:

Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.

Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.}:

Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.:

Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.}:

There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.

His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.

Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.

And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to James Comey and Miles Taylor.

And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.

It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.

And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.

That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Trump or his henchmen.

When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.

Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.

The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November 2026 elections.

This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.

Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.

Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).

The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.

As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.

That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”

Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.

The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.

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1 30 jimmy carter interview quote oligarchy

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462 views Oct 9, 2024 #TikTok #ThomHartmann #CitizensUnited

Citizens United has had far reaching impacts on American democracy. Thanks to limitless money in politics, billionaires can influence public policy as they please. Back in 2010 when Citizens United was decided America's billionaires spent $31 million. That number rose to over $2 billion in 2020. If Trump gets elected again come November, he could be a king surrounded by oligarchs who run the country.

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Did Corporate Personhood Turn Democracy Into Fascism? Thom Hartmann Program

3.9K views 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=holBeVTFScg)

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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kufb7A7qEqg)

Sep 20, 2025 #MoreFromThom

Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility.

The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Trump’s and Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.

When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” or “traitors” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.

But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.

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Trump's horrific cult contains the seeds of its own destruction

Thom Hartmann September 05, 2025

America is at risk of abandoning its founding principle of government, “by and for the people,” in favor of a system older than democracy itself: rule by one man.

Pretty much everybody understands that the United States and the old Soviet Union both had governments based on ideology or principle. The main notion of the US was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and has guided us toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union” for 249 years:

“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

We call it democracy. It’s larger than any one president, any one Congress, any collection of Supreme Court justices or governors. It’s a foundational principle that’s held together by our Constitution and the laws we’ve passed over the years grounded in these core ideas.

For the Soviet Union, the idea was Marx’s, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To accomplish this, they put together a single-party state that provided housing, medical care, food, employment, and education to every Soviet citizen; in exchange the populace was expected to work hard and never challenge the power or legitimacy of the state.

Everybody understood these basic structural differences. Both were governments being driven not by personalities but by philosophy.

Although one could argue that FDR and Stalin both had widespread support and, upon their deaths, left their nations shaken, neither was truly what you’d call a cult leader. Truman and Khruschev stepped in and each country kept humming along because both countries claimed guiding ideas larger then either of those men.

But there’s a third form of government that is rarely acknowledge in the American press or high school civics classes, except in history: rule by a popular strongman. When, on April 13, 1655, Louis XIV said, “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state is me” or “I am the state”) he summed up that perspective.

Saddam Hussein called it Ba’athism, but in reality he was the government of Iraq. Pol Pot called it communism, but in reality he was the government of Cambodia. Putin claims Russia is a democratic republic with a free-market economy, much like the US, but in reality he is the government of Russia.

From the earliest days of political science, scholars have warned of regimes where the ruler and the state become one and the same, something political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship” or “personalist rule.” (Jim Stewartson does a deeper dive into this here.)

Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), observed that in such systems the survival of the government was entirely bound up in the survival of the man at the top: “In a principality where the people have no share in government, if the prince is destroyed, the state is likewise ruined.” He understood that once power is concentrated in a single figure, the institutions around him become little more than ornaments.

A century later, the French jurist Jean Bodin gave this reality a new name: personalist sovereignty. In his Six Books of the Republic (1576), Bodin defined it as “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic, which is vested in a prince or in the people.” When that sovereignty was vested in a prince, the fiction of shared governance disappeared: the prince was the republic.

Modern scholars have only refined this insight. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their classic Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), argued that “the essence of the totalitarian state is that power is monopolized by a single man or a small group, and that all institutions are subordinated to this monopoly.”

Political scientist Juan Linz later described this even more bluntly:

“Personalist rule emerges when power is concentrated in the hands of one individual who dominates not only the state apparatus but also the party, the military, and the economy.”

Whether the label is Ba’athism, communism, or “sovereign democracy,” the reality is the same. When one man becomes the state, when his survival is the survival of the regime, you are no longer looking at a republic, a democracy, or even a functioning ideology. You are looking at a personalist dictatorship, a form of government as old as Machiavelli’s princes and as modern as today’s autocrats.

This is what Donald Trump is trying to turn America into, using the template Putin, Hitler, and Viktor Orbán — all personalist dictators — provided him.

This explains why he’d fire people with genuine expertise, from the State Department to the CDC to our intelligence agencies and beyond, and replace them with incompetent toadies.

Their first loyalty in a democratic republic would be to the truth, to the people, to serving a “we society” nation with their best diplomacy, science, or spycraft.

But in a personalist dictatorship, the job of every person in the government isn’t to serve the citizens who provide the “consent of the governed” but, instead, to exclusively serve Dear Leader.

This explains the mass firings, the slavish Cabinet meetings where Trump’s toadies slobber all over him, and the casual lies that are routinely told by the White House press office and senior Republican officials. It tells us why Republican members of the House and Senate only speak up for principle when they’re willing to also abandon their reelection plans.

It also explains the fragility of our current government, given Trump’s age and poor state of health.

When nations run of, by, and for Dear Leader lose that leader, the result is typically chaos and a major change in that form of government, unless the leader has first so successfully co-opted the entirety of the state systems that they’ll continue following the corrupt structures Dear Leader had put into place.

When a democracy loses a leader, in other words, the system continues. But when a personalist dictatorship loses its strongman, the system shatters.

Franco ran a personalist dictatorship in Spain right up until 1975, when he died and democracy returned to that European nation. Although defeat in war took them down, the loss of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo all signaled political transformations in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The same was true of Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, although their removals left power vacuums that led to arguably worse forms of government as opportunists and predators stepped in to fill the void.

Understanding these dynamics should inform Democrats and the few remaining Republicans who haven’t pledged their entire loyalty to Trump and Trumpism. The only true north of his reign has been self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, things that require cult-leader-level charisma to maintain, so if Trump suffers death or incapacity before his term is out the power vacuum will be massive.

Already, Republicans are jockeying for the position of inheritor of the MAGA crown in an effort to replicate Trump’s one-man rule. JD Vance is assuring us he’s had plenty of “on the job training.” Marco Rubio is trying to play the statesman on the international stage, although Trump keeps sabotaging his efforts, from bringing peace to Ukraine to preventing India from dumping America in favor of an alliance with China and Russia.

Other opportunists and hangers-on, from Ted Cruz to Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton, are trying to position themselves as rightwing power brokers, although given how completely the Party has sold out to America’s rightwing billionaires and Middle Eastern autocrats, the final decisions about the fate and future of the leadership of the GOP will probably be made by a handful of morbidly rich men.

Democrats, meanwhile, are learning the lesson of fighting fire with fire, in this case the need for a “big” personality to take on the massive cult following — among the Republican base and within our now-corrupted government institutions — Trump has created. This is why Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are getting such traction: both are punching back at the bully.

And they’re probably right about the way they’re going about it. In this era where spectacle and outrage have replace newsworthiness as driving forces propelled by social media, search site, and news site algorithms, it’s going to take a big personality to take down Trump or his successors. Somebody who can dominate the news cycle day after day while pounding a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message.

We’ve seen this in America before. When the GOP destroyed the economy with the Republican Great Depression, the huge personality of FDR stepped up and used the force of his own personal charisma and magnetism to put the nation back on track. Republicans squealed that FDR was “imposing socialism,” but he largely ignored them and focused on what was best for average working-class Americans, literally creating the modern middle class.

Right now, the only organizing principles held by Republicans are fealty to Trump’s whims and their own personal greed (and that of their billionaire donors). “Conservative” principles of efficiency in government, defense of democracies around the world, and fiscal responsibility at home have all been thrown overboard in favor of raw power, corruption, and a willingness to burn down the institutions of the Republic if it keeps them in charge one more election cycle.

To the extent that Democrats can forcefully point this out and strong, genuinely progressive politicians can step up into leadership, there’s a huge opportunity here to reclaim political power and put America back on the small-d democratic path. Particularly if or when Trump is no longer a factor in the GOP’s political equation, leaving his Party lost in the wilderness.

If Democrats rise to that challenge, they can lead America back toward democracy and progress. But if they hesitate — or if too many cling to the illusion that Trumpism is just another policy debate — then history will record that the oldest democracy in the modern world fell not to an ideology, but to the vanity and greed of one broken man and an opposition that failed to understand and then meet the moment.

We can’t let that happen.

NOW READ: Trump just accidentally revealed a dirty secret — and it has America's CEOs panicking

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Behind Trump's latest purge — and why MAGA's no longer pretending

Thom Hartmann August 22, 2025

In his novel 1984, George Orwell warned, “Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.” Today, Donald Trump and the GOP have weaponized that prophecy, twisting it into the foundation of their crusade to Make America White Again.

What they are building is not a political movement but a parallel nation — a MAGAstan — where loyalty oaths replace truth, history is scrubbed clean of slavery and racism, and authoritarian obedience is demanded in the name of patriotism.

This is America’s homegrown Taliban, and they’re no longer pretending to hide their intentions.

When the Oklahoma Department of Education rolled out its new “America First” MAGA certification exam for teachers, designed with the help of a rightwing propaganda outlet, it wasn’t about improving education. It was about making sure that any teacher who dares to acknowledge the realities of race, gender, or American history is shut out of the profession.

Applicants from California or New York now must take a test that appears to demand perfect answers on questions about civics, chromosomes, religion, and so-called gender ideology. It’s not an exam, it’s a political loyalty test, and it fits neatly into the larger pattern we are seeing in Republican politics today. They aren’t hiding their racism or misogyny anymore. They’re reveling in it.

That reality was underscored by Trump’s latest tantrum against the Smithsonian and other museums. On his Nazi-infested social media platform, Trump complained that our museums are “out of control” because they talk about “how bad slavery was,” racism, and the struggles of the downtrodden. He whined that there is “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future”

What he really means is that America should stop teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and ongoing systemic racism and instead return to a whitewashed myth of national greatness that erases Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices.

His words are a plain translation of the GOP’s broader war on what they call “woke.” Being “anti-woke” is just a thinly veiled way of saying, “We’re okay with racism and misogyny.”

And Trump is the perfect avatar for this reinvention of the Confederacy, as I detail in my newest book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.

Trump’s and his GOP’s pro-racism neofascist purges go far beyond education and museums; they’ve also gone after the federal workforce with a vengeance. They canceled the government’s annual employee survey, gutted DEI programs across every agency, and are mass-firing federal workers, particularly in agencies that employ large numbers of Black women.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency — run by a Nazi-saluting white South African immigrant — put more than a quarter of a million jobs on the chopping block, devastating communities where civil service has long been the pathway into the middle class.

Black Americans, particularly Black women, have disproportionately relied on those jobs for stability and upward mobility. Taking them away isn’t about saving taxpayer money: it’s a targeted attack, designed to roll back decades of progress.

At the same time, groups aligned with Trump are publishing watchlists of federal workers they call “subversives,” lists overwhelmingly filled with women and people of color. Those people are now being hounded, relocated, or forced out altogether.

Senior women and Black leaders in the military are being fired or pushed into retirement. Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, NATO’s only woman on its military committee, was removed. Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, who had led military healthcare, was forced to resign after 32 years of service.

These purges are political, not professional. They’re designed to restore the military to a largely all-white, all-male leadership structure. And at the same time, Trump and his enablers are working to rename bases after Confederate generals and restore monuments dedicated to traitors who fought against democracy to preserve slavery.

And now Trump is claiming — against the statistics — that crime in Washington, DC is “out of control.” This is Nixon’s Southern Strategy — blame crime on Black people while turning the country into a police state — on steroids.

Racism is the thread that ties all of this together.

When five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans wasted no time enacting voter suppression laws that disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters. When Republicans on the Court blessed partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, Republican-controlled states immediately redrew maps to diminish the power of Black communities.

This is about keeping power in the hands of white conservatives, no matter the cost to democracy.

And the cruelty isn’t limited to our own citizens. The Trump administration has begun deporting Afghan translators who risked their lives working alongside American troops, even as they continue to apply for legal protection through Special Immigrant Visa programs. ICE agents recently detained one such interpreter — someone who had helped U.S. soldiers survive the war — because the new GOP priority is to get as many brown people out of the country as possible.

This is not patriotism. It’s ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy.

I used to believe that maybe 20 percent of white Americans were openly racist. That was based on my experience growing up and on the way racism was often hidden behind polite code.

But looking at today’s voting patterns, at the cheering crowds for Trump’s open bigotry, it seems more like 55 to 60 percent. When a majority of white voters willingly support a party that strips voting rights from Black citizens, erases slavery from classrooms and museums, fires Black leaders from government, and deports brown allies, that’s not a fringe problem. That’s a national crisis.

This kind of “othering” of racial and gender minorities is a classic hallmark of fascism. It’s what we saw in Germany in the 1930s and what Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin are doing in Hungary and Russia today. You dehumanize groups of people, define them as enemies of the state, and then strip away their rights until they no longer have the power to resist.

Trump and the GOP are running this playbook right out in the open. And far too many in the media are still treating “anti-woke” rhetoric as a culture-war issue instead of what it really is: a naked declaration of racism, misogyny, and authoritarian intent.

Democrats and people of good conscience cannot let this language go unchallenged.

Every time Republicans sneer about “woke,” it should be called what it is: they’re defending racism and misogyny. They’re trying to drag us back into a world where straight white men hold all the power and everyone else is erased. This is not just an ideological disagreement. It is an attack on the very idea of equality and democracy.

Woke people must stop playing defense and start organizing. We need mass mobilizations — marches, protests, and direct action — to show that Americans will not tolerate a return to white supremacy dressed up as patriotism.

We need to pressure Democrats to go on offense, to stop using mealy-mouthed language and start telling the truth: the GOP is running on racism, period.

And we need to demand that the media stop laundering Republican talking points and call out this agenda for what it is: a fascist project to make racism great again.

The stakes are nothing less than the future of American democracy. If we fail to rise to this challenge, they won’t just win the next election; they’ll win the power to define who counts as an American, whose stories matter, and who has a right to belong.

This is the GOP’s vision of MAGAstan: a land where truth is outlawed, history is erased, dissent is punished, and democracy is reduced to a hollow slogan.

It’s not conservatism. It’s not patriotism. It is the same naked pursuit of power through racism, misogyny, and authoritarian rule that we’ve seen in one country after another throughout history.

And here’s the brutal truth: they’re telling us exactly who they are and exactly what kind of dictatorship they want.

The only question left is whether the rest of us will stand by in silence while America is dragged into its darkest chapter or whether we will rise up, speak out, and refuse to let our country become the authoritarian nightmare Trump and the GOP are building in plain sight.

NOW READ: Trump just crossed a line no other president ever dared to

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MAGA screwed by Trump and his bizarre crew of lickspittles to the tune of $50 trillion

A woman places a MAGA hat on a man's head while listening to Donald Trump Jr. speak during the AmericaFest 2024 conference sponsored by conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 19, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr

Thom Hartmann August 20, 2025

Donald Trump represents the most recent — and destructive — iteration of the American right.

The old Confederacy was built on rightwing oligarchy and racism; since the Democratic Party abandoned the Klan and the Lost Cause in the 1960s, the Republicans picked up that mantle. And Trump, a lifelong racist, was ideally suited to lead the new GOP movement.

Trump exclusively serves whoever pays the biggest bribes, either in cash, 747s, or votes, who today are mostly big, monopolistic businesses, the morbidly rich, foreign dictators, so-called “Christian” hustlers, and the Republican base of male white supremacist racists.

Lyndon Johnson famously said of Richard Nixon’s “Law and Order” racism campaign:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

This has been the GOP’s mantra for over 50 years and Trump has turned it into an art form. While the party’s tax and anti-union policies have transferred at least $50 trillion from the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich just since Reagan’s inauguration, Trump has a extracted several billion dollars for himself and his family by exploiting the presidency.

Trump-loving white racists continue to vote for the party because he’s working so hard to disempower women and Black people while pushing brown people out of the country or throwing them into concentration camps.

In the meantime, in the service of their rich donors, Trump and his Republican toadies have:

Fired over 8,000 Social Security workers, throwing the agency into chaos so people’s experience working with them will be frustrating (so they’ll accept privatization).

Forced people, starting two months after the 2026 midterm elections, to re-qualify for Medicaid every six months; most people wouldn’t even maintain a driver’s license if every six months they had to go back to the DMV to requalify.

Destroyed unions across America (most recently, Trump stripped union representation from hundreds of thousands of federal workers) leading to a collapse in wages and benefits.

Stripped our public schools of funding, reallocating resources to whites-only and religious academies.

Left America so awash in guns that we’re the only country in the world (other than Gaza) where the leading cause of the death of children is bullets.

Killed off research into mRNA vaccines that were showing great promise to prevent and even cure cancer, among other diseases.

Ended free and inexpensive college education, making America the only country in the world with over $1.5 trillion in student debt crushing an entire generation.

Ruined America’s “soft power” around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of millions, mostly in Africa, while China and Russia pick up our former allies.

Betrayed our democratic ally Ukraine by withholding new weapons for eight months now while sucking up to Putin and now openly taking the dictator’s side.

Embraced autocratic and dictatorial regimes around the world while dissing our democratic allies in Europe, India, Australia, Asia, and South and Central America.

Politicized our military, something George Washington warned loudly against and every president since Jefferson has done his best to avoid.

Corrupted our courts and prosecutors by appointing unqualified Fox “News” stars and others, including people credibly accused of sexual assault, taking bribes, and engaging in a coup attempt.

Established new standards for criminality and self-dealing in office.

Ignored due process requirements in US law and the Constitution when it comes to brown-skinned immigrants.

Corrupted America’s reputation as a beacon of democracy for the rest of the world.

Intimidated media, law firms, and corporate leaders into going along with creeping fascism while demanding from them bribes and tribute to the Trump Crime Family.

Frozen money appropriated by Congress for green energy projects that would ameliorate climate change and cancer-causing pollution.

Pitted Americans against each other while whipping up hysteria around race and religion.

Betrayed Jesus and the founders of the rest of the world’s major religions by embracing corrupt preachers and politicizing churches.

Put masked, armed thugs on the streets of America to terrorize people and turn our country into a police state.

All in the service of the richest among us and to the detriment of working class Americans who keep “emptying their pockets” for Trump, the GOP, and the billionaire social media moguls.

What’s it going to take for average people to wake up to how badly they’ve been screwed by Trump and his bizarre crew of lickspittles?

History suggests the major turning points are economic; every 80 or so years America experiences a massive crash, followed by a severe war and a progressive renewal. The Crash of 1771 followed by the American Revolution; the Panic of 1856 followed by the Civil War; the Republican Great Depression followed by World War II. And this year it’s been exactly 80 years since the end of that war.

Trump’s incoherent — and clearly unconstitutional — proclamation of a phony “economic emergency” to commandeer from Congress the power to impose tariffs is already slowing our economy, increasing unemployment, and jacking up inflation. And his ICE raids have led to produce rotting in the fields, giving us a 38% increase in wholesale vegetable costs over the past month, compared to last year.

Combine this very real probability that he’s driving us into a recession or even a depression with his dangerous, anti-democratic foreign policy — that seems to be entirely rooted in embracing whatever country gives him the largest bribes via jet planes and real estate projects, or doing whatever Vladimir Putin demands of him — and we may well be on the verge of a 1930s/1940s style crash and world war scenario.

The world order shakes, markets and banks collapse, Putin takes the rest of Ukraine, China takes Taiwan, India goes to war with Pakistan, Israel attacks Iran, Trump dithers and impotently threatens, and the world could well be in a major crisis far quicker than most Americans think possible.

Will that be enough to wake up the average voter the way the Republican Great Depression did in the 1930s, stripping the GOP of political power for the next 40 years? Will it bring about a new progressive renewal, like the ones that followed the crash/war cycles of the 1780s, 1860s, and 1940s?

Or will Trump, Putin, and Orbán finally succeed in taking America down the Russia/Hungary road from oligarchy to outright authoritarian fascism before the 2028 presidential election?

To the extent we still can speak out, participate in our political system, and are willing to fight for a return to the egalitarian democracy of the New Deal and Great Society, our future is still largely in our own hands.

NOW READ: The painfully obvious truth about Trump's capitulation

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Trump just crossed a line no other president ever dared to

:{:{Thom Hartmann August 21, 2025}:

With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:

“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.

Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.

Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

NOW READ: Trump's new 'emergency' could be his downfall — if Democrats exploit it

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This new capitulation to Trump is grotesque — and the most dangerous yet

Thom Hartmann July 31, 2025

The media’s job in a democratic society is to speak truth to power, not to suck up to it. But last week, CBS and its parent company Paramount waved the white flag, handing Donald Trump a $16 million bribe and agreeing to censor their own newsroom to curry favor with a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted rapist authoritarian who lost the popular vote twice.

That is not journalism. That’s capitulation. And it’s devastating to democracies.

The Paramount merger with Skydance should never have been a political issue. In normal times, regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) operate independently, applying laws without fear or favor. But these are not normal times.

Trump’s FCC — under the control of far-right ideologue Brendan Carr, who helped draft the fascism-friendly blueprint known as Project 2025 — made it clear they’d block the deal unless CBS “cleaned house.”

Carr even bragged on CNBC that the merger only went through because Skydance promised to remove “bias” from CBS News. By “bias,” of course, he means “truth.”

Trump and Carr appear to be demanding that CBS stop telling the truth about the GOP’s fascist drift, stop investigating corruption, and stop airing facts that make Trump and the MAGA movement look bad. And CBS didn’t just roll over: they cut a personal check to Trump for $16 million, reportedly threw in an equal amount in free advertising, canceled Stephen Colbert’s show to eliminate critical comedy, and agreed to install a literal “monitor” in their newsroom to hunt down and eliminate so-called “leftwing bias.”

This is not just grotesque. It’s dangerous.

Installing government-friendly “monitors” in newsrooms to silence dissent is one of the first things authoritarians do when they take power. It happened in Hungary under Viktor Orbán. It happened in Russia under Vladimir Putin. In Germany in the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler handed control of the media to Joseph Goebbels and banned reporting that contradicted Nazi talking points.

What Trump and Carr are doing is textbook fascism: co-opting the press, criminalizing dissent, and demanding personal loyalty above all else across both government and the media.

The problem, of course, is that reality has a well-known leftwing bias. That’s because reality, unlike rightwing ideology, is rooted in facts. For example:

Trickle-down economics has never helped the working class — it’s a scam to transfer wealth to the rich.

Immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes — they’re less likely.

Late-term abortions are rare and almost always involve severe fetal abnormalities or risks to the mother — women don’t “love getting abortions” or do so with little thought.

Unions raise wages and reduce inequality — they don’t “steal from workers.”

Climate change is real and accelerating, and fossil fuel companies and Republicans have known it — and spent billions to cover it up — for decades.

Renewable energy is cheaper than coal, gas, or oil in most of the world.

People on public assistance are usually not “lazy” but are either disabled, working or actively seeking work, or living in areas where there is no work.

Raising the minimum wage doesn’t increase unemployment — it boosts the economym, which increases employment.

Universal healthcare works in every other developed nation — it’s not “impossible” to implement here in America.

The U.S. was not founded as a Christian nation, but as a secular republic.

Yet when these facts and others become “too political” for CBS to air — when truth is treated as liberal bias — we’re in real trouble. If CBS can’t push back on obvious lies because it’s afraid of offending Trump’s FCC, how long before every newsroom falls in line?

This is exactly how freedom of the press — and then freedom for everybody — dies: not with a bang, but with a checkbook and a veiled threat. When media companies start self-censoring to avoid regulatory retribution, they become lapdogs, not watchdogs.

And Trump isn’t even trying to hide this. He’s bragging about it.

Last week, the White House even released a full-on tantrum of a statement attacking South Park for mocking Trump. The show dared to suggest that combining the powers of the presidency with lawsuits and bribes might be a bad thing for democracy. In response, Trump’s staff accused the show of being “irrelevant” and “desperate for attention.”

Can you name any other president in American history who issued a press release attacking a cartoon?

But Trump’s not just punching down with his words: he’s using the full weight of the federal government to go after anyone who defies him. He’s already targeted universities, law firms, prosecutors, and journalists with bogus DOJ investigations and regulatory harassment. Now he’s turned the FCC into his personal censorship bureau.

The bribes paid by CBS and ABC weren’t one-offs, they were the first installment in a classic protection racket.

That’s not America. That’s a mob state being run by a man who behaves like a mob boss.

So what do we do? First, we must stop pretending this is normal. It’s not. CBS didn’t make a “business decision,” they submitted to a political shakedown. And the rest of the media should not let them get away with it.

Second, we must speak out, loudly and relentlessly. Let CBS know that rolling over for a wannabe strongman is unacceptable. Tell your local stations you want truth, not Trump-approved propaganda. Support independent journalism and media outlets willing to tell the truth even when it’s unpopular. Subscribe. Donate. Amplify their work.

And finally, we need to get serious about defending our democracy. That means voting like our freedoms depend on it, because they do. It means rejecting candidates who would silence the press and stack the courts and install “monitors” in our newsrooms. It means recognizing authoritarianism when it’s right in front of us and calling it what it is. It means getting inside your local Democratic Party and fighting for real progressive change and the survival of our republic.

Trump has shown us, again and again, that he will use every lever of power to silence his critics and punish his enemies. Now he has the FCC and a major news network doing his bidding. If we stay silent now, we may not get another chance.

Democracy dies when people stop caring. Let’s prove that we still do.

NOW READ: 'You guys made this happen': Dems find a way to stick it to a furious GOP

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Why Republicans worship Trump as their sick and twisted role model

(REUTERS)

Thom HartmannJuly 20, 2025

James Carville recently suggested that Democrats need to do more to reach out to young men, as though pandering to testosterone-fueled grievance and entitlement is the key to winning elections. Let’s be blunt: that’s a bull----, dead-end strategy that risks ratifying the very worst elements of a crisis in masculinity that’s corroding our politics, poisoning our culture, and endangering our democracy.

And it’s coming from the top, down.

Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist, according to the judge in his case. A New York jury found him liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a civil case, and he’s remained unapologetic. Then he moved straight to pardoning other men in his orbit, even convicted ones like Roger Stone and a rapper with a history of alleged sexual assault. And now he’s telling us to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein wasn’t an outlier: he was a prototype. A predator who operated in plain sight, protected by the powerful, and normalized by the elite. His crimes weren’t hidden; they were ignored, downplayed, and rationalized until they became impossible to deny.

The recent revelations about the scope of his network, and the prominent men it touched, show how deeply entrenched rape culture is not just at the fringes of politics, but at its very core.

Trump pardoned multiple anti-abortion criminals as well as Ross Ulbricht, who ran the world’s most notorious market for illicit drugs (that some allege could also have been used for human trafficking); Trump's administration apparently helped free Andrew and Tristan Tate, rightwing influencers accused of rape in Romania, from prison in that country, so they could return to America to help promote the GOP to their young male followers.

Rape culture isn’t just at the top; it’s everywhere, especially in the digital spaces young men inhabit. Pornography has become the de facto sex education for millions of boys. A ten‑year‑old with a smartphone has unfettered access to violent, misogynistic content that normalizes coercion and degradation.

This isn’t just a parental issue, it’s a cultural emergency. This content is shaping how an entire generation understands sex, power, and consent.

And Trump’s “best friend” Epstein was an avatar of that twisted worldview.

Trump and Epstein were reportedly best buds for years, partying together, traveling together on Epstein’s private jet, enjoying the same grotesque perks of unchecked wealth.

Both political parties have brushed shoulders with predators, but only one is building a platform that protects them by law. Virtually every Republican in the House of Representatives just voted to conceal the information about Epstein our government currently has.

And now, Elon Musk echoes that same ideology with a techno-eugenic twist, building a brood while normalizing control over women’s bodies in the name of “saving civilization.”

Musk is openly using white women as baby incubators. Musk has fathered at least 14 children with four different women. He’s talked openly about a global “underpopulation crisis” and described his mission to produce a “legion-level” brood of children before the apocalypse. He’s recruited mothers via X, and allegedly dangled millions in hush-money deals. This isn’t family values: it’s eugenic breeding with a Big Daddy tint.

That’s also largely what the so‑called “Tradwife” movement is selling. On social media and in right-wing circles, we’re seeing a resurgence of the Traditional Wife persona; it’s not really about choice or liberty as they try to sell it, but hierarchy. White women are expected to go “back to the kitchen and bedroom,” producing more white babies in a panic about the “browning” of America.

This fixation on race and reproduction mirrors the same “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric promoted on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets that fed the Charlottesville rally and inspired mass murderers in Las Vegas, Buffalo, and El Paso.

From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” to telling Esquire Magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” our president has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women.

JD Vance has similarly pushed the tradwife meme, arguing that:

“I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

That “single” job is the key; he’s not talking about economic advancement in the middle class but, rather, pitching the idea that dad should work and mom should stay home to cook, clean, and attend to the kids.

And, like in the 1950s and before, it’s all undergirded by state violence. Jessica Valenti writes with clarity and horror at her Abortion Every Day Substack, documenting how Red states are now arresting women for miscarriages and far, far worse is on the horizon.

Law enforcement officers in Red states are now interrogating women who seek care for pregnancy complications, Republican Attorneys General are demanding records of miscarriages and abortions even from Blue states, and doctors are afraid to treat women in crisis, leading to a doubling in the use of blood transfusions (women almost bleeding to death) in Texas since they passed their draconian abortion ban. It’s deliberate, and it’s escalating.

And now Republicans in Congress and the states are openly talking about bringing back enforcement of the Comstock Act of 1873, the Victorian-era law banning not just abortion but contraception and obscene materials, as I wrote about in The Cold Dead Hand of Anthony Comstock.

Meanwhile, the fetal personhood movement backed by Trump and Vance is becoming mainstream. As vice president, J.D. Vance spoke at the 2025 March for Life rally, declaring “I want more babies in the United States of America” and aligned himself with the GOP’s agenda of fetal personhood, a policy that could make IVF, contraception, and even most miscarriage treatment illegal.

This is a deliberate, systemic reinforcement of toxic masculinity, an ideology of power, control, and domination.

It shows up in incel forums, Proud Boys gatherings, Andrew Tate videos, and in the halls of Congress. It’s being sold to young men as an antidote to their anxieties, be they economic, social, or existential.

From Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, rape culture isn’t fringe: it’s the foundation. And it’s a lie.

Some Republicans will pretend to claim that they just want to return America to the Leave It To Beaver world of June Cleaver, the happy homemaker of 1960s TV. What they don’t like to point out, though, is that in the 1960s most women didn’t have much of a choice.

When Republicans say that your grandmother stayed with your grandfather and should be your role model, they fail to point out that women three generations ago really had few choices unless they were independently wealthy.

Employers could refuse to hire women because of their gender as recently as 1964; home sellers and real estate agents could refuse to sell a house to women up until 1974; it wasn’t until 1988 that the law said landlords could no longer refuse to rent to women. Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized until 1993.

When Louise and I got married in 1972, she couldn’t get a credit card or sign a mortgage without the signature of me, her brother, or her father. She couldn’t serve on a jury, get a no-fault divorce, or enroll in an Ivy League college. And if she’d had an unwanted pregnancy, she’d be out of luck until 1973’s Roe v Wade decision.

In 20 states, Republicans have succeeded in removing from women one of the most important options that allow them to stay in the workplace: abortion of an accidental or unwanted pregnancy. Now they’re going after birth control. And their war on DEI is just another aspect of their war on their own women, as white women are the main beneficiaries of the DEI programs Republicans are demanding corporations and government agencies end.

Republicans are even working hard on ending no-fault divorce: as Vance said, women should stay home and serve their husbands even when those men are physically or emotionally abusive.

They ignore the reality of an 8 to 16 percent decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws, a roughly 30 percent decrease in intimate partner violence, and a 10 percent drop in women murdered by their partners. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Republican legislators are also pushing back hard against equal-pay-for-equal-work laws, calling such efforts DEI, again arguing that women shouldn’t be on the job in the first place.

These are all aspects of a crisis of masculinity and rape culture that Republicans are exploiting to the detriment of both women and the men who’re buying their perverted siren song.

Thus, Democratic consultants’ calls to “reach out” to young men without challenging these ideas are dangerous. They can be interpreted as code for validation, not transformation.

What we need instead is a redefinition of masculinity: strength defined by compassion, power defined by service, leadership defined by respect.

And there are real exemplars out there.

Look at former Sen. Jon Tester, Montana farmer and Marine vet, who fights for working families without preening bravado. Look at former President Joe Biden — yes, him — who has comforted grieving mothers and lent moral clarity and empathy where so many others have failed. Look at single fathers, teachers, firefighters, nurses, community organizers: men who show up because they care, not to conquer.

True masculinity uplifts. It nurtures. It protects without demeaning. It leads with humility. It affirms the full humanity of women.

That’s the kind of man worth celebrating and inviting young men to be. Not the guy who calls himself a “legion” builder, or hustles violent porn on the internet and brags of his conquests on YouTube, or thinks women exclusively belong at home to “raise the babies.”

Democrats shouldn’t pander to wounded pride. They shouldn’t validate grievance or reinforce entitlement. They should, instead, challenge men to grow up; to become allies in a fight for justice, equality, and democracy.

Redefining masculinity isn’t a side project: it’s central to reclaiming our national soul.

Let Republicans hold up Trump, Musk, and Tate as their sick, twisted role models. Democrats should amplify the real men: the compassionate, the just, the fierce protectors of freedom and equality.

Let’s reject the calls coming from multiple corners to “reach out” to codes of rape culture. Instead, let’s lead the way to a future where strength means service, power means accountability, and freedom means equality for everyone.

NOW READ: Donald Trump Jr. gets the revolting last word

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The first victims of Trump's hit list

Thom Hartmann January 17, 2025

It may seem counter-intuitive, given that most people think of dictators as bad guys themselves, but the simple reality is that without proclaiming enemies — larger than life enemies — dictators have a hard time hanging onto power and accomplishing the things they want to do.

Hitler had Jews. Mussolini had the Italian Socialist Party. For Duterte it was drug dealers. Stalin vilified the “Kulaks” (wealthy peasants) as a threat to the Soviet Union. Mao blamed the bourgeoisie. Pol Pot said intellectuals were the enemy and so ordered everybody who could read killed. Idi Amin blamed Indians and Asians for the problems of Uganda. Robert Mugabe said white farmers were destroying Zimbabwe. Slobodan Milošević pointed to the Kosovo Albanians. Pinochet blamed the trade unions for Chile’s struggles.

Trump has flirted with condemning several different groups over the years, primarily using brown-skinned immigrants as his bogeymen, although the GOP has also vilified queer people, Black people, academics, journalists, teachers, and liberals to motivate the hatred of their base.

I learned about the importance of a good enemy when taking a creative writing class from the late Robert B. Parker in the 1970s. At the time, he was working on his third Spenser novel and hadn’t yet really hit it big, so a few of us who signed up for his weekend seminar were able to sit at his feet and learn from the man who became one of America’s great masters of fiction.

While the hero of the story is important, Parker told us, it’s the antihero — the bad guy or antagonist — who makes real for the reader the goodness of the hero.

He said that Superman, for example, would have just been a boring guy who stopped bank robberies if it weren’t for Lex Luthor. Batman would only be a rich guy with a fancy car and a weird outfit if it weren’t for the Joker. Without Moby Dick, Captain Ahab was merely another whaler. Sherlock Holmes would have been a weird but boring private eye were it not for Professor Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime.”

You get the idea. The hero can only be as good as the bad guy is bad. Every superhero requires a super-antihero. A larger-than-life bad guy. Genuine evil.

Even beginning novelists and screenwriters know this. And so does every dictator, including wannabe dictator Trump. It was a lesson George W. Bush learned and used after 9/11 to lie us into two unnecessary wars, make billions for Cheney’s near-bankrupt Halliburton, and destroy our reputation around the world.

Today, it’s why the GOP is making such a big deal about Laken Riley, the white woman killed by an Hispanic “illegal” immigrant, going so far as to name legislation after her. See how terrible these “invaders” are? They try to rape white women and when they don’t get their way, they kill them!

It’s why Trump, when he first announced his candidacy in 2015, characterized Latino immigrants as rapists and murderers. Its why Nancy Mace is constantly talking about “predators with penises” being in women’s restrooms. It’s why rightwingers claim books in our schools are “indoctrinating” our children. It’s why Trump still claims the Central Park Five should have been executed.

When a dictator wants to rally the people — particularly so they’ll support him in doing something dreadful — he must first convince them that the common enemy he’s identified is super evil.

To successfully claim to fight evil, he must first identify that evil in terms everybody understands. And it can’t be ordinary evil; his opponents must be super-evil incarnate: Monstrous. Depraved. Malefic. Diabolical. Satanic.

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 the first group he and his Nazis went after weren’t the Jews or even the communists. There were supporters of both groups across the country at the time, and he needed a genuinely “other” minority group to attack first, one that only a small handful of people would ever rise to defend.

So, he went after trans people. The famous book-burning picture is from in front of the Berlin Institute of Sexology, where Magnus Hirschfield was supporting trans people undergoing the first sexual reassignment surgeries in the modern world.

Fascists always start by declaring themselves the victims of evil “others.” Victimhood is essential to the fascist worldview; it’s at its core. And it’s their excuse for destroying other people’s lives.

They then cast the weakest and least popular minorities in a society as the victimizers of the fascists. Fascism is never directed against the rich or powerful, but always against those least able to defend themselves. It’s bullying turned into a political movement.

Trump has gone after multiple groups during his political career, including trans people, Black Haitian immigrants, Central- and South American immigrants, teachers, librarians, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protestors, the media, and Democrats generally.

To really turn America into a hotbed of violence and retribution, though, he’s going to need to infamize groups one at a time.

Where will he begin? Who will he turn into the first super-villains?

Will it be members of the press, dragged before congressional committees and subject to millions in lawsuits? Will he join Nancy Mace in demonizing queer people? Will he join Putin in calling Ukrainians Nazis? Can he convince enough people that Democrats are a danger to America that elected officials will shut up and hide the way so many did in 1930s Germany?

Trump and his bully boys have big plans for America, and getting people behind more tax cuts for billionaires, mass deportations, killing Obamacare and Medicaid, imprisoning the press, and gutting our civil and human rights will be a big lift. He’s going to have to identify his enemies in terms that are so stark that few Americans will dare speak up.

So, where do you think he’ll begin? Who will be his first victims, justifying his going beyond the law and the Constitution?

Post your thoughts below in our comments section.

NOW READ: A new ugly streak in American politics

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This jaw-dropping truth about the Supreme Court will make you furious

Thom Hartmann July 18, 2025

Earlier this month, Louise and I vacationed across several different cities and rural areas in Norway, the country from which my grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1917. The place was immaculate, modern, and, astonishingly, seemed entirely free of homelessness. Official stats say around 3,000 people lack housing across the entire country. That’s about the number you’ll see sleeping on sidewalks in a single Los Angeles neighborhood.

Depending on the city, it looked like half or more of the cars on the road were electric. Norway has mandated that, starting this coming January, all new cars sold in that nation must be zero-emission. Charging stations are everywhere. Already, 89 percent of all new cars sold there last year were fully electric.

But the real eye-opener wasn’t the electric cars or tidy sidewalks; it was the democracy. Norway is a functioning democratic republic, but not in the American sense where billionaires run the show to their own benefit.

It’s a country that practices democratic socialism, a term that causes conniptions among Fox “News” anchors and libertarian think tanks but simply means this: The people vote for leaders who actually implement policies the majority wants.

Sadly, that’s not the case here pretty much at all, at least since the Reagan Revolution. Back here in the United States, six billionaire-corrupted Supreme Court justices just told us that democracy doesn’t matter anymore. That the desires of millions of Americans can be rendered meaningless, especially if billionaires and their puppets want it that way.

Yesterday, this Trump-packed Supreme Court quietly — in an unsigned ruling on their badly-abused so-called “shadow docket” with no public debate and no explanation — handed down one of the most destructive rulings in modern history.

In a 6–3 decision, the justices green-lit Trump’s plan to gut the Department of Education, firing 1,400 people, freezing $6.8 billion in funding, and throwing the constitutional guarantee of equal access to education under the proverbial bus. It also flies in the face of the constitutional requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” by spending money Congress appropriates and keeping open agencies Congress created.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was scathing, calling the ruling “indefensible” and warning it would “cripple the federal government’s ability to ensure civil rights are enforced in education.”

The highest court in our land just sided with a twice-impeached, sexual-assaulting, insurrection-inciting president to dismantle the very agency responsible for making sure children with disabilities get accommodations. That Black and Brown, Jewish and Muslim students aren’t systematically discriminated against. That poor children in poor neighborhoods can still get a good education. That people with massive student debt can get some small breaks. That schools have at least some federal oversight.

Compare that to Norway.

While American billionaires are buying legislators and court decisions to keep their taxes low, their subsidies for the fossil fuel industry flowing, and to crush unions, Norwegians are investing in their people.

Nobody in Norway ever goes bankrupt from medical bills. College and trade schools are free. Unions are everywhere, wages are high, and stiff taxes on the morbidly rich ensure that public services like education and healthcare are publicly funded rather than run by greedy corporations and billionaire CEOs.

How do they do it? Why is it so different there compared to here?

Because in Norway, and across most of Europe, democracy is real. Citizens are automatically registered to vote. Elections are free of voter suppression, and dark money is illegal. Politicians are answerable to the people, not to fossil fuel barons or Wall Street banksters.

And so, people can vote for legislators who can actually give them what they want:

Universal healthcare

Free higher education

Robust public transit

Workers’ rights and living wages

Climate action, not climate denial

Meanwhile, in America, six corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court have become an unelected, billionaire-funded wrecking crew that’s gleefully tearing down every public institution that threatens plutocratic rule.

This disparity, this tragedy, is no accident here in our country.

As I’ve written about for years and most recently detailed in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it began in the modern era with Lewis Powell’s 1971 Memo, a blueprint for corporate America to seize the courts, media, education, and politics. Nixon rewarded Powell by putting him on the Supreme Court the following year, and the rest is tragic history.

From Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United, this court and its billionaire benefactors have redefined bribery as “free speech” and legalized the wholesale purchase of politicians. And, of course, Supreme Court justices.

This week’s shadow docket ruling is just the latest in that decades-long march toward oligarchy and, now, dictatorship.

The irony? The majority of Americans want a Norway-style system.

66% support Medicare for All

58% support free college and student debt cancellation

64% support taxing the ultra-rich more heavily

60% of workers say they’d join a union if they could

So why don’t we have it?

Because six corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, and the corrupt rightwing billionaires who bought them and support their lavish lifestyles, won’t let us.

They’ve legalized voter suppression, gutted campaign finance laws, blessed gerrymandering, and are now attacking public education, the very foundation of a functioning democracy.

The lesson of Norway isn’t that the people there are somehow better. It’s that they’ve built institutions that respect the will of the majority and block the power of the morbidly rich. And when their democratic institutions are under threat, they act.

In America, we must do the same.

End lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and put in term limits.

Ban dark money in politics.

Rebuild public education, not dismantle it.

Tax the morbidly rich.

Expand and protect voting rights.

This isn’t a left-right issue; it’s a democracy-versus-oligarchy issue. And this week’s Supreme Court ruling should be a five-alarm fire.

If we want a country that looks more like Norway and less like the feudal state Trump and his bought-off justices envision, we’ve got to fight for it.

The billionaires may have the Supreme Court, the White House, and Congress, at least for now. But we still have the numbers.

And in a democracy, that still means something, if we make it mean something.

NOW READ: MAGA is mad about more than a broken promise

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'Veterans on Patrol': Inside MAGA's new assault on reality and bizarre conspiracy theory

Thom Hartmann July 12, 2025

In Oklahoma, a domestic militia calling itself “Veterans on Patrol” is systematically targeting weather radars. Their leader, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, claims the military is controlling the weather through Doppler radar systems and that these machines are part of a divine affront — a “weather weapon” — that is “mocking God Himself.”

He’s encouraging his followers to sabotage these radars under an operation he calls “Leaning Tower.” This isn’t just fringe paranoia: it’s part of a growing anti-reality insurgency that threatens our democracy itself.

Let’s be blunt: this is insanity. Not just in its content, but in its consequences. And yet, it’s not isolated. It’s one of many conspiracy-fueled campaigns that now animate parts of American life, often backed by violence or intimidation. From QAnon to flat-earth nonsense to vaccine “skeptics” now within the Food and Drug Administration, we’re watching a dangerous erosion of truth, a collapse of shared facts, and an outright assault on the institutions that protect life and liberty.

What’s happening here isn’t just about weather radars: it’s about reality itself.

When people are told not to believe their own eyes, not to trust scientists, doctors, journalists, or even the National Weather Service, society begins to crack. And the people exploiting those cracks — including some of the Trump administration’s most senior officials (see: Bob Kennedy and Stephen Miller, among others) — know exactly what they’re doing.

Veterans on Patrol isn’t just anti-science or anti-government; it’s anti-democracy. It joins a growing list of extremist groups peddling lies and hatred: anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, antisemitic, misogynist, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim. It wraps its destruction in the flag and cloaks its violence in religion. And when Meyer boasts about being responsible for “a lot more than” taking down a radar, we’d be fools not to take him seriously. Oklahoma, after all, remembers Timothy McVeigh.

