2025 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 8, 2025

"One Battle After Another" Is What Happens When Art Refuses to Kneel

Conservatives call Anderson's film "irresponsible" because it dares to show what happens when power turns its guns on the powerless... This week has felt like one battle after another. We all watched video after video of ICE agents dropping from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment, kicking in doors and terrorizing Black and Hispanic American and immigrant families, then trashing and stealing their possessions without ever presenting a warrant signed by a judge. The GOP pushed the country to the brink again with another government shutdown threat while right-wing legislatures redrew districts to erase the votes of millions. We heard more talk of arresting journalists for doing their jobs, and watched as the military rolled through American cities as if people here are the enemy. Each day has felt like a slow-motion assault on democracy itself. Louise and I went to see Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie One Battle After Another last weekend, and I was stunned. It's a film of rare courage and artistry. From the first scene to the last, Paul Thomas Anderson reminds us that cinema can still tell the truth about power and conscience. It's a film that demands attention, not permission.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 7, 2025

Is ICE Today’s Klan?

From concealed identities to sanctioned violence, the echoes between ICE raids and Klan terror are too loud to ignore… Masked, armed law enforcement agents who regularly violate the law and strip people of their constitutional rights is nothing new in America. They have, in fact, a long and well-documented history, including states — after years of abuse by masked men — passing laws specifically to prevent them from concealing their identities when performing law enforcement operations. In this era, we call them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents; during the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries they called themselves the Klu Klux Klan. They often operated with the blessing of both federal and state governments, often deputized and given badges and guns, and “enforced the law” while wearing their famous white hoods to conceal their individual identities.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 6, 2025

America’s Fourth Amendment Is on Life Support — What Do You Do When Your Government Becomes the Criminal?

Raids without warrants, kids in zip-ties, and officials who say "F** the children": this is the moral collapse of the American state. It's time for state authorities to start making arrests... Remember the old TV crime/drama shows? A cop would bang on a suspect’s door and the suspect would say, through the door, “Do you have a warrant?” The officer would then walk away, promising to come back later with the requisite paper signed by a judge. No more. Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 5, 2025

Ludwig von Mises and the “Critical Race Theory” of neoliberalism: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness

To say that Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were both traumatized and influenced by their respective brushes with Nazism would be an understatement. Mises suffered the indignity of Hitler’s gestapo rummaging through his apartment in March of 1938, seizing 21 boxes of his papers and taking over his apartment. Two years later, Mises fled to the United States, where, ironically, he advocated many of Hitler’s racial ideas and even integrated them into his economic ideology. “It must be emphasized,” he wrote, “that the destiny of modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years is inseparably linked with the fate of economic science.”

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 4, 2025

Saturday Report 10/4/25 — As the wealth of the top 1% of Americans hit a record $52 trillion, young people’s support for the Trump administration is in free fall...

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Swing district voters are increasingly upset with Trump and the GOP about exploding grocery prices. — Over the past decade Republicans have voted at least 70 times to repeal Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA), and they took a major whack at it again with the Big Billionaires’ Bill this year; most Americans agree with Democrats that its worth shutting down the government to force them to repeal the cuts. — Speaking of the shutdown, Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice Chairman and California Congressman Ro Khanna, a twice-monthly regular on my radio/TV program, echoed the point yesterday on Fox News that I made here on Hartmann Report a few days ago and have been discussing on the air: Republicans in the Senate don’t need a single Democratic vote to re-open the government. Not one! And they could do it tomorrow. — As the wealth of the top 1% of Americans hit a record $52 trillion last month (up 6% over the previous quarter), young people’s support for the Trump administration is in free-fall. — Portlanders laying flowers in front of the ICE building, planning a naked bike ride as a protest, and Portland’s bicycle police arresting a rightwing influencer (and two others) for trying to get into a fight with anti-ICE protesters are apparently getting to the White House. Now they’re threatening to cutting federal funds to Portland. — Elon speaks, the FBI leaps. — “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth orders our military to kill four more Venezuelan civilians in defiance of both US and international law, and the naval airmen comply. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World: The Superpower Hidden in ADHD: Hypercuriosity — Thom TV: Sue's Daily Stack, Monday, 29 September, 2025 — Wisdom School: The Hidden Power of Gratitude and Forgiveness

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 3, 2025

Twelve Steps to National Collapse: A Blueprint for How Democracies Die

A historian's alarm: when these twelve familiar steps appear in a nation, the result is often irreversible—unless citizens rise up and demand otherwise… "A house divided against itself cannot stand." —Abraham Lincoln "The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. To render us again one people, acting as one nation, should be the object of every man really a patriot."—Thomas Jefferson People are baffled. Why are Trump and his Republican lickspittles so intent on gutting our government, destroying our alliances and reputation around the world, and screwing working class people while transferring over $50 trillion from them to the morbidly rich?

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 2, 2025

The GOP’s Addiction to Lies: The Death of Truth and the Rise of Post-Fact Politics

When lies become policy and propaganda becomes identity, democracy itself is put at risk… Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics. Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment; having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them. As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people. That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were naked lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused. That party is dead.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 1, 2025

Is America Sleepwalking Into The Dictator’s Playbook?

History's tyrants followed this same path — and those citizens who failed to resist lost their nations forever… Most jobs have a "playbook," a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it's running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house's plumbing. Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too. It's one that's been carefully followed in recent times by Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator's Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Marcos, Pinochet, Stalin, and Tojo (among others). And now it's being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who're a bit more than halfway through the list.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 30, 2025

"Radical Left Violence” Is the New Big Lie — And It’s Deadlier Than You Think

Decades of disinformation have built a rightwing propaganda empire—now it’s aimed at silencing dissent. Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud. They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as ten million Americans being denied their vote in 2028. But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 29, 2025

Impeach or Perish: Why Republicans Must Choose Between Trump and the Constitution

Impeachment isn’t just a political strategy; it’s the last defense of our Constitution. Republicans must act now, decisively and unapologetically. If they do, they may yet save America and themselves… Donald Trump and many of the people surrounding him have become explicit threats to what’s left of our democratic republic. And now they’re saying that my (or your) simply saying those words may be enough to get us locked up or otherwise legally, financially, or physically destroyed. In 1964, like Hillary Clinton, I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater, and later read both of his autobiographies, Conscience of a Conservative and With No Apologies. There’s no way Goldwater — or any Republican of that era — would tolerate the ways Trump and his toadies are ripping apart our constitutional order and flagrantly violating our laws and traditions. And now he’s trying to pick a Made-For-Fox “News” fight in Portland; if one kid throws a Molotov cocktail, it will become the justification for another massive loss of our constitutional rights of free speech and assembly all across the nation. Cheered on by rightwing media for profit. If Republicans don’t stand up soon and impeach Trump — and demand Vance reflect the traditional values of republican democracy or similarly face impeachment — history will judge them beyond harshly.