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With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged….”

Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.

And it’s not like the Republicans really believe the mythology they’re trying to sell the rest of us. The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000 — more than a billion ballots cast nationwide — and found just 89 cases of non-citizen voters. In more than twenty years!

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The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump’s claims were right that the election was “stolen” from him by “Mexicans” voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.”

Nonetheless, Republicans keep promoting their lie that “illegals are voting” to justify massive purges of legal voters whose only crime is being Black, Hispanic, living in a college town, or being a big city dweller in a Red state. A likely Democratic voter, in other words.

And let’s not forget that hypocrite Trump himself is all in on encouraging voter fraud; at his “midterm convention” in Dallas a few weeks ago he had thousands of people raise their hands and repeat an oath after him:

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell...”

And the Reuters story comes three weeks after six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let Trump’s DHS, run by former plumber Markwayne Mullin, turn an ICE immigration database called SAVE into a bulk voter-purging machine right in the middle of an election.

When Texas ran its registered voters through SAVE they purged thousands of people wrongly flagged as noncitizens; LULAC is suing to try to get these actual citizens voting rights restored.

Which all raises a question that I’ve been asking on the air (and in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting) for years:

“Why is it that if a Republican governor wants to take away your gun he has to go to court, but if he wants to take away your vote he doesn’t even have to notify you?”

You’ll recall that back in 2008 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declared that we all have an absolute constitutional “right” to own a gun, and if any state or city wants to violate that right they have to go before a judge and present evidence that you can contest and even appeal all the way to the Supreme Court itself.

When we have a “right” in America and our government wants to take it away, they have to provide notice, irrefutable evidence, a courtroom and neutral judge, a finding, and a right to appeal. It’s called “due process” and is established by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

And in 1993, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed a law establishing — without any ambiguity — that your vote is also a “right.” The National Voter Registration Act lays it out clearly:

“[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” and that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”

And the phrase “right to vote” also appears five times in the Constitution itself, more than any other right that document names (guns get a single mention).

So, why is it that Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year? And how are they getting away with using junk-mail-appearing postcards to justify those purges?

In 1981, the RNC sent letters to Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey to “verify” their voting status; they built a challenge list of 45,000 people and posted off-duty cops at polling places in predominantly Black and Democratic Newark and Trenton to check names to challenge those voters.

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The Democratic Party sued against this practice, called “caging” in the direct mail industry, and won a court order blocking the Republicans from doing it. That consent decree expired in 2018, though, the same year that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told Ohio Secretary of State John Husted that he could resume the practice, but this time instead of the GOP paying for it the cost of mailing the postcards could be covered by Ohio taxpayers.

Justice Breyer’s dissent pointed out the obvious fraud of it, noting that on average around 4 percent of Americans move their residence every year but:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they [allegedly] changed their residences.”

Now the practice has spread to virtually every Republican-controlled state. They send out millions of postcards that look like junk mail and if you don’t return one and skip an election, you’re officially purged. They don’t even have to notify you; you find out when you show up on election day and they either turn you away or give you a “provisional” ballot.

During and after the 2024 election, my radio/TV show’s phone lines were jammed with people — many from big cities in Ohio and Georgia — complaining that this had happened to them and they’d just discovered it when they tried to vote. None had been notified.

And, sure enough, the provisional ballots were the tell that exposes this GOP scam. The Election Assistance Commission’s own survey of the 2024 election found that 1,736,209 Americans were shunted onto provisional ballots that year, and that the single most common reason was that the voter “did not appear on the list of eligible voters.”

Provisional ballots are often not counted at all, unless the voter shows up at the Secretary of State’s office before the final count to certify that they are, in fact, a legal citizen and voter.

Since the Husted decision by the Supreme Court allowing this bizarre practice, Republicans have put their corrupt system into hyperdrive. That same EAC federal survey found that GOP-controlled states sent out nearly 40 million “confirmation postcards” in just the two years between the 2022 and 2024 elections.

As a result, more than 21 million registered voters were stripped from the voting rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and the most common justification was that they failed to return that junk-mail postcard.

Reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast testified about this in federal court for the NAACP and, here on Hartmann Report, detailed how his team went through Georgia’s purge list person-by-person.

They found 198,351 Georgians who’d been cancelled even though they hadn’t moved and were still (mostly Black) citizens. In Wisconsin, where Harris lost by 29,397 votes, Republicans had purged 166,433 voters from the lists. Pennsylvania had purged 360,132 people, about three times Trump’s margin of victory in that state.

His conclusion was straightforward:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

In other words, your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Court and Congress.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if your county sheriff started confiscating guns from people who failed to mail back a postcard. The rightwing press would be hysterical and the Court would strike it down in a New York minute.

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So here’s where we are today. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff - ens - purger”) cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations last August, 6 percent of the entire state, the majority Democrats according to a Fair Fight analysis.

When Black Voters Matter asked for the records behind the purge, Raffensperger’s office handed over a stripped-down spreadsheet, and they had to sue him to try to get the names. Ohio’s Frank LaRose published a list of 352,389 names for cancellation just this past year, following a 2024 purge in which Ohio Democrats documented more than a thousand wrongly removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone.

Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize their full voter files, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, so the whole country can be run through his flawed SAVE purging database.

Republicans can’t win elections on their track record of taking away healthcare, gutting the Social Security administration, and handing massive tax cuts to billionaires, so they send postcards into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and college towns. The only thing that’s changed since Jim Crow, in other words, is the technology.

Democrats in Congress tried to fix this situation in 2022 with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. It passed the House and had a majority in the Senate, but every Republican in the Senate joined in a filibuster. If Kirstin Sinema and Joe Manchin hadn’t stabbed us all in the back by voting with Republicans to sustain the filibuster, these crimes against our democracy would be explicitly illegal, as they already are in every other advanced nation in the world.

Fixing this — codifying our “right to vote” per the NVRA from 1993 and with new legislation — has to be right up there with overturning the other most-corrupt action to come from Republicans on the Court aka Citizens United.

But none of that will ever happen if Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate so Trump can further disintegrate our republic and turn us into his beloved Russia before the 2028 election.

So, vote!

And please share this article with your friends in Red states, support independent journalism by subscribing to the Hartmann Report, and pass it on. They can’t purge all of us if we’re all watching.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Erase My Name”

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The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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When we think of strongman dictatorships we often imagine tanks in the streets, but those usually come in the later stages of repression (think Tienanmen Square) and often are never even needed (think today’s Russia). Instead, as every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

That’s the message of this week’s raid on Ilhan Omar’s home, and so many other atrocities committed by Trump’s eager fascist lickspittles over the past 21 months. He and his advisors are simply repeating a long and well-trod history.