This latest attack rendered a critical radar system “instantly obsolete,” according to meteorologist David Payne. That radar was designed to save lives, particularly in tornado-prone Oklahoma. When it’s destroyed, people will die. Period. This is not free speech: this is domestic terrorism.

But here’s the deeper issue: this attack is only a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the deliberate poisoning of the American mind with fantasy and fear by a network and system of media and social media owned by anti-democracy rightwing billionaires and filled with Russian trolls. And when truth dies, democracy soon follows.

Because democracy — as Thomas Jefferson so accurately pointed out (“Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government”) — depends on an educated public operating on the basis of shared truths and actual facts.

You can’t have a functioning republic if half the country believes extreme weather is a “liberal weapon” and the other half knows it’s the result of an atmosphere warmed by fossil fuel emissions. You can’t govern when reality itself is disputed. And you certainly can’t maintain civil peace when people are being radicalized into acts of violence based on complete and utter delusion.

The fossil-fuel-billionaire-funded radical right’s war on truth isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. When lies are repeated often enough, they become gospel to those who want to believe them.

Right-wing media outlets, extremist influencers, and opportunistic Republicans have learned — as Josef Goebbels famously preached — that a lie can be more powerful than the truth when it aligns with grievance, fear, and identity and is repeated often enough.

The problem isn’t just gullibility. It’s that these lies are weaponized. And when they take hold, facts become negotiable, science becomes suspect, and even saving people from storms becomes controversial.

Just look at how the “mainstream media” consistently omits from their reporting on Trump’s tariffs that they’re a clear violation of the Constitution and was explicitly called that in an unanimous decision by the US Trade Court, as Robert Hubbell points out so eloquently.

Or when the media ignores the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 14th amendment violations of ICE’s random, masked, warrantless arrests and incarceration of brown-skinned people, including those with Green Cards at the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp, along with those with full, court-ordered permission to be here in America.

What does this mean for democracy?

A shattered consensus on truth makes informed voting impossible. If voters can’t agree on basic facts — like whether the atmosphere is heating up or whether a vaccine works — how can they make rational decisions at the ballot box?

The weaponization of delusion breeds violence. Just like the January 6th attack on our Capitol, these radar attacks are fueled by conspiracy and rage. They don’t just damage property, they destabilize the rule of law.

When truth is optional, tyranny becomes inevitable. Autocrats thrive in the fog of misinformation. The more confused and divided a people are, the easier they are to control, thus the daily Trump Reality Show.

Public trust collapses. Scientists, educators, journalists, and public servants all become suspect. That vacuum gets filled by cult leaders, armed militias, and political demagogues.

:{:{Democracy becomes unrecognizable. Without a shared sense of reality, debate becomes pointless, compromise becomes impossible, and elections become battlegrounds instead of ways to determine a rational direction for our shared future.}:

So what do we do?

We fight back with truth. Unapologetically. Loudly. Persistently.

We stand up for science. For journalism. For civic education. For basic decency.

We hold platforms accountable that spread lies, tweak their algorithms secretly to promote anti-democracy messages, and reject the persistent “mainstream media” cowardice of both-sidesism. There aren’t “two sides” to facts. There is reality and there are lies.

We support platforms, networks, media, newsletters, programs, writers, speakers, politicians, and movements that promote the truth and push back against the creeping fascism that is rapidly overtaking our nation.

So we must loudly and persistently call this out for what it is: an attempt — which has so far been successful at destroying democracy in nations like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey — to engage in social and political sabotage. It’s radicalism, a form of domestic terrorism whose target is democracy itself.

And it’s time to say: enough.

Because without truth, we don’t just lose the weather forecast.

We lose our nation.

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A cult leader shows how Trump is taking America to a very dark place

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Thom Hartmann July 13, 2025

Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).

Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.

Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.

Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.

This is an old story in new packaging.

Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.

Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.

He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.

Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”

That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.

All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.

Trump operates from the same playbook.

His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.

And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth.

Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.

Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”

It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.

When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.

Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.

And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.

We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.

Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.

Trump has followed that playbook to the letter.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.

These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.

It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.

His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.

And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.

So what comes next?

Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.

Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.

We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.

But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.

History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.

Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.

We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.

NOW READ: The most dangerous guy at Fox News is probably not who you think

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Trump won't need to cancel the midterms if this Republican plot succeeds

Thom Hartmann July 08, 2025

James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency,” around next year’s elections, it’s time to sit up straight.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power.

“The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said, and he’s not wrong.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.

Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.

Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.

Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.

Let’s break it down:

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”

In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.

Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.

Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.

If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.

And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.

Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.

In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.

That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.

While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.

Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.

And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.

Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”

He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.

And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.

Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.

So what do we do?

As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.

We need:

Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.

Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.

Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.

Election monitoring from independent and international groups.

And, when Democrats are again in power (G-d willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.

If Trump succeeds in today’s massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.

So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.

Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court just made it so that you can no longer look away

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Trump admin's latest theatrics have troubling echoes — of a 1930's German concentration camp

U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson (R-IA), Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Representative Randy Feenstra (R-IA) look as they stand near U.S. President Donald Trump at Joint Base Andrews, following a visit to Iowa, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. July 4, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Thom HartmannJuly 04, 2025

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our family. The crematoriums shocked our children, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps. The ovens were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera.

The death camps, it turns out, were all located outside of Germany so Dear Leader could deny responsibility for them. You know, like Gitmo.

Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (aka the “GOP Donor Fellatio Act”) contains a 13-fold increase in ICE’s budget, turning it into the largest single (secret, masked) police force in America, along with, in aggregate, close to $100 billion to build a new series of “detention facilities” all across America.

If this passes, soon the country will pockmarked by concentration camps. As Trump said on Tuesday:

“Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron’s doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.”

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.

Trump is back in the White House. The Republican Party controls Congress. And with a permanent “immigration emergency” in place, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running point on an experiment in authoritarian governance.

Alligator Alcatraz is the proof-of-concept.

Rising in a remote wildlife preserve in Big Cypress National Preserve — Indigenous land, no less — Alligator Alcatraz is expected to hold thousands of undocumented migrants. Some reports say 1,000 at launch; others say 5,000. Either way, it is the largest civilian detention project built on U.S. soil in a generation.

It’s surrounded by dense marshland, home to pythons and alligators.

“Let them try to escape,” Trump smirked at a recent rally. “They better know how to run from an alligator.”

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.

But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”

The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains:

“From the very beginning, the camp was a place of brutality. During the first years, most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime.”

They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.

The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.

Sound familiar?

Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.

That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.

Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.

That means asylum seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.

And if you believe this won’t expand — if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America — then you haven’t read a history book lately.

Stripping people of their citizenship is called denaturalization, and it was one of Hitler’s favorite tools against his enemies and Jews, who were referred to as “undesirable foreign elements” and denaturalized en masse in 1935.

Trump’s DoJ just updated their guidelines relating to the 25 million American citizens who first came to this country as immigrants and then obtained citizenship through the naturalization process. It used to be that you could only lose your citizenship if you committed a serious enough crime.

And, on Tuesday, Trump said:

“Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together.”

So now, the DoJ says, Trump can choose to denaturalize anybody and then immediately send them to Alligator Alcatraz:

“Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue [may be stripped of citizenship]. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.” (emphasis added)

And as a special bonus, the memo notes that stripping American citizens of their citizenship is a civil, not criminal, process so you are not entitled to have a lawyer or any of the other normal aspects of legal procedure like a trial that we generally think of as our rights. Franz Kafka would be proud.

Dachau didn’t just hold communists. Over time, it expanded to include denaturalized Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and anyone who opposed Nazi policy. It became a national crucible of cruelty. It normalized the idea that “certain people do not deserve legal protections.”

That is the fire that Alligator Alcatraz is stoking today.

How is this being done? Through a cunning abuse of emergency powers.

Florida has been under a rolling immigration “state of emergency” since 2023, a legal status that allows the governor to bypass environmental protections, override public procurement processes, and redirect funds without oversight.

Sound familiar? It should. The Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree to grant themselves emergency powers in perpetuity. One crisis, one convenient boogeyman, and suddenly all democratic guardrails are removed.

Today, DeSantis is using FEMA funds intended for hurricane victims to build migrant cages. Tomorrow, it could be protesters. Journalists. Teachers. You.

This isn’t alarmism. It’s precedent.

Let’s talk about the location, because it matters.

Big Cypress is a remote and largely inaccessible swamp, home to endangered species, sacred Indigenous land, and — now — a prison surrounded by natural predators.

Human rights lawyers and journalists will find it hard to access. Escapes will be all but impossible. Oversight will be nonexistent. That’s by design.

Dachau, too, was deliberately chosen for its isolation. As the memorial website explains:

“The camp was constantly expanded and served as the prototype and model for all later concentration camps.”

It became a template. A blueprint. And its very existence reshaped what the German public considered “normal.”

Alligator Alcatraz is the same. A testing ground. If it succeeds — not as a legal institution, but as a political spectacle — there will be more. One in Texas. One in Arizona. One in Arkansas. Maybe even one in your backyard.

The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.

The message that some people are less than human. That caging them is acceptable. That they deserve no rights, no hearing, no compassion. Just mud and barbed wire.

That was the logic behind Dachau.

And it’s becoming the logic behind Trump’s America.

This facility is being built not to solve a problem, but to create one. To manufacture outrage. To train the public to see brown-skinned immigrants not as workers or families or survivors but as invaders. Intruders. Animals.

And that’s when the door opens for something far worse.

We cannot afford to wait. We cannot afford to be polite. The time for half-measures and technocratic rebuttals and “strongly worded letters” is over.

America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp — literal and figurative — where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.

Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison. It’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really?

The answer, as always, is up to us.

We must engage:

Lawsuits: Civil liberties groups and Indigenous tribes must continue challenging this facility in court. Environmental statutes, tribal treaties, and international human rights laws can still be leveraged.

Documentation: Journalists must risk everything to document the construction, conditions, and policies of Alligator Alcatraz. We need eyes in the swamp, or darkness will reign.

Direct Action: Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and national mobilization must become central. This is a fight for the moral compass of our country.

Language: Stop calling this a “detention center.” Call it what it is: a political prison. A migrant concentration camp. Words matter.

History: Teach your neighbors about Dachau. Show them how it started. Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”

Democracy doesn’t fall all at once. It decays from the inside. It erodes at the margins. It disappears not with a bang, but with a shrug.

The United States of America has reached a threshold. We can step back and reaffirm our commitment to human dignity, to due process, to liberty and justice for all.

Or we can cross into the swamp. And never come back.

Dachau was the beginning of something monstrous. Let Alligator Alcatraz be the end of something: the end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, and the start of a renewed resistance.

Because if we wait too long, we may wake up one day and discover we are no longer the land of the free, but only the home of the caged.

NOW READ: Republicans just declared war on grandma

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Here's the real reason Republicans hate the middle class

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) looks on, on the day he meets with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz along with other Senators, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 5, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Thom Hartmann July 02, 2025

A Pew poll published last week finds that 59 percent of Americans say the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts taxes for billionaires and raises them for working-class people — and was passed by the Senate on Tuesday — “would hurt lower-income people and 51 percent think it would hurt middle-income people.”

And they’re right. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill will measurably reduce the income and spending power of low- and middle-income people while giving a ~$4 trillion gift to the morbidly rich.

Americans have figured this out: according to a Fox “News” poll published last week and reported by Newsweek:

“Only 38 percent favored the bill, while 59 percent opposed it, a 21-point gap against the bill. About half of all voters believed the legislation would be detrimental to their families, and just a quarter thought it would deliver any benefit.”

So, why would Republicans want to further reduce the size and wealth of America’s middle class?

Turns out, there are two good reasons that answer that question.

The first and simplest is that ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it legal for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians, the GOP has done the bidding of the morbidly rich to the exclusion of everybody else.

And there’s considerable truth to that argument. The Court opened that door with their Buckley and Bellotti decisions in the late 1970s, laying the foundation for Ronald Reagan’s war against unions and working people and his so-called “Reagan Revolution” on behalf of the wealthy.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in the Diamond Alternative Energy v EPA case that was decided on June 20 and made it easier for the fossil fuel industry to challenge environmental regulations:

“This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens. … Our ruling will no doubt aid future attempts by the fuel industry to attack the Clean Air Act. … I worry that the fuel industry’s gain comes at a reputational cost for this Court, which is already viewed by many as being overly sympathetic to corporate interests. …“For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the Court softens its certiorari standards when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests, looking past the jurisdictional defects or other vehicle problems that would typically doom petitions from other parties. This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants — workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others — will further fortify that impression. …

“The Court’s remarkably lenient approach to standing in this case contrasts starkly with the stern stance it has taken in cases concerning the rights of ordinary citizens. … The Constitution does not distinguish between plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce and those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegregated schools, or privacy. But if someone reviewing our case law harbored doubts about that proposition, today’s decision will do little to dissuade them.”

But while it’s true that Republicans have been naked toadies for rich people and big corporations for a century, there’s a larger reason why Trump and the GOP are working so hard to immiserate and impoverish working class Americans.

That reason has to do with something called “modernization theory.”

Back in 1959, one of the inventors of modernization theory, Seymour Martin Lipset, famously wrote:

“The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”

Lipset argued that industrialization led to unions and higher wages, which in turn funded higher-education opportunities and urbanization, which both grew a larger middle class. As people’s material conditions improved, Lipset noted, their focus shifted from survival issues like food and shelter to more aspirational elements like democratic values, civil and human rights, representation in government, and the rule of law.

In other words, the wealthier the middle class becomes, the more it will demand a vibrant democracy and a government that represents its interests.

On the other hand — and here is the GOP‘s real goal — if you can do away with or diminish the wealth and political power of the middle class, you can more easily loot the government and act exclusively in the interest of the morbidly rich.

As Barrington Moore noted in his book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: “No bourgeois [middle class], no democracy.”

In 2003, researchers Carles Boix and Susan Stokes found strong evidence that wealthier countries are more likely to be democracies, and once established, democracies are far more stable in richer nations. Similarly, in their bookEconomic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy", Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson prove that when economic growth empowers new classes (especially the middle class), those groups will demand political reforms.

Using examples including South Korea, Taiwan, Eastern Europe, and Tunisia, multiple cross-national studies using World Bank income data and Freedom House democracy scores show a strong correlation between per capita income and democratic governance; as people become wealthier they more vigorously demand a small-d democratic political system.

This happens because middle class people have economic security, giving them the time and energy to demand their rights; want property protections, honest courts, education, and fair governance; and typically have relied on meritocratic systems (education, hard work) to achieve their status instead of using corruption or inherited wealth and privilege.

By 1981, the American middle class was at its peak because of a 74 percent top personal income tax bracket, a 50 percent top corporate income tax rate, a strong and healthy social safety net, cheap healthcare (because hospitals and insurance companies were required to be nonprofits in most states), and free or near-free college.

Democracy was also arguably at its peak; for the previous 40+ years Congress had passed, one after the other, bills that primarily benefitted average working people and the middle class. Voting was easy, women and minorities were empowered, and we led the world in education and innovation.

This is not, however, what many wealthy oligarchs want, particularly those who become politically active.

Instead of democracy, they want government to protect their wealth and privilege to the exclusion of “the rabble.”

Instead of paying the cost of a government large enough to guarantee the emergence and sustenance of a middle class, they want tax cuts and subsidies for their businesses. Instead of rights for average people, they want police and courts that will, as Justice Jackson noted, focus instead on their unique wants and needs.

When Reagan came into office in 1981 about a third of American workers had good union jobs, meaning that about two-thirds of all American families lived good middle-class lives on a single paycheck (because the union jobs established the wage and benefits floor for non-union employers who had to compete with them for workers).

That was the year the GOP declared war on working-class people because, in the estimation of the Nixon- and Reagan-era Republicans, our democracy had gotten out of hand.

Workers were demanding good pay and benefits; women, racial, and gender minorities were demanding equal rights; and students demanded an end to the war in Vietnam.

Conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley saw these demands as symptoms of a “cultural decay” caused by working class people having more wealth and leisure time than they were “intellectually and culturally capable of handling.”

So, in 1981 the GOP set about dismantling the American middle class with their so-called Reagan Revolution.

The result is that today only about 45 percent of Americans are in the middle class, and it takes two jobs to establish that same lifestyle; since Reagan took office fully $50 trillion has been transferred from the homes, savings, and retirement accounts of working class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent.

As the social scientists cited above found, when the middle class shrinks below a certain threshold its demands for democracy are replaced by populist demands for, essentially, revenge.

“Who did this to us?” is the battle cry, and the GOP’s ready answer — first emerging in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh, going on steroids in the 1990s with Fox “News,” and pounded on by Donald Trump ever since he first came down that escalator in 2015 — is, “It’s the immigrants, Black people, uppity women, college students and professors, and the union bosses.”

MAGA — particularly its white racist base — bought it hook, line, and sinker, leading us to a massive tax-cut bill, court decisions that screw working people and the environment, and an explosion in hate crimes and politically inspired violence.

The bottom line is that the GOP opposes democracy because it interferes with and complicates their very well paid efforts to suck up to — and legislate on behalf of — the morbidly rich. And they disdain the middle class (but love the uneducated poor) because the larger the middle class the louder come the demands for fairness in the distribution of the common wealth and democracy.

So, the next time somebody asks you why Republicans hate the middle class, let them know that, “It’s the democracy, stupid!”

NOW READ: The 'cracks' are showing: Behind the battle for who leads the GOP when Trump is gone

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Republican plan could push us over the edge in a way that may well be irreversible

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:{:{Thom Hartmann June 26, 2025}:

Right now, the only thing that’s preventing Trump from going full dictator is the federal court system and our ability to challenge his unlawful, unconstitutional behavior.

Republicans in the Senate think they have a fix for that, though. It’s a good-news, bad-news scenario, although the bad is far worse than anything most of us could have imagined.

The good news is that Republicans in the Senate have removed the provision in their Kill Medicaid To Pay For Tax Cuts For Billionaires (“Big Beautiful Bill”) legislation that would have prevented courts from being able to hold Trump’s people from being held in contempt of court when they refuse to follow court orders.

The bad news is that they’ve replaced it with a provision in Section 70302 of the bill that will make it all but impossible for anybody — other than billionaires and giant corporations — to sue the Trump administration for dictatorial behavior (or anything else) in federal court.

This may have something to do with the fact that more than 300 lawsuits have been filed against Trump and his goons, and federal courts have blocked Trump in at least 187 of them, as of this week. Trump has outright won only 7.1 percent of such cases.

The system Republican senators have inserted to keep you and me — and nonprofit public interest groups and Blue state governors — from suing Trump is pretty straightforward. Instead of just filing the lawsuit and paying the typically small fees associated with those filings, you’ll now have to post a bond that could run into the millions or even billions of dollars before your filing can be accepted by the court.

Quoting Alicia Bannon, judiciary program director at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, The San Francisco Chroniclenoted:

“If this language becomes law, Bannon said, ‘it will be financially impossible for ordinary Americans to go to court to protect their rights,’ like trying to make sure they receive Social Security payments or are protected against unlawful deportation. Bonds for those orders could cost many millions of dollars, she said.”

Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, was truly excited by the prospect of everybody — except billionaires and giant corporations — being blocked from the federal courthouse when Trump’s people screw them. He crowed:

“Finally, the Senate Judiciary Committee is advancing solutions in the One Big Beautiful Bill to restore the constitutional role of the federal judiciary.”

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a regular guest on my radio program and the author of Constitutional Law: Principles and Polices(among other great books), told the Chronicle the legislation, if it becomes law, would prevent people whose rights have been violated by the Trump administration from getting help from the courts “at a time when the President is violating the Constitution as never before seen in American history.”

The bond amounts that must be posted are calculated as the expected cost to the federal government “in an amount proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by the Federal Government.”

Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick notes at his UnPopulist newsletter that such a bond requirement will bring most filings before federal courts to a screeching halt:

“That is especially true in cases involving sweeping policies where the government could claim ‘costs’ in the billions. Only state governments could conceivably post bonds in that amount, though they would also balk at the potential hit to their budgets.”

And the court you’re filing the request for relief with can’t even consider your economic circumstances or the cost to you of the damage inflicted by the Trump administration depriving you of your rights. The bill explicitly says:

“No court may consider any factor other than the value of the costs and damages sustained.”

Are you a citizen who’s been arrested and detained illegally by ICE and held in detention for months where you were starved and beaten up? ICE could claim it’ll cost them 10 or 50 million dollars to litigate and resolve your case, so that’s what you’ll have to put up before you can ask the court for relief or damages.

Have you been denied reentry to the United States? Assaulted, robbed, or raped by an ICE, FBI, or other federal officer? Had your Social Security or Medicare benefits cut off as punishment for your political activities? Arrested and held in a hellhole Louisiana private prison for years for carrying a sign protesting Trump’s fascist behavior?

Tough luck, as the old saying goes. Bolick adds:

“This [provision of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill] means that many parties would have no choice but accept violations of their rights rather than seek legal redress, severely undermining the Constitution.”

Trump isn’t the only authoritarian in Washington, DC, as this provision proves. Republicans in the Senate are more than happy to block average citizens, their attorneys, public interest groups, and even states from the federal courthouse doors, leaving us all at the mercy of Trump and his goons.

Even the Koch-funded Libertarian Reason Magazine was horrified, writing:

“[I]f this provision passes, the government could impose even blatantly illegal and unconstitutional policies for long periods of time, unless and until litigation reaches a final conclusion. That could inflict grave harm on the victims of illegality. Consider media subject to illegal censorship during a crucial news cycle, illegally deported immigrants, people imprisoned without due process, and more.”

In other words, America is on the verge of dictatorship and this will push us over the edge in a way that may well be irreversible.

Even conservatives should be concerned, as it’s unlikely the GOP will control the federal government forever and a future Democratic administration could abuse this provision just as easily as the Trump regime is no-doubt eager to do.

Call your Republican senators and House member to let them know your thoughts on this matter. The number for the House and Senate switchboard is 202-224-3121.

And be sure to remember this enthusiastic GOP betrayal of basic American values of fairness, rights, and the rule of law — and tell everybody you know about it — when election time comes around.

NOW READ: Trump's reckless boast has just been thoroughly debunked

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How Trump manipulates his supporters — and the rest of America

Thom HartmannJune 25, 2025

Recently, I looked at the importance of our government embracing free speech and not trying to stifle it or intimidate (or deport) people for unpopular political writings. Today, let’s examine the flip side of that argument: hate speech, the power and danger of hate itself, and how we defeat it as Trump tries to use it to manipulate us.

Hate is poison; it never makes anything better. It’s corrosive like an acid, eats away at our empathy and reason, and eventually destroys our very humanity. When nations are consumed by hate — like Germany was in the 1930s, or the American South was during Jim Crow — the result is invariably the destruction of civil society and its replacement with political, economic, and legal systems based in and dependent upon violence.

Hate killed a state legislator in Minneapolis, nearly killed Paul Pelosi with a hammer, and fuels the same violent rage that burned through Charlottesville, stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and has been stalking school board meetings and statehouses across America for the past two decades.

Hate brought Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) to his knees. Does anybody believe that if he’d been white he’d have been dragged out like that and beat to the ground? It inspired Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Elon Musk to essentially congratulate a would-be mass murderer. It just arrested the Comptroller of New York City for trying to defend a man seeking asylum in the United States.

Hate blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, took down the twin towers on 9/11, and keeps loading the chambers of mass shooters while whispering lies about enemies and conspiracies until blood spills in schools, synagogues, churches, and supermarkets.

So why does Donald Trump — and why do his followers, including those elected to federal and state office, and his cabinet members — so vigorously embrace hate?

Trump is the first president in American history to explicitly use hate as a campaign tool and then embrace it as the central focus of his rule. He launched his first campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” proposed a Muslim ban, called for violence at his rallies, and used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, women, and political opponents. For Memorial Day, he posted a social media message calling the half of Americans who voted against him “scum.”

This wasn’t political strategy in the traditional sense — it was a revival of something far more dangerous: the politics of hate as a tool for seizing and maintaining power.

It works, in part, because hate can be intoxicating. It reduces complex issues to simple binaries grounded in scapegoating the hated. Economic anxiety becomes the fault of immigrants. Cultural change becomes a conspiracy by elites. Personal failures become the result of a rigged system designed to benefit “them” at the expense of “us.”

And Trump’s use of hate is unprecedented in American presidential politics. Previous presidents, even those who harbored prejudices or implemented discriminatory policies, worked to maintain a veneer of dignity and unity in their public messaging.

They understood that the presidency — the ultimate parental figure and role model for the nation, its citizens, and its children — demanded a certain moral authority, even when their actions fell short of their rhetoric.

Trump shattered that norm, showing other Republicans that explicit appeals to grievance and animosity — and the amplification of them by right-wing hate-based media — mobilized his base more effectively than traditional appeals to shared values or common purpose.

Why, after all, bother to fix things and make the country run better when you can hold power and massively enrich yourself by simply and constantly churning the rancid pool of hate that’s always deep in the underbelly of any nation?

This has worked for Trump because hate is intoxicating; it provides a rush of righteous anger that feels empowering to those who feel powerless. It creates a sense of belonging among those who’ve been marginalized by 44 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class.

Most dangerously, it absolves the haters of personal responsibility by moving the blame for society’s usually complex problems onto designated enemies like immigrants, trans people, and racial or religious minorities.

Authoritarian leaders throughout history have used hate as a unifying force; indeed, it’s the key to authoritarians seizing power in the first place. When a population is afraid, divided, or economically insecure, hate becomes a shortcut to loyalty.

“It’s not your fault you’re struggling,” the demagogue whispers. “It’s their fault — the Jews, the immigrants, the Blacks, the Muslims, the queer people, the intellectuals, the journalists, the protestors.”

Hate simplifies the world into “us” and “them,” and in doing so it becomes a weapon of distraction that keeps working people too angry at each other to realize they’re being ripped off and exploited by the very people stoking the flames.

That’s exactly what’s happening in America today.

While Trump and the GOP rage about immigrants, trans kids, and university protests, they’re shoveling trillions in tax cuts to billionaires, gutting environmental protections, slashing Social Security and healthcare funding, and selling off public lands to oil and mining companies.

This reinvented GOP — this party of hate — wants you looking at your neighbor with suspicion so you don’t notice the donor class that’s buying your government out from under you. Hate stood in a press conference last week and declared its mission was to “liberate” Los Angeles from its mayor and governor.

But there’s a deeper, psychological layer to this too. Hate feels powerful. It produces adrenaline, a rush of certainty, a sense of purpose. It gives people who feel small and angry a story where they’re not just victims; instead, they’re righteous warriors.

In a society where inequality has exploded because we still haven’t overturned Reagan’s neoliberalism and raised taxes on rich people, hate offers the illusion of control.

And Trump — with his narcissism, his need for revenge, and his boundless craving for applause — knows how to serve that illusion with a smile and a sneer. He doesn’t just deploy hate cynically. He needs it. It’s his fuel. It fills his rallies. It lights up his social media posts. It drives his movement. It’s intrinsic to his personality and has driven him throughout his life.

Tragically for the rest of us, the consequences are very real.

Black churches are being burned again. Jewish people are being murdered in synagogues. Asian American elders are being assaulted in the streets. Hispanic families are being torn apart. Queer teens are dying by suicide. Public servants — from school board members to election workers — are being harassed, threatened, and driven from their posts.

We’ve been here before. The Ku Klux Klan used Christianity and nationalism to justify lynching. Hitler used “traditional values” and economic anxiety to justify genocide. Rwanda’s broadcasters spent months using radio to call their political enemies “cockroaches” before the slaughter began. The pattern is always the same: dehumanize, divide, and destroy.

And it can happen here again — if we let it.

Already we see Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott rewriting textbooks to whitewash slavery and justify bigotry. We see state legislators introducing laws that would imprison librarians, ban books, silence teachers, erase trans people, and outlaw protest. We see a Supreme Court that’s blessed voter suppression and gutted civil rights law. We see vigilantes armed with AR-15s patrolling polling places and border towns.

And we see a growing movement, led by Trump, that is explicitly preparing for violence. His allies talk about using the military against American citizens. They’re calling for mass deportations, camps, loyalty tests, and the criminalization of dissent.

This isn’t rhetoric. It’s a roadmap.

But hate is also fragile. Its political utility contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies built on hatred eventually consume themselves: As we’re all experiencing right now, the energy required to maintain constant vigilance against enemies exhausts populations.

The paranoia that fuels hate movements creates internal fractures as former allies become new targets, something we’ve seen repeatedly among Trump’s lieutenants. No society based in hate can last long; just ask the ghosts of the Confederacy.

History provides numerous examples of this pattern. The French Revolution devoured its own children as revolutionary fervor turned to internecine purges. McCarthyism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. The Cultural Revolution in China destroyed countless lives before the leadership recognized its destructive trajectory. In each case, societies paid tremendous costs before finding ways to step back from the brink.

The antidote to hate isn’t silence or appeasement. It’s not cowardice or cynicism. It’s courage, as we saw during the No Kings Day protests.

It’s the courage to speak out, even when your voice shakes. It’s the courage to stand with your neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. It’s the courage to vote, to organize, to protest, and to tell the truth about the haters, even when the truth is unpopular and the haters threaten you.

America is not a perfect country. But we are a country with a long tradition of fighting back against hate, from the abolitionists to the Freedom Riders, from labor organizers to marriage equality activists. Every inch of progress this nation has seen over the past 250 years has come from people refusing to let hatred have the last word.

Now it’s our turn to confront and defeat hate. Our opportunity to remake America with compassion and the embrace of our fellow human beings, regardless of their race, religion, gender identity, or politics. It’s our obligation in this new century that’s been so badly despoiled by Trump’s pathetic attempts to turn us against each other.

Trump is betting that Americans are too numb, too tired, or too divided to stand up to the hate machine he’s building. He’s betting that we’ll be distracted by his and Fox’s manufactured outrage while he consolidates power behind the scenes.

But we can prove him wrong. We can show up — in the streets, at the ballot box, in our neighborhoods and online communities — and remind each other that decency still matters, that democracy still matters, that love and solidarity are stronger than hate and fear.

Our Founders remind us that this great country belongs to the people. All of us. United not by race or religion or ideology, but by a shared commitment to democracy, liberty, and justice for everyone.

Let’s make that commitment real. Let’s reject hate. Let’s choose courage. And let’s fight like hell for the America we still believe is possible.

Pass it along, speak out, and get active; tag, you’re it!

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The danger of getting used to the unthinkable

Donald Trump with Tulsi Gabbard in Duluth, Georgia, October 23, 2024 (Phil Mistry/Shutterstock.com)

Thom Hartmann June 18, 2025

It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.

This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.

Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”

But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.

Let’s not forget:

— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.

— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour” of Congress.

— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Elon Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.

— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.

— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.

— When Trump praised Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.

— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having co-written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Benjamin Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it.

— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”

This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it). As the historian Robert Paxton wrote:

“To resist seemed pointless … finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

:{:{“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter...}:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”}:

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in politics.

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows…

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Sound familiar?

Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave COVID and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The New York Times:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward.

The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say, “That’s just Trump being Trump.” We say: “That’s fascist rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize.

When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and see. We fight back now.

When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them out.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

NOW READ: White House has insiders convinced Trump is unfit for job: whistleblower

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The only Democratic safeguard Trump hasn't crushed

Thom Hartmann June 14, 2025

Trump wants blood.

The spectacle is the point. The helicopters. The uniforms. The rumble of armored personnel carriers down the boulevards of Los Angeles. The former president of the United States — now reinstalled in the White House through judicial (Citizens United) and electoral (Musk’s money and X) sleight-of-hand that would make Orbán proud — sent U.S. Marines into an American city.

Marines who are trained in killing people. Quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. Not crowd control, not defending the constitutional right to protest, not arresting and Mirandizing: just shedding blood. Blowing things up and killing people is what this most lethal fighting force in the world does so well. And Trump just sent them into our civilian streets.

At the same time, Donald Trump is presiding over the most openly corrupt regime in the history of this country.

He’s looting the treasury in broad daylight, giving away a $4 trillion tax cut to his billionaire donors and golf buddies, repealing clean air and water protections while wildfires torch the west and hurricanes batter the south, and inviting domestic terrorists into the halls of power. His family and cronies are raking in billions from foreign governments — from Saudi royals to Russian oligarchs to Chinese front companies — with not even a fig leaf of legality.

Meanwhile, he’s gutted the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, turned the Department of Homeland Security into a political police force, and is laying off scientists from NOAA and NASA because they keep insisting that the Earth is, in fact, burning from the poisons his fossil fuel billionaire friends sell.

And now, as his approval ratings begin to wobble and questions mount about his finances, his backroom deals, and his erratic behavior, he reaches for the oldest play in the authoritarian playbook: provoke unrest then send in the troops.

As LA Mayor Karen Bass said:

“These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.”

This is not new. Nixon tried it. Hitler perfected it. Mussolini reveled in it. Trump is following a script so old and worn that it should’ve been burned for kindling by now, but here we are again.

In the early 1970s, as opposition to the Vietnam War reached a boiling point, Richard Nixon didn’t try to calm the waters: he deliberately stirred them. He referred to student protesters as “communists” and “bums,” cheered on violent pro-government mobs like the one that beat peaceful demonstrators during the Hard Hat Riot in New York, and did everything he could to push the country into a cultural war fever.

Nixon’s goal was simple: make protest look like rebellion, make rebellion look like terrorism, and make himself look like the only one who could restore “law and order.”

He succeeded, for a while, and it even got him re-elected in 1972. But the price was Watergate, war crimes, and a generation’s trust in government flushed down the drain.

Now Trump, with Stephen Miller whispering fascist bedtime stories in his ear and Steve Bannon howling about civil war from the sidelines, is picking up where Nixon left off. But this time the stakes are even higher, and the intentions are even clearer.

Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles under the absurd claim of needing to “protect the public” from leftist “urban insurgents” is not about law enforcement. It’s about spectacle. It's about optics. It’s about setting the stage for something much darker.

Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Recep Tayipp Erdoğan in Turkey, Trump is using public protests as both scapegoat and smokescreen. The plan is to provoke confrontation, paint it as insurrection, and then invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, a 200-year-old law that allows a president to deploy the military domestically and override governors and mayors.

Once that happens, the road to full dictatorship is wide open.

The Insurrection Act suspends Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that prevents the U.S. military from being used as a domestic police force. With a stroke of a pen, Trump can militarize every protest, shut down dissent, seize media infrastructure, or even delay — or “postpone” — elections on grounds of public disorder.

Think that’s far-fetched?

Trump has already floated the idea of suspending elections. He joked in 2020 about “12 more years.” His allies in Congress and right-wing media are openly calling for him to stay in office “as long as necessary.” A majority of Republican voters now say they’d support postponing elections “in an emergency.” And who defines the emergency? Trump does.

The recent calls for the military to intervene aren’t about securing streets; they’re about testing the waters. If there’s not enough public backlash to sending Marines into Los Angeles, what’s next? Troops in Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Atlanta? Your town?

This is how democracies die: not with a bang, but with a series of flags, uniforms, and carefully orchestrated TV shots showing a president “taking control.”

And while all this is happening, where’s the coverage of the $4 trillion tax giveaway to the morbidly rich?

Where’s the outrage over the billions flowing into Trump’s money bins from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause?

Where’s the investigation into the domestic terrorism unit Trump dismantled while neo-Nazis train in camps in Michigan and Florida?

Where’s the climate report that was buried?

Where are the Epstein files?

Where’s the fury over his push to gut Medicaid and privatize our social safety net?

The answer: they’re all buried beneath a pile of riot gear and tear gas canisters.

This is the playbook. Distract, divide, and dominate.

Hitler provoked street clashes with pro-democracy protestors, his brown shirts starting street brawls, then used the Reichstag fire as the excuse to seize emergency powers. Mussolini’s Blackshirts beat and murdered union organizers to manufacture a crisis, then demanded — and got — martial law. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines used student protests to declare martial law and cancel elections: I was working in that country the week he fled to Hawaii. Erdoğan used unrest in Gezi Park to round up journalists, rewrite the Turkish constitution, and jail his political rivals.

It’s not just history. It’s prophecy.

Trump has studied these men, either directly or through his cadre of enablers and strategists. Bannon once said he admired Lenin because he wanted to “destroy the state.” Miller has been pushing for suspension of habeas corpus. Trump himself tried to deploy the military in 2020 during the George Floyd protests but was held back — barely — by Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper’s gone now. In his place? Loyalists.

So what do we do?

We do the one thing that autocrats have never figured out how to fully suppress: we show up.

We take to the streets, not in violent defiance but in peaceful, defiant unity. We reclaim the tools of democracy — voice, presence, solidarity — and we make it clear that we see what he’s doing and we are not going to let it stand.

That’s why this Saturday matters more than ever.

No Kings Day isn’t just a rally. It’s a declaration. That we will not be ruled by strongmen. That we do not recognize the Trump family as royalty. That we believe in the power of the people and the promise of our republic.

That no matter how much bloodshed Trump tries to provoke, he will not succeed.

Because when you stand in a crowd of thousands, arm-in-arm with your neighbors, flags flying not in fear but in resistance, you remind the would-be tyrant of something he desperately wants to forget: we outnumber him.

We always have. We just need to show up.

Tag, we’re it.

NOW READ: Trump's reckoning is the final chapter of a horrifying old movie

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This scheme is so mind-boggling even Republicans have stopped lying about it

Thom Hartmann June 11, 2025

We’re about to embark on what will be one of the most interesting political, sociological, and media experiments of our lifetimes. It’ll answer the question: “Can Republicans still get away with lying to their own voters?”

Forty-four years ago, the Reagan administration — after winning the White House because they cut a criminal, treasonous deal with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election — decided to take a second massive chance at deceiving the American voters.

Today’s rightwing media machine didn’t exist at the time; there was no Fox “News,” no 1,500 rightwing radio stations, no rightwing bloggers and podcasters getting millions from Russia and neofascist foundations, no rightwing billionaire owners of social media and the nation’s biggest newspapers and TV networks, so the risk of simply and blatantly lying to the public was far greater than today.

But in 1981 Ronald Reagan and the GOP decided — after 48 continuous years of Americans embracing both the New Deal’s programs and it’s top 90%-74% income tax bracket for the morbidly rich — that the risk was worth it. After all, if their bet paid off the rewards (that would come as future campaign donations) would be in the hundreds of billions.

So, they rolled out one of the most audacious lies, the biggest defiance of simple math and common sense, in the lifetime of most Americans: “Tax cuts pay for themselves and, as a bonus, increase prosperity for average working people.”

At the time, everybody knew it was a lie.

America had been paying down the debt we ran up fighting fascists in World War II so effectively that our national debt was less than one trillion dollars in 1980.

CEOs only took a maximum of about 30 times what their workers did (to avoid that top tax bracket), meaning there was plenty left over in the company to pay workers well, provide generous benefits and retirements, and invest in new factories and products. (The Stock Buyback Scam wasn’t legalized by Reagan until 1982.)

Most thoughtful working people understood that their paychecks were based on “after-tax” income; when taxes went up, so did pay (as they’d seen), and when taxes went down employers would freeze or even cut worker’s pay because the tax cut worked as if it were a pay raise. (This is why wages have been stagnant all these years, reflecting repeated tax cuts.)

Americans also understood that when the government went into debt, it issued IOUs called Bonds or Treasuries that paid interest to the mostly wealthy people who held them, and that the average American family was then on the hook for $872 a year to fund those then-13% interest payments. (Today, the average American household owes $7,812.50 a year to fund the interest on our national debt.)

The experience with Republican tax cuts in the “Roaring 20s” that exploded wealth at the top and then led straight to the Republican Great Depression starting in 1929 taught people back then about the danger of cutting taxes on the wealthy.

Nonetheless, Reagan’s team and the GOP thought they could get away with it if they could just come up with an appealing “story” to explain how tax cuts for billionaires would actually benefit the average working family. So, they went to work and came up with a project worthy of Hans Christian Andersen (author of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”).

Rich people aren’t just rich people, they told America; they’re also members of a noble class among us called “job creators.”

Ignoring the fact that the most vibrant part of the American economy at the time was small, family-owned businesses (now mostly put out of business because Reagan stopped enforcing our anti-trust laws in 1983), they promoted the slogan, “No poor person ever gave me a job.” It was endlessly echoed by conservative commentators on weekend TV shows and in newspapers.

Republicans claimed that if these morbidly rich “job creators” were just given a few hundred million additional dollars every year via massive tax breaks, dropping the top income tax bracket from the then-74% down to 28%, those “job creators” would dutifully use that cash to build new factories and pay their workers even better.

They brought in a handful of hack economists who knew how to do good TV to argue that there was a magical “curve” showing that as taxes went down, government revenue would go up. Cutting taxes could end the nation’s deficit! The media gobbled it up.

They lionized Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca for only taking $1 in salary in 1980, as if every CEO in America was willing to sacrifice for the good of their company and their employees. (In fact, Iacocca had almost a million dollars in “non-paycheck income” from Chrysler that year that put him on the Forbes list of the 100 highest paid CEOs in America.)

Finally, the GOP promoted, via Reagan’s Budget Director, David Stockman, a “new” theory they termed “trickle down” that claimed that when rich people got billions in tax giveaways they’d nobly refuse to invest that money in the market or stash it in their money bins, but instead would “revive the economy” by “buying more stuff,” thus creating more jobs in manufacturing, distribution, and retail. (Stockman later said, in a moment of candor on my radio program, “Supply-side economics was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”)

Back in the 1980s, this sextet of deceit worked. Most Americans went along with Reagan’s mind-boggling tax cuts. Amazingly, the lie still worked in the early 2000s when George W. Bush repeated Reagan’s magic trick and again blessed his wealthy peers with trillions more in tax gifts while insisting the cuts would reinvigorate the economy via the shamanic “job creators.”

But this year, things got weird: Republicans and their rightwing media machine aren’t even trying to promote their lies from the ’80s. At least not seriously.

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This bill does not add to the deficit. In fact, according to the Council of Economic Advisors, this bill will save $1.6 trillion,” nobody took her seriously and her lie wasn’t even extensively quoted in the media. (Politifact labeled it totally false.)

When “Christian” House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that kicking millions of mostly children and elderly people off Medicaid, gutting SNAP food benefits, and taking a $500 billion cut out of Medicare while gifting America’s billionaires with over $4 trillion of borrowed money would provide “rocket fuel” for the US economy, nobody even bothered to echo his sentiment.

Republicans, instead of promoting Reagan’s old schtick, are basically just telling the American people, “Screw you; get over it. This is what we do.”

It has pundits across the political spectrum scratching their heads. Why aren’t Republicans even trying to sell their tax cuts?

Is the billionaire-owned rightwing media machine now so powerful that Republicans can today simply ignore voters, not even bothering to offer a rationalization for their tax cuts, and America will continue to elect them?

Has Reaganomics so gutted the American middle class (taking us from 65% of us in the middle class with a single income in 1980 to only 47% of us with two people working full time) that people no longer have the free time to pay attention to the news?

Since Clinton deregulated newspaper, radio, and TV station ownership in 1996 by largely ending the ownership cap and local control limits, has the destruction of the nation’s newspapers made us so poorly informed that most people really have no idea what’s going on? (Over 200 U.S. counties now have no local newspaper, and nearly 1,500 counties have only one local news outlet; more than two-thirds of local daily newspapers are now owned by out-of-state operations, many of them politically conservative hedge funds.)

Have Republicans and their rightwing media actually succeeded in getting Americans to identify with the rich, presumably in the hopes that they’ll one day win the lottery?

Or has the lie been told so often that Republican voters still believe it, a sort of Economic Stockholm Syndrome, so GOP politicians don’t even need to repeat it? (Even the famously-conservative Financial Times is skeptical of that one, as you can see from this headline: “Trump’s tax bill triumph could be a poisoned chalice for Republicans.”)

The fate of this bill in the Senate — and the midterm elections next year — will tell us a lot about whether the old reliable Republican bull still works.

Stay tuned. This is getting fascinating.

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A sick obsession is killing workers, democracy and our planet

:{:{Thom HartmannJune 02, 2025}:

It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.

What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:

“Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”

That’s tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.

With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.

When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.

Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.

And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands.

As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:

“Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.

“So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”

It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions.

Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!

We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.

But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are called SuperPACs.

As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.

While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly-free healthcare to its citizens, free or nearly-free education including college, and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:

— Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.

— Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)

— More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

— Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.

— Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s forty-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

— Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).

— Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.

— The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.

— Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

In the forty-two years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

All because our courts and politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.

Solving this problem won’t be easy but also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.

We did this before.

As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.

Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.

It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.

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Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare

Ku Klux Klan initiation at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. June 1949. KKK men in full white masks and gowns lead new members wearing small face masks. Shutterstock/ Everett Collection

Thom Hartmann January 22, 2025

Welcome to your first full day in the new Confederate States of America.

Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to:

— Making American as white as possible,

— Stripping women and minorities of political and economic power,

— Gutting workers’ rights,

— Rigging election outcomes,

— Leaders nakedly taking bribes,

— Using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies,

— Making queer people invisible,

— Reconfiguring schools for indoctrination,

— Having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and,

— Maintaining a government of, by, and for rich white men.

