Author: Thom Hartmann

It is no secret that for years Republicans have targeted Black and Hispanic voters, doing everything they can to make it harder for these folks to vote. Their latest targets are young people: the GOP has decided that Gen Z is their mortal enemy. The DLC’s National Communications Director, Abhi Rahman, laid it out for Rolling Stone magazine: “Young people are the reason why Biden won in 2020 and Democrats up and down the ballot won in 2022 and 2023. If Gen Z continues to vote, we’re on the cusp of the most progressive era in our country’s history. Republicans know...

As we watch the Trump campaign prepare to replace 50,000 civil servants with fascist toadies if he wins the White House, it is important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want. From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world. This...

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations,” a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries, with the exception of the catastrophic Reagan Revolution years of 1981 to 2021. In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace, as a result of that education. From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s...

Given the horrific trend of America always passing another world record for mass shootings, it is well past the time for how we hold political debates around guns. The discussion about guns in America generally falls into two polar opposite positions: do not regulate guns at all, or ban large parts of the spectrum of guns and heavily regulate ownership of the rest. The guaranteed defense of the status quo invokes FOX/rightwing culture war stuff like the “right to own weapons of war.” But there is a third position, entirely outside of that spectrum, which every actual “free market“...

The 1970s was a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political and sometimes violent SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed. Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and...

Republican election theft used to be covert and was almost never covered by the press. Now they are doing it out in the open and defying federal courts to stop them, while ignoring press coverage that outs what they are up to. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, the courts have neither sword nor purse: they don’t have any mechanism to force compliance with their rulings. So it appears that multiple Republican states have chosen to simply ignore their own courts, as well as the federal courts and the Supreme Court. This is a big step...