On the morning of March 14, 1757, King George II ordered Admiral John Byng executed by firing squad on the quarterdeck of the HMS Monarch in Portsmouth harbor. His crime? He’d just lost a battle off the coast of Minorca. Two years later, Voltaire wrote the event into his novella Candide, having the hero of his story watch the execution from the deck of a nearby ship. When a sailor standing with him asks why Byng was killed, his hero replied:

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. Pour encourager les autres.”

The phrase has been foundational to the rise of every tyrant in history since. Pick a few people, make an example of them, and the fear will spread across the population in a way that’s just as effective as an army of secret police.

The genius, as Voltaire pointed out, is that it costs almost nothing yet, when done right, can have enormous impact on public behavior.

Trump has been running this play since the day he took office, and this week he ran it again, this time on a member of Congress just three weeks before an election.

Reports suggest that Homeland Security Investigations — a division of ICE — raided Ilhan Omar’s house in Washington looking for paperwork her late father filled out when she was a child refugee. She has not been charged with a crime and, as is so common, ICE isn’t explaining what they’re up to here.

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That same afternoon Trump called her “totally crooked” and went off on her that night in Youngstown, Ohio calling the country she came from “one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet” while the crowd chanted “deport.”

Ever since March, this administration has apparently been looking for ways to take down this high-profile and unapologetic critic of Trump and his many criminal and authoritarian acts. Back in March, JD Vance told a rightwing podcaster that Omar had “definitely committed immigration fraud” and that Stephen Miller was working out “how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you build a case.”

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment.

To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

This has now — like in Russia — become standard operating practice. And it reaches all the way down to a single mother of two in New Jersey; Joanne Carducci, who posts as JoJoFromJerz on Substack, revealed last month that lawyers for the president and first lady spent the first half of this year sending her letters demanding a retraction, an apology, and money over her online criticism of Melania Trump. She bravely describes in detail how threats left her worrying about her children, her home, and her livelihood.

And that’s one of the most low-profile of the cases; we never would have known if she hadn’t spoken up. How many other authors and commentators have been similarly threatened? Odds are 99% will never write about it, particularly if the threats also contain demands for confidentiality like hers apparently did.

— There’s James Comey, indicted twice now, most recently for putting a photo of seashells on social media. It’s been six months since he was charged, and he won’t even be arraigned until January of next year. And the Justice Department fired his daughter from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

— Letitia James, who got a fraud conviction against Trump, was indicted for mortgage fraud last October and after the case was dismissed in November Todd Blanche brought the same case before two more grand juries over two weeks; both still refused to indict her. Now Bill Pulte is going after her.

— Lisa Cook was merely the first Black woman to be a governor of the Federal Reserve, an intolerable situation for this racist, revanchist regime. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to fire her, last week Trump signed an order for her to appear at a closed-door kangaroo court “hearing” on November 5th, two days after the election.

— They went after Senator Adam Schiff, who had to set up a legal defense fund to deal with the consequences.

— Cassidy Hutchison, who at 25 sat in front of the January 6th committee and told her story, has — bizarrely — the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ coming after her.

— When Trump turned his machine against former CIA Director John Brennan, who’s been publicly criticizing Trump, two prosecutors in a row quit so they’ve staffed the case with military lawyers and a former clerk to Judge Aileen Cannon.

— And then there’s Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympian who touched the Reflecting Pool that Trump had hired a donor and friend to re-paint. He was arrested, Jeanine Pirro indicted him for a 10-year felony, and last week his lawyers asked the inspectors general to investigate what they called a “nightmare.” I’m not holding my breath; the arrest for publicly embarrassing Trump was the entire point.

The press is getting the same treatment.

— Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, two Black journalists, were arrested in January at Pam Bondi’s personal direction for covering a protest at a St. Paul church, even though a federal magistrate had already refused to sign the warrant for lack of probable cause. Prosecutors later had to admit the sworn claim that the two were “chanting with agitators” was simply false, but their motions to dismiss the arrest are still pending and racking up legal bills.

— Trump went after George Stephanopoulos and ABC and they stupidly gave him $16 million dollars to make it go away. Instead, though, Trump turned his guns (and his lickspittle, Brendan Carr) on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.

— And as of Friday, the Justice Department has antitrust demands out to all five networks for briefly suspending pool coverage after the White House banned CNN.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and shut down his critics. Reuters reported that the Trump regime has put up a cross-agency task force, meeting since May of last year, to coordinate punishment of perceived enemies.

Their Pulitzer-winning reporting on this issue has counted at least 470 targets of retribution by last November, including 128 federal workers fired and 112 security clearances pulled. The group Protect Democracy has an even more extensive tracker of these efforts to silence dissent and truth.

None of this is new, strategy-wise. In the weeks after the Reichstag fire in 1933, Hitler opened a detention facility at Dachau and threw a few thousand leftwing commentators, politicians, and journalist (among them Carl von Ossietzky) in as a message to the rest of the country.

Stalin exploited the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov as an excuse for show trials that were really designed to cow every party official and newspaper editor who may think of opposing him.

In 2003, the early days of what has since become his dictatorship, Putin jailed just one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. When a few press outlets dared challenge him, reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her apartment building’s elevator and the Russian press hasn’t spoken up since.

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And it’s been tried here before, too, by the guy who taught this to Trump himself.

Joe McCarthy never succeeded in sending anybody to prison for being a communist, but he didn’t have to. As I point out in The Last American President, he and his chief counsel Roy Cohn very publicly destroyed the careers of a few people and, as a result, thousands of teachers, screenwriters, diplomats, and union organizers quietly shut up. What we’re watching today is the Cohn method with the full weight of the United States Department of Justice behind it.

I’ve even encountered a small taste of this in my career. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was a reporter and the morning news anchor at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, then the number one station in Michigan’s capital.

One morning a state police officer and a federal agent walked into our newsroom and told us that they were about to make a mass arrest a few miles away at a house full of young people who’d stopped paying their federal taxes to protest the Vietnam War. They asked us, politely, to not report it because, they said, they didn’t want to encourage the movement.

After they left, my news director and I argued about it for several hours. It was ultimately his call, though, and we didn’t run the story. Nobody threatened us, but nobody had to. Two men with badges and the power to make your life miserable had asked a favor, and we gave it to them, and I’ve carried that around for more than fifty years.

If a polite request could do that to a newsroom in 1970, think about what a pre-dawn raid on a congresswoman does to every reporter, prosecutor, professor, and civil servant watching the news this week.