Never in American history has a group of morbidly rich white men this large or with anything close to this net worth sat to watch a president get sworn into office, and never before have so many billionaires been in a president’s cabinet.

Trump has been openly selling legislation; for example, he recently told a group of fossil fuel CEOs that, if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d gut the nation’s environmental laws that they don’t like.

Seeing the opportunity, the nation’s richest people have flocked to Trump’s side, each presumably hoping for their own desired federal subsidies or an end to regulations, government lawsuits, or anti-trust actions.

And, of course, they all want more tax cuts.

The Immigration Act of 1924 limited people coming into the country based on race; each year’s immigrants must be selected in a way that maintained the racial ratios that existed in 1890 (before the big wave of swarthy southern European immigrants, most Italian and Greek, that came here during the three decades between 1890 and 1924).

In 1965, Congress passed a new immigration law that ended the racial/country quotas, leading to a rapid increase in Black and Brown immigrants entering the country legally. Combined with illegal immigration, Reagan’s amnesty, and birthright citizenship for their children, the browning of American picked up speed to the point where 2014 was the first year when nonwhite children outnumbered white kids in the nation’s public schools.

To end this trend and make America white again, Trump has, at various times, proposed that America no longer allow immigrants from majority Black “shithole countries,” banned immigration from majority-Muslim countries, will harden the southern border, and last night signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

The 14th Amendment defines birthright citizenship, saying:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s lawyers are arguing that people here without documentation are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law because they’re not here legally. Therefore, they say, their children born here are also not “born subject to the jurisdiction” of American law and thus not citizens.

They plan to take their argument to the Supreme Court, where it may receive a favorable hearing. If successful, they might even have a case for stripping citizenship from and then deporting tens of millions of mostly Hispanic American citizens whose parents were undocumented.

Our MAGA Supreme Court majority has already succeeded in several steps toward this goal, by ending abortion rights and gutting both civil rights and voting rights laws.

Four GOP-controlled states are considering charging women who get abortions with murder, and Republicans on the Supreme Court have already functionally outlawed affirmative action and given states the power to make voting harder for Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.

Vice President Vance has written to the Justice Department demanding that they begin to enforce the moribund Comstock Act, which would outlaw the mailing of abortion and birth control medications, among other things (including porn).

Meanwhile, DEI programs in both government and the corporate world are being ended to once again allow companies with white leadership to give preference to white men up for jobs or promotions. Looking at the composition of Trump’s incoming administration and cabinet, it’s reasonable to assume that nonwhite people must be willing to play the role Samuel L. Jackson did in Django Unchained if they want a position.

In his last administration, Trump put the virulently anti-union lawyer Eugene Scalia (son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) in charge of the Labor Department. His current nominee, former Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has a more mixed record, but she won’t be setting the administration’s labor policy: Trump will.

The same Trump who told Elon Musk on a live X event:

“You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.'”

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.” Bezos is also virulently opposed to unionization of his Amazon workplace, and Trump has a long history of avoiding hiring companies with unions to do work on his properties.

When the plantation oligarchs ended democracy in the Old South during the 1840-1860 era, they continued to allow elections. But white men who voted (they were the only ones allowed to vote) for anybody other than the oligarch’s men often lost work, were beaten, and even sometimes lynched.

Republicans today are a bit more sophisticated, but their ability to rig elections has endured.

In the years immediately following the Republicans on the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, over 1600 polling places were closed by Republican-controlled states, most in Black neighborhoods. GOP-run state after state passed laws making it harder to register to vote, allowing challenges to voters and purges of voting rolls, and making it easier to refuse to count mail-in votes from cities with Democratic majorities by claiming signature mismatches.

Reporter Greg Palast estimates that if this had not happened and every eligible voter was allowed to vote and every vote cast was counted, Kamala Harris would today be president.

Republicans also work hard to select their voters, rather than allowing voters to select their representatives. While Democratic states have largely abandoned gerrymandering — which could have given Democrats a majority in the House today — Republican states have doubled down on the practice year after year.

Donald Trump has rolled out a new meme cybercurrency that will allow any billionaire, company, or foreign country to shovel as much money as they want into his own personal pockets, presumably in exchange for whatever government contract, subsidy, or help they can negotiate with the new president.

The Confederacy, organized and run by a small handful of plantation oligarchs, was also notoriously corrupt, and state governments in the Old South often ran on a naked bribe system.

Slaveholders in the Old South used Christianity to justify their inexecrable practice. Today’s MAGA Confederates are no less hypocritical.

Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality or abortion, although he was explicit that preachers shouldn’t pray in public and that the only way to join Him in heaven was to feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, house the homeless, and visit those in prison.

None of that matters, though, to the sanctimonious hustlers running megachurches and appearing on TV and radio; their only goal is to increase their own wealth and power. And Trump, who didn’t even bother to put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, promises to gift them with money and prestige so long as they keep delivering their parishioners to the voting booths for Republicans.

Republicans across the nation have succeeded in banning thousands of books that feature or even contain queer characters or discuss homosexuality or transsexuality from schools and libraries. They’re also launching legal efforts — with the explicit support of Clarence Thomas — to outlaw gay marriage and adoption, with the ultimate goal of sending queer people back into the closet as they were prior to the 1980s.

Trump, meanwhile, promises to only recognize two sexes, essentially outlawing trans people.

Republicans are proposing in their platform to micromanage school curriculum nationwide by “defunding schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination.”

This appears to include removing references to our nation’s history of slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy; rewriting economic and social studies textbooks to make them more billionaire-friendly; and attacking socialism and communism in ways that may cause students to think that Social Security and similar programs are wrong.

In the Old South it was the Ku Klux Klan and the slave patrols.

Today there are dozens of white supremacist groups and independent militias, all devoted to white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Trump’s pardons of the criminals involved in January 6th tells us he’s committed to having the militias that support him rebuild their ranks and get back out onto the streets, but this time on his behalf.

And his continued opposition to gun control signals that, like dictators throughout history and most recently in Hungary and Russia, he wants them armed and dangerous.

The bottom line is that the oligarchy of the old Confederacy never really went away and arguably has just taken over the United States 164 years after they first fired on Fort Sumpter, this time with “Tech Bros” replacing plantation owners.

The big question now is whether they’ll be able to hang onto the wealth and power they’ve managed to seize with this election. Oligarchy, after all, is usually a transitional form of government because people get so angry about the government doing everything for the rich and powerful and little to nothing for them that they demand change.

Popular discontent rises until the oligarchs either slam down an iron fist to crush it with violence and thus flip the country into the type of tyranny you see today in Russia, or citizens overcome the oligarchy and restore democracy, as happened in Ukraine when Paul Manifort’s guy (and Putin’s friend) was deposed by the people in 2019, replacing him with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Which way will it go in America? Unless Trump gets really violent really fast (a possibility), we’ll probably know with the results of next year’s midterm elections…

NOW READ: Trump kept his promise — and made some Democrats look like fools

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There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook

Thom Hartmann April 12, 2025

— Trump’s legal serfs: when law firms bow to the Don. Trump is bragging about how he’s forced five more major US law firms to kiss his a-- and give away $940 million in free services to his favorite causes. So far, the rogues gallery of cowardly law firms which have put money above principle includes Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, Paul Weiss, Skadden Milbank & Willkie, and Farr & Gallagher. On the other hand, three major firms are suing Trump’s administration for their efforts to intimidate and extort them (my words, not theirs), including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale. And over 1600 attorneys who work for the big firms that have bowed down to Trump’s intimidation have signed a letter demanding they do better.

They wrote: “When we are united, we cannot be intimidated. These tactics only work if the majority does not speak up. Our hope was that our employers, some of the most profitable law firms in the world, would lead the way. That has not yet been the case.” One of the very first things authoritarians do when they seize control of a country — from Hitler in the 1930s to Putin in the early 2000s — is to seize control of the country’s legal system.

Typically they follow a twofold strategy of punishing independent judges and terrifying attorneys; Trump is doing both with a shocking level of speed and zeal. This is how democracy dies, not with a bang but with a pro bono agreement.

— The Empire shudders: how Trump’s trade tantrum could trigger America’s fall. China can destroy Trump (and America) if Mark Carney doesn’t do the job first: China produces 90% of the world’s rare earth minerals, which America needs to build chips, jet engines, advanced displays, missiles, avionics, and a whole spectrum of other applications, many specific to the military and advanced computer manufacturing. And on April 4th, in response to Trump’s first tariff tantrum, they put export controls on the seven (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium) most critical for US manufacturers and the US military. We have some reserves, but if this lasts for months it could seriously damage our military and advanced manufacturing capabilities.

Trump appears to believe that President Xi will come to him any day now to “kiss my a--” (as he bragged a few days ago about other governments’ leaders), but the Chinese dictator is showing no signs of bending or bowing, responding to Trump’s “stupid” 145% tariffs with a blanket 125% tariff of their own.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — himself the former Chairman of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada (the equivalents of our Fed) — got together last week with leaders of Europe and Japan to plan their response to Trump. About $8.5 trillion of the US’ $36 trillion national debt is held by foreign governments (as Treasuries), including $350 billion by Canada, $1 trillion by Japan, and between $1.5 and $2 by the EU. If they were to coordinate the process of dumping their bonds, he reportedly suggested, it would flood the market with US bonds and make it harder for the the American Treasury Department to sell new debt issues, forcing us to increase the rate of interest we pay.

This would drive up US mortgages and other credit, make it harder for companies to finance expansion and new operations, and increase the cost to the US government to fund our own debt: the result, if sustained over a few months, could be devastating. And, sure enough, it appears that’s exactly what they did this past week when bond yields shot up, forcing Trump to put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs.

This threatens America’s position as the holder of the world’s reserve currency, as well as possibly producing a liquidity crisis similar to what had Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen’s hands trembling when, in 2008, he announced that the nation’s banking system had “frozen up” and needed a multi-trillion-dollar bailout from Congress and our Fed (which Bush gave to the banks and their executives), and throw America into a severe recession or possibly even a second Republican Great Depression. Should Carney, et al, continue dumping US debt and China jump in by bailing on their $760 billion in treasuries, it could bring our financial system to its knees just as Republicans in Congress are trying to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion (which will have to be borrowed by selling that amount in treasuries) to fund their planned $4.5 trillion tax gift to America’s billionaires.

Highlighting the danger, the headline in yesterday’s Financial Times is, for finance experts, a virtual primal scream: Liquidity worsens in $29tn Treasury market as volatility soars. Hang onto your seats (and your assets): this could get insanely wild — and dangerous for all of us — before long. (And it’s amazing how the mainstream media is missing/ignoring these two stories.)

— Was there a “lack of urgency” in the Supreme Court deportation ruling about the Maryland father wrongly deported to El Salvador’s most notorious prison? You Betcha... Will the Republican justices keep sucking up to Trump? Is a frog’s a-- watertight? The Supreme Court issued one of the most mumbling, mealy-mouthed decisions in a century, giving Trump’s gestapo plenty of time to continue the torture of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the husband of a US citizen and father of three (including a nonverbal autistic child) along with over 200 others, over 70% of whom have no criminal record according to CBS. The Trump regime’s lawyers went to court yesterday and basically stalled, saying they didn’t know where Garcia is or what his status is, a clear and naked lie.

If nothing else, when El Salvador’s hard-right (arguably neo-Nazi) president Nayib Bukele visits the White House this coming Monday, he could simply bring Garcia and the others with him. But don’t hold your breath; he and Trump are both gleeful about their ability to incarcerate and torture a legal US resident without any legal due process in complete violation of the US Constitution and international law. The simple reality is that Trump is transforming America into a police state, step by step, and aligning himself with some of the planet’s worst autocrats while crapping on our closest allies…just like I’ll bet Putin taught him how to do.

— Seniors are first in the line of fire as Trump’s tariff bomb explodes. Top Senate Democrats just proposed an emergency Social Security payment boost:Senators Chuck Schumer, Ron Wyden, and Elizabeth Warren are putting forward legislation to increase the monthly Social Security payments of everybody in the country by $200 a month to compensate for the coming Trump tariff inflation. The Social Security Emergency Inflation Relief Actis a response to the early signs that inflation — and shortages — are about to explode as both major and minor retailers across the nation are cancelling orders for Chinese goods rather than pay a 145% import tax (tariff). These cancellations will produce shortages and drive up prices, hitting low income people the hardest (as Republican policies always do).

If nothing changes over the next week or two, expect major inflationary impact to sweep America starting in a big way next month. Meanwhile, Republicans promise to kill this Senate effort to give a raise to people on Social Security, because it may show down their plan to hand trillions to their billionaire benefactors. Finally, I’m already seeing signs that America has already slipped into a recession: Every time we’ve had a recession in the 22 years I’ve been doing my radio show, the early indicator is that advertisers begin to cut back on their ad budgets for radio. I heard from our ad agency this week that this has begun, so we’re looking at ways to tighten our belts, financially speaking. I predict, based on this “early warning system” that hasn’t failed me yet, that we’ll all see the impact of the Trump recession within a few weeks. We gave Trump a loaded gun and he pointed it straight at our feet and began blasting away. Will this break the spell this cult leader has on his followers? Stay tuned.

— Authoritarian Alert! There’s a new dress code in Trump’s Washington, and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook. Remember Mao Zedong and those little red pins with a gold image of his head on them? Stalin had them, too, as does Kim Jong Un; as Dean Blundell notes, if you fail to wear your Kim pin properly, you can get arrested in North Korea. Trump apparently loved the idea of having similar pins with his head on them, as do some of his cabinet members; FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was spotted wearing a Trump head pin in DC this week. Trump’s apparently selling pure gold versions, although you can get gold-like ones on amazon for as little as ten bucks. What’s next? A mandate that we all carry a little booklet of Trump’s most famous sayings? (“I moved on her like a b-----. I couldn't get there and she was married. … You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p-----. You can do anything.”) G-d help us all…

— The SAVE Act: What could possibly go wrong with the House-passed bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote — Hillary sends out a warning about it — I've been warning about this for months! I’ve written several times about the GOP’s latest strategy to purge millions of American women from the nation’s voting rolls with their new SAVE Act, which passed the House this past week (with the votes of four democrats: Ed Case (HI), Henry Cuellar (TX), Jared Golden (ME), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA). They’re doing this because women are about 7% more likely to vote Democratic than men. As Hillary Clinton noted on Xitter yesterday: “The House just passed the Republican voter suppression measure that threatens voting access for millions of Americans, including 69 million women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates.”

Ever since 1980, when Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich proclaimed the goal of the GOP should be to “reduce the voting population,” the party has sponsored thousands of pieces of legislation — hundreds of which have been made into law — to make it harder to register, harder to vote, and easier to get purged from voting rolls or have your vote thrown out. This bill, which will next be debated in the Senate (will Fetterman join Republicans and vote for it like these four turncoat Dems did in the House?), is the most serious assault on women’s right to vote since Republicans first opposed the 19th Amendment in 1920. Let your senators know you’re not happy and they should vote to filibuster and then defeat it.

— Crazy Alert! The next market crash or maybe even a war may be engineered by a robot — and nobody will be accountable. “Evil robots” could start a financial crisis or a world war in order to profit the corporations that own them, without those corporations even knowing about it?The Bank of England — not an organization prone to conspiracy thinking — issued a warning this week about what might happen when stock trading firms deploy AI robots to handle making money for them. The fear is that the robots will figure out what Naomi Klein wrote an entire book about: Disasters represent an opportunity to make big bucks. If an AI computer could infiltrate an air traffic control system and crash a plane, for example, right after betting big on airline stocks falling, it could make a fortune for its owners.

The Bank’s report noted, “Models might learn that stress events increase their opportunity to make profit and so take actions actively to increase the likelihood of such events.” They added: “AI could facilitate collusion or other forms of market manipulation” without the “human manager’s intention or awareness.” Yikes! Maybe it’s time for some legislation to get this genie under control?

NOW READ: Everything Trump is doing makes perfect sense if you understand one simple fact

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no lnx

Republicans and the biggest political con of the last century

Thom Hartmann May 24, 2025

Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:

“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”

Donald Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:

“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump as also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“

But why? What the hell is going on here?

Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. They point out that if unemployment numbers included the underemployed and those stuck in “poverty-wage jobs,” it would be around 24%, not the 4.2% recently reported, leading to an acknowledgement of a widespread misery that’s largely hidden by the way we currently calculate unemployment.

Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.

Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.

The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.

And nobody’s sure why.

The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.

At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.

You could call it treason, except that it’s become so normalized and institutionalized that most Americans wouldn’t even understand the reason for the label.

Republican policy weirdness that brought us to this moment began around the national debt in 1981.

The U.S. was significantly in debt following our Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Following the philosophy that a large national debt should only exist during a time of national emergency, in each case, after the end of each war, we began a serious effort to pay down that debt.

Andrew Jackson finished paying off the entire debt from the Revolutionary War in the 1830s. We’d largely paid off the debt from the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, and, as the Treasury Department notes on its debt history site, our “government ended the century with its finances in very good order.”

We paid the national debt for WWI down to a mere $17 billion by the time the Republican Great Depression hit, but between the cost of the New Deal and World War II, we entered the post-WWII era in 1946 with a debt equal to 106% of GDP, a ratio we hit again in 2015.

Republicans and Democrats quickly united around the idea of paying off our national debt in the post-war years, driving it down to a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) between 1945 and 1981 when Reagan came into office.

And then, following Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santas” plan, the GOP embarked on an experiment that had never been intentionally tried in the U.S. or any other developed country in world history: drive up the national debt as high as possible with massive tax breaks for the very richest among us.

Reagan did this for two reasons:

— First, deficit spending with trillions in borrowed money (he ran the debt up to $2.4 trillion in a mere 8 years) stimulates the economy, so people thought Reagan had produced good times. (Give me a $2 trillion credit card, and I’ll show you what it looks like to live large, too!)

— Second, the rising debt gave Republicans the perfect excuse to follow Wanniski’s advice to force the Democrats to “shoot their Santa [of programs like Social Security and Medicaid] in the face.” Whenever a Republican is in the White House, Wanniski argued, Republicans should run up the debt as hard and fast as possible, so when a Democrat is in the White House they can squeal about “the debt our children will inherit! Oh, the humanity!”

The GOP has stuck to this strategy for 44 years now, running up $36 trillion in debt (and our entire Gross Domestic Product was a mere $27.7 trillion last year) and now, finally, we’ve reached the point where this unsustainable debt is not only costing us a trillion dollars a year in debt service (interest payments) but has led to a downgrade of our nation’s credit score.

At first, the main effect of the Two Santas strategy was merely to make the morbidly rich among us fabulously richer, while extracting much of that wealth from the homes, retirement plans, and savings of the middle class. It was, quite simply, a planned and successful transfer of roughly $50 trillion into the money bins of the rich, almost all of it coming out of the hides and lives of the rest of us.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class with a single paycheck being able to buy a home, a car, raise a family, put the kids through school, and provide for a decent retirement.

Today, that same standard of living requires a bit more than two full-time jobs, and only about 47% of us are in the middle class (with two wage earners instead of just one in 1981).

“‘The middle class has been declining — we just haven't recognized it fully,’ LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig told CBS MoneyWatch. ‘It’s really dangerous because it’s the kind of thing that leads to social unrest, and it’s not fair. The American dream is not that it’s given to you — it’s that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead and achieve the things in life that you want to achieve. It’s not living in a tent, not having to steal.”

But now Trump, Musk, Vance, and congressional Republicans — having first crushed the American middle class — are doing everything they can to destroy America’s preeminent position in the world along with our social safety net.

— Instead of investing in education and science, they’re making it harder for students to get an education.

— Instead of promoting democracy around the world, they’re embracing murderous dictators while broadcasting rightwing neofascist propaganda on Voice of America.

— Instead of lifting up Americans by helping our veterans and providing food, healthcare, and shelter to the poor and disabled, they’re gutting the VA and the social safety net.

As a result, today nearly half of American children (45% or 34 million kids) rely on food and medical programs that are now targeted by “Christian” Mike Johnson’s House Republicans in their Big Brutal Bill providing trillions in tax breaks to billionaires. The proposed cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, for example, would be the largest in the history of the U.S.

Reagan’s Two Santas strategy has done serious harm to America, collapsing the economic futures of two entire generations.

And now they’re going after our government itself.

But, why? Nobody’s sure.

— Did Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or both tell Trump and/or Elon Musk to destroy America?

— Are our country’s billionaires so psychopathically greedy that they’re willing to sell us all out for another few billion dollars in tax breaks?

— Do Trump’s allies believe that if they can impoverish Americans we’ll be more willing to go along with their authoritarian agenda the way Germans did after being immiserated by the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s?

— Are they following the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophers of Silicon Valley who argue that democracy is outdated and “we need to get over our dictator phobia” and let the tech giants run the country?

Nobody knows for sure. Nobody can really explain it.

Republicans are aren’t even pretending anymore; they’re not even bothering to proclaim BS like “trickle down” or the “need to support the job creators.“

Most distressing, there’s virtually no discussion of any of this in the mainstream press.

— The Two Santas strategy is easily documented, but never mentioned.

— The explosion of our national debt is all over economists’ websites, but when the American media mentions it, it’s always in the context of Democrats needing to “reduce spending” rather than the fact that virtually 100% of our debt today was put there exclusively by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal wars.

— Nobody, it seems, is speculating about why Trump and Musk would want to kill off USAID or kneecap the FAA and the National Weather Service. Qui bono (who benefits?) other than Putin and Xi? The savings are a drop in the billionaire’s bucket; there must be a larger agenda than just funding tax cuts for billionaires.

— And, they’re now holding their votes in the middle of the night; I think we all know what they are hiding and the credulous press is letting pass.

I don’t know why Republicans have been so enthusiastic about first destroying the American middle class and now our government itself, but the consequences have driven the explosion of rightwing anger, racism, and misogyny that’s been sweeping the nation since Trump’s appearance on the scene in 2015.

And now they’re threatening our position in the world, as well as possibly leading us all into a third world war.

Why do you think this is happening?

NOW READ: 'Trump's tactics are in fact communist': Former Tea Party congressman busts MAGA for what it is

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AN 5 25

This disaster has me so angry I can barely type straight. Elon Musk and his phony “Department of Government Efficiency” — which isn’t even a real government department, by the way — are systematically destroying the agencies that keep Americans alive when Mother Nature comes calling. And for what? Some twisted ideological experiment that’s going to cost lives.

The National Weather Service (NWS) is falling apart right before hurricane season. They have 155 empty positions that should be filled with forecasters working around the clock to track storms and save lives.

Tom Fahy from the National Weather Service Employees Organization nailed it when he toldThe Washington Post:

“For most of the last half century, NWS has been a 24/7 operation. Not anymore, thanks to Elon Musk.”

Picture this: a Category 4 hurricane spinning up in the Gulf, and the people who should be tracking its every move and warning coastal communities just aren’t there anymore. That’s not some dystopian nightmare: that’s what Donald Trump and Musk have done to us.

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Want to know how insane this gets? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) started the year with over 600 vacant positions. Instead of filling those jobs, Trump’s crew — with Musk’s DOGE cheerleading the destruction — illegally fired or pushed out another 10% of the remaining staff. They’re literally making the problem worse.

The consequences hit immediately. Last month, the NWS had to stop launching weather balloons at several sites and gut their data collection operations because they don’t have enough people. Those balloons aren’t just pretty toys; they’re how we know if that storm brewing in the Atlantic is going to slam into Miami, New Orleans, or Houston, or fizzle out at sea.

Here’s another insane part of this: NOAA’s weather data generates $9 in economic value every year for every $1 of expense, and benefits the US to the tune of over $5 billion a year. That’s the kind of return on investment that would make venture capitalists weep with joy. But Musk and Trump are torching it anyway, because their real goal isn’t efficiency, it’s blinding Americans to the climate crisis.

This attack on NOAA fits perfectly with their broader war on climate science. We can’t have people understanding the true cost of extreme weather if they and their fossil fuel funders want to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere, right? Better to leave everyone stumbling around in the dark while the planet burns.

And don’t even get me started on what they’re doing to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They’re gutting the agency that coordinates disaster relief that, ironically, benefits red states that get pummeled by hurricanes and tornadoes every year the most. Remember Hurricane Helene tearing through North Carolina last fall? Instead of supporting relief efforts, lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene spent their time attacking FEMA and spreading conspiracy theories.

Greene actually tweeted: “Yes, they can control the weather.” If that were true, maybe she could ask Trump and Musk to turn on those magical Jewish space lasers and give us all a break.

But this isn’t really about controlling weather, it’s about controlling information. It’s about making sure Americans don’t have the tools to prepare for disasters or understand why they’re getting worse. It’s about putting ideology ahead of human lives, and we should all be sick of it.

Was it Vladimir Putin or the fossil fuel billionaires who told Trump and Musk to do this? Because I can’t think of any other reason why they’d be working so hard to bring death and destruction to millions of Americans.

People are going to die because of these cuts. Not might die, not could die:will die. Families will lose everything. Communities will be wiped off the map. All because two billionaires decided their war on our “socialist” government and the tax dollars that support it was more important than keeping ordinary Americans safe.

The NWS, NOAA, and FEMA aren’t bloated bureaucracies wasting taxpayer money. They’re the thin line between advance warning and mass casualties. They’re the difference between evacuation and devastation.

We can’t let them finish this demolition job directed against our nation. Call your representatives. Raise hell. Make noise. And, if we can’t stop them, let’s make sure that when the next big storm hits and the warnings don’t come in time, we’ll all know exactly who’s responsible for the bodies.

NOW READ:At least one Trump attack dog just killed their career

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A dangerous new lie is being peddled by Trump's toadies

Thom Hartmann May 19, 2025 |

Trump and his billionaire toadies like Howard Lutnik and Scott Bessent are peddling a dangerous lie to working-class Americans. They’re strutting around claiming their tariffs will bring back “good paying jobs” with “great benefits,” while actively undermining the very thing that made manufacturing jobs valuable to working people in the first place: unions.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s really happening: Without strong unions, bringing manufacturing back to America will simply create more sweatshop opportunities where desperate workers earn between $7.25 and $15 an hour with zero benefits and zero security.

The only reason manufacturing jobs like my father had at a tool-and-die shop in the 1960s paid well enough to catapult a single-wage-earner family into the middle class was because they had a union — the Machinists’ Union, in my dad’s case — fighting relentlessly for their rights and dignity.

My father’s union job meant we owned a modest home, had reliable healthcare, and could attend college without crushing debt. The manufacturing jobs Trump promises? Starvation wages without healthcare while corporate profits soar and executives buy their third megayacht.

The proof of their deception is written all over their actions: They’re already reconfiguring the Labor Department into an anti-worker weapon designed to crush any further unionization in America.

Joe Biden was also working to revive American manufacturing — with actual success — but he made it absolutely clear that companies benefiting from his Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act should welcome unions in exchange for government support.

Trump and his GOP enablers want the opposite: docile workers grateful for poverty wages.

While Republicans babble endlessly about “job creators,” they fundamentally misunderstand — or deliberately obscure — how a nation’s true wealth is actually generated.

It’s not through Wall Street speculation or billionaire tax breaks. It’s through making things of value; the exact activity their donor class has eagerly shipped overseas for decades while pocketing the difference.

There’s a profound economic reason to bring manufacturing home that Adam Smith laid out in 1776 and Alexander Hamilton amplified in 1791 when he presented his vision for turning America into a manufacturing powerhouse. It’s the fundamental principle behind Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations” that I explain in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

A tree limb lying on the forest floor has zero economic value. But apply human labor by whittling it into an axe handle, and you’ve created something valuable. That “added value” — the result of applying human (or machine) labor to raw materials — is wealth added to the nation, often lasting for generations if the product endures. Axes made in the 17th century are still being sold in America; manufacturing can produce wealth that truly lasts generations.

Manufacturing, in other words, is the only true way a country becomes wealthier. It’s why China transformed from the impoverished nation I witnessed firsthand when I lived and studied there in 1986 to the economic juggernaut it is today. It’s why Japan and South Korea emerged from the devastation of war to become industrial powerhouses within decades.

This is not generally true, by the way, of a service economy, the system that Reagan and Clinton told us would give us “clean jobs” as America abandoned manufacturing in the 1980-2000s era.

If I give you a $50 haircut and you give me a $50 massage — a service economy — we’ve merely shuffled money around while the nation’s overall wealth remains unchanged. But build a factory producing solar panels, and you’ve created something from raw materials that generates power for decades: that’s real wealth that didn’t exist before.

Republicans used to understand this basic economic principle before they sold their souls to Wall Street speculators and foreign dictators who shower them with “investments.”

Service-only economies don’t generate wealth; they just recirculate existing money. This fundamental truth is the strongest argument for rebuilding American manufacturing capacity, yet it’s one that economists and political commentators almost never mention. Trump certainly doesn’t grasp it — or care — as he hawks Chinese-made MAGA hats while pretending to champion American workers.

The hypocrisy is staggering. This is the same Donald Trump whose branded clothing lines were manufactured in China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. The same Republican Party that pushed “free trade” deals for decades that gutted American manufacturing communities. Now they’re suddenly tariff champions? Please.

So yes, let’s use thoughtfully designed tariffs and other trade policies to bring manufacturing back to our shores. Let Congress debate and pass these measures with 3- to 10-year phase-in periods so manufacturers can plan their transition to American production without the chaos of Trump changing his mind every time some foreign dictator slips another million into his back pocket.

But don’t be fooled for one second: the GOP’s plan to resurrect American manufacturing while continuing their war on unions is nothing but a cynical ploy to create an army of desperate, low-wage workers with no power to demand their fair share.

It’s not “Making America Great Again” — it’s making America into exactly what their corporate donors have always wanted: a docile workforce with no voice, no protections, and nowhere else to go.

We need manufacturing AND unions. Anything less is just another con job from the party that’s perfected the art of getting working class Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

NOW READ: Trump just issued a threat to all of us

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How MAGA got brainwashed: The science behind the right-wing’s 50-year propaganda campaign

Thom Hartmann May 14, 2025

Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying because as a lifelong con man, it’s all he knows how to do.

He’s still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. He lied at the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as Rep. Al Green (D-TX) pointed out. Along with over 100 other lies he told that day. And now he’s lying about his trade deals with the UK and other governments. Every single day he adds to the pile of lies he’s inflicting on the American people and the world.

Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him.

Not the science of elections: the science of propaganda.

New findings from psychologists at universities in California and Georgia published in the journal Cognitive Research show that the more often a statement — regardless of its truthfulness — is repeated, the more emphatically it’s believed.

The researchers noted:

“Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness.”

While modern science is affirming this truism, it’s been in use a long time. In the past century, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called out Republicans for using what we today call the Big Lie around several issues. Running for re-election in 1944, he said:

“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself.“The technique was all set out in Hitler's book — and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

Back then Republicans were lying that Democrats had caused the Republican Great Depression (as it was called until the 1950s) and that FDR had “failed” to adequately prepare America for war with Germany or Japan (while Republican after Republican took to the floor of Congress to tell us, before the war, that “we can do business with Hitler”).

Now Trump’s lies (like about the election, immigrants, and what Elon Musk is up to) are parroted daily by Republican politicians and usually echoed in the media without pushback. After all, Trump reportedly slept with a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside: he would be fluent in Hitler’s Big Lie strategy.

Besides the addition of Trump’s lies, Republican lies haven’t changed a lot since FDR’s era, although they’re more focused and now repeated daily by thousands of rightwing websites, bloggers, podcasts, Fox “News,” and talk radio shows.

Over the past 44 years, Republican billionaires have built an extraordinary nationwide media propaganda machine. Their goal was directed towards justifying tax cuts for the morbidly rich and the deregulation of polluting industries, but now it’s been taken over by Trump acolytes promoting, among other lies, the idea the Democrats torture children and drink their blood.

The “useful idiots” in this scheme have been the American corporate and billionaire-owned media, who dutifully echo or leave unchallenged the GOP’s regular lies.

One of the Republicans most egregious lies — that America is evenly split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats and on the issues of the day — is constantly repeated on the political Sunday shows. Always without a single word of pushback from the show’s host.

While the Senate may be more-or-less split 50/50, Democrats in the Senate represent over 40 million more Americans than do Republicans. And on issues like tax cuts for billionaires, the right to unionize, access to Medicare/Medicaid, climate change, the right to abortion, privatizing Social Security, drug prices, Medicaid expansion, free college, and the minimum wage Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of Democrats.

So how did so many Americans end up believing the many lies that are daily pushed by the GOP?

In a word: repetition, just like the science shows works. Here are a few of their greatest hits, with each followed by my rebuttal:

'Tax cuts produce prosperity'

In a remarkable study published by The London School of Economics, looking at 18 wealthy OECD countries over 50 years, the researchers discovered, unambiguously:

“We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

In other words, tax cuts for the rich make the rich richer and throw the nation into debt, but otherwise have no measurable effect on the economy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been assuring us that if we just give more money to the “job creators,” they’ll use it to open new factories and raise wages. In fact, the morbidly rich simply put that extra money into their offshore accounts and money bins.

In fact, in the 44 years since Reagan started the practice of massive Republican tax cuts for the richest Americans, there has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from America’s working class into the money bins of our morbidly rich.

The idea that tax cuts for the rich and corporations would produce prosperity was a lie from the beginning and still is, but Republicans are still repeating it after nearly 50 years of disastrous experience with neoliberal Reaganomics.

...?

In fact, immigrants — legal and undocumented — are far less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. After all, who wants to either get deported or blow up their chances of becoming a citizen of the country they’ve taken such huge and often deadly chances to reach?

And the statistics aren’t even close. In a massive study funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, published by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, scientists discovered American citizens are 200% to 400% more likely to commit violent felonies against persons, drug crimes, and felony property crimes than immigrants, regardless of their immigration status.

But that won’t stop rightwing media from hyping every exception-to-the-rule when an immigrant is caught committing a crime. Lies, after all, are the coin of their realm.

The minimum wage was established in 1938 and has been raised 22 times. If there had ever been — in all that time — even a single year when inflation increases could be tied to increases in the minimum wage, every Republican in America would have the year memorized.

“You don’t want what happened in 1958 to happen ever again!” they’d warn us while wagging fingers in our faces. Except there is not even one single example of an increase in the minimum wage increasing inflation, which is why they never cite a single statistic or year.

When researchers decided to seriously dig into the topic, they found that a massive 10% increase in the minimum wage may have as much as a 0.1% — one-tenth-of-one-percent, or ten cents on a $100 product — impact on inflation, but that’s never been recorded in American history. Wages simply aren’t that large a part of the price of most goods and even most services.

This is a favorite of the multi-billion-dollar union-busting industry to roll out in their mandatory “reeducation” sessions with captive workers who are considering voting for unionization. It’s a complete lie.

Unlike workers’ actual bosses, whose compensation typically goes up with profits, union “bosses” are simply employees of heavily regulated nonprofit organizations (unions) who work on a salary. They earn just a small fraction of what the actual corporate bosses take from the companies they’re trying to unionize.

When they’re successful, however, union bosses do reduce corporate profits by forcing companies to give their workers better pay and benefits. Which is why corporations are willing to pay millions of dollars a day, in some cases, to bring in these high-powered law firms to intimidate workers.

This one depends on how you define “corrupt.” If you mean that dead people are voting or people are voting multiple times in multiple states, that’s so rare as to compete with the Loch Ness Monster for headlines.

After all, with millions of dollars and over a hundred lawyers and lawmakers, Republicans tried in 60 courtrooms (including the U.S. Supreme Court) to prove even a single case of election fraud that may have affected the outcome of the 2020 election: they failed every time.

On the other hand, if you define “corrupt” as Republican elections officials purging millions of voters — most people of color, students, city-dwellers, and the working poor — from the voting rolls, then maybe there’s some truth to it. But that’s not the line Republicans are selling.

This is one of the deadliest lies Republicans promote. A massive study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine found that having a gun in the home doubles the risk of residents of that home being victims of homicide and triples the risk of successful suicide.

Nonetheless, the big gun manufacturers and their Russian-supported National Rifle Association shower millions on Republican politicians all across America, so now guns have become the top cause of death among children here, something that’s never happened in any developed country, anytime in history, anywhere else in the world.

America now has about 120 guns per 100 people, while in most other developed countries the ratio is around 20 guns per 100 people. In many countries — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for example — it’s fewer than one gun per 100 people.

We are awash in blood and gun violence because of this Republican lie.

This lie is vigorously promoted by the Christian nationalist movement, led by multi-millionaire preachers and televangelists who are not only profiting from it but also have acquired considerable political power through it.

America, in fact, was the first democracy in the world that was founded in an entirely and explicitly secular fashion. The only prominent Founder who promoted the idea of America as a Christian nation was “Give me liberty or give me death” Patrick Henry, who was Virginia’s largest slaveholder and refused to sign the Constitution when it was finished in the fall of 1787.

Jefferson, Franklin, Rush, Washington and numerous others among the Founders didn’t even consider themselves Christians, and those who did — most notably John Adams and James Madison — were outspoken about the dangers of mixing religion and politics.

President Madison’s first veto, in fact, was to strike down a law that gave a DC church money to run a poorhouse. He said in his veto message that it would strike a bad precedent for the American government to give any money whatsoever to any church for a function that government should run itself.

Madison, who was a regular churchgoer (Jefferson attended, too, because until the Revolution the law in Virginia required church membership and attendance as a prerequisite for running for political office), was concerned that government money would corrupt the religion he loved; Jefferson was worried that if “priests” ever became politicians it would lead to the ruin of the republic.

The two debated the issue of which was the greatest danger to America regularly: it turns out both were right.

This is so facially absurd it shouldn’t even require mentioning, but there is literally not a single elected Republican at the federal level (at least that I know of) who will contradict it.

Like with the gun industry, the fossil fuel industry pays their politicians very well, and, since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, that money has worked to hold the GOP in the blood-stained clutches of the industry.

And now these Republican lies about climate change threaten all life on Earth.

So much happened during the last Trump administration that Americans can be forgiven for forgetting that Trump, in 2019, promised Chinese President Xi Jinping that he wouldn’t object if Xi brutally crushed the Hong Kong independence movement.

Trump was working on getting Chinese trademarks for his daughter Ivanka’s fashion line and other Ivanka-branded items (including coffins, voting machines, and almost any other category available) so, as CNN reported on October 4, 2019:

“The remarkable pledge to the Chinese leader is a dramatic departure from decades of US support for human rights in China and shows just how eager Trump is to strike a deal with Beijing…”

Trump’s so-called “trade war” with China was a joke. He imposed a few cosmetic tariffs that backfired and the Chinese didn’t take seriously because they were done by executive order rather than an act of Congress.

After hubby Jared got $2 billion for selling America out to Saudi Arabia, Ivanka seems to have lost interest in her business dealings in China. But in the meantime, the democracy movement in Hong Kong was completely crushed and its advocates are now dead or in prison thanks to Trump.

Every one of these lies, among others, are vigorously promoted by GOP-aligned media.

Their constant repetition has led average Republicans to fervently believe them, to the detriment of both the United States and, particularly with climate change, the future of life on Earth.

And now Trump has rolled out a new Big Lie that the media is obediently repeating: surrendering Ukraine to Russia will bring about “peace.” It’s probably the most despicable lie he’s promoted in decades.

FDR was right to call out the Republican Party for their Big Lie strategy back in the day. Tragically, he was 80 years too early for today’s Americans to realize the long, deep roots of the modern GOP’s propaganda strategy.

Over the past 40 years, our media has been largely complicit, echoing these Republican Big Lies. It’s well past time for American media to take its responsibility to present the truth seriously.

NOW READ: The single stupidest statement about Trump ever made

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Trump just issued a threat to all of us

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo

Thom Hartmann May 06, 2025

In the dark corners of America’s halls of power, something sinister is unfolding. Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched an assault on one of the most sacred pillars of our democracy: the freedom of the press. And make no mistake, this isn’t just another policy change. It’s a deliberate strategy straight from the dictator’s playbook.

Late last month, Bondi quietly issued a memo rescinding vital protections for journalists that had prevented the government from forcing reporters to reveal their sources or surrender their notes during leak investigations. This wasn’t just any memo; it was a declaration of war against the very foundation of press freedom in America.

Bondi’s memo, released late on a Friday afternoon (a classic timing choice to minimize media attention), rescinded policies that had limited when and how Justice Department attorneys could pursue records or testimony from journalists, including in cases involving the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets to the press. The implications are chilling and immediate.

The Justice Department will now allow federal investigators to pursue communications from media outlets in government leak investigations, marking a complete reversal of Biden-era (and previous administrations’) policies that protected journalists from becoming targets of government intimidation.

Bondi’s justification? The Justice Department “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Did you catch that? Not disclosures that threaten national security, but those that “undermine President Trump’s policies.” Since when did the President’s policies become sacred and beyond scrutiny? Since when did exposing wrongdoing by our government become a crime against “the American people”?

Throughout our history, ethical government officials who leaked information to the press have been essential to maintaining our democracy. They’ve exposed corruption, illegal wars, and unconstitutional surveillance, and in many cases they’ve paid a heavy price for their courage.

Take my old friend and correspondent Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps America’s most famous whistleblower. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing how multiple presidents had systematically lied to the American people about the Vietnam War. He believed the documents contained “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.” His brave act helped change public opinion and ultimately contributed to ending that disastrous war.

When Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon administration tried to block their publication. The Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States upholding the press’s right to publish has been called one of the “modern pillars” of First Amendment rights with respect to freedom of the press.

That same Nixon administration that tried to silence Ellsberg created the infamous “White House Plumbers” unit to stop leaks, which later led directly to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s downfall.

History shows that when presidents attack whistleblowers and the press, they’re usually trying to hide their own misdeeds. And it sure feels like that’s exactly what Bondi and Trump are now up to.

In more recent history, we’ve seen Edward Snowden expose the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and Chelsea Manning reveal troubling military actions, including the killing of civilians. Both were driven by their conviction that the American people deserved to know about government overreach and misconduct.

The Founders understood that a democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry, and citizens cannot be informed without a free press that can hold the powerful accountable. That’s why they enshrined press freedom in the First Amendment; they knew from bitter experience that power corrupts, and that the powerful will always seek to hide their corruption.

A free press serves as our early warning system against government overreach and abuse. When journalists can protect their sources, those inside the government who witness wrongdoing can come forward without fear of retribution. This critical flow of information is what Bondi is now trying to shut down.

Bondi’s actions come in the midst of an aggressive campaign against unauthorized leaking in Trump’s second administration. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has already referred “two intelligence community leakers” to the Justice Department for potential prosecutions, with a third referral on the way.

What we’re witnessing is step one in the dictator’s playbook: silence those who tell the truth about your regime. We’ve seen this pattern in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and countless other countries where democracy has withered into authoritarianism. First, attack the press. Then, criminalize dissent. Intimidate lawmakers, lawyers, and judges. Finally, consolidate power in the hands of a single leader.

Bondi’s memo added that there will be procedures in place before members of the media are compelled to testify or their records are seized, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Justice Department is now prepared to compel journalists to testify, and their records will be subject to seizure.

But the most alarming part of all is what Bondi reportedly wants to do next. According to sources close to the Justice Department, she has argued that leakers — or even reporters — who provide information that she doesn’t like could be prosecuted for treason, a crime that carries the death penalty.

Let that sink in: the Attorney General of the United States believes that journalists doing their constitutionally protected job could be subject to execution.

I’ve been covering American politics for five decades, and just to be very clear: This is not normal. This is not just another partisan policy dispute. This is an existential threat to our constitutional system of government.

When a government official can decide that reporting unflattering information is “treason,” we’re no longer living in a democracy. We’re living in an authoritarian state where power flows from the top down, not from the people up.

Bondi’s actions reveal the Trump administration’s true nature. They have no interest in our democratic traditions or constitutional liberties. Their only goal is to consolidate power and silence dissent.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which documents threats to press freedom, has condemned Bondi’s decision and criticized Republicans in Congress who killed a federal shield law in 2024 that would have protected journalists from such subpoenas.

We’ve seen this before. Nixon’s attacks on the press were a precursor to his abuses of power. The Bush administration’s aggressive prosecutions of leakers after 9/11 helped enable his unconstitutional torture program and illegal surveillance. And Trump’s first term was marked by constant rhetorical attacks on the press as “enemies of the people.”

But this move by Bondi takes things to a new and dangerous level. By institutionalizing the persecution of journalists and their sources, she’s laying the groundwork for a full-scale assault on press freedom.

She claims that “subpoenaed news outlets are to be given advanced notice” and that the subpoenas will be “narrowly drawn,” but these are empty promises from an administration that has repeatedly shown contempt for democratic norms and the rule of law.

The time for polite disagreement or “strongly worded letters” is over. The time for waiting to see what happens next is over. We must act now to protect our democracy before it’s too late.

First, demand that Congress pass a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to reveal their sources. This is not a partisan issue; it’s about preserving the basic functioning of our democracy.

Second, support independent journalism with your dollars and your attention. Subscribe to newspapers, donate to nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica, and share important stories with your networks. A robust press is our best defense against tyranny.

