Hartmann Report

In dark times, hope isn’t a passive emotion: it’s a discipline, a practice we must cultivate daily through action and solidarity, a discipline that keeps us moving forward no matter how hard things get. It keeps us grounded and focused on a positive future. Mariame Kaba, the prison abolitionist and organizer, puts it perfectly: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. . . . we have to practice it every single day.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Is the Supreme Court preparing to take a knife to mail-in voting just in time for the midterms? — Trump’s war against Iran to help Putin, MBS, Kushner, and Netanyahu rolls on, and the risks to America and world peace get worse every day. — Trump’s war on Iran is the best gift he’s given Putin in years, even better than when he hung Putin’s picture in the White House with the former American presidents. — Donald Trump, according to his alcoholic, woman-abusing “Secretary of War,” doesn’t “want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.” — In his best imitation of one of Stalin’s or Putin’s toadies, FCC Chairman and Trump brown-noser Brendan Carr bragged about his role, and rightwing billionaire’s help, in censoring major American media. — Our grifter billionaire president offered “anything you want” to morbidly rich fossil fuel executives if they’d just give him piles of campaign money and backdoor dark funds for his own use, and is now following through by blocking the Endangered Species Act.

The shift to fascism isn’t loud or obvious; it’s gradual, justified, and dangerously easy to accept... The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clear intimidative threats.

It's a sign of an industry that knows it’s above the law and has been doing so with absolute arrogance — making billions every year — for 30 years... On Monday, a New Mexico jury delivered what the coalition ParentsSOS called “a watershed moment,” finding that Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Google (YouTube) knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what its executives knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

A 30-year campaign of intimidation turned watchdogs into lapdogs, and now the consequences are impossible to ignore… Yesterday morning, standing in the Oval Office, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.” Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.

Bannon just pulled back the curtain on a strategy that ties together recent events in a way that’s getting harder and harder to dismiss… Steve Bannon, an enthusiastic advocate of authoritarianism, dropped the mask this week. On his War Room podcast, while interviewing far-right lawyer Mike Davis, Bannon said plainly what the Trump administration has been dancing and weaving around for months: “We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” There it is. Not a conspiracy theory. And definitely not liberal hand-wringing. The man himself, in his own words, explaining exactly what’s going on at airports across the country right now.

When a gentle, thoughtful, holy man like Pope Leo XIV denounces what Trump has done by killing thousands in an illegal and unnecessary war of choice — he called it a “scandal to ​the whole human family” yesterday — the world knows our president has descended into something truly and profoundly evil. There’s a single through-line connecting everything happening to us right now, and it all has to do with the damaged, broken, deranged man in the White House.

History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — A Dangerous Deal Behind Closed Doors: Is Trump Letting Putin Reshape U.S. Foreign Policy? — Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0: Will Trump Confront Putin, or Fold? — Will Colombia be the next country Trump invades or whose leadership he tries to decapitate? — America’s Healthcare Collapse Is Here, and It Was Written Into Law. — Another death in ICE custody: How many more before anyone is held accountable? — Meet the new Kyrsten Sinema: John Fetterman.

How decades of corporate power and political strategy rewired the country from within… Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been accused of raping 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House yesterday, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him. The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.