The judges who’ve been about the only force in America capable of stopping Trump have been feeling it the most. U.S. Marshals logged 564 threats against federal judges in fiscal 2025, and Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island — who Trump and his allies called a “monster” and a “lunatic” for blocking a funding freeze — had marshals tell him they’d identified at least six credible death threats.

Judge Esther Salas, who now spends her time warning her colleagues about what his rhetoric produces, knows the power of Trump’s intimidation efforts. In 2020 her only son, Daniel, opened the door of their New Jersey home to a Trump supporter in a delivery uniform who’d written that she was a “lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama” and shot Daniel dead. He was twenty.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

That’s what the admiral on the quarterdeck was for. You don’t need to arrest a nation to get there. You just need to arrest a few hundred people loudly enough and often enough, and eventually everyone else essentially arrests themselves.

What gives me hope, however, is how the courts have been holding the line.

Three Virginia grand juries looked at Letitia James and said no. A Minnesota magistrate refused to sign the Don Lemon warrant. Judges in Alexandria rebuked prosecutors from the bench. Career lawyers in Florida walked out of the grand conspiracy case rather than put their names on it. The Supreme Court, of all institutions, told Trump he can’t fire Lisa Cook on a whim.

But the lesson history teaches us when we look at how dozens of democracies have been felled by fascist strongmen is that after the legislature and much of the press are cowed eventually the courts will crack, too. The only thing that will prevent that is if Democrats can take power in Congress and use the power of the subpoena to expose this fascist scheme.

Show up for the reporters and the whistleblowers and the Olympic canoeists when they’re in the dock, and don’t let a single one of these cases pass without comment. Show up to vote and bring five friends.

And if this piece was useful, please share it widely and consider supporting independent media by subscribing to the Hartmann Report at hartmannreport.com. They’re counting on our silence. Let’s disappoint them.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Silence is the Prize”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaires’ propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

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Three weeks from today, California voters will have their ballots tallied on Proposition 40 (and 41 and 42, which would negate 40) that will impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets — the wealth — of the state’s 200+ billionaires.

The money will be used to make up for the massive almost-trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in that state, that hits in January because the Republican’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill used it to pay for their trillions in tax cuts for billionaires.

The California Democratic Party has formally endorsed Prop 40 along with the California Nurses Association and the state AFL-CIO, and if the state’s Democratic politicians had backed the tax across the board, odds are very high that it would pass and 42 (which is now polling over 50%) would fail.

But Governor Gavin Newsom has come out against it, making an argument that dates back to the Reagan years:

“If you ask the morbidly rich to pay more in taxes they’ll simply leave the state.”

That threat is the beating heart of a bizarre economic and governing philosophy called neoliberalism. I remember the late Milton Friedman hustling this crap back in the 1970s and was horrified when Reagan dusted off its variation in the old Horse and Sparrow economics that Warren Harding had tried in the 1920s, calling it “trickle down.”

Harding told people that if you feed horses [rich people] extra oats, that will pass through into their patties on the road where the sparrows [working class people] can pick them out. He cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 73 to 25 percent, which kicked off the Roaring 20’s and led directly to Black Tuesday and the Republican Great Depression.

It took FDR almost a decade to completely repudiate Harding’s policies and put the nation back together and, with his 90 percent top tax rate on the morbidly rich, create the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation in the history of the world.

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Reagan cut the top rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times, according to his own economic advisor Bruce Bartlett, to partially cover the hole that blew in the nation’s budget (Reagan tripled our national debt in a mere 8 years, a non-wartime record at the time.)

Thus began the destruction of FDR’s vaunted middle class and the explosion of today’s predatory billionaire class.

The “tax burden” (a favorite Republican phrase) moved down the income ladder from the rich to working class people and has kept moving in that direction through every Republican administration since.

But neoliberalism wasn’t limited to America; it swept the democratic world in the 1980s and 1990s, most famously embraced by the French and the British but popping up measurably in virtually all the European nations. The result is today most visible in the student riots that are tearing France apart.

I was listening to The New York Times “Daily” podcast on the topic yesterday and they started out by blaming France’s debt and school crisis on decades of over-spending on social policy without mentioning the revenue (taxes) side of the equation. Interestingly, the top comment (as I’m writing this) on the podcast says:

“Is it any surprise that the neoliberal Times ignored the effect of cutting taxes on the rich & went immediately for France’s social welfare programs? Instead of cutting taxes, France should have raised them. Ask Kansas how trickle-down economics actually works.”

Macron — a neoliberal “conservative” and former investment banker — is still doubling down on tax-cutting neoliberalilsm. This week their legislature, the National Assembly, opens debate on an austerity budget that cuts pensions and freezes wages for public workers.

Young people are in the streets, around 400 high schools have shut down, and the government’s borrowing costs have hit their highest level in at least two decades. And France is probably just the beginning; Bloomberg is warning that the turmoil could and probably will spread across the Eurozone.

France does spend a lot on its people: everybody has healthcare, childcare, college, and a dignified retirement and the trains generally run on time. And those costs are what the neoliberal politicians and press in America are focusing on.

Almost nobody, though, is asking why the morbidly rich in France are paying less and working class people are paying more in the years since the ’80s, just like it’s been here in America since our very own neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

From 1914 through 1986, France’s top income tax rate on the morbidly rich was generally above 60 percent and it’s middle class was steadily growing. Until 1985 its corporations paid a 50 percent tax on profits. Then the neoliberals arrived, and today the top personal rate is 45 percent, the top corporate rate is 25 percent, and, while French billionaires have never had it so good, the French middle class is in crisis.

While total taxes actually climbed from 33.7 percent of the economy in 1965 to 43.5 percent today, the money that used to come from the top tiers of society and business was replaced with flat levies on paychecks and on purchases that everybody buys. As a result, the progressive income tax went from 12 percent of public revenue in 1981 to 6 percent by 2014.

The result is that the effective tax rate on the richest 0.1 percent is 26 percent rather than the 45 percent that an affluent doctor or lawyer might pay, as France’s Institut des Politiques Publiques points out.

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Economist Gabriel Zucman puts it more bluntly, noting that the average French person pays about 51 percent of their income in taxes of all kinds while billionaires pay about 25 percent. Which is why, over that same period, the fortunes of France’s 500 richest people swelled from 6 percent of the country’s GDP to 42 percent.

Demonstrating that old cliché about the definition of insanity, Macron stupidly poured gasoline on the fire his predecessors had started.

He scrapped the country’s wealth tax and cut the corporate rate from 33 percent to 25 percent; France’s own national auditor, the Cour des comptes, concluded that his tax cuts have cost the treasury more than €60 billion a year and produced no savings whatsoever to offset them. (That’s a bit more than a third of this year’s entire French government’s deficit.)

