Author: Thom Hartmann

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale If you are the family of a 12-year-old girl in Texas who has been raped and impregnated, or the husband of a 50-year-old Oklahoma woman who is at higher risk of death from pregnancy after a failure of birth control, your only truly safe option right now is to move to Canada. That is because individual states in the U.S. generally enforce each other’s court...

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”...