Hartmann Report

"Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter future for all." —Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024 The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems. Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement. Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Is this how a free press dies in America, with Don Lemon in handcuffs? — New Trump act may lead to the takeover of elections. — Trump's New Grift: A $10 Billion Demand for "Reputational Harm" After his Income Tax Avoidance Was Exposed. — Trump building 'white supremacist army' inside government that will outlast him. — Is Minneapolis now a "papers please" city for non-whites? — Mark Carney stood up for democracy, and Trump is pissed. — DOJ busted for removing Epstein files accusing Trump of child rape.

How war language is being used to collapse the distance between immigration enforcement, political retaliation, and the criminalization of dissent… "The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse." —John D. MacDonald A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility for-profit concentration camp in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn't cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what's happening to him; odds are he has no understanding of why he's being treated with such brutality. Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a "deterrent" to "illegal immigration" that's "poisoning the blood" of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

Under Trump, tax giveaways to the wealthy and soaring debt replaced economic stability and sacrificing the nation's future for short-term political gain… America's economic system has never been fair or perfect, but for more than a century it rested on basic guardrails that kept instability in check and allowed us to fight for progress and win. Those guardrails are now being stripped away by policies that favor wealth and power over accountability and long-term stability. For over a hundred years, the United States has been the cornerstone of international economic stability. The independence of our central bank (the "Fed") has been a part of it, as has the strength of the dollar, which comes about in large part because the rest of the world relies on our currency as the default for international trade. And now Trump and the GOP are threatening it all.

Trump's recalibration follows the same step-back, step-forward playbook used by Orbán, Putin, and every modern strongman… Over on Threads last night, sierracascadia posted: "CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying 'there may have been a breach of protocol' and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This fucking clown show guys. They are all going down." Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that. But, wait a minute. Slow down. It's way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.

Will we stand with the generations who expanded freedom through resistance and sacrifice or surrender self-government to fear, force, and authoritarian power? There is something deeply unsettling about Lincoln's famous phrase "four score," meaning eighty years. It's roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be. Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every eighty years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy. What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

What the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti reveal about who really controls this country and how... Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to "massacre" ICE agents. But that's not their real message. Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who'd just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman. One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches. "I could kill you right here, right now," he said with a smile, "and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money." His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. —Thomas Paine In the stark offices of Kyiv’s Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Matviichuk and her team meticulously document war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By early 2025, they’ve documented over 68,000 cases since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. This Nobel Peace Prize–winning organization has tracked Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian civilians since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. I remember watching Louise’s face as we saw news reports of mass graves in Bucha: the shock, horror, and tears. “This is Putin’s work,” she whispered. “But Trump helped make it possible.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — So much for the "anti-big-government right" in America. — It was the third or fourth shot that killed Renee Good. — Trump's war on the First Amendment threatens to change America forever. — How did America get to the point where a five-year-old hostage is an acceptable tool of law enforcement? — House passes bill funding ICE with help from seven turncoat Democrats: the bill provides more billions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with no meaningful constraints on its violent tactics in Minnesota or elsewhere. — The Trump administration goes after protesters that stormed a church but they're entirely fine with the protesters who stormed the capitol, killed and harmed police, and smeared poop on the wall of the capitol. — Trump is using our money to target states that didn't vote for him. Surprise. — King of the World bully uses "board of Peace" just like he uses Tariffs. It's all about bullying and loyalty to Emperor Trump.

M. Scott Peck warned decades ago that social systems built on lies eventually lose the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, loyalty from morality, or raw power from truth.. Jack Smith's testimony before Congress yesterday was a master class at demonstrating how elected Republicans have become what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck termed "People of the Lie" with his 1986 bestseller. It was the perfect example for this week being the sixteenth anniversary of the corrupt Citizens United decision. For most of American history, lying in politics carried a real and immediate cost. Get caught and you'd lose credibility, maybe get voted out of office, and sometimes — like with the roughly 40 people around Richard Nixon who went to prison — even face criminal consequences.