Hartmann Report

As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic and rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold. As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart. And they’re having considerable success.

Typically, oligarchies flip in one of two directions within a generation: either back to democracy, or into a full-blown fascist police state. Now that the January 6th Commission is dead, it’s time for Pelosi and Schumer to create Congressional panels with subpoena power to take a serious look at the rise of fascism in the GOP, from the Trump/Manafort effort in 2015 through the vote-rigging laws being passed in state after state today. It may be our last chance to expose and stop this country’s slide into fascism.

This is not a fight over something like the minimum wage. This is a battle for the survival of the American republic and in a larger sense, it's about the survival of democracy across the world. Republicans and their authoritarian supporters are working right now to steal the 2024 election and drop their 2020 treason into the memory hole. We can't let them get away with it.

But Democrats have some big sticks, if they choose to use them. In the minds of the authoritarian base of the GOP, there are only two kinds of people: those who bully, and those who get bullied. Republicans in Congress have decided which side they're on. Or at least which side they're cowed by. Liz Cheney recently said that a number of Republicans in the House of Representatives believed Donald Trump had committed crimes for which he should be impeached, but were afraid to vote for impeachment. They were, Cheney said, "Afraid for their own security and … afraid for their lives."

Control of our schools is essential to the GOP undoing the "wokeness" of the Millennial Generation and returning the US to a "1950s Beaver Cleaver" kind of racial order. Imagine if hard-core crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene ran most of the school boards all across America. They could raise up an entire new generation of civics-clueless right-wing racist kids, and probably keep much of it well below the nation's radar screen.

The stakes are higher than they’ve been since the 1860s and the 1930s; this may be our last chance to rescue democracy in this country. Want some racism, sexism, misogyny, blunt and angry nationalism, and good-old-fashioned corruption with your government? We just had an example during the four years of the Trump presidency of how this could change everyday life in America, and the election to leadership of Trump acolyte Elise Stefanik shows how many in the Republican Party want to institutionalize it. It’s important to understand what it really means.

For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from the political process. And we must hold the known psychopaths accountable. The “election audit” in Arizona continues, with Republican hacks handling the ballots in ways that pretty clearly violate federal law — and now we’re learning there’s an open router connected to the auditing computers. It’s not just a scam — the FBI/DOJ is investigating it as an actual crime.

Instead of cleaning up their act, Republicans are embracing international crooks Liz Cheney is wrong. The GOP is now so deeply embedded with the international criminal class that it's not worth saving. For 40 years the GOP has been a peripheral but important part of the international criminal class; Donald Trump pushed the Party fully into its embrace while trying to drag the entire country with him.

There's apparently no depth to which they won't go. Authoritarian Trump followers within the GOP are actively promoting death and disease among Americans to win elections. The brutality and cynicism is breathtaking. As we saw yesterday, Rand Paul and several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, grilling Dr. Fauci, did their best to advance one of the GOP's two major 2022/2024 election strategies.

It will guarantee that every citizen in this country, regardless of their race or economic status, will have an equal right to vote in all elections that have any federal component whatsoever. With all their new "voter suppression" laws in the states, Republicans are working to keep and improve a corrupt system that's put them in power and keeps them in power, despite only representing a minority of Americans nationwide. That's why they're trying to change our election law with little tweaks like making it harder to get a mail-in ballot or preventing people from bringing a drink of water to somebody in line.