Hartmann Report

He’s already using the language of narcissistic collapse, priming his cult followers to experience rage and act out revenge fantasies on his behalf in a clear call to stochastic terrorism... When I was young, I dated a girl who, on reflection, was a classic malignant narcissist. She went from loving me to, when I ended the relationship, stalking and threatening me with both social and physical violence. This may well be what America has in store as Trump descends into a legal hell of his own criminal creation, particularly when he’s facing real jail time; if he’s rejected by the GOP primary voters; or if he’s the nominee and loses the election while still facing jail time. It’s called “narcissistic collapse.”

This truly is a climate emergency, and every day that goes by without significant action further endangers the future of almost all life on Earth, including us... Is Phoenix Ameria’s first unlivable city? Will this be the year America and the world wakes up? CBS News is reporting that people in Phoenix are rationing their air conditioning; a British climatologist has declared it the developed world’s first “uninhabitable city without air conditioning.” In large parts of the United States this summer, climate change-driven heat domes are making pavement so hot that when people pass out and come in contact with it they end up in the hospital with second and third-degree burns. Multiple hospitals report that their burn units are near capacity.

"I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes." —President William Howard Taft commenting on the 1907 Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal elections and was overturned by Citizens United

— How a conservative activist spiffed a $1.8 million propaganda campaign to flatter Clarence Thomas — Looks like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was possibly a Russian hack. — GOP AG's are planning for a “fugitive slave act” to track abortion and trans “felons.” — Red states continue to “shackle” Black people. — How a single lie on Fox “News” threw Michigan’s politics into chaos and is being used to try to flip their legislature from Democratic to Republican. — A lawyer is forging ground that others may will follow about big oil: this could be tobacco all over again. — Geeky Science/Orwell Alert! What is America going to do about AI now being used for “deep fakes” in politics?

Trump: “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” Earlier this week, The New York Times published a partial exposé of Trump’s plans for his second administration. It involved basically turning America into Russia or Hungary, where the president becomes the singular center of federal power, eclipsing Congress and the Courts.

Voting rights are essential to maintaining a democracy; without them nations quickly devolve into oligarchy and then autocracy... Without free and fair elections and widespread voter participation, you can’t have a functioning democratic republic. Republicans know this: that’s why they’re trying to end free and fair elections. ... Felon disenfranchisement laws were a common way to suppress the Black vote in the Confederate states, and explains why in Florida one in five African American adults — well over a million — have a felony conviction and, until recently, were unable to vote. And it’s not that Black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people; it’s that they’re more likely to get caught, prosecuted, and convicted. Black people in Florida do not, for example, jaywalk three times more than white people but they are three times more likely to be cited by the police for it.

Rightwing billionaires (who pay an average income tax of 3.4 percent) think the world is made up of “makers” and “takers." So what if 45,000 Americans die every year because of this callous attitude? The easiest and laziest way for a state government to deny its citizens a benefit to which they’re entitled is to wrap it in so much paperwork, make people jump through so many hoops to qualify, that they give up in confusion or exhaustion. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, one of the nation’s cruelest — he’s shipped refugees out of state based on lies, put a $10,000 bounty on the heads of pregnant women, and ordered his own police to throw children and nursing babies into the Rio Grande River where razor wire awaits them — is all-in on this with regard to Medicaid.

Most Americans just learned, from reporting this week in The New York Times, that Trump, billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks, and some of the leaders of the GOP have a plan to flip America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian strongman-type of government should he or another like-minded MAGA Republican win the White House in 2024. This would be the death-knell of democracy, the crisis I warn about in my new book, and a historic disaster of almost unimaginable proportions given how much influence our nation has on other democracies around the world. This week that new book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, hits the bookstores.

The GOP is exploiting the structures in our brains that are rooted deep in our DNA, the wiring that says, “I must protect 'us' from 'them,'” the wiring that kept humans tribal for 300 millennia... The American Experiment is facing a new test. Is it possible for a nation to be both democratic and fully integrated (race, religion, gender)? How do we overcome the natural human tendency to self-segregate and to demonize “the other”? It’s an issue that’s not unique to our nation; the question is tearing apart Israel, South Africa, and much of Europe as you’re reading these words (as I wrote about at some length last week).

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United