Hartmann Report

How the GOP's war on empathy turned America into a playground for billionaires and psychopaths... "In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men." — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

Masked ICE agents are now snatching dissidents off the streets like a scene from Stalin's Russia. This isn't speculative fiction. It's happening right now, in America… This is how it begins. Tuesday night, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was going out to a restaurant to meet friends when masked federal ICE agents dressed in street clothes seized her off a public sidewalk and disappeared her. Her apparent crime was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Trump and Netanyahu. Where is she now? At first, nobody knew. As her attorney told The New York Times: "We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her." Then it was revealed last night — as the video of her kidnapping went viral — that she's been transported to a violent ICE facility in Louisiana. Yeah, that place. Without any legal due process that anybody can identify.

No matter how hard you try, the world won't forget. The lies, the corruption, and the betrayal are etched into history, a stain that will follow your party for generations… Dear Republicans, Here we go again. A large chunk of Trump's cabinet and our national security leaders just endangered our country and our pilots who were flying over Yemen with their arrogance and frank stupidity. Their lies about it were so egregious that Jeffrey Goldberg published the actual transcript in The Atlantic this morning. Only the best people, right?

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was a 1971 movie starring Robert DeNiro about a mafia family in New York that’s led by a buffoon who surrounds himself with other incompetents and thus seems to always screw everything up. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.

And this one ends with either democracy renewed — or democracy erased… We're now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Trump is ignoring the courts' orders and threatening the judges' lives so blatantly that even Chief Justice John Roberts has been moved to speak out. The history of America is the history of fits and starts of progress followed by oligarchic backlash leading to periods of pain and stagnation (except for the morbidly rich). Our first eighty years started with the American Revolution against an absolute monarch and the world's largest corporation. But the Founders' idealism was rejected by the Southern oligarchs, who saw the end of slavery as a threat to their wealth and power; they'd already turned the South into a neofascist hellscape and then launched the war against America that Abraham Lincoln won.

Voting is mandatory in Australia and Belgium—so why not here? Many people would loudly proclaim that compulsory voting is an anti-democratic idea, but it seems unlikely that anyone would argue that Australia and Belgium are dictatorships because they fine people who don’t vote. The $20 fine is high enough to make it worthwhile for voters to participate but low enough that it is unlikely to bankrupt someone or be burdensome to enforce. Australia implemented compulsory voting in 1924; the voter turnout in Australia has never been lower than 91 percent.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump Admin: Hand Over the Data or Say Goodbye to Social Security — Lock Them Up? Trump Officials Face Jail Time for Stonewalling. — One of the nation's largest Democratic-aligned law firms caves in to Trump threats and pressure. — Trump's Budget: Robbing the Poor to Enrich the Wealthy?. — Trump Wants Tesla Vandals Locked in El Salvador's Notorious Mega-Prison. — is Trump going to declare martial law? — Furry Alert! Don't think the GOP are doing enough? Well it's just not true: They are now tackling the furry crisis in our schools. Isn't that more important than protecting social security or minimum wage? — Wisdom School: Challenging Reality: The Mind-Matter Connection — Hunter in a Farmer's World: ADHD Chaos Hack: Mastering Your Time Before It Masters You

Trump, Musk, and their tech-bro overlords are engineering America's authoritarian future... The future of American democracy isn't being dismantled by accident; it's being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new. A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.

If Trump can destroy America's biggest law firms, who will be left to stand against him? Donald Trump and his henchmen have set out to break the legs of American democracy by making it difficult for people he hates to hire an attorney to defend themselves or sue the Trump administration. He and Musk are also, with their public statements, apparently trying to terrify federal and state judges into submission with threats that their followers will employ violence. This could very well herald the end of our republic, transforming America into something that more closely resembles Russia or 1930s Germany than anything Hamilton or Franklin would have endorsed. First, some background.

First, they came for the immigrants. Now, they're coming for legal residents, tourists, and even citizens. Are you paying attention now? Imagine stepping off a plane in the United States, fully expecting to enter the country without issue, only to be surrounded by armed agents, handcuffed, and thrown into a freezing detention center. No trial. No lawyer. No contact with the outside world. In Trump's America, you are no longer guaranteed your rights or freedom—because now, it takes nothing more than an ICE agent's "suspicion" to make you disappear. This isn't a mistake. It's part of an expanding system of cruelty, where ICE—once an agency tasked with immigration enforcement—is now operating like an unchecked police force, targeting legal residents, visitors, and even US citizens with impunity.