Hartmann Report

The result was that science, culture, and human rights — and even the exploration of any religious doctrine not authorized by Church authorities — were frozen for a "dark" thousand years… Want a repeat of the Dark Ages? Just put religion in charge of government. Donald Trump and JD Vance, who recently converted to Catholicism, are the political leaders of a movement to convert America's form of governance from a secular democratic republic into a fundamentalist white Christian ethnostate. In this, they're joined by the six Catholic Republican justices on the Supreme Court who've already imposed their church's religious doctrine on the rest of us with their Dobbs decision. Trump's doing this to bring in the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic vote; Vance is apparently a true believer. In both cases they threaten to throw America into a new Dark Age resembling, in a worst case scenario, the rule of the mullahs who replaced Iran's secular democracy with a theocratic state. It's useful to look at what happened to Europe when, around the 6th century, the newly formed Catholic Church took over most of that continent and ruled it with an iron fist for at least nine centuries, an era we refer to as "the Dark Ages."

Looking back, although about half of the founders were practicing their own form of voter suppression as slaveholders, most held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley v. Valeo case and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC). In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read it in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy that was run of, by, and for the rich.24 He said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.”25 He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

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He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just daily reliving his old hits, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days... I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program: Americans are baffled about what's happened to Donald Trump. He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him. He's gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened? The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career. He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall! Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking. First, the background.

How long will it take us to reject this new McCarthy era that Trump, Vance, and their allies are hell-bent on inflicting on us? It appears that groups aligned with Donald Trump and JD Vance are preparing to reboot an American version of the old East German Stasi, this time with government workers in their crosshairs. I remember the Stasi well.

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.

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