Author: Thom Hartmann

Promoting a Culture War: How Putin used Trump to seize almost total control over the Republican Party

There is little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They are gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check. Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands...

Read More

America’s 47th: What our dystopian future will look like if Putin and the GOP can reinstall Trump to power

If Trump is re-elected, he would be America’s 47th president, so he has named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it is a dystopian nightmare. At worst it means ending our current system of American government, aligning the U.S. with Russia and other autocratic nations, with the U.S. 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...

Read More

A Red Caesar: How the GOP’s new political order could end the American experiment in 2024

“Thirty years ago,” Damon Linker said, “if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane.” Now, however, the senior lecturer at Penn State University’s Department of Political Science and author of the Notes from the Middleground Substack newsletter has reconsidered. “But it’s no longer insane,” Linker writes. “It’s now real. There are those people out there.” And, Linker notes, “The question is: will they get their chance.” The simple reality is that they already have...

Read More

21st Century Jim Crow: Generation Z becomes the latest target of GOP’s voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin

It is no secret that for years Republicans have targeted Black and Hispanic voters, doing everything they can to make it harder for these folks to vote. Their latest targets are young people: the GOP has decided that Gen Z is their mortal enemy. The DLC’s National Communications Director, Abhi Rahman, laid it out for Rolling Stone magazine: “Young people are the reason why Biden won in 2020 and Democrats up and down the ballot won in 2022 and 2023. If Gen Z continues to vote, we’re on the cusp of the most progressive era in our country’s history. Republicans know...

Read More

How the Republican slogan of “power at any cost” delivered six illegitimate GOP presidents

As we watch the Trump campaign prepare to replace 50,000 civil servants with fascist toadies if he wins the White House, it is important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want. From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world. This...

Read More

An uneducated nation: Why Republicans want so badly to put an end to public schools in America

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations,” a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries, with the exception of the catastrophic Reagan Revolution years of 1981 to 2021. In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace, as a result of that education. From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s...

Read More