Author: Thom Hartmann

Donald Trump is still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. Science, it turns out, is on his side. Not the science of elections: the science of propaganda. New findings from psychologists at universities in California and Georgia and published in the journal Cognitive Research show that the more often a statement — regardless of its truthfulness — is repeated, the more emphatically it is believed. The researchers noted: “Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth...

Republicans claim to “love America,” but what does that mean? They sure don’t love our religious freedom. America was founded in 1789 as the first secular republic in the history of the world, an accomplishment the Founders and Framers reveled in. Secular literally means “not religious” or “not based in religion.” But Republicans will openly tell you that they hate secularism and want, instead, the opposite of the core value on which this country was founded: instead, they want to put the interests of a particular religion (and only one sect within that religion) above all else. While our...

I have previously written about how Democrats must engage with the topic of crime, and now new reports document how the GOP intends to use crime as their major wedge issue in this November’s election. But the conversation does us a disservice if it is limited to crime and punishment. We must consider what is driving crime and the social breakdown of which it is a symptom. Most people think crime (particularly property crime) is caused by poverty, like the poor people portrayed in Les Misérables stealing food for their children. But Louis XVI’s policies had both increased poverty in France...