Hartmann Report

Trump has long admired dictators who weaponize civilian gangs to crush dissent. Will his next chapter involve unleashing his own militias to terrorize the American public? One of the most common characteristics of rule by an authoritarian who's taken over a democracy is his use of unofficial civilian paramilitary groups and militia gangs to terrorize or even kill his political opponents. Back in the day, Hitler had his Brownshirts, Mussolini his Blackshirts. The practice has since become far more widespread — routine, almost — as we can see across multiple formerly democratic nations taken over — by election — during the past three decades.

Why Zuckerberg's changes at Meta signal a darker future for Democracy... Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg (wearing a $900,000 watch) announced yesterday morning that across their over-7-billion-user-strong social media empire — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — they'll be dialing back on fact-checking. They're also preparing to promote more "political" content (among other changes that support those two moves, like no longer filtering out trash-talking queer people or immigrants, and moving what's left of their Trust & Safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas). Here's the problem: Republican politicians rely on lies, distortions, and falsehoods to sell most of their policies and candidates.

While other nations offer universal benefits, we double down on serving billionaires' interests… Yesterday, Congress certified the electoral vote count making a billionaire president again, starting after he's sworn in on January 20th. Yes, we chose a billionaire. Again. After other billionaires spent billions to convince us to make that choice. As you're reading these words, billionaires from America and around the world are making pilgrimages to his shabby golf motel to kiss our upcoming billionaire president's ass and hand him envelopes with $1 million checks that represent a few hours (at most) of income for most of them or their companies. Meanwhile, our billionaire president-in-waiting is packing his cabinet — the heads of all of the most important federal agencies — with even more billionaires. This is all being celebrated over on billionaire-owned Fox "News" and on billionaire-owned hate radio networks, as well as in the billionaire-owned Washington Post, LA Times, and the roughly half of American local newspapers owned by billionaire hedge funds. Other countries enjoy benefits like free healthcare and college; modern mass transit; and affordable housing, food, and drugs.

This is exactly the sort of environment which can turn normal people into monsters who then seize control and ultimately destroy nations from within… "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." — Friedrich Nietzsche. To get the public to go along with the kind of radical social change that strips people of rights and privileges — and, eventually, their wealth — requires a shock to the political system which can then be exploited by a cynical political leader, his party, and their media allies.

Kris Kobach’s national debut was as a speaker on the first day of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. I attended that convention and broadcast my show from there, sitting next to Sean Hannity, interviewing and meeting many of the GOP luminaries. And most of what they wanted to talk about was the same as Kobach’s speech: the danger of Mexicans sneaking into the United States and voting (along with robbing, raping, and drug running). Ironically, they didn’t seem so concerned with Mexicans taking American jobs. When I repeatedly brought up with Republicans how Ronald Reagan had pretty much stopped prosecuting employers after his 1986 amnesty for five million “illegals,” and how entire industries that used to have an all-American labor force and were heavily unionized, like construction and meat packing, were now mostly just employing people who were in the country illegally, they’d just shrug their shoulders. One said, “Well, it did help break the unions” or words to that effect.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — 2025: The year American Oligarchy officially begins? — Is the “Scarlet F” coming to Trump? What is the legal significance of Trump being a convicted felon? — How the media has failed on Trump coverage. — It looks like Net Neutrality is dead. — NOT AGAIN: China downplays mystery virus deaths despite pandemic fears. — Also, some thoughts and details about Jimmy Carter from an earlier Daily Take that you may have missed in all the coverage around his death and upcoming funeral — And, finally, apologies for the publication confusion — Hunter in a Farmer’s World: Wired for Wonder: Decoding ADHD — Wisdom School: Sweat Your Way to a Longer Life: How Saunas Boost Your Health & Extend Your Lifespan! — Knights Templar: The Pervasive Universal Consciousness Model: A New Frontier in Understanding Reality

Nature and economics share some fascinating patterns, one of which explains why Donald Trump is about to become president and how the morbidly rich have appropriated over $50 trillion from working class people since the 1980s. Scientists use something called the Lorka-Volterra equations to explain how predators and prey interact in the wild. These equations show us that animal populations rise and fall in predictable cycles — when there are lots of rabbits, fox populations grow, but as foxes eat more rabbits, the rabbit population shrinks, which then causes fox numbers to drop, allowing rabbits to multiply again. Incredibly, this back-and-forth pattern mirrors what happens between the wealthy and working classes in our economy and political systems over the past 100 years.

The real reason GOP policies target wages, unions, and public education. Donald Trump, a billionaire himself, will soon become president with a cabinet worth at least a third of a trillion dollars. Add Musk, and you're over $800 billion in wealth held by this small handful of people. By comparison, the entire combined net worth of Joe Biden's cabinet is $118, million. That's about one-tenth of one billion dollars: $0.118 billion. All of them, combined, including Biden himself, are worth what some of these billionaires make in a day. To become a billionaire, generally you have to have a singular priority. One that is reflected in your work, your life, and your politics. And that priority, contrary to the poor MAGA suckers Trump and his billionaire buddies convinced to vote for him in November, has nothing to do with average Americans or the middle class. If anything, it has to do with sucking as much wealth out of the middle class as possible to make yourself a billionaire. Just since Reagan's tax cuts, they've taken $50 trillion from us.

To get an honest immigration system, we must reverse Reaganism... Trump says he's going to imprison and then deport millions of brown-skinned immigrants. He's going after the wrong people. It seems that ever time a Republican goes on one of the national political TV shows, they make sure to get in the lie that "Joe Biden opened the southern border wide open," or toss in a reference to "Biden's open borders." It is, of course, a vicious lie — but one that's almost never called out by the hosts because it's peripheral or tangential to the topic being discussed. And, as is so often the case, this all started with Reagan (more on that in a moment). While it's true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) the latest main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees is the Republican Party itself.

January 6th was a rehearsal; they're now planning 2025. Coups quietly build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli… As we look at the upcoming year this New Year's Eve, the most urgent question facing us is whether the assault Putin, Orbán, Trump, Musk, and Vance have planned for our political system in 2025 will succeed. In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall. "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly." "What brought it on?" "Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends." For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their "friends." They are not friends. With few exceptions, they are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.