And make no mistake: the French people understand exactly what’s been done to them. When French-American economist Gabriel Zucman suggested France should levy a 2 percent minimum wealth tax (like Prop 40 in California, but smaller and permanent) on family fortunes over €100 million (about 1,800 French households) fully 86 percent of the public supported it, including 92 percent of Macron’s own party.

Nonetheless, Macron’s conservative allies joined up with Le Pen’s hard right to kill it in the Assembly last fall, warning that — wait for it — if it passed, “The rich would flee France.”

So now Macron is trying to extract that money from the nation’s retirees, just like Republicans here in America are right now talking about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare to sustain their tax cuts for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

France is almost certainly just the first domino to fall from neoliberal stupidity, as I detailed in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America. When you look at income taxes across the developed world in 1981, the average hit to the morbidly rich was 66 percent. By 2013 it had fallen to 43 percent, as the worldwide average corporate tax rate fell from 47 to 25 percent.

When two British scholars looked at 50 years of tax cuts for the rich in 18 wealthy countries, they showed how these neoliberal tax cuts consistently made the rich richer but did nothing measurable for growth or jobs. The sparrows (and us trickle-ees) are still waiting for the oats and drips.

Which brings us back to California and Newsom’s political calculations. Economists Saez and Zucman calculate that California’s billionaires currently pay about 0.2 percent of their wealth in state taxes each year, so even if fully a quarter of them stormed off to Texas or Florida it’d take a century for that lost income tax to equal what this one-time wealth tax would bring in even with only three-quarters of them still there to pay it.

Study after study shows most of them don’t leave anyway, because their homes, their companies, and their friends are where they made their money.

In 2022, for example, Massachusetts voters approved a 4 percent surtax on incomes over a million dollars, and sure enough, billionaires like Patriots owner Robert Kraft and New Balance’s Jim Davis shrilly warned that the rich would flee the state.

Instead, the tax brought in $3.38 billion last year, the third year in a row it’s more than doubled the state’s original estimate. Federal tax data from Massachusetts proves higher-income households were less likely to leave the year after it passed than the year before. And that money is now paying for quality schools, free community college, and low-cost public transit.

Newsome, of course, knows all this. But he also knows that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires buying our elections, so having access to billionaires’ money could be a big factor in his all-but-announced run for president in 2028.

What the French students are showing the world right now is what happens when politicians with real power across the political spectrum cling to neoliberal low-tax doctrine. The debt piles up, the bond traders start circling like chum-drawn sharks, and pretty soon everybody is talking about “fixing” Social Security, schools, and the rest of the social safety net to “restore fiscal responsibility.”

Meanwhile the morbidly rich see their wealth explode and — in America with this corrupt Supreme Court — their political power rises right along with it, which just accelerates the process.

So, if you live in California, vote “Yes!” on Prop 40 and “No!!!” on 41 and 42. And keep an eye and ear out for potential Democratic contenders for 2028 who — like Congressman Ro Khanna — have the courage to tell the truth about these things.

News for People, Not Power

Louise’s Daily Song: “We Gave It All To The Rich”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaire’s propaganda machine (whose social media sites have shadow-banned me and most progressives) would rather never see it.

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Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy the middle finger, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that pissed off truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

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As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

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As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

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US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

Congress has the power to find out which it is and to stop it, but only if enough of us make enough noise. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative to sign Fitzpatrick’s discharge petition the day the House comes back.

Demand that your senators get the written certification from Trump that the 2022 law requires and to insist the Graham Act’s sanctions actually kick in by their October 18th deadline.

Then check your registration at vote.org and show up on November 3 like the country depends on it. And if this piece was useful to you, please share it with friends and family, and consider subscribing to and supporting the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work together.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Benedict Arnold’s Ghost”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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When you ask most Americans why we’re the only developed nation on Earth without a national healthcare system that covers everybody at low cost, saves trillions, and saves hundreds of thousands of people from unnecessary death and disability every year, most will tell you about the AMA, the insurance lobby, or Reagan.

And, indeed, they’re all part of the story. But the deeper answer, one I discovered — to my shock — when I was writing this book, is that it’s almost all because of a guy nobody in modern America has every heard of.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman stepped off a boat in New York in 1884 with $4.76 in his pocket and not a word of English. By 1920 he was a vice president of Prudential, one of the most powerful and respected statisticians in the country, and America’s leading authority on the pseudoscience used to justify Jim Crow that was then called “scientific racism.” He was also, as you’ll read next Sunday, the single most effective opponent of universal health insurance this nation has ever produced.

What makes Hoffman so unsettling is that he wasn’t a crank. He published the first work anywhere in the world linking tobacco to lung cancer, documented the connection between asbestos and the mesothelioma that killed my father, and helped create what became both the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association.

He was brilliant when it came to numbers, and could read a mortality table better than almost anyone alive. And in 1896 he put that skill to work on a 300-page book that I tracked down in an antiquarian book store titled: Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. In that book, he purported to “prove” that Black Americans were headed for extinction because of their racial inferiority, and that any attempt by white society or government to help them — healthcare above all — would only speed up the process while dragging white people down with it.

This chapter follows Hoffman from the Georgia obstetrician’s pamphlet that gave him the idea, through the statistical case he built for it, to the arguments he left behind. “Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” he wrote. When David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on the proposition that government help hurts the people it’s meant to help, he was simply reciting Hoffman with the racial vocabulary filed off.

A warning before you begin reading: I quote Hoffman at length, and his language is the language of white supremacy. I left it intact because I want you to see exactly what the founding intellectual of American healthcare opposition believed, in his own words. That thread runs straight from his book to your Republican congressman’s talking points.

America, the Land of the Sick

America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right, the only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare, and the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, continuously enslaved and legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

Prior to the “Trump Depression,” roughly 60 percent of Americans would have to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1000 expense⁵⁹; the number now is probably closer to 80% of Americans who can’t handle such a hit and is higher still for minority communities. Yet copays and deductibles when a person gets sick averaged $1318.00 in 2015 when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans, up from $548 just ten years earlier.⁶⁰ This strikes minorities particularly hard , which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 30 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system – or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans – was Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Insurance Company that promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman Makes a Discovery

Racism is the main reason America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, as does every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get. And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post-Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man most Americans have never heard of.

In 1884 nineteen-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing 5’ 7” and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English,” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”⁶¹

From this humble beginning, Hoffman would become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920, he was an American citizen, Vice President of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.