Third, contact your representatives and tell them that protecting press freedom must be a top priority. Remind them that their oath is to the Constitution, not to any president or party. The phone number for the congressional switchboard, which can connect you to both your senators and your member of the House, is 202-224-3121.

Fourth, prepare to take to the streets if Bondi follows through on her threat to prosecute journalists for treason. That would be a red line from which there is no return to normal democratic governance.

Finally, remember that the press isn’t perfect — no human institution is — but it’s essential. When governments attack journalists, it’s rarely because they’re telling lies. It’s almost always because they’re telling truths that the powerful don’t want heard.

We stand at a crossroads in American history. Down one path lies a renewed commitment to our democratic values, including a free press that can hold the powerful accountable. Down the other lies authoritarianism, where “truth” is whatever the leader says it is, and those who disagree face persecution or worse.

The choice should be obvious. But making the right choice requires courage, from journalists who continue to do their jobs despite threats, from whistleblowers who risk everything to expose wrongdoing, and from citizens who refuse to be silent in the face of growing tyranny.

Pam Bondi and Donald Trump have shown their true colors. They’ve revealed their contempt for the Constitution and their fear of the truth. They’re trying to create a country where no one can challenge their power or expose their corruption.

We cannot — we must not — let them succeed. Our democracy depends on it.

NOW READ: Democrats need to draw 'political blood': Expert lays out strategy for defeating MAGA

The time to act is now.

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Thom Hartmann May 07, 2025

Trump and his billionaire toadies like Howard Lutnik and Scott Bessent are peddling a dangerous lie to working-class Americans. They’re strutting around claiming their tariffs will bring back “good paying jobs” with “great benefits,” while actively undermining the very thing that made manufacturing jobs valuable to working people in the first place: unions.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s really happening: Without strong unions, bringing manufacturing back to America will simply create more sweatshop opportunities where desperate workers earn between $7.25 and $15 an hour with zero benefits and zero security.

The only reason manufacturing jobs like my father had at a tool-and-die shop in the 1960s paid well enough to catapult a single-wage-earner family into the middle class was because they had a union — the Machinists’ Union, in my dad’s case — fighting relentlessly for their rights and dignity.

My father’s union job meant we owned a modest home, had reliable healthcare, and could attend college without crushing debt. The manufacturing jobs Trump promises? Starvation wages without healthcare while corporate profits soar and executives buy their third megayacht.

The proof of their deception is written all over their actions: They’re already reconfiguring the Labor Department into an anti-worker weapon designed to crush any further unionization in America.

Joe Biden was also working to revive American manufacturing — with actual success — but he made it absolutely clear that companies benefiting from his Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act should welcome unions in exchange for government support.

Trump and his GOP enablers want the opposite: docile workers grateful for poverty wages.

While Republicans babble endlessly about “job creators,” they fundamentally misunderstand — or deliberately obscure — how a nation’s true wealth is actually generated.

It’s not through Wall Street speculation or billionaire tax breaks. It’s through making things of value; the exact activity their donor class has eagerly shipped overseas for decades while pocketing the difference.

There’s a profound economic reason to bring manufacturing home that Adam Smith laid out in 1776 and Alexander Hamilton amplified in 1791 when he presented his vision for turning America into a manufacturing powerhouse. It’s the fundamental principle behind Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations” that I explain in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

A tree limb lying on the forest floor has zero economic value. But apply human labor by whittling it into an axe handle, and you’ve created something valuable. That “added value” — the result of applying human (or machine) labor to raw materials — is wealth added to the nation, often lasting for generations if the product endures. Axes made in the 17th century are still being sold in America; manufacturing can produce wealth that truly lasts generations.

Manufacturing, in other words, is the only true way a country becomes wealthier. It’s why China transformed from the impoverished nation I witnessed firsthand when I lived and studied there in 1986 to the economic juggernaut it is today. It’s why Japan and South Korea emerged from the devastation of war to become industrial powerhouses within decades.

This is not generally true, by the way, of a service economy, the system that Reagan and Clinton told us would give us “clean jobs” as America abandoned manufacturing in the 1980-2000s era.

If I give you a $50 haircut and you give me a $50 massage — a service economy — we’ve merely shuffled money around while the nation’s overall wealth remains unchanged. But build a factory producing solar panels, and you’ve created something from raw materials that generates power for decades: that’s real wealth that didn’t exist before.

Republicans used to understand this basic economic principle before they sold their souls to Wall Street speculators and foreign dictators who shower them with “investments.”

Service-only economies don’t generate wealth; they just recirculate existing money. This fundamental truth is the strongest argument for rebuilding American manufacturing capacity, yet it’s one that economists and political commentators almost never mention. Trump certainly doesn’t grasp it — or care — as he hawks Chinese-made MAGA hats while pretending to champion American workers.

The hypocrisy is staggering. This is the same Donald Trump whose branded clothing lines were manufactured in China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. The same Republican Party that pushed “free trade” deals for decades that gutted American manufacturing communities. Now they’re suddenly tariff champions? Please.

So yes, let’s use thoughtfully designed tariffs and other trade policies to bring manufacturing back to our shores. Let Congress debate and pass these measures with 3- to 10-year phase-in periods so manufacturers can plan their transition to American production without the chaos of Trump changing his mind every time some foreign dictator slips another million into his back pocket.

But don’t be fooled for one second: the GOP’s plan to resurrect American manufacturing while continuing their war on unions is nothing but a cynical ploy to create an army of desperate, low-wage workers with no power to demand their fair share.

It’s not “Making America Great Again” — it’s making America into exactly what their corporate donors have always wanted: a docile workforce with no voice, no protections, and nowhere else to go.

We need manufacturing AND unions. Anything less is just another con job from the party that’s perfected the art of getting working class Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

NOW READ: Trump just issued a threat to all of us

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What the Trump administration did wasn't an accident

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump reacts next to coal industry workers, on the day he signs energy-related executive orders at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 8, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo

Thom Hartmann May 03, 2025

It was a cold, gray morning in Oklahoma when the government came crashing through the wrong door.

Without warning, ICE agents clad in black tactical gear burst into a quiet family home. Guns drawn, boots pounding on hardwood, they moved like soldiers in hostile territory — except this wasn’t a war zone. It was a suburban neighborhood. A home where children did homework, parents made dinner, and everyone believed, until that moment, that living in America meant having rights.

They were wrong.

In the chaos, the teenage daughter — still in her underwear — was yanked from her bedroom and forced to stand, exposed and terrified, while armed strangers rifled through her belongings. Her screams went unanswered. The agents refused to let her or the rest of the family get dressed. They didn’t explain why they were there, didn’t ask questions, didn’t seem to care that the person they were looking for didn’t live at that address.

Then they started taking things: cell phones, tablets, laptops — anything that might contain information or, perhaps more to the point, value. They seized all the family’s cash, their passports, their children’s devices. When the family demanded answers, they were met with silence and threats. No warrant was ever shown. No charges were filed. No receipts left behind.

ICE simply vanished, leaving the family humiliated, traumatized, and stripped of the basic tools of modern life. The agency has since refused to return the electronics or the money. There has been no apology, no accountability, no restitution — just a void where justice is supposed to live.

What happened to that family wasn’t an accident. It was a symptom — a glimpse behind the curtain of what the Trump administration has built: an unaccountable, increasingly lawless deportation regime that functions more like a secret police force than a branch of a democratic government.

And the targets aren’t just undocumented immigrants or criminal suspects anymore. They’re legal residents. College students. People born and raised in this country. Their only “crime” is voicing dissent, having the wrong skin color, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But some are pushing back, bringing us big news from the ACLU yesterday:

“The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ruled today that Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and recent Columbia graduate student, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views. The court rejected the government’s attempt to shut down Mr. Khalil’s case before it could be heard.”

Khalil has committed no crime. He was in the U.S. legally. His only offense — in the eyes of the Trump administration — was participating in peaceful protests criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza. For that, ICE agents stormed his university housing and locked him in a detention facility, citing a vague national security justification that amounts to little more than “we don’t like what he said.”

This is not how a constitutional republic behaves. It is how authoritarian regimes operate: by making examples out of those who speak up, and terrifying the rest into silence.

To understand how dangerous this moment is — how far we’ve drifted from our foundational values — we have to reach back nearly two centuries. Because this is not the first time American leaders have had to grapple with whether the protections of our laws apply to those without political power, to people who aren’t citizens but are still human beings.

In February 1841, 73-year-old former President John Quincy Adams stood before the Supreme Court to defend 53 African men who had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone, sold into slavery, and transported aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. These men, having seized the ship and attempted to return home, were captured off the coast of Long Island and jailed as property, their fates debated not as individuals but as commodities.

Adams — the son of a founding father and one of the last living links to the American Revolution — didn’t argue their case as a matter of political favor or foreign diplomacy. He invoked something deeper: the principle that all people, regardless of citizenship, nationality, or status, are entitled to the protection of the law when they are on American soil.

“By what right was it denied to the men who had restored themselves to freedom,” Adams thundered, “and why was it extended to the perpetrators of those acts of violence themselves?”

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

The administration’s justification in Khalil’s case? That his presence in the U.S. could cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” That’s the legal equivalent of saying, “We’re deporting him because we want to.” It’s not just unconstitutional: it’s tyrannical.

And this isn’t isolated. Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street by masked agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israeli policy in a student newspaper over a year ago. In both cases, there were no warrants, no hearings, no evidence of criminal activity. Just black-bag operations targeting people for using their First Amendment rights.

Meanwhile, pro-Netanyahu political groups — many with direct ties to Trumpworld — are openly compiling lists of student activists and professors to target for deportation. And the administration appears to be acting on those lists.

John Quincy Adams would be horrified, but not surprised.

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

The very notion should be constitutionally absurd. But like so many authoritarian moves, it’s being normalized through repetition.

First they came for the undocumented. Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then the student visa holders. Now, they’re signaling plans to come after naturalized citizens — and even people born here — if they hold the “wrong” political beliefs.

Trump’s January executive order made this shift brutally clear:

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you... I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

But who gets to decide what constitutes a “pro-jihadist protest” or who counts as a “Hamas sympathizer”? The Trump administration does. No court. No jury. No evidence required. Just guilt by association — and punishment without due process.

This is precisely how autocrats consolidate power: they redefine dissent as treason, criminalize speech, and strip away rights piecemeal until there’s nothing left to defend. It happened in Turkey under Erdoğan. It happened in Hungary under Orbán. It happened in Putin’s Russia. And now it’s happening here.

The echoes of the Amistad case are unmistakable. Back then, the federal government sought to hand kidnapped Africans over to foreign governments to appease diplomatic partners. Today, we are handing peaceful student protesters over to ICE and DHS to appease political donors and right-wing pressure groups.

The same disregard for humanity. The same corruption of justice. The same weaponization of government to serve ideology instead of law.

But just as Adams turned the tide in 1841 by reminding America of its founding principles, we must do the same today.

Because this isn’t about immigration policy. It’s not about border security. It’s about the foundational principle that all people — all people — have the right to due process, the right to protest, and the right to be free from government persecution.

That family in Oklahoma, whose lives were shattered by an ICE raid on the wrong house? They weren’t caught in the gears of bureaucracy. They were deliberately crushed by a system designed to instill fear, to dehumanize, and to render justice optional.

Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk are not threats to national security; they’re reminders of what democracy is supposed to look like: people using their voices to speak uncomfortable truths. That’s what authoritarians fear most.

And if we let this continue — if we fail to act — we are complicit in the unraveling of the very idea of America.

We must fight this on every front:

First, we need immediate legal challenges to every deportation that lacks due process. Constitutional rights don’t depend on citizenship: they apply to every person on American soil.

Second, we need massive public protest against these policies. Universities should, within the law, refuse to cooperate with ICE and protect their students. Communities should establish sanctuary policies. Legal organizations should provide pro bono representation to those targeted.

And finally, we need to reclaim the narrative. This isn’t about immigration policy or national security; it’s about the most fundamental American principle: that all people possess inalienable rights, even those who aren’t citizens or are accused of a crime.

John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.

The time for action is now. Contact your representatives. Support legal defense funds. Share this story. Join the fight.

Because if we don’t stand up for them today, there may be no one left to stand up for us tomorrow.

NOW READ: Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

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Only one thing is going to stand in Trump's way — and he knows it

Thom Hartmann April 28, 2025

It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night.

It happened in broad daylight — in the heart of an American courthouse.

Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on Friday morning and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding.

But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror.

This was a warning shot aimed directly at the beating heart of America’s judiciary:

“Fall in line — or you’re next.”

In that moment, the world’s oldest democracy lurched closer to the edge of authoritarian rule. In that moment, America became a little less free — and a lot more like the nightmare Vladimir Putin always hoped we’d become.

The FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan last Friday without even having a legal arrest warrant; this is as outrageous and police-state illegal as an administration can get.

And Pam Bondi’s performance Friday — after her federal agents swarm-raided this county judge — wasn’t staged for the general public.

The real audience was a very small, select group: America’s judges.

Their message is very simple: “P--- us off, judges, and you could end up in prison, too.”

Trump has already pacified the Article I branch of government — Congress — and now he’s in the process of pacifying the Article III branch, the Judiciary.

There are only 3 branches to our government: cowing both Congress and the nation’s Judiciary will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways.

Nothing and nobody else will be able to stop him, short of a military coup (and he’s already decapitated the senior leadership of the military) or unending demonstrations in the streets (demonstrators who may soon face live ammunition).

That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Vladimir Putin-style dictatorship where you are punished for the smallest deviation from orthodoxy and can find yourself in prison or sued into bankruptcy if you dare speak out in public.

It appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor, if not his handler. Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the historic American infrastructure (which has been an example for the world for 250 years) and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world.

To get there, now that they’ve pacified every single Republican member of Congress (most recently, Don Bacon criticized Trump’s schizophrenic tariffs; a day later he started talking about retiring), they only have to seize control of the Judiciary, and then nothing except We The People will stand in their way.

Nothing. Will. Stand. In. Trump’s. Way. Except We The People. And he knows it.

Look at the striking parallels between Putin’s strategies and Trump’s actions:

From installing Trump’s loyalists in the military and the federal police agencies of the Department of Justice and FBI, to his open threats against freedom of the press, to the GOP’s efforts to rig elections and purge voters, Trump’s subversion of US democracy looks eerily familiar.

He’s taking pages directly from the autocrat’s handbook.

Trump has openly quoted and praised autocrats like Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has presented his leadership in speeches to the GOP and CPAC as a model of an “illiberal” state.

Trump’s not hiding his admiration for dictators; he’s flaunting it. And now he’s putting the final stages of their script into action.

Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism follows “a known playbook. It’s unfolded in many other countries,” as journalist Anne Applebaum notes. “These are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American.”

In a mere matter of weeks into his presidency, Applebaum says, Trump and his allies “have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy.”

The speed is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It only took Hitler 53 days to completely end democracy in Germany. Others, like Lukashenko, Orbán, Putin, Mussolini, Duterte, El-Sisi, and Erdoğan took longer (none longer than two years), but you could argue that Trump has been working at this project for 9 years now.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies how democracies slip into authoritarianism, warns that we’re heading toward what experts call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that “constitutionally continue to be democracies” with regular elections and legal opposition, but where “systematic abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”

Make no mistake about what’s happening: Trump and his allies are methodically working through a four-step process to establish complete autocratic control, which will turn America into a one-man dictatorship.

1. Terrorize Congress: Trump’s already largely succeeded here. Republican lawmakers now march in lockstep with his agenda, afraid to oppose him even when their consciences scream otherwise. The V-Dem Institute already warns that Trump’s actions are “extremely worrying” for American democracy.

2. Terrorize the Media: Trump has, as The Washington Post writes, “relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes,” as political scientists have noted. “He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’” With help from Elon Musk and other billionaires, he’s creating a media and social media environment where truth itself is under assault. And last week his administration threatened to arrest journalists and charge them with treason, an offense for which they could be executed.

3. Terrorize Judges and Lawyers: What we witnessed Friday with the raid on a county judge and the arrest of a retired judge earlier in the week is just the beginning. The final step in this process will be intimidating the Supreme Court, and if Trump’s minions can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary, it will be much easier to terrorize members of the Court itself, just like Putin and Orbán have done. This follows dangerous cracks in democracy’s pillars that experts have been warning about.

4. Terrorize Citizens: Once the above institutions are captured and there’s no more Constitutional opposition to Trump, the final phase begins: crushing individual dissent through fear, persecution, and potentially violence. This is the playbook Malcolm Nance detailed in his work analyzing Putin’s strategies to undermine American democracy and has already started against immigrants and student visa holders. If history tells us anything, American citizens will be next.

Most of this is already in place; time is running out fast.

Trump and his fellow fascists know their time is running out because elections are coming in a handful of months and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now, and it is already beginning to decline.

This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges, so they can implement the final destruction of any Constitutionally-based opposition to Trump’s one-man rule.

If Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule as quickly as some other historical dictators did, the complete (albeit hopefully temporary) end of American democracy could happen very rapidly, possibly even in the next few weeks or months. The window for action is closing fast.

But there’s still hope, because we’re still We The People. As long as our protest movement continues to grow and demand a stop to the damage Trump and Musk are doing to our democratic republic, we may be able to slow or even stop this anti-American cabal and reclaim our republic.

Our protesting in the streets and reaching out to legislators may encourage resistance within the media and courts, and might even inspire a handful of Republicans to stand against this wannabe dictator.

When democratic institutions fail, the last line of defense has always been citizens willing to take to the streets. Ukraine provides the most powerful recent example of how a determined populace can rescue democracy from Russian-inspired authoritarianism.

During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, over half a million people joined demonstrations in Kyiv to defend democracy against creeping authoritarianism. Those protests ultimately ended Viktor Yanukovych’s Russia-backed puppet regime (and kicked out its Russian-funded American advisor, Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) and became known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Ukrainians stood firm in the streets despite violence and intimidation, and their courage changed history.

Ukraine’s later Orange Revolution similarly empowered ordinary citizens to engage in mass protests, with some lasting continously more than two weeks. This peaceful revolution successfully defended Ukraine’s democratic aspirations against Russian influence and showed the world that people power can overcome autocratic manipulation.

Putin fears democracy, particularly at his doorstep like in Ukraine and the Baltic states. He knows that democracy is contagious, and any spread near Russia, he believes, poses an existential threat to his autocratic rule. That’s why he invaded Ukraine, and that’s why he spent millions on social media trolls to support Trump’s election and his assault on our democratic institutions.

As Ukrainian historian Hanna Perekhoda warns, “If we let Russian authoritarians win, it will mean that the authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the U.S., for example, will grow stronger.”

If this assault on the Courts (and the implied intimidation of all judges including those on the Supreme Court) succeeds, and the media continues to bow down, the only thing left will be us in the streets.

The time for half-measures, “very strong letters,” and polite political disagreement has passed. We are watching in real-time as our 250-year experiment in democracy is being dismantled by a would-be dictator taking his cues from — or, at least, modeling his presidency on — Vladimir Putin.

This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan exaggeration. This is the stark reality facing our nation today. Fascism and dictatorship are at our doorstep.

Just last week, it was reported that Trump has now deported three American citizens, including a child taking cancer therapy.

Not content to just pull student visas and ask them to leave the country, Trump’s goons have been imprisoning students for writing OpEd articles for weeks. And now they’re show-arresting judges.

The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an isolated incident; it’s part a broader strategy to intimidate the judiciary and consolidate power.

When judges are arrested for upholding the principles of due process, the very foundation of democracy is at risk. This moment demands vigilance and action from all who value the rule of law.

The preservation of our democratic institutions depends on our collective response to such unprecedented challenges.

Buckle up, America. Democracy itself is on the line, and if the courts fall, we’ll be its last defenders.

NOW READ: Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy

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Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy

Activist Phyllis Schafly wearing a "Stop ERA" badge, demonstrating with other women against the Equal Rights Amendment in front of the White House, Washington, D.C..

Thom Hartmann April 27, 2025

In a Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.

I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.

Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.

The founding premise of the modern conservative movement tracks back a generation before Stormer’s book to a Republican thought leader named Russell Kirk. He laid it out in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Kirk argued that the middle class was becoming a threat to America; without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control of everything — he worried that society would devolve into chaos.

The opening chapter of his book was about Edmund Burke, the Irish conservative who wrote, in 1790, that hairdressers and candlemakers should not be allowed to run for political office or even to vote:

“The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person — to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature...”

Kirk and his followers essentially predicted in 1951 that if today’s “hairdressers and working tallow-chandlers” — college students, women, working-class people, and people of color — ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, there would essentially be a communist revolution in the US, handing us over to Stalin and his Politburo.

(Keep in mind, this was when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, both abortion and birth control were illegal in most states, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband’s, brother’s, or father’s signature.)

Throughout the 1950s, Kirk and his warnings of the dangers of an activist middle-class developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot.

But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.

Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning. Gay liberation was also having a moment.

Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Wealthy white conservatives freaked out as the morbidly rich promoted the idea that America was experiencing a “moral decline” that could only be fixed by ending the union movement and other “liberal” causes that shared the union movements’ populist goals.

They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night: the “communists” — those uppity racial minorities, women who’d forgotten their “rightful place in society,” students who objected to Vietnam, unionized workers, and gender minorities — were on the verge of “taking over” America.

These five movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, America’s most powerful and well-known conservative commentators (like William F. Buckley Jr.) were telling Republicans that Russell Kirk was, indeed, a prophet.

They’d finally found a politically acceptable “hook” to destroy the wealth of working-class people and transfer trillions into their own money bins: fear of communism and a prophesied social decay caused by an activist middle class.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these five movements represented was put into place in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: the explicit goal of the morbidly rich white men funding the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg to end the protests of the ’60s and ’70s, restore “social stability,” and increase corporate profitability.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats, particularly the hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding an end to police killings. They also wanted to outlaw abortion, to put women “back in their place.”

Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put income taxes on Social Security and unemployment payments, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.

He ended the tax deductibility of credit-card, car-loan, and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were only a handful of billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; today’s democracy-destroying explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.)

Reagan declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s just now beginning to recover from its low of 6% of the private workforce.

He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and negotiated NAFTA, which Clinton signed and thus opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while radically cutting corporate labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, Reagan’s War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more, over a couple of decades, than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s and ’30s.

The billionaire’s investment in taking the middle-class down a peg was paying off by orders of magnitude.

Had Reagan not destroyed the nation’s unions, the median American income today would be well over $100,000 a year, minimum-wage households would have a family income of $86,000, and a single wage-earner would still be able to buy a house, a car, send the kids to college, and have a decent retirement (as my dad did, working a union job for 35 years in a tool-and-die shop).

Instead, CEOs today keep all that money for themselves and their investors.

And Reagan’s War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt: as predicted, many aren’t willing to jeopardize it all by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling this campaign of impoverishment to the American people to help out the billionaire class was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, grant women equal rights, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, conservatives said, all of those things were aspects of “socialism.” And if America embraced socialism, we may as well be ruled by the Soviet Union.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government “socialist” programs were not the solution to our problems, but instead were the problem itself.

He ridiculed the formerly-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He even told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, throughout the 1970s and 1980s Republican billionaires built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify Reagan’s message that government supports of any sort for poor or working-class people were simply gateway drugs to socialism and, inevitably, communism.

It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from billionaire-funded groups like the Heritage Foundation. Billionaire-owned Fox “News” today carries on the tradition.

It had been a pretty good scam for the billionaires who owned the GOP and wanted, back in the 1950s, to stop the union movement that was forcing them to share their profits with their workers.

First, they terrified Americans about communism and socialism, then convinced about half of us that those things came straight out of “liberal” social and economic movements.

Unions, feminism, acceptance of the queer community, civil rights, minimum wage increases, and even regulation of corporate behavior would, they told us, all lead to Soviet-style tyranny.

So, to save America from herself, Reagan gutted the American middle class, transferring over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

By 2016, Americans were starting to figure out that they’d been screwed — and that Hillary Clinton’s husband had been in on it by continuing Reagan’s policies and doubling-down on free trade — and were loudly demanding change.

Into this maelstrom walked Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the savior of the country. In the GOP primary he pointed out how corrupt his opponents were, particularly Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and destroyed them, one after the other.

For the general election in 2016, he changed his tune and ran on what was traditionally a Democratic platform, saying he was going to bring jobs home, end so-called “free trade” policies [TPP], raise taxes on the rich so much that “my friends won’t talk to me anymore,” and make sure every American had free or low-cost healthcare and access to an affordable college education.

They were all lies — something Trump had become adept at during his business career — but they worked and sucked in disaffected workers who knew they’d been screwed but weren’t sure who did it to them or why.

So here we are.

We have an open fascist and apparent friend of authoritarian Russia as president after being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony charges, having previously been adjudicated as responsible for sexual abuse (the judge called it “rape”) and fraud.

He’s putting into place people and policies that could turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and apparently wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us about back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire president with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.

And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits.

Perhaps none dare call it treason. But I do.

NOW READ: The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to

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Time's up for the GOP

Thom Hartmann April 25, 2025

We’ve spent years watching Donald Trump attack our democratic institutions, inflame divisions, and corrupt the public discourse.

But focusing solely on Trump misses the larger, more disturbing reality: Trump isn’t acting alone. He’s a dangerous pathogen that found the perfect host in today’s Republican Party, an organism already compromised and eager to be infected.

The evidence of this dangerous symbiosis is alarming and immediate. Just days ago, America crossed a threshold that should chill every citizen who still believes in the rule of law.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a young man living peacefully in Maryland with no criminal record, was ripped from his home and deported to El Salvador — not by rogue agents, not by mistake, but in deliberate defiance of multiple federal court orders.

A judge had explicitly ordered that Garcia not be deported. The U.S. Supreme Court had intervened. And still, the Trump-controlled Department of Justice — under Attorney General Pam Bondi — refused to comply.

Garcia vanished from U.S. soil like a political dissident in a dictatorship. Senator Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to find him yesterday, only to be denied access. The Salvadoran government wouldn’t even confirm his location. Garcia now sits detained, alone in a foreign country, denied lawyers, family, or recourse.

He’s not a criminal — he’s a political hostage. His only crime was existing under an administration that believes it is above the law.

This isn’t abstract. This is what the death of democracy feels like. A court order ignored. A life uprooted. A senator stonewalled.

And it’s a precedent set: if the executive branch can disappear a legal US resident despite Supreme Court orders, democracy is already bleeding out right in front of our eyes.

To fully comprehend the gravity of our situation, we must recognize that Trump is both a symptom and a disease. Like any opportunistic virus, he didn’t invent the weakness — he exploited it. The Republican Party, drifting toward authoritarianism since Nixon, became the perfect host.

From the backlash to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, to Nixon's Southern Strategy, to the Tea Party’s billionaire-funded anti-government rage against our first Black president, the GOP built a party on grievance and fear. It corroded democratic norms for decades. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, union busting, judicial stacking, demonizing immigrants and queer people, rightwing propaganda media — all laid the groundwork.

Trump didn’t create this environment. He walked into it, flipped the switches, and set it ablaze. He didn’t poison the well. He found it already poisoned and drank deeply.

What’s particularly chilling is how methodical Trump’s attack on democracy has been.

He’s spent years convincing millions that elections are fraudulent — despite no credible evidence. This isn’t just the tantrum of a defeated candidate. It’s a calculated attempt to destroy the one institution that makes a republic function: trust in the vote. When citizens no longer believe their ballots count, democracy dies.

That was the goal. Undermine faith in the system so completely that only Trump — and those who pledge loyalty to him — are seen as legitimate.

His authoritarian instincts were never hidden. He praised dictators like Putin, Orbán, MBS, and Kim Jong Un. He demanded personal loyalty from government officials, attacked the judiciary, and labeled the free press “the enemy of the people.” Every move was pulled straight from the autocrat’s playbook, designed to erode checks on his power.

The insurrection on January 6 was not an outlier, but rather the inevitable outcome of years of lies, hate, and democratic erosion. Trump didn’t just incite a mob; he sat and watched — gleefully — as it ransacked the Capitol, hunted lawmakers, and shattered windows in the temple of democracy. He delayed help. He wanted it to succeed.

And the Republican Party? It shrugged. Which is the key to both understanding and stopping Trump.

None of this destruction would be possible without the Republican Party’s active complicity. They are not passive bystanders; they are eager enablers. Leaders who once called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” now parrot his lies and excuse his crimes.

Why? Because they’ve traded principle for power. The “party of family values” excused porn star hush money because it helped rig the 2016 election. The “party of fiscal responsibility” celebrated massive tax cuts for billionaires that exploded our nation’s deficit. The “party of national security” turned a blind eye as Trump aligned with America's adversaries and vilified NATO.

They sold their souls. And for what? Judges? Tax cuts? A fleeting grip on power?

At the core of this transformation is the deliberate cultivation of cruelty as political strategy. Trump’s policies were never just misguided: they were purposefully cruel.

The separation of children at the border wasn’t a failure; it was a feature. Designed to cause pain. Designed to deter. Designed to send a message that America no longer welcomed the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, at least when their skin is not white.

His refusal to return Kilmar Garcia to his family and community (and over 200 others) is not an outlier. It’s the same cruelty repackaged. The same contempt for legal restraint. The same hunger for domination. And if he’s not stopped by Republicans on the Supreme Court or Republicans in Congress, history and his own words tell us he’ll be coming for you and me next.

Beyond policy, Trump has waged a relentless war on truth itself. He didn’t just lie; he declared war on the very idea of truth. He called climate change a hoax. He politicized a deadly pandemic. He turned science into a partisan enemy and transformed medical expertise into a battleground.

The result? Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary Covid (and now measles) deaths. A public so divided they couldn’t agree on masks or medicine. That wasn’t an accident. It was the point: destroy our shared reality, and you can then more easily destroy democracy.

Perhaps most destructive of all, Trump didn’t merely inherit America’s divisions: he weaponized them. He didn’t unify urban and rural, rich and poor, Black and white: he pitted them against each other for personal gain. Rage was his currency. Fear his strategy. When people are busy hating each other, he knows, they don’t notice who’s robbing them blind.

What we now face is no longer a political party but a vicious, cruel cult of personality. Today’s GOP isn’t defined by principles or policies: Disagree and you’re exiled — just ask Liz Cheney. Ask Adam Kinzinger. Ask Mitt Romney.

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t represent a fringe any longer; she is the mainstream now. Her recent town hall — where dissenters were tased — wasn’t an aberration. It’s the new GOP, where violence is celebrated as a tool, not a last resort, and elected officials revel in their own cruelty, brutality, and ability to ignore the needs of their constituents while taking millions from their donors.

She’s the perfect reflection of Trump: His pathological narcissism drives much of his destructive behavior. A man who cannot tolerate criticism, admit fault, or share the spotlight will burn down democracy itself to protect his fragile ego.

When faced with a choice between national interest and personal gratification, Trump invariably chooses the latter. His demand for absolute loyalty — to him personally, not to the nation or the Constitution — reveals a man who sees America not as a nation to serve but as a stage for his own aggrandizement.

There’s also method in Trump’s chaos. By keeping the country in a constant state of outrage and crisis, he prevents organized resistance and meaningful accountability. The chaos isn’t accidental; it’s strategic, designed to exhaust opponents and normalize previously unthinkable behavior. Each new outrage makes the previous one seem quaint by comparison, creating a downward spiral of degraded expectations.

Trump has weaponized division for political gain. He doesn’t simply observe American divisions; he actively creates and exploits them. By turning Americans against each other — urban versus rural, white versus non-white, native-born versus immigrant — he creates tribal loyalties that override ethical concerns or policy considerations. A divided America is easier to manipulate and control than a united one.

What’s most terrifying about this transformation is that Trump has created a blueprint for future authoritarians. He’s shown how to destroy a developed, advanced democracy from within — legally, slowly, under the guise of patriotism.

And the Republican Party? It’s not just following the map. It’s paving the road.

The critical question before us isn’t whether Trump has damaged America. He has. The question is whether that damage is reversible.

— Can we still rebuild?

— Can Republican elders return to principle?

— Can billionaire donors withdraw their support and allow democratic values to reassert themselves?

— Will it take a second Republican Great Depression to shock the party awake?

Americans don’t yet know any of the answers here, but we do know this: inaction is surrender.

Our democratic survival depends on recognizing that Trump is the virus, but the Republican Party is the host. And if we don’t treat the host, the next authoritarian will be worse. Smarter. More effective. More dangerous.

What happened to Kilmar Garcia could happen again. It will happen again, in fact, if we let it. Our democratic immune system — the press, the courts, business and the legal profession, the voters — must fight back. Because we are running out of time.

Rebuilding what they’ve destroyed will require more than simply removing Trump from power; it will demand a fundamental recommitment to democratic values and institutions by the GOP.

Republicans: Wake up!

You are the last firewall. This is your reckoning. Your move.

NOW READ: Farmers in deep-red state spell trouble for Trump as he mocks the Constitution

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SAME DAY?!

NO LNX

Will we let this orange-faced death-cult leader finish the job he started?

Thom Hartmann April 25, 2025

The Trump administration just gutted Meals on Wheels. Seriously. Meals on Wheels!

Donald Trump didn’t just “disrupt” America; he detonated it. Like a political Chernobyl, he poisoned the very soil of our democratic republic, leaving behind a toxic cloud of cruelty, corruption, and chaos that will radiate through generations if we don’t contain it now.

He didn’t merely bring darkness; he cultivated it. He made it fashionable. He turned cruelty into currency and made ignorance a political virtue.

This man, a grotesque cocktail of malignant narcissism and petty vengeance, ripped the mask off American decency and showed the world our ugliest face. He caged children. Caged. Children. He laughed off their cries while his ghoulish acolytes used “Where are the children?” as a punchline for their next QAnon rally.

He welcomed white supremacists with winks and dog whistles, calling them “very fine people,” while spitting venom at Black athletes who dared kneel in peaceful protest.

He invited fascism to dinner and served it on gold-plated Trump steaks. He made lying the lingua franca of the right, burning truth to the ground like a carnival barker selling snake oil from a flaming soapbox.

And let’s not forget the blood on his hands: 1,193,165 dead from COVID by the time he left office, 400,000 of them unnecessarily, dismissed as nothing more than “a flu,” while he admitted — on tape — that he knew it was airborne and knew it was lethal. His apathy was homicidal, his incompetence catastrophic.

He tried to overthrow a fair election. He summoned a violent mob. He watched them beat cops with American flags and screamed “Fight like hell!” while cowering in the White House, delighting in the destruction like Nero fiddling as Rome burned.

And now, like some grotesque twist on historical fascism, Trump’s regime is quietly disappearing even legal U.S. residents — snatched off the streets by ICE and dumped into El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, a dystopian nightmare of concrete and cruelty.

One such man, Kilmar Ábrego García, had legal status and a home in Maryland. But Trump’s agents defied a federal court order and deported him anyway, vanishing him into a foreign hellhole so brutal it defies comprehension.

This isn’t policy: it’s a purge. A test run for authoritarian exile. And if Trump’s not stopped by Congress, the courts, or We The People in the streets, it won’t end there.

But somehow, he’s still here, waddling across the political stage like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of authoritarianism, bloated with power, empty of soul, and reeking of spray tan and sulfur.

Donald Trump didn’t just bring darkness: he’s a goddamn black hole, a gravity-well of cruelty sucking the light out of everything he touches.

This is a man who desecrates everything good.

Empathy? He mocks it. Truth? He slanders it. Democracy? He’d bulldoze it for a golf course.

And if we let him continue, he won’t just end democracy — he’ll make damn sure it never rises again.

So the question is: are we awake yet?

Or will we let this orange-faced death-cult leader finish the job he started, grinning over the corpse of the America we once believed in?

Now is not the time to kneel: it’s the time to rise. Stay loud, stay vigilant, and show up. Every protest, every march, every call to DC, every raised voice chips away at the darkness.

Democracy isn’t a spectator sport: it’s a fight, and we damn well better show up for it.

NOW READ: Time's up for the GOP

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no lnx

Home | Breathing is now a political act — thanks to the GOP

Thom Hartmann April 24, 2025

Breathing is no longer a basic human right in America: it’s now a political battleground.

Over 156 million Americans are inhaling toxic air today, not because we don’t know how to fix it, but because the Republican Party has decided that clean air is something only Democrats care about.

While children gasp through inhalers and wildfires choke entire cities, Trump and his fossil-fueled allies are dismantling environmental protections with surgical cruelty. This isn’t ignorance — it’s policy. It’s profit. It’s war on your lungs, your family, and your future.

The American Lung Association just released a new report documenting how over 156 million Americans are breathing poisonous air. Trump and the Republicans don’t give a damn; if anything, they’re enthusiastic about it.

Fossil fuel billionaires and the industry that made them rich have been major patrons of Republican politicians ever since Ronald Reagan floated into the White House in 1980 on a tsunami of oil and coal money. Donald Trump is no different.

Claiming that climate science research “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth,” the Trump regime last week cut millions from a Nobel Prize winning scientist’s program’s collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Princeton University.

Last month they also attacked the Renew America’s Schools program that provides funding for more than 3,400 schools across the country to install heat pumps, insulation, electric school busses, and other efforts to reduce their carbon footprints.

Lost in the news of Trump’s latest stock market pump-and-dump scheme for insiders and his kidnapping legal US citizens for foreign rendition, they also announced last Friday that they were zeroing out funding for the nation’s premiere annual climate change analysis, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the 13 agencies that collaborate on the National Climate Assessment. The report is mandated by Congress, but Trump is ignoring the law.

This follows by a few weeks EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement that the official position of the US government’s warning of climate change will soon be reversed. As Politico reported on March 12th:

“President Donald Trump’s environmental chief announced Wednesday that he will seek to overturn the federal government’s core scientific finding about the dangers of greenhouse gases — along with 30 other key regulatory actions stretching back years or decades.”

The report added that that Zeldin will also be gutting CO2 limits for coal-fired power plants, tailpipe emissions, methane leaks, and ending a program requiring major industries to report their CO2 emissions. In other words, “To hell with the health of our children and our climate; there’s money to be made and campaign contributions to be solicited!”

Tuesday of last week, Trump signed an executive order declaring war on individual state initiatives to dial back carbon emissions, ordering the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of such state laws. The EO specifically attacked “climate Superfund” programs in Vermont and New York that would have required fossil fuel companies to reimburse those states for damages caused by climate change-fueled storms, as well as going after California’s cap-and-trade carbon credit auctions.

Fossil fuel oligarchs are, no doubt, breaking out the champagne. And the dark money for attack ads against Democrats in 2026 and 2028.

This widespread and wholesale destruction of programs intended to research and fight climate change will directly damage the future of young people in America, but Trump and the GOP frankly don’t give a damn. There are, after all, big bucks to be made and campaign contributions to be collected.

This insanity began in its modern form when five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled in their 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell) that money was the same thing as “free speech,” protected by the First Amendment, and that corporations are “persons,” protected by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. That floated Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of oligarch money, as I noted in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

Five corrupt Republicans on the Court doubled down on that in 2010 with Citizens United, which led to an absolute explosion of billionaire money in politics. As a result, in 2024 just 150 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion to elect candidates, money that went to the GOP on a more than 2:1 basis.

And now, in a manner demonstrative of a fully corrupt banana republic mindset, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are giving the fossil fuel industry everything they could want. In addition to the outrages listed above, in just the first three months of this regime, they have further gifted the industry by:

— Exempting Coal Plants from Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS): The Trump administration granted two-year exemptions to 47 coal-fired power plants, allowing them to bypass MATS regulations. This decision increases the risk of mercury pollution, which can cause neurological damage (particularly in children) and respiratory illnesses.

— Declaring a National Energy Emergency: Trump declared a national energy emergency to accelerate fossil fuel development, weakening environmental reviews and potentially increasing pollution.

— Rolling Back Vehicle Emissions Standards: The administration overturned emissions standards for vehicles, leading to increased air pollution and associated health risks.

— Reducing EPA Enforcement: Under Trump, the EPA brought fewer cases against polluters and sought lower penalties, diminishing deterrents against environmental violations. Now Musk and his Doge teenagers are further gutting the EPA itself.

— Weakening Methane Emission Regulations: The administration rolled back rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations, contributing to climate change and air quality issues.

— Providing Direct Channels for Pollution Exemptions: Fossil fuel companies were given a direct email line to request exemptions from air pollution regulations, undermining public health protections.

— Eliminating Climate and Environmental Justice Webpages: The removal of federal climate and environmental justice webpages hindered public access to crucial information for addressing pollution and climate impacts and served to hide or cover up Trump’s naked corruption.

— Reversing the Clean Power Plan: The administration replaced the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which could lead to thousands of additional premature deaths annually due to increased air pollution.

— Cutting Funding for Environmental Protections: Significant budget cuts to the EPA and other environmental programs reduced the capacity to monitor and enforce pollution controls.

— Reducing Public Land Protections: The administration reduced the size of national monuments and opened protected lands to fossil fuel extraction, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity.

— Rolling Back Clean Water Protections: By narrowing the definition of “protected waters,” the administration allowed more pollutants to enter waterways, affecting drinking water and aquatic life.

— Undermining Scientific Research: Policies were enacted to limit the use of scientific studies in policy-making, particularly those related to environmental and public health research.

— Reversing the Paris Climate Agreement Commitment: The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under Trump signaled a retreat from global efforts to combat climate change.

— Promoting Fossil Fuel Exports: The administration lifted restrictions on fossil fuel exports, encouraging increased production and consumption globally, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

— Reducing Air Quality Monitoring: Cuts to air pollution monitoring programs made it more difficult to detect and address harmful emissions, posing risks to public health but increasing the profits and impunity of the fossil fuel industry.

Trump and Republican cronies in his administration and Congress are committed to trading millions of cases of asthma, childhood cancers, and environmental damage — not to mention the thousands who are dying every year from climate-change-related violent weather, floods, and fires — in exchange for blood-money cash.

Republicans refuse to do town halls, refuse to answer questions about this, and hide behind a timid media that’s afraid to even ask serious questions about this criminal corruption of the protective role of government.

Which leaves it up to us.

— Get out in the streets as often as possible.

— Call your representatives, particularly if they’re Republicans (only 4 or 5 Republicans in the House and Senate could change the course of history).

— Make your voice heard on social media, letters to the editor, calling into to talk radio, and sharing messages like these with friends and family.

— Contribute, if you can, to politicians who are taking brave stands against the oligarchy.

This is not just politics — it’s a slow-motion slaughter disguised as deregulation.

Republicans won’t answer for it, won’t debate it, and won’t hold town halls to face the people they’re sacrificing. The media tiptoes. The billionaires cheer. And Trump signs away your children’s futures with a grin and a pen.

But here’s the truth they don’t want us to grasp: If we want our children to grow up with lungs that work, we better start working and voting like our lives — and theirs — depend on it.

This isn’t just about air. It’s about whether democracy itself can breathe.

Tag—you’re it.

===

no lnx

America's biggest threat is coming from inside the house

Thom Hartmann April 21, 2025

America is under siege, but not by foreign armies or rogue terrorists. Instead, the threat is coming from inside the house: unelected billionaires who are quietly hijacking our democratic institutions from within.

Although it’s entirely possible that they are collaborating with foreign autocrats, including Vladimir Putin, who are also billionaires and thus share their unique authoritarian worldview.

And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower named Daniel Berulis, we now have a window into what may well be one of the most brazen and dangerous power grabs in American history.

This isn’t cheap or even ordinary corruption: this is the sort of thing that happens in Third World countries, like when Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines used cronies and spies to infiltrate government agencies and neutralize political opponents, or when Vladimir Putin installed former KGB allies into key Russian institutions to crush whistleblowers and rig judicial outcomes, or when Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales dismantled anti-corruption agencies and handed sensitive state information to business elites.

It’s the sort of corruption that destroys democracies from the inside out.

Berulis risked his career, his safety, even his life to reveal what’s happening inside Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE — a name that sounds innocuous enough, until you understand what they’re actually doing.

DOGE, according to Berulis’ bombshell disclosure, managed to breach the National Labor Relations Board’s computer systems and extract what he described as “the equivalent to a section of the New York Public Library” in sensitive data. This isn’t just bureaucratic overreach — it’s a digital smash-and-grab, right out of the authoritarian playbook.

And make no mistake: this is not some crackpot theory. Shortly after DOGE operatives created accounts inside the NLRB system, a login attempt came from a Russian IP address using one of those accounts — with the correct credentials. Within minutes of the breach, the data may have already been in the hands of the Putin government.

That’s the same Vladimir Putin who press reports say has been in regular telephone contact with both Donald Trump and Elon Musk for the past two years.

What’s being looted here isn’t just random bureaucratic files. We’re talking about the private information of whistleblowers, union organizers, witnesses in federal cases, proprietary corporate data, and labor rights enforcement strategies. Including complaints and complainants against Elon Musk’s companies.

In other words, the raw materials for dismantling organized labor in America — and for targeting, harassing, or discrediting anyone trying to stand up to corporate power, including Elon Musk’s multiple efforts to stop or break unionization attempts in his own companies.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s the naked truth, verified by a growing number of insiders and corroborated by NPR, which reports that at least eleven government officials and staffers have confirmed their fears about DOGE’s data exfiltration campaign.

