Hartmann Report

Will the GOP reform itself, or must it die? You can tell when Republicans are in trouble: they start throwing gunpowder on the fires of the culture wars. This week Republicans who control the Michigan State House and Senate passed a law requiring the state to inform recipients of the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine that it was developed using fetal stem cells.

Covid may soon be the least of our worries. As more Americans are getting vaccinated, there’s a sense of relief washing over the country that’s almost giddy. But we’re not out of the Covid woods yet, and, in some ways, it’s distracted us from a frankly much larger crisis. Our planet is screaming a message at us, and Covid is part of that communication. The death of nature and the appearance of Covid are all part of the same thing.

What red blooded, Nazi-arm-band-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving, Capitol-invading, gun-toting American patriot could possibly object? Marjorie Taylor Greene is characterizing vaccine passports as “Joe Biden‘s mark of the beast,” so they must have some value. But we have to come up with a different name for them if we’re going to get the conspiracy nuts…er…Republicans on board.

Donald Trump is the man George Wallace hoped he could one day become. He rode the train of white supremacy all the way to the White House, something Wallace only dreamed of. If you run a search on “What is Trumpism?” a wide variety of answers and theories pop up.

Is this manslaughter, now that Trump brags that he actively ignored the scientific advice? Dr. Deborah Birx is trying to clean up her reputation by telling the story of how Trump was ignoring the science and pressuring her to instead promote his “open the country” policy that killed so many Americans. But we don’t have to listen to her; Trump, himself, bragged on Fox News that when Dr. Fauci gave him advice on how to save American lives, he “was doing the opposite of what he [Fauci] was saying.”

Cars taught us how to deal with things that can kill people. The discussion about guns in America generally falls into two polar opposite positions: don’t regulate guns at all, or ban large parts of the spectrum of guns and heavily regulate ownership of the rest. But there’s a third position, entirely outside of that spectrum, which every actual “free market“ conservative in America should embrace, and liberals should be down with as well.

The filibuster is not just helping authoritarians damage democracy; it's endangering all life on planet Earth, including the future of the human species Most of the discussion around ending the Republican Party‘s ability to block any kind of progress in America by using the filibuster has centered on the success or failure of individual Biden-era policies.

This naked assault on Democracy sets the stage for other GOP-controlled states to do the same. In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail. The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

Did you really think turning America over to billionaire oligarchs and giant corporations would make a better world? Dear Republican voter: When Ted Nugent, the NRA and the GOP told you that more guns would make America a less violent society, what did you expect? Did you really think that suddenly every American would become a fast-draw marksman and vigilante justice would take us back to some happy Wild West movie fantasy?

Americans are disconnected from the real carnage these weapons of war produce. Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever. Emmett Till was kidnapped by two white Mississippi men, brutally tortured, murdered and his mangled body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any consequence.)