Hartmann Report

The work of our day is to restore the idea of America — an egalitarian democratic republic — and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years… What is the “idea” of America? The core of the American identity? Trump, Vance, and the GOP say they’re all about patriotism; in fact, they’re promoting a white Christian identity form of nationalism, which is an entirely different thing. A dark, dangerous, and deadly thing. Incompatible with our Founders’ idea of America.

For the past forty-plus years, Republicans — just like dysfunctional HOAs — have been stealing from America's future… The GOP's 43-year tax-cuts-for-billionaires-while-we-ignore-the-needs-of-the-country grift has an analogy in condos and homes across America that might help voters understand how it works and how they've gotten away with it. Fully 84 percent of all homes and apartments built and sold in 2022 came with a homeowner's association (HOA), and an estimated 27 percent of all homeowners nationwide currently live in a property controlled by an HOA. And many are very unhappy about the experience.

Wealthy white men have had the right to vote in America since the beginning of our republic. It’s been a very, very different story for women and Native Americans. Women’s voting rights took a long time. Native Americans’ took longer. The struggle for women’s voting rights began in April 1776, when 32-year-old Abigail Adams sat at her writing table in her home in Braintree, Massachusetts, a small town a few hours’ ride south of Boston.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Project 2025 mastermind's alarming ties to radical catholic sect Opus Dei revealed. — Is JD Vance the new Dan Quayle? — House Democrats Launch Bold Crusade to Elevate American Workers to New Heights — Trump runs afowl: Chickens out of debate with Kamala — United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called out the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Norway for expanding fossil fuel production. — Shocking Murder of Sonya Massey Exposes Urgent Need for Police Reform. — Hunter In a Farmers World Alert! ADHD As Hypervigilance Run Amok — Wisdom School Alert! Why Humanity Has a Deep and Ancient Connection to Water

It's being reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead babies during the first Dobbs year… Newborn babies are the latest victims in the ongoing Republican War On Women™. The most recent deadly aspect of the crisis started with Donald Trump proudly putting three anti-abortion Catholics on the Supreme Court, promising America that they'd overturn Roe v Wade. He sure delivered on that; it was probably the only promise he's kept in his entire life. Multiple pregnant Red state women have, over the past year or so, told harrowing stories about almost dying before doctors were willing to give them healthcare for fear of going to prison because of draconian state abortion bans. But now we learn that GOP policies aren't just capable of killing women; they appear to have killed at least 20,000 newborn babies in 2022, as Red states across the country instituted abortion bans in the wake of the Dobbs decision by six Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported that after a steady, 25-year decline in infant mortality, America saw a full 3 percent increase in dead newborn babies during the first Dobbs year. (Statistics for 2023 will come out next year.)

Trump is right now following a road blazed before him by multiple authoritarians and dictators who took over democracies in recent years… Donald Trump took the first step to extinguishing the free and independent press in American yesterday, when federal judge and Bush-appointee Cecilia Altonaga ruled that his defamation lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and ABC News could go forward. She ruled that "a reasonable jury could conclude Plaintiff was defamed and, as a result, dismissal is inappropriate." (emphasis hers) Stephanopoulos had asked Republican Representative Nancy Mace how she could continue to support Trump when he had been "found liable for rape." Trump is claiming that question libeled him and asking for damages that could run into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Vance's career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump's businesses. Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century… Minnesota Governor Tim Walz yesterday blasted JD Vance for being a "grifter," because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with "24 kids in my graduating class" where "12 were cousins." In Vance's autobiography Hillbilly Elegy he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother's drug use. In fact, they're victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother's addiction is a symptom, not a cause. Vance, of course, "nobly" rose above it all with the help of our socialist GI Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from rightwing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.

Vance is apparently offended that ungrateful American women like Kamala Harris demand not just birth control and abortion but also the right to divorce... Yesterday at a campaign stop in Ohio, JD Vance said that Kamala Harris shouldn't lead America because she isn't "grateful for it." Vance told his nearly-all-white crowd: "You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris." The white myth of America, which Vance echoed at his RNC speech, is that our nation was "built" by white men, ignoring the Black, Asian, and Hispanic labor, and that of women of all races, that built much of this nation.

We must unite quickly around our candidate and her and our Party's pick for VP and hit the ground running by the end of this week... President Biden has let go of his candidacy to focus on being president during this time of major international chaos. He also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidential nomination, virtually guaranteeing she'll head up the ticket. There's little chance that the Democratic Party's candidate will be anybody other than Kamala Harris, and she's certainly earned it.

It’s as difficult to disentangle racism from birtherism as it is tough to separate the Three-Fifths Compromise from the Electoral College. The Three-Fifths Compromise gave a larger share of representation in Congress to slave states. And because the Electoral College reflects the makeup of Congress, one could argue that were it not for slavery, George W. Bush and Donald Trump never would have become president. Slavery has been the single largest defining factor in the history and arc of American politics. That salient “peculiar institution” is responsible for the Second Amendment and for the Electoral College working the way it does.