Here’s the conflict of interest that should make every American’s hair stand on end: Elon Musk’s companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — were themselves under investigation by the NLRB for alleged labor violations. At least until Musk’s underlings fired the people investigating him and his companies.

Musk now has his own handpicked operatives inside the very agency tasked with holding him accountable. It’s like giving the bank robber a master key to the bank and letting him wander the halls at night. It’s a grotesque perversion of the rule of law, a corruption of the most fundamental principle of American justice that no one is above the law.

And if the information DOGE extracted gets used in court — or even leaked selectively — it could permanently tilt the scales of justice in favor of Musk and his corporate cronies. Labor law experts are already sounding the alarm, warning that even the possibility of access will have a chilling effect on union organizing and whistleblowing.

Just imagine you’re a worker trying to form a union. Would you still speak out, knowing your employer might now know your name, your address, your testimony, and your strategy — thanks to a government program run by that very employer’s billionaire CEO?

But it gets worse. Much worse. According to longtime employees within the Department of Labor and other agencies, the DOGE teams aren’t seasoned experts or trained cybersecurity professionals. They’re “new arrivals,” many of them with no vetting, no security clearance, and no relevant experience. Some have even worked with criminal hackers, and another reportedly runs a website based in Russia.

Yet they were granted sweeping access to some of the most sensitive data systems in the federal government. It’s a digital coup executed not by hackers, but by political loyalists and tech-bro mercenaries handed the keys to the kingdom by billionaire benefactors.

When Berulis tried to do the right thing — when he and his colleagues reached out to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to report the breach — they were stonewalled. Their alert was “disrupted by higher-ups without explanation.” And Berulis himself received a specific threat reminiscent of KGB strategies.

Internal cybersecurity teams were told by the Trump administration to stand down. One furious staffer at the Interior Department confessed that “every single alarm system we have regarding insider threats is going off,” but they were ordered to ignore them. That’s not just a red flag; it’s the flashing neon sign of a government being gutted from within. Or being turned over to Russian intelligence.

And don’t let the bureaucratic language of “data breaches” and “access credentials” lull you into thinking this is harmless IT stuff. These are national security breaches.

If this is what it appears to be, the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair for far less.

This is a modern Watergate, but instead of burglars breaking into a filing cabinet, they’re downloading 10 gigabytes of information with a keystroke. Instead of physical threats, DOGE’s enforcers are using drones to photograph whistleblowers, and notes are being taped to front doors like something out of a dystopian thriller.

Yet that’s exactly what happened to Berulis: a threatening note, drone surveillance, and an unmistakable message — shut up or we’ll make your life hell.

This is how authoritarianism functions in the 21st century. It doesn’t need a dictator in a military uniform when it has billionaires in boardrooms, access to surveillance technology, and cronies embedded deep within the machinery of government. It replaces accountability with loyalty. It replaces oversight with secrecy.

And it replaces democracy with intimidation and control, just like in Hungary and Russia.

Even if Musk and DOGE never use the data they’ve extracted, the damage is already done. The fear is out there. As labor expert Kate Bronfenbrenner put it, “Just saying that they have access to the data is intimidating.” And that’s the point.

This isn’t just about controlling government agencies and the courts; it’s about creating a culture of fear so pervasive that no one dares to challenge power. Workers won’t organize. Regulators won’t enforce. Whistleblowers won’t come forward. Democracy withers not with a bang, but with a whimper of silence and complicity.

And let’s not pretend this is all just theoretical. DOGE’s operations are still underway, expanding into other agencies, extracting more data, disabling more security protocols, silencing more voices.

Congress is beginning to stir — Rep. Gerald Connolly is calling for an investigation — but the clock is ticking. While bureaucrats write memos and hold hearings, the digital pillaging continues unchecked.

This is not some far-off threat. It’s happening here, now, and it’s being orchestrated by some of the richest men in the world who have zero accountability to the American people.

The same billionaires who already own our social media platforms, our space infrastructure, and our news cycles now want direct access to our government’s innermost workings. And they’re getting it.

The soul of American democracy is on the line. The question now is: will we let it be sold to the highest bidder, or will we stand up, speak out, and reclaim it?

Berulis showed us what courage looks like. Now it’s our turn.

Because if we don’t stop this now, it won’t just be our data they’re coming for — it’ll be our freedom.

Report typos and corrections to: feedback@alternet.org.

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Two examples of courage in the face of American tyranny

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an 4 25

— Is Trump Helping Putin Defeat Ukraine? ‘Lil Marco Rubio announced yesterday that the Trump administration is on the verge of simply handing Ukraine over to Russia, if Putin won’t go along with the so-called peace deal Trump has offered. Zelenskyy has agreed to it, even though the price is huge (no NATO, Russia keeps the land they have, no security guarantees from the US at all, possible mineral/oil deals), but Putin clearly doesn’t intend to stop until he’s subjugated the entire nation, setting up his next drive into Poland and the Baltic states. To make things even worse, Zelenskyy has been virtually begging the US to sell him Patriot anti-air missiles, as they’re about the only system available in the world that can stop Russian hypersonic glide missiles.

Phillips Obrien has a great summary of the situation over at his Substack newsletter.

Zelenskyy came over here with at least $30 billion out of the $50 billion European countries have given him as grants and loans for that bizarre Oval Office meeting, but Trump and Vance, beside behaving like schoolyard bullies, are simply refusing to sell him the systems. Even though that will be a $30 billion stimulus to the US economy, would help out GOP-donor defense companies, and would help defend a democratic ally who was promised security by the US in the Budapest Memorandum back in 1994 in exchange for giving up their nukes. It appears that Trump is totally, nakedly, openly dancing to Putin’s tune here.

Will Europe be able to fill in the gap left by Trump’s abandonment of our ally? And if Putin pushes harder or even tries to take part of Poland or Estonia, will Trump sabotage the Article 5 guarantee of NATO on Putin’s behalf? It’s looking like all of these are viable scenarios, and don’t bode well for world peace or the future of democracy in Europe or America. Trump is either the most stupid president we’ve ever had or he is, in fact, the oft-predicted Manchurian Candidate, eager to destroy America and hand our people and resources over to the world’s dictators.

— Our government used to keep track of lies and disinformation coming from Russia. Marco Rubio just shut that agency down.Most Russian and Chinese propaganda designed to get Americans hating each other or destroy our country from within first appears on rightwing websites and social media sites. They’ve been so successful at it that when YouGov polled Americans they found that roughly a third of us believeat least ten outright lies Russia has promoted via our media including things like “Ukraine President Zelensky's approval rating is down to 4%” and “Ukraine sold Hamas weapons that were donated to Ukraine by the United States.”

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Our federal government set up an agency within the State Department, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (CFIMIH), which has been regularly documenting these thousands of daily efforts to damage America, but Trump and his buddies are outraged that the CFIMIH keeps pointing out lies, deepfakes, and outright propaganda appearing on rightwing media, websites, and Xitter. So, ‘Lil Marco deleted the agency this week. As The New York Timesreported yesterday:

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said. …

“The office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by rival powers of the United States, as well as terrorist groups, and publishing reports on them. Some Republican lawmakers in recent years have accused federal employees and nongovernment experts working on tracking disinformation of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world and trying to coordinate with social media companies to do so. Russian disinformation often circulates in far-right online channels.”

So, here we are. Both the GOP, the rightwing media ecosystem, and the Trump administration are all just fine with Russian efforts to influence our elections, foment hatred, and cause the collapse of America’s soft power around the world. Apparently, they all hate democracy as much as Putin does, and are committed to ending the rule of law — and any semblance of honest dialogue and debate — in our nation. In any other time and circumstance, the news media would be calling this out for what it is: treason.

— Can Trump really fire Fed chair Jerome Powell as he claimed yesterday? In fact, the law and Supreme Court precedent say he can’t but his lawyers are hard at work trying to overturn that. Back in 1935, President Roosevelt tried to fire the head of the FTC, but was blocked when the Supreme Court, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor, said he lacked the power to do it. That precedent applies to the Fed, as well as other agencies like the Labor Department, where Trump just illegally fired a few Democrats from the NLRB. The case was accepted this week by SCOTUS and, if they rule to overturn their own precedent (as both Thomas and Gorsuch have already publicly called for) Jerome Powell’s job could vanish the next day.

Which, of course, could provoke a massive international crisis of confidence in the US financial system, further crashing markets, the dollar, and perhaps even beginning the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If that happens, hang onto everything you have as all bets are off; it’ll be the beginning of a major impoverishment of the United States at all levels and in dozens of different ways.

— Idaho Republicans gave families $50M for private schools — and scrapped $30M used for public education..say what?!?One eternal truth about the GOP going all the way back to the late 19th century (with the exception of the Teddy Roosevelt presidency) is that they hate public education. David Koch ran for VP in 1980 on a platform calling for not just the end of the Department of Education but also shutting down all the public schools in America and ending compulsory schooling altogether; his ideas have now become doctrine for the Trump administration.

So it should surprise nobody that the Republican-controlled Idaho legislature just coughed up$50 million to give $5000 a year to families wealthy enough to already be sending their kids to private schools (which invariably cost more than $5K) while partially paying for it by cutting $30 million out of public schools. The subsidies will be enough for 6,000 upper middle class and wealthy families to benefit, but means cutting support to 24,000 public school students.

As we learned from our experience with the GI Billafter WWII, the most productive investment a nation can make is in educating its young people; for every $1 we spent sending young returning soldiers to college, America got back $7 in lifetime tax revenue over and above what we would have gotten had they not had that college education. The numbers for primary school are even starker. But don’t try telling that to the GOP: There are campaign contributions to be collected from the for-profit private school industry!

— JD Vance says if Brits can’t use the N-word and slurs against gays in public venues, they can’t cut a trade deal with America. Seriously. The United Kingdom has the same sorts of hate speech laws that are extant in most of the rest of Europe and the developed world, and that’s really pissing off the straight white male supremacists who run the Trump administration. Echoing classic arguments made by the Klan over the years, Vance is referring to straight white European Christian men as the carriers of “western civilization” and, if they’re not allowed to publicly intimidate, harass, and hate on non-white, non-Christian, queer people and women he wants to withhold favorable trade terms.

As he recently said in a speech in Germany, “The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” From the 19th century KKK to today’s GOP, hate is a core “fundamental value.” Disgusting.

— Did your miscarriage tissue have a dignified funeral at a state approved facility? If not, get ready for jail if Republicans have their way.Remember last month when a young Georgia woman was arrested for disposing of a miscarriage in the trash behind her apartment? She was let out of jail and charges were dropped after a few days of outrage in the media, but this scenario may soon become far more common in Red state America. One in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage, and often they’re so early they just resemble a very hard menstrual period.

Nonetheless, Republican legislators in Nebraska are the first in the nation to demand that women give the tissue expelled in those miscarriages a $9,000 funeral, complete with coffins and burials; if they flush or otherwise dispose of the tissue they risk prison. Democratic State Senator Megan Hunt asked the bill’s sponsor “how much blood has to be on the pad?” before the law would kick in, but never got an answer; apparently the answer is, “Any amount.” If this passes and is implemented in Nebraska, expect it to come to a Red state near you next. The GOP’s war on women rolls along…

— Crazy Alert! The GOP has adopted new family values: you can now DM offering to inseminate women you don’t know!Has Elon sent you a DM on Xitter offering to inseminate you? If so, as Wonkette notes, you’d apparently be one of many. In what must qualify as one of the creepiest articles ever published by The Wall Street Journal, they chronicled his obsession with producing as many offspring as possible to, apparently, improve the gene pool of humanity. As the Journal’s piece notes about Musk’s interactions with social influencer Tiffany Fong:

“Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer.

“That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X.

“During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted.

“That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.

This takes adjectives like “bizarre” and “creepy” to a whole new level…

NOW READ:Behind the fatal Trump flaw MAGA can't even defend

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Is this the moment American democracy finally broke?

Thom Hartmann April 11, 2025

The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn’t just the right to vote or protest — it’s the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others.

And it’s the one Donald Trump tried to crush yesterday with the stroke of a pen.

When he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor — two public servants whose only crime was telling the truth — Trump didn’t just abuse his office. He weaponized the government against honesty itself.

This wasn’t law enforcement: It was political vengeance. This wasn’t democracy: It was a warning shot from the edge of autocracy.

And if we let this slide — if we treat it as just another Trump headline — we are inviting the next strongman to do the same, only worse.

The freedom to speak truth to power is either sacred, or it’s gone.

Thus, Donald Trump just moved America miles down the road toward our becoming a police state. There’s no other way to describe it.

His Executive Order (EO) signed yesterday demanding criminal investigations into Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor — and his public statement that Taylor is a “traitor” guilty of “treason” — are nothing short of a blatant assault on the rule of law and a perilous step toward turning America into a dictatorship.

This isn't just about settling personal scores; it's a calculated move to instill fear, silence dissent, and dismantle the very foundations of our democratic institutions.

Can you imagine yourself being called a traitor by the president of the United States and thus facing prison? Having to hire expensive attorneys that may well force you to sell your home to pay for, just to defend yourself? Not to mention having to protect yourself and your family from the rightwing enforcers who are probably at this moment doxxing and threatening Krebs and Taylor?

This echoes tactics used by autocrats throughout history: Stalin’s purges, Nixon’s enemies list (though less successfully executed), and more recently, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Putin in Russia. If normalized, it risks further turning the U.S. into an illiberal democracy or autocracy, where elections occur but power is retained through fear, manipulation, and coercion. Or worse, a violent kleptocracy like Russia.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), had the audacity to do his job by ensuring the integrity of our elections and debunking Trump’s baseless lies of fraud in the 2020 election. Miles Taylor, who served as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, dared to speak out against the administration's reckless policies and wrote a book.

Their “crime”? Upholding their oaths to the Constitution and telling the truth.

By weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue these individuals, Trump is not only abusing presidential power but also sending a chilling message to current and future whistleblowers: “Cross me, and you’ll pay.” This is the hallmark of a despot, not a democratically elected leader.

But Trump isn’t stopping there. He’s extending his vendetta to the very institutions that safeguard our legal system and might defend Taylor and Krebs.

Law firms like Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block are being targeted with punitive measures — revoked security clearances, terminated federal contracts, and restricted access to federal buildings including courthouses — all because they’ve had the courage to represent clients like these two who have challenged Trump’s overreaches.

In addition to signing an executive order targeting two former employees yesterday, Trump also signed one attacking yet another law firm, this time Susman Godfrey, which helped Dominion Voting Systems get millions from Fox for their 2020 election lies.

This is a direct attack on the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to legal representation. When the government intimidates law firms into submission, it erodes the adversarial system that is essential for justice.

The implications are dire. If attorneys fear retribution for taking on cases that oppose the administration, who will hold the government accountable? Who will defend people like Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor?

This orchestrated campaign of intimidation is designed to create a chilling effect, deterring legal professionals from defending those who dare to speak truth to power.

This EO is a tactic ripped straight from the playbook of violent, authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, Erdoğan’s, and Orbán’s, where the law becomes a tool of oppression rather than justice.

Moreover, this politicization of the Department of Justice undermines its very mission. The DOJ is meant to operate independently, free from political influence, to uphold the law impartially.

Yet, under Trump’s directive, it is being transformed before our eyes into his personal enforcer, pursuing baseless investigations to settle political scores in ways Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. This perversion of justice not only delegitimizes the department but also erodes public trust in our legal institutions.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t just about Krebs, Taylor, or the targeted law firms: It’s about the survival of our democracy. When a president can wield power to punish dissent and dismantle checks and balances without consequence, we are treading dangerous waters.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Trump’s actions are a direct assault on these freedoms, aiming to silence opposition and consolidate power.

The legal community is beginning to push back. Over 500 law firms have united to challenge these types of executive orders, recognizing them as a grave threat to our constitutional governance. Former top lawyers from major corporations have also voiced their opposition, understanding that this isn’t just a legal issue but a fundamental attack on the principles that underpin our society.

However, resistance must extend beyond the legal profession: we all must speak out. Every American who values democracy, justice, and freedom should be alarmed by these developments.

This is a moment that demands vigilance and action. We cannot afford to be complacent as the pillars of our democracy are systematically dismantled. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121, and another set of demonstrations are scheduled for a week from this coming Saturday, April 19th.

If there was ever any doubt, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are now laid bare. His actions are not those of a leader who respects the Constitution or the people he serves: They are the actions of a man desperate to exploit and cling to power by any means necessary, even if it means destroying the very fabric of our nation.

This executive order is more than just a scandal — it’s a frontal assault on democracy. It shows Trump’s willingness to use the machinery of state as a weapon against truth and accountability, and underscores the urgent need to safeguard democratic institutions, enforce accountability, and reaffirm the independence of the rule of law in America.

If we fail to hold Trump accountable for turning the justice system into a tool of revenge, we are not just rewriting the rules — we're erasing them.

Democracy doesn’t “die in darkness.” It dies when truth becomes a crime and silence becomes survival. The time to speak up is now—while we still can.

NOW READ: The sickening secret sauce to Trump's political success

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Dark Enlightenment: How a radical ideology is fueling the movement to gut our government

Thom Hartmann March 21, 2025

The future of American democracy isn’t being dismantled by accident; it’s being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new.

A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.

Trump and Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.

Americans are baffled by the brutal, relentless attack on the institutions of America that they’ve launched.

Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID? What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts or giving college students Pell Grants? Why gut billions in scientific research that’s kept America at the forefront of the world and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives?

Paul Krugman recommends a psychiatrist weigh in; Dr. Bandy X. Lee (a frequent guest on my program) points that out, noting, “How exactly this plays out is, as I have said, a spiritual question.” Three New York Times writers even had a lengthy back-and-forth on the topic, under the title: “Is Destruction the Point?”

— Some speculate that Musk and Trump are both tight with Putin and they’re destroying our government at his direction, helping achieve the goal he’s had since his KGB days to destroy America from within.

— Others think it’s just a way of crippling government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and the Post Office so they can now be profitably taken over by private industry.

— Democratic politicians tell us Musk and Trump are just trying to cut government spending to pay for the $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires that Mike Johnson will be introducing in the House in the next few weeks.

They’re all wrong.

The simple answer is that these people intend to replace the 240+ year “American Experiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco.

There’s an actual ideology behind all this, and it isn’t the old-fashioned Ayn Rand libertarianism that was such a rage during the Reagan era.

This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

And it’s not entirely new; they believe they have proof that it works it can be found way over on the other side of the planet. I’ve been there, in fact, and it does seem to be working just fine…if you don’t care about freedom.

Back in 1994 I published a book proposing that ADHD wasn’t a brain disease or disorder but, instead, a form of brain wiring that would be highly adaptive during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer period but can present a struggle for people in today’s factory-like school systems. TIME Magazine did a cover story about it, including an article featuring my book, and suddenly I was in demand literally around the world.

One of the countries I visited during the book tour that ensued (the book’s available in more than a dozen languages) was Singapore. A parents’ group had reached out to my publisher and set up an opportunity for me to talk about my theory and ways schools could be reinvented to work for both “normal” and ADHD kids.

I gave the speech and laid out a series of suggestions, and during the Q&A that followed, one of the parents asked how to best convince schools to adopt some of my ideas. I suggested they should “become politically active,” a standard answer in most every other country I’d visited (and here in America). Little did I realize the significance of that phrase.

When I got back to my hotel, an internationally famous five-star tower with a beautiful atrium, my room had been torn apart. The mattress and box springs were on the floor, as were the contents of my suitcase. Every drawer was pulled open. My toiletries kit was all over the bathroom floor.

I called hotel security to report what I thought was a break-in or robbery, although I couldn’t immediately see that anything was missing. The head of security showed up in my room five minutes later with the hotel manager. They looked around the room with neither shock nor alarm.

The manager explained, with a hint (but only a hint) of apology in his voice, “The police were here,” as if that explained everything.

“They did this?” I asked, as I recall.

He nodded and said, “Presumably.”

“Why?” I demanded.

Both men shrugged. The head of security asked me if I’d engaged in anything illegal while in Singapore, particularly bringing illegal drugs into the country, and I indignantly denied even the possibility. They shrugged their shoulders again and offered to send a maid up to help make put the room back together.

The next morning, I had breakfast with some of the parents I’d met the afternoon before and told them what happened. They explained, in a whisper, that I never should have mentioned “politics” in my speech.

“It is not allowed here,” as I recall one telling me.

Singapore has come a ways from the mid-1990s, but is still an authoritarian state. As Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote for Mother Jones:

“During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate libertarian economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly conservative mishmash of social and political control.

“Singapore has banned all kinds of free speech; intervened in marriages and family planning; encouraged eugenics; caned people for minor crimes; created an ethnically homogeneous ruling class; treated the migrant worker population as second-class citizens; and, famously, banned chewing gum.

“This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A ‘soft’ authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. ‘The exuberance of democracy,’ LKY explained, ‘leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.’” (emphasis added)

According to the philosopher-king of the Dark Enlightenment movement, the guy who woke up JD Vance and the billionaires who support him, Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future.

As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about Curtis Yarvin and the other Dark Enlightenment thinkers who have inspired Musk, Theil, Vance, et al:

“For a new breed of right-wing thinkers, politicians, and activists, LKY’s approach to government is appealing. Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s resident neo-monarchist, compares LKY to FDR—both good examples, he says, of a unilateral leader.

“And Nick Land, an accelerationist philosopher, calls LKY an ‘autocratic enabler of freedom.’

“To them, LKY is the paradigm of an illiberal ruler who created a paradise for his subjects: a freedom without rights, a prosperity without disorder.”

Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run Social Security just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.

But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on — which Trump probably doesn’t even understand — involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.

And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human — Artificial General Intelligence or AGI — some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.

All it’ll take is a monarchical leader who, like KLY, brooks no dissent.

Trump could be that leader — or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats like Vance and Musk who are really running things — and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.

Rana Foorahar explains it in The Financial Times:

“The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.

“As Yarvin has said, ‘If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia . . . One way of dealing with that is . . . hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution . . . ’”

And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.

— A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40 percent of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.

— And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18 percent of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaire families who represent a mere .00000045 percent of the American population.

The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.

Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical” societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should — with a high-tech AGI twist — replace today’s democratic “experiment.”

(Ironically, a large portion of the infrastructure that this movement is using was financed by fossil fuel billionaires who simply wanted to avoid paying income taxes and to have their oil companies deregulated so they could make more pollution and thus more profit. Similar to the people who funded the rise of Hitler — including Fritz Thyssen who wrote the book I Paid Hitler after WWII as an apology — many are now surprised, and some even frightened, by the turn of things.)

They are pushing forward with the “move fast and break things”slogan of the Tech industry that Mark Zuckerberg popularized. And they are having breathtaking success, between that strategy and the billions of dollars they are easily able to spend to seize the political power to fulfill their vision. They call themselves “Masters of the Universe” without a trace of irony.

Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:

“Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

“Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

“In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major ‘shareholders’ select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.

“Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.”

He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”

Rachel Maddow has similarly featured stories about Yarvin and others like him on her program, albeit infrequently. The New Yorker has written about the movement, as have multiple other publications.

Lefty intellectuals and progressive thought leaders are suddenly waking up to the Dark Enlightenment experiment that, like a glacier finally reaching the sea, has been slowly consuming the GOP as it moves along and is now — with hundreds of millions from Elon Musk buying the White House for Trump — suddenly cleaving off massive icebergs of damaged governmental institutions.

But a much wider understanding of what’s really animating Trump’s and Musk’s experimental destruction of our government is needed.

If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.

Pass it along…and get into the streets!

NOW READ: Here's why Trump supporters can't see through his lies

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Wake up: In Trump’s America, you are no longer guaranteed your rights or your freedom

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attends the National Governors Association (NGA) dinner and reception hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. First Lady Melania Trump in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 22, 2025.

Thom Hartmann March 20, 2025

Imagine stepping off a plane in the United States, fully expecting to enter the country without issue, only to be surrounded by armed agents, handcuffed, and thrown into a freezing detention center. No trial. No lawyer. No contact with the outside world.

In Trump’s America, you are no longer guaranteed your rights or freedom—because now, it takes nothing more than an ICE agent’s “suspicion” to make you disappear.

This isn’t a mistake. It’s part of an expanding system of cruelty, where ICE—once an agency tasked with immigration enforcement—is now operating like an unchecked police force, targeting legal residents, visitors, and even US citizens with impunity.

They have become—since the days when Trump sent them here into Portland without ID to kidnap citizens off the streets and torment them in 2020—the Führer’s private police force. His very own “protection squads” or Schutzstaffel.

People who follow every rule, complete all the required paperwork, and obey every regulation are still finding themselves locked away, held in horrific conditions, and stripped of their rights—all based on the whims of an agent who doesn’t even need evidence to justify an arrest.

A U.S. citizen from Chicago was among 22 people recently subjected to unlawful arrests and detention by ICE. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that during Trump’s first term, immigration authorities asked to hold approximately 600 likely citizens and actually deported about 70 likely citizens.

But now, in part because of the Laken Riley Act, it’s getting worse. Forty-two Democrats in the House and fourteen in the Senate voted to pass this execrable GOP bill last month; it was named after a young woman murdered by an undocumented alien whose story was relentlessly promoted by Fox “News” and other rightwing hate media.

That law, recently signed by Trump, says that ICE now has the authority to detain anybody — anybody — for an indefinite period of time — no time limit whatsoever — if an ICE agent simply says that he or she “suspects” the person is in the country illegally or without documentation.

Did you think, “It can’t happen here”?

Wake up: Trump has already begun putting it into effect, although our media seem curiously silent about its application.

Fabian Schmidt, a German-born engineer, has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, legally working, paying taxes, and contributing to his community. None of that mattered when he returned home from a trip abroad. As soon as he landed at Logan Airport in Boston, ICE agents pulled him aside. His green card renewal was “flagged” for some unknown reason—no explanation, no opportunity to clarify, just a red mark in a government system.

That was all it took. ICE stripped him of his clothes, subjected him to hours of aggressive questioning, and locked him in a detention center. They threw him into an ice-cold shower and left him shivering on the concrete floor, humiliated and terrified.

For days, his mother, Astrid, desperately tried to find him. She called ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and any agency that might give her an answer. They either ignored her or outright lied, claiming they had no record of her son. When she finally learned where he was, Fabian was barely holding himself together. “They treat us like animals,” he told her.

And why was he there? Because of a supposed “bureaucratic error.” ICE used a minor paperwork issue as an excuse to detain a legal resident of the United States without due process, a tactic that’s becoming frighteningly common.

For Jessica Brösche, a German tattoo artist, her visit to the United States was supposed to be brief—just a trip to see friends and enjoy the country. She had a valid passport, a return ticket, and legal permission to enter under the Visa Waiver Program. Yet, ICE decided that she might try to work while visiting, a baseless assumption that required no proof and no justification.

Just “suspicion.” That was enough to detain her indefinitely.

Once inside, the nightmare deepened. They threw her into a cell with no bed and no access to legal assistance. For eight straight days, they kept her in solitary confinement. The lights never dimmed, and the sounds of other detainees screaming in despair echoed through the walls. She started hallucinating, her grip on reality slipping. Desperate to feel something, anything real, she punched the walls until her knuckles bled.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Amelia, searched frantically for her. ICE refused to confirm her location or even acknowledge that they had detained her. No charges, no trial, no legal recourse—just silence.

Jessica’s case isn’t unique. People who follow all immigration rules are being detained under vague suspicions, often disappearing into a bureaucratic black hole. And once they’re inside the system, their rights mean nothing.

Consider Jasmine Mooney, the actor who starred in the American Pie franchise and a Canadian businesswoman who played by the rules. She secured a job offer, completed all visa paperwork, and followed every U.S. immigration law to the letter. But that didn’t stop ICE from shackling her, chaining her wrists, ankles, and waist as if she were a violent offender.

For days, she was trapped in a brutal private, for-profit detention facility, laying on the bare floor with nothing but a crinkled foil sheet for warmth. Then, in the dead of night, ICE dragged her from her cell, bound her in chains again, and forced her onto a bus with dozens of other women. They drove for hours, denying them food, water, or bathroom breaks. By the time she arrived at another facility, she had been awake for 24 hours and was too weak to stand.

To this day, ICE refuses to explain why she was detained. And why would they? They don’t have to. The agency operates with absolute power, detaining people for as long as they want, answering to no one.

Moody tells her horrifying story to The Guardian, writing:

“I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet. …

“There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.”

These aren’t isolated cases. ICE has transformed itself into an authoritarian force that detains people indefinitely on suspicion alone. No evidence? No trial? No problem.

And the for-profit prison industry that’s holding many if not most of them has no incentive to help these people; the more they detail and the longer they stay, the more money the prison companies make (which they then share as campaign donations with Republican politicians).

ICE agents don’t need proof. They only need the power to act—and Trump has given it to them.

And, while these three cases from the last few weeks have leaked into the press, it’s possible there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of others. And if there aren’t now, there probably will be soon.

Canadians — and people all over the world — have to be reconsidering ever visiting or even passing through the United States.

We have become one of those dangerous, lawless nations you see movies about where the biggest threat isn’t the criminal element but are the guys in uniform who can do anything they want to you, any time they want, with no fear of consequences.

Meanwhile, these agents of the Trump administration are turning their focus on American citizens who have offended them.

ProPublica documented yesterday how a 21-year-old US citizen born in Philadelphia was dragged off to detention; a 10-year-old American citizen girl was deported, interrupting her chemo for brain cancer; and an estimated 600 US citizens were detained during Trump’s first term.

They noted in their report:

“In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents. …

“The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Border Patrol nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.”

“Mistakenly”? Like the people “detained” Portland in 2020?

Worse, ICE and Trump’s lawyers are actively defying court orders that might restrain them.

High-ranking ICE officials have made it clear they don’t care what judges say, what laws dictate, or even what the Constitution requires. As Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:

“We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.’

When a federal court ordered them to halt a mass deportation flight last week, ICE ignored the ruling and sent over 250 immigrants—mostly asylum seekers—back into danger. According to Reuters, many are not even remotely affiliated with a Venezuelan gang:

“Anyelo had told his sister on Friday night that he would be deported to Venezuela, she said in a phone interview with Reuters from Texas.

“Solanyer said her brother had been detained on January 31 after an appointment at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. He had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally with Solanyer and another sister in November 2023 and had been released to pursue a claim for asylum.

“Solanyer said an ICE officer told her that her brother was detained because of a tattoo that linked him to Tren de Aragua, a violent gang with Venezuelan prison origins that has spread through the Americas. She said the tattoo depicted a rose and that he had gotten it in a tattoo parlor in Dallas.

“‘He thought it looked cool, looked nice, it didn't have any other significance,’ she said, stressing that he is not a gang member.”

As FPWellman notes on the excellent On Democracy Substack newsletter, also quoting Reuters:

“Johanny Sanchez, 22, suspects her husband Franco Caraballo, 26, who was detained in Texas, could now be in El Salvador, but does not know for sure.

“Caraballo had multiple tattoos including ones of roses, a clock with this daughter’s birth time, a lion and a shaving razor, said his wife.

“‘I’ve never seen him without hair, so I haven't recognized him in the photos,’ she said. ‘I just suspect he’s there because of the tattoos that he has and right now any Venezuelan man with tattoos is assumed to be a gang member,’ she added, citing also the fact that he has effectively gone missing.

:

“Sanchez said her husband has never been a member of Tren de Aragua.”

But all of these young men were forbidden the right to hear their charges, face their accusers, hire an attorney, plead before a judge or jury, or enjoy the speedy trial that our Constitution and Bill of Rights guarantee to “every person” within the United States, citizen or not. They were simply arrested and sent to a foreign hellhole to be tortured at your and my expense.

The Trump administration apparently doesn’t have any intention of following the Constitution and 240+ years of the rule of law. Instead, they’re going full dictator.

And they’re proud of it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ridiculing the judge’s order to stop the illegal, no-due-process deportation flights to El Salvador, retweeted “Oopsie … Too late,” with a smirking emoji.

A president who can deport anyone, even in defiance of a judge’s order, is a president who can arrest anyone. ICE is no longer just violating human rights—it is dismantling the American legal system itself with the explicit approval of nearly every Republican and forty-six weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.

This is no longer about immigration. It’s about control. About unrestrained police power. How long will it be before Trump reprises his sending ICE into cities to kidnap and terrorize US citizen protestors like he did five years ago?

A judge stopped him then; today, it appears, he’ll just laugh at any order a judge issues.

If this continues, the question isn’t who the ICE “protection squads” and other federal police agencies will target next—it’s who will be left to stop them.

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It's official: The American Dream is dead — and Trump's billionaires are to blame

(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump's inauguration as the next President of the United States.

Thom Hartmann March 12, 2025

Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people.

He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversize mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.

The explosion in housing costs — driven in large part by Republican policies — have triggered our crisis of homelessness.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-four years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from an occasional, local problem to a nationwide crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is causing it.

Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

Again, it wasn’t always this way in America.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a union job in a tool-and-die shop.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks communities like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new government-subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.

As the Zillow-funded study noted:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So, if it wasn’t always this way in America, how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America.

Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

As Marketwatch noted in an article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:

“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

It is, in other words, real estate speculators like Trump and his billionaire buddies.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, the GOP’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.

At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.

Their study found:

— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.

— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.

— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.

— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.

— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”

These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.

The Zillow study found similarly damning data:

— “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.

— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.

— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”

The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceed 32 percent of median household income, homeless exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.

This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market” that Trump and Musk call “big government.”

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.

— New Zealand similarly passed their no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.

— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.

— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.

:{:{— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.}:

— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

Tragically, there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, and the problem is made worse every day by the growing inequality resulting from Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax and deregulation policies.

It wasn’t always this way in America, and it doesn’t have to continue.

Trump’s tough-guy snarl at Washington DC’s Mayor Bowser last week reminds us that homelessness isn’t just something that spontaneously occurs: it’s the direct result of government policies.

Policies promoted by Trump and Republicans over the past four decades.

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Trump's bootlicker brigade: How fake patriots are destroying America

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 04: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio kisses Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as he arrives for President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 04, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee/Pool via REUTERS

Thom Hartmann March 10, 2025

Former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin accused Congressman Al Green and other Democrats of “disrespect” and — absurdly— “inhumanity” for standing up and pointing out Donald Trump’s over-100 lies in his State of the Union address.

This is the same on-the-take Senator Joe Manchin who refused to break a filibuster and thus blocked legislation that would have reversed Citizens United and established an absolute right to vote in America.

The same sellout-coal-baron Senator Joe Manchin who opened the door for Elon Musk to buy the election for Donald Trump and Republicans to throw around 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off voting rolls or refuse to count their votes.

Now that the big money is on the Republican side, thanks in large part to cross-my-palm-with-cash Senator Joe Manchin stabbing America in the back, the elderly yacht-dweller seems to have joined the MAGA Republicans, at least in spirit.

You know who I’m talking about: those guys who claim to represent the “real” America.

We saw them jumping up over and over again at Trump’s State of the Union Address, chanting “USA, USA, USA” when Texas Congressman Al Green tried to point out that Trump was lying to everybody.

They show up at school board and city council meetings sometimes literally wrapped in the American flag while carrying semiautomatic weapons in one hand and bibles in the other, screaming obscenities and threats at public officials.

They demand that children be exposed to measles in school and refused to vaccinate their kids, then support Republicans who are planning to destroy the Medicaid program that provides healthcare to more than 70 million Americans.

They say they love our country, but they and the world’s richest man are actively gutting our government in a way that is openly delighting Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

They forbid teachers from teaching sex education, make it illegal for teachers to mention birth control, and when girls become pregnant make it a crime to get an abortion.

They strip out of our schools’ curriculum the history of Black people being beaten at the Edmund Pettis Bridge 60 years ago today, are banning books nationwide, and are waging war against queer people for simply wanting to be who they are.

They say they love our military, but are firing thousands of workers in the Veterans Administration.

They claim to be champions for the elderly, but are actively working on a plan to privatize Social Security while they gut the Social Security administration itself.

They insist that global warming is a hoax and fight like hell to keep hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies flowing to the fossil fuel oligarchs, threatening violence at even a discussion of a carbon tax, electric cars, or LED light bulbs.

They celebrate an attack on our US Capitol as well as several state capitols, trying to kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Vice President Mike Pence, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

They complain about the “American carnage” of our century-old infrastructure, but threaten a new civil war if politicians raise taxes on the well-off and the morbidly rich to fix it.

They assert a belief in “fiscal responsibility,” but are preparing to borrow another $5 trillion to give to their billionaire donors as tax cuts and corporate subsidies.

They demand prayer in schools and “one nation, under god” at public events, yet totally disregard Jesus’ teaching that prayer be done so quietly and privately that it’s in one’s “closet.”

Their preachers openly violate US tax law, forcing us all to pay for their public utilities like police, fire, and public roads, while defying Jesus’ teachings about separating church and state (not to mention the similar sentiments of this nation’s Founders).

They attack colleges and academics and support over a trillion dollars in student debt (which happens nowhere else on Earth) and are actively deconstructing our Department of Education while demanding tariffs against countries that technologically outpace us because they have better-educated workforces.

They claim to be “Christians” yet oppose government-supported food stamps and housing support in open defiance of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25:31-46 that the only way to get to heaven is to feed the hungry and care for the homeless.

They claim to believe in democracy yet push laws making it harder to vote but easier for goons to show up at polling places in militia garb to intimidate those who want to vote.

They say they’re on the side of working people but hate unions (except police unions).

They claim to be America’s best patriots.

They’re wrong, and tragically deluded.

In fact, they’re the boot-licking brigade for morbidly rich rightwing billionaires who don’t want their polluting businesses regulated or their taxes raised.

They’re gullible patsies of hustlers claiming religion inspires them while fleecing their congregations to buy a new private jet and a new mansion in Hawaii.

They’re sexually insecure men being played as marks by the NRA and the weapons industry, who tell them that by strapping AR15 prosthetic penises across their backs they seem masculine.

They’re grown-up elementary school bullies who turned to violence as children to conceal their inability to keep up in the classroom and now do the same when they don’t understand basic science.

They’re white chumps who’re convinced they’re genetically superior to everybody else and are terribly confused when they see really smart nonwhite people on TV or in politics.

They’re useful idiots of foreign autocrats and oligarchs who send millions of trolls and fake news across social media daily because a functioning American democracy is a threat to their own wealth, power, and appearance of legitimacy.

They’re dupes for billionaire media families and their TV and radio hosts who’re laughing all the way to the bank as they crank the outrage machine harder and harder to keep their suckers glued to the dial.

Genuine patriots work to heal a country, to bring out its best, to strengthen its social and political fabric and make a better nation and world for future generations.

These people are not patriots: they’ve been screwed for 44 years by Reaganomics, told it’s raining while that “trickle down” is just America’s oligarchs pissing on them, and they’re looking for someone to blame.

Trump and rightwing media have told them for years that their troubles are caused by people of color, scientists, unions, “liberals” and the “coastal elites” — and they’re believing it.

It would be tragic if these boot-lickers weren’t so wed to hate, bigotry, and violence; instead they’re a genuine threat to law-abiding Americans and the survival of our democratic republic.

NOW READ: Here's Trump's next target — according to the tyrant's playbook

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We crushed fascists before — and it's time to do it again

Benito Mussolini in 1942 (Creative Commons)

Thom Hartmann March 05, 2025

Last night, we were treated to a litany of grievance, political bulls---, and lies. Of particular note was Trump’s declaration of war against the government of the United States, particularly Social Security, which I’ll discuss at more length tomorrow.

But the larger issue, given the GOP’s adoption of neofascism, is how far Trump and his Republican enablers have dragged America from the form of government on which America was founded.

On my radio program last Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders said that the older he gets the more he “appreciates the genius of the Founders,” who wrote into the Constitution the separation of powers that have held our country together for almost 250 years and guaranteed that no king has ever emerged in our America.

Until now.

Republicans are going out of their way to overlook Federalist 47, published by James Madison on February 1, 1788. Titled, ”The Particular Structure of the New Government and the Distribution of Power Among Its Different Parts,” Madison wrote about how important it was that the different branches of government serve as checks and balances on each other:

“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty,” wrote Madison of his concern that any one particular group might dominate all three branches of government.

He added, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A paragraph later, Madison quotes the Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu, inserting his own capital letters for emphasis:

“‘When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body,’ says he [Montesquieu], ‘there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest THE SAME monarch or senate should ENACT tyrannical laws to EXECUTE them in a tyrannical manner.’”

In Federalist 48, Madison quotes from Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”:

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body,” wrote Jefferson in this commentary quoted by his protégé, Madison, in Federalist 48. “The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government.

“It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.”

Jefferson added in his Notes:

“An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

“For this reason, that Convention which passed the ordinance of government [the Constitution], laid its foundation on this basis, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments should be separate and distinct, so that no person should exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time.’’

Which makes perfect sense, unless, of course, you are a Republican sponsored by the richest men in the world whose thirst for wealth and power seems to have no limits.

We’ve danced around the edge of this before, although the last time we actually defeated the American fascists.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “[W]rite a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions — perhaps prescient of a rightwing billionaire buying and twisting fascistic the world’s largest social media site — was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. …

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist” — the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is:

“A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” But not the government of, by, and for We The People America’s Founders envisioned: instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the richest and most powerful men in the nation and the corporations they own.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the “Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni” — the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Donald Trump and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace’s view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels and billionaires.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he added in the next paragraph, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...”

Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggest that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talkshow host. The politician — Buzz Windrip — runs his campaign on “family values,” the flag, and “patriotism.” Windrip and the talkshow host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American.

When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new “patriotic” laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

As Lewis noted in his novel:

“[T]he President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: ‘There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don’t belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!’ The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy.” And, President “Windrip’s partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the ‘Corpos,’ which nickname was generally used.”

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book “It Can’t Happen Here.” And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.

These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace’s thinking when he wrote:

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.

“American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after ‘the present unpleasantness’ ceases.”

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic, but to achieve complete domination of an economy they must first seize complete political control of the nation. Fascism/corporatism is really an attempt to create a modern version of feudalism by merging billionaire and corporate interests with those of the state.

And feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy; it can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who noted in his book What’s The Matter With Kansas that, “You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America — ‘going out of business’ signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.”

The businesses “going out of business” are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally-owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business “are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage.” He added:

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

But American fascists who would want CEOs like Trump and Vance as President and Vice President don’t generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and Jews, they point to a “them” to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of America” or Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, Wallace continued:

“The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

“It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination...”

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation’s largest corporations — who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media — they could promote their lies with ease.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.

“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Finally, Wallace said, speaking as if directly to Musk’s claim that he’s merely increasing the “efficiency” of the federal government by gutting it:

“The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit.

“We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of “Trust Buster” Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace’s President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party’s renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“[O]ut of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man....”

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

But, he thundered in that speech:

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

Today, we again stand at the crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself “MAGA.” The Trump administration’s behavior today eerily parallels the warning of 1936 when Roosevelt said:

“In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.”

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings have come full circle. Which is why it’s so critical that we all stand up and speak out to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.

NOW READ: Russia could win a war against America without ever firing a shot — here's how

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How Trump and the GOP have already fixed the 2026 election

Thom Hartmann March 01, 2025

— Donald Trump and JD Vance betrayed America yesterday. We haven’t seen a betrayal this severe since Benedict Arnold or the Civil War. These men have handed America and the democracies of the world over to a violent, fascist dictator. This makes Julius Rosenberg’s treason seem like a minor indiscretion. It’s more important than ever to call your representatives to let them know your opinion of this treason against democracy and America. 202-224-3121.

— Wealthy Republicans poised to write their own tax cuts. The rich Republicans serving on the two tax-writing committees, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, are preparing to give themselves and their peers a huge tax break. Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) lays it out this way: “The wealthiest GOP members could give themselves a roughly $1.8 million annual income tax cut and their families a potential one-time estate tax cut of $22.8 million—a potential total of $24.6 million in tax cuts if they pass legislation to extend the Trump tax bill.” This is nothing new, of course; ever since the Reagan Revolution of 1981 wealthy Republicans on tax-writing committees have been taking care of themselves and their economic class in a big way. That doesn’t, however, make it any less disgusting.

— The plan to “demolish” Social Security is underway right before our eyes: who will stop them? The GOP’s plan to make Americans hate Social Security is well along in its execution. Their scheme — which they’ve been advancing in small increments for 44 years — is brilliantly simple: break the agency’s ability to respond to taxpayers, causing people to have to wait on the phone or travel for hours to stand in line for hours. As complaints mount, Republicans will then point to the “broken Social Security Administration” and pitch a Medicare Advantage-like alternative: privatized “Social Security Advantage,” run by the big New York banks who are reliable GOP donors. Once a critical mass of seniors have moved from SS to the new privatized program, they’ll then just shut down legacy Social Security, arguing that “the free marketplace has spoken.” The key to accelerating the process (Social Security’s administrative staff has been far too small for decades since Reagan first started cutting it) is a new demand from Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner that the agency cut its workforce by fully fifty percent. Once that happens, all bets are off; the agency may not even be able to get checks out in a timely manner or process applications for new benefits, much less help SS recipients sign up or solve problems they may encounter.

