Author: Thom Hartmann

Today’s Republican Party, intentionally or unwittingly, is following a script. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first they came for the queer people. A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books...

How would you like a side of liver cancer with those fries? Testicular cancer with your chicken sandwich? Childhood obesity with your kid’s meal? These were the findings of a 2022 analysis of wrappers performed by Consumer Reports while looking for chemicals called PFASs in packaging for fast food products sold across America. PFAS is an acronym for Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, a family of over 12,000 chemicals that was first discovered in 1938 by a 27-year-old chemist named Roy Plunkett. By combining fluorine with carbon, he invented chemicals that resisted water, oils, grease, and even heat: they seemed both inert...

Following the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt, news organizations have documented hundreds of thousands of Republicans across America leaving their party by going to the effort of changing their party registration. Most, like Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, say it is because of the hate. Particularly since the rise of Trump in 2015, but certainly dating back to Trump’s 2008 Birther conspiracy theory — and with the seeds planted in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy — hate has become the rotted core of the GOP. Hate of queer people; hate of college professors; hate of Black people; hate of immigrants; hate...

As MAGA Republicans rudely interrupted the president’s State of the Union speech by shouting, “secure the border,” it is important to remember what happened when Republicans were in charge of securing the border. Their “big new idea” was to forcibly separate children from their parents and put bewildered and terrified youngsters in cages for the world to see. And then they trafficked and disposed of those children, as if dumping the trash, in a way that “lost” thousands of them. Last week the Biden administration announced that, so far, they’ve managed to reunite 2,926 of the 3,924 children brutally torn from...

Republicans have been lying to their voters in the Midwest and South for decades, and now those the same voters are dying as a result of unprecedented severe weather that ties directly back to those lies. This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you did not know. As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it is going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they have been screwed by the...

Now that Donald Trump has been indicted, expect to see the fascist movement in America heat up quickly. And become more deadly. That it is happening at the same time our children are experiencing an unprecedented level of slaughter is no coincidence, and helps explain Republican unwillingness to do anything about guns. Many Americans are baffled. Why, they ask, would Republicans refuse to act when semiautomatic weapons designed for the battlefield are used against our children? When we’ve had 38 school shootings — and over 100 mass shootings — all using semiautomatic battlefield-style weapons in the first 90 days...