Author: Thom Hartmann

For Democrats, there are tons of issues on the ballot. Climate change, free college, expanding Medicare, family leave after giving birth, Pre-K education, middle-class tax cut, child tax credit, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and literally dozens of other less high-profile ways to expand democracy and rebuild our middle class after 40 years of assault by neoliberal Reaganomics. For Republicans there is really only one issue: race. Or, more specifically, maintaining the dominance of white people over every other racial group in America, and the survival of political and economic white supremacy. Forty years ago, Republicans pretended...

Senator Joe Manchin, echoing the rightwing billionaire’s think-tanks’ PR and every Republican in Congress, recently said his objection to free college for students and eyeglasses for seniors was that such things created an “entitlement society,” a slur that means “a nation of welfare recipients.” In that, he displays a fundamental ignorance about what governments do and how societies work, as well as the difference between what we usually call the “social safety net” and things people should expect simply as a “right of citizenship” in a first-world country. He also misunderstands the difference between expenses and investments. A “social...

If President Biden’s Build Back Better plan goes down in flames, you can blame the U.S. Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, in fact, is destroying both American politics and the planet. Case in point: Oil industry executives testified before Congress this week, suffering a barrage of questions, including particularly intense ones from Reps. Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Katie Porter. The CEOs exhibited the same sort of arrogant insolence Mark Zuckerberg displayed in July of last year when he was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. It was, basically, a smug,...

Congressman Steve Scalise, the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives and the guy who ran for office from Louisiana as “David Duke without the baggage,” has announced he was whipping Republican votes to block a criminal contempt referral to the DOJ from the January 6 Select Committee against Steve Bannon. My father’s Republican Party is now the modern-day Confederacy, and Republicans’ defense of Steve Bannon defying subpoenas this week pretty much proves it. If it keeps moving in the same direction, our American republic may soon be fully transformed into a racist, strongman oligarchy. The racist and big-money...

History shows that most democratic nations do not realize how serious their fascism problem is until it overtakes them altogether. We saw it in the 1930s in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan. Today it is happened in Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and Brazil, and is well underway in Poland, India, and multiple smaller countries. Here in America, the GOP has a serious fascism problem, and it is endangering all of us. It is closer than most of us realize. Fascism isn’t just about the merger of oligarch and state interests; it also requires a repudiation of the...

People are hungry and homeless in America, literally over a million children go to bed hungry, but all the Republicans care about is their tax cuts and deregulation. Where, media pundits wonder out loud as they wring their hands, does this cruelty come from, and why has the GOP so enthusiastically embraced it? The necessary precondition to cruelty is dehumanization, the otherizing of people, reducing them from fellow-human status to an “other” and a “them.” The ability to do this is a survival skill buried deep in our evolution: we have to set aside empathy to kill an animal...