Author: Thom Hartmann

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...

Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Bongino and 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. Marjorie Taylor Greene is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the...

A fascinating article in “The New York Times” by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives us the beginnings of an understanding of how and why social media is so destructive to society. Gray points out that most people assume humans have historically been predators, the metaphorical big cats of the jungle. In fact, Gray says, we’ve historically been prey, the victims of predators: “This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where...