In 1908 his article The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades, published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became Vice President of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the association between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

In 1913 Hoffman wrote a seminal paper on the relationship between workplace pollution and cancer, which led him to cofound The American Society for the Control of Cancer (known today as the American Cancer Society). In 1937, he extended his research beyond the workplace and published Cancer and Diet, a book correctly pointing out the correlation between poor nutrition and cancer that is still in print at a dense 767 pages, mostly of statistical analysis between dietary habits and rates of disease.

His cancer research was so extensive and detailed (he concluded that diets heavy in processed foods and animal products produced higher cancer rates) that Adelle Davis – whose books became my mother’s nutrition guru in the 1950s and ‘60s – became an early “convert” and “a devotee of Frederick Hoffman.”⁶² But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.

On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a pamphlet by Dr. Eugene R Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled Vital Equation of the Negro. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.⁶³

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether blacks would soon outnumber whites in that part of the country. The Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of black people claimed that blacks were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmet Till (among others).

However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking the protective womb of slavery, would die out for the simple reason that the black race was inferior to whites.

Corson acknowledged the Klan’s argument that, “The simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, whites would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s “Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.”⁶⁴ While blacks may have more children, Corson wrote, whites would still outnumber them because black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.” Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which he is not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, the Negro “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race…”

The discovery of this theory, called the “racial extinction thesis,” electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that may prevent or slow down the extinction of black people in America.

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro

In August of 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s opus magnum, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for black people “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”⁶⁵

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but to prove that any time white people tried to help black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman writes, “he is in the South as a permanent factor…with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections…and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”⁶⁶

In great detail, Hoffman spends about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, that blacks were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race.

“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. … This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration…sexual immorality…diminished social and economic efficiency…” And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed blacks in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote,” than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”

But with abolition, former slaves were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos or carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

But at the time, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries when he wrote:

“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral.

“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. … The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

To those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman (and his colleagues, including the Prudential Insurance Company) had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

From Scientific Racism to Libertarianism

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for Vice President of the United States on the banner of the

Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 Race Traits book, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor and legal violence, but it was scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position…” The damage done to black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman points to Native Americans to prove his point. “Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. … An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that had destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity. “The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: Only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate it weakens the overall human race.

“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concludes, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity. “All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy and religion have failed to develop [among blacks] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.

“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education – as any Libertarian can tell you – is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote, “Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.” And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed these were eternal truths independent of race.

“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. …[I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance … must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

Notice how Hoffman handled his numbers here, using real Black mortality data. The fact is that Black Americans in 1896 did die younger and more often of tuberculosis, malaria, and childbirth.

What Hoffman pulled off here, though, blinded by his own racism, was to strip out the obvious cause for all that suffering — three centuries of slavery followed by thirty years of poverty, Jim Crow, and hospitals that turned Black patients away — and attribute it instead to a simplistic argument for “race inferiority.”

That one widely-believed-in-his-day move of blaming the struggles and pain of the victims of American racism on themselves is also at the core of the libertarian/GOP case against healthcare. When you hear Republican politicians and on-the-take Democrats argue that uninsured people have “chosen” not to have coverage, that Medicaid recipients need “skin in the game,” or that expanding healthcare coverage “creates dependency,” you’re hearing echoes of the words of the long-dead Frederick Hoffman.

Next Sunday I’ll move from healthcare (and race) theory to the literally trillions of dollars involved. Prudential Insurance Company made Hoffman a VP and put him on the road, speaking to legislatures, physicians groups, and Congress between 1916 and 1920. Through those well-paid efforts he personally helped kill — repeatedly — what would have been America’s first healthcare-for-all program. And, ironically, all this was going down just three decades after Germany built the world’s first successful single-payer system in 1886.

If you know a young person who’s heard the Republican mantra that “welfare makes people dependent,” send them this chapter.

And join us for a discussion of the book and the situation with American healthcare on the last Sunday of October at 9 am PT, noon ET.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

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— Donald Trump woke up from a nap in the Oval Office this week just in time to remember Vladimir Putin’s birthday. While his own Treasury Secretary was speaking, Trump nodded off at his own event, then perked right up to announce he had a call scheduled to wish his mentor (my word, not his) a happy 74th. By Friday we learned what the birthday boy got. Trump crowed on his Nazi-infested social media site that us taxpayers will buy five million tons of diesel — a deal worth billions to the Kremlin’s deeply troubled war chest — at today’s record-high prices. As a sweetener, a birthday cupcake you could call it, Trump ordered his Treasury Department to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel for the next half-year. And he and little Marco Rubio are going after the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Putin, and are trying to quite literally destroy it. And, shortly, Ka$h Patel will be visiting Moscow. Bizarrely, this all happened just a few weeks after he signed Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill. This is the same Putin whose government, US officials have confirmed, is providing Iran with detailed, specific targeting information on American troops, ships, and planes that’s been used to kill our service members. It’s the same Putin Trump’s invited to December’s G20, which he’s holding, corruptly, at his own shabby golf resort motel in Florida. Ukraine, meanwhile, was told no by Trump and Vance (who called it one of his “proudest moments”) when Zelensky asked for Patriot interceptors to stop Russian missiles from daily killing its civilians, a war crime. How much more of this treasonous behavior will the American people, and the congressional Republicans — who swore an oath to the Constitution rather than to Trump — tolerate? The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Ask them.

— Time magazine interviewed the President of the United States, wrote down twelve things he said, and then had to publish a second article explaining that most of them weren’t true. Raw Story has the rundown. Trump told the reporters he won 86 percent of the popular vote (it was 49.8 percent). He said he’s at 99 percent approval in Israel. He said his convention speech drew 107 million viewers and beat the NFL opener (Nielsen says he had 2.5 million viewers against football’s 25.1 million). He said Iran’s inflation is 300 percent (it’s 83.8) and blamed the American press for the idea that his war would be over in four or five weeks, something he promised in the early days of the war (originally it was going to be “a few weeks”). Time’s fact-checkers described Trump’s popular vote whopper by gently saying, “He’s conflating two figures.” Conflating is what Grandpa does with the grandkids’ names at Thanksgiving. How much longer will our media continue to tuck his blatant, daily lies into a polite sidebar while the lies themselves get the headline? This has been going on since 2015; no wonder we’re in such deep trouble and our democracy is in such a crisis. Our media needs to grow a damn spine.

