Author: Thom Hartmann

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...

Progressives should not just be fighting the GOP, we should be learning from them. No, we should not be learning from their bizarro economics. We should not be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism, or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest man. But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they have even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush. If progressives hope to...

Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms, to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who has ever lived or worked in an autocratic state can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot. Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from...

With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It’s shockingly anti-American. Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they’ve found a way to end that resistance. Here’s the backstory. The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act...

Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story. But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. Greg Palast recently did the math, and it’s now irrefutable: the only reason Trump is in the White House is because over 4 million Americans were either denied their right to vote or their votes were discarded. The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission data tells the damning story: a...

It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night. It happened in broad daylight, in the heart of an American courthouse. Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on April 25 and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding. But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror. This was a...