Author: Thom Hartmann

Civil society requires that its citizens feel safe in public spaces; destroy that generalized sense of safety and you will radically warp public opinion to the Right, which promises safety and “tough on crime,” while producing a whole new generation of safe-space destroyers. Our most fragile members of society are our children, which is why when shooters go after schools it disrupts society at its most fundamental level. Right behind schools are celebratory events (Vegas shooter, yesterday’s Trump supporter), stores/theaters, and places of worship. If a malignant actor — say, Putin — wanted to truly disrupt American society, all...

We recently learned from the January 6th hearings that Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson tried to hand a phony slate of electoral votes from Michigan and Wisconsin to Vice President Mike Pence just before the election was certified on January 6. How did a corrupt senator even find himself in a position where he could have handed two pieces of paper to the Vice President that would have changed the outcome of our presidential election? The Electoral College. The Electoral College: Sucks. It causes political strategies that make national elections turn on a handful of states, which increase the...

Democrats are gearing up for policy battles in the House and Senate over “gun safety.” They should also be preparing for a decades-long war over “gun control.” In 1977, Harlan Carter and a group of his friends staged a coup within the senior ranks of the NRA, flipping it from a gun-safety-oriented sportsman’s club into a “no compromise” (Carter’s phrase) lobbying and PR group for the gun industry. Carter was the perfect man for the job of filling America with guns, championing the slaughter of schoolchildren, and amping us up to around 45,000 gun deaths a year — more...

The CEO of America’s largest bank is worried, and for good reason. On June 1, the Fed started something it has not done for quite a while. It started dumping bonds. The Fed has been goosing the economy steadily since the Bush Crash of 2008, buying US and corporate bonds with money it creates out of thin air (only the Fed can “print money” like this by simply willing the dollars into existence). By purchasing and holding those bonds over the past 14 years, the Fed has created and then flushed into our economy $8 trillion in liquid cash....

Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy. In two speeches this week, Orbán laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American “Great Replacement Theory,” trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation’s media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in “gender madness.”...