As Congressman John Larson noted: “This is nothing more than a backdoor benefit cut and an insult to Americans who have paid into the system and earned their Social Security—all to pay for trillions in new tax cuts for the wealthy.” Social Security Works president Nancy Altman was blunt: “Field offices around the country will close. Wait times for the 1-800 number will soar.” Larson added: “Let me be clear—laying off half of the workforce at the Social Security Administration and shuttering field offices will mean the delay, disruption, and denial of benefits.”

Meanwhile, Idaho’s Republican Senator Mike Crapo blocked Bernie Sanders’ attempt this week to give all seniors on Social Security a $2400 annual raise. Noting that the raise would be paid for by having people earning more than $250,000 a year start paying Social Security taxes on all their income above that amount (which is currently exempt from Social Security taxes),

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (a co-sponsor of the legislation) said, “The Social Security Expansion Act will protect the national treasure that is Social Security by extending the trust fund’s solvency for 75 years and expanding benefits by $2,400 a year so that everyone in America can retire with the security and dignity they deserve after a lifetime of hard work.” But big banks and the morbidly rich object, and they own the GOP…

— Is the flu shot for next year getting canceled along with the developing plans for a bird flu vaccine? Is a diseased population “easier to control”? Bob Kennedy’s FDA has cancelled, for a second time, the annual meeting of scientists to determine which flu strains will be included in the flu vaccine that’ll be distributed this fall, leaving the entire system in chaos. It’s possible that American vaccine manufacturers may have to get their advice from the World Health Organization, even though the FDA has always been the gold standard of advice that’s usually followed by the WHO. Meanwhile, President Musk has started the process of killing off American development of a bird flu vaccine. Why would Trump, Musk, and Kennedy put Americans at such a public health risk that could lead to tens of thousands of deaths and economic chaos? Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat muses that “a diseased population is easier to control.” Or is this another way to kneecap America that Putin put Trump up to? Inquiring minds want to know…

— How Trump and the GOP Fixed the 2026 Election — Yes, 2026. As noted this past week in a guest editorial here at Hartmann Report, Greg Palast confirms that the massive voter roll purges and rejections of mail-in ballots that got Trump into the White House in 2024 will be repeated — and expanded — in 2026 and 2028. Republican-controlled states are already busily purging millions of voters in Blue cities, since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice last decade. Democrats seem blissfully oblivious to what’s been happening for the past two decades, ever since Florida Governor Jeb Bush threw roughly 90,000 valid and legal Florida voters, nearly all Black, off the rolls in 2000 because they had names that were “similar” to those of people in Texas’ prisons (a list supplied by Jeb’s brother George, then governor of Texas).

You can imagine how Republicans would have reacted if Democrats had been pulling these stunts; it’s way past time for Democrats to start raising hell and increasing public awareness.

— Good luck if you’re flying. President Musk’s gutting of the Federal Aviation Administration in the same month that’s seen multiple fatal and near-fatal air accidents has led to such a critical shortage of qualified air traffic controllers that Musk had to take to his social media sewer to beg retired controllers back to work. Given that the law requires retirement for controllers at 56, this may be a challenge. In the meantime, the flying public takes the risk while Musk and his billionaire buddies fly their private jets out of smaller, less congested private airports. Being a billionaire has its advantages…

— Crazy Alert! Proof Trump runs Fox-So-Called-News. After Trump’s Cabinet Ass-Kissing Session in the White House this week, embarrassing in its North Korea-like obsequiousness, the president turned to a Fox “News” host and, apparently not realizing his mic was hot, demanded that he say the meeting was “Unbelievable” in its greatness. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe how low we’ve fallen…

NOW READ: 'Ruthless cuts': Trump ripped for 'complete betrayal' of his base

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The Supreme Court has a new playbook — and Democrats need to adapt before it's too late

Thom Hartmann February 25, 2025

Imagine that the NFL made a rule change that allowed every team to have an extra three men on the field during the game — but half of the NFL teams, protesting the new rule as “wrong” and “too much of a deviation from fairness and norms” refused to add the three players to their own lineups.

Who’d be winning almost every game? Who’d be going to the Superbowl?

This is an almost perfect analogy to what Democrats are doing today with electoral politics.

In 2013, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court changed the rules for our elections, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They ruled, over liberal justice’s objections, that it was just fine to allow states to gerrymander based on presumed political affiliation and on race (with a tiny fig leaf required) and to throw millions of people off the voter rolls, again based on race or their living in an area that votes heavily for one party or the other.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her Shelby County v Holder dissent:

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

This was followed by two other corrupt all-Republican decisions, Rucho v Common Causeand Alexander v NAACP, that expanded the ability of states to gerrymander their political districts to favor one political party over another to consolidate control over state legislatures and the US House of Representatives.

Additionally, the all-Republican 2018 Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute decisionmade it easy for states to target voters with postcards that look like junk mail and throw them off the voting rolls if they failed to return them.

As a result of this rapid-fire series of corrupt voting-related decisions Republican-controlled states have:

— Passed hundreds of laws making it harder to register to vote, particularly for poor, Black, female, disabled, and elderly voters,

— Thrown, just last year, 4.2 million mostly Democratic voters off the rolls or refused to count their votes, leading, as journalist Greg Palast documented last month, to the 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republicans seizing control of the House and Senate, and,

— Gerrymandered their states even more heavily and surgically to give Republicans a solid hold on the House of Representatives and multiple state legislatures.

Democratically controlled states, meanwhile, have done nothing.

Actually, Democratic controlled states have done worse than nothing; many, citing “fairness” and “the way it should be done” have stopped gerrymandering altogether. None have engaged in any sort of voter suppression; to the contrary, most have expanded mail-in voting and other options to make voting easier for both Democrats and Republicans.

The result is plain and reflects the obvious goal of the rightwingers on the Supreme Court: Republicans today control the House, Senate, White House, and a handful of state houses that otherwise would have gone to Democrats.

North Carolina is a great example; it’s politically a roughly 50/50 state, which is why a statewide office like Governor has repeatedly gone to a Democrat. Nonetheless, Republicans hold 10 out of the state’s 13 seats in the US House of Representatives because of gerrymanders. If North Carolina hadn’t been gerrymandered, the US House would today be in Democratic hands.

Ditto for Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Utah, providing Republicans with seven additional House seats that would have gone to Democrats without gerrymandering.

Meanwhile, in 2008 California did away with gerrymanders because they were “unfair,” handing as many as 4 mostly permanent House seats to Republicans. Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia are moving in the same direction.

But that’s just the beginning.

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they rolled out a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

Democrats, on the other hand, generally go out of their way to allow for small variations, noting that “people’s signatures often change as they age or if they’re in a hurry.”

And then there are the voter roll purges that used to be illegal.

In multiple Republican states, particularly Georgia, Ohio, Florida, and Texas, mailing out postcards into urban areas to purge people from the voting rolls has become a routine practice. (It was Ohio that took the issue to the Supreme Court in the Husted case.)

This is because purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Blue cities in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

Remember George W. Bush’s 537-vote “victory” over Al Gore in 2000? Just a few months before that election, as the BBC documented and reported, Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris purged over 90,000 Black voters from the rolls because, Harris alleged, their names were “similar” to the names of felons in Texas.

More recently, the Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading up to his 50,000-vote win that year against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:

“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

It’s time for Democrats to start fighting back: They need to put their three extra men on the field.

— Democratic states, instead of rejecting gerrymanders, should start to aggressively gerrymander like Republican states have done; it could produce a near-permanent Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

— Democratic states should start mailing postcards into rural Red areas, purging Republican voters who fail to return them from the rolls.

— Democratic election judges should, as Republicans often do, aggressive challenge mail-in voter’s signatures in GOP-heavy areas, leading to the rejection of their ballots.

None of these things are “fair” but all are “legal.” It’s called fighting fire with fire.

And if Democrats were to do these simple things, in addition to winning more seats in the House and state legislatures, it would evoke howls of “unfair” from Republicans. Those protests, in turn, may even lead to Republicans working with Democrats to reform our voting system to make it easy for everybody in America to vote. (Not holding my breath, but just saying…)

Instead, Republicans are on the verge of passing the SAVE act that will prevent millions, perhaps tens of millions, of married women who haven’t gone to court to change their names after marriage from voting in 2026 and 2028. And Democratic leadership isn’t even making a concerted effort to let Americans know about it!

As distasteful as it may be, Democrats need to suck it up and fight Republicans on the field by using the new rules the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has defined over the past decade.

Otherwise, prepare for even more losses in the next two election cycles.

NOW READ: That Trump 'backlash' may not be real — here's why

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We've reached the moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms

Donald Trump talks to Shalga Hightower, mother of Iofemi Hightower who was killed in 2007, during a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 2, 2016.

Thom Hartmann February 24, 2025

Get ready.

The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

Comrade Krasnov’s…er, Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing as fast as his embrace of Comrade Putin is growing. Fascism expert and On Tyranny author Professor Timothy Snyder notes over at BlueSky:

“Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”

James Carville told Dan Abrams:

“This whole thing is collapsing. … I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.”

At the same time, four Republicans have now thrown Nazi salutes, three over this past weekend at CPAC. They think they can overcome their fear of the people by intimidating us.

This is a moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms because if, as Rachel Bitecofer documents, Trump and his followers really are following Hitler’s script to seize total power and turn America into an authoritarian dictatorship, the next step may well be to exploit an attack on America.

Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-two years ago this week: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.

A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)

And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that February day.

Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the socialists and Jews.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for “terrorists” was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.

His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.

Similarly, in 2002, the new Russian President Putin was engaged in a war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.

A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).

Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia; he launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.

In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya to elevate his own profile while finally seizing full control of the region.

It was an echo of the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to leverage himself into the presidency the following year. He’d used those terror attacks to consolidate his power, and repeated the trick in 2003 beginning with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil. By the following year most serious voices of dissent or opposition in Russia were either dead, in prison, or fleeing for their lives.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Both George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu — at a time when their popularity was in the toilet and charges of impropriety were swirling (in Netanyahu’s case, actual criminal charges) — ignored multiple warnings of attacks coming.

The 9/11 and October 7 attacks — predicted by agencies and nations warning American and Israeli intelligence services respectively — were then successfully used by both to consolidate their own popularity and power.

Which is why this is such a dangerous moment that requires vigilance and preparation.

Trump’s popularity is now collapsing as his largest campaign donor takes a chainsaw to the American government, threatening virtually every aspect of federal and state functions from Social Security to Medicaid to medical research and foreign aid. An attack on America that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.

In an extreme case, which he has publicly mused about, an attack could justify his declaring a national state of emergency, suspending elections, and putting the Constitution on ice. He could then shut down media he doesn’t like, imprison people who speak out, and suspend the 2026 and 2028 elections.

All legally.

At the same time he’s contemplating this, the FBI — America’s premiere counterterrorism organization — is being scattered with as many as 1500 agents leaving Washington, DC. An open apologist for Putin has been put in charge of our intelligence services. And the senior leadership of our military was just purged, replaced with toadies who’ll praise Trump as if this were North Korea at every opportunity.

And the JAG officers of each branch of the military along with their senior commanders — the people who would determine the legality of presidential orders to, say, shoot at protestors or open detention camps for journalists and dissidents — have been fired and replaced by loyalists who’ll do whatever Trump demands.

Brett Holmgren was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until a few weeks ago; he recently warned that the threat levels right now are at unprecedented highs.

Muslims around the world are incensed by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza; Ukrainian expats and refugees are furious about Trump’s embrace of Putin; and the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan has already carried out attacks killing 13 Americans along with a recent slaughter in Moscow.

And, pointing to the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans last month, Holmgren added:

“I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home…”

Anybody remember the bombs left at the RNC and DNC on January 6th? The bomber is still at large, not to mention groups across the political spectrum — and recently fired federal workers — who may have grievances against our government. And people from nations around the world where USAID was keeping friends and relatives alive but isn’t any longer.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong in my concern that we’re facing the very real possibility of an imminent attack that will be exploited by Trump to put a final nail in the coffin of American democracy, but we all — and Democrats, in particular — need to be ready. The Reichstag Fire scenario could be closer than any of us expect.

As the saying goes: “Stand back and stand by.”

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TRUMP BOASTS LIES WORLD NOW RESPECTS US AGAON, BUT OPPOSITE; HEGSETH JDV UNDO POSTWAR SYSTEM; NEGOIT UKR 3 DICTATOR PETRO-STATES SAUDI

2 25

AN

Last week in Europe, the United States sent some very strong messages it is prepared to upend the established global order.

US Vice President JD Vance warned a stunned Munich Security Conference that Europe has an “enemy within”, referring to leaders who ignore their citizens’ concerns and values. He also advocated for right-wing political groups to be brought into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of NATO defence ministers, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth talked about hard power, the warrior ethos and the need for NATO members to spend up to 5% of their GDPs on defence. Most have only just climbed to about 2%, the longstanding NATO guideline.

In Poland, he reaffirmed the US commitment to the defence of Poland (and NATO) and committed to bolstering the US military presence there. So, despite the mixed messaging, the United States is not leaving Europe anytime soon. YOU SURE?

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly demanding a significant levy from Ukraine as payback for US protection and support.

The combination of remarks has left pundits and policymakers wondering – is the US-led international order, with its multilateral institutions, nearing its end?

The demise of the rules-based order?

The United States played a leading role in establishing the rules-based international order from the ashes of the second world war.

Critics have decried the UN-related institutions that arose at this time. But the rules-based order is perhaps best viewed as Voltaire saw the Holy Roman Empire: “no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Those proclaiming the demise of the rules-based order should be careful what they wish for.

Such a system of trusted international exchanges barely existed prior to 1945. And while superpowers have carved out many exceptions for themselves, the rules-based order has nonetheless resulted in a time of remarkable stability and prosperity for the world.

So, why would the United States now appear to be retreating from this arrangement? The declining centrality of US influence goes some way to explain this.

China’s rise and the rise of Trump

To place the current events in proper context, we need to go back 25 years, when China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

This move was supported by and facilitated by then US President Bill Clinton in a belief that market liberalisation would eventually lead to political liberalisation.

Since then, China’s growth has skyrocketed thanks to its ready access to global markets. But it’s retained a strong mercantilist approach, counter to the spirit of the WTO. This has generated much resentment and nervousness among Western powers about the changing global power balance.

Since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, in particular, China has taken on an adversarial position to the rules-based order, following its own set of rules.

In effect, the world got neither the political nor the trade liberalisation that it once sought from China. Rather, the rules as they applied in China (and to an extent in Russia) allowed state-owned enterprises to co-opt – if not outright steal – technology shared by their international industry partners.

Foreign companies were squeezed out of China and had difficulty competing with lower-priced Chinese products at home.

Trump’s rise is, in part, a reaction to these developments. During his first term from 2017–20, Trump fitfully attempted to take a retaliatory, transactional approach to international relations. Now, as he begins his second term, he has a much more clear-eyed plan of action.

What Trump expects now

What became startlingly clear at the Munich Security Conference was Trump’s new vision of transactional alliances with America’s traditional partners.

In his view, the United States is not so much retreating into isolationism as much as it’s acting as a great power with its own economic interests at heart. Trump is eager for the US to assert its place in a world where spheres of influence matter as much – if not more – than any particular set of rules.

Evidently, the US is no longer advocating for multilateralism, in which states cooperate as equals. Now, it’s focused more on multi-polarity – a world with several great powers, in which the US puts its own interests first. As Trump frequently reminds us, “America First”.

According to this world view, allies and adversaries have equally been taking unfair advantage of:

• America’s famous openness (notably its borders)
• its liberal trade policies (which, according to Trump, has led to the de-industrialisation of the American heartland).

Its allies have also taken advantage of the generosity of its security umbrella, leading to their cavalier approach to security.

The Trump administration’s remedy to all of this involves doling out sanctimonious advice. An example of this: Vance telling European allies they should.JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference.

It’s also doling out some tough medicine, apparently trying to provoke a reaction in European capitals so they significantly increase their defence spending. This would enable the US to step back from being Europe’s security guarantor and finally undertake its long-talked-about pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary: China.

Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen. JUST HAD ANOTHER GREAT CALL W XI

For America’s close security and economic partners, this presents an unprecedented challenge. The old preconceptions and expectations no longer seem to apply. What’s important now is not so much America’s shared values with Europe, it’s their overlapping interests.

For America’s allies, as well as its adversaries, this is going to require some hard thinking and new strategies, both economically and militarily.

John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Why is Trump bending the knee?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Thom Hartmann February 19, 2025

What if Putin owns Trump?

I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? The BBC reported yesterday that Trump gave Russia everything they want with regard to Ukraine, rewarding Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation, and even took steps to help rebuild Russia’s economy that sanctions and the war damaged:

“The Americans said they agreed to four principles with the Russians, maintaining talks between the delegations, restoring broader diplomatic ties, enabling teams to work on a path to end the war in Ukraine, and then what the US called historic economic and investment opportunities with Russia.

“But what of any concessions being demanded of Moscow? Mr. Rubio wouldn't set any out to reporters after the meeting, saying only that it would be a matter for future talks. Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made clear European peacekeeping forces were out of the question. …

“Pressed on why the US wasn’t laying down conditions for Moscow in order to agree to a durable peace, Mr Rubio said the two sides would only agree to ending the war on terms they were each happy with.” (emphasis mine)

Trump, in other words, has ordered Lil’ Marco to give Russia whatever they want and to hell with Ukraine. It’s a complete betrayal of Ukraine, America, democracy, and our European allies.

He even incoherently blamed Ukraine for Russia invading them, killing their people, stealing their children, and destroying their cities:

“Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it.

“You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down.”

This morning, Trump went even farther, lying with Russian talking points about how much money America has spent in Ukraine and calling President Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Why?

ALSO READ: 'Outrageous lies': Trump floats kicking millions off of Social Security

What if Trump is working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? And has been running him as an asset since at least 2017?

That would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).

That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through his operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?

Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for this second term?

And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow documented last night?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Postreported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it.

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

And now, to complicate matters, Elon Musk has access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, himself, has also reportedly been having secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had also taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957, aka Schedule F.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And now Musk is doing it for him. Deconstructing the American government. For Trump. Or for Putin.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine this week to demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a rightwing coup attempt before in this country: wealthy Republican industrialists tried to kidnap and kill President Franklin Roosevelt 92 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.”

Not a single one of those traitors, some aligned with Hitler, was ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

NOW READ: Trump's view of the world is becoming clear

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Why is the media ignoring Trumpworld's latest shout-outs to hardcore racists?

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while signing executive orders during a brief event in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2025.

Thom Hartmann February 18, 2025

One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.

Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, all just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?

And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?

Elon Musk, Trump’s #1 campaign donor and co-president, threw two Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes following Trump’s inauguration, causing the media to fall all over itself trying to make excuses for his behavior. Actual, declared Nazis and white supremacists were thrown into an ecstatic tizzy, however, with the Ohio Proud Boys posting the clip with the words, “Heil Trump!”

The neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe posted the Musk clip with the Waffen SS lightning-bolt emoji; their leader, Christopher Pohlhaus, wrote: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.” Other neo-Nazi, Nazi, and white supremacist groups across the web jumped in to celebrate the salute, as Rolling Stone extensively documented.

ALSO READ: Trump's days of defiant bribery are numbered — here's why

It all seems to have really picked up steam after young neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, chanting Nazi slogans, murdering a young woman protestor, and giving Hitler salutes.

Our media completely failed to identify them as Nazis, even though they were proclaiming that themselves.

Since Trump’s endorsement of their behavior with his “good people on both sides” comment, which he continues to defend, such behavior has been emulated across the nation.

Poke anything associated with Trump and odds are Nazi memes will pop out.

The “America First” slogan was the name of an openly pro-Nazi movement in America in the 1930s, a fact that seems to have been lost down the memory hole. And Trump told his former Chief of Staff, Marine General John Kelly, that “Hitler did some good things…” along with referring to American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”

And then there are Trump’s attacks on the media, echoing Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler with their “enemy of the people” rhetoric. He’s suing media outlets left and right, just like Putin and Orbán did in their early years to intimidate reporters and bankrupt opposition publications and websites.

Elon Musk just called for reporters for CBS’s 60 Minutes program — “the biggest liars in the world” — to receive “a long prison sentence.”

In an echo of Hitler’s “denunciations,” his “border czar” is even calling for the police at the Department of Justice to investigate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling immigrants about their constitutional rights.

After pointing out at a rally that Hitler said that Jews were “poisoning the blood” of Germany (yes, he pointed it out himself), Trump then said of nonwhites in America:

“It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

The 2021 CPAC meeting featured a stage resembling the Odal Rune, a potent Nazi symbol, that drew a rebuke from the hotel hosting the conference.

In 2022, Trump dined with Nick Fuentes, a prominent and out Holocaust denier. Trump later posted a 30-second video that twice references a “unified Reich.” Trump’s buddy Steve Bannon has repeatedly endorsed the notoriously antisemitic and racist novel The Camp of the Saints” which characterizes Black Americans, “dirty Arabs,” and “feces-eating Hindu rapists” as engaging in a conspiracy to destroy white people and civilization.

His son, Don Jr., retweeted a message by a white supremacist who attacks interracial dating and queer people, “liked” tweets by another account that posts pictures of Jews with exaggerated noses, made a “joke” about gas chambers and our media, and participated in an interview with a talk show host who said slavery was the best thing to have ever happened to Black people.

When Vice President Vance visited Germany this past week, instead of meeting with that nation’s chancellor or his peer, he hung out with the leader of the Nazi-adjacent AfD party, while giving a speech in which he extensively quoted Putin’s sentiments. Proud to be known by the company he keeps…

And then there’s DOGE, the official title of the iron-fisted, massively rich oligarchs who ruled Venice for ten centuries that’s been reclaimed by billionaire Musk for himself and his work. The logo is arguably explicit, as Jim Stewartson points out at his excellent mind-war.com newsletter/website:

“On the DOGE logo there are 8 stars above the cartoon, and 8 stars on the flag inside the gear. This is another National Socialist signal. It means Heil Hitler. Musk has used this signal numerous times, in addition to quite literally doing two Hitler salutes at the inauguration.”

There are also 14 teeth on the gear that makes up the O in DOGE in the logo, a direct rip-off from Hitler’s Nazi labor movement of the 1930s, reflecting the famous “14 words” memorized by every white supremacist: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Check out this 30-second video, courtesy of Jim Stewartson at mind-war.com:

Following that theme, Trump, Vance, and multiple Republican politicians and media figures have, for years, promoted the Naziesque “Great Replacement Theory” that posits American Jews are paying their agents in business, government, and society to hire Black, brown, and queer people and women to replace white men.

Additionally, when Trump tweeted out his Anders Breivik quote about saving the country and thus violating no laws, Musk retweeted it with 14 American flag emojis. These guys aren’t subtle because they don’t have to be; they know any American media that calls them out will either be attacked as paranoid or they’ll simply say it was a joke or misunderstanding.

But their followers know exactly what they’re saying, and why. Just like they understood that Trump’s birther crap was really his way of saying, “Hey, white people, have you noticed that guy in the White House is Black? We can’t tolerate that!”

And they also clearly heard the dog whistle when he came down the escalator and attacked brown-skinned immigrants. Or when he claimed the Potomac crash was because the helicopter pilot was a woman hired “because of DEI.”

Or when Trump offered refugee status to white South Africans, but not to Black or Indian South Africans.

There’s so much evidence of Trump’s and Musk’s apartheid leanings, it’s pretty much impossible to deny any longer. Which raises the question: Is our media in with the Nazis, or just committed to Not-Seeing them?

NOW READ: Reckless firing of federal workers creating a crisis for this deep red state

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Here's what happens when the world's richest man puts a target on your back}:

Thom Hartmann february 08, 2025

— Why every American should care about CBS settling ‘dangerous’ Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, wants to merge with Skydance, another media giant, but they need the approval of Trump’s FCC to make it happen. CBS, meanwhile, is being sued by Trump personally for $10 billion for violating “news distortion rules.” The suit is a blatant attempt to intimidate a network into favorable coverage — something straight out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook (or Putin in his early days) — but CBS is, according to insiders quoted in the media, seriously considering making some sort of a settlement, handing millions to Trump to make the suit go away. This follows ABC doing the same thing after George Stephanopolis said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” — a description of Trump’s attack on E. Jean Carroll that the judge in the case said was appropriate — but, again, the network paid him off with $15 million to make the threats go away.

In an extraordinary and risky show of defiance, CNN anchor Jake Tapper took to the airwaves to explain that CBS’s considering a payoff is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. He said that to “settle the suit would be a white flag of surrender… the network of [veteran broadcaster] Edward R. Murrow… saying, we will not speak truth to power. We will acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.” He wrapped up his rant, saying, “You live long enough and you see how eroded standards that politicians think work for their side always end up being wielded against them. And at that point, it doesn’t even matter who started it. It just matters that corporations are leaning on news divisions to supplicate themselves to whomever is in power because of their bottom line and the implied threat from the government.”

It’s been a few years since I had lunch with Jake in Washington, DC, but I was impressed then and am even more so now. It’s getting more and more dangerous for reporters and opinion writers to speak out against the authoritarian/fascist threat this administration represents. Good on Jake Tapper. Now, the rest of the stars in American media need to get on board rather than cowering behind bland, adjective-free coverage.

— Elon Musk demands firing of ‘disgusting and cruel’ WSJ reporter who uncovered DOGE employee’s racist tweets. Katherine Long is a Wall Street Journal reporter who uncovered (or reported on) the racist social media posts of a 25-year-old Musk staffer who’s invading our government offices. She wrote:

“Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“‘Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,’ the account posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts.

“‘You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,’ the account wrote on X in September. ‘Normalize Indian hate,’ the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.”

Now, in the administration’s latest attempt to intimidate our nation’s reporters, Musk wants her scalp, retweeting on X a post claiming she’s an USAID employee (she isn’t; that was years ago): “What the hell? Certainly improper, possibly criminal.” When the richest guy in the world and owner of the world’s largest social media site puts a target on your back, it can be extraordinarily intimidating, particularly for somebody who’s never had a high public profile. It’s also dangerous.

And now JD Vance, who’s married to a woman who’s the daughter of Indian immigrants, joined the pile-on against Long, writing on X, “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.” He also wants Mr. “Normalize Indian Hate” re-hired, adding: “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.” It’s gotta be tough cosplaying a white supremacist while married to a dark-skinned Indian woman…

— Trump tries to intimidate The Washington Post and columnist Eugene Robinson. The storied WAPO writer was a guest on Joe Scarborough’s eponymous TV show Friday morning, calling out the Trump/Musk shutdown of USAID, saying:

“These are highly skilled technical people in these NGOs, Christian NGOs, Roman Catholic, and evangelical NGOs, and all of that’s being shut down. The camps are being collapsed in many areas, and people who’ve had their houses burned down, their children raped, who are traumatized. They’re getting food aid from us. The whole operation is going to be shut down. … They don’t care what happens to the people of the world because they don’t vote in the United States. They don’t care that hundreds of millions of people are going to have to be on the edge of starvation if these programs aren’t restored immediately.”

The comments apparently sent Trump into a rage, provoking him to post on his Nazi-infested social media site, “Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post is INCOMPETENT! So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN. He should be fired immediately!!!”

The last president who declared war on our free press was John Adams, and his imprisonment of multiple newspaper publishers for “slandering” him caused his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, to leave the White House and Washington DC for the final two years of the Adams’ presidency; the two men never met in person again (although they resumed a correspondence in the years before their death within hours of each other on July 4, 1826). Jefferson was right; without a free and independent press it’s impossible to have a functioning democracy. Which appears to be exactly why Trump and his fascist-leaning, Nazi-saluting colleagues are so enthusiastic about taking down our media and replacing it with a Greek chorus like Fox “News.”

— Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls out the Court’s rightwingers on presidential immunity. The Democratic-appointee justice made her first public comments since the bizarre decision was handed down months ago, pointing out that our Founders never, ever intended that anybody in America should be above the law and for the Court to say so hurts its credibility. “If we as a court go so much further ahead of people, our legitimacy is going to be questioned,” Sotomayor said in Kentucky this week. “I think the immunity case is one of those situations. I don’t think that Americans have accepted that anyone should be above the law in America. Our equality as people was the foundation of our society and of our Constitution.” }:}:

Gee, ya think? When FDR and LBJ were pushing through Congress the main components of the New Deal and Great Society, it was Republicans who were screaming about an imperial presidency, saying both presidents had grabbed too much power for themselves. Now we have a man who appears to think himself king of America, and suddenly the GOP is just fine with that.}:

— GOP bill bans prosecutors from going after officials who refuse to certify elections..say what?! Republican legislators in Arizona are pushing legislation that would let a single crank with a “sworn statement” shut down counting or certifying votes in Blue counties of the state. Currently, it’s illegal for a county clerk or other official to refuse to certify an election without a seriously good reason, but this bill would end “legal liability for balking at certification if they have any ‘documentation or other evidence’ that suggests ‘potential irregularities or errors in the election process,’” including “not just official reports but also sworn affidavits and ‘expert testimony.’” So, if you wanted to shut down the certification of, say, Maricopa County (Phoenix) and only count ballots from the Red regions of the state, all you’d have to do is submit a “sworn affidavit” that you believe there’s something hinky going on. Increasingly, it appears there’s no limit to what Republicans will do to rig elections…

— Trump administration orders states to halt EV charging programs. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Biden got through Congress appropriated $5 billion for the construction of EV chargers on federal highways and $2.5 billion for chargers in towns and communities. Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order cancelling those funds and shutting down the program, handing a huge and profitable win to the guy whose company owns the largest EV charging network in American: Elon Musk. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how corrupt this deal is…

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Another 'hair on fire' moment as Elon Musk further buries his nose into the US government

Thom Hartmann February 01, 2025

— Let’s just call these mass firings at Justice and the FBI what they are. Donald Trump is a lawless man who is ripping apart the FBI to turn it into a banana republic-style group of enforcing thugs who will only do his will. They will spare his friends and persecute his enemies. We’ve seen this over and over during the past century in countries all over the world; it’s nothing new. It’s just that we never expected to see it here in America.

Putin dreamed for most of his life of destroying America; he now has a friend who is doing it for him. This attack on the Justice Department and particularly on the FBI is the beginning of America’s first true era of dictatorship. The only question now is how long and how far Democratic and Republican politicians and career government employees will tolerate this, and, when their resistance comes, whether it will be too late. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121.

— This plane crash shows Trump can’t handle a crisis; we’re going to have to hold our breath for the next 4 years... We already knew this from Covid, when at least 400,000 Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s utter incompetence and his attempts to use the pandemic for political gain. Now, with the plane and helicopter crash into the Potomac he let his racist and misogynist freak flag fly high, coming out before any investigations to say that the crash was caused by Black people, women, and/or handicapped people having been hired by the FAA.

This is sick, twisted, unAmerican, inhumane, and highlights his complete and utter lack of character or humanity. It now appears that the fault for the crash lies with the helicopter pilot, who was both too high and off-course — and was apparently a woman. One of his people must’ve told Trump, who immediately saw it as an opportunity to go off on women, arguing, like Pete Hegseth, that women shouldn’t be in any kind of significant role in the military. The FAA itself did a quick investigation and found that there was only one controller in the tower handing both plane and helicopter traffic (normally there are 2) in part because the DCA airport only has 19 certified controllers altogether, even though the FAA says they should have 30.

This is the result of years of Republican cuts to the FAA’s budget to finance tax breaks for billionaires. The GOP’s 2025 proposed budget includes another 26% cut in FAA funding to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, just like their unsuccessful 2023 budget effort. When will Americans wake up to the fact that Republicans only care about billionaires and big corporations that kick back campaign contributions to them in exchange for subsidies, deregulation, and tax loopholes? You’d think, after all these years of the Reaganomics trickle-down scam (among others) that they’d have figured it out…

— We have another “hair on fire” moment with Musk sticking his nose (and people) into our Government. After the head of the FAA opened an investigation into Musk’s SpaceX program, it appears that Musk himself intervened to get the guy to quit or be fired; now another federal officer, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, has also resigned rather than do battle with Musk. Nobody elected this billionaire — arguably the richest man in the world — but this past week he apparently walked into (or sent emissaries) the part of the Treasury Department that writes trillions of dollars in checks to demand information about who’s getting paid, how much, and why.

This could include highly confidential information that may well include government payments to Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink competitors, among others. Will Trump reign him in? It appears that our president is as afraid of Musk as many of his employees say they are. Oligarchy is a form of government where morbidly rich people or their agents take over the reins of government and turn its resources and efforts away from helping average people and toward protecting and subsidizing the oligarchs themselves. We’re officially there.

— People are trying to simplify the message. One of the latest viral internet memes is a graphic with the following words on it:

*January 20: Trump FIRES the FAA director

*January 21: Trump FREEZES all Air Traffic Controller hiring

*January 22: Trump DISBANDS the Aviation Safety Advisory Committee

*January 28: Trump sends a buyout/retirement ransom letter to existing FAA employees

*January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years, 67 fatalities. WE ARE ONCE AGAIN RULED BY AN INCOMPETENT FOOL WHO IS GONNA GET US ALL KILLED!

— “They’re both dangerous”: Senators are worried after both Patel and Gabbard refused a constitutional pledge. Delaware’s Democratic Senator Chris Coons is warning Americans that when he asked both Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard if they’d refuse an illegal or unconstitutional order from Trump, both refused to say they’d stand up to the Mango Mussolini. “It gives me real pause,” Coons told Raw Story, adding, “Bill Barr answered easily [that he’d refuse an illegal order].

Pam Bondi answered easily. Merrick Garland answered easily. I do that with every nominee.” The sad and simple reality is that Trump has so badly intimidated his nominees that most are afraid to even say out loud that they’d challenge him, much less actually do it when the chips are down. This should alarm every American, particularly given Trump’s long history of criminal behavior and his past requests to the military to shoot protestors “in the legs” and other bizarre, illegal, and fundamentally unAmerican steps. We’re in for a hell of a ride over the next four years…

— “Mass Murderer in Waiting”: Reporter accuses LA Times’ billionaire owner of editing his anti-RFK op-ed to support Kennedy. Eric Reinhart wrote an article for the LA Times about Bob Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate, but is now saying that the paper’s editors — presumably at the behest of the paper’s rightwing billionaire owner — rewrote his article and changed the headline to make it seem like he was endorsing Kennedy when in fact it was the opposite.

“I am the author of this OpEd,” Reinhart wrote on X, “which was given a misleading title and from which key lines were cut—lines that made very clear that RFK Jr is dangerously ignorant, has absolutely no business near HHS, and is effectively a mass murderer in waiting.” What’s the old joke about the Golden Rule? “He who has the gold makes the rules,” as I recall. Certainly seems to be the case here, truth be damned…

— ICE horror story hits the news… A grandmother, mother, and toddler were all hauled off to an ICE immigration detention center (euphemism for “jail”) by Trump’s officers when they were caught speaking Spanish to each other. Turns out they were visiting from Puerto Rico — where everybody’s a US citizen — but that didn’t deter the enthusiastic cops.

Thank the gods they didn’t end up in Gitmo. ICE had been prioritizing undocumented immigrants who’d committed crimes while in the US, but since Trump gave each ICE office a daily quota for arrests they’re starting to do more general sweeps, looking for people who’ve been good residents, quietly doing their work and paying their taxes. The latest report is that Trump wants to open the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison for black- and brown-skinned people here without documentation; as the old saying goes, the cruelty is the point.

NOW READ: Inside the GOP's 60-year conspiracy to kill our democracy

===

A Mafia State: Why all Americans are now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s worst nightmare

Posted by Thom Hartmann | Nov 19, 2024

A Mafia State: Why all Americans are now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s worst nightmare | Milwaukee Independent

alexander Hamilton thought he and the others who wrote the Constitution had it all figured out.

He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the U.S. Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.

They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president.

They would have laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.

In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:

“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, Hamilton told us, the people would ferret out such a con man or traitor and Congress and the Supreme Court would put a brake on such a man even if he were to slip past the voters and the Electoral College:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress.

He wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”

He even bragged in Federalist 71 that presidents would be of such high character that they could easily avoid being seduced “by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.”

He also believed that good elected officials in Congress, dependent on the voters for their own political futures, would serve as a check against a corrupt president bent on exploiting his position for his own enrichment, the demands of special interest groups (like billionaires), or the interests of a hostile foreign government:

“But however inclined we might be to insist upon an unbounded complaisance in the Executive [President] to the inclinations of the people, we can with no propriety contend for a like complaisance to the humors of the legislature.”

Turns out, Hamilton was wrong. His nightmare scenario tracks back to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, starting with Lewis Powell authoring the 1978 Bellotti decision that says money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It reached its fetid bottom with John Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ Citizens United blowing up almost all campaign contribution limits.

Without billionaire-controlled media, including billionaire-owned social media, and billions spent to carpet-bomb America with extraordinarily deceptive advertising, Donald Trump would never have had a chance.

By the late 19th century, we realized Hamilton was mistaken and put up guardrails to prevent this.

The Communications Act of 1934 established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and gave it authority to regulate “broadcasting in the public interest.” It also established the Equal Time Rule, requiring broadcast stations to give major candidates for public office roughly equal exposure to the public.

In 1941, the FCC introduced the first specific limits on media ownership with its “Report on Chain Broadcasting,” which restricted ownership of multiple radio stations. In 1946, the FCC established the “duopoly” rule, prohibiting ownership of more than one television station in a market. No Fox or Sinclair, in other words, would be allowed a national footprint to corrupt our democratic system.

In 1949, the FCC formally adopted the Fairness Doctrine as a rule, and in 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to codify the Fairness Doctrine into law. Specifically, they rewrote Section 315(a) to read:

“A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

The 1975 newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule prohibited ownership of both a daily newspaper and a full-power broadcast station in the same market.

Similarly, we once had hard and fast rules against billionaires and giant corporations corrupting our political process.

After the Industrial Revolution of the late 1880s brought mind-boggling levels of wealth to a small number of men, those Robber Barons predictably reached out for control of the politicians, state and federal, who might regulate their behavior.

In response, states and the U.S. Congress began passing serious laws to limit the corrupting power of money in politics.

In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said:

“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.”

The penalty included a substantial fine, up to five years in prison for individual executives and even the company’s lawyers, and the death sentence of the corporation itself being forbidden from doing business.

Two years later, efforts to control bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation from making “money contributions in connection with any election to any [federal] political office.”

By 1925, the Tillman Act had been incorporated into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, further limiting money in politics, and in 1938 we got the Hatch Act which limited contributions to $5000 per candidate and $3 million per party.

As a result, for most of the 20th century prior to the Reagan Revolution, politicians did what the citizens wanted. We got Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, food and housing support, new public schools, the right to unionize, high-quality education, nearly free college, nonprofit hospitals and health insurance companies, and tightly regulated banks.

Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals we got another bunch of laws to regulate money in politics, including the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, and the 1974 creation of the Federal Elections Commission, which then promulgated rules further limiting “dark money” and other forms of political bribery.

That all began to end, however, when Richard Nixon swung the Supreme Court hard to the right with his appointment of Lewis Powell in 1972, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. This laid the foundation for the Reagan Revolution and today’s massive corruption across the GOP.

By 1978, Powell had authored the case of First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti, which blew up nearly all of those laws.

In 2010 five corrupt Republican appointees on the Court finished the perversion of American politics with their Citizens United decision, overturning hundreds of state and federal laws dating back more than a century.

Thus, big money now runs the show, and, to paraphrase Lord Acton, big money corrupts absolutely.

As FDR famously said, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

It has gotten so bad since Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote on Citizens United that legislation Americans clearly want cannot even get a debate in the House or Senate when they are controlled by Republicans on issues including:

• Reducing or ending student debt
• Free or low-cost college
• Dental, hearing and eyeglasses for seniors on Medicare
• Raising the cap on Social Security so it is solvent for the next 75 years
• Getting the Post Office into postal banking for low-income people
• Stopping global warming
• Making pharmaceuticals affordable
• Medicare for all
• Taxing the rich
• Cutting back on fossil fuel emissions
• Breaking up the big monopolies to restore competition and lower prices

All of these positions, when polled as a single policy point rather than through a partisan frame, are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. None can get into law because billionaires or corporations have paid off enough politicians to stop them.

This corruption of the “rules of the game” by the Supreme Court has, in turn, attracted criminally disposed sociopaths into government at all levels, from state legislatures to the U.S. Congress. It is so bad that we can’t even stop members of Congress from trading stocks on insider information.

This is America becoming a Mafia State; with Trump and the corrupt toadies he is inserting into our government, we are all now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare.

It will be at least two years before we can do anything about it at the voting booth, but now is the time to get mobilized and start planning.

Show up for your local Democratic Party meeting and volunteer; precinct committee persons can have an amazing impact on the direction of the Party. Join a group like Indivisible. Become an evangelist for democracy. Support independent media and share newsletters and websites with everybody you know.

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-democracy/

Alternet+

The only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America

Thom Hartmann February 06, 2025

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he’s got a better way and it’ll all work out.

In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don’t directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany; to paraphrase: First they came for the government workers…

Then people start resisting, which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures and the courts: he figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned.

When she was being confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not executed an illegal order on Donald Trump’s behalf. Like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him. Or prosecute somebody who had investigated him. Or imprison — perhaps only temporarily, at first — somebody who has spoken out against him.

We’re there now. Bondi just announced that the political prosecutions are about to begin. At first they will be going after the police agencies themselves, as a way of bringing them to heel: Terrify the terrifiers.

Next will be the Press. First they will use financial terror to force compliance; we’re already seeing that with Trump’s lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. That will expand. Eventually it will turn into shutdowns and arrests.

He will remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white, male supremacist worldview and the new authoritarianism.

He will realign our democratic country away from democratic allies and toward countries run by dictators like he aspires to become.

He will purge the military of leadership that might resist him and of troops who might refuse his orders.

He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for “the worst of the worst“ in places beyond the reach of law, like Auschwitz in Poland or Guantánamo in Cuba.

He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus, singing his praises and carrying his every word.

By proclaiming, as every dictator does, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he will bring the country‘s largest religious institutions to heel.

He will proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, like the Autobahn or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They will distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself.

He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him. Hitler had his Brownshirts; Republicans in Nassau County are right now trying to field America’s first armed private militia.

He will remake commerce and business, so the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled I Paid Hitler. Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book.

America today is early in this process, although it doesn’t typically take very long. It took Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, although he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Trump and his project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years: They hit the ground running.

This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions.

Right now, though, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion, the media, and the Democratic Party; Republicans have completely caved and the courts move too slowly to stop him.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this off in a matter of weeks, and so far — because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats — they may be right.

Unless we all stand up and speak out now.

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NO LNX

:{Greenlight for tyranny as impotent Dems' lack of resistance opens the floodgates}:}:

Thom Hartmann February 03, 2025

Is Trump’s, Musk’s, and Putin’s coup against democracy complete?

Under the guise of a 44-year campaign to reverse the middle-class advances of the New Deal and Great Society, rightwing billionaires and the Republicans they own have pushed a fundamentally fascist agenda that is now openly at war with America. They are engaging in a coup, finishing the work Trump started on January 6, 2021.

Trump is nakedly breaking the law right in front of the entire country, just as progressive Democrats have been predicting. Not a single elected Republican has had the courage to try to stop him or even speak out against his lawlessness, and only a handful of Democrats have found that fearlessness. That has to change.

— Trump is illegally firing career Civil Service prosecutors in the DOJ and agents in the FBI. The principal message he is conveying is, “Donald Trump, his family, and his friends are above the law. Investigate them and you will lose your job.”

— He’s illegally fired Inspectors General who search out and prosecute corruption within their own agencies.

— He’s illegally impounded money appropriated by Congress.

— He’s illegally imposing tariffs against Mexico and Canada, turning our friends against us, just like Putin has dreamed for years.

— USAID, created by President Kennedy, is our single most effective tool for keeping poor countries on America’s side instead of joining Russia or China. Musk has declared war on this Agency, and the only beneficiaries will be those two dictatorships.

— And now this South African billionaire has apparently downloaded all of your and my private information from the federal agencies responsible for making six trillion dollars’ worth of payments every year, with the explicit permission of Treasury Secretary and billionaire Scott Bessent — who was put into his job with the votes of 15 compliant Democratic senators.

As Senator Patty Murray (who voted against Bessent) noted on Bluesky yesterday:

“All of your most sensitive data and our country’s checkbook are in the hands of an unelected billionaire. This is the most corrupt administration in history and it’s putting our economy & government in serious jeopardy.

“It’s time to speak out and fight back. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/u...”

Hell, it’s way past time to speak out and fight back.

Ever since Reagan’s Revolution on behalf of the billionaire class, many of us have been shouting from the rooftops about the inevitability of this day. I’ve published multiple books and hundreds of articles (see * below), as have many of my colleagues, warning of this exact scenario.

This is the tail-end of the battle, not the beginning:

— When Republicans claimed that corporations were “persons” with rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights (including the right to fund political campaigns), Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, Bill Clinton encouraged corporate contributions to his “New Democrats.”

