Hartmann Report

It drained many of us of our hope and optimism, much as it did in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy last led a national bullying campaign… On his eponymous TV show, Joe Scarborough pointed out this week how angry and toxic Xitter has become recently. I've seen the same thing, as have many others; quitting Xitter has become a thing, largely as a result of the venomous culture that's taken hold there. This seems to be more closely connected to it being taken over by a morbidly rich South African immigrant who seems to delight in bullying his own child (and others) than to the political season; previous election cycles didn't see similar reports of such widespread hostility and bullying behavior that was driving people to quit particular social media sites altogether. That's probably because one of the first rules of social organization is that culture flows from the top down.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class… Today begins the official political season of 2024, the fall countdown to election day and inauguration day, and the start of billions of dollars raised by morbidly rich rightwingers that will be pouring into our media, email, and phones. The Democratic Convention was really rocking (I was broadcasting live from the SiriusXM booth), laying out both the horrors of Republican red state governance and expanding the good-for-America-and-the-middle-class programs that President Biden first signed into law almost four years ago. He's stopped inflation and given us the highest stock market, best jobs numbers, and fastest return of factories to America in over 50 years. It all raises a critical question: How did America go so far astray after FDR saved us from the Republican Great Depression? And what can we learn from FDR that can help Democrats win elections and put America back together again?

The NRB's lawsuit could be the death knell for the Johnson Amendment… A group representing rightwing preachers is trying to bring about a merger of church and state with a new lawsuit. This is incredibly dangerous.

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — For fans of Ali Velshi’s brilliant weekend show on MSNBC, internet gods permitting, I’ll be on with him at 11:45 AM Eastern time tomorrow. — The “Other Project 2025.” — Trump is promoting a street-sign campaign by a notorious racist who goes by the name “Sabo.” — “The bullying needs to stop.” — CNN shows everything that’s wrong with 2024’s repeat of 2016’s election coverage. — Why aren’t the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice seeking criminal assault and trespass charges against the Trump staffers who assaulted an Arlington National Cemetery employee and then proceeded to use gravestones as end-tables and campaign props? — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: How to deal with the problem of time. — Wisdom School Alert: Are you reaching the happiness available to you?

A federal ruling could finally tear down the legal shield that lets platforms profit from poisonous content—and it's about time… This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation's desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

Sometimes you can learn as much from attending to what Republicans suddenly stop saying as to what they are talking about… Republicans have pulled off a coup against an entire branch of government, and nobody seems to have noticed. But if you pay attention, it's shocking. Sometimes you can learn as much from attending to what Republicans suddenly stop saying as from what they are talking about. In this case, it's their half-century-long obsession with convening a constitutional convention to rewrite the US Constitution. Under Article V of our Constitution, when two-thirds of the states formally call for a "con-con" to rewrite our nation's founding document, it officially comes into being. They can then make small changes like enshrining the right of billionaires and corporations to bribe judges and politicians, or insert the doctrine of corporate personhood into the document, or simply throw the whole thing out and start over. Many on the right are hoping to insert a national ban on abortion into a new constitution; others want to end the right of women to vote, do away with all antidiscrimination laws, outlaw labor unions, or return the selection of senators to the states.

And it's one more vital reason why the Harris/Walz call for Americans of all races, religions, and gender identities to embrace each other and bring our nation together is so vital… Some Republicans appear to have decided that Kamala Harris is only 3/5ths of a person and therefore cannot run for president. What do Senator Ted Cruz's father Rafael Cruz, Kellyanne Conway, former Governor Mike Huckabee, Senator Rand Paul, Former Representative Michele Bachmann, Former Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, Publisher and former Republican Presidential Candidate Steve Forbes, former diplomat and Republican Presidential Candidate Alan Keyes, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell have in common? All are members, executives within, or endorsers of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), a group that grew out of a 1934 California assembly and went national in 1996. The group has been called "The Tea Party before there was a Tea Party" and "the Republican wing of the Republican Party," although it operates independently from the GOP. They made big news last week, though, when they charged that Kamala Harris is not a "natural born citizen" and therefore not eligible to run for or to hold the office of President of the United States. In an echo of Donald Trump's notorious birther movement of 2008, NFRA cited the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which removed citizenship rights from Black Americans, as a basis for their argument.

From Reconstruction to DeSantis to Paxton: How Republicans Are Keeping Power by Any Means Necessary… The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Black voters in their 80s to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters. It's a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan: "If you can't win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn't get you over the top, intimidate!" As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women's voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote. We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.

Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a collective and inclusive "us," and to repudiate hate and "othering" as a political strategy... "Identity politics" can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who've traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it's no longer needed. The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today's America that's white Christian men) identifies people who aren't part of their group as an "other" and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the "outsiders."