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— Trump’s meme coin buyers have lost 97 percent of their “investments,” so naturally he’s throwing another dinner to sell more of them. As Lisa Needham lays out at Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, the top 185 holders of $TRUMP will “win” seats at a November 22 gala at his Virginia golf club, complete with a swag bag of Trump cologne, and the four biggest buyers get an 18-karat gold Trump watch. The so-called coin peaked above $73 and now trades around $1.79. Trump is making billions off crypto while the suckers who bought his and Melania’s meme coins were out $3.81 billion by the end of June. But wait: there’s more! While regular buyers are being told to hold tight for a shot at being invited to this super-special dinner, the coin’s biggest insider wallet has moved tens of millions of dollars’ worth of them into a position to sell. One investor who’s lost $400,000 summed it up, saying, “The grift continues until morale improves.” In fact, there are two kinds of buyers for these “collectible” tokens: suckers and people — including foreigners — wanting to buy influence or pardons from Trump. The Founders had a word for this (emoluments) and so does the criminal code (bribery), and if Republicans in Congress had even the faintest semblance of integrity they would shut the whole grift down tomorrow. Vote!

— The bond market, which doesn’t watch Fox “News,” is telling us what it really thinks of Trump’s America. Bloomberg reports that something called the “term premium” — the extra interest investors demand before they’ll lend Uncle Sam money by buying 10-year bonds — has shoved Treasury yields to a 24-year high. As a result, we’re all paying more for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards because America’s lenders (Treasury buyers) don’t trust Trump, Bessent, and the Republicans who control Congress and keep borrowing trillions to give to Trump and his billionaire buddies as tax breaks. There are energy shocks from Trump’s illegal (and stupid) war on Iran leaving oil stuck above $100 a barrel, as well as a $2 trillion federal deficit just so far this year. This is the end product of 45 years of Reaganomics, decades of GOP lies, and an accumulated $40 trillion in tax breaks for the morbidly rich and giant corporations. We need to tax the morbidly rich like we did when America built the world’s largest middle class, strengthen the social safety net, and stop starting illegal wars that we can’t even afford to pay for.

— Somebody seems to have misplaced fifty million dollars, and nobody in Trump’s orbit is in any hurry to find it. A decade ago, Congress set aside money for an America 250 celebration of our anniversary, but Trump ignored that (other than taking the money) and created his own, privatized “Freedom 250” celebration as a new grift to squeeze millions out of major donors like Chevron, United Airlines, and the defense giant RTX. Now documents uncovered by the watchdog group PEER discovered that the events cost $128 million and at least $114 million of that came from our tax dollars, even though The Wall Street Journal says the “donors” kicked in at least $50 million and (my guess) probably much more. Trump passed out that money to his contractor friends with no competitive bidding whatsoever, and now refuses to say who gave him money, or how much, or even where the money went. Democrats suspect he just turned it into another slush fund for himself and his family; perhaps they should look for piles of cash in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago?

— The people building artificial intelligence are holding private rehearsals for the day it hurts a whole lot of us. Axios reports that top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are gaming out what happens after a catastrophic AI event, “most likely a cyberattack,” that could knock out banking, the internet, or even power and water. Axios reports that industry insiders told them they expect “something big” within the next six to twelve months. But when Mediaite dug into it, they concluded that this is really more PR planning than anything else; handling the public and political revolt and a panicked Congress. Trump, who is now heavily invested financially in AI, calls the danger a “hoax” and says the industry should just police itself. You know, like tobacco, asbestos, the Pinto, leaded gasoline, Oxycontin and the Sacklers, and the banks in 2008. That’s always worked out so well for America. Even some Republicans think that’s nuts; there’s already a bipartisan bill requiring a kill switch on advanced AI. Pass it now, while the lights are still on.

— Having lost at the Supreme Court, Trump has decided to hold his own trial of Lisa Cook at the White House, with his own appointees as the jury. The Supreme Court ruled against him in June when he tried to fire the nation’s first Black female Federal Reserve governor. So this week he signed a memo creating a “committee of inquiry” made up of his economic adviser, his EEOC chairman, and his ethics director, who will decide Cook’s fate. As the Guardian reports, she’s being summoned to a kangaroo court that will be closed to the public, capped at four hours, and held on November 5, two days after the midterms, when it’s too late to piss off voters. In an administration that fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first woman to lead the Navy, it appears that her race and gender are her real offense. The Senate confirmed her; the Senate should defend her. But don’t count on the Trump lickspittles and cowards (and probably quite a few racists and misogynists) in today’s Republican-run Congress to do squat.

— Hypocrisy Alert! The senator who sued new mothers over medical bills as small as $101 apparently doesn’t pay for his own cookies. Holly Thomas, who owns Holly’s Sweet Treats in Hutchinson, Kansas, says Senator Roger Marshall’s campaign took delivery of $678.75 worth of cookies and treats for his 2020 primary watch party and never paid for them. She’s been calling and emailing Marshall — without any response — as she was then a brand-new business owner trying to survive the pandemic. This is the same Senator/Dr. Marshall whose OB-GYN practice, the New York Times found, sued more than 700 of his female patients — many of them low-income people — and charged them 18 percent interest. He even had 81 of them arrested after missing court dates in those cases. He calls that reporting a “hit job.” At the 18 percent he charged his patients, Holly’s invoice would be north of $1,400 by now. Congress abolished federal debtors’ prisons way back in 1833, and that principle is supposed to work the same way for a working mom with a hospital bill just the same as it does for a senator with a bakery invoice. But this is Republican-run America, where we’ve got one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for everybody else. Kansans get to settle this particular account on November 3.

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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Something stinks.

Astoria is one of my favorites on the Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% vote-by-mail state.

So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, “The timing of these issues is especially concerning.”

At first, I figured this was a one-off; something weird or broken in the Astoria post office. But when I mentioned this on the air Monday of this week my lines were flooded with calls from states across the nation saying that they’re having similar problems with the mail. The calls have continued every day since.

Yesterday, an American listener who follows us on YouTube from Germany called in to say that his ballot was mailed out on September 19th (the law requires all foreign-resident ballots to go out by then) and he’s tracking it online but it still hasn’t arrived at his home in Mannheim.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order limiting who could get a mail-in ballot, that the Supreme Court knocked down last month. But apparently he’s still working on the Post Office, just in some different ways, many of which are being kept under wraps. But there are some clues.

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Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 armed private security guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago.

Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious human rights abuses.”

The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the Postal Service seems to be supervising them. He described the result as “private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.”

In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month.

Then there’s Trump’s wannabe Schutzstaffel of armed, masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs now equipped with electric gloves that are used for torture in other countries who seems to delight in shooting people — including American citizens like Renee Good — in their cars. Democracy Forward just released 166 pages of internal ICE records they got with a FOIA filing and the result is shocking.

This renegade agency that seems to answer only to Trump and Stephen Miller has now collected 50.6 million voter roll records from the Justice Department.

What the hell is ICE doing with our voter records? And what could their having our personal voting habits possibly have to do with controlling immigration?