— When Republicans said billionaires and corporations bribing politicians was legal (and could even be considered “tips”), Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead the “Problem Solvers” and many others simply put their hands out.

— When Republicans gutted union protections, borrowed $34 trillion to fund tax breaks for billionaires, and ended support for college tuition, Democrats could have spoken out, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, many “moved to the center.”

— When Republicans fought voting rights and purged over 50 million voters from the rolls over the past decade (giving Trump the White House last year), Democrats could have raised hell, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they abandoned Red states, often not even bothering to run candidates.

— When Republicans denied climate change and went to the mat to protect the hundreds of billions in subsidies the fossil fuel industry gets every year, Democrats could have stopped them, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they complained about “disruptive” groups protesting pipelines.

— When Republicans raised an entire Astroturf Tea Party movement to fight progressive efforts to put into place a national healthcare system that would include a buy-in option for Medicare at all ages, Democrats could have fought for their constituents, but — other than the progressives — didn’t. Instead, they offered a privatized Obamacare and weak “negotiation” with drug companies to lower prices on 10 drugs while ignoring the creeping privatization of Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam.

In each case, progressive Democrats were ahead of the curve and corporate Democrats either ignored or even obstructed needed reforms.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been steamrolling ahead with their plan — first laid out by Lewis Powell in 1971 — to turn our country into an oligarchy that’s no longer accountable to its people.

And now they’re just months away from finishing off our democratic republic, silencing all voices of dissent, and guaranteeing — like Trump promised — that we may never be able to even vote again in a meaningful election with candidates who aren’t pre-vetted by billionaires.

The greatest danger America is facing today — because Democratic messaging and outrage have been so weak for so long — is that average people won’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Democratic Party — Hakeem Jefferies in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate — are both saying that they’re not going to challenge Trump on every crime he commits, and Democratic senators voted unanimously for Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, who’s now in Panama threatening that sovereign government.

Trump is working as hard as possible to make his fascist vision of America a reality by attacking, threatening, and suing reporters and media outlets while his billionaire buddies and AIPAC threaten to fund primary challenges against any politician — Democrat or Republican — who dares to challenge them.

And the threats are working:

— The media is walking on pins and needles, trying to avoid pissing off Trump or Musk.

— The FCC just launched an investigation that could lead to the end of NPR and PBS.

— Major networks are paying off Trump to settle frivolous lawsuits.

— Democrats are treating Vichy Republicans as if they were good faith colleagues during normal times, many even voting for Trump’s cabinet nominees.

But these are not normal times: Our democracy is hanging by a thread. The simple reality is that the MAGA takeover of the GOP has turned it into, essentially, an agent of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. And an immigrant billionaire is deconstructing our government like a toddler busting up a Lego set.

Democrats — who campaigned on the allegation that Trump was a fascist — must now behave like their claim was true and fight back, before Trump and Musk finalize Orbán’s and Putin’s neofascist governance model, making such a response impossible.

— Shut down the House and the Senate.

— Challenge Johnson’s speakership.

— Fight every unanimous consent vote.

— Use quorum calls to bring floor business to a standstill.

— Put holds on every Trump nominee, even for things like naming Post Offices or noncontroversial positions.

— Hold a major press conference every day and coordinate with Democrats across the nation to amplify that day’s message across local and national media.

— Organize political guerilla theater and mass protest events.

Average people can reach out to their elected officials — the phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 — and raise absolute holy hell. Blow up social media with protest and outrage posts. Share your concerns with friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors.

As Bernie Sanders — who’s been fighting this fight his entire life and was on my radio/TV show every Friday for 11 years — shared yesterday with people subscribed to his newsletter:

“We must fight back — effectively. This is not a time for wallowing in despair and hiding under the covers. The stakes are too high. We’re not just fighting for ourselves. We’re fighting for our kids and for future generations. We’re fighting for the future of this planet.

“Further, we must not become overwhelmed and think that Trump has some kind of extraordinary mandate and an inevitable glide path into the future. That’s what the right-wing mouthpieces want you to believe, but it’s not true. Trump won the election because Kamala Harris and a very weak and out-of-touch Democratic Party received 5 million votes LESS than Biden did in 2020, not because Donald Trump or his agenda were popular. His agenda can be defeated. …

“We cannot just play defense. We have got to be on offense. Please, never forget, the agenda that we are fighting for is widely supported by working families all across this country. And we must continue to fight for that agenda.”

It only took Hitler 53 days to use legal means to turn Germany from a functioning democracy into a dictatorship. We’ve officially gone way too far down that same road, and if Trump and Project 2025 aren’t stopped now it may well be too late by as soon as this Spring.

*Many of us have been raising the alarm for years:

Three decades ago (1995), I wrote a bestselling book about climate change, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which is now in its third complete rewrite/edition and available in 17 languages. It’s been made into or inspired several feature-length movies, including a short, shocking video that Leonardo DiCaprio and I put together a decade ago. Today’s Republicans, owned outright by fossil fuel billionaires since the 1980s, continue to deny the clear link between their products and the deaths and property damage extreme weather are causing.

Just a few years later (1999), I broke the story in my book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rightsthat corporate personhood had not, in fact, been ratified by the Supreme Court in 1886, but was a scam promulgated by the wealthy Republican Clerk of the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, on behalf of the railroad oligarchs.

When George W. Bush doubled down on Reaganomics with his massive trillion-dollar 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for billionaires and a Labor Department hostile to workers’ rights, I wrote Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, detailing how Republican policies are devastating working class people, students, and people living on Social Security. Things have only gotten worse in the years since it was first published.

When Bush and Cheney lied us into two illegal wars to seize oil and save Halliburton, I wrote We The People: A Call to Take Back America. The back cover copy says:

“America faces its greatest threat since the Civil War. The worst fears of the Founders are being realized, as powerful corporate interests have taken over our culture and representative government. We the People now face a fundamental choice: take back our country ... or do nothing, and become victims of tyranny and empire.”

Those were followed by a book on the rightwing’s war on American culture (Threshold: The Progressive Plan to Pull America Back from the Brink), political messaging (Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision), and two histories of America’s founding and what it means for today (What Would Jefferson Do?and The American Revolution of 1800with Dan Sisson).

Since then I’ve published the Hidden History series of 10 short books alerting Americans to our gun crisis, the GOP’s war on voting, the Supreme Court’s betrayal of America, the rise of American monopolies (foreword by Ralph Nader), the dangers of rising oligarchy, our corrupt healthcare system, how tech billionaires are this generation’s Big Brother, how neoliberalism took over both political parties and then America, the history of our democracy and its Native American inspiration, and what’s happened to the American Dream and how to recover it.

Many of us have been fighting this predicted rise of fascism — kicked off in 1981 by Ronald Reagan — for years, even decades. Please join us and share the message as far and wide as you can!

==

AN NO LNX

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-medicaid/

Trump supporters finally finding out why you shouldn't vote for a criminal corporate raider

Thom Hartmann

January 29, 2025

Yesterday, the Medicaid payment portal was shut down in all 50 states; they came back up when a federal judge put Trump’s illegal impoundment of federal funds on hold until February 3rd.

And it wasn’t just Medicaid. The Trump administration shut down Pell grants, federally supported student loans, veterans homeless shelters, veterans suicide prevention programs, school meals, home heating assistance, housing assistance, food stamps, food for women and infants, childcare, Headstart, child abuse investigations, rape crisis centers, and hundreds of other programs.

Why?

Because Trump is trying to gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney gutted Clear Channel when I did my show from one of their studios a decade ago.

Romney’s company did it to shut down Air America and then extract the millions in wealth Clear Channel had, before throwing the husk of the company into bankruptcy; Trump is tearing our systems of governance apart because he and his billionaire buddies are offended by the idea of paying taxes to help the American middle class and the poor.

In the process, Trump is also breaking multiple laws and daring Congress and the courts to do anything about it. This is the beginning of the path to both economic chaos and dictatorship.

But first, let’s take a look at what Trump and his billionaire funders are up to and why.

Back in 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on a platform of shutting down virtually every federal function except the military and the court system. Some billionaires, you see, hate paying taxes and many of them think that all those “gummint” programs are both unnecessary and wasteful.

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.

— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.

— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.

— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.

— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.

— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.

— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.

— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.

— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.

— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.

— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.

— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.

— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.

— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.

— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.

— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.

— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.

— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.

— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.

— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.

— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.

— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

In other words, gut the federal government the same way Mitt Romney’s company gutted Clear Channel. But in politics and governance, it’s called libertarianism, which is the hot new philosophy for Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires.

The “Project 2025” plan put together by the Heritage Foundation (funded in part for years by the Koch brothers’ network) was a 21st century cleaned-up version of Koch’s 1980 Libertarian Party platform. And now we’re seeing it put into place, one step at a time.

Like Romney stripping the liberal talk radio network out of Clear Channel, they are now stripping the 20th century out of our laws and policies.

It’s why Republicans are working so hard to disempower women in the workplace, starting with eliminating their control over their own reproductive capacity.

It’s also why they’re doing everything they can to shut down corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide; the majority of the hiring and increased pay benefits coming from corporate, government, and academic DEI programs go to women, a situation Republican men find intolerable.

Republicans want to either “return” to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution (as advocated by Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito) or embrace Russell Vought’s “post-constitutional” order, in which the last century’s “innovations” (including the income tax, women’s suffrage, “welfare” programs, entitlements, and even free public school and college) are dialed back.

We also see this in the ways the Republicans on the Supreme Court have gutted both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, how they’ve stripped most of the teeth out of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how they’re working to castrate most regulatory agencies including the EPA, FTC, and even the IRS.

Republicans are trying to do to our government, in other words, what corporate raiders do to companies.

Some of it is simple greed: as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows, the cash stash at the very top of the American economic pyramid grows exponentially.

Other American oligarchs follow the teachings of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan who all argued that a larger-than-50% middle class is a threat to the stability of the nation.

The simple reality is that nations without a large and active federal government providing protections and services to its people never develop large middle classes.

Unregulated capitalism always produces the kind of nation Charles Dickens wrote about in Christmas Carol and his many other novels: A tiny 1% who own most wealth; a small 3-5% middle class of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners (Ebeneezer Scrooge); and a massive 90%+ class of the working poor (Bob Cratchit).

Ever since the 1950s when Russell Kirk wrote his manifesto The Conservative Mind, a small cabal of Republicans and billionaires have argued that FDR’s “big government” programs — that moved America from being 10% middle class in the 1930s to over 60% when Reagan came into office in 1981 (it’s under 50% now) — were dangerous.

As I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, their argument was largely based on the turmoil of the 1960s, when women, Blacks, and young people were demanding rights; they worried that these protests could lead to the destruction of our republic and a “communist takeover.”

Nowadays most rightwing billionaires have largely abandoned that argument, simply asserting their disgust at having to pay taxes to support programs that primarily benefit “the little people.”

And then, of course, there are those in the GOP who simply hate America because of its pluralism and diversity.

Most recently, Trump proved his commitment to fulfill their and Putin’s desire to see America’s government destroyed by sending an email to 2 million federal employees offering them 8 months pay if they’ll resign.

Just like when I was at Clear Channel and Romney’s company fired or laid off more than half of the employees here in Portland.

In the process of disemboweling our federal government, however, Trump is taking it a step farther and breaking multiple laws:

— The Impoundment Control Act, which was passed in the 1970s after Nixon withheld funding for programs he didn’t like, including the Clean Water Act, Public Housing projects, the elementary and Secondary Education Act that funded public schools in poor districts, school desegregation efforts, mass transit programs for cities, and health research and healthcare programs for low-income people.

The law says that presidents cannot refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress without the explicit permission of both the House and Senate, and requires him to give them 45 days to consider the impoundment or rescission of funds.

Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law and daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.

— The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 and the Civil Service Reform Act guarantee that federal government employees can’t be fired for “retaliation” or political reasons; there must be actual evidence that they are not doing their jobs, doing them poorly, or behaving in ways that justify the firing.

When Trump fired all the career prosecutors and lawyers in the Justice Department who’d participated in his prosecution, it was a clear case of political retaliation and a clear violation of the law.

Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law and daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.

— The Inspector General Act of 1978 (also responding to Nixon’s corruption) mandates that the president must notify Congress at least 30 days before removing an IG and provide detailed, case-specific reasons for the dismissal. Inspectors General are the watchdogs for federal agencies, keeping an eye out for people within those agencies committing fraud, stealing funds, or engaging in illegal favoritism or bribery, among other crimes.

Firing them is like a police department firing its Internal Affairs department that looks into corrupt cops. It sets up every federal agency affected by the firings to be corrupted by the Trump cronies put in charge of them. Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is furious about this.

Our lawless, convicted-criminal president is nakedly breaking this law, too, as he raids our government, and is daring Congress and the courts to do something about it.

As Alexandrian Ocasio-Cortez noted on social media yesterday:

“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires. We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”

Trump’s defiance of these three major laws (along with a few others) in the first two weeks of his presidency — and the GOP’s acquiescence to his criminality — are terrible signs for the future of American democracy.

They are frankly even more dangerous than his corporate raider-like efforts to bring the American government to its knees.

While most Americans who voted for Trump probably knew he was a convicted criminal, it’s unlikely they also thought he’d commit crimes in office that would gut the protections and programs that so many of them need. They f----- around and now they’re finding out.

Sadly, they’re taking the rest of us with them…

===

// mta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXqRMmiKOk

Welcome to the new American oligarchy: Trump’s rise was decades in the making

Jan 26, 2025

President Donald Trump’s rise is not an anomaly – he is the product of forces set in motion 50 years ago, driven by massive deregulation and key Supreme Court decisions that dismantled a century of safeguards against corporate political spending, explains Thom Hartmann, author of ‘The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.’ Together, these forces steered America toward oligarchy. Trump recognized the cracks in our system—and moved in to exploit them. In this next chapter of America’s story, “Velshi” will track those who wield economic power to undermine everyday Americans–including the tech-industrial complex now occupying the halls of American power.

===

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no lnx

Alternet

Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare

Ku Klux Klan initiation at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. June 1949. KKK men in full white masks and gowns lead new members wearing small face masks. Shutterstock/ Everett Collection

Thom Hartmann January 22, 2025

Welcome to your first full day in the new Confederate States of America.

Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to:

— Making American as white as possible,

— Stripping women and minorities of political and economic power,

— Gutting workers’ rights,

— Rigging election outcomes,

— Leaders nakedly taking bribes,

— Using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies,

— Making queer people invisible,

— Reconfiguring schools for indoctrination,

— Having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and,

— Maintaining a government of, by, and for rich white men.

Never in American history has a group of morbidly rich white men this large or with anything close to this net worth sat to watch a president get sworn into office, and never before have so many billionaires been in a president’s cabinet.

Trump has been openly selling legislation; for example, he recently told a group of fossil fuel CEOs that, if they’d give him a billion dollars, he’d gut the nation’s environmental laws that they don’t like.

Seeing the opportunity, the nation’s richest people have flocked to Trump’s side, each presumably hoping for their own desired federal subsidies or an end to regulations, government lawsuits, or anti-trust actions.

And, of course, they all want more tax cuts.

The Immigration Act of 1924 limited people coming into the country based on race; each year’s immigrants must be selected in a way that maintained the racial ratios that existed in 1890 (before the big wave of swarthy southern European immigrants, most Italian and Greek, that came here during the three decades between 1890 and 1924).

In 1965, Congress passed a new immigration law that ended the racial/country quotas, leading to a rapid increase in Black and Brown immigrants entering the country legally. Combined with illegal immigration, Reagan’s amnesty, and birthright citizenship for their children, the browning of American picked up speed to the point where 2014 was the first year when nonwhite children outnumbered white kids in the nation’s public schools.

To end this trend and make America white again, Trump has, at various times, proposed that America no longer allow immigrants from majority Black “shithole countries,” banned immigration from majority-Muslim countries, will harden the southern border, and last night signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

The 14th Amendment defines birthright citizenship, saying:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s lawyers are arguing that people here without documentation are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law because they’re not here legally. Therefore, they say, their children born here are also not “born subject to the jurisdiction” of American law and thus not citizens.

They plan to take their argument to the Supreme Court, where it may receive a favorable hearing. If successful, they might even have a case for stripping citizenship from and then deporting tens of millions of mostly Hispanic American citizens whose parents were undocumented.

Our MAGA Supreme Court majority has already succeeded in several steps toward this goal, by ending abortion rights and gutting both civil rights and voting rights laws.

Four GOP-controlled states are considering charging women who get abortions with murder, and Republicans on the Supreme Court have already functionally outlawed affirmative action and given states the power to make voting harder for Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.

Vice President Vance has written to the Justice Department demanding that they begin to enforce the moribund Comstock Act, which would outlaw the mailing of abortion and birth control medications, among other things (including porn).

Meanwhile, DEI programs in both government and the corporate world are being ended to once again allow companies with white leadership to give preference to white men up for jobs or promotions. Looking at the composition of Trump’s incoming administration and cabinet, it’s reasonable to assume that nonwhite people must be willing to play the role Samuel L. Jackson did in Django Unchained if they want a position.

In his last administration, Trump put the virulently anti-union lawyer Eugene Scalia (son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) in charge of the Labor Department. His current nominee, former Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has a more mixed record, but she won’t be setting the administration’s labor policy: Trump will.

The same Trump who told Elon Musk on a live X event:

“You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ’That’s OK. You’re all gone.'”

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.” Bezos is also virulently opposed to unionization of his Amazon workplace, and Trump has a long history of avoiding hiring companies with unions to do work on his properties.

When the plantation oligarchs ended democracy in the Old South during the 1840-1860 era, they continued to allow elections. But white men who voted (they were the only ones allowed to vote) for anybody other than the oligarch’s men often lost work, were beaten, and even sometimes lynched.

Republicans today are a bit more sophisticated, but their ability to rig elections has endured.

In the years immediately following the Republicans on the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, over 1600 polling places were closed by Republican-controlled states, most in Black neighborhoods. GOP-run state after state passed laws making it harder to register to vote, allowing challenges to voters and purges of voting rolls, and making it easier to refuse to count mail-in votes from cities with Democratic majorities by claiming signature mismatches.

Reporter Greg Palast estimates that if this had not happened and every eligible voter was allowed to vote and every vote cast was counted, Kamala Harris would today be president.

Republicans also work hard to select their voters, rather than allowing voters to select their representatives. While Democratic states have largely abandoned gerrymandering — which could have given Democrats a majority in the House today — Republican states have doubled down on the practice year after year.

Donald Trump has rolled out a new meme cybercurrency that will allow any billionaire, company, or foreign country to shovel as much money as they want into his own personal pockets, presumably in exchange for whatever government contract, subsidy, or help they can negotiate with the new president.

The Confederacy, organized and run by a small handful of plantation oligarchs, was also notoriously corrupt, and state governments in the Old South often ran on a naked bribe system.

Slaveholders in the Old South used Christianity to justify their inexecrable practice. Today’s MAGA Confederates are no less hypocritical.

Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality or abortion, although he was explicit that preachers shouldn’t pray in public and that the only way to join Him in heaven was to feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, house the homeless, and visit those in prison.

None of that matters, though, to the sanctimonious hustlers running megachurches and appearing on TV and radio; their only goal is to increase their own wealth and power. And Trump, who didn’t even bother to put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, promises to gift them with money and prestige so long as they keep delivering their parishioners to the voting booths for Republicans.

Republicans across the nation have succeeded in banning thousands of books that feature or even contain queer characters or discuss homosexuality or transsexuality from schools and libraries. They’re also launching legal efforts — with the explicit support of Clarence Thomas — to outlaw gay marriage and adoption, with the ultimate goal of sending queer people back into the closet as they were prior to the 1980s.

Trump, meanwhile, promises to only recognize two sexes, essentially outlawing trans people.

Republicans are proposing in their platform to micromanage school curriculum nationwide by “defunding schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination.”

This appears to include removing references to our nation’s history of slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy; rewriting economic and social studies textbooks to make them more billionaire-friendly; and attacking socialism and communism in ways that may cause students to think that Social Security and similar programs are wrong.

In the Old South it was the Ku Klux Klan and the slave patrols.

Today there are dozens of white supremacist groups and independent militias, all devoted to white supremacy and Christian nationalism. Trump’s pardons of the criminals involved in January 6th tells us he’s committed to having the militias that support him rebuild their ranks and get back out onto the streets, but this time on his behalf.

And his continued opposition to gun control signals that, like dictators throughout history and most recently in Hungary and Russia, he wants them armed and dangerous.

The bottom line is that the oligarchy of the old Confederacy never really went away and arguably has just taken over the United States 164 years after they first fired on Fort Sumpter, this time with “Tech Bros” replacing plantation owners.

The big question now is whether they’ll be able to hang onto the wealth and power they’ve managed to seize with this election. Oligarchy, after all, is usually a transitional form of government because people get so angry about the government doing everything for the rich and powerful and little to nothing for them that they demand change.

Popular discontent rises until the oligarchs either slam down an iron fist to crush it with violence and thus flip the country into the type of tyranny you see today in Russia, or citizens overcome the oligarchy and restore democracy, as happened in Ukraine when Paul Manifort’s guy (and Putin’s friend) was deposed by the people in 2019, replacing him with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Which way will it go in America? Unless Trump gets really violent really fast (a possibility), we’ll probably know with the results of next year’s midterm elections…

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no lnx

an 1 25

The evolution of political bribery — and the real reason for the $Trump coins

Thom Hartmann January 23, 2025

Both Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon took cash bribes while in the White House and before. Agnew’s dated back to shakedowns he did as Maryland governor, while Nixon helped Jimmy Hoffa get out of a prosecution and allegedly ran interference for a group of milk producers.

Since then, bribing politicians has gotten a lot easier thanks to five Republicans on the US Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, decided 15 years ago this week, legalized political bribery so long as it is done through campaign, PAC, or SuperPAC funds.

But for some people there’s just never enough money.

Donald Trump had been running small-time hustles to make money for decades, selling sneakers, bibles, steaks, vodka, water, etc., and he expanded these schemes when he became president in 2016 to let his followers give him money in exchange for what they thought were collectable assets.

Remember, back in 2000, when he was first seriously considering running for president (on the Reform Party ticket), he said:

“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

After his son-in-law got $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, though, and his companies made an estimated $2.4 billion during his last presidency, it appears that Trump decided the small stuff was for pikers so he’s going to crank the door wide open to serious tens-of-billions-of-dollars money.

First, he and his son-in-law are working with several foreign governments, including Bulgaria and Vietnam, to build Trump properties that will fatten Trump‘s wallet. This, in itself, is a blatant example of how foreign governments can buy influence with his administration.

But then he kicked the door to corruption even wider.

A “fungible crypto asset” like the new $TRUMP coin (and the $MELANIA coin) is essentially a digital picture that’s limited in its issue to a certain number of items. Each individual “coin” is separately kept and can be traded on the Solana blockchain, guaranteeing there won’t be counterfeits.

So, what people are buying when they pick up $TRUMP coins are essentially tiny digital pictures of his face with the words “fight, fight, fight!” They have no intrinsic or underlying value, and are not backed by any asset, crypto or otherwise. Their “collector value” — which is how they’re being hawked on his website — is equally sketchy, particularly if there will be a billion of them in circulation.

Bottom line: it appears that $TRUMP coins are simply a way “friends of Trump” can funnel cash to him and he can verify their transfer so he could, if he chose, help them out.

Trump initially issued 200 million of the coins, and they’re currently trading at $33.69 each (down from $75.35 earlier in the week), meaning the market value or capitalization of $TRUMP is currently $7.59 billion, exceeding even the more generous estimates of Trump’s previous net worth.

When he releases another 800 million over the next three years it appears he’ll make tens of billions more, so long as people or governments keep buying/trading them.

Thus, anybody who wants to give Trump a large amount of money, presumably in exchange for his good will or even a specific change in policy or position, now no longer has to visit the White House with a briefcase full of cash like Jimmy Hoffa and the milk guys did.

All they have to do is drop a few million or billion on $TRUMP and, because the Solana blockchain is public, Trump can immediately see who’s giving him cash. The rest of us can’t though: the blockchain only identifies the purchaser’s wallet, which is typically an obscure set of numbers. But if that purchaser has told Trump which wallet is theirs, he can track down who spiffed him and who didn’t.

The Founders of our republic were very concerned about this type of scenario. Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist 22:

“Evils of this description ought not to be regarded as imaginary. One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. …

“In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust… Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments. How much this contributed to the ruin of the ancient commonwealths has been already delineated.”

This led to the Constitution containing the Foreign Emoluments Clause, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, that explicitly says:

“[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Interestingly, Alexander Hamilton believed the clause didn’t apply to the president or vice president; when he was Secretary of the Treasury, the Senate asked him to clarify by submitting a list of office holders who were subject to the clause’s provisions. His list only included political appointees.

The Supreme Court has never issued a decision on the Emoluments Clause, either, adding to the ambiguity of the state of the law.

To solve the problem of this uncertainty, in 1966 Congress passed The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act which specifically identified the president and vice president as “employees” of the US government who may not, under penalty of prosecution, accept any gift with more than minimal value without congressional approval.

Enforcing that law, though, would require Trump’s Attorney General to investigate his cash flow and then prosecute him, something that’s unlikely given how he will apparently (based on how Pam Bondi avoided answering direct questions) only appoint people to that position who promise loyalty to him above the Constitution or the good of our nation.

And any sort of congressional investigation of Trump taking what may appear to be bribes is equally unlikely; he’s made it clear that he and Elon will destroy any elected Republican in their next primary who tries to hold him accountable.

On top of all that, the $TRUMP coin is just a small part of a much larger and rather sprawling collection of internet- and blockchain-based crypto operations Trump and his family are involved with that could make them billions. Wendy Siegelman does a deep dive into them over at her brilliant Substack newsletter.

With the $TRUMP coin vehicle that enables foreign governments, princes, and even domestic billionaires or companies to shovel millions or even billions directly into Trump’s pockets, it appears that he’s decided to leave his working class MAGA followers in the dust and redirect his efforts toward the truly morbidly rich.

After all, he can’t run for election again (and will be 82) in 2028 (unless he pulls a Putin and runs for VP); he no longer needs his MAGA followers, at least as a revenue source, for the moment.

In his inaugural speech, Trump referred to his second presidency as the start of a “golden age” for America. Most likely, though, it’ll just be a golden pile of cash filling the money bin of the most corrupt president in American history…

NOW READ: Predictably cruel and bonkers Trump has an antidote

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NO LNX

alternet-

It's time to wake up: The GOP isn't interested in democracy

Thom Hartmann January 15, 2025

There’s no compromising with evil, although some Democrats apparently think they can. Evil, by its very nature, will always win in such situations, even when it appears to have compromised or cooperated.

“Evil” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a force that causes bad things to happen.”

In a democracy—derived from the Greek root demos, meaning “the people”—the core principle is governance that serves the collective well-being of its citizens. When decisions or actions prioritize the interests of a small, privileged group or industry over the needs of the majority, they undermine this principle.

Such actions can be rightly viewed as “a force that causes bad things to happen” for the broader population, eroding trust and equality within the system. Evil, in other words.

Today’s Republican Party is now fully in the service of:

— The fossil fuel industry, which is threatening all life on Earth and just this week helped light Los Angeles on fire.

— The for-profit health insurance industry, which is (according to The Lancet) responsible for over 65,000 Americans dying unnecessarily every year.

— A group of rightwing billionaires who appear committed to replacing American democracy with oligarchy, which, as noted before, eventually morphs into tyranny.

— The gun industry, responsible for terrorizing and psychologically scarring our nation’s schoolchildren with active shooter drills, not to mention the highest gun homicide rate in the developed world.

— For-profit movements to end/privatize public school and keep college unaffordable.

— An investment industry financializing housing, which has caused a crisis of affordability and widespread homelessness.

— The predators in the banking industry who crashed our economy on George W. Bush’s watch and then walked away with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money.

The list, of course, goes on (including the GOP’s loyalty to the military/industrial complex and Putin), but the point is that all of these portend such dramatically terrible consequences for average Americans that they could realistically be termed “evil.”

And now a few Democrats apparently think they can “compromise” with these proudly in-the-service-of-evil people. It’s a terrible mistake.

Take the Laken Riley Act. It contains a provision that would give Trump the power to detain any undocumented immigrant in America who’s accused of a crime, including such minor crimes as shoplifting, with life imprisonment.

As Michelle Goldberg wrote this week for The New York Times:

“It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are merely arrested for any theft-related crimes, with no provision to free them if the charges are later dropped. …

“The bill applies to many immigrants who are authorized to be here, including Dreamers and those with temporary protected status. And the legislation contains no exemption for minors. As Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me, the Laken Riley Act could mandate the indefinite detention of a juvenile child of asylum-seekers arrested for swiping a candy bar, even if he or she didn’t do it.”

And yet John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego — who both ran for office as principled progressives — have jumped on board, co-sponsoring the legislation.

Presumably they haven’t done their homework, which is problematic itself, but they also should have known that any legislation that includes explicit attacks on President Biden (“victims of the Biden administration’s open borders policies”) as part of its original language is a GOP stalking horse.

You can’t compromise with evil.

That’s not to say that Democrats and Republicans can’t have interests that overlap where they can work together.

But this illustrates the very real danger of collaborating with people who are not operating in good faith, and whose allegiance is to billionaires and predators instead of to their constituents and the people of the United States. Who will do or say just about anything to please their funders and/or Donald Trump.

Like yesterday when Mike Johnson, whose state got $1.7 billion in federal aid to deal with Hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Ida, just told CNN that if California — which Trump hates, and whose governor he wants to prevent from ever becoming president — wants disaster aid:

“I think there should be conditions on that aid.”

Historically, disasters brought Americans together. It’s a human instinct, among normal people, to reach out to care for other humans in crisis.

But not with Trump and today’s GOP: they are absolutely set on exploiting this climate-change-driven disaster in California to destroy Democrats. Trump is leading the charge, and elected Republicans and rightwing media are enthusiastically jumping on board.

And for some inexplicable reason, outside of Gavin Newsome, most Democrats are not aggressively fighting back. They should instead be using his and the GOP’s outrageous efforts to exploit this disaster to hammer them.

As Steve Schmidt wrote in his The Warning newsletter:

“Being nice to Trump means being capitulant. When it comes to kneeling in front of the man whom Scarborough called Hitler, there is nothing civil about it. In fact, it is as indecent an act as there is.”

The preeminent advantage evil people have when they go into politics, after all, is their willingness and ability to lie without compunction. Trump is the master at it, and now it’s demanded of every Republican every time they show up on a Sunday show.

Normal humans always want to give the benefit of the doubt, to trust others, to assume the best, and evil liars actively exploit this for their own gain.

Like when Republicans said that cutting taxes on billionaires will help average people, that a national healthcare system and free college won’t work in America, that more guns means less violence, or that Iraq played a role in 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction.

Or look at how Trump has endorsed Putin’s attack on Ukraine and Xi’s designs on Taiwan — complete violations of the post-WWII rules-based-order — by proclaiming that America would consider using military force to annex Panama and/or Greenland.

We’re already seeing the evil that Republicans have embraced this new year being actively normalized by our media; yesterday’s Senate hearings with Pete Hegseth were a great example. In any other era, any other incoming administration in American history, a man who broke trust with three wives and was repeatedly accused of drunkenness on the job wouldn’t get past the first interview and would shock the press.

But this incoming administration is being run by a man with 34 felony convictions, a credible allegation of rape, who himself cheated on each of his three wives just like Hegseth allegedly did. Evil, it turns out, flows from the top down.

Next up, to fund their tax cuts for billionaires, Republicans will most likely attach a debt-ceiling suspension or increase to must-pass legislation favored by Democrats or disaster aid. And if it’s held up by principled opposition, the media will probably bow to Republican framing, blaming Democrats.

The next two years are going to be very dangerous for Democratic legislators. They’ll be wined and dined by evil people, threatened and vilified if they don’t cave in, and praised in the media when they do.

Billionaires and their agents will reach out to some the way they did with Kyrsten Sinema, and a few Democratic senators will probably fall under their sway. It looks like John Fetterman is already leaning in that direction.

They need to remember Winston Churchill’s sage advice:

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."

Evil never surrenders: It’s time to stand up and fight.

NOW READ: Republicans are tearing each other apart — and Democrats need to exploit it

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alternet

It's not just social media that's giving violent white supremacists a pass

Thom Hartmann January 11, 2025

— The fossil fuel industry is apparently paying off Republicans — in a practice legalized by Republicans on the Supreme Court — to make sure Congress never passes legislation to hold them accountable for all the death and destruction they’ve caused by lying about climate change for the past 50 years. }:

Here, for example, are the biggest recipients of their largesse, according to OpenSecrets:

Romney, Mitt (R-UT) $8,291,262; Cornyn, John (R-TX) $4,678,062; Cruz, Ted (R-TX) $4,138,421; McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) $2,852,107; McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA) $2,581,832; Hutchison, Kay Bailey (R-TX) $2,332,021; Inhofe, James M (R-OK) $2,320,139; Pearce, Steve (R-NM) $2,236,714; Barton, Joe (R-TX) $2,211,987; Brady, Kevin (R-TX) $2,087,396; Scalise, Steve (R-LA) $1,847,013; Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK) $1,792,602.

If you haven’t yet noticed the trend, just check out the party affiliation of each…}:

— Convicted Felon Trump now has the “Scarlet F”: Our first felon President. There was a time that many of us remember when America — for all our faults, history, and stupid international meddling — was seen around the world as a beacon of morality and the staunchest defender of democratic values. Now, we’re the laughingstock — or the terror — of the developed world, since a grifting adjudicated sexual abuser, Putin lackey, and chronic liar is about to become president again. Alexander Hamilton warned us, but our media was far too busy fluffing Trump’s ego and sanewashing his BS to remind us that our first Secretary of the Treasury and the main author of the Federalist Papers wrote, in 1792:

“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy... When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day

It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” (Emphasis added)}:

And “directing the whirlwind” of racial hate, fear, and bigotry — as I regularly point out here on Hartmann Report— is exactly what Trump thinks he can do to reverse the Civil Rights movement and the New Deal (I’m skeptical he can pull it off). The Founders — and FDR and LBJ — must be rolling in their graves…

— It's not just social media that's giving violent white supremacists a pass... Without telling us, so far as I can tell, Bloomberg is reporting that the FBI (and the DHS more generally) stopped seriously monitoring and infiltrating violent white supremacist groups two years ago, around the time they were being trashed for such investigations by sedition-, Putin-, and Trump-loving Republicans in the House. The pressure seems to have worked.

“In 2022, DHS closed its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to offer best practices in countering viral conspiracies,” reports Bloomberg, adding that, “DHS also recently shuttered a unit that swept the internet for threatening materials in public posts, social media messages and online forums…”

Putin’s internet trolls, operating with huge budgets and the resources of the Russian state behind them, have since become a major force on the top social media sites, and both X and Meta are no longer suppressing their lies and attacks on democracy. Is it fossil fuel billionaires or social media billionaires who are the greatest threat to the future of world peace and democracy? Hard to choose…

— Greedy insurer interrupts cancer surgery in shocking mid-procedure call... Dr. Elisabeth Potter was in the middle of surgery on a breast cancer patient when a nurse ran into the operating theater to say that UnitedHealthcare was on the phone demanding to speak with her. She interrupted the surgery, leaving the unconscious patient whose chest was cut open on the table, to take the call. Here’s her story in her own words, as she told it on Instagram and later confirmed with Newsweek:

“So, I scrubbed out of my case and I called UnitedHealthcare, and the gentleman said he needed some information about her. Wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her inpatient stay should be justified. And I was like, ‘Do you understand this? She's asleep right now and she has breast cancer?’ And the gentleman said, ‘Actually, I don’t — that’s a different department that would know that information.’ And I was like, ‘Well, she does need to stay overnight tonight, and you have all the information with you because I got approval for this surgery, and I need to go back and be with my patient now.’ But, yeah, it’s out of control. Insurance is out of control. I have no other words.”

I can think of a few words: Parasitic, thief, malefic, heinous, flagitious, depraved, monstrous, mephistophelean, godless, loathsome, psychopathic, cruel, sadistic, maleficient, and vile for a start… Feel free to add your nouns or adjectives in the comments below.

— Indiana Republicans want to threaten rape victims with felonies if they try to get an abortion. Over at her brilliant “Abortion Every Day” substack newsletter, Jessica Valenti tells us that Indiana State Senator Mike Young has proposed legislation that would subject a woman in that state to 2.5 years in prison if she were to claim rape to get an abortion (about the only way to get an abortion in Indiana, unless your life is in danger) and then can’t subsequently prove to the satisfaction of the state’s GOP that she was actually raped.}:

The bill also makes it a crime to possess the abortion drug mifepristone, evoking the possibility of midnight raids with Indiana police kicking in the doors of women who Indiana Republicans think may have purchased the drug from an online telehealth physician. Freedumb!!}:

— Wondering why Trump is on a jeremiad against Panama? Some suggest his rant was timed to coincide with Jimmy Carter’s funeral to give rightwing media an excuse to trash Carter’s signing the Panama Canal Treaty that Nixon first started negotiating. But consider this story from Newsweek titled “Trump Organization Accused of Tax Evasion in Panama.” Just like the way he scammed New York State out of tax dollars (for which he was adjudicated and sentenced last year) his failed hotel in Panama hadn’t been paying its taxes either. Trump’s involved in a huge lawsuit down their right now, and some speculate that toppling the Panamanian government might work out well for his personal interests. Keep an eye on this one!

— James Carville suggests Jeff Bezos is trying to buy Trump via Melania. Amazon has just announced that they’re going to spend $40 million on a documentary about Melania Trump, who got her legal status in the US with a “genius visa” that’s typically reserved for the world’s top scientists and Nobel Prize winners (there are only around 3,000 issued every year). Carville, who was himself the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, implies that this number stinks of a payoff:

“This is something I’m going to claim some expertise in, the subject of documentaries because I’ve been the subject of two and I’ve been the subject of a recent one… You can produce a world class documentary for $2 million. I know it. You couldn’t spend $40 million on a documentary if you tried 10 times harder to do it, so where’s the money going? Well, we know where the money is going.”

Why? Well, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorneys general are suing Amazon for allegedly maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices, and Bezos apparently hates unions and might want help stopping them in his warehouses…

— Crazy Alert! Greenlanders really hate Trump, so Don Jr. had to hire homeless people to make it look like somebody was welcoming him. Danish Radio (which once loaned me a studio for two weeks to do my show: great people!) is reporting that after having Greenlanders give him the finger in the airport and post “Yankee go home” on Facebook, Don Jr. had to hire a few local “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people to pretend to be Trump supporters for his recent stunt visiting that country. As one local, Tom Amtof of the town of Nuuk, told DR News: “All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful.” Yeah, distasteful. Again, there are other words…

NOW READ: Trump and his minions attempt to make America small, stupid and mean

AN 1 25

alternet

Trump's mysterious relationship with Zuckerberg — and the real reason behind Meta's shift

Thom Hartmann January 09, 2025

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (wearing a $900,000 watch) announced yesterday morning that across their over-7-billion-user-strong social media empire — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — they’ll be dialing back on fact-checking. They’re also preparing to promote more “political” content (among other changes that support those two moves, like no longer filtering out trash-talking women, queer people, or immigrants, and moving what’s left of their Trust & Safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas).

Here’s the problem: Republican politicians rely on lies, distortions, and falsehoods to sell most of their policies and candidates.

They must do this because the reality of their actual goals (cut billionaire taxes, increase pollution, gut worker and consumer protections, defund schools and medical care, privatize and cut Social Security and Medicare, subsidize oil companies, outlaw abortion, etc.) are so repellent to most Americans.

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has been shockingly scrupulous for decades about telling the truth, at least with regard to policy. The last “big lie” I can remember coming from the Dems was LBJ’s claiming that North Vietnam had attacked us at the Gulf of Tonkin. And that was 60 years ago!

Seriously, can you think of any major Democratic Party lies in the past few decades that Democratic politicians repeated regularly on cable TV shows, op-eds, and in campaign commercials? Particularly, lies about important public policy debates and the structure of our government and its programs?

I did a search for “Democratic lies” using 2 different AI programs, Google, and DuckDuckGo. The worst I could find — none of which are consequential or even real, actual, or oft-repeated lies — were, according to those search sites:

— Only the rich will pay more taxes under proposed policies.

— A transition to green energy won’t cost any jobs.

— Sanctuary cities reduce crime rates universally.

— Social media platforms primarily suppress left-wing voices.

— Trump’s Project 2025 wasn’t actually Trump’s project.

— Expanding federal funding for education guarantees improved student outcomes.

— Kamala Harris falsely claimed Trump encouraged Putin to invade U.S. allies.

— Harris mischaracterized a border security bill as the "strongest in decades."

— Tim Walz falsely attributed a quote about ruthless use of power to JD Vance.

— Illinois Governor JB Pritzker misleadingly claimed Trump told people to drink bleach for COVID-19.

— Electric vehicles are affordable and practical for all Americans, regardless of income or location.

On the other hand, those same sources handed me this (partial) list of actual and destructive-to-democracy-and-society lies that are regularly told and promoted by Republicans in pretty much every venue and show up every Sunday on the political shows:

— The 2020 election was stolen.

— Global warming isn’t real or important.

— Giving tax cuts to billionaires helps average working people.

— Biden “opened” our southern border for four years.

— Democrats encourage illegal immigrants to vote.

— Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that’s going broke and can only be fixed by cutting benefits or privatization.

— A national healthcare system like every other advanced democracy in the world has won’t work in America.

— Free or inexpensive college doesn’t benefit the nation, but student debt builds “individual responsibility.”

— The Democratic Party is filled with sexual monsters and child predators who drink blood.

— Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and Afghanistan was responsible for 9/11.

— The United States was founded as a Christian nation, and the Founding Fathers intended it to be governed by biblical law.

— Critical Race Theory is being taught in elementary schools to make white children feel guilty.

— Cutting corporate taxes leads to higher wages for workers.

— Climate change policies are an attack on the economy and personal freedom.

— Gun control laws lead to higher crime rates.

— Wind and solar energy are unreliable and will destroy the energy grid.

— LGBTQ+ rights threaten religious freedom and the safety of children.

— Voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States.

— Democrats want to abolish the police and create lawless “anarchy zones.”

— Universal basic income or expanded welfare programs discourage hard work.

— Raising the minimum wage will destroy small businesses and increase unemployment.

— Public schools are indoctrinating children with Marxist and homosexual ideologies.

— The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) caused massive job losses and economic ruin.

— Immigration is the primary cause of crime and drug trafficking in the U.S.

— The January 6th insurrection was a peaceful protest.

— Unions are corrupt and hurt workers more than they help.

— Democrats are pushing to remove God and religion from American society.

— The mainstream media is entirely biased and acts as a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party.

— Raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt small businesses and destroy the economy.

— Abortion is murder, and Democrats support killing babies even after birth.

— Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable and should be privatized.

— America’s biggest national security threat is China, not climate change.

— Universal background checks for gun purchases are a slippery slope to gun confiscation.

— The U.S. military is being weakened by “woke” policies and diversity initiatives.

— Public health measures during pandemics, like masks and vaccines, are a government overreach and an attack on personal freedom.

— The Green New Deal will eliminate cows, airplanes, and American jobs.

— The COVID-19 vaccine is part of a government tracking or depopulation program.

— Teachers’ unions are destroying education by prioritizing their own interests over students.

— Democrats want to eliminate suburbs through urban housing policies.

— Cutting capital gains taxes helps working Americans and stimulates the economy.

— The U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, and any changes would make it worse.

— Climate scientists are exaggerating or fabricating evidence to get government funding.

— Most Americans support banning books and other restrictions on teaching controversial topics.

— Homelessness is caused by laziness and bad personal choices, not systemic issues like housing costs and investment operations.

— DEI, Affirmative Action, and similar programs are a form of “reverse racism” that discriminates against white people.

— Black immigrants eat white people’s dogs and cats.

— January 6th was an inside FBI operation, a Democratic Party Antifa operation, or both.

These lies have political potency and have often altered election outcomes. Many or even most are frequently promoted by Republican politicians at every opportunity. Many are at the foundation of GOP political campaigns.

Zuckerberg, the country’s richest millennial (with an estimated 1/50th of all American millennial’s wealth in his own money bin), recently made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ass and hand him a $1 million check.

Yesterday, Trump bragged that Zuck did this because he was frightened by Trump’s explicit and written threat to put him in prison for the “rest of his life.” He essentially bragged, “I’m alpha, Zuck is beta.”

Zuckerberg also put one of Trump’s closest personal buds, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship Dana White, on Meta’s board of directors, where White can keep an eye on the CEO for Trump.

Finally, Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for George W. Bush, to Chief Global Affairs Officer. Kaplan then went on Fox and bragged that they were making the changes because Trump is coming into the White House:

“We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”

Right.

One hand washes the other. Meta is fighting the federal government right now, which wants to break up its alleged monopoly. Trump’s friends Putin and the rightwing death squad militias forming in America — when their most violent members are let out of prison with a pardon — can now have free rein to dominate, recruit, and terrorize on social media, much like they did before.

