Author: Thom Hartmann

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children. This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny. Democracies typically do not turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It usually happens from within, and is driven by an alliance between demagogic politicians, corrupt religious leaders, bigoted street brawlers, and some of the wealthiest people in society. First, fascists identify groups of people they believe are both vulnerable and sufficiently powerless that they won’t...

The Supreme Court turned our lives over to billionaires and giant corporations, leaving Americans feeling powerless and angry. The GOP stepped in to tell us the real culprits are Democrats, women, and minorities. We must re-take our government and recover our lost sense of agency. Here’s why and how: “Agency” is the ability to control yourself and your own life. “Loss of agency” is the psychological term for people no longer being able to influence the course of their own life or the world around them. The phrase is often used to describe the situation of (usually) women suffering...

Terrorism is defined as using violence or the threat of violence to achieve political ends. Although the Brooklyn subway shooter has been charged with terrorism, we don’t yet know if he had any actual political goals or was simply mentally ill. Ted Cruz was closer to the mark when he called the January 6th insurrectionists “terrorists” … at least until Tucker Carlson called him in for a spanking. No more of that kind of talk from Ted. But it does raise an important question in this era of attempted bombings of the DNC and RNC, the siege of multiple...

It is time to rename the Russell Senate Office Building, where 33 senators today conduct their daily business, and the effort would be more than a symbolic gesture. Senator Richard Russell was most famous as the guy who wielded the filibuster to destroy Civil Rights legislation. Most of the time he was quite successful, spending decades scuttling legislation proposed to outlaw lynching, end school segregation, or to insure voting rights. In 1932 Russell, then the openly segregationist Governor of Georgia, won election to the U.S. Senate from that state, taking office in 1933. He immediately joined the “Southern Bloc”...

Ron DeSantis, the most likely GOP candidate for president in 2024, has gone to war with trans people and Disney, saying he was doing so to protect Florida’s children. It is a slick trick that seems to be working for him and his Republican colleagues, and is thus spreading to other states. Authoritarian politicians in electoral democracies typically exploit people’s fear to gain political power, and then use that power to destroy the democracy itself from within. But first they have to create that fear by building up a straw-man villain. Republicans today are running that strategy to try...

The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the U.S. Postal Service. It is an outrageous story that most Americans do not know a thing about. To understand what is going on with the Post Office right now, we first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets are not interested in discussing. It is an issue that is hitting millions of Americans right now. One of our kids, for example, recently became the first member of our family to...