Author: Thom Hartmann

As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people, or even threatening them, for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics. That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media...

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 was not always this way. I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik,...

After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out Big Balls in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America. None of that matters. Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator in the world does when they get ahold...

They are lying to us again. The American government is not too big or too bloated: it is too small. And the result of it being too small is a steady erosion of Americans’ freedom over the past forty-four years. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his March, 1933 inaugural address: “A necessitous man is not a free man.” If you or your children are sick but afraid to go to the hospital because you know the bills will leave you broke and homeless, you are not free. If you need to go to college or trade school to...

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...

Elon Musk is probably chuckling as Trump flails. The firestorm around the Epstein documents arguably started when he tweeted that Trump was in the files. Which has led to some significant changes in the Trump/media/politics/deep-state landscape that it is important to review. They include questions about the future of Trump, his cult followers, a possible power struggle between Trump and Murdoch, and JD Vance’s Presidential ambitions. To begin: if you want everything around the Epstein furor to make sense, all you have to understand is that Donald Trump has been leading a cult. Like Jim Jones did. Like Charles...