Most important, though, in a nation where one political party routinely uses lies and distortions but the other is generally committed to telling the truth, who benefits when the “free expression” of political lies is dramatically boosted?

(And none of this even begins to explore the political bias of the algorithms used by Meta and X to promote rage-producing content to users…because those algorithms are secret.)

Meta and X could prioritize telling the truth and stopping — or at least identifying — naked political lies to help stabilize America’s political system and society. Instead, it appears that the 54% of Americans who get all or most of their news from social media are now about to get drenched in a hurricane of Republican lies and misinformation.

This is not without consequences for our nation and the world.

The removal of fact-checkers and subsequent increase in false online information, which we’ve already seen on other platforms, erodes truth and accountability in public discourse, creates fertile ground for authoritarian politicians, undermines democratic processes, and fuels societal polarization.

It’s exactly what Vladimir Putin wants for America and has paid millions for trolls to produce for years, which is why it’s no surprise that Donald Trump would threaten Mark Zuckerberg to make it happen.

Without a shared baseline of truth, meaningful public debate becomes impossible. People retreat into echo chambers, making collective problem-solving a relic of the past and turning governance into a tool for manipulation rather than representation.

Ultimately, this path leads to a dystopia where truth becomes irrelevant, power dictates reality, and the fundamental principles of democracy — accountability, transparency, and representation — are destroyed.

The proof that we’re already a far ways down this road is that — by substantial margins — voters who got their news and political/current events information from traditional sources like major newspapers and the mainstream TV networks (that still fact-check) voted for Harris, while those who got most of their news from social media primarily voted for Trump.

Republican strategists know this and are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Meta following X’s path.

But the worst of it is that virtually all of the Democratic “lies” aren’t really lies; they’re usually disjointed attempts to push policies (like raising taxes on the rich or Medicare For All) that ultimately benefit average Americans.

On the other side, though, virtually all of the Republican “lies” are actual lies or major distortions designed to either inflame bigoted passions or conceal the real goal of what they’re doing in the background (typically to make the morbidly rich even richer).

For example, as the press is focused on Trump‘s Greenland rants, Republicans in Congress are preparing a massive multi-trillion-dollar tax cut (that will fuel inflation and further impoverish working-class people) for billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Trump.

The old sleight-of-hand begins anew, with social media ready to put it on steroids.

Using massive amounts of naked lies as a political strategy is relatively new in America, having started with Reagan promising that trickle down would increase prosperity and gone into hyperdrive with Trump’s first lie-filled term.

By killing off or even reducing meaningful fact-checking, Zuckerberg, like Musk before him, is handing a loaded gun to a GOP ready and willing to use it, while Democrats are left with, at best, slingshots that they really don’t even want to use (and aren’t particularly good at).

And you can bet your bottom dollar that billionaires Trump, Zuckerberg, Putin, and Musk know it.

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no lnx

alternet-

Americans are doubling down on the thing that hurts them the most

Thom Hartmann January 07, 2025

Yesterday, Congress certified the electoral vote count making a billionaire president again, starting after he’s sworn in on January 20th.

Yes, we chose a billionaire. Again. After other billionaires spent billions to convince us to make that choice.

As you’re reading these words, billionaires from America and around the world are making pilgrimages to his shabby golf motel to kiss our upcoming billionaire president’s ass and hand him envelopes with $1 million checks that represent a few hours (at most) of income for most of them or their companies.

Meanwhile, our billionaire president-in-waiting is packing his cabinet — the heads of all of the most important federal agencies — with even more billionaires. This is all being celebrated over on billionaire-owned Fox “News” and on billionaire-owned hate radio networks, as well as in the billionaire-owned Washington Post, LA Times, and the roughly half of American local newspapers owned by billionaire hedge funds.

Other countries enjoy benefits like free healthcare and college; modern mass transit; and affordable housing, food, and drugs.

They also have inexpensive internet and phone service without companies listening in and selling their information, schools that don’t even need to mention school shooters, and streets and parks filled with pedestrians and children instead of tents for the homeless.

Additionally, they benefit from renewable electricity that gets cheaper every year while cleaning their environment.

We, on the other hand, have the world‘s largest collection of billionaires.

Most Americans probably didn’t realize this was the choice they were making in the election of 1980 when Reagan and Bush promised “Morning In America.”

We’d been battered by that generation’s version of the Covid shock: when Arab nations got together to punish us for taking Israel’s side and cut off our oil supply in 1973, it threw us into a decade-long period of “stagflation” (high unemployment and inflation).

Nixon couldn’t handle it; odd/even days at the gas pumps merely infuriated drivers.

Jerry Ford couldn’t handle it; his “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were a sad joke that guaranteed he’d become a one-term president.

Jimmy Carter made some good progress — particularly with his plan for a “national solar bank” that would provide 20% of the country’s energy by 2000 — but Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election, ending Jimmy’s hopes for a second term.

By the time Reagan ran for office in 1980, inflation was still a problem; it was an echo of the 1973 oil embargo, amplified by a second oil shock resulting from the 1979 Iranian revolution, again exploding American gasoline prices and cutting economic growth.

By that time, as I detail in The Hidden History of the American Dream, we were desperate.

Reagan — an even more talented actor than Trump (who NBC spent millions training to act for TV cameras) — convinced us he had it all figured out. At first, his promises were vague; something about supply-side economics, “trickle down,” and Laffer Curves that nobody really understood (and George HW Bush initially called “Voodoo Economics”).

Once he took office, America watched with hope and some trepidation as Reagan turned our economy inside-out, massively cut taxes on the country’s thirteen billionaires, repeatedly raised taxes on millions of working-class people, cut and taxed Social Security, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, gutted federal funds for education, killed off two-thirds of the country’s unions, and, negotiating the GATT and NAFTA agreements, beginning the process of offshoring over 60,000 factories.

Reagan never got inflation below 4 percent and he almost tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to roughly $2.2 trillion), but throwing around those trillions in borrowed money made it seem like the economy was getting better even as wages were frozen by monopolists and a lack of union representation.

And that’s how we got the billionaires.

Back in 1980, nobody in America was rich enough to shoot himself into space on a penis-shaped rocket, and superyachts were a fantasy. The nation’s richest man was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, whose net worth — at just a bit below $2 billion — wouldn’t even qualify him for today’s Forbes 500 list; he lived a low-key life and, like most wealthy men of that era, didn’t much involve himself in politics (there were laws back then against rich people subsidizing federal judges or politicians).

But Reagan’s changes in the tax code and destruction of unions led to a 50,000 billion dollar ($50 trillion) transfer of wealth from the pensions, homes, incomes, and bank accounts of middle class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich between 1981 and today.

We had only 13 billionaires from 1980 to 1986 but — with Reagan’s final tax cut which took the rate on multimillion-dollar incomes from over 70% down to 28% — that number began to explode. By 1990, there were 99 billionaires in America; today there are over 800 of them, representing a more-than-50-fold increase in just four decades.

Not content with simply grabbing much of America’s wealth for themselves, a handful of our billionaires next reached out for control of our government.

They created media empires, think tanks, and policy centers, both writing and then pushing their own legislation that was dutifully carried into law by politicians they’d bought off. They outright purchased the entire GOP, along with a large handful of elected “problem solver” Democrats.

They set up institutions to seize control of our independent judiciary; five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court returned the favor by fully legalizing billionaires buying elections with their Citizens United decision in 2010.

Total spending on federal elections — for president, the House, and the Senate combined — was $92 million in 1980, $103 million in 1984, and $324 million in 1988. How quaint!

Just one billionaire — Elon Musk — spent over a quarter billion dollars putting Trump into office this past fall. Other billionaires jumped in, pushing total 2024 spending over $7 billion (and that doesn’t count dark money, which is almost certainly billions more).

Saudi billionaires jumped in to help billionaire Musk purchase Twitter for $44 billion, turning it, along with an alleged army of Russian-billionaire-funded trolls pretending to be Americans, into a massive megaphone to elect billionaire-friendly Republicans including billionaire Trump.

They’re now building “conservative” colleges and primary schools, funded with state tax money thanks to bought-off politicians, that will educate the generation coming up that billionaires are a necessary and benevolent force in the world.

And we don’t talk about our nation’s billionaire problem because billionaires own or control so many of the nation’s channels of news and discussion from social media to television networks to newspapers.

Even simple, traditional political endorsements get censored; G-d forbid somebody (who won a Pulitzer!) should draw a cartoon showing media billionaires bowing down to our new billionaire president. Or speak out on billionaire-owned social media.

Maybe one day America will join the other 37 OECD “rich” nations in offering to our average- and low-income people nearly-free college and healthcare, removing guns from our streets and schools, housing the homeless, and building modern mass transit.

Maybe our middle class will again become socially and economically mobile, we’ll rid ourselves of over $2 trillion in student debt, and we’ll never again be the only developed country in the world where people lose everything to bankruptcy because somebody in the family got sick.

For at least the next four years, however, we must content ourselves with the proud knowledge that we have more billionaires than any other country in the world. That they now run out government, with their top 1 percent owning fully 40.5 percent of our nation’s entire wealth ($43.45 trillion). As the Forbes “Capitalist Tool” headline gloats: “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country.”

Yep, sure enough: We’re number one! And Trump and the GOP promise to do everything they can to keep it that way.

NOW READ: The criminals will soon be in charge: How Joe Biden helps normalize evil

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no lnx

alternet

The real reason Republican policies target wages, unions and public education

Thom Hartmann January 03, 2025

Donald Trump, a billionaire himself, will soon become president with a cabinet worth at least a third of a trillion dollars. Add Musk, and you’re over $800 billion in wealth held by this small handful of people.

By comparison, the entire combined net worth of Joe Biden’s cabinet is $118, million. That’s about one-tenth of one billion dollars: $0.118 billion. All of them, combined, including Biden himself, are worth what some of these billionaires make in a day.

To become a billionaire, generally you have to have a singular priority. One that is reflected in your work, your life, and your politics. And that priority, contrary to the poor MAGA suckers Trump and his billionaire buddies convinced to vote for him in November, has nothing to do with average Americans or the middle class.

If anything, it has to do with sucking as much wealth out of the middle class as possible to make yourself a billionaire. Just since Reagan‘s tax cuts, they’ve taken $50 trillion from us.

Remember Trump and Musk laughing about how Musk fired people when they tried to unionize?

How Jeff Bezos does battle with Amazon employees who want a union?

Or how Republicans have kept the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour — half of what it is in Australia and most of the rest of the developed world — and will seemingly fight to the death to keep it there?

How did we get here? How did the Republicans pull us off? How and why did it happen?

This Spring will be the 22nd anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40 years (since Reagan) that was:

— authored by Republicans,

— principally co-sponsored by Republicans,

— passed Congress with a Republican majority,

— signed by a Republican president,

— and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.

Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run states the real “shithole” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not just about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and Brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

By cutting government support for poor and working-class people, as Anand Giridharadas documents so well, those very average Americans will become more dependent on the noble philanthropists among the billionaire class and less bonded to their own nation’s government.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who want to get an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Last time he was president, Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories were humming and the stock market was rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans were just collateral damage.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” or “obsessively selfish” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor bankers!

It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun. And if any of their daughters were raped, they’d be getting an abortion in a New York minute.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity.

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers).

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. The Trump administration, for example, kicked off the midterm election year of 2018 by raiding over ninety 7-Eleven stores, hauling off undocumented Hispanic people for the cameras they invited to the arrests. Not a single employer went to jail, although they were the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

In fact, now they are fighting to bring more workers into the country who will do tech coding and be waiters at Trump’s gaudy golf motels.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Donald Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers or terrified by active shooter drills in our schools.

It’s a safe bet that over the next four years Trump and Republicans in Congress will not give my listeners an opportunity to win that contest.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, greed is all Republican politicians care about or are willing to fight for.

ALSO READ: What the science of predators tells us about the morbidly rich

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Inside the GOP plan that destroyed American jobs

Thom Hartmann January 02, 2025

Trump says he’s going to imprison and then deport millions of brown-skinned immigrants. He’s going after the wrong people.

It seems that ever time a Republican goes on one of the national political TV shows, they make sure to get in the lie that “Joe Biden opened the southern border wide open,” or toss in a reference to “Biden’s open borders.”

It is, of course, a viscious lie — but one that’s almost never called out by the hosts because it’s peripheral or tangential to the topic being discussed. And, as is so often the case, this all started with Reagan (more on that in a moment).

While it’s true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) the latest main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees is the Republican Party itself.

Lacking any actual, substantive economic issues to run on, the GOP decided after Biden’s election in 2021 to fall back on a familiar ploy: scare white people that brown people are coming for them and/or their jobs. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, I remember well how the GOP pitch to white people was that Black people wanted “our” jobs; now it’s brown people from south of the border.

Trump did this in the most crude, vulgar and racist way possible from his first entrance into the Republican primary through the end of his presidency. It frightened enough white voters that it got him into office once, and the GOP repeated that trick last November.

In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Their daily lies about American policies for the past four years are causing people to put their lives in danger.

The truth is that Joe Biden never “opened” our southern border.

“Open borders” have never been his policy or the Democratic Party’s policy or, indeed, the policy of any elected Democrat or Democratic strategist in modern American history.

Everybody understands and agrees that for a country to function it must regulate immigration, and it’s borders must have a reasonable level of integrity.

Republicans are playing a very dangerous game here. By loudly proclaiming their lie that Biden had “opened” the southern border and was “welcoming” immigrants and refugees “with open arms,” they created the very problem they’re pointing to.

Republican lies like this don’t stay in the United States.

As they get repeated through our media, even when most Americans realize they’re simply wild exaggerations (at the most charitable), the media of other countries are happy to pick up the story and spread it across Mexico and Central America.

This, in turn, encourages the desperate, the poor, and the ambitious to head north or send their teenage children northward in hopes for a better life. Meanwhile, criminal cartels have jumped into the human trafficking business in a big way, exploiting and aggressively repeating the GOP rhetoric to recruit new “customers.”

I lived and worked in Germany for a year, and it took me months to get a work-permit from that government to do so. I worked in Australia, and the process of getting that work-permit took a couple of months.

In both cases, it was my employers who were most worried about my successfully getting the work permits and did most of the work to make it happen. There’s an important reason for that.

The way that most countries prevent undocumented immigrants from disrupting their economies and causing cheap labor competition with their citizens is by putting employers in jail when they hire people who don’t have the right to work in that country.

We used to do this in the United States.

In the 1920s, the US began regulating immigration and similarly put into place laws regulating who could legally work in this country and who couldn’t.

Because there was so much demand for low-wage immigrant labor in the food belt of California during harvest season, President Dwight Eisenhower experimented with a program in the 1950s that granted season-long passes to workers from Mexico. Millions took him up on it, but his Bracero program failed because employers controlled the permits, and far too many used that control to threaten people who objected to having their wages stolen or refused to tolerate physical or sexual abuse.

A similar dynamic is at work today. Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.

Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.

It got this way in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people, and directed the government’s enforcement activities instead toward the least powerful and able to defend themselves: brown-skinned immigrants.

The result has been a labor market in the US that’s been distorted by undocumented workers creating a black-market for low-wage labor that many of America’s largest corporations enthusiastically support.

For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream. They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement.

Reagan and his Republican allies, with healthy campaign donations from both industries, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act to make it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.

As Brad Plumer noted in The Washington Post:

“[T]he bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. ‘The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,’ he says.”

So Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, and the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others.

Forty-dollar-an-hour American-citizen unionized workers were replaced with seven-dollar-an-hour undocumented workers desperate for a chance at a life in America for themselves and their children.

From the Republican point of view, an added bonus was that levels of unionization in both industries utterly collapsed. Reagan succeeded in transforming the American workplace, and set up decades of potential anti-Latino hysteria that Republicans could use as a political wedge.

Without acknowledging that it was Reagan himself who set up the “crisis,” Republicans today hold serious-sounding conferences and press availabilities about how “illegals” are “trying to steal Americans jobs!” They’re all over rightwing hate radio and in the conservative media on a near-daily basis.

But it’s not poor people coming here in search of safety or a better life who are impacting our labor markets (and, frankly, it’s a small impact): it’s the companies that hire them.

And those same companies then funded Republican politicians who pushed under-the-radar social media ads at African Americans in 2016 and the last election saying that Democrats wanted Hispanic “illegals” to come in to take their jobs.

America, it turns out, doesn’t have an “illegal immigrant” problem: we have an “illegal employer” problem.

Nonetheless, to paraphrase Mitch McConnell, they persist. As the AP noted in a recent article:

“Black lawmakers accused Republicans on Tuesday of trying to ‘manufacture tension’ between African-Americans and immigrants as GOP House members argued in a hearing that more minorities would be working were it not for illegal immigration.”

Tossing even more gasoline on the flame they, themselves, lit, Republicans are now amplifying the warnings and “danger” of undocumented immigrants by pulling out the Bush/Cheney “terrorist” card along with Trump’s “diseased rapist criminals” and “they want to take your job” tropes.

Because the GOP has been playing these kinds of racist, xenophobic games with immigration since the Reagan era, our immigration and refugee systems are a total mess. Trump additionally did everything he could to take an axe to anything that wasn’t a jail or a cage…and turned those jail cells into sweet little profit centers for his private-prison donor corporations.

America needs comprehensive immigration reform and a rational immigration policy that’s grounded in both compassion and enlightened economic self-interest. We need an honest debate around it, stripped of the GOP’s racial dog-whistles. And our media needs to stop taking GOP lies about immigration and the southern border at face value.

Americans — and people who want to become Americans out of hope or desperation — deserve better. And throwing some of these rich white employers in jail instead of terrified immigrants would be a good start.

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The devastating truth about the GOP's war on education

Thom Hartmann December 31, 2024

“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who

control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.

It wasn’t always this way.

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.

That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.

Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.

There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:

“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:

“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”

Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.

Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.

Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.

Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”

Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.

Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating

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New lessons for progressives — from the far right

Thom Hartmann December 24, 2024

Recently, I mentioned that I’d be sharing more specifics on how to reform the Democratic Party and seize control of our country back from the racist, misogynist MAGAs. This is the first article along those lines.

Progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the GOP: we should be learning from them.

No, we shouldn’t be learning from their bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest man.

But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party take over the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get out the vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:

“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?

“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties, if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party's platform.

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.

Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.

This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:

“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.

“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”

Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before the elections.

In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.

But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of people like the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: They’d filled up the Republican Party.

And we saw the results of the Precinct Committee takeover first in 2012 and most recently last month: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by activists who’ve taken over the party and are also running for school boards and other local offices.

In 2012, after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and 9 new seats in the Senate.

And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.

Progressives need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.

The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.

Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:

“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”

If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.

And as we see right now in Biden’s and Harris’ apparent inability to call out Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to an endless stream of Republican victories and the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.

We have been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, a women’s march in DC, or voting, although those are all important.

But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in one short year, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.

If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.

We have 23 months before the next national elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.

Good luck and get started!

NEXT UP: How to turn power over to billionaires who will leave you behind

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Home | How CEOs are funding one of America's most dangerous shifts

Thom HartmannDecember 18, 2024

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.”

—Donald Trump Dec. 10, 2024

The 1986 American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as:

“fascism (făsh'ĩz'am) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

We’re about to be there.

The power of government to both reward and punish is awesome. No other entity can legally take money away from citizens at gunpoint and hand it to others it favors. No other entity has the power to deprive people of their freedom and even their lives. No other entity can use both of those powers to regulate how business must be conducted.

When Disney, a $248 billion dollar company, decided to give a $15 million donation to Donald Trump’s presidential library slush fund, they didn’t do so because they were worried about losing a defamation lawsuit.

To the contrary, they would have easily won the case. The judge in Trump’s New York trial came right out and said, in front of God and the whole world:

“The finding Ms. Carroll failed to prove she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the N.Y. Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’. Indeed, as the evidence at trial… makes clear, the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

It’s also extraordinarily difficult for a public figure to sue for defamation, per the Supreme Court’s 1964 Times v Sullivan case, which requires proof of “actual malice,” a very, very high legal standard.

An article in The New York Times this past weekend added this gem of a paragraph, although ABC insists the meeting wasn’t arranged to discuss the defamation claim:

“Debra OConnell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Palm Beach last Monday, according to two people briefed on their interaction. The dinner was part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.”

Whether OConnell and Wiles discussed the defamation case or not is almost beside the point; the reasonable assumption is that Disney didn’t decide to pay off Trump because they were concerned about the lawsuit but, instead, because they wanted to be on the inside, rather than the outside, of the group of corporations that will make up the “friends of Trump” as he takes over the reins of government. Disney has already gotten their nose bloody by trying to stand up to Trump’s Mini-Me, Ron DeSantis; they’ve learned their lesson well.

This is, classically, how fascists work. In fascist states, corporations and wealthy individuals fall all over themselves to gain the favor of the fascist strongman leader or they lose out big.

When Putin took over Russia, he essentially said to the richest of the Russian oligarchs, “You can be with me or against me, but there is no middle ground.” Ditto for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán (who met with Trump in Florida last week), Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (who Trump praised this week), and history’s fascist strongmen from Tojo, Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini to more recent versions like Pinochet, el-Sisi, and Ceaușescu.

And now America. Soon to be the newest fascist state in the world.

This goes way beyond ignoring fascism’s chronicler Timothy Snyder’s warning not to “obey in advance”: The companies whose CEOs are making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago right now are actively trying to get on the inside with Trump by nakedly supporting him.

They both fear his punishments (he’d called for ABC to lose its broadcast licenses, for example) and hope for his largess when he instructs his federal agencies to start cutting regulations and going easy on corporate mergers and tax evasion.

For over 240 years, America was administered by presidents who adhered to the idea that they should govern, as then-New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs wrote in 1896, “without fear or favor.”

Not only did they not direct the government to help or harm any specific companies or industries, those elected to the White House over the past century or so even put their own personal wealth into blind trusts to avoid even the appearance of using government to enrich themselves.

All of that came to a screeching halt when the most corrupt (and richest) president in American history came into office in 2017. Now, empowered by having gotten away with encouraging outright sedition (among other crimes), Trump is doubling down as he accepts million-dollar “donations” from corporate CEOs.

While it’s unlikely oligarchs who refuse to go along with Trump will begin to fall out of 14th floor windows like in Russia, Trump has already made it clear he’ll use regulatory agencies and the courts to punish them like Orbán does.

This is not the American way. It is, instead, how fascist nations that inevitably morph into dictatorships work. It’s a huge warning signal to us and the world.

It also sets a terrible example for other republics around the world that aspire to our (former) ideals of democracy and fair play in business and government. And it sets our country up to become a sleazy tinpot dictatorship, descending to the ethics and credibility standards of Third World caricatures.

History is taking careful note of those CEOs who are energetically brown-nosing Trump, just as it did with Thyssen and Krupp, who were prosecuted for war crimes in the 1940s.

And to compound this evil, these businesses are adding to the power that Trump is rapidly accumulating as, one after another, they, politicians of both parties, and people across the media bow their heads and bend their knees.

Any company so willing to engage with such tainted government leadership should alarm us all: Going forward, the honesty, reliability, and safety of their products may well be corrupted by their praetorian relationship with Trump’s regulators, rather than responding to the competitive forces of the actual marketplace.

Which is also why, going forward, we’d all do best to avoid their programs, products, and services.

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How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare

Thom Hartmann December 16, 2024

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.

As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,

— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,

— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,

— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.

Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.

In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”

From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.

In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.

On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.

The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).

However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”

Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.

While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”

Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”

The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.

In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”

In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:

“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”

And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”

But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:

“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:

“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”

The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:

“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.

“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.

“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity.

“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.

“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:

“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”

And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:

“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).

Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:

“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”

Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:

“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”

The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.

His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:

“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:

“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”

Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.

We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.

Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.

NOW READ: Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare

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Thom Hartmann: Why I Support Move to Amend

Posted by Greg Coleridge 1859.20pc on December 11, 2024

Hi, Thom Hartmann here, author and progressive political commentator. Many of you know me from the #1 rated progressive nationally syndicated radio show, the Thom Hartmann Program.

I'm also a long time supporter of Move to Amend!

Please join with me in supporting their work to end corporate personhood and get big money out of politics.

This effort is more important than ever before. We will witness in 2025 much more blatant and intense schemes to capture the government and culture by corporations and billionaires to increase their power and profit. Resistance to single corporate assaults to individuals, communities and the environment will be important going forward in what will be a climate of attacks on marginalized groups and mass uprisings of people’s movements, and the increasingly corrupt and unjust neoliberal/conservative establishment that I report on daily.

However, equally, if not more, important, will be widening and deepening educating and mobilizing toward fundamental solutions like the We the People Amendment that increase people power over corporate power and the corrupting influence of money in politics.

No one else is doing the work Move to Amend does - confronting corporate personhood directly. Working with a committed, visionary and passionate group of individuals who understand the changes needed in the U.S. is rare, and something that I am incredibly proud to support.Move to Amend is on the frontlines in building a broad, deep, diverse and democratic democracy movement through community education, public speaking, movement education, direct action, lobbying and alliance and coalition building, which we urgently need to grow under the new Trump administration.

Their accomplishments to this point are impressive given their small staff and budget: a 90 Congressional supporters of the We the People Amendment, 785 organizational endorsements and 725 local resolutions and ballot initiatives – as well as visibility at numerous national mass actions.

For several decades, I have used my position in the media, as a speaker and as an author of Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights and scores of articles to help push for an end to “corporate personhood” and for the cause that Move to Amend leads across the country. Because I, like you, understand that corporate constitutional rights are standing in the way of every movement’s success -- from environmental justice and climate collapse, to the for-profit prison and health care systems and endless wars and occupations -- and we can’t win as long as these corporations and special interest groups have more rights and resources than we do.

The Move to Amend analysis is spot on: Our problem is structural that goes beyond elections.Chipping away at the edges of corporate political spending is not going to change the hundreds of ways corporations legalize bribery and overrule human and community self-determination.

Many groups talking about “corporate personhood” are only working on money in politics. History teaches us that’s not enough. The campaign finance system was already broken before Citizens United, so merely reversing the decision won’t return us to any democratic paradise. The problem is corporations with 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendment rights, coupled with limited liability and other benefits. We must abolish all corporate constitutional rights. When accomplished, we will have more political candidates who are more accountable to voters than donors and more communities able to legally protect their residents and environment from corporate abuses previously shielded by corporate constitutional rights.

I’ve supported Move to Amend since the very beginning -- and I intend to keep it up. It’s one of the best investments in democracy I’ve ever made. Please join with me in supporting this critical work.

Move to Amend needs to raise $100,000 to end 2024 in the black -- more than at the end of previous years due to so many contributions earlier this year diverted to political campaigns. This is all the more reason to please join me in supporting this critical people's movement.

Please help Move to Amend get all of us one step closer to real democracy; to the end of corporate rule and corruption. Please join me in donating today!

Yours in the movement to amend,

*Thom Hartmann

p.s. It’s all too easy right now to feel indifferent, resigned, defeated, overwhelmed, afraid and/or angry. These are the feelings those in power want us to feel – so that we become paralyzed and incapable of envisioning and actively creating a dramatically better future. The playwright, political dissident, and eventual President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel said, “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive for a good cause.” Move to Amend is working for a good, if not great, cause to create meaningful democracy. Please contribute to Move to Amend today

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When profits kill: The deadly cost of treating healthcare as a business

Thom Hartmann December 10, 2024

The recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare — the health insurance company with, reportedly, the highest rate of claims rejections (and thus dead, wounded, and furious customers and their relations) — gives us a perfect window to understand the stupidity and danger of the Musk/Trump/Ramaswamy strategy of “cutting government” to “make it more efficient, run it like a corporation.”

Consider health care, which in almost every other developed country in the world is legally part of the commons — the infrastructure of the nation, like our roads, public schools, parks, police, military, libraries, and fire departments — owned by the people collectively and run for the sole purpose of meeting a basic human need.

The entire idea of government — dating all the way back to Gilgamesh and before — is to fulfill that singular purpose of meeting citizens’ needs and keeping the nation strong and healthy. That’s a very different mandate from that of a corporation, which is solely directed (some argue by law) to generate profits.

The Veterans’ Administration healthcare system, for example, is essentially socialist rather than capitalist. The VA owns the land and buildings, pays the salaries of everybody from the surgeons to the janitors, and makes most all decisions about care. Its primary purpose — just like that of the healthcare systems of every other democracy in the world — is to keep and make veterans healthy. Its operation is nearly identical to that of Britain’s beloved socialist National Health Service.

UnitedHealthcare similarly owns its own land and buildings, and its officers and employees behave in a way that’s aligned with the company’s primary purpose, but that purpose is to make a profit. Sure, it writes checks for healthcare that’s then delivered to people, but that’s just the way UnitedHealthcare makes money; writing checks and, most importantly, refusing to write checks.

Think about it. If UnitedHealthcare’s main goal was to keep people healthy, they wouldn’t be rejecting 32 percent of claims presented to them. Like the VA, when people needed help they’d make sure they got it.

Instead, they make damn sure their executives get millions of dollars every year (and investors get billions) because making a massive profit ($23 billion last year, and nearly every penny arguably came from saying “no” to somebody’s healthcare needs) is their real business.

On the other hand, if the VA’s goal was to make or save money by “being run efficiently like a company,” they’d be refusing service to a lot more veterans (which it appears is on the horizon).

This is the essential difference between government and business, between meeting human needs (social) and reaching capitalism’s goal (profit).

It’s why its deeply idiotic to say, as Republicans have been doing since the Reagan Revolution, that “government should be run like a business.” That’s nearly as crackbrained a suggestion as saying that fire departments should make a profit (a doltish notion promoted by some Libertarians). Government should be run like a government, and companies should be run like companies.

Given how obvious this is with even a little bit of thought, where did this imbecilic idea that government should run like a business come from?

Turns out, it’s been driven for most of the past century by morbidly rich businessmen (almost entirely men) who don’t want to pay their taxes. As Jeff Tiedrich notes:

“The scariest sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m a billionaire, and I’m here to help.’”

Rightwing billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share of the costs of society set up think tanks, policy centers, and built media operations to promote their idea that the commons are really there for them to plunder under the rubric of privatization and efficiency.

They’ve had considerable success. Slightly more than half of Medicare is now privatized, multiple Republican-controlled states are in the process of privatizing their public school systems, and the billionaire-funded Project 2025 and the incoming Trump administration have big plans for privatizing other essential government services.

The area where their success is most visible, though, is the American healthcare system. Because the desire of rightwing billionaires not to pay taxes have prevailed ever since Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare like most of the rest of the world has, Americans spend significantly more on healthcare than other developed countries.

In 2022, citizens of the United States spent an estimated $12,742 per person on healthcare, the highest among wealthy nations. This is nearly twice the average of $6,850 per person for other wealthy OECD countries.

Over the next decade, it is estimated that America will spend between $55 and $60 trillion on healthcare if nothing changes and we continue to cut giant corporations in for a large slice of our healthcare money.

On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders’ single-payer Medicare For All plan would only cost $32 trillion over the next 10 years. And it would cover everybody in America, every man woman and child, in every medical aspect including vision, dental, psychological, and hearing.

Currently 25 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever.

If we keep our current system, the difference between it and the savings from a single-payer system will end up in the pockets, in large part, of massive insurance giants and their executives and investors. And as campaign contributions for bought off Republicans. This isn’t rocket science.

And you’d think that giving all those extra billions to companies like UnitedHealthcare would result in America having great health outcomes. But, no.

Despite insanely higher spending, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy at birth, higher rates of chronic diseases, higher rates of avoidable or treatable deaths, and higher maternal and infant mortality rates than any of our peer nations.

Compared to single-payer nations like Canada, the U.S. also has a higher incidence of chronic health conditions, Americans see doctors less often and have fewer hospital stays, and the U.S. has fewer hospital beds and physicians per person.

No other country in the world allows a predatory for-profit industry like this to exist as a primary way of providing healthcare. Every other advanced democracy considers healthcare a right of citizenship, rather than an opportunity for a handful of industry executives to hoard a fortune, buy Swiss chalets, and fly around on private jets.

This is one of the most widely shared graphics on social media over the past few days in posts having to do with Thompson’s murder…

Sure, there are lots of health insurance companies in other developed countries, but instead of offering basic healthcare (which is provided by the government) mostly wealthy people subscribe to them to pay for premium services like private hospital rooms, international air ambulance services, and cosmetic surgery.

Essentially, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson made decisions that killed Americans for a living, in exchange for $10 million a year. He and his peers in the industry are probably paid as much as they are because there is an actual shortage of people with business training who are willing to oversee decisions that cause or allow others to die in exchange for millions in annual compensation.

That Americans are well aware of this obscenity explains the gleeful response to his murder that’s spread across social media, including the refusal of online sleuths to participate in finding his killer.

It shouldn’t need be said that vigilantism is no way to respond to toxic individuals and companies that cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Hopefully, Thompson’s murder will spark a conversation about the role of government and the commons — and the very real need to end the corrupt privatization of our healthcare system (including the Medicare Advantage scam) that has harmed so many of us and killed or injured so many of the people we love.

ALSO READ: CEO shooting suspect’s manifesto claims violence is answer to health care industry: report

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alternet-There's only one way to defeat Trump's billionaires boys club

FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Donald Trump during a campaign rally, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.

Thom Hartmann

December 04, 2024

If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.

The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.

President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.

ALSO READ: Trump finds a new lawman is who even more lawless than he is

“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.

Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.

The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:

— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.

— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.

— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.

— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.

— Attacking our right to vote.

— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).

— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.

— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.

— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.

— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.

— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.

— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.

— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.

Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.

This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.

Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.

From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.

FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.

After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.

Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.

And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.

Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.

NOW READ: Trump is giving his middle finger to America

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Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

Thom Hartmann

December 04, 2024

“The ideas you are about to hear are not idle conjecture. I have built upon a foundation of indisputable first causes, so that the unifying force which controls the cosmos is revealed in full clarity.” — Jack Vance

Trump named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47,” although for reasons known only to them, America’s mainstream media persists in ignoring it. They shouldn’t.

At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans — which we’ll probably see implemented during his first 100 days — include:

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, as they will now have both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Trump’s appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to identify “fraud and waste” in federal agencies, a mantra since the Reagan presidency used to strip agencies his donors and their corporations resent. Every Republican president has used this phrase in this way, but Trump promises to turn Reagan’s and Bush’s scalpel into a meataxe.

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information,’” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US. Is the announced divestment of MSNBC by Comcast an early indicator that corporate media sees this coming?

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Similarly, Trump’s appointee to head the FBI says they’ll be coming after reporters and opinion writers and their publications:

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Trump has already tested the limits of his own lawbreaking when it comes to creating a police state and gotten away with it. In 2020, he sent armed federal officers — without identification and in unmarked vehicles — into Portland to illegally snatch unarmed peaceful protestors off the streets, intimidate and beat them up, and dump them. Expect this test to go nationwide.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies.

As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day last year, this will quickly go way beyond the “illegal immigrant criminals” he’ll use an an excuse to build the camps and mobilize the police and military:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda. Have you recently posted anti-Trump screeds on social media? Putin and Orbán put people in prison or sue them for such behavior.

And, as Europe’s most famous dictator did during our grandparents’ generation, he’ll start by rounding up unfavored groups with his promised incarceration and deportation of “millions” of undocumented immigrants. That’ll establish the physical infrastructure that he can later use to imprison members of the media and his “enemies within.”

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of to the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his first presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his first presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of Black people in the South who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined by using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 8 years.

Already Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to run the DOJ, has said she wants to prosecute and imprison the people who participated in investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office in 2017, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this was just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in his second term. Nancy Mace’s supercilious, vicious, and bigoted attack on trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride is just the earliest warning of what’s to come nationwide.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

At the same time, three states have now authorized or mandated Christian bible instruction in public schools. While all are currently on pause because of lawsuits, expect this trend to go national as Trump repays the multimillionaire televangelist and megachurch grifters who helped him get elected.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts with everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner.

A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by, presumably, simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation criminally attacking another nation to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab any nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this signals a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans next year for this nation. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Now is the time to join the resistance, while it’s still possible. Show up at your local Democratic Party meetings and help infiltrate the Party. Join Indivisible or one of the other great organizations. Get active on social media. Evangelize friends and family.

We have a hell of a lot of work ahead of us; let’s get started!

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alternet-

Trump is taking the mask off after lying to us for more than a year

Thom Hartmann

November 30, 2024

— Trump is taking off the mask, after lying to us for over a year about not knowing anything about Project 2025. Former President Trump, who previously kept his distance from Project 2025, is now selecting its key architects for potential cabinet positions and wow, are they doozies. The 900-page conservative policy blueprint, which has alarmed Democrats, appears to be moving from the sidelines to center stage in Trump's plans for a potential second term. His choice of Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, along with several other picks tied to the project, tells us he was lying (surprise!) when he repeatedly disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s project to take apart America’s government; we saw a smaller version of this in 1981 when Reagan took Heritage’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” and implemented nearly 80 percent of its suggestions, including massive tax breaks for billionaires and deregulation of pollution and consumer protections for corporations.

— Trump picks herd immunity advocate to lead National Institutes of Health (NIH). Want more death with your health policy? The appointment of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a vocal critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President-elect Donald Trump represents a radical departure from established public health strategies. The Great Barrington Declaration called for achieving herd immunity through natural infection — a strategy widely criticized by health experts, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who labeled it as dangerous and not aligned with mainstream science. If America had pursued herd immunity it could have meant millions more deaths, particularly among the vulnerable. Bhattacharya’s stance against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, coupled with his promotion of herd immunity, raises questions about how far the NIH will be degraded under his leadership. This appointment, alongside other controversial nominations such as Bob Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggests a shift away from science-based public health policies in our agencies that were specifically created to promote science-based public health. This could not only undermine efforts to control infectious diseases but also erode public trust in health institutions, posing a direct threat to the integrity of American public health and scientific research. More death and disease? Apparently that’s what many Americans just voted for, whether they knew it or not…

— Trump Chooses Megadonor Art Collector To Head U.S. Navy. Yep, an art collector and investment guy. To run the Navy. Trump’s nomination of John Phelan, an art collector and Republican megadonor who has never served in the military, as Secretary of the Navy, represents another radical departure from traditional appointments. Phelan, who leads the private investment firm Rugger Management and previously managed investments for billionaire Michael Dell, hosted a high-profile fundraiser for Trump at his $38 million Aspen, Colorado, home, raising a huge pile of money. Now Trump’s rewarding him. Phelan’s lack of military background undermines the leadership of the Navy, since his primary qualification is apparently his shoveling cash to Trump. This appointment raises alarm bells across the military about the prioritization of political loyalty over expertise in critical defense roles, potentially compromising the effectiveness and integrity of military leadership. Exactly the sort of thing Putin would love Trump to do. Surprised? No…

— So much for that “wall of separation between church and state” that Jefferson wrote about. Trump’s selection of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) signals a significant shift toward embedding Christian nationalist ideologies within federal governance. Vought, a self-identified proponent of “Christian nationism,” claims — incorrectly — that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed accordingly. Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, prioritizes affirming the U.S. as a Christian nation, advocating a form of Christian supremacy, where, despite the presence of diverse faiths, Christianity is at the core of a government-approved American identity. This blows apart the separation between church and state, marginalizing non-Christian communities and undermining the pluralistic foundations of American democracy. If you’re not a Christian — or you’re not the rightwing variety of Christian promoted by Trump and his multimillionaire televangelist huckster supporters — buckle up. The ride is going to get bumpy.

— Musk wants to get rid of the anti-fraud police. Why? Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has raised significant concerns that the grifter in the White House wants to empower banking and investment grifters to rip us all off. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), stating, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” The CFPB, established in 2010 following the Bush Crash, is the main agency safeguarding consumers from predatory financial practices. Its dissolution will leave consumers vulnerable to exploitation and massive rip-offs by financial institutions. Musk’s leadership of DOGE, combined with his substantial business interests and political influence, also means he and his friends may even benefit from silencing the regulators and increase the problem of crony capitalism. He’s already called for de-funding a government agency that helps low-income rural people get broadband, saying his company Starlink should provide that service. This move aligns with longstanding Republican efforts to curtail the CFPB’s authority in exchange for massive contributions from banks and investment firms, raising alarms about the preservation of essential consumer safeguards for average working people. Get ready to get ripped of big-time.

— Embarassed Tesla owners are taking steps… Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump and engagement with far-right conspiracy theories have grossed out many Tesla owners, leading to a explosion of anti-Musk sentiment within the community. Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker, has seen a surge in sales of anti-Musk stickers, with hundreds sold daily to Tesla owners seeking to distance themselves from Musk’s political affiliations. These stickers feature slogans like “Anti Elon Tesla Club” and “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy.” Hiller, who decided against purchasing a Tesla due to Musk’s behavior on Xitter, notes that many customers now feel embarrassed driving their Teslas. Will rightwing Tesla buyers make up for the loss of environmentally conscious people who’d previously been the car’s base? Apparently that’s what Elon is betting on, as Tesla is the largest source of his wealth.

— Jair Bolsonaro — aka “Brazil’s Trump” (he fled to Mar-a-Lago when his followers attacked the legislature like Trump’s did on January 6th) — thinks Trump and his people will get him back into power. Fascists of a feather gotta stick together, or at least that’s what Bolsonaro thinks: he told an interviewer that he’s relying on Trump’s help to get back into power in Brazil. He’s been charged with attempting a coup in his own nation, and says he’s hoping Trump will slap harsh sanctions on Brazil if they continue to prosecute Bolsonaro or prevent him from running for president again. It’s like the gang is getting back together to destroy democracy worldwide: Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Putin, Xi and every tinpot dictator in the world…

— Crazy Alert! JD Vance posts a re-do of the famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting with him as Trump’s wife — and rightwingers are going nuts with cringe. Seriously, here’s the picture. You can’t make this stuff up.

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no lnx

alternet-The war on truth threatens to unravel the very foundation of our republic

Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., November 19, 2024. Brandon Bell/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Thom Hartmann November 30, 2024

For Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with:

“What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?”

So here’s the rest of the story:

Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope.

Although you won't learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

It started when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bache supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically close to today’s Republicans).

Bache attacked Adams in an op-ed piece by calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”

To be sure, Bache wasn’t the only one attacking Adams in 1798. His Aurora was one of about 20 independent newspapers aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and many were openly questioning Adams’ policies and ridiculing Adams' fondness for formality and grandeur.

On the Federalist side, conservative newspaper editors were equally outspoken. Noah Webster wrote that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were “the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Another Federalist characterized the Democratic-Republicans as “democrats, momocrats and all other kinds of rats,” while Federalist newspapers promoted a weird collection of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jefferson and his colleagues.

But while Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans had learned to develop a thick skin, University of Missouri-Rolla history professor Larry Gragg points out in an October 1998 article in American History magazine that Bache’s writings sent Adams and his wife into a self-righteous frenzy.

Abigail wrote to her husband and others that Benjamin Franklin Bache was expressing the “malice” of a man “possessed by Satan.” The Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were engaging, she said, in “abuse, deception, and falsehood,” and Bache was a “lying wretch.”

Abigail insisted that her husband and Congress must act to punish Bache for his “most insolent and abusive” words about her husband and his administration. His “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” must be stopped, she demanded.

Abigail Adams followed the logic employed by modern-day “conservatives” who say that those opposed to Trump’s policies are “unpatriotic,” by writing that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”

Worked into a frenzy by Abigail Adams’ and Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of John Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into its most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.

Empowered with this early gift of presidential power, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested, and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.

Bache, often referred to as “Lightning Rod Junior” after his famous grandfather, was the first to be hauled into jail (before the laws even became effective!), followed by New York Time Piece editor John Daly Burk, which put his paper out of business. Bache died of yellow fever while awaiting trial, and Burk accepted deportation to avoid imprisonment and then fled.

Others didn't avoid prison so easily. Editors of seventeen of the twenty or so Democratic-Republican-affiliated newspapers were arrested, and ten were convicted and imprisoned; many of their newspapers went out of business.

Bache’s successor, William Duane (who both took over the newspaper and married Bache’s widow), continued the attacks on Adams, publishing in the June 24, 1799 issue of the Aurora a private letter John Adams had written to Tench Coxe in which then-Vice President Adams admitted that there were still men influenced by Great Britain in the U.S. government.

The letter cast Adams in an embarrassing light, as it implied that Adams himself may still have British loyalties (something suspected by many, ever since his pre-revolutionary defense of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre), and made the quick-tempered Adams furious.

Imprisoning his opponents in the press was only the beginning for Adams, though. Knowing Jefferson would mount a challenge to his presidency in 1800, he and the Federalists hatched a plot to pass secret legislation that would have disputed presidential elections decided “in secret” and “behind closed doors.”

Duane got evidence of the plot, and published it just after having published the letter that so infuriated Adams. It was altogether too much for the president who didn't want to let go of his power: Adams had Duane arrested and hauled before Congress on Sedition Act charges.

Duane would have stayed in jail had not Thomas Jefferson intervened, letting Duane leave to “consult his attorney.” Duane went into hiding until the end of the Adams' presidency.

Emboldened, the Federalists reached out beyond just newspaper editors.