Hartmann Report

— How a conservative activist spiffed a $1.8 million propaganda campaign to flatter Clarence Thomas — Looks like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was possibly a Russian hack. — GOP AG's are planning for a “fugitive slave act” to track abortion and trans “felons.” — Red states continue to “shackle” Black people. — How a single lie on Fox “News” threw Michigan’s politics into chaos and is being used to try to flip their legislature from Democratic to Republican. — A lawyer is forging ground that others may will follow about big oil: this could be tobacco all over again. — Geeky Science/Orwell Alert! What is America going to do about AI now being used for “deep fakes” in politics?

Trump: “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” Earlier this week, The New York Times published a partial exposé of Trump’s plans for his second administration. It involved basically turning America into Russia or Hungary, where the president becomes the singular center of federal power, eclipsing Congress and the Courts.

Voting rights are essential to maintaining a democracy; without them nations quickly devolve into oligarchy and then autocracy... Without free and fair elections and widespread voter participation, you can’t have a functioning democratic republic. Republicans know this: that’s why they’re trying to end free and fair elections. ... Felon disenfranchisement laws were a common way to suppress the Black vote in the Confederate states, and explains why in Florida one in five African American adults — well over a million — have a felony conviction and, until recently, were unable to vote. And it’s not that Black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people; it’s that they’re more likely to get caught, prosecuted, and convicted. Black people in Florida do not, for example, jaywalk three times more than white people but they are three times more likely to be cited by the police for it.

Rightwing billionaires (who pay an average income tax of 3.4 percent) think the world is made up of “makers” and “takers." So what if 45,000 Americans die every year because of this callous attitude? The easiest and laziest way for a state government to deny its citizens a benefit to which they’re entitled is to wrap it in so much paperwork, make people jump through so many hoops to qualify, that they give up in confusion or exhaustion. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, one of the nation’s cruelest — he’s shipped refugees out of state based on lies, put a $10,000 bounty on the heads of pregnant women, and ordered his own police to throw children and nursing babies into the Rio Grande River where razor wire awaits them — is all-in on this with regard to Medicaid.

Most Americans just learned, from reporting this week in The New York Times, that Trump, billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks, and some of the leaders of the GOP have a plan to flip America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian strongman-type of government should he or another like-minded MAGA Republican win the White House in 2024. This would be the death-knell of democracy, the crisis I warn about in my new book, and a historic disaster of almost unimaginable proportions given how much influence our nation has on other democracies around the world. This week that new book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, hits the bookstores.

The GOP is exploiting the structures in our brains that are rooted deep in our DNA, the wiring that says, “I must protect 'us' from 'them,'” the wiring that kept humans tribal for 300 millennia... The American Experiment is facing a new test. Is it possible for a nation to be both democratic and fully integrated (race, religion, gender)? How do we overcome the natural human tendency to self-segregate and to demonize “the other”? It’s an issue that’s not unique to our nation; the question is tearing apart Israel, South Africa, and much of Europe as you’re reading these words (as I wrote about at some length last week).

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The Clarence Thomas corruption scandal grows. — Should we protect our great-great grand children’s rights today? — Florida Republican calls for gutting the FBI like a fish and ending all public schools. — In Good News: Biden to forgive student debt in the billions for over 800,000 people. — Florida is going down in flames because the insurance industry is cutting their losses. Who’s next and what will this mean for the future of America? — Would you live in a Red state or Red area? — What!? Are publishers already training AI to write books “from” best-selling authors? — Geeky Science! Climate change is melting down America: we need to nationalize the poison that's killing the planet.

Establishing a political and personal identity in the public’s mind early on is crucial to effective campaigning and to developing a campaign that can withstand both personal and political attacks. Several Fox News hosts were attempting to ridicule Vice President Harris yesterday, essentially making things up. This is just the beginning. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, most Americans knew very little about his running mate, Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson. Moreover, they didn’t much care. Kennedy was a robust 43 years old and the odds that he’d succumb to disease or old age weren’t even considered (and the last president assassinated was McKinley in 1901, which nobody of voting age then remembered). Therefore, outside of Texas, when JFK campaigned that year, he almost never even mentioned LBJ. Nobody really cared. That won’t be true next year. Regardless of who the Republican nominee is, their line of attack against the Biden/Harris ticket will be simple.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill – unnecessarily – a half-million Americans... Kentucky MAGA Republican James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has been exposed as basically a con man with his phony Hunter Biden bribe witness. Now he is trying to rewrite the history of Trump and Covid. Comer’s latest stunt to try to whitewash Trump’s role in the unnecessary death of at least a half-million Americans is to argue — nonsensically — that the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab and therefore something, something, something Trump is not responsible. He’s doing this with House Oversight Committee hearings this week. The reason Comer and other MAGA Republicans are working so hard to push this perennial theory (which may be true, but so what?) is that they think directing the nation’s attention to the Wuhan lab — which got collaboration and minor funding from Anthony Fauci’s realm of the government — will point us at Fauci and thus distract us all from how many Americans Trump let die and why. And it’s the “why” Trump intentionally let a half million Americans die unnecessarily where our media, and the Democrats, are really missing the story