But it gets worse: they also got another 48.4 million “voter records” from what the documents call the “independent sources” of election denier Heather Honey, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s point person on “election integrity.”

Before 2020, Honey was a private investigator who worked counterfeit-goods cases, with no background or experience in elections or voting machines. She’s an outspoken election denier who still claims Trump won in 2020.

And she’s the source of the false claim that “Pennsylvania counted more votes than it had voters,” which Trump repeated from the stage at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 which so enraged the mob that then attacked the Capitol, trying to “hang Mike Pence” and ended up causing the deaths of five police officers and the hospitalization of 140 others.

When The New York Times dug into those same documents they found that Homeland Security has already opened investigations into 150 “good government” nonprofit organizations that register voters. The papers show that they’ve considered sending undercover agents into some of these nonprofits to “disrupt activities.”

Trump’s toadies are also seeding the ground with stories that would justify massive intervention in the final moments or subsequent counting days of the election. In July, former plumber and current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed they’d discovered more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls in just four states and threatened to send state officials to jail for even the smallest infractions, if they make any mistakes during this election.

Pretty quickly that number of 250,000 non-citizens on the rolls — widely reported on rightwing media — dropped like a stone. DHS revised their count to claim that there were 185 noncitizens registered in Nevada, one of those four states; when the state investigated, they found that every single one of those 185 people was a lawful citizen.

But if Republicans lose the election this fall, it’s safe to assume Trump will revive that 250,000 number, true or not; he’s never been afraid to tell “truthful hyperbole” (as he calls lying in his book).

Then there are the polling places and the count itself. The Justice Department is dispatching “monitors,” and voting rights groups and local governments are in court right now challenging the administration’s plans to put armed federal agents at the polls and counting operations.

This administration has also joined Russia and Belarus as being the only three countries in the world to refuse to allow in international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has overseen our elections for decades. What are they hiding?

And their arrogance is astonishing: when a federal judge recently told a DOJ attorney he’d require advance notice before a state released its “citizenship lists,” the answer, as Democracy Docket reported, was “If you want to enjoin us, enjoin us.”

In other words, like with the East Wing/Ballroom, reflecting pool, Arch, killing people in boats in the Caribbean, or bombing Iran without congressional authorization (or dozens of other examples), “We’ll do our crimes right in the open and get done what we want and you can sue us and yell about it later. We win anyway.”

Like so many of his crimes that he pre-announces, Trump told the Times earlier this year that he “should have” deployed the National Guard in 2020 to seize voting machines in swing states like Georgia.

— He’s falsely claimed that states are mere agents of the feds when they count votes, so the president can tell them what to do and how to do it.

— He mused to House Republicans about canceling the midterms altogether, said out loud that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places, and told NBC he’d only accept the results this fall “if the elections are honest.” We all know what that means when a Putin acolyte says it.

— Asked by TIME about declaring a national emergency around the election, he refused to rule it out.

We should take him seriously: he’s already tried to overthrow our legitimately elected government once before.

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At 2:24 on the afternoon of January 6, already aware that the Capitol had been breached and violent thugs were searching for the electoral college ballots and terrifying members of Congress, he tweeted that Mike Pence “lacked the courage to do what needed to be done.” To defy the results of the election, in other words. His mob surged and began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as Trump gleefully watched on TV from the White House.

Most concerning, that year there were still lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department who could tell him no. They’re all gone now, replaced by election deniers, neofascists, and lickspittles.

Speaking of neofascists, the two guys who run his MAGA Inc. $415 million SuperPac spent part of the past few weeks helping a Putin-aligned candidate and party win an election in the Balkans. When the rightwing winner was announced, he profusely thanked Putin for his help and future close cooperation.

And it’s not like we haven’t seen Republicans steal elections before. After Jeb Bush purged some 90,000 mostly Black and Hispanic voters from the Florida rolls just before the 2000 election, his brother “won” by 537 votes. The state Supreme Court ordered a recount and, ignoring the 10th Amendment and the Constitution having given voting to the states, five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court halted the count.

A year later a consortium of news organizations finished examining the ballots and found that if every disputed ballot in the state had been counted, Al Gore would have come out ahead. As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

But that recount didn’t happen because a crowd of Republican congressional staffers — backed up by lawyers Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett who’d come to Florida to help out — held their “Brooks Brothers Riot” pounding on the doors and windows of the Miami-Dade canvassing board until it shut down its hand recount.

And then there’s the purging of legitimate voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — which is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states with large Blue cities, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

The Brennan Center added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges double-checked and pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

So we need to be ready for anything from slowed-down mail to bogus lists of alleged noncitizens to Spanish agents with guns overseeing our mail-in ballots.

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That’s all the bad news.

The good news is that none of these strategies — which worked great for Republicans in close elections like 2000 and 2024 — can stop a landslide.

If the count is too large to deny or whittle away, we may be able to turn back Trump’s steady and varied attacks on our democracy and our elections.

So check your registration today at vote.org, and check it again next week. If you vote by mail, track your ballot, return it early, and use an official drop box if your state has them. If it hasn’t arrived when it should, call your county elections office and ask for a replacement.

If you’re an American living overseas and you’re still waiting, like my caller in Germany, you can use the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot as a backup. Then find three people who weren’t planning to vote and get them to the polls.

They’ve told us what they intend to do, and they can only pull it off if the election is close. Please share this article with everyone you know, and if you’re not already a subscriber, join us at hartmannreport.com so we can keep sounding this alarm together through Election Day and beyond.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Something Stinks”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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On Monday night in Grand Island, Nebraska, Donald Trump was trying to convince a tiny rally crowd to vote Republican when, as he is wont to do, he wandered off-prompter into a riff about what Iran could do to two American cities and the crowd cheered:

“They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over very soon.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom said:

“Donald Trump’s remarks were dangerous – if not treasonous – putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America’s largest naval hubs.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the remark could compromise her city’s safety, and the Republican running to represent San Diego in the US House, Jim Desmond, said:

“No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”

The White House tried spinning it all, claiming Trump only meant that a (fantasy) nuclear-armed Iran would’ve threatened those cities if he hadn’t gone to war against them first. Maybe so. Forbes magazine — nobody’s idea of a lefty outlet — instead reported that it’s unclear whether he was warning about an attack or daring Iran to launch one.

And then Trump repeated his language again last night in Texas, saying:

“And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. You want to see a horror show? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles.”

Trying to read Trump’s twisted mind is a dangerous effort, but we can look at what politicians in positions similar to him have done in the past, as well as checking out whether he’s trying to strengthen or weaken our ability to prevent such an attack.

Back in March of 2003, as George W. Bush was about to invade Iraq, I wrote an essay called “When Democracy Failed” detailing how Hitler used the burning of the German parliament building to consolidate his power.

While the history is still debated, historian Benjamin Carter Hett builds a compelling case that the Nazis essentially set up the 24-year-old (perhaps mentally ill) Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe to do it or even started the fire themselves. Hitler, standing in front of the smoldering building, told a British reporter “This is a signal from God,” and by the next day he had his Reichstag Fire Decree pushed through parliament suspending civil liberties across Germany, creating an instant police state.

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It turns out that this meme — a foreign attack that rescues or expands the powers of a political leader — is one of the oldest stories in politics, including American politics:

— President James Polk was incredibly unpopular in 1846 (and since!), so he sent American troops into Mexican territory; when they were predictably fired on, Polk gave a speech to Congress claiming that Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil.” It was such an obvious attempt to start a war to rescue Polk’s sagging fortunes that freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln introduced his Spot Resolution to try, unsuccessfully, to stop what quickly became the Mexican-American War.

— When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor in 1898, most likely from a fire in a coal bunker next to her magazine, newspaper oligarch William Randolph Hearst sent a cable to the artist Frederic Remington at Havana: “Please remain [in Cuba]. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Within weeks we were at war with Spain, dramatically boosting the popularity of President McKinley and setting the stage for Teddy Roosevelt’s rise to power.

— In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually put it in writing. Operation Northwoods proposed the US military covertly blow up an American ship and stage a terror campaign in Miami and Washington, DC so America could blame Castro and invade Cuba; it was only scuttled because President Kennedy said no.

— Two years later Lyndon Johnson and SecDef Robert McNamara claimed an August 4 attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin that NSA’s own historian later concluded never happened. McNamara had wanted the war, and some historians even assert he lied about the attack to Johnson for weeks until the war against Vietnam was underway.

— In the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt froze Japan’s assets and cut off its oil, knowing fully that he was backing Tokyo into a corner. While Republicans claimed he knew the attack on Pearl Harbor would come out of it, the evidence for that is sketchy; nonetheless, it provided the rationalization to enter World War II, which by then Roosevelt had concluded was necessary to save European democracy even though US public opinion was largely against the war (there was a large “America first” political movement that explicitly embraced Hitler and opposed entering the war).

— Two years before 9/11 George W. Bush told his ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, that if he ever got the chance to invade Iraq he wouldn’t waste the political capital a war would give him the way his father had.

A year later the Project for the New American Century, whose founding statement his brother Jeb had signed, published a report arguing that invading Iraq and taking their oil wasn’t politically possible unless “some catastrophic and catalyzing event” like “a new Pearl Harbor” were to happen.

Then on August 6, 2001, while he was vacationing in Crawford, the CIA flew an agent all the way to Texas to hand President George W. Bush a briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Bush began the longest vacation in presidential history, refusing to return to DC abut also refusing to pull together his team to stop the plot. Five weeks later nearly three thousand Americans were dead, his approval rating zoomed from 51 to 90 percent (the highest Gallup has ever recorded), and he got the war he’d told Herskowitz about.

This “let them attack us and I’ll become the hero against them” strategy works overseas, too.

— Vladimir Putin (Trump’s mentor, who he called yesterday to wish a happy birthday) was an obscure prime minister in September of 1999 when apartment buildings started blowing up across Russia, killing around 300 people. When local police in the city of Ryazan caught Putin’s secret police/FSB agents planting another bomb in a basement, the Kremlin claimed it was just a “training exercise.” Putin used the terror from the Chechen attacks to start a war in Chechnya that he rode straight into the presidency.

— In Israel, the military had Hamas’s battle plan for October 7, a document they code-named “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before the attack. Benjamin Netanyahu’s poll numbers were in free-fall, but the attack and his response of bombing the crap out of Gaza both boosted his popularity and postponed his trial for corruption and bribery, keeping him in office.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump, who’s less than four weeks from a midterm election that looks like it’s going to be a screaming disaster for Republicans. He knows that if Democrats take the House or Senate, his life (and that of Uday, Qusay, and Jared) will become a living hell.

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On September 26, Trump flat-out rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and restart talks; the Wall Street Journal then, shockingly, reported he’d privately told aides that he plans to get his revenge for his war humiliation by bombing Iran again after the election. He said much the same to Time magazine last week, causing some to wonder if he’s deliberately trying to provoke Iran into attacking the US now.

Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to catch Iranian operatives inside the United States have been pulled off the job. Just days before the war began in February, Ka$h Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, the specific FBI counterintelligence unit that tracks threats from Iran.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that nearly a quarter of the FBI’s agents, and up to 40 percent in the biggest field offices (like LA and San Diego?), were pulled onto immigration duty. This included huge numbers of counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise on Iran, and The Intercept found in May that none have been replaced or put back on Iran/terrorism watch.

And the threat of an Iranian attack on US assets is real. Ten days ago British police arrested five men near RAF Fairford, the base American bombers use to hit Iran. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says there are “strong indications“ Tehran had a hand in it, although this is an evolving story.

Given all this, Trump has some ‘splaining to do:

— Has Trump been briefed on a specific threat to Southern California, and if he has, what’s being done about it?

— Why were the FBI’s Iran specialists fired or relocated on the eve of a war with Iran, and how many of our top counterterrorism agents are still out rounding up brown-skinned day laborers?

— Why did he turn down an offer to reopen the Strait while, at the same time, provocatively promising more bombing after the election?

— And it’s not like the idea hasn’t occurred to Trump: Back when Barack Obama was running for reelection Trump tweeted on November 29, 2011: “In order to get elected, BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” Two weeks earlier he’d posted a video saying that starting a war with Iran was “the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected.”

The following July he claimed Obama was “preparing a possible attack on Iran right before November,” and on October 9, 2012, with the election a month away, he told his followers that with Obama’s poll numbers falling they should “watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran.”

The last thing in the world that I’d hope for is that Trump is actually encouraging a massive attack on Los Angeles and San Diego just to rescue himself and his party politically. But having lived through 9/11, the subsequent Patriot Act and Bush lying us into two wars to get himself re-elected in 2004 — and having written these sort of histories for decades — I can’t dismiss it.

Congress can get answers to every one of those questions if enough of us insist. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both of your senators that you want Kash Patel under oath about who’s actually guarding this country, that you want those agents back on counterterrorism now, and that you want a public commitment that no attack — no matter how terrible — will be used to delay or federalize the November 3 election.

Then check your registration at vote.org, make a plan to vote, and bring somebody with you.

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Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.