Author: Thom Hartmann

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz recently blasted JD Vance for being a “grifter,” because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with “24 kids in my graduating class” where “12 were cousins.” In Vance’s autobiography Hillbilly Elegy he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his...

While the media devotes much hand-wringing to Republican vulnerability in this November’s election because of abortion, virtually no attention is paid to what has been that party’s primary electoral strategy since the 1960s: preventing citizens from voting. This year, it appears, voter purges, signature challenges, and election worker intimidation are how the GOP thinks they can overcome America’s distaste for their support of criminalized abortion. In the run-up to New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial election, Republicans in that state put together what they called the National Ballot Security Task Force. They recruited hundreds of off-duty cops and private security guards, arming them with guns,...

Want to end Social Security? Just vote for Donald Trump or pretty much any Republican this fall. Every year that Donald Trump was president he proposed budgets that would have cut Social Security funding and benefits; in 2020 he even campaigned on ending the payroll tax — that funds it and Medicare — altogether. The Republican Study Committee, which claims 175 of the House’s 219 Republican members of Congress, released their annual budget proposals last summer, and, sure to form, they also called for the setup of draconian cuts to Social Security. Weirdly, the title of the section of their budget that cuts Social Security...

At a campaign stop in Ohio on July 22, JD Vance said that Kamala Harris should not lead America because she is not “grateful for it.” Vance told his nearly-all-White crowd: “You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.” The White myth of America, which Vance echoed at his RNC speech, is that our nation was “built”...

Following both speeches by Vance and Trump at the RNC, the future trajectory of America if they are elected is pretty clear. First, it is important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money. These men are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms....

Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace. Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise, Brinkley said, spending the rest of his presidency trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He later worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trying, successfully, to de-escalate tensions between the U.S. and the USSR....