Hartmann Report

The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight: it's a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus… If you’ve wandered anywhere near the White House this past week, you couldn’t have missed it, because there’s now a ninety-two-foot, six-hundred-ton tangle of steel and floodlights squatting on the South Lawn like a carnival ride that ate a cathedral. The UFC calls it “The Claw.” It’s taller than the White House itself, tricked out like a Fourth of July beer can, and bolted down right over the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so that on Trump’s birthday, June 14th, two grown men can punch and choke each other bloody in front of thousands of howling fans. Trump liked it so much he floated leaving it up forever, then had his handlers walk it back when somebody gently reminded him the President still occasionally needs a helicopter. Replacing the torn-up lawn afterward will run about seven hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly seven hundred thousand dollars more than this spectacle is worth. There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

How white nationalism, anti-immigrant fear mongering, and open racism are reviving the politics that once tore America apart… Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s. One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota who were committing “massive welfare fraud that’s just fine with Tim Walz and the Democrats.” Louise and I were astonished as we heard another note that immigration across the Southern “open border” during the Obama and Biden administrations not only brought us “rapists and murderers,” but these (mostly Catholic) people carried a “dangerous ideology” to America. They were wiping out our healthcare system and depriving “good [white] Americans” of benefits through their “massive fraud.” These Black and Brown people are even fraudulently voting, handing elections to Democrats, another ranted, lying that that’s “why Democrats always open the borders.” Meanwhile, rightwing news sites brag that under Trump, Vance, and Miller, only white people have been legally admitted into the US during the last 6 months (true) because Trump is “protecting the [racial] integrity of America.” It echoed Trump’s false complaint that the white people of South Africa are experiencing a “genocide.”

The crime took place in Washington, DC, but its seeds were planted in California, where the most powerful corporation in America was waging war against democracy itself. The Dawn of the First Progressive Era To truly grasp the scope of the crime of 1886, you first have to understand what America was becoming at the time, and what the oligarchs were desperately trying to stop.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — In eight days, the People’s House becomes a pay-per-view fight venue, and the symbolism is doing overtime. — Fox “News” spent months hunting a Maine sexting story while ignoring a Texas crime spree, and that tells you everything. — In the richest nation in human history, we have circled all the way back to pandemic-level hunger, on purpose. — The administration drew up plans to declare 2.7 million living Americans legally dead — and very nearly pulled it off. — For the first time in the internet’s history, bots now outnumber humans. — A heavily mutated COVID variant is spreading through 25 states right as Trump turns off the lights we use to see it. — Crazy Alert! The man who spent four years sneering about “Sleepy Joe” appears to have nodded off and started mumbling during his own 3 p.m. Oval Office event this week — Cult Alert! Trump bought his entire Cabinet matching $145 black Florsheim dress shoes — without bothering to ask their sizes

America spent two centuries learning that law enforcement should show its face. Now we're watching the consequences of ignoring that lesson… It was January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history, when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!” The man raised his hands. He thought he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents. They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.

We must all become truth-tellers, whether our platform is radio, TV, Substack, social media, a local newspaper, or a protest sign raised in the town square… I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year. The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU SDS. I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.

Imagine an America where elections cost less, voters mattered more, and public policy followed an honest path… It’s beyond time for some good-old-fashioned truth telling. There’s a singular cancer at the core of our democracy and it shows up in dozens of ways that don’t seem related to most Americans. It’s tearing our country apart, paralyzed our government, and has gutted our middle class. That cancer is big and dark money in politics.

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why? David French published a thoughtful op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now. His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. Read more at HartmannReport.com.

The Founders fought a revolution against kings; Trump is turning their anniversary into a tribute to himself… Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction. A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power. Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

Every law student in America learns the same story: “In 1886, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. This single decision fundamentally transformed American democracy, business, and law. It granted corporations the same constitutional rights as human beings: free speech, due process, equal protection. Everything that followed, from unlimited corporate campaign spending to corporate control of our media, politics, and environment, traces back to that pivotal moment.” There’s just one problem: It never happened. The Supreme Court debated this issue and never made that ruling. Not in 1886, not ever.