Author: Thom Hartmann

Russia is not just at war with Ukraine; they are also in a cold war with us. And recently Putin got a significant victory in that war, which is now being fought on the battleground of social media and the Internet. Representative Matt Gaetz and Senator Rand Paul helped lead Putin’s victory this week in his cold war with America by stripping aid for Ukraine out of the continuing resolution to keep our government funded for the next 45 days. It was a clear signal from Republicans in Congress to Putin that if he can just hang on long...

Republicans in the House of Representatives today are opening a phony “impeachment hearing” using Hunter Biden as a foil to try to destroy Joe Biden politically. They never even held a vote to establish a committee for that purpose. It is purely theatre. Meanwhile, Democrats in the Senate have an opportunity to examine some actual, egregious, and destructive-to-the-country crimes committed in the White House by Trump and his family members that they’re apparently going to whiff. They need to hear from us. Hunter Biden, at least, is now pushing back against this vicious and dishonest GOP smear campaign even...

America is rapidly bifurcating, becoming two nations, and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.” Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy. In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and...

China, Russia, and a handful of rightwing billionaires are trying to tear down our democracy. “Putin Republicans,” aka the MAGA GOP, are trying to help them. For most of the 7,000-year history of modern civilization autocracy has been the default system all over the world, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy. The past two centuries, however, have featured an ongoing battle for primacy between democracy and autocratic oligarchy. At the time of the Civil War there was only a small handful of democratic nations in the world, and they all held their breath to see...

American families with children, and the American Dream they are trying to live, are about to face a serious crisis. Counterintuitively, the pandemic brought a child-care boon to working families with kids. This was in large part due to the extraordinary efforts of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, who got billions for expanded childcare funds to families in distress. Although these were technically emergency funds, they were similar to normal, routine programs offered by virtually every other developed country in the world. But when the pandemic was declared officially over, Republicans dug their...

While it may be satisfying to call Trump and his enablers “fascists,” there is a deeper truth here, with which America must come to terms: the Trump/MAGA faction of the GOP has declared war on democracy itself. Funded by rightwing billionaires who, themselves, view democracy as an inconvenient pain-in-the-ass and, when Democrats talk about them “paying their fair share,” an actual threat, these MAGA Republicans have also joined forces with wealthy international elements dedicated to ending democracy all around the world. They are supported by a media machine itself largely created by rightwing billionaires — Murdoch’s